A Free-Market Energy Blog

Comments to the InterAcademy IPCC Review: Is It Time to Start Over?

By Chip Knappenberger -- August 3, 2010

In May 2010, the InterAcademy Council (IAC) was selected to “conduct an independent review of the IPCC processes and the procedures by which it prepares its assessments of climate change.” In June, economist David (P. D.) Henderson shared with MasterResource his rather critical comments submitted to the IAC which centered around the IPCC’s lax adherence to their own set of governing principles. In this article, we highlight several other submissions to the IAC that Dr. Henderson thought MasterResource readers may find particularly interesting.

Additionally, we offer a compilation of all other IAC submissions that we could find scattered across the web—a service that the IAC does not itself provide.

Background

The IAC bills itself as “a multinational organization of science academies created to produce reports on scientific, technological, and health issues related to the great global challenges of our time, providing knowledge and advice to national governments and international organizations” and as such has been asked by the United Nations to:

[E]stablish a Committee of experts from relevant fields to conduct the review and to present recommendations on possible revisions of IPCC processes and procedures.

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Climate Alarmism vs. the IPCC (did Manzi get what Romm missed?)

By Robert Murphy -- August 2, 2010

The innocent layperson may have gotten the idea that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) represented the “consensus” view that urgent government action is needed to avert catastrophic impacts on humanity.

And yet, as Jim Manzi’s recent exchange with uber-alarmist Joe Romm makes perfectly clear, even the latest IPCC report punctures holes in the alarmist claims. Perhaps without realizing it, Romm implicitly admits that the IPCC AR4 report never supported the alarmist view.

Manzi Uses the IPCC to Take Down Al Gore

In his relatively new position as “in-house critic” at The New Republic, Manzi criticized a characteristically alarmist piece that Al Gore had published in the same venue. Manzi wanted to show that Gore was misleading the public on what the “scientific consensus” actually had to say about the risks of climate change.…

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Open Letter to Senator Brownback on His Support for a Federal Renewable Energy Standard

By Thomas Stacy II -- August 1, 2010

[Editor note: Senator Harry Reid (D-Nev.) removed a federal renewable mandate from the energy bill now under debate. However, Sen. Brownback of Kansas has indicated his intention to add an amendment to the bill resurrecting such a mandate.]

US Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS) displays a national debt clock on his home page and is a proclaimed conservative. Yet he supports wasteful government spending on deployment of impotent technologies like wind energy.

I believe Sam and his kind are the root cause of a failure for industrial windpower opponents to gain the upper hand in Washington D.C. I further believe that in Brownback’s case, his faulty platform correlates to his committee membership, which shows his allegiance to the agriculture lobby, which represent the secondary financial beneficiaries of wind energy deployment.…

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Milton Friedman on Mineral Resource Theory (remembering a giant of social thought)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- July 30, 2010
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New Mexico: Raising Rates for Bad Energy in a Poor State

By Marita Noon -- July 29, 2010
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Why Cap-and-Trade Is Politically Failing: Cost, Cost, Cost (The Chamberlin study and his response to Michael Levi, Council on Foreign Relations)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- July 28, 2010
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Muir Russell Findings No Solace for U.S. EPA

By Chip Knappenberger -- July 27, 2010
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Muir Russell Climategate Findings: Superficial, Uncompelling

By Chip Knappenberger -- July 26, 2010
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Regulatory Failure by the Numbers

By Robert L. Bradley, Jr. and Richard W. Fulmer -- July 24, 2010
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Northwest Windpower: Problems Aplenty

By Eric Lowe -- July 22, 2010
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