Category ►►► Globaloney Sandwich

July 15, 2008

Here's How to Get That Scientific Consensus on Globaloney: Jail "Deniers"

Though he now insists he didn't mean it "literally" (any of the several times he said it), Canadian anthropogenic global climate change (AGCC) advocate and occasional scientist David Suzuki has called for imprisonment of politicians who didn't kow-tow to globaloney hysteria, for the "intergenerational crime" of rejecting the Kyoto Protocol and other international global-warming demands:

"What I would challenge you to do is to put a lot of effort into trying to see whether there's a legal way of throwing our so-called leaders into jail because what they're doing is a criminal act," said Dr. Suzuki, a former board member of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.

"It's an intergenerational crime in the face of all the knowledge and science from over 20 years."

The statement elicited rounds of applause.

After a furor erupted over the "scientist's" call for an end to freedom of speech on this issue, Suzuki claimed he didn't really mean it literally. It was just a joke.

If we were talking about the United States, I wouldn't be worried; but this is Canada... the same country that is prosecuting both Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant for violating the "human rights" of Moslems by opposing creeping sharia-law through the West. The National Post notes at least one legal means by which Suzuki's joke could actually be implemented into law:

The Kyoto Protocol Implementation Act, a Liberal-sponsored private member's bill that passed and was given Royal Assent last year, legally requires the Conservative government to abide by the international pact's short-term environmental targets.

In the event that conditions are not met, government officials are held liable.

"Every person who contravenes a regulation made under this Act is guilty of an offence punishable by indictment or on summary conviction, as prescribed by the regulations," the act reads, "and liable to a fine or to imprisonment as prescribed by the regulations."

Adding fuel to this carbon-releasing fire, in late June, James Hansen -- the NASA scientist who has been the prime mover behind Globaloney for the past two decades -- agreed with Dr. Suzuki: Jail those globaloney deniers! He wants us to start with the CEOs of energy companies, who (it is well known) legally have no freedom of speech rights, because they're always saying things that any fool knows are damned lies:

James Hansen, one of the world's leading climate scientists, will today call for the chief executives of large fossil fuel companies to be put on trial for high crimes against humanity and nature (?), accusing them of actively spreading doubt about global warming in the same way that tobacco companies blurred the links between smoking and cancer.

Hansen will use the symbolically charged 20th anniversary of his groundbreaking speech to the US Congress -- in which he was among the first to sound the alarm over the reality of global warming -- to argue that radical steps need to be taken immediately if the "perfect storm" of irreversible climate change is not to become inevitable.

Speaking before Congress again, he will accuse the chief executive officers of companies such as ExxonMobil and Peabody Energy of being fully aware of the disinformation about climate change they are spreading.

In an interview with the Guardian he said: "When you are in that kind of position, as the CEO of one the primary players who have been putting out misinformation even via organisations that affect what gets into school textbooks, then I think that's a crime."

Yes; any fool. Hansen was unavailable to reveal whether this, too, was just a joke.

Here is the transcript of that "interview," which appears to be more of a monologue by Dr. Hansen:

Special interests have blocked transition to our renewable energy future. Instead of moving heavily into renewable energies, fossil companies choose to spread doubt about global warming, as tobacco companies discredited the smoking-cancer link. Methods are sophisticated, including funding to help shape school textbook discussions of global warming.

CEOs of fossil energy companies know what they are doing and are aware of long-term consequences of continued business as usual. In my opinion, these CEOs should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature.

Mr. Hansen was also unavailable to answer whether he thinks that infamous "deniers" who are also prominent, independent scientists, unconnected to any "fossil energy companies," should also be tried for "high crimes against humanity and nature." (Some of these AGCC dissenters, or "deniers," as Lawrence Solomon puckishly dubs them, are enumerated in the "slither through.")

The lesson here should be clear: Global warming hysteria is a creature of the Left; and like all leftish projects, freedom of speech is globaloney's enemy: Those who dare speak out are liars; liars are criminals; and criminals should be prosecuted... on whatever fanciful charges can be plucked from the ether. ("Intergenerational crime in the face of all the knowledge and science from over 20 years!" "High crimes against humanity and nature!")

Persuading the world that terrorism by Islamists has nothing whatsoever to do with Islam is another project of the Left... and as such, it too is subject to the "wicked words" exemption to freedom of speech, as Steyn and Levant have discovered: Both are now fighting for their liberty as of this writing.

I have a simple rule: If your thesis can only be supported by gagging anyone who dissents, then it is almost certainly wrong, and risibly so. Apply as needed.

As noted above, NASA scientist and AGCC High Panjandrum James Hansen has not stated whether he wishes to see criminal prosecutions against the following Holocaust Anthropogenic Global Climate Change deniers; each of these is mentioned in the Lawrence Solomon book the Deniers, whence I compiled the list.

These are the men that Hansen, Suzuki, et al dismiss as poseurs, charlatans, and lickspittles of Big Energy:

1. Syun-Ichi Akasofu, Founding Director of the International Arctic Research Center of the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) and its Director since its establishment in 1998 until January of 2007. Previously he was director of the Geophysical Institute since 1986;
2. Reid Bryson (deceased), atmospheric scientist, geologist and meteorologist; professor emeritus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison; first chairman of the Department of Meteorology; first director of the Institute for Environmental Studies;
3. Robert Carter, research professor in the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University, Australia; geologist and marine geologist with special interests in stratigraphy and, more recently, climate change; former Director of Australia's Secretariat for the Ocean Drilling Program;
4. Rhodes Fairbridge, Australian geologist and expert on climate change; taught at Columbia University from 1955 until his 1982 retirement; supervising editor for the Encyclopedia of Earth Sciences; developed the Fairbridge Curve, a record of changes in sea levels over the last 10,000 years;
5. Eigil Friis-Christensen, expert in space physics; Director of the Danish National Space Center; geophysicist at the Danish Meteorological Institute; between 1976 and 1997, Principal Investigator of the Greenland Magnetometer Array; 1991 paper, "Length of the Solar Cycle: An Indicator of Solar Activity Closely Associated with Climate", published in Science, presented his findings on global warming and sun activity correlation, pre-dating the Rio Conference and Kyoto Conference; between 1991 and 1997, Head, Solar-Terrestrial Physics Division, Danish Meteorological Institute; Friis-Christensen and Henrik Svensmark were the earliest scientists to suggest a possible link between galactic cosmic rays and global climate change assisted by solar wind intensity variation, termed cosmoclimatology; Adjunct Professor of geophysics and space physics, 1996 to 2006, Niels Bohr Institute of University of Copenhagen;
6. Vincent Gray, New Zealand-based coal chemist, climate author, self-selected Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) expert reviewer, founder of the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition;
7. William Gray, pioneer in the science of forecasting hurricanes; Emeritus Professor of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University (CSU); head of the Tropical Meteorology Project at CSU's Department of Atmospheric Sciences;
8. Zbigniew Jaworowski, chairman of the Scientific Council of the Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection in Warsaw; former chair of the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation; principal investigator of three research projects of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and of four research projects of the International Atomic Energy Agency; held posts with the Centre d'Etude Nucleaires near Paris; the Biophysical Group of the Institute of Physics, University of Oslo; the Norwegian Polar Research Institute and the National Institute for Polar Research in Tokyo;
9. George Kukla, retired professor of climatology at Columbia University; researcher at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory; co-author of a chapter in the book "Natural Climate Variability on Decade to Century Time Scales" published by the National Research Council;
10. Christopher Landsea, Science and Operations Officer at the National Hurricane Center; formerly research meteorologist with Hurricane Research Division of Atlantic Oceanographic & Meteorological Laboratory at NOAA; member of the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society;
11. Richard Lindzen, Harvard trained atmospheric physicist and Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology;
12. Paul Reiter, professor of medical entomology at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, France; member of the World Health Organization Expert Advisory Committee on Vector Biology and Control; employee of the Center for Disease Control (Dengue Branch) for 22 years; Fellow of the Royal Entomological Society; specialist in mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria and dengue fever;
13. Nir Shaviv, Israeli associate professor of physics, carrying out research in the fields of astrophysics and climate science (correlations between sun activity and climate change); associate professor at the Racah Institute of Physics of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem;
14. Sami Solanki, Professor at the Institute of Astronomy at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich[1] (Swiss Federal Institure of Technology in Zürich); Director for the Sun-Heliosphere Department of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research; scientific member of the Max Planck Society; Chair (and spokesperson) of the International Max Planck Research School on Physical Processes in the Solar System and Beyond at the Universities of Braunschweig and Göttingen; editor-in-chief of the Living ReviewsTM in Solar Physics, an online review journal for solar physics and related fields;
15. Henrik Svensmark, physicist at the Danish National Space Center in Copenhagen; director of the Centre for Sun-Climate Research at the Danish Space Research Institute (DSRI), a part of the Danish National Space Center; previously headed sun-climate group at DSRI;
16. Hendrik Tennekes, former director of research at the Royal Dutch Meteorological Institute (Koninklijk Nederlands Meteorologisch Instituut, or KNMI); former professor of aeronautical engineering at Pennsylvania State University;
17. Richard Tol, Research Professor at the Economic and Social Research Institute, Dublin, Ireland; Professor of the Economics of Climate Change at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, the Netherlands; Adjunct Professor at the Department of Engineering and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh (PA, USA); Associate of the Research Unit Sustainability and Global Change, Hamburg University and Centre for Marine and Atmospheric Science, Hamburg, Germany;
18. Edward Wegman, statistics professor at George Mason University and chair of the National Research Council’s Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics. He holds a Ph.D. in mathematical statistics and is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and a Senior Member of the IEEE.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, July 15, 2008, at the time of 10:33 AM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

