Utopia, you are standing in it!

In the interests of transparency, and to provide a window to some of the ugliness found in climate science, here in PDF is a copy of my deposition in the case of Mann vs. CEI/National Review, which is into its 8th year.

You can find some various documents related to the case here and here. Here is an update on the most recent actions in the case.

Another setback for the doomsayers, as some inconvenient truths flow in their direction. Meanwhile the US ‘climate envoy’ comes up with the useless claim that “You don’t have to be a scientist to begin to feel that we’re looking at a trend line.” A trend of ever-increasing vacuous climate sales talk?
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The Washington Post has published an enlightening opinion piece on climate alarm and climate realism, says The GWPF.

Its weekly columnist Mark Thiessen bases his column on an interview with Steve Koonin and his new book ‘Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters’ which is making quite a splash due to its matter-of-fact, no-nonsense approach.

It is my pleasure to announce the forthcoming publication of a book by Michael Heaney and myself. It is called Party in the Street: The Antiwar Movement and the Democratic Party after 9/11. It will be available from Cambridge University Press starting in early 2015.

The book is an in-depth examination of the relationship between the major social movement of the early 2000s and the Democratic Party. We begin with a puzzle. In 2006, the antiwar movement began to decline, a time when the US government escalated the war and at least five years before US combat troops completely left Iraq. Normally, one would expect that an escalation of war and favorable public opinion would lead to heightened  activism. Instead, we see the reverse.

We answer this question with a theory of movement-party intersections – the “Party in the Street.” Inspired by modern intersectionality scholarship, we argue that…

Back in 1983 the American Wind Industry Association claimed that solar and wind would be “competitive and self-supporting on a national level by the end of the decade if assisted by tax credits and augmented by federally sponsored R&D”. That was over 37 years ago. And there was no lack of assistance in the form of tax credits and federally sponsored R&D, along with a whole bunch of other punitive mandates and targets designed to cripple conventional generators and favour chaotically intermittent wind and solar.

Wind and solar don’t run on sunshine and breezes, they’re powered by massive and endless subsidies. Remove the subsidies and both so-called ‘industries’ would disappear in a heartbeat.

The perpetual claims about wind and solar competing with dispatchable generation sources, such as coal, gas and nuclear, ring hollow when talk turns to reducing the subsidies and forcing the unreliables to face true competition – unleashed…

Mary Tudor was England’s first queen regnant. As mentioned in the initial post announcing the series, Mary I of England is acknowledged as the first Queen to reign in her own right despite the brief, disputed reigns of the Empress Matilda and Lady Jane Grey.

In 1554, Mary married the future King Felipe II of Spain, becoming queen consort of Habsburg Spain on his accession in 1556. He was the eldest son of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, who is also Carlos I of Spain, and Eleanore of Portugal.

Felipe’s father arranged this marriage to 37-year-old Queen Mary I of England, Charles’ maternal first cousin. Charles V ceded the crown of Naples, as well as his claim to the Kingdom of Jerusalem, to Felipe in order to give his son equal status to his wife upon their marriage.

Their marriage at Winchester Cathedral on July 24, 1554 took place just…

The Catholic King James II had fled his throne, and a favored Protestant Dutchman named William of Orange had roused the people in what became known as the “Glorious Revolution.” It was a moment of extraordinary growth and opportunity for England under the governance of a foreign king. William, perhaps more than anyone, transformed the fractious English monarchy into a dominant imperial power. England was now to be regarded as a significant European power, on par with France, in alliance with the Netherlands, a hegemonic influence over the aging Spanish Empire. David Starkey calls William one of England’s greatest monarchs.

William of Orange was a tenacious yet somewhat sickly figure. As a child he was asthmatic and partly crippled with a tubercular lung. “But within this emaciated and defective frame there burned a remorseless fire, fanned by the storms of Europe, and intensified by the…

As a parent I find it particularly disheartening to observe the near-complete indifference of governments and major political parties that might hope to form governments to the atrocious productivity performance of the New Zealand economy. If the last National government was bad, the Labour or Labour-led governments since 2017 have been worse. It is hard to think of a single thing they’ve done to improve the climate for market-driven business investment and productivity growth, and easy to identify a growing list of things that worsen the outlook – most individually probably quite small effects, but the cumulative direction is pretty clear. Before I had kids I used to idly talk about not encouraging any I had to stay in New Zealand, so relatively poor were the prospects becoming. It is harder to take that stance when it is real young people one enjoys being around, but…..at least from an economic…

William Happer provides a framework for thinking about climate, based on his expertise regarding atmospheric radiation (the “greenhouse” mechanism).  But he uses plain language accessible to all.  The Independent Institute published the transcript for those like myself who prefer reading for full comprehension.  Source: How to Think about Climate Change  Some excerpted highlights in italics with my bolds,

This presentation by Dr. William Happer was delivered at the Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar in Phoenix, Arizona, that was held on February 19, 2021. The Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor Emeritus of Physics at Princeton University, Dr. Happer is the author of the foreword to the Revised and Expanded Third Edition of the Independent Institute book, Hot Talk, Cold Science: Global Warming’s Unfinished Debate, by S. Fred Singer, David R. Legates and Anthony R. Lupo.

The Climate Crusade for a False Alarm

The best way to think about the frenzy…

The Scottish National Party emerged as the largest party in the Scottish parliamentary elections held on 6 May. It fell short of an overall majority but still won an impressive 64 of 129 seats. Nicola Sturgeon, who will be reappointed as First Minister within the new devolved administration, has reiterated the SNP’s quest for independence, claiming that a second referendum is ‘the will of the country’. She will count on the support of the Green party in her quest to hold a popular vote on separate statehood.

Such a referendum was of course held in 2014, and the proposition was rejected by a majority of voters: 55%-45%. The SNP claims political legitimacy for its demand to hold a second referendum on various bases, not least the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union. Voters in Scotland opted for the remain option by 62%-38% in the…