More "adjustments" of temperature data from the CRU?

The BBC recently came out with a dramatic article stating that 2010 was the warmest year since 1850 (widely recognized as the last year that temperatures dropped at the end of the Little Ice Age.)

The WMO analysis combines data from three leading research agencies, and is regarded as the most authoritative.

The three records are maintained by the US-based National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) and National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), and jointly in the UK by the Hadley Centre and the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU).

Then two scientist looked at the original data from the CRU in East Anglia (of Climategate fame) and found that temperature data had been altered.

Comparing the actual data for each year, from 2001 to 2010, with that given in the press release shows that for four years the original figure has been adjusted downwards. Only for 2010 was the data revised upwards, by the largest adjustment of all, allowing the Met Office to claim that 2010 was the hottest year of the decade.

One wonders why the data from the UK would need to be changed, apparently for publicity purposes, when the data released by "denier" Roy Spencer's university already showed 2010 to be in a statistical tie with 1998 for the warmest year in 40 years. Didn't that quite fit publicity needs?

These kinds of discoveries of altered data just keep happening.  And not just in climate science. There are several reasons for this.

One disturbing thing about alterations in temperature data by climate scientists, starting several years ago with IPPC data, is that the scientists who revise the data typically refuse to say why or how they determined that historical data should be changed.

The discovery of alterations in the data from the CRU comes close on the heels of another scandal in the UK involving the failure of the Met Office to predict the cold winter there:

. . . . the weather service caused a sensation by making the startling claim that it was gagged by government ministers from issuing a cold winter forecast. Instead, a milder than average prediction was made that has been resoundingly ridiculed in one of the worst winters in a century.

Ultimate Recycling

It's hard to imagine that someone who went to school at Berkeley and who writes as well as Richard Fernandez was once affiliated with a street gang that prowled around a smoky garbage dump.

I finally ran into a photoblog which accurately conveys something of the landscape in certain scenes of my novel, No Way In. The My Sari-sari Store site is a treasure-house of images that capture a world that very few people, least of all the better sort of indigenes, will ever know. The photoblog is subtitled Happyland: a look into the world of the utterly, utterly poor. That is a title of genius which could only have been generated by somebody who truly “knows” that millieu and can be used to describe the entire civilization of the islands. It is not entirely facetious. The people who live in Happyland feel the same sorrow, but also the same joy that every human being feels.

“Sa Tondo man, ay may langit din” is code phrase which means that “we too can reach heaven” and is often uttered in an undertone to assert a fundamental equality of humanity with those who zip by in automobiles. It is the key to deciphering the us versus them dynamic of a Third World society of which the diplomatic set usually knows only the upper crust. The people eating the food salvaged from dumpsters, or living off the trash are brothers in their own way, to the poor in Cairo and those who want a better life. That is the half we should get to know if we want to understand what the societies of our “allies” are really built on. There is value to running around with the English speaking elite, and swap stories of common memories at Georgetown, but it is the people of Happyland, who, in whatever language, make up the bulk of those who are aspirational.

Take a look through the photos:

The photos are great. They are not compositions of pity, but depictions of people whose sufferings while not to be underestimated have a humanity that is not undervalued. I am particularly grateful to Happyland photos for depictions of scavenging, which readers will remember from the book. Note this scavenging is the genteel stuff, not the hard core demonic scene that characterized Smokey Mountain. . . 

I looked up an old Belmont Club post I remembered from before the blog was moved to Pajamas Media, when I only knew Fernandez as "Wretchard".  It is about hazards facing the very poor, including those at Smokey Mountain in the Philippines:

. . . Many years ago I actually lived for some months in and around a dump site far worse than the one which collapsed. It was known as Smokey Mountain; and the infernal fires which arose from it night and day were caused by the spontaneous combustion of organic material underfoot. If anything resembled a terrestrial version of hell, it was Smokey Mountain at night with garbage trucks snaking up the hill amidst pillars of fire and smoke, attended by what seemed innumerable legions of imps. The site was featured in many documentaries which purported to show the horror of life in the Third World, but I can tell you, from first hand experience, that the denizens of Smokey Mountain considered themselves to be comparatively lucky. They had a guaranteed income. . . 

