Free Republic

Yes. Before I am told by someone. The article is old. Still it is relevant. China is one of the most censorious societies on Earth. So what better place for ­Facebook to recruit social media censors? There are at least half a dozen “Chinese nationals who are working on censorship,” a former Facebook insider told me last week. “So at some point, they [Facebook bosses] thought, ‘Hey, we’re going to get them H-1B visas so they can do this work.’ ” The insider shared an internal directory of the team that does much of this work. It’s called Hate-Speech Engineering...

Liberals have long honored the power of "satire" to bring the mighty down to size -- when they're conservatives. Liberals are honored and adored. Take The Daily Show on Comedy Central. At least since the days when Jon Stewart brought his "God, I admire you" routine to Democratic candidate John Kerry in 2004, they've been a pliant platform for Democrats. On Wednesday, Daily Show host Trevor Noah offered that to Al Gore, mocking Trump as a "famous scientist" (as if Gore is an astrophysicist?) and only interrrupting Gore's talking points with "right, right" and agreeing with everything. Gore insisted "the...

President Donald Trump pushed back on reporters who confronted him with a government report on global warming, saying he knew of “scientists that very much dispute it.” “Well, I think we’ve contributed, we certainly contribute, I mean, there’s certain pollutants that go up and there’s certain things that happen,” Trump said in an interview with Axios reporters that aired on HBO Sunday night. Axios reporters thought bringing a copy of the most recent National Climate Assessment (NCA) would make it harder for Trump to question its findings. It didn’t work.

h/t Willie Soon & Quadrant Online – the following are excerpts from a climate report which the Hewlett Packard website describes as a collaboration between HP Labs and Forum for the Future. 2028: Jean-Claude Bertillon, leader of the No Climate Change Party in Canada, is convicted of denying the existence of climate change. He is deported to the international convict settlement on Kerguelen in the Southern Ocean.

Is because he has a very powerful bulls**t detector. We know this thanks to a fascinating and unwittingly revelatory article in the German newspaper Der Spiegel. The paper reveals how, in the days running up to President Trump’s decision to quit the UN Paris accord, he received a series of deputations from EU leaders urging him to change his mind. “For me it’s easier to stay in than step out,” Trump told them. This is perfectly true. Since his momentous Rose Garden speech announcing his plans to pull out of Paris, Trump has taken more flak than a thousand-bomber raid...

On Thursday, President Donald Trump announced that the United States would be withdrawing from the Paris climate change accord, much the chagrin of the ‘chicken little’ liberal media who declared the apocalypse was upon us. CNN’s normally mild-mannered host Jake Tapper was visibly distraught during Sunday’s State of the Union when he was railing against U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley for how the U.S. now looked to the rest of the world. But when spoke with climate alarmist/hypocrite Al Gore he was at peace. After a fleeting exchange of pleasant hellos, Tapper swiftly pounced on Haley and demanded to know how...

The unchecked use of fossil fuels will produce a climate not seen since the Triassic period about 200 million years ago, researchers warn in a new report. The culprit for this unprecedented warming is atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2), suggest researchers led by the University of Southampton in the UK, which by the year 2250 could reach levels equivalent to those of the “age of reptiles,” when dinosaurs roamed the earth. In their research, the researchers admit that CO2 levels are “much lower now” than they have been at other, hotter points in the earth’s history, yet they warn that levels...

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) -- It was a late March surprise for residents of Alaska's largest city, the kind that snarls traffic and keeps kids at home for the day. The National Weather Service said 8.8 inches (22.4 centimeters) of snow fell on Anchorage between 10 p.m. Tuesday and 1:30 p.m. Wednesday. That's a record for March 29 in Anchorage, said meteorologist Rebecca Duell. The Anchorage School District canceled classes for the day, and the deep snow slowed traffic. One enterprising person on a bicycle with fat tires was caught by a camera from Anchorage television station KTVA. The cyclist was...

The UAE was one of a number of Middle Eastern countries to bare the brunt of a freak weather phenomenon yesterday. A shock snowstorm blasted through the Arab country, usually known for its blistering heat, scorched deserts and year-round sunshine. The blizzard covered parts of the country with up to 10 centimetres of snow, according to the local Met Office. Other Gulf States also experienced rare lightning strikes, sandstorms, rough seas and high winds of up to 90km an hour.

