We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
It is the most important scandal of our time. Climate alarmists are trying to impoverish the world, ostensibly in order to cool it down but really, in my view, to achieve the liberal holy grail of government control over everything. The scandal comes along at a critical moment to cast doubt on whether the "scientists" behind the global warming scare are doing science at all. Rather, their own words suggest that they are engaging in a combination of politics and fraud.
The skeptics were regarded as cranks and shills for evil polluters, such as the oil companies. If they got coverage at all, it was negative.
Now comes Climategate. It is out of step with the media agenda. What does the media do now?
“Ignore it,” has been the first answer.
Regard it as an unimportant story[4]. Not nearly as important as Tiger Woods or the couple that crashed a White House party. It is just another hacker, and undoubtedly the work of one of those oil company shills. Yes, ignore it. It will fade away.
The second answer: Write about Climategate’s general unimportance and give the parties involved a platform to dismiss the charges. Various outlets took minor steps to cover the story in a limited, dismissive way.
SCIENTISTS BEHAVING BADLY: Steve Hayward on the ClimateGate scandal. “The behavior of the CRU circle has cast a long shadow over the entire climate science community, and many honest scientists will now undeservedly bear the stigma of Climategate unless a full airing of the issues is conducted. Other important climate research centers with close ties to the CRU–including NASA’s Goddard Institute and the Climate Change Science Program at NOAA–should not be exempt from a full-dress investigation. Such a reevaluation must begin with an understanding of the crucial role the CRU circle has played in the global warming drama.” Read the whole thing, which provides a nice summary of the issues so far.
Image: The new palms and rising balmy waters at Maggie's Farm Resort and Spa in central New England. It's about time. We bought the place for that exact purpose, cleverly anticipating the arrival of the palms and beaches.
...according to a number of recently released scientific studies, dogs are not merely emotional con artists: they are also intellectual con artists. They've learned not only to fake love; they've managed to convince us that they are a lot smarter than they really are. In both cases they play us for the saps we are.
The new analysis of the data will take three years, meaning that the Met Office will not be able to state with absolute confidence the extent of the warming trend until the end of 2012.
...from a letter Jefferson wrote in 1762: “The old-fellows say we must read to gain knowledge and gain knowledge to make us happy and admired. . . . Mere jargon! Is there any such thing as happiness in this world? No: And as for admiration I am sure the man who powders most, perfumes most, embroiders most, and talks most nonsense, is most admired.”
The Massachusetts model, yet again - Boston Globe "Six hospitals to sue state over payment shortfalls": "The suit charges that Massachusetts violated a law requiring adequate reimbursement to hospitals for patients insured by the government. The hospitals contend the state set repayment rates so low they do not cover the cost of such medical care." Fear not, all these issues will be ironed out in the federal plan. Paul Krugman told me so.
You may suppose that those with a resilient faith in end-of-days global warming would be more distraught than anyone over these actions. You'd be wrong. In the wake of the scandal, we are told there is nothing to see. The administration, the United Nations, most of the left-wing punditry and political establishment have shrugged it off. What else can they do?
To many of these folks, the science of global warming is only a tool of ideology. To step back and re-examine their thinking would also mean — at least temporarily — ceding a foothold on policy that allows government to control behavior. It would mean putting the brakes on the billions of dollars allocated to force fundamental economic and societal manipulations through cap-and-trade schemes and fabricated "new energy economies," among many other intrusive policies.
Krauthammer spoiled his excellent piece on medical insurance by claiming a moral imperative for medical insurance.Not for medical care - for medical insurance. I agree with the Powerline guys that this part of Krauthammer's piece makes no sense.
It is a moral imperative for parents to take care of their kids as best they can. And, in a nation founded on equality in the face of the law, you could make a case for universal free national legal care.
Socialized medicine is no more insurance than Social Security is. What it is is having the government - ie your neighbors - pay your bills. That's not insurance.
OK, now Obama’s presidency is becoming super embarrassing. I honestly feel like someone is going to come out and pat him on the head all patronizingly. His latest Jobs Forum, (kind of like a Summit, I think, only not as fancy pants) to be hosted on Thursday, is yet another example of how woefully unprepared and hopelessly in over his head he is.