A tremendous amount of recycling was achieved in this way. What you have to understand is that the garbage which finally settled to the bottom of Smokey Mountain had been stripped of its last usable material. It was picked clean. Most of Manila's cardboard, a considerable percentage of its glass bottles and quite a bit of its scrap metal came from the labor of thousands of scavengers. From a certain point of view it was the epitome of "appropriate technology". It was almost fantastically "Green". And come to think of it, it was mostly honest labor.

For those who think that understanding a "carbon footprint" is all there is to knowing about environmentalism, a spell in the Third World would be an interesting experience, though I'm damned if I can say what lesson it conveys. As for myself, I can distinctly recall reading Ignazio Silone's Bread and Wine during that period, a novel about a revolutionary in Italy whose passwords were "never a rose without a thorn". Yes indeed. Never a rose without a thorn.

UPDATE: Wretchard describes in the comments some of the features of society in the Phillippines which make "Happyland" almost inevitable, and how those conditions could be changed.

YouTube University: Milton Friedman Explains Libertarianism

Although currently allied with conservatives, libertarians are not exactly like the typical conservative. The late Milton Friedman explains libertarianism in a 1999 interview with Peter Robinson. You can watch the whole thing a one time, or in shorter segments. You might want to consider where you fall on the continuum between supporting the maximum possible individual liberty on one hand OR mandating equality of outcome as well as providing safety, services, etc. through government action on the other hand.

Peter Robinson looks "inauthentic" on a motorcycle. But in this classic interview he asks Milton Friedman some tough questions about his libertarian positions. A college semester in 25 minutes.

Want shorter classes?

What is a libertarian?

What produced the dark and dirty London of Charles Dickens?

Are regulators like the FDA necessary to safeguard consumers? I could tell some stories to support either a yes or no position.

Should the government mandate that nutritional labels be placed on food packaging?

Of 14 cabinet departments, Milton Friedman says he would only keep a handful.

MORE: The kinds of interviews you don't see on TV anymore (radio interviews sometimes still provide this kind of exchange):

GREED 2 minutes. Kudos to Phil Donahue for asking good questions, then listening.

Federal Reserve and the New Deal, Chrysler bailout in 1979, automobile industry. 10 minutes.

Economics of medical care 9 minutes

Why it isn't necessary to change elected officials in order to change government. One minute.

The four ways to spend money.3 minutes

Local vs. Federal Government Spending, increasing production of goods and services (what the Greens want us to keep to a minimum). 3 minutes

Michael Crichton, Science and Global Warming

The late Michael Crichton describes the "nasty, unfair, brutal" response of his fellow liberals in the Global Warming camp to his book, State of Fear. He supported a traditional scientific approach over the post-normal approach to science favored by global warming alarmists. Entire interview is here. Critique of An Inconvenient Truth here. Note that Crichton died before Climategate confirmed many of the points he made in these videos.

Michael Crichton talks with high school students:

1. Although he does not name the Sierra Club, he gently explains to students how the lawsuit filed by the Sierra Club helped lead to the deaths of 30 million people - "more people than Hitler and Stalin together killed". People of color.

2. Should environmentalism be a religion?

3. His personal interest in people's attraction to totalitarianism.

4. Second-hand smoke

Richard Fernandez looks back at the alarmism concerning Global Cooling in the 1970s, to which Crichton made reference.  Prominent Global Warming alarmist James Hansen was just a lowly computer model developer back in those days of global cooling alarmism.  I don't think he got nearly as much publicity (or money) then as he does now.

. . . . .   Can a New Ice Age be blamed on America? If it can, then it’s real. Otherwise it is false. Over the coming years and beyond my lifetime, historians may wish to apply this formula: V = American Policy multiplied by the absolute value of any variable. It’s always America’s fault.

And of course, whatever problem with the climate emerges in the future, The Left Must Be Put In Charge.

Because the Liberal Elite is always right.  Somewhat brutal, but hilarious. There are a lot of people just  like this on the Left.  Especially in academia.

The Postmodern Cultural Elite

In a piece which echoes s few of the ideas here, VDH identifies what he thinks are characteristics of the "New Aristocracy" of our day:

This ad hoc meditation on cultural elitism was all prompted last week by listening to a poor white tree-trimmer lecture me on the various merits of his three different chain saws, while I was talking on the cell phone with a nasal-voiced, snotty Washington reporter — out here south of Fresno — but, in minutes, to be on the way to work at the antipode at Stanford. . .

