Free Republic

When the state of New York went to court this week to accuse Exxon Mobil of misleading investors, it was just the latest demonstration by cities, counties, states and even a group of young Americans that they are fed up waiting for corporations, Congress or the White House to take action on global warming. The lawsuit by New York Attorney General Barbara D. Underwood seeks to use the state’s tough securities laws to force the petroleum giant to publicly acknowledge the huge costs it will face as it grapples with human-caused climate change. Like an earlier lawsuit against the U.S....

With the fall harvest underway across the nation's Midwest "breadbasket," early U.S. Department of Agriculture reporting predicts record-setting corn and soybean crops for 2018.  The corn crop will be above average for a record sixth year in a row, while soybean production is projected at an all-time high of 4.4 billion bushels, up 4 percent from last year's previous record.U.S. corn, soybean, wheat, and even rice crops look to continue a trend of remarkable growth in both productivity and output.  This year, corn may yield a record 178.4 bushels per acre nationwide.  If realized, this will be the highest yield on record for...

The latest report from the world’s climate scientists has made clear the size of the challenge if the world is to stay below the global warming limit hoped for in the Paris climate agreement. Unfortunately, with current trends we are likely to cross this threshold within the next two decades because we are already two-thirds of the way there. But how do we know what is driving these climate trends? It comes down to the same kind of detective work that typifies a crime scene investigation, only here we are dealing with a case that encompasses the whole world. Let...

FULL TITLE: We’re altering the climate so severely that we’ll soon face apocalyptic repercussions. Sucking carbon dioxide out of the air could save us. Deadly hurricanes seem to be becoming more frequent, 12 of the 15 largest wildfires in California history have occurred in the last two decades, and cities like Cape Town, South Africa are facing severe water shortages. This isn't a coincidence. These kinds of dangerous weather events are linked to carbon-dioxide emissions. In human history, the atmosphere has never had as much CO2 in it as it does today. Burning fossil fuels for energy, clearing forests, and...

The global food system’s environmental impact is large and growing. Nearly a quarter of all planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions come from food production and associated land-use change. And as incomes rise and more people move to cities, consumption of meat and dairy - foods with outsized climate impacts - is on the rise. Limiting the global rise in meat consumption - in particular, beef, lamb and goat - is critical for reining in runaway warming. Ruminant meats have the highest resource requirements of any foods we eat. Producing beef, for example, uses 20 times the land and emits 20 times...

In a world riddled with climate-change doomsday predictions, a small but growing number of scientists are saying the highly touted climate models predicting steadily increasing global temperature due to humans’ carbon-dioxide emissions are wrong and that Earth could soon face something even more dire: global cooling. One such climate scientist is Valentina Zharkova, an astrophysicist at Northumbria University in the United Kingdom. Zharkova and her team of researchers say that based on mathematical models of the Sun’s magnetic activity, it’s likely Earth will experience decreasing magnetic waves over a 33-year period beginning in 2021. Zharkova is not alone. In...

Texas has been called the “disaster capital of the United States” by scientists, and that’s because Texas has any type of weather you can imagine. Tornadoes, hailstorms, severe weather, dust storms, floods, droughts, blizzards, ice, hurricanes and wildfires are all possible in the Lone Star State. “We get everything there is to get naturally because of our location,” Katharine Hayhoe said Wednesday night in the fourth installment of “Duets,” an ongoing conversation series hosted by the Arts & Life team of The Dallas Morning News. Hayhoe is the director of the climate science center at Texas Tech University and a...

President Donald Trump, Florida Gov. Rick Scott, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, and others who oppose action to address human-induced climate change should be held accountable for climate crimes against humanity. They are the authors and agents of systematic policies that deny basic human rights to their own citizens and people around the world, including the rights to life, health, and property. These politicians have blood on their hands, and the death toll continues to rise. Trump and his minions are the loyal servants of the fossil-fuel industry, which fill Republican party campaign coffers. Trump has also stalled the fight against...

The list of crimes Donald Trump has committed against the planet, in just two years, is already so impeachably long that his slippery-fish climate denial registers as hardly more than a footnote. “I have a natural instinct for science,” the president bragged to the AP Tuesday, a week after the U.N. raised the alarm on global warming that is much faster, and more horrifying, than it had acknowledged before. It was an especially grotesque demonstration of bad faith, given that just weeks ago, his administration had announced that, as a matter of climate policy, it was now assuming a worst-case...

In March 2017, Natalie Mahowald, professor of earth and atmospheric sciences and the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future’s faculty director for the environment, was selected by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as a lead author on the “Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius.” The final report made international headlines when it was released Oct. 8. Among its key findings: scientific evidence is clear that human activities have caused 1 C of global warming since the late 1800s, and current trends suggest if the planet keeps warming at the same rate global warming...

