Free Republic

SANTA FE, N.M. — A proposed overhaul of New Mexico’s state science standards for public schools came under intense criticism Monday at a packed public hearing in the state capital for omitting or deleting references to global warming, evolution and the age of the Earth. Comments at the hearing overwhelmingly sided against state revisions to a set of standards developed by a consortium of states and the National Academy of Sciences. Of the 55 initial speakers, none backed the standards. Public school teachers, state university faculty, Democratic Party officials and the science chairman for a school catering to local Native...

... Jefferson County, Texas, is among the low-lying coastal areas of America that could lose the most as the ice caps melt and the seas warm and rise. At the same time, it is more economically dependent on the petroleum industry and its emissions-spewing refineries than any other place in the U.S. Residents seemed to choose between the two last November, abandoning a four-decade-old pattern of voting Democratic in presidential elections to support Donald Trump. Then came Hurricane Harvey. Now some conservatives here are newly confronting some of the most polarizing questions in American political discourse: What role do humans...

Pope Francis implicitly criticized the United States on Monday for pulling out of the Paris agreement on climate change, praising it as a means to control the devastating effects of global warming. The U.S. is the only country out of 195 signatories to have withdrawn from the accord, which aims to cut emissions blamed for the rise in temperatures. U.S. President Donald Trump announced the decision in June shortly after visiting the pope, a strong supporter of the deal. At the time a Vatican official said the move was a “slap in the face” for the pope and the Vatican.

Pope Francis addressed the FAO Monday on the question of world hunger, proposing that wars and climate change must be overcome in order to properly address the crisis of world hunger and immigration. “The relationship between hunger and migrations can only be addressed if we go to the root of the problem,” the Pope said at the headquarters of the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) in Rome. “In this regard, studies conducted by the United Nations, like many others conducted by civil organizations, agree that there are two major obstacles that must be overcome: conflicts and climate change.” The pontiff...

Swedish scientists have found that flatulent shellfish are creating vast amounts of greenhouse gases, leading to a predictable slew of comments about farting cockles and clams. But beneath the schoolboy humour, there is a serious point. The two gases in question – methane and nitrous oxide – are potent agents of climate change, with a warming potential 28 and 265 times greater than carbon dioxide respectively. Scientists studying the Baltic Sea off the coast of Sweden have found that shellfish are producing one-tenth of all the greenhouses gases released there – the equivalent to the amount produced by 20,000 cattle....

According to the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, Americans fall into six groups when it comes to climate change: alarmed, concerned, cautious, disengaged, doubtful, and dismissive. I would add a seventh category: panicked. That’s me. I’m a science journalist, so I understand and accept the problem. But I when I read articles about global warming, my anxiety soars. I have to disengage. I check Facebook for puppy videos. Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that I couldn’t make it more than halfway through David Wallace-Wells’s “The Uninhabitable Earth,” published in New York magazine in July. In his 6,600-word cover story,...

"BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU." This slogan appeared on posters of the Party leader in the dystopian society of George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. It was a constant reminder of omnipresent government surveillance for “thoughtcrime” – independent thinking. In Orwell’s book, Ministry of Truth ‘history re-writer’ Winston Smith quietly rebelled against this oppression, starting a diary expressing forbidden thoughts. But government telescreens were everywhere. Watched constantly, Smith’s every move was monitored. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the consequences of being caught were dire; the stress on individuals enormous. As head of the International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC), I have been feeling a...

Larry Flynt, the pornography publisher, is offering "up to $10 million" to anyone who produces information that leads to President Donald Trump's impeachment and removal from office. Laying out the offer in a full-page ad in the Sunday edition of The Washington Post, the advert says: “Buried in Trump’s top-secret tax returns or in other records from his far-flung investments there may be a smoking gun.” “The attempt to impeach Donald Trump will strike many as a sour grapes plot by Democrats to overturn a legitimate election,” it continues. “But there is a strong case to be made that the...

President Donald Trump will nominate a climate change skeptic with ties to the fossil fuel industry to serve as a top environmental adviser. The White House on Thursday announced the selection of Kathleen Hartnett White of Texas to serve as chair of the Council on Environmental Quality. White served under former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, now Trump's energy secretary, for six years on a commission overseeing the state environmental agency. White was fiercely critical of what she called the Obama administration's "imperial EPA" and pushed back against stricter limits on air and water pollution. She is a senior fellow at...

The deadly wildfires ravaging northern California have destroyed more than 3,500 homes and businesses, leveling entire neighborhoods and forcing thousands of residents to flee the flames. Experts say fires like those burning up California wine country will be more frequent, more intense and last longer as global temperatures rise. While no single fire can be said to have been caused by climate change, variations in temperature and precipitation are already affecting the complex dynamics that determine how wildfires develop and spread. California Gov. Jerry Brown laid the blame squarely at the feet of climate change on Wednesday. "With a warming...

