Free Republic

An international team of scientists, including Dr. Willie Soon, has produced a solar model which does a skilful job of reproducing past climate shifts such as the Little Ice Age and Medieval Warm Period...The main reasons for the Little Ice Age (LIA) are the long and deep minimum of summer insolation and insolation seasonality (IS) in the Northern Hemisphere...The noted characteristics of insolation, reflecting not only variations in the arrival of solar radiation, but also variations in the mechanisms of heat transfer, are not taken into account in the general astronomical theory of climate. Taking these indicators into account will...

WASHINGTON (AP) — States are getting the go-ahead to build a nationwide network of electric vehicle charging stations that would place new or upgraded ones every 50 miles (80 kilometers) along interstate highways as part of the Biden administration’s plan to spur widespread adoption of the zero-emission cars. The administration on Thursday announced the availability of $5 billion in federal money to states over five years under President Joe Biden’s infrastructure law, sketching out a vision of seamless climate-friendly car travel from coast to coast. Under Transportation Department requirements, states must submit plans to the federal government and can begin...

Eliminating all animal agriculture within the next 15 years would drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions and also pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. A new study of the climate impacts of raising animals for food concludes that phasing out all animal agriculture has the potential to substantially alter the trajectory of global warming. The work is a collaboration between Michael Eisen, professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and Patrick Brown, professor emeritus of biochemistry at Stanford University and the CEO of Impossible Foods Inc., a company that sells plant-based meat substitutes. Eisen, who consults...

Over the past three years, dozens of cities across the country have banned natural gas hookups in newly constructed buildings as part of a growing campaign to reduce carbon emissions from homes. The movement scored a major victory last month, when New York City’s outgoing Mayor Bill de Blasio signed into law a ban on gas hookups in new buildings. Though new laws apply to the entire home, the policy debate often focuses on one room in particular: the kitchen. Gas stoves account for a relatively small share of the emissions released by a typical household, but they’ve become a...

The United States staggered through a steady onslaught of deadly billion-dollar weather and climate disasters in an extra hot 2021, while the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions last year jumped 6% because of surges in coal and long-haul trucking, putting America further behind its 2030 climate change cutting goal. Three different reports released Monday, though not directly connected, paint a picture of a U.S. in 2021 struggling with global warming and its efforts to curb it. Scientists have long said human-caused climate change makes extreme weather nastier and more frequent, documenting numerous links to wild and deadly weather events. They say...

While EU member states provide financial support to poor households affected by rising energy bills, the European Commission is focusing on long term solutions like energy efficiency and renewables, which have the potential to “eradicate energy poverty” once and for all, an EU official dealing with the issue has said. Energy poverty is “a pre-existing problem” to the current energy price hike, which is linked to the inability of people to pay their fossil fuel bills, said Adela Tesarova, an official at the Commission’s energy department. “We want to avoid that decarbonisation makes this problem worse,” she told a EURACTIV...

Protesters with a group called "Occupy Biden" have spent the past week in President Biden's Delaware neighborhood calling on him to declare a "national climate emergency." According to a description for the protest, which took place near President Biden's residence in Delaware, the group said that "nonviolent action" is needed in order to push President Biden towards making changes to his climate policy. On Saturday, the final day of the group's protest, individuals protested on a road near the president's house while members of the Secret Service were nearby monitoring the group.

Germany on Friday shut down half of the six nuclear plants it still has in operation, a year before the country draws the final curtain on its decades-long use of atomic power. The decision to phase out nuclear power and shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy was first taken by the center-left government of Gerhard Schroeder in 2002. His successor, Angela Merkel, reversed her decision to extend the lifetime of Germany’s nuclear plants in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan and set 2022 as the final deadline for shutting them down. The three reactors now being...

Ever-growing environmental threats are pushing many animals and plants to the brink of extinction — the scale of which hasn’t been seen since dinosaurs died out, the German branch of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) said on Wednesday. The stark warnings came as WWF Germany released its “Winners and Losers of 2021,” an annual list of animals whose existence is now acutely under threat — as well as conservation victories. There are currently 142,500 animal and plant species on the Red List of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) — 40,000 of which are “threatened with extinction.” It...

The European Union’s executive Commission is considering whether to include nuclear and natural gas in its “sustainable finance taxonomy”, a rulebook that will restrict which activities can be labelled as climate-friendly investments. “We are going to have most likely a discussion tomorrow in college, which then will lead… to approval next year,” EU environment commissioner Virginijus Sinkevičius told a news conference on Monday, referring to the Commission’s weekly “college” meeting.

