Free Republic

The European Union has agreed a host of climate and energy targets this week: It’s set energy efficiency standards for new buildings, and agreed to climate targets for 2030. Europe has a history of progressive environmental legislation, and it political leaders often position themselves as climate heroes. Recently, French President Emmanuel Macron appears to have moved in on German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s traditional territory as international climate champion, with public displays of support for climate science and attacks on US President Donald Trump’s regressive climate policies. But behind the bravado, is Europe doing enough to cut emissions? The short answer,...

A former member of the Obama administration claims Washington, D.C., often uses “misleading” news releases about climate data to influence public opinion. Former Energy Department Undersecretary Steven Koonin told The Wall Street Journal Monday that bureaucrats within former President Barack Obama’s administration spun scientific data to manipulate public opinion. “What you saw coming out of the press releases about climate data, climate analysis, was, I’d say, misleading, sometimes just wrong,” Koonin said, referring to elements within the Obama administration he said were responsible for manipulating climate data. He pointed to a National Climate Assessment in 2014 showing hurricane activity has...

The fact that it’s being proposed by Republicans doesn’t make it any more economically palatable. Madness is rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule — Friedrich Nietzsche ‘Cap and trade was just one way of skinning the cat; it was not the only way,” Barack Obama declared after Democrats’ disastrous losses in the 2010 midterm elections. That shellacking finally killed off the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill. From it was born the EPA’s Clean Power Plan and the Obama administration’s war on coal, in turn a contributory factor to Donald Trump’s election and Republicans’...

It is this solution, brilliant at the time, that leads us to Brearley’s legacy on climate change. Because over the course of the last 200 plus years, the electoral college, which provides for stronger voting power per person in more rural and less populated states, has elected four U.S. presidents who clearly lost the popular vote (1876, 1888, 2000 and 2016). Two of those elections have occurred during the period in which we have known about the causes and impacts of carbon dioxide emissions and climate change and in both cases, the impacts of those elections have very likely had...

Cement, the ubiquitous material used to build roads, buildings and other infrastructure, absorbs about one billion tons of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) annually, according to a new study published Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience. But concrete carbonation is “not currently considered in emissions inventories” kept by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), according to the study’s co-authors, an international team of researchers led by Professor Dabo Guan of the U.K.’s University of East Anglia. The study found that cement’s natural carbonation process not only offsets the fossil fuel emissions released during its production, it also “represents a...

Paris (AFP) - A rapidly melting glacier atop East Antarctica is on track to lift oceans at least two metres, and could soon pass a "tipping point" of no return, researchers said Wednesday. To date, scientists have mostly worried about the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets as dangerous drivers of sea level rise. But the new study, following up on earlier work by the same team, has identified a third major threat to hundreds of millions of people living in coastal areas around the world. "I predict that before the end of the century the great global cities of...

The U.N.’s scientific panel on climate change will write a special report on how to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) compared with pre-industrial times. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change agreed Thursday to explore the issue after a request by world governments in Paris last December. Many scientists say it will be virtually impossible to keep warming below that level without removing vast quantities of heat-trapping greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. …

Most people don’t realize this yet, but if a Democrat gets the keys to the White House next year it’s game over for the US economy. This isn’t just for the obvious reason that liberals like Sen. Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton don’t understand free markets or small government. It’s because the left has got its hands on the magic formula that enables it to do at both federal and local level all the things that lefties love to do – the meddling, the nannying, the taxing, the regulating, the confiscating, the cronyism – virtually unopposed by the people who...

(CNSNews.com) - White House Science Advisor John Holdren says because of the impacts of climate change, agricultural and construction workers “will basically be unable to control their body temperature and will die.” “In some parts of the world, when you look more broadly at this question, you see the likelihood that in the hottest times of the year it will be simply physiologically impossible to work outdoors,” Holdren said at a White House event on climate change Monday. “That means agriculture, that means construction, people who try to work outdoors will basically be unable to control their body temperature and...

Fraud: While the global warming alarmists have done a good job of spreading fright, they haven’t been so good at hiding their real motivation. Yet another one has slipped up and revealed the catalyst driving the climate scare. We have been told now for almost three decades that man has to change his ways or his fossil-fuel emissions will scorch Earth with catastrophic warming. Scientists, politicians and activists have maintained the narrative that their concern is only about caring for our planet and its inhabitants. But this is simply not true. The narrative is a ruse. They are after something...