The five characteristics he identified:

1) Truth

One requisite to being a cultural elite, unfortunately, is a certain allegiance to untruth, to saying one thing and doing another. . .

In short, money, privilege, and status create in the cultural elite both a fear of mixing it up with others that might jeopardize position and placement, and yet guilt for that very sense of entitlement and exemption. All that, in turn, only heightens the shrill and sanctimonious rhetorical demands on less blessed others to prove their morality.

Barack Obama was a genius in recognizing all this, and at a very early age no less. The subtext of Dreams from My Father, and indeed Obama’s life from 18 to 45, was to allay elite fears, guilt, and suspicions. . . .

2) Nature

The cultural elite class tends to romanticize nature, since it has little contact with it. Energy Secretary Steven Chu cheaply announces that California farms will dry up and blow away, with no clue how the tomatoes in his salad or the lamb chops on his plate are grown, cleaned, shipped — and land in his mouth. . . .

3) Muscularity

An elite is often characterized as staying fit entirely by the workout, the gym, the jog — never by chain sawing, digging, climbing, or hammering. Yet here too arises contradiction. The elite, being largely progressive, champion the muscular classes to the degree they can stay distant from them. . .

4) Gender

. . . Why can’t any of our actors talk like a Humphrey Bogart, Glenn Ford, Lee Marvin, Henry Fonda, James Stewart, Bill Holden, or Gregory Peck? I’m not asking for Jack Palance or Fess Parker, just a normal male mainstream voice. I know there are Al Pacinos and Robert De Niros, but they too seem to fade before the new wave of DiCaprios. Elites talk (and probably sound) like the freedmen in Petronius’s Satyricon

5) Logic There is little logic among the cultural elite, maybe because there is little omnipresent fear of job losses or the absence of money, and so arises a rather comfortable margin to indulge in nonsense. The idea that taxes cause scarcity, and subsidy abundance is a foreign concept. The notion that entitlements create dependency is considered Neanderthal. . . In other words, take a deep breath and imagine the opposite of everything you know by experience to be true, and you have mostly the worldview of the sheltered cultural elite, who navigate in rather protected channels and not in the open seas of the real world.

Quote of the Day

P.J. O'Rourke:

Everybody wants to save the earth; nobody wants to help Mom do the dishes.

Confucius: "morals and art will deteriorate"

Brought forward from an old post elsewhere.  Note that hyperbole concerning global warming has had even more negative consequences for proponents of these views than when the post was written in December of 2008.

“If language is not correct . . . . . . morals and art will deteriorate":

Many years ago I went through an art exhibition at a glitzy mall in Newport Beach. I remember two of the art exhibits. One was a model wearing one of those iconic French Maid outfits - the short black, form-fitting dress with the little white apron and cap. But the model (perhaps the artist) was a rather tall man who also wore black tights, some really ugly black and white gym shoes and a gas mask. The other memorable exhibit featured wall hangings which exploited the various textures and colors of lint removed from clothes dryers.

I think there was some sort of environmental message intended by both of these art pieces, but I'm not sure what it was.

There are at this moment in history a lot of "artists" on the Left delivering political messages through "art". Relatively few on the Right, most of them satirists pointing out rhetorical or other excesses on the Left. Moe Lane compares Australian Green protesters (dignified by American standards) to performance art. I can imagine myself in the audience. He says about the second photo in this post:

". . . it looks for all the world like a snapshot of a particularly boring and pretentious piece of performance art. You know the kind that I’m talking about; one featuring three or four people moving about and talking aimlessly while atonal, yet annoying, stringed instruments play in the background. You’re there because your S.O.’s friend is involved with the production, and you have been promised that the party afterward will not be dull - so you spend the time trying to decipher the program, which reads like it was translated from German to English via Academic Marxist, with a quick stopover at Martian. You suspect that it has gained in the translation; meanwhile, up on the stage someone has just waved a broomstick at a man wearing a cow suit, which apparently has something to do with the Falkland Islands War.

It is about that time that you grimly conclude that the party afterward will be dull."

