Shaken faith

Clive Crook at The Atlantic has been a stalwart supporter of the doctrines of global warming.

Now, being a man of integrity, he's not so sure.

In my previous post on Climategate I blithely said that nothing in the climate science email dump surprised me much. Having waded more deeply over the weekend I take that back.

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Remember that this is not an academic exercise. We contemplate outlays of trillions of dollars to fix this supposed problem. Can I read these emails and feel that the scientists involved deserve to be trusted? No, I cannot. These people are willing to subvert the very methods--notably, peer review--that underwrite the integrity of their discipline...

The IPCC process needs to be fixed, as a matter of the greatest urgency. Read David Henderson or the Wegman report to see how. And in the meantime, let's have some independent inquiries into what has been going on.

NOTE: It's not just the science that needs to be fixed, it's the entire orientation of the climate change enterprise. To become a serious attempt to deal with AGW, what's required is a cost-benefit framework, one that will judge the desirability of proposed interventions according to their projected balance of costs and benefits. Absent that, there is nothing useful for policy making and the choices that requires; instead, all you get is a series of absolutist judgments appropriate to religious belief, not to the real-world trade-offs required by any application of technology. Bjorn Lomborg has been making this argument from the very beginning. Even though he accepts the reality of AGW, he's been treated like an enemy heretic by the warming religionists (his treatment by Scientific American was especially shameful). But on the cost-benefit approach, he was right then, and he's right now.

Or he would be if this were really about global warming, which it isn't. AGW is merely a convenient weapon in a larger ideological war against capitalism. And that's why the following, for example, cuts no ice whatsoever and merely makes Lomborg more hated:

Lomborg:

We should invest dramatically more, say 0.2 per cent of GDP every year, in research and development into green-energy technologies. This would be 50 times more than what the world spends now, yet it would be half the price of Kyoto and much less than what any new treaty coming out of Copenhagen will cost.

People say, you shouldn't be a climate-science denier, and I agree. But likewise you shouldn't be a climate-economics denier. And in doing the numbers, we're saying that if you want to keep the temperature rise at two degrees centigrade by cutting carbon emissions, by the end of the century it's going to end up costing 13 per cent of the global GDP. And the benefit will be that for every dollar you spend, you end up avoiding two cents worth of climate damage. That's an incredibly bad deal.

But if you spend money investing in research and development and green-energy technology, for every dollar you spend, you end up avoiding $11 of climate damage. So you end up doing 500 times more good.

Sorry, Bjorn, you're missing the point of what this fight is really all about...

Byron

Corrupt from the start

A Major Deception on Global Warming, by a former president of the National Academy of Sciences, was published in 1996, almost 15 years ago; to say it was, or should have been, a giant red flag is an understatement. (NOTE: The IPCC is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a UN organization that does not do original research, but periodically issues highly influential reports that assess "the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant for the understanding of the risk of human-induced climate change." In fact, the IPCC appears to have functioned as a tool of the cabal of data-cooking climate fraudsters now being exposed, who operated out of the CRU and other research sites, and who provide the evidentiary basis from which the IPCC reports are written. The IPCC was, of course, given the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007...)

It is well to keep in mind that this scandalous mess has occurred for specific reasons. The larger context begins with a scientific specialty, climate science, that had never been anything but a scientific backwater. Suddenly, the concept of Global Warming, which promised to provide a powerful scientific rationale for certain environmental and political agendas, changed all that over night. Eager enablers stood readily available and more than willing. All that was needed to bring every conceivable kind of reward to the lowly field of climate science and its practitioners was scientific backing for the propositions that global temperatures were rising with a speed unprecedented in history and that the rise was due to human activity. The models were primitive, the data weak and subject to interpretation -- perfect conditions for building a consensus based on nothing but ambition. The corruption of climate science has followed as night follows day.

Climate change: this is the worst scientific scandal of our generation is a very nice summary of why these revelations are of such huge importance. The Cliffs Notes version is this: (1) Policy makers around the world rely on reports from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to formulate their views about the reality and severity of AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming) and the steps required to combat and reverse it. Those steps would involve government controls on every aspect of economies around the world, by national and supra-national regulatory bodies, and they would result in enormous transfers of wealth. (2) The IPCC reports, in turn, have been controlled by a small group of climatologists in Britain and the U.S. Recently revealed emails document the way this group of AGW true believers has used its power to subvert the peer review process to silence dissenting voices, and how it has manipulated and falsified the data on which IPCC recommendations have been based. (3) If, as it appears, the evidence base for IPCC reports is misleading or fraudulent, then those reports must not be used to formulate economic or other policies. (4) But a huge Climate Change Industry has emerged, encompassing capitalism haters and carbon traders, tree huggers and government bureaucrats, with vested interests so varied and so deep, within and outside of government, that it will not be easy to slow down the AGW freight train, even if its scientific basis is shown to be without merit.

