March 11, 2019

Effects of air traffic on climate

This possibility was briefly discussed in the first edition of Hot Talk, Cold Science (HTCS) (see Fig. 19, pg. 54), with emission peaking at about 30 km and latitude ~30Ndeg.  However, it has not yet been detected. I anticipate that as a...

March 10, 2019

Remembering Climategate

Climategate refers to the leakage of emails among what may be termed alarmist conspirators, mostly Anglos in the U.K. and the USA.  They contrived and managed to suppress the circulation of any papers or data expressing opinions, contrary t...

February 25, 2019

The global warming pause

The non-warming of the climate has become a topic much discussed since about 2005.  John Christy has testified to Congress about the "gap" between IPCC climate models, which are based on steadily increasing levels of atmosphe...

February 25, 2019

Temperature in year 2100

It is not obvious that "the GH gas CO2 can also cool the atmosphere" (Singer, American Thinker, April 2, 2018).  In general, this may happen in a region where the lapse rate is positive — i.e., where temp...

February 11, 2019

The question of sea level rise

Sea level has risen about 400 feet since the last glacial maximum of ~18,000 years ago (see fig. below). Currently, sea level is rising at the rate of 1-2mm per year — and has been rising at that rate for the past several centuries...

February 7, 2019

The 1978–1997 warming trend is an artifact of instrumentation

Now we tackle, using newly available data, what may have caused the fictitious temperature trend in the latter decades of the 20th century. We first look at ocean data.  There was a great shift, after 1980, in the way Sea Surfa...

January 24, 2019

Two decades of the 'hockey stick'

The "hockey stick" graph refers to the results of Dr. Michael Mann (see "NIPCC vs. IPCC," Fig. 20, pg. 22).  In 1998, he presented a summary of his analysis of "proxy" data of the past 1,000 years, mostly ...

October 21, 2018

Push-pull: A decent explanation for how we got the Moon

The Moon is the largest planetary satellite of our solar system; its mass is about 1% of the Earth's mass.  It is the only natural satellite of the Earth.  Venus and Mercury have none.  Mars has two sm...

September 16, 2018

Calculating life on Mars

The New York Times recently (June 21, 2018) speculated about a Summer Solstice mystery: "Does the Earth's Tilt [of its spin axis, currently 23.5 degrees] Hold the Secret to Life?"  It encouraged me to write about a different k...

September 8, 2018

Explaining the Twin Paradox

Al and Bob are twin brothers on Earth.  One day, Bob decides to visit a nearby galaxy, so he hops on a spacecraft and goes off at nearly the speed of light.  He comes back a few days later, according to his reckoning, and reunites...

September 6, 2018

Where did the Moon come from?

If you pick up a textbook on astronomy, chances are that the origin of the Moon is ascribed to impact on the Earth by a large object, about the size of Mars. That is also the currently accepted view among non-specialists. But the impact hypothesis...

September 5, 2018

Peak Oil: A Lesson in False Prophecy

As recently as 10 years ago, we were told that the world was running out of oil soon. Horrors! Then, directional drilling and fracking opened up the prolific resource of “tight” oil shale. New production records are being set daily; the U...

September 1, 2018

The F-35 Stealth Fighter vs Russia's S-300 Anti-Aircraft System

As an avid reader of Aviation Week, I became interested in the F-35, the newest Department of Defense fighter plane. The DOD had sold nine initial units to our ally Israel. I thought it was a wise decision for three reasons: 1....

August 31, 2018

Trump and the end of the 'Oil Crisis'

President Donald Trump has declared that the world oil crisis has passed.  My hope is that Congress, at some point, will remove the requirements for gasoline additives, especially for the corn-based bio-fuel ethanol. One of the advertise...

August 27, 2018

The Supreme Court, 'Clean' Energy, and the Clean Air Act

When we hear about "clean" energy these days, it generally refers only to solar and wind, which do not emit CO2.  CO2 is never mentioned as a "criteria pollutant" in the Clean Air Act or any amendment. ...

August 9, 2018

A carbon tax: A useless solution to a nonexistent problem

Mr. Fred Krupp is president of the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF).  He claims that "capitalism will solve the climate problem" (op-ed, WSJ, July 22, 2018).  EDF pays him the princely sum of about $350,000 USD. ...

