Free Republic

Moments like the one we live in now come along from time to time, providing the opportunity to learn from the mistakes of the past. For instance, key takeaways from the Deepwater Horizon incident of April 2010 and how they apply to today are clear except to those who deny them. On Apr. 20, 2010, an explosion occurred on the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico. The explosion, which killed 11 men, caused the rig to sink into the deep and started a devastating oil leak from the well. Prior to it being capped three months afterward,...

The New York HEAT Act might not make the final budget. The bill reduces the state’s reliance on natural gas and cuts ratepayer costs by eliminating certain rules. It was in both legislative chambers’ one-house budgets, but last-minute scrambling could remove it. New York League of Conservation Voters Policy Director Patrick McClellan said, aside from people’s preference for natural gas, other challenges have made the bill hard to pass. “I think that there has also been some irresponsible fear-mongering against this bill from some people who oppose it,” said McClellan, “basically telling people this means that their natural gas service...

Caltech and JPL scientists suggest the fingerprints of early photochemistry provide a solution to the long-standing mystery. Mars is blanketed by a thin, mostly carbon dioxide atmosphere—one that is far too thin to prevent large amounts of water on the surface of the planet from subliming or evaporating. But many researchers have suggested that the planet was once shrouded in an atmosphere many times thicker than Earth's. For decades that left the question, "Where did all the carbon go?" Now a team of scientists from Caltech and JPL thinks they have a possible answer. The researchers suggest that 3.8 billion...

Earth's changing spin is threatening to toy with our sense of time, clocks and computerized society in an unprecedented way — but only for a second. For the first time in history, world timekeepers may have to consider subtracting a second from our clocks in a few years because the planet is rotating a tad faster than it used to. Clocks may have to skip a second — called a "negative leap second" — around 2029, a study in the journal Nature said Wednesday.

Global warming has slightly slowed the Earth’s rotation — and it could affect how we measure time. A study published Wednesday found that the melting of polar ice — an accelerating trend driven primarily by human-caused climate change — has caused the Earth to spin less quickly than it would otherwise.

A wave anomaly captured by a weather-mapping system sparked a global mystery this week—with some internet sleuths even claiming it proves the existence of aliens. A giant cluster of waves over 80 feet high and spanning 2,000 miles—an area larger than Texas—appeared to move through the ocean off the coast of Africa on April 10 in a journey that lasted about 24 hours before it vanished. Some online commentators said the formation could only have been created by something moving under the surface of the sea—making it an "unidentified submersible object," the ocean equivalent of a UFO. A graphic of...

OXFORD, England (AP) — Humanity has only two years left “to save the world” by making dramatic changes in the way it spews heat-trapping emissions and it has even less time to act to get the finances behind such a massive shift, the head of the United Nations climate agency said. With governments of the world facing a 2025 deadline for new and stronger plans to curb carbon pollution, nearly half of the world's populations voting in elections this year, and crucial global finance meetings later this month in Washington, United Nations executive climate secretary Simon Stiell said Wednesday he...

In recent months Tesla has had a bumpy ride. In January the electric-vehicle (ev) pioneer warned that growth would be “notably lower” this year, as motorists’ enthusiasm for battery power loses charge. The same month it had to suspend most production at its giant factory near Berlin because of supply disruptions caused by turmoil in the Red Sea. Its market share in China, the world’s biggest ev market, is falling as it fends off cheaper local competition, especially from byd, which late last year briefly eclipsed Tesla as the world’s biggest ev-maker. Tesla hit another big pothole on April 2nd,...

In a far-reaching new essay in The New Atlantis, the environmental researcher Ted Nordhaus makes a damning and authoritative case that while the basic science of CO2 and climate is solid, it has been abused by the activist class in service of a wildly irresponsible and unscientific climate catastrophism. This reckless alarmism, saturated across the mainstream media and endlessly amplified by it, has had profound societal consequences. It has both distorted public understanding of the massive benefits the carbon economy makes possible and grossly exaggerated the risks of extreme events it allegedly makes more likely. As a result it has...

A team of European researchers says that hundreds of thousands of meteorites, which may provide valuable information about the dawn of life on Earth, are disappearing from Antarctica at an alarming rate. Based on their research, the scientists behind the alarming findings say that as many as three-quarters of the approximately 300,000-800,000 meteorites resting on the surface of the Antarctic ice sheet could be lost by 2050. Published in the journal Nature Climate Change, the research says the culprit behind the wholesale disappearance is the steady rise in global temperature. “For every tenth of a degree of increase in global...

EXCLUSIVE: Biden administration officials successfully pressured fact-checking website Snopes to alter its rating on a fact check it conducted regarding a potential federal ban on gas stoves, according to internal communications. In early January 2023, Snopes issued a "mixture" rating on the claim that the Biden administration was considering a ban on gas-powered stovetops, citing comments made by a senior official overseeing product regulations. Shortly before the fact check, Richard Trumka Jr., a member of the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), said such a ban was "on the table." "This is a hidden hazard," Trumka told Bloomberg at the time....

