This week the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration reported that 2012 was the warmest year on record for the contiguous United States. NOAA’s not the only one to reach this conclusion. As Ron Bailey noted
Archive | Climate Change
Mann v. Steyn — CEI SLAPPs Back
By Jonathan H. Adler on December 20, 2012 11:44 am in Climate Change, Defamation, Freedom of Speech, Politicizing Science
Earlier this week, Rand Simberg and the Competitive Enterprise Institute replied to Michael Mann’s libel suit. Specifically, they filed a motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim and, more interestingly, a special motion to dismiss under the District of Columbia’s Anti-SLAPP Act. As I noted here, Mann exposed himself to this motion by […]
Little Change in Global Drought
Evidence of global warming can be found in a global increase in the frequency and severity of droughts, right? That’s what scientists thought, but a new paper in Nature finds no evidence that warmer temperatures in recent decades have correlated with (let alone caused) an increase in droughts. Contrary to what the IPCC had concluded […]
Mann v. Steyn — The Defendants Respond
By Jonathan H. Adler on October 25, 2012 8:51 pm in Climate Change, Defamation, Freedom of Speech, Politicizing Science
On Monday, famed climate scientist Michael Mann filed suit against National Review and the Competitive Enterprise Institute over some allegedly defamatory blog posts. Now some of the defendants have responded. Here is CEI’s official response, and a legal analysis from their lawyer. Of note, while CEI refused to apologize for the initial blog post (which […]
Mann v. Steyn — Popcorn Time
By Jonathan H. Adler on October 23, 2012 2:19 pm in Climate Change, Defamation, Freedom of Speech, Politicizing Science
Climatologist Michael Mann, creator of the infamous “hockey stick” graph, has filed suit against National Review and the Competitive Enterprise Institute for allegedly defamatory blog posts attacking Mann and his work. Dr. Mann has posted a release about the suit on his Facebook page. I’ll post links to the complaint once it’s on-line. In the […]
En Banc Petitions in D.C. Circuit Greenhouse Gas Litigation
By Jonathan H. Adler on August 28, 2012 3:48 pm in Administrative Law, Climate Change, Environment, Standing
Earlier this month, several of the parties challenging the Environmental Protection Agency’s decision to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act filed petitions for panel rehearing or rehearing en banc in Coalition for Responsible Regulation v. EPA, in which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit turned away all of the state […]
Mann v. Steyn
Penn State climatologist Michael Mann, he of the infamous “Hockey stick” graph, is threatening to sue Mark Steyn and National Review for a blog post on NRO in which Steyn (quoting Rand Simberg) compared Penn State’s investigation of scientific misconduct allegations against Mann with the same university’s initial investigation of Jerry Sandusky and the Penn […]
Lessons from British Columbia’s Carbon Tax
In yesterday’s NYT, Yoram Bauman and Shi-Ling Hsu explained why the U.S. would be wise to follow British Columbia’s example and impose a carbon tax and use the revenues to reduce other tax rates. On Sunday, the best climate policy in the world got even better: British Columbia’s carbon tax — a tax on the […]
The D.C. Circuit’s Greenhouse Gas Decision
Today’s decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in Coalition for Responsible Regulation v. EPA is quite significant for environmental law. As John Elwood notes below, the court turned away the state and industry challenges to the EPA’s decision to begin regulating greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. The only […]
D.C. Circuit Rejects Challenges to Greenhouse Gas Regulations
The summary of the holding from the court’s opinion: [W]e conclude: 1) the Endangerment Finding and Tailpipe Rule are neither arbitrary nor capricious; 2) EPA’s interpretation of the governing CAA provisions is unambiguously correct; and 3) no petitioner has standing to challenge the Timing and Tailoring Rules. We thus dismiss for lack of jurisdiction all […]
NASA’s James Hansen Is Right
NASA’s James Hansen can be a bit unhinged when he talks about climate change. Although one of the world’s more prominent climate scientists, he has a penchant for selectively presenting only the most apocalyptic global warming scenarios and adopting unduly inflammatory rhetoric, as when he compared coal-laden trains, aka “death trains,” to the railcars carrying […]
Heartland’s Mad Billboard Stunt
By Jonathan H. Adler on May 9, 2012 10:40 am in Climate Change, Energy, Environment, Politicizing Science
The folks at the Heartland Institute are mad, and that seems to have driven them a little mad. For years environmental activists have compared climate skeptics and those who raise questions about the likelihood of a warming-induced apocalypse to Holocaust deniers and worse. In 1989, then-Senator Al Gore famously compared those who downplayed the climate […]
EPA to Release More Greenhouse Gas Regulations
The Washington Post reports the Environmental Protection Agency will release proposed regulations governing the emissions of greenhouse gas emissions from power plants this week, perhaps as early as today. As described by the Post, this New Source Performance Standard regulation could put a halt to the construction of new coal-fired power plants unless and until […]
Climate Change in the D.C. Circuit
Today the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit will begin two days of oral arguments in a set of challenges to the EPA’s various rules applying the Clean Air Act to greenhouse gas regulations. These rules are the inevitable outgrowth of the Supreme Court’s decision in Massachusetts v. EPA, as I explain here […]
Climategate Turnabout Continued
The revelation that Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute posed as a Heartland Institute board member to obtain confidential board documents and then distributed these documents, along with an almost-certainly-fake “Climate Strategy” memo continues to reverberate through climate science and policy circles. Folks that might otherwise be discussing the new study claiming climate change could […]