Free Republic

Dear EarthTalk: What is the best way to measure how close we are to the dreaded "point of no return" with climate change? In other words, when do we think we will have gone too far? — David Johnston, via EarthTalk.org While we may not yet have reached the “point of no return” - when no amount of cutbacks on greenhouse gas emissions will save us from potentially catastrophic global warming - climate scientists warn we may be getting awfully close. Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution a century ago, the average global temperature has risen some 1.6 degrees...

San Francisco activist Tom Steyer’s NextGen Climate Super PAC Monday announced the billionaire Democrat will wage a campaign to put Republicans on the “hot seat” about climate change and spend “what it takes” for an aggressive new high-tech “war room” to track — and attack — GOP candidates in 2016. The program, based at the NextGen headquarters in the Financial District — with satellite offices in Washington, D.C., and other cities — aims to make climate change a “top tier” issue next year. It will focus its firepower on turning environmental concerns into a “wedge issue,” especially with young voters,...

In 2005, I changed my mind about climate change: I concluded that the balance of the scientific evidence showed that man-made global warming could likely pose a significant problem for humanity by the end of this century. My new assessment did not please a number of my friends, some of whom made their disappointment clear.At the 2007 annual gala dinner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a D.C.-based free-market think tank, the master of ceremonies was former National Review editor John O'Sullivan. To entertain the crowd, O'Sullivan put together a counterfeit tale in which I ostensibly had given a lecture on...

What Sharyl Attkisson told me about vaccines By Jon Rappoport February 11, 2015 http://www.nomorefakenews.com “The complete failure of this year’s flu vaccine, even by conventional standards, is a major scandal at the CDC. To distract the press and public, we now have a fake epidemic of measles, and pressure to take the vaccine, take all vaccines all the time. This is called a psyop. Psyops build fake realities.” (The Underground, Jon Rappoport) As my readers know, I’ve written many articles about vaccines, covering: mandatory shots; the pseudoscience of vaccination; severe adverse effects; poisons in shots; disastrous vaccination campaigns, and so...

The co-founder and former guitarist of the popular world-famous Christian rock band the Newsboys has officially renounced his Christian faith and is calling members of the current version of the band hypocrites. George Perdikis, who founded the chart-topping Christian band in 1985 with his friend Peter Furler, wrote an op-ed on Wednesday published by the website Patheos explaining how he transformed from a guitarist in one of the most popular Christian rock bands of all-time to a cosmology-enthused atheist. "I always felt uncomfortable with the strict rules imposed by Christianity. All I wanted to do was play rock and roll,"...

The American public and U.S. scientists are light-years apart on science issues. And 98 percent of surveyed scientists say it's a problem..... Scientists are far less worried about genetically modified food, pesticide use, and nuclear power than is the general public, according to matching polls of both the general public and the country's largest general science organization. Scientists were more certain that global warming is caused by man, evolution is real, overpopulation is a danger and mandatory vaccination against childhood diseases is needed.

After the mass shooting at the University of California at Santa Barbara, Mel Robbins, writing for CNN, argued that blame lay not with the National Rifle Association, but with “the shooter and the mental health services he did or didn’t get.”

".....Yuma,Colorado, a farming town of 3,500 people near the Kansas border, celebrated last month as homegrown Republican Cory Gardner was elected to the U.S. Senate. Gardner, a high school football player and the son of a farm equipment dealer, defeated incumbent Democratic Sen. Mark Udall to help the GOP gain control of the Senate in the second-most expensive congressional race of all time.Gardner represented Colorado’s 4th Congressional District for four years, an expansive territory that covers the mostly flat and rural eastern third of the state. Farmers there mostly grow corn to feed cattle, and water comes from the quickly...

The New Republic magazine celebrates its 100th anniversary with a special section called “100 Years, 100 Thinkers.”Unfortunately, the categories into which these “minds who’ve defined our century” are helpfully slotted are almost parodically First World, elite-uptown-liberal:“Architecture.” “Environmentalism.” “Songwriting.” “Diplomacy.”And of course, “American Civil Rights.” (Zzzzzzzz….)Unless you count “Medicine,” no hard sciences were deemed worthy of consideration.An alien browsing this section would be forgiven for assuming that man never set foot on the moon.But who cares when someone named Alice Waters “made (local) lettuce sexy!”(And besides, The New Republic assures us that “Martians need only watch one of [Richard Pryor's] concert...

Stardust got in their eyes. In the spring a group of astronomers who go by the name of BICEP announced they had detected ripples in the sky, gravitational waves that were the opening notes of the Big Bang. The finding was heralded as potentially the greatest discovery of the admittedly young century, but some outside astronomers said the group had underestimated the extent to which interstellar dust could have contaminated the results - a possibility that the group conceded in its official report in June. Now a long-awaited report by astronomers using data from the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite...

