Free Republic

Since 1880, when global temperatures began to be systematically collected, no year has been warmer than 2014. The 15 warmest years, with one single exception, have come during the first 15 years of the new millennium. Indeed, it has become an open question as to whether global warming can be stopped anymore—or at least limited as policymakers have called for. Is capitalism ultimately responsible for the problem, or could it actually help to solve it? […] Following the Copenhagen fiasco, the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Yvo de Boer of the Netherlands, resigned in...

Water is eating away at the Antarctic ice, melting it where it hits the oceans...And the melting is accelerating...Climate change has shifted the wind pattern around the continent, pushing warmer water farther north against and below the western ice sheet and the peninsula.

To the Editor: Yet another climate denier letter displaying a scientific illiteracy that is a sad indictment of our educational system: "Humans didn't cause global warming" in the Feb 11 edition of The Sanford Herald. All you have to do is Google "Scientific American global warming" to find out that global warming is an undisputed scientific fact. Climate scientists know all about previous periods of climate change, that's basic high school science class stuff. They were all caused by something. Scientists call that something a "forcing." They have established that this time the forcing is not any of the previous...

Global Warming is real and is definitely caused by human-produced carbon . . . pencil lead, that is....adjustments are the dominant factor in the global warming trend....The obvious intent of adjustments is to create the illusion of a dramatic global warming signal in recent times.

“2014 was the hottest year on record.” Q: If the above statement is not true – and (see below) it isn’t – would it make it any more true were it to be uttered in an important speech at Davos by fashion designer, songwriter and hip hop producer Pharrell Williams?... It began spreading earlier this month when NASA GISS’s director Gavin Schmidt held a press conference to declare that 2014 was the hottest year ever recorded. This sounded jolly impressive. But there were, it subsequently emerged, several things wrong with this headline story. The first – which, admittedly, you would...

The latest research on little auks, sometimes called "penguins of the north," reveals a surprising response to a rapidly warming Arctic: The birds make up for food lost to the effects of climate change by catching prey that were stunned by the cold water running off melting glaciers—another effect of climate change. The study, published Monday in the journal Global Change Biology, is the first to examine the feeding habits of little auks as Arctic ice is lost. Scientists watched the birds in Franz-Josef Land, off the northern coast of Russia, during an expedition supported by the National Geographic Society....

The economic damage caused by a ton of carbon dioxide emissions – often referred to as the "social cost" of carbon – could actually be six times higher than the value that the United States now uses to guide current energy regulations, and possibly future mitigation policies, Stanford scientists say. A recent U.S. government study concluded, based on the results of three widely used economic impact models, that an additional ton of carbon dioxide emitted in 2015 would cause $37 worth of economic damages. These damages are expected to take various forms, including decreased agricultural yields, harm to human health...

At the end of last year, with most of his colleagues stuck in Washington for an important Senate session on a Saturday, Sen. James M. Inhofe was in Tulsa getting spurs fastened onto a pair of boots. “They’re ostrich,” said Inhofe (R-Okla.), the country’s most prominent climate-change denier, referring to his footwear. “Probably some endangered species; I have a reputation to maintain.” Inhofe could have been wearing Birkenstocks and it wouldn’t have put a dent in his notoriety. The senator cemented his status as public enemy No. 1 for environmentalists long ago, topping it off with his 2012 book on...

Guest Post by Willis EschenbachFollowing up on my previous investigations into the oceanic pH dataset, I’ve taken a deeper look at what the 2.5 million pH data points from the oceanographic data can tell us. Let me start with an overview of oceanic pH (the measure of alkalinity/acidity, with neutral being a pH of 7.0). Many people think that the ocean has only one pH  everywhere. Other people think that the oceanic pH is different in different places, but is constant over time. Neither view is correct.First, here is a view of a transect of the north Pacific ocean...

Co-authored James Doogue and JoNovaEmpirical data withheld by key scientists shows that since 1910 ocean pH levels have not decreased in our oceans as carbon dioxide levels increased. Overall the trend is messy but more up than down, becoming less acidic. So much for those terrifying oceans of acid that were coming our way.What happened to those graphs? Scientists have had pH meters and measurements of the oceans for one hundred years. But experts decided that computer simulations in 2014 were better at measuring the pH in 1910 than the pH meters were. The red line (below) is the models...