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Saturday, February 28, 2015
The Nature Of Evidence
Some leading advocates of man-made global warming and of regulatory actions to terminate use of the world’s cheapest and most efficient sources of energy admit the truth: it’s a secular religion masquerading as science.
Read U.N. Official Admits Belief In Global Warming Is Religious, posted on the Investors.com website.
We are repeatedly told by President Obama and mainstream media that all the world’s scientists support the global-warming tenet. This is a lie in the nature of, “If you like your health insurance and your present doctor you can keep them.” Increasingly so-called evidence of global warming is steadily being revealed as creation of fraudulent data or mendacious manipulation of data.
Global-warming believers nonetheless blandly assert the opposite.
Junk Science • Thought Police & PC • (1) Comments
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Friday, February 20, 2015
Restoring The Unwritten Constitution
Liberal-progressivism, exemplified in President Obama, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, and Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, is aimed at destroying the essence of constitutionalism that gave birth to the United States.
Constitutional Principles • Political Theory • Tradition & Morality • (5) Comments
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Thursday, February 05, 2015
Is The President A Law Unto Himself?
England’s Stuart kings’ repeated efforts to bypass Parliament and to proclaim laws unilaterally led to the Glorious Revolution of 1689 deposing James II and to Parliament’s enacting the English Bill of Rights, the precursor to our own first ten amendments to the Constitution.
Is Obama Charles I or James II redux?
Read Adam White’s article from the City Journal website.
Unfaithful Executive: On presidential oaths and obligations
Constitutional Principles • (1) Comments
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Sunday, February 01, 2015
Conflict With Obamacare?
Hold the Applause For Obama’s Demarche On Personalized Medicine
By Betsy McCaughey, in a New York Sun op-ed piece.
Welfare-State Socialism • (1) Comments
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Friday, January 30, 2015
No Limit To Obama’s Power Claims
Who needs a Congress to pass laws, with a compliant Attorney General and a president who claims an apparently unlimited prerogative to order whatever strikes his fancy?
Read Peter Wehner’s brief gloss on the questioning of Attorney General nominee Loretta Lynch.
Constitutional Principles • (1) Comments
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Thursday, January 29, 2015
All Distortion, All The Time
Read Conrad Black’s assessment in The New York Sun of the president’s state-of-the-union address.
Welfare-State Socialism • (1) Comments
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Wednesday, January 28, 2015
Socialists Perfecting The Human Race
Liberal-progressive-socialists apparently are ignorant of their own history and unaware of the implications of their feminist doctrine.
Read this article by Paul Kengor in The American Spectator.
Media & Opinion • Thought Police & PC • (0) Comments
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Tuesday, January 27, 2015
Even Great Britain Admits That “Warmest Year” Is Unconfirmed
The UK has been one of the staunchest advocates of global warming and the need to wreck the economy with energy strangulation, on the assumption that liberal-progressive minds have god-like powers to control the universe. God-created nature, however, has for the last couple of decades failed to bend to liberal-progressive minds.
UK Met Office Confirms 2014 Continues Global Warming ‘Pause’
Junk Science • Media & Opinion • Thought Police & PC • (5) Comments
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Sunday, January 25, 2015
What Hath The Fed Wrought?
City Journal columnist Nicole Gelinas gives us a brief overview of the Fed’s failure to deal with the economy’s real problem: too much debt, in 2008, and still today. The implicit assumption underlying Obama administration policies and those of the Fed is that the way to deal with people who have more debt than they can repay is to encourage them to borrow still more money.
Of Interest at the Fed
No one knows what will happen if the central bank raises rates.
The “wealth effect” created by the Keynesian economic policies of former Fed chairman Ben Bernanke succeeded only in booming the stock market, enriching wealthy bankers, hedge fund operators, and speculators. Retirees and lower-income ranks of workers have been trashed by near-zero interest rate returns on their savings.
The productive economy has labored for nearly eight years under increasing governmental regulatory strangulation and deficit spending financed largely by the Fed’s quantitative easement, government-bond-buying policy. Recent slow gains in economic activity have been made, despite Obama’s administrative regulatory policies and constant threats of more regulation and higher taxes. In fact, the biggest engine of economic recovery has been hydrofracking to produce more petroleum and natural gas, which the Obama administration has sought to kill off and replace with government-subsidized efforts to force use of “green” energy.
