Free Republic

President Obama blasted his Republican critics Thursday for their resistance to investing in alternative energy sources, comparing their stance to the beliefs of those who thought that Columbus would sail off the edge of the world. In another in a series of speeches defending his energy policies, Obama touted his push for green energy growth — including wind and solar power, electric cars and biofuels — as a way to help wean the nation from a dependence on foreign oil. And he mocked his rivals for failing to embrace his ideas. “If some of these folks were around when Columbus...

The groups currently drafting new science standards for American classrooms have decided to include a section addressing the issue of climate change. The Congressionally chartered National Academies, including the National Research Council, plan to include a document drafted last year that says that human activities have at least a partial impact on climate.Although there’s a strong consensus in scientific literature on anthropogenic climate change, in America the issue is a source of significant controversy and debate. Just how strident the debate over climate change had become came as a surprise to one California middle school teacher: When Treena Joi, a...

WASHINGTON — Global warming-fueled sea level rise over the next century could flood 3.7 million people in 544 U.S. cities temporarily, according to a new method of looking at risking of rising seas published in two scientific papers. The cities that have the most people living within three feet (one meter) of high tide — the projected sea level rise by the year 2100 made by many scientists and computer models — are in Florida, Louisiana, and New York. New York City, often not thought of as a city prone to flooding, has 141,000 people at risk, which is second...

Little by little, the federal Department of Education appropriates ever more power for itself. (Never mind that the department might very well be unconstitutional in the first place.) Today, most public schools are dependent one way or another on federal funds. Those funds don’t come without strings — and, under the Obama administration, bureaucrats have tightened those strings considerably. Through the Race to the Top competition, the Ed Department enticed states with reward funds to adopt national standards. (Some state leaders — like Texas Gov. Rick Perry — turned down the funding, but they were the exceptions.) The common core...

After many years in which evolution was the most contentious issue in science education, climate change is now the battle du jour in school districts across the country. The fight could heat up further in April, when several national bodies are set to release a draft of new science standards that include detailed instruction on climate change. The groups preparing the standards include the National Research Council, which is part of the congressionally chartered National Academies. They are working from a document they drew up last year that says climate change is caused in part by manmade events, such as...

How the regulating class is using bogus claims about climate change to entrench and extend their economic privileges and political control.Guest Post: Dr David M.W. Evans, 29 Feb 2012, last updated 13 Mar 2012, latest pdf hereThe Science The sister article Climate Coup—The Science (a more mainstream version of The Skeptic’s Case) contains the science foundation for this essay. It checks the track record of the climate models against our best and latest data, from impeccable sources. It details how you can download this data yourself. It finds that the climate models got all their major predictions wrong: Test Climate...

Schenectady, NY - THE NEWS that Lord Monckton was to give his “Climate of Freedom” lecture at Union College in Schenectady, New York, had thrown the university’s environmentalists into a turmoil. The campus environmentalists set up a Facebook page announcing a counter-meeting of their own immediately following Monckton’s lecture. There is no debate about global warming, they announced. There is a consensus. The science is settled. Their meeting would be addressed by professors and PhDs, the “true” scientists, no less. Sparks, it seemed, were gonna fly. Traveling with Lord Monckton on the East Coast leg of his current whistle-stop tour...

Ordinary people are not putting enough pressure on governments to deliver a legally binding deal on cutting greenhouse gas emissions, the U.N.'s climate chief said. "There is not enough well up from the bottom up. I don't see millions of citizens demanding climate action," Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, said at a lecture on Friday. "The reality we have to deal with is the process is very slow and the urgency is every day growing. The only way out is to continue to push on the government side but we can't depend 100...

MILLIONS of dollars in government research funding is being ploughed into studies of emotion in climate change messages, ancient economic life in Italy and the history of the moon. Studies of sleeping snails and determining if Australian birds are getting smaller because of climate change have also been allocated funding in the latest round of grants totalling $300 million by the Australian Research Council. Another project titled "Sending and responding to messages about climate change: the role of emotion and morality" by a Queensland university secured $197,302. The council said it was an important psychology project. The study to determine...

In the 1970s it seemed like we had problems we could never fix — and I'm not talking about white polyester disco suits and the band Air Supply. To punctuate the dismal vibe, everybody smoked, or so it seemed if you were sitting on an airplane at the edge of the DMZ between the smoking and nonsmoking sections. But then something funny happened. We tackled those problems. A move toward more fuel-efficient vehicles, plus Alaskan oil and geopolitical changes, gave us a breather from the tyranny of oil. How'd we do it? The answer is worth considering as we struggle...

