Berkeley, CA, Takoma Park, MD and other cities; California, Connecticut, New York, Virginia, and other states; Germany, England, and other countries; the European Union – all plan to banish oil, natural gas, and coal within 10, 20 or 30 years. A number of US states...
More than 1.4 million cases of COVID-19 and 106,000 deaths in the United States alone have accompanied stay-home lockdowns, businesses bankruptcies, over 40 million unemployed workers, plummeting tax revenues and unprecedented debt. Ongoing rioting, vandalism, arson...
The five largest mass die-offs in which 50–95% of species were eliminated occurred during the Ordovician, Devonian, Permian, Triassic, and Cretaceous periods. Most recently, human actions, especially over the past two centuries, have precipitated a global extinction...
As of May 20, the United States had more than 1.5 million confirmed cases of the Wuhan Coronavirus. US deaths related or attributed to the virus topped 92,000 (though many were really due to old age and related co-morbidities). Because of COVID-19, much of the US...
Carbon taxes at the borders are becoming a popular idea among some countries and world regions. For example, the European Commission, the EU executive institution, is proposing environmental tariffs “on imports from countries with less stringent climate-protection...
In his novel 1984, George Orwell envisioned a future that is arguably unfolding before our eyes where government authority was supreme and truth and freedom were not to be found. Perhaps he should have named his novel 2021 because our times seem more like his novel...
Logic defeats the climate scare
Sometimes logic trumps even the loudest voices. That is what happened on Wednesday night when climate change and greenhouse gas emission reduction were completely missing from the first Presidential debate.
Nine climate activist groups—the League of Conservation Voters, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Sierra Club, the National Wildlife Federation, The Climate Reality Project, MomsRising.org, GlobalSolutions.org, iMatter Campaign and Moms Clean Air Force—delivered petitions with over 160,000 signatures to the office of debate moderator PBS newsman Jim Lehrer urging him to ask the candidates about climate change. For weeks, main stream media have been pushing climate change, asserting that President Obama and Governor Romney must address this, “the most crucial issue of our time.”
But they did not, and Lehr completely ignored the topic as well.
It appears that Obama, Romney and Lehr all instinctively understood that, in comparison with the nation’s pressing issues, discussions about “stopping global warming” were not worth even a single minute of air time.
Optimists assert that climate realism, the understanding that climate changes naturally all the time with little influence from humanity, is finally winning out over alarmism. Science and economics, they say, will win the war in realism’s favour. That is dangerously naïve.
For example, while some scientists do indeed give the sort of confident, absolute statements included in the Monitor report, some scientists say the exact opposite, namely that we are headed for far more dangerous global cooling no matter what humanity does. Many others simply say that we do not know the future of global climate and that we cannot make meaningful forecasts until there are considerable advances in the basic science.
Politically correct but deceptive phrases such as “carbon tax” are dangerous because they influence millions of people and, ultimately, important government policy.
While it makes sense to prepare for natural climate change—warming and cooling, drought and flood, rising and falling sea levels—as our societies expand, the idea that we know, or even can know, the future of our planet’s climate is simply a modern day myth.
Carbon dioxide is an invisible gas, while carbon is a black solid. Referring to carbon dioxide as “carbon” is as foolish as calling water “hydrogen” or salt “chlorine.”
Prediction markets may also be able to help policymakers make better decisions. One policy area where they may prove especially useful is environmental policymaking in response to climate change. Given the highly technical nature of the complicated scientific questions that lie at the hart of the policy questions surrounding climate change, and the fact that these questions have become highly politicized, new sources of objective information about the likelihood of accelerating global warming in the years ahead would be extremely valuable.
Earlier last month Professor Richard Muller of the University of California, Berkeley’s BEST project announced that, based on their newly constructed global land temperature record, “no component that matches solar activity” was related to temperature. Instead, Professor Muller said, carbon dioxide controlled temperature.
My wife Nancy and I recently enjoyed a couple of great days with Burt Rutan and his wife Tonya at their beautiful new home in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. The visit afforded an opportunity to discuss many topics of keenly shared interest, including the global warming “debate”. Although Burt is world renowned for his remarkable record-setting achievements in aircraft and spacecraft design, he has devoted a great deal of attention to this subject as well.