Free Republic

Land covers 196.9 million square miles of the planet, which is broken up into 196 countries that are home to 7.125 billion people. With so much land available on Earth you would think people are spread out evenly throughout the world - but a stunning new map reveals that isn't the case. An entrepreneur used data from Nasa to understand where most of the world's population resides and found half of us are crammed into just one percent of the world.

The plan we are most likely to adopt to address climate change will cost far too much and do next to nothing. The fight over the science of warming is over, yes. But the debate over the solution to global warming hasn't even begun. I. A False Choice On a family visit to Kenya long before he became president of the United States, Barack Obama declared that he wanted to go on safari. His Kenyan half sister, Auma, chided him for being a neocolonialist."Why should all that land be set aside for tourists," she asked, "when it could be used...

The Keystone XL saga has taken a new twist in the New Year. On Jan. 6, TransCanada (the company that would have built and operated the Alberta to Texas pipeline) launched two lawsuits over President Obama's November rejection of the pipeline. One of the lawsuits will challenge the president's constitutional authority to grant permits when Congress has already acted, as it did in early 2015 when a bipartisan bill was passed approving the construction of the pipeline. The second lawsuit seeks damages of more than US$15 billion by issuing a claim under Chapter 11 of the North American Free Trade...

"My name is Mark Steyn. I am not a scientist. I am an author. My main interest in climate science is that Michael E Mann, the inventor of one of its most notorious artifacts, is suing me for "defamation of a Nobel Prize winner" -- a crime that I was not aware existed, especially in his case, as according to the Nobel Institute he is not a Nobel Prize winner. So I recently edited a book about it called "A Disgrace to the Profession": The World's Scientists -- in Their Own Words-- On Michael E Mann, His Hockey Stick, and...

State Treasurer Ted Wheeler asked Gov. Kate Brown Thursday to suspend the Energy Department's troubled Small-Scale Energy Loan Program.

The developing world deserves reparations from wealthier nations as compensation for the harmful climate change effects that are mostly our fault. It's us who have tainted our global commons by emitting vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and us whose actions have led to extreme weather and other disasters in the world's most vulnerable regions. But a strictly financial mea culpa from rich nations won't be enough. Rich countries should also invest in geoengineering projects to provide solutions for those on the front lines of climate change: those who cannot afford to pay for more adaptive and resilient...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: I try to avoid getting too deep or heavy on this program, but I had a lot of free time over the last 10 days or so, just to sit around and think as things came to my mind and ponder various things that just jumped in and jumped out of my mind. I didn't purposely focus on anything. I just reacted to whatever thoughts that I had that might have been stimulated by things I was reading. I didn't watch much television while I was gone. You look at this countdown clock and Algore and the...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: I have been shocked (pleasantly so) to see some in the Drive-By Media recognize our Algore countdown clock at RushLimbaugh.com. Back in 2006, Algore said that we had ten years remaining. Ten years. Humanity had 10 years left to save the earth from what was then called global warming. And if we didn't save it in ten years, it was all lost, it was hopeless, and the fate of humanity would be hanging in the balance. Well, that 10-year anniversary comes up this month, January 27. Gore said we have 10 years left before the earth cooks,...

The energy component of the widely followed S&P Goldman Sachs Commodity Index (GSCI) fell 41% from the start of 2015, a larger decline than the industrial metals, grains, and precious metals components, which declined 24%, 19%, and 11%, respectively, in 2015. Weakness in global economic growth contributed to the overall decline in commodity markets in 2015, but unique supply-side factors within certain commodity markets also affected prices. Each of the 16 commodities in the S&P GSCI Energy, Grains, Industrial Metals, and Precious Metals indices declined in 2015, with prices of some of the energy commodities falling more than 30%. Nickel,...