July 23, 2018

The Next Ice Age

While most people still worry about global warming, I am more concerned about the next Ice Age. A glaciation would present a serious problem for survival of our present civilization, akin to a nuclear winter that many worried about 30 years ago. ...

June 27, 2018

Remember Nuclear Winter?

Fear of a catastrophic nuclear winter gripped much of the media and political establishments, much the way fear of global warming/climate change does today.   If you are under fifty years of age, you probably never heard of Nuclear Winte...

June 2, 2018

Israel versus Iran

Persian and Jewish people have had friendly relations since biblical times.  Emperor Cyrus liberated Jewish exiles in Babylon and helped rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem.  More recently, the Shah of Iran and Israel planned a pipeli...

April 2, 2018

Does the Greenhouse Gas CO2 cool the climate?

Most would consider this an odd question and probably ignore it or just delete it. Not so fast, please, my friends! The answer to the question is important in understanding the puzzling ineffectiveness of the greenhouse gas (GHG) carbon dioxide (CO2)...

October 30, 2017

Global warming and peer review

An essay in the current issue (Oct. 2017) of Eos, the house organ and newsletter of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), is titled "Red, Blue – and Peer-Review" (P.R.). The essay asserts that P.R. is superior to a debate between a...

May 11, 2017

A Global Warming Surprise

Exploring some of the intricacies of GW [Global Warming] science can lead to surprising results that have major consequences.  In a recent invited talk at the Heartland Institute’s ICCC-12 [Twelfth International Conference on Climate Chang...

December 9, 2016

To Mars by Economy Class: A Perfect Project For Trump

President Trump can “make America great again” by planning a surprising and easily affordable human exploration mission to the red planet Mars and its two moonlets Phobos and Deimos: PH-D, for short.  JFK is remembered by many people...

November 19, 2016

Dee-Oh-Tee and me

I was asked to contribute a few personal recollections, celebrating the 50th birthday of DOT, the U.S. Department of Transportation. My first contact was in 1970, when FAA chief William Magruder asked me (then serving as a deputy assistant secreta...

August 23, 2016

Is the Antarctic Ozone Hole Really Mending?

The AOH is an ephemeral (every Oct-Nov) thinning of stratospheric ozone at an altitude of 20-25 km, roughly covering the Antarctic continent; unanticipated, it was discovered serendipitously in 1985 but is now tracked with satellite-borne ozone meter...

February 23, 2016

Paris Climate Accord: Hope, Change -- and Collapse

The Paris Accord (PA) on global warming, concluded in December 2015, had been viewed as an enhancement of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol (KP).  But only some weeks later, the Supreme Court of the US (SCOTUS) effectively “killed” EPA’s...

February 8, 2016

The Goldilocks Approach to Global Warming

Maybe you've heard or read somewhere that all kinds of terrible disasters will happen if the (global mean surface) temperature rises just 2竅ｰC above the pre-industrial level; according to some datasets, we are already more than halfway there....

January 29, 2016

Climate Change: The Burden of Proof

This article is based on a Heartland Panel talk [Dec7, 2015, at Hotel California, Paris]. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has to provide proof for significant human-caused climate change; yet their climate models have never b...

November 30, 2015

The Burden of Proof on Climate Change

The burden of proof for Anthropogenic Climate Change falls on alarmists. Climate Change (CC) has been ongoing for millions of years – long before humans existed on this planet. Obviously, the causes were all of natural origin, and not anthro...

November 29, 2015

Surviving an imminent ice age

Solar observers predict a “Little Ice Age (LIA)” to arrive before 2100.  While expert economists confirm that a modestly warmer climate benefits both health and human prosperity, a colder climate generally spells more sickness and po...

November 27, 2015

Einstein, Your GPS (and Me)

Just 100 years ago, Einstein announced his General Theory of Relativity.  Four decades later, I used it to calculate the rate of a clock orbiting the Earth.  It has turned out to be of importance for the GPS system, which depends on accurat...