Hyperbole on the part of Australian Greens has reduced the tendency of the general population to pay attention to the Global Warming Issue. Particularly since the Australian contribution to greenhouse gasses is so tiny compared to, say, China's growing emissions. But the Greens still have the attention of the news media - just like in America. This may be one reason why political "performance art" gets more and more extreme while serious, fact-based discussions of issues go unnoticed.

Why reject Dutch help on the oil spill?

The Gulf Oil Catastrophe could have been averted. There still stands an offer from the Dutch for technology which could remove most of the oil now threatening the coast. Even Kevin Costner's idea worked and was rejected. Follow the links to find out why so many common-sense solutions were rejected. Outrageous.

Meanwhile, Team Obama continues to focust on things like climate change legislation instead of fixing problems in the Gulf. The Heritage Foundation provides a "to-do list" for the President. As Krauthammer said a while ago, Barak Obama doesn't do the mundane. He's a "vision" kind of guy, not a "boats in the water" kind of guy.

UPDATE:   The Government decided to accept some foreign help on June 29. MORE THAN TWO MONTHS AFTER THE FIRST OFFERS OF HELP. Reynolds started bumping the first link up repeatedly on June 26. The article is detailed and makes the government sound stupidly inflexible and partisan (support of unions over environmental concerns, etc.). I'm sure lots of other people picked it up, too. Maybe Ace's burning skull on June 29 was the final straw.

Of course, some of the delays were just the typical stuff you get with a big bureaucracy, rather than the immediate responsibility of the Obama administration.  Not so different from when volunteer professional fire fighters were delayed after Katrina in providing help with rescues while they waited around for workplace sexual harassment training.

Obama has Vision Concerning the BP Oil Spill

Charles Krauthammer:

Barack Obama doesn't do the mundane. He was sent to us to do larger things. You could see that plainly in his Oval Office address on the gulf oil spill. He could barely get himself through the pedestrian first half: a bit of BP-bashing, a bit of faux-Clintonian "I feel your pain," a bit of recovery and economic mitigation accounting. It wasn't until the end of the speech -- the let-no-crisis-go-to-waste part that tried to leverage the Gulf Coast devastation to advance his cap-and-trade climate-change agenda -- that Obama warmed to his task.

Pedestrian is beneath Obama. Mr. Fix-It he is not. He is world-historical, the visionary, come to make the oceans recede and the planet heal.

How? By creating a glorious, new, clean green economy. And how exactly to do that? From Washington, by presidential command and with tens of billions of dollars thrown around. With the liberal (and professorial) conceit that scientific breakthroughs can be legislated into existence, Obama proposes to give us a new industrial economy.

Krauthammer brings us back to reality in the rest of the piece and ends with.

That's why Tuesday's speech was received with such consternation. It was so untethered from reality. The gulf is gushing, and the president is talking mystery roads to unknown destinations. That passes for vision, and vision is Obama's thing. It sure beats cleaning up beaches.

Rich Lowry on the bursting of a great "Liberal Hubris Bubble":

In his new book, The Icarus Syndrome, author Peter Beinart writes of “hubris bubbles” that infect American foreign policy after successes. In the domestic arena, liberalism has been riding its most expansive hubris bubble since Lyndon Johnson modestly declared on the cusp of the Great Society, “These are the most hopeful times since Christ was born.”

Those millennial expectations returned with the honeyed words of Obama. . . .

If landing a man on the moon proves government can do practically anything, what does it prove that it can’t get the right kind of boom to the right places and deploy it properly in the Gulf? What does it say that the Environmental Protection Agency couldn’t get its story straight on what kind of dispersant BP could use on the oil? What does it show that it took weeks for the government to approve the building of protective sand berms by Louisiana?

Rachel Carson Lied, Millions Died

The Sierra Club's lawsuit against DDT use helped precipitate a worldwide ban. If a right-leaning group had done something like this, it would be called genocide.

100 things you should know about DDT:

11. Population control advocates blamed DDT for increasing third world population. In the 1960s, World Health Organization authorities believed there was no alternative to the overpopulation problem but to assure than up to 40 percent of the children in poor nations would die of malaria. As an official of the Agency for International Development stated, "Rather dead than alive and riotously reproducing."

[Desowitz, RS. 1992. Malaria Capers, W.W. Norton & Company]

More on DDT here and here.

Dengue Fever hits Key West. Details here and here.