Two predictions: (1) This will eventually be recognized as the biggest boondoggle in the history of science; and (2) Its proximate cause will be determined to be the purposeful subversion and consequent failure of the peer review system.

Byron

Corrupt science

On the chance that anyone remains interested in the global warming debate, below are two links describing newly discovered fraud and scandal at the level of data collection and analysis. Both involve, among others, senior people at the premier British climatological research center, the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at U. of East Anglia, also known as the Hadley center. Both cast doubt on what have been considered key supports for the reality of global warming, because both raise serious questions about the evidentiary basis underlying "consensus" claims about climate change.

The first involves emails among senior researchers that describe how data was fudged to hide results that did not support claims about historical temperature trends; these emails, which go back many years, have only now come to light as the result of hackers breaking into files at the CRU. It is an interesting question whether deliberate data fudging would constitute a conspiracy to defraud taxpayers who, in good faith, foot the bill for this research, as well as paying the salaries of the perpetrators.

The second is a scandal involving failures of peer review to uncover biased selection of tree-ring data that was used in at least eight highly-cited papers appearing in both Science and Nature, among other prestigious journals. The papers made sweeping claims about historical warming trends based on what now appears to be clearly fraudulent methodology involving purposive data selection; the scandal only came to light after prodigious efforts by a Canadian mathematician to gain access to the original data on which the published results and associated claims had been based.

Scientific corruption like this is exactly what you should expect once science becomes politicized, and the Consensus Gravy Train starts to roll down the track. The failure of peer review at highly prestigious journals is especially destructive, as that is ordinarily the only line of defense against sloppy or fraudulent research making its way into the literature, from there to be widely cited as Truth. But once the declared "consensus" has become highly rewarding to the participants (publications, salary increases, academic promotions, grant money, trips to conferences, appointment to high-profile government bodies and panels, TV appearances, job offers, etc.), all the normal safeguards and controls that keep science honest go out the window. This is especially the case if a moral dimension can be attached to the subject matter; that effort has succeeded with respect to global warming, with skeptics seen not merely as mistaken, but also as possessing evil intentions.

Notice that in both of these cases the dishonesty was discovered by outsiders. That's no surprise, and neither is the constant effort to discredit and silence those who are skeptical of the global warming "consensus." This is science at its worst.

Byron

Do hacked e-mails show global-warming fraud?
Treemometers: A new scientific scandal

Punked

The reviews of Obysmal's Asia trip are beginning to come in, and they are not good, even from stalwart cheerleaders like the NYT, Washington Post, and LA Times.

The trip was, overall, a disastrous flop. Simply stated, Obama gets no respect, the predictable response to his weak, clueless approach to foreign relations. Welcome back, Carter? But I don't remember even Carter bowing down before any emperors. Like Putin, the Chinese leadership looks straight through the glib talk and smiles, seeing Obama for exactly what he is, a zero, a nothing -- other than a walking embodiment of the decline of American power.

"This is not only sad, it is dangerous. A weak and disrespected America is bad for America, sends the wrong message to enemies (including terrorists), hurts dissident movements abroad, and — as a political matter, again — reminds us nothing so much as it does of the years of Jimmy Carter, which it took even more years to overcome."

Let's hope the patch-up here does not come in the form of a triumphant Obama Latin American tour, featuring friendly meetings with Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, and Luiz Lula (that last is President of Brazil, famous for declaring the that the global financial crisis was caused by "the irrational behavior of white people with blue eyes," which sounds very much like something from a sermon by Rev. Wright, Obama's pastor for all those years in Chicago). Where else can he go? The Europeans (Western and Eastern) are fed up with him, the Russians and Chinese have him pegged as a nonentity, he and Hillary have made a mess of the Israeli-Palestinian situation, and he's paralyzed on the Iraq-Afghanistan-Pakistan theater because there's no way to vote "Present."

What's left? A trip to Antarctica to feed the penguins?

Byron

How to destroy an economy

Massive government deficits means selling huge quantities of government bonds to fund the debt. The money that flows to those bond sales is removed from the private sector and becomes unavailable for investment in businesses, especially new, small businesses, which are the primary source of new employment.

Thus does government suck the lifeblood from the private economy, substituting its own wasteful spending for the efficiency of the private market.

Calling an explosion of government spending and and debt "stimulus" is pure socialist fantasy. You get economic stimulus by cutting taxes so that individuals and businesses have more money to spend and invest. But Obama is too ignorant of economic theory, or too ignorant of economic history, or too ideologically hidebound to do that. I think it's all three.

