“Many of the writers about ‘peak oil’ have moved on to ‘peak everything’ (Richard Heinberg) and ‘peak food’ (Paul Roberts). They apply the same flawed model that treats resources as static and ignores investment and innovation. This is especially telling since the model has failed so abysmally in the case of food and famine, as the record of Paul Ehrlich and his followers has shown.”

In his excellent book, Future Babble, Dan Gardner demonstrates empirically that the neo-Malthusians who have plagued us for the past half century have not only been egregiously wrong in their predictions; they have tended to insist that they were, in fact, correct, all contrary evidence notwithstanding. They accomplish this primarily by selective memory, such as greatly understating their original claims, or treating minor, regular difficulties (such as local famines) as confirmation of their apocalyptic visions.…

“Climate change is likely to increase the frequency of warmer winters and low snowpack.”

– Ben Chou (Natural Resources Defense Council), “California Needs Proactive Ways to Deal with Drought,” EnergyNewsData.com, April 3, 2015.

“Nature makes drought; man makes water shortages. Government water conservation policies, misinformed by the environmentalist ideology of the NRDC, are worsening the water shortage.” (below)

Ben Chou’s March 31, 2015 column on the Natural Resources Defense Council’s “Switchboard” website, cross posted on April 3rd at EnergyNewsData.com, requires rebuttal if we are going to deal with the California drought empirically and not ideologically.

Chou correctly writes that California’s April 2015 snowpack is indicative of the amount of water that can be carried forward into the hot summer months. Even so, water supplies are measured in California over a 5- and 10-year meteorological cycle.…

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.…

“The IPCC model looks more worthless by the day, but the authors needed explanations and accordingly invented them. My favorite was that property crimes would rise because warmer weather encouraged people to go outdoors and burglars would thrive. (The original working paper explained that this was a consequence of climate becoming more “pleasant,” but the published version is missing this.)”

There are supplies of and demands for just about everything.  Find a way to subsidize supply (say taxation), intensify demand (media) or both and soon you have a growth industry.  Like climate crisisology.

The crisis of our day started innocently, a possibly interesting use of research funds. In the 1970s, and into the 1980s, it was the story of a world facing a probably, if not inescapable, ice age. By the early 1990s, planetary warming had won the competition for funds and media attention.…