A few interesting bits and pieces this morning, as the Climate Cuttings series reaches its half century.
Bryan Appleyard has an article in the Sunday Times on sceptics, namechecking Piers Corbyn, Lord Monckton, Graham Stringer and Fay Kelly-Tuncay (who is campaigning to repeal the Climate Change Act here in the UK). The article can be seen at Appleyard's site or here.
Neither side is winning this fight, though the greens are on the ropes. As they slug it out, the language grows ever more vicious and the claims of both sides ever more extreme. To the sceptics the greens are lying, cheating, catastrophe-crazed group thinkers; to the warmists, the sceptics are mad, bad, neo-fascist defenders of Big Oil.
At the margins it is, admittedly, all too easy to find evidence for all these charges. But in the middle, the ground occupied by the reasonable person, there is only confusion and uncertainty. Meanwhile, the planet cycles on regardless. In time, it will make its own decisions about the viability of our troublesome species.
As if to emphasise the tottering of the global warming edifice, Ford are getting out of the electric vehicle market.
We still don’t know what the winning technology is going to be…We’re continuing to invest in hydrogen, we’re continuing to invest in biofuels.”
It's not hard to see why greens are struggling when they take desperate steps like calling for action on global warming because of the tsunami in Japan.
Jonathan Adler of everybody's favourite US law blog, the Volokh Conspiracy, looks at alternatives to regulation of carbon dioxide. Judy Curry responds.