The Environmental Protection Agency is so out of control that it needs a major fix, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli tells Newsmax.TV. And a court case challenging the agency’s powers to limit greenhouse gases now before a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., could be just the remedy the agency needs, he said. “I am cautiously optimistic that the court will send this back to the EPA to be fixed,” Cuccinelli said. “I hope to fix it like a dog — snip — but that’s going to require a new president as well, so I hope the timing will work...

James Garvey, a philosopher and the author of The Ethics of Climate Change has written a defence of Peter Gleick at the Guardian:What Heartland is doing is harmful, because it gets in the way of public consensus and action. Was Gleick right to lie to expose Heartland and maybe stop it from causing further delay to action on climate change? If his lie has good effects overall – if those who take Heartland's money to push scepticism are dismissed as shills, if donors pull funding after being exposed in the press – then perhaps on balance he did the right...

From Amazon’s list of Gleick book reviews hereMust read — for the real history of the climate debate and the war by deniers,February 8, 2012 This review is from: The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines (Hardcover) Michael Mann — a world class scientist and communicator about the seriousness of climate change — has finally put all of the recent history (sordid, indeed) about climate denial, attacks on climate scientists, and serial and intentional efforts by climate “skeptics” and “deniers” (a word many of them self-apply) into a book. As the title suggests, there IS...

Peter H. Gleick, a water and climate analyst who has been studying aspects of global warming for more than two decades, in recent years became an aggressive critic of organizations and individuals casting doubt on the seriousness of greenhouse-driven climate change. He used blogs, congressional testimony, group letters and other means to make his case. Now, Gleick has admitted to an act that leaves his reputation in ruins and threatens to undercut the cause he spent so much time pursuing. His summary, just published on his blog at Huffington Post, speaks for itself. SNIP---- The Heartland Institute had already signaled...

Richard North at the EU Referendum blog provides some interesting comment regarding funding. While the warmists are successfully focusing attention on the minor-league operations of the Heartland Institute, with a total budget for all its issues, which include health care, education, and technology policy, of around $4.4 million, their own funding arrangements, amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars, are largely evading scrutiny. .... The Climate Works Foundation, though, is of special interest as it was in 2008, awarded $460,800,000 from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, a grant-making organisation with assets of $7.2 billion, which disbursed $353,400,000 in grants...

If you think there are no new reasons to get freaked out by climate change, try this: There’s at least a theoretical possibility that a warmer and warmer world could lead to tinier and tinier humans. That’s the inevitable conclusion of a just-published study of Siferhippus sandae, the littlest horse that ever lived. The Siferhippus sandae first appeared about 56 million years ago, and it was never a terribly prepossessing creature, weighing no more than 12 lbs. (5.5 kg). While it was not exactly built for steeplechase running, its skeletal architecture — not to mention its unmistakably equine face —...

Dr Peter Gleick provides more evidence that the supporters of the Cause will stop at nothing. Magical thinking: a rainmaker in Kenya, whose credibility is being funded by British taxpayers Photo: DFID/International Development Research Centre/Thomas Omondi What a very odd situation we find ourselves in, due to the extraordinary transformation in recent years of the so-called debate over global warming. Last week, The Sunday Telegraph reported that, as part of Britain’s overseas aid budget, the Department for International Development is well on the way to spending £1.5 billion on a mass of climate-related projects across the world. These range from...

Earlier this month, the Internet lit up with a tantalizing whodunit. Someone had leaked to bloggers confidential internal fundraising and strategic documents from the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based think-tank that questions global warming orthodoxy. The apparent goal: to discredit and embarrass those who raise doubts about the science behind climate change. Heartland officials cried foul, asserting that at least one of the documents was forged. They vowed to track down the leaker and pursue charges. This week, Peter Gleick saved them the trouble of a search. He confessed that he had assumed a false identity to obtain some of the...

U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe years ago declared man-made global warming a hoax and more recently declared victory over his opponents in that long-running debate. Still, the Oklahoma Republican believes his work is not done. Next week, the senator said his plans for the book's introduction include interviews with several broadcast personalities known for being on the other side of the debate. Published by WND Books, which described it as a coup de grace to the global-warming movement, the book is titled "The Greatest Hoax," with the subtitle "How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future." Next week, the senator said,...

I’d ask EPA’s Lisa Jackson about the legality of “disappearing” the over $468,000 dollars in grants to Peter Gleick’s Pacific Institute from the EPA grants database, then putting them back, all without any public notice. Since 2007, Gleick’s PI has received over 1 million in taxpayer’s money. In 2007 they got $647,000 dollars in two grants from the EPA, which also “disappeared” this week. When an FOIA request was made to the EPA, they mysteriously returned. Showdown at the EPA corralSource: Junk Science By Steve MilloyMarch 2 should be a date that lives in infamy for the Obama Environmental Protection...