Coming Home from Copenhagen

Roger L. Simon summarizes his experience at the Copenhagen Climate Conference: "I have seen the future, and it stinks.

I am only just back last night from the Copenhagen UN climate change conference, yet am convinced of the accuracy of my headline – an obvious parody of Lincoln Steffens’ famous 1921 declaration about the Soviet Union, “I have seen the future and it works. ” In this case, however, the future concerns (supposedly democratic) “global governance” and not the workers’ state. For make no mistake about it, Kenneth Andersen is correct. COP15 was only peripherally about “climate change” and almost entirely about UN hegemony.

His comments on the European press and on ClimateGate are interesting. Also:

Copenhagen was intended as an important advance toward world governance. On the face of it, it’s a beautiful idea. When I was younger, I was highly attracted to it. But my up-close-and-personal encounters with the UN have turned that attraction to near revulsion. It’s very clear that under global government – because of its size and natural inefficiencies – accountability is nigh on to impossible, transparency nothing but a distant dream, very often not even desired. In short, it’s 1984. And COP15 was just that – legions staring at world leaders on Jumbotrons as they blathered platitudes, while negotiations were conducted behind closed doors. (That’s bad enough in our Congress, but on a global scale…?)

Simon did take advantage of his trip to repair a hole in his education:

But I will add that, perhaps fortuitously, my long voyage home . . . finally gave me ample undisturbed time to finish a book I had wanted to read for a long time – F. A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. How apropos it turned out to be. Hayek had a lot of this figured out in 1944. I recommend to all who haven’t taken the time. It’s just a sign of my own indoctrination that I had read Marx, Marcuse, Gramsci, etc., etc. first.

From the comments:

I would also urge you to read Hayek’s collection of essays titled “The Fatal Conceit”. I fortunately read his polemic 40 years ago and realized that I loved liberty more than equality. Hayek said that those that placed a higher value on liberty did better on any measure of equality, other than that of the grave or the gulag, than those who purported to produce a society of equals.

Summing Up the Copenhagen Conference

Victor Davis Hanson does it in just a few words. I agree with him. I can't think of any reason to take this conference seriously, other than the power it confers on truly terrible governments. And upon an opaque, unaccountable UN.

Illustration of an obsessive mindset: "So we cheated a bit" - Climate Art meets Climate Science:

Taking his cue from discredited ClimateGate "scientists," Danish artist Jens Galschioet came up with an arresting way to precisely illustrate the soggy dangers of climate change. High above the heads of Copenhagen's pedestrians, Galschioet strategically placed a series of red, flashing lights: With the blinking red lights placed all around Copenhagen, including near the Bella Center that currently hosts the climate change talks, he hopes to stir images in people’s minds of what the Danish capital will look like when the Greenland ice melts. . .{That is, if sea levels don't drop}.

"Technically and pedagogically it is a sound idea. The problem is that they are hanging at incorrect heights by the city lakes, where they currently sit at 11.34 metres," said architect Ole Oerslev.

The city lakes are already 5.89 metres above sea level, so the flashing lights should have been put up at 69 centimetres height.

"The rest of the lights put up around the city and out by the Bella Center are in the correct elevation. We wanted to display something downtown as well and even though we knew that the lights should have been at 69 centimetres, we didn’t really feel it looked like much. So we cheated a bit and decided to explain if anyone found out," explained Galschioet.

"For all of you hateful Metric Deniers out there (I'm looking at you, America), 11.34 meters equals 37.2 feet and 69 centimeters is a little over 2 feet. Since I missed out on all the fun of reconstructing ClimateGate data, here's my groundbreaking contribution:" . . Graph at the link. Plus another piece of really weird Climate Art. Go ahead. Take a chance. Follow the link.

Other Climate Change art, science and rhetoric brings to mind in an ironic way examples of too much government power, in particular for me: Nazi concentration camps and Rwandan torture/death squads. Robert Mugabe:

When the capitalist gods of carbon burp and belch their dangerous emissions, it's we, the lesser mortals of the developing sphere, who gasp and sink and eventually die.

A representative of Mugabe's government wants to reduce the population of the country by half. They have been busy doing this by killing people from the wrong tribal background, as well as their political opposition. And by terrorizing and kicking out of the country the Indians, Asians and Caucasians who knew how to run things. Now, Mugabe is highly dependent on aid from "the capitalist gods of carbon", whom he needs to maintain the power of his murderous regime.

