Climate
April 11, 2023 — Steven Hayward
As everyone knows, the increase in home runs a couple decades back was due mostly to steroid use, but it turns out that all major league sluggers need for their home run totals to soar is more carbon dioxide emissions. I wish we could say we’re making this up: Baseball Home Runs Are Increasing Thanks to Climate Change, Study Says In a paper published Friday in the Bulletin of the
»
March 31, 2023 — Steven Hayward
It is hard to single out the most egregious demagogue in the U.S. Senate, but near or at the top of my list is Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse. He likes to blast “dark money” even though Democrats by far receive more so-called “dark money” than conservatives or Republicans. (I’m updating my periodic Lexicon of Political Terms accordingly, to reflect that “dark money” means “donations from the private sector that
»
March 19, 2023 — Steven Hayward
English majors are fast disappearing from our colleges and universities, and with good reason. Here’s a current summer course offering from Johns Hopkins University: Climate Fiction and Capitalist Accumulation – AS.060.186 This course will examine the relationship between capitalist accumulation, the climate crisis, and contemporary climate fiction. What is capitalist accumulation? How has this process led to the contemporary climate crisis? What ideas constitute its ideological apparatus? How do contemporary
»
March 15, 2023 — Steven Hayward
You can’t make this up, though of course you can, because everything reduces to climate change these days, except for when it can be reduced to racism, but so far the narrative makers haven’t been able to come up with the racism angle to the SVB collapse. (I predict we’ll see it by the end of the week.) Death of a Climate Bank What hasn’t received as much attention is
»
March 2, 2023 — Steven Hayward
Herewith an omnibus post on the climate and energy scene for today (though I could do this at the top of each hour every day): • Did you notice how the mainstream media rushed to mention that the Department of Energy assigned “low confidence” to their finding that COVID-19 likely originated from a lab leak in Wuhan? How come the mainstream media never mentions the “low confidence” scientists often assign
»
February 14, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Reason has posted statistician Aaron Brown’s excellent column “The shameless attack on a climate change dissenter.” The “dissenter” is Steven F. Koonin, a University Professor at New York University with appointments in the Stern School of Business, the Tandon School of Engineering, and the Department of Physics. He served in the Energy Department under the Obama administration (“where his portfolio included the climate research program and energy technology strategy”) and
»
February 8, 2023 — Scott Johnson
I thought the flight of the Chinese spy balloon across the United States was a national embarrassment, but it was nothing compared to President Biden’s State of the Union performance last night. I thought he hit the high point with his congratulation of Kevin McCarthy for ascending to the Speakership in the first few seconds of his speech. The speed of the descent varied, but it was downhill all the
»
February 4, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Every day, the agenda-driven press cranks out hundreds of articles about our rapidly warming planet. But is the Earth, in fact, warming rapidly? Or warming at all? At Watts Up With That, Christopher Monckton points out that the facts don’t support the hype: There has been no trend in the UAH global mean lower-troposphere temperature anomalies since September 2014: 8 years 5 months and counting. As always, the New Pause
»
January 25, 2023 — John Hinderaker
China is the world’s number one emitter of carbon dioxide. If you take the Left’s global warming hysteria seriously, nothing can be done without China (and also India) drastically curbing their emissions. If everyone in North America dropped dead, it would do no measurable good for the world’s climate, if you believe the Leftists’ numbers. So if liberals were really serious about climate change, they would be looking hard at
»
January 19, 2023 — John Hinderaker
If John Kerry’s lips are moving, you can be pretty sure he is saying something that isn’t true. But miracles happen: at Davos on Tuesday, Kerry blurted out the truth. Maybe because it was on a subject that is close to his heart, money. Legal Insurrection reports: In his remarks, Kerry also spoke about the task of keeping the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius alive. “So,
»
January 19, 2023 — Steven Hayward
Many of our major cities today face out of control homelessness, rising crime, a collapsed central business district because of COVID, and poor public schools. But many of our mayors know what to do about . . . climate change. The midwits at Axios report on a poll of mayors asking what “tools” they want to fight climate change. Guess what? They want more power. Who could have seen that
»
January 10, 2023 — John Hinderaker
It doesn’t come as any surprise to regular Power Line readers that the politically and economically motivated climate hysteria with which we are constantly bombarded is false. This piece by Javier Vinós at Watts Up With That, titled “Good 2022 Climate News the MSM didn’t tell you,” does an excellent job of summing up the reality that is usually obscured. As Vinos says, there has been mild warming during the
»
January 10, 2023 — Steven Hayward
There are a couple of noteworthy passages in Fed Chairman Jerome Powell’s speech delivered earlier today over in Sweden about central bank independence, such as: [W]e should “stick to our knitting” and not wander off to pursue perceived social benefits that are not tightly linked to our statutory goals and authorities. . . [W]ithout explicit congressional legislation, it would be inappropriate for us to use our monetary policy or supervisory tools
»
January 5, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Some years ago, environmental alarmists decided to hedge their bets by talking about “climate change” rather than “global warming.” These days, any inconvenient weather event is chalked up to “climate change.” If a tornado hits Florida, it’s climate change. If rain spoils your picnic, it’s climate change. But are severe weather events actually increasing? No, they are not: [D]ata for all year 2022 tropical storms shows that global wide, storms
»
January 1, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Dr. John Christy is one of the world’s top climate experts. In this interview on BizNewsTV, he lays out some of the basics and explains why climate hysteria is unwarranted. It is a good antidote to the anti-scientific extremism that usually typifies this subject:
»
January 1, 2023 — Steven Hayward
I usually eschew making predictions—especially about the future—but one prediction for 2023 I can confidently make is that liberals will continue being idiots, most especially about their new religion: c****** c*****. Some people think this letter to the Washington Post is a Sokal-style hoax, but how could you tell? I’m going to treat it as genuine; after all, the Post did. Dear Margo: I have a suggestion for how you
»
December 9, 2022 — Steven Hayward
Who or what publication deserves to be regarded as the worst news media outlet in the country (or the world)? Chances are it is the one in your nearest metro area. Wait—how can that possibly be? I dunno, but if we ask the media, this is likely the answer they’d come up with. About 15 years ago I co-authored a book about air pollution and the Clean Air Act. I
»
