Free Republic

Global warming alarmists have been caught doctoring the results of a widely cited paper asserting there is a 97 percent scientific consensus regarding human-caused global warming. After taking a closer look at the paper, investigative journalists report the authors’ claims of a 97 percent consensus relied on them misclassifying the papers of some of the world’s most prominent global warming skeptics. At the same time, the authors deliberately presented a meaningless survey question that allowed them to twist the responses to fit their own preconceived global warming alarmism. Misleading Question Global warming alarmist John Cook, founder of the misleadingly named...

Removable flood walls would be set up for much of lower Manhattan, a 15-to-20-foot levee would guard part of Staten Island and gates and levees would shield Brooklyn as part of a nearly $20 billion plan Mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed Tuesday to protect New York City from storms and the effects of global warming.Bloomberg’s proposals also include building dunes in Staten Island and the Rockaways, firming up the shoreline with bulkheads in various neighborhoods and considering building a levee and a new “Seaport City” development at the South Street Seaport that would echo nearby Battery Park City. The mayor also...

This is how the AGW panic ends: not with a bang, but with a whimper. The Economist, which (despite a recent decline) remains probably the best news magazine in the English language, now admits that (a) global average temperature has been flat for 15 years even as CO2 levels have been rising rapidly, (b) surface temperatures are at the lowest edge of the range predicted by IPCC climate models, (c) on current trends, they will soon fall clean outside and below the model predictions, (c) estimates of climate sensitivity need revising downwards, and (d) something, probably multiple things, is badly...

IIn history studies of the Great Global Warming Scare, people will ask, is this the bargaining stage or the start of acceptance? Adapting to _ not just fighting _ climate change is taking the heat out of global warming talk Seth Borenstein for The Associated PressWASHINGTON (AP) — Efforts to curb global warming have quietly shifted as greenhouse gases inexorably rise.The conversation is no longer solely about how to save the planet by cutting carbon emissions. It’s becoming more about how to save ourselves from the warming planet’s wild weather. — Newsdaily On the five stages of  grief, this...

VIDEO At the UN Climate Conference in Bonn, Germany, we came across a delegate who explained that the unusual cold weather accompanying the conference (yes, the "Gore Effect" was out in force!) was a perfect example of how global warming is affecting our lives!

Notice how the headline says “unusual weather” rather that admit that COLD weather is the problem? The unprecedented meeting in Exeter follows the coldest spring in more than 50 years, incredibly widespread snow in May, and the coldest Easter Sunday on record.

A pair of fundraisers just 90 minutes apart in the San Francisco Bay area last week laid bare the competing forces of politics and policy that President Obama is grappling with as he prepares to unveil a slate of major initiatives on global warming in late June or July. In public comments at the beginning of the first session, Obama made clear that he considered climate change “one of the most important decisions we make as a nation,” according to a transcript released by the White House. But during the second event, according to several people familiar with his private...

New York City would spend nearly $20 billion to get ready for rising sea levels and hotter summers under a proposal unveiled on Tuesday by Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The sweeping plan includes 250 recommendations, ranging from installing floodwalls and storm barriers to upgrades of power and telecommunications infrastructures.

Between 1989 and 2008, clean-air rules in California virtually halved the concentrations of black-carbon soot in the state's skies, in effect reducing the state's carbon footprint by the equivalent of cutting carbon dioxide emissions by 21 million tons a year, according to new analysis. Though the data have yet to be fed into global climate models to see if California's results can be replicated elsewhere, they bolster the hope that focusing on black-carbon soot could be an effective way to begin to address global warming. Estimates of how large an effect soot controls could have on global warming will have...

Never underestimate the sneakiness when you’re dealing with The Most Transparent Administration, Evah‘s tortured internal conflict between pretending to heed the voices calling for pragmatic economic growth and appeasing the vociferous green interests nipping at their heels. The Obama administration just threw a major bone to said interests with a reevaluation that’s going to come in particularly handy in producing very official- and serious-sounding studies and reports, but it was carried out in a very quiet maneuver that I’m sure they’re hoping will pass by the public eye generally unnoticed. The Obama administration uses their “social cost of carbon” estimate...

Governments around the world have just received one of the most important scientific reports ever written. It provides the starkest assessment yet of how the earth's climate is responding to rising levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and creating risks for billions of people from extreme weather events and rising sea levels. Compiled for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change by 255 scientific experts from universities and research institutes in 38 countries, the report provides an up-to-date overview of the findings of thousands of recent peer-reviewed research papers. Most important, the latest IPCC report includes an analysis of new...