From the comments:

Funny how environmentalism shades into socialism over time.

Given the exemplary environmental record of socialist countries, this make total sense.

Yes: no rich capitalist country has ever come close to the environmental destruction wreaked by the USSR, particularly in its lesser republics and satellite countries. Once they're in power, socialist governments justify all sorts of damage to "lesser mortals", and to the environment, for the "common good". Or as some might put it, for "Climate Justice".

Think President Obama has the power to convince China not to build a new coal-fired plant every 10 days? Think Again.

Think that carbon in the air will be reduced if aluminum production moves from Australia to China so that Australia can reduce its "carbon footprint"? Think again.

Many on the Left went home from this conference discouraged and disillusioned, especially with President Obama, whom they had hoped could bring the world together on the issue of carbon reduction and "climate justice". Many government representatives went home to try to figure out how to use the next conference, in Mexico City, to further their own interests.

Music of Zimbabwe from a group now apparently living in Austria. Liner notes for #16:

16. Vinqo (Trad., arr., Dumisani Ramadu Moyo) – “Ama Vinqo Vinqo” are skin ripples of fat that are characteristic of bulkiness. Fatness in Ndebele society is a desirable sign of success and good health. This song is dedicated to Joshua Mqabuko Nyongolo Nkomo, the late great former vice-president of Zimbabwe who founded the ZAPU liberation movement. He was affectionately called “u ma Fuku fuku” in reference to his large frame. Insingizi lament that since his departure, Zimbabweans have faced unimaginable suffering and despondence. We miss him greatly.

Check out the samples for #5 and #10, too. CD also available at highly capitalist Walmart as "Spirit of Africa: Insingizi." Recommended.

Separation of Powers? Bah! Promise and Peril of the Executive State

The Senate failed to ratify the Kyoto agreement during the Clinton Administration. This was later blamed on George W. Bush. As if he had the power to force the Senate to vote to harm the economy.

Now, lots of people also seem to think that Obama has a great deal of power to negotiate in Copenhagen and beyond without congressional approval, and they're apparently right, according to a report discussed at the link. But that power comes with risks to the President.

What we have here is the modern executive state. And the tale of how so powerful an executive arose is not really complicated: Congress and the Supreme Court conspired to create it. A century ago, progressives began viewing the Constitution’s checks and balances not as protections against overweening power but as impediments to enlightened government — the kind of government that would one day be used to “save the planet.” Since the New Deal, Congress has delegated ever more powers to the executive branch without much guidance as to how they are to be used. And a supine Court, cowed originally by Franklin Roosevelt’s threat to add six new members, has gone along, in the name of “democracy” and judicial modesty, even as the expanding government has looked less and less democratic.

Still, some democratic controls are still in place. . .

If Obama goes too far, Congress or the courts could become involved. But the power of foreign governments not to cooperate with Obama is an even greater PR risk to the President than any potential domestic action to limit his power. China is asserting new-found power. Reprise SNL. Sort of crude, but makes a point. Likewise Ace, though one quote concerning Obama's "unprecedented" non-binding agreement is cogent:

There is no binding part of this deal. That's why China, India, etc., have agreed to it. It doesn't require them to do anything.

Instead, it asks countries that are stupid enough to slit their economic throats to do so, so that India and China and so on can reap the rewards

Peril from the American Left: A lot of people thought that if Obama came to Copenhagen, he would surely be able to bring the world together on Global Warming. Some Progressives are disappointed in Obama's lack of messianic power to bring to pass a binding agreement between the leaders of the world's contries - rich and poor, free and unfree:

This is a declaration that small and poor countries don't matter, that international civil society doesn't matter, and that serious limits on carbon don't matter. The president has wrecked the UN and he's wrecked the possibility of a tough plan to control global warming. It may get Obama a reputation as a tough American leader, but it's at the expense of everything progressives have held dear. 189 countries have been left powerless, and the foxes now guard the carbon henhouse without any oversight.

Wow. The reality-based community isn't very reality-based sometimes.

History and Future of Progressivism: Four intellectual forerunners of Obama-style progressivisism, plus comedy gold from John Kerry. And from President Obama, if you follow the last link.

