Free Republic

In the perfect world of economic liberals, every commodity has its price. Limited supply makes goods more expensive and vice versa. That's how markets work—at least in theory. In practice, things often look different, and this is especially true when it comes to emissions trading, a business subject to a very different mechanism: laws dictated by the European Union. Economists have generally praised the trading scheme as a nearly ideal instrument for reducing harmful carbon dioxide emissions. … But for the last half year, prices for CO2 certificates have dropped almost continuously, decreasing by about half, to around €8 ($10.60)...

Greenhouse gas emissions from biofuels such as palm oil, soybean and rapeseed are higher than those for fossil fuels when the effects of Indirect Land Use Change (ILUC) are counted, according to leaked EU data seen by EurActiv. The default values assigned to the biofuels compare to those from Canada’s oil sands—also known as tar sands—according to the figures, which should be released along with long-awaited legislative proposals on biofuels in the spring. A spokesperson for the European Commission said she could “not comment on leaked documents, such as impact assessments, which have not been published.” But industry and civil...

I know it is traditional to walk out on speakers who do not toe the line on climate at the RSA – I saw it happen to Bjorn Lomborg last year when he gave the Prince Philip lecture – let me be quite clear. I am not a “denier”. I fully accept that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, the climate has been warming and that man is very likely to be at least partly responsible. When a study was published recently saying that 98% of scientists “believe” in global warming, I looked at the questions they had been asked...

It is a great honour to be asked to deliver the Angus Millar lecture. I have no idea whether Angus Millar ever saw himself as a heretic, but I have a soft spot for heresy. One of my ancestral relations, Nicholas Ridley* the Oxford martyr, was burned at the stake for heresy. My topic today is scientific heresy. When are scientific heretics right and when are they mad? How do you tell the difference between science and pseudoscience? Let us run through some issues, starting with the easy ones. Astronomy is a science; astrology is a pseudoscience. Evolution is science;...

With a House Republican loading political ammunition in a national fight over government science, Interior Department officials said Friday they would stand by the work of two scientists whose integrity was attacked recently by a federal judge overseeing the Delta water wars. U.S. District Judge Oliver Wanger, in a lengthy and strongly worded assault Sept. 16, said the two scientists deliberately misled him when they urged him not to weaken new rules meant to help imperiled Delta smelt in wet years like this one. He called one scientist, Jennifer Norris of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, a "zealot" who...

Full Title: How to go out with a bang — score points for censorship — a poseur for honor! An editor has resigned after committing the dastardliest of crimes: He helped publish a skeptical paper in a peer-reviewed journal. God-forbid, imagine a paper being reviewed only by people who have some sympathies with your results? It’s unthinkable. We all know that Nature and Science, for example, dutifully send all the papers by alarmists to at least one skeptical reviewer, and since 97% of 77 climate scientists are alarmists, that means the other two scientists who aren’t, are very busy people. ...

Obama tells young reporters: Climate change a top challenge for young people By Andrew Restuccia - 08/30/11 01:21 PM ET Climate change is one of the greatest challenges facing young people, President Obama said in a recent interview with young reporters from Scholastic News. “Another big challenge that your generation is going to face is the environmental challenge,” Obama said in an interview with Scholastic News Press Corp. that was conducted in July but posted online this month. “Although we’ve made big improvements over the last 20 or 30 years in making our air clean and our water clean, there...

The scale of Hurricane Irene, which could cause more extensive damage along the Eastern Seaboard than any storm in decades, is reviving an old question: are hurricanes getting worse because of human-induced climate change? The short answer from scientists is that they are still trying to figure it out. But many of them do believe that hurricanes will get more intense as the planet warms, and they see large hurricanes like Irene as a harbinger....

It may not rank as the most compelling reason to curb greenhouse gases, but reducing our emissions might just save humanity from a pre-emptive alien attack, scientists claim... This highly speculative scenario...described by scientists at Nasa and Pennsylvania State University...

FRIDAY, May 20 (HealthDay News) -- For the average listener, the vowel sounds in an unfamiliar voice quickly give away the speaker's sexual orientation, a new study finds."I'm not sure what exactly the listeners are responding to in the vowel," study lead author Erik C. Tracy, a cognitive psychologist at Ohio State University, said in a news release from the American Institute of Physics. "Other researchers have done various acoustic analyses to understand why gay and heterosexual men produce vowels differently. Whatever this difference is, it seems that listeners are using it to make this sexual orientation decision." When hearing...

