We hope this is true.

It comes from PowerLine, by Steven Hayward:

The green energy bubble … is bursting …, and as usual environmentalists are slow to see that they’re about to get run over by a revival of the hydrocarbon economy. … Fossil fuels are crushing the so-called green “fuels of the future” beloved of fruit-juice drinkers and vegans everywhere. …

In an extremely curious New York Times story last week, Times environmental writer John Broder notes that President Obama pushed hard for the final approval of Shell Oil’s long sought permit to begin drilling in a new offshore oil field in Alaska, which has been held up for years by bureaucratic red tape and environmental lawsuits …

Watch out for that pig flying over your neck of the woods.

The fruit-juice vegans are upset about it.

“We never would have expected a Democratic president — let alone one seeking to be ‘transformative’ — to open up the Arctic Ocean for drilling,” said Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club [one of the oldest biggest organizations of environmentalists]. …

Obama has grown very quiet about climate change. He can spot a political loser from a Chicago mile away. He’s not attending the UN’s 20th anniversary of the Earth Summit that started the whole climate diplomacy circus. Twenty years ago the greens browbeat President Bush to attend, which he ultimately did. But the craven greens seem to be giving Obama a pass.

As Roll Call reports: “President Barack Obama’s first Earth Day proclamation in 2009 was an urgent call to address global warming. This year? The word “climate” didn’t even get a mention… 

Gone are the urgent statements warning of melting glaciers and rising sea levels. …

This Washington Post headline tells why the enviros are about to get run over: “Center of Gravity in Oil World Shifts to Americas”

From Canada to Colombia to Brazil, oil and gas production in the Western Hemisphere is booming, with the United States emerging less dependent on supplies from an unstable Middle East. Central to the new energy equation is the United States itself, which has ramped up production and is now churning out 1.7 million more barrels of oil and liquid fuel per day than in 2005. . .

“We have a revolution here,” said Larry Goldstein, director of the Energy Policy Research Foundation in New York. “In 47 years in this business, I’ve never seen anything like this. This is the equivalent of a Category 5 hurricane.” …

In Germany, too, … the pledge to phase out nuclear power is looking increasingly unrealistic and …  renewable energy subsidies are being cut sharply. … Some leading Social Democrats [party of the left] have called for building . . . more coal-fired power plants (gasp)! …

And the Berliner Morgenpost reports:

The German government no longer believes in the green energy transition. Doubts are growing in the ruling coalition government that the ecological project can succeed.

The news has not yet reached the middle-sized US town where we are headquartered. Our City Council is dominated by voluntary agents of Big Green. They say the town must “urgently” achieve “carbon neutrality” in its electricity supply. They seem pleased to add that there will be “significant rate increases to cover added costs”. One of the Councilmen, a leading shout in the movement, proclaimed this “the greatest moral issue of our time”. After which there was a rush for the doors as the hour had struck when fruit juice and broccoli are served in the grand marble entrance hall.

Steven Hayward writes at Powerline about a French intellectual, Pascal Bruckner, who explains why  –

… apocalyptic fear has gripped so many of our leaders, scientists and intellectuals … You’ll get what you’ve got coming! That is the death wish that our misanthropes address to us. These are not great souls who alert us to troubles but tiny minds who wish us suffering if we have the presumption to refuse to listen to them.

Catastrophe is not their fear but their joy. …

It is the paradox of open societies that they seem to be disordered … threatened by crime, loneliness, and drugs because they display their indignity before the whole world, never ceasing to admit their defects, whereas other, more oppressive societies seem harmonious because the press and the opposition are muzzled. “Where there are no visible conflicts, there is no freedom,” Montesquieu said. Democracies are by their nature uneasy, they never realize their ideal; they necessarily disappoint us, creating a gap between the hope they elicit and the realities they construct.

Freedom is messy, and messiness is fecund. Only where there is freedom do great things grow.

Melanie Phillips writes:

A new book, Die Kalte Sonne [The Cold Sun], written by Prof Dr Fritz Vahrenholt and geologist/paleontologist Dr. Sebastian Lüning, has caused a sensation even in advance of its official publication yesterday. For Prof. Vahrenholt, a renewable energy expert, was one of the fathers of the modern German green movement and believed everything preached by the IPCC. But … he is now a far sadder and wiser man:

Doubt came two years ago when he was an expert reviewer of an IPCC report on renewable energy. “I discovered numerous errors and asked myself if the other IPCC reports on climate were similarly sloppy.”

In his book he explains how he dug into the IPCC climate report and was horrified by what he had found. Then add the 10 years of stagnant temperatures, failed predictions, Climategate e-mails, and discussions he had with dozens of other skeptical elite scientists. That was more than enough. … “I couldn’t take it any more. I had to write this book.”’

She concludes:

How could so many apparently sane and sensible people have departed so comprehensively from reason over the anthropogenic global warming scam and to have placed such blind faith in renewable energy sources? Several immediate reasons come to mind – indeed, I have enumerated them on many occasions – such as the brainwashing grip of environmental ideology, the western retreat from reason and truth, the manipulation of grant-funding, the intimidation of rigorous scientists, and the fact that so many [scientists] have sloppily endorsed AGW theory without bothering to look at how the IPCC actually reached its bogus conclusions.

But the deeper question still remains. What is it in the psyche of the western mind that has caused so many people not only to be seduced by a set of obvious myths and fallacies over AGW theory but to be utterly resistant to every scrap of evidence … that showed they were totally out to lunch?

(The same question could be asked of people who believe in God or gods.)

