There are many thousands of academics and others that do not like capitalism, industrialization, consumerism, and mineral energies. The same “consensus” thought that Peak Oil had arrived, time and again. Malthusianism is and has always been “consensus science.”

An ongoing exercise in groupthink is to believe the climate is in crisis because a scientific/political elite says so. Never mind that the Malthusians/ neo-Malthusians have been wrong with their ‘garbage-in, garbage-out’ models ever since the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) “limits to growth” model in 1972.

Enter Mark Mathis of the Clear Energy Alliance, a student of all things energy and climate and a distinguished communicator (see Appendix). Last month at an industry event (Marcellus Utica Midstream Conference, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), Mathis stated in “Breaking Through the Regulatory Wall:”

For a scientist, for a climatologist to say, “we know that we’re the cause,” okay, “and the consequences are extreme” — well, we’ve got these giant natural factors, you know, sunspot activity, oceans, cloud formations, these are all extraordinarily complex things, okay?

“The multitude of smoking guns in the Climategate emails made it a war zone. And the ‘missing heat’ raised by Climategater Kevin Trenberth plagues high-sensitivity warmists today.”

“You can be happy and optimistic…. The dense (mineral) energy era (fossil fuels) has been a boom to you, me, and virtually everyone. CO2 is greening the ecosphere while climate-related deaths plummet. And the Paris Climate Accord is failing–a good political outcome for the developing countries in particular.”

A recent post at DesmogUK, titled Why the Climategate Hack was More than an Attack on Science, caught my eye. Funny how the apologists have to defend an event that happened a decade ago! They would love to just ignore it and move on. But in clear words, sentences, and in English, science was tortured in the name of a cause.…

This continues my three-part review of Andrew Dessler’s primer on the physical science and political economy of climate change, Introduction to Modern Climate Change (2nd edition: 2016).

Part I, “Suggestions for More Interdisciplinary Scholarship, Less Advocacy,” brought attention to the uneven treatment of issues in science, economics, and public policy that tainted the primer. I questioned the Deep Ecology assumption of optimal nature, wherein, according to Dessler, “any change in climate, either warming or cooling, will result in overall negative outcomes for human society” (p. 146).

This seems exactly wrong in our interglacial period when climate-related fatalities have fallen dramatically and agricultural production has soared thanks to warmth but particularly to fossil-fueled capitalism. Incentives and wealth have proven more than a match for the vicissitudes of weather and climate. As Alex Epstein (The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, pp.…

“If ‘some humans survive’ is the only thing we care about, then climate change is a non-issue. I think it’s certain that ‘some’ humans will survive almost any climate change. They may be living short, hard lives of poverty, but they’ll be alive.”

“Future humans, as they live in a climate dystopia: ‘I thought he cared about the environment’.”

“I find the path we’re on now — the rich world survives (if lucky), but abandons everyone else — to be morally problematic.”

Professor Andrew Dessler of Texas A&M is the alarmist’s alarmist. At a lunch some years ago, he remarked to me (and his more moderate colleague Gerald North) that humankind would have to live underground because of anthropogenic warming. And he stated that fossil fuels had made us slaves, a deep-ecology argument that has been ably turned around by Matt Ridley).…