Free Republic

Ireland’s dependence on fossil fuels in transport is leaving the country exposed to repeated fuel price shocks as global energy markets remain disrupted, the Climate Change Advisory Council (CCAC) has warned. Accelerated investment in public transport, active travel, electric vehicle charging infrastructure and grid capacity would reduce this exposure, the council said in the transport chapter of its 2026 Annual Review. Temporary emergency responses to fuel price increases were not sufficiently targeted, it said, recommending that those most exposed and least able to avoid fuel costs be given support. Welcoming the Government’s pilot scrappage scheme to incentivize the purchase of...

George Santayana famously said that those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. The same is true for judicial overreach. Those judges who yield to the temptation to counter policies that are not to their liking are likely to repeat such excesses of power. That is why the recent decision of U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley in Boston is so concerning. While there are good-faith reasons why some have objected to the removal of slavery and climate change exhibits from national parks and monuments, this is not about the merits but the authority to make such changes. Kelley’s recent...

El Niño has officially begun, and it is forecast to intensify into a very strong or “Super” El Niño with major shifts in global weather patterns and an even hotter climate, according to a new report released Thursday morning from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. El Niño is a periodic weather pattern in the tropical Pacific Ocean that alters winds and features unusually hot waters in the central and eastern Pacific. These changes in winds and ocean temperatures have knock-on effects on weather patterns worldwide. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center is giving this El Niño a 63% chance of becoming...

A massive, semi-continent-sized subsurface structure has been discovered by scientists beneath Antarctica’s frozen surface. The discovery, reported by an international team of scientists, reveals the presence of an unusually shaped feature which researchers with Durham University’s Department of Geography characterize as a “vast geological structure hidden beneath the East Antarctic Ice Sheet.” The discovery was recently detailed in a study featured in Nature Geoscience. A Massive Fan-Shaped Structure Composed of several gigantic basins located beneath more than three kilometers of the southern continent’s icy exterior, the unusual structure has been dubbed the “East Antarctic Fan-shaped Basin Province.” The massive feature...

President Donald Trump's restoration of the Great Reflecting Pool on the Washington Mall and the many fountains throughout the District of Columbia is really a metaphor for what is happening all over the country. Trump is succeeding at Making America Great Again. The president posted via Truth Social on Friday, "The Great Reflecting Pool, that stretches between The Lincoln Memorial and The Washington Monument, just opened to 'rave reviews' but, maliciously or not, some say, like The Washington Post, it was a 'paint job.' This was not a paint job. This was highly sophisticated material, industrial strength, that could last...

Water has mass, and mass has leverage. Move enough groundwater from aquifers onto farms, into cities, and eventually into the ocean, and Earth’s spin changes by a measurable amount. The shift is tiny on a planetary scale, but the number still grabs you: between 1993 and 2010, researchers estimated that groundwater depletion nudged Earth’s rotational pole by about 31.5 inches. The figure comes from a 2023 study in Geophysical Research Letters, which estimated that humans depleted about 2,150 gigatons of groundwater between 1993 and 2010. When researchers added that water movement to their polar-motion model, the model lined up much...

For thousands of people across southern Italy, the first sign that something unusual had happened was not a news alert or a warning from authorities. It was the sound. Shortly after midnight on 2 June, residents in several regions reported hearing a loud rumble and feeling their homes shake. Some were already asleep when the tremor woke them. Others took to social media within minutes, trying to work out whether what they had just experienced was an earthquake. It was. A 6.2 earthquake rattled southern Italy and was felt hundreds of kilometres away Tourist begs police not to fine her...

Almost every day now, there is another headline warning about the collapsing birth rate across the developed world, and along with it, another think piece attempting to diagnose why younger generations seem increasingly reluctant to build families. This week, new figures out of England and Wales showed that the number of babies being born has fallen to the lowest level since 1977, with couples delaying parenthood until their thirties or deciding against children altogether. The total fertility rate dropped to 1.39 children per woman, the lowest level ever recorded. The explanations offered for this phenomenon tend to revolve around economics,...

Reikado Hall on Miyajima Island's Mount Misen has been known as the home of the "eternal flame" for over 1,200 years. And the thing about eternal flames is that if they do get out of control, you can't really put them out. Otherwise they're not so eternal are they? And then the inevitable happens: A Buddhist hall in Western Japan known for housing an "eternal flame" that has been burning for over 1,000 years caught fire and burned to the ground on Miyajima Island. pic.twitter.com/8HPHGdDu4A— The Associated Press (@AP) May 21, 2026Yep, according to News on Japan, the eternal flame...