July 13, 2008

How Bush Got His Groove Back

Today, President George W. Bush did something that shocked some of us: With a sweep of his presidential hand, he rejected the attempt by a low-level advisor to the Environmental Protection Agency to force the administration to regular carbon dioxide (which we all exhale) as a "pollutant," defying both the Democrats and the Supreme Court:

The Bush administration, dismissing the recommendations of its top experts, rejected regulating the greenhouse gases blamed for global warming Friday, saying it would cripple the U.S. economy.

In a 588-page federal notice, the Environmental Protection Agency made no finding on whether global warming poses a threat to people's health or welfare, reversing an earlier conclusion at the insistence of the White House and officially kicking any decision on a solution to the next president and Congress.

The Democrats -- both their political wing in Congress and their journalistic wing -- reacted with befuddled fury; how dare the president try to censor Jason K. Burnett, the Democrats' best friend, when all he wanted to do was save the planet!

But we say good on President Bush that he finally found, well, the courage to tell both the Democratic mole inside the EPA and also the Supreme Court to go jump. The Democrats wanted Bush to use the Clean Air Act to "regulate" (ration and tax) carbon dioxide; but Bush said that the law was meant to cover pollutants... not perfectly natural gases that are, in fact, essential to plant life.

He says that it's up to the Democratic Congress to go through the formal process of trying to enact a new law to regulate carbon and carbonoids, if that's what they really want:

The White House on Thursday rejected the EPA's suggestion three weeks earlier that the 1970 Clean Air Act can be both workable and effective for addressing global climate change. The EPA said Friday that law is "ill-suited" for dealing with global warming.

"If our nation is truly serious about regulating greenhouse gases, the Clean Air Act is the wrong tool for the job," EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson told reporters. "It is really at the feet of Congress."

But this is one of those "don't throw me in that bridal path" moments, because the minute the Democrats try to write a globaloney bill into law, they will run smack into the buzzsaw of the economy and energy prices: The people want, and will want for the forseeable future, more drilling... not lame and transparent attempts to force an end to the use of fossil fuels.

The Democrats at least realize they don't want to take the heat (no pun) for crippling the American economy; rather, they want to force Bush to do it -- then blame him for any problems:

Congress hasn't found the will to do much about the problem either. Supporters of regulating greenhouse gases could get only 48 votes in the 100-member Senate last month. The House has held several hearings on the problem but no votes on any bill addressing it. Both major presidential candidates, Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama, have endorsed variations of the approach rejected by the Senate.

What's interesting is that this is not really a fight over "anthropogenic global climate change," though that is at the heart of the dispute. The real issue here is the unitary Executive, which Democrats have failed to understand since the year Dot.

They believe, or at least claim, that the theory of the unitary Executive is that the president (the
"Executive" of the country) rules over both the other two branches, becoming supreme leader. This is risible on its face: The president cannot arbitrarily alter the Constitution, so he's stuck with the balance of powers. Rather, the theory of the unitary Executive is that the chief executive (the president) is the final voice of authority for anything emanating from an Executive department, including the EPA. Members of the agency, let alone individual, appointed members of the scientific staff, do not have authority to run their own foreign policy against the president's wishes.

Thus, it is (or should be) meaningless what a lower-level advisory committee at the EPA said about their grandiose plans; Bush has the authority to make them change their findings... especially when the science is still unsettled (scores of scientsts on "the other side" advancing very plausible counter-arguments that globaloney is just that... baloney). And especially does this president have the virtue of rightness on his side, since several other cabinet heads are totally opposed to trying to implement the Court's holding:

The EPA said it had encountered resistance from the Agriculture, Commerce, Energy and Transportation departments, as well as the White House, that made it "impossible" to respond in a timely fashion to the Supreme Court decision.

"Our agencies have serious concerns with this suggestion because it does not fairly recognize the enormous -- and, we believe, insurmountable -- burdens, difficulties, and costs, and likely limited benefits, of using the Clean Air Act" to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, the secretaries of the four agencies wrote to the White House on Wednesday.

While the GOP was in control of Congress, it sometimes seemed as if Bush's only function (apart from Iraq) was to rubber-stamp anything the Republican legislature sent him. But with the loss of both chambers in 2006, Rip Van Bush as awaked from his 40-year slumber and roared into his true power as president: I daresay he has had more success against the Democrats than against his own party.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, July 13, 2008, at the time of 2:03 AM | Comments (11) | TrackBack

July 8, 2008

Cheney vs. the EPA: the Sound of One Wing Flapping

Here's the scaremongering lede from the Associated Press -- funneled into hometown newspapers and dutifully recited on local news stations across the country:

Vice President Dick Cheney's office pushed for major deletions in congressional testimony on the public health consequences of climate change, fearing the presentation by a leading health official might make it harder to avoid regulating greenhouse gases, a former EPA officials maintains.

When six pages were cut from testimony on climate change and public health by the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last October, the White House insisted the changes were made because of reservations raised by White House advisers about the accuracy of the science.

But Jason K. Burnett, until last month the senior adviser on climate change to Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Stephen Johnson, says that Cheney's office was deeply involved in getting nearly half of the CDC's original draft testimony removed. [How would Cheney's involvement refute the claim that the snipped pages were scientifically inaccurate?]

"The Council on Environmental Quality and the office of the vice president were seeking deletions to the CDC testimony (concerning) ... any discussions of the human health consequences of climate change," Burnett has told the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

AP and other elite media imply that the wicked George W. Bush and the administration try to censor inconvenient scientific truth that undercuts the interests of their masters at Big Oil. But what's really going on here is a desperate struggle by the Left to enshrine the conventional wisdom of anthropogenic global climate change into federal law quickly, before the public can catch up to the current science -- which has thrown a rising ride of cold water on global warming hysteria.

The Left? What has the Left got to do with the Bush administration's own former "senior adviser on climate change" to the EPA? Just a minor matter that AP forgot to include in their piece: Jason K. Burnett did not simply resign from the EPA in June "because of disagreements over the agency's response to climate change," as AP reports.

He resigned to return to California and campaign for Barack H. Obama. And we had to get this information from, of all sources, the Los Angeles Times! (Hat tip to NRO blogger Kevin D. Williamson.)

Burnett is a lifelong Democrat and well-heeled (a member of the David Packard clan, of Hewlett-Packard fame and fortune); and as even AP admits, he has donated more than $125,000 to Democrats since Algore's presidential campaign in 2000. This appears to be another sad instance where Bush foolishly reached out to Democrats, thinking they wanted to come together, right now, and solve problems.

He forgot, yet again, that to the Left, "the personal is political;" every waking moment is an opportunity to politick for their pet causes. And there is no branch of science more political today than anthropogenic global climate change (AGCC), the supposition that human industrial activity causes the Earth's temperature to soar -- causing disasters we can only avert by cutting back on our energy use so markedly, civilization itself would be set back centuries.

But evidently, AP doesn't think that proponents of AGCC can be politically motivated (they have no trouble believing the same charge against critics of the orthodoxy). The fact that Burnett has become an Obama campaign worker seemed irrelevant to AP in evaluating the accuracy and veracity of his pronunciamentos on global climate change, including this one:

"Climate change endangers health and welfare," Burnett said. "The EPA is required to use existing law to reduce greenhouse gases. The sooner we begin addressing it in earnest, the better off we'll be."

This is the "senior advisor on climate change," which is -- or should be -- a position held by a scientist. But Burnett is not a scientist; he is an economist... and judging from his political positions, not even a free-market economist.

It's not unlikely that his deeply held belief that EPA is required to reduce greenhouse gases surely influences the advisory conclusions he sends to that agency... and when they're not implemented, that he conveys to Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA, 89%) for her to cite at a press conference, where she accuses Vice President Dick Cheney of orchestrating a "cover-up." (Burnett stood beside her on the podium smirking as she did so.)