Economics • Welfare-State Socialism • (3) Comments
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Thursday, January 22, 2015
Main-Stream Media’s Tabloid Sensationalism
Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins uncovers the distortion and misrepresentation, either through ignorance or through propagandistic intention, characterizing main-stream media’s reporting of recent false claims that 2014 was the hottest year on record.
Climate Reporting’s Hot Mess
AP takes the cake in the relentless campaign by global-warming journalists to discredit their own profession.
By HOLMAN W. JENKINS, JR.
Jan. 20, 2015 8:07 p.m. ET
News reporting of the latest climate alarm was not uniformly bad. Among hundreds of publications in the Factiva database, exactly one—the Mail on Sunday, one of those derided London tabloids—injected the phrase “statistically significant” into consideration of whether 2014 was in any meaningful sense the “hottest year on record.”
A nonjournalistic source and not exactly an outfit of climate-change deniers, Berkeley Earth, also noted that, when it comes to 2014 and the other “hottest year” candidates, 2005 and 2010, the observed temperature difference was smaller than the margin of error by a factor of five, adding: “Therefore it is impossible to conclude from our analysis which of 2014, 2010, or 2005 was actually the warmest year.”
To its credit, the Washington Post alluded to the possibly more important fact that “rising temperatures have not kept pace with computer simulations that predicted even faster warming.”
The New York Times contributed nothing to reader enlightenment as usual, and the Associated Press committed a howler by claiming that “nine of the 10 hottest years in NOAA global records have occurred since 2000. The odds of this happening at random are about 650 million to 1, according to University of South Carolina statistician John Grego. ”
This might be true if Earth’s climate were dice, where rolling a six has no effect on the odds of the next roll being a six. But climate is a continuous process of incremental change. A unified theory of media idiocy on climate is beyond the scope of this column, but even someone with the apparently parched intellect of an AP editor should be able to look at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration charts and notice that cool years are grouped with cool years, warm years with warm years, and in-between years with in-between years.
Either NOAA’s entire temperature history is a statistical anomaly of incomprehensible, galactic proportions—or AP has peddled itself a faulty assumption. And sure enough, Mr. Grego tells me AP specifically instructed him to assume “all years had the same probability of being ‘selected’ as one of the 10 hottest years on record.” This is akin to assuming that, because you weighed 195 pounds at some point in your life, there should be an equal chance of you weighing 195 pounds at any point in your life, even when you were a baby.
The real mystery, though, would be if the warmest years did not bunch up in the post-1998 period, given the sharp warming observed from the late 1970s to the late 1990s.
When climate reporters robotically insist, as they did again this week, that the 2000s represent the hottest period in the rather skimpy, 134-year historical record, they are merely reiterating that the pre-1998 warming happened. No clear trend up or down has been apparent since then.
The bigger problem, of course, is that evidence of warming is not evidence of what causes warming. One would be astonished if mankind, with its prodigious release of greenhouse gases and other activities, were not having an impact on climate. But how and how much are the crucial questions.
But all this is magisterially beside the point in a sense. If the decades have validated any set of propositions, it’s the following: Mankind is unlikely to do anything meaningful about carbon dioxide as a matter of concerted public policy, and anything it does will be in the service of domestic pork interests, having no impact on climate.
Even if humanity could assert bureaucratic control over climate, the cost-benefit case would remain problematic—the costs being huge and the benefits necessarily being as uncertain as man’s role in causing climate change.
A carbon tax as part of pro-growth tax reform is one measure that might pass a cost-benefit test, thanks mainly to the nonclimate benefits of tax reform. Alas, no sign exists that a quorum of countries is ready to march together down this road. President Obama this week decided to use the tax-reform opportunity to pursue partisan class-warfare themes rather than advance a carbon tax proposal in exchange for lower rates.
So the climate problem, if there’s a problem, likely won’t be solved by some supreme effort of global bureaucratic will. But one could easily imagine it being solved by the normal, unwilled progress of technology. A battery—pick a number—five or 10 times more efficient than today’s, holding more energy and charging and discharging faster, would so revolutionize world energy practices that scientists would have to consider how a sudden decline in human carbon-dioxide emissions might affect the climate.
Solar and wind collection don’t have to be particularly efficient if storage becomes efficient. More solar energy reaches the earth’s surface in a year than is contained in all remaining reserves of fossil fuels and uranium. And to the inventor the financial and reputational rewards would be extravagant—which explains why billions of dollars are flowing into battery research.
Junk Science • Media & Opinion • Thought Police & PC • (1) Comments
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