Enlarge Image Mixed bag. Carbon dioxide emissions were down in the United States and Europe in 2012, but up worldwide. Credit: International Energy Agency/Redrawing The Energy-Climate Map LONDON—Governments shouldn't wait for a proposed international climate deal to take hold in 2020—they can take four steps right away to curb carbon emissions, argues a new report from a global energy think tank. By implementing the quartet of policies by 2015, nations could buy "precious time while international climate negotiations continue," says economist Fatih Birol, the lead author of a report released here yesterday by the International Energy Agency (IEA). At...

Let’s say that a progressive community decides to implement a law that requires its residents to have a body mass index within the “normal range”. Undeniably such a measure would be good for the citizens of this community. It would reduce obesity, improve overall health, decrease health care costs and if practiced across the country would reduce food consumption causing food demand to lessen, food costs to fall, and the demand for agricultural land to lessen. To make this law more palatable to the population it will be called the Pink Code: like being “in the pink” (a healthy condition)...

As readers may know, National Review and I have an impending court date in Washington with Dr Michael E Mann, creator of the global-warming “hockey stick” and self-proclaimed Nobel laureate, for the hitherto unknown crime of “defamation of a Nobel prize recipient“. (You can contribute to our legal defense fund here; also, the TV rights to my forthcoming white Bronco chase are still available – we’ll be using a hybrid, of course). Forced by circumstance to take an interest in the latest developments on the climate-change “consensus”, I was interested to see this story, in which The New York Times...

(Reuters) - New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg on Tuesday announced a $20 billion plan to prepare for rising sea levels and hotter summers expected as a result of climate change in the coming decades. The plan, which follows widespread destruction wreaked by Superstorm Sandy last year, included about 250 recommendations ranging from new floodwalls and storm barriers to upgrades of power and telecommunications infrastructures. It coincided with a report updating projections of the impact of climate change, saying that over the next 40 years the number of sweltering summer days could double or even triple and that the sea level...

Former Vice President Al Gore made some disgraceful statements about the Koch brothers Tuesday. Participating in a Google+ Conversation, Gore accused two of the nation's largest employers of being "purveyors of the dirtiest energy on earth" (video follows with transcript and commentary): Gore Calls the Koch Brothers 'Purveyors of the Dirtiest Energy on Earth' AL GORE: [Obama’s] got a big decision coming up on the XL Pipeline for these awful, filthy tar sands that, you know, Canada just said, "Don’t take it across British Columbia. We’re not going to put up with that. It’s just too dirty and too dangerous."...

Climate Change: The New York Times is wondering, as are other mainstream media outlets, "What to Make of a Warming Plateau." If the media had a more critical eye, they'd see what they've been expecting is wrong. The Times reported Monday that "The rise in the surface temperature of earth has been markedly slower over the last 15 years than in the 20 years before that. And that lull in warming has occurred even as greenhouse gases have accumulated in the atmosphere at a record pace." The reporter admits the break in temperature increases "highlights important gaps in our knowledge...

As unlikely as this may sound, we have lucked out in recent years when it comes to global warming. The rise in the surface temperature of earth has been markedly slower over the last 15 years than in the 20 years before that. And that lull in warming has occurred even as greenhouse gases have accumulated in the atmosphere at a record pace. The slowdown is a bit of a mystery to climate scientists. The situation highlights important gaps in our knowledge of the climate system

The recent announcement by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that carbon dioxide levels as measured from Hawaii’s Mauna Loa volcano have exceeded 400 parts per million, most likely the highest level in three million years, is the latest and most dramatic proof of global warming that is being propelled by human activity. Despite the disastrous toll caused by extreme weather events, capitalist governments around the world have been incapable of addressing, let alone reversing, the growth of greenhouse gases. In the US, Obama—hailed as the “environmental president” by various Democratic Party aligned groups—has proven to be nothing but a...

The Ghost Empire - Climate Change, Global Warming, Drought and Desertification Commodities / Climate Change June 08, 2013 - 07:29 PM GMT By: Richard Mills Drought is a normal recurring feature of the climate in most parts of the world. It doesn’t get the attention of a tornado, hurricane or flood. Instead, it’s a slower and less obvious, a much quieter disaster creeping up on us unawares. Climate change is currently warming many regions, overall warmer temperatures increase the frequency and intensity of heat waves and droughts. We can prepare for some climate change consequences with public education, water conservation...

