Free Republic

Republicans on Capitol Hill are challenging an assertion by House leaders that their new health-care package comes in under President Obama's spending limit of $900 billion over the next decade. The true cost of the measure, the GOP argues, is more than $1 trillion. A House leadership aide dismissed the charge as "GOP spin." But, in this case, the spin is essentially true. According to a preliminary estimate by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, expanding coverage to an additional 36 million Americans would cost $1.055 trillion over the next decade under the House plan, counting tax breaks for small businesses,...

Freaked Out Over SuperFreakonomics Global warming might be solved with a helium balloon and a few miles of garden hose. By BRET STEPHENS Suppose for a minute—which is about 59 seconds too long, but that's for another column—that global warming poses an imminent threat to the survival of our species. Suppose, too, that the best solution involves a helium balloon, several miles of garden hose and a harmless stream of sulfur dioxide being pumped into the upper atmosphere, all at a cost of a single F-22 fighter jet. Good news, right? Maybe, but not if you're Al Gore or one...

According to the latest Pew Research Poll, only 35 percent see global warming as a very serious problem, down from 44 percent last year. Fifty-seven percent believe there is solid evidence that man is driving climate change, down from 71 percent in 2008. As the public concern over climate change continues to erode, Lord Christopher Monckton -- the former advisor for science policy to Lady Margaret Thatcher -- says the alleged science behind manmade climate change is eroding as well. Christopher Monckton"First of all, it's now been demonstrated by measurement that CO2 has only one-sixth of the warming effect on...

Ecology: The administration creates the mother of all protected habitats for a species whose numbers have increased since Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth." It's our hopes for energy independence that are drowning. When filmmaker Phelim McAleer, whose documentary "Not Evil Just Wrong" takes apart the myths of global warming, got to ask Gore a question at the annual conference of the Society of Environmental Journalists, McAleer brought up the nine critical errors in Gore's film "An Inconvenient Truth." A British court two years ago listed them and said they must be righted before the film could be shown in schools...

Environmentalism: As polls show belief in global warming is dropping, a new study suggests that dogs and cats, like people, are a plague upon the earth. They say people should have edible pets. Here, kitty, kitty. A new Pew Research Center study conducted Sept. 30-Oct. 4 says the number of Americans who think there's solid evidence the average temperature on earth has been getting warmer over the past few decades has plummeted from 71% in April 2008 to 57% today. Over the same period, there's been a comparable decline in the proportion of Americans who say global temperatures are rising...

Biofuel refineries in the US have set fresh records for grain use every month since May. Almost a third of the US corn harvest will be diverted into ethanol for motors this year, or 12pc of the global crop. The world's grain stocks have dropped from four to 2.6 months cover since 2000, despite two bumper harvests in North America. China's inventories are at a 30-year low. Asian rice stocks are near danger level. Yet farm commodities have largely missed out on Bernanke's reflation rally in metals, oil, and everything else. Dylan Grice from Société Générale sees "bargain basement" prices....

Climate Change: As a Colorado Rockies playoff game is snowed out, scientists report that Arctic sea ice is thickening and Antarctic snow melt is the lowest in three decades. Whatever happened to global warming? Al Gore wasn't there to throw out the first snowball, er, baseball, so he might not have noticed that Saturday's playoff game between the Colorado Rockies and the Philadelphia Phillies was snowed out — in early October. The field should have been snow-free just as the North Pole was to be ice-free this year. It seems that ice at both poles hasn't been paying attention to...

The latest report of arctic sea ice was released, since the September minimum has passed and ice is now reforming as winter approaches. The National Snow and Ice Data Center report states that this was the third lowest amount of sea ice on record, but I contend that is missing the point. In this era of dire claims of climate marred by the controversy of global cooling, public dissent, and early season snow, a NASA follow up report appears to ignore the good news: The arctic sea ice is actually expanding! --snip-- The first lines of a press release from...

·11250 Waples Mill Road ·   Fairfax, Virginia 22030    ·800-392-8683   The "Junkiest" Junk Science That Taxpayers' Money Can Buy   Friday, October 09, 2009   Now, more than at any other time in anyone's memory, the federal government is in no position to waste taxpayer dollars on gun control advocacy "research."  Nevertheless, the National Institutes of Health recently gave anti-gun researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine $639,586 to conduct a survey intended to prove that possessing a gun doesn't benefit assault victims. Criminologist Gary Kleck calls the resulting survey "the very epitome of junk science in the guns-and-violence field—poor...

Carbon trading markets will yield few fortunes and break a lot of hearts I am no economist, but for an amateur I have a track record in predicting economic trends at least as good as Paul Krugman’s and I didn’t bother attending an Ivy League school to be able to do that. In predicting economic bubbles there are two things to remember. One is that most bubbles deal with intangibles, such as Michael Milliken’s junk bonds and the dot com bubble that saw insane valuations for non-performing stocks simply because they had an “E” in front of their name. The...