Republican leaders in Congress think so, and they are calling for an overhaul of the entire federal pay system to help slash government spending. Democrats and other defenders of the government work force say federal workers are actually underpaid compared with their private counterparts. A closer look at the data shows that both sides have a point but that supporters of federal workers are a bit closer to reality.... That argument is backed up by a 2002 study of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. It found that federal salaries for most professional and administrative jobs lagged well behind compensation offered...

It is possible that such a phenomenon could occur when matter around a newborn star forms into planets. In a planet's orbit around a star, there are two places where a third body can safely orbit. These spots, known as Lagrange points, are 120 degrees in front of and behind whichever body is smaller. The discovered co-orbiting planets, located in the four-planet system KOI-730, are always 120 degrees apart, permanent fixtures in each others' night skies. Fifty million years after the birth of our solar system, the moon may have formed from the debris of a collision between Earth and...

UK Conservative party leader David Cameron has been urged to condemn "breathtaking" comments about gay people by Tory MEP Roger Helmer. On Sunday, Helmer tweeted: "Why is it OK for a surgeon to perform a sex-change operation, but not OK for a psychiatrist to try to 'turn' a consenting homosexual?" He was responding to an article at the weekend in the Sunday Telegraph newspaper about how a British psychotherapist who tried to "convert" a gay man to become heterosexual now faces being struck off. Lesley Pilkington, 60, a psychotherapist for 20 years, faces being stripped of her accreditation to the...

Even if humans stop producing excess carbon dioxide in 2100, the lingering effects of global warming could span the next millennia. The results? By the year 3000, global warming would be more than a hot topic - the West Antarctic ice sheet could collapse, and global sea levels would rise by about 13 feet (4 meters), according to a new study. Using a computer model, researchers looked at two scenarios - an end to humans' industrial carbon dioxide emissions by 2010 and by 2100 - stretched out to the year 3000.

Washington: The US National Weather Service has issued a blizzard warning for parts of New York, New Jersey and other states along the east coast of the United States as a major winter storm bears down on the area on Sunday. A band of frigid weather was snaking up the East Coast on Sunday, promising blizzards and a foot of snow for New York City and New England, while several states made emergency declarations as the storm caused crashes on slick roads. Heavy snow and blizzards in parts of North Carolina were making driving conditions difficult, and there were dozens...

Christmas trees 'make non-Christians feel excluded' Christmas trees should be removed from public places to avoid making non-Christians feel “excluded”, scientists have suggested By Andy Bloxham 11:43AM GMT 20 Dec 2010 Researchers at Simon Fraser University in Canada, found non-Christians feel less self-assured and have fewer positive feelings if a Christmas tree was in the room. The scientists conducted the study using 77 Christians and 57 non-believers, including Buddhists and Sikhs. The participants did not know the survey was about Christmas, and were asked to fill in questions about themselves both when a 12-inch Christmas tree was in the room...

SALT LAKE CITY -- Two Salt Lake City residents committed to telling the public about dangers of global warming are walking 350 miles. Ryan and Jamie Pleune say their "Pilgrimage for Hope" calls attention to the number 350. It represents 350 parts per million -- the level of carbon dioxide beyond which global warming will become intolerable. The Pleunes say our current carbon dioxide level measures in at 392 parts per million, and in an effort to bring it back down to 350, they are taking personal action. "One of the things about climate change is it's just this hopeless...

PARIS (AFP) – Men whose index fingers are longer than their ring, or fourth, fingers run a significantly lower risk of prostate cancer, according to a study published Wednesday in the British Journal of Cancer. The chances of developing the disease drop by a third, and even more in younger men, the study found. "Our results show that relative finger length could be used as a simple test for prostate cancer risk, particularly in men aged under 60," said Ros Eeles, a professor at the Institute of Cancer Research in Britain and co-author of the study. Finger pattern could help...

Narcissistic personality disorder, characterized by an inflated sense of self-importance and the need for constant attention, has been eliminated from the upcoming manual of mental disorders, which psychiatrists use to diagnose mental illness. As Charles Zanor reports in today’s Science Times, the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — due out in 2013 and known as D.S.M.-5 — has eliminated five of the 10 personality disorders that are listed in the current edition. The best known of these is narcissistic personality disorder. It is a puzzle why the manual’s committee on personality disorders has decided...

