Climate
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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January 14, 2019 — Steven Hayward
Okay, I’m managing to stifle my non-stop laughter at the “Green New Deal,” sobered partly by the realization that our coveted Green Weenie Award is not big enough to cover the serial madness that will be the Green New Deal once the specifics of it start to take shape in actual legislative proposals. Right now it is at the vague generalization stage. Except that environmentalists are making clear what they
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January 4, 2019 — Steven Hayward
As I suggested in my latest Loose Ends post earlier today, our standards for giving out one of our highly coveted Green Weenie Awards have been significantly raised. You can’t get one any more just for proposing a Green New Deal or something economically illiterate. You have to do a lot better than that. Like Samuel Miller-McDonald, who writes at The Trouble today that perhaps the only hope for avoiding
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December 29, 2018 — Scott Johnson
I am afraid that I am inextricably linked to Dan Rather. He will appear in my obituary if I am accorded one, although I think I may have done a few more significant things in my life than help expose the fraud he aided and abetted in the 2004 presidential election. The true history of that fraud has already receded into the mists of ancient history. Although Rather is still
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December 27, 2018 — Steven Hayward
As everyone knows, climate orthodoxy holds that climate change from carbon emissions is going to make extreme weather more extreme. So I won’t hold my breath waiting to hear the climatistas commenting on this story from the Bezos Bulletin Washington Post today: 2018 will be the first year with no violent tornadoes in the United States In the whirlwind that is 2018, there has been a notable lack of high-end twisters.
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December 13, 2018 — John Hinderaker
Manhattan Contrarian asks: When Will It Be OK To Laugh At The Climate Campaigners? A great opportunity to demonstrate your earnestness and fervor as a climate campaigner has been the latest UN climate confab, known as “COP 24,” taking place in Katowice, Poland this week and last. 22,000 bureaucrats and functionaries have gathered to tell the world that it must promptly do away with the evil fossil fuels and transition
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December 10, 2018 — Steven Hayward
Here in America we have Civil War re-enactors, and it seems France has 1968 Paris Riot re-enactors. The only thing missing is Charles de Gaulle. Emmanuel Macron isn’t even fit to be de Gaulle’s stand-in poodle. I notice his public approval ratings are around 18 percent. No wonder Trump smiles when they stand together at G-20 meetings. I’ve been wanting for months to write up a retrospective look at the
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November 24, 2018 — Scott Johnson
The usual suspects are touting the release of the Fourth National Climate Assessment (Volume II) yesterday. As far as I can tell it is the usual global warming rubbish recast in the name of “climate.” Matt Daily considers the political ramifications of the report in the Politico article “Trump’s dire climate report hands ammunition to Democrats.” This is what it’s all about, isn’t it? Let’s turn over our resources and
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November 23, 2018 — John Hinderaker
As part of its effort to promote global warming hysteria, the New York Times has published an interactive feature titled How Much Hotter Is Your Home Town Than When You Were Born? The Times page will show you how many 90-degree-plus days there are currently, compared with the year of your birth (or 1960, which is as far into the past as the Times goes). This is a rather random
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November 21, 2018 — John Hinderaker
Barack Obama is in the news again. On Monday evening, he gave a talk in Chicago at the Obama Foundation Summit, whatever that is. I haven’t tried to track down a video, but NBC News reports on the event: Obama, speaking at the Obama Foundation Summit on Monday night, said the answers already exist to solve many of the problems facing both the U.S. and the world, but that the
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November 14, 2018 — Steven Hayward
About ten days back Nature magazine generated a lot of media attention for a study it published that purported to prove that the oceans were warming considerably faster than previously thought–up to 60 percent more. Naturally this set off the climatistas (“The study drew considerable media attention, including from The Post,” as the Washington Post laconically put it), as though they need additional confirmation of their eschatology. There’s just one problem—one
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November 13, 2018 — Steven Hayward
Polar bears became the mascot of the climatistas a while ago, but at least in one part of far northern Canada, there are too many of them: There are too many polar bears in parts of Nunavut and climate change hasn’t yet affected any of them, says a draft management plan from the territorial government that contradicts much of conventional scientific thinking. The proposed plan — which is to go
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November 12, 2018 — John Hinderaker
This is a theme that Steve and I have recurred to many times on this site. Today it is voiced by Freeman Dyson, one of the world’s most eminent scientists. Dyson, a theoretical physicist and professor emeritus of Mathematical Physics and Astrophysics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, is famous among other things for unifying the three versions of quantum electrodynamics. He has been a harsh critic of
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October 25, 2018 — Steven Hayward
It gets tiresome to note the limitations and lamosity of niche wind power, but who’d have thought that wind power might also make global warming worse. But that’s just what a new Harvard study reported recently the MIT Technology Review concludes. Wide-scale US wind power could cause significant warming Wind power is booming in the United States. It’s expanded 35-fold since 2000 and now provides 8% of the nation’s electricity. The US
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October 9, 2018 — Steven Hayward
Did you hear the news: the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is out with a big new report on climate change, and you’ll never believe what it says! The headline is that scientists say we have only ten years left to save the planet! It’s Green Groundhog Day! Again. Or deja vu all over again, as that famous climate scientist Yogi Berra once put it. (Or was that the
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September 17, 2018 — John Hinderaker
The Science and Environmental Policy Project produces a weekly newsletter on climate-related subjects, The Week That Was. I highly recommend subscribing to TWTW as the easiest way to keep abreast of climate news. This week’s edition begins, not for the first time, with a famous quotation from Richard Feynman, one of the greatest of 20th Century scientists: It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart
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September 13, 2018 — Steven Hayward
• As has already been noted here in the latest Green Weenie Award, the climatistas are all spun up to say that Hurricane Florence proves that catastrophic climate change is upon us and that we need to hand over our car keys to Al Gore right now. If you pay attention to extreme weather trends, you’ll know that the period between Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and last year saw no
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