One of the ever-looming threats of climate change is sea level rise, which already threatens to displace millions of people worldwide and force them to move inland by the end of the century. A big part of the rising water levels are hotter temperatures at the poles—home to giant glaciers and ice shelves that hold crucial quantities of frozen H2O. The Florida-sized Thwaites glacier in Antarctica, nicknamed the “doomsday glacier,” is already losing 50 billion tons of ice each year. That in itself accounts for around 4 percent of annual global sea level rise. But unpublished research shared at the...

Environmentalism, as much as anything, represents semi-educated man's yearning to return to a less complicated past, one in which man was dependent upon nature's vagaries rather than master of them. Maybe that explains why European environmentalists have decided that the way to reduce carbon emissions from shipping is to use "giant kites" — or, as humans called them for thousands of years, "sails." This is not a joke. It's absolutely real and highlights just how ludicrous the modern left has become. There is nothing in the world more charming than a movie or TV series based upon Jane Austen's books....

NEWS RELEASEEnvironmental Quality Commission votes to establish Climate Protection Program Date: Dec. 16, 2021New DEQ program will reduce greenhouse gas emissions in Oregon by 90% by 2050Statewide, OR — Today the Oregon Environmental Quality Commission voted 3-1 to establish the Climate Protection Program which sets enforceable and declining limits on greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels used throughout Oregon. The limits apply to diesel, gasoline, natural gas and propane, used in transportation, residential, commercial and industrial settings.Along with other actions by the Oregon Legislature, this makes Oregon one of the few states in the nation with a comprehensive and...

"An attempt by the U.N. Security Council to pass what would have been the first-ever standalone resolution linking climate change and the council’s primary mandate of maintaining international peace and security was torpedoed Monday by Russia. Russia used its veto power to kill the resolution drafted by Ireland and Niger. India also voted “no” while China abstained. ..."

US President Joe Biden Wednesday signed an executive order mandating that the US federal government become carbon neutral by 2050. The order relies on a variety of clean energy initiatives, including transforming the government’s fleet of 600,000 vehicles into electric cars by 2035. In a statement, the Biden administration said the “whole-of-government effort to tackle the climate crisis” must happen “in a way that creates well-paying jobs, grows industries and makes the country more economically competitive.” “The executive order will reduce emissions across federal operations, invest in American clean energy industries and manufacturing, and create clean, healthy, and resilient communities,”...

As our living ark swings around the Sun, its current loop is fairly circular. But Earth's orbit isn't as stable as you may think. Every 405,000 years, our planet's orbit stretches out and becomes 5 percent elliptical, before returning to a more even path.... ... Beaufort and team suggest the lag seen between orbital eccentricity and changes in climate could hint that "coccolithophores may drive – rather than just respond to – carbon cycle changes." In other words, these minuscule little organisms, along with other phytoplankton, may help change Earth's climate in response to these orbital events....

Germany is expected to see up to 30 cm of fresh snowfall and 90 km/h winds on Tuesday evening as Storm Christian sweeps across the southern and western regions of the country. Reporting the weather on Focus, meteorologist Jan Schenk warned that the combination of forceful winds and heavy snow could lead to dangerous conditions in the south of the country over Tuesday evening and into the night. “Peak winds in the south will reach 90 km/h in the lowlands and hurricane force over the peaks of the Alps,” he said. “This could lead to snow drifts at higher altitudes...

Dozens of customers who stopped for a drink at Britain’s highest altitude pub got a longer stay than they bargained for, after the building was cut off by a blizzard. Sixty-one people woke up Monday after their third night at the Tan Hill Inn in the Yorkshire Dales, 270 miles (435 kilometers) north of London. They have been unable to leave since Friday, when a late autumn storm brought snow and heavy winds that felled power cables and blocked roads. The pub sits 1,732 feet (528 meters) above sea level and is used to being cut off by bad weather....

Met Éireann has said parts of the country could see some showers of sleet or snow later this week. Lowest temperatures are expected to drop towards the freezing point on Wednesday night, with a lowest temperature of –1°C forecast on Thursday. Friday will be cold with some showers possibly turning to sleet in the evening. Highest temperatures will be between just 7°C and 9°C with an added wind chill factor. Some showers of sleet or snow are likely over the north and west, with lowest temperatures of 0°C to 4°C. Sleet and snow remains possible over high ground in the...

Earth's atmosphere is rising because of climate change, a new study shows. Weather balloon measurements, taken in the Northern Hemisphere over the past 40 years, reveal that the lowest layer of Earth's atmosphere — called the troposphere — has been expanding upward at a rate of roughly 164 feet (50 meters) per decade, and climate change is the cause, according to findings published Nov.r 5 in the journal Science Advances. ... ...Climate change isn't the only human-made driver of the rising tropopause. The stratosphere — the layer above the troposphere — is also shrinking....