Free Republic

California is bracing for a powerful winter storm that could bring up to 10 feet of snow and high winds to the Sierra Nevada. “A second winter storm will impact the West Coast on Thursday and Friday,” the National Weather Service’s (NWS) Weather Prediction Center said in a forecast discussion Thursday. “The storm will create heavy mountain snow that will affect many passes. Multiple feet of snow are likely (over 80% chance) for higher elevations, especially above 5000 feet, including many Cascade and Sierra Nevada Mountain passes,” the notice added. “Extremely heavy snow rates surpassing 3 inches per hour are...

The Quaternary glaciation, also known as the Pleistocene glaciation or the current ice age, is a series of glacial events separated by interglacial events during the Quaternary period from 2.58 Ma (million years ago) to present. In popular culture, there is often reference to "the next ice age".[24] Technically, because Earth is already in an ice age at present, this usually refers to the next glacial period (because the Earth is currently in an interglacial period).

CIA director nominee Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.) said Thursday that he would rather not wade into the climate change debate during his confirmation hearing before the Senate Select Intelligence Committee. “I frankly as a director of CIA would prefer today not to get into the details of climate debate and science. It seems my role is gonna be so different and unique from that. It is gonna be to work alongside warriors keeping Americans safe, and so I stand by the things that I’ve said previously with respect to that issue,” Pompeo said. Sen. Kamal Harris (D-Calif.) asked Pompeo, “CIA...

This exceptionally cold and snowy winter has shown that government climate scientists were dead wrong when it came to predicting just how cold this winter would be, while the 197-year old Farmers’ Almanac predicted this winter would be “bitterly cold”. Bloomberg Businessweek reports that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center (CPC) predicted temperatures would be “above normal from November through January across much of the lower 48 states.” This, however, was dead wrong. As Bloomberg notes, the CPC underestimated the “mammoth December cold wave, which brought snow to Dallas and chilled partiers in Times Square on New...

Winds near hurricane force of 74 mph were expected to generate seas as high as 25 feet in the northern Bering Sea, forecasters said. The winds were expected to raise sea levels as much as 9 feet in the Norton Sound. Those levels combined with the high waves were expected to cause significant coastal erosion and major flooding. The winds may also push sea ice on shore, adding to the dangers, NWS forecasters said.

A sea-level rise of just a few inches will bring flooding to South Florida cities, contaminate sources of drinking water and lead to sharp increases in utility bills over the next 20 or 30 years, according a study released Wednesday by Florida Atlantic University. The study found that projected sea level increases of 3 to 6 inches by 2030, due to global warming, could overwhelm flood-control systems that in many areas are more than 50 years old. The authors provided a list of steps to be taken in the coming decades, from moving drinking-water wells inland to installing more pump...

CHICAGO (AFP) – President-elect Barack Obama said Tuesday his administration would brook no further delay in tackling climate change after discussing global warming with former vice president Al Gore. Sitting between Gore and his vice president-elect Joseph Biden following the hour-long meeting, Obama told reporters: "All three of us are in agreement that the time for delay is over. The time for denial is over.

"Six Greenpeace activists have been cleared of causing criminal damage during a protest over coal-fired power. " "Outside the court, activist Mr Stewart said the verdict was "a tipping point for the climate change movement". He said: "When 12 normal people say it is legitimate for a direct action group to shut down a coal-fired power station because of the harm it does to our planet then where does that leave government energy policy?"

Yes, kids, science is a wonderful thing. But not nearly as wonderful as climate modeling, which can perform supernatural miracles. Honest! Climate modeling can raise the level of the oceans (even without Obama's intervention), it can burn up the planet a hundred years from now, and Shazzam! -- the models can save us again -- all without leaving your video games, and without the benefit of the real-world data that you need for boring old regular science. At least, that's what Nature -- the oldest science journal in the world, going back to Isaac Newton -- now claims. According to...

Then in 1999 an obscure young US physicist, Michael Mann, came up with a new graph like nothing seen before. Instead of the familiar rises and falls in temperature over the past 1,000 years, the line ran virtually flat, only curving up dramatically at the end in a hockey-stick shape to show recent decades as easily the hottest on record. This was just what the IPCC wanted, The Mediaeval Warming had simply been wiped from the record. When its next report came along in 2001, Mann's graph was given top billing, appearing right at the top of page one of...

