So Let Me Get This Straight

The entire world has been assured that the “science was settled” that the last decade had been the hottest in recorded times, and that it was unprecedented, and it was surely caused by our breathing and SUV driving, and that we had to dramatically increase the cost of energy, reduce our own income, and keep the Third World in poverty (or transfer vast amounts of our own wealth to them), because the head of the Climate Research Unit kept a messy office?

You know, I keep a messy office, too, but then, I’ve never tried to remake the entire world on the basis of my analyses. (Off planet is a different story…)

This really is an amazing story. As I’ve been saying, the people who have been skeptical have been the true scientists, and the warm mongers betrayers of science, for power and politics.

And where is Al Gore? In fact, where is the American press?

[Wee-hour update]

More from The Times:

“The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change,” said John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a former lead author on the IPCC.

The doubts of Christy and a number of other researchers focus on the thousands of weather stations around the world, which have been used to collect temperature data over the past 150 years.

These stations, they believe, have been seriously compromised by factors such as urbanisation, changes in land use and, in many cases, being moved from site to site.

Christy has published research papers looking at these effects in three different regions: east Africa, and the American states of California and Alabama.

“The story is the same for each one,” he said. “The popular data sets show a lot of warming but the apparent temperature rise was actually caused by local factors affecting the weather stations, such as land development.”

You don’t say.

And why isn’t anyone reporting on this on this side of the Pond?

[Monday morning update]

The WaPo is finally showing up to the party. Still no sign of the Paper Formerly Known As The Paper Of Record, though.

[Monday evening update — I’m home from Colorado…]

Climaquiddick (I wish that people would quit calling it Climategate…) reminds Instapundit of the Michael Bellesiles scandal. Me too.

Bellesiles, for those who don’t remember, was a historian at Emory who wrote a book making some, er, counterintuitive claims about guns in early America — in short, that they were much rarer than generally thought, and frequently owned and controlled by the government. Constitutional law scholars who expressed doubts about this were told to shut up by historians, who cited the importance of “peer review” as a guarantor of accuracy, and who wrapped themselves in claims of professional expertise.

Unfortunately, it turned out that Bellesiles had made it up. His work was based on probate records, and when people tried to find them, it turned out that many didn’t exist (one data set he claimed to have used turned out, on review, to have been destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake). It also turned out that Bellesiles hadn’t even visited some of the archives he claimed to have researched. When challenged to produce his data, he was unable to do so, and offered unpersuasive stories regarding why.

Well, on second thought, there are no parallels at all…

99 thoughts on “So Let Me Get This Straight”

  1. I own an XJ Jeep(Cherokee). We used them for years as a fleet vehicle at work. Nothing could match them for their ability to take punishemnt and keep going. I defty anyone to back up a claim it is not a true SUV.

    I would also add the Nissan Xterra to that list.

    I will take it over any piece of crap Land Rover has built in the last 20 years.

  2. Rand Simberg Says:

    February 16th, 2010 at 7:59 am
    CAFE is also the reason that GM and others don’t bring in their excellent small cars from off shore.

    That seems counterintuitive to me. Why would laws requiring better gas mileage knock out smaller cars? Don’t they generally provide better gas mileage? Is is because those small cars are high quality but not so great on fuel effeciency? Can you explain that further?

  3. Rand, it may be more complicated than CAFE standards. There are a lot of regulations on cars that make it expensive to bring them into the US market, such as pollution standards and safety standards. Companies like Honda and Toyota (to name just a couple) have decades of experience at meeting US standards but they still produce vehicles for other markets that will never be imported to America due to the costs of meeting US requirements.

  4. Comments like that invite skepticism. Suppose Lake Erie was in Europe. Would it have frozen during the Younger Dryas stadial? If so, you’ve got an example of a freezing taking place in response to warming period.

    Last I heard, the Younger Dryas was a global cooling period. Wikipedia agrees with me.

  5. kayawanee,

    (Note: I am drastically oversimplifying this)

    The CAFE regulations applied to cars, not light trucks. SUVs are built on light truck chassis, and thus not subject to the same set of fleet regulations (once again, it is actually a lot more complex than this, but I am giving you the rough cut) and thus can be manufactured in bulk without getting the maker creamed by the CAFE regs. Since a demand for large vehicles (think minivans, station wagons, luxury sedans with substantial room, etc) is both real and unlikely to significantly decline, a carmaker can meet this demand with SUVs while avoiding the CAFE regs.

