“There is this mismatch between what the climate models are producing and what the observations are showing,” says lead author John Fyfe, a climate modeller at the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis in Victoria, British Columbia. “We can’t ignore it.”
Susan Solomon, a climatologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, says that Fyfe’s framework helps to put twenty-first-century trends into perspective, and clearly indicates that the rate of warming slowed down at a time when greenhouse-gas emissions were rising dramatically.
– Jeff Tollefson, “Global Warming ‘Hiatus’ Debate Flares Up Again.” Nature, February 24, 2016.
It was officially noted in early 2016 with the above article in Nature, which was subtitled “Researchers now argue that slowdown in warming was real.”
I was reminded of this upon reading Pierre Gosselin’s recent post at NoTricksZone, “Global Temperature Rise Some 75% Lower Than Models Projected!…
Continue Reading“If resources are not fixed but created, then the nature of the scarcity problem changes dramatically. For the technological means involved in the use of resources determines their creation and therefore the extent of their scarcity. The nature of the scarcity is not outside the process (that is natural), but a condition of it.”
– Tom DeGregori (1987). “Resources Are Not; They Become: An Institutional Theory.” Journal of Economic Issues, p. 1258.
The above quotation from one of my mentors goes a long way to explain the paradox of how “fixed” mineral supply (gold, silver …. oil, gas) expand rather than contract in a global free market.
A back-page current from the Wall Street Journal–just business-as-usual in the industry and in reporting–reminded me of Professor DeGregori’s insight. …
Continue Reading“Milton Friedman’s timeless energy insights should be appreciated for all time.”
Born on this day 106 years ago, free-market economist Milton Friedman (1912–2006) was one of a kind. Even the dyspeptic Paul Krugman called his rival “the economist’s economist…a very great man indeed—a man of intellectual courage who was one of the most important economic thinkers of all time and possibly the most brilliant communicator of economic ideas to the general public that ever lived.” The Economist (November 23, 2006) called him “the most influential economist of the second half of the twentieth century… and possibly all of it.”
Milton Friedman’s major professional mark was in monetary economics. But as a public intellectual, writing popular books and a biweekly Newsweek column, he became conversant in different fields, including energy.
Friedman understood how, for much of US history, major energy regulation was sponsored by some segment of the industry.…
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