October 21, 2015

Paris Climate Conference is likely to fail

COP-21, the 21st Conference of the Parties (to the Global Climate Treaty) is convening in Paris (November 30 to December 11, 2015) to try to impose global restrictions on the emission of the greenhouse (GH) gas carbon dioxide. The usual cast of chara...

September 30, 2015

For Sustainable Energy, Choose Nuclear

Many believe that wind and solar energy are essential, when the world “runs out” of non-renewable fossil fuels.  They also believe that wind and solar are unique in providing energy that’s carbon-free, inexhaustible, and essent...

September 23, 2015

Methane Regulation: Some Personal Recollections

See also: Methane Madness: Science Does Not Support White House Policy The White House-EPA plan to control methane emissions is but the latest effort against our domestic energy industry and would simply raise costs to consumers.  It acts lik...

September 22, 2015

Methane Madness: Science Does Not Support White House Policy

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on 18 August 2015 proposed regulations to reduce emissions of methane.  These regulations would be the first to directly restrict methane emissions by the oil and gas industry; they build on a 2012 ru...

September 15, 2015

Obama's House of Cards

Introduction President Obama seems anxious to shore up his legacy in several disparate areas: concluding a nuclear deal with Iran; reaching an international climate accord in Paris in December 2015; phasing out fossil fuels for electric generation...

August 30, 2015

Iran Nuclear Deal: what now?

The U.S. Congress is presently reviewing the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)*, a deal concluded on July 14, 2015 by Iran and the major world powers.  It is likely that Congress will reject the Deal in September; but it may not be able...

August 5, 2015

Peer Review Is Not What It's Cracked Up To Be

Much is made of the peer-review of scientific papers; it is frequently held up as the gold standard that assures the quality of scientific publishing.  People often ask whether some work has undergone peer-review and are then ready to accept it ...

July 31, 2015

A Paradigm Change: Re-directing public concern from Global Warming to Global Cooling

I want to change public concern from Global (GW) to Global Cooling (GC).  Presented here are three arguments in favor of such a drastic shift -- which involves also a drastic shift in current policies, such as mitigation of the greenhouse (GH) g...

July 28, 2015

Editor of <em>Science</em> Magazine Should Resign!

The 3 July 2015 issue of Science features a remarkable editorial by Editor Marcia McNutt.  Titled “The beyond-two-degree inferno,” it suggests that an anthropogenic greenhouse (GH) warming of more than 2 degrees C (global average) wi...

July 1, 2015

Protecting Humanity from Ice Ages

I have recently become quite concerned about ice ages and the dangers they pose to humans on our planet -- and indeed to most of terrestrial ecology. I must confess I never much worried about the supposed dangers of global warming -- even if we co...

July 1, 2015

Commenters excoriate a <em>Science</em> paper that denies global warming 'pause'

Perhaps the most inconvenient truth for global warming theorists has been the absence of any statistically significant warming trend in the past 18 years – in spite of rapidly rising atmospheric levels of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide....

June 4, 2015

The climate warming pause goes AWOL (or not)

Science mag is publishing a blockbuster paper today, on June 4.  Oh boy!  Get ready to watch yet another big fight about climate change – this time mainly among different groups of climate alarmists.  Is there a “pause...

May 13, 2015

Saving Humanity from Catastrophic Global Cooling: A Task for Geo-Engineering

There are two kinds of ice ages; they are fundamentally different and therefore require different methods of mitigation: (i) Major (Milankovich-style) glaciations occur on a 100,000-year time-scale and are controlled astronomically.  (ii) ...

April 18, 2015

Preventing a Coming Ice Age

Geo-engineering has become a buzzword again, thanks to a recent two-volume report of the US National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council [NAS-NRC 2015; http://bit.ly/EOSNRC].  Driven by exaggerated concerns about greenhouse (GH) warmin...

April 16, 2015

Obama Expected to Bind US to CO2 Reduction at Paris Climate Meeting This Year

In his State-of-the-Union address, president Obama again confirmed that “saving the climate” remains one of his top priorities.  Yet an official December 2014 confab in Lima, Peru didn't really conclude anything -- certainly no b...

