John Stossel’s new show premieres tonight on Fox Business Channel at 8pm ET. His topic is global warming. He has called the opening film shown to delegates at the Copenhagen conference “fear-mongering.” Here it is: Please Help the World — COP15 Opening Film
Archive | Environment
Applying the Precautionary Principle Consistently
One major problem with most invocations of the precautionary principle is that people tend to apply it to whatever danger they want to prevent, but largely ignore it in considering the potential dangers created by the policies they advocate. For example, Dick Cheney applied a version of the principle to the threat of terrorism, arguing […]
Europol Reports Massive Fraud in the Carbon Credits Market
Europol, the European police consortium, has issued the following press release: The Hague, 09 December 2009 Carbon Credit fraud causes more than 5 billion euros damage for European Taxpayer The European Union (EU) Emission Trading System (ETS) has been the victim of fraudulent traders in the past 18 months. This resulted in losses of approximately […]
The Precautionary Principle
Last night I was talking with a colleague about writing something on the “Precautionary Principle.” This morning I see John Miller at the Corner writing about a Tom Friedman column pushing that very principle. After raising Dick Cheney’s views on meeting low-probability threats from Al Qaeda and quoting Cass Sunstein on the precautionary principle, Friedman […]
Some of the “Homogenized” Temperature Data is False
By Jim Lindgren on December 8, 2009 5:43 pm in Academia, Climate Change, Environment, Politicizing Science
When the CRU at East Anglia disclosed that it had lost some of the raw temperature data, leaving only the “homogenized” data, some honest commentators expressed the hope that the homogenizing was competently done. Anyone who has been following Climate Audit for the last few years knows that at least some of the adjustments to […]
Krugman v. Hansen
NYT columnist Paul Krugman is not happy with NASA climate scientist James Hansen for the latter’s op-ed attacking cap-and-trade and proposing a tax-based alternative (which I blogged about here). Such arguments are “unhelpful,” Krugman says, because they ignore the fact that in the theoretical world of transaction-cost free blackboard economics caps and taxes are the […]
Here Come the Greenhouse Regs
This afternoon, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will announce that it has made a formal determination that, in the judgment of the EPA Administrator, the emission of greenhouse gases cause, or contribute to, air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare. This is the so-called “endangerment finding” which will trigger […]
OzoneGate and ClimateGate
In his post below, Eric Posner asks why ozone depletion and the phaseout of CFCs and other ozone-depleting substances did not produce the same degree of backlash as does global warming. Where were the Climate Skeptics back then? Or was ozonegate, like asteroidgate, a non-event because the climate is a “complex system” whereas, um…. Why […]
Physicists Ask American Physical Society to Rescind Its Statement on Global Warming Because It Was Based on “Cheat[ing]” and “Corrupted” Work
By Jim Lindgren on December 7, 2009 2:29 am in Academia, Climate Change, Environment, Politicizing Science
While the wider world is just beginning to realize that the subfield of paleoclimatology is in shambles (and has been for the last decade), scientists in related disciplines are increasingly fighting back against the shoddy work and orthodoxy that was foisted on them. A small group, including several prominent physicists, are asking the American Physical […]
Steven Hayward on ClimateGate
Steven Hayward (of AEI) has an excellent article in the Weekly Standard on the CRU scandal (tip to Powerline and Adler below). Hayward concludes: The distinction between utterly politicized scientists such as Jones, Mann, and NASA’s James Hansen, and other more sober scientists has been lost on the media and climate campaigners for a long […]
Debunking Briffa’s Version of the Hockey Sticks
By Jim Lindgren on December 6, 2009 12:18 am in Academia, Climate Change, Environment, Politicizing Science
Among the most ethically challenged of the scientists at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia is Keith Briffa. A couple of months ago, the Bishop Hill blog retold in detail the sad story about Briffa’s own version of the Hockey Stick, which he was able to keep alive by his attempts […]
Looking Back at the Hockey Stick Thesis: The JoNova Acoount
By Jim Lindgren on December 4, 2009 10:16 pm in Academia, Climate Change, Environment, Politicizing Science
Besides last year’s Bishop Hill post discussed below, another blog account of the “Hockey Stick” thesis that merits excerpting is at JoNova. I do this despite my finding its tone a bit overheated and its generalizations not being adequately qualified. Substantively, I disagree with its treatment of the evidence in favor of the Medieval Warming […]
Looking Back at the Hockey Stick Thesis: The Bishop Hill Account
By Jim Lindgren on December 4, 2009 9:39 pm in Academia, Climate Change, Environment, Politicizing Science
Because a big part of the scientific misconduct in ClimateGate involves Michael Mann’s now discredited “Hockey Stick” thesis, I thought it might be good to review a couple of the better posts outlining some of the misbehavior. The first is a long post from 16 months ago at the Bishop Hill blog (tip to Andrew […]
Noah Sachs Responds to Anderson re Copenhagen and Collective Action
By Kenneth Anderson on November 30, 2009 10:36 pm in Climate Change, Collective Action Problems, Economy, Environment, International Law, Politicizing Science
Noah Sachs, over at PrafsBlawg, is kind enough to respond to my post on the Copenhagen meetings and collective action problems. It is worth reading the whole thing, but here is a chunk of it. (If you comment, please remember that Professor Sachs is my guest here, so be courteous. And my thanks to him […]
How Are the Copenhagen Talks Supposed to Overcome Collective Action Problems?
By Kenneth Anderson on November 29, 2009 7:42 pm in Climate Change, Collective Action Problems, Environment, International Law
Let me leave aside for the moment all the leaked memos and stuff. I would describe myself as a non-expert on climate issues who has been gradually persuaded to the following positions: Agnostic on the question of warming and human impact on it; Getting less agnostic as I read the emails and leaked materials; Unpersuaded […]