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Judith Curry Looks for Middle Ground in the Contentious Climate Debate (Jerry North, can you help her?)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- August 27, 2010

“I am not afraid about the climate.”

– Judith Curry, quoted in Alexandre Mansur, “American Researcher Says That There Is Still a lot of Uncertainty About Global Warming, Época, May 1, 2010.

“Real Climate, I think they’ve damaged their brand. They started out doing something that people liked, but they’ve been too partisan in a scientific way.”

– Judith Curry, quoted in Eric Berger, “Judith Curry: On Antarctic sea ice, Climategate and skeptics.” August 18, 2010.

There is solid middle ground in the ever-contentious climate-change debate. And now is the time to welcome it, given that politics is not going to reverse in any detectable amount the human influence on climate.

And the shame of the post-Climategate era is that other scientists like Curry did not join her to right the wrongs of a profession that has become politicized, agendacized, and Malthusiancized.

Latest on the Death Spiral of Climate Alarmism (Is it time to focus on real environmental problems and not CO2?)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- August 26, 2010

Ken Green at MasterResource published an influential post, The Death Spiral for Climate Alarmism Continues (June 2, 2010), that began with two quotations:

“We have at most ten years—not ten years to decide upon action, but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions.”

– James Hansen, “The Threat to the Planet,” New York Review of Books, July 13, 2006.

“Desperation is setting in among climate alarmists who by their own math can see that the window is rapidly closing on ’saving the planet’.”

– Kenneth Green, ”A Death Spiral for Climate Alarmism, Redux?” MasterResource, September 30, 2009.

And what was true in June is even more true today as the failure to price carbon dioxide (CO2) is leaving Europe as the sacrificial lambs on an altar of climate-change inconsequentiality.…

A Skeptic of Climate Alarmism Speaks: Does Walter Cunningham Have More of a Case than His Critics Contend?

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- August 19, 2010

“As I have argued for years, we simply do not know the answer [to the sensitivity of climate to greenhouse gas forcing]. There is a wide margin of error in many of the ingredients that go into the [climate] models. For example, we do not know some of the radiative properties of the aerosols to a factor of 5. No matter how good your climate model is, you cannot compensate for that uncertainty. The range of uncertainty is broad enough to accommodate [Patrick] Michaels (well, maybe North) and [Jerry] Mahlman.”

– Gerald North (Texas A&M) to Rob Bradley (Enron), September 17, 1999

“One has to fill in what goes on between 5 km and the surface. The standard way is through atmospheric models. I cannot make a better excuse.”

– Gerald North (Texas A&M) to Rob Bradley (Enron), October 2, 1998

“We do not know much about modeling climate.

Obama Gives Oil and Gas a Cold Shoulder (Ducking Houston on his recent visit)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- August 18, 2010

Here Comes Ingenuity! Offshore Drilling Will Be Better, Cleaner, Safer in the New Era (Julian Simon speaks to us today)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- August 11, 2010

Milton Friedman on Mineral Resource Theory (remembering a giant of social thought)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- July 30, 2010

Why Cap-and-Trade Is Politically Failing: Cost, Cost, Cost (The Chamberlin study and his response to Michael Levi, Council on Foreign Relations)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- July 28, 2010

BP Fools the “Socially Responsible” Investors (‘Green’ Enron did too)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- July 20, 2010

A Free Market Energy Vision

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- July 16, 2010

2Q-2010 MasterResource Update: The Progress Continues

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- July 3, 2010