Climatologists and statisticians of Ca' Foscari University of Venice have elaborated a method to accurately estimate systematic errors affecting decadal climate predictions. The proposed method promises great progress toward the achievement of reliable near-term climate forecasts. The numerical models currently employed in decadal climate prediction systems are affected by severe systematic errors (or biases) in key regions of the ocean and atmosphere, due to their imperfect representation of fundamental physical processes. Because of these biases, the simulated mean state of the climate can be significantly different from the observed one over large regions. As in the case of weather forecast,...

Al Gore recently had a telling altercation with a journalist. The Spectator’s Ross Clark wanted to ask him about Miami sea-level rises suggested in the new film, “An Inconvenient Sequel.” The reporter started to explain that he had consulted Florida International University sea-level-rise expert Shimon Wdowinski. Gore’s response: “Never heard of him — is he a denier?” Then he asked the journalist, “Are you a denier?” When Clark responded that he was sure climate change is a problem but didn’t know how big, Gore declared, “You are a denier.” I was recently on the receiving end of a similar rebuff...

Just as Hurricane Harvey wrapped up its devastation of Houston, Irma got into line behind it and quickly built into the strongest Atlantic hurricane in recorded history. Now, Maria leaves a broken Caribbean in its wake: Dominica's rooftops and rainforests have been ripped to shreds, and Puerto Rico may be without power for months as a result of the storm. (Learn more about how hurricanes work.) It’s hard to avoid comparisons to the last time two such powerful storms threatened U.S. landfall in the catastrophic 2005 hurricane season, 12 years ago. As in 2005, when Katrina and Rita devastated the...

If it’s totalitarian and unresearched, it’s not a consensus. Arturo Casadevall and Ferric Fang, two academic microbiologists with no special knowledge of climate, recently used their article in the Hill to commit the repellent but now commonplace hate-crime of describing researchers skeptical of the sillier exaggerations of the climate-change establishment as “denialists.” This disfiguring hate-word, calculated to invite an invidious comparison between climate skeptics and those who say the Nazis did not murder six million Jews, is not fit to be uttered by any serious academic. Here, as always, its misuse by intellectual pygmies indicated more than a little nervousness...

SACRAMENTO (CBS SF) — California Gov. Jerry Brown warns that catastrophic wildfires will keep ripping through the state as the climate warms. **SNIP** He said a warming climate has contributed to catastrophic wildfires. “That’s the way it is with a warming climate, dry weather and reducing moisture.” said Brown. “These kind of catastrophes have happened and they’ll continue to happen, and we have to be prepared to do everything we can to mitigate.” The governor has positioned himself as a leader in the fight against climate change.

Big deadly fires are nothing new to California, particularly during fire season when the Santa Ana or Diablo winds blow hot and dry, making tinder out of trees and bushes that have been baking all summer long. But the firestorm now raging through Northern California isn’t the typical wildfire. We don’t yet know what started the fires in Northern California, but we have a good idea of what made them so destructive. Authorities blame a combination of factors. Burning fossil fuels is not the only human activity that contributes to the destruction wrought by wildfires and hurricanes. So does the...

The grownups have finally won and everyone in the UK, from those in cold homes to those on polluted streets and in flooded towns, will benefit. The most important aspect of the UK government’s new clean growth strategy is its unequivocal statement that tackling climate change and a prosperous economy are one and the same thing. There is no long-term, high-carbon economic strategy because the impacts of unchecked climate change destroy economies, as Lord Nicholas Stern puts it. But the Conservative party has long been swinging between the green dream and fossil-fuelled fantasies. Recent years have seen one green policy...

A rapidly spreading invasive pest now threatens crops across the continent. The fall armyworm is closely related to the African armyworm, which is native to the continent. Both pests feed not just on corn, but also on other cereal crops like rice, sorghum, and wheat. Kenneth Wilson of Lancaster University has studied the African armyworm for 25 years and is now part of a working group with the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization that is examining how to deal with the newly arrived pest. The fall armyworm comes at a time when farmers throughout rural Africa are grappling with...

One of the worse effects of sentencing someone to prison time is what it does to that person’s health. Which is why anyone on the cusp of a term of imprisonment is really much, much better off seeing a dentist and a doctor before they go in. Another problem that anyone who has spent any time in a jail or prison knows — even in a lawyer visiting room — is that prisons underspend on HVAC systems, if they spend at all. In the summer, jails and prisons are sweltering. In the winter, people in federal prisons often have to...

When Kimberly Button drove her RV to Glacier National Park in Montana this summer, she expected relief from her muggy home town of Orlando. “We assumed that we’d have mild temperatures,” she says. “We couldn’t have been more wrong.” Instead, the Rocky Mountains baked in mid-90-degree temperatures. Button’s family camper, which didn’t have air conditioning, felt like a sweatbox. “We were looking at each other,” Button says, “and saying, “How is it this hot in Glacier National Park?” Earlier this year, Jessica Pociask, an ecologist and the founder of Wank Expeditions, a tour operator, had to cancel a tour to...