Filed under: Energy, Environment, Freedom, Global Warming, Humor, Junk Science, Politics, Science/Technology | Tags: 15 Years Without Warming, Bonn Climate Talks, The Models Don't Work
The latest round of UN Climate talks has been going on in Bonn. People from the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) were on hand and thought it might be a good idea to see if delegates were aware of the fact that global temperatures have stopped rising for the last fifteen years? Well, no, they are unaware, and hilarity ensues. Facts don’t really matter to them anyway. You must not question their religious faith. They believe.
Increases in CO2 are not the cause of warming temperatures. Warming temperatures are the cause of increases in CO2. Don’t worry, be happy. You just had it backwards.
Filed under: Capitalism, Democrat Corruption, Economy, Energy, Junk Science | Tags: A Hidden Agenda, Cost Benefit Analysis, Doing it the Sneaky Way
Now that we have established, once again, that the climate models cannot predict anything, and that increases in CO2 don’t cause warming temperatures, but warming temperatures cause increases in CO2 — Obama has quietly raised the ‘carbon price’ to combat climate change.
This was buried in a little-noticed rule on microwave ovens. [Now what are they doing to our microwaves?] It is a change in the U.S. government’s accounting for carbon emissions that can have wide-ranging implications for everything from power plants to the Keystone XL pipeline.
The increase in the so-called ‘social cost’ of carbon to $38 a metric ton in 2015, from $23.80 adjusts the calculation the government uses to weigh costs and benefits of proposed regulations. This is meant to approximate the losses from global warming such as flood damage and diminished crops. “Cult science!”
And “cult science” leads to “cult math.” Anything from new mileage standards to clean energy loans will seem more valuable in its cost-benefit analysis. Environmentalists, or cult scientists, can use the cost-benefit analysis to fight projects that they oppose, like the Keystone XL pipeline , or any coal mining on public lands. That these projects would create thousands of highly paid jobs, and plentiful cheap energy can now be attacked on the basis of cost-benefit analysis based on false figures. The cult science folks won’t give up easily.
As we learn that climate damage is worse and worse, there is no direction they could go but up,” Laurie Johnson, chief economist for climate at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in an interview. Johnson says the administration should go further; she estimates the carbon cost could be as much as $266 a ton.
This sort of thing is supposed to be opened to public comment, but the Obama administration often does things behind closed doors. That’s why they are so embroiled in scandals. Expect it to get worse. Obama will attempt to get what he wants through executive order and regulation. The EPA will have all sorts of rules coming up to deprive us of cheap efficient power and force us into dependence on expensive, inefficient wind and solar.
Obama is determined that one of his great accomplishments will be saving us from the rise of the oceans and beginning the healing of the planet. The attempt to force us to rely on “clean energy” from wind and solar will collapse, because the technologies won’t work — wind is too intermittent and solar is too diffuse, and we an only make them useful at all by supporting them with ordinary energy.
Filed under: Capitalism, Democrat Corruption, Domestic Policy, Economy, Health Care, Law, Politics, Statism, Taxes | Tags: Free Market Capitalism, Increased Taxes, Regulation and Control
President Obama simply cannot stop doing the things that discourage businesses from hiring, and failing to do the things that wold help improve the employment situation. The biggest downer at present is ObamaCare. The regulations that force businesses to pay for the health care of anyone working 30 hours a week have led, not to a flurry of hiring more people for 40 hour weeks, but to workers being reduced to part-time at 28 hours or less.
Grocery stores operate on a low profit margin, and schedule workers for the hours when the store is busiest. Here, and probably nationwide, more stores are converting to at least partial self-check-out lines. The same for big box stores like Home Depot. Business has never liked being in the health-insurance business, and is using this opportunity to get out of it. Every law, passed in haste, will have unintended consequences. Thoughtful people can anticipate some of them, but things do not work out as expected. In manufacturing plants, more tasks are performed by machines. Who do you call today where you are answered by a human instead of a machine?
The administration has bragged that the economy added 175,000 jobs last month, but the number of job openings actually fell by 118,000 in April. The burning desire of a statist administration is for ever more regulation, ever more control — impulses that create more unemployment. If you refuse to allow the free market to work, you don’t get much work. Economics writer James Pethokoukis plaintively asked recently “Where are the entrepreneurs?”
Starting something new is taking a big risk. People who have a great idea borrow from their home equity, relatives, friends, take out second mortgages and load on debt to start a new business. Why are so many of Obama’s backers looking for subsidies and grants from the government to start a business? To absolve them from the risk of starting on their own.
