Free Republic

That darn global warming rears its ugly head Monday at the Vatican (click images to enlarge)

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has yet again been caught exaggerating ‘global warming’ by fiddling with the raw temperature data. This time, that data concerns the recent record-breaking cold across the northeastern U.S. which NOAA is trying to erase from history. If you believe NOAA’s charts, there was nothing particularly unusual about this winter’s cold weather which caused sharks to freeze in the ocean and iguanas to drop out of trees.Here is NOAA’s January 2018 chart for Northeast U.S. – an area which includes New England along with NY, PA, NJ, DE and MD.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has given its prestigious award for Public Engagement with Science to climate scientist, Michael E. Mann. No, this is not a joke – though it should be. That’s Michael Mann as in the creator of possibly the most discredited artefact in climate science history: the ludicrous, fabricated “Hockey Stick.” That’s Michael Mann, the litigious activist and vexatious Twitter troll who dismisses any scientist who disagrees with him as a “denier”; who was exposed in the Climategate emails trying to ruin the careers of his opponents and attempting to shut down the...

Melting ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are speeding up the already fast pace of sea level rise, new satellite research shows. At the current rate, the world's oceans on average will be at least 2 feet - - 61 centimeters - - higher by the end of the century compared to today, according to researchers who published in Monday's Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences. The research, based on 25 years of satellite data, shows that pace has quickened, mainly from the melting of massive ice sheets. It confirms scientists' computer simulations and is in line with predictions...

Climate change is threatening crop yields worldwide, yet little is known about how global warming will confuse normal plant physiology. Researchers in the UK now show that higher temperatures accelerate seed dispersal in crop species belonging to the cabbage and mustard plant family, limiting reproductive success, and this effect is mediated by a gene called INDEHISCENT. The findings appear February 12 in the journal Molecular Plant. "In many crops, such as oilseed rape, premature seed dispersal is one of the major causes of crop loss. In the context of climate change, this could become increasingly severe," says co-senior author Vinod...

Global warming has the power to curtail one of nature's most powerful phenomena, cutting the chance of lightning strikes in the future. Increasing greenhouse gases could have a significant effect on storm clouds, experts say. Under worst case climate change scenarios temperatures worldwide could increase by 5°C (9°F) by 2100. Using a new method, researchers calculate that the likely incidence of lightning flashes from storm clouds will drop by 15 per cent under these conditions. Dr Declan Finney of the University of Leeds, who was part of the research, told MailOnline: 'In previous studies of the impact of climate change...

First they tried suing the utility companies. Then they tried suing the automakers. They even tried suing oil companies on behalf of an Alaskan village in danger of being inundated by oil-fueled rising sea levels. Each approach ended when courts said that the judiciary branch wasn’t the right place to address human-induced global warming, a problem so big it requires a coordinated international response that only legislators can implement. Now private plaintiff lawyers and their allies in government are trying a new strategy: Suing under state-law theories of public nuisance. San Francisco and several other California cities and counties have...

Evolutionists Celebrate Darwin Day BY JAKE HEBERT, PH.D. * | MONDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 2018 February 12th is Darwin Day—Charles Darwin’s birthday. Many secular and humanist organizations set aside this day to honor Darwin and his legacy. According to the International Darwin Day website, a formal recognition of Darwin Day began in the 1990s with molecular and cell biologist Dr. Robert Stephens; geneticist, biologist, and philosopher Professor Massimo Pigliucci; and Amanda Chesworth, the former president of Internet Infidels and current publisher of the Skeptical Inquirer magazine.1

Former Cailfornia governor Arnold Schwarzenegger made a rare return to Sacramento last Thursday and declared that Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt needed to be fired. The Los Angeles Times reported that it was Schwarzenegger’s second dig at Pruitt in less than a week (original links): “He is without any doubt the wrong person at that place,” former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said. “He does not represent the people. He only represents the special interests. He should be removed immediately.” Schwarzenegger was in Sacramento to meet with seven state Assembly Republicans who support environmental protection policies. Last month, the former...

Tuvalu – the Pacific island group often cited by climate alarmists as the nation most immediately at risk from rising sea levels caused by ‘global warming’ – is not sinking after all. In fact it’s getting bigger, scientists now admit. A University of Auckland study examined changes in the geography of Tuvalu’s nine atolls and 101 reef islands between 1971 and 2014, using aerial photographs and satellite imagery. It found eight of the atolls and almost three-quarters of the islands grew during the study period, lifting Tuvalu’s total land area by 2.9 percent, even though sea levels in the country...

