Free Republic

On Sept. 23, 2016, a group of protesters blocked a Burlington Northern Santa Fe freight train carrying coal in Spokane, WA, to prevent the earth from warming up. From a scientific standpoint, the action was absurd. As a piece of a political theater, it may have been more effective. The blockage by Rev. George Taylor and other members of groups called Veterans for Peace and Raging Grannies garnered widespread press coverage. And the protest may trigger a legal revolution as well. In a hearing tomorrow, a judge in Spokane is expected to hand down a written ruling allowing Taylor to...

Princeton University researchers have found that the climate models scientists use to project future conditions on our planet underestimate the cooling effect that clouds have on a daily — and even hourly — basis, particularly over land. The researchers report in the journal Nature Communications that models tend to factor in too much of the sun’s daily heat, which results in warmer, drier conditions than might actually occur. The researchers found that inaccuracies in accounting for the diurnal, or daily, cloud cycle did not seem to invalidate climate projections, but they did increase the margin of error for a crucial...

The precise extent of human-induced climate change is unclear, but the basic science is unequivocal, as is the danger it poses to the United States. This threat comes from the direct impact of climate change on agricultural production and sea levels but equally importantly from the huge waves of migration that climate change is likely to cause, on a scale that even the world’s richest states and societies will be unable either to prevent or accommodate. Yet for two out of the past four U.S. administrations, action on this issue has been frozen due to the refusal of a large...

Washington Governor Claims ‘Just 59 Days’ To Save Children From Global Warming Michael Bastasch 4:47 PM 01/09/2018 Washington state’s Democratic Governor Jay Inslee warned there was “just 59 days” to save future generations from “an endless cycle of crop-killing droughts one year, and rivers spilling their banks the next.” Inslee went on a lengthy Twitter rant in efforts to convince the state legislature to pass legislation to tax carbon dioxide emissions. Washington residents voted down Inslee’s last carbon tax plan by a wide margin in 2016. We have just 59 days to do our part to save our children from...

The article claims that German Chancellor Merkel and her coaltion non-government have agreed to abandon their current climate-change plans - or, at least, to kick the can five years down the road. Further evidence that President Trump was right to pull out of the Paris accord, which (as most people already knew) was a sham from the beginning.

Anne Idsal, a 34-year-old Baylor graduate whose family has long worked in GOP politics, said she’s unsure of the extent that humans impact climate change.When the Trump administration announced the appointment of Anne Idsal as the new regional EPA administrator, Adrian Shelley, the director of Public Citizen Texas, had just one thought: Who? “That name meant nothing to me,” said Shelley, who has worked on environmental issues in Texas for the past six years. Idsal is something of an unknown quantity for many, though she comes from a well-connected Texas political family with ties to the Republican guard and has...

People who have never personally assessed President Trump have lately been diagnosing him with mental illness and discussing the ramifications of this diagnosis that they made up.  Dr. Brandy Lee, a professor of psychiatry at Yale, a university that is supposed to be highly respected, told Newsweek that, if possible, she and other like-minded psychiatrists would "be declaring a public health emergency that needs to be responded to as quickly as possible." “As more time passes, we come closer to the greatest risk of danger," she added, "one that could even mean the extinction of the human species. This is not hyperbole. This...

In Florida over the holidays, President Trump tweeted, “In the East, it could be the COLDEST New Year’s Eve on record. Perhaps we could use a little bit of that good old Global Warming that our Country, but not other countries, was going to pay TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS to protect against. Bundle up!”Al Gore—the leading global warming propagandist—fearing a collapse of his warming hypothesis, tweeted that the recent record lows are due to global warming. That drew biting derision from real climate scientist Dr. Roy W. Spencer in an imaginary interchange on his Facebook page:"ME: So warm winters, cold winters,...

Scientists in the Netherlands have found a new excuse as to why sea levels are stubbornly refusing to rise in line with Al Gore’s doomsday predictions: “ocean bottom deformation.” Apparently, they claim in a study by Thomas Frederikse et al, the weight of the extra water caused by all those melting glaciers and icecaps is so great that it is causing the sea bed to sink. Their paper – titled ‘Ocean Bottom Deformation Due To Present-Day Mass Redistribution and Its Impact on Sea Level Observations’ – is published in Geophysical Research Letters.Here is the abstract:

The challenge of a possible cholera outbreak is facing Bangladesh as the climate-induced warming of the earth induces the growth for algae and bacteria, experts have observed. The temperature rise in Bangladesh will make possible the growth for various algae and bacteria, leading to more cholera cases in the country, said Dr Md Sirajul Islam, emeritus scientist of International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh. Global warming caused by climate change might influence the transmission dynamic of cholera, he added. The environmental microbiologist came up with the observation during his presentation on water treatment as an adaptation option to climate...

