The first great requisite of motive power is, that it shall be wholly at our command, to be exerted when, and where, and in what degree we desire. The wind, for instance, as a direct motive power, is wholly inapplicable to a system of machine labour, for during a calm season the whole business of the country would be thrown out of gear.

– W. S. Jevons, The Coal Question (London: Macmillan, 1865), p. 122.

If only the legion of energy experts and specialists in the colleges and universities, U.S. Department of Energy labs, and environmentalist organizations understood William Stanley Jevons of the 19th century and Vaclav Smil today. If so, they would understand why:

• Renewable energy is failing at times of peak demand (see the Duck Curve post this week).

“In a paper being published in the March-April [2009] edition of the journal Environment, Matthew C. Nisbet … said Mr. Gore’s approach, focusing on language of crisis and catastrophe, could actually be serving the other side in the fight … ‘as global-warming alarmism….'” – Andrew Revkin, NYT (2009).

“There has to be a lot of shrillness taken out of our language. In the environmental community, we have to be more humble. We can’t take the attitude that we have all the answers.” – Fred Krupp, Environmental Defense Fund (2011).

A backlash against climate alarmism is evident. Witness the interest in Michael Shellenberger’s Apocalypse Never, building on his argument presented at Forbes seven months ago, Why Climate Alarmism Hurts Us All.

Bjorn Lomborg’s new book, False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet,” also a best seller, demotes the climate scare at just the time the other side wants panic.…

“To refine our estimates of climate sensitivity will require breakthroughs in climate physics and more high-quality measurements…. Both outcomes likely lie a couple decades hence….”

“Are Climate Model Projections too Hot?” Niskanen Center (downloaded January 19, 2020)

Climate activists, whether scientists or members of a nongovernmental organization (NGO), eschew direct debate. “The science is settled!” … “We must take action now!” … All to keep fossil fuels in the ground and let the consumers worry about energy affordability, reliability, and convenience.

But the holy grail of climate sensitivity to man-made emissions of greenhouse gases, the enhanced greenhouse effect, remains in stubborn dispute today as in the 1980s. The range of equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) is wide and not expected to come down soon.

The bottom end, as projected by models and accepted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is in net positive territory, according to leading climate economists.…

[Editor Note: It was during the Thanksgiving weekend ten years ago that the Climategate unsettling oeuvre was being disseminated and analyzed. This post summarizes some remembrances from that period.]

“They were shown: contriving to destroy inconvenient data in order to evade FOI inquiries; attempting to shut down scientific journals which published studies unhelpful to their cause; viciously bullying dissenters; even trying to rewrite history, for example, to erase the widely recognised Medieval Warming Period.” (James Delingpole, “My Finest Hour,” November 9, 2019)

“There is no doubt that these emails are embarrassing and a public-relations disaster for science.” (Andrew Dessler, “Climate E-Mails Cloud the Debate,” December 10, 2009)

Climategate lives in infamy. Then, and now, it is a case study of agendas driving science rather than science driving agendas.…