“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.…

We are used to hearing about how far behind the curve the United States is on energy. Just today, we were reminded that Germany and China will gobble up our future since we have failed to invest in solar and wind technologies, in particular, photovoltaic fabrication plants.

Actually, that’s not quite true. There are quite a number of PV plants in the U.S., just not any using the technology touted by the New York Times reporter.

And as for wind: did you know that “China is going to eat our lunch and take our jobs on clean energy.” That is not true either. Current wind generating capacity in the U.S. is just shy of 30,000 MW, larger than any other country, including Germany (24,000 MW) and China (13,000 MW).…

As an old-fashioned scientist, I prefer hard engineering realities to all those interminably vacuous and poorly informed policy “debates” that feature energy self-sufficiency (even Saudis import!), sustainability (at what spatial and temporal scales?), stakeholders (are not we all, in a global economy?) and green economy (but are not we still burning some 9 billion tonnes of carbon annually?).

High regard for facts and low regard for wishful thinking has forced me to deal repeatedly with many energy illusions–if not outright delusions–and to point out many complications and difficulties to be encountered during an inevitably lengthy transition from an overwhelmingly fossil-fueled world to economies drawing a substantial share of their primary energies from renewable sources.

Steel & Coal-Derived Coke

Here is another challenge for the energy transformationists, one that is both inexplicably neglected and extraordinarily important: steel’s fundamental dependence on coal-derived coke with no practical substitutes on any rational technical horizon.…

This is part 2 of my post on a recent Partnership for a Secure America (PSA) briefing on climate change, energy and national security. Yesterday’s post made two main points:

(1) The strange-bedfellow coalition of defense hawks and eco-warriers is based not on sound national security arguments but on a convergence of political interests. For defense hawks, the alleged climate crisis facilitates mission creep by providing an open-ended rationale to expand DOD programs, activities, capabilities, and the appropriations to fund them. For green groups, partnership with defense and intelligence big wigs builds their already formidable lobbying machine and gives them cachet with conservatives who generally oppose government meddling in energy markets and Kyoto-style “global governance.”

(2) The PSA panelists exaggerate the security risks of climate change. The “history” of global warming, recent research on climate sensitivity, and even the Stern Review (properly understood) call into question the claim that climate change is an important “threat multiplier.”