Who will stop the Rain-ier? Scientists are warning that Washington’s Mount Rainier could unleash a catastrophic mudslide that has the potential to devastate three large towns within minutes. Often considered the crown jewel of Washington postcards, the over 14,000-foot-tall mountain is deemed the most dangerous in the US due to its towering height, frequent earthquakes, and precarious location upstream of a population center with over 100,000 people. While there is no evidence Rainier is about to blow its stack, magma is not the most dangerous fallout from the Cascade range’s preeminent volcano.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stole the show at a recent congressional hearing with two jars of brown water. Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) explained that the dirty water had come from Morgan County, Ga., where a Meta data center is allegedly tainting the water of local residents. It was an image perfectly suited to driving the intensifying opposition to data centers in that it was photogenic, easy to understand — and misleading. According to reporting in the New York Times last year, the water problem has affected four homes in the vicinity of the data center, not the entire county, as AOC implied. It...

For those who were impressed with how Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. handled two black snakes at Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz’s house over the weekend, he definitely upped the ante. In a video posted on Wednesday, RFK can be seen removing a rattlesnake, presumably from his home in Los Angeles. “In response to the many comments about venomous snakes, this video shows how Cheryl and I handled a recent rattlesnake rescue,” Kennedy captioned the newly-posted video. https://twitter.com/i/status/2059748137506418787

Findings by academic researchers suggest that hyperscalers' AI data centers contribute to local warming, but not everyone agrees. Findings of a new study conducted by a group of academics from around the globe have revealed that land surface temperature (LST) increases by 2°C (3.6°F) on average after the start of operations of an AI data center, an effect detectable up to an estimated 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) away. The study, The data heat island effect: quantifying the impact of AI data centers in a warming world, was conducted by a dozen experts from leading universities in the UK, Singapore, France,...

A tropical area of interest may develop in the western Caribbean or Gulf and track toward the waters along the eastern Gulf and the southern Atlantic coast of the United States from the final weekend of May into early June. Should a storm evolve, it could add to and extend existing rain in parts of the Southeast that will occur regardless during this week. "Rain will fall across parts of the south-central and southeastern United States this week regardless of whether tropical activity develops in the western Caribbean, southern Gulf or southwestern Atlantic," AccuWeather Expert Meteorologist Adam Douty said. "However,...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The dangerous heat wave shattering March records all over the U.S. Southwest is more than just another extreme weather blip. It’s the latest next-level weather wildness that is occurring ever more frequently as Earth’s warming builds. Experts said unprecedented and deadly weather extremes that sometimes strike at abnormal times and in unusual places are putting more people in danger. For example, the Southwest is used to coping with deadly heat, but not months ahead of schedule, including a 112 degrees Fahrenheit (44.4 degrees Celsius) reading in two Arizona communities on Friday that smashed the highest March temperature...

New York is strong-arming 18 industrial-scale solar power plants into rural communities across the state despite strong opposition from locals. Schuylerville farmer Alexandra Fasulo had just settled into the idyllic acreage she purchased in 2023 when Gov. Kathy Hochul’s bulldozers came roaring in, poised to thrash 1,800 acres of protected grassland to build a 100-megawatt-capacity solar energy complex in nearby Fort Edward, NY. Worried that chemical runoff and contamination may affect her farm, Fasulo attended a town meeting last fall to voice concerns to developers and state authorities. “We were like serfs coming before a king. It was so much...

In Norway’s highest mountains, experts are scouring perilous terrain for pieces of the past, long stored in mint condition in ice patches. As temperatures rise across the world, glacial archaeologists must find the emerging artifacts before they degrade forever This arrow with a pressure-flaked arrowhead made from gray quartzite dates to the Late Stone Age or Bronze Age and was found on Norway’s ice. The pitch and the animal sinew used to fasten the arrowhead are still preserved, which is exceptionally rare. Espen Finstad, Innlandet County Municipality ============================================================================================ A brown leather loafer came into view on a patch of ice...

The world loves coal. That is the simple message from results showing new coal-fired power plants hit a global 10-year high in 2025, defying climate doomers who decry its use and long for wind farms, solar panels and hydro power everywhere. Rising gas prices and supply disruptions linked to the Middle East crisis are just some of the factors pushing countries like China, Indonesia, India, Japan, South Korea, Germany, and Italy to rely more heavily on dependable coal-fired energy security even as the global coal fleet generated less electricity – for now. Overall coal power capacity — plants that came...

A UN body of researchers that puts together possible climate scenarios announced last week that one extreme scenario it put forward back in 2011 is no longer plausible. As Roger Pielke Jr. from AEI puts it, the climate apocalypse is no longer around the corner.The climate apocalypse isn’t around the corner after all. That’s the upshot of a recent report from the international panel that supplies official “scenarios” to researchers, governments and banks. It turns out that the most extreme assumptions about the future — the doomsaying predictions embodied in the worst-case scenario known as RCP8.5 — are “implausible.”...The substance...

You would have time to make peace with what has happened. A fully frozen Earth... that would be the result! Image Credit: Art Knights / Shutterstock.com It is Terrifying Affair Thursday, and we are imagining a scenario that could never happen, but is wonderfully fun to explore. And in case it becomes a ridiculous conspiracy theory like Earth losing gravity for 7 seconds, at least we are ahead of the curve in debunking it. The scenario for the day is what if the Sun somehow disappears? Magically vanishes from the center of the Solar System. What would happen next? Well,...