A Free-Market Energy Blog

The Global Cooling Scare Revisited (‘Ice Age’ Holdren had plenty of company)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- September 26, 2009

“Predictions of future climate trends by Stephen Schneider and other leading climatologists, based on the prevailing knowledge of the atmosphere in the early 1970s, gave more weight to the potential problem of global cooling than it now appears to merit.”

– Paul and Anne Ehrlich, Betrayal of Science and Reason (Washington: Island Press, 1996), p. 34.

Recent attention has been paid to the coming Ice Age talk of John Holdren and Steven Schneider before they got global warming religion.

Here are some “global cooling” quotations and comments from an earlier era. While such concern was not a scientific ‘consensus,’ such as that created by the United Nations’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in favor of high-sensitivity anthropogenic global warming, the Ice Age scare was a very active hypothesis that should give pause to the Boiling Age purveyors of today.…

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Secretary Chu, Repeat After Me: “Consumers Respond to Price Signals, Not Moral Exhortations” (remember Jimmy Carter?)

By Donald Hertzmark -- September 25, 2009

Thirty years after President Carter declared that our energy crisis was the “moral equivalent of war,” forever known as “meow,” we are faced with another federal potentate who is sure that he knows what is best for us. At a Smart Grid conference in Washington, D.C., Energy Secretary Stephen Chu opined that “The American public … just like your teenage kids, aren’t acting in a way that they should act.”

Just as President Carter declared that our country’s failure to conserve natural gas and oil was a symptom of a “malaise,” not heaven forefend, the low prices for fuels sold at (federally) regulated prices, so does the current Energy Secretary believe that our citizenry is incapable of making rational decisions about energy use.

Why would the smartest guy in the room (read: central planner) say such a thing–a mistake his press office now says?…

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Is Joe Romm a ‘Global Lukewarmer’?

By Chip Knappenberger -- September 24, 2009

“On our current emissions path, we’re going to … warm more than 4°C by century’s end.”

– Joseph Romm, Climate Progress, August 11, 2009

I will be happy to bet anyone that the 2010s will be the hottest decade in the temperature record, more than 0.15°C hotter than the hottest decade so far using the NASA GISS dataset.  Any takers? Andy [Revkin]?”

Joseph Romm, Climate Progress, September 22, 2009

In a fit of rage, uber-alarmist Joe Romm of ClimateProgress has recently offered a temperature warming bet that he can win even if more than 85% of all climate models are shown to overpredict future warming.

Has Joe seen the light and become a “lukewarmer”—that is, someone who thinks that the human CO2 emissions will result in only a modest rise in global temperature, somewhere at or below the bottom end of the IPCC range of projections?…

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The Federal ‘Green’ Super Highway: 3,000 Miles to Nowhere? (Part II: Obama’s power grab and high cost)

By Robert Peltier -- September 23, 2009
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The Federal “Green” Superhighway: 3,000 Miles to Nowhere? (Part II: Obama’s power grab, high cost)

By Robert Peltier --
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The Federal ‘Green’ Superhighway: 3,000 Miles to Nowhere? (Part I: siting politics and state wealth transfers)

By Robert Peltier -- September 22, 2009
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Running Into Oil

By -- September 21, 2009
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IER’s Danish Wind Study: Response to Critics

By -- September 19, 2009
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The United States is the World’s True Energy Superpower

By Donald Hertzmark -- September 18, 2009
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The Iron Age & Coal-based Coke: A Neglected Case of Fossil-fuel Dependence

By Vaclav Smil -- September 17, 2009
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