Free Republic

Politicians who bow to the demands of the world's climate alarmists have long sought various means of reducing anthropogenic CO2 emissions. ... But the "rules of the road" will soon be become much more stringent, and you and I may be asked - if not mandated by law - to make an unprecedented lifestyle change that could dramatically curtail one of our most cherished personal freedoms, all in the name of "saving the planet." Writing for the scientific journal Global Environmental Change, two academics at Oregon State University - Paul Murtaugh and Michael Schlax - identify this lifestyle change in...

WHAT is your carbon legacy - not the emissions you are personally liable for, but those of your descendants? Ask Paul Murtaugh, a statistician at Oregon State University in Corvallis.If you have a child, he says, you and you partner are each responsible for half its emissions. If that child has kids, one-quarter of their emissions are down to you, and so on. How it adds up depends on population trends and emission changes in the future.Murtaugh used UN population projections, which say that after 2050, birth rates in all countries will be 1.85 children per woman, on average....

The New Scientist had a story by their book editor Amanda Gefter called "How to Spot a Hidden Religious Agenda". Today, it was pulled from their web site; the explanation being that they "received a complaint about the contents of the story." You can still find a copy here, and we've copied the text until we find out what caused them to pull the story. Here's the opening: ---------------------------------------------------------------- As a book reviews editor at New Scientist, I often come across so-called science books which after a few pages reveal themselves to be harbouring ulterior motives. I have learned to...

Shedding Light on the Protein Big Bang Theory March 13, 2009 — The precise three-dimensional structure of a typical protein molecule is so complex, its origin would seem hopeless by chance. What if evolutionary biologists were to discover a whole host of proteins literally exploded into existence at the beginning of complex life? We can find out what they would think by looking at an article on the “protein big bang” found on Astrobiology Magazine...

EPA proposes greenhouse gas registry – A first step for climate policy On March 10 the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced that it will propose a new rule to require greenhouse gas emissions reporting from thousands of businesses nationwide – a prerequisite for any effective climate change program. A greenhouse gas registry is a database for collecting, verifying, and tracking emissions from specific industrial sources. Late in 2007 Congress ordered the Bush EPA to create just such a greenhouse gas emissions reporting rule. Not surprisingly, the Bush administration missed its first deadline for publishing a draft of the rule and...

CNN’s Sanjay Gupta filled in as host on Larry King Live on Wednesday, six days after ending his bid to be Obama's surgeon general. Despite his medical training, he did not see fit to correct former President Bill Clinton after he repeatedly referred to human embryos as not being fertilized.

Published online 4 March 2009 We cannot live by scepticism alone Harry Collins1 Harry Collins is director of the Centre for the Study of Knowledge Expertise Science at Cardiff University, UK. He is currently working on a book about tacit and explicit knowledge. Email: collinshm@cf.ac.uk Top of pageAbstract Scientists have been too dogmatic about scientific truth and sociologists have fostered too much scepticism — social scientists must now elect to put science back at the core of society, says Harry Collins. J. TAYLOR The term 'science studies' was invented in the 1970s by 'outsiders', such as those from the social sciences...

Taxpayer-funded PBS journalist Bonnie Erbe has some advice for Democrats: politicize the 2010 Census, then use the biased numbers to jam pack Congress full of left wing wackos. “Depoliticize the Census?” PSB “journalist” she wrote in her blog at US News & World Report. “Surely they jest!” “The Census is part of the spoils of victory.....

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson opened Pandora’s box recently by agreeing to reconsider a Bush administration decision that excluded carbon dioxide from the list of pollutants the agency regulates under the Clean Air Act. Human beings and animals exhale the carbon dioxide that plants use in photosynthesis. A byproduct of photosynthesis is normally oxygen breathed by human beings and animals. So to even consider classifying carbon dioxide as a pollutant is, to put it mildly, quite a stretch.

(Editor's note: After this story was published, the communications director for the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming said that Chairman Ed Markey, D-Mass., could not attend the global warming rally because of a "scheduling conflict." See below.) (CNSNews.com) – Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) had to cancel an appearance Monday at a global warming rally in Washington, D.C., that was hit by a snowstorm because her flight was delayed, her office told CNSNews.com. Brianna Cayo-Cotter, the spokesman for the Energy Action Coalition that held the rally, told a group of reporters that she had...