Free people strive and create; regulated, controlled people hunker down and try to save their money. We have a government at present that wants more people to be dependent on the government. They are paying people to sign others up for food stamps, for welfare, for disability—the help that you are “entitled” to. The thing you won’t see on this chart is the increase in part-time or temporary employment. The problem is not, as is often claimed, available workers lacking the skills needed for the sectors with job openings — but a broad-based lack of demand for workers. Business is hurting. If you listen carefully to the radio, you will hear all sorts of businesses advertising who have never advertised before.
The administration’s efforts to destroy free market capitalism are perhaps the biggest scandal of all.
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Filed under: Capitalism, Economy, Freedom, History, Pop Culture, Socialism | Tags: George Orwell's 1984, NSA Spying?, Sales Up 7000%
Since the exposure last week of the vast scope of the United States’ government’s domestic surveillance operations, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. which was published sixty-four years ago has enjoyed a massive spike in sales. Amazon sales of the book shot up 7,000% just this week. Is Obama Big Brother?
Are we being organized into a world that is no longer free in the name of what? Something more perfect, more communal, more equal and more just. So how come everything seems to be tilted in the direction of the government? So how come when we are going to have more equal health care, all the members of the government get to keep their remarkably good plans? How come all these green start ups that are supposed to offer so many new green jobs go bankrupt but enrich Obama’s supporters who ran the companies or owned them?
If we are to be more equal, then how come those who disagree with the administration are treated so differently? How come what Obama claims today seems to have no relation to what he said last week? Is this the Ministry of Truth which published public falsehoods? Or is this the imagined world that Edward Snowden lives in?
Filed under: Education, Environment, Global Warming, Junk Science, Science/Technology | Tags: Helmut Schmidt University Presentation, Professor Murry Salby
Climate “Model World” Diverges Starkly from “Real World”
The world-renowned astrophysicist Professor Murry Salby of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia made a presentation in Hamburg, Germany at Helmut Schmidt University on April 18, as part of a European tour.
Professor Salby is the author of the textbook Physics of the Atmosphere and Climate (Cambridge University Press) and Fundamentals of Atmospheric Physics (Academic Press).
He recently caused excitement with new findings on the relationship of the 12C-and 13C isotopes and the development of CO2-concentration. From the findings he concluded that the anthropogenic emissions only had a slight impact on the global CO2-concentrations. They are mainly a consequence of temperature changes. This relationship is known up to now only from the warming phases after the last ice ages. Professor Salby extends this relationship to our current climate development. (From Die kalte Sonne)
Most of the presentation is very mathematical and technical. But the last 10 minutes sum up everything very nicely for laypersons.
At the 1:04:05 mark he sums it up neatly:
CO2 then evolves not like temperature, as it does in the model, but like the integral of temperature. In dotted blue is the integral of observed temperature. It closely tracks observed CO2 — even after the 1990s when the observed record of CO2 and temperature clearly diverged. If CO2 tracks the integral of temperature, which it clearly does, it cannot track temperature, which it clearly doesn’t.
In the model, CO2 and temperature are related directly. In the real world they are also related, but differently. The distinctly different relationship between CO2 and global temperature represents a fundamental difference its evolution in the model world and the real world. If the global energy balance is wrong, everything else is window dressing.
—”In the Real World global temperature is not controlled exclusively by CO2, as it is in the Model World.
—In significant part, however, CO2 is controlled by Global Temperature, as it is in the Proxy Record.”
At the end of his presentation, Salby implies, quoting Richard Feynman, that CO2 science today can be described as “Cult Science.”
He sums up, quoting Feynman: “If it differs from observations, then it’s wrong. That’s all there is to it.”
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And yesterday from the “Cult Science ” bunch, this wonderful piece:
“It’s Too Late: Fight Against Climate Change Has Failed”
Dana Milbank, of the Washington Post, ventures forth to explain how it’s all over. The flood walls to protect downtown Washington from a rising Potomac River have never been finished. The fight against climate change, the cause celebre of the environmental movement for more than a decade, has failed in its primary purpose. In the race to prevent disaster, it’s already too late.
Among climate-change activists, the realization is spreading that the combination of political inaction on greenhouse gases, plentiful new petroleum supplies and accelerating changes in weather patterns means there is no escaping more life-altering floods, droughts and fires. Although ongoing efforts to reduce carbon emissions could mitigate even worse catastrophe, momentum has shifted in part to preparing for the inevitable consequences of a warmer planet.
Mayor Bloomberg rolled out a $19.5 billion plan Tuesday “to prepare for the impacts of a changing climate. By midcentury, up to a quarter of all New York City’s land area, where 800,000 residents live today will be in the flood plain, and 40 miles of our waterfront could see flooding on a regular basis just during normal high tides.”
Do read the whole thing. This is Cult Science at its best. These people can never grasp the difference between weather and climate.
American Elephants 