Free Republic

Fires raged. Rivers flooded. Ice melted. Droughts baked. Storms brewed. Temperatures soared. And people died. Climate change in 2021 reshaped life on planet Earth through extreme weather. World leaders are gathering in Scotland to try to accelerate the fight to curb climate change. So far, it’s not working, as the world keeps getting hotter and its weather more extreme, scientists and government officials say. They don’t have to point far back in time or far off for examples. There have been deadly floods in Belgium, Germany, China and Tennessee. Fire blazed in parts of the U.S. West, Greece and even...

ASA just shared a stunning image of a nearly perfect rectangular iceberg in Antarctica. The monolithic slab of ice, floating just off the Larsen C ice shelf appears quite unnatural given the 90-degree angles. NASA took the image as part of Operation IceBridge, a mission to image Earth's polar regions in order to understand how ice (thickness, location, accumulation, etc.) has been changing in recent years.

The Red Rectangle, so named because of its bizarre shape and striking color, is a nebula — a cosmic cloud of gas and particles. In this case, the nebula is formed by the central star, HD 44179, which is reaching the end of its life and shedding most of its mass into space. The source of the red light emitted by the Red Rectangle baffled scientists for more than 30 years. The same kind of red emission was seen throughout the Milky Way and in other galaxies, but scientists weren't sure what created it. The mystery was finally solved in...