EPA last August released a new rule requiring America's natural gas drilling industry to reduce methane emissions by 40% to 45% in ten years. EPA's own estimate at global warming to be prevented? An undetectable 0.002 degree Celsius. The Wall Street Journal rightly opined: The rule will ... do immediate harm to a drilling industry that is already under pressure from falling global energy prices. The shale gas revolution has created hundreds of thousands of jobs, reduced costs for U.S. … [Read more...]
Getting a Grasp on Grid Reliability Issues with Wind and Solar
Critics of calls for rapid replacement of coal and natural gas with wind and solar to power the grid often argue that the intermittency of wind and solar destabilize the electrical power grid, making brownouts and blackouts, which are costly and often life threatening, more likely. The basic point is that simple to make, but its explanation and support are more difficult. A new post at Judith Curry's Climate Etc. blog, by a guest author identified simply as "Planning Engineer," develops the … [Read more...]
Never Underestimate Your Opponent—Coming to Grips with the Paris Climate Agreement
Master Sun [Tzu] talks often about deception and therefore warns against being deceived by the enemy and underestimating their ability. ‘He who exercises no forethought but makes light of his opponents is sure to be captured by them.’ It’s important to properly assess your opponent without prejudice or assumption. Many skeptics of catastrophic, anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) and therefore opponents of a legally binding treaty to limit carbon dioxide emissions to fight it, including me, … [Read more...]
Whose Policies Kill More People: ISIS…or Greenpeace?
Approximately 200,000 people have died due to global terrorism in the last 10 years. During the same time, many millions of people (mostly women and children) have died due to policies promoted by Greenpeace and other “green” organizations (e.g. anti-DDT, anti-golden rice, anti-fossil fuel). I’ve said it before…I don’t really care where our energy comes from…as long as it is abundant and affordable. Until someone comes up with an alternative energy source with those two characteristics, … [Read more...]
Is Our Position on Global Warming “Baffling”?
In our current public dialogue, people don’t often encounter our position on global warming, so when they do, they can find it surprising, even “baffling,” as one website visitor on the second day of COP21, the UN climate summit in Paris, put it. But if they take the time to investigate why we hold our position, we think they'll at least no longer be baffled, even if they're not persuaded. If we were persuaded by the empirical evidence that human use of fossil fuels was causing global … [Read more...]
Preventing Climate Change does Not Help the Poor, It Dooms Them!
Many climate scientists argue that we need to mitigate global warming because otherwise it will be the poor who will be hurt the most. Apparently these scientists do not understand their own models. Projections from climate models are based on the rates of poverty reduction, with the highest (‘worst’) temperature projections resulting when the poorest people in the world increase their incomes from $246 (measured in constant 1990 USD) to $49,000 per year (approximately equal to U.S. GDP per … [Read more...]
Climate Policies Kill through Fuel Poverty
Deepak Lal, one of the world’s leading development economists, wrote in his book Poverty and Progress: Realities and Myths about Global Poverty: The greatest threat to the alleviation of the structural poverty of the Third World is the continuing campaign by western governments, egged on by some climate scientists and green activists, to curb greenhouse emissions, primarily the CO2 from burning fossil fuels. … [I]t is mankind’s use of the mineral energy stored in nature’s gift of fossil fuels … … [Read more...]
Bill Gates Gets It on Wind and Solar
In an interview published in The Atlantic, billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates had two very astute observations about wind and solar energy: On the limits of wind power and solar photovoltaic cells: Wind has grown super-fast, on a very subsidized basis. Solar, off a smaller base, has been growing even faster—again on a highly subsidized basis. But it’s absolutely fair to say that even the modest R&D that’s been done, and the various deployment incentives that are there, have worked … [Read more...]
Climate Skeptics: Bought By Fossil Fuel Companies?
This video is worth watching and sharing. Well-known scientists, scholars, and policy leaders respond to accusations of receiving money from oil companies, and reveal where their funding really comes from. … [Read more...]
India Dances toward Paris
India last week announced its "climate action plan" in preparation for December's climate summit in Paris, and the featured points grabbed the world's attention: 40% increase of "clean [i.e., CO2-free] energy" by 2030; reduced CO2 "emission intensity" by 33% from 2005 levels by 2030; calling for wealth countries of the West to help it meet the costs of these efforts. That last point is the one to be taken most seriously. As for the first two, well, there's lots of smoke and mirrors, but … [Read more...]
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 48
- 49
- 50
- 51
- 52
- …
- 54
- Next Page »
