[The other posts in this series on the activism of Texas A&M climatologists are here: Part II, Part III, Part IV, and Part V]

On March 7th, the Houston Chronicle published an editorial by two Texas A&M climate scientists, Andrew Dessler and Gerald North (et al.):  “On Global Warming, the Science is Solid.” The op-ed argued that Climategate was a mere distraction and that climate science was settled in favor of alarm–both points being intended to challenge the State of Texas’s Petition for Rehearing to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s endangerment finding, which was based on a belief of “settled science.”

A week later, a response/defense followed in the Chronicle, written by Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott: “State Suing for Responsible Scientific Conclusions.”…

In recent years, I have been working on a book trilogy inspired by the rise and fall of Enron, easily a top-ten event in the history of commercial capitalism. I worked at Enron for 16 years and knew Ken Lay (a nice, albeit subtly flawed, man) well. No, I did not know the extent of the company’s problems (very few did), but I should have known more. Still, I was very critical of the company’s political business model and in particular, Enron’s climate alarmism and investments in (uneconomic, unreliable, unprofitable) wind power and solar power.

Book 1 in the trilogy, Capitalism at Work: Business, Government, and Energy (2009), spends several chapters on best business practices and sustainable corporate culture under capitalism proper–and the perils for the same from political capitalism.…

Most everyone in science or politics is familiar with the scandal that erupted after hundreds of emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) were made public several months ago. The emails between climate scientists expose evidence of climate-data manipulation, conspiracies to silence scientists critical of man-made global-warming theory, and dodging of freedom-of-information requests.

Climategate became shorthand for bad behavior.  The climate-science community scrambled. The United Nations and myriad other groups trembled about the scandal’s implications for their own climate agendas. Investigations commenced into the actions of the CRU’s director, Phil Jones, and of Penn State’s Michael Mann, author of the infamous, debunked “hockey-stick” climate graph.

Yet today things have become relatively quiet. Though the media and much of the public have turned their attention to other stories, including the failure of climate politics in Copenhagen and the backlash against Obama’s Chicago-hard politics, a key lesson from Climategate remains: climate policy has not been and is not being guided by sound science.…

My recent post at MasterResource, Climategate: Here Comes Courage!, has been picked up in the blogosphere (such as at WattsUpWithThat) and has received several thousand views at MasterResource.

In my post, I profiled three individuals in the Houston area who in the post-Climategate environment have spoken up more forcefully against climate alarmism:

1. Dr. Neil Frank (a former director of the National Hurricane Center in Miami and a weather forecaster at KHOU-Channel 11 in Houston);
2. Michelle Michot Foss, an internationally respected energy economist with the University of Texas at Austin and the past president of both the U.S. Association for Energy Economics (2001) and the International Association for Energy Economics (2003); and
3. Peter Hartley, the George and Cynthia Mitchell Chair in Sustainable Development and Environmental Economics, and Professor of Economics, at Rice University.