Free Republic

Highlights: Combines multiple methods estimating pre-Columbian population numbers. Estimates European arrival in 1492 lead to 56 million deaths by 1600. Large population reduction led to reforestation of 55.8 Mha and 7.4 Pg C uptake. 1610 atmospheric CO2 drop partly caused by indigenous depopulation of the Americas. Humans contributed to Earth System changes before the Industrial Revolution. Furthermore, we show that the global carbon budget of the 1500s cannot be balanced until large-scale vegetation regeneration in the Americas is included. The Great Dying of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas resulted in a human-driven global impact on the Earth System in...

More than 3.8 billion years ago, in a time period called the Hadean eon, our planet Earth was constantly bombarded by asteroids, which caused the large-scale melting of its surface rocks. Most of these surface rocks were basalts, and the asteroid impacts produced large pools of superheated impact melt of such composition. These basaltic pools were tens of kilometres thick, and thousands of kilometres in diameter. “If you want to get an idea of what the surface of Earth looked like at that time, you can just look at the surface of the Moon which is covered by a vast...

Hagfish Haunts Darwin A zombie hagfish rises from the dead, and scares Darwin from two directions. January 24, 2019 | David F. Coppedge Hagfish are eel-like fish that look like creatures from a horror movie. Their tapir-like snouts are scary enough, but when threatened, they have a unique weapon: slime! They can spread a net of sticky slime around them that can clog the gills of an attacker. And they have been doing this for at least 100 million Darwin Years, perhaps 300 million.

A legislative proposal in Connecticut would mandate instruction on climate change in public schools statewide, beginning in elementary school. Connecticut already has adopted science standards that call for teaching of climate change, but if the bill passes it is believed that it would be the country's first to write such a requirement into law. "A lot of schools make the study of climate change an elective, and I don't believe it should be an elective," said state Rep. Christine Palm, a Democrat from Chester who proposed the bill. "I think it should be mandatory, and I think it should be...

... The most obvious way that cannabis fuels violence in psychotic people is through its tendency to cause paranoia. Even marijuana advocates acknowledge that the drug can cause paranoia; the risk is so obvious that users joke about it, and dispensaries advertise certain strains as less likely to do so. But for people with psychotic disorders, paranoia can fuel extreme violence. A 2007 paper in the Medical Journal of Australia looked at 88 defendants who had committed homicide during psychotic episodes. It found that most of the killers believed they were in danger from the victim, and almost two-thirds reported...

Blind, slippery and prone to burrowing underground, a newly discovered amphibian has much in common with President Donald Trump, claims the British company that named the creature.

EDISON - A recent study has ranked New Jersey 47th in the U.S. for the least Christmas-friendly states. The survey was done by GetCenturyLink. The rankings were based on online activity and areas of culture.

Academic Freedom — Sweeping Up the Shards Rob Sheldon December 4, 2018 The online magazine Quillette has a tradition of providing a forum for people who can’t get heard on the regular channels, perhaps due to political correctness. Here is an article, “The New Evolution Deniers,” by evolutionary biologist Colin Wright at Penn State. He thinks that the slogan “gender is a social construct” denies Darwin. Here are the conclusions: Back when evolution was under attack from proponents of Biblical Creation and Intelligent Design, academic scientists were under no pressure to hold back criticism. This is because these anti-evolution movements...

A former Obama administration official with ties to a liberal advocacy group funded by Democratic megadonors George Soros and Tom Steyer helped prepare the Fourth National Climate Assessment, whose dire predictions have since been attacked as overblown. Andrew Light, who worked on the 2015 Paris accord negotiations as a senior adviser to the U.S. Special Envoy on Climate Change under Secretary of State John F. Kerry, served as a review editor for the assessment, overseeing the pivotal final chapter that concluded under a worst-case scenario that global warming could wipe out as much as 10 percent of the U.S. economy...

... The new U.S. report, as well as a United Nations report issued in October, instead aim at frightening the public—exactly the approach that so manifestly has failed to move the needle for 35 years. Maybe it’s because voters are skeptical of doom-mongering. Maybe they have grown fatalistic about climate change. Or maybe, reflecting the folly of climate campaigners, they’ve gotten a message that acting on greenhouse gases requires giving up prosperity. Reporting Sunday on the French fuel-tax demonstrations, the New York Times noted: “Many in the crowd said that they did not disdain the government’s environmental goals, but that...

