Free Republic

While much of the attention in discussions about climate change often focuses on areas such as the Arctic or small island nations, the effects on regions such as the Middle East, and particularly Iraq, is often overlooked. Yet, the consequences of climate change in Iraq are profound and far-reaching, affecting not only the environment but also exacerbating existing social, economic and political challenges. As the world grapples with the wider existential threat, it is critical that we shed light on the plight of Iraq and outline the actions both the country and the international community must take to address this...

As inflation remains stubbornly high, farmers throughout the Western world are warning that cost increases from the net zero movement will drive food prices still higher, while simultaneously putting many smaller farmers out of business.January inflation numbers showed that prices increased by 3.1 percent over what they were a year ago, indicating that the fight against inflation, while progressing, has not been won.Overall, prices have surged by nearly 18 percent since January 2021 when President Joe Biden took office.Americans are struggling in an economy in which, by official statistics, nearly one-fifth of the value of their dollars has evaporated in...

BRUSSELS — The world just experienced its hottest January on record, continuing a run of exceptional heat fueled by climate change, the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said on Thursday. Last month surpassed the previous warmest January, which occurred in 2020, in C3S’s records going back to 1950. The exceptional month came after 2023 ranked as the planet’s hottest year in global records going back to 1850, as human-caused climate change and the El Nino weather phenomenon, which warms the surface waters in the eastern Pacific Ocean, pushed temperatures higher. Every month since June has been the world’s...

Nicholas Wise is a fluid dynamics researcher who moonlights as a scientific fraud buster, reports Science magazine. And last June he "was digging around on shady Facebook groups when he came across something he had never seen before." Wise was all too familiar with offers to sell or buy author slots and reviews on scientific papers — the signs of a busy paper mill. Exploiting the growing pressure on scientists worldwide to amass publications even if they lack resources to undertake quality research, these furtive intermediaries by some accounts pump out tens or even hundreds of thousands of articles every...

White House adviser John Podesta will replace John Kerry as the nation’s lead climate diplomat, the White House announced on Wednesday. “We need to keep meeting the gravity of this moment, and there is no one better than John Podesta to make sure we do,” White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients, in a written statement shared with reporters. Podesta will remain at the White House and will get the title of senior advisor to the president for international climate policy. In that role, he will lead the Biden administration’s international climate policy agenda and will coordinate with other officials...

With many major airlines now committed to sustainability and ‘green’ fuels, a protest at one of the UK’s airports focused on private jets. On Saturday, January 27, Greta Thunberg, the 21-year-old Swedish environmental activist, took a stand against the increasing use of private jets, joining forces with Extinction Rebellion at Farnborough Airport. The demonstration took place in the morning with the airport brimming with protesters, objecting to the proposed 40 per cent rise in annual flight numbers. Most Read on Euro Weekly News Spain to pioneer mobile national ID H&M announces major store closures in Spain Finance Roundup for Spain...

The New York Times put Charles Murray on the cover of its Sunday Magazine, calling him "The Most Dangerous Conservative." That was after he co-wrote the book, "The Bell Curve," which argued that different ethnic groups have, on average, different IQs. As Murray puts it in my video this week, "Blacks on average have a lower IQ than whites. However, whites are not at the top. East Asians, on average, have a higher IQ than whites. Ashkenazi Jews have higher IQs." Other researchers agree. An article in ScienceDirect journal puts it this way, "East Asians and their descendants average an...

The World Economic Forum has declared war on coffee drinkers, declaring that they are causing “global boiling” and must be stopped at all costs.According to World Economic Forum Agenda Contributor Hubert Keller, “The coffee that we all drink emits between 15 and 20 tonnes of CO2 per tonne of coffee… Every time we drink coffee, we are putting CO2 into the atmosphere.”“Most of the coffee is produced by monoculture, and monoculture is also affected by climate change. The quality of these natural assets is deteriorating rapidly.”According to the World Economic Forum, coffee drinkers will have to limit themselves to two...

Extremely cold Arctic air and severe winter weather swept southward into much of the U.S. in mid-January 2024, breaking daily low temperature records from Montana to Texas. Tens of millions of people were affected by dangerously cold temperatures, and heavy lake-effect snow and snow squalls have had severe effects across the Great Lakes and Northeast regions. These severe cold events occur when the polar jet stream – the familiar jet stream of winter that runs along the boundary between Arctic and more temperate air – dips deeply southward, bringing the cold Arctic air to regions that don’t often experience it....

Japanese scientists took a video illustrating how plants communicate with each other. They created a device that vents chemicals from plants being damaged by insects directly into a healthy plant. In response, the video shows the living one producing calcium through its leaves, which indicates the plant senses danger. We don’t see plants prowling in the wild, hunting prey, and making sounds, so it’s easy to assume they don’t communicate with each other. However, this experiment proves that plants can convey messages to each other for survival. As a result, it becomes an eye-opener that expands our understanding of the...

