Free Republic

Executive Summary An Inconvenient Truth ( AIT ), Vice President Al Gore's book on “The planetary emergency of global warming and what can be done about it,” purports to be a non-partisan, non-ideological exposition of climate science and moral common-sense. In reality, AIT is a colorfully illustrated lawyer's brief for global warming alarmism and energy rationing. It is a J'Accuse hurled at fossil-energy-based civilization, especially the USA, and above all the Bush Administration and its allies in the U.S. oil and auto industries. We do not expect lawyers to argue both for and against their clients, nor do we expect...

The up-tick in global warming propaganda in recent days is to set the stage for the release of the Fourth Assessment Report from the International Panel on Climate Change. Surprise, surprise, the report will say the sky is falling – faster and faster. For people who have watched this process since the beginning, this report, at least the executive summary of the report, is mostly hogwash, wordsmithed by policy wonks and media specialists to scare the gas out of the economy. The First Assessment Report was developed by a fairly balanced group of scientists from around the world and released...

The global warming carnival hits its full stride this week in preparation for the release of the long-awaited and much-hyped United Nations report on global warming. It’s unfortunate for the climateers that this week’s climate science doesn’t live up to all the hoopla. The week started out with a Congressional hearing in which Rep. Henry Waxman accused the Bush administration of trying to squelch the science about global warming. Rep. Waxman seems to have overlooked the fact that, if silencing debate was the administration’s goal, there was a far better way to go about achieving that goal – that is,...

Artifact: A Chilling Tale of Global Warming Katherine Mangu-Ward | February 2007 Print Edition The United Nations has ventured into children’s publishing with a scary story about a small boy who loses a dogsled race because of global warming. In November the odd little picture book cum policy brief, Tore and the Town on Thin Ice, made the rounds at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Kenya.The night after he loses the race by falling through a weak place in the ice, Tore has a dream in which he sees the Inuit goddess Sedna, who warns him that “rich...

ARIS -- It's a trend that counts Leonardo DiCaprio, London cabs and Al Gore among its followers: Making life "carbon neutral" through tree-planting and other environmentally friendly efforts to curb emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide. The theme is a hot one as scientists in Paris this week prepare to issue a major report on global warming -- but critics say the movement is counterproductive, even a scam. The practicalities of "offsetting" carbon dioxide emitted when flying, driving cars, even getting married are increasingly simple. A growing array of companies offer to calculate how much carbon dioxide such activities give off...

When did "Climate Change" replace "Global Warming"?So the Democrats in Congress are taking up "climate change". I must've heard that phrase "climate change" a dozen times in the news reports, but I don't think I heard the phrase "global warming" a single time. Are the liberals so afraid of the reaction to the phrase "global warming" that they are now shying away from it? When did this happen? Did I miss the memo?

Smoking cigarettes is a clear health risk, as most everyone knows. But lately, people have begun to worry about the health risks of secondhand smoke. Some policymakers and activists are even claiming that the government should crack down on secondhand smoke exposure, given what "the science" indicates about such exposure. Last July, introducing his office's latest report on secondhand smoke, then-U.S. Surgeon General Richard Carmona asserted that "there is no risk-free level of secondhand smoke exposure," that "breathing secondhand smoke for even a short time can damage cells and set the cancer process in motion," and that... --snip-- In addition,...

Two private advocacy groups told a congressional hearing Tuesday that climate scientists at seven government agencies say they have been subjected to political pressure aimed at downplaying the threat of global warming. The groups presented a survey that shows two in five of the 279 climate scientists who responded to a questionnaire complained that some of their scientific papers had been edited in a way that changed their meaning. Nearly half of the 279 said in response to another question that at some point they had been told to delete reference to "global warming" or "climate change" from a report....

Later this week in Paris, climate scientists will issue a dire forecast for the planet that warns of slowly rising sea levels and higher temperatures. But that may be the sugarcoated version. Early and changeable drafts of their upcoming authoritative report on climate change foresee smaller sea level rises than were projected in 2001 in the last report. Many top U.S. scientists reject these rosier numbers. Those calculations don't include the recent, and dramatic, melt-off of big ice sheets in two crucial locations: They "don't take into account the gorillas — Greenland and Antarctica," said Ohio State University earth sciences...

FEDERAL WAY, Wash., Jan. 24 -- Frosty E. Hardiman is neither impressed nor surprised that "An Inconvenient Truth," the global-warming movie narrated by former vice president Al Gore, received an Oscar nomination this week for best documentary. "Liberal left is all over Hollywood," he grumbled a few hours after the nomination was announced. Hardiman, a parent of seven here in the southern suburbs of Seattle, has himself roiled the global-warming waters. It happened early this month when he learned that one of his daughters would be watching "An Inconvenient Truth" in her seventh-grade science class. "No you will not teach...

