Free Republic

High-profile Republicans converged this year around a new favorite refrain when it comes to climate change: “I’m not a scientist.” Party leaders and candidates for office repeated variations of the theme throughout the year when asked whether manmade climate change is happening and what should be done about it. “What I have said repeatedly is I’m not a scientist,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) told a Kentucky sports radio show. “I’m not qualified to debate the science over climate change,” Speaker John Boehner (Ohio) said of the Obama administration’s climate rule for power plants. “I’d leave it to the...

If educators scare students too much about the threat of climate change, they may "succumb to denial," a teachers' guide by the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) warns. In its guide, "Teaching Climate Literacy and Energy Awareness," NOAA presents seven "essential principles": 1.Sun is primary energy 2.Climate is complex 3.Life affects climate; climate affects life 4.Climate is variable 5.Our understanding of climate 6.Humans affect climate 7.Climate change has consequences Principle 7 - "Climate Change Will Have Consequences for the Earth System and Human Lives" - warns educators that scaring students can cause them to succumb to denial: "Alarming students and...

Geoff Sherrington writes: National Geographic Magazine had a Global Warming issue in September 2004. New instruments have given new data. By planning now, NatGeo can make a revised issue 10 years later, in September 2014. The 2014 edition should aim to correct what is now known to be wrong or questionable in the 2004 edition. We can help. Here are some quotes that need attention. The first three have some commentary, as is suggested for the remainder.1. “The famed snows of Kilimanjaro have melted more than 80% since 1912.” P.14 This might have been correct at the time of...

Recently, 130 environmentalist groups gathered in an UN-backed event in Venezuela to gather more civilian support to combat climate change, reports the Daily Caller. A number of them signed the Margarita Declaration which calls for an end to the “hegemonic capitalist system” as the only solution to human-caused climate change. The environmentalists argued that measures such as carbon capture and trade and conservation efforts are not sufficient to prevent the environmental disasters they are predicting; instead, they demanded a radical system change. Although they did not spell out what their ideal social system would be, we can assume they want...

Each new climate-change study seems more pessimistic than the last. This May and June, for example, were the hottest ones on record for the planet. Effective countermeasures now could actually ward off many of these threats at relatively modest cost. Yet despite a robust scientific consensus that greenhouse gas emissions are at the root of the problem, legislation to curb them has gone nowhere in Congress. In response, President Obama has proposed stricter regulations on electric utilities, which some scientists warn may be too little, too late. Why aren’t we demanding more forceful action? One reason may be the frequent...

When, in 2012, EPA official Al Almendariz likened his enforcement strategy for federal drilling policies to Romans’ peacekeeping tactics in the Mediterranean — “Crucify them,” he quipped — he was only exhibiting what many already knew: that the Environmental Protection Agency performs its work with an almost religious zeal. But the agency’s latest effort — a massive clampdown on the nation’s coal industry — is receiving actual religious imprimatur. This week 28 religious leaders, representing not only a number of Christian denominations (Presbyterian, Episcopal, Lutheran, Methodist, Quaker, Baptist, and more) but other faiths (Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, and Bahāʾī), testified in...

Maybe it’s me, but the predictable right-wing cries of outrage over the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed rules on carbon seem oddly muted and unfocused. I mean, these are the people who managed to create national outrage over nonexistent death panels. Now the Obama administration is doing something that really will impose at least some pain on some people. Where are the eye-catching fake horror stories? For what it’s worth, however, the attacks on the new rules mainly involve the three C’s: conspiracy, cost and China. That is, right-wingers claim that there isn’t any global warming, that it’s all a hoax...

The problems that arise from having a mouth is that sometimes they open. It’s even worse when the owner doesn’t know how to keep it shut. But, when it comes to liberal Democrats, it has become an epidemic…and they just cannot contain themselves. Especially when it comes to the financially driven fear-fest known as climate change…because, you know…we’re all going to die. Ladies, and Gents, I present to you… 10 Things Liberals Insanely Link To Global Warming: 1) Global Warming Causes Rape Hide yo kids, hide yo wife, cuz global warming be raping everyone up in here! Back in February,...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: In the meantime, I have a huge, huge See, I Told You So opportunity here combined with the latest pivot and announcement from the White House yesterday. They've dropped everything now. They've dropped Benghazi, they've dropped everything, and they're moving forward (once again) on climate change/global warming. There is a desire on the part the Democrat Party and the left for the president to once again assume dictatorial-like powers to do what must be done in the area of climate change and global warming to accomplish whatever it is they want to accomplish. It's not "saving the...