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO), headquartered in Geneva, is releasing videos that predict what weather reports will be like in 2050 These are based on what happens if climate change is allowed to continue Earth's average temperature could rise by more than 4°C (7.2°F) by the end of the 21st century, according to researchers This could lead to more extreme weather around the world such as storms, droughts and flooding The videos are being released ahead of the UN Climate Summit 2014 What will weather reports be like in 2050? Rather dramatic and unnerving if climate change gets out of...

"Star Trek: Voyager" actor Robert Picardo says he way too old to experiment with Bill Nye the Science Guy ... in the bedroom. Picardo is asking a judge to stop his soon-to-be ex-wife from spreading rumors he's in a gay relationship with Nye.   The actor says in court docs -- obtained by TMZ -- Linda Pawlik lured him over to her house July 4th by falsely telling him the family dog was missing.  While he was there, he claims Linda had a P.I. attach a GPS device to his car. Days later ... Linda started telling family friends the...

Each new climate-change study seems more pessimistic than the last. This May and June, for example, were the hottest ones on record for the planet. Effective countermeasures now could actually ward off many of these threats at relatively modest cost. Yet despite a robust scientific consensus that greenhouse gas emissions are at the root of the problem, legislation to curb them has gone nowhere in Congress. In response, President Obama has proposed stricter regulations on electric utilities, which some scientists warn may be too little, too late. Why aren’t we demanding more forceful action? One reason may be the frequent...

According to new research from Boston University, young children with a religious background are less able to distinguish between fantasy and reality compared with their secular counterparts. In two studies, 66 kindergarten-age children were presented with three types of stories - realistic, religious and fantastical. The researchers then queried the children on whether they thought the main character in the story was real or fictional. While nearly all children found the figures in the realistic narratives to be real, secular and religious children were split on religious stories. Children with a religious upbringing tended to view the protagonists in religious stories as...

Climate change skeptics have suggested a recent slowdown in the warming of the Earth is evidence that global warming is a farce and that climate models can't be trusted, but new research suggests the slowdown, or "pause," was not a significant disruption of larger trends. The planet has been slowly warming over the last century or more. But in the last 15 years, that rate of warming has slowed. Temperatures are still high by historical standards; but between 1998 and 2013 they were slightly below what climate models had predicted. A small number of scientists and policy makers have pointed...

"Paedophilic interest is natural and normal for human males,” said the presentation. “At least a sizeable minority of normal males would like to have sex with children … Normal males are aroused by children.” Some yellowing tract from the Seventies or early Eighties, era of abusive celebrities and the infamous PIE, the Paedophile Information Exchange? No. Anonymous commenters on some underground website? No again. The statement that paedophilia is “natural and normal” was made not three decades ago but last July. It was made not in private but as one of the central claims of an academic presentation delivered, at...

BBC report: “Impartiality in science coverage does not simply lie in reflecting a wide range of views, but depends on the varying degree of prominence (due weight) such views should be given.” LONDON, July 7 (UPI) --In an internal report released today by the BBC trust addressing the broadcaster's impartiality in science reporting and the gender balance of its contributors and presenters, the BBC has officially taken the position that it will be giving climate change deniers less airtime in an effort to provide more accurate reporting that better reflects the weighted view of the scientific community. When they set...

Valeria Tanco (L), and Sophy Jesty pose with their new baby girl, Emilia, at their home in Knoxville, Tennessee April 7, 2014.Several liberal media organizations are reporting the results of a new same-sex parenting study which suggests that gay parents do a better job of raising children than the general population. There are four imporant points to understand about that study, however.Here are a few of the headlines:CBS News: "Children of same-sex couples healthy, well-adjusted, study finds"NBC News: "Children of Same-Sex Parents Are Healthier: Study"The Huffington Post: "Children Of Gay Parents Are Happier And Healthier Than Their Peers, New Study...

Medical science is making bold new leaps every day. Not only is there a new medication out that is just like the old medication, except it costs 10 times as much, but the American Medical Association has decided that gender is purely imaginary.For thousands of years, human ignorance convinced us that there were two genders. Now the AMA says that gender is imaginary. You can be any gender you want. Change gender every week. Or every day. We’re in Hopechangeistan now. Biology, like economics and military science, are purely imaginary fields. “Science” says so. In other action Monday, the AMA...

President Obama, in an address speech to UC Irvine graduates Saturday, took aim at congressional Republicans and others who dispute climate change, saying they posed a threat to the future.