Free Republic

A fascinating new paper comparing global warmism to past scares concludes this one is much like the rest - just as dodgy and just as likely to peter out. It’s the work of South Australian academic Dr Kesten C. Green and American forecasting expert J. Scott Armstrong: We summarize evidence showing that the global warming alarm movement has more of the character of a political movement than that of a scientific controversy. We then make forecasts of the effects and outcomes of this movement using a structured analysis of analogous situations—a method that has been shown to produce accurate forecasts...

Environmentalists trying to push a green agenda through the Legislature will face a decidedly different atmosphere in 2007. The Senate has long been the friendlier of California's two legislative houses to environmental legislation, but Tuesday's primary elections swept a small cohort of pro-business Democrats into the upper house. That, combined with the replacement of moderate Assembly Democrats with more liberal counterparts, looks to have shifted the legislative landscape for environmental legislation. "The Senate is less green and the Assembly has gotten more green," said Bill Magavern, the Sierra Club's senior legislative representative. According to the California League of Conservation Voters...