You wouldn’t think so if you read recent press reports. Just like this time last year, the global press is bombarding the public with alarming reports coming from the bottom of the world. From the Discovery Channel on April 28th, 2009 “Huge Ice Shelf Breaks From Antarctica, Fractures.” From National Geographic News on April 30th, [...]

Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category
Antarctic Ice Increasing
Tea Parties & Environmentalism
Earlier this week, on April 15th, 2009, not coincidentally the day each year when tax returns are due from America’s workers, there were “tea parties” held throughout the United States - approximately 2,000 separate events, some drawing over 10,000 people. It is probably accurate to estimate several hundred thousand people participated.
In Sacramento, California, at what was [...]
The Abundance Choice
The prevailing challenge facing humanity when confronted with resource constraints is not that we are running out of resources, but how we will adapt and create new and better solutions to meet the needs that currently are being met by what are arguably scarce or finite resources. If one accepts this premise, that we are [...]
Smart Growth, or Green Bantustans?
It would be an understatement to say we’ve been accused of taking controversial positions on environmental issues - smart growth, global warming, government reform, fossil fuel and nuclear power, to name a few. The problem, however, is these positions are not adopted out of some pathological need to be contrarian, they spring from genuine conviction [...]
Carbon Taxes & Public Sector Pensions
About a year ago I participated for a few months with an industry group that was attempting to insert some rationality into what is probably the most irrational, extremist, dangerous, job-killing, regressive laws in the modern history of the United States, AB32, California’s Global Warming Act. Unlike renewable portfolio standards, which can at least be justified by virtue of their potential [...]
Calculating Employee Compensation
Still absent from much of the discussion regarding state and local government budget deficits is an attempt to properly assess rates of worker compensation. But if one performs this exercise, normalizing for all present and future benefits, it immediately becomes clear that the true compensation of public employees is significantly higher than is being commonly reported, [...]
Humanity’s Prosperous Destiny
Something we don’t hear often enough amidst this era’s turbulent convergence of cultures and challenging disruptions of technology is this: Humanity is destined within a tantalizingly few decades to achieve a level of prosperity that can scarcely be imagined today. The ongoing conflicts of nations, continued destruction of the environment, heartbreaking poverty, ruthless injustice - these all [...]

















professor of meteorology and
atmospheric physic...