...even if you accept the IPCC predictions, look what happens. The IPCC says that world temperature will increase by 2100 by somewhere between 3.2F and 7.2F. A warming of half way between these two points works out at an average temperature increase of 0.05 degrees F per year. In the last 25 years of the past century, temperature increased at the rate of 0.04 degrees per year. (In this century, it has not increased at all!) Has this proved so appalling to manage?
Lord Lawson then notes that the IPCC predicts that, at this level of temperature rise, global food production will actually increase. He takes the IPCC's gloomiest prediction of the economic effects of global warming over the same period. By its own figures, the difference between what would happen with global warming and without it amounts to this: in a hundred years' time, people in the developed world would be "only 2.6 times better off than they are today, instead of 2.7 times, and their contemporaries in the developing world would be "only" 8.5 times as well off as people in the developing world are today, instead of 9.5 times better off". So this is the projected catastrophe, to avoid which the people of the present generation are being asked to curtail their carbon emissions by 70 per cent.
Slice your average environment correspondent through the middle and you're going to find a left-leaning liberal arts graduate who is utterly out of his/her depth. Their world view is being swept from underneath them and they are being shown — in ways that they do not really and have never had to understand — that the guys they thought were the goodies are in fact "at it" and that those they have spent a decade disparaging as deniers were in fact spot on.
...the Climategate e-mails reveal an unprecedented, systematic conspiracy to stifle discussion and debate, conceal and manipulate data, revise temperature trends that contradict predictions of dangerous warming, avoid compliance with Freedom of Information requests, and pressure scientific journals and the IPCC to publish alarmist studies and exclude dissenting analyses so as to manufacture "consensus."
I am not a professional climatologist but a common-sense fellow. Therefore I think I have more credibility than the average person who makes a living from "climate change." I enjoyed Coyote's Catastrophe Denied, but I think even he gave too much credence to existing data.
It seems to me that there is no accurate way to measure "global temperatures" or "global climate" other than via the troposphere. Tree rings and sediments and weather stations are ridiculous "proxies" for "global climate." Furthermore, there is no such thing as a "global climate" anyway.
The reason is that, at sea level, the earth consists of thousands of climates and millions of micro-climates - all on land undergoing constant fluctuation and all impacted by natural ebbs and flows and much of it impacted in some way by man and his land use, urbanization, etc (The earth's population was 1.2 billion in 1850, now it is 6.8 billion.) - and the ocean remains incomprehensibly complex with all of its oscillations and strange fluctuating vertical and horizontal currents.
I am not a climatologist, but I am always a skeptic about whatever experts tell me. I am a skeptic even about the 0.6 degree F change in the past 150 years. I think all of our temperature data is meaningless beyond its immediate locale - except for the troposphere data which we have only for recent years.
Science is never about truth. It's just about the theory and hypothesis du jour. That's what it's supposed to be.
I was being facetious yesterday about Climategate and Palin, but not today: is the Afghanistan "plan" timed to provide cover for health care? Sort of a wag the dog thing?
Am I getting smarter about how pols manipulate us, or am I getting paranoid? Or both?
Looking back it is easy to see that the emails, far from being just trivial statements exchanged between pals, partners in deceit, and collegial others, were indeed the window into the entire mind-set that drove and sustained what is looking to be the largest and most far-reaching hoax in the history of science; a hoax perpetuated across decades by dozens if not hundreds of "scientists" for the sake of "saving the planet" and money, and fame, and status, and power. Indeed, this hoax makes Bernard Madoff look like a street-corner three-card-monte hustler. Looking through the window provided by the emails you can discern, with no effort of imagination whatsoever, the much greater real-world environment in which the hoax was born, grew, took on a life of its own, and was fed and sustained until it swept the whole world into its maw.
One of my oldest and, deservedly ten times over, most respected friends, a combat veteran, a journalist, a frontline refugee aid worker, a man of the cloth, a professor, major scholar, a mentor and example to generations, wrote me this email below. He offers insights based on real experience that is lacking in mere scribblers in media and blogs who haven't ever been on the front-lines of life, death, and hope and effort despite odds due to undefeatable faith.
