Free Republic

On the eve of Tuesday's U.N. climate summit, the United Nations chief underscored the urgent need to tackle climate change by moving toward an energy-efficient, low-carbon global economy. Speaking at the opening of Climate Week NYC, a set of more than 140 climate-related events across the city, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said he had noticed much more urgency to address climate change than he had seen in previous U.N. gatherings on the issue in 2007 and in 2009, when governments failed at a Copenhagen conference to agree a new binding climate treaty. (snip) France has been chosen to host...

It’s not enough that John Kerry's diplomatic plate is overcrowded with unpalatable menaces like ISIS/ISIL and an epidemic of Ebola that could mushroom to pandemic proportions. As busy as Kerry is, flying around the globe and assembling a coalition of supporters to push back against a terrorist group more vicious and well-funded than any in recent history, he still manages to get his licks in about global warming. In a recent speech before an assemblage of foreign ministers, he urged that the threat of climate change must be addressed with the same ”immediacy” as terrorism and Ebola. The same immediacy?...

Google is breaking ties with the American Legislative Exchange Council, a prominent network of conservative state legislators that, among other projects, works to roll back laws that promote solar and wind power, the company's chairman said Monday. The decision marks a major victory for a campaign by environmentalists, union activists and other liberal groups that have pushed companies to drop support for ALEC. Microsoft ended its ties to the group a few weeks ago. “The consensus within the company was that that was some sort of mistake,” Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt said, referring to the initial decision to support...

That well-known bastion of right wing nuttery - the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration - has released data showing that US temps have not risen in the last decade and have, in fact, dropped. Forbes: Responding to widespread criticism that its temperature station readings were corrupted by poor siting issues and suspect adjustments, NOAA established a network of 114 pristinely sited temperature stations spread out fairly uniformly throughout the United States. Because the network, known as the U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN), is so uniformly and pristinely situated, the temperature data require no adjustments to provide an accurate nationwide temperature...

It starts with Al Gore. When it comes time to teach his high school sophomores about global warming, Wyoming science teacher Jim Stith shows An Inconvenient Truth. The green documentary delivers an unambiguous message: Human activity is driving dangerous climate change. But the third-year teacher is no devotee of the former vice president. "I make sure they watch it on a day I'm gone because I can't stand to listen to him talk," Stith said. And he doesn't teach Gore's conclusions as settled science. After the film, his class watches a movie called The Great Global Warming Swindle. It trots...

According to the RSS satellite data, whose value for May 2014 has just been published, the global warming trend in the 17 years 9 [months] since September 1996 is zero (Fig. 1). The 213 months without global warming represent more than half the 425-month satellite data record since January 1979. No one now in high school has lived through global warming. The hiatus period of 17 years 9 months is the farthest back one can go in the RSS satellite temperature record and still show a zero trend. But the length of the pause in global warming, significant though it...

Setting the stage for upcoming restrictions on coal-fired power plants, the Obama administration is making a concerted effort to cast its energy policy as an economic success that is creating jobs, securing the nation against international upheavals and shifting energy use to cleaner sources. In a 42-page report to be released Thursday, the White House argues that significant increases in the domestic production of natural gas and reductions in oil consumption have better positioned the United States to advance its economic and environmental goals. Few of the report's conclusions are new, but it includes a detailed analysis of how past...

...Senator James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee and a stalwart believer that global warming is a “hoax,” dismissed the report as a publicity stunt. Perhaps the senator needs a history lesson, because climate change has been leading to global conflict — and even the collapse of civilizations — for more than 3,000 years. Drought and famine led to internal rebellions in some societies and the sacking of others, as people fleeing hardship at home became conquerors abroad. One of the most vivid examples comes from around 1200 B.C. A centuries-long drought in...

President Obama is expected to announce on Monday [moved to sometime next week. ed] an Environmental Protection Agency regulation to cut carbon pollution from the nation’s 600 coal-fired power plants, in a speech that government analysts in Beijing, Brussels and beyond will scrutinize to determine how serious the president is about fighting global warming. The regulation will be Mr. Obama’s most forceful effort to reverse 20 years of relative inaction on climate change by the United States, which has stood as the greatest obstacle to international efforts to slow the rise of heat-trapping gases from burning coal and oil that...

The global warming hysterics’ favorite fantasy these days is that Antarctic ice will melt due to hypothetical warming, leading to catastrophic flooding as the level of the oceans rises. It is commonly asserted that sea level will rise at least three feet by the end of the century. Put aside whether the Earth actually will warm and whether a three-foot rise would really be catastrophic. Put aside, too, any doubts about how much melting will occur even if the Earth warms by a few degrees, given that the average annual high temperature in Antarctica is -49 F. Does the reality...

