Free Republic

The new administrator of nasa held a town hall Thursday at the agency’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. Jim Bridenstine is about four weeks into the job, and his path here was mired in controversy. After a few opening remarks, he started taking some questions. The first was about what Bridenstine thinks makes him qualified to be the head of nasa. The second was, as the moderator put it, “one more easy one—because it’s about climate change.” Bridenstine laughed. So did many in the room. It was an uncomfortable question. Bridenstine, as a Republican in Congress, has a record of denying...

One of the most electrifying moments of the 2018 Winter Olympics came when American cross-country skier Jessie Diggins surged from behind in the final seconds to win gold for her and teammate Kikkan Randall in the team sprint. It was a gutsy feat. Future Olympians may not get a shot at the dream Diggins achieved in PyeongChang. That’s because climate change is warming our winters, reducing our snowpack, and shortening our seasons - all changes that make it difficult to participate in snowsports. Diggins and four other winter Olympians - Stacey Cook, Arielle Gold, Maddie Phaneuf, and David Wise -...

Florida and Texas are the two states expected to suffer the greatest economic damage from climate change, according to a new study from Science magazine. The study used a model that aimed to calculate the future impact on each state’s gross domestic product (GDP) from events including hurricanes, storm surges, changes in agricultural yields, changing electricity demands, changes in mortality rates, changes to the labor supply, rising sea levels and rising crime rates. The study comes amid a concerted effort by climate activists to help the U.S. meet the goals of the Paris Accord of limiting temperature change to below...

Jamie Cutter isn’t shy about sexual health. She teaches sexual education at Delta Charter High School to a generation that’s breaking traditional gender expectations. But when she started teaching it four years ago, there weren’t many books helping her navigate the waters of intersex, transgender and other non-traditional gender norms in an inclusive way.

Limiting global warming to two degrees Celsius will not prevent destructive and deadly climate impacts, as once hoped, dozens of experts concluded in a score of scientific studies released Monday. A world that heats up by 2C - long regarded as the temperature ceiling for a climate-safe planet - could see mass displacement due to rising seas, a drop in per capita income, regional shortages of food and fresh water, and the loss of animal and plant species at an accelerated speed. Poor and emerging countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America will get hit hardest, according to the studies.

Ready for a world in which a $50 DNA test can predict your odds of earning a PhD or forecast which toddler gets into a selective preschool? Robert Plomin, a behavioral geneticist, says that’s exactly what’s coming. For decades genetic researchers have sought the hereditary factors behind intelligence, with little luck. But now gene studies have finally gotten big enough—and hence powerful enough—to zero in on genetic differences linked to IQ. A year ago, no gene had ever been tied to performance on an IQ test. Since then, more than 500 have, thanks to gene studies involving more than 200,000...

In a recent New York Times op-ed, two former EPA officials criticize a Trump administration plan that would require the EPA to reveal the details of studies used to craft environmental regulations. In this piece, Obama’s EPA director Gina McCarthy and assistant director Janet McCabe, claim that: Current EPA director Scott Pruitt and “some conservative members of Congress are setting up a nonexistent problem in order to prevent the EPA from using the best available science.” EPA’s studies “adhere to all professional standards and meet every expectation of the scientific community in terms of peer review and scientific integrity.” the...

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration may have a boring name, but it has a very important job: It measures U.S. temperatures. Unfortunately, it seems to be a captive of the global warming religion. Its data are fraudulent. What do we mean by fraudulent? How about this: NOAA has made repeated "adjustments" to its data, for the presumed scientific reason of making the data sets more accurate. Nothing wrong with that. Except, all their changes point to one thing — lowering previously measured temperatures to show cooler weather in the past, and raising more recent temperatures to show warming in...

The legal battle against oil companies for their purported role in contributing to a climate change crisis is starting to take shape. This past Wednesday, a federal judge in San Francisco made history, holding the first-ever U.S. court hearing exploring the impact of climate change. Lawyers representing the cities of Oakland and San Francisco as well as five of the largest multinational oil companies named in the lawsuit, participated in a climate change “tutorial,” a chance to explore both sides’ positions on several questions related to climate change. Here’s what we learned from the hearing: future litigation will pit reasoned...

Norfolk's butterflies, bees, bugs, birds, trees and mammals are at major risk from climate change as temperatures rise—according to new research from the University of East Anglia. Researchers carried out the first in-depth audit of its kind for a region in the UK to see how biodiversity might be impacted in Norfolk as the world warms. The study finds that the region's Swallowtail Butterfly, which can't be found anywhere else in the UK, is at risk - along with three quarters of bumblebee, grasshopper and moth species. The project reveals that at just 2oC, 72 per cent of bumblebees in...

