[Editor’s note: This post from 2011 is relevant today as the Losing Left tries to impugn the motives of the free-market climate/energy realists, one target being climatologist David Legates, recently profiled at MasterResource.
David Appell, part of the controversy back in 2011, in fact, reared his head again in the comments section recently at MasterResource. An active climate alarmist with very strong opinions, he hardly rebuted his rebutters. Science is supposed to be his thing; if he would like to answer for Gina McCarthy and US EPA here, he will be given the floor.]
The public editor at the New York Times, Arthur Brisbane, recently wrote in his weekly Public Editor column about the trustworthiness of Robert Bryce, the nation’s leading energy journalist who has graduated to being a top energy public policy scholar, period.…
SESSIONS: All right. Carbon pollution is CO2, and that’s really not a pollutant; that’s a plant food, and it doesn’t harm anybody except that it might include temperature increases. Let me ask you one more time: Are you asserting, just give me this answer; if you take the average of the models predicting how fast the temperature would increase, is the temperature in fact increasing less than that or more than that?
McCARTHY: I cannot answer that question specifically.
– Exchange between Senator Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) and Gina McCarthy (U.S. EPA), March 4, 2015.
The U.S. Senate Committee on Environmental & Public Works has sent this letter to U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy on April 1, 2015–and it is all about science and not parody. At a previous hearing, Administrator McCarthy claimed ignorance about climate model temperature predictions (above) but promised to answer the question(s) in writing.…
Jerry Taylor has written a lawyer’s brief for climate alarmism and open-ended forced energy transformation via the tax code. Might he like to demolish his new ideas in a second White Paper–“The Libertarian Case Against ‘The Conservative Case for a Carbon Tax'”? It is in his head and can be put on paper–if his emotions can get out of the way.
The intellectual case for government control of greenhouse gas emissions–the all-in cause of the anti-industrial neo-Malthusians–has always been suspect, not unlike earlier man-versus-earth outcries. But climate alarm has become weaker since its heyday (1988–98) for several reasons.
First, temperature rise has slowed significantly in the last 18 years (the warming “pause” or “hiatus“). Second, sensitivity estimates have been coming down toward long-held “skeptic” levels. Third, “fat tail” extreme-warming scenarios for risk analysis are under assault. …