I saw a Space.com article today entitled, Can Venus teach us to take climate change seriously? While Space.com writers should know quite a bit about the other planets, the article was a fount of misinformation and gross exaggeration. The obvious purpose of the article was scare us into taking increasing carbon dioxide levels seriously, following on the Fourth National Climate Assessment (NC4) report (which I’m still trying to digest). After repeating the NC4 claim that “10 percent of the U.S. … [Read more...]
Pritzker Wages War on Ideal Climate for Illinois Crop Conditions
Newly-elected Democratic Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker said “I believe in science” in his inaugural address but then promptly said he would take action to combat ideal climate conditions for Illinois crops. Trumpeting false and debunked climate scare tactics, Pritzker signaled he would take action to restrict carbon dioxide emissions and fight the recent climate conditions that have fostered record crop output on a nearly annual basis. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) projects Illinois … [Read more...]
Has There Been a Dramatic Increase in Ocean Temperatures?
A pastor recently wrote to the Cornwall Alliance, I am currently responding to an online debate over a new report over rising ocean temperatures. The report says that once the raw data is passed through new methods of calibration and bias it shows a dramatic increase in ocean temperatures. I seem to remember that somewhere around the mid 1990’s that the people recording ocean temperatures changed their methods because the traditional recordings were not showing any increase in ocean … [Read more...]
Is Global Warming Causing More and Stronger Hurricanes?
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...]
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