    If no CAFE regs existed, it is unlikely that most carmakers would make SUVs (expensive to produce, and they offer little to MOST consumers that cannot be provided by car chassis designs) in significant quantities. Since SUVs are inherently less efficient than car chassis designs in terms of mileage (once again, oversimplifying, but you get the picture), the overall vehicle mix would skew more towards efficiency over time…

  6. So, Fletcher, NOW it’s “all about capital cost vs running cost”?

    That wasn’t what you said, initially:

    Sure. Let’s throw out all the historical information and start again. That way Americans can carry on using twice as much energy per capita as any other nation for at least another twenty years before there’s enough data to draw any conclusions.

    Of course, by then the world might be on an irreversible slide into Carboniferous Era conditions, except for NW Europe which might well look more like Labrador than like it does now, after the Gulf Stream has switched off; but never mind, Americans will still be having fun driving two-ton cars and small trucks instead of sensible vehicles, and running AC at arctic levels in subtropical outside conditions.

    Is the Carboniferous period when we stop comparing capital costs and running costs?

    But then it became

    It’s people who don’t give a sh!t about destroying it, or large portions of it, as long as they make money doing it – in such ways as pouring acid sludge loaded with heavy metals, sewage sludge, water loaded with wood fibres, chlorinated solvents… into rivers. Pouring toxic smoke into the air. Chucking carcinogenic asbestos residues onto uncontrolled landfill. Making baby’s bottles out of plastic containing oestrogenic chemicals. The list goes on and on and on and on. And preventing this sort of behaviour is what regulation is all about.

    Guess those folks are just interested in making money—unlike in Czechoslovakia, of course!

    But really, it’s about wearing a sweater in the office and not driving an SUV—is that a function of capital cost, or running cost?

    I’m so confused, Fletch!

  7. Karl, the Younger Dryas was an example of abrupt cooling brought on by global warming. Whether the Younger Dryas involved only localized cooling in Europe or global cooling is under debate, but either way, a global warming period abruptly brought a great freeze, probably because increased meltwater (from proto Lake Erie itself!) disrupted thermohaline circulation in the Atlantic. My point was that a warming globe can – abruptly – lead to a lake as large as Lake Erie freezing, contrary to MfK’s blanket statement. My bigger point is that the climate is a complex system and observations like “it is snowing in DC” and “Lake Erie froze” don’t really tell you what’s going on at all, let alone whether the climate is chaging.

  8. Not driving an SUV as a private vehicle has absolutely nothing to do with any decision that industrial managers might make.

    Observer – Are there or are there not rather a lot of rivers in mountain mining areas in which nothing can live because of high levels of acid and heavy metals, leaching out from waste tips and the like? Or at the very least, there were until various campaigners did something about it. I seem to remember the name “Love Canal”, too.

    Unrestrained capitalism is just as bad as, if not worse than, Stalinist communism. The people in charge are different, of course.

  9. Love Canal was caused by the government.

    Unrestrained capitalism is just as bad as, if not worse than, Stalinist communism.

    This statement is lunacy. When did unrestrained capitalism murder millions of people?

  10. When did unrestrained capitalism murder millions of people?

    Rand, Do you believe that the peculiar institution of slavery was not an example of unrestrained capitalism? If so, why?

  11. No, slavery was not an example of “unrestrained capitalism.” It had nothing to do with capitalism. Slavery was an example of a lack of enforcement of, and indeed encouragement by the government of the denial of basic human rights.

    Capitalism is about the voluntary exchange of goods and services, and making of contracts, without government coercion (at least to non-Marxists, which is one of the reasons I prefer the term, or at least prefix, “free-market,” because capitalism is actually a Marxist concept). The notion that it can somehow indulge in slavery is ludicrous, by definition.

  12. So, you’re saying that the free-market, by definition, includes the enforcement (by a government, or just by someone?) of basic human rights.

    That’s not the standard definition.

    The overwhelming majority of moderately left-wing political activity in the free world (the US Democratic party, various mainstream European parties, etc) is motivated by the concern that this is not the standard definition.

