“Recent data and research supports the importance of natural climate variability and calls into question the conclusion that humans are the dominant cause of recent climate change.”
– Judith Curry, Congressional testimony of April 15, 2015 (see below)
“I gave up on Judith Curry a while ago. I don’t know what she thinks she’s doing, but it’s not helping the cause, or her professional credibility.”
—Dr. Michael Mann, IPCC Lead Author, disclosed Climategate e-mail, May 30, 2008.
A major development in the history of the physical climate-change debate occurred when respected mainstream climatologist Judith Curry parted ways with an increasingly conflicted, even corrupted, mainstream of neo-Malthusian, Left-of-Center, rent-seeking (crony) scientists. No, the debate is not about global warming (agreed) or a human influence on climate (agreed); it is the predestined conclusion of ‘consensus’ science that any human influence on global climate is bad-to-catastrophic, not benign or positive.…
[Editor note: From time to time, MasterResource will publish excerpts from Bradley’s forthcoming book, Political Enron: A Business History, (John Wiley & Sons and Scrivener Publishing, 2016). The first two volumes of his trilogy on political capitalism, inspired by the rise and fall of Enron, are on worldview (2009) and industry background (2011).]
Enron’s two-front civil war within the fossil-fuel industry in the late 1980s and early 1990s had natural gas warring against coal on the one side and petroleum on the other. But Ken Lay’s well researched, ably orchestrated effort inspired another split, this one within the hitherto anti-fossil-fuel, anti-industrial environmental community.
“Natural gas has, until recently, tended to be lumped in with the ‘bad guys,'” wrote natural gas scribe Daniel Macey. “Now the question is whether to let natural gas into the environmental camp.”…
“Cap-and-trade is a hidden regressive tax, benefiting the select few who have managed to get themselves written into the … bill…. Think revolving door between the government and Wall Street. Think revolving door between Congress and lobbyists.”
– James Hansen, “I Just Had a Baby, at Age 68,” (2009).
“Ontario and Quebec to sign cap-and-trade deal Monday ahead of premiers’ summit on climate change,” the headline from the National Post (Canada) read over the weekend. Yesterday, in fact, Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne signed an agreement with Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard to price (regulate) carbon-dioxide (CO2) emissions in an effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Such joins California, which has an operating cap-and-trade program pursuant to the Western Climate Initiative.
Cap-and-trade has been lambasted by the father of climate alarmism, James Hansen, whose testimony in mid-1988 brought the issue of the enhanced greenhouse effect to a national audience.…