Free Republic

No excerpt from IHE allowed, story here. To summarize, an engineering education magazine publishes a letter by a professor critical of homosexuality, and many are appalled.

News that will no doubt spark global warming debates, an ancient forest floor has surfaced thanks to an Alaska glacier thawing. According to Live Science, trees in the forest are at least 1,000 years old. Stumps and logs coming from the thawing glacier were first noticed 50 years ago, but the forest has begun to emerge only recently. Scientists from University of Alaska Southeast in Juneau noticed more trees popping up while studying the thawing Mendenhall Glacier. Many of the trees on the Alaska glacier, which is a 36.8-square-mile river of ice flowing into a lake near Juneau, are reportedly...

US Study Finds Link Between Gun Ownership and Homicide: Factual or Faulty?

In the wake of a crushing defeat last week for the climate alarmism-promoting Australian Labor Party, which imposed the deeply unpopular and expensive “carbon tax” credited by analysts for the conservative coalition’s victory, authorities in Australia are preparing to dismantle and consolidate the myriad global-warming schemes spawned under the previous government. However, while legislation is already being drafted, major hurdles remain before the tax on CO2 can be scrapped, sparking an outcry among businesses, state governments, and especially Australian voters, who voted overwhelmingly in favor of the new coalition and its pledge to kill the costly economic burden. According to...

(Boston) -- A new study from the American Journal of Public Heath shows that U.S. states with higher estimated rates of gun ownership experience a higher number of firearms-related homicides. The study, led by a Boston University School of Public Health researcher, examines the National Rifle Association's (NRA) claim that increased gun ownership does not lead to increased gun violence. It is the largest study conducted to date into the correlation between gun ownership and firearms violence, and the first to comprehensively examine the issue since the tragic shooting last December of 20 children and 7 adults at Sandy Hook...

Climate models wildly overestimated global warming, study finds By Maxim Lott Published September 12, 2013 | FoxNews.com Can you rely on the weather forecast? Maybe not, at least when it comes to global warming predictions over short time periods. That’s the upshot of a new study in the journal Nature Climate Change that compared 117 climate predictions made in the 1990's to the actual amount of warming. Out of 117 predictions, the study’s author told FoxNews.com, three were roughly accurate and 114 overestimated the amount of warming. On average, the predictions forecasted two times more global warming than actually occurred....

At the weekend my old mucker David Rose reported in the Mail On Sunday the shocking news that there is 60 per cent more sea ice at the Arctic than there was this time last year. So too did Hayley Dixon in the Telegraph. The implication of both pieces was that perhaps this global warming thing we've been hearing about ad nauseam this last couple of decades isn't quite the deadly threat the 'scientists' have been telling us it was; that indeed, maybe the more pressing worry ought to be global cooling.Luckily the Guardian's token Big Oil employee and environmental...

Peru’s government has declared a state of emergency in parts of the southern Andean region of Puno that have been hit with the coldest temperatures in a decade, daily El Comercio reported. == snip Hundreds of families have been affected and more than 250,000 alpacas have died due to freezing temperatures and snow storms that have hit the southern highlands.

'Marco Rubio threatens everything in his path'

UPDATE: 8/23/13 1:00PM PDT Its seems there’s blunders to go around. The Washington Post now says they “misquoted” Gore. Given his penchant for saying and doing dumb things in the past related to his views on climate, color me “skeptical”, especially when he makes ugly comparisons about people like he did below. It may be more of a case of some deal was worked out behind the scenes to salvage Gore’s waning credibility. I suppose we’ll never know, but I have asked WaPo to put the relevant audio of the tape recorded session online so we can verify that Gore...

The false "hockeystick" graph with which (in 2001) the UN climate panel claimed that current surface temperatures are "unprecedented" in a millennium is at odds with hundreds of scientific papers and with their own previous position.  There is nothing unusual about today's temperatures; the world was warmer in the Middle Ages.  However, the "hockeystick" graph showing a rapid increase in 20th century CO2 concentration is genuine. The Third Assessment Report (2001) of the UN-sponsored IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) espouses a temperature history over the last thousand years that resembles a 'hockeystick' (HS).  The 'shank' is the smooth decline...