NARRAGANSETT, R.I. - The former head of the Naval Meteorology and Oceanographic Command called attention to climate change during an extreme weather symposium at the University of Rhode Island. Rear Adm. Jonathan White called climate change a threat to humanity's survival at the Graduate School of Oceanography this week. White said the military has been stretched thin as it deals with "infrastructure and the effects of climate change." Democratic U.S. Rep. James Langevin said the country needs to support researchers studying ways to understand climate change and mitigate its effects. Professor John King said "transformational change" is needed to address...

GLOBAL warming could reawaken ancient diseases - even the Black Death - according to an Oxford University professor. Higher global temperatures would melt ice sheets that store long-buried bacteria, spreading disease and potentially causing new global pandemics. Professor Peter Frankopan offered his prediction at the Cheltenham Literary Festival on Friday, as reported by The Times. The professor of global history began by stating in his view there was “absolutely no chance” the international community would hit the Paris Agreement’s target of keeping global temperature rises under 1.5C. “If we go over that degree change, it’s not about the Maldives being...

A United Nations. climate change report this month declared the world to be in danger of losing the battle against global warming if extreme measures are not adopted in the next decade. But you can make a difference in global warming at home and in your community - and save yourself money in the process. 1. Commute like a European - Traditional cars burn fossil fuels, causing air pollution and contributing to smog, acid rain and global warming. Biking, walking or taking public transit are the best alternatives. 2. When you do drive, plug in - If we can replace...

... Until recently, the consequences of climate change were thought to be so far into the future that many average people, including those who live in coastal zones, declared they needn’t bother; they’d be long dead by the time catastrophe struck. No more. Climate change is here, costing billions of dollars every year to recover from destructive events. Without adapting to that new reality, the world will confront rising costs of disasters that put economic growth, health, and in some places, even survival at risk. To spur action, a coalition led by billionaire Bill Gates, former United Nations Secretary General...

Former United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon appealed for a sense of urgency Tuesday as he launched a new commission that aims to accelerate and expand ways the world can prepare for climate change. “Without urgent adaptation action, we risk undermining food, energy and water security for decades to come,” Ban told guests as the Global Commission on Adaptation got underway in The Hague. The commission’s mandate is to encourage the development of measures to manage the effects of climate change through technology, planning and investment. Ban is leading the group with Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and World Bank CEO Kristalina...

If states are “laboratories of democracy,” ballot initiatives in Washington and California next month will test whether voters are willing to tax pollution, and how the revenue should be spent. These experiments will provide crucial insights for shaping climate initiatives elsewhere. In Washington state, Ballot Initiative 1631, also known as the Carbon Emissions Fee Measure or the Protect Washington Act, would impose a fee on the state’s largest industrial polluters. The fee would start at $15 per ton of carbon dioxide in 2020, and rise by $2 per year plus inflation thereafter. That’s nowhere near the more than $100 per...

Can you be an environmentalist and still drive a car? The question came to mind last week, when the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report that gave us 12 years to stave off cataclysmic climate change. If the world’s governments, businesses and people don’t act and act dramatically, global warming could rise more than 1.5 C and cause droughts, famine, floods and heat. It’s a dire prediction. As a driver, it forces you to think about your culpability. The automobile, after all, is a significant contributor to climate change. The Environmental Protection Agency maintains that cars...

Add beer to chocolate, coffee, and wine as some of life’s little pleasures that global warming will make scarcer and costlier, scientists say. Increasing bouts of extreme heat waves and drought will hurt production of barley, a key beer ingredient, in the future. Losses of barley yield can be as much as 17 percent, an international group of researchers estimated. That means beer prices on average would double, even adjusting for inflation, according to the study in Monday’s journal Nature Plants . In countries like Ireland, where cost of a brew is already high, prices could triple. The findings come...

The climate alarmists just can’t catch a break. NASA is reporting that the sun is entering one of the deepest Solar Minima of the Space Age; and Earth’s atmosphere is responding in kind. So, start pumping out that CO2, everyone. We’re going to need all the greenhouse gases we can get. “We see a cooling trend,” said Martin Mlynczak of NASA’s Langley Research Center. “High above Earth’s surface, near the edge of space, our atmosphere is losing heat energy. If current trends continue, it could soon set a Space Age record for cold.” The new data is coming from NASA’s...

The self-proclaimed Climate Prophets who claim they can predict climate years in advance are either deliberately lying or incredibly stupid. Weather related scientists don't know enough about the factors that control daily weather to make more than approximate predictions of short term weather. How can anyone believe weather scientists can accurately predict weather decades in advance? If you look at a Weather Bureau forecast you will notice that if it predicts the possibility of rain the prediction will show the probability of rain as a percentage. The probability of rain might by 20% or maybe 60%. Meteorologists know rain can...