Free Republic

... Jefferson County, Texas, is among the low-lying coastal areas of America that could lose the most as the ice caps melt and the seas warm and rise. At the same time, it is more economically dependent on the petroleum industry and its emissions-spewing refineries than any other place in the U.S. Residents seemed to choose between the two last November, abandoning a four-decade-old pattern of voting Democratic in presidential elections to support Donald Trump. Then came Hurricane Harvey. Now some conservatives here are newly confronting some of the most polarizing questions in American political discourse: What role do humans...

California on Friday expanded its market for buying and trading permits to emit greenhouse gases to include the Canadian province of Ontario. The market is the centerpiece of California’s cap-and-trade program, which aims to reduce carbon pollution over time by capping emissions and requiring companies to obtain permits to pollute. Quebec is already part of the market. California is aiming to reduce emissions by 40 percent from 1990 levels by 2030. The two Canadian provinces have similar or stricter goals. California Gov. Jerry Brown signed the agreement Friday in Quebec at a meeting with officials of both provinces, capping off...

RUSH: Folks, there’s something new happening in the climate change world. A couple of pieces here and one of them at the U.K. Telegraph. You know what? Headline: “Climate Change Not As Threatening to Planet as Previously Thought, Says New Research.” And this is from climate change scientists. This is not from the, quote, unquote, deniers. It’s fascinating. It’s not warming, folks, and in fact in some places it’s cooling, and so the climate change fascists have to have an explanation. And wait ’til you hear what it is. BREAK TRANSCRIPTRUSH: On the global warming story, I don’t need to...

Houston has barely begun to dry out from Hurricane Harvey, and Florida faces a massive rebuilding effort after the Irma catastrophe. These two storms, among the most powerful in American history, are typical of the extreme weather events that are likely to become more common as the planet warms. So why isn’t the public heeding scientists and demanding climate action by politicians that could help deal with these destructive extremes? You can point fingers at the influence of fossil fuel companies, at misinformation from climate deniers and at political obstructionism, notably from a fragmented Republican party. But a much deeper...

The 'slowdown' in global warming is over, the Met Office has said. While the world remained at near-record levels of warmth in the early 2000s, analysis of rolling 15-year trends shows that the rate of warming slowed between 1999 and 2014, the experts confirmed. But a change in the natural pattern of warm and cool phases in Pacific Ocean surface temperatures, which have an impact on global temperatures, has brought the slowdown to an end.

Today we face a challenging political climate, but the climate crisis shouldn’t be political. It is not only the greatest existential crisis we face: it is also causing a global health emergency, where the stakes are life and death.

Princeton Physics Professor Discredits Anthropogenic Climate Change Theory  

Clearly, it's not how many heavy-handed regulations and mandates and subsidies that a state imposes that defines it as a leader In a fiery speech to the American Geophysical Union conference, California Governor Brown continued his quest regarding climate change, but has apparently revealed a chink in his armor. He threatened incoming President Trump that California will go it’s own way if the Feds reconfigure national climate policy. Insisting that climate change remains the greatest existential threat to mankind, he insists the Paris accord be upheld and that other US States follow “California’s lead.” California’s Governor Brown and other elected...

Al Gore’s climate change documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” is getting a sequel. Paramount Pictures said Friday the follow-up to the Oscar-winning original will premiere at next January’s Sundance Film Festival. In the new documentary, former Vice President Gore examines global warming’s escalation and the solutions at hand, Paramount said. …

The Canadian government approved a national carbon price on Friday after a heated discussion. In a meeting attended by provincial representatives, aboriginal leaders, as well as United States Vice President Joe Biden, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau pushed the carbon-pricing plan he had been working on for months. […] The plan calls for the cost of producing a ton of carbon pollution to rise 10 Canadian dollars ($7.60, €7.19) per year starting in 2018 until it reaches 50 Canadian dollars in 2022. In a compromise, the price would pause for British Columbia at 30 Canadian dollars in 2020. Out of...

The urgent threat of climate change means there is “no time to despair” over the election of Donald Trump, according to former vice-president Al Gore, who hopes that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton will join an escalated climate campaign against the president-elect. Gore told the Guardian he remained hopeful Trump would reverse some of his positions on climate change but predicted an unprecedented backlash from environmentalists over the next four years.