  13. So, you’re saying that the free-market, by definition, includes the enforcement (by a government, or just by someone?) of basic human rights.

    Of course it does. Government has a role in capitalism, as envisioned by the Founders, including enforcement of contracts, and yes, enforcement of property rights and basic human rights, and individuals own themselves. But that’s negative rights, not positive ones (the lack of which in the Constitution Obama complains about).

  14. Bob-1:

    Are you suggesting that slavery exists only in the context of capitalism?

    So, Greece, which had slavery, and Rome, which had slavery, were both capitalist systems?

    I think that not even Marx would make such a startling claim.

  15. And if we’re going to talk about slavery, let’s define it.

    What differences were there between slaves and, say, Soviet-era peasants, who were not allowed to leave their collective farms, and had no voice in how they were treated (but could be killed, as we saw w/ kulaks)?

  16. For that matter, what is the difference between slaves, and most of the residents of, say, North Korea? Or Cuba?

    There was a reason that Hayek titled his book “The Road To Serfdom.”

  17. Lurking Observer asks: Are you suggesting that slavery exists only in the context of capitalism?

    No, I’m not suggesting that at all. Slavery has been practiced differently in different times and places. Slavery in the United States was firmly entrenched in our free market system. Slaves in the United States were bought and sold at auctions. Additionally, of course, slavery allowed plantation owners to become wealthy as the owners particpated in the free market system, but the auctions themselves best illustrate my point. A slave camp in North Korea, or in some ancient society, might not have much to do with the free market system. But in the United States, slaves were bought and sold on the free market.

    Lurking Observer asks: So, Greece, which had slavery, and Rome, which had slavery, were both capitalist systems?

    That certainly doesn’t follow from what I said.

    Lurking Observer asks: What differences were there between slaves and, say, Soviet-era peasants, who were not allowed to leave their collective farms, and had no voice in how they were treated (but could be killed, as we saw w/ kulaks)?

    Rand asks: For that matter, what is the difference between slaves, and most of the residents of, say, North Korea? Or Cuba?

    Again, my point isn’t that people were denied their rights. Lots of people in many different times and places have been denied their rights – they’ve been muzzled, enslaved, tortured, and killed for a variety for a variety of motives. You can certainly have slavery without a free market, and slavery has certainly existed in many times and places completely outside of any sort of free market. But slaves in the United States did suffer as part of a free market.

    Someone enslaved by the North Korean government for the purpose of political control is not a victim of “unrestrained capitalism”, but in the United States, when slavery was legal, the free market was so unrestrained that we saw free citizens buying and selling their fellow human beings.

    As I said above, today, moderate & mainstream left-wing political behavior in the Free World centers on figuring out how to gently restrain the free market so that basic human rights are enforced while not unduly restraining people from being free and prosperous.

  18. Slavery in the United States was firmly entrenched in our free market system.

    Do you have no concept at all of what an oxymoronic statement that is?

    If not, there is no hope for you.

  19. Address the slave auctions. How wasn’t that a free market? By definition, buyers and sellers do not coerce each other — the definition doesn’t address the goods for sale.

  20. Bob-1 takes Fletch’s statement that unfettered capitalism is as bad, if not worse, than Stalinist Communism and tries to defend it by bringing up slavery.

    NOT b/c slavery is inherent to unfettered capitalism, b/c, to his credit, not even Bob-1 is that stupid.

    Instead, it’s apparently b/c some slavery occurred under capitalism (specifically, US history). \

    Therefore, well, therefore what, actually?

    There have been murders under capitalism. Ergo, capitalism is worse than Stalinist Russia? Ooops, that doesn’t quite work.

    I know! Slavery was bad, ergo it’s the same as murdering millions!

    Mayhap true. But then, there’s the odd situation that the number of slaves in America grew from the period when the importation of slaves was outlawed (in the early 1800s) and the end of the Civil War. Which would seem to suggest that, rather than deliberately murdering the slaves (which, as Bob-1 notes, actually cost slaveowners money), they apparently were able to increase in number.

