Sea Level Rise Fastest in 2000 Years (Or Not!)
As the actual data shows, the rate of sea level rise in New Jersey has been pretty constant since 1910, which suggests that carbon dioxide emissions have little overall effect. What we are seeing is the result of natural global warming since the Little Ice Age ended:…
Swiss Voters Reject New Climate Taxes
According to the BBC, “Voter rejection undermines Switzerland’s entire strategy to comply with the Paris Agreement. Today’s results are a devastating blow for environmentalists.”.…
The Absurdity of Peer Review
Does it catch fraud or manipulations of data? No, patently not: peer reviewers are not omniscient, so they cannot divine made-up data, nor can they check all the outputs of a lab to see when they’ve simply copy-and-pasted data between papers. If they were, we wouldn’t have the website PubPeer stuffed to the gills with people flagging potentially serious misdemeanors in published papers, nor Retraction Watch’s endless reporting of papers so dodgy they’re expunged from the literature.…
Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #458
“There are but two ways of forming an opinion in science. One is the scientific method; the other, the scholastic. One can judge from experiment, or one can blindly accept authority. To the scientific mind, experimental proof is all important, and theory merely a convenience in description, to be junked when it no longer fits. To the academic mind, authority is everything and facts are junked when they do not fit theory laid down by authority” – Robert A. Heinlein, Aeronautical Engineer and Science Fiction Writer (1907-1988) [H/t Kip Hansen]…
Climate Woke G7 Agrees to Eliminate Coal Jobs
Anyone listening in Pennsylvania?…
New Paper From Richard Tol: The Economic Impact of Weather and Climate
I propose a new conceptual framework to disentangle the impacts of weather and climate on economic activity and growth: A stochastic frontier model with climate in the production frontier and weather shocks as a source of inefficiency. I test it on a sample of 160 countries over the period 1950-2014. Temperature and rainfall determine production possibilities in both rich and poor countries; positively in cold countries and negatively in hot ones. Weather anomalies reduce inefficiency in rich countries but increase inefficiency in poor and hot countries; and more so in countries with low weather variability. The climate effect is larger that the weather effect.…