Free Republic

A new Harvard University climate action plan, announced by Harvard President Drew Faust today, clears an ambitious path forward to shift campus operations further away from fossil fuels. The plan includes two significant science-based targets to reduce emissions dramatically: a long-term goal to be fossil-fuel-free by 2050, and a short-term one to be fossil-fuel-neutral by 2026. The plan builds on Harvard’s previous 10-year climate goal, achieved in 2016, to reduce on-campus greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent, despite a square footage increase of 12 percent during that period. Following this milestone, Faust appointed a climate change task force composed of...

Slash CEO income, bring more women on board and go low carbon, Church Investors Group tells companies. The Church Investors Group has warned some of Britain’s biggest companies it intends to take a hard line on executive pay, gender diversity and climate change over the forthcoming annual meeting season. The group, which represents church organisations with combined investment assets of about £17bn, has told companies listed on the FTSE 350 index it will refuse to re-elect directors at firms failing to make sufficient progress in key areas. “The best companies contribute to the common good through their products and services...

The political fight over global warming has extended to science education in recent years as several states have attempted to weaken or block new teaching standards that included information about climate science. But only in Idaho has the state legislature stripped all mentions of human-caused climate change from statewide science guidelines while leaving the rest of the standards intact. Now teachers, parents and students are pushing back, hoping to convince the Republican-controlled Idaho Legislature to approve revised standards, which science proponents say are watered down but would still represent a victory for climate change education in the state. The Idaho...

Scientists have uncovered another hidden threat buried in the icy frozen north—massive natural reserves of mercury, a toxic heavy metal that in some forms can build up in fish and other animals and cause serious health problems in humans. A study published Monday in the journal Geophysical Research Letters reports that the amount of natural mercury bound up in Arctic permafrost may be 10 times greater than all the mercury humans have pumped into the atmosphere from coal-burning and other pollution sources over the last 30 years. As climate change warms the land, this thawing permafrost could release significant quantities...

PYEONGCHANG, South Korea — The only thing more extreme than the Olympic sports is the weather here. The Winter Olympics are slated to begin on Friday as temperatures in the South Korean city plunge. While the athletes are prepared for the bone-chilling temperatures, worries about spectators catching hypothermia or staying home have been raised. "The athletes are pretty well insulated for the hypothermia but, for somebody out here watching the sports, it can occur as quickly as 45 minutes," said Dr. Dave Weinstein, a physician with Team USA who specializes in orthopedic surgery.

Warmer temperatures and declining snow are making it tougher to host the games. It’s no surprise for climate researchers that training for the Winter Olympics, and the games themselves, have run into trouble. For sports contests that rely on snow and ice, a warmer global climate is no friend. The same week in January that Women’s Cup races stalled, the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, released a study concluding that climate change is increasingly threatening the viability of the Winter Olympics, held once every four years. The updated study, which includes contributions from Canadian, Austrian, and Chinese researchers, concludes...

The University of Colorado is teaming up with 12 other North American research universities with a common goal: tackling climate change. The University Climate Change Coalition bands together 13 campuses and university systems from the United States, Canada and Mexico to work with their respective communities conquering climate-related challenges. The coalition plans to spearhead local and national action in areas such as climate modeling, regulation and policy solutions and more, CU said. In 2015, the U.S.-based universities of the coalition accounted for nearly a quarter of environmental research done by all U.S. institutions, according to data collected by the National...

Climate myths are often contradictory – it’s not warming, though it’s warming because of the sun, and really it’s all just an ocean cycle – but they all seem to share one thing in common: logical fallacies and reasoning errors. John Cook, Peter Ellerton, and David Kinkead have just published a paper in Environmental Research Letters in which they examined 42 common climate myths and found that every single one demonstrates fallacious reasoning. Cook has previously published research on using ‘misconception-based learning’ to dislodge climate myths from peoples’ brains and replace them with facts, and beating denial by inoculating people...

