David Victor of UC San Diego, who was one of the authors of the important PNAS paper we recently highlighted that debunked the renewable power fantasies of David Jacobson, appears today in Nature with an article pointing out the farce of the Paris Climate Accord:

Wishful thinking and bravado are eclipsing reality. Countries in the European Union are struggling to increase energy efficiency and renewable power to the levels that they claimed they would. Japan promised cuts in emissions to match those of its peers, but meeting the goals will cost more than the country is willing to pay.

The article points out that Japan, unlike silly Germany, California and other U.S. states, actually wants to restart some of its shuttered nuclear power plants, which it will have to do if it is going to come anywhere close to its emissions reduction targets—targets that will have no effect on warming even according to the dodgy models of the climatistas. But never mind that little detail. . .

Victor and his several co-authors are conventional warmists rather than skeptics, but it is always good to see climate and energy realism in action rather than sloganeering and clichés.

Which brings me to the recent lecture on “climate change paranoia” that Roger Pielke Jr delivered recently in London for the Global Warming Policy Foundation. I think Roger, who is by his own description a liberal Democrat, may describe himself as a “lukewarmer”—the world has warmed some and may warm some more because of greenhouse gas emissions—and he favors a carbon tax, research into “air capture” (i.e., removing CO2 from the ambient air) and other measures to address potential climate risk. For these departures from the climatista orthodoxy he has been viciously attacked. One of the revelations of Wikileaks last year, in fact, was how Tom Steyer and the Center for American Progress lobbied Nate Silver’s 538.org to oust Roger as a contributing writer on climate issues because his fact-filled analyses don’t fit the climatista narrative.

The entire lecture and comment period is almost two hours long, and I haven’t even got through the whole thing yet, but it is worth screening the first hour or so if you can manage it (he talks about the Wikileaks affair around minute 25). There is especially Roger’s cogent explanation of what he calls “the iron law of climate policy” about the cost factor of energy transitions, starting around minute 42. Worth skipping to this point if you don’t have time for anything else.