I will agree with Barbara "Box of Hammers" Boxer on one point: There is indeed a cover-up of vital data related to anthropogenic global climate change. Proponents of globaloney hysteria ("Hansenites," I think I'll call them, after Hysteric in Chief James Hansen at NASA) have systematically covered up all scientific evidence that casts doubt on their current catastrophe theory:

• They have ignored evidence that the so-called "Hockey Stick graph" used in all early reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), showing a sharp and unprecedented lurch upward in global temperature in the twentieth century, was completely bogus: It was, in fact, an artifact of faulty statistical modeling, as demonstrated fairly conclusively by Dr. Edward Wegman. (The IPCC stealthily dropped the Hockey Stick from subsequent publications without actually coming out and admitting it was a fraud.)
• Hansenites have tried for more than a decade to cover up the existence of the Mediaeval Warming Period -- during which the Earth experienced warming that was faster and hotter than any experienced now... and all this happened long before there was any industrial activity anywhere on the planet.
• They have studiously ignored or even attacked the scientific evidence showing a significant correlation between sun activity and climate change -- in particular, the solar magnetic field and its relation to cosmic rays and low-altitude cloud cover on the Earth. Much research remains to be done, and thousands of scientists are involved in that very task... but so far, the IPCC's only response has been to accuse them all of orchestrating a vast, right-wing conspiracy with the oil companies to smear Algore. (No, I'm not kidding. Honestly. Read as much as you can stand, without dying from terminal ennui, of this inaptly titled Newsweek story, "the Truth About Denial.")

• They have tried to suppress all evidence of the beneficial effects of a higher CO₂ environment on crops -- including plants that are stronger, larger, more naturally pest-resistant, grow faster, and are tastier; the effect of higher CO₂ on world hunger would be remarkable.

• Hansenites have consistently applied "static analysis" in order to produce reports showing utter disaster from what seem to be fairly minor predicted effects, such as a rise in sea level of a foot or two over the next hundred years: In order to show massive catastrophe, the IPCC assumes that human society will not respond in any way to the slight rise -- for example, by building sea-surge walls and levees in vulnerable areas, such as people in Europe and elsewhere have done literally for centuries.
• And when all else fails, globaloney totalitarians portray research as "denial" and equate it with denying the Holocaust. The IPCC itself has smeared the reputations of "climate-change deniers," tried to interfere with their funding, and even advocated criminally prosecuting scientists whose research leads them to dissent from global-warming orthodoxy, and any politician who votes against the IPCC's orders. Climate absolutists suggest such charges as "intergenerational crimes" and "high crimes against humanity and nature." We've scheduled a post to be published here on Tuesday that will detail this new tactic for promoting "scientific consensus."

(I strongly recommend the book the Deniers, by Lawrence Solomon, for much discussion of several of these scientific disputes.)

Given this history of utterly one-sided "debate" of the science behind the Hansenites' pronouncements of looming global ruin if we don't rush to cripple Western economies, is it any wonder that the Bush administration wants to ensure that the "scientific" recommendations Jason Burnett gives to the EPA and the "scientific" testimony that various "experts" (such as James Hansen) offer to courts are actually accurate, complete, and include the views of respected scientists, working in relevant fields, who happen to dissent?

And is it really nefarious if the administration acts to suppress partisan politicking disguised as climate science? Until we know exactly what testimony Vice President Cheney sought to have excised from the official report, and whether there really is actual scientific concensus on those points -- or whether they constituted deliberate exaggeration by a highly political non-scientist committed to implementing the establishment view on AGCC, and allergic to contrary data -- we have no way to judge whether Cheney's actions were reasonable or constituted "censorship."

The entire field of climate change is already so thoroughly tainted by politics, mostly from the Left, that it has become toxic. Globaloney is like a bird that tries to fly with only one wing. Removing from official reports tendentious, unverifiable claims actually furthers the cause of real science; Dick Cheney should do more of it, and we should applaud and encourage him.

Algore notwithstanding, the science is not settled. There is no scientific "consensus." People are confused by the similar word in the political sphere, where a consensus might mean that only 20% of politicians or voters disagree. But in science, the term "consensus" means agreement by every major, respected scientist working in the relevant field. If even a couple of them dispute some scientific theory, the science is not "settled."

With AGCC, however, it's not "a couple" if dissenters; there are literally thousands of scientists working in areas that show some propensity to undermine the naive version of globaloney. More research is clearly needed before legislators or the courts can implement policy; scientific questions are not resolved by shouting down the opposition.

Cheney might have engaged in improper, unethical, or even criminal behavior... but the Democrats have not even presented a prima-facie case yet, let alone responded to rigorous cross-examination by the other side. Until they get a lot more specific about exactly what was cut out (or attempted to be removed) and why, they have a pocketful of empty.

And for those answers, Democrats can no longer merely talk among themselves; they're actually going to have to ask Dick Cheney those questions in the press and give him the opportunity to defend his actions. And they're going to have to allow free testimony by scientists who have a different take on what the available evidence shows.

Finally, we will need a neutral arbiter to resolve who is right. And no, Jason K. Burnett will not suffice.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, July 8, 2008, at the time of 6:36 PM | Comments (11) | TrackBack

June 9, 2008

Medved Runs False-Flag Operation...

I almost got snookered by Michael Medved today.

He had a guest, a mathematician named David Berlinski, who was flogging a new book titled the Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions. It sounded pretty interesting: Berlinski argues that science can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God, which of course is a theme I have pounded on for many years now.

I was right in the middle of making an order through Amazon.com when Berlinski started speaking. He sounded plausible enough -- and I'm so much of a pushover when it comes to buying new books -- that I simply added the book to my currently open order.

But something stuck in my craw; I thought sure I had heard Berlinski's name before. So I looked him up in Wikipedia... and lo! Medved had failed to disclose a material fact about the author: David Berlinski is an evolution-denier and vocal advocate for so-called "intelligent design." He is even a member of the Discovery Institute!

Didn't Michael Medved think it relevant, in a book discussing science, faith, and atheism, to mention that his guest had a dog in that fight?

In a fit of pique at having been hornswoggled like that, I quickly deleted the Berlinski book and closed my Amazon order. But I also continued listening to see whether Medved would ever mention this fairly substantive and critical fact.

He never did during the entire interview, unless perhaps during the last five minutes (I received a phone call, so I cannot vouch for that final segment). The closest Medved came was late in the interview, when he gave an outro, just before a commercial break, saying that Berlinski had been in a movie about scientists who are "persecuted" when they "dare to challenge scientific fundamentalism." By that point, I already knew Berlinski's dirty, little secret; but had I not looked him up, I doubt I would have guessed from this capsule description.

In the next segment, Medved made clear that the movie in question was (you guessed it) Expelled, written by Ben Stein, Kevin Miller, and Walt Ruloff and narrated by Stein; I think I would have had an inkling by that point... but even then, Medved did not flatly admit that Berlinski was an IDist; he kept that up his sleeve. And Berlinski himself said nothing about it, either.

We have already dealt with Expelled in a two-post review/response; no need to explain again why I consider ID just the latest incarnation of Creationism:

• Expelled: No Intelligence Offered - part 1 (Win Ben Stein's Monkey Trial!)
• Expelled: No Intelligence Offered - part 2 (Ben in the Dock)

I certainly do not argue that proponents of Intelligent Design should be dismissed out of hand when they opine on the question of faith and science. But it's rather sharp practice to conceal from listeners a salient fact about a guest that directly speaks to his credibility on the subject.

I recall an analogous incident from the sorry history of the Los Angeles Dog Trainer Times -- the newspaper Patterico loves so well; Friend Lee's calls this one of the "three strikes" that caused him to cancel his subscription in 1999 (I had canceled mine years earlier). When David S. Landes published the Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor, the Times selected a historian named Eric Hobsbawm to review this obviously free-market take on economics. Hobsbawm utterly trashed the book, the author, anyone fool enough to read it even on loan from the library, and in general, the entire school of economics that could produce such twaddle.

In the little blurb at the bottom of the review, the Times wrote, "Eric Hobsbawm is Professor Emeritus at the New School for Social Research in the Political Science department," or somesuch (despite the quotation marks, I don't actually have the review before me; this is from the collective memory of Friend Lee and me).

They could have added a longer description but chose not to:

Some observers outside the Times might consider this relevant to the credibility of a reviewer who attacks a book on economics that is consciously styled after the writings of Adam Smith. And by the same coin, some of us consider it relevant that the guy who wrote the book about the intersection between faith and science is a Creationist. (However, so far as I can tell, Professor Berlinski was never a member of the Socialist Schoolboys.)

