All Posts Tagged With: "climate change"

Global Warming Revisited

In the May 2001 Freeman I published “Unprecedented Global Warming?” which noted that climate change (global warming and global cooling) is a continuing phenomenon and that what we’ve witnessed in the last 25 years is “by no means unprecedented.” The Medieval Warm Period (800-1300), which took place without SUVs, power plants, or factories, was warmer [...]

24Apr2009 | | 13 comments | Continued

Too Much Freedom

Roy Cordato is vice president for research and resident scholar at the John Locke Foundation in North Carolina. It’s been said that when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. For politicians, bureaucrats, and many activists, when the only tool they have is coercion, the cause of every [...]

1Jul2008 | | 8 comments | Continued

Don’t Look to Government to Cool Down the Planet

Recently on “20/20” I said “give me a break” to Al Gore for claiming that the global-warming debate is over and suggesting that all dissenters were in it for the money. I interviewed independent scientists who say Gore is wrong. Some people were relieved to finally hear the other side: “Thank you, thank you, thank [...]

1Jan2008 | | 1 comment | Continued

How a Free Society Could Solve Global Warming

The phrase “global warming” has been around for quite some time, but in the past year it has captured the spotlight as never before. One can’t turn on the radio or open a newspaper without facing ads from “green” corporations, or hearing the latest way to reduce one’s “carbon footprint.” With even prominent Republicans (such [...]

1Oct2007 | | 11 comments | Continued

Cool on the Idea of Cooling Global Warming

Donald Boudreaux is chairman of the economics department at George Mason University. Here’s some self-promotion: the December 21, 2006, issue of The New York Review of Books published this letter of mine—a letter saturated with the obvious influence of FEE’s founder, Leonard Read: I’ve read few passages in your pages that are as mistaken as Bill [...]

1Apr2007 | | 3 comments | Continued

Climate Change: What if They’re Right?

What do Pat Robertson, Gregg Easterbrook, and Michael Shermer have in common? They’ve all moved from climate-change skepticism to the “global warming consensus.” These leading lights may help guide others toward this consensus too. And given the possibility that believers in global warming are right, I’d like to be charitable and suppose that, first, this [...]

1Jan2007 | | 20 comments | Continued

Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media

Climatologist Patrick Michaels gives us a nontechnical and readable exposé of the “myths and facts” surrounding global warming. For skeptics of the mainstream global-warming hypothesis, that is, that dramatic, human-induced warming is occurring and will have cataclysmic effects if not checked by lifestyle-altering public policies, this book is a great read and an indispensable reference. [...]

14Dec2005 | | 0 comments | Continued

Energy: The Master Resource

The economic and historical ignorance of the American public is frequently exploited by politicians and special-interest groups. The hotter the issue, the greater the exploitation, and no issue is hotter today than energy. Myths and misconceptions abound, leading people to embrace harmful interventionist policies. Ask a hundred typical Americans what role government should play in [...]

14Dec2005 | | 1 comment | Continued

Global Warming Is a Threat?

Last December Naomi Oreskes, an associate professor
of history at UCLA, published a Washington
Post Outlook piece called Undeniable Global
Warming. She asserted that the planet is warming
(true), that increases in greenhouse gases have something
to do with it (true), that several scientific societies hold
this view (true), that the remainder of the discussion is
quibbling about the details, and that we must respond
to the threats that global warming presents.

1Oct2005 | | 1 comment | Continued

Higher CO2, More Global Warming, and Less Extinction?

Christopher Lingle is a professor of economics at Universidad Francisco Marroquín in Guatemala and adjunct scholar at the Centre for Civil Society in New Delhi. It is widely believed that humans exert a harmful impact on the natural environment, especially when it comes to releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. And so there is some [...]

1Sep2004 | | 3 comments | Continued

Global Warming: Extreme Weather or Extreme Prejudice?

Christopher Lingle is professor of economics at Universidad Francisco Marroquín in Guatemala and global strategist for eConoLytics.com. Extreme weather is making headlines. Record summer temperatures in Europe and a large number of heat-related deaths in India joined news about severe flooding in Bangladesh, China, and Sri Lanka. And an unusual number of tornados in the [...]

1Nov2003 | | 5 comments | Continued

The Sustainable–and Young–Hydrocarbon Energy Age

As the Bush administration confronts the economy’s growing need for affordable and reliable energy, the critics of the hydrocarbon-based energy economy are back to the drawing board. The “soft” energy path of subsidies and mandates for conservation and nonhydro renewable energy—hatched during the 1970s energy crisis and popularized during the eight years of Clinton/Gore—was not [...]

1Nov2001 | | 3 comments | Continued

The Satanic Gases: Clearing the Air about Global Warming by Patrick J. Michaels and Robert C. Balling

Cato Institute · 2000 · 224 pages · $10.95 paperback Reviewed by Bonner Cohen “There’s no question that global warming is a real phenomenon, that it is occurring,” EPA administrator Christie Todd Whitman told the press in February. “and while scientists can’t predict where the droughts will occur, where the flooding will occur precisely or [...]

1Oct2001 | | 0 comments | Continued

The Coming Global Superstorm by Art Bell and Whitley Strieber

Pocket Books • 2000 • 255 pages • $23.95 Academics like Your Obedient Servant are instructed that literature has to be analyzed in terms of its social and societal context. From this, I conclude that Art Bell and Whitley Strieber’s The Coming Global Superstorm, more than anything else, is a monument to the failure of [...]

1Mar2001 | | 1 comment | Continued

Climate-Change Worries in the Eighteenth Century

Aubrey Drewry is the R. Hugh Daniel Professor Of Business and Free Enterprise at Birmingham-Southern College in Birmingham, Alabama. In the 1770s the Lunar Society of Birmingham, England, whose members were some of the leading thinkers of the era, regularly gathered to discuss their concerns about global climate change. They were interested in the scientific [...]

1Jul1998 | | 2 comments | Continued

Hot Talk, Cold Science: Global Warming’s Unfinished Debate

Ben Bolch is Robert McCallum Distinguished Professor of Economics at Rhodes College and coauthor of Apocalypse Not; Science, Economics and the Environment (Cato Institute, 1993). Fred Singer is a scientist with impeccable credentials. He was the first director of the U.S. Weather Satellite Service, winner of the U.S. Department of Commerce Gold Medal Award, and [...]

1Jul1998 | | 0 comments | Continued

Global Warming: Hot Problem or Hot Air?

Jonathan Adler is director of environmental studies at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington D.C., and the editor of The Costs of Kyoto: Climate Change Policy and Its Implications (1997), from which portions of this essay are adapted. El Niño is the overhyped weather event of the decade. It has even made CNN’s “Larry King [...]

1Apr1998 | | 6 comments | Continued
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