Free Republic

The New York Times’ multi-part series profiling President Barack Obama’s legacy on global warming reveals the president is a fan of a book on how “climate change and overpopulation” could cause modern civilization to collapse. Obama was apparently a fan of Jared Diamond’s 2005 book “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed,” which “explored the environmental changes that wiped out ancient societies like Easter Island and discussed how modern equivalents like climate change and overpopulation could yield the same destruction,” according to NYT. An Obama aide told NYT he “recalled” the president mentioning Diamond’s book. Diamond is also the...

California will become a petri dish for international efforts to slow global warming under legislation signed by Gov. Jerry Brown on Thursday, forcing one of the world’s largest economies to squeeze into a dramatically smaller carbon footprint. “What we’re doing here is farsighted, as well as far-reaching,” Brown said at a signing ceremony at Vista Hermosa Natural Park in downtown Los Angeles. “California is doing something that no other state has done.” The legislation, SB 32, requires the state to slash greenhouse gas emissions to 40% below 1990 levels by 2030, a much more ambitious target than the previous goal...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Man-made climate change about doubled the chances for the type of heavy downpours that caused devastating Louisiana floods last month, a new federal study finds. Using two different sets of measurements and computer model runs simulating thousands of years, scientists found a clear sign of global warming in the rain that triggered the flooding that killed at least 13 people, damaged 150,000 homes and cost at least $8.7 billion. More than 26 inches of rain fell in one week, with nearly a foot in just one day, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

A new study from professors at Oklahoma State University has found that Republicans and Democrats have never been so far apart on climate issues. "What was once a modest tendency for Congressional Republicans to be less pro-environmental than their Democratic counterparts has become a chasm—with Republicans taking near-unanimous anti-environmental stances on relevant legislation in recent years, especially 2015," the study said. This distance between the parties was further exacerbated by the rise of the Koch-funded Tea Party, which took the hard line of fully dismissing the climate change threat, often making climate change a lightning rod for voters who were...

Obama and China’s President Xi Jinping on Saturday sealed their nations’ participation in last year’s Paris climate change agreement. At a ceremony on the sidelines of a global economic summit, Mr. Obama and Xi, representing the world’s two biggest carbon emitters, delivered a series of documents to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. The papers certified the U.S. and China have taken the necessary steps to join the Paris accord that set nation-by-nation targets for cutting carbon emissions. The formal U.S.-Chinese announcement means the accord could enter force by the end of the year, a faster than anticipated timeline. The Paris deal...

Storm surges pushed by Hermine, the once and future hurricane that on Sunday was moving up the US eastern seaboard, could be even more damaging because sea levels have risen by a foot due to global warming, climate scientists say.Michael Mann of the Pennsylvania State University noted that this century’s one-foot sea-level rise in New York City meant 25 more square miles flooded during Hurricane Sandy in 2012, causing billions more in damage. “We are already experiencing more and more flooding due to climate change in every storm,” said Michael Oppenheimer, a geosciences professor at Princeton University. “And it’s only...

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said on Sunday that climate change scepticism is over, the day after the United States joined China to ratify the Paris agreement to curb climate-warming emissions. Climate change skeptics dispute the widely held understanding that excessive levels of emissions in the atmosphere cause global warming and harm the environment, and have become increasingly side-lined at international summits. "The debate over climate phenomenon is over scientifically and environmentally," said Ban

First there was Brexit, now there’s Clexit – or “Climate Exit”. The Clexit Coalition represents a growing movement of individuals no longer buying that the “science” behind climate change is settled. They argue that all harmful, costly and unscientific climate treaties should be torn up and are on a mission to have their voices heard and their opinions represented fairly in the media. Viv Forbes, Founding Secretary of “Clexit” (Climate Exit), writes:

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The Standing Committee of China’s rubberstamp parliament is meeting to discuss formally acceding to a far-reaching climate change agreement negotiated in Paris last year, amid signs that President Obama is preparing to take the same step — but without Senate ratification — possibly within days. The White House maintains that the climate accord is an executive agreement, not a treaty, and therefore does not require the Senate’s advice and consent. Obama travels to China this week for a G20 summit in Hangzhou, and climate change is high on the agenda both for the summit and for his bilateral meetings with...

NANCY NOLAN: I'm old enough to be a grandmother, but I'm not. LUDDEN: Nancy Nolan tells two younger women that people didn't know about climate change when she had her kids in the '80s. Then she became a climate activist. Her children are grown now. NOLAN: And when they were old enough to go off on their own, you know, I said to them, I hope you never have children, which is an awful thing to say. It can bring me to tears easily.

