“Pauses as long as 15 years are rare in the simulations, and ‘we expect that [real-world] warming will resume in the next few years,’ the Hadley Centre group writes…. Researchers … agree that no sort of natural variability can hold off greenhouse warming much longer.”
– Richard Kerr, Science (2009)
That’s Richard A. Kerr, the longtime, award-winning climate-change scribe for Science magazine, the flagship publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The article, “What Happened to Global Warming? Scientists Say Just Wait a Bit,” was published October 1, 2009.
The article is important in the history of climate thought because it captures neatly the (over)confidence of the scientists who turn to models to justify their faith that past overestimation will soon be reversed. Judith Curry’s recent discovery of F.…
“The only good national energy strategy is one premised on private property rights, voluntary exchange, and the rule of law. Not a central, government plan, but a decentralized we-the-people ‘plan’.”
Energy studies, energy plans. They are not new. We saw them in 1938, 1977, yesterday—and in years between.
Now, the smartest-guys-in-the-government-room will, once again, pontificate and propose more regulation and intervention on top of the tens of thousands of pages of directives that have built up in the last 40+ years. (The modern era of U.S. energy regulation began with Nixon’s wage-and-price-control order of August 1971.)
Usually, such studies come out with recommendations, which then turn into legislative proposals for a Congressional debate and a vote before reaching the President’s desk. But with President Obama legislating via Executive Order, expect the worst.…
“Here’s to a post-PTC world. One where, in Lisa Linowes words, ‘the industry shifts their business plans away from those based on tax avoidance to plans based on energy production’.”
Last month, the Institute for Energy Research (IER) held a policy luncheon on Capitol Hill to discuss the problems of wind power in light of the debate about whether to extend the long-standing (1992–) production tax credit (PTC). The event highlighted a new IER study calculating the “taker” and “payer” states from the PTC, Estimating the State-Level Impact of Federal Wind Energy.
I moderated the panel. Panelists included Travis Fisher (IER) and three leading grassroots activists: Lisa Linowes of New Hampshire, Tom Stacey from Ohio, and Kevon Martis of Michigan. Lisa, Tom, and Kevon are wind-power experts whose volunteer work is inspired by the economic waste and wholly unnecessary degradation of rural life.…