Category Archives: Business

The Low-Info Hipster Morons Who Voted For Obama

…learn that elections have consequences:

That mean old company won’t throw extra cash at them so that they can live the New York City lifestyle to which they’ve become accustomed! Dear Dudes: Companies are in business to stay in business and employ people. Obamacare regulations are making that increasingly more difficult; the costs are staggering and burdensome. That whole “you can keep your plan” deal? Obama lied.

And anyone with half a brain would have known that. But they’re products of the public educational system, and universities.

Poor Poor Pitiful Mann

The involuntary public figure. And Monckton is piling on:

I, too, can name-drop sanctimoniously, just like Michael E. Mann.

Meanwhile, I’ve also been subject to a constant onslaught of character attacks and smears on websites, in op-eds, by a politicized and now-discredited clerk in the House of Lords acting without the authority of the House, in Michael E. Mann’s Climategate emails, and on left-leaning news outlets, usually by front groups or individuals tied to global-warming profiteers of the traffic-light tendency (the Greens too yellow to admit they’re really Reds): groups like Greenpeace, Deutsche Bank, the Environmental Defense Fund, Munich Re, and the World Wide Fund for Nature.

As the website WattsUpWithThat has frequently pointed out, climate researchers are in a street fight with those who seek to discredit the data that now comprehensively disprove the once-accepted scientific “evidence” simply because it is inconvenient for many who are profiting from attacking fossil fuel use.

Being the focus of such attacks has a lead lining: I’ve become an accidental public figure in the debate over human-caused climate change. Reluctant at first, I remain reluctant embrace this role, but nevertheless I choose to use my position in the public eye to inform the discourse surrounding the issue of climate change.

Despite continued albeit diminishing skepticism in official quarters, in reality the evidence against dangerous human-caused climate change is now very strong. By digging up and burning fossil fuels, humans are releasing carbon that had been buried in the Earth into the atmosphere, helping to stave off the mass extinctions that would follow from the next – and long overdue – Ice Age. And storms like extra-tropical system Sandy and hurricane Irene, and the oft-precedented heat, drought, and wild-fires of last summer cannot in logic, reason, or science be attributed to “global warming” that has become conspicuous chiefly by its near-total absence over the past two decades and perhaps more. In a deterministic climate object operating on a rational world, that which has not happened cannot have caused that which has.

If we continue down this path of lavishly-funded nonsense, we will be leaving our children and grandchildren a different planet—one with more extreme Socialism, more pronounced and widespread scientific illiteracy, worse episodes of cant even than those of Michael E. Mann (if that were possible), and greater competition for diminishing taxpayer subsidies. It will be worse than we ever thought.

My emphasis. As a commenter at JunkScience noted, that’s bumper sticker material, there.

The Economic Illiteracy

…of Fauxcahontas:

Whereas the regulatory points made in the Senate Banking hearings are esoteric and easily abused to create YouTube moments, the $22 minimum wage issue is readily understandable to the public and understood as absurd. What small business or retail outlet could survive if the minimum salary were $45,000 per year, regardless of what the employee did or what experience the employee had?

The country’s in the very best of hands.

A Change On Climate Change

The Economist comes to its senses:

The mismatch between rising greenhouse-gas emissions and not-rising temperatures is among the biggest puzzles in climate science just now. It does not mean global warming is a delusion. Flat though they are, temperatures in the first decade of the 21st century remain almost 1°C above their level in the first decade of the 20th. But the puzzle does need explaining.

The mismatch might mean that—for some unexplained reason—there has been a temporary lag between more carbon dioxide and higher temperatures in 2000-10. Or it might be that the 1990s, when temperatures were rising fast, was the anomalous period. Or, as an increasing body of research is suggesting, it may be that the climate is responding to higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in ways that had not been properly understood before. This possibility, if true, could have profound significance both for climate science and for environmental and social policy.

No kidding.

The models are, and always have been, junk science, and it is insane to make costly public policy decisions based on them.