“The Master Resource people are whores of the fossil fuel industry. (Yes, that certainly includes you.)” – David Appell to author, March 5, 2014

If temperament and dramatis personae matter, the climate alarmists lose resoundingly to their scientific critics. I have gotten to know the quite reasonable, friendly Roy Spencer, John Christy, Craig D. Idso, Richard Lindzen, and other leaders of the so-called climate realist, global lukewarming school. And Marlo Lewis et al. (CEI); James Taylor, Sterling Burnett, et al. (Heartland); Craig Rucker, Marc Morano, et al. at CFACT; and many more on the advocacy side.

All of “us” know the difference between straight analysis and advocacy versus ad hominem argumentation. Our side is polite … but tough on naked pleas for government authoritarianism or civil disruption by climate alarmists/forced energy transformationists.…

“Many people think that the threat of ‘global warming’ arose only towards the end of the twentieth century…. Climate change, either natural or anthropogenic, has been discussed from the classical age onwards, evolving from the expected benefits of climate engineering to today’s fear of global disaster.”

– Hans von Storch and Nico Stehr, “Climate Change in Perspective,” Nature, June 8, 2000, p. 615

It is all gloom, what Michael Mann cautioned against as “doomism.”[1] Such alarm has been the mainstream narrative—and wrong—since the 1960s. And warnings about how exaggeration can backfire (New York Times: “In Climate Debate, Exaggeration Is a Pitfall“) have been thrown to the wind in the futile, costly pursuit of Net Zero.

This post presents the climate alarm quotations of today with the quotations from Paul Ehrlich and the Club of Rome in the late 1960s/early 1970s for historical perspective.…

Ed. Note: Jane Shaw Stroup blogs at two websites: Jane Takes On History and Liberty and Ecology Blog. The post below can be accessed here.

Each year, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) has a dinner in Washington, D.C., honoring the economist Julian Simon, who died in 1998. Simon was a rare optimist in the fields of population and natural resources. He disagreed with most environmentalists of his day (especially in the 1980s through 1990s). They feared passionately that growing population would overwhelm agriculture and industry and that the world would run out of natural resources such as oil and minerals.

Instead, Simon thought that more births are a good thing and was sure that resources would not disappear. His upbeat views were widely disparaged.

Ecologist Garrett Hardin called him “Dr.…

“We believe energy should be in an upward spiral. Energy is the foundational engine of our civilization. The more energy we have, the more people we can have, and the better everyone’s lives can be. We should raise everyone to the energy consumption level we have, then increase our energy 1,000x, then raise everyone else’s energy 1,000x as well.” (- Techno-Optimist Manifesto, below)

Add a new name to the powerful critics of climate alarmism and forced energy transformation. Marc Andreessen is the author of The Techno-Optimist Manifesto, which draws upon the Julian Simon tradition of free minds and free markets to solve real challenges. This is a refreshing anecdote to the doom-and-gloom neo-Malthusians–and a threat to the climate industrial complex.

Sure enough, the critics are out with swords. Having posted The Techno-Optimist Manifesto on LinkedIn to the Climate Change Professionals Group, I was asked: “How is this diatribe from consume-more economics suitable for climate change professionals group??”…