Free Republic

Anyone who thought “manmade climate cataclysm” rhetoric couldn’t possibly exceed Obama era levels should read the complaint filed in the “public nuisance” lawsuit that’s being argued before Federal District Court Judge William Alsup in a California courtroom: Oakland v BP and other oil companies.The allegations read at times like they were written by a Monty Python comedy team and a couple of first year law students. Defendant companies “conspired” to produce dangerous fuels, the complaint asserts, and “followed the Big Tobacco playbook” to promote their use, while paying “denialist front groups” to question “established” climate science, “downplay” the “unprecedented” risks...

The legal battle against oil companies for their purported role in contributing to a climate change crisis is starting to take shape. This past Wednesday, a federal judge in San Francisco made history, holding the first-ever U.S. court hearing exploring the impact of climate change. Lawyers representing the cities of Oakland and San Francisco as well as five of the largest multinational oil companies named in the lawsuit, participated in a climate change “tutorial,” a chance to explore both sides’ positions on several questions related to climate change. Here’s what we learned from the hearing: future litigation will pit reasoned...

Suppose a crooked prosecutor framed someone and was determined to get a conviction. So he built an entire case on tainted, circumstantial evidence, and testimony from witnesses who had their reasons for wanting the guy in jail. Suppose the prosecutor ignored or hid exculpatory evidence and colluded with the judge to prevent the defendant from presenting a robust defense or cross-examining adverse witnesses. You know what would happen – at least in a fair and just society. The victim would be exonerated and compensated. The prosecutor and judge would be disbarred, fined and jailed. What you may not know is...

Note: This piece was co-authored by H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D.In the world of science, debates rarely end. Only after years of careful analyses, rigorous scientific studies, and the replication of findings can scientists safely declare they believe a theory has likely been proven. And even then, real scientists know virtually every scientific conclusion is subject to further debate and experimentation as additional insights are discovered.On the topic of the science of climate change, including the causes and potential dangers, the debate is still very much alive and well. But the current climate-change debate held in most public forums, including in...

When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight,” English essayist Samuel Johnson observed 240 years ago, “it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” That’s certainly true in the climate change arena. After ending US participation in the Paris climate treaty and abolishing many government restrictions on fossil fuel use, the Trump Administration began preparing red team-blue team examinations of the science behind claims of “dangerous manmade climate change.” Asian, African, and even European countries are building still more coal and gas-fired power plants. A recent poll found that only 28% of Americans think climate scientists understand the causes of...

I was surprised to discover that Al Gore's new movie begins with words from me! While icebergs melt dramatically, Gore plays a clip of me saying, "'An Inconvenient Truth' won him an Oscar, yet much of the movie is nonsense. 'Sea levels may rise 20 feet' -- absurd." He used this comment from one of my TV shows. The "20 feet" claim is absurd -- one of many hyped claims in his movie. His second film, "An Inconvenient Sequel," shows lower Manhattan underwater while Gore intones: "This is global warming!" My goodness! Stossel doubts Al Gore's claim, but pictures don't...

This past March, 17 attorneys general launched a coordinated effort to investigate, pursue and prosecute companies, think tanks and other organizations that say there is little credible evidence that human “greenhouse gas” emissions are causing “dangerous” or “catastrophic” manmade climate change.The AGs said their targets’ actions constitute “fraud” – which they described as using “polished public relations campaigns” to “muddle the truth,” “discredit prevailing climate science,” and “mislead” people about threats from higher temperatures, rising seas, floods and more severe weather. Their real goal is to intimidate and silence targeted groups, and bankrupt them with legal fees, court costs and...

Whenever there is a new record set, whether rain, hurricane, drought, etc., those in the climate change alarmist camp seem to be quick to point to global warming as the cause and make more dire predictions regarding the future—even when there are other documented reasons and even when hard data (not models) disputes the claim. Such is the case with Lake Mead. On May 20, the federal Bureau of Reclamation announced that the nation’s largest reservoir reached an all-time low. The current level slipped below the previous record set in June 2015. Despite reports of the mismanagement of the important...

This time a year ago, there was talk conservatives and libertarians finally might be ready to truly join forces on an agenda to win the 2016 elections and govern as principled believers in limited government. The libertarian wing of the Republican Party – which certainly doesn’t include all libertarians – had a respectable candidate for president in Rand Paul. Another candidate, Marco Rubio, seemed open to libertarian ideas on immigration, as indicated by his participation in the Gang of 8 proposal for immigration reform. But the longer this campaign has gone on, the more the strains of the relationship have...

Conservatives, Christian and non-Christian alike, share concerns about · civil and religious liberty, · abortion and the sanctity of human life, · human trafficking and pornography and how they damage families, · fiscal responsibility in government, and · poverty. What many don’t know is that there are links between climate alarmism and every one of these issues. Let me take them in reverse order. First, climate alarmism undermines fiscal responsibility in government. Not only do governments around the world spend nearly $1 billion per day just on research into climate change, but also policies meant to reduce global warming would...