Due to a combination of prudence and morbid curiosity, a great deal of scholarly research (and journalism) about climate change has focused on the worst of all possible worlds. For scientists running climate-economic models, that nightmare scenario has a concrete definition: In 2011, such researchers established four baseline scenarios for the future of greenhouse gas emissions (ranging from the benign to the catastrophic) for the sake of facilitating comparable studies. The most fearsome — and widely cited — of these baselines, known as “RCP8.5,” imagined a year 2100 in which an overpopulated, technologically underdeveloped humanity is digging up and burning...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The head of the Environmental Protection Agency is again understating the threat posed by climate change, this time by suggesting that global warming may be a good thing for humanity.EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has championed the continued burning of fossil fuels while expressing doubt about the consensus of climate scientists that man-made carbon emissions are overwhelmingly the cause of record temperature increases observed around the world.In an interview with KSNV-TV in Las Vegas on Tuesday, Pruitt made several statements that are undercut by the work of climate scientists, including those at his own agency. The Associated Press...

Athletes from all over the world are preparing for an extremely cold Winter Olympics in South Korea, likely the 2018 games will be the coldest in more than two decades. Weather forecasters say the 2018 Olympics in Pyeongchang, which start Thursday, will easily be the coldest since the 1994 games in Lillehammer, Norway, which were the coldest on record. It got so cold on Saturday audience members walked out of opening ceremony rehearsals, USA Today reported. Cold weather comes as some scientists and environmentalists claim that man-made global warming will make it harder to hold winter games in the future,...

Former secretary of state believes females will be 'burdened' more — and will have to 'find the firewood'Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton predicted Monday during a human rights event at Georgetown University that climate change will force women to “bear the brunt of looking for the food, looking for the firewood, looking for the place to migrate to …” Such migration won’t be led by men, she maintained, but rather by women “when all of the grass is finally gone as the desertification moves south and you have to keep moving your livestock or your crops are no longer...

The White House plans to withdraw Kathleen Hartnett White's nomination to head the Council on Environmental Quality, a White House official confirmed to CNN Saturday. Hartnett White, who would have overseen environmental and energy policies across the government, had described the belief in "global warming" as a "kind of paganism" for "secular elites" during a September 2016 interview on "The Right Perspective," an online conservative radio show. She has also said the goal of climate activists and the United Nations was an all-powerful, one-world government and "planetary management," KFile reported. President Donald Trump announced Hartnett White's nomination in October and...

President Trump appeared to not have a basic understanding of climate science in an interview with Piers Morgan airing Sunday. Trump claimed that the earth is simultaneously heating and cooling and therefore climate change is not happening. “There is a cooling, and there’s a heating. I mean, look, it used to not be climate change, it used to be global warming. That wasn’t working too well because it was getting too cold all over the place,” Trump said. The statement is contradicted by scientists across the globe, including those at NASA, who have said for years that greenhouse gases caused...

French President Emmanuel Macron made global warming a central part of his World Economic Forum speech on Wednesday in Davos, pledging to close all of his country’s coal-fired power plants by 2021. Macron’s anti-coal pledge comes as Ecology Minister Nicolas Hulot announced France failed to meet its 2016 global warming target to limit greenhouse gas emissions to 447 million metric tons. Hulot said France would revise its global warming targets to better align with its Paris climate accord commitment to go “carbon neutral” by 2050, Reuters reported. Macron has been one of the most vocal supporters of the Paris climate...

Climate change is a sprawling, complex problem. But there is an astonishingly simple way to make a difference: plant more trees. Trees scrub pollution from the air, reduce erosion, improve water quality, provide homes for animals and insects, and enhance our lives in countless other ways. It turns out that ecosystem restoration is also an emerging business opportunity. A new report from the World Resources Institute and the Nature Conservancy says governments around the world have committed to reviving nearly 400 million acres of wilderness — an area larger than South Africa. As countries push to regrow forests, startups are dreaming up...

Scientists Get Buried In Snow At Davos While Lecturing On Global Warming Michael Bastasch 2:58 PM 01/23/2018 Scientists have once again set up a mock Arctic base camp to educate world leaders about man-made global warming at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Climate scientists hope their mock camp illustrates how global warming could impact the Arctic, but the “Gore effect” may make it harder to get the message across. Davos has seen frigid temperatures along with about six feet of snow in the last six days. The Basecamp @ArcticDavos is open for business: a unique opportunity to meet...

Pollution in the atmosphere is having an unexpected consequence, scientists say—it's helping to cool the climate, masking some of the global warming that's occurred so far. That means efforts worldwide to clean up the air may cause an increase in warming, as well as other climate effects, as this pollution disappears. New research is helping to quantify just how big that effect might be. A study published this month in the journal Geophysical Research Letters suggests that eliminating the human emission of aerosols—tiny, air-polluting particles often released by industrial activities—could result in additional global warming of anywhere from half a...