John Hinderaker at PowerLine quotes Melanie Phillips and comments:

One by one, the more honest of the scientists who fell for the anthropogenic global warming hoax are confessing their error. …

I would add, with respect to the IPCC reports, that they are not only sloppy but contradictory. If someone tells you he agrees with the IPCC report, you should ask him, Which one?

And this is also from PowerLine, by Steven Hayward:

As John [Hinderaker] noted here Tuesday, and I have noted several times over the last few weeks, the climate campaign is suffering body blows on an almost daily basis. The latest is the report, based on new and more comprehensive satellite data, that the ice melt in the Himalayas has been nil — zip, zilch, nada — over the last ten years.

Here’s how the left-wing [AGW-promoting] Guardian newspaper in Britain reports it:

“The world’s greatest snow-capped peaks, which run in a chain from the Himalayas to Tian Shan on the border of China and Kyrgyzstan, have lost no ice over the last decade, new research shows. The discovery has stunned scientists, who had believed that around 50bn tonnes of meltwater were being shed each year and not being replaced by new snowfall. The study is the first to survey all the world’s icecaps and glaciers and was made possible by the use of satellite data. Overall, the contribution of melting ice outside the two largest caps – Greenland and Antarctica – is much less than previously estimated, with the lack of ice loss in the Himalayas and the other high peaks of Asia responsible for most of the discrepancy.” …

It’s fun watching these guys fall on their face in real time. The whole circus is falling apart much faster than I expected. I can tell you that around Washington the whole climate change angle is slowly being dropped from conversation … It’s almost like talking with normal people again.

Post Script: Go here to read about the work of  the  Danish physicist Henrik Svensmark, who holds that the central factor regulating Earth’s climate is the the intensity of solar radiation.

We see the “Occupy Wall Street” protest as a manifestation of economic ignorance and the politics of envy.

We find confirmation of our view at PowerLine, where Steven Hayward quotes from the great free-market economist Friedrich Hayek:

As we continue to fixate on the inchoate [“incoherent” would be more apt  – JB] but plainly radical demands/desires of the lefty-losers Wall Street Occupiers, this passage from Hayek’s famous chapter in The Constitution of Liberty on “Equality Value, and Merit” hits the spot dead on:

“When we inquire into the justification for these demands [to equalize all outcomes], we find that they rest on the discontent that the success of some people often produces in those that are less successful, or, to put it bluntly, on envy. The modern tendency to gratify this passion and to disguise it in the respectable garment of social justice is developing into a serious threat to freedom. Recently an attempt was made to base these demands on the argument that it ought to be the aim of politics to remove all sources of discontent. This would, of course, necessarily mean that it is the responsibility of government to see that nobody is healthier or possesses a happier temperament, a better-suited spouse or more prospering children, than anybody else. If really all unfulfilled desires have a claim on the community, individual responsibility is at an end. However human, envy is certainly not one of the sources of discontent that a free society can eliminate. It is probably one of the essential conditions for the preservation of such a society that we do not countenance envy, not sanction its demands by camouflaging it as social justice, but treat it, in the words of John Stuart Mill, as “that most anti-social and odious of all passions.”

It’s almost as if Hayek wrote this with Occupy Wall Street in mind.

Although this article from PowerLine by Steven Hayward, referring to another in Nature, doesn’t deal specifically with retractions of scientific papers on climate change, it provides a needed lesson to those warmists who argue that consensus is in itself a scientific proof.

[B]ehind at least half of [the retractions] lies some shocking tale of scientific misconduct — plagiarism, altered images or faked data — and the other half are admissions of embarrassing mistakes. But retraction notices are increasing rapidly. In the early 2000s, only about 30 retraction notices appeared annually. This year, the Web of Science is on track to index more than 400 — even though the total number of papers published has risen by only 44% over the past decade.

There’s a lot more here to ponder, such as the essentially hollow and meaningless nature of modern peer review, and the increasingly tribal and ideological drift of much of the academic scientific establishment. …

Elsewhere in this week’s issue of Nature, Dan Sarewitz of Arizona State University, one of the truly honest brokers in the academic science and policy world, offers a terrific essay on what’s wrong with so-called “consensus” science reports. …

When scientists wish to speak with one voice, they typically do so in a most unscientific way: the consensus report. The idea is to condense the knowledge of many experts into a single point of view that can settle disputes and aid policy-making. But the process of achieving such a consensus often acts against these goals, and can undermine the very authority it seeks to project. . .

The very idea that science best expresses its authority through consensus statements is at odds with a vibrant scientific enterprise. Consensus is for textbooks; real science depends for its progress on continual challenges to the current state of always-imperfect knowledge.

Yet it was probably peer review criticism that revealed the errors in at least some of the retracted papers. The fact that so many more papers are being retracted is a healthy sign. To what extent, one may wonder, is the international row over climate-change claims and counter-claims responsible for the rise.

What seems to have happened with the papers on man-made global warming (AGW) is that a politicized posse of immoral scientists did everything they could to silence criticism.

They wanted AGW to be believed like a religion, with faith rather than reason. That made them betrayers of science itself, its enemies: anti-scientists.

If their thesis was true, why did they need to fake data (the “hockey-stick” graph), suppress facts (the Climategate emails), and conspire to block criticism?

Because – one must conclude – they wanted “scientific fact” to support policies that mattered more to them than truth. See here and here and here.

Change happens. Warming happens. It’s the causes of change that are in dispute – and whether it is a threat, so serious that impoverishing redistribute policies must be enacted by governments to save the earth from doom. In regard to which, there is this statement (from this source):

In the room where you are sitting right now, the temperature difference between the floor and the ceiling is about one degree. That’s the kind of imperceptible change we’re talking about — over the next century!

Arguments supporting and disputing that are invited.