February 19, 2015

Into the Brave New World of Geo-engineering

The US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) just published a two-volume report on geo-engineering (Geo-Eng), invoked in order to neutralize the “threat of climate change.”  Geo-Eng is a contentious topic for zealots, since it might per...

February 3, 2015

Global Warming Pause: Is the End Near?

Introduction Global Warming (GW) alarmists are in a pickle: no GW, in spite of rising CO2 levels.  True believers are using quasi-religious slogans, like “The End [of the GW pause] is Near” and “Repent [Stop emitting CO2] Be...

January 27, 2015

World price of oil -- where is OPEC now?

The world price of crude oil, which has been around 100 dollars a barrel for the past 6 years, has suddenly collapsed and is now tending below 50 dollars.  Many are trying to understand this rapid decrease and have proposed various explanations....

January 20, 2015

White House Methane Madness

Contrary to persistent claims by environmentalists, Methane is not an important greenhouse gas (GHG); it has a totally negligible impact on climate.  Attempts to control methane emissions make little sense; the just-announced [Jan 14] White Hous...

December 29, 2014

Cause of Pause in Global Warming

There has been essentially no global warming since 1998.  Some would choose 1997, others would more conservatively use 2002 as the proper starting date, based on satellite data.  Of course, this is quite unexpected, since CO2 -- a leading G...

December 8, 2014

The China Climate Accord: A bad deal for the US

The world is fascinated by the November 12 climate agreement between President Obama and Chinese President Xi.  Has China finally decided to “fight climate change”?  My personal opinion is that China is taking advantage of White...

November 16, 2014

A Suicidal Collapse of Western Civilization?

My background is basically European -- and more specifically, Western European.  I have lived and worked in many of those countries, and I know most of the major cities intimately -- from Stockholm in the north, Newcastle, London, Paris, The Hag...

October 15, 2014

The Climate Sensitivity Controversy

The concept of Climate Sensitivity (CS) is a useful way to describe the effects of carbon dioxide on the climate.  CS can be derived either from climate models or empirically – with the hope that the two results are concordant.  ...

October 7, 2014

Just Say NO to a Carbon Tax

I am against instituting a carbon tax, but my reasons are rather different from the conventional ones.  I see three major problems with any proposed carbon tax: It irrationally discriminates against some forms of energy and subsidizes othe...

September 26, 2014

Does Business Risk Facing a 'Climate Crash'?

With the publication of their report on climate risk, three multi-billionaires have started a campaign to frighten the public about global-warming “calamities” and to persuade business leaders to become worried about “climate risk...

August 15, 2014

Climate Science Does Not Support IPCC Conclusions

Since 2008, the Chicago-based, libertarian-leaning Heartland Institute has organized nine ICCCs (International Conferences on Climate Change). Norman Rogers (American Thinker, Aug 9, 2014) has given a general overview of ICCC-9 (at Las Vegas), which ...

June 3, 2014

The National Climate Assessment (NCA) Doubles Down on Doom

President Barack Obama has decided to make “combating climate change” one of the top priorities of his second term; his EPA has pursued policies that amount to a “war on coal” -- or more specifically on emissions of carbon...

March 27, 2014

The Coming Paradigm Shift on Climate

The just-published NIPCC reports may lead to a paradigm shift about what or who causes current climate changes.  All the evidence suggests that Nature rules the climate – not Man. Watch for it: We may be on the threshold of a tipping po...

February 26, 2014

The Kerry Climate Capers

It looks like John Kerry's peace efforts may not garner him a Nobel Prize - so why not try Global Warming? "The science is unequivocal, and those who refuse to believe it are simply burying their heads in the sand. We don't have time for a meeting a...

February 17, 2014

Climate Consensus Con Game

At the outset, let's be quite clear: There is no consensus about dangerous anthropogenic global warming (DAGW) -- and there never was.  There is not even a consensus on whether human activities, such as burning fossil fuels to produce useful ene...

February 3, 2014

The Stealth Carbon Tax

Using Executive Order 12866 (Regulatory Planning and Review, issued by President Bill Clinton back in 1993), the White House Office of Management and Budget (WH-OMB) has published numerical estimates for the 'Social Cost of Carbon' (SCC).  In Pu...