Just because the motives of many climate change advocates are questionable, even evil, does that mean the entire global warming proposition is a fraud? It is an article of faith among many conservatives that climate change is sham science. Even worse, it is the nexus of a vast conspiracy involving governments, the UN, and climate scientists that is seeking to destroy the industrial economies of the West, create a one world government, and enrich people like Al Gore who have bet a bundle on a reduced carbon emissions future. They believe that either the earth is not warming at all,...

One year ago today, after returning from a conference in Brussels, I sat down in Dulles airport, connected to WiFi, researched and wrote this article, called two people, CEI’s Chris Horner to check legality issues, and Marc Morano (who was traveling in car on the PCH in California) to give him a heads up, and pressed the “publish” button just seconds before they closed the door to my flight back to Sacramento. When I landed five hours later, I immediately got back on WiFi and found the the story had exploded, and we lived in a different world. I...

The Global Warming hearing today on C-SPAN included Dr. Richard Lindzen, Dr Judth  Curry, Dr. Pat Michaels, Dr. Ben Santer, and Dr. Heidi Cullen, among others. Many didn’t get a chance to watch (to see if Ben Santer “beat the crap out of Pat Michaels“) but we have the video here. C-SPAN: House Subcommittee on Energy and Environment heard from a dozen witnesses about how the public and private sectors are approaching climate change. Washington, DC : 3 hr. 47 min.It is now online and can be watched in full at this link:http://www.c-span.org/Watch/Media/2010/11/17/HP/A/40918/House+Science+Technology+Subcommittee+Hearing+on+Climate+Change+Science.aspxh/t to WUWT reader Rational Debate

Dr. Bradley Schaeffer is a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. This video of his "astronomy class", which is actually an indoctrination session on global warming, was posted to YouTube Monday.

reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society. It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so...

A decade of commercial space flight would have a devastating impact on climate change and global temperatures, according to a new study.Scientists believe that vast amounts of black soot created by a new generation of spacecraft could lead to temperatures in polar regions rising by as mush as one degree Celsius.The study comes as the dream of whisking tourists edged closer to reality with the official opening of the runway at the world's first commercial spaceport by Sir Richard Branson.The billionaire said he expects flights for space tourists to begin in nine to 18 months,

"A few may genuinely believe global warming is a left-wing plot. Others may be singing the tune of corporate benefactors. And many Republicans have seized on the cap-and-trade climate bill as another way to paint Democrats as out-of-control taxers. "In one way or another, though, all are custodians of a strategy whose guiding principle has been to avoid debate about solutions to climate change by denying its existence — or at least by diminishing its importance. The strategy worked, destroying hopes for Congressional action while further confusing ordinary citizens for whom global warming was already a remote and complex matter....

Hey, in an entertainment universe where a blood-soaked psychopath can be a hero and flesh-munching zombies can be hilarious (to me, too), what’s a few exploding schoolchildren? Late last week, a British climate group released “ No Pressure,” a mini-film aimed at rounding up new recruits to its “10:10″ movement, in which people, schools, companies and other participants pledge to cut their greenhouse gas emissions 10 percent in a year. On paper, the project had everything going for it — the screenwriter of “Four Weddings and a Funeral” and “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” music by Radiohead, on-screen talent including Gillian Anderson,...

"If governments spent only one per cent of what is spent on armies, they would change the face of the world for poor people." Osama bin Laden, October 1, 2010. OSAMA bin Laden believes climate change is more damaging than war. An audio recording attributed to the al-Qaeda leader and broadcast on the internet yesterday expresses concern about the devastating floods in Pakistan and calls on Muslims to provide relief for the victims. "The number of victims caused by climate change is very big... bigger than the victims of wars," says the recording. If genuine, the recording would be...

How hot was it? The National Weather Service's thermometer downtown reached 113 degrees for the first time since records began being kept in 1877 — and then stopped working. The record highs follow a summer of record lows. It was so hot Monday that it broke the all-time record — and the weatherman's thermometer. The National Weather Service's thermometer for downtown Los Angeles headed into uncharted territory at 12:15 p.m. Monday, reaching 113 degrees for the first time since records began being kept in 1877. Shortly after that banner moment, the temperature dipped back to 111, and then climbed back...

THE United Nations was set today to appoint an obscure Malaysian astrophysicist to act as Earth�s first contact for any aliens that may come visiting. Mazlan Othman, the head of the UN's little-known Office for Outer Space Affairs (Unoosa), is to describe her potential new role next week at a scientific conference at the Royal Society’s Kavli conference centre in Buckinghamshire. She is scheduled to tell delegates that the recent discovery of hundreds of planets around other stars has made the detection of extraterrestrial life more likely than ever before - and that means the UN must be ready...

