Free Republic

Tech is already making the world a better place. It is helping refugees integrate into society, it is empowering people with disabilities, and connecting communities.Al Gore believes it can been instrumental in reversing climate change. "My purpose here is to recruit you to be part of the solution to the climate crisis," he told the audience at Web Summit -- Europe's biggest tech conference -- in Lisbon on Thursday. "You can have a bigger impact than practically any other group in the entire world."It's the latest pitch by the former US vice president as he continues his mission to protect...

Ever-higher temperatures are melting the ice sheets faster than projected. Sea level is rising. International efforts to reduce greenhouse gases are taking longer than expected. It's a nightmare scenario that could soon demand an emergency response. What to do? One idea gaining traction is to seed marine clouds with salt water or other particles, increasing their potential to reflect solar rays, cooling the earth. It's part of a nascent and controversial branch of science known as "sunlight reflection methods," or SRM. "We think SRM could buy time for other (carbon-reduction) measures to be put in place," said Philip J. Rasch,...

The effects of climate change, such as droughts, wild-fires and extreme weather are a particular concern for those living in countries where people cannot afford to protect themselves against such disasters. Globally, 70% of the damage caused by climate change events, and 98% in developing countries, doesn’t get compensated unless the government steps in, delegates heard at the 23rd Conference of the Parties (COP23) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which is taking place in Bonn, Germany. Climate risk insurance – which provides financial compensation for people following climate-related disasters – could be a powerful tool...

Two Clearwater residents, Keith McNeill and Jean Nelson, recently attended Citizens Climate Lobby-Canada’s annual conference and lobbying days, which were held Oct. 21-24 in Ottawa. “It was four days full of firsts and mosts,” said Cathy Orlando, the national director of CCL Canada. “We had the most number of face-to-face meetings: 44 in one lobbying blitz.” There were 49 lobbying meetings in all. Fifty-one CCL volunteers lobbied in those meetings, and in total, 65 people attended the conference. Armed with two days of training and networking, 240 signatures from businesses and NGOs on their open letter and 652 print media...

The sun is setting over Karamoja. Time for the nomadic herders to return their cattle to thorn-ringed enclosures. They've roamed since first light, searching for pasture in Uganda's poorest region where water and grazing land are scarce. Now the changing climate has brought hunger and bewilderment as traditional coping methods for the harsh environment fail. As the first major global climate conference convenes in Germany since President Donald Trump announced that the U.S. will pull out of the 2015 Paris accord, many in Africa fear they will be hit harder than most. Historically, the rainy season runs from April to...

We all have a climate story to tell. As I head for the latest round of UN climate talks (COP23) in Bonn, Germany, relatives in Malaysia tell me that our home state, Penang, has been almost completely submerged by floods, killing seven people and displacing thousands. As with most disasters and shocks, the poorest are the worst hit. Climate-related migration is already hurting some of the most vulnerable communities. Clearly, the impacts these people are suffering are not their own fault, but the symptom of a crisis for which developed nations and multinational corporations are primarily responsible by relentlessly extracting...

When a damaging heat wave occurs, how much responsibility do the major greenhouse gas-emitting countries bear? It's a question scientists say they're getting closer to answering at a country-by-country level. As international climate negotiators meet in Germany this week, a team of scientists has published a method for estimating how individual countries' shares of global greenhouse gas emissions over time contributed to the risk of specific extreme climate events, like heat waves, occurring in other countries. The new techniques "make it possible to assign extreme events to human-induced climate change and historical emissions," and "allow losses and damage associated with...

If observed climate variables such as temperature or precipitation change over time, it raises the question as to whether human influence plays a role. To investigate this, scientists are applying a method for estimating causal relationships. The fact that greenhouse gases emitted by humans are changing the global climate system is scientifically undisputed. Climate researchers often look to the future with their models and try to calculate how the increasing concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere will affect various climate variables. To test whether these climate variables are influenced by rising greenhouse gas emissions from human activities, scientists have developed...

President Donald Trump’s nominee to serve as his top environmental adviser said Wednesday she is unconvinced by a new U.S. government assessment reaffirming that manmade carbon emissions are the primary cause of climate change. Kathleen Hartnett White testified before a Senate committee weighing her confirmation as chair of the Council on Environmental Quality at the White House. White, who is from Texas, reiterated her view that carbon dioxide is a “plant nutrient,” not a pollutant. Pressed by Democrats about the specific evidence linking carbon emissions to global warming, White grew visibly flustered. “I am not a scientist, but in my...

BRUSSELS Gov. Jerry Brown, arriving in Brussels after collegial events in Germany, sparred publicly with British politicians when confronted over his climate change record at the European Parliament on Wednesday. Steven Woolfe, a British politician on the parliament, was first to pierce the pleasantries, accusing Brown of supporting state intervention “at a huge scale” and spending and increasing taxes “like it’s going out of fashion.” Brown’s climate change policy, he argued isolates the state from much of the U.S. Woolfe dismissed California’s cap-and-trade carbon market a “tax-and-spend” policy. And he teased the governor as potentially being interested in joining the...