Color me annoyed -- but unsurprised.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, June 9, 2008, at the time of 7:19 PM | Comments (12) | TrackBack

June 2, 2008

Obamanomics 101

When the Democrats seized Congress in 2006, they promised, among the many promises they made -- among the seemingly millions of promises they made -- to move immediately to solve "global warming" (they hadn't yet gotten the memo about calling it "global climate change," so as to include global warming, global cooling, and global unusual stability). They swore they would reduce America's "carbon footprint." They vowed to cure the Earth's "fever" by any means necessary (a progressive term of art that means "no matter what you great unwashed, with your false consciousness, may think you want").

After two years of concerted action to surrender in Iraq, they have now turned to this particular promise. They have decided that the time for talk is over, and what we need now is action, action, action! Today, the Democrats in the Senate, having trampled underfoot a more moderate climate plan supported by John McCain and the Senate Republicans ("false consciousness!"), introduced their own draconian vision.

The proposal would cap carbon dioxide releases at 2005 levels by 2012. Additional reductions would follow annually so that by 2050, total U.S. greenhouse emissions would be about one-third of current levels.

The bill would create a pollution allowance trading system. That would generate billions of dollars a year to help people offset expected higher energy costs, promote low-carbon energy alternatives and help industries deal with the transition. Part of the $6.7 trillion projected to be collected from the allowances over 40 years would go toward $800 billion in tax breaks to offset people's higher energy costs.

These reductions "will not only enable us to avoid the ravages of unchecked global warming, but will create millions of new jobs," contends Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer of California, who heads the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

But this bill is only a pale shadow of what we will have if Barack H. Obama is elected; no piker he, Obama has proposed, as part of his own energy policy, a scheme to reduce carbon emissions by 80% over the next 41 years. This would not just cripple the economy; achieving such a cut in so little time would require us to paraplegicize our economy. (I don't care if there's no such word; there ought to be.) As Sen. O. puts it on his campaign web site:

Well, I don't believe that climate change is just an issue that's convenient to bring up during a campaign. I believe it's one of the greatest moral challenges of our generation.

(I wondered whether Obama considers Islamic terrorism another of the "greatest moral challenges" of our generation; but I can't tell, because, so far as I can tell, he doesn't actually mention terrorism or al-Qaeda on his website. But there's no search function either, so I can't be certain.)

Welcome to Obamanomics: You may think that you don't want to go back to the 1940s level of energy use, but that's just pesky, old false consciousness again. Just ask Barack; he'll tell you what to think. (If you don't understand what I mean, please buy and read Jonah Goldberg's tour de force, Liberal Fascism.)

But the Democrats have discovered, to their shock and anguish, that voters might actually be more concerned about their own bank accounts than the American carbon footprint. Not only that, but Republican senators and President Bush are not the irrelevancies that Democrats, in their hubris, imagine them. For now it appears nearly certain that this bill is D.O.A.... at least for this session:

With gasoline at $4 per gallon and home heating and cooling costs soaring, it is getting harder to sell a bill that would transform the country's energy industries and - as critics will argue - cause energy prices to rise even more....

The debate on global warming is viewed as a watershed in climate change politics. Yet both sides acknowledge the prospects for passage are slim this election year.

Several GOP senators are promising a filibuster; the bill's supporters are expressing doubt they can find the 60 votes to overcome the delaying tactic. [Not to mention having to find 67 votes to override a promised presidential veto.]

The problem, of course, is in the economic details hinted at by the quotation above; can any sane, sober person read the following without lurching back a bit and saying, "What the -- ?"

The bill would create a pollution allowance trading system. That would generate billions of dollars a year to help people offset expected higher energy costs, promote low-carbon energy alternatives and help industries deal with the transition. Part of the $6.7 trillion projected to be collected from the allowances over 40 years would go toward $800 billion in tax breaks to offset people's higher energy costs.

For the innumerate, a trillion is a thousand billion; so $6.7 trillion is the same as $6,700 billion. Divided by 41 years (2009 through 2050) gives us an annual collection of "allowances" (that is, a tax on businesses and on energy sales) of $163.4 billion per year... and even that assumes that the Democrats didn't lowball their own estimate; if it's business as usual, their own internal figures probably show twice that big a tax -- $326.8 billion per year -- which will also certainly be written in such a way that it grows much faster than inflation (every tax seems to do that).

By way of contrast, the estimated expenses of Medicare Part D -- the Medicare prescription-drug benefit enacted in 2003 -- which has elicited screams of anguish not only from conservatives but even many moderates of both parties -- is a mere $36 billion per year. This brand new, carbon-rationing bureaucracy will be more than 4.5 times as large as Medicare Part D, even by the Democrats' own tendentious estimate. Under the more realistic speculation, it will be nine times as big.

But wait, not all of that $6.7 trillion dollars collected will be kept by the federal government! Heaven forbid we accuse "progressives" of wanting to tax us into oblivion: They pledge to give us "tax breaks" of $800 billion. As Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA, 80% -- actually 89%, if we don't count her two skipped votes last year) said, that will "enable us to avoid the ravages of unchecked global warming [and] create millions of new jobs" to boot.

Sorry, more math (arithmetic, actually): They squeeze $163.4 billion per year out of businesses -- who will pass the bill along to their customers (that's you!), of course, since the alternative is to go bankrupt; but then the same new bureaucracy will kick back $19.5 billion per year to favored clients. This will, of course, create "millions of new jobs."

Of course, they would never do this via earmarks to special interests, for Obama is an honorable man. So are Democrats all, all honorable men. And women.

(As a complete non-sequitur, did you all know that Obama earmarked $100,000 for a certain Catholic priest who has been much discussed in the news recently? According to the New York Times, "Typical of Mr. Obama’s earmarks was a $100,000 grant for a youth center at a Catholic church run by the Rev. Michael Pfleger, a controversial priest who was one of the few South Side clergymen to back Mr. Obama against Mr. Rush." I'm not sure what made me think of this...)

So by all means, rejectionist Republicans: Go ahead and boycott the election, allowing Barack H. Obama to become president by default. I'm sure our nation will be able to weather:

• Declaring defeat and running home from Iraq;
• Coffee klatches with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (and his sock-puppet, Bashar Assad), Kim Jong-Il, Raul Castro, and Oogo Chavez -- all without any preconditions;
• The total government takeover of the health-care industry;
• A complete and mercilessly enforced ban on drilling for oil anywhere that isn't already tapped out, coupled with an energy policy that jacks gasoline prices up to $7 a gallon -- but which subsidizes windmills;
• A federal bench, including the Supreme Court, packed with lifetime appointments of clones of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, whom Obama himself said were his favorite justices and the model of his future appointments;
• Same-sex marriage nationwide, imposed by those judges;
• And staggering tax increases on everyone, not only via repealing the Bush tax cuts but also by raising capital-gains tax and business taxes.

Would we really easily survive as a world superpower with such radical U-turns in our national policy -- all at the same time? Would we then just pick ourselves up and elect Pat Buchanan or Tom Tancredo, and all would be right with the world?

Some appear to believe so. But for the rest of us, I think it's time not just to vote for John McCain ourselves, but for each of us to resolve to get our posteriors out into the streets and work for victory.

Remember, in war and politics, you don't win by losing... you win by winning. So unless you really, really like subsisting on yams and tofu, sweltering in the summer and freezing in winter, never going anywhere beyond walking distance, and living from welfare check to welfare check, it's time to get busy and make sure this particular liberal fascist from Chicago never has occasion to move his offices a mile west, across the National Mall to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, June 2, 2008, at the time of 9:14 PM | Comments (24) | TrackBack

May 12, 2008

So What Will President McCain Do...

John McCain has made globaloney a cornerstone of his campaign, a way (as Agence France-Presse puts it) to "differentiate" himself from George W. Bush's "skepticism on global warming":

The Arizona senator was due to propose a cap-and-trade system designed to cut greenhouse gas emissions, in remarks which will clearly separate him from the skepticism on global warming which has marked Bush's presidency.

The initiative will also signal that McCain plans to challenge the Democrats for independent voters in the November presidential election, targetting especially the climate change stance of leading Democratic candidate Barack Obama.

Now, if this were purely a cynical attempt to peel off some of the independents and moderate Democrats from the Democratic nominee, then as scientific data piles up debunking the myth of anthropogenic global climate change (AGCC), it would presumably be easy for McCain simply to let it all drop into the memory hole. But I'm skeptical that McCain is such a cynic; I think it far more likely that he is a true believer in globaloney... in which case, it will be difficult for him to accept the data, no matter how prestigious the scientist, university, or scientific agency may be in the fields of meteorology, atmospheric sciences, or climatology. (Not impossible but quite tough.)

It's not McCain's worst sin; that would still have to be the McCain-Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 -- which was held by the Supreme Court to be constitutional in this century's "Roe v. Wade" legal fiasco, McConnell v. FEC, 540 U.S. 93 (2003). But a passionate belief in globaloney would surely give the "Gang of 14" a run for its money in the Sincere but Misguided Judgment sweepstakes.

