Free Republic

Warming of the Arctic caused by climate change has increased the number of polar vortex outbreaks, when frigid air from the far north bathes the central and eastern United States in killer cold, a study finds. The study in the journal Science Thursday is the first to show the connections between changes in the polar region and February’s Valentine’s Week freeze that triggered widespread power outages in Texas, killing more than 170 people and causing at least $20 billion in damage. The polar vortex normally keeps icy air trapped in the Arctic. But warmer air weakens the vortex, allowing it...

It’s as if the world has been turned upside-down, or at least its weather. You can blame the increasingly familiar polar vortex, which has brought a taste of the Arctic to places where winter often requires no more than a jacket. Around the North Pole, winter’s ultra-cold air is usually kept bottled up 15 to 30 miles high. That’s the polar vortex, which spins like a whirling top at the top of the planet. But occasionally something slams against the top, sending the cold air escaping from its Arctic home and heading south. It’s been happening more often, and scientists...

It doesn’t quite have the ring of “Morning in America” and “I Like Ike.” But the phrase “Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.” is getting an unlikely moment in the spotlight as President Donald Trump has taken a detour into the politics of dementia three months before the election. Trump, 74, attempted to demonstrate his mental fitness by reciting five words - in order, importantly - over and over in a television interview broadcast Wednesday night. The Republican president said that collection of nouns, or ones like them, was part of a cognitive test he had aced while declaring that his...

What President Donald Trump says and does often flies in the face of mainstream science. Coronavirus and the idea of injecting disinfectants is only the latest episode. When a rare solar eclipse happened in 2017, astronomers and eye doctors repeatedly warned people not to stare directly at the sun without protection. Photos show Trump did anyway. He later donned protective glasses. For decades, scientists have called climate change a pressing issue, pointing to data, physics and chemistry. Trump regularly called it a hoax until recently. He also claims that noise from wind turbines - which he refers to as windmills...

For more than two years President Donald Trump has talked about pulling the United States out of the landmark Paris climate agreement . Starting Monday he finally can do something about it. Even then, though, the withdrawal process takes a year and wouldn’t become official until at least the day after the 2020 presidential election. […] The terms of the deal say no country can withdraw in the first three years. So Monday is the first time the U.S. could actually start the withdrawal process, which begins with a letter to the United Nations. And it doesn’t become official for...

NEW YORK (AP) — Earth is in more hot water than ever before, and so are we, an expert United Nations climate panel warned in a grim new report Wednesday. Sea levels are rising at an ever-faster rate as ice and snow shrink, and oceans are getting more acidic and losing oxygen, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said in a report issued as world leaders met at the United Nations.

Greenland is where Earth's refrigerator door is left open, where glaciers dwindle and seas begin to rise.... Summer this year is hitting the island hard with record-shattering heat and extreme melt. Scientists estimate that by the end of the summer, about 440 billion tons of ice — maybe more — will have melted or calved off Greenland's giant ice sheet. Helheim glacier, for example, has shrunk about 6 miles (10 kilometers) since scientists visited in 2005.

WASHINGTON (AP) — African-Americans and Hispanics breathe in far more deadly air pollution than they are responsible for making, a new study said.A study looked at who is exposed to fine particle pollution — responsible for about 100,000 American deaths a year — and how much different races are responsible for the pollution based on their buying, driving and living habits.Scientists calculate that Hispanics on average breathe in 63 percent more of the pollution that leads to heart and breathing deaths than they make. For African-Americans the figure is 56 percent, according to a study published Monday in the Proceedings...

Ramping up wind power in America would also dial up the nation’s temperatures, a new study out of Harvard found. While wind energy is widely celebrated as environmentally friendly, the researchers concluded that a dramatic, all-out expansion in the number of turbines could warm the country even more than climate change from burning coal and other fossil fuels, because of the way the spinning blades disturb the layers of warm and cold air in the atmosphere. Some parts of the central United States are already seeing nights that are up to 2 degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 degrees Celsius) warmer because of...

In a writeup which shows that the wire service obviously hasn’t studied the hateful examples of liberal-left hate collected by the Twitter curators at Twitchy, a Thursday afternoon Associated Press writeup claims that conservative “say” they’re happy (with an implication that they don't really mean it), while liberals “show it” (supposedly meaning that they’re genuine). The reporter assigned to this pathetic piece of pablum somehow deemed worthy of “Big Story” status is Seth Borenstein, whose normal beat is twisting his reportage to convince America in light of mountains of contrary evidence and 18 years of flat worldwide temperatures that global...

A prominent physicist and skeptic of global warming spent two years trying to find out if mainstream climate scientists were wrong. In the end, he determined they were right: Temperatures really are rising rapidly. The study of the world's surface temperatures by Richard Muller was partially bankrolled by a foundation connected to global warming deniers. He pursued long-held skeptic theories in analyzing the data. He was spurred to action because of "Climategate," a British scandal involving hacked emails of scientists. Yet he found that the land is 1.6 degrees warmer than in the 1950s. Those numbers from Muller, who works...

Ironically, 2008 is on pace to be a slightly cooler year in a steadily rising temperature trend line. Experts say it's thanks to a La Nina weather variation. While skeptics are already using it as evidence of some kind of cooling trend, it actually illustrates how fast the world is warming.

WASHINGTON - The method of mining used at the Utah mine that collapsed Monday, trapping six miners, has a history of being disproportionately deadly, according to federal safety studies. It is "the most dangerous type of mining there is," said Tony Oppegard, a former top federal and state of Kentucky mine safety official who is now a private attorney in Lexington, Ky., representing miners. The reason the practice is used is that it pays off: The last bit of coal taken from pillars is pure profit, Oppegard said. Plus, if someone violates rules during pillar removal and there is a...