The claim is common that global warming is generating more and stronger hurricanes. (And other tropical cyclones. Technically, as Paul Homewood points out, these storms are called hurricanes when they develop over the Atlantic or eastern Pacific Oceans, cyclones when they form over the Bay of Bengal and the northern Indian Ocean, and and typhoons when they develop in the western Pacific.) Is it true? Not according to the empirical data. Those show that there has been no significant upward … [Read more...]
Chuck Todd Devotes an Hour to Attacking a Strawman
Chuck Todd, on a recent episode of Meet the Press, highlighted the issue of global warming and climate change. He unapologetically made it clear that he wasn’t interested in hearing from people on the opposing side of the scientific issue, stating: “We’re not going to debate climate change, the existence of it. The Earth is getting hotter. And human activity is a major cause, period. We’re not going to give time to climate deniers. The science is settled, even if political opinion is … [Read more...]
Do Health Risks from Mercury Justify Stringent Regulations on Coal-Fired Power Plants?
[Editor's Note: The announcement December 27, 2018, by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that it is revising cost findings behind its Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) ignited a firestorm of complaints on the ground that mercury is a known neurotoxin that can cause brain damage in infants and young people. While that is true, it's also true that the risk depends greatly on the degree of exposure---and there is compelling evidence that mercury emissions from coal-fired … [Read more...]
Why Christmas Won Over Greek Philosophy: PLATO . . . PARALLEL UNIVERSE . . . LOGOS
Logos (translated as “Word”) is a Greek idea first articulated by Heraclitus (535 - 475 BC). It postulated that our world makes sense because alongside our marvelous physical universe exists a parallel realm of reason and thought. Plato (428 - 348 BC ?) thought of Logos as the realm of truth, a parallel universe of Forms (including ideas, language and logic). That realm of Logos, Plato assumed, pre-existed our material world. The visible cosmos may be like a shadow, copy, or image of that true, … [Read more...]
Dumping CCS Is the Right Decision
Every once in a while—well, a lot more often than I wish—I miss a big story related to climate change and climate policy. Week before last, on my birthday, I missed a really big one: the decision by the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to reverse a critical piece of Obama-era energy regulation. Acting EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler—whom President Donald Trump nominated the following week to become permanent Administrator—announced December 6 that EPA would liberate … [Read more...]
A Million Here, a Million There—Pretty Soon You’re Talking about Real Penguins
Eighty years ago, a museum curator aboard a fishing trawler in the Indian Ocean got a shock felt around the world. In a net full of mundane fish, he found one he'd never expected to see. It was a coelecanth. Why hadn't he expected to see it? Because ichthyologists (fish scientists) believed it had gone extinct 65 million years before. Yet there it was, flopping around, all too alive to have gone extinct 65 million years ago. The discovery shook the world of marine biologists. Fast forward … [Read more...]
Is the Case for Drastic Climate Policy a Case of Misplaced Expertise?
Jonah Goldberg, writing about climate change and climate policy (yes, there really is a difference between the two) in National Review, hit the nail on the head when he said, "expertise doesn’t necessarily transfer over from one field to another." What he had in mind was the silliness of thinking that climate scientists, because they are (we'll concede the point for the sake of argument) experts about climate, are therefore also experts about what to do about it (assuming anything should be … [Read more...]
Are We “Lukewarmers”?
A friend of the Cornwall Alliance wrote us recently, saying: I've just read Roy Spencer's Global Warming Skepticism Busy People, and I am a little surprised at how much he concedes to the alarmists, e.g., there is warming, it is partially anthropogenic, a majority of scientists do believe in anthropogenic warming, a rise of 5 degrees Centigrade would be a problem, etc. Are these all positions with which Cornwall Alliance agrees? Roy describes himself early in the book as a "lukewarmer." Is … [Read more...]
Will Fighting Climate Change Make the World Cleaner?
This is the fourth and last in a series of answers to a common, popular defense of drastic measures to combat manmade global warming. For the first, click here; for the second, click here; and for the third, click here. Bob’s final argument was this: “On the other hand, if climate change isn’t our fault but we choose to act like it is, we still end up with a world less polluted and more enjoyable. And we will have done everything we can to protect the creation we have been made stewards of. I … [Read more...]
Is Failure to Fight Climate Change Really Suicidal?
This is the third in a series of answers to a common, popular defense of drastic measures to combat manmade global warming. For the first, click here, and for the second, click here. The third and fourth points “Bob” made were these: “For most people, I think this would be a no-brainer issue if it weren’t politicized. But if the above two points are true, your political party affiliation doesn’t matter. Desiring to see the world less polluted is non-partisan. Practically, if there is ANY … [Read more...]
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