    As Robert Fogel’s research has suggested, in fact, slaves that you beat and starve to an inch of their lives (never mind murder) don’t actually do much labor for you. Which, if you’ve just spent money buying them at the free market slave auctions, kinda defeats the purpose.

    So, where’s the body counts? I mean, the Soviets murdered so many in such a short time, they classified their census, b/c the numbers were so damning.

    Now, what Bob-1’s digression into slavery has to do w/ Fletch’s claim that capitalism is worse than Stalinist Communism, or how this relates to the environment, beyond Bob’s clear assumption that CAPITALISM. IS. BAD. is beyond me.

    But then, when the purpose is to say that capitalism is bad, well, I guess any argument’s worth a few electrons…

  21. the definition doesn’t address the goods for sale.

    It’s amazing how easy it is to define the problem away, if you want to defend governments, and bash free enterprise…

  22. Lurking Observer, I was answering Rand’s question when I brought up slavery. Rand asked “When did unrestrained capitalism murder millions of people?”

    Of course, slavery as practiced in the United States would have been horrible even if all of the slaves had died from natural causes. But you want to know about body counts, which is actually reasonable, given the argument we’re having.

    Western slavery’s body count: Anywhere from six million to sixy million murders. See http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstatv.htm#African for mulitple sources. More sources can be easily be provided – the subject has been researched extensively.

    I don’t think capitalism is bad at all. I was merely answering Rand’s question, and commenting on completely unrestrained capitalsim. You can read a recent comment of mine on this blog to see evidence of my support for capitalism: http://www.transterrestrial.com/?p=24812#comment-108494

  23. Rand said: It’s amazing how easy it is to define the problem away, if you want to defend governments, and bash free enterprise…

    Rand, I don’t want to do either of those things here — I did the opposite with regard to New Space. Further, I’m not playing fast and loose with definitions, but I’d like to (politely) suggest that you are. The definition of “free market” that I’m using can be found in the first few paragraphs of this wikipedia link:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market

    The definition addresses the requirement that neither the buyer nor the seller be subject to force or fraud. It doesn’t rule out slavery, as basic human rights aren’t addressed, only the rights of the seller and buyer. The definition wasn’t written by me, and I’m not cherry-picking. What definition are you using?

  24. The definition addresses the requirement that neither the buyer nor the seller be subject to force or fraud.

    You continue to ignore the fact that one person cannot own another. The buyer is “buying” stolen goods, since the property is not the sellers to sell. This is where the government enables slavery. It has nothing to do with capitalism or free markets, despite your desperate attempts to slander those terms.

  25. I heartily agree that since people own themselves, the goods are stolen, but why doesn’t a free market exist for stolen goods. Lets leave slavery out of it for a moment. Pawn shops routinely traffic in stolen goods (only inadvertently of course). Are well-meaning pawn shops not part of the free market? If the buyer and seller aren’t defrauding each other, why does it matter that the goods were stolen?

    Just as an aside, although I disagree many of your positions, I continue to learn a lot from this blog. Preferring the term “free market” instead of “capitalism” is a good idea.

  26. Are well-meaning pawn shops not part of the free market? If the buyer and seller aren’t defrauding each other, why does it matter that the goods were stolen?

    Because legitimate pawn-shop owners know that they cannot traffic in stolen goods, because it violates the rights of those from whom they were stolen. Slavery is the ultimate theft of such rights.

    I think you’re being deliberately obtuse.

  27. For clarity: A thief sells a stolen ten speed bicycle to a naive pawn shop owner. This is fraud – not part of the free market. The hapless pawn shop owner sells the bicycle to Jim after Jim outbids Karl. Jim and the pawn shop owner agree on an acceptable price. Neither is aware that the goods are stolen. This seems like a good example of the free market doing its thing.

  28. You example is stupid and pointless. No slave owner or seller was under the illusion that they were not selling and buying a stolen human life. They simply thought it acceptable and legal. Just as they did in ancient Greece and Rome. Or in modern Arabia…

    But it’s not capitalism, or the free market. To claim otherwise is to slander both. And modern America. But if you prefer to simply be obtuse, I’ll grant it instead.

  29. You don’t say why it is not capitalism or the free market. I thought you were saying that the free market can’t sell stolen goods, but my example shows how stolen goods can be sold without fraud on the free market. If a slave buyer and slave seller are not defruding each other, why isn’t a slave auction capitalism? You have not explained or offered a definition — you’ve thrown around words like “obtuse” and “slander”, but you haven’t provided a sound argument.

