Science and the University of Maryland have provided a way for you to read the paper for free …

Point your browser to:

http://www.palmerlab.umd.edu/index.html

Scroll down to where it says:

Link to article and supporting material.

Click there.

Ken.

I’m sure that there are considerable studies and data regarding the benefits of electricity and minerals in general. After all everything that we buy and consume is either mined or grown and that which is grown would be exceedingly difficult without mining. The easiest way to discourage mining is to quit demanding the products that use the minerals.

Since most of the benefit side seems to be ignored or downplayed in this blog, many are left trying to argue points or studies regarding the cost side of the mining equation. Coal is definitely on the defensive since there’s so much well-funded offense.

Regarding the Hendryx/Ahern study I believe that the study understated the benefits of coal since the benefits of electricity and steel were ignored, as were many taxes that are paid by the industry.

You’re right — just because a study is “peer reviewed” doesn’t make it gospel. And just because something is in one peer reviewed article certainly doesn’t make it correct.

But in this instance, the authors cited the findings of many peer-reviewed articles from many fields — and their conclusions of what those studies add up to was peer-reviewed and published in what is almost certainly the most respected scientific journal in the world.

The reactions I’ve seen so far from the coal industry and its supporters have been to criticize the authors, without offering any science of its own to show this paper is wrong.

On the issue of climate change … to say that we as a planet or a nation are considering “acting quickly” is not accurate, I don’t believe.

The first IPCC assessment was published in 1990. Follow-up assessments (based on the growing body of peer-reviewed literature) were published in 1992, 1995, 2001, and 2007.

With each study, the weight of the evidence grew, and the inaction continues.

Ken.

My only point was that because a study in “peer reviewed” doesn’t make it gospel. If we had acted as quickly on the new ice age predictions as some would like us to act on global warming we would have been wrong. If the elimination of fossile fuels is what it takes it has to be done over a generation with new technology which should be in the developmental stages now. Wind/solar and other types of energy are great, but currently can’t keep us the strong nation we are now. I don’t buy that this battle is over MTR, it over coal mining and use in general.

That is actually one strength of the Science paper that Margaret Palmer and others have provided on mountaintop removal. The NMA and others in the industry may want to criticize it for not providing “new” research (even though it actually does). But a literature review like this goes out and looks at all of the other peer reviewed papers and tries to explain what they are adding up to.

Ken.

Climate science as we know it today did not exist in the 1960s and 1970s. The integrated enterprise embodied in the Nobel Prizewinning work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change existed then as separate threads of research pursued by isolated groups of scientists. Atmospheric chemists and modelers grappled with the measurement of changes in carbon dioxide and atmospheric gases, and the changes in climate that might result. Meanwhile, geologists and paleoclimate researchers tried to understand when Earth slipped into and out of ice ages, and why. An enduring popular myth suggests that in the 1970s the climate science community was predicting “global cooling” and an “imminent” ice age, an observation frequently used by those who would undermine what climate scientists say today about the prospect of global warming. A review of the literature suggests that, on the contrary, greenhouse warming even then dominated scientists’ thinking as being one of the most important forces shaping Earth’s climate on human time scales. More importantly than showing the falsehood of the myth, this review describes how scientists of the time built the foundation on which the cohesive enterprise of modern climate science now rests.

this might help

You may find The myth of the 1970s global cooling scientific consensus useful in separating the wheat from the chaff. I don’t trust popular news sources for information about scientific development (except Coal Tattoo, of course!)