January 21, 2014

The Inventor of the Global Warming Hockey Stick Doubles Down

Professor Michael Mann, the inventor of the Hockeystick temperature graph, had a contentious editorial essay in the January 17th issue of the New York Times.  [The Hockeystick graph purports to show that temperatures of the last thousand years d...

January 7, 2014

Iran's Arak Plutonium Reactor

There are basically two ways to make a nuclear bomb; both methods have been adopted in the United States and they both work.  The first consists of enriching natural uranium in the isotope 235, which is fissionable.  Its natural concentrati...

November 12, 2013

IPCC 's Bogus Evidence for Global Warming

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up by the United Nations in 1988 and has been trying very hard to demonstrate the threat of a dangerous human influence on climate due to the emission of greenhouse gases....

November 5, 2013

SCOTUS Revisits EPA Regulation of CO2

On October 15, 2013, the US Supreme Court (SCOTUS) granted 'Certiorari' to Petitioners who have been suing the EPA over regulations to control CO2.  In 2007, SCOTUS had ruled that CO2 may be considered a pollutant under the Clean Air Act (CAA), ...

November 3, 2013

Non-governmental climate scientists slam the UN's IPCC

The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a final version of their Summary for Policy Makers (SPM) of its fifth assessment report (AR5) on September 27, 2013.  This new SPM reveals that the IPCC has retreated ...

September 23, 2013

Report from the 'War on Coal'

A major project has been quietly underway, within the executive branch of the U.S. government, trying to calculate a "social cost of carbon" (SCC) -- a so-called "non-market externality" (i. e., not captured by the normal price system of a free marke...

September 5, 2013

The UN Climate Panel's 'Hot Spot' is Missing in Action

The Second Assessment Report of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN's climate-science panel (IPCC-AR2, 1996), invented the Hot-Spot in the tropical atmosphere about 10 km above the earth's surface and assumed, mistakenly, it was pr...

August 20, 2013

A Tale of Two Climate HockeySticks

The false "hockeystick" graph with which (in 2001) the UN climate panel claimed that current surface temperatures are "unprecedented" in a millennium is at odds with hundreds of scientific papers and with their own previous position.  There is n...

July 31, 2013

Sea Level Rise Surprise

Driving the seemingly endless climate-treaty negotiations, the most widely feared consequence of Global Warming appears to be a catastrophic rise in sea level (SLR).  Environmental advocacy groups are filling the airwaves with lurid images of fl...

July 11, 2013

China Questions Climate Consensus

The world's most populous nation is officially openly debating whether fears of anthropogenic global warming are justified by science.  In May 2013, the Chinese Academy of Sciences translated and published the reports of NIPCC (Non-governmental ...

June 6, 2013

Could Global Warming Slow Sea Level Rise?

The most widely feared consequence of global warming appears to be sea level rise (SLR).  Environmental advocacy groups are polluting the airwaves and internet with lurid images of flooding of Bangladesh and Pacific islands, and raising the spec...

June 1, 2013

To Mars -- in three easy steps

Since the Apollo landings nearly a half- century ago, NASA has been adrift in interplanetary space in search of an overarching goal.  Mars is the obvious choice -- both for science and for public impact. Now, of course, "easy" is a relative te...

May 24, 2013

NASA Adrift in Interplanetary Space

Since the first Apollo landing in 1969, NASA has been looking, unsuccessfully, for an overarching goal to match this spectacular achievement: landing men on the Moon.  The International Space Station (ISS) has not turned out to be what it was ad...

May 9, 2013

The Oil Price Enigma

Oil is the single most important commodity purchased today, and its price influences the fortunes of every nation on the planet in significant ways. Yet nobody can tell you with honesty that they know where the price is headed. Thirty years ago (an...

April 19, 2013

Climate Change Conversation Aborted

An editorial essay by American Chemical Society (ACS) officers Bassam Shakhashiri and Jerry Bell (Science 5 April 2013) extends a gracious invitation for a "respectful conversation" about Climate Change.  Yet when I tried to respond, the editors...

