How dare he dispute that noted scientific journal, Rolling Stone?
What To Do About Global Warming/Cooling
I see a problem with this approach, I think, unless I’m missing something:
1. Are global temperatures warming?
2. Do the negative consequences of the change outweigh the positive consequences?
3. Can we do anything that will reverse the change?
4. Do the positive consequences of the action outweigh the negative consequences of doing nothing?Notice, the steps have nothing at all whatsoever to do with whether or not global warming is anthropogenic. The climate’s “naturalness” is actually irrelevant. If a 10 kilometer-wide asteroid were hurling toward earth at 100,000 km per hour, it would be a completely natural event. However, just because the meteor wasn’t anthropogenic doesn’t mean that we wouldn’t take actions to deflect it.
Notice also, that we could change question 1 from “warming” to “cooling” and the four-step approach still works. And quite frankly, cooling is probably a more historically problematic situation.
If the answer to any one of the above four questions is “No,” then we should do absolutely nothing about a changing climate. If the answer to all of the questions are “Yes,” then, and only then, should we take any actions.
The first problem is in step 3. It doesn’t seem to account for cost. Suppose there is something that we can do (at least in theory) to reverse the change, but it would result in the loss of (say) a quadrillion dollars in global economic growth over the next century. And that points out the problem with Step 4. Rather than comparing the positive aspects of the action to the negative consequences of doing nothing, we need to compare the positive consequences of the action to their cost. For example, Wikipedia (FWIW) says that the gross world product is about seventy trillion dollars. If we were to get a growth rate of 4 percent over a century, that would mean that in 2113, the GWP would be (1.04)**(100), or about fifty times that amount, or about 3.5 quadrillion dollars. If by arbitrarily making energy more expensive with carbon taxes or caps, we were to reduce that growth rate by a mere half a percent (which is probably a conservative estimate — many of the proposals would do much more economic damage), that would reduce the factor of growth after a hundred years to about thirty, instead of fifty. That is, the world would be 20 times seventy, or 1.4 quadrillion dollars poorer over that period of time. You can buy a lot of mitigation against climate issues with that kind of money.
This is the kind of rational analysis that Bjørn Lomberg has been doing
Public Education
An industry of mediocrity. Mostly thanks to the teacher’s unions.
It’s been over thirty years since that report on the subject, that said if a foreign power had imposed such a system on us, it would be rightly considered an act of war. But we continue to do it to ourselves, and nothing has changed. If anything, it’s gotten worse.
The Media Swoon
Looking back at Michael Hastings’ campaign reporting from 2008:
I simply cannot imagine what it is about Obama that gets people going this way (and yes, I understand there’s a racial element of attraction to a cool black guy, but that doesn’t really explain the depth and weirdness of it, IMHO), except to say that it’s clearly something non-verbal. I believe it has been operating with Obama for virtually his entire life and has worked to his very great advantage. Quite a few people have always reacted to him as though his mere presence were almost supernaturally attractive, as if he exuded a kind of force field that made them—as Hastings so well put it—practically swoon.
It’s a dangerous phenomenon. I believe that Obama understands it and cultivates it, too. And no, I don’t think it’s actually hypnosis, although it works in some powerfully suggestive manner. It also takes advantage of the fact that so many journalists today are very young writers (like Hastings) who have done almost nothing else for a living, and so they seem especially susceptible. In the mid-20th century, reporters for major publications used to be uniformly older and to have had more varied prior experience in life and the world—more hard-boiled and hard-nosed, and less susceptible to swooning hero worship, although they were hardly immune to respect and liking.
In their childish emotionalism, they’ve helped usher in an era of massive wealth destruction, ruining millions of lives. And only now, with the revelations of the AP and Fox News, are they starting to realize the danger they should have seen with things like this:
That’s the way this White House works on the press: engender hero worship bordering on the hysterical, and then use the threat of withdrawal of the chance to be in the loved one’s presence to compel compliance.
Sick. Dangerous. And it explains quite a bit, doesn’t it?
Yes, and like an abused spouse, fearing the “war on women” and other chimaera, they’ll return to him in time for next year’s election, to unwittingly try to continue the destruction.
