Some thoughts on their application to climate policy, in response to Judith Curry’s take.
As I noted on Twitter, two points. First, there really is no good physical case to be made that warmer global temperatures results in more extreme weather events. Storms are heat engines, driven by temperature differences, not total enthalpy. Also, I wrote about the fallacy of the precautionary principle as applied to climate policy four years ago.
…is the marginalization of the Jewish state:
The relation between Obama and Netanyahu in the White House meeting reflected and prefigured the relation between the U.S. and Israel on the international and diplomatic stage, culminating in an agreement with Iran in which Israel had no part and was effectively ostracized. To say that Obama has no love for Israel is to put it mildly.
It would be interesting in this context to see the Khalidi/Obama video squirreled away by the Los Angeles Times. Rashid Khalidi, a former PLO spokesman and current Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University, makes no secret of his hatred for Israel. Obama and Khalidi were good friends, and as Discover the Networks reports, “In 2003 Obama would attend a farewell party in Khalidi’s honor when the latter was leaving the University of Chicago to embark on his new position at Columbia.” The event was filmed and one may plausibly wonder what revelation the LAT is suppressing with regard to Obama’s participation, especially as Obama had praised Khalidi for having “challenged my thinking.” Israpundit’s Ted Belman puts it succinctly: “What was said at this event was presumably so damaging to Obama’s political career that the LA Times, that liberal bastion, who came into possession of a tape of the event, refused to release it.”
In any case, everything Obama has done vis à vis the Jewish state — favoring anti-Zionist rabbis and organizations, inveighing against housing construction in its own capital city, supporting the Palestinians in fruitless rounds of “peace talks,” insisting that Israel retreat to its indefensible pre-1967 borders, leaking military secrets about Israeli pre-emptive actions against Syria and Hezbollah — indicates that Obama would like to see Israel confined to a tiny sliver of land, boxed in between the sea and the Arabs, reduced to a rump state at the mercy of its enemies, and eventually ushered out of the corridors of history. This puts him in league with the ayatollahs. This is Obama’s version of the knockout game.
Except in the knockout game, the victim selection is random.
It’s been seventy-two years, now. and the event is passing out of living memory. We should remember, but given the state of public education, in another generation it will either not be taught at all, or as some sort of demonstration of the intrinsic racism of America.
When the hippies were expelled from the garden?
Should you eat lots of them?
Unfortunately, I’m allergic to them. There may be some that I’m not, but it’s not fun to experiment. The only ones I know I can eat are macadamias.
Also, note: eating fat doesn’t make you fat.
…is crumbling:
I am a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society and a Certified Consulting Meteorologist. To the best of my memory I never had a chance to respond to this poll of the AMS membership.
That said, the fact that 70% of scientists say that humans affect the climate is utterly unsurprising. That has been known scientifically since Changnon’s METROMEX study in the early 70′s. The fact that 9 out of ten that publish on the subject of climate believe humans affect the climate is also utterly unsurprising.
For me, the money question was #6, “How worried are you about global warming?” Only 30% answered “very worried.” This would make 70% of the respondents “deniers” since that perjorative term seems to be applied to anyone who does not accept the “IPCC consensus” of catastrophic global warming. A statistically similar number (28%) is not worried or “not very worried” about global warming.
So, you can spin the results any way you want but this survey of a small number of AMS members doesn’t reveal any great concern about global warming.
Yup. All of this talk about consensus is just an attempt to bully people into their socialist “solutions” to a non-existent problem.
A mea culpa, and some thoughts from Matt Welchalsh.
Whenever you declare something a positive “right,” it implies slavery on the part of someone else to fulfill it. If we continue on the current path with health care, forced conscription of doctors is inevitable.
[Update a few minutes later]
I liked this:
Another force at work here is the fact that government intervention in health care has for years been sending doctors out of general practice and into specializations that are far removed from Washington’s interference. Obamacare will almost certainly intensify that trend, producing a surplus of specialists such as cosmetic surgeons even as the nation experiences a shortage of primary-care physicians. The legacy of Democratic health-care reform very well may turn out to be cheaper boob jobs, a fitting comeuppance for the boobs who put this program in place and the boobs who elected them.
I think there may be a few fewer boobs next fall.
Both parties have misleading rhetoric about it.
Yes, the purpose of a business is not to create jobs. As he notes, a business that thinks it is is unlikely to succeed. Jobs are a fortuitous side effect of letting the economy grow in a free market.