Category Archives: Media Criticism

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

The Hockey Stick

April 1, 2013 Rand Simberg 8 Comments

…broken again. I’ve been too busy with the book to delve into the Marcott mess, but it seems to have imploded almost immediately upon publication, and Science (and “science”) haven’t exactly covered themselves in glory:

Let me be perfectly clear — I am accusing no one of scientific misconduct. The errors documented here could have been the product of group dynamics, institutional dysfunction, miscommunication, sloppiness or laziness (do note that misconduct can result absent explicit intent). However, what matters most now is how the relevant parties respond to the identification of a clear misrepresentation of a scientific paper by those who should not make such errors.

That response will say a lot about how this small but visible part of the climate community views the importance of scientific integrity.

Given the history, I’m not hopeful.

[Update a few minutes later]

More thoughts from Jonathan Adler:

No, this does not show that climate change is a scientific fraud. What it does show, however, is that some are willing to “sex up” climate science findings to feed sensational media coverage, and end up undermining confidence in climate science. Given that there is still much we do not know about climate change — including why mean global temperature has been flat for the past ten years — undermining confidence in climate science can (further) undermine its ability to inform policy. Climate science has taken some significant hits in the past few years. It doesn’t need any more.

At this point, it should be abundantly clear how foolish it would be to make major public-policy decisions on such “science.”

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

California Dreaming

April 1, 2013 Rand Simberg 2 Comments

Ah, the utopian fantasies of the loony left:

Fittingly, the same day Egan’s hymn was published, the California State Auditor reported the state’s net worth – its assets minus its liabilities – at negative $127.2 billion. Also reported were $167.9 billion in long-term obligations, not including $60 billion in unfunded liabilities for retiree health care, or those for state employees’ future pensions. These are not just “bills.” These are benefits for public employees and services for the poor that won’t be delivered as promised.

California’s public school system, both one of the most expensive and one of the poorest performing in the country, is not improving. The state’s prison system is both so overcrowded and underfunded that the US Supreme Court deemed conditions “cruel and unusual punishment.” And despite 9.8 percent unemployment (tied for highest in the country), tax, regulatory, and zoning policies make blue-collar job creation in manufacturing and real estate development next to impossible.

But other than that, things are great.

Egan and other turquoise dreamers seem to look at tenured teachers, happy prison guards, and fleeced one-percenters and believe conditions are promising enough to move on to romantic dreams of the future. Over the heads of undereducated kids, the chronically unemployed, and the poor, they see a high-speed train zooming along the sparkling coast. This is not how progressives used to think.

What constitutes actual “progress” is, of course, subjective.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Bob Woodward

March 30, 2013 Rand Simberg 21 Comments

The truth about him.

I disagree that Nixon’s first term was a success, domestically, unless by that you simply mean that he accomplished what he set out to. His policies were hardly conservative — he introduced wage and price controls, and the double nickel speed limit, the idiotic bane of my youth that wasn’t really undone until we got a Republican Congress in 1994. But I agree that the impeachment mood was driven far more by personal dislike for him than actual guilt. Bill Clinton got away with many things, and worse things, that Nixon was merely accused of. His primary crime, if it was one, was hiring ethically-challenged aides. It is interesting to speculate how much better off the Vietnamese would have been if he had been president in 1974.

[Update a while later]

I celebrated Nixon’s resignation at the time, but I’d been raised to hate him by Democrat parents. But the Clinton administration was when I finally turned my back on the Democrats as irredeemably corrupt and partisan. Nixon was hounded out of office, with the support of members of his own party, who found his behavior rising to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors, even though he was probably innocent of any actual crime. Clinton, on the other had, had his party circle the wagons around him, even though he had committed multiple federal felonies, after taking an oath to see that the law was faithfully executed, in the service of seeing that a young woman over whom he had great power and was sexually abused by him, didn’t get a fair trial, and sending out his winged monkeys to trash the reputations of her and other women that he raped and molested. There were a few honest Democrats in that episode, but the vast majority of them were disgusting partisan hypocrites, never to be taken seriously again.

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

The Economist’s Climate Alarmism

March 30, 2013 Rand Simberg 9 Comments

Thoughts on their backing off:

…in January, they gave up on the global climate treaty approach, and are now acknowledging the many nuances inherent to climate modeling. This is a sign that the global intellectual and political establishment is gradually distancing itself from the climate radicals and taking a more thoughtful and balanced approach. We also hope it’s a sign that they’re beginning to realize a more fundamental truth about the politics of climate change: that green hysteria and doom-mongering are leading causes of climate skepticism.

I’ve always been appropriately skeptical about the modeling:

I guess I am a denier. Here’s what I deny.

I deny that science is a compendium of knowledge to be ladled out to school children like government-approved pablum (and particularly malnutritious pablum), rather than a systematic method of attaining such knowledge.

I deny that skepticism about anthropogenic climate change is epistemologically equivalent to skepticism about evolution, and I resent the implications that if one is skeptical about the former, one must be similarly skeptical about the latter, and “anti-science.”

As someone who has done complex modeling and computer coding myself, I deny that we understand the complex and chaotic interactions of the atmosphere, oceans and solar and other inputs sufficiently to model them with any confidence into the future, and I deny that it is unreasonable and unscientific to think that those who believe they do have such understanding suffer from hubris. To paraphrase Carl Sagan, extraordinary policy prescriptions require extraordinary evidence.

The world seems to be catching up to me.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary