[Editor’s note: This post from 2011 is relevant today as the Losing Left tries to impugn the motives of the free-market climate/energy realists, one target being climatologist David Legates, recently profiled at MasterResource.

David Appell, part of the controversy back in 2011, in fact, reared his head again in the comments section recently at MasterResource. An active climate alarmist with very strong opinions, he hardly rebuted his rebutters. Science is supposed to be his thing; if he would like to answer for Gina McCarthy and US EPA here, he will be given the floor.]

The public editor at the New York Times, Arthur Brisbane, recently wrote in his weekly Public Editor column about the trustworthiness of Robert Bryce, the nation’s leading energy journalist who has graduated to being a top energy public policy scholar, period.…

“Each of the complex climate models used by the IPCC grossly overstates the amount of warming the planet has experienced during the past 120 or so years. In addition, based on the idea that temperatures should rise right along with CO₂ emissions, these models have missed the entire 18+ year hiatus in rising temperatures.”

In early January, the noted science journal Science Bulletin published a paper by Lord Christopher Monckton; Astrophysicist Willie Soon, Ph.D.: climatologist and geologist David Legates, Ph.D.; and statistician William Briggs, “Why Models Run Hot: Results from an Irreducibly Simple Climate Model,” which introduced a new, simple model of the climate’s response to adding CO₂ to the atmosphere.  Their model outperformed the complex climate models used by the IPCC to project future temperatures and temperature trends.…

Life must be melancholy at best the neo-Malthusian closed-minded pessimists at such anti-liberty/pro-state organizations as Sierra Club, NRDC, 350.org, and Center for American Progress. No Julian Simon or Bjorn Lomborg or Judith Curry or Alex Epstein or Matt Ridley allowed at these shops!

Thankfully, most people–and certainly voters through demonstrated preference–are pessimistic about government and optimistic about life in a free society. And so it must be hard for the chronically discontent to interact on a personal, family level, particularly during the holiday season.

Consider the following quotations of Messing With The Holidays.

Heed the Warnings: Why We’re on the Brink of Mass Extinction (The Daily Beast, November 30, 2014)

“Evolutionary biologist Sean B. Carroll, executive producer of the doc Mass Extinction: Life At the Brink, on why mankind’s days are numbered….”

“[Sen. Harry] Reid’s attacks have drawn cries of McCarthyism from around the political world, including MSNBC host Joe Scarborough and Mother Jones editor Daniel Schulman. And they’ve even created discomfort among liberal big-money donors and operatives, who worry the argument might expose them to charges of hypocrisy, while they also question the effectiveness of running against donors who won’t appear on any ballots.”

– Kenneth Vogel, “Behind Harry Reid’s War Against the Koch Brothers,”  POLITICO, July 7, 2014.

It was an all-too-familiar reframe: guilt by association (and in this case guilt from false/good association). At Climate Progress, Joe Romm breathlessly reported last month that “Bjorn Lomborg Is Part of the Koch Network—and Cashing In.” In Romm’s vitriolic words:

You know the T-shirt-wearing climate inactivist Lomborg (aka the Danish Delayer) from such recent gems as “Subsidizing renewables won’t stop global warming” and “What an increasingly wonderful world” and “The Poor Need Cheap Fossil Fuels” (seriously — or not).