Report reveals all bar one of party's 48 mid-term election candidates are sceptical about climate changeAll but one of the 48 Republican hopefuls for the Senate mid-term elections in November deny the existence of climate change or oppose action on global warming, according to a report released today.The strong Republican front against established science includes entrenched Senate leaders as well as the new wave of radical conservatives endorsed by the Tea Party activists, says a report by the Centre for American Progress.

EAST LANSING, Mich. — Women tend to accept the scientific consensus on global warming more than men, according to a study by a Michigan State University researcher. The findings ('The effects of gender on climate change knowledge and concern in the American public', Population & Environment, 2010, Volume 32, Number 1, Pages 66-87), challenge common perceptions that men are more scientifically literate, said sociologist Aaron M. McCright. "Men still claim they have a better understanding of global warming than women, even though women's beliefs align much more closely with the scientific consensus," said McCright, an associate professor with appointments in...

Mass extinctions have served as huge reset buttons that dramatically changed the diversity of species found in oceans all over the world, according to a comprehensive study of fossil records. The findings suggest humans will live in a very different future if they drive animals to extinction, because the loss of each species can alter entire ecosystems. Some scientists have speculated that effects of humans - from hunting to climate change - are fueling another great mass extinction. A few go so far as to say we are entering a new geologic epoch, leaving the 10,000-year-old Holocene Epoch behind and...

[James Lee Demands as posted at http://www.savetheplanetprotest.com/] The Discovery Channel MUST broadcast to the world their commitment to save the planet and to do the following IMMEDIATELY:1. The Discovery Channel and it's affiliate channels MUST have daily television programs at prime time slots based on Daniel Quinn's "My Ishmael" pages 207-212 where solutions to save the planet would be done in the same way as the Industrial Revolution was done, by people building on each other's inventive ideas. Focus must be given on how people can live WITHOUT giving birth to more filthy human children since those new additions continue...

One may think that someone as well connected as long-time Washington correspondent and MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell might also connect the dots. After an unseasonably rough DC winter occurring right in the midst of the ClimateGate scandal, she would be aware of doubt being cast over the idea of manmade global warming. But if you want evidence her mind is made up regardless of any of this, you could detect from her reaction to a report from Politco's Jim VandeHei that some Republican candidates are using the climate change debate to advance their campaigns. (Snip) ''"It just seems that I

There is an open secret in the oil industry that dare not speak its name: peak oil. Well, two did speak its name and gained no acclaim for it. One, M. King Hubbert, died years ago. The other and the most controversial, Matthew Simmons, died at his Maine summer home Aug. 8. The peak oil idea is simple: Oil is a finite commodity, and one day we are going to use up all of it. Hubbert, a geologist, began speculating on the effects of the gradual decline in worldwide production in the 1950s. He expressed this in a simple graph,...

NaturalNews) In a bombshell finding that has far-reaching implications for society and culture, scientists at the University of Rochester have found that phthalates -- the chemical found in many vinyl and plastic products -- tends to "feminize" boys, altering their brains to express more feminine characteristics. The study has been published in the Journal of Andrology. Phthalates are found in vinyl products (including vinyl flooring), PVC shower curtains, plastic furniture and even in the plastic coating of the insides of dishwashing machines. The feminization process happens during pregnancy when phthalate exposure causes hormone disruptions in the unborn baby. This chemical...

The Obama administration told Congress to find a way to regulate greenhouse gases -- or else. Last month, Congress refused: Democratic leaders in the Senate declined to take up climate legislation before their August break, which means it looks effectively dead for this session. Now the White House is stuck with "or else." The Environmental Protection Agency will soon begin regulating greenhouse gases factory by factory, power plant by power plant. That could be unwieldy, expensive and unpopular -- even President Obama has said it's not his preferred solution. But for now, it's his only option. The next few months...

New federal regulations issued this week stipulate that the electronic health records--that all Americans are supposed to have by 2014 under the terms of the stimulus law that President Barack Obama signed last year--must record not only the traditional measures of height and weight, but also the Body Mass Index: a measure of obesity. The obesity-rating regulation states that every American's electronic health record must: “Calculate body mass index. Automatically calculate and display body mass index (BMI) based on a patient’s height and weight.” The law also requires that these electronic health records be available--with appropriate security measures--on a national...