  30. Karl, the Younger Dryas was an example of abrupt cooling brought on by global warming.

    Bob-1, the Younger Dryas were a period of cooling. Ascribing a cause as you glibly do, seems a bit premature. Claiming it was “global warming”, sounds a bit nursery school. Or maybe like that abomination of a movie, the Day After Tomorrow thing where evil human induced global warming leads to superstorms, a new ice age, and other silliness.

  31. Karl,

    The Day After Tomorrow was a ridiculous movie — have you read Climatologist William Hyde’s hilarious review of it? Hyde said he’d have to be paid to watch it, readers of rec.arts.sf.written passed the hat and collected sufficient funds, and the resulting comical review is here:
    http://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts.sf.written/msg/6e52157aaf63775f

    Nevertheless, as even Hyde points out, very abrupt climate change is possible when thermohaline circulation is disrupted. The Younger Dryas freezing period may have come on as quickly as three months or as long as three years (I have cites for that, but cite 7 of that wikipedia article you cited suggests the timeframe was a few months to a few years). The idea that a global warming period caused increased meltwater in North America which disrupted thermohaline circulation in the Atlantic and brought on an abrupt drop in temperatures in Europe isn’t a nursery school theory – it is the leading explanation for the Younger Dryas stadial.

    Karl, whether you agree with me on the above subject or not, I respect your ability to make logical well-thought-out arguments. I’d be interested in your opinion regarding the disagreement Rand and I are having above. I am saying that the slave auctions which were held in the United States were conducted within the framework of a free market as economists define one. Rand disagrees. Thanks for any thoughts!

    —-

    For reference, I’m using this wikipedia definition, which I believe applies as well to a slave auction as to any other kind of auction:

    A free market is a market without economic intervention and regulation by government except to regulate against force or fraud. This is the contemporary use of the terminology used by economists and in popular culture; the term has had other uses historically. A free market requires protection of property rights, but no regulation, no subsidization, no single monetary system, and no governmental monopolies. It is the opposite of a controlled market, where the government regulates prices or how property is used.

    The theory holds that within the ideal free market, property rights are voluntarily exchanged at a price arranged solely by the mutual consent of sellers and buyers. By definition, buyers and sellers do not coerce each other, in the sense that they obtain each other’s property rights without the use of physical force, threat of physical force, or fraud, nor are they coerced by a third party (such as by government via transfer payments) [1] and they engage in trade simply because they both consent and believe that what they are getting is worth more than or as much as what they give up.

  32. In the two paragraph definition I provided above, the use of force only applies to the buyer and the sller. Force and coercion is also needed when selling livestock, but this force isn’t relevent to the sale, as it is applied only to the goods, not to the buyer and seller. In the United States, people were treated like livestock and were bought and sold on the free market.

    That’s not slander on the United Staes, by the way – I love my country, and what it stands for, but just as I want Germans to face the truth about what they did to my relatives during the Holocaust, I think Americans should face the truth about what was legal in our own country. I also think the free market is the best way to distribute goods and services, but it needs to be restrained, and the trick is to deterimine the minimim restraint necessary to protect basic human rights.

  33. The fact that human beings were wrongly treated like livestock doesn’t render slavery a free-market activity, sorry. To call it that is a an odious slander of the free market.

  34. Rand, you can say “odious slander” and “sorry” all you want, but a sound argument would be more convincing!

  35. Slavery on the American market led to between six million and sixty million murders.

    Which has nothing to do with free markets. Slavery was not a failure of the free market. It was a failure to have a free market, which has been the case for most of the world for most of human history.

  36. It is certainly true that the free market didn’t cause slavery — evil caused slavery. In the United States, the free market was how slaves were distributed while in other cultures, other systems were used (government camps, inheritance, etc).

    At this pont, your argument seems to boil down to a focus on the word “free”. But language doesn’t work like that – free only modifies market. The market was free even if the goods sold on the market were not.

