[Editor note: A new paper by Christopher Booker, GLOBAL WARMING: A Case Study of Groupthink (subtitled How science can shed new light on the most important ‘non-debate’ of our time) was released yesterday by the Global Warming Policy Foundation. The full paper is highly recommended, but a useful summary of major climate-debate events is provided below in Mr. Booker’s Introduction.]

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“… the rest of the world had no intention of going along with the declared aim of Paris, to agree on the wholesale ‘decarbonisation’ of the world’s economy. Yet astonishingly, so lost were developed countries in the groupthink that the Western media failed to recognize what was happening. One person who did was President Trump who, to the fury of all those still blinded by the groupthink, gave the refusal of the rest of the world to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions as his reason for pulling the US out of the Paris Accord (although even now this was not picked up by those reporting on his decision in the West).”

[Editor note: This post is taken from Marian Tupy’s new study, “Julian Simon Was Right: A Half-Century of Population Growth, Increasing Prosperity, and Falling Commodity Prices” (Cato Institute: February 16, 2018).]

“In 1960, American workers worked, on average, 1,930 hours per year. In 2017, they worked 1,758 hours per year — a reduction of 9 percent.”

“… the human brain, the ultimate resource, is capable of solving complex challenges. We have been doing so with disease, hunger, and extreme poverty, and we can do so with respect to the use of natural resources.”

Many people believe that global population growth leads to greater poverty and more famines, but evidence suggests otherwise. Between 1960 and 2016, the world’s population increased by 145 percent. Over the same time period, real average annual per capita income in the world rose by 183 percent.…

Do not think that the wind power industry has market viability.…

“Wouldn’t it be nice if we could scientifically determine the cumulative costs or benefits that result over the next three hundred years from our choices in the present? It may be nice, but it is impossible. ”

“Because [mainstream climate] models produced such wildly different results depending on the projections and assumptions baked in the mathematical cake, economist Robert Pindyck concluded after an extensive review of such models that they are so badly flawed as to make them virtually useless for policy.”

When former President Obama wanted to curtail carbon dioxide emissions, he instructed his economic advisors to construct a way to calculate their effect on society. The metric adopted by the EPA to guide them in their quest to regulate the economy is a metric called the “social cost of carbon” (SCC).…