Climate
April 19, 2019 — Steven Hayward
I’m fond of referring to the climate campaigners as the “climatistas” because they remind me of the Sandinistas and their fellow-traveling fans back in the 1980s. But someone writing as “Will” over at The Medium has done me one better in calling attention to how the climate change fanatics resemble nothing so much as a full-blown religious cult. Read the whole thing, but here are the ten signs and his
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April 11, 2019 — John Hinderaker
We have endured a horrific winter here in Minnesota. Temperatures plunging below -20 F, the snowiest February on record, a winter that wouldn’t end–and still hasn’t. We are in the midst of an 8 to 12 inch late-season snow storm. I took this photo off my front steps this morning and posted it on Instagram: The picture actually understates the case: I always post pretty photos on Instagram. Missing are
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April 8, 2019 — John Hinderaker
Global warming hysteria is not based on observation–the Earth’s atmosphere is not warming significantly–but, rather, on computer models. Of course, a computer model will do more or less what its designer tells it to, and the fact that the alarmists’ models do not predict global temperatures accurately has somehow failed to dent the religious faith of those who believe in catastrophic anthropogenic global warming. The Science and Environmental Policy Project’s
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March 27, 2019 — John Hinderaker
To say that it has been a tough week for the Democratic Party is an understatement. Yesterday Mitch McConnell obliged grandstanding Democrats by bringing the Green New Deal resolution up for a vote in the Senate. The Democrats regarded this as a dirty trick, evidently because they do not intend their policy proposals to be taken seriously. The Senate vote was 57-0 against the Green New Deal. Almost all Senate
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March 20, 2019 — John Hinderaker
Liberals apparently chose the polar bear as a poster child for global warming because the bears are considered cute, although no one who had a close encounter with a polar bear would describe it that way. Why global warming would be harmful to polar bears was never persuasively explained, nor was there any explanation of how the bears had survived many climatic changes over hundreds of thousands of years. In
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March 8, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
Archaeologists in Peru have found what they say is the site of the largest child sacrifice in the world. According to the Washington Post, about 140 children were slaughtered at the site in the mid 1400s. The children all were killed in the same way. Their chests were slit open. This was done, researchers say, to remove their hearts. Researchers have found a second site nearby that may contain as
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March 4, 2019 — John Hinderaker
I would have said that nothing could exceed the folly of wind and solar energy, but biomass may come close. This Vox article is headlined: “Europe’s renewable energy policy is built on burning American trees.” You no doubt have heard of “biomass,” but likely don’t know what it actually means. As the headline suggests, it mostly means American trees. In the lowland forests of the American southeast, loblolly pines and
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February 25, 2019 — Steven Hayward
Keen competition once again for Power Line’s coveted Green Weenie Award. PETA, the animal rights wackos, made a strong bid with a Tweet on the birthday of the late, beloved Australian naturalist Steve Irwin that was totally tone deaf even for the fanatics of PETA. The occasion was Google deciding to note Irwin’s birthday with their daily doodle: But then there’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, because of course she is. You may
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February 23, 2019 — John Hinderaker
I wrote here about the epic winter we are having in Minnesota, hard on the heels of “expert” testimony in Minnesota’s legislature to the effect that we don’t get much snow anymore because of global warming–false, snowfall has been increasing, not decreasing–and temperatures in Duluth are no longer expected to dip below 10 degrees. Less than two weeks after that testimony was given, the winter turned brutal and the temperature
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February 20, 2019 — John Hinderaker
I have written many times about the unwarranted “adjustments” to measured past temperatures by government agencies, which serve to inflate the modest warming that has occurred in recent decades. Organizations around the world (NOAA and NASA-GISS here in the U.S.) have done this over and over, usually surreptitiously. The Manhattan Contrarian shares my opinion that this misrepresentation of the historical record is the worst scandal in the history of science.
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February 11, 2019 — John Hinderaker
If you dispute the inflated and inconsistent claims of global warming alarmists, you are denounced as anti-science. You may even find yourself under investigation. But is catastrophic anthropogenic global warming actually a scientific theory at all? A fundamental principle of science is that a theory, to have any significance, must be falsifiable. Science proceeds by proposing a hypothesis, and figuring out what the hypothesis implies. Scientists then make real-world observations
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February 8, 2019 — John Hinderaker
Judith Curry is one of the world’s most respected climate scientists. On Wednesday, she testified before the House Committee on Natural Resources on the complexities and uncertainties that are too often unacknowledged in the debate over global warming. Her testimony is here and is worth reading in its entirety. Its rational, scientific approach contrasts strongly with the ill-informed hysteria that usually predominates on this topic. On pages 7-8 of her
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February 8, 2019 — Scott Johnson
As Steve noted in his update to “The Green New Deal and gerundive government,” the FAQ accompanying the release of the Green New Deal resolution was promptly removed by the resolution’s sponsors and deposited into an Orwellian memory hole. A close reading of the document — such as the one by David Harsanyi, say, or Rich Lowry — suggests that it boldly satirizes the worthy project to rescue our planet
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January 29, 2019 — John Hinderaker
When I was a kid, everyone knew the unofficial motto of the U.S. Postal Service, which was inscribed on the principal New York City post office: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” I think it was true, once, too. But not any more: Wednesday mail delivery canceled: The U.S. Postal Service announced late Tuesday afternoon
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January 21, 2019 — John Hinderaker
Regular readers know that we have been debunking global warming (aka “climate change”) hysteria for a long time. As data accumulate the realist position that we have espoused becomes ever stronger. While it is often useful to take a deep dive into the data, it is also helpful to step back and see the big picture. That is what Ken Haapala, President of the Science and Environmental Policy Project, did
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January 21, 2019 — Steven Hayward
The latest issue of Nature magazine has a fascinating article that goes some of the way in vindicating Ronald Reagan’s infamous “gaffe” about how trees cause air pollution (because they do), but offers much much more about the problems of politicized and supposedly “settled” climate science. The article is called “How Much Can Forests Fight Climate Change?“, and it walks through just how unsettled this question is. The subhed to
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January 16, 2019 — John Hinderaker
Liberals wax hysterical about global warming, mostly because it provides an opportunity for graft: politically connected businessmen make billions by manufacturing and selling wind and solar products that exist only because of government mandates and subsidies. These corrupt businessmen, in turn, donate many millions to the campaigns of politicians who vote for mandates and subsidies, who are mostly (but not entirely) Democrats. Meanwhile, the rest of us–those who consume electricity–pay
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