But the odd thing is that McCain always seems to have lots of company in his little insanities. On the BCRA, he had the full support of President Bush and even Sen. Fred Thompson in the Senate vote on March 20th, 2002; and on globaloney, he has the enthusiastic company of both Democratic candidates, Hillary and Obama.

McCain's approach is called "cap and trade;" it includes a bit of a nod towards a free market, although with a government-enforced, anti-Capitalist, "Pigovian" ceiling:

McCain proposed a cap-and-trade system, which sets a limit of total greenhouse gas emissions but allows companies to sell unused greenhouse gas emission credits to other firms which have exceeded their quota.

His plan would seek to return emissions to 2005 levels by 2012, and a return to 1990 levels by 2020. It foresees a reduction of 60 percent below 1990 levels by 2050.

This perfectly encapsulates the Do Something! disorder: Whenever a sufferer sees a problem (real or imaginary), his disorder prompts him to demand that the government "do something" about it.

He impatiently dismisses any suggestion that if the putative problem is let alone, it will probably cure itself. He rejects as "do nothingism" the strategy that we can best cure macro problems by allowing natural processes to work their magic (Capitalism, the ordinary weather cycle, the ordinary business cycle, the march of technology, the biennial vote). Rather, sufferers insist that "the time for debate is over" and demand "action, action, action!" Don't debate, don't plan, don't think -- just do something... anything!

Normally McCain is immune to the disorder; but on two issues -- campaign corruption and globaloney -- he exhibits symptoms of an advanced stage.

Barack Obama's plan (from his website) is strikingly similar, except he wants to reduce emissions by significantly more than does McCain:

Obama supports implementation of a market-based cap-and-trade system to reduce carbon emissions by the amount scientists say is necessary: 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050.

For collectors, here is the Hillary Clinton carbon plan, which is -- surprise, surprise -- virtually identical to Obama's:

Centered on a cap and trade system for carbon emissions, stronger energy and auto efficiency standards and a significant increase in green research funding, Hillary's plan will reduce America's reliance on foreign oil and address the looming climate crisis.

Setting ambitious targets, the plan would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent from 1990 levels by 2050 to avoid the worst effects of global warming, and cut foreign oil imports by two-thirds from 2030 projected levels, more than 10 million barrels per day.

But nobody really cares and it makes no difference; she is not going to be the nominee.

Both Democrats would cut emissions by a third again as much as would McCain... which is precisely why globaloney nonsense is not going to be an issue in the election: If you really rejects the whole crumbling edifice of AGCC, what are you going to do -- vote for Bob Barr?

But there is one other point that cuts for McCain in the election. I believe that, while McCain is sincere, neither Obama nor Clinton is; I believe neither Democrat cares one way or another whether we "do something" about AGCC or not: They care only that the liberal electorate cares.

Thus, while it may be difficult for John McCain to accept that his deep belief about global warming is wrong -- requiring him to admit he was taken for a ride by politicians masquerading as scientists, like NASA's James Hansen -- nevertheless, since he was rationally (if invalidly) convinced of AGCC, he is open to being rationally convinced that it's simply wrong.

But the Democrats were not "rationally convinced" of the truth of globaloney, they were politically convinced. Thus, as long as the great liberal unwashed believe in it, Obama and Hillary will support it -- no matter what the science eventually says.

While this belief in globaloney bothers me (though not nearly so much as the conservative obsession with finding "scientific" alternatives to established evolutionary theory), the Democratic candidate will be much worse than John McCain. Therefore, there's no reason to bring it up in the future: As bad as we many think McCain is, he is still better than the only plausible alternative, even on this issue.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, May 12, 2008, at the time of 3:20 PM | Comments (11) | TrackBack

December 14, 2007

"The Courage to Do Nothing"

There are some things Man (according to the dominant paradigm) is not meant to know...

And here's a nice round-up of forbidden knowledge from the Republicans in the Senate, led by Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK, 100%), ranking member (and former chairman) of the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works (EPW). Inhofe is a national treasure, one of the few Republicans not only willing to stand up against the greedy socialists at the UN (many Republicans do that), but also willing to put in the time to educate himself on the actual science involved.

This makes Inhofe a much more potent danger to the regime of so-called "anthropogenic (man-made) global climate change" than his colleagues. Hardly any other senator or representative, on either side the aisle, is willing to go so far as actually learning something about what he's talking about.

In the meanwhile, my brother sends me a link to another page of the Senate EPW Republican minority website, in which Inhofe finally nails the climatistas: He catches them confessing the real reason for all the hoopla about globaloney. This is a true "cognition" moment when all the pieces abruptly fall into place:

A global tax on carbon dioxide emissions was urged to help save the Earth from catastrophic man-made global warming at the United Nations climate conference. A panel of UN participants on Thursday urged the adoption of a tax that would represent “a global burden sharing system, fair, with solidarity, and legally binding to all nations....”

“A climate change response must have at its heart a redistribution of wealth and resources,” said Emma Brindal, a climate justice campaigner coordinator for Friends of the Earth.

Yes. Now you understand why I have consistently referred to the climatistas as "socialists": Because they are.

But back to the first report from EPW. Evidently, Man was not meant to know that...

An international team of scientists skeptical of man-made climate fears promoted by the UN and former Vice President Al Gore, descended on Bali this week to urge the world to "have the courage to do nothing" in response to UN demands.

Lord Christopher Monckton, a UK climate researcher, had a blunt message for UN climate conference participants on Monday.

"Climate change is a non-problem. The right answer to a non-problem is to have the courage to do nothing," Monckton told participants.

"The UN conference is a complete waste of our time and your money and we should no longer pay the slightest attention to the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,)" Monckton added.

A group called Frontiers of Freedom posts several pieces by Lord Monckton; Frontiers of Freedom appears to be a much-needed force on the right side of the "Sense vs. Nonsense" debate now going on among climate scientists around the world. The exaggerated reality of globaloney has started to sink in; and climatologists, atmospheric physicists and chemists, meteorologists, and such have begun to realize how much damage would be done not only to the field but to their own personal careers, were they to be caught in the lies of the high priests of anthropogenic global climate change.

Here is a clip from another of Monckton's pieces currently on the front page of FF.org:

As a contributor to the IPCC's 2007 report, I share the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore. Yet I and many of my peers in the British House of Lords - through our hereditary element the most independent-minded of lawmakers - profoundly disagree on fundamental scientific grounds with both the IPCC and my co-laureate's alarmist movie An Inconvenient Truth, which won this year's Oscar for Best Sci-Fi Comedy Horror.

Two detailed investigations by Committees of the House confirm that the IPCC has deliberately, persistently and prodigiously exaggerated not only the effect of greenhouse gases on temperature but also the environmental consequences of warmer weather.

My contribution to the 2007 report illustrates the scientific problem. The report's first table of figures - inserted by the IPCC's bureaucrats after the scientists had finalized the draft, and without their consent - listed four contributions to sea-level rise. The bureaucrats had multiplied the effect of melting ice from the Greenland and West Antarctic Ice Sheets by 10.

Monckton goes on to note that the sea-level rise caused by melting ice sheets is actually expected to be 7 centimeters over 100 years... "not seven meters imminently, and that the Greenland ice sheet (which thickened by 50 cm between 1995 and 2005) might only melt after several millennia, probably by natural causes, just as it last did 850,000 years ago."

Had Monckton not corrected the record, a "seven meters" rise -- that's 22.965879265 feet, or rounding off, 23 feet -- would have become the new conventional "wisdom" on globaloney. It would have appeared in paper after paper, and nobody else would ever have gone back to the original source, realized the mistake the politicians (not the scientists) had made, and noted the error. Note that until Monckton did it, nobody else had.

Thus are great Nonsense discoveries made.

But here's that laundry list we promised of even more things Man was not meant to know, according to the IPCC:

• Dr. David Evans is a mathematician who does "carbon accounting" for the government of Australia: "We now have quite a lot of evidence that carbon emissions definitely don't cause global warming. We have the missing [human] signature [in the atmosphere], we have the IPCC models being wrong and we have the lack of a temperature going up the last 5 years." More from Dr. Evans.
• Evans also notes a peer-reviewed paper this month in the International Journal of Climatology of the Royal Meteorological Society, which finds that "Climate warming is naturally caused and shows no human influence." The authors are Prof. David H. Douglass (Univ. of Rochester), Prof. John R. Christy (Univ. of Alabama), Benjamin D. Pearson (graduate student), and Prof. S. Fred Singer (Univ. of Virginia).
• Dr Vincent Gray, a charter member of the UN IPCC Expert Reviewers Panel, writes in the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition website: "Over the years, as I have learned more about the data and procedures of the IPCC I have found increasing opposition by them to providing explanations, until I have been forced to the conclusion that for significant parts of the work of the IPCC, the data collection and scientific methods employed are unsound. Resistance to all efforts to try and discuss or rectify these problems has convinced me that normal scientific procedures are not only rejected by the IPCC, but that this practice is endemic, and was part of the organisation from the very beginning. I therefore consider that the IPCC is fundamentally corrupt. The only "reform" I could envisage, would be its abolition."