Antarctica has confounded scientists, defying the dire predictions of scientists the South Pole would shrink and exacerbate sea level rise in the coming decades. Climate models predicted Antarctic sea ice would shrink as the world warmed, and that warming would boost snowfall over the southern continent. Neither of those predictions have panned out, and now scientists say “natural variability” is overwhelming human-induced warming. “Truth is, the science is complex, and that in most places and with most events, natural variability still plays a dominant role, and undoubtedly will continue to do so,” Chip Knappenberger, a climate scientist with the libertarian...

California Governor Jerry Brown (D) says that evidence that global warming solution legislation hurts jobs “is very dubious, if it exists at all.” While speaking at a press conference Wednesday night Brown praised the passage of SB32 in the California Senate, which sets a target of cutting the state’s output of heat-trapping emissions 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030. […] “The economy is an impersonal mechanism of profit-seeking enterprises who will take the world as they find it. Whether it’s a mountain or a river or a regulation or a need for bright people. People who want to invest...

The problem with environmentalists isn't merely that they have destructive ideas about the economy, but that so many of them embrace repulsive ideas about human beings. Take a recent NPR piece that asks, "Should We Be Having Kids In The Age Of Climate Change?" If you want to learn about how environmentalism has already affected people in society, read about the couple pondering "the ethics of procreation" and its impact on the climate before starting a family, or the group of women in a prosperous New Hampshire town swapping stories about how the "the climate crisis is a reproductive crisis."...

Earlier this month, an outbreak of anthrax in northern Russia caused the death of a 12-year-old boy and his grandmother and put 90 people in the hospital. These deadly spores – which had not been seen in the Arctic since 1941 – also spread to 2,300 caribou. Russian troops trained in biological warfare were dispatched to the Yamalo-Nenets region to evacuate hundreds of the indigenous, nomadic people and quarantine the disease. Americans are likely to associate anthrax with the mysterious white powder that was mailed to news media and US Senate offices in the weeks following 11 September 2001....

Communities in nine U.S. states that have been hard-hit by coal layoffs are being promised more than 3,000 jobs in several industries through a multimillion-dollar federal grant. Officials for the Appalachian Regional Commission and other agencies announced the 29 projects totaling nearly $39 million Wednesday at a news conference in Huntington, West Virginia. The investments are expected to create or retain more than 3,400 jobs in agriculture, health care, manufacturing, technology and other industries. The projects are intended to help communities in Texas and in eight Appalachian states: Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia. …

From the “global warming and ocean acidification will kill everything, forever” and the “nature always finds a way” department comes this inconvenient truth.Back From The Dead: Giant Coral Reef That ‘Died’ In 2003 Teeming With Life Again In 2003, researchers declared Coral Castles dead. On the floor of a remote island lagoon halfway between Hawaii and Fiji, the giant reef site had been devastated by unusually warm water. Its remains looked like a pile of drab dinner plates tossed into the sea. Research dives in 2009 and 2012 had shown little improvement in the coral colonies.Then in 2015, a team of...

The Environmental Protection Agency and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration jointly issued a new regulation last week that is meant to help protect the world from “climate change” by limiting “greenhouse gas emissions” and improving fuel efficiency in medium- and heavy-duty vehicles operated in the United States. The 1,690-page regulation is approximately 700,000 words long. A “regulatory impact analysis” published by EPA and NHTSA estimates the regulation will add an average of as much as $13,749 to the cost of a tractor truck and $1,370 to a trailer, making some tractor-trailer combinations $15,119 more expensive in 2027 than they...

American truckers, and the big rigs they drive, are literally the lifeblood of this nation, transporting food, raw materials and finished goods from one end of the country to the other and back again, delivering what is needed where it is needed when it is needed on a daily basis. But those truckers just had a major roadblock placed in their way, courtesy of President Barack Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency, and the consequences for not only the trucking industry, but America as a whole, could be devastating. According to The Daily Caller, the EPA just announced on Tuesday that it...

WWith hindsight, it seems as though scientific breakthroughs sweep quickly to universal acceptance. A paper is published and everybody says, “Eureka!” But that’s not necessarily the case. Sometimes scientists have too much invested in the status quo to accept a new way of looking at things. This was certainly true when Albert Einstein‘s 1905 paper on “special relativity” first challenged the British conception of ether. Einstein argued that space and time were bound up together (something he would elaborate on in his theory of general relativity of 1915, adding gravity to the mix of space/time), a complicated idea that contradicted...