Modern greens who inappropriately and metaphorically often use the term “denier” to compare global warming skeptics to Holocaust deniers are shockingly betrayed by their very own environmental history. Modern environmentalism was largely born in the racist forests of Germany in the 1800's that was at first anti-Semitic, but later became mixed up with Social Darwinian biological science in which the very word 'ecology' was coined in 1866. Today, the green movement is no longer racist, but has evolved into anti-humanism in general ...

THE WORLD now has a rough deadline for action on climate change. Nations need to take aggressive action in the next 15 years to cut carbon emissions, in order to forestall the worst effects of global warming, says the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Expect a certain part of our political class to insist that man-made climate change is not consensus science, and that until it is, nothing should be done. The problem there is obvious: By the time all the skeptics are persuaded, it will be too late for an effective response. In that regard, climate change poses a...

Aerospace engineering is a challenging major under the best of circumstances. Over 100 people were in my freshman class, but only 15 graduated. The crux of that climb at my alma mater was the so-called “slaughterhouse” semester: the fall of senior year, wherein one had to take 5 technically challenging and labor intensive classes in order to graduate that spring: Aerodynamics Lab, Vibrations, Space Vehicle Dynamics, Propulsion, and Rocket Propulsion. To apply for grad school you had to write your essays, pay the application fees, apply for fellowships, collect letters of recommendation, etc. And self-supporting students like me also had...

The Mongol warlord built the world's largest land-based empire. But he couldn't have done it without a change in climate. The difference was Genghis Khan, the warlord who united the tribes and launched them on their wave of unstoppable conquest. But the Mongol Empire wasn’t solely the product of Genghis’s will. As a fascinating new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) demonstrates, the rise of the Mongols may have owed just as much to beneficial changes in the climate that made the grasslands of the Mongol steppes green and verdant, fueling the horses that were...

Another insane cold wave — not the infamous “polar vortex ” but its evil twin — is bringing sub-zero and single-digit temperatures to much of the nation. And global warming may be even more extreme, and potentially more catastrophic, than climate scientists had feared. This is, of course, no contradiction. The rallying cry of the denialists — “It’s really cold outside, so global warming must be a crock!” — can be taken seriously only by those with a toddler’s limited conception of time and space. They forget that it’s winter, and apparently they don’t quite grasp that even when it’s...

The next time you hear someone dispute that human activity is destabilizing our climate, remember this pie chart. It represents geochemist James Lawrence Powell's review of 2,258 peer-reviewed scientific articles about climate change, written by 9,136 authors, published between Nov. 12, 2012 and December 31, 2013. Of all those hundreds of papers and thousands of researchers, Powell found one article, authored by a single scientist, that attributed climate change to something other than human actions: "The Role of Solar Activity in Global Warming," by S.V. Avakyan, appearing in the Herald of the Russian Academy of Science, Vol. 83, No. 3....

<p>Why did all the experts get the hurricane season outlook so wrong?</p> <p>Twelve forecast teams predicted an average of 16 named storms, including eight hurricanes, four major. Yet this season, which ends Saturday, saw only 13 named storms, including two mediocre Category 1 hurricanes.</p>

I was perusing through the news and saw many articles on the horrific destruction the storm in the Philippines had wrought. As I reading through the stories at Google, yahoo News, the term 'Climate Negotiator' kept on appearing in article after article. Well, I had no idea what a Climate Negotiator is, does. I mean, trying to negotiate with the climate seems a sissyphean task if not the most mentally stable thing to attempt. I tried searching Google, Yahoo for some precise meaning, job description for a Climate Negotiator but information was far and few between. It seems it is...

Explore the world’s new coastlines if sea level rises 216 feet.The maps here show the world as it is now, with only one difference: All the ice on land has melted and drained into the sea, raising it 216 feet and creating new shorelines for our continents and inland seas. There are more than five million cubic miles of ice on Earth, and some scientists say it would take more than 5,000 years to melt it all. If we continue adding carbon to the atmosphere, we’ll very likely create an ice-free planet, with an average temperature of perhaps 80 degrees...

Here’s another bizarre school assignment to add to the pile, courtesy of Wisconsin-based talk show host Vicki McKenna. Students are asked to work in groups to choose seven people to save from a shipwreck. To help in their decision, they are given some rudimentary information about each passenger, such as race and religious views. Mr. Blake, for example, is a Mormon who “sympathizes with anti-black views,” while Mr. Newton is a “black power advocated” [sic] who is “suspected of homosexual activity.” You can see the educational value, especially when you take into account Father Frans, a priest who is “often...

The Los Angeles Times is giving the cold shoulder to global warming skeptics. Paul Thornton, editor of the paper’s letters section, recently wrote a letter of his own, stating flatly that he won't publish some letters from those skeptical of man’s role in our planet’s warming climate. In Thornton’s eyes, those people are often wrong -- and he doesn’t print obviously wrong statements.