April 2, 2013

Impoverishing Climate Alarmism at the New York Times

I love to read NY Times columnist Gail Collins -- though I seldom agree with her, especially on matters of climate change [NYT March 27]. She has an angelic smile and a wonderful sense of humor; I wish I could write like that. She also has a large d...

March 13, 2013

Another Hockey Stick?

Green forces, eager to promote their theories of global warming, appear to be practicing intellectual recycling.  Is this the return of the notorious hockey stick - which, in 2001, was the central dogma of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) beli...

March 5, 2013

The Anatomy of Climate Science Hype

The manipulation behind Study of Ice Age Bolsters Carbon and Warming Link by Justin Gillis, New York Times, March 1, 2013 A NY Times science story (by Justin Gillis, March 1) illustrates some interesting points about science journalism - esp. in the ...

December 27, 2012

Climate Science vs Politics: The Road Ahead

There is good news and bad news about climate. The good news is that science evidence has made it quite clear that the human contribution to a possible global warming is minor; in fact it cannot even be identified in the data record.  The bad ne...

December 22, 2012

Environmental Protection Lessons from Ronald Reagan: 'Trust but Verify'

Cass R. Sunstein is a professor at the Harvard Law School and a former administrator of the Obama White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.  His op-ed in the NY Times (Nov 11, 2012) tells us that a cost-benefit analysis convinced...

November 3, 2012

Bloomberg's November Surprise

The multibillionaire mayor of New York City has combined bad climate science and bad politics, hoping to help swing the electorate toward reelecting Barack Obama. The New York Times (Nov 2) reports: In a surprise announcement, Mayor Michael R. ...

October 25, 2012

Obama's EPA Plans for 2013

The November elections will determine the direction of US climate policy -- and therefore also energy policy and the pace of economic growth: jobs, standards of living, budget deficits and inflation.  Obama has already promised to make climate c...

September 26, 2012

Climate Realism

Even with the Kyoto Protocol due to expire at the end of this year, Obama persists in giving highest priority to climate change policy if re-elected.  Does the U.S. really want to lead the world in committing economic suicide?  It pays to l...

August 30, 2012

Winning the AGW Science Debate: Here's How

The upcoming election battles may be unique in offering for the first time a debate about global warming.  Neither Bush-Gore nor McCain-Obama chose to discuss the issue -- maybe because they were not really that far apart.  By contrast, Bar...

August 20, 2012

Paul Ryan, the Perfect Anti-Gore

Vice-president hopeful Paul D. Ryan is the polar opposite to former VP Al Gore.  Instead of promoting fears, the candidate is a pretty solid skeptic when it comes to catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW).  Romney is obviously com...

June 11, 2012

'Cap and Trade' For CO₂ Needs a Stake through the Heart

Cap and trade (C&T) is in the news again: Global Carbon Market trading (practically all EU) climbed to $176 billion in 2011 according to the The World Bank, which has just released its annual State and Trends of The Carbon Market in 2012....

May 30, 2012

Romney's Historic Opportunity: Low-Cost Energy Fuels Economic Recovery

Energy, the lifeblood of the economy, is the Achilles heel of President Barack Obama.  Mitt Romney can win the November election if he concentrates his campaign on a sensible energy policy. Mr. Romney will have to make a case not merely against...

April 11, 2012

Cheap Natural Gas Heralds an Energy Revolution

All bets are off for the future of energy in the United States and, indeed, the world, as the price of natural gas plummets to ever-lower values -- thanks to the development of technology that can access gas and liquids trapped in hitherto inaccessib...

April 5, 2012

Climategate Heads to Court

As a climate scientist, I am quite familiar with the background facts that Prof Michael E. Mann (now at Penn State U) so shamelessly distorts in his new book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines. First, the scientifi...

March 28, 2012

The Gas Price Kerfuffle: Obama's Achilles Heel?

Newt Gingrich seemed to be shooting from the hip when he promised, if elected, to bring us gasoline at $2.50 a gallon.  Yet cheaper gas is not out of question once the price of crude oil is brought down to about $60 a barrel.  And I readily...

