The money isn't there

What Washington really fears: being out of money and out on their ass

Conventional wisdom on both sides of the Atlantic is that an immediate failure to address the liquidity problems faced by both Athens and Washington will plunge the world into a new era of darkness. Conventional wisdom, as it so often is, is wrong. The problem is not illiquidity; it is insolvency.

Al Gore's "Lockbox" nonsense was always just that. The box doesn't exist, and neither does the money that was supposed to be in it. It's all being spent, and much more besides.

What's left is an accounting myth, exploding deficits and debt, a dunce president hell-bent to add new entitlements, and a Democrat Party that thinks raising the debt ceiling is a magical way to keep the money flowing.

The rating agencies are not fooled, however. A downgrade will cost hundreds of billions every year in increased government debt service and borrowing costs. Hundreds of billions that will not be available in the capital markets for efficient, job-producing private sector investment.

This is the Obamanomics recipe for further crippling the greatest wealth-producing engine that ever existed, the U.S. economy.

The country's in the best of hands.

Byron

Jobs problem solved

If, for the collective good, the government can require individuals to buy health insurance they don't need or want, why can't the government also require companies to hire employees they don't need or want? The additional consumer spending will kick-start the economy, and voila! the additional workers needed will already be there!

Problem solved, and wouldn't you know it, the solution was right there in the commerce clause all along.

Obamanomics: The gift that keeps on giving.

Byron

Global warming follies

Maybe this investigation of IPCC's (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) highly questionable estimation methods, which appear to vastly over-estimate warming from CO2, will finally put an end to the global warming fiasco:

The IPCC and high biased climate sensitivity

The comments are very good -- here are a few that give the gist of the problem, which is basically poor IPCC estimates of how much temperature increase will result from a doubling of CO2. The IPCC estimate is way too high, because it was arrived at by faulty procedures.

Commenter:

Just to shorthand the study because it's pretty long on the technobabble.

The IPCC took eight studies on climate sensitivity of which one (Forster/Gregory 06) was the only study based purely on observational evidence, with no dependence on any climate model simulations, threw said study in their voodoo math machines and basically 2x the results. It then put the study up in the graph with the other studies and basically pulled the “mikes nature trick/hide the decline” game.

Another commenter:

The bone of contention among the better informed has always been about the amplification and seldom about the baseline increase from CO2 sans amplification. 1.1C per doubling is nothing to worry about and everyone knows it. 4C per doubling is something even I would worry about and I don’t worry easily. Fortunately there’s not a shadow of doubt in mind that 4C is a complete fabrication without a shred of empirical evidence behind it while 1C per doubling is quite credible and supported by virtually all the observations and theoretical physics. So, no worries. We’ll run out of fossil fuels before we can pump enough into the atmosphere to even do something as positive as end the ice age. Hopefully we’ll have a replacement source of energy to keep us warm and fed when the glaciers begin their inevitable rapid advance. If not then civilization is going to collapse by ice not fire.

Another:

A year ago people here would be swarming all over this post by now. Nic Lewis, it appears, has pretty much knocked down the central pole of the Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming tent, by showing how the IPCC used statistical tricks and mis-applied Bayesian analysis to skew projections of climate sensitivity to CO2, more than doubling the projected sensitivity arrived at by the only instrumental study of this phenomenon, and applying the same statistical measures used for purely modelled projections. It’s hard to get frightened by a likely 1.2 degrees C warming from a doubling of CO2, with diminishing results over that initial doubling due to the exponential relationship between CO2 and radiative forcing. Well done, Mr. Lewis.

Another:

So it is models, all the way down.

That last precisely nails the problem: poorly-specified computer models, where small differences in estimates can make huge differences in predictions. To that add the general problem of measurement error, and you have the prescription for a scientific fun house. In this case, predictions from models were used to trump empirical data! That takes the cake. "Who are you going to believe, my simulation model or your lying eyes?"

Anybody who puts faith in these climate models either (1) has not had experience with computer modeling of real-world events, or (2) are driven by personal interests (financial, political, career, etc.) that override whatever scientific integrity they might otherwise have had.

Byron

Of course

VIA INSTAPUNDIT:

JULY 5, 2011

STUDY: The more people know about science, the less they believe in global warming.

“The conventional explanation for controversy over climate change emphasizes impediments to public understanding: Limited popular knowledge of science, the inability of ordinary citizens to assess technical information, and the resulting widespread use of unreliable cognitive heuristics to assess risk. A large survey of U.S. adults (N = 1540) found little support for this account. On the whole, the most scientifically literate and numerate subjects were slightly less likely, not more, to see climate change as a serious threat than the least scientifically literate and numerate ones.”

Posted at 12:25 pm by Glenn Reynolds

Aha! So, the less you know, the easier you are to fool? And the easier you are to fool, the easier it will be to stampede you into advocating whatever nonsense is being pedaled? to get you to yap about "scientific consensus" as if you had the slightest idea what you're talking about?

The global warming crusade has never been about science, it's been about using the accoutrements of science to push agendas -- political agendas for some, and a get-rich agenda for others. For science, it will stand primarily as an embarrassment.

Byron

Rubio

The short clip of Rubio speaking is extremely impressive.  And so is Ed Morrissey's commentary.  (Btw, why Morrissey hasn't been picked up by some major news organization is beyond me; the guy is consistently first-rate. Instead, we get an endless procession of blow-dry nit wits who don't know much about anything except how to check their make-up and make the stereotyped hand gestures when the talk.)