Take a look at the action of the Department of Energy. They just recently loaned $529 million dollars to a Finnish company that is producing a $90,000 dollar hybrid sports car (that is $90,000 per car Clyde). These funds are supposed to be used to create , or save American jobs, not sent overseas to create Finnish jobs building cars that none of us can afford in the first place. Now comes the really interesting part, guess who is now receiving profits from this little venture by way of ownership of a fair amount of stock in this company? You...

Leadership: Our new science czar, John Holdren, once backed compulsory sterilization and forced abortion as part of a government population-control program. The only thing missing was a Soylent Green recipe.In April, President Obama declared that "the days of science taking a back seat to ideology are over." In everything from stem cell research to climate change and energy policy, reason and science would triumph. The problem is that what the Obama administration considers science, as exemplified by the choice of Holdren, is troubling. In a recently rediscovered 1977 book, "Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment," co-authored with doomsters Paul and Anne Ehrlich,...

Not content with his humiliation at Copenhagen, Denmark this past September, President Obama will be traveling there again in December to attend the UN COP15 Climate Change Conference. This agreement would commit the United States to punitive and expensive greenhouse gas regulations dictated by the United Nations without recourse. COP stands for "Conference of the Parties" and the December Copenhagen conference will be the 15th under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), hence COP15. According to their website, it will be one of the largest conferences ever held outside the New York or Geneva headquarters, with an...

(CNSNews.com) – International law dealing with refugees should be amended to cover people affected by disasters attributed to climate change, environmental lawyers are arguing. With the United Nations and others predicting upward of 200 million people being displaced by 2050 as a result of environmental changes, the London-based Foundation for International Environmental Law and Development (FIELD) says they will need help dealing with “statelessness and compensation.” “International refugee law focuses on those who are persecuted for political, racial or religious reasons,” the organization’s director, Joy Hyvarinen, said in a statement Thursday. “It was not designed for those who are left...

The secret to sex appeal lies with the tampering of pheromones, creating a "sexual tsunami", according to new research. Scientists at the University of Toronto ... discovered that when the pheromone was removed, it created a "sexual tsunami" where the bugs proved attractive to one another, regardless of sex. The research found that male fruit flies with no history of homosexuality attempted to mate with their pheromone-free males ... Even flies of a different species were interested, according to the research team. "Lacking these chemical signals eliminated barriers to mating," Prof Levine said.

Smoking bans in places like restaurants, offices and public buildings reduce cases of heart attacks and heart disease, according to a report released Thursday by a federally commissioned panel of scientists. The report, issued by the Institute of Medicine, concluded that exposure to secondhand smoke significantly increased the risk of having a heart attack among both smokers and nonsmokers. The panel also said it found that a reduction in heart problems began to take effect fairly quickly after a smoking ban was instituted and that exposure to low or fleeting levels of secondhand smoke could cause cardiovascular problems. “Even a...

And the award goes to... (drumroll)... The New York Times, for "Biggest Obstacle to Global Climate Deal May Be How to Pay for It"! Quite frankly, that's the only obstacle to a global climate deal. What else is there? Some states are just baddies who want to ruin the globe for everyone else? But it's just a headline, and those are usually created by someone who didn't write the actual article, so surely the meat is better. Let's take a peek at the lede: As world leaders struggle to hash out a new global climate deal by December, they face...

Public Discourse: Our energy secretary applauds and encourages companies to leave the U.S. Chamber of Commerce over its position on climate change. Should any Cabinet secretary, with the powers of government behind him, be threatening U.S. companies? Part of the climate-change mantra is that the debate is over and the science is settled. Just to make sure, environmental groups have sought to pressure businesses to go green or at least keep silent. Now it would appear the whole weight of the federal government is being thrown behind this campaign to coerce and silence real and potential opposition. On Thursday, Steven...

At a conference for environmental journalists in Wisconsin, Al Gore dodged questions on the many identified errors in his global warming movie, An Inconvenient Truth. "We're very close to that political tipping point," Gore said. "Never before in human history has a single generation been asked to make such difficult and consequential decisions." While the audience of environmental journalists were largely in agreement with Mr. Gore's presentation and his positions, one Irish journalist and filmmaker asked Gore about the many scientific errors that were found in Gore's global warming movie, An Inconvenient Truth. "A judge in the British High Court,...

<p>Global Warming: President Obama warns of planetary doom at the U.N. if we fail to pass cap-and-trade legislation. Meanwhile, a former warm-monger predicts decades of cooling as the sun stays nearly "spotless."</p> <p>The president had hoped to address Tuesday's United Nations climate change summit in New York with a finished cap-and-trade bill. Failing that, he hoped he'd at least have a version of the Waxman-Markey bill that has passed the House on his desk before the Copenhagen talks in December to cobble together a follow-up to the failed Kyoto Protocol.</p>