RUSH: Try this one from yesterday's stack. I don't know if you people know this or not, but Al Gore has been out at the Sundance Film Festival out there in Park City, Utah. This is one of Robert Redford's big do's, and apparently Al Gore is working on a movie that -- what is the name of this movie? Oh, that's right, "An Inconvenient Truth," and the movie will document his efforts to raise alarm on the effects of global warming, and so he brought Tipper and the kids out there. He's attending parties and posing for pictures with...

One year before the end of his second and final term in office, United Nations secretary-general Ban Ki-moon says he has spent "most of my time and energy" at the helm of the global body focused on one issue -- climate change. "I have spent real passion ... and most of my time and energy on this issue," Ban told the Associated Press in an interview focusing on his work in that area, culminating in the recent Paris climate conference. And he told the wire service that climate change, including follow-through on the global deal reached in Paris, will remain...

We only have to look at what’s going on today in Rome to catch up to Obama sidekick Pope Francis The very first thing Barack Obama did on his first full day at the White House was to jack up the heat. Out on the campaign trail, he had advised the plebes of the world to keep their thermostats—- to “72 degrees at all times”—no matter how frigid the winter and had lectured plain folk to pump air into their tires for the sake of the environment. It was said that the new administration made it warm enough in the...

Iranian protesters broke into the Saudi embassy in Tehran after launching several Molotov cocktails into the building. The rally in front of the embassy was triggered by Riyadh’s execution of a prominent Shiite cleric.

Every year around the world, hundreds of millions of children wait anxiously for Santa Claus to arrive and bring presents and good cheer. But what if Santa never came? What if this year the reindeer all fall ill, perhaps due to Crazy Reindeer disease (the analog to Mad Cow) and Santa is forced to cancel Christmas? The result would be devastating. Fortunately, for any children reading, official word from the North Pole is that Santa’s sleigh has some new upgrades this year that allow it to run on good old fashioned jet fuel if the reindeer fail. And with the...

The results are in for one Illinois university's famous mock presidential election, but the clear winner may surprise some. Western Illinois University's mock election predicted a landslide victory for Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders, with running mate Martin O'Malley, in 2016. The predicted Sanders-O'Malley ticket garnered 404 electoral votes to Jeb Bush-Marco Rubio's 114 votes. In the popular vote, Sanders earned 741 votes (49 percent) to Bush's 577 (38 percent). The famously accurate mock election correctly predicted the outcomes of the 2008 and 2012 elections, and the university claims it's the "largest and most elaborate mock presidential simulation in the nation."...

Bernie Sanders has entered a new stage of his campaign. The Vermont senator, who is running for president on a populist message and often speaks passionately about environmental issues, was for months regularly seen flying in coach class on commercial flights. **SNIP** Most recently, the campaign confirmed, a Gulfstream 200, took the Senator and some staff from Burlington, Vermont two days after Christmas and then from Las Vegas, Nevada to Moline, Illinois for campaign events in eastern Iowa this week. Days before the holiday, a private jet whisked the team from Omaha, Nebraska to Chicago, Illinois in order to fit...

.........."Everyone by now is familiar with the 'pause' or 'slowdown' in the rate of global warming that has taken place over the past 20 years of so, but few realize is that the observed warming rate has been beneath the model mean expectation for periods extending back to the mid-20th century-60+ years," Patrick Michaels and Chip Knappenberger, climate scientists at the libertarian Cato Institute, write in a working paper released in December. Michaels and Knappenberger compared observed global surface temperature warming rates since 1950 to what was predicted by 108 climate models used by government climate scientists to predict how...

BURNING fossil fuels and cutting down trees causes global COOLING, a shock new NASA study has found.

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: If climate change were a TV show, a hearing in Washington yesterday would be counterprogramming. Senator Ted Cruz held a hearing. He showcased witnesses who questioned the findings of climate science. On the same day, he came by to make his case to us. DAVID GREENE, HOST: The Republican presidential candidate raised this issue just as negotiators discuss climate change in Paris. Nearly 200 countries are working out commitments to fight it. None are questioning facts like those on a climate webpage published by NASA. INSKEEP: NASA says carbon dioxide is at its highest level in 650,000...