“… to a significant extent man commands as well the very destiny of this planet where he lives, and the destiny of all life upon it.”

“In order to have both environmental quality and an improving standard of living, we will need to develop new clean energy sources and to learn to use energy more efficiently.”

– President Richard Nixon (February 8, 1972)

Government grows with emergencies, real or imagined. There have been wartime emergencies, such as World War II. And there have been Malthusian ’emergencies’–as in resource exhaustion in the 1970s and climate change today.

Forty-nine years ago today, amid a natural gas shortage (from long-standing price controls), and with tightening oil markets (from his price controls), President Nixon gave a “Special Message to Congress Outlining the 1972 Environmental Program.”…

“There’s a range of credible perspectives that I try to consider. It’s a very complex problem, and we don’t have the answers yet.”

“And now we have way too much confidence in some very dubious climate models and inadequate data sets. And we’re not really framing the problem broadly enough to … make credible projections about the range of things that we could possibly see in the 21st century.”

– Judith Curry, below

“One plus the truth equals a majority,” the saying goes. This certainly applies to Judith Curry, a distinguished academic and professional climate scientist now retired from Georgia Tech. (For previous posts at MasterResource on Dr. Curry, see here.)

The latest from this rare straight shooter comes from a taped interview with Christopher Balkaran at his Strong and Free Podcast, where, in his words, “my goal is to showcase multiple perspectives on the topics and ideas of our time, regardless of your politics and views.”…

“Whispered discreetly at conferences or in meeting rooms, these claims [against mainstream climate science] might be accepted as part of the frequently contentious process of a still evolving area of science. Stated publicly on some of the same Web sites that broke the so-called Climategate e-mails last fall, they are considered by many to be a betrayal, earning Curry epithets from her colleagues ranging from ‘naive’ to ‘bizarre’ to ‘nasty’ to worse.”

– “Climate heretic: Judith Curry Turns on her Colleagues,” Scientific American (reprinted in Nature), 2010.

The Climategate saga in 2009 (see here and here) opened the door to uncertainty and dissent regarding the ‘settled science’ view of carbon dioxide (CO2) and climate alarmism. The next year, Scientific American (October 25, 2010) published a piece by Michael Lemonick, then senior science writer at Climate Central, on respected scientist Judith Curry on the agenda-driven turn of climate science.…

“A reliable worldview, respect for data, and humility in the face of the unknown allow older writings to have longevity and relevance. I believe that the above summary has held up well as the climate debate enters its fourth decade. I predict that fossil fuels will outlive and overcome the current attack just as was done back in the 1970s.”

In 2003, I published a booklet for the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) in London, Climate Alarmism Reconsidered. Written 15 years after James Hansen’s climate-scare testimony, and 16 years before Joe Biden’s ‘climate day‘ yesterday, I present the summary bullets of that study.

The ten points follow:

• The energy sustainability issues of resource depletion, reliability (security) and pollution have been effectively addressed by market entrepreneurship, technology, and, in the absence of private property rights, measured regulation.