More Stimulus Equals More Unemployment

Yet another economy-devouring worm hidden in the gigantic rotten apple that is Pelosi's 2,000-page ObamaCare bill. One can only hope that the Senate will put a bullet between the eyes of this monstrosity.
I'd bet that if Obama were asked about this, he'd claim he didn't know it was in the bill. I think he'd probably be telling the truth. Nobody knows what's in the bill.

Question: Do these people hate the idea of a market economy, or do they not know what they're doing? Answer: They hate the idea of a market economy and they don't know what they're doing.

The 69% increase in capital-gains taxes

[It's already emblematic of the Obama administration, and more economists and bank analysts are saying it's likely to reach 13%. As it already has for the state of Rhode Island, which went 63% for Obama. And Nevada (55% for Obama). Michigan (57% for Obama) is over 15%. Hope! Change! Stimulus! Oops!]

Byron

"Slow-motion train wreck"

Bolton is absolutely right, as usual, in this excellent interview.

What some are calling "due deliberation" by Obama on Afghanistan is nothing but months of indecision and pure lack of leadership. With troops taking casualties in the field and morale collapsing, Obama continues to look in vain for some way to split the difference. He has to make a tough decision, but he's clueless and weak, so he's paralyzed. The pattern of leaks suggests growing division and unrest within the Obama national defense/foreign policy team.

Obysmal claims to be delaying because of concerns about corruption, etc., in Karzai's government, which is ludicrous. As Bolton points out, the critically important problem here is the future of nuclear Pakistan, which would become vastly more precarious with a Taliban regime next door. It makes no sense whatever to make the future of Pakistan hostage to concerns about governmental corruption in Afghanistan. Good grief.

In that part of the world, it is still the case that the quantity of government is more important that its quality. If Obama waits for an end to government corruption in Afghanistan, he will wait forever. And if Pakistan goes up for grabs, which it could, Obama will find out what real trouble looks like.

Clueless, weak, and indecisive, Obama is just the kind of individual who has no business being Commander and Chief.

Byron

UPS vs. FedEx

I'm not sure about the merits either way (is work at FedEx individualized, or is it more like an assembly line?), but this is a nice video. As stuff like this gets better and better, it's pretty easy to predict the continued decline of print media.

What a video like this lacks is some version of the hyperlinks you see embedded in print articles on the Web, those internal links that you can click to get additional info on this or that. A video version would take you to another video, not to a text page. The viewer might not even have to know how to read. I don't entirely like the sound of that, but then I'm a print-age fossil. You don't have to know how to read with book download devices like the Amazon Kindle, either, because they have a digital voice option that can read the book to you. If that sounds lazy, imagine that you go blind someday.

Still, it's hard to keep from injecting a moral dimension into this: Dammit, people should know how to read! Even a term like "print-age fossil" has a sub-text of self-satisfaction and superiority. But by the standards of the 18th Century, I'm sub-literate because I don't know Latin. My defense is that almost nobody any longer needs to know Latin. Hmm, wait a sec...

Byron

Compromiser in Chief

Iran to Obama: Pound sand

Obysmal fancies himself the Wise Compromiser, a split-the-difference kind of guy. It's reported that he's about to split the difference on Afghanistan by providing about half as many troops as the our military says it needs -- but he's making up for that by taking twice as long to come to the decision! (The problem here is that our foolish generals insist on seeing this as a military issue, while Obama knows it's entirely personal and political.)

Maybe he can get Iran to split the difference and only build half the nuclear bombs it's got on the drawing board. Or maybe they'll agree to only nuke half of Israel.

I'm coming to the conclusion that Obama is exactly what he appears to be, a glib, shallow, egocentric half-wit. But I'm willing to split the difference on that, and say that he's a half-glib, half-shallow, half-egocentric quarter-wit.

Byron

In a nutshell

Anybody with a pulse knows this is what's going on, but it's refreshing to hear somebody (John Cassidy of The New Yorker) openly admit it. All entitlements resemble a ratchet wrench in exactly this way, of course.

But I think this health care monstrosity is going down to defeat, and then things should become much more sane, and much more fun. In the semi-long run, the major effect of this debacle may be to resuscitate and rejuvenate a GOP that had unraveled and become less than worthy of support or respect. Obama's for change, and a fiscally principled GOP would certainly be a change.

The longer-run lesson is that while both parties dream of controlling an undivided government, every time either one actually achieves it, they pretty quickly overreach and self-destruct. There's no substitute for the mutual counterbalancing that goes with the separation of powers, and it's true for the President vs. Congress, too.

Byron

From WSJ Best of the Web:

So, to sum up, in the name of an abstraction ("making the United States a more equitable society") and because it fits their "political calculus," Obama and Nancy Pelosi are planning to impose upon the country a massively expensive burden that can never be lifted. And they're lying to us about it ("some subterfuge is historically necessary").