This provokes a fair amount of pushback. One piece in The Guardian went so far as to term such views “a new, strange form of denial.” The author of that piece, Naomi Oreskes, is a history professor at Harvard. (Apparently history profs now know more about the subject than the IPCC, too.) Oreskes never even attempts to refute the conclusion about the need for more nuclear power. She simply disparages it.

It’s easy to understand why. Many environmentalists consider nuclear power — pardon the technical jargon — really yucky. So they will argue that the world can ratchet back greenhouse-gas emissions without any nuclear power at all. There are entire campaigns built around selling the idea. You can visit their websites, which claim we can power the world with nothing but renewable-energy sources such as wind, water and solar.

And on that point they are correct — in the same sense that it is correct to say you can run a mile in under four minutes. All you have to do is run four quarter-miles in under 60 seconds each, without stopping. Mission accomplished! And just as nothing in the laws of biology prevents you from running a four-minute mile, nothing in the laws of physics prevents powering the planet with renewables alone.