Mr. Fred Krupp is president of the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF). He claims that capitalism will solve the climate problem (op-ed, WSJ, July 22, 2018). EDF pays him the princely sum of about $350,000 USD. Evidently, his duties include spreading the idea that EDF, an aggressive environmental non-profit, is pro-market.
Krupp asserts that the climate warmed in the final two decades of the 20th century, thus following the 1988 predictions of Dr. James Hansen, former head of NASA-GISS (Goddard Institute for Space Studies), notorious for his violent opposition to emission of CO2.
But Krupp is quite wrong, and so are the predictions of Dr. Hansen. There is no warming at all after about 1940, til the El Niño event of 1998 (which had nothing to do with CO2). Therefore, there is no climate problem to be solved.
It turns out that the warming reported by surface weather stations is fakeit is entirely an instrumental artifact, caused by drastic changes after 1980 in the way in which (surface) temperatures were measuredas discussed in detail in a research paper by noted meteorologist Dr. Joseph DAleo.
Krupp further asserts that satellites show atmospheric warming. Wrong again! Prof. John Christy has shown that neither satellites nor balloon-borne radiosondes exhibit warming in the final decades of the 20th centurynor does any other data source.
A carbon tax?
Krupp espouses market-based mechanisms. All of this sounds persuasive until you discover that he really wants a carbon taxthe wrong remedy, especially for a nonexistent climate problem.