Some more peer-reviewed research recently published in refereed scientific journals that casts considerable doubt on the "consensus position" of the IPCC:

• "Phenomenological reconstructions of the solar signature in the Northern Hemisphere surface temperature records since 1600", by N. Scafetta and B. J. West, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research. "Under this scenario the Sun might have contributed up to approximately 50%... of the observed global warming since 1900.
• "Quantifying the influence of anthropogenic surface processes and inhomogeneities on gridded global climate data," by Ross R. McKitrick and Patrick J. Michaels, to be published in the Journal of Geophysical Research (in press): "We conclude that the data contamination likely leads to an overstatement of actual trends over land. Using the regression model to filter the extraneous, nonclimatic effects reduces the estimated 1980-2002 global average temperature trend over land by about half."
• "A 2000-year global temperature reconstruction based on non-treering proxies," by Dr. Craig Loehle, Energy & Environment 18(7-8): 1049-1058: "There are reasons to believe that tree ring data may not properly capture long-term climate changes. In this study, eighteen 2000-year-long series were obtained that were not based on tree ring data.... The mean series shows the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) and Little Ice Age (LIA) quite clearly, with the MWP being approximately 0.3°C warmer than 20th century values at these eighteen sites."

Many, many more links, quotes, and snarks at the EPW minority site. Our point is not to mock those pushing the "consensus position" -- well, all right, you caught me: Our point is not entirely to mock those pushing the "consensus position;" it's also important to note that the "consensus position" of the IPCC is really not a consensus.

In politics, "consensus" may mean 75%, or even 2/3rds. For example, it only takes a consensus of 50%+1 of the House and 2/3rds of the U.S. Senate to remove a president from office by impeachment.

But in science, the word "consensus" has a very different meaning. Rather than a majority or even supermajority, a scientific consensus means that every oft-cited scientist doing contemporary research in the field must agree. That means that if there are, say, 50 specialists considered "cutting edge" in some particular scientific field, to say you have the "consensus" of scientists in that field, all 50 would have to agree.

If just one of those 50 dissented, and was publishing research he said contradicted the proposed consensus position, that research would have to be answered. In science, it's not sufficient to say, "yeah, well he doesn't count": You need to produce peer-reviewed data showing that the dissenter is wrong, and explaining why he achieved the results he did, before you can move to a consensus.

Science does not advance by majority vote; it is, in fact, precisely the dissenters -- Galileo, Darwin, Einstein, Heisenberg -- who produce the truly new science. The vast majority of dissenters are inevitably going to be wrong; but the vast majority of scientific breakthroughs nevertheless come from dissenters. This apparent contradiction is essential to understanding the history of science.

The problem is that the UN's IPCC is not a scientific body; it is a political body, controlled by diplomats and politicians and operating under political rules -- but releasing its "findings" as if they were science. Other politicians then seize upon these political reports to claim that "the science" backs their demands for essentially socialist redistribution of wealth from rich, modern, capitalist countries ("polluters") to poor, anachronistic, socialist ones ("innocent victims").

This further allows socialists to pretend that socialism works: It "works" when capitalists are forced by some legal regime to contribute constant coerced infusions of cash to prevent these third-world economies from completely collapsing.

In politics, the major actors know how to deal with dissenters: They are marginalized (no matter how good the science they publish), labeled extremists, and banned from participating in conventions, councils, panels, and other fora. And this is precisely what the IPCC has consistently done to those scientists who do not lovingly embrace the putative "consensus position" on anthropogenic global climate change.

More and more scientists are becoming agitated and resentful of the tactic, and even those who for the most part support the "consensus position" are starting to speak out against the bullying tactics of the IPCC itself. Look for both primary dissent (disagreement with the "consensus position") and secondary dissent (anger at the thuggish treatment of primary dissenters) to rise and rise -- faster than the sea level! -- until it floods across the whole edifice of globaloney, washing it away like a tidal wave across a Bangladeshi beachfront bistro.

UPDATE: It appears that John Hinderaker and I have two thoughts with but a single mind between them...

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 14, 2007, at the time of 6:24 PM | Comments (34) | TrackBack

August 1, 2007

Russia - Trying to Annex Arctic - Had to Plough Through Deep Ice!

I was reading about Russia trying to annex a large chuck of the North Pole, when I was struck by this passage:

In an unprecedented and potentially perilous mission, veteran Arctic explorer Artur Chilingarov will descend 14,000 feet in a deep sea submersible and drop a Russian tricolor cast in titanium onto the seabed.

With Russia’s northern rivals, all eager to extend their own Arctic ambitions, looking on uneasily, two Russian ships reached the North Pole after ploughing their way through deep ice for over a week.

But maybe they didn't really mean that. I read further...

Global warming has given renewed impetus to the race for control of the Arctic.

Melting ice sheets could open up the fabled North East passage, the quest for which claimed countless sailors’ lives, for the first time.

The route, which could dramatically cut the length of a journey from Europe to Asia, could become navigable to commercial traffic within eight years.

So there you have it from the Telegraph's mouth: There is no Northeast Passage; the ice hasn't broken up; people are simply hoping that it will, because if it did, it would vastly increase the world recoverable oil supply -- and also make a big positive difference in shipping time.

In other words, here is another wonderful benefit from global warming -- that alas we don't get, because there is no significant global warming. Prompting me to repeat my plaintive cri de coeur for the last decade:

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, August 1, 2007, at the time of 1:54 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

May 7, 2007

A Devil's Deal I Would Eagerly Accept

The Democrats have crafted an Intelligence Authorization Bill that diverts scarce intelligence resources into yet another insane attempt to "prove" anthropogenic global warming, a.k.a. "Globaloney."

And I very much support the bill. Have I gone mad?

Bah, ye of little lizardian faith! Yes, it wastes time, resources, and money on an absurdity (global warming has no significant national-security implications whatsoever). But it also dramatically increases funding for human intelligence (HumInt) operations... actual spies to infiltrate countries like Iran, Syria, and North Korea, instead of relying entirely on spy satellites and such... signals intelligence, or SigInt, in IntelSpeak.

The bill also increases funding for counterintelligence, which I would hope includes hunting down al-Qaeda sleeper cells and such inside the United States:

Mr. Reyes lauded his panel's work on the bill, noting that it will lead to "stronger, better intelligence," especially by adding money for human intelligence training and for sending analysts abroad.

For the first time, the bill will fund a "baseline" for intelligence activities related to terrorism and Iraq, he said.

He also said it will strengthen counterintelligence, enhance oversight and eliminate wasteful spending.

Quite frankly, I'm perfectly willing to make that trade-off, if that's what it takes to get the Democrats aboard.

If the Republicans can strip the Globaloney nonsense out of the bill and still get the Democrats to sign up, that would be wonderful. I'd love to have that. Of course, I'd also love to have a trail horse and a house on five acres of land here in Southern Cal; I think the odds of that are marginally better than the odds of getting Chairman Silvestre Reyes (D-TX, 80%) to accept HumInt without GoreInt.

Theoretically, we could have gotten a lot of this in the 109th Congress (2005-2006); the Republicans were in charge, and the president is always eager to improve our intelligence-gathering capability. So... why didn't we?

Oh yeah, I forgot:

Last year, the Republican-controlled Senate failed to pass its Intelligence Authorization bill.

Along with failing to make permanent the tax cuts and failing to enact the federal budget.

Say... I wonder why we lost Congress?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, May 7, 2007, at the time of 9:09 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

April 10, 2007

Congress Elects Itself President

Congress is getting frisky.

Flush with their success in anointing themselves Commanders in Chief of the armed forces (via the supplementary funding bill for the troops) and chiefs of foreign policy (applauding as Squeaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Haight-Ashbury, 95%, negotiates a separate peace at any price with Bashar Assad), Democratic and a few Republican legislators now want the rest of the cake.

They plan to pass a bill establishing a new heirarchy of national security and intelligence priorities for the United States. Demoted from the top spots are global jihadism and terrorist financing networks, the Middle East, nuclear proliferation, CBW, Red China, and North Korea.

Promoted to the top spot will be -- wait for it -- global climate change!

The CIA and Pentagon would for the first time be required to assess the national security implications of climate change under proposed legislation intended to elevate global warming to a national defense issue.

The bipartisan proposal, which its sponsors expect to pass the Congress with wide support, calls for the director of national intelligence to conduct the first-ever "national intelligence estimate" on global warming.

