DK said: 1. Those peer review volunteers …

My comment is not about peer review, but scientific review. Peer review is under the control of the journal. My post refers to the vast inequality in government funding, for global warming supporters but very little to global warming skeptics.

DK said: 2. If they “repeatedly expose major errors” how do the studies keep getting published?

Because the relevant journals are biased, and heavily influenced by the GW establishment. Some of the recently released emails show the manipulation. GW supporters pressure the journals to not publish skeptical studies.

Why should it be so difficult to get the data underlying the CRU studies and results? Because they don't want scientific review of their work. And, the CRU threw out the original data! The new science, from their perspective, is “trust us”, we are working for the good of humanity.

Steve McIntyre at climateaudit.org reports his struggle to get the release of data and methods from the CRU and others. They delay and refuse. He reports submitting criticisms to the journals. They impose ridiculous limits and also deny by delay. The emails show the bias and collusion of the journals, even Science, in denying “peer reviewed status” to any objections. The game has been “deny the forum” rather than to answer the criticism.

DK said: People win grant money for a research proposal – not for a set of results. The results come AFTER the grant is funded.

The emails now available show that any money given to CRU is going to support GW. They are not objective scientists. Instead, they actively suppress opposing work.

As far as I can tell nobody commenting here yet has suggested we drop fossil fuels.

No one here is certainly.

Who is everyone else?

Not a single person living in the vast majority of the world DOESN'T use petroleum. Not one.

Further, it is not practical to have the property rights you describe. Such property rights would have neigbours suing each other over barbecues, smoking on an adjacent property, wearing perfume and farting in public.

I don't reject the concept of externalities or the concept of market failure in general. But the vast majority of the anti-fossil fuel crowd isn't interested in fixing externalities. Rather it's in search of its own rents and liberally proclaims all and sundry to be an “externality” that only they can ride to the rescue and fix with horribly inefficient solution funded by resources forcibly extracted from you, of course. For the vast majority of that movement, it's the first step to totalitarian control of the population, not the first step to a better environment. I know some of these people personally and they are scary. Al Gore is the poster child.

I've always been amazed that libertarians in general (this goes beyond you – not making a comment on you at this point) aren't more interested or accepting of externalities. It seems like someone concerned with coercion would be very concerned about externalities, but for some reason they're not! At least you can resist or have a say in the state. You can't do that at all when it comes to things like pollution. I don't expect them to completely be on board with externality concerns, but the outright rejection of coercion like that has always struck me as very strange and inconsistent with a classical liberal understanding of human freedom.

Billions of tax dollars finance AGW research as a matter of fact. Policy makers finance this research only because catastrophic consequences are a possibility, however remote. If everyone agrees that Global Warming is an interesting but practically inconsequential event, it's just another natural curiosity drawing a small fraction of the research dollars, but everyone never agrees on anything. Catastrophic forecasts and only these forecasts keep global climatologists at the Big Science table.

But your version of “without rents” conveniently neglects the property rights regime that the state actively supports. I know I'm not going to budge you on externalities – but at least do everybody the favor of stating your foundational assumptions more explicitly. I'm up front about how my assumptions about externalities shape my views on the issue.

Whenever government involves itself in the operations of a company, the company has an interest in the policy of the state. These “costs” you speak of are highly subjective and create ample opportunity for competitors to fossil fuels and the anti-capitalist groups posing as environmentalists to concoct whatever scare tactic they wish, back it with crap science and then impose the cost of their anti-free market ideology on everyone else. Let's not pretend that doesn't happen and we're just trying to contain some easily defined neighbourhood effect.

How do you reckon?

I just would caution againt working off of the assumption that the absence of an explicit policy means that there is no rent-granting policy in place.

There are rents. Nobody disputes that. There are rents because there actually is a ton of state meddling and onerous restrictions in energy production. I'm pointing out that energy production existed just fine without rents and can do so. There is no natural relationship between government and petroleum companies. “Renewables” can't compete. Renewable energy just isn't efficient and can only exist with a government subsidy. This has nothing to do with property rights and everything to do with how much energy is extracted per unit.

I don't have any problem at all with people choosing to heat their houses with solar energy if the choose. I do have a problem with subsidizing this activity. I also have a problem with petroleum subsidies, but I also know from years of covering U.S. upstream companies that the tax breaks exist to encourage production which was discouraged by expensive state restrictions and regulations.

2. If they “repeatedly expose major errors” how do the studies keep getting published? This article seems to fundamentally misunderstand the process of peer review.

People win grant money for a research proposal – not for a set of results. The results come AFTER the grant is funded. My company has received lots of research grants from the government and often we don't tell them what they want to hear – and they don't like that. We keep getting them because they know we're objective.

And they didn't have to threaten or incarcerate one person in order to earn those profits.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Recent_Sea_Le...

If I similarly suggest that average global temperature is now falling, based upon measurements over the last eight years, you'd dismiss me as a “denier”, but you just can't apply the same critical logic to your own assumptions.

But even if sea level is rising at 3 mm/year, and not the long term trend of 1.8 mm, even if this sudden increase in the rate is not a statistical blip, even if the rate remains so high throughout the 21s century, we're discussing a 3 decimeter rise over the century, less than a foot, not the Manhattan flooding 20 feet that Al Gore ominously forecasts in An Inconvenient Truth.

The problem is that even 3 mm/century isn't remotely catastrophic, and that's the best you can do at the moment.

Yet the naysayers are labeled as being motivated by profits.

Profits pale in comparison to absolute power, yet that motive is dismissed.

I don't get it.