Free Republic

Ever wonder about the final straw that will bring down western civilization? A British judge may have created it. On November 3rd, Mr Justice Michael Burton, the same judge that allowed continued showing of An Inconvenient Truth to children in British schools even while recognizing it to be a dishonest political propaganda film decided that: "A belief in man-made climate change, and the alleged resulting moral imperatives, is capable if genuinely held, of being a philosophical belief for the purpose of the 2003 Religion and Belief Regulations." The ruling means that an employment tribunal will decide whether Al Gore should...

A new book on climate change is hitting shelves soon.   The book — titled Climate Change Reconsidered — is authored by scientists Craig Idso and Fred Singer. Joe Bast, president and CEO of The Heartland Institute, helped edit the book; he says the book is a response to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s report on global warming.   “It is an authoritative, detailed, and completely scientific rebuttal of the claim that global warming is a crisis,” Bast explains.   The book’s editor continues: “It demonstrates that there is just extensive scientific support that says that whatever warming has...

Director Mike Judge’s new animated television series “The Goode Family” is a send-up of a clan of environmentalists who live by the words “What would Al Gore do?” Gerald and Helen Goode want nothing more than to minimize their carbon footprint. They feed their dog, Che, only veggies (much to the pet’s dismay) and Mr. Goode dutifully separates sheets of toilet paper when his wife accidentally buys two-ply. And, of course, the family drives a hybrid. On Wednesday at 9 p.m., “The Goode Family” will have its premiere on ABC and become the first animated series on the network’s prime-time...

It's time the Concord Monitor started exercising editorial responsibility and stopped publishing letters which are misinformed, scientifically incorrect and dangerously misleading to the public. Bruce Cobb's April 23 letter, "Dangerous bill," published ironically the day after Earth Day, contains many statements that are simply wrong. He states that "the current fear of CO2, or carbon is completely foolish and based on unsound science." If you Google "effect of CO2 on climate change," you will get about 10,900,000 "hits" - many of which lead to scientific papers and books documenting the direct effect CO2 has on increasing atmospheric temperature. The work...

The Global Warming movement has been compared to a religion -- albeit one without God, but with a vision of sin and repentance, damnation and salvation. Not quite. Real religion is about improving the human condition by encouraging moral conduct in obedience to the will of God. The proponents of Global Warming are creating a suicide cult, which -- if followed to its logical conclusion -- will lead to human extinction. Forget the Kyoto Treaty. Forget the Luddite Lieberman-Warner bill to cut so-called greenhouse gas emissions by 70% by 2050, which would cost the U.S. an estimated $1 trillion and...

This is the time of year, as Hillary Clinton once put it, when Christians celebrate “the birth of a homeless child” — or, in Al Gore’s words, “a homeless woman gave birth to a homeless child.” Just for the record, Jesus wasn’t “homeless.” He had a perfectly nice home back in Nazareth. But he happened to be born in Bethlehem. It was census time and Joseph was obliged to schlep halfway across the country to register in the town of his birth. Which is such an absurdly bureaucratic over-regulatory cockamamie Big Government nightmare it’s surely only a matter of time...

As I say, the above demographic audit has become something of an annual tradition in this space. But here's something new that took hold in the year 2007: A radical antihumanism, long present just below the surface, bobbed up and became explicit and respectable. In Britain, the Optimum Population Trust said that "the biggest cause of climate change is climate changers – in other words, human beings," and professor John Guillebaud called on Britons to voluntarily reduce the number of children they have. "Every person who is born," says Toni Vernelli, "produces more rubbish, more pollution, more greenhouse gases and...

A COUPLE of days before Al Gore was awarded his Nobel Peace prize, Michael Burton, an English High Court judge and apparently a fine film critic, ruled that Al's Oscar-winner An Inconvenient Truth was prone to "alarmism and exaggeration" and identified nine major factual errors. For example, the former vice-president predicts a rise in sea levels of 6m "in the near future". "The Armageddon scenario he predicts," declared Burton, "is not in line with the scientific consensus." I'll say. The so-called scientific consensus of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests rising sea levels across the next century of somewhere...

Global warming has become a big-ticket item in the eyes of its supporters. At stake are research funds, jobs and the ability to control lives all over the globe. Most climatologists agree that over the last century, the Earth's average temperature has risen about one degree Celsius. The controversy centers around the source of the temperature change -- man-made or natural causes. Global warming alarmists hold the view that it's man-made emissions of CO2 that's driving climate change, and they seek to suppress any dissent suggesting other causes. According to the July 16 Washington Times, Michael T. Eckhart, president of...

Against an elegant backdrop of political cocktail partying, singer/songwriter Sheryl Crow and top presidential adviser Karl Rove got into a heated exchange over global warming at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner. Crow recently joined forces with Hollywood activist Laurie David in the “Stop Global Warming College Tour,” which pretty much is what it says. The duo was seen in a heated conversation with Rove, in an incident which quickly became the evening’s centerpiece of discussion. An eye-witness recounted what they saw: “Sheryl and Karl Rove were talking. Karl looked annoyed and she was poking him [angrily]. He...