Julian Simon (1932–1998) died 22 years ago this week, just short of his 66th birthday, too young by today’s standards. But Simon Lives! moments are common, with the most recent being the President of the United States telling the world leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos:
…“[W]e must reject the perennial prophets of doom and their predictions of the apocalypse. They are the heirs of yesterday’s foolish fortune-tellers — and I have them and you have them, and we all have them, and they want to see us do badly…. They predicted an overpopulation crisis in the 1960s, mass starvation in the ’70s, and an end of oil in the 1990s. These alarmists always demand the same thing: absolute power to dominate, transform, and control every aspect of our lives.”
“This encyclopedic and even-handed survey of the evidence of global warming is a welcome corrective to the raging hysteria about the alleged dangers of global warming. [Thomas Gale] Moore demonstrates conclusively that global warming is more likely to benefit than to harm the general public.”
– Milton Friedman, back-cover endorsement, Thomas Gale Moore, Climate of Fear: Why We Shouldn’t Worry About Global Warming (1998).
“Of all my father’s accomplishments, I believe the one he was proudest of was his role in ending military conscription. I do not think he would be happy to be conscripted, posthumously, for someone else’s cause [of a carbon tax].” (David Friedman, below)
The son of the late Milton Friedman (1912–2006), David Friedman, called it “A Case of Posthumous Conscription.”
The controversy harks back to 2014 when Bob Inglis of RepublicEn (a fake, Left-funded Republican front group) chaired an event at the University of Chicago titled, “What Would Milton Friedman Do About Climate Change?”…
“To refine our estimates of climate sensitivity will require breakthroughs in climate physics and more high-quality measurements…. Both outcomes likely lie a couple decades hence….”
“Are Climate Model Projections too Hot?” Niskanen Center (downloaded January 19, 2020)
Climate activists, whether scientists or members of a nongovernmental organization (NGO), eschew direct debate. “The science is settled!” … “We must take action now!” … All to keep fossil fuels in the ground and let the consumers worry about energy affordability, reliability, and convenience.
But the holy grail of climate sensitivity to man-made emissions of greenhouse gases, the enhanced greenhouse effect, remains in stubborn dispute today as in the 1980s. The range of equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) is wide and not expected to come down soon.
The bottom end, as projected by models and accepted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is in net positive territory, according to leading climate economists.…