Might it be that it was Ronald Reagan and not Barack Obama who began to slow the rise of the seas? That is one conclusion that could be drawn from a new paper by Canadian physicist Qing-Bin Lu of Ontario's University of Waterloo. Instead of carbon dioxide emissions, Mr. Lu argues that ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and other halocarbons caused global warming. Thanks to the Reagan administration and the 1987 Montreal Protocol, CFCs have been phased out by developed countries. After a lag, Mr. Lu argues that global temperatures peaked around 2002 and predicts they are set to gradually fall over...

I was aware of this story yesterday, but I didn’t like the original plot, (see at the end of this post) since use of straight line linear trends doesn’t accurately reflect the reality of the observation data. While it is often hard to find any reality in climate models, linear trend lines mask the underlying variance. Today, Dr. Spencer has produced a graph that I feel is representative and very well worth sharing, because it does in fact convey an EPIC FAIL speaking directly to the accuracy of an ensemble of climate models. – AnthonyDr. Roy Spencer writes: In response...

Climatism, the belief that man-made greenhouse gases are destroying Earth’s climate, is on the wane. Once riding high, the ideology of man-made climate change is losing its influence in governments across the world. Climategate, the release of e-mails from the University of East Anglia, called the science of dangerous warming into question and turned the tide of global opinion. Background On November 19, 2009, and unidentified hacker or internal whistle-blower downloaded more than 1,000 documents and e-mails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at East Anglia University in the United Kingdom and posted them on a server in Russia. Within...

Along with ending 1970s stagflation and destroying the Soviet Empire, President Ronald Reagan saved the planet from global warming, which would make him the greatest president ever. The article was based on a new scientific paper that suggests that "ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and other halocarbons caused global warming" and not carbon dioxide. Thanks to President Reagan, use of these chemicals were phased out by the 1987 Montreal Protocols, leading to the current flattening out of global temperatures that have the warming alarmists so puzzled.

HARRIETSHAM, KENT – Here in the Garden of England, after a long and savage winter, we have had the coldest spring in 120 years. Snow fell in the north of England as late as May 23. The trees are still struggling into leaf. The bluebells came a month late. This is the third or fourth bad winter in a row. In Russia they have had the coldest winter and the highest snowfall in a century. In the United States, around 10,000 new cold-weather and high-snowfall records have been set. The climate cry-babies are wailing that global warming is causing global...

In two recent posts to his website, Dr. Spencer demonstrated quite clearly that the models used by global warming alarmists are fatally flawed. And if the models are flawed, the projections based on those models are worthless. After all: garbage in, garbage out.

It is widely reported and accepted that there has been no increase in average global temperatures for at least 16 years. Surprisingly (or not so surprisingly), the delegates in attendance at the UN's Bonn Climate Change Conference (June 3-14, 2013) were either completely unaware of the global warming standstill or didn't think it mattered.

The most widely feared consequence of global warming appears to be sea level rise (SLR). Environmental advocacy groups are polluting the airwaves and internet with lurid images of flooding of Bangladesh and Pacific islands, and raising the specter of hundreds of millions of environmental refugees. Even sober scientists... --snip-- The first clue that there might be something amiss with the IPCC logic comes from the IPCC report itself. According to this authoritative source, the contribution to SLR of the past century comes mainly from three sources: (i) thermal expansion of the warming ocean contributed about 4 cm; (ii) the melting...

Susan Rice will replace Tom Donilon as national security adviser, the White House is expected to announce Wednesday. Rice, currently the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, will be formally introduced in her new role by President Barack Obama at 2 p.m. ET. A White House official says Samantha Power, a former special assistant to the president on the National Security Council, will be nominated to replace Susan Rice as the U.N. ambassador.

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Yeah, here we are, great to be back here, folks. The news just isn't the news when I'm not here to tell you about it. I had so many people send me e-mails last week and the first couple days this week: "You know, Rush, there's a lot going on but it just doesn't seem like it's actually going on without you here." Folks, trust me, it was going on. It was happening. And I know it just doesn't seem the same, but the news isn't the news when I'm away. Because there isn't any news anymore....

Environment: Carbon dioxide concentrations in our atmosphere recently hit the 400 parts-per-million mark. So is all that CO2 scorching the planet? No. But it does seem to be making our deserts greener. The reality, according to Australian research, is that in this era of higher carbon concentrations, plant life in dry regions has grown lush. The greening of the deserts is due to the "fertilization effect" — the impact carbon dioxide has on plant life. In summarizing the report, the American Geophysical Union said researchers focused on "the southwestern corner of North America, Australia's outback, the Middle East, and some...

