“We were motivated by the public and political controversy fostered by alarming predictions of impending catastrophic anthropogenic global warming [at] NASA …. Many of us felt these alarming and premature predictions … would eventually damage NASA’s reputation for excellent and objective science and engineering achievement.”
The U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) was established in 1990 in order to “assist the nation and the world to understand, assess, predict, and respond to human-induced and natural processes of global change.” Two reports have been released (2000 and 2009), and a third one is due out this year.
The whole (government) exercise from the beginning has been predictably politicized. The reports are a lawyer’s brief for climate alarmism and policy activism–complete with a call for expanded federal research dollars. But the lack of even-handedness with the physical science, no to mention the scientific method itself, has reached crisis proportions.…
“Some molecules are painted with a no export sign. Other molecules are painted with the OK to export sign, and there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason as to why some molecules are OK and some aren’t.”
– Rusty Braziel, RBN Energy LLC, quoted in “Crude export ban no match for lightest U.S. shale oil,” Fuel Fix, February 26, 2013.
“It’s not often you get to participate in a paradigm shift in an industry, and I think we are doing that now.”
– Anders Ekvall (Shell LNG), quoted in Harry Weber, “Natural Gas Industry Expects Big Things,” Houston Chronicle, April 20, 2013.
At the LNG 17 mega-conference in Houston last week, more than 5,000 industry professionals from 80+ countries, and thousands more visitors enjoying 200,000 square feet of exhibits, plotted to make natural gas a global commodity not unlike oil.…
“Government interventions are problematic, so intervene only when the case is fully proven.”
– Margaret Thatcher, Statecraft: Strategies for a Changing World. New York: HarperCollins, 2002, p. 453.
“An Inconvenient Truth About Margaret Thatcher: She Was a Climate Hawk,” declares Will Oremus in Slate. In “The Iron Lady’s Strong Stance on Climate Change” (Daily Climate, reposted at Climate Progress), author Douglas Fischer notes “how seriously [Margaret Thatcher] viewed the threat of climate change and the robustness, more than 20 years ago, of climate science and United Nations body tasked with assessing state of that science.”
True, UK Prime Minister Thatcher was the first and most important international figure to champion the cause of climate alarmism. But the above authors conveniently stop their discussion with her pronouncements in the early 1990s.…