Arctic Ice Confounds Models | The Resilient Earth

That is the way nature works: warm weather followed by cold and all Earth's creatures adapting to what comes their way. All Earth's creatures except overly excited ecologists and hyperactive climate scientists, that is. The story about shrunken Arctic summer ice has run its course and the rest of humanity will get on with the important things in life—making a living, raising a family and eking out a bit of enjoyment when they can. What happens if next year there is even less ice? Or that ten years from now the Arctic is ice free during the summer? From nature's point of view not much, since this will not be the first time. Surely humanity can survive what the polar bear and Arctic zooplankton have lived through many times before.

Quadrant Online - Environmentalism's bum steers

All over the Western World economies are in trouble with productive activity struggling under a growing burden of bloated government and stifling bureaucracy for which environmentalism has provided a major impetus. In developing nations it has been estimated that as many as 30 million native people have been driven into landless poverty as conservation refugees. In the US, UK, Germany and Australia power grids are approaching the threshold of major blackouts as a consequence of decades long failure to invest in new capacity because of uncertainty and barriers imposed by environmental regulations. Meanwhile hundreds of billions of dollars have been wasted on costly, inefficient and unreliable wind and solar farms which produce only trivial amounts of power and no measurable reduction in CO2 emissions.

Academic versus professional perspectives | Climate Etc.

The reward system for academics is to have a provocative idea get published in a high impact journal, and increasingly to garner some media attention for the research. Whether or not the idea turns out to be correct is not of particular importance in the reward system for academics.

For professionals in engineering, finance, the world of regulations, etc., there are typically serious penalties for getting it wrong, i.e. if the bridge collapses. As a result, due diligence, verification and validation, uncertainty analysis, auditing etc. are essential elements of the profession.