... in the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency is issuing more anti-hydrocarbon regulations and more statements detailing the coming horrors of “dangerous manmade climate change.” Two points must be kept uppermost: the global warming “disasters” exist only in computer models, Hollywood movies and alarmist assertions; and the “preventative measures” are worse than the disasters. The issue is not whether greenhouse gases “contribute to” climate change. Scientists acknowledge that. The only relevant issues are: How big a contribution? Do these gases now dominate planetary climate variation, supplanting the solar, atmospheric, oceanic and other forces that have warmed and cooled our...

The magnetic north pole has moved 161 miles in 6 months only, this puts its arrival in Siberia in less that 2 years, and it is when it arrives there that it will have migrated 40 degrees across the northern hemisphere at this point the poles will shift at high speed over the equator until it reaches 40 degrees south, i will tell you what i expect to happen when it goes past the 40 degrees point in the coming uploads...

Climate change is real, it's caused largely by human activities, and it poses significant risks for our health. Some members of Congress disagree with this simple, scientifically proven fact. We need to work to curb climate change, and a big step is to raise our voices to change the conversation in Washington. Call these deniers out. Hold them accountable. Ask them if they will admit climate change is a problem. We will continue updating the list below as supporters get answers to the basic question of whether their representatives in Congress accept the science on climate change. We hope that...

As far as I know, there are no Ph.D.s offered in the study of junk science. Maybe there should be. There are numerous instances of credentialed scientists pursuing faulty theories against evidence and common sense. Irving Langmuir's 1953 talk, "Pathological Science," is a classic compendium of examples; there is the recent case of cold fusion, with the imaginary tabletop nuclear fusion reactors still being given media credibility. Often media attention and fawning admirers blind scientists to scientific reality. Junk science also appeals to ideologues if it provides support for their ideology. For example, those who are ideologically opposed to capitalism...

Inspector Clouseau: Does your dog bite? Hotel Clerk: No. Inspector Clouseau: [bowing down to pet the dog] Nice doggie. [Dog barks and bites Clouseau in the hand] Inspector Clouseau: I thought you said your dog did not bite! Hotel Clerk: That is not my dog. As kids, we all learned the old adage, “when you assume you make an ass out of u and me.”... --snip-- The coupe de grace in this category is of course global warming, manmade climate change, or whatever Al Gore is calling it these days. In this case, all the civilized nations of the world...

WASHINGTON, DC—Scientists have long suspected that a flourishing of green foliage around the globe, observed since the early 1980s in satellite data, springs at least in part from the increasing concentration of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere. Now, a study of arid regions around the globe finds that a carbon dioxide “fertilization effect” has, indeed, caused a gradual greening from 1982 to 2010. ..snip... The team’s model predicted that foliage would increase by some 5 to 10 percent given the 14 percent increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration during the study period. The satellite data agreed, showing an 11 percent increase...

Physicist Ernest Moniz was sworn in last week as U.S. Energy secretary, and wasted little time laying out his priorities. Along with a major speech on energy efficiency, as well as pronouncements about nuclear power and natural gas, he issued a blunt warning to any opponents or obfuscators of climate science: The jig is up. "Let me make it very clear that there is no ambiguity in terms of the scientific basis calling for a prudent response on climate change," he told a crowd of Energy Department employees May 21 following his swearing-in ceremony at DOE headquarters. "I am...

**SNIP** The last topic of discussion was potential solutions. The panel split into two sides on this one. Some panelists suggested different options to prevent further greenhouse gas pollution, such as a transition to renewable energy and increasing fuel efficiency in vehicles. Others, however, saw the only real solution as finding ways to live in an imbalanced world, like avoiding development in flood-prone areas. Such a view might seem unnecessarily bleak and pessimistic, but it's by far the more practical view. The Earth has only 16 years left of emitting greenhouse gases until we reach a tipping point. That's not...

Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) — not carbon emissions — are the real culprit behind global warming, claims a new study out of the University of Waterloo. “Conventional thinking says that the emission of human-made non-CFC gases such as carbon dioxide has mainly contributed to global warming. But we have observed data going back to the Industrial Revolution that convincingly shows that conventional understanding is wrong,” said Qing-Bin Lu, a science professor at the University of Waterloo and author of the study. “In fact, the data shows that CFCs conspiring with cosmic rays caused both the polar ozone hole and global warming,” Lu...