Sybil was the first major book to tie "MPD" to child abuse. Published in 1973, it was followed by a compelling 1976 movie. Sybil played a substantial role in the cultural and psychiatric tsunami, later known as the "false" or "recovered" memory debate. According to author Debbie Nathan "In the entire history of Western civilization, there had been less than 200 cases over a period of centuries. But after the book and film, suddenly there were hundreds and thousands. And by the late 1980s there were 40,000 cases diagnosed in the United States alone." See Sybil Exposed

Imagine if you crossed a rhino with a giant turtle and then supersized the result: You might get something like Lisowicia bojani, a newly discovered Triassic mammal cousin that had a body shaped like a rhinoceros, a beak like a turtle, and weighed as much as an African elephant, about 9 tons. Paleontologists say this startling creature offers a new view of the dawn of the age of the dinosaurs. "Who would have ever thought that there were giant, elephant-sized mammal cousins living alongside some of the very first dinosaurs?" marvels Stephen Brusatte, a vertebrate paleontologist at The University of...

Unchecked climate change will cost the US hundreds of billions of dollars and damage human health and quality of life, a US government report warns. "Future risks from climate change depend... on decisions made today," the 4th National Climate Assessment says. The report says climate change is "presenting growing challenges to human health and safety, quality of life, and the rate of economic growth". The warning is at odds with the Trump administration's fossil fuels agenda. The White House said the report - compiled with help from numerous US government agencies and departments - was inaccurate. Spokeswoman Lindsay Walters said...

When the NY Times, Washington Post, CNN and other fact-challenged news outlets reported a few months ago that the oceans were warming at a catastrophic rate due to climate change, they all missed a glaring math error in the original science paper. The paper, co-authored by Ralph Keeling of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, was published in the science journal Nature. It erroneously claimed that ocean temperatures were skyrocketing at a rate that was 60 percent higher than the IPCC’s known rate of ocean temperature trends. But the paper suffered from a glaring mathematical error that has since been exposed....

Earlier this week, the newly-elected Democratic Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez dropped by Rep. Nancy Pelosi's Capitol Hill office. She was not there to say hello to her new colleague but to show support for a group of environmentalists hosting a sit-in in the potential Speaker of the House's workspace. The move rankled party leadership and consultants. But what exactly was Representative-elect Ocasio-Cortez showing support for? It was the "Green New Deal", a massive overhaul spending plan of the United States' economy in an effort to supposedly combat climate change. According to Politico, Ocasio-Cortez met with members from the Sunrise Movement, a nationwide...

Let me be absolutely clear: I am in no doubt there are people who feel they are one gender while having the body of the other. Living with such constant, internal conflict is horrifying for many of those affected, and it should never be ignored. No one should seek to suppress another person’s genuinely held sexual orientation or gender identity. But the question we must ask ourselves today is this – how do we decide whose needs are genuine? And how, then, should we treat them? I have been a psychotherapist for more than 30 years and, in that time,...

Matt Stone and Trey Parker — the “South Park” creators known for their take-no-prisoners mockery of cultural issues from both sides of the sociopolitical aisle — apparently are feeling a little guilty for mocking Al Gore’s climate change evangelism. See, way back in 2006, a “South Park” episode featured the former vice president warning South Park Elementary School students about the “single biggest threat to our planet” — i.e., ManBearPig, a monster representing climate change, NBC News reported. Gore was a month away from releasing “An Inconvenient Truth” when that episode came out — and the network noted that since...

Harvard scientists reexamined the bizarre, interstellar space object known as “Oumuamua,” which rocketed through our solar system late last year, resurrecting the possibility that it may be an alien probe. Academics and scientists were quick to write off the cigar-shaped object as a previously unknown type of bolide – a comet or asteroid – propelled in a highly unusual manner, but their observations are once again, being challenged. Oumuamua, which means “a messenger sent to reach out in advance,” was first observed by Robert Weryk at the Pan-STARRS 1 telescope in Hawaii. He measured the object to be several hundred...

It forms at speeds of more than 1,000 mph (1,600 km/h), it lies deep beneath our feet, it could destroy hopes for alien life, and — finally — scientists understand how it works. Back in March, researchers writing in the journal Science revealed that they have found the first evidence for this ice, called "Ice VII." Scientists had predicted its existence beforehand. Under the right conditions, it was believed, ice could form in a pool of water without a layer of heat at the leading edge of its growing surface. That — along with super-intense pressures and temperatures — would...

This story came out earlier this week but it was shocking enough that it bears a look. The transgender activist community was all abuzz on Thursday over a letter that had actually been featured in the New York Times a week earlier. Buzzfeed picked it up and ran with it, adding to the celebratory mood. The document in question was an open letter published by a gaggle of 1,600 scientists who are rejecting the anticipated HHS memo defining sex and gender in traditional, scientifically accepted terms for purposes of Title IX questions. What’s truly amazing is the fact that these...