Free Republic

Those who leave their energy-guzzling multi-million-dollar mansions when they fly off on their private jets to save-the-planet climate change conferences like to ease their consciences and explain their hypocrisy by pointing to their carbon offsets like paying for trees to be planted somewhere that might mature in a hundred years or so. There are a lot of trees in California and a good number of them are on fire, thanks to environmental regulations and policies that are supposed to protect the environment but are in fact destroying it. The irony in California that the very trees that are supposed to...

School officials in Portland, Oregon, have banned books questioning climate change from the classroom. The city's public school board voted last week that any material saying climate change doesn't exist or that humans are not at fault should be removed. The resolution also directs school staff to develop an implementation plan for 'curriculum and educational opportunities that address climate change and climate justice in all Portland Public Schools.' The measure was passed even though the Oregon Institute of Science and medicine is circulating a petition which states: 'there is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane,...

When Science is Betrayed – and What Lessons We Should Learn By: Msgr. Charles PopeThere is a great reverence for science in our culture. On the one hand, rightly so. Science has made enormous strides that have changed life as we know it. Profound discoveries have eradicated diseases, improved health, increased the world’s food supply, led to a computer revolution, drawn us higher into outer space and deeper into inner space, revealed hidden mysteries of nature, and produced technologies unimaginable to even our recent ancestors.On the other hand, the reverence of science has tipped perhaps too far in the direction of a...

The Washington Post recently ran a shocking above-the-fold article warning us of "Escalating Ice Loss Found in Antarctica." A new paper by Eric Rignot of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory shows a net loss of ice where most scientists thought the opposite would occur. The Post went full-bore with this one, spreading the article on to an entire interior page. The piece ends by noting that Rajenda Pachauri, head of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is so concerned that he's is personally going down to inspect the situation. He should. Before he even gets to Antarctica, Pachauri...