Free Republic

OAKLAND — Former state Senate President Pro Tem and 2010 Oakland mayoral candidate Don Perata joined cancer research and health advocates Monday to launch a ballot measure that would hike cigarette taxes by a dollar a pack. "This is the right measure for the right time," Corey Goodman, a UC San Francisco professor and former biotech entrepreneur, said at a news conference in the Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute, adding the half-billion dollars per year this measure could raise would help move scientific breakthroughs "from the bench to the bedside" to save lives. Perata said he conceived of the measure...

Alleged scientific misconduct and academic dishonesty at Barack Obama's Environmental Protection Agency Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) has already put it on record in her letter to the Wall Street Journal that the real purpose of so-called greenhouse gas regulations, such as government-mandated cap and trade regulations, is to enrich Barack Obama's campaign contribution bundlers at J.P. Morgan Chase (six figures in bundled contributions) and Goldman Sachs (almost a million dollars in bundled contributions). Bundled contributions are entirely legal but the thing nonetheless speaks for itself; Barack Obama is dancing the cap-and-trade with the fat cat climate profiteers who brought (or bought)...

Copenhagen climate change agreement is impossible World leaders have finally accepted that it will be impossible to come to a deal on climate change this year and have moved their attention to setting new deadlines for a global agreement. By Louise Gray, Environment Correspondent Published: 2:10PM GMT 15 Nov 2009 The United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December has been billed as the world's last chance to stop global warming. But negotiations to forge a binding agreement have been hampered by a US refusal to sign up to targets on cutting greenhouse gas emissions. The deadlock forced world...

Everyone in Britain should have an annual carbon ration and be penalised if they use too much fuel, the head of the Environment Agency will say. Lord Smith of Finsbury believes that implementing individual carbon allowances for every person will be the most effective way of meeting the targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions. It would involve people being issued with a unique number which they would hand over when purchasing products that contribute to their carbon footprint, such as fuel, airline tickets and electricity.

Warming: After stifling a report questioning the science behind climate change, the EPA is censoring two of its lawyers for saying the proposed solutions are also problematical. The debate isn't over. It's being suppressed. In the proud tradition of EPA whistle-blower Alan Carlin, whose leaked study blew the lid off the EPA's hyped and flawed science behind climate change, two EPA lawyers, Laurie Williams and Allan Zabel, have produced a Web video titled "A Huge Mistake." In it they say cap-and-trade in general and the Waxman-Markey bill in particular are the wrong answers anyway. Williams and Zabel do not deny...

Research at the universities of Liverpool and Oxford into the finger length of primate species has revealed that cooperative behavior is linked to exposure to hormone levels in the womb. The hormones, called androgens, are important in the development of masculine characteristics such as aggression and strength. It is also thought that prenatal androgens affect finger length during development in the womb. High levels of androgens, such as testosterone, increase the length of the fourth finger in comparison to the second finger. Scientists used finger ratios as an indicator of the levels of exposure to the hormone and compared this...

Dogs, especially their noses, have been an important law enforcement tool for ages, whether its scent tracking or sniffing out drugs or explosives. But one use has come under harsh criticism recently: the dog-scent lineup, reports The New York Times. In a dog-scent lineup, a dog smells contaminated items from the crime scene thought to hold the suspect's scent and then sniffs at scents swabbed from the suspect and other innocent people that match the suspect's description. The point is to have the dog signal his handler when it recognizes the scent from the crime scene during the scent lineup....

Junk Science: The oracle of climate disaster has a new book out on global warming that should be on the fiction list. He asks us to commit economic suicide while he rakes in millions from his green investments. 'Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis," Al Gore's sequel to his 2006 tome "An Inconvenient Truth," came out Tuesday. Printed on recycled paper using low-VOC (volatile organic compound) ink, it will undoubtedly be a best-seller and on the desk of every attendee at next month's climate change conference in Copenhagen. In a press release announcing the book, the Oscar-...

INCREASINGLY, the road to Copenhagen resembles a suburban street on Halloween with the number of climate change freak shows and stunts reaching a nadir in recent weeks. Nicholas Stern says we should turn vegetarian in order to combat climate change. If you must eat meat, eat kangaroos, says Ross Garnaut, because marsupials emit negligible amounts of methane. And that champagne you drank on Melbourne Cup day? Scientists scolded us with a report that a 750ml bottle of bubbly could produce 100 million bubbles, releasing five litres of carbon dioxide. Yet far from rallying people to the cause of immediate action...

Regardless of your tribal affiliations, were you cautiously optimistic when our new president promised to "restore science to its rightful place" in the formulation of public policy? Were you embarrassed by the prior occupant's politicization of issues that should have been decided on a more scientific basis? Did you assume that Barack Obama would surround himself with apolitical science advisors unencumbered by embarrassing anti-science baggage and free of culture-war axes to grind? To paraphrase a once famous mayor of New York - So how's he doing so far? You're probably aware that the H1N1 swine flu vaccine supply has fallen...

Thanks for killing the planet, dog owners. Well, that's a rough paraphrase of a New Zealand study that claims a medium-size dog leaves a larger ecological footprint than an SUV. In "Time to Eat the Dog? The Real Guide to Sustainable Living," authors Robert and Brenda Vale argue that resources required to feed a dog — including the amount of land needed to feed the animals that go into its food — give it about twice the eco-footprint of, say, building and fueling a Toyota Land Cruiser. Noting that a cat's pawprint was roughly equivalent to a Volkswagen Golf's, "New...

President Obama’s highly controversial Safe Schools Czar, Kevin Jennings, is concerned about the heterosexual indoctrination of children in our public schools. In his bizarre view: “we all know what’s promoted in our schools: Heterosexuality is promoted in our schools. Every time kids read Romeo and Juliet or they’re encouraged to go to the prom or whatever it is, kids are aggressively recruited to be heterosexual in this country. And you know what, it doesn’t work. The reality is that if schools could affect your sexual orientation there would have been no gay people in the first place. But they’re still...

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...