“The climate-crisis industry is much larger than merely the IPCC and vaguely defined government agencies. Other major players include wealthy, powerful Big Green pressure groups; wind, solar and biofuel companies that offer supposed alternatives to fossil fuels; politicians who have tied their careers, influence and campaign contributions to the global warming/climate change/extreme weather mantra; and journalists and media outlets that have also hitched their wagons to this global movement.”

Georgia Institute of Technology climate sciences professor Judith Curry has perceptively interpreted a recent analysis by economists William Butos and Thomas McQuade on how “Big Players” can distort climate research and other scientific endeavors. Their discussion, and hundreds of comments that followed, deserve careful consideration.

Big Players are institutions and officials who have the funding, influence and power to dictate who receives grants, what research gets published, whose evidence and conclusions receive wide coverage, and whether the findings and related policy proposals will be debated.…

“Only by expanding our research to include careful and honest studies of natural factors will science be able to discern and separate significant human influences from the powerful natural forces responsible for minor-to-profound climate fluctuations throughout history. Only then will we begin to improve our ability to predict why, when, how and where Earth’s climate is likely to change in the future.”

Bad climate knowledge, quantified as multi-decadal predictions, tell impoverished countries that they can develop only with “green” wind and solar energy. The World Bank, U.S. Overseas Private Investment Corporation, and other financial institutions increasingly refuse to provide grants or loans for electricity generation projects fueled by coal or natural gas, for example. (Whether or not these agencies should exist is another question.)

In the face of domestic statism institutionalizing poverty, millions continue to die every year because they do not have electricity to operate water purification facilities; refrigerators to keep food and medicine from spoiling; or stoves and heaters to replace wood and dung fires that cause rampant lung diseases.…

“Everybody talks about the weather,” an old adage states, “but nobody does anything about it.” Don’t tell that to the climate alarmists who conflate weather with climate because humans are causing climate “disruption.” Experts from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, fixated on carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions, tell us to “do something about it.” At the very least, they say, improved climate prediction can prepare us for the crises to come.

There are three problems with his narrative (outside of its recent political rejection at the U.S. ballot box, which means defunding to come).

One, scientists increasingly realize that carbon dioxide’s role as a “greenhouse gas” is much lower than previously thought.

Two, cutting CO₂ emissions means slashing the use of fossil fuels that provide over 80% of America’s and the world’s energy enabling modern living standards and lifting billions of people out of poverty and disease.…

“Carbon pollution conjures up images prior to the 1960s when coal was burned without environmental controls in electric power generation; there was train transportation and city-operated district heating systems; there was home heating and cooking with vast amounts of soot strewn over snow in the winter; and when laundry was dried outside and cars parked outside too. In reality carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels is a positive benefit to society as explained by Princeton University Emeritus Professor William Happer in The Myth of Carbon Pollution.”

British journalist Tim Montgomerie recently wrote in The Times (UK), “Our energy policy is insane: this the inconvenient truth.” I could not have found a better title for the Obama-led, and too often Republican supported, energy policies at home.

Montgomerie described the plight of those in the United Kingdom saddled with energy policies that take money from poor pensioners and give it to wealthy landowners who profit from wind farms. …