Harry Reid, Herman van Rompuy and REALLY Big Government

Harry Reid has been in the news lately, as he tries to push through his massive version of the health care bill before people find out what it says.

Mark Steyn looks at the bigger picture concerning growing statism, weaving several trains of thought into a coherent piece comparing Barak Obama, Herman van Rompuy and Harry Reid. A short work of art which is interesting just for its structure, whether or not you agree with him. Read the whole thing. Excerpts:

Rich Lowry, my boss at National Review, writes that Obama has become a "crashingly banal" bore. The good news is that he "is not nearly as dull as, say, Herman van Rompuy."

Who?

Oh, come on. Herman van Rompuy. He's some Belgian cove who was recently appointed "president" of "Europe," whatever that means. . .

Steyn then writes about how van Rompuy was chosen to head up the EU, in part, because he was not charismatic. "By contrast, the point of Barack Obama is to dazzle. . . . As Evan Thomas of Newsweek drooled a mere six months ago, Obama was 'standing above the country ... above the world. He's sort of God.'" Plus, Steyn makes an excursion into satire concerning the repetitive rhetorical patterns which have emerged in President Obama's speeches. Not to be missed if you want to understand the way the President's speeches now affect various audiences.* Then:

To return to what's-his-name, the Belgian bloke, van Rumpoy, just because he's a nonentity doesn't mean he's not effective. In his acceptance speech the other week, he declared: "2009 is the first year of global governance."

Did you get that memo?

Me, neither. But he has a point. The upgrading of the G20, Gordon Brown's plans for planetary financial regulation, and the Copenhagen climate summit (whose inauguration of a transnational bureaucracy to facilitate the multitrillion-dollar shakedown of functioning economies would be the biggest exercise in punitive liberalism the developed world has ever been subjected to) are all pillars of "global governance." Right now, if you don't like the local grade school, you move to the next town. If you're sick of Massachusetts taxes, you move to New Hampshire. Where do you move to if you don't like "global governance"? What polling station do you go to to vote it out?

America has its Herman van Rumpoys, too. Harry Reid is really the Harry van Reidpoy of Congress. Very few people know who he is or what he does. But, while Obama continues on his stately progress . . . Reid's beavering away, advancing the cause of van Rumpoy-scale statism.

The news this week that the well-connected Democrat pollster, Mark Penn, received $6 million of "stimulus" money to "preserve" three jobs in his public relations firm to work on a promotional campaign for the switch from analog to digital TV is a perfect snapshot of Big Government. . .

Because of the disconnect between rhetoric and reality in many of the President's speeches, many conservatives noted their surprise and relief at the realism and humility in President Obama's acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize. But Steyn found one piece of characteristic "dazzle" that the speechwriters left in:

. . . Can you believe this line made it into the speech?

"I do not bring with me today a definitive solution to the problems of war."

Well, there's a surprise. When you consider all the White House eyeballs that approve a presidential speech, it's truly remarkable that there's no one to scribble on the first draft: "Scrub this, Fred. It makes POTUS sound like a self-aggrandizing buffoon." It's not even merely the content, but the stylistic tics: "I do not bring with me" – as if I, God of Evan Thomas' Newsweek, am briefly descending to this obscure Scandinavian backwater bearing wisdom from beyond the stars.

Obama's sagging numbers are less a regular presidential "approval rating" than a measure of the ever-widening gulf between the messianic ballyhoo and his actual performance. . .

Maybe President Obama can pull out of his recent pattern of over-the-top, repetitive rhetoric. The speech in Oslo was a hopeful sign. Time will tell. Meamwhile we need to watch people like Harry Reid and Herman van Rompuy, working away steadily and usually quietly to increase the power of people like them over our lives.

.

* Historical note: When Mark Steyn was blogging about Barak Obama's speech at the Democratic Convention which put his career on fast-forward, Steyn's reaction was something to the effect that "The Republicans are in trouble." He was looking toward the future career of Obama. Steyn's assessment of Obama's effectiveness in speaking, especially in light of his over-exposure, has changed some in the article linked above. Several factors probably contributed to his markedly different reviews.

If you're interested in the President's speeches, you might also see if you can still detect evidence of The Obama Code, "a moral vision and a view of unity" in President Obama's recent speeches. The "code" was not expounded by Obama - it was "discovered" by Professor George Lakoff, one of the Left's leading teachers of techniques for deceptive and influential rhetoric. The ends justify the means, you know.