  37. A personal attack? And one that contradicts, with no evidence, everything I’ve said in this thread about being as restrained as possible when regulating the market. Seriously? I’ve been nothing but respectful in this conversation, complimenting you and this blog along the way. I’m disappointed. But moreover, not only don’t you have a good manners, you don’t even have a good argument. You haven’t made your case.

  38. Bob-1 illustrates why Ayn Rand’s definition of capitalism is necessary. Relevant excerpt from Unknown Ideal: “In a capitalist society, all human relationships are voluntary.”

  39. Bob-1 still fails, w/ all his insistence that slavery is associated w/ the free market, to prove Fletcher’s point, which is that capitalism is as evil, if not worse, than Stalinist Communism.

    Stalin managed to kill some 2-3 million in just the Great Purge. Total victims during his rule (1921-1951) was on the order of 7 million, and that does NOT include the victims of the various famines that he perpetrated.

    Mao, comparable to Stalin, killed off perhaps twice as many in the course of the Great Leap Forward (one of the worst famines of the 20th Century) as well as various millions more in the course of various campaigns and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Thus, in, perhaps, twenty-five years, Mao killed some 20 million.

    By comparison, North Korea is a bunch of pikers.

    Three centuries of slavery, according to Bob-1, led to 6-60 million deaths (w/ the high end numbers considered suspect even by Bob-1’s source). And note that those millions and millions of deaths were not all due to the American experience with slavery. After all, this included slaves sent to the Central and South American markets.

    But Bob-1, who claims to nonetheless be actually defending capitalism, attributes all these deaths as part of the American free market system, and therefore triumphantly concludes that he’s proven his point, i.e., capitalism is as deadly as Stalinist Communism.

    All to further support Fletcher’s point that capitalism is a poor steward of the environment.

    Who’s unconvinced??

  40. No. You ascribe arguments to me that I didn’t make. I don’t even read what Fletcher writes for the most part (once I realized that the guy regularly advocates genocide on this blog, I stopped reading him.)

    I noticed Rand ask When did unrestrained capitalism murder millions of people? I answered. Rand argued, you argued, I argued back. That’s it. Fletcher has nothing to do with it. I didn’t say capitalism is evil, and nor did I suggest that it is similar to Stalinism. I was just trying to show why the free market needs some restraint.

    I do think there is a related argument to be made about industrial pollution, but again, the USSR under Stalin and his successors was much worse on that score.

  41. I did say “unrestrained capitalism” – which has never to my knowledge been tried. As to slavery; well, there was a free market in slaves as far as the buyers and sellers were concerned, and nobody asked the slaves’ opinion.

    Love Canal? Well, the building of houses on the land was caused by the government, sure. However, it was a private company that put all that toxic filth in the ground in the first place instead of cleaning it up.

    It’s insufficiently regulated free enterprise that is turning thousands of acres of mature rainforest into smoke and ash as we “speak”, incidentally leading to the extinction of probably thousands of species that we never knew existed as well as dozens that we know full well do exist – for now. It was free enterprise that caused the Dustbowl. And on and on and on and on…

    Classic economics treats the natural world as a free good of no value, and very rarely takes any account of external costs in its accounting – such as dead rivers caused by pouring poison into the rivers, or turning said rivers anoxic by putting vast amounts of organic waste and/or fertiliser runoff into them. And preventing that sort of abuse is what regulation should be about.

    Caveat emptor only works when the quality of an item is obvious. If you know how to use an axe, you know how to tell whether it’s any good or not. But how do you tell from visual inspection whether (for example) a computer is any good internally? Or whether you are buying an investment or a Ponzi scheme? And that sort of abuse is what regulation should be about.

  42. Sorry, Bob, I missed this discussion. My view is that the trading of slaves was a relatively free market. As I understand it, there was some regulation of slave trading. For example, you couldn’t bring more over legally after some point in the early 19th century. Also, I imagine there was some sort of standards system in place much like what would be present in the trade of livestock.

    But the labor market which depended on slaves was most certainly not free with force being used to compel the labor of these hapless slaves. That means in my view that both you and Rand are correct in your own way.

    I disagree with your original assertion that slavery was a case of unrestrained capitalism. Ultimately, the institution was backed by the force of the state and had to be. Any would-be planning for a slave revolt would have to take into account the overwhelming force that the state would bring.

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