The Senate on Wednesday afternoon voted in favor of passing a bill reversing the Biden administration's actions mandating states to track and set reduction goals for greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles on highways. The chamber approved the resolution in a 53-47 vote in which Sens. Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz.; Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio; Jon Tester, D-Mont.; and Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., joined every Republican voting in the affirmative. The bill was introduced in February by Sens. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D.; Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va.; and Manchin. "Few things are more frustrating in government than un-elected bureaucrats asserting authority they don’t have and foisting federal...

Earthquakes on the East Coast are rare but sea level rise and frequent flooding may lead to a higher frequency of quakes. But here's why you shouldn't be alarmed. "An earthquake is based on tectonic plates, and New York is sitting on a 'lazy' plate, which is good, meaning we do not have so many earthquakes, but there are other things that happen -- too much rain or drought," Dr. Marsellos told NBC New York. Long periods of flooding can cause water levels to rise leading to possible landslides. Those slides can "lubricate" faults and may account for a higher...

A candidate running for Senate in New Jersey was ruthlessly goaded on social media after claiming the “climate crisis” was to blame for the Friday earthquake that rocked the tri-state area. Green Party member Christina Amira Khalil shared the controversial message just minutes after the quake, which was the strongest temblor to strike near the Big Apple in 140 years. “I experienced my first earthquake in NJ. We never get earthquakes. The climate crisis is real. The weirdest experience ever,” Khalil wrote on X.

April 9 (UPI) -- The European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service said Tuesday that at 1.68 degrees Celsius hotter than the "pre-industrial" era, March was the warmest March on record and the tenth straight temperature record-breaking month. The new March high was calculated from an estimate of the average March temperature during the "pre-industrial" reference period, designated as 1850-1900 which also shows a year-round global average temperature from April 2023 to March 2024 period that is 1.58 degrees Celsius higher than the pre-industrial average. The climate group's top scientist called for urgent cuts in the volume of greenhouse gasses being...

STRASBOURG, France, April 9 (Reuters) - Europe's top human rights court ruled on Tuesday that the Swiss government had violated the human rights of its citizens by failing to do enough to combat climate change. The European Court of Human Rights's (ECtHR) decision on the case brought by more than 2,000 elderly Swiss women set a precedent that will resonate across Europe and beyond for how courts deal with a growing trend of climate litigation. The Swiss women, known as KlimaSeniorinnen, argued their government's climate inaction put them at risk of dying during heatwaves. In her ruling, Court President Siofra...

A group of older Swiss women have won the first ever climate case victory in the European Court of Human Rights. The women, mostly in their 70s, said that their age and gender made them particularly vulnerable to the effects of heatwaves linked to climate change. The court said Switzerland's efforts to meet its emission reduction targets had been woefully inadequate. It is the first time the powerful court has ruled on global warming. Swedish campaigner Greta Thunberg joined activists celebrating at the court in Strasbourg on Tuesday. "We still can't really believe it. We keep asking our lawyers, 'is...

Reconstructions of paleo-CO2 levels openly rely on data derived from plant stomata. But when modern (1800s-present) CO2 measurements from stomata conflict with the narrative that humans drive CO2 levels, they are patently rejected. [emphasis, links added] Scientists readily acknowledge plant stomata evidence from one location is “widely used as an effective tool for paleoenvironmental reconstructions” of global atmospheric CO2 from 1 to 150 million years ago (Badihagh et al., 2024). For example, in a new study, 100-150 million-year-old stomata samples from Iran are shown to reconfirm that global atmospheric CO2 levels hit 1,100 to 1,700 ppm during the Jurassic period....

Norway's wolf claim unsupported Scandinavian wolf researchers say that Norwegian authorities have no scientific basis for their claim that the ongoing cull of five wolves will not threaten Norway's wolf population. Here the first of five wolves was shot in Koppang on Jan. 16. The second wolf shot was a fertile female from a protected zone, shot by mistake. Norway's claim that killing five of its roughly 20 wolves poses no danger is based on an argument that Norway and Sweden have a shared wolf population of a bit over 100 animals. Experts dispute the Norwegian standpoint, forskning.no, the web...

What if I told you that there was an actual CONSPIRACY going on? A research experiment that they kept hidden from the public because they were afraid of a backlash. Because that is exactly what has been going on. And keep reading to the end, because you will never be able to guess who has been involved in this project… From the deck of a decommissioned aircraft carrier in the San Francisco Bay, researchers from the University of Washington LAUNCHED trillions of salt particles into the atmosphere with the intent of blocking out the sunlight from earth. This is all...