The European Union is very concerned about climate.
But its concern is not principally about the scares emanating from the assumption-driven (Malthus in/Malthus out) studies regarding man-made climate change. The EU’s leaders fear that the Old Continent’s self-declared “leadership” in the “world war against climate change” might not be joined–and thus will be rendered ineffective in the global context. And the politicians know that all-pain/no-gain climate policy will increasingly trouble the voters, who must be placated.
This is a bitter pill given that the U.S. presidential elections brought into office the environmentally oriented Barack Obama and the alarmist dream team (Carol Browner, John Holdren, etc.). Europe felt like its efforts to curb emissions would enter a new phase, where the rest of the world would have progressively joined forces and leveled the playing field on pricing carbon emissions.…
Continue ReadingJuly 17, 1955, was the first time electricity generated by a U.S. nuclear power plant flowed into a utility grid. In what then was an experiment, Utah Power & Light plugged in the Argonne National Laboratory experimental boiler water reactor, BORAX-III.
The plant produced merely 2 megawatts for more than an hour, as planned. Since then, the U.S. nuclear industry has steadily improved their ability to effectively manage the operations and maintenance of nuclear power plants. Now, more than 50 years after that first nuclear power supply, America lags far behind even developing nations in new construction. New roadblocks threaten to further erode progress in the U.S. Whether this is good or not I will leave to the reader, but here is a snap-shot of the situation facing the U.S.
Significant Global Growth
Today, 436 nuclear power plants are in operation in 30 countries with a total capacity of 370 GW, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).…
Continue Reading[Editor’s note: J. Scott Armstrong and Kesten C. Green, first time guest posters, are leading researchers in the field of forecasting. Scott Armstrong is a Professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and Kesten Green is a Senior Research Fellow at the Business and Economic Forecasting Unit at Monash University]
We have recently proposed a model that provides forecasts that are over seven times more accurate than forecasts from the procedures used by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
This important finding, which we report in an article titled “Validity of climate change forecasting for public policy decision making” in the latest issue of the International Journal of Forecasting, is the result of a collaboration between climate scientist Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and ourselves.…
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