In other news, this month is shaping up as the coldest April ever. Except on Capitol Hill, which is experiencing an unusually hot high-pressure zone.

Lest you think Congress can be satisfied merely by a quick study, which finds that there are no such "national security implications," legislators insist not only that the CIA and the Department of Defenser report -- they demand the Executive agencies arrive at the correct conclusions... and then act on them:

The measure also would order the Pentagon to undertake a series of war games to determine how global climate change could affect US security, including "direct physical threats to the United States posed by extreme weather events such as hurricanes."

The article makes it pretty plain that the purpose is to completely bypass the EPA and the president and simply force the country to implement the Democrats' preferred solutions (smash the looms, same as their solution to "global cooling" in the 1970s). Once again, science is to be decided by a roll-call vote in the House and Senate:

The growing attention to global warming as a national security issue could open new avenues of support for tougher efforts to limit greenhouse gases, according to specialists.

"If you get the intelligence community to apply some of its analytic capabilities to this issue, it could be compelling to whoever is sitting in the White House," said Anne Harrington , director of the committee on international security at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington. "If the White House does not absorb the independent scientific expertise, then maybe something from the intelligence community might have more weight."

When confronted by scientists who refuse to toe the party line on global warming, it's always in the best tradition of the scientific process to turn to Lysenkoism.

There's not much else to say about this story. You can't parody a farce.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, April 10, 2007, at the time of 4:49 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

March 21, 2007

Al Gore's Political Epitaph

Something that Dean Barnett wrote on Hugh Hewitt's blog sparked my latent urge to rewrite, and I succumbed. I believe this inadvertent collaboration (which will come as news to Dean!) has reduced Al Gore down to what will surely be history's epitaph when he finally withdraws himself from the public sphere (which will be like finally shaking a rock out of your shoe).

Here is what Dean wrote:

After watching hours of the erstwhile Veep’s congressional testimony, I think I finally understand him . Ultimately, he is a tragic if unsympathetic figure. Has there ever been a man who so desperately hungered for greatness who was so thoroughly suffused with mediocrity?

And here is the epitaph that sums up, I believe, the "erstwhile Veep's" entire adult life:

Heck, that's all I wanted to say.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, March 21, 2007, at the time of 8:17 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

February 23, 2007

And the Heat Goes On

We noted Delaware's State Climatologist and University of Delaware Professor David R. Legates in an earlier post: The First Church of Fundamentalist Climate Change. In our last chapter, Dr. Legates had espoused climatological heresy, and the Grand Inquisitor had fingered him as a possible apostate:

Along comes Professor David R. Legates, Delaware's "state climatologist." Dr. Legates stands steadfast for free scientific inquiry... which would put him on a collision course with the doyenne of the Weather Channel, if ever they were to meet:

Enter Legates, a Ph.D. climatologist who received the title of state climatologist in 2005 from Daniel Leathers, now the head of the University of Delaware's geography department.

Legates joined a group of scientists late last year in urging the court to reject the state claims, in a brief filed by the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute. [Delaware had joined a suit demanding the federal government regulate carbon dioxide from cars because of "global warming."]

"It is simply impossible to conclude that the net effect of greenhouse gases endangers human health and welfare," the brief said.

Grand Inquisitor Dr. Heidi Cullen, "Climate Expert and host Of The Climate Code" on the Weather Channel, rebuked Dr. Legates' backsliding on matters of faith, good and hard:

If a meteorologist can't speak to the fundamental science of climate change, then maybe the [American Meteorological Society] shouldn't give them a Seal of Approval.

The governor of Delaware, Ruth Ann Minner, who might have finished high school, has stepped swiftly forward to resolve this disagreement between the scientist and the TV weathergirl:

Gov. Ruth Ann Minner has directed Delaware's state climatologist to stop using his title in public statements on climate change, citing a clash of views on global warming and confusion over the position's ties to the administration....

"Your views on climate change, as I understand them, are not aligned with those of my administration," Minner wrote.

"In light of my position and due to the confusion surrounding your role with the state, I am directing you to offer any future statements on this or other public policy matters only on behalf of yourself or the University of Delaware," Minner wrote, "and not as state climatologist."

(Now there's leadership, by thunder! As Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-At Large, 100%) and Sen. Barack "Abraham" Obama (D-IL, 100%) rend the flesh from each the other's body, and erstwhile Sen. John Edwards slinks slowly in the west, perhaps the Democratic Party has at last found its new face for the presidential nomination in 2008. And why not President Ruth Ann Minner?)

Having taken her gardening shears and snipped off Dr. Legates' epaulets, Gov. Minner has now thoroughly refuted his objections to anthropogenic global climate change. Environmentalist groups are ecstatic, and the good doctor is presumed by all concerned to be sadder but wiser, following this chastening.

There is something deeply satisfying about the finality produced by the machinations of the scientific method.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 23, 2007, at the time of 6:05 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

February 12, 2007

Wow - Cosmic, Dude!

A fascinating new theory for global climate change -- that temperature rises and falls are driven less by human production of "greenhouse gases" but primarily by how much or how little the sun's magnetic field protects the Earth from cosmic rays -- has just gained a lot more credibilty due to a recent experiment conducted by Danish scientist Henrik Svensmark at the Danish National Space Center.

In a book, [the Chilling Stars,] to be published this week, [Dr. Henrik Svensmark of Denmark and science writer Nigel Calder] claim that fluctuations in the number of cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere directly alter the amount of cloud covering the planet.

High levels of cloud cover blankets the Earth and reflects radiated heat from the Sun back out into space, causing the planet to cool.

Henrik Svensmark, a weather scientist at the Danish National Space Centre who led the team behind the research, believes that the planet is experiencing a natural period of low cloud cover due to fewer cosmic rays entering the atmosphere.

This, he says, is responsible for much of the global warming we are experiencing.

This theory holds that the more cosmic rays that strike the upper atmosphere, the greater the cloud cover on Earth. And the amount of cosmic rays we receive is due to the intensity of the sun's magnetic field, which varies: A stronger solar magnetic field means fewer cosmic ray particles, fewer clouds, and more global warming; a weaker field means more cosmic rays, more clouds, and global cooling.

Science writer Nigel Calder, who co-authored the book with Svensmark, explains the theory on a nutshell:

He saw from compilations of weather satellite data that cloudiness varies according to how many atomic particles are coming in from exploded stars. More cosmic rays, more clouds. The sun’s magnetic field bats away many of the cosmic rays, and its intensification during the 20th century meant fewer cosmic rays, fewer clouds, and a warmer world. On the other hand the Little Ice Age was chilly because the lazy sun let in more cosmic rays, leaving the world cloudier and gloomier.

But this theory is not going down well with those who have staked everything on demonstrating anthropogenic ("human created") global climate change (AGCC). Calder reports that Svensmark had tremendous difficulty getting his research, which contradicts the globaloney orthodoxy (and how's that for an unbiased phrasing?), published at all:

Disdain for the sun goes with a failure by the self-appointed greenhouse experts to keep up with inconvenient discoveries about how the solar variations control the climate....

In a box of air in the basement, [Svensmark and his team] were able to show that electrons set free by cosmic rays coming through the ceiling stitched together droplets of sulphuric acid and water. These are the building blocks for cloud condensation. But journal after journal declined to publish their report; the discovery finally appeared in the Proceedings of the Royal Society late last year.

The Telegraph story mentions only one skeptic, "Giles Harrison, a cloud specialist at Reading University;" but this is not necessarily representative. I suspect that, even assuming Dr. Svensmark's experiment is replicable, the theory of AGCC will not go down without a fight. Too much political power (including a "world carbon tax" to transfer vast sums of money from the civilized West to the impoverished carbon criminals) rides on AGCC being true. Nobody "in the loop" is going to allow mere reality to decide the issue.

Still, an upcoming experiment could end up throwing a monkey wrench into a cocked hat:

A team of more than 60 scientists from around the world are preparing to conduct a large-scale experiment using a particle accelerator in Geneva, Switzerland, to replicate the effect of cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere.

They hope this will prove whether this deep space radiation is responsible for changing cloud cover. If so, it could force climate scientists to re-evaluate their ideas about how global warming occurs.

Meanwhile, leftist newspaper columnist Ellen Goodman -- whom few realize is a world-renowned atmospheric physicist, an internationally acclaimed climatologist, and founding member of the American Meteorological Society -- has carefully explained that anyone who denies the political consensus of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), that Republicans driving SUVs are responsible for all the global warming we have experienced this winter, is roughly equivalent to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad:

I would like to say we're at a point where global warming is impossible to deny. Let's just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and future.