My friend's email, to all of you:
From a column by David Ignatius:
"When I asked Obama if the Taliban wouldn't simply wait us out, he was dismissive: "This is an argument that I don't give a lot of credence to, because if you follow the logic of this argument, then you would never leave. Right? Essentially you'd be signing on to have Afghanistan as a protectorate of the United States indefinitely."
Are Germany, Italy, South Korea, Philippines, and the horn of Africa protectorates of the United States? Maybe he thinks so. Maybe this explains his treatment of the Poles and the Czechs on missile defense.
As for never leaving: Well, we would "never leave" if (a) it is impossible to defeat the Taliban, or (b) we shouldn't even try to defeat them because we never should have been there in the first place, the Taliban will eventually be the legitimate rulers of Afghanistan, and this is just a face-saving way for us to leave.
I think Obama believes in and has opted for (b). It's David Ignatius, not Obama, who refers to the Taliban. Obama in his speech never mentioned the Taliban as the enemy we were fighting. Only Al Qaeda. In fact, he spoke of certain Taliban participating in the government. Remember a few months ago when the White House was leaking hints that we could live with the Taliban back in power? They have convinced themselves that there is a significant difference between the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and this whole strategy is designed not to turn it around, as the surge did in Iraq, but simply to get us out and shift the blame. And if the Taliban return? Who cares? Their problem. We can live with what the Iranian government does to its people, why not the Taliban?
This is all just a distraction from health-care and cap and trade. If the Taliban do come back Kabul will be too dangerous for anyone other than Frank Rich to visit, so we won't know what's going on, and what we don't know can't bother us.
He says in the speech that we are not patrons but partners, and then he speaks of the Pakistan and Afghan governments in an utterly dismissive tone, as if he were speaking to ADHD children. The Karzai government is corrupt and inefficient? Compared to what? Najibullah or Mullah Omar, Kharzai's predecessors? Is the Afghan government more corrupt than the governments of Chicago, Boston, New Orleans, NYC, Illinois, Massachusetts, Louisiana, or the District of Columbia? Wait, I almost forgot. The last Minnesota election for US senator should be included. Is the Kharzai government less accountable than our own and it's 18 million dollar websitetracking the stimulus funds?
Obama says Afghanistan is different from Vietnam because in Afghanistan we are not facing "a broad-based popular insurgency." So it was the "broad-based insurgency" that finally won in Vietnam? Why are there so many Vietnamese in this country? Why did South Vietnam become a gulag for twenty years after 1975? (I went back for the first time in 1995, and it was one of the most oppressive societies I have ever experienced.) Where did the soldiers in the South Vietnamese army come from? If North Korea were to overtake South Korea tomorrow, would it be the result of a broad-based insurgency? The entire North Vietnamese army--after we had withdrawn all support from the South--overran the country. Not the Viet Cong, the North Vietnamese Army. Some South Vietnamese units fought to the last man. Some were still fighting a rear guard action in the central highlands for five years after the fall of Saigon.
However, if the Afghans, as Obama suggests, don't want a return of the Taliban, why are we about to facilitate their return? Obama's whole plan sounds like just enough to keep his generals from resigning, but not enough to defeat the Taliban. An upfront capitulation and retreat would actually be better. That would say we don't want to win but would leave open the question of whether we could have won if we wanted to. But the result we'll get will say we couldn't have won in any case, that American arms simply couldn't prevail. Notice that he said nothing about why he's sending 2 brigades less than his commander asked for. It probably polls better that way. But Obama doesn't believe that any war can ever be legitimate. Read his speeches from Cairo, Normandy, or Berlin. He has talked about the progress of American blacks from slavery to his presidency, without ever mentioning the civil war. It just didn't happen. It was like the fall of the Berlin Wall. There was no military involved, no "cold war," people just "came together" and the wall fell.
He plans to "end" both wars--no matter the consequences--before the 2012 campaign season begins. This will aid his reelection and help him "earn" his Nobel. I'm beginning to wonder if I can in good conscience encourage a student to remain in or enter ROTC with a commander-in-chief as unprincipled and feckless as this one--and an Army chief of staff as stupid as Gen. Casey. I've always encouraged our students to at least consider military service. I never thought this would be a question for me. But it is becoming one now.
