Judith Curry Looks for Middle Ground in the Contentious Climate Debate (Jerry North, can you help her?)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- August 27, 2010 4 Comments

“I am not afraid about the climate.”

– Judith Curry, quoted in Alexandre Mansur, “American Researcher Says That There Is Still a lot of Uncertainty About Global Warming, Época, May 1, 2010.

“Real Climate, I think they’ve damaged their brand. They started out doing something that people liked, but they’ve been too partisan in a scientific way.”

– Judith Curry, quoted in Eric Berger, “Judith Curry: On Antarctic sea ice, Climategate and skeptics.” August 18, 2010.

There is solid middle ground in the ever-contentious climate-change debate. And now is the time to welcome it, given that politics is not going to reverse in any detectable amount the human influence on climate.

And the shame of the post-Climategate era is that other scientists like Curry did not join her to right the wrongs of a profession that has become politicized, agendacized, and Malthusiancized.

Continue Reading

Latest on the Death Spiral of Climate Alarmism (Is it time to focus on real environmental problems and not CO2?)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- August 26, 2010 4 Comments

Ken Green at MasterResource published an influential post, The Death Spiral for Climate Alarmism Continues (June 2, 2010), that began with two quotations:

“We have at most ten years—not ten years to decide upon action, but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions.”

– James Hansen, “The Threat to the Planet,” New York Review of Books, July 13, 2006.

“Desperation is setting in among climate alarmists who by their own math can see that the window is rapidly closing on ’saving the planet’.”

– Kenneth Green, ”A Death Spiral for Climate Alarmism, Redux?” MasterResource, September 30, 2009.

And what was true in June is even more true today as the failure to price carbon dioxide (CO2) is leaving Europe as the sacrificial lambs on an altar of climate-change inconsequentiality.…

Continue Reading

Open Letter to Senator Brownback on His Support for a Federal Renewable Energy Standard

By Thomas Stacy II -- August 1, 2010 5 Comments

[Editor note: Senator Harry Reid (D-Nev.) removed a federal renewable mandate from the energy bill now under debate. However, Sen. Brownback of Kansas has indicated his intention to add an amendment to the bill resurrecting such a mandate.]

US Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS) displays a national debt clock on his home page and is a proclaimed conservative. Yet he supports wasteful government spending on deployment of impotent technologies like wind energy.

I believe Sam and his kind are the root cause of a failure for industrial windpower opponents to gain the upper hand in Washington D.C. I further believe that in Brownback’s case, his faulty platform correlates to his committee membership, which shows his allegiance to the agriculture lobby, which represent the secondary financial beneficiaries of wind energy deployment.…

Continue Reading

Milton Friedman on Mineral Resource Theory (remembering a giant of social thought)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- July 30, 2010 26 Comments

Editor note: Milton Friedman would be 98 this Saturday July 31. (He died on November 16, 2006.) This exchange with Robert Bradley–when Dr. Friedman was 91 years old–is testament to the mental powers of one of the greatest social thinkers of modern time.

Friedman had not met Bradley but was in the habit of actively communicating with scholars until his final illness.

I had heard that the great economist and social thinker Milton Friedman (1912–2006) was a prolific communicator with those who posed worthy questions to him. So when I got interested in mineral resource theory, which would culminate with my 2007 essay, Resourceship: An Austrian Theory of Mineral Resources, I asked Dr. Friedman in August 2003 about his views on the late Julian Simon (1932–98), specifically whether Simon’s work on resources, and his conception of the ultimate resource, merited a Nobel Prize in economics.…

Continue Reading

Regulatory Failure by the Numbers

By Robert L. Bradley, Jr. and Richard W. Fulmer -- July 24, 2010 3 Comments Continue Reading

U.S. Spent Nuclear Fuel Policy: Road to Nowhere [Part V: Lessons]

By Robert Peltier -- July 13, 2010 2 Comments Continue Reading

The U.S. Spent Nuclear Fuel Policy: Road to Nowhere [Part III: Yucca Mountain]

By Robert Peltier -- July 10, 2010 4 Comments Continue Reading

Reforming a Flawed Process: The IPCC and Its Clients (submission to the InterAcademy Council Review)

By David Henderson -- June 16, 2010 6 Comments Continue Reading

California’s Economy and Global Warming: Political Morphology

By Tom Tanton -- June 8, 2010 14 Comments Continue Reading

Economic/Environmental Assessment of Grid-Tied Photovoltaics: Arizona Lessons for the U.S.

By David Bergeron -- June 7, 2010 7 Comments Continue Reading