Free Republic

A self-confessed hostility toward people who drive Hummers, along with worries about family and finances, prompted a 72-year-old Southlake man to scratch paint on five of the sports utility vehicles, police said. (snip) '' 'I've got a mentally ill son and everything went together, my wife is diabetic and having problems, the stock market, and I just looked at the truck and I gashed it. 'I don't have a twin, I'm 72 years old and I'm awfully sorry.' ''

Well inside the Arctic Circle, scientists have found black smoker vents farther north than anyone has ever seen before. The cluster of five vents – one towering nearly four stories in height – are venting water as hot as 570 F. The vents are located at 73 degrees north on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge between Greenland and Norway. That's more than 120 miles from the previous northernmost vents found during a 2005 expedition..... The area around the vents was alive with microorganisms and animals. Preliminary observations suggest that the ecosystem around these Arctic vents is diverse and appears to be unique,...

YouTube -- the instant internet video service -- has played an odd role in the 2008 campaign. First -- thanks to CNN -- it provided cheesy snowmen to question Republicans in one primary debate. Now, thanks to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), YouTube has become a news service. Last week, the dour Reid faced a Fox News camera and said, “The one thing we fail to talk about is those costs that you don't see on the bottom line. Coal makes us sick. Oil makes us sick. It's global warming. It's ruining our country. It's ruining our world. We've...

Here is the latest image showing the CO2 emissions, well not directly but indirectly, caused by humans doing their agricultural burning. Since this is the week, may as well start it on the right foot, exposing the hoax. If it weren't a hoax, would these Live Earth people be singing the praises of this practice, or would they be trying to stop it. This does appear to be generating much more greenhouse gas that cars, I doubt even LA is this polluted -- An yes we have had our share of brush fires, and I know how bad the choking...

Oil Spills Seen as the Only Exception NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 14 -- Early tests on the floodwater that covered most of this city do not suggest it will leave a permanent toxic residue or render residential areas uninhabitable for more than a short time, officials of both state and federal environmental agencies said yesterday. The pollution consists primarily of fecal matter and slightly elevated concentrations of metals such as lead and chromium that were in the city's soil before Hurricane Katrina. There are also trace amounts of many petroleum-based chemicals and some pesticides. Despite descriptions of the floodwater as a...

These words were written by Anton Chekhov, who visited Sakhalin, the "Russian Australia," the remote land where convicts were sent, in 1890. That was long before the huge oil and gas deposits were discovered on the Sakhalin shelf. As irony would have it, the fantastic mineral wealth was discovered in that unsuitable upper third of the island that was not counted. The oil and gas deposits that went on to become part of the production-sharing ventures Sakhalin-1 and Sakhalin-2 were discovered during the Soviet years: Odopto (1977), Chaivo (1979), Lunskoye (1984), Piltun-Astokhskoye (1986) and Arktun-Daginskoye (1989). But there was no...

Nations seek to integrate climate change tracking mechanisms Government officials and scientists from more that 30 countries have called for the speedy development of an integrated method to observe climate change and other environmental trends on Earth. Participants at the so-called "Earth Observation Summit" held at the US State Department in Washington, have pledged to move ahead with an "international, comprehensive, coordinated and sustained" monitoring mechanism within 10 years' time. "We, the participants, call for and intend to participate in a comprehensive, coordinated Earth observation system that is used for the benefit of humankind and thereby contributes to sustaining the...