Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman explained “the key to science” this way: In general we look for a new law by the following process. First we guess it. Then we compute the consequences of the guess to see what would be implied if this law that we guessed is right. Then we compare the result of the computation to nature, with experiment or experience, compare it directly with observation, to see if it works. If it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. In that simple statement is … [Read more...]
A Humorous and Devastating Critique of Green Economics
Just a brief note to recommend the reading of Tim Worstall's Chasing Rainbows: How the Green Agenda Defeats Its Aims. For fullest enjoyment, understand from the start that you must imagine its whole text being said aloud by an Englishman in a tone riddled with sarcasm. Think of Fawlty Towers or some such. Worstall, a Fellow of the Adam Smith Institute, is an economist and businessman. His "Introduction" actually teaches some basic economic principles, such as comparative advantage and the … [Read more...]
Keeping People in the Dark is Easy—Just Keep Them in the Dark
It's long been clear that electricity, by putting enormous power at the fingertips of billions of ordinary people, has been crucial to their conquest of poverty. Just now, though, a short article by energy journalist Robert Bryce turned a new light on for me: Electricity is crucial to keeping people free, too. Why? Because information and its rapid, unrestricted sharing feed freedom. And electricity facilitates that rapid sharing of information---through telephones, radio, television, the … [Read more...]
Worried about Warming? What about Cooling?
While most of the global elite and politicians and media are worried that human action will usher in global warming, the more likely scenario for the next thirt years or more is global cooling. And while some warming would be mostly good for people and planet, cooling would not. That's the testimony of history. Humanity has always done better in warmer than in colder periods in history. Crops grow better, so food is more abundant. Cold snaps kill ten times as many people per day as heat waves. … [Read more...]
Why Solar and Wind Are Not the Future
Wind and solar are hailed as the future of our world. Are they? Wind farms were a familiar sight for me as they were an integral part of the landscape near my hometown in southern India. The general assumption was that these windmills would generate a significant amount of electricity to aid the energy sector that was struggling to meet soaring electricity demand. However, the wind farms turned out to be a burden, not a boon. They generated unreliable and expensive electricity that was … [Read more...]
What Do You Get When You Mix Socialism with Pursuit of Profits from Renewable Energy?
The latest from the climate alarmism's anti-capitalism department: Christiana Figueres, former Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (parent of the 2015 Paris climate agreement) and now a leader in "Mission 2020," an international cooperative effort to get global carbon dioxide emissions on a downward trend by 2020, is upset with heavy industry---especially (not surprisingly!) in the United States. She told Thomson Reuters Foundation News that heavy … [Read more...]
Can You Really Have Fun Debating Climate Change?
"Unsafe Space," dedicated to discussing serious issues in comedic fashion, did everyone a real service on January 22. It posted a panel discussion on climate change featuring scientists Jon Christensen (defending the alarmist view) and Willie Soon (defending the skeptics' view). It's a good discussion with plenty of give-and-take and at least a modicum of mutual respect. An abbreviated version in video is on YouTube, while the full version, audio only, is on Unsafe Space's own site (where … [Read more...]
Forget Climate Change, Defend America!
George Orwell, call your office. In what Huffington Post's Alexander Kaufman called "an Orwellian rhetorical shift away from a scientific reality," the Department of Defense "scrubbed its latest National Defense Strategy of all references to climate change." In all likelihood, Orwell would call the 30-year campaign for climate alarmism---with all its oxymoronic appeals to "scientific consensus," its sleight-of-hand temperature data homogenizations, its revisions of past data to exaggerate … [Read more...]
After 20 Years, No New Global Temperature Record
[The article below by Cornwall Alliance Senior Fellow Dr. Roy W. Spencer, reprinted from his blog by permission, reports that the linear warming trend from 1970--2017 was 0.13 deg. C per decade. The computer climate models on which the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, and the negotiators of the 2015 Paris climate agreement rely simulate a warming trend of 0.216 deg. C per decade, i.e., two-thirds faster than actually measured, and that … [Read more...]
Is Capitalism Bad for the Environment? The Eighth Commandment Offers a Clue
A common charge by environmentalists is that capitalism is bad for the environment. Indeed, Christiana Figueres, former secretary-general of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, opined that climate negotiations in Paris in late 2014 offered the world its best opportunity to replace the reigning global economic order (capitalism, or free markets) with another (socialism, or government-planned economies). But is capitalism really bad for the environment? One of the Ten … [Read more...]
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