Why did one of the world's top physicists—ever—sign the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation's Open Letter to Pope Francis on Climate Change, which challenges climate alarmism, though he's a liberal, a Democrat, likes President Obama, and has a strong background in climate science? His interview with the UK Register and his foreword to a new study titled Carbon Dioxide: The Good News reveal some of his reasons. Freeman Dyson believes increasing atmospheric CO2 content does more good than harm and that President Obama "chose the wrong side" in the climate debate. He explains that climate change "is not a...

Lockheed Martin, a recent Washington Post article notes, is getting into renewable energy, nuclear fusion, “sustainability” and even fish farming projects, to augment its reduced defense profits. The company plans to forge new ties with Defense Department and other Obama initiatives, based on a shared belief in manmade climate change as a critical security and planetary threat. It is charging ahead where other defense contractors have failed, confident that its expertise, lobbying skills and “socially responsible” commitment to preventing climate chaos will land it plentiful contracts and subsidies. As with its polar counterparts, 90% of the titanic climate funding iceberg...

Editor's note: Roger Bezdek coauthored this piece. “Social responsibility” activists want universities and pension funds to eliminate fossil fuel companies from their investment portfolios. They plan to spotlight their demands on “Global Divestment Day,” February 13-14. Their agenda is misguided, immoral, lethal … and racist. A mere 200 years ago, the vast majority of humans were poor, sick and malnourished. Life expectancy in 1810 was less than 40 years, and even royal families lived under sanitation, disease and housing standards inferior to what American welfare families enjoy today. Then a veritable revolution occurred. The world began to enjoy a bonanza in wealth, technology, living...

Near-term global warming projections (brick-red region) on[0.13, 0.50] K decade-1, compared with observations (green region)that fall on [0.0, 0.11] K decade-1, and the simple model's 21stcentury warming projections (yellow arrow), falling on 0.09 [0.06,0.12] K decade-1. Credit: Science China PressA major peer-reviewed climate physics paper in the first issue (January 2015: vol. 60 no. 1) of the prestigious Science Bulletin (formerly Chinese Science Bulletin), the journal of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, exposes elementary but serious errors in the general-circulation models relied on by the UN's climate panel, the IPCC. The errors were the reason for concern about Man's effect...

In an article provide from the archives of the Chicago Tribune we see a cautionary tale with  happy ending. The article written by Michael Smith in January of 1969 quotes Dr. Glenn T. Seaborg, then chairman of the Atomic Energy commission: “For 21st century Chicago,” Smith wrote in summary of Seaborg in 1969, “the price could be the creation of a city in which the sun never shines because it cannot penetrate the tons of airborne pollutants and a city where rainfall strikes terror because it drenches everything with destructive and deadly acids.”Growing up in Chicago the sun often never...

The hunt for Manbearpig continues. Amusing Alarmist predictions have ranged from the apocalyptic to the bizarre, but the latest is downright idiotic. According to a couple of scientists from Columbia University, air travel might be relegated to the trash bin of history in the future because of the supposed global warming that is occurring today. According to Breitbart.com:The two scientists, Coffel and Horton, looked at a phenomenon known amongst pilots as ‘density altitude’, which affects a plane’s ability to take off. Essentially, on hotter days the air is less dense, making it harder to get a plane airborne.Okay… So warm air...

Uh oh… The evil, hate filled, GOP now has control of the US Senate. Clearly the world will soon end. (Lucky for me, I have stocked up on guns and ammo… So I’m feeling better prepared than my Diana DeGette-loving neighbor.) Ben Adler, the former Newsweek.com editor, was among the more frantic examples of post-election meltdown. Appearing somewhat like Chris Matthews during a Republican victory, Ben scrambled to express his frustration at conservative gains with over-the-top rhetoric. He even went so far as to say that conservatives should not be mistaken for “rational human beings” or “patriotic Americans”.Super classy. Adler insisted...

The CEO for Fiat Chrysler (remember how an Italian company helped save Detroit?) is begging Americans to kill more polar bears, pollute the air, and continue to melt the polar ice caps… Or something. There’s also an outside chance that he’s just being a responsible CEO by trying to keep his company out of bankruptcy. Whatever the reason, Sergio Marchionne is asking consumers to steer clear of the company’s all electric Fiat. Under the direction of Marchionne, Fiat Chrysler is apparently taking a new approach to keeping the company solvent: Sell cars that people actually want to buy. And he...

The White House has released its latest National Climate Assessment. An 829-page report and 127-page “summary” were quickly followed by press releases, television appearances, interviews and photo ops with tornado victims – all to underscore President Obama’s central claims: Human-induced climate change, “once considered an issue for the distant future, has moved firmly into the present.” It is “affecting Americans right now,” disrupting their lives. The effects of “are already being felt in every corner of the United States.” Corn producers in Iowa, oyster growers in Washington, maple syrup producers in Vermont, crop-growth cycles in Great Plains states “are all...

Global-warming orthodoxy is not merely irrational. It is wicked.[snip] ".......Biologists have always known that carbon dioxide is essential for plant growth, and of course without plants there would be very little animal life, and no human life, on the planet. The climate alarmists have done their best to obscure this basic scientific truth by insisting on describing carbon emissions as “pollution” — which, whether or not they warm the planet they most certainly are not — and deliberately mislabeling forms of energy that produce these emissions as “dirty.” In the same way, they like to label renewable energy as “clean,”...