March 7, 2012

EPA Endangers Human Health and Welfare

Last week, a three-judge panel of the federal District Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit heard two days of oral arguments in the lawsuit challenging the Environmental Protection Agency's regulation of greenhouse gas emissions using the Clean Air ...

March 4, 2012

Europe's Airline Tax Lacks Science Support

European Union climate policy seems to be driven by the usual bureaucratic twins: more control and more tax revenues.  Added to these, there is the almost pathological fear of global warming and the unreasonable compulsion to reduce emissions of...

February 29, 2012

Climate Deniers Are Giving Us Skeptics a Bad Name

Gallia omnia est divisa in partes tres.  This phrase from Julius Gaius Caesar about the division of Gaul nicely illustrates the universe of climate scientists -- also divided into three parts.  On the one side are the "warmistas," with fixe...

February 25, 2012

Obama Skins the Cat

Much of White House policy is driven by pathological fear of global warming and the unreasonable compulsion to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, a non-toxic natural constituent of the atmosphere and an absolute necessity for the survival of plants,...

February 20, 2012

The Heartland Institute Flap

[In the ongoing climate debate, the Heartland Institute is perhaps best known as organizer and host of six international climate change conferences (ICCC) and as publisher of Climate Change Reconsidered: The Report of the Nongovernmental In...

January 31, 2012

Hormuz Hysteria

There has been much unnecessary concern about Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz.  Some 20% of world oil traverses this narrow waterway between Iran and Oman, at the eastern end of the Persian Gulf.  The situation has been escalating rapidly...

January 2, 2012

Fake! Fake! Fake! Fake!

In discussing the recent release of some 5,000 Climategate e-mails, blogger Anthony Watts uses the clever headline "They are real -- and they're spectacular."  He credits Jerry Seinfeld as the source.  Following his example, I choose the he...

November 28, 2011

Durban Climate Conference: The Dream Fades

See also: Global Warming Bubble is Popping, Prince Charles' latest eco-fantasy,  Another blow for warmist fraud: Canada pulling out of Kyoto Protocols Things don't look promising for the perennial climate confab which convenes in Durban, South A...

November 17, 2011

Why BEST Will Not Settle the Climate Debate

Global warming has re-entered public consciousness in recent days, partly because of the buzz surrounding the release of warming results from the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project.  The reaction of the "warmistas" has been jubila...

October 21, 2011

Cain's Valuable 9-9-9 Plan

I like Cain's 9-9-9 scheme.  It is bold, tries to balance all methods of taxation, and contains many valuable ideas.  It's not just for true Conservatives and Independents; some of its features should appeal to Democrats, populists, and to ...

October 15, 2011

EPA's CO2 Endangerment Finding is Endangered

In a narrow 5-4 decision in 2007, the US Supreme Court authorized the EPA to consider the greenhouse gas CO2 as a 'pollutant' under the terms of the Clean Air Act -- provided EPA could demonstrate that CO2 posed a threat to human health and welfare....

July 11, 2011

A World Food Crisis?

Forecasting world famines has become a favorite pastime for some: from the Reverend Thomas Malthus and more recently Paul Ehrlich to the Club of Rome and the Paddock brothers in the 1970s -- and of course, to Lester Brown, about once every decade....

June 21, 2011

Science and Smear Merchants

Professor Naomi Oreskes, of the University of California in San Diego, claims to be a science historian.  One can readily demonstrate that she is neither a credible scientist nor a credible historian; the best evidence is right there in her rece...

May 21, 2011

Regulation Cannot Control Malignant Melanoma

As we move into the summer season, not only do temperatures increase, so do exposure to the Sun, sunburns, and concern about the ozone layer and skin cancer.  But there are also some important policy issues to think about.Malignant melanoma is t...

May 14, 2011

Regulation Cannot Control Malignant Melanoma

As we move into the summer season, not only do temperatures increase, so do exposure to the Sun, sunburns, and concern about the ozone layer and skin cancer.  But there are also some important policy issues to think about.Malignant melanoma is t...

April 22, 2011

The Sustainable Development Hoax

"Sustainable Development" (SD) is basically a slogan without a specific meaning.  Linked to Earth Day (April 22), it masquerades as a call for clean air, green energy, and suggests a pristine bucolic existence for us and our progeny --...

