Editor note: On November 10, 2009 Mr. Green testifedbefore the Senate Committee on Finance about global warming. During the course of his testimony, an obviously agitated Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) challenged Ken on different aspects of the climate debate. His responses are printed here. [Part II of this series is tomorrow.]

1. Not One Peer-Reviewed Paper Contradicts the “Consensus” View of the Climate Crisis
Sen. Kerry asserted that not one peer-reviewed paper contradicts the “consensus” view that greenhouse gas emissions will cause devastating consequences, and that we must limit their emissions radically to avoid the maximum “consensus” value of two degrees Celsius, which Kerry claimed was the point at which catastrophic damage would occur to the Earth’s climate. I offered to provide several.

Perhaps the central issue in climate science involves estimates of the sensitivity of the climate to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.…

“[LEDs are] not the same. They’re weird-looking. They’re sized different and have these unusual ripples. If you have those interspersed with your traditional lights, they’re going to look dumb.”

– Interviewed consumer, AP Piece, December 21, 2009

An AP piece yesterday by by Sean Murphy, Many Take Dim View of New-Fangled Christmas Lights, is another example of some of the problems that occur when an (inferior) product is forced on consumers in the name of “energy sustainability” (aka, the futile climate crusade).

Small, unsafe, high-insurance-premium micro cars are bad enough (do these things work on the highway?). But also troubling is the assault on quality lighting–and more lighting per se–that hinder those whose mood is elevated by brightness and the many who have trouble coping with the dark. (Of course some can go too far with holiday lighting, as with any pleasurable activity.)…

When you fly overnight from Johannesburg to Europe the lights become thin just north of Lusaka, Zambia, a few more in Zambia’s Copper Belt and then nothing (and I mean nothing) until the North African coastline. For most of this 11-12 hour flight there are no artificial lights below. From the Sahara on south, but excluding South Africa, a region that is home to more than 400 million people consumes less electricity than New York City.

The World At Night (courtesy of Bert Christensen. Click to enlarge.)

• And yet this area includes major oil producers:
  Nigeria produces 2.1 million b/d oil and consumes 19 billion kWh/y
  Angola produces 2.0 million b/d oil and consumes 3.2 billion kWh/y
  Equatorial Guinea produces 0.36 million b/d and consumes 26 million kWh/y
  Other sub-Saharan Africa oil producers supply more than 1 million b/d to world markets.

A powerful argument against climate alarmism is the failed worldview of modern neo-Malthusianism, which has promoted fear after fear with an intolerant, smartest-guys-in-the-room mentality. Remember the “population bomb” where many millions would die in food riots? Well, obesity turned out to be the real problem.

Remember the Club of Rome’s resource scare? In 1972, 57 predictions of exhaustion were made regarding 19 different minerals. All either have been falsified or will be.

Remember the global-cooling scare promoted by, among others, the Obama administration’s science czar, John Holdren? (Yes, global cooling was a big deal, although it was not a “consensus.”)

And all of the above doom merchants were uber-confident and still are loath to admit they were ever wrong. Holdren, for example, is sticking to his prediction that as many as one billion people could die by 2020 from (man-made) climate change.…