The United Nations, ever eager to embrace global warming, has a new climate report to be released that claims scientists are more certain than ever that global warming is real, but now there is hard evidence that global surface temperatures have stabilized over the last 15 years according to the U.K.’s weather-watching Met Office.

AUGUST 20, 2013 AT 9:56 AM A draft of the next IPCC climate report has arrived, and it is more of the same: We are all gonna die! An international panel of scientists has found with near certainty that human activity is the cause of most of the temperature increases of recent decades, and warns that sea levels could conceivably rise by more than three feet by the end of the century if emissions continue at a runaway pace. The scientists, whose findings are reported in a draft summary of the next big United Nations climate report, largely dismiss a...

Insect sex may seem fairly simple: fluttering dances, clasping abdomens, a quick mount on a forest floor. But a new review of homosexual insect encounters suggests the acts may not be that straightforward for the individuals involved. Researchers have widely examined homosexual behavior in mammals and birds, but have addressed it less frequently in insects and spiders. To assess the range of evolutionary explanations for same-sex intercourse in the invertebrate world, a team of biologists from Tel Aviv University in Israel examined roughly 100 existing studies on the topic and compiled the first comprehensive review of homosexuality in invertebrates. The...

Dr. Benny Peiser at The Australian: Europe pulls the plug on its green future Slowly but gradually, Europe is awakening to a green energy crisis, an economic and political debacle that is entirely self-inflicted.The mainstream media, which used to encourage the renewables push enthusiastically, is beginning to sober up too. With more and more cracks beginning to appear, many newspapers are returning to their proper role as the fourth estate, exposing the pitfalls of Europe’s green-energy gamble and opening their pages for thorough analysis and debate. Today, European media is full of news and commentary about the problems of an...

U.S. Committee on Science, Space and TechnologyHand it over. Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX), chairman of the House science committee, signs a subpoena ordering the Environmental Protection Agency to hand over sensitive health data. In a rare step, the science committee of the U.S. House of Representatives voted yesterday to subpoena the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for data from key studies used to justify air pollution regulations.Following a heated exchange of letters between Committee Chair Lamar Smith (R-TX) and ranking member Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX), the committee approved its first subpoena in 21 years. The vote was strictly along party lines,...

EACH of us took turns over the past 43 years running the Environmental Protection Agency. We served Republican presidents, but we have a message that transcends political affiliation: the United States must move now on substantive steps to curb climate change, at home and internationally. There is no longer any credible scientific debate about the basic facts: our world continues to warm, with the last decade the hottest in modern records, and the deep ocean warming faster than the earth’s atmosphere. Sea level is rising. Arctic Sea ice is melting years faster than projected. The costs of inaction are undeniable....

Shifts in climate are strongly linked to increases in violence around the world, a study suggests. US scientists found that even small changes in temperature or rainfall correlated with a rise in assaults, rapes and murders, as well as group conflicts and war. The team says with the current projected levels of climate change, the world is likely to become a more violent place.

... A new study comes to a startling conclusion: Among primates, including perhaps humans, monogamy evolved because it protected infants from being killed by rival males. Living in pairs, what researchers call social monogamy, has repeatedly evolved among animals, although in widely varying proportions among different groups. Thus, about 90% of bird species are socially monogamous, probably because incubating eggs and feeding hatchlings is a full-time job that requires both parents. But in mammals, females carry the babies inside their bodies and are solely responsible for providing milk to young infants—and only about 5% of species are socially monogamous.

As you squeegee out your basement, replace your blown-off roof tiles, bury your heat-withered tomato crop and think about moving to a house on higher ground, you will be forgiven if you want to step out onto the street, tilt your head toward those odd-shaped clouds massing on the horizon, and scream, “Fix it! And that might be a reasonable request. The weather is broken. To some degree, this is because we broke it: While it is foolish to link any individual extreme-weather event to the larger climate, it is becoming increasingly apparent that the growing frequency and intensity of...