Climate
May 21, 2013 — Steven Hayward
The news broadcasts of the Oklahoma tornado disaster that I saw last night and this morning were thankfully free of speculation that this tornado is proof of—wait for it—global warming, and therefore one more reason to hand over control of our energy sector to environmentalists. I am certain this will come from the usual people starting today, but for now, note the New York Times’ Andrew Revkin discounting the thesis:
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May 11, 2013 — John Hinderaker
2013 featured the winter that wouldn’t end. Here in Minneapolis, the snow has finally melted and leaves are starting to come out on the trees. Farther north, though, the lakes are still largely frozen. This weekend is the opening of Minnesota’s fishing season, one of the most important dates on the calendar. But it’s hard to go after those walleyes when you’re dodging ice on the lake. The Minneapolis Star
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May 4, 2013 — John Hinderaker
Alarmists have been quick to blame weather extremes of all kinds on global warming. The claim that “climate change” is responsible for extreme weather events has been repeated countless times. But what can the alarmists make of the fact that weather, here in the U.S., at least, is the least extreme in history? Currently, there are fewer tornadoes in the U.S. than ever. This chart, created by Harold Brooks of
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May 2, 2013 — Steven Hayward
Ben Boychuk of City Journal California (and the fine InfiniteMonkeys blog) has been after me for a while to write for its pages now that I’ve been foolish enough to move back to the less-than-golden state, but I’ve been too busy to oblige. But when he pointed me to the latest nonsense from the climate capos about how California’s wine industry was imperiled, I had to swing into action. The result
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April 28, 2013 — John Hinderaker
Carbon dioxide does influence the Earth’s climate, but it is just one variable among a great many, and its impact is small. Scientists agree that if you double the CO2 in the atmosphere, it will cause an increase in the Earth’s temperature of around one degree Celsius. Nearly all scientists also agree that an increase of that magnitude would be good, not bad, for humans. The minor role played by
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April 26, 2013 — Steven Hayward
Just in time for the Weekly Winston comes the fabulous news that the Bank of England has decided to put Churchill on the five-pound note. Now, can we please put Reagan on the twenty, or something? Speaking of Winnie, who according to legend (surely apocryphal) was the inspiration for A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh, loyal Power Line reader RS sends along this adaptation of Milne to remind us of why
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April 23, 2013 — John Hinderaker
Earth Day wasn’t kind to the Twin Cities, dumping up to ten inches of snow on the metropolitan area. Over the last week, low temperature records have been smashed all across the Upper Midwest. It looks more like Christmas than May Day: The Twins were snowed out last night for, I believe, the third time this season–can you imagine trying to play baseball in that? But I think they are
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April 18, 2013 — John Hinderaker
But not, here in Minnesota, for the reasons Eliot had in mind. On the contrary: we are in the midst of a six to eight inch snowstorm. It is coming down heavier than that to the west and north. This is what my world looks like: I drove home from work tonight. The guy who plows my driveway hadn’t been here, probably waiting for the snow to stop. The heavy
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April 18, 2013 — Steven Hayward
It’s been another terrible, no good, very bad week for the left, and it isn’t over yet. We could still get another Democrat or trade union running for cover over the disaster that is the unfolding of Obamacare. We certainly haven’t seen the last of the left’s bitter clingers complaining about the four Democratic Senators who extended their own right of self-preservation to the rest of us by voting down
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April 16, 2013 — Steven Hayward
Beating up on California these days is easier than snatching lunch money from the pocket protector of a skinny near-sighted kid. But why should Victor Davis Hanson have all the fun? And besides, now that I’m back in my home state after a decade away, the decay is palpable, like roads suffering from obvious “deferred maintenance” to unfinished housing tracts, etc. So what are the main problems facing California right
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April 11, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
Have left-liberals killed liberal education? I’ve come to think so, and recent developments at Vassar and Bowdoin help confirm my fear. The indispensable Stanley Kurtz is on top of both stories. At Vassar, the subject of this post, he reports on attempts to block a speech by Alex Epstein, a proponent and defender of America’s conventional energy industries. Epstein was invited to speak by Vassar’s Moderate, Independent, Conservative Alliance (MICA).
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April 11, 2013 — John Hinderaker
It was hot in Washington, D.C. yesterday. Unfortunately, some Democrats couldn’t just sit back and enjoy it. The Hill reports: House Democrats on Wednesday pointed to today’s record-setting heat in Washington D.C. as the latest sign that the Earth is warming. Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) managed a speech on the House floor in which several Democrats joined to say that Congress needs to find a way forward on climate change
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April 10, 2013 — John Hinderaker
This letter to the editor of a newspaper in Washington State was written by Dr. David Deming in response to an attack on Don Easterbrook by a group of professors at Western Washington University. I thought it was too good not to share; in part, because it isn’t just about global warming alarmism, it is about science. Via Watts Up With That? Note that there are numerous links in the
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April 3, 2013 — John Hinderaker
Last month, a group of scientists headed by geologist Shaun Marcott launched the latest salvo in the global warming war. They announced that they had reconstructed the last 11,000 years of Earth climate history, based on various proxies, and had found that in the 20th century there was an unprecedented uptick in temperature. The Marcott paper was hailed by liberal media outlets; to cite just a few examples: * “We’re
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April 1, 2013 — John Hinderaker
The case for global warming hysteria rests entirely on certain computer models that committed warmist partisans have been paid tens of billions of dollars by greedy governments to develop. It is hardly a shock, then, that these programs crank out one alarming scenario after another. They predict endless cataclysms resulting from an always-warming Earth, even as the actual Earth, not the computer-generated one, stubbornly refuses to heat up, year after
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March 31, 2013 — Steven Hayward
Since we’re on the subject of climate change here in recent days, herewith Churchill’s musings about climate and technology from his essay “Fifty Years Hence,” published in the late 1920s and available now in Thoughts and Adventures. Part of this passage is a tolerably good anticipation of “geoengineering,” or “solar radiation management.” The discovery and control of such sources of power [such as nuclear] would cause changes in human affairs
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March 29, 2013 — Steven Hayward
In my Weekly Standard cover story about the fallout from the “Climategate” email scandal three years ago, I offered the following question by way of prediction: Eventually the climate modeling community is going to have to reconsider the central question: Have the models the IPCC uses for its predictions of catastrophic warming overestimated the climate’s sensitivity to greenhouse gases? The article then went on to survey emerging research (U.S. government funded!) casting
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