Last week, members of the House of Representatives turned their attention to the biggest Obama scandal yet. No, I do not mean the IRS or Benghazi. Those are more partisan witch hunt than true scandal, a point backed up by recent CNN polling that shows independents and moderates trust the White House's take. This is the real scandal: President Obama said in his second inaugural address that failing to act on climate change would "betray future generations." Now, many expect that he is ready to do exactly that by approving the Keystone XL pipeline. Last week, the pro-Keystone House of...

Scientists are struggling to explain a slowdown in climate change that has exposed gaps in their understanding and defies a rise in global greenhouse gas emissions. Often focused on century-long trends, most climate models failed to predict that the temperature rise would slow, starting around 2000. Scientists are now intent on figuring out the causes and determining whether the respite will be brief or a more lasting phenomenon. "The climate system is not quite so simple as people thought," said Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish statistician and author of "The Skeptical Environmentalist" who estimates that moderate warming will be beneficial for...

Remember all the stories about how a glut of cheap shale gas was killing off coal in the United States and slashing the country’s carbon-dioxide emissions? It’s time to revise those headlines slightly. According to the latest data from the Energy Information Administration, coal has been reclaiming some — though not all — of its market share in 2013: This shouldn’t be too much of a surprise. As I’ve noted before, natural gas prices have been creeping up over the past year, thanks to a combination of a colder winter, higher demand for heating fuel, scaled-back drilling, and also new...

Around 1250 A.D., historical records show, ice packs began showing up farther south in the North Atlantic. Glaciers also began expanding on Greenland, soon to threaten Norse settlements on the island. From 1275 to 1300 A.D., glaciers began expanding more broadly, according to radiocarbon dating of plants killed by the glacier growth. The period known today as the Little Ice Age was just starting to poke through. Summers began cooling in Northern Europe after 1300 A.D., negatively impacting growing seasons, as reflected in the Great Famine of 1315 to 1317. Expanding glaciers and ice cover spreading across Greenland began driving...

Occasionally, we hear from people who believe that liberal media bias isn’t really that big of an issue because most people don’t really trust reporters to tell the truth. While public trust in the media is at an all-time low, that hardly means they lack the power to shape opinion. A perfect case in point is the notion popularized by environmental alarmist Al Gore that the Earth is experiencing more severe weather events supposedly caused by “climate change.” Like his earlier debunked claims that global temperatures were increasing, this statement is also false. But many people are simply unaware of...

N.Y. 3 Feet of Snow: Reversed Global Warming Causes Unusual Amount of Snowfall on Memorial Day Weekend In New York [PHOTOS] 3 feet of snow had just fallen in New York over Memorial Day weekend, and the unusual amount of snowfall sparked speculations that say the extreme weather was caused by reversed global warming. **SNIP** Although during May of last year, the temperature had been going up due to global warming, this year's Memorial Day weekend experienced what some have called "reversed global warming," as the temperature is dropping much more than usual. Residents of New York were surprised to...

A Memorial Day weekend storm has dropped three feet of snow on a New York ski mountain near the Vermont border. Whiteface Mountain spokesman Jon Lundin says 36 inches of white powder has blanketed the nearly 5,000-foot tall mountain in the Adirondacks. That has forced the Olympic Regional Development Authority to close Whiteface Veteran’s Memorial Highway on the backside of the mountain. …

Both style and substance bespeak the weakness of climate-warmist arguments.I recently attended a fascinating and informative talk by Tom Harris, director of the International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC), delivered at a branch of the Ottawa Public Library. The lecture was, in part, framed as a response to a presentation held the week before by Dave Rhynas, an Al Gore-trained speaker, who followed the warmist party line faithfully. As Harris wrote afterward about it in a circulating email, “The talk was very ‘canned,’ no significant new material from what we are all used to hearing from Gore, so it would have...

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) wasted no crisis knowing what and whom to blame following the devastating tornado that hit Moore, Oklahoma. Republicans caused it to happen through anthropogenic (man-caused) global warming. “When cyclones tear up Oklahoma and hurricanes swamp Alabama and wildfires scorch Texas, you come to us, the rest of the country, for billions of dollars to recover. And the damage that your polluters and deniers are doing doesn’t just hit Oklahoma and Alabama and Texas.” So what about all that hot air? Is it possibly coming from none other than the senator himself? Well-respected meteorologist Joe Bastardi believes...

Memorial Day weekend is expected to feel more like “winter” for areas of the eastern U.S., according to forecasters at weather.com, with snow possible for parts of the Northeast.