Climate
January 31, 2013 — John Hinderaker
On the way home from the office tonight, I picked up a six pack of beer. When I pulled into my garage, the temperature was -1 F. Not epic by any means, but pretty darn cold. We have a sort of overflow refrigerator in our garage, and I realized I had better put the beer there–not to keep it cold, but to keep it warm. If I had left it
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January 27, 2013 — John Hinderaker
Michael Mann, perpetrator of the notorious hockey stick hoax, is one of the world’s execrable characters. On top of his more important bad qualities, he is a whiner. The self-pitying Mann
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January 26, 2013 — John Hinderaker
My wife, who is a big Derek Jeter fan, will be disappointed to see this: Derek Jeter interrupted his rehab work on his surgically repaired left ankle to rub shoulders with the world’s most powerful at the Davos Economic Forum. Jeter — invited by Pepsi — said he hopes climate change would be discussed: “I was in New York for Hurricane Sandy . . . It’s something that needs to
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January 26, 2013 — Steven Hayward
A theme of my environmental coverage here and elsewhere is that most environmental problems are overestimated, partly because of the neo-religious fervor behind the Malthusianism-uber-alles methodology of environmentalists, and partly for the closely related reason that serial crises are the best means by which the political class gathers more power to itself. In the fullness of time we’ve come to recognize that environmental problems are not world-ending potential apocalyses, but
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January 22, 2013 — Steven Hayward
The Governor of Nebraska, Dave Heineman, has approved a new route for the long-delayed Keystone XL pipeline. But now the State Department is slow-walking the final decision as long as it can. State has the say on Keystone because the pipeline will cross a national boundary. This is actually good news, since State has to deal with Canada directly about many matters, unlike the EPA, which can disregard Canadian interests.
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January 22, 2013 — John Hinderaker
Proponents of the anthropogenic global warming theory rely on global temperature data over a period of centuries that purport to be accurate to within a tiny fraction of one degree. Common sense warns us to be skeptical of such spurious certainty. But the truth is much worse: climate alarmists have systematically fudged the historical record by changing past temperature data to make it look as though the earth is warming,
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January 16, 2013 — Steven Hayward
The other day I took note of the fact that, as I have long predicted, the media is losing interest in climate change in large part because the climate campaign long ago became an unimaginative crashing bore. Moreover, as also long expected, we’re starting to see the “counter-intuitive” narrative start to appear—namely, that moderate warming might have net benefits. (Actually the IPCC reports have implied this all along, but the
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January 14, 2013 — Steven Hayward
Given that half of the Power Line team resides in Minnesota, fergawdsake, where 24 degrees this time of year qualifies as balmy, kudos to Jimmy Kimmel for assembling these truly ridiculous clips of LA TV newswers bloviating hysterically about how cold it is because it’s only getting up to 50 degrees in LA right now in the daytime, and down to as little as 34 degrees at night: Really, is
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January 14, 2013 — Steven Hayward
The steady, relentless collapse of the climate campaign proceeds apace, notwithstanding the sugar high climate campaigners enjoyed after Hurricane Sandy and Obama’s re-election. Obama promises that a price on carbon is a main objective of his second term, but given that it is an Obama promise, climate campaigners should understand they’ve just been given the kiss of death. The media is slowly starting to give up on the whole game.
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January 8, 2013 — John Hinderaker
You’ve certainly seen the news stories trumpeting data from the National Climatic Data Center purporting to show that 2012 was the warmest year on record in the continental United States. This AP story, to note just one example, is headlined “US roasts to hottest year on record by landslide.” And news reports invariably try to link this claim with human-induced global warming, even though the U.S. represents only 2% of
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January 7, 2013 — Steven Hayward
So far most of the critical discussion about Chuck Hagel for SecDef is that he said mean things about homosexuals, or is hostile to Israel, if not in fact anti-Semitic. So far I’m curious that people on the Left in particular are forgetting Hagel’s key role in derailing the egregious Kyoto Protocol in its infancy. He was the key person behind the “Byrd-Hagel” resolution in the Senate in 1997 denouncing
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January 5, 2013 — John Hinderaker
At the journal Earth System Dynamics, M. Beenstock, Y. Reingewertz, and N. Paldor have published a paper titled “Polynomial cointegration tests of anthropogenic impact on global warming” which Anthony Watts describes as a potential bombshell. The authors conducted an exhaustive statistical analysis of data from 1850 through 2007, applying the technique of cointegration, which the authors describe as follows: Cointegration theory is based on the simple notion that time series
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January 3, 2013 — Steven Hayward
America’s tax system wasn’t the only thing that went over a cliff at midnight on December 31. The Kyoto Protocol on climate change—the treaty I’ve called the most feckless and unserious act of international diplomacy since the Kellogg-Briand Pact—expired on December 31. Despite all the best efforts of the worst people, there was no 11th hour rescue, no climate “grand bargain,” and not even a tax increase on the top
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December 26, 2012 — Steven Hayward
In the course of doing some background research for yesterday’s decision on the winner of the first annual Power Line Green Weenie of the Year Award, I discovered that the fun people at DeSmogBlog—the folks who “broke” the story of the Heartland Institute back in February that actually turned out to be about Peter Gleick’s theft of Heartland documents—have compiled a “global warming disinformation database” of the leading “deniers”—a veritable
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December 23, 2012 — John Hinderaker
Michael Mann is the climate scientist who invented the now-notorious “hockey stick” graph, which purported to show unprecedented warming in the 20th century. The hockey stick has come and gone, but Mann lives on as one of the principal figures in the world of climate alarmism. Currently, climate realists have gone to court to try to obtain email communications that Mann, who teaches at Penn State, authored as a public
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December 19, 2012 — Steven Hayward
John reported here the other day about the leaked portion of the forthcoming report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which admits the possible role of cosmic radiation in cloud formation. This may be the first time the IPCC has acknowledged this as a possible factor, even though the hypothesis has been around for more than 20 years. But the big ball game all along in climate science
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December 17, 2012 — Steven Hayward
While analysts will argue for a long time what effect Hurricane Sandy had on the outcome of the election (some people think it tipped the close race to Obama), a question not getting enough attention is whether Sandy was a hurricane at all when it made landfall. The answer, it turns out, may depend more on insurance regulation than science. The question is additionally important because hurricane warnings were never
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