There's a funny story about Barack Obama at Harvard Law, both funny-ha-ha and funny-peculiar. It involves one of those cloud-borne Himalayan intellects of liberalism, Professor Larry Tribe, the Tyler Professor of Constitutional Law at one of the most prestigious law schools in the United States. Tribe is the legal giant who is always a bridesmaid but never a bride for the Supremes. And yea verily, the Professor met and held converse with The Blessed Lightworker Himself back in the nineties. The story doesn't say if they were both stoned out of their minds when they got together, but it's the...

CBS News: "It's been ten years since that oddly public passionate kiss at the Democratic convention. That was followed by Gore winning the popular vote for President but losing the electoral vote. Family friend Sally Quinn says that may have done the marriage irreparable harm."

Climate Science: Noted scientists at a Chicago climate conference declare that global warming is not only dead, but that the planet faces a big chill for decades to come. What about those frozen wind turbines? It's not exactly Copenhagen or Kyoto, but the 700 scientists attending the fourth International Conference on Climate Change, sponsored by the Heartland Institute, had some chilling news of their own in the most liberal sense. "Global warming is over — at least for a few decades," Don Easterbrook, emeritus professor of geology at Western Washington University, told the gathering. "However, the bad news is that...

NEW YORK (AFP) – The world faces the nightmare possibility of fishless oceans by 2050 without fundamental restructuring of the fishing industry, UN experts said Monday. "If the various estimates we have received... come true, then we are in the situation where 40 years down the line we, effectively, are out of fish," Pavan Sukhdev, head of the UN Environment Program's green economy initiative, told journalists in New York. A Green Economy report due later this year by UNEP and outside experts argues this disaster can be avoided if subsidies to fishing fleets are slashed and fish are given protected...

Meeting a beautiful woman can be bad for your health, scientists have found.Just five minutes alone with an attractive female raise the levels of cortisol, the body's stress hormone, according to a study from the University of Valencia. The effects are heightened in men who believe that the woman in question is "out of their league". Cortisol is produced by the body under physical or psychological stress and has been linked to heart disease. Researchers tested 84 male students by asking each one to sit in a room and solve a Sudoku puzzle. Two strangers, one male and one female,...

On May 2 2008, Chile's Chaiten Volcano released a gigantic cloud of emissions composed of ash, steam, smoke, and various oddball gases whose estimated amount equals to one trillion cow farts, a UN-sponsored climate change study revealed. "In just one day, this volcano set the Kyoto Protocol back 15 years, obliterating the otherwise outstanding success of our multi-billion dollar efforts to curb the release of cow farts into the atmosphere," complained Chairman of Intergovernmental Panel on Cow Farts (IPCF) Rajendra K. Pachauri at an emergency conference at Grand Plaza Hotel in New York yesterday. "Therefore, we demand that this eruption...

View video HERE. Ironically, the abortion shill, in the course of her sales pitch for death, refers to the child as a person. Even Blackmun, the infamous author of Roe vs. Wade, admitted in the majority opinion that if the fetus is a person, they are OF COURSE protected by the Fourteenth Amendment.

Identified via two-million-year-old fossils, a new human ancestor dubbed Australopithecus sediba may be the "key transitional species" between the apelike australopithecines—and the first Homo, or human, species, according to a new study.

BILLINGS, Mont. — Glacier National Park has lost two more of its namesake moving icefields to climate change, which is shrinking the rivers of ice until they grind to a halt, a government researcher said Wednesday. Warmer temperatures have reduced the number of named glaciers in the northwestern Montana park to 25, said Dan Fagre said, an ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey. He warned many of the rest of the glaciers may be gone by the end of the decade. "It's continual," Fagre said. "When we're measuring glacier margins, by the time we go home the glacier is already...

The Laysan albatross is a downy seabird with a seven-foot wingspan and a notched, pale yellow beak. Every November, a small colony of albatrosses assembles at a place called Kaena Point, overlooking the Pacific at the foot of a volcanic range, on the northwestern tip of Oahu, Hawaii. Each bird has spent the past six months in solitude, ranging over open water as far north as Alaska, and has come back to the breeding ground to reunite with its mate. Albatrosses can live to be 60 or 70 years old and typically mate with the same bird every year, for...

Geologists from the University of Leicester are among four scientists- including a Nobel prize-winner -- who suggest that Earth has entered a new age of geological time. The Age of Aquarius? Not quite -- It's the Anthropocene Epoch, say the scientists writing in the journal Environmental Science & Technology. And they add that the dawning of this new epoch may include the sixth largest mass extinction in Earth's history.