“We have no room for error…. Barring a major reversal in U.S. policies in the very next decade, come the 2020s, most everyone will know the grim fate that awaits the next fifty generations.”

“[The alternative to inaction] is a [later] massive, sustained government intervention into every aspect of our lives on a scale that far surpasses what this country did during World War II.”

Dr. Exaggeration… Dr. Doom… Dr. Wrong. Part I yesterday examined Joe Romm’s 1996 co-authored piece in The Atlantic Monthly, “Mideast Oil Forever?” Today’s post examines quotations and predictions from Romm’s book, Hell and High Water (Morrow: 2007).

The book’s opening quotation comes from James Hansen. “We are on the precipice of climate system tipping points beyond which there is no redemption.” And then Romm’s opening:

Imagine if inland United States were 10℉ hotter, with many states ravaged by mega-droughts and the widespread wildfires that result.

“To the extent that the Gulf’s recapture of the dominant share of the global oil market will make price increases more likely, the U.S. economy is at risk…. Since 1970 sharp increases in the price of oil have always been followed by economic recessions in the United States.”

 – Charles Curtis and Joseph Romm, “Mideast Oil Forever?”  The Atlantic Monthly,  April 1996.

“This notion that the environmental movement — or any other major play in the media landscape — is pushing non-stop apocalyptic messages like a broken record is one I debunked ….”

– Joe Romm, “A Critique of the Broken-Record Counterfactual Message of the New York Times on Environmentalists and Scientists,” ThinkProgress,  April 29, 2012.

Joe Romm, the climate-alarmist doyen of ThinkProgress (Center for American Progress), has long been subject to rebuttal at MasterResource.…

“The ‘vast majority’ of CO2 pipelines carry carbon dioxide for enhanced oil recovery, according to US Department of Energy…. But this free-market niche is a now being joined [via the Carbon Capture Coalition] by a wholly new application for CO2 that is all about government mandates and subsidies.”

“As Wendall Phillips warned in 1852, ‘Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. Power is ever stealing from the many to the few’.”

Government goes to those who show up. This aphorism explains the growth of government: those particularly advantaged by special government favor organize and lobby while the rest of us tend to our private business.

Such cronyism marks real-world government versus the romantic view wherein impartial legislators above the special-interest fray wisely block the entreaties of those who would injure the common interest of taxpayers and consumers.…

“If the current pace of the buildup of these gases continues, the effect is likely to be a warming of 3 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit [between now and] the year 2025 to 2050, according to these projections…. The rise in global temperature is predicted to … caus[e] sea levels to rise by one to four feet by the middle of the next century.”

–  Philip Shabecoff, “Global Warming Has Begun.” New York Times, June 24, 1988.

Climate exaggeration (in the long Malthusian tradition) creates a paper trail and data points for falsification. Some 30 years ago, temperature- and sea-level–rise predictions were made that are in the news. As the predictions near the beginning of the forecast period, the skeptics of alarmism are well on their way to yet another victory.…