Free Republic

The White House argued Thursday that the sense of emergency surrounding the coronavirus pandemic would continue, despite some Democrats downplaying the level of concern over the virus. During the daily briefing, White House press secretary Jen Psaki reacted to a comments from Colorado Democrat Gov. Jared Polis, who said in December that the “medical emergency” surrounding the virus was “over” because of vaccines.

At the Republican National Convention last summer, the GOP approved a platform that stated: “We propose to shift responsibility for environmental regulation from the federal bureaucracy to the states and to transform the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] into an independent bipartisan commission, similar to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, with structural safeguards against politicized science.” It also says “We will likewise forbid the EPA to regulate carbon dioxide, something never envisioned when Congress passed the Clean Air Act.” The GOP followed the lead of President Donald Trump, who in a March debate said he would abolish EPA, and in a May...

Experts manufacture whatever facts an activist, politician, or bureaucrat needs."Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts," the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) famously quipped. But when it comes to social and environmental problems nowadays, nearly everyone thinks he is entitled to his own facts, and an army of experts is on hand to manufacture and promote the carefully curated truths they require. The Progressive Era dream of empowering nonpartisan experts to solve social, economic, and environmental problems has failed spectacularly. What happened?Breakthrough Institute founders Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger grapple with this question in...

Science has come full-circle, taking a page from the medieval Church by using fear and persecution to silence skeptics. The oppressed have become the oppressors. Given that most professional scientific bodies and peer-reviewed journals have been active accomplices in this scandal, one wonders how many other so called scientific consensuses have been similarly engineered and waiting for their own ClimateGates before truth is known. —Joanne Nova The above quote is important because it addresses the politicization of science and research. Dean Esmay, the owner of Dean’s World where I blog occasionally as part of a group, has often commented that...

Editor's note: Global warming is unlikely to be a dangerous future problem, with or without the implementation of such programs as the Kyoto Protocol, according to Dr. Richard Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology...alarmist media claims to the contrary are fueled more by politics than by science... The global mean temperature is never constant, and it has no choice but to increase or decrease--both of which it does on all known time scales. That this quantity has increased about 0.6ºC (or about 1ºF) over the past century is likely. A relevant...

“Secondhand smoke debate ‘over.” That’s the message from the Surgeon General’s office, delivered by a sycophantic media. The claim is that the science has now overwhelmingly proved that smoke from others’ cigarettes can kill you. Actually, “debate over” simply means: “If you have your doubts, shut up!” But you definitely should have doubts over the new Surgeon General’s report, a massive 727-page door stop. Like many massive reports on controversial issues, it’s probably designed that way so nobody (especially reporters on deadline) will want to or have time to read beyond the executive summary. That includes me; if I had...

One of the many striking statements in Michael Crichton's best-selling novel, "State of Fear," comes in a footnote on page 43: "Since 1940 ... data have [shown] ... predominantly a cooling trend. ... The Greenland ice sheet and coastal regions are not following the current global warming trend."Forget the words, interesting as they are in the context of supposed worldwide warming trends. Consider this obvious point: They come from a well-sourced footnote in a best-selling work of fiction.Obviously, "Fear" is not the normal novel. It is, in fact, a jeremiad against junk science, against the politicized theory of global warming...

Introduction to Creationism's Trojan Horse Introduction It used to be obvious that the world was designed by some sort of intelligence. What else could account for fire and rain and lightning and earthquakes? Above all, the wonderful abilities of living things seemed to point to a creator who had a special interest in life. Today we understand most of these things in terms of physical forces acting under impersonal laws.We don’t yet know the most fundamental laws, and we can’t work out the consequences of all the laws we know. The human mind remains extraordinarily difficult to understand, but...