March 31, 2011

Adventures in Federal Budget Cutting

I have served in five different positions under both Republican and Democrat administrations and have had some modest success in cutting authorized spending.  But the experience has been difficult and has caused me some personal problems.  ...

March 13, 2011

Good bye, Kyoto

The 1997 Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012, after surviving 15 years, mostly spent on life support.  It reached its peak in Bali in 2007 at the annual UN gabfest, had a sudden unexpected collapse in Copenhagen in 2009, and has been in a coma since....

March 6, 2011

The CO2 Tax Redux

Princeton economics professor Alan Blinder's Wall Street Journal op-ed on taxing CO2 emissions has drawn a lot of flak from all sides.   On the one hand, he has been attacked for wholeheartedly embracing the climate myths of the U...

February 19, 2011

What do Climate Data Really Show? The Berkeley Climate Data Project

The e-mails leaked from the University of East Anglia in November 2009 produced what is popularly called "Climategate."  They exposed the thoroughly unethical behavior of a group of climate scientists, mainly in the UK and US, involved...

February 18, 2011

The Sad State of the State of California

Many must be wondering whether the state of California is beyond repair.  This is particularly true after the November 2010 elections when its citizens voted for the same politicians that have brought them the same failed policies.  As defi...

February 14, 2011

Egypt needs an enemy

Events in Egypt have moved rapidly and it seems now that the Supreme Military Council will take over and run the country, at least until the next election.  While this solution to the crisis may satisfy the protesters for the time being, I do no...

December 27, 2010

CARB's Carbon Capers

In a nearly unanimous vote, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) just approved a statewide cap-and-trade scheme to limit emissions of CO2 from six hundred major industrial plants, starting in 2012.  Proposition 23 on the California ballot, ...

December 19, 2010

Secondhand Smoke, Lung Cancer, and the Global Warming Debate

In 1993, the EPA published a report claiming that secondhand smoke (SHS -- also sometimes known as environmental tobacco smoke or ETS) causes three thousand deaths from lung cancer every year.  Anyone doubting this result has been subject to att...

November 29, 2010

The Cancun Climate Capers

Today, Nov. 29, marks the beginning of the Cancun COP (Conference of the Parties [to the Kyoto Protocol]). This is the 16th meeting of the nearly two hundred national delegations, which have been convening annually since the Kyoto Protocol was negoti...

November 14, 2010

The Global Warming Court Battle

Kenneth Cuccinelli II, elected as the Attorney General of the Commonwealth of Virginia in November 2009, has demanded from the University of Virginia (my university) the e-mails and other information of Dr. Michael Mann, who was an assistant professo...

November 7, 2010

Climate Alarmism at the New York Times

The New York Times editorial page has been persistent in publishing alarmist editorials on climate change.  The latest one appearing shortly before the November elections accused politicians of being in "denial" about climate change....

November 5, 2010

The Green Bubble Is about to Burst

There is a revolution coming that is likely to burst the green global warming bubble: the temperature trend used by the IPCC (the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) to support their conclusion about anthropogenic global warming (AGW) i...

November 3, 2010

The French Academy Lays an Egg

The august French Academy has spoken. After a cursory examination of the climate issue, a day of selected testimonies, and some internal discussion among admitted non-experts, their Oct. 28 report to the French science minister concluded that gl...

August 5, 2010

The Renewable Electricity Standard is a Hoax, a Fraud, and a Rip-Off

The U.S. Senate's proposed Renewable Electricity Standard (RES) would force electric utilities to generate a large and increasing percentage of their power from wind and solar -- rising to 15% by 2021. These goals resemble those of the Waxman-Markey ...

April 14, 2010

ClimateGate Whitewash

There is now a desperate effort afoot by assorted climate alarmists to explain away the revelations of the incriminating e-mails leaked last year from the University of East Anglia (UEA). A concerted whitewash campaign is in full swing to save the IP...

February 10, 2010

The end of the IPCC

Almost daily, we learn about new problems with the formerly respected UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC):  In their 2001 report, they claimed that the 20th century was "unusual" and blamed it on human-released greenhou...