[Editor Note: For several years, Bradley published his “Political Energy” series at Forbes.com. This particular post, published on March 25, 2016, received 6,146 views. Given the lawsuits against ExxonMobil and other energy companies alleging a conspiracy to hide from the public the postulated delirious effects of anthropogenic climate change from fossil fuel burning, his major points remain pertinent today.] This article follows:

The Left has declared another war on Exxon Mobil. No, it’s not about high prices and high profits, as it has been before. The new charge is that the world’s largest private-sector energy company knew about the dangers of global warming back in the 1970s and 1980s from its own internal scientific investigation.

Therefore, Exxon should have disclosed to investors and other parties that its carbon-based business model had special risks.…

“The multitude of smoking guns in the Climategate emails made it a war zone. And the ‘missing heat’ raised by Climategater Kevin Trenberth plagues high-sensitivity warmists today.”

“You can be happy and optimistic…. The dense (mineral) energy era (fossil fuels) has been a boom to you, me, and virtually everyone. CO2 is greening the ecosphere while climate-related deaths plummet. And the Paris Climate Accord is failing–a good political outcome for the developing countries in particular.”

A recent post at DesmogUK, titled Why the Climategate Hack was More than an Attack on Science, caught my eye. Funny how the apologists have to defend an event that happened a decade ago! They would love to just ignore it and move on. But in clear words, sentences, and in English, science was tortured in the name of a cause.…

” … climate scientists cannot conduct controlled experiments on the Earth…. Instead they use … Global Climate Models, or GCMs–mathematical representations of the Earth that run on computers.”

“Processes operating at smaller scales [than 100 km], such as clouds, cannot be represented explicitly in the models but just instead be parameterized.”

“Parameterizations … [have] ad hoc constructions that are tuned so the model produces a realistic present-day climate. Consequently, parameterizations are one of the largest sources of uncertainly in GCMs.”

– Andrew Dessler and Edward Parson, The Science and Politics of Global Climate Change: A Guide to the Debate (Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 19–20.

The above explanation by climate scientist Andrew Dessler (co-author Parson is a lawyer/public policy specialist) opens the door to asking the question: are climate models ready for prime time?…

This continues my three-part review of Andrew Dessler’s primer on the physical science and political economy of climate change, Introduction to Modern Climate Change (2nd edition: 2016).

Part I, “Suggestions for More Interdisciplinary Scholarship, Less Advocacy,” brought attention to the uneven treatment of issues in science, economics, and public policy that tainted the primer. I questioned the Deep Ecology assumption of optimal nature, wherein, according to Dessler, “any change in climate, either warming or cooling, will result in overall negative outcomes for human society” (p. 146).

This seems exactly wrong in our interglacial period when climate-related fatalities have fallen dramatically and agricultural production has soared thanks to warmth but particularly to fossil-fueled capitalism. Incentives and wealth have proven more than a match for the vicissitudes of weather and climate. As Alex Epstein (The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, pp.…