Free Republic

A hole the size of Maine—or larger than the Netherlands, depending on which geographic mass means more to you—has opened up in the Weddell Sea in Antarctica. In an otherwise thick layer of sea ice, still frozen from the Antarctic winter, the hole is an aberration. Ice scientists aren’t sure what’s going on, but they’re all talking about it. “It looks like you just punched a hole in the ice,” atmospheric physicist Kent Moore, of the University of Toronto, told Vice’s Motherboard. Autonomous float deployed in 2015 has resurfaced unexpectedly inside polynya & started transmitting data https://t.co/qnyTYRVoOy @NSF pic.twitter.com/JgfwdDtBoc —...

The Trump administration formally proposed on Tuesday to roll back yet another of President Barack Obama’s efforts to position the United States as a global leader in the fight against climate change. The move, though widely anticipated, was deeply disheartening. All this is infuriating on several levels. It repeated the same false narrative that congressional Republicans have been peddling for years and that Mr. Trump’s minions are peddling now — that environmental regulations are job killers, that restraining greenhouse gas emissions will damage the economy, that the way forward lies in digging more coal and punching more holes in the...

It’s been a terrifying season for what we used to call natural disasters. It is tempting to look at this string of disasters and think, Climate change is here. As the journalist Malcolm Harris put it blithely on Twitter, “There didn’t used to be a major natural disaster every single day.” But the truth is actually far scarier than “welcome to the new normal.” The climate system we have been observing since August, the one that has pummeled the planet again and again and exposed even the world’s wealthiest country as unable (or at least unwilling) to properly respond to...

The Midwest is safe from hurricanes and drought-driven wildfires. But that does not mean the region and its roads and bridges are free from the threat of climate change, a new study warns. Higher temperatures and unusually heavy rain events in the Midwest spell trouble for transportation and infrastructure systems, according to a study released Tuesday by the Midwest Economic Policy Institute. The group is a division of the Illinois Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank whose members include representatives from the construction industry and labor unions. “Rising temperatures and the likelihood of more storms and flooding reduce the...

The International Monetary Fund has warned the world’s richest nations to have a greater sense of urgency about climate change. The IMF’s latest World Economic Outlook (WEO), released overnight, has dedicated an entire chapter to the impact of weather shocks and climate change on global economic activity. It warns coping with climate change will be one of the “fundamental challenges” of the 21st century, saying richer countries must help low-income economies adapt to rapidly increasing temperatures. “Climate change is a negative global externality of potentially catastrophic proportions and only collective action and multilateral cooperation can effectively address its causes and...

A new statistical tool for modeling large climate and environmental datasets that has broad applications—from weather forecasting to flood warning and irrigation management—has been developed by researchers at KAUST. Ying Sun and her PhD student Huang Huang developed a new method that uses a hierarchical low-rank approximation scheme to resolve the computational burden, providing an efficient tool for fitting Gaussian process models to datasets that contain large quantities of climate and environmental measurements. The model was applied to a spatial dataset of two million soil-moisture measurements from the Mississippi River basin in the United States. They were able to fit...

After more than two decades of study I am convinced that life here on Earth has been getting better and better for the billions of we people who make this little blue marble our beloved home. The “tons and tons of carbon we are spewing into the atmosphere every day” as Al Gore puts it are actually a good thing. In his rants that the Earth will become uninhabitable former Vice President Gore is referring the carbon dioxide gas being released into the atmosphere as we power our civilization with fossil fuels. However, it turns out that as the...

A lawyer for an environmental activist convicted of targeting an oil pipeline in North Dakota said he doesn't think a judge's decision disallowing the threat of global warming as a defense to justify the crime would be grounds for an appeal. Defendant Michael Foster, of Seattle, said he has not decided whether to appeal his jury conviction to the North Dakota Supreme Court, and part of him wants "to honor the judge and the jury and their verdict." Foster took part in effort on Oct. 11, 2016, to draw attention to climate change by turning off valves on five pipelines...

HAZARD, Ky. (AP) — A coalition of left-leaning states and environmental groups are vowing to fight the Trump administration's move to kill an Obama-era effort to limit carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants. Speaking Monday in the coal-mining state of Kentucky, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt said he would be issuing a new set of rules overriding the Clean Power Plan, the centerpiece of President Barack Obama's drive to curb global climate change. "The war on coal is over," Pruitt declared, adding that no federal agency should ever use its authority to "declare war on any sector of our...

The Vatican has once more waded into the uncharted waters of environmental protection, urging nations to practice “multilateral governance” in order to combat the evils of rising sea levels and the loss of coral reefs. Writing on behalf of Pope Francis, Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin addressed the Fourth International Conference on Our Ocean, an Ocean for Life, encouraging participants to abandon “cynical or indifferent ways of acting” and to become fully engaged in care for the oceans “as part of an integrated vision of human development.”

