Fighting Climate Alarmism in 1999: What’s New?

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- November 12, 2010

Reprinted below is a letter-to-the-editor that I wrote to The Electricity Journal in response to an essay by Michael Shepard, “Turning the Climate Challenge into Business Opportunity” (The Electricity Journal, 1999, vol. 12, issue 10, pages 82-84).

The test of scholarship is how one’s arguments hold up over time. The state of knowledge changes as new evidence accumulates, so it is important to keep past work in the context of the year it was written (1999).

But what do we know now versus then? And how do you think this rebuttal reads 11 years later? (One data point: Robert Mendelsohn of Yale still believes in the conclusions of his work that I reference below as he communicated to me by email.)

Dear Editors:

Michael Shepard guest editorial, “Turning the Climate Challenge into Business Opportunity,” is premised on such statements as “the climate problem is real” and “the imperative [is] to stabilize the atmosphere’s loading of greenhouse gases.”

…

Wind Energy is Ancient (the infant industry argument for subsidies does not apply)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- November 8, 2010

“The use of wind power is as old as history.”

– Erich Zimmermann, World Resources and Industries (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1951), p. 62.

The day after the election, the New York Times cutely titled an editorial, “New Energy Outfoxes Old in California.” The Houston Chronicle dutifully reprinted it.

Problem is, what the Left sees as new energy is really ancient, and what is seen as old is really new. Coal, oil, and gas are several hundred years old; renewable energies are as old as human time. Solar and wind and falling water and burning plants–renewables all–are caveman energies.

This textbook from 1838 (is this old enough for you, New York Times?) explained the problem with wind, a problem that is at the center of the debate 172 years later.…

Halloween Hangover: Ehrlich, Holdren, Hansen Unretracted

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- November 1, 2010

“If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”

– Paul Ehrlich, quoted in Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource 2, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 35.

“As University of California physicist John Holdren has said, it is possible that carbon-dioxide climate-induced famines could kill as many as a billion people before the year 2020.”

– Paul Ehrlich, The Machinery of Nature, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1986, p. 274.

In the name of science, Paul Ehrlich, John Holdren, and James Hansen (et al.) have made doom-and-gloom predictions about business-as-usual in an attempt to shock humanity into immediate legislative action and lifestyle changes.

It did not work. The elapsed predictions have failed to come to pass. Little wonder that new installments of climate alarmism, such as Juliet Eilperin’s “25% of Wild Mammal Species Face Extinction: Global Assessment Paints ‘Bleak Picture,’ Scientists Say, and Figure of Those at Risk Could Be Higher” in the Washington Post (October 7), don’t register with voters.…