I have some thoughts, over at PJM.
Category Archives: Media Criticism
Hope! And Not Change!
Really.
Has Obama given up on ObamaCare?
If so, the anger at the political incompetence of the White House on the Hill among the Dems will go incandescent.
Plus, a bonus. A compendium of presidential (and presidential candidate) liesbroken promises, about health care. And it doesn’t even include my favorite: “If you like your current insurance, you’ll be able to keep it.” Well, I’m currently self insured. I’m not going to be allowed to keep it. Unless this monstrosity craters, and note the title of the post.
Avatar And Pantheism
Some thoughts from Ross Douthat.
Punishing Us For Our Sins
High AGW Priest Tom Friedman thinks that we deserve to be hit by a massive storm:
Absent such a storm that literally parts the Red Sea again and drives home to all the doubters that catastrophic climate change is a clear and present danger, the domestic pressures in every country to avoid legally binding and verifiable carbon reductions will remain very powerful.
That will be our come-to-Gaia moment.
[Update a few minutes later]
Is global warming a dead issue?
It may well be. We’re now too broke to be able to afford such an ostentatious, gaudy and pointless religion.
[Update a few minutes later]
I kind of buried the lede in the link above — it cites a paper claiming that global temperature is more influenced by CFCs and cosmic rays than CO2. It’s peer reviewed, too.
If the biggest problems are cosmic rays and solar radiation, it’s hard to see how the power-hungry bureaucrats are going to leverage that into taking over the global economy.
That Didn’t Take Long
When I wrote that denizens of the east coast had to shovel a couple of feet of global warming, I was right:
…this record-breaking snowstorm is pretty much precisely what climate science predicts. Since one typically can’t make a direct association between any individual weather event and global warming, perhaps the best approach is to borrow and modify a term from the scientific literature and call this a “global-warming-type” deluge…
Global warming. Is there anything that it can’t do?
More over at The American Spectator, where I got the link, with some history in comments:
The worst storm for the East Coast occured in late Jan 1888 (just a few weeks after the horrible Children’s Blizzard). The entire Mid Atlantic states were buried under 15-20 foot snow drifts
The strongest cyclone to hit the UK occured in the 17th Century, and resulted portions of upper Scottland be buried under 60 foot of sand.
Some of the most spectacular rain fall events for Europe occured in the 14th and 15th centuries, which caused widespread famine and starvation. In Normandy, during the summer of 1318 it rained every day but 3.
Ditto for China. The 14th through the 17th centuries saw both record droughts and rainfalls.
And none can be attributed to AGW.
Of course it can. The planet was anticipating our voracious energy usage in the future.
The New Utilities
Trust busting, or cartel building?
if you think monopoly bargaining is the problem in health care, our cost problem is going to get worse, not better. Think of the one area where we see the most customer complaints: quasi-public utilities like the cable and phone companies. They also have a rather ponderous rate of innovation, and no particular interest in controlling their costs. That’s not an accident; it’s a feature of a regulatory structure that starts from provider costs and works up to what extra percentage they will be allowed to charge essentially captive consumers.
The notion that we need the government to “compete” with insurance companies is economically insane. As I’ve said before, if they need competition, let them compete with each other. That they don’t is a result of flawed government policy, which the lunacy that is passing the Congress will only make much worse.
As a commenter there notes, this bill will essentially ban true private insurance. If this becomes law, expect to see an underground economy and black market in health care.
The Politicization
…of peer review:
What these and other episodes reveal was that there was a concerted effort to stage-manage the appearance of an ironclad consensus at the expense of the scientific process. Rather than make an open and honest argument that, despite persistent uncertainties, there is substantial theoretical and empirical evidence to support the hypothesis that human activity is contributing to a gradual warming of the atmosphere, they focused on squelching dissenting scientific views, corrupting science in the process.
Unfortunately, as a commenter there notes, there isn’t anything really new about this. Kuhn understood it over half a century ago. This episode simply provided an ugly window into it, and in a case where the science is deeply consequential. It doesn’t “prove” that the earth is not anthropogenically warming (and people who think that science “proves” things in general simply demonstrate their lack of understanding of science). What it does show is that the people who have been telling us that it does are not to be trusted, and that a thorough, and transparent, review of the evidence is in order before we base major policy on their preferences.
[Update a few minutes later]
Another good point in comments, and you should really read all the comments over there. It is in response to the comment that we shouldn’t throw out all of the good science and scientists based on these bad apples:
100% of the scientists with like conclusions who have had their emails and code exposed to the world seem to have engaged in bad behaviour. Furthermore, very few of the scientists with like conclusions condemned the bad behaviour, instead beginning by defending it. Given these facts, I think we should say that we don’t know whether other scientist with like conclusions have engaged in bad behaviour, rather than just assuming that they haven’t.
Also:
…it is critical to examine the influence the bad apples have had over everything subsequent. To do that you first need to realize that although there are reams of studies on AGW indeed, they are almost all based off a shocking small group of data. Historic temperature wise, there are 3 major datasets in the world, and (apparently now that CRU has lost theirs) one repository for raw data. These datasets are references in a staggering amount of research, and their creators and care takers are the exact people in question here. Doug [sic] Jones being the godfather. The Wegman report warmed of how a small group of climate scientists from a small number of institutes were working too closely together to hope for any independent analysis. That has proved entirely true.
Slightly OT, but that first comment reminds me of the national, even global exchange we’ve had over the past eight years:
Defense: Not all Muslims are terrorists.
Retort: Yes, but to first order, at least lately, all terrorists have been Muslim.
Sadly for those scientists with integrity working in this field (and we don’t know how many there are — perhaps most of those with integrity have been chased out by now), this scandal has tainted them all, even if the media continues to misreport or ignore it.
Not Fascist Enough
Naomi Klein is complaining about the president:
Obama, it’s worth remembering, also came to office with the big banks on their knees — it took real effort not to nationalize them. Once again, if Obama had dared to use the power that was handed to him by history, he could have mandated the banks to provide the loans for factories to be retrofitted and new green infrastructure to be built. Instead he declared that the government shouldn’t tell the failed banks how to run their businesses. Green businesses report that it’s harder than ever to get a loan.
Imagine if these three huge economic engines — the banks, the auto companies, the stimulus bill — had been harnessed to a common green vision. If that had happened, demand for a complementary energy bill would have been part of a coherent transformative agenda.
Imagine. It’s easy if you try.
More Exploding Watermelons
Here’s the latest from the fruit salad, over at The Independent:
The most progressive US president in a generation comes to the most important international meeting since the Second World War and delivers a speech so devoid of substance that he might as well have made it on speaker-phone from a beach in Hawaii. His aides argue in private that he had no choice, such is the opposition on Capitol Hill to any action that could challenge the dominance of fossil fuels in American life. And so the nation that put a man on the Moon can’t summon the collective will to protect men and women back here on Earth from the consequences of an economic model and lifestyle choice that has taken on the mantle of a religion.
I’m long on record of opposing the idiocy of inappropriate comparisons of the crisis du jour to Apollo. Is he really comparing a massive technological achievement of engineering to “summoning a collective will” (i.e., social engineering)? Apparently.
And when it comes to “taking on the mantle of a religion,” I can only suggest that he and his gaze long into a mirror.
Global Warming Models
…should be treated like horoscopes.
We now know that the models can’t even forecast the past (and they’re extremely shoddy work on inspection), and they want us to rely on them to make trillion-dollar decisions?