“’Unaccountable statistics’ [are] statistical goulash that sounds tangy and sophisticated but is actually bereft of substance, and used to make predictions that are almost never accounted for. Any number of ‘scientific’ renewable energy reports, from NREL to Stanford to MIT, are of this kind.”

Kent Hawkins’s post yesterday, “Science, Advocacy, and Public Policy,” defends the scientific method against both political correctness and the misuses of the method, often by people who claim to be scientists. This is a major issue in the current energy and climate debate where exaggeration and bias go hand-in-hand. I wish to add support to Hawkins’s theses in light of some of science’s nuanced complexity.

Scientific Inquiry

Here’s how a few mainly twentieth century scientists defined the purpose of scientific inquiry:

“Science is the disinterested search for the objective truth about the material world.”–Richard

 “The Master Resource people are whores of the fossil fuel industry. (Yes, that certainly includes you.)”

– David Appell (@davidappell) | March 5, 2014 at 10:33 pm |

Judith Curry at Climate, Etc. posted about a new analysis by Nic Lewis and Marcel Crok, “A sensitive matter:  How the IPCC buried evidence showing good news about global warming” (Global Warming Policy Foundation: press release here; short version here), for which she wrote an introduction (see Appendix B below).

Several hundred comments followed. A critical, emotive thread of comments toward Lewis/Crok, and by implication Curry, was coming from David Appell, a highly credentialed journalist with a widely read blog, Quark Soup, that focuses on climate issues from an alarmist perspective.

I noticed this comment from Dr. Appell in response to pokerguy (aka al neipris) | March 5, 2014 at 7:16 pm who argued that at lower climate sensitivity, the external effects would “more likely … be overwhelmingly positive in its effect.”…

On December 26, 2008, the free-market energy blog MasterResource began. Some 1,440 posts (from 150 authors) later, we are nearing two million views.

The original idea of MasterResource was to bring a distinguished group of energy experts together to attract a wider audience. The thinking was that a movement website would provide the critical mass to be heard in an increasingly crowded blogosphere.

Here was the original concept as explained in our first blog five years ago today:

We are just getting started here, but some of us veterans of the energy debate from a private property, free-market perspective have teamed together to offer our thoughts on late breaking energy items. When I read my newspapers each day, I have some thoughts that I wish I could share with folks from a historical, worldview perspective.

“In this century the bulk of humanity will live in large densely populated cities. If the citizens of of these cities are to attain a high quality of life they will require large centralised energy generation. This is not a matter of ideological preference, but of engineering reality.”

– Robert Wilson, The Future of Energy: Why Power Density Matters, Energy Collective, August 8, 2013.

“There is no doubt that we in the United States need to alter our energy strategy. The question is how we will change it. A rational energy strategy must be determined by scientific evaluation of fact and logical analysis of performance and economics–not by emotion, political considerations, and ‘feel good’ methodologies.”

– Jerry Graf (below)

Other than the damage to the economy from the waste itself, the real problem with mandating and subsidizing non-viable energy technology projects is that this distracts us and diverts resources from other efforts to improve our energy production strategy.…