Germany’s top court on Wednesday required parliament to legally recognize a “third gender” from birth, potentially making it the first European country to offer intersex people the option of identifying as neither male nor female. Current regulations on civil status are discriminatory against intersex people, the Federal Constitutional Court said, noting that the sexual identity of an individual is protected as a basic right. Legislators must by the end of 2018 pass a new regulation to offer a third gender option in birth registers, the court added, ruling in favour of an appeal brought by an intersex person. In the...

PARIS - U.S. President Donald Trump, who pulled his country out of the 2015 Paris climate change deal, is “for the time being” not invited to a climate change summit due to be held in the French capital in December, an official in President Emmanuel Macron’s office said. Over a hundred countries, as well as non governmental organizations, have been invited for the Dec.12 summit. “The United States have a bit of a special status for that summit,” the official said.

Paul McCartney criticized President Trump's lax attitude toward climate change in a new interview with the BBC. "You've got someone like Trump who says that it [climate change] is just a hoax," he said. "A lot of people like myself think that's just madness." "It's maybe a good time now to try and focus people's attention and say, 'Look, forget about [Trump] – we can do something,'" he said. "It's not the total solution, but it's part of the solution. A lot of people have been saying this for a long time but there's resistance."

Countries should sue the world’s biggest oil, coal and gas, and cement companies for damages resulting from climate change—says well-known climate scientist James Hansen. Hansen, a former NASA scientist who warned Congress about the dangers of climate change in 1988, says global warming of 2°C, or even 1.5°C, is dangerous, risking sea level rise of at least 10 feet in as little as 50 years. An enormous amount of money is urgently needed to dramatically slash emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), take existing CO2 out of the atmosphere, and for countries to cope with the impacts of climate change, Hansen...

It is time to stop the dairy and meat giants from destroying the climate and shift our support to making our small farmers, herders and ranchers resilient. Did you know that three meat companies – JBS, Cargill and Tyson – are estimated to have emitted more greenhouse gases last year than all of France and nearly as much as some of the biggest oil companies like Exxon, BP and Shell? Few meat and dairy companies calculate or publish their climate emissions. So for the first time ever, we have estimated corporate emissions from livestock, using the most comprehensive methodology created...

Climate change is having a huge impact on Afghanistan's agriculture-based society. Despite changing environment patterns, Afghan farmers have a limited understanding of how climate change is affecting their livelihood. For generations, Salman Mohammadi's family has worked on a farm in the Lal Wa Sar Jangal district in Afghanistan's central Ghor province. The farming, he recalls, was hard but the life was simple. But things started to change in the past few years as Mohammadi noticed a disturbance in the rain and snowfall patterns. Mohammadi's case is not unique. Over the past decades, many Afghan farmers have had to leave farming...

WASHINGTON — Then there was one. Syria announced during United Nations climate talks on Tuesday that it would sign the Paris agreement on climate change. The move, which comes on the heels of Nicaragua signing the accord last month, will leave the United States as the only country that has rejected the global pact. According to several people who were in a plenary session at the climate talks in Bonn, Germany, a Syrian delegate announced that the country was poised to send its ratification of the Paris agreement to the United Nations. “This is the very last country that actually...

The Noble Lie is a concept discussed by Plato in the dialogues, lies told by oligarchs to get the populace in the right frame of mind, deceptions intended to influence the mindset and behavior of the populace. The Noble Lie is not often noble; it is the tool of the totalitarian. Totalitarianism is built on the Noble Lie and the best evidence of it in modern society is political correctness and its accompanying censorship and intimidation of any speech or conduct that contradicts the Orwellian “good think” of the Noble Lie. Most would assume that prestigious medical journals like Journal...

If you have a garden, there’s a good chance it is filled with signs of climate change, though they might not always be what you would expect. It seems obvious that as global temperatures increase, flowers might be inclined to bloom earlier. But Will Pearse, an assistant professor in Utah State University’s Department of Biology, had a hunch that the effects of a changing climate could be more profound. So Pearse, who has a background in evolutionary ecology, used unconventional statistical techniques to show that flowering plants may indeed be struggling to adapt — not just blossoming earlier in some...

In a dramatic shift from the Obama era, United States negotiators representing the Trump administration at the G7 summit of health ministers in Milan, Italy have resisted references to climate change, sexual and reproductive rights — including abortion — and universal health care in an agreement set to finalized on Monday. draft communique shared with BuzzFeed News notes that the U.S. demands to strike out all references to “climate change” and “man-made” weather, and “other disasters.” The U.S. is also refusing a reference “to engage in international cooperation to implement the Paris climate agreement,” according to BuzzFeed News. The U.S....