My friend is a bit discouraged tonight, to say the least. Neither you nor I nor he need worry that he will remain that way. His life is one of striving with all his being and integrity to overcome evil and to contribute good to the world. He will keep on, as must we, as Obama too shall pass, and be replaced with a better.
P.S.: My friend saw this and a private email comment to him that "spirit demands fiber". He replies
Yes, of course you're right. You'll know I've despaired if I give up teaching before I have to. I was thinking today that Obama's--and Axelrod's and Emanuel's--incredible ingnorance of history show how harmful it is when colleges get rid of core requirements.
Obama graduated from Columbia and he knows absolutely nothing about US and World history. Nothing! Listening to him reminds me being in a coffee shop in the late 60s, trying to make my move on a beautiful girl, but as the 4th international idiocies tumbled out of her mouth, the beauty slowly vanished, and chastity became easy--at least with her. Four things can kill sexual desire: hunger, exhaustion, fear, and listening to an idiot. That's why in Ranger school, all I could think of was a good meal. On a LRRP patrol in Vietnam, just getting safely back to base. In the coffee shop in Minneapolis, just getting the hell out of there. Wonder why these memories came back as I listened to Commander Zero's speech tonight?
BTW, Related: Read this op-ed, by another friend, of course a former Marine, and much more: Counterinsurgency Incoherence
Dr. Mann now tells me that he was unaware, when he wrote the response, that such grafting had in fact been done in the earlier cover chart, and I take him at his word. But I don’t see why the question was dismissed so readily, with the implication that only a tool of the fossil-fuel industry would raise it.
If Mann is telling the truth, he is utterly incompetent. I suspect he is lying, but a gullible Tierney appears to buy it. How would you not know how your cover graph was constructed?
The Christmas Season runs from the first day of Advent until the end of Epiphany. Joseph Bottum discusses. Advent and Epiphany are the religious, mysterious, joyful part, and Christmas is the secular, fun piece. It's all good, in my opinion.
...basically we are being asked to restructure the entire economy of the planet on the say-so of a few "scientists" whose work cannot be verified or even reconstructed. Is there any intellectually honest person who thinks that is a good idea?
Climate change is not just an environmental problem, it is a human rights issue. In fact it's the biggest child rights problem of our time. With the potential rise of up to 160,000 child deaths a year in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia directly resulting from climate change, it is children, the most vulnerable children, who will be caught at the centre of the storm.
Environmentalism should be regarded on the same level with religion "as the only compelling, value-based narrative available to humanity," according to a paper written two years ago to influence the future strategy of the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP), the world's would-be environmental watchdog.
I just read about the circular firing squads at the IPCC, with calls for the firing of the CPU and even for the disbanding of the entire IPCC (why not the rest of the UN at the same time?). Plus other good details at Climate Depot and also in the Political Climate column of Icecap.
Addendum #3: The more I think about it, the more I think that Climategate might be the biggest expose of the year. And yet the MSM will barely mention it because it DOES NOT FIT THE SOCIALIST NARRATIVE. Unbelievable, for people who supposedly want viewers and to sell newspapers - but they did the same thing with the ACORN stories. Thus for real news we must rely on amateurs, semi-pros, and bloggers. This from Clive Crook via Blair:
In my previous post on Climategate
I blithely said that nothing in the climate science email dump
surprised me much. Having waded more deeply over the weekend I take
that back.
The closed-mindedness of these supposed men of science, their
willingness to go to any lengths to defend a preconceived message, is
surprising even to me. The stink of intellectual corruption is overpowering. And, as Christopher Booker argues,
this scandal is not at the margins of the politicised IPCC process. It
is not tangential to the policy prescriptions emanating from what David
Henderson called the environmental policy milieu. It goes to the core of that process ...
Just when it seemed as if, finally, there could be some real open discussion about the data, 
Tiger Woods drives 
Via 
Reason: 
The Christmas Season runs from the first day of Advent until the end of Epiphany.