Links

Climate Science
  • Skeptical Science -- Actually not a climate skeptic website.  It's a climate activist website, refuting just about every climate skeptic argument imaginable.  Terrific resource.  On many issues, it has "basic", "intermediate", and "advanced" answers, and if even the "advanced" answer isn't satisfying, there are blog entries following the answers where fairly sophisticated, intelligent people are discussing the matter in even more detail.
  • NOAA Global Climate at a Glance -- This website allows one to plot global temperature data since 1880, averaged over time spans ranging from one month to 5 years.  NOAA is the national agency for weather prediction, they run the weather satellites.  The website also allows one to plot temperature for the US, or for any state, or for many cities.  Very informative, especially when discussing the false claim frequently made by climate skeptics that global temperatures haven't risen since 1998.
  • Berkeley Earth The organization formed by Berkeley physics professor Richard A Muller when he did an exhaustive study re-creating the temperature record.
  • Climate Change Resources A general website on climate change.
  • Grist Article on Debunking Climate Myths A very extensive article on Grist about how to debunk myths on climate science.
  • XKCD Earth's Temperature Timeline An illustration of the Earth's temperature over the last 20,000 years.

Carbon-Free Energy
  • Stanford Professor Mark Z. Jacobson's Plan for 100% carbon-free energy in the US by 2050, with no nuclear (132 pages).  It involves getting energy mostly from solar, wind, hydro, and geothermal, and using hydro for energy storage for windless nights.  Pretty much every suitable hydro site in the country has already been dammed, and Jacobson realizes this.  For energy storage, we'll need an order of magnitude more dam turbines than we have, and the proposal is to add more turbines to existing dams, including many irrigation dams that currently don't have any turbines on them.
    • Paper outlining the plan (132 pages).  Much of the paper is appendices with long lists of figures.
    • Mark Z Jacobson's October 25 2018 talk.  The video is one hour long, but the first exactly 10 minutes is all introductions. You really can't see the slides very well in the video, but you can load them here. These are the exact same slides used in the video.
    • Christopher T. M. Clack's rebuttal to the Jacobson Plan which is only 6 pages long.  It says that Jacobson radically overestimates the amount of turbines that can be added to existing dams, among other problems.  Jacobson sued the authors of this paper for misrepresenting his work, but later dropped the suit. This was still very problematic for Clack Et Al, since they had spent large sums on legal defense before the lawsuit was dropped. If Jacobson is going to intimidate critics into silence by threatening to bankrupt them with lawsuits, that calls into question the credibilty of his work, since it is not subject to proper cross-examination.
    • This article in Scientific American discussed the controversy, before the lawsuit was filed. Jacobson and his acolytes tend to view anyone who questions them as shills for the nuclear industry.
  • Nuclear Energy
  • Lifetime Emissions by Energy Type This is net warming caused by the emissions of CO2 and CH4 (methane) due to the creation of the energy consumed by one person in their lifetime.
  • Cost per MWh by Energy Type Note that when the cost of wind and solar are calculated, they usually aren't factoring in the expense of either storing the energy for windless nights, or keeping a backup supply from some other source on standby.
  • En-Roads Climate Solutions Simulator. This simulator allows the user to try out different climate solutions to find out what is effective and what is not.
    Some skepticism is appropriate -- they dismiss nuclear as having much potential, they probably aren't taking into account the possibility of meltdown-proof next-gen reactors, and new manufacturing reactors on barges in shipyards.

Interview With the Organizer

This 5-minute video interview was done by a bunch of students at the New York Film Academy as a class project. One of the students was asking questions, but he was completely edited out. The actual interview when on for at least 45 minutes, which they edited down to about 5 minutes.

The editing was pretty good, but the organizer forgot to mention an important part of the story about the panel about a carbon tax. The sentence about the panelist began with "One of the environmentalists foamed at the mouth for three minutes about how he hated everything about 'markets', 'markets' were just awful" and then the panelist's sentence ended with "even if I were talking with a conservative, not that that would ever happen, I wouldn't describe a carbon tax as a 'market friendly' solution.".

This interview was done when the organization was still based on a lecture series, and we were not very successful in that form.

Other Recommended Organizations

ESG / Sustainable Investing

The Carbon Collective Introduction to Sustainable Investing

Big Oil CEO's Testifying to Congress: Thursday, October 27, 2021

This is the video of the CEO's of the 5 biggest oil companies, and the CEO of the API (American Petroleum Institute, an oil lobby) testifying before congress.

  • Entire Video: 6 hours and 38 minutes long
  • It first gets interesting an hour and a half in: at this point, Rep Carolyn Maloney D-NY, the chair of the committee, asks all the oil company CEO's whether they believe climate change is real and caused by human combustion of fossil fuels. All 5 agreed.

    • After that, she talked about memos many decades ago written by scientists at these companies, which warned about climate change, and testimony by the oil CEO's (different people than the ones testifying now) after having received this advice from their scientists, denying climate change.

    She also mentioned testimony from former scientists at these oil companies before congress in the past (the scientists weren't there today) saying that the overwhelming consensus of what they told management was that climate change is real, and management later made public statements, including testimony before congress, that it was not.

  • Nearly everything said by the Republicans in congress was relevant, but boy, a lot of these Republicans really, really love the oil companies.
  • Biden shut down work on the Keystone Pipeline hours after taking office. The Republicans had some guy who was laid off by that action testify. They had him talk a lot.
  • At this point Rep Ro Khanna (D-CA) was talking about electric cars. All the CEO's said they support electric cars, but Khanna talked about how the API had been running Facebook ads advocating against electrical utilities companies providing car charging stations. Khanna was very congenial and civilized with the CEO's, but he asked them, since they said they supported electric cars, to please tell the API, which they all support with millions of dollars, to stop doing that particular lobbying and none of them would. The API also lobbied heavily against a methane tax, and he again pleaded with them to tell the API to stop doing that and they wouldn't answer the question.
  • 3 members of "the squad" testified near the end. They were generally just very hostile. AOC (D-NY) said that we expect crop failures in 2028 unless major climate action was taken, which is something that I'd never heard before. I don't believe her – I didn't see anything like that in the IPCC reports. Ilhan Omar (D-NY) ended her statement demanding that the CEO's all resign.
  • Here's Rep. Maloney at the end with her summarizing remarks..
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Vegetarian Policy

Sometimes we get vegans demanding that we stop serving pizza with cheese on it to anybody. Vegans are welcome in this group and we get vegan pizza for them, but preaching to others about their diet will not be tolerated.

Conservative Climate Activists

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Email the Organizer, Bill Chapman