About a week ago, a strong winter storm, known as a nor’easter, was making its way, hit and miss, up the Northeastern seaboard. While forecasts of two feet or more in New York City were busts, forecasts of near three feet in the Boston environs were right on.
As almost goes without saying nowadays, speculation as to the influence of human-caused global warming on the behavior of the snowstorm are rife. Any by “speculation,” I mean blaming global warming for the storm’s ferocity.
And, as also goes without saying, the actual science behind such speculation is both slim and countered by a large body of confounding evidence.
But the number of stories in the mainstream media that hyped the former greatly outnumbered any that even bothered to mention the latter.
Below is reprinted a blog post that I co-authored with Patrick Michaels for the Cato Institute in the hours leading up to the storm trying to tamp down the global warming hype.…
Continue Reading“[A]n analysis of some of the calamities reported in doom and gloom media accounts shows some—at times, severe—disconnect with actual observations. For instance, there is no evidence that ocean acidification has killed jellyfish predators, nor that jellyfish are taking over the ocean, and predictions that the killer algae, Caulerpa taxifolia, was going to devastate the Mediterranean ecosystem have not been realized, despite claims to the contrary from the media.”
– Carlos Duarte et al., “Reconsidering Ocean Calamities,” BioScience, December 31, 2014.
“Ocean Life Faces Mass Extinction, Broad Study Says” stated a recent headline in the New York Times. Is it true? Has a “groundbreaking” analysis “from hundreds of sources” of the world’s oceans unearthed signs of human-caused global catastrophe, as claimed? Or is this just another alarmist narrative that’s all wet?…
Continue ReadingEconomic conservation of energy consists of voluntary actions and investments that make sense to the decision-maker in a free-market setting. Political conservation is government-directed energy reduction measures. The later, conservationism, is energy savings for its own sake through monopolistic coercion or special favor (tax beak, crony regulation, or public check).
Demand-Side Management (DSM) programs by electric utilities are a major element of conservationism. Those who support reasonable efficiency and the elimination of waste should let the energy-efficiency politicos have the DSM term and use other words to describe what is favored.
DSM rose to regulatory prominence during the late 1980’s following the disastrous nuclear generation construction programs of the electric utilities. The confidence of the utility industry and its regulators in high-cost building programs shaken, they listened to new other approaches to meet future energy demand.…
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