Free Republic

From its embrace of dubious research about autism, its skepticism over vaccines, and its wholesale rejection of the consensus about climate change, the Trump administration continues to raise alarm within the scientific community. Our William Brangham spoke with two prominent researchers about their new book chronicling what they argue is a concerted war on science. William Brangham: "In their new book, our guests argue that we're living through a — quote — "anti-science superstorm," where a concerted group of global actors, billionaires, leaders of nation-states, and credentialed experts work to confuse and mislead the public about basic scientific principles, particularly...

Terradot, a carbon removal company, is using “enhanced rock weathering” to sequester carbon by spreading crushed volcanic rock over farmland.STATE OF SÃO PAULO, Brazil — Across vast stretches of farmland in southern Brazil, researchers at a carbon removal company are attempting to accelerate a natural process that normally unfolds over thousands or millions of years. The company, Terradot, is spreading tons of volcanic rock crushed into a fine dust over land where soybeans, sugar cane and other crops are grown. As rain percolates through the soil, chemical reactions pull carbon from the air and convert it into bicarbonate ions that...

In southern India, a new enterprise called Peer Publicon Consultancy offers a full suite of services to scientific researchers. It will not only write a scholarly paper for a fee but also guarantee publishing the fraudulent work in a respected journal. It is one of many “paper mills” that have emerged across Asia and Eastern Europe over the last two decades. Paper mills are having remarkable success peddling tens of thousands of bogus academic journal papers and authorships to university and medical researchers seeking to pad their resumes in highly competitive fields. These sophisticated outfits also engage in trickery to...

Inhalers that provide fast-acting treatment for people with certain respiratory conditions are contributing to greenhouse gas emissions, which can worsen both climate change and the conditions themselves, according to new research. In the study, published Monday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, researchers found inhalers approved for asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD, generated an estimated 24.9 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions in the United States from 2014 to 2024. This is equivalent to the emissions of about 530,000 gas-powered cars each year, according to the study. "Scaled across tens of millions of...

Pope Leo XIV has hit out at those who minimise the "increasingly evident" impact of rising temperatures in his first major statement on climate change. Reiterating the words of his predecessor Pope Francis, the new pontiff lambasted critics who "ridicule those who speak of global warming". The Pope's remarks, at a speech in Castel Gondolfo near Rome, will be seen as an implied criticism of US President Donald Trump, who last month called climate change a "con". Pope Leo also called for greater action from citizens the world over on climate change, saying there was no room for indifference or...

Six beachfront houses fell into the ocean Tuesday as rough surf from offshore hurricanes pounded North Carolina's Outer Banks. The homes, perched on stilts in Buxton on Hatteras Island, buckled one by one as six-to-12 foot waves from Hurricanes Humberto and Imelda slammed the coast.

The European Union is poised to fully implement the world's first carbon border tax from Jan 1st...The EU is poised to implement the climate policy as part of an effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and promote cleaner production processes outside the bloc.

President Donald J. Trump strode to the podium of the United Nations General Assembly and delivered a speech bold and uncompromising in its excoriation of the fictions hoisted by the elites. In a world awash with sanctimonious platitudes about mass migration and climate change, Trump dubbed them the forces “destroying a large part of the free world”With characteristic bluntness, he declared the global climate change movement as “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world”

It's the peak of the Atlantic hurricane season but - very unusually - there are currently no tropical storms or hurricanes. The last named tropical storm 'Fernand' weakened in the mid-Atlantic on 28 August. And there are no storms predicted by the National Hurricane Centre over the next week, despite forecasts for a busier than average season, which runs from 1 June to 30 November. However, forecasters suggest the current lull in activity will be short-lived with a flurry of storms to come later in the season... Multiple factors for lullIn a special report from CSU addressing the quiet spell,...

It has been a while since we have checked in on polar ice. I’m sure you remember the hysteria of a few years ago–Arctic sea ice is melting! Al Gore predicted, in 2009, that the Arctic would be “completely ice-free” by 2014. Far from having disappeared, there are still 1.8 million square miles of ice floating in the Arctic Ocean. The annual Arctic sea ice minimum has arrived once again, and as usual, it provides far less drama than the media headlines would suggest. According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), Arctic sea ice extent bottomed out...