Here is Dana Milbank of WaPo celebrating the “retreat” of climate change deniers: “There is no denying it: Climate-change deniers are in retreat.” He concludes his op-ed by noting “that corporations are becoming reluctant to bankroll crazy theories,” and “the surrender of climate-change deniers will follow.” For Milbank, this marks the historic turning point marking the collapse of flat-Earth science “crazies.”

President Barack Obama will ask Americans to think of climate change as a threat not just to the environment, but also to their health. Obama on Tuesday was to announce a series of steps that private entities like Google and Microsoft are taking to better prepare the nation's health systems for the inevitable effects of a warmer, more erratic climate. He was to be joined at Howard University Medical School by Surgeon General Vivek Murthy and the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Gina McCarthy.

Environmental activist and billionaire Tom Steyer served notice on Monday that he will use his wealth to try to bring climate change into the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, vowing to target Republican hopefuls who deny the connection between burning fossil fuels and rising global temperatures. Steyer’s NextGen Climate political action committee launched what it calls the Hot Seat campaign aimed at calling out Republican candidates for taking money from the billionaire Koch brothers. The group will target Senator Rand Paul, who is expected to launch his presidential campaign on Tuesday.

The potential loss of the EPA in their anti-fracking campaign probably has environmentalists scrambling to rehash their stance on the well-stimulation process. Too bad for them they’ve already made some pretty ridiculous claims about fracking. The Daily Caller News Foundation has taken the liberty of listing the top five most ridiculous anti-fracking claims here:

Whatever Barack Obama has to say about “climate change” (formerly known as “global warming”) is a lie. It would be nice to have a President and a government we could trust.

For some reason, I don’t find it surprising that Oregon is a hotbed of climate alarmism. Thus, when the Portland Tribune recently published an article describing how Oregon’s “warmer climate imperils our health,” it seemed appropriate to look further into the claims being made. Apparently, climate change in Oregon will lead to “less snow on Mount Hood? [but] we can live with that.” Interesting, given how there has been no significant trend in maximum overwinter snowpack on Mount Hood since records began in 1981. Indeed, according to an article in 2012 at ABC News Cleveland, snowpack in the Cascade Mountains...

In a softball interview with Environmental Protection Agency administrator Gina McCarthy on Thursday, MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell teed up the Obama administration official to dismiss legitimate Republican criticism of the President's climate deal with China: "I wanted to ask you of course about this major breakthrough with China. And the criticism already from many Republicans....What are you facing as you approach climate deniers...now that you have, you know, the Republicans in charge?

“Weather isn’t climate.” Now that we’re once again in the grips of Polar Vortex or Arctic Blast or whatever we’re calling it this time, you’re going to hear that refrain a lot. “Weather isn’t climate.” And that’s true, of course — until it isn’t. Over a long enough timespan, weather IS the climate. If your tropical beachfront property has had a century of temperate seasonal weather, complete with snowstorms and summer dry spells, it would probably be a mistake to keep calling it tropical. Things change. Climate typically changes slowly, but it does change. There are ancient tropical ferns and...

We've been focused on the major angles and rhymes of Tuesday's election, from a new GOP governor in Illinois to Governor-Elect Abbott winning 44% of the Hispanic vote in Texas. However, there was another interesting angle to the election. It was a bad night for "global warming," "climate change," "environmentalists," or whatever you want to call them these days.

CLIMATE CHANGE is our era’s defining challenge, but most of America’s universities are planning to sit this one out. Though students and faculty members at more than 400 colleges have called for administrators to divest from fossil-fuel energy companies, fewer than 20 have committed to doing so. Stanford recently divested from coal, but none of the other schools had endowments within the 150 largest in 2013.

In her new book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, environmentalist Naomi Klein advocates a ban on fossil fuels and a statist utopia where government “creates” a record number of jobs through “investment” in wind and solar energy. (Full disclosure: I have not read Klein’s book, nor do I intend to read it. However, I did read fawning reviews by Mark Bittman in New York Times and Drew Nelles in the Globe and Mail—more than enough time spent contemplating Klein and her reviewers’ dishonest claims.)