“The Master Resource people are whores of the fossil fuel industry. (Yes, that certainly includes you.)”

– David Appell (@davidappell) | March 5, 2014 at 10:33 pm |

Judith Curry at Climate, Etc. posted about a new analysis by Nic Lewis and Marcel Crok, “A sensitive matter:  How the IPCC buried evidence showing good news about global warming” (Global Warming Policy Foundation: press release here; short version here), for which she wrote an introduction (see Appendix B below).

Several hundred comments followed. A critical, emotive thread of comments toward Lewis/Crok, and by implication Curry, was coming from David Appell, a highly credentialed journalist with a widely read blog, Quark Soup, that focuses on climate issues from an alarmist perspective.

I noticed this comment from Dr. Appell in response to pokerguy (aka al neipris) | March 5, 2014 at 7:16 pm who argued that at lower climate sensitivity, the external effects would “more likely … be overwhelmingly positive in its effect.”…

Leslie Stahl (CBS): Part of this [green technology investment] was supposed to be creating new jobs. Everything I’ve read there were not many jobs created.

Steven Koonin (DOE-ex): That’s correct.

Stahl: So what went wrong there?

Koonin: I didn’t say it would create jobs. Other people did.

Stahl: So you never thought it was gonna create ….

Koonin: I didn’t think it mattered as a job creation, no.

Last night (January 5, 2014), Leslie Stahl of 60 Minutes (CBS) exposed the green-technology boondoggle before a national audience.

The Cleantech Crash focused on venture-capitalist (and rent-seeker) Vinod Khosla, “the father of the Cleantech revolution.” Khosla has invested more than one billion dollars personally in approximately 50 energy startups, along with much taxpayer commitment. Yet his projects are in the red.…

“The real climate change ‘deniers’ are the alarmists who deny that natural forces still dominate weather and climate events, and refuse to acknowledge that thousands of scientists do not agree with IPCC proclamations and prescriptions.”

The old saws of climate alarmism getting increasingly desperate and intolerant in the face of contrary theoretical evidence and empirical anomalies.

The ad hominem attacks seem strange. Shouldn’t all good citizens of the earth be buoyed by the fact that yet another Malthusian-like alarm is becoming more and more implausible?

Shrilling, If Not Shilling

Al Gore is in full attack model, employing his “Climate Reality Project” to “Draw the Line on Denial,” even as he laid off 90% of the staff at his “Alliance for Climate Protection.” Greenpeace has joined the fray, launching a “Dealing in Doubt” campaign that blames ExxonMobil for funding the “global warming denial machine.”…

“The Baker Institute has some truing up to do in the multi-disciplinary field of climate change. Playing to its strengths, Rice University and Baker should host its third climate conference, titled something like ‘New Developments in the Physical Science of Climate Change.’

[Professor] Ronald Sass in his recent op-ed called for an ‘open, national debate on climate change.’ May Rice University and the Baker Institute lead the way.”

The Houston Chronicle this week ran opposing opinion-page editorials on the climate-change issue, one by Lamar Smith of the U.S. House of Representatives and the other by Ronald Sass, Fellow in Global Climate Change at Rice University’s James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy.

Politician Smith politely makes multi-disciplinary arguments assuming the best intentions of his opponents. Academic Sass goes ad hominem on the Keystone XL pipeline issue and refers vaguely to a scientific consensus for his position.…