Aquatic animals that feed on lake and stream bottom sediments burp out small amounts of nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas, a new study finds. While the biological emissions from these critters pales in comparison to the nitrous oxide emitted by fossil fuel burning, their contribution could increase as more and more nitrogen-rich fertilizer runs off into lakes, streams and seas, the authors of the study said. Nitrous oxide (N2O) is more commonly known to anyone who has sat in the dentist's chair as laughing gas. In the atmosphere it is a powerful greenhouse gas, packing about 310 times the...

A keynote speaker at the upcoming International Conference on Climate Change says carbon dioxide would have to be a miracle compound in order to have any significant global climate impact. John Coleman has more than 50 years' experience forecasting the weather. He is also one of the 70+ featured scientists who will be attending the 2009 International Conference on Climate Change in New York City March 8-10. As the Obama administration mulls carbon cap-and-trade, Coleman had this to say about CO2. "CO2? It's a great positive," he states. "Without carbon dioxide in the atmosphere we'd all die because everything we...

For the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth (February 12, 2009), National Geographic News asked leading scientists for their picks of the most important fossils that show evolution in action ...

Leading atheist Richard Dawkins himself admits: “[T]here is enough information capacity in a single human cell to store the Encyclopaedia Britannica, all 30 volumes of it, three or four times over.” [The Blind Watchmaker, cited in my book Refuting Evolution, ch. 9] Just as the Britannica had intelligent writers to produce its information, so it is scientific to believe that the information in the living world likewise had an original Writer. Furthermore, the DNA information requires a complex decoding machine, the ribosome, but the instructions to build ribosomes are on the DNA. And decoding requires energy from ATP, built by...

Cap and Trade will not work! It will not generate revenue! It will cost trillions and it will cause more unemployment. (See below) Energy costs will rise, but the radical environmental left will be appeased by Dear Leader. And The Obama Administration will get away with all of this, without much real scrutiny, because of those blinded by the media and ObamaMania. Thanks, in advance, for helping to run our country into the ground you ignorant Liberals. The grand larceny and dishonesty in all of this nonsense is that current White House budget director Peter Orszag, misled Congress last fall...

President Barack Obama's first budget includes $15 billion a year for renewable energy programs and an ambitious plan to raise $646 billion from a carbon reduction proposal. "Because our future depends on our ability to break free from oil that's controlled by foreign dictators, we need to make clean, renewable energy the profitable kind of energy," Mr. Obama said Thursday morning. "That's why we'll be working with Congress on legislation that places a market-based cap on carbon pollution and drives the production of more renewable energy." The plan uses money from a cap-and-trade program — which would allow companies to...

Remains of embryos entombed in their fish mothers' wombs for 380 million years have been found in fossils from an ancient rock outcrop in Western Australia. The finding is a big deal because it suggests that sex goes way back. The prehistoric fish, called placoderms, are found at the base of the vertebrate evolutionary tree (in a large group we humans also belong to), so it now looks like sexual intercourse, and the mating behaviors that go along with it, were more widespread in these ancient animals than previously thought, said the scientists who made the discovery. -snip-

President Obama is banking on $300 billion to come in by 2022 from a cap-and-trade plan to reduce greenhouse gases, according to a source with knowledge of the president's proposed budget. Mr. Obama expects money from the climate-change proposal to start rolling in by 2012, and that amount would come in over the subsequent 10 years as companies purchase carbon offsets, according to the source. The budget's assumption of money from a revenue stream that does not yet exist provides a concrete indication that Mr. Obama expects a cap-and-trade system to be in place soon although Congress still must shape,...

Why, since President Obama promised to “restore science to its rightful place” in Washington, do some things feel not quite right? First there was Steven Chu, the physicist and new energy secretary, warning The Los Angeles Times that climate change could make water so scarce by century’s end that “there’s no more agriculture in California” and no way to keep the state’s cities going, either. Then there was the hearing in the Senate to confirm another physicist, John Holdren, to be the president’s science adviser. Dr. Holdren was asked about some of his gloomy neo-Malthusian warnings in the past, like...