“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.…

 “With the exception of EPA’s Dr. Allan Carlin, I have never encountered a published view of a federal employee questioning that catastrophic climate change is caused by carbon dioxide.  The penalties from this conflict are too severe of loss of pay increases, promotions, or dismissal.”

In the past few weeks, statements of scientists challenging the hypothesis that carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuels is causing catastrophic global warming are being criticized on ad hominem grounds. The charge is that there exists an inherent conflict-of-interest, owingto their sources of income, specifically income from fossil-fuel companies or pro-fossil-fuel organizations otherwise.

The starting point (it was surely orchestrated) was the attack on Dr. Willie Soon by the February 21, 2015 New York Times article, “Deeper Ties to Corporate Cash for Doubtful Climate Researcher,” by Justin Gillis and John Schwartz.…

“What [new mainstream climate science developments] point to is the declining credibility of demands for cutting back CO2 emissions by switching from abundant, affordable, reliable fossil fuels to scarcer, more expensive, less reliable wind, solar, and biofuels, the effect of which would be higher energy costs and therefore higher costs for everything else—harming the world’s poor most of all.”

It is extremely likely that the most oft-cited statement from the recently leaked “Summary for Policymakers” (SPM) of the forthcoming Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will be:

It is extremely likely that human influence on climate caused more than half of the increase in global average surface temperature from 1951–2010.

Mainstream media and global warming enthusiasts will latch onto that. With little or no awareness of either its textual or its historical context, they will say, “There!…

When I was director of public policy analysis at Enron in the late 1990s, I hired climatologist Gerald North of Texas A&M as a consultant to help me get to the bottom of the raging debate between climate ‘skeptics’ and ‘alarmists.’ I was Ken Lay’s speechwriter, and I was concerned that Enron’s embrace of climate alarmism (we had seven profit centers banking on priced CO2 from government intervention) was intellectually off base and thus violated the honesty plank of corporate responsibility.

It was money well spent. Dr. North was personable and honest, although he had a propensity to default toward alarmism if you did not challenge him. (Such is the neo-Malthusian propensity of most natural scientists who see nature as optimal and the human influence as only downside.) This is why I have called Dr.…