Think I was kidding about the Republican gibe above? O ye of little faith (in the insanity and hysteria of the BDS-afflicted Goodman):

One reason is that while poles are melting and polar bears are swimming between ice floes, American politics has remained polarized. There are astonishing gaps between Republican science and Democratic science. Try these numbers: Only 23 percent of college-educated Republicans believe the warming is due to humans, while 75 percent of college-educated Democrats believe it. [See if you can guess on which side Goodman finds herself.]

This great divide comes from the science-be-damned-and-debunked attitude of the Bush administration and its favorite media outlets. The day of the report, Big Oil Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma actually described it as "a shining example of the corruption of science for political gain." Speaking of corruption of science, the American Enterprise Institute, which has gotten $1.6 million over the years from Exxon Mobil, offered $10,000 last summer to scientists who would counter the IPCC report.

That last accusation sounds familiar; now where did we recently read about that...?

Goodman goes on to psychoanalyze the dissenters -- liberalism's very favorite trick when they cannot reply with reason (which is most of the time) -- then turns to an old Jesuit argument of percentages:

In addition, maybe we can turn denial into planning. "If the weatherman says there's a 75 percent chance of rain, you take your umbrella," Shellenberger tells groups. Even people who clutched denial as their last, best hope can prepare, he says, for the next Katrina. Global warming preparation is both his antidote for helplessness and goad to collective action.

Of course, if the weatherman says it's going to be a cold winter, you don't immediately chop all your furniture and your house into firewood to keep warm.

Lost on secret scientists like Ms. Goodman is the simple fact that all decisions have consequences... not just those decisions you disagree with. Deciding to take "action" to prevent global warming -- by which promoters always mean to reduce energy use by reducing industrialization, to smash the looms -- would have a catastrophic effect on the world's economy, producing a crash that would end up killing far more people that are projected to die in the putative world heat wave of the 21st century.

As a wise man once said -- oh, wait, I think it was I -- "there are no solutions, only trade-offs." A "good solution" is a trade-off where what you lose is worth less to you than what you gain... for example, when buying an Enya CD or when throwing away a burger from Jack In the Box after only a single bite.

A "bad solution" is when you lose more than you gain: the most perfect example is the present case, crippling the world's economy to reduce warming by about a tenth of a degree per century. In a shockingly unexpected turn of events, loony lefties like Ellen Goodman, despite her unrivaled scientific credentials, consistently advocate "bad solutions."

I think I should have thrown her away after only a single bite.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 12, 2007, at the time of 5:12 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

February 5, 2007

Incandescent Irritation

What did the corned beef say to the sliced tongue? "I'm on a roll!"

Here's another insane environmentalist moment, this time from my native state again -- California, the granola state: land of fruits, nuts, and flakes. Assemblyman Lloyd Levine, representing Van Nuys (that's a small city within the city of Los Angeles, in the southwest end of the San Fernando Valley), chairman of the Assembly Utilities and Commerce Committee, has introduced a bill to ban all incandescent lightbulbs by 2012.

No, it's not a rib. Sorry:

A California lawmaker wants to make his state the first to ban incandescent lightbulbs as part of California's groundbreaking initiatives to reduce energy use and greenhouse gases blamed for global warming.

The "How Many Legislators Does it Take to Change a Lightbulb Act" [this part may be a rib!] would ban incandescent lightbulbs by 2012 in favor of energy-saving compact fluorescent lightbulbs.

"Incandescent lightbulbs were first developed almost 125 years ago, and since that time they have undergone no major modifications," California Assemblyman Lloyd Levine said on Tuesday.

Well, yeah. That's because, to quote Mary Poppins, they're "practically perfect in every way" (except they burn out too quickly).

This stands in stark contrast to fluorescent lighting, which makes me sick. I mean that literally: they flicker at some frequency that gives me a headache and makes me feel a bit queasy. When I used to work in a office, I bought a regular lamp and put it on my desk, so its light could drown out the finicky, flickering fluorescent flapdoodle overhead.

Nowadays, I always buy the GE Reveal bulbs, which are as much like outdoor light as one can get in an inexpensive lightbulb; and I like a lot of lumens... in the living room alone, we have two 150-watt bulbs and a 100-watter. That's another reason I detest fluorescent lights: they turn everything a weird, pasty-purple-ish color that makes me feel like I'm on Mars, except without the low gravity.

This brings me to the point of this post (you knew there was going to one in here somewhere): Is there anything more typical (and telling) than a lefty who is so totalitarian, he even wants to tell you what kind of lightbulb you're allowed to use? Well, maybe the Al Gore "two-flusher." Both are indicative of the Left's hatred of human choice. When they say they're "pro-choice," they certainly don't mean you to have the choice to disobey them.

They are, as Thomas Sowell dubbed them, the "anointed;" and they are anointed because they have "the Vision"... the Vision being of a man-made utopia run by -- well, by people like them. The Vision includes a rather colossal ego that compels the anointed to declare (now I'm quoting George Bernard Shaw) that "the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature." (Antony and Cleopatra, Act II)

In the present case, Mr. Levine evidently doesn't like to read much, or to do anything else involving the eyes after sunset. Thus, he sees no moral or ethical impediment to telling everyone else to pollute his home with awful, color-changing, eye-straining fluorescent lightbulbs. The wishes of hoi polloi are of no account.

But of course, the reality is that even if this abomination passed -- it would just mean a huge black market in California incandescence: we would all order lights from the internet; and if they passed a second law prohibiting the operation of the U.S. Mail or requiring inspections to ensure that nobody is obtaining the forbidden fruit, we would find a way around that, too. Maybe some enterprising mafioso would ship lightbulbs into the Golden State hidden inside bales of medical marijuana or boxes of condoms destined for Van Nuys Middle School.

And I doubt Assemblyman Levine would even care: the important thing is to make a statement; whether the plan is actually plausible -- or even possible -- is an engineering detail. (As a minor aside, it's also evident he wrote his own hagiographic Wikipedia entry.)

Liberals... can't live with 'em; can't ditch 'em in the Mojave Desert with defective cell phones.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 5, 2007, at the time of 5:36 AM | Comments (14) | TrackBack

February 2, 2007

Climate Change: the Dash for Cash

A new charge is roiling the scientific community; it was leveled today by the ultra-leftist Guardian, formerly the Manchester Guardian, out of the U.K.:

Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world's largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today.

Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

This is, of course, yet another attempt to marginalize and silence any opposition to the First Church of Fundamentalist Climate Change: the purpose is to taint all Globaloney skeptics with the stench of corruption... they're all bought and paid for! Don't listen to them! They're just mercenaries!

"Shut up," he explained.

The Guardian never does explain the "lobby group" remark (yet another libel). A lobbyist is typically hired by a particular company to individually lobby legislators or the executive (federal or state) to procure public funding via earmarks or other special-interest tax funding.

The AEI is a non-profit public advocacy group that accepts no government money; they do not engage in "lobbying," at least by the normal dictionary-definition accepted by everybody but leftists. They are no more a "lobby group" than is the MacArthur Foundation -- and less so than the left-leaning Brookings Institution, which actually does get much of its funding from taxpayer money.

This slur against the AEI tells you everything you need to know about the globaloney mobsters.

The Guardian attack exemplifies a perennial bugaboo with the Left: they like to believe that where one gets funding absolutely determines what one says... that everyone is a scientific soldier of fortune who will do or say anything to get the cash. (I assume this belief is psychological projection on the part of leftists.) The Guardian makes the connection explicit at the end of the article in a throw-away libel they quote from some Greenpiece dolt. It serves as a synecdoche, not just of the globaloneyists, but of the Left in general:

Ben Stewart of Greenpeace said: "The AEI is more than just a thinktank, it functions as the Bush administration's intellectual Cosa Nostra. They are White House surrogates in the last throes of their campaign of climate change denial. They lost on the science; they lost on the moral case for action. All they've got left is a suitcase full of cash."

This is about as despicable a slime as one can imagine... and it's one reason why I believe the Guardian has not fully shed its old Marxian thuggishness. But let's roll up our sleeves and get our feet wet...

Before dealing with the true risibility of the Guardian's charge -- its blind spot about its own side -- let's first get the silly elements out of the way:

The long arm of ExxonMobile

The American Enterprise Institute is "an ExxonMobil-funded [lobby group] with close links to the Bush administration;" thus, one presumes, the AEI simply does the bidding of its evil, corporate, Capitalist masters, without regard to the suffering people of the world (Haliburton!)

The Guardian backs up this attack with a single pair of statistics:

The AEI has received more than $1.6m from ExxonMobil and more than 20 of its staff have worked as consultants to the Bush administration.

What they don't mention is that the AEI has an operating budget of more than $30 million, all of which comes from grants by private corporations, private foundations, groups, and individuals, mostly by conservative foundations (J.M Olin, JM Foundation), rich conservatives like Richard Melon Scaife, and companies like Coors (run b