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — With China leading the way by announcing its first emission cuts, world leaders said Wednesday they are getting more serious about fighting climate change and the deadly extreme weather that comes with it. At the United Nations high-level climate summit, Chinese president Xi Jinping announced the world’s largest carbon-polluting country would aim to cut emissions by 7% to 10% by 2035. China spews more than 31% of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. Xi and Brazil’s leader also took thinly veiled swipes on Wednesday afternoon at U.S. President Donald Trump’s attacks a day earlier on renewable energy...

Arctic sea ice extent bottomed out on September 10th, 2025, at...1.78 million square miles...It's been 13 years since the record low of 2012, and no new record has been set since...Satellite records of global ice began just 47 years ago.

Pooja Tilvawala knows it’s a gamble to use more than $46,000 of her own savings to help young people get to the United Nations climate summit in Brazil. But she thinks it’s a necessary one. As national delegations, activists and other attendees struggle to find affordable places to stay by November, with some deciding not to go at all, Tilvawala, who lives in London, has spent hours working from afar to find lodging in Belem, negotiate prices and contracts and put down deposits. She did all that to create a housing portal specifically for young people who want to be...

The CO2 red line for plant death on Earth is around 150 ppm...During the last Glacial Maximum (20,000 years ago) CO2 was 180 ppm...The optimum CO2 level for plants is around 1,000 ppm...CO2 today is 422 ppm...

It looked like the Sun was heading toward a historic lull in activity. That trend flipped in 2008, according to new research. The Sun has become increasingly active since 2008, a new NASA study shows. Solar activity is known to fluctuate in cycles of 11 years, but there are longer-term variations that can last decades. Case in point: Since the 1980s, the amount of solar activity had been steadily decreasing all the way up to 2008, when solar activity was the weakest on record. At that point, scientists expected the Sun to be entering a period of historically low activity....

Turns out, as much money as those Biden bozos blew through, prepaying for electric buses up front that were never and will never now be delivered?EPA head Lee Zeldin says the Biden administraiton sent $160 million dollars to a Canadian electric vehicles company.... which then pocketed the money, didn’t send the school buses promised and then declared bankruptcy!“There was $160 million that went to a Canadian electric… pic.twitter.com/hANBqhFPfm— Mike Netter (@nettermike) August 16, 2025...“There was $160 million that went to a Canadian electric vehicle bus manufacturer. The Biden administration sent all of the money — They gave all the money...

The US power grid is under significant stress due to rapidly increasing electricity demand from AI data centers and electric vehicles, coupled with the retirement of traditional power plants.The grid faces mounting vulnerabilities from extreme weather events, cybersecurity threats, and physical sabotage, while policy gridlock and infrastructure delays hinder necessary upgrades.Despite challenges, the situation presents investment opportunities in grid modernization, diversified generation, and solutions for energy storage and load management.America’s power grid is straining under the weight of a fast-changing energy landscape. Beyond the usual summer hum of air conditioners, power demand is surging from electric vehicle chargers and sprawling...

Global climate models are software behemoths, often containing more than a million lines of code. Inevitably, such complex models will contain mistakes, or "bugs." But because model outputs are widely used to inform climate policy, it's important that they generate trustworthy results. Ulrike Proske and Lieke Melsen set out to understand how climate modelers think about, identify, and address bugs. They interviewed 11 scientists and scientific programmers from the Max-Planck-Institut für Meteorologie who work on the ICON climate model for their study published in Earth's Future. When new code is developed for ICON, it's screened and tested to catch bugs...

India's oil demand is likely to outpace China's this year, according to Trafigura Group. The prediction was made by Chief Economist Saad Rahim during an event hosted by S&P Global Commodity Insights on Monday. He said that "this year, Indian demand is set to outstrip China's if you exclude strategic stockpiling." Market dynamics Role in global demand growth India and China, the region's top crude importers, are major contributors to demand growth. The two countries are at the center of how producers and traders adapt to economic changes and the rise of renewable energy. India's growth is fueled by urbanization...

It is something like central heating for north-west Europe: the North Atlantic circulation ensures that the winters are milder than elsewhere in northern latitudes. It brings warm water from the tropics up to the North Atlantic in the upper ocean layers. The warm surface of the sea in front of the European coasts heats up the atmosphere. This mild air flows to us and ensures a temperate climate. However, there are increasing indications that climate change is turning this heating off slowly but irrevocably. The Atlantic current is one of the tipping points of the global climate system - among...