Add this to the list of decisions affected by climate change: Should I have children? It is not an easy time for people to feel hopeful, with the effects of global warming no longer theoretical, projections becoming more dire and governmental action lagging. And while few, if any, studies have examined how large a role climate change plays in people’s childbearing decisions, it loomed large in interviews with more than a dozen people ages 18 to 43. A 32-year-old who always thought she would have children can no longer justify it to herself. A Mormon has bucked the expectations of...

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...

Fake science: Two articles yesterday from the so-called science journals Nature and Science today illustrate once again how pervasive the corruption in the climate field has now spread to almost anything that relates to climate

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — Some polar bears in the Arctic are shedding pounds during the time they should be beefing up, a new study shows. It’s the climate change diet and scientists say it’s not good.

A free-market think tank is asking the Securities and Exchange Commission for an investigation into possible bond fraud by local and municipal governments that claim they will be harmed by climate change. The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) says a number of municipalities, most of them in California, are suing oil and gas companies for future damages because of climate change, and in doing so are often explicit in their forecasts of predicted sea-level rise and monetary damages. However, when those same cities sell bonds to investors, they're being far more generic in their claims of future catastrophe. "In their suits...

SEATTLE – When President Trump was candidate Trump, he called climate change a hoax. Since taking the Oval Office, he’s said very little about greenhouse gasses and their impact on the planet. But he did issue a statement that he plans to pull the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Agreement, which aims to reduce emissions as a way to stop global warming. But West Coast states are driving in the opposite direction, with designs of erecting a green wall built on taxing carbon. “This is both an economic benefit for the state of Washington and a job creator,” said...

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...

MichelleNotThatOne mentioned that yesterday was the 40th anniversary of the Great Blizzard of 1978. I liked this part (paraphrased): Student apartment management to tenants: “God will take care of the snow.” Student tenants to management: “Then God will also pay the rent.” Oddly enough precisely 11 years earlier, on January 26-27 1967, another blizzard of monstrous proportions blew through pretty much the same path: The days prior to January 26 and 27, 1967 were unseasonably warm with temperatures in the 50s and 60s in some parts of Michigan. Then suddenly winter temperatures returned and with them came several feet of...

Can the simple act of eating a sandwich really be bad for the environment? New research by British scientists suggests a shocking response: Depends on the sandwich. Researchers at the University of Manchester Thursday announced the results of what they claim to be "the first ever study looking at the carbon footprint of sandwiches, both home-made and pre-packaged." Perhaps not surprisingly, the results are bad news for meat-eaters. The study found that sandwiches containing pork meat (that's bacon, ham and sausage), cheese and prawns contained the highest carbon footprints. The worst of the lot, the so-called "all-day breakfast" sandwich containing...

The U.S. is still on schedule to meet its obligations under the Paris Climate Agreement despite its decision to pull out of the accord, Gore said Thursday"Several governors of our largest states, hundreds of cities and thousands of U.S. businesses are now ensuring that the U.S. will not only meet but exceed the commitments it made under the Paris Agreement," Gore, who was speaking on a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, said Thursday. Under the agreement, reached at the end of 2015, world leaders committed to making sure global warming stays "well below" two degrees Celsius...

Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) is settled science, proclaim the predictors of weather doomsday. Settled Science? Science evolves continuously and can never be settled, unless, of course, the ‘settled’ subject is dogma, not science. Is it just a ‘my way or the highway’ attempt by vested interests to close discussion on their terms? Consider the term “peer reviewed”. Science evolves through the contribution of new ideas which are published so that their peers (other scientists) can review, validate, contribute, or argue with them. If we had accepted Niels Bohr’s version of the atom as settled science, there would have been no...

More than 1,000 private jet flights have been delivering globalist elites to the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, where attendees are discussing — among other topics — the ‘major threat’ of climate change. Airports around the Swiss ski resort will see the number of private jets spike 335 per cent during the annual meeting of world elites, according to Air Charter Service (ACS). Research commissioned by the jet hire company found an average 218 private jet movements a day during the weeklong forum, compared to the 65 daily flights Swiss airfields usually deal with.