President George W. Bush refused to back down on his position on tackling global warming as he unveiled a new energy initiative this week that failed to convince environmentalists. Bush briefly discussed global warming during his annual State of the Union address to Congress Tuesday, proposing a plan to slash America's dependence on foreign oil by using new technologies. The US leader called for reducing US gasoline consumption by 20 percent over 10 years, mainly by raising the supply of alternative fuels like ethanol. "America is on the verge of technological breakthroughs that will enable us to live our lives...

Of Gay Sheep, Science and Peril of Bad Publicity By JOHN SCHWARTZ Published: January 25, 2007 Charles Roselli set out to discover what makes some sheep gay. Then the news media and the blogosphere got hold of the story. Dr. Roselli, a researcher at the Oregon Health and Science University, has searched for the past five years for physiological factors that might explain why about 8 percent of rams seek sex exclusively with other rams instead of ewes. The goal, he says, is to understand the fundamental mechanisms of sexual orientation in sheep. Other researchers might some day build on...

Who says politics is show business for ugly people? "An Inconvenient Truth," Al Gore's film on the perils of global warming, scored two Oscar nominations Tuesday - for best documentary feature and best original song. While he is not technically a nominee - the film's director, David Guggenheim, won the nod, as did singer Melissa Etheridge for the song "I Need to Wake Up" - Gore said he was "thrilled" that his movie was honored. "The film . . . has brought awareness of the climate crisis to people in the United States and all over the world," Gore said...

Scientists long have issued the warnings: The modern world's appetite for cars, air conditioning and cheap, fossil-fuel energy spews billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, unnaturally warming the world. Yet, it took the dramatic images of a hurricane overtaking New Orleans and searing heat last summer to finally trigger widespread public concern on the issue of global warming. Climate scientists might be expected to bask in the spotlight after their decades of toil. The general public now cares about greenhouse gases, and with a new Democratic-led Congress, federal action on climate change may be at hand. Problem...

The world's biggest fund for environmental projects is investing for the first time in a non-renewable, polluting fuel -- coal -- in what it says is a new pragmatic approach to the energy needs of the developing world. The Global Environment Facility, managed by the World Bank and United Nations agencies, said on Tuesday it was putting $45.5 million toward an overhaul of some of power-hungry India's aging coal-fired plants to make them more efficient and less polluting. Monique Barbut, the facility's CEO, said there had been long debates about whether it should be funding a "polluting" coal project, in...

AMS CERTIFIED WEATHERMAN STRIKES BACK AT WEATHER CHANNEL CALL FOR DECERTIFICATION

The Weather Channel’s most prominent climatologist is advocating that broadcast meteorologists be stripped of their scientific certification if they express skepticism about predictions of manmade catastrophic global warming. This latest call to silence skeptics follows a year (2006) in which skeptics were compared to "Holocaust Deniers" and Nuremberg-style war crimes trials were advocated by several climate alarmists. The Weather Channel’s (TWC) Heidi Cullen, who hosts the weekly global warming program "The Climate Code," is advocating that the American Meteorological Society (AMS) revoke their "Seal of Approval" for any television weatherman who expresses skepticism that human activity is creating a climate...

Clock Moves Forward Two Minutes 15 January 2007 | 10:27 PM The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BAS) is moving the minute hand of the Doomsday Clock on January 17, 2007, from 7 to 5 minutes to midnight. BAS announced the Clock change at an unprecedented joint news conference at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, DC, and the Royal Society in London. In a statement supporting the decision to move the hand of the Doomsday Clock, the BAS Board focused on two major sources of catastrophe: the perils of 27,000 nuclear weapons, 2000 of them...

Today Bill OReilly blamed "Sugar" for our obseity. HE, like most Americans, has confused High Fruitose Corn Syrup with Sugar. In the Days when Soft Drinks and Fast Food actually used Sugar, 12 ounces was a BIG Pepsi. When Donut Batter included real Sugar, a box of a Dozen was expected to sevre 6 or more. We got Full, not FAT. Then Cuba fell to Castro. Industry discovered "Corn sweeteners". Today, Government and the Media call "High Fruitose Corn Syrup" SUGAR. Then they blame "SUGAR" for our Obeisity.

FEDERAL WAY, Wash. (AP) - The Federal Way School Board has put the brakes on schools showing former Vice President Al Gore's global warming movie, "An Inconvenient Truth." In a vote last night, the board decided to require that an opposing view be presented in order for teachers to present the film. The board voted 3 to 0, with two members absent. Board president Ed Barney said he had received about a half-dozen complaints from parents that their child was taking the film as fact after viewing it at school. Barney said the film had been shown at some high...