The impacts of climate change are among the environmental challenges facing Iran that helped spark protests in dozens of cities across the Islamic republic. At least 20 people have died in the uprising, driven by the sudden collapse of financial institutions, low wages and mistrust of national leaders. Rising temperatures are seen by some experts as an underlying condition for the economic hardships that led to the unrest. A severe drought, mismanaged water resources and dust storms diminished Iran's economy in recent years, according to experts who study the region. While the protests are largely driven by resistance to the...

Green sea turtles do not develop into males or females due to sex chromosomes, like humans and most other mammals do. Instead, the temperature outside a turtle egg influences the sex of the growing embryo. And this unusual biological quirk, scientists say, endangers their future in a warmer world. Already, some sea turtle populations are so skewed by heat that the young reptiles are almost entirely female, according to a new report in the journal Current Biology. “This is one of the most important conservation papers of the decade,” said biologist David Owens, a professor emeritus at the College of...

In November, as delegates from all over the world gathered in the former German capital of Bonn for the annual UN climate summit, their hosts were feeling a bit embarrassed. Germany likes to champion itself as a climate leader. But when delivering her headline speech to the summit, Chancellor Angela Merkel was unable to make any new climate commitments. That’s because she was locked in difficult coalition negotiations with the free-market liberals and the environmentalist Greens. Germany is still 40 percent reliant on coal, a reality Merkel acknowledged in her speech. Because of strong economic growth and Merkel’s decision to...

With most of the U.S. recently in the grip of significant cold, and given the proper goading from President Trump, liberals again felt led to lecture us on the difference between weather and climate. It's lost on most leftists how they so often fail to apply the same standards to themselves. Whether blizzards, hurricanes, wildfires, tornadoes, record heat, record cold, and so on, with religious devotion, liberals almost never fail to link dramatic weather events to their apocalyptic climate narrative. One of the easiest jobs in the world has to be that of climate doomsayer. No matter the weather, the...

Meteorologist Bill Steffen sorts through the rhetoric coming from both the Right and the Left to reveal the real trajectory of our planet based on current evidence. Steffen has been a weatherman since the 1970s, so he knows a thing or two about the weather.

A winter storm has been hammering the Northeast, while even states like Florida are experiencing much colder weather than normal. What’s going on? Is this extreme winter evidence for climate change – or just part of the normal weather cycle? Meteorologist and weather forecaster Joe Bastardi of WeatherBell.com talked about weather patterns and this year’s unusually cold winter . His analysis is a stark contrast to climate change activists’ scare tactics. Listen to the clip (above) to hear him combat various arguments tying cold winter weather to global warming.

RUSH: Well, it may be sunny, but it is 60 degrees here, and I’m telling you, for us… (laughing) I shouldn’t even mention it, not with people sitting there a minus-zero wind chill. It’s cold to us. It’s relative. It is very cold to us. I mean, there are people that are gonna laugh. Like tomorrow the weather forecast here has a high of 64, which will happen about two or three in the afternoon, but the wind is gonna be out of the north-northwest at about 15 to 20. It’s gonna make it feel like 55 or less. There...

The Interior Department’s number-two official issued a secretarial order just before Christmas rescinding several climate change and conservation policies issued under the Obama administration, saying they were “inconsistent” with President Trump’s quest for energy independence. Secretarial Order 3360, signed Dec. 22 by Interior Deputy Secretary David Bernhardt, wipes away four separate directives and policy manuals aimed at showing departmental employees how to minimize the environmental impact of activities on federal land and in federal waters, and calls for the review of a fifth one that applies to the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska. Instead, it directs officials to reinstate and update guidance...

Biting Arctic air — bringing wind chills as low as 30 below — will make the outdoors miserable for more than 130 million Americans in the Northeast, as well as parts of the Southeast and Great Plains this weekend, forecasters warn. But before folks file this cold snap away under "typical winter weather," scientists say the potentially record-breaking temperatures in store for Friday night through Sunday are being fed, at least in part, by a warming climate. Confused? A study published last year in the journal WIRES Climate Change, however, lays out how the warming Arctic and melting ice appear...

Barack Obama promised upon leaving the White House that he would stay out of President Trump’s hair unless it was really, really important. Increasingly during 2017, Mr. Obama found really important topics on which to challenge Mr. Trump. When Mr. Trump pushed Congress last March to repeal Obamacare, Mr. Obama jumped in to save his signature program with one of his first public comments as a private citizen. “Reality continues to discredit the false claim that this law is in a ‘death spiral,’” Mr. Obama said, using Mr. Trump’s favorite phrase for criticizing the Affordable Care Act. “Likewise, this law...