Myron Ebell, director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute, is spearheading Trump’s transition plans for EPA, the sources said. snip Ebell appears to relish criticism from the left. In a biography submitted when he testified before Congress, he listed among his recognitions that he had been featured in a Greenpeace “Field Guide to Climate Criminals,” dubbed a “misleader” on global warming by Rolling Stone and was the subject of a motion to censure in the British House of Commons after Ebell criticized the United Kingdom’s chief scientific adviser for his views on global...

Nearly 200 countries may sign a modest Kyoto II climate treaty, say December 2014 media reports from Lima, Peru. But will they agree to stop using coal to generate electricity? No. Curtail their economic growth? No. Cease emitting carbon dioxide? Maybe, but only a little, sometime in the future, when it is more convenient to do so, without any binding commitments. Then why would they sign a treaty?Primarily because they expect to get free energy technology transfers, and billions of dollars a year in climate “mitigation, adaptation and reparation” money from Western nations that they blame (and which blame themselves)...

The White House Science and Technology Advisor, says an initiative is underway “with the goal of ensuring a climate smart citizenry in the United States.” “In December of last year the White House Climate Education and Literacy Initiative was launched--with the goal of ensuring a climate smart citizenry in the United States,” Dr. John Holdren says in a White House video released last week. “Whenever I can I use opportunities like this ‘Ask Dr. H’ initiative to communicate about climate change and the strong scientific underpinnings of our actions to combat it.” “Based on our scientific understanding of climate change...

President Barack Obama is getting some help from the country's tech giants in his effort to show Americans how climate change will affect their communities. The Obama administration thinks that local data, which may have a real-world effect on Americans' lives, will provide a convincing argument for steps to prevent climate change. The risk rising sea levels have on individual communities will be the focus of a new website, climate.data.gov, which uses government data to put environmental changes in context. The White House also called on tech companies to develop tools for Americans to better get a grasp on how...

**SNIP** The scientist leading the research said that unless emissions of greenhouse gases were cut, the planet would heat up by a minimum of 4C by 2100, twice the level the world's governments deem dangerous. The research indicates that fewer clouds form as the planet warms, meaning less sunlight is reflected back into space, driving temperatures up further still. The way clouds affect global warming has been the biggest mystery surrounding future climate change. Professor Steven Sherwood, at the University of New South Wales, in Australia, who led the new work, said: "This study breaks new ground twice: first by...

EACH of us took turns over the past 43 years running the Environmental Protection Agency. We served Republican presidents, but we have a message that transcends political affiliation: the United States must move now on substantive steps to curb climate change, at home and internationally. There is no longer any credible scientific debate about the basic facts: our world continues to warm, with the last decade the hottest in modern records, and the deep ocean warming faster than the earth’s atmosphere. Sea level is rising. Arctic Sea ice is melting years faster than projected. The costs of inaction are undeniable....

As the European cold front is about to enter its third week, the Danube River and Black Sea have frozen over in many countries, with La Repubblica reporting that 420 have died across Europe. ... The Black Sea waters around the Ukrainian port city of Odessa were completely frozen for the first time since 1977, and Ukrainian ports will remain closed until at least Feb. 15. Russia's Novorossiysk port, usually an ice-free port all year round, was closed for two days last week because of ice. In the Romanian Black Sea port of Constanța, the waters were frozen for up...

Report says global climate deal hinges on Obama reelectionBy Ben Geman - 01/05/12 11:55 AM ET Prospects for striking a binding global climate deal by 2015 are probably toast if President Obama loses in November. That’s among the conclusions in a wide-ranging, new climate and green energy outlook from banking giant HSBC’s research branch. A major outcome from the United Nations climate talks in December was a plan to craft a deal by 2015 — one that would include big, developing nations such as China — and have it come into force by 2020. But Obama’s main Republican White House...

Earth's temperatures will likely stabilize for a period as deep ocean waters absorb enough heat to mask the effects of global warming for up to a decade, a new study indicates. Earth's "missing heat" has long been a mystery for climate scientists as the last decade saw an incessant growth in greenhouse gas emissions did not elevate surface temperature as much as expected. The joint U.S.-Australian study, based on computer simulations of global climate, points to ocean layers deeper than 1,000 feet (300 meters) as the main location of the "missing heat" during periods such as the past decade when...