“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the states of facts and evidence.” (John Adams, 1770)

“Facts are stupid….(laughter) stubborn things.” (Ronald Reagan, 1988)

When President Regan, in his address to the 1988 Republican National Convention, stumbled on the word “stubborn”–referencing the famous John Adams quote above–he might as well have been talking about the chasm between the facts of acoustic investigation of wind turbine installation, as reported by the victims, and the hyperbole and spin from the industry itself.

“Wind Facts” are openly  portrayed by the industry as “stupidly obvious” things:  green, clean and free. Complainers, aka victims,  are dismissed as hyper sensitive if not hypochondriacs. Academic or government studies often portray such subjects as having a natural disposition for unhappiness and discomfort about things such as body type, with inferences of predilection for an anti-wind position and negative physical effects.…

“Each of the complex climate models used by the IPCC grossly overstates the amount of warming the planet has experienced during the past 120 or so years. In addition, based on the idea that temperatures should rise right along with CO₂ emissions, these models have missed the entire 18+ year hiatus in rising temperatures.”

In early January, the noted science journal Science Bulletin published a paper by Lord Christopher Monckton; Astrophysicist Willie Soon, Ph.D.: climatologist and geologist David Legates, Ph.D.; and statistician William Briggs, “Why Models Run Hot: Results from an Irreducibly Simple Climate Model,” which introduced a new, simple model of the climate’s response to adding CO₂ to the atmosphere.  Their model outperformed the complex climate models used by the IPCC to project future temperatures and temperature trends.…

 “The benefits of allowing the free market in oil and gasoline to operate, particularly in the moment as opposed to several months or a year down the road, are not only diffuse and widespread but cannot be directly compared to the immediate, concentrated, and highly visible costs being realized in the oil industry. In fact, most of these benefits have yet to occur.”

There is a proposition in public choice economics called the special interest effect. It basically argues that government grows because, for most government programs, there are concentrated beneficiaries and diffused cost bearers. What this means is that the benefits of government programs will fall on relatively small, easily definable and therefore organizable groups, i.e. special interests, while the costs will be thinly spread across the population as a whole.…

About a week ago, a strong winter storm, known as a nor’easter, was making its way, hit and miss, up the Northeastern seaboard. While forecasts of two feet or more in New York City were busts, forecasts of near three feet in the Boston environs were right on.

As almost goes without saying nowadays, speculation as to the influence of human-caused global warming on the behavior of the snowstorm are rife. Any by “speculation,” I mean blaming global warming for the storm’s ferocity.

And, as also goes without saying, the actual science behind such speculation is both slim and countered by a large body of confounding evidence.

But the number of stories in the mainstream media that hyped the former greatly outnumbered any that even bothered to mention the latter.

Below is reprinted a blog post that I co-authored with Patrick Michaels for the Cato Institute in the hours leading up to the storm trying to tamp down the global warming hype.…