The "Seven Crucial Intellectual Moves" of the Obama Code are:

1. Values Over Programs
2. Progressive Values Are American Values
3. Biconceptualism and the New Bipartisanship
4. Protection and Empowerment
5. Morality and Economics Fit Together
6. Systemic Causation and Systemic Risk
7. Contested Concepts and Patriotic Language

Harry Reid's Self-Sacrificing Push for Health Care Reform

Barak Obama promised us "Hope and Change". There are several governmental efforts right now to dramatically change the world. Some people have pointed out how improbable it is that someone like Harry Reid could be leading one of those efforts. Quite a contrast in personality and style with the dazzling Barak Obama. That contrast, and its potential consequences, is discussed in a fascinating manner by Mark Steyn, here. Many people think that Reid may be sacrificing his chances for re-election by his push to pass this unpopular bill.

Ace:

We must rush, rush, rush to pass a bill, without even reading it, so that the bill can take effect in 2014.

Yeah that makes sense.

Once in a while a wildly inappropriate statement by Harry Reid makes the news. He recently compared Republicans who opposed his health care bill to those in the past who had supported the continuation of slavery in the United States. Maybe that's why Reid didn't even tell Republican senators what was in his bill. Update December 17, Sen. McConnell:

“Americans were told the purpose of reform was to reduce the cost of health care.

"Instead, Democrat leaders produced a $2.5 trillion, 2,074-page monstrosity that vastly expands government, raises taxes, raises premiums, and wrecks Medicare.

“And they want to rush this bill through by Christmas — one of the most significant, far-reaching pieces of legislation in U.S. history. They want to rush it.

“And here’s the most outrageous part: at the end of this rush, they want us to vote on a bill that no one outside the Majority Leader’s conference room has even seen.

“That’s right. The final bill we’ll vote on isn’t even the one we’ve had on the floor. It’s the deal Democrat leaders have been trying to work out in private.

“That’s what they intend to bring to the floor and force a vote on before Christmas."

Hope. Change. Transparency.

Whatever its details, Reid's bill would move Americans closer to the captivity to government bureaucracy now seen in Canadian health care, which is hitting the predictable decline which develops in government-run systems.

The Canadian system is now seriously under-serving those with chronic conditions and those outside cities. In the UK, the rich can opt out of the crumbling public system if they are willing to forego all government-paid health care, while continuing to pay taxes for such care. This option is not available to Canadians. Those who now come to the U.S. for care may soon find that option for escape from captivity to bureaucracy gone, too. And the pharmaceutical development upon which they freeload may be very seriously curtailed in the future, too.

With all the recent demonizing of insurance companies by the Democratic leadership and the plan to double-tax the best insurance policies, and to otherwise turn insurance companies into government contractors, how long can it be before only the very rich will be able to afford quality care, or before just about everyone must accept "standard", rationed care?

Joseph C. Phillips reminds Harry Reid of some actual history concerning slavery.

In remarks intended to further paint the political right as immoral, racist and evil, Reid offered that, “Instead of joining us on the right side of history, all the Republicans can come up with is, ’slow down, stop everything, let’s start over.’ If you think you’ve heard these same excuses before, you’re right. When this country belatedly recognized the wrongs of slavery, there were those who dug in their heels and said ’slow down, it’s too early, things aren’t bad enough.’”

Reid is obviously confused. Republicans have no power to block passage of the senate healthcare reform bill. Nor are Republicans delaying passage of Obamacare. If Healthcare reform is being delayed and/or eventually dies it will be because one or more of Reid’s fellow Democrats decided to do the right thing and kill this Frankenbill where it lays.

Ironically, had Reid been speaking to Democrats he would not only have been currently correct, but historically accurate as well. . .

Reid's health care bill is unpopular in his own state. Reid has just deeply, and inaccurately, insulted his constituency as well as his Republican colleagues. Why does he seem so desperate to pass this bill when it is doing him so much political damage?

Byron York talked with a Democratic Strategist who presented some possible explanations: :

In the end, perhaps the most compelling explanation for Democratic behavior is that they are simply in too deep to do anything else. "Once you've gone this far, what is the cost of failure?" asks the strategist.

At that