The Environmental Protection Agency is expected to soon formally repeal the Clean Power Plan (CPP) in what would be one of the biggest blows yet to former President Barack Obama’s legacy on climate change. A draft proposal of the EPA’s conclusions, leaked to news outlets over the past 24 hours, argues that the plan — which would limit carbon emissions from power plants and, in the process, drastically reduce the amount of coal-generated electricity in the U.S. — goes beyond the bounds of federal law and unnecessarily hikes energy prices for consumers. ~snip~ “The EPA is proposing to repeal the...

placed, according to an internal Environmental Protection Agency document.The draft proposal represents the administration’s first substantive step toward rolling back the plan, which was designed to curb greenhouse gas emissions from the power sector, after months of presidential tweets and condemnations of Mr. Obama’s efforts to reduce climate-warming pollution.But it also lays the groundwork for new, presumably weaker, regulations by asking for the public and industry to offer ideas for a replacement.

PATH TO PROGRESS   In a patch of barren land that hasn't yielded crops for centuries, engineers from the Sahara Forest Project say they're designing a sustainable farm that uses solar power to desalinate seawater for crops, then uses the runoff to fend off desertification. AQABA, JORDAN—Hope in Jordan is taking the form of a cucumber in the desert. It is not a mirage. Some say it is the future. In the arid southern desert of Wadi Araba, where scorching temperatures and dust devils leave scant signs of life, a team of environmental engineers is working on a solution for...

Climate change may cause nearly three times as much clear-air turbulence as current conditions by the period between 2050 and 2080, according to a study released today. Flights over the north Atlantic may experience as much as 180 percent more severe turbulence, or in-flight bumpiness stronger than gravity and able to shake passengers in a plane’s cabin, according to the study, published in the Geophysical Research Letters journal. Flights over North America may experience an additional 110 percent, and flights over Europe up to 160 percent more. “What air travelers can expect is to be confined to their seat for...

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said on Wednesday he hoped recent devastating hurricanes in the Caribbean and southern United States would convince climate change skeptics like U.S. President Donald Trump that global warming is a “major threat.” Guterres, who will visit the Caribbean islands this weekend to see damage from last month’s hurricanes said the world must be more determined in pushing for ”a clean, sustainable energy future.”“I have not yet lost my hope that what is happening will be making those that are still skeptical about climate change to be more and more realizing that this, indeed, is a...

The project to develop the world’s first full-scale carbon capture and storage system located on the Norwegian continental shelf (NCS) is moving along with subsidiaries of Shell and Total signing on to join Statoil in leading the effort. Norwegian state-owned carbon capture technology firm Gassnova awarded Statoil the contract for the first phase of the project June 2017. Norske Shell and Total E&P Norge are now entering as equal partners, while Statoil will lead the project. The storage project is part of Norwegian government’s efforts to develop full-scale carbon capture and storage in Norway so that long-term climate targets in...

French President Emmanuel Macron's 30-million-euro "Make Climate Great Again" campaign has narrowed a list of candidate scientists from abroad from thousands to 90, nearly half from the US, a French official said Friday.Macron made the offer to fund and host foreign climate experts in early June after US President Donald Trump announced the United States would pull out of the 196-nation Paris Agreement, which pledges to cap global warming. Trump also asked Congress to slash climate-research budgets across multiple federal agencies, including the Departments of Energy, NASA, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). If...

The debate on man-made climate change on planet Earth has ignited to a fever-pitch. It is hard to believe the science guy, Bill Nye, is open to jail time for climate change dissenters. Yes, it has gone that far. But it has gotten much worse than what Bill Nye said. The following has totally shocked me: https://www.cato.org/blog/sen-whitehouse-bring-rico-charges-against-climate-wrongthink QUOTE Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) urges the U.S. Department of Justice to consider filing a racketeering suit against the oil and coal industries for having promoted wrongful thinking on climate change, with the activities of “conservative policy” groups an apparent target of the...

A new NASA-sponsored study shows that global methane emissions produced by livestock are 11 percent higher than estimates made last decade. Because methane is a particularly nasty greenhouse gas, the new finding means it’s going to be even tougher to combat climate change than we realized. We’ve known for quite some time that greenhouse gases produced by cattle, sheep, and pigs are a significant contributor to global warming, but the new research, published in Carbon Balance and Management, shows it’s worse than we thought. Revised figures of methane produced by livestock in 2011 were 11 percent higher than estimates made...

Branson along with Bill Gates, Cargill, and Kimball Musk, backed the Memphis Meats clean-meat startup in its $17 million Series A round, which went on to raise in excess of $22 million. Memphis Meats will join a cadre of sustainable food businesses such as the three Israeli companies — Meat the Future, Future Meat Technologies, and SuperMeat — which will supply food to China as part of a $300 million deal. Branson, who gave up meat in 2014, appears to be investing in alignment with his beliefs and predictions about the future, all while trying to act against the deforestation...