China’s state-run Global Times on Wednesday eagerly touted a report from two climate alarmist think tanks, Common Wealth in the United Kingdom and the Climate and Community Project in the United States, that claimed the British and American militaries “owe” $111 billion in “climate reparations” to communities supposedly threatened by their carbon emissions. The Global Times is the house organ of the Chinese government, the worst polluter and carbon emitter on Earth by a very wide margin, but it naturally left China’s emissions unmentioned as it focused on the “social cost of carbon” calculations run by the two think tanks...

An international team of scientists led by Oregon State University researchers has used a novel 500-year dataset to frame a "restorative" pathway through which humanity can avoid the worst ecological and social outcomes of climate change. In addition to charting a possible new course for society, the researchers say their "paradigm shifting" plan can support climate modeling and discussion by providing a set of actions that strongly emphasize social and economic justice as well as environmental sustainability. Oregon State's William Ripple, former OSU postdoctoral researcher Christopher Wolf and collaborators argue their scenario should be included in climate models along with...

… balmy holidays are a preview of something darker: bigger climate extremes, more natural disasters, the specter not of a world where humans suffer through these things and find ways to survive but where we’ve made the planet so uninhabitable that, in the longer run, the planet survives but we don’t. I was thinking about this while standing outside a science museum a couple of days ago with a friend. We were talking about the weather, but not the kind of small talk when you have nothing else to say. “I’m not sure our grandkids will even know what snow...

This is my first Christmas without my dad. As hard as it is for me and my siblings, it’s harder still for our mother, who is having her first Christmas since 1963 without him. Dad’s days in the hospital and subsequent death ushered in a wave of emotions, memories, and ponderings about heaven, sin, salvation, and for me, fossil fuels. The last item in that list may sound strange, but let me explain. As an advocate for the energy industry, work follows me everywhere, and I love it because I love what I do. But fossil fuels are not just...

Is it time for change at the UN? A recent petition has stirred global attention, calling for Greta Thunberg’s appointment as the UN Ambassador for Climate Action. Love her or loathe her, you can’t ignore her, she’s instantly recognisable and everyone knows where she stands on environmental issues. Greta Thunberg, the 20-year-old Swedish climate activist came to prominence in 2018, when as a schoolgirl she went ‘on strike’ from school to raise awareness of the planet’s climate crisis. Since then she has become a global icon, a champion for many activists around the world, with the power to muster protests...

United States Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry says it will take trillions of dollars to “solve” climate change. Then he says, “There is not enough money in any country in the world to actually solve this problem.”Kerry has little understanding of money or how it’s created. He’s a multimillionaire because he married a rich woman. Now he wants to take more of your money to pretend to affect climate change.Bjorn Lomborg points out that there are better things society should spend money on.Lomborg acknowledges that a warmer climate brings problems. “As temperatures get higher, sea water, like everything...

resident Biden's administration has begun probing the nation's largest banks to assess their plans to mitigate climate risk with their loans and business. A recent "discovery review" led by the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) looked into more than two dozen banks to determine how they are accounting for climate risk in their loans and investment strategies, in addition to investigating how they manage energy finance and greenhouse gas emissions, Reuters first reported. The purpose of this review is to supervise bank activities and support the effective management of climate-related financial risks among institutions...

The roller coaster of this year’s United Nations Climate Conference (COP28) has ended with a historic new agreement: For the first time, world governments have said countries should transition away from fossil fuels. The deal comes after days of tense negotiations, especially over the fossil fuel language, which caused the Dubai conference to stretch into overtime. Climate advocates have praised it as a step forward, but also raised concerns about potential loopholes in its language and criticized it for not going further as the climate crisis deepens — and fossil fuel production continues to increase.

DUBAI — For 30 years, with temperatures and sea levels rising, global negotiators have managed to discuss the health of the planet without addressing the root cause of the problem. In meeting after meeting, document after document, even in the landmark 2015 Paris agreement, one phrase has been conspicuously absent: any mention of fossil fuels. “This is really difficult stuff. We are talking about the future of humanity, the future of economic structures and geopolitics,” said Hana AlHashimi, the lead negotiator for the United Arab Emirates. U.S. climate envoy John F. Kerry has said that Washington supports language “requiring the...

COP isn’t a new acronym, but the United Nations’ climate conference and it’s been running for decades. Farhana Yamin is a key architect of the UN’s Paris Climate Agreement who seems to be involved (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farhana_Yamin#Career) with the British deep state and she attended COP28 promoting decolonization and reparations. These aren’t just social clubs for elites to “feel like important visionaries” or to “appease libtards,” they’re places where policy proposals get worked out and agreed upon by globalist leaders around the world.