Free Republic

It’s not quite burning-scientists-at-the-stake bad, but it’s close — or at least feels that way. President Donald Trump’s administration is openly waging war against universities, closing independent science review panels, funding fewer grants, and shutting down or raising concerns about the closure of important centers of government research (even though in some cases, they’re probably not supposed to). The evidence is now clear that the modern American structure of science can no longer survive as an apolitical entity that enjoys consistent, bipartisan support. Science is now suffering a generational catastrophe, not just in terms of funding, but in terms of...

Climate change worsened by human behavior made 2025 one of the three hottest years on record, scientists said. The analysis from World Weather Attribution researchers, released Tuesday in Europe, came after a year when people around the world were slammed by the dangerous extremes brought on by a warming planet. "If we don't stop burning fossil fuels very, very, quickly, very soon, it will be very hard to keep that goal" of warming, Friederike Otto, co-founder of World Weather Attribution and an Imperial College London climate scientist, told The Associated Press. "The science is increasingly clear." "The heat waves we...

Chief White House medical adviser Anthony Fauci speculated that China likely got rid of an intermediary host that carried the COVID-19 virus between bats and humans when officials cleaned out the live animal market where the virus is theorized to have first caused an infection in humans. "It was very likely in a host- what the Chinese did, I don't have firsthand knowledge of that, but the people who were reporting it, who investigated what they did is they cleaned out the markets as soon as it turned out that it was clear that there were clusters coming from the...

"General reaction seems to be that the CRUgate emails are genuine, but with the caveat that there could be some less reliable stuff slipped in. In the circumstances, here are some summaries of the CRUgate files. I'll update these as and when I can. The refs are the email number. Phil Jones writes to University of Hull to try to stop sceptic Sonia Boehmer Christiansen using her Hull affiliation. Graham F Haughton of Hull University says its easier to push greenery there now SB-C has retired.(1256765544) Michael Mann discusses how to destroy a journal that has published sceptic papers.(1047388489) Tim...