You may recall our recent discussion about a new EPA policy which will require all scientific studies used in considering new regulations to make not only their findings but their methodology and underlying data available for public scrutiny and comparative analysis. What’s not to like, right? These are investigations being done by the government and funded by the taxpayer, so the information used to reach any conclusions should be freely available. Everyone’s a big fan of transparency when it comes to those sneaks in Washington so this should roll through smoothly. Not even close. It turns out that a previous...

With thousands of square miles of land already lost along the coast, Avery Island, home of the famed hot sauce, faces being marooned. The home of Tabasco, the now ubiquitous but uniquely branded condiment controlled by the same family since Edmund McIlhenny first stumbled across a pepper plant growing by a chicken coop on Avery Island, is under threat. An unimaginable plight just a few years ago, the advancing tides are menacing its perimeter. “It does worry us, and we are working hard to minimise the land loss,” said Tony Simmons, the seventh consecutive McIlhenny family member to lead the...

CHEYENNE — U.S. government officials who engage in regional planning for an area of Wyoming and Montana that supplies 40 percent of the nation’s coal must consider reducing coal mining as a way to fight climate change, a judge has ruled. Friday’s ruling by U.S. District Judge Brian Morris in Great Falls, Montana, applies to the Powder River Basin, where house-sized dump trucks haul loads mined around the clock from open-pit coal mines. Some of the mines measure more than a mile wide. Morris rejected U.S. Bureau of Land Management officials’ argument that climate change could be addressed when they...

Each year, 150,000 people hike Scotland’s Ben Nevis – a former volcano and Britain’s highest mountain, at 4,400ft above sea level. Many opt to take the so-called tourist trail, the rocky path which winds and zigzags its way to the summit. Few realise that this path was initially carved out in 1883 for a very unique scientific expedition. Even fewer know that now, more than a century later, this site is providing UK scientists with insights into climate change. Today, we have advanced weather forecast models – which are capable of using the kind of data taken at Ben Nevis...

On Wednesday, a federal judge will hold a “climate science tutorial” as part of San Francisco’s and Oakland’s nuisance cases against five oil giants for damages related to sea level rise.

NOAA’s US temperature record shows that US was warmest in the 1930’s and has generally cooled as CO2 has increased. This wrecks greenhouse gas theory, so they “adjust” the data to make it look like the US is warming. The NOAA data tampering produces a spectacular hockey stick of scientific fraud, which becomes the basis of vast amounts of downstream junk climate science. Pre-2000 temperatures are progressively cooled, and post-2000 temperatures are warmed. This year has been a particularly spectacular episode of data tampering by NOAA, as they introduce nearly 2.5 degrees of fake warming since 1895. (Please see full...

"It was suspected that a harsh drought from about 2000 to 2010 that killed tens of thousands of livestock was unprecedented in the region’s history and primarily the result of human-caused climate change. But the tree ring data show that the dry spell, while rare in its severity, was not outside the realm of natural climate variability, researchers report online March 14 in Science Advances."

After several years of often rancorous debate—and more back-and-forth action than a beach restoration project Idaho lawmakers finally have decided that climate change will be taught in Idaho schools. “It’s a wonderful thing for for our state and its students!” said Coeur d’Alene environmental science teacher Jamie Esler, who served on a state committee of award-winning educators, parents, and scientists that developed the K12 science standards.The science standards developed by the highly qualified committee, over painstaking months of work, maintain “integrity around the science of climate,” and will enable Idaho science teachers to fully educate their students about human-caused climate...

314 Action Wants to Elect Scientists, But Only if They're Democrats The U.S. Congress is made up mostly of professional politicians and lawyers. This comes as a surprise to precisely no one, but the sheer numbers are rather striking.According to the Congressional Research Service (PDF, Table 2), the 115th Congress consists of 168 Representatives (out of 435) who are lawyers, and the Senate has 50 lawyers (out of 100). Combined, lawyers make up nearly 41% of Congress.How many lawyers are in the U.S.? One law firm (with a nifty interactive map!) estimates roughly 1.3 million. Given that the U.S. population...

A new Columbia Business School study is out with the latest bizarre claim about man-made global warming — it could alter people’s personalities. “As climate change continues across the world, we may also observe concomitant changes in human personality,” reads the study, published in the journal Nature on Tuesday. It’s only the latest in a slew of studies on the potential psychological effects of future warming, and it’s not even the most bizarre. For example, recent studies have claimed worry about global warming is making people depressed. Those worried about man-made warming reported “feelings of loneliness and lethargy,” Reuters reported...