Free Republic

WASHINGTON – The military officer charged with monitoring North Korea at a time when the rogue nation is threatening to unleash missile attacks worldwide has used a Senate hearing to double down on his claim that it is global warming that is the real danger. Navy Adm. Samuel Locklear III originally caused a stir just weeks ago when in a speech to scholars at Harvard and Tufts universities in Cambridge, Mass., he said the climate change factor should be the focus of American concern. At today’s hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee he defended his assessment that global warming...

COLUMBUS, Ohio—A new form of clean coal technology reached an important milestone recently, with the successful operation of a research-scale combustion system at Ohio State University. The technology is now ready for testing at a larger scale. For 203 continuous hours, the Ohio State combustion unit produced heat from coal while capturing 99 percent of the carbon dioxide produced in the reaction. Liang-Shih Fan, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and director of Ohio State’s Clean Coal Research Laboratory, pioneered the technology called Coal-Direct Chemical Looping (CDCL), which chemically harnesses coal’s energy and efficiently contains the carbon dioxide produced before...

It's official, Tampa Bay: December 2010 was the coldest December in recorded history. Overall, the average daily temperature, the high and the low divided by two, was about 10 degrees below the norm for the month. Tampa set a new record low at 53.2 degrees, besting the previous record of 54.5 degrees in 1935. It was even colder than January 2010's record-breaking cold snap. St. Petersburg's 56.3 degrees beat a record of 56.9, also from 1935. In Hernando County, Brooksville set a record at 52 degrees. The previous low was 54.1 in 1935. St. Leo, in Pasco County, also set...

The evolution from fire to fossil fuels to nuclear energy is a path of improved human health and welfare arising from efficient and effective access to energy. One trade-off is that energy use by human beings has always produced environmental change. For example, it has resulted in human artifacts marking the landscape, the removal of trees from major areas for wood burning, and region-wide noxious air pollution from coal burning. On the other hand, ready availability of energy that produces wealth through the free market system provides ways to remedy or minimize environmental damage from energy use. With widespread industrialization,...