Climate
August 24, 2019 — John Hinderaker
Some years ago, Dr. Tim Ball wrote that climate scientist Michael Mann “belongs in the state pen, not Penn State.” At issue was Mann’s famous “hockey stick” graph that purported to show a sudden and unprecedented 20th century warming trend. The hockey stick featured prominently in the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report (2001), but has since been shown to be wrong. The question, in my view, is whether it was an
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August 22, 2019 — John Hinderaker
Three stories in today’s news–none of them the type of story I would normally write about–illustrate a common theme. The first is from Britain, where eco-crusaders Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are being accused of hypocrisy for repeatedly zipping back and forth to Nice on a private jet. Meanwhile, Prince William booked his family on a £73 commercial flight to Scotland, in what is viewed as a rebuke of his
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August 21, 2019 — John Hinderaker
This story is a few days old, but worth noting nevertheless. This account is from the Science and Environmental Policy Project’s The Week That Was: Solar physicist Nir Shaviv reluctantly granted science journalist Doron Levin an interview, although Shaviv was skeptical that it would be published. A similar interview to a reporter for Bloomberg was reject by its editorial board. Leven assured Shaviv that Forbes would publish the interview online.
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August 18, 2019 — John Hinderaker
Steve wrote on Thursday about Nature magazine publishing a blacklist of prominent global warming realists. Steve and I were both happy to be on the list. Others have responded in various ways. Australia’s Joanne Nova created this hilarious parody of the cover of Nature, “The International Journal of Fashions In Science.” Click to enlarge: Lord Monckton, on the other hand, is not amused. He has written to various parties threatening
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August 15, 2019 — John Hinderaker
Part of the Left’s rationale for shifting from “global warming” to “climate change” was a desire to capitalize on severe weather events by claiming they are symptomatic of “climate change.” While many people wouldn’t mind their region getting a little warmer, none of us want to see more hurricanes, tornadoes, floods or droughts. So in recent years, we have been bombarded with claims that every adverse weather event is somehow
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August 15, 2019 — Steven Hayward
Nature Communications, a former science publication, disgraced itself this week with an article that goes to absurd lengths to indict the media for giving equal time to “climate change contrarians” (though the “denier” epithet turns up for duty soon enough) over “expert climate change scientists,” among whom they include, for example, the deranged Michael Mann. You can take in the whole article here: “Juxtaposition of Climate Change Contrarians and Scientists
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August 6, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
Let’s start by identifying what’s not driving it. The surge in immigration from Central America to the United States is not caused by violence in the countries the migrants are leaving. As Matt Sussis points out in the video below, since 2011 the murder rate has declined significantly in Guatemala and Honduras. It has declined significantly in El Salvador since 2015. Some on the left claim that climate change is
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August 4, 2019 — Steven Hayward
It hardly needs mentioning that enlarging government power to “fight climate change” is nowadays a central purpose of the left. Well, the Jerusalem Post reports on a scheme that just might change this: Climate Change Is a Jewish Issue [T]here’s a much more immediate and dire threat to our future against which Jewish federations and advocacy organizations have not devoted nearly enough resources. By “our” future I mean not only
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July 22, 2019 — John Hinderaker
Francis Menton sticks it to the global warming lobby, good and hard: If you follow closely the subject of hypothesized human-caused global warming, you probably regularly experience, as I do, a strong sense of cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, you read dozens of pieces from seemingly authoritative media sources, as well as from important political officeholders, declaring that the causal relationship between human CO2 emissions and rapidly rising global
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July 22, 2019 — Steven Hayward
As I’ve been pointing our for more than a decade, the most ominous contradiction of the environmental left these days is the way in which they champion the rights of nature while going along with the rest of the left in denying human nature, let alone the natural rights of humans—which is the central premise of democratic self-government. The result, as I have been warning, is the increasingly open anti-democratic
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July 18, 2019 — John Hinderaker
From the current The Week That Was, the invaluable compilation of climate-related information from the Science and Environmental Policy Project: Led by John Christy, the Earth System Science Center, The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH), has 40 years of direct measurement of atmospheric temperature trends, yet the IPCC and others cling to surface measurements with very poor global coverage, with data contaminated by the urban heat-island effect. The IPCC
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July 1, 2019 — John Hinderaker
I have written many times about what I consider the worst scandal in the history of science: efforts by the curators of global temperature records to rewrite the past so as to produce an illusion of warming that is not reflected in the temperatures that have actually been recorded. No Tricks Zone picks up the theme in a post titled “Adjusted ‘Unadjusted Data: NASA Uses The ‘Magic Wand Of Fudging’,
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June 24, 2019 — John Hinderaker
The Science and Environmental Policy Project is one of the best sources of information on the climate debate. Its The Week That Was is a great way to stay current on developments. This week, along with much else, Ken Haapala, President of SEPP, addresses the fiendishly complicated, and still not understood, role of clouds: One of the disturbing characteristics of many politicians, “experts” on climate science, and even established scientific
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June 21, 2019 — Steven Hayward
Tomorrow marks the 50th anniversary of one of the iconic moments of modern environmental history—the infamous Cuyahoga River fire in Cleveland. Things were so bad, the legend goes, that rivers were catching fire! But most of what you think you know about that story is incomplete or inaccurate, argues Jonathan H. Adler, the Johan Verheij Professor of Law at Case Western Reserve University School of Law. In a now-famous article,
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June 19, 2019 — Steven Hayward
“The Empty Radicalism of the Climate Apocalypse” is the title of an article in the latest issue of the National Academies of Science journal Issues in Science and Technology by my very smart and sensible progressive (not always an oxymoron!) pal Ted Nordhaus of the Breakthrough Institute. While Ted agrees with the standard or “consensus” view of climate change risk, that’s about all he agrees with the climatistas about. That’s
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June 15, 2019 — John Hinderaker
One of the things that make climate science interesting is that it is in its infancy. It is a Wild West era in which hardly anything is settled, and just about everything is up for grabs. I wrote here about the fact that the impact of water vapor, CO2 and other greenhouse gases on global temperatures is logarithmic, which means that their effect declines rapidly as concentrations increase. That is
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June 12, 2019 — John Hinderaker
One of the many problems with the Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming theory–now disguised under the anodyne title of “climate change,” which includes both drought and floods, among other things–is that the impact of a greenhouse gas like CO2 on the Earth’s temperature is logarithmic. That is to say, the effect is largest with the first molecules of CO2, and diminishes as the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere grows. The
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