The Pew Center on Global Climate Change is premised on the notion that climate science is settled and we must move toward major, open-ended government intervention with energy and the economy. “Climate change poses an extraordinary challenge that demands immediate action,” begins the Science Impacts page on the Pew Center’s website.
Thus I was surprised to read this from a Pew representative in a debate over climate-change science hosted recently by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. As debate participant Lawrence Solomon reported the Financial Post:
… Continue Reading“I really detest phrases like the science is settled,” asserted Dr. Jay Gulledge, a climate specialist at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change in his opening statement. “To characterize myself and the Pew Center as viewing the science as settled is a bit of a red herring.”
In last Friday’s Wall Street Journal (Jan. 2, 2008), Science Journal editor Robert Lee Hotz reviewed the climate of 2008 and concluded that despite a relatively cool year, all signs were go for anthropogenic global warming proceeding at a rapid and destructive clip—perhaps even faster than climate models envisioned.
Hotz’s review was extremely selective, with the effect of keeping the specter of catastrophic global warming alive and well, in the face of mounting evidence that it has, in fact, become gravely ill.
A closer look at the recent behavior of global temperatures indicates that all is not well with climate-model projections of alarming climate change.
2008 added another year to a lengthening string in which the rate of global temperature rise has been far beneath model predictions showing that natural variability still plays a large role in everyday weather and climate.…
Continue ReadingRobert Bryce is one of the leading journalists on energy issues. He is Managing Editor of Energy Tribune, and in a recent article gave a mea culpa on oil speculators:
… Continue ReadingBack in June, I wrote a piece for The American in which I argued that oil prices were being driven higher by the immutable law of supply and demand. Today, with prices plunging to near $40 instead of the $145 level seen in mid-July, it’s abundantly obvious that speculators were a key driver, probably the main driver, of the surge in oil prices that occurred between late 2007 and July.
So, to be clear, I was wrong. The leaders of OPEC were right. So, too, was my pal, Ed Wallace. In May, Wallace, a savvy journalist from Fort Worth who writes for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and Business Week, published several articles [in] which he showed how the unregulated futures market was being used by speculators to push prices upward.