Free Republic

There is a point at which one’s contempt for the environmentalists and their allies is irredeemable. There is no longer the usual excuse that’s there’s room for argument or discussion regarding global warming. Having been labeled “deniers” for years, the sense that the end of this hoax is in sight brings no desire to forgive and forget. Recently, Dr. Roy Spencer, an atmospheric scientist who formerly worked for NASA, testified before a Senate committee. Free now to speak without the impediments of bureaucratic oversight, Dr. Spencer told the committee, “I am pleased to deliver good news from the front lines...

We live in an invisible atmospheric sea of water vapor, Earth's primary greenhouse gas. Our atmosphere could hold much more water vapor than it does, which would then lead to a much warmer Earth -- but it doesn't. So, why is the greenhouse effect limited to its current value? We don't know; scientists simply "assume" that it magically stays that way. Current computerized climate models that predict large amounts of global warming only do so after making very crude assumptions about why the Earth's natural greenhouse effect is limited to its present average value. In the following article I will...

May 29, 2008, 6:30 a.m. Sacrifices to the Climate GodsBeware Lieberman-Warner. By Roy Spencer It is well-established that the ancient Mayan, Aztec, Incan, and Toltec peoples offered human sacrifices, probably in the belief that such rituals would placate the gods who were in charge of nature; for instance, to help bring life-giving rains to their crops. Although we shudder at the thought of such barbaric practices, I believe that we have unwittingly reinstituted human sacrifice in modern times. But while the list of justifications has grown immensely, our new rituals are still performed in the name of avoiding the...

May 01, 2008, 9:00 a.m. More Carbon Dioxide, PleaseRaising a scientific question. By Roy Spencer There seems to be an unwritten assumption among environmentalists — and among the media — that any influence humans have on nature is, by definition, bad. I even see it in scientific papers written by climate researchers. For instance, if we can measure some minute amount of a trace gas in the atmosphere at the South Pole, well removed from its human source, we are astonished at the far-reaching effects of mankind’s “pollution.� But if nature was left undisturbed, would it be any happier...

Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, employs a variety of techniques to convince the viewer of what Gore apparently believes: that hurricane activity, melting ice sheets, floods, droughts, etc. are all becoming more frequent because of man-made global warming. His campaign to raise public awareness of global warming is reminiscent of Rachel Carson’s 1962 book, Silent Spring, about the negative environmental and human health effects of using the pesticide DDT.

I hate to get into the global warming issue again, but we are now being inundated with newspaper articles and television talking-heads screaming about ‘having to do “something” about man-made global warming’, inspired by the questionable film, “An Inconvenient Truth”, by Al Gore. We were saved from efforts to destroy our economy when socialists, posing as independent scientists, were defeated in 1997 by a 97 to 0 Senate vote against the now-failed Kyoto Treaty (when Al Gore was Vice President). I feel we are being setup for another attack on our way of life in the same way atheists and...

The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case being brought by a dozen states, several major cities, and environmental groups who want carbon dioxide, widely believed to be contributing to the current global warming trend, to be designated as a pollutant. The plaintiffs are challenging the Environmental Protection Agency's decision in 2003 that carbon dioxide (CO2) is not a pollutant that would come under the regulatory portions of the Clean Air Act. That decision has been upheld by two lower court rulings. A Supreme Court decision siding with the plaintiffs could have wide-ranging consequences, since it would open the...

A science article that appears today in Geophysical Research Letters casts serious doubt on the oft-cited claim that global temperatures are warmer now than they have been anytime in the last 1,000 years. Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick examined the methodology that led Mann et al. (1998) to publish in the popular science journal Nature the famous "hockey stick" shaped temperature curve, which was a centerpiece of the Third Assessment Report of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2001. The hockey stick curve showed a gradual cooling since around 1400 A.D. (the hockey stick handle) then a...