FOREST fires rage out of control despite water-bombing by helicopters. A sweltering heatwave grips the outback. Is this Australia? No, it’s Scotland enjoying its driest spring on record. The war might have come and gone, and we might be having an election next week, but all Scotland can talk about is the odd weather. Welcome to global warming.Or is it? I remain doggedly unconvinced. Certainly, the past decade has seen shorter winters in Scotland. But that only proves the climate is highly variable. Certainly, we are seeing a global bounce in temperature since the mini cold spasm that gripped the...

When it comes to measuring global warming, it's all about altitude. Temperature readings taken close to Earth's surface -- about 6 feet off the ground -- show a slightly warmer planet than measurements taken from on high by satellites in orbit. And that discrepancy has given ammunition to climate-change doubters. Government agencies and most scientists rely primarily on ground measurements, and they show that 2015 was the warmest year on record. The National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, NASA, the Japanese and British meteorological agencies and the World Meteorological Organization all use ground data. It's a matter of better accuracy and relevance,...

A senior scientist at NASA has announced in the New York Times that he has terminal cancer. This is sad. What’s sadder, though, is that he has chosen to exploit his personal tragedy for the purposes of promoting climate change alarmism. Here is how Piers Sellers (pictured) – acting director of NASA’s Earth Sciences division – begins his New York Times article: I'm a climate scientist who has just been told I have Stage 4 pancreatic cancer. This diagnosis puts me in an interesting position. I've spent much of my professional life thinking about the science of climate change, which...

Farewell to the man who invented 'climate change’ To this day, global climate policy is still shaped by the agenda of Maurice Strong, a Canadian multimillionaire During the Second World War, having emerged from humble origins in the Great Depression, Strong became convinced that the new United Nations should become a world government, dedicated to ensuring that the wealth enjoyed by the richer countries of the West should be spread out around the world’s underprivileged majority. In 2005, Strong was caught having been illicitly paid $1 million from the UN’s Oil for Food programme, supposedly set up to allow Saddam...

Larry David says, "You know, Al is a funny guy, but he's also a very serious guy who believes humans may have only 10 years left to save the planet from turning into a total frying pan." Now, the last time I heard some liberal talk about "ten years" it was 1988, Ted Danson. We had ten years to save the oceans; we were all going to pay the consequences, which would result in our death. Now Al Gore says we've got ten years. Ten years left to save the planet from a scorching. Okay, we're going to start counting....

American taxpayers will once again be liable for more than one-fifth of the United Nations' regular budget next year, as well as more than one-quarter of the much-larger peacekeeping budget - a total of approximately $2,957,000,000. The U.N. General Assembly just before Christmas approved a regular operating budget of $5.4 billion for the 2016-17 period. (That budget is calculated biannually.) Of the $2.7 billion earmarked for 2016, the U.S. will account for 22 percent, or $594 million. Of the separate peacekeeping budget - $8.27 billion for the year ending June 30 - the U.S. is liable for 28.5783 percent, or...

BURNING fossil fuels and cutting down trees causes global COOLING, a shock new NASA study has found. Major theories about what causes temperatures to rise have been thrown into doubt after NASA found the Earth has cooled in areas of heavy industrialization where more trees have been lost and more fossil fuel burning takes place. Environmentalists have long argued the burning of fossil fuels in power stations and for other uses is responsible for global warming and predicted temperature increases because of the high levels of carbon dioxide produced - which causes the global greenhouse effect. While the findings did...

The draft of the international agreement to deal with climate change, which is being considered today in Paris by representatives from 195 countries, calls for the developed nations of the world to transfer wealth to developing nations, including through "public funds." "Developed country Parties shall provide financial resources to assist developing country Parties with respect to both mitigation and adaptation in continuation of their existing obligations under the Convention," says Article 9 of the draft agreement. "As part of a global effort, developed country Parties should continue to take the lead in mobilizing climate finance from a wide variety of...

(CNSNews.com) - At news conference in Paris on Tuesday, President Obama said "the most elegant way" to reduce carbon emissions is "to put a price on it." He was responding to a reporter who asked Obama, "I wonder if you see any political path back home toward putting a price on carbon?" "I have long believed that the most elegant way to drive innovation and to reduce carbon emissions is to put a price on it. This is a classic market failure," Obama replied. "If you open up an Econ 101 textbook, it will say the market's very good about...

As UN’s Paris summit approaches, one of France’s top mathematics consultancies, a legendary physicist, and a former IPCC author have joined France’s best-known TV weatherman, Philippe Verdier, in delivering black eyes and severe body blows to the increasingly discredited global-warming alarm lobby. As host of the United Nations climate summit this December, the French government is pulling out all stops to make it a “success,” striving mightily to create the impression of unquestionable “consensus” on global warming — even if it means resorting to suppression of scientific dissent and freedom of expression." “We must have a consensus,” French President Francois...