“… as we suffer through the hellish summer of 2011 … one lesson from the book is clear: Get used to it.” (Andrew Dessler)

A decade ago, the Texas A&M climate alarmist Andrew Dessler, long followed at MasterResource for his exaggerations and bad temperment, wrote an op-ed for the Houston Chronicle: “Texas is Vulnerable to Warming Climate” (July 10, 2011; updated August 17, 2011).

How does Professor Dessler’s op-ed read today? The short answer: not very well. The mad scientist should chill with some A/C (72^o, not 78^o) and focus on the real here-and-now problem: the state’s overbuilt wind and solar capacity that has wounded the Texas electrical grid (as in price spikes and greenouts).

Here is Dessler’s opinion-page editorial with my comments.…

“Senile, scientifically illiterate, grumpy old men are NOT pleased [with the arrival of Greta Thunberg to New York City and the United States].” (Andrew Dessler, August 28, 2019)

Anger, Disrespect

“The use of old, senile, scientifically illiterate men to promote climate change denial is truly a disgrace.” (Andrew Dessler, August 21, 2019)

“Who should be madder about calling people who reject climate science ‘climate deniers.’ Climate deniers, because it lumps them in with holocaust deniers? Or Holocaust deniers, because it lumps them in with climate deniers.” (Andrew Dessler, July 18, 2019)

“your puny consensus science is no match for my UNCERTAINTY MONSTER! Bwahahah!” “ma’am, this is Arbys. can I take your order?” (May 15, 2019 tweet exchange with Judith Curry)

“It’s awesome that Henri, an MIT student, misspelled [Richard] Lindzen’s name.…

“Is the human environment better because of increasing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the usage of carbon-based energies? The answer is a resounding yes. That is triumphant news, whether the human influence on climate is net ‘bad’ or net ‘good’ by a physical, stasis metric.”

Statistics and history matter. Particularly when a shared narrative is contradicted by the interaction of man and nature.

A recent Facebook post by Bjørn Lomborg cannot be emphasized enough in this regard. Over the last century, climate-related deaths have plummeted as societal wealth has overcome the limits to nature. I am reminded of an Alex Epstein quotation, mirroring a major theme of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels:

Nature doesn’t give us a stable, safe climate that we make dangerous. It gives us an ever-changing, dangerous climate that we need to make safe.

[Editor Note: It was during the Thanksgiving weekend 11 years ago that the Climategate’s unsettling oeuvre was first being disseminated and analyzed. This post summarizes some remembrances from that period.]

“The conflict between the two ideas about how science should be conducted–a closed system dominated by gatekeepers, or a more chaotic but less hierarchical open system–is the dominant story of the [Climategate] emails over more than a decade.” – Fred Pearce, The Climate Files (2010), p. 13.

“There is no doubt that these emails are embarrassing and a public-relations disaster for science.” – Andrew Dessler, “Climate E-Mails Cloud the Debate,” December 10, 2009.

Climategate lives in infamy. Then, and now, it is a case study of agendas driving science rather than science driving agendas.

A decade ago, climate alarmists and friends (including Dessler above) went into damage control.…