Global Warming
When it’s a good thing:
Given that climate change is a mixture of curses and blessings, any policy addressing it is going to involve trade-offs. Slowing it down, for example, would hurt some, help others. It’s not clear why a cold, Arctic-reliant country like Russia whose economy is linked to the oil and gas trade would find a benefit in cooperating with efforts to stop climate change. It also appears that human activities like farming are better able to adjust to temperature variations than some pessimists would have us believe. Crops like soya, corn and wheat can be bred (or genetically modified) to grow in warmer and dryer conditions at a modest cost.
Greens, many impelled by emotional overreactions or a deep inner belief that unfettered capitalism is a terrible thing, have tried to simplify the discussion about the earth’s changing climate into a morality play. They’ve overstated the evidence that favors worst-case scenarios, argued for top down, bureaucratic solutions that don’t work, and when critics object to these policies they lash out at their critics as ‘science deniers.’
Because they have other agendas, and because for them, it’s a religion. You can pay for a hell of a lot of mitigation with all of the wealth that’s being opened up in the Arctic, but it doesn’t give them the requisite amount of control.
The Obligation
Steven Wolfe, a former congressional space staffer, has what looks to be an interesting new book out. It has a lot of good blurbs.
Cybershaming In The Science Fiction Community
It can get very ugly when the Left starts to eat its own:
The virtually thoughtless piling on is perhaps the most appalling. So many of the criticizers whose comments I have come across admit they haven’t even read the columns in question. Once the ball of shunning and shaming got rolling, hundreds of onlookers, alerted by social media, jumped on the bandwagon, attracted by the enticing glow of participating in shared moral outrage. Moral preening is on overload; industry professionals and would-be professionals frantically signal to each other that they are right-thinkers. According to the mau-mauers, Mike and Barry did not merely misspeak (miswrite?); they did not have decent-enough intentions which were ruined by Paleolithic habits and blinkered upbringings; they are morally suspect, malign and vicious and evil. It’s burn the witch! all over again, but this time on a pyre of blog posts and Tweets.
I mentioned before that I completely understand the vehemence of Barry’s reaction to all this. One sadly ironic aspect of this brouhaha is that Barry is a lifelong man of the Left. He was staunchly antiwar during the Vietnam era (see early stories such as “Final War”), and his dream president was (and remains) Eugene McCarthy. I fully believe, based on his writings about Alice Sheldon and Judith Merril, that Barry considers himself a feminist, and an avid one. Condemnation from one’s “own side” always burns hotter in one’s craw than condemnation from “the other guys,” which can be easily rationalized away; just as criticism (especially when viewed as unfair) from one’s own family hurts much worse than criticism from relative strangers. Forty years ago (and in all the years since), Barry was a fierce advocate of the New Wave in science fiction, whose practitioners (with the sole exception of R. A. Lafferty) were all politically aligned with the Left, as opposed to old-timers such as John W. Campbell and Robert Heinlein. Now Barry must feel as though the children of the Revolution are eating their elders (as so frequently happens, it seems).
This is actually one reason that I don’t read anywhere near as much SF as I did when I was a kid.
Paula Deen
I’ve never been a big fan, but I really don’t understand what all the fuss is about (particularly since she seems to be a big Obama supporter). As far as I can tell she seems to be guilty of using the N-word (apparently long ago, in private, describing to her husband someone who had stolen from her), and of considering casting blacks as slaves at a recreation of an antebellum wedding party. I’m certainly not shocked that a woman who grew up in the south in the fifties and sixties would have that word in her vocabulary (which I presume is what she meant by her “yes, of course” in sworn testimony), or that she might deploy it under stressful circumstances. And as for the slavery reenactment, how does this differ from hiring actors for a movie about the period? It’s not like she proposed to actually enslave them. And as almost always, the reportage on this has been sensationalist and awful.
She made a mistake with her abject apologies, I think. She should have simply explained the circumstances, to pre-empt all of the nonsense.
Obama’s Melting Wings
When I first read the title of Mark Steyn’s latest, on Obama’s European meltdown, I thought it was an allusion to Icarus, but apparently not. It would be a good one, though — a naive man flies too close to the sun, and consequently plummets.
“Malarkey”
Did you know that it’s a Spanish word?
Ah, Joe Biden — impeachment insurance.