America’s most important environmentalist Bill McKibben is off the rails: ‘Use America’s defense budget to fight climate war’, by Anthony Watts.

It should be possible to build large quantities of solar panels and turbine blades, and it should be possible to put lots of people at work on good jobs doing that, okay? And it should be a huge priority, and if you think we don’t have the money then you’re not paying attention.

We have things like the defense budget that need to be put to work defending us against the most dangerous adversaries we face. The conceit of that New Republic piece was that we are in fact already at war though we do not really recognize it. But, by all the measures that we normally count as warfare, that’s what’s going on. We’re losing territory day by day. People are being killed day by day in great numbers. There will probably be added to that death toll tonight someplace along the coast of Florida.

We’re at war, we’re just not fighting back, and the time has come to do that, and it will take as the history of WWII shows, government leadership to make that happen. It will take a concentrated national effort and a concentrated international effort to make that happen. It won’t happen on its own, it requires leadership.

No. The carbon scare is all due to a simple modeling error made decades ago and baked into the cake of how climate scientists think about, and model, the climate. A simple technical error. Fix the error, and the scare goes away — future warming due to increasing carbon dioxide will be a fifth to a tenth of current official estimate. Book coming soon.

Unfortunately it is people like him who have had the ear of bureaucrats and politicians for the last 30 years. The world is currently spending about US$ 1.5 trillion per year on renewables and other measures aimed at slowing the increase in carbon dioxide (with no noticeable impact).