“The Master Resource people are whores of the fossil fuel industry. (Yes, that certainly includes you.)” – David Appell to author, March 5, 2014

If temperament and dramatis personae matter, the climate alarmists lose resoundingly to their scientific critics. I have gotten to know the quite reasonable, friendly Roy Spencer, John Christy, Craig D. Idso, Richard Lindzen, and other leaders of the so-called climate realist, global lukewarming school. And Marlo Lewis et al. (CEI); James Taylor, Sterling Burnett, et al. (Heartland); Craig Rucker, Marc Morano, et al. at CFACT; and many more on the advocacy side.

All of “us” know the difference between straight analysis and advocacy versus ad hominem argumentation. Our side is polite … but tough on naked pleas for government authoritarianism or civil disruption by climate alarmists/forced energy transformationists.…

“Many people think that the threat of ‘global warming’ arose only towards the end of the twentieth century…. Climate change, either natural or anthropogenic, has been discussed from the classical age onwards, evolving from the expected benefits of climate engineering to today’s fear of global disaster.”

– Hans von Storch and Nico Stehr, “Climate Change in Perspective,” Nature, June 8, 2000, p. 615

It is all gloom, what Michael Mann cautioned against as “doomism.”[1] Such alarm has been the mainstream narrative—and wrong—since the 1960s. And warnings about how exaggeration can backfire (New York Times: “In Climate Debate, Exaggeration Is a Pitfall“) have been thrown to the wind in the futile, costly pursuit of Net Zero.

This post presents the climate alarm quotations of today with the quotations from Paul Ehrlich and the Club of Rome in the late 1960s/early 1970s for historical perspective.…

“The late economist Julian Simon offers a cautionary tale for both climate scientists and economists…. His views have stood the test of time relatively well. But he also had strong views on topics that he was not an expert — climate change being a particular example — and on that topic his views have not fared well…. Simon was wrong about global warming….”

Cleaning Up Our Mess

On climate change, what is our obligation to future generations? Spring 2022 • Regulation By David Levine

This article starts with Greta Thunberg, assumes a negative externality of untold proportion, and ends with the assertion that Julian Simon being wrong on climate change because “he was not an expert.”

And the article pretends to be objective, fair, and impartial.

Things have gotten intellectually sick at the Cato Institute.…

Ed. Note: Jane Shaw Stroup blogs at two websites: Jane Takes On History and Liberty and Ecology Blog. The post below can be accessed here.

Each year, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) has a dinner in Washington, D.C., honoring the economist Julian Simon, who died in 1998. Simon was a rare optimist in the fields of population and natural resources. He disagreed with most environmentalists of his day (especially in the 1980s through 1990s). They feared passionately that growing population would overwhelm agriculture and industry and that the world would run out of natural resources such as oil and minerals.

Instead, Simon thought that more births are a good thing and was sure that resources would not disappear. His upbeat views were widely disparaged.

Ecologist Garrett Hardin called him “Dr.…