Chemist Dr. Martin Hertzberg’s response to NYT’s Paul Krugman: 'Hysteria is based on half-baked computer models’ By EPW Blog Tuesday, August 5, 2008 Dr. Martin Hertzberg’s response to NYT’s Paul Krugman: ‘Hysteria is based on half-baked computer models’ (Dr. Martin Hertzberg, a retired Navy meteorologist with a PhD in physical chemistry, is one of the more than 500 scientists featured in the U.S. Senate’s report of scientists dissenting from man-made global warming fears. See this U.S. Senate report.) Hertzberg Excerpt: I am a lifelong liberal Democrat, but I am also a scientist. […] In this morning’s article “Can This Planet...

Al Gore has a new boat and even it is green. The boat is docked at Hurricane Marina on Center Hill Lake in Smithville, about 70 miles east of Nashville. While it doesn't have solar panels yet, a spokesperson at Gore's office told News 2 they are scheduled to be installed Wednesday. The boat is named Bio-Solar One and has been called the "Toyota Prius of boats"...

Here's something unlikely to make the cover of Time. From the Science & Public Policy Institute: WASHINGTON (7-15-08) — Mathematical proof that there is no "climate crisis" appears today in a major, peer-reviewed paper in Physics and Society, a learned journal of the 10,000-strong American Physical Society, SPPI reports. Christopher Monckton, who once advised Margaret Thatcher, demonstrates via 30 equations that computer models used by the UN's climate panel (IPCC) were pre-programmed with overstated values for the three variables whose product is "climate sensitivity" (temperature increase in response to greenhouse-gas increase), resulting in a 500-2000% overstatement of CO2's effect on...

White House Blocks EPA Emissions Draft Document Outlines Keys To Regulating Greenhouse Gases By IAN TALLEY and SIOBHAN HUGHES June 30, 2008 WASHINGTON -- The White House is trying to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from publishing a document that could become the legal roadmap for regulating greenhouse-gas emissions in the U.S., said people close to the matter. The fight over the document is the latest development in a long-running conflict between the EPA and the White House over climate-change policy. It will likely intensify ongoing Congressional investigations into the Bush administration's involvement in the agency's policymaking. The draft document,...

The deniers of global warming are about to latch on to a new argument. The world is cooling. And they are right - well, slightly. Globally, this year is likely to be the coolest for some time - back to the average of the early 90s, according to some unpublished forecasts. This is no refutation of man-made global warming. It is the inevitable consequence of one of nature's climatic cycles. The La Niña, the cold phase of the El Niño cycle in the Pacific, has sent average global temperatures plunging this year. And there is more. Longer term climate cycles...

May 28, 2008 Posted By Marc Morano – 3:33 PM EST – Marc_Morano@EPW.Senate.Gov New York Times Makes Factual Blunder Paper erroneously claims Senate last voted on global warming bill in 2003 A New York Times editorial today arguing in favor of the Senate’s upcoming mandatory global warming cap-and-trade legislation committed a blatant factual error. The May 28 Times editorial incorrectly claimed, “The Senate last addressed climate change in 2003 when it cast 43 votes in favor of a bill sponsored by Mr. McCain and Mr. Lieberman.” (LINK) In their apparently hasty Google search of Senate history, the editors at the...

The global warming debate arrives in the Senate next week, and it's about time. Finally, the Members will have to vote on something real, as opposed to their buck-passing to courts and regulators, and their easy trashing of President Bush. The vehicle is a bill that principal sponsors Joe Lieberman and John Warner are calling "landmark legislation." They're too modest. Warner-Lieberman would impose the most extensive government reorganization of the American economy since the 1930s. Thankfully, the American system makes it hard for colossal tax and regulatory burdens to foxtrot into law without scrutiny. So we hope our politicians will...

For about 300 years Jupiter's banded atmosphere has shown a remarkable feature to telescopic viewers, a large swirling storm system known as The Great Red Spot. In 2006, another red storm system appeared, actually seen to form as smaller whitish oval-shaped storms merged and then developed the curious reddish hue. Now, Jupiter has a third red spot ...

The spring storm that blanketed Anchorage with heavy snow Friday is creating trouble all around town. Friday evening, the National Weather Service upgraded the situation from an advisory to a heavy snow warning. People should travel only in an emergency, the weather service said. The deadline for removing studded tires was April 30 -- Wednesday. But state Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan issued an emergency order Friday extending the deadline two weeks for those affected. The new deadline for those in the storm area is May 15. Around 10 inches of snow fell during the day and another 8 to...

WASHINGTON (AP) - Revising his stance on global warming, President Bush on Wednesday proposed a new target for stopping the growth of the nation's greenhouse gas emissions by 2025. The president also called for putting the brakes on greenhouse gas emissions from electric power plants within 10 to 15 years. "To reach our 2025 goal, we will need to more rapidly slow the growth of power sector greenhouse gas emissions so that they peak within 10 to 15 years, and decline thereafter," Bush said in excerpts of the speech released early by the White House.