The German Ministry of Environment has falsified the conclusions of a UN climate change report in the German-language version released last week, in an attempt to hide the fact that the country's 'green policies' are useless. The ministry’s four-page summary of the report contains outright contradictions and falsifications of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recommendations, apparently made to hide UN criticism of the way the German government has turned emissions-trading into a cash cow for futile renewable energy projects. Die Welt said on Sunday that parts of the thousands of pages-long English-language report which the ministry found embarrassing were...

The United Nations (UN) has delivered its latest verdict on the measures necessary to save the world from global warming and the news is as grim as it is predictable and wearisomely familiar: More regulation from "experts", technocrats and bureaucrats at supranational organisations, such as the one whose initials begin with U and end with N.More taxpayer subsidies for expensive, inefficient renewable energy.More nuclear power (with shale gas used as a transitional fuel to replace coal). The abandonment of fossil fuels. Less meat consumption.A single, globally-regulated price for carbon dioxide. More local-government-enforced walking, cycling and public transportation. More back-door wealth...

The Solyndra “scandal” is trotted out every few months as part of the big-vs.-small-government debate in this country, but it is not and never was a scandal. The federal clean-energy loan program that the infamous solar-panel maker was a part of was designed to finance risky ventures, and Solyndra was a reasonable risk: an innovative manufacturer with huge private backing and an opportunity to transform the industry. But the industry transformed itself first. Silicon prices plunged, Solyndra’s advantages vanished, and the firm went bust. It happens. The Bush and Obama Administrations both selected Solyndra from 143 applicants for the program’s...

ON Sunday, the best climate policy in the world got even better: British Columbia’s carbon tax — a tax on the carbon content of all fossil fuels burned in the province — increased from $25 to $30 per metric ton of carbon dioxide, making it more expensive to pollute. This was good news not only for the environment but for nearly everyone who pays taxes in British Columbia, because the carbon tax is used to reduce taxes for individuals and businesses. Thanks to this tax swap, British Columbia has lowered its corporate income tax rate to 10 percent from 12...

Congressional negotiators struck a deal Thursday that overturns the new rules that were to have banned sales of traditional incandescent light bulbs beginning next year. That agreement is tucked inside the massive 1,200-page spending bill that funds the government through the rest of this fiscal year, and which both houses of Congress will vote on Friday. Mr. Obama is expected to sign the bill, which heads off a looming government shutdown. Congressional Republicans dropped almost all of the policy restrictions they tried to attach to the bill, but won inclusion of the light bulb provision, which prevents the Obama administration...

Carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels have soared in the last 20 years, giving the world much less chance of avoiding dangerous climate change, new data show. The research was published as lead negotiators were arriving at the UN climate talks in Durban, South Africa, where prospects of a new global treaty on climate change appeared to have stalled, with deep divisions between developed and developing countries. Emissions from burning fossil fuels rose by 5.9% in 2010, bringing the total rise since 1990—the baseline year for calculating emissions under the Kyoto protocol—to 49%. Measured over two decades, that is...

* China eyeing "vastly superior" scale, Immelt warns * "I worry a little bit about us," Immelt says of U.S.* GE "all-in" on solar, sees potential $20 bln business By Scott MaloneNov 3 (Reuters) - General Electric Co's Jeff Immelt worries the United States may lose ground to China in the renewable energy sector because it is not prepared to invest in solar, wind and other technologies on the same scale.But the chief executive of the largest U.S. conglomerate said his company remains undaunted and will continue to work in the sector despite the recent bankruptcy of solar panel maker...

Today is ManBearPig day. World renowned carbon trader and masseuse enthusiast Al Gore will be kicking off the celebrations by showing wall-to-wall eco-porn videos of weather doing scary things; stock markets across Europe will be collapsing in sympathy with the Prince of Wales's recent claims that economic growth is unhealthy and we must all live more "sustainably" (ie in abject poverty); and here on this blog we plan to commemorate this glorious event with fun, games and some of our favourite South Park, Simpsons, and Eco-loon propaganda videos. Altogether now: "GLOBAL WARMING! WE DIDN'T LISTEN!!!!" Here are the Simpsons:

When the six F/A-18 Hornets in the U.S. Navy's Blue Angels flight demonstration team thrill the crowds at the Naval Air Station Patuxent River Air Expo in Maryland this weekend, they'll be soaring on biofuel. Each of the six Hornets will be powered by a 50/50-blend of jet fuel and camelina-based biofuel, according to a Navy press release. Camelina is a high-oil flowering plant grown in rotation on land used for wheat and on land too marginal for food production, according to Sustainable Oils, the company providing it to the military. Sustainable Oils says camelina can also reduce carbon emissions...

It seems like an environmental no-brainer. As populations increase, cities grow, and water supplies grow ever scarcer in the world’s drier regions, more and more municipalities are tending to recycle wastewater after treatment in sewage works to irrigate parks and other green urban space. What could be wrong with that? Well, quite a lot, actually, according to a new study, which concludes it could increase global warming. The research, published in the current issue of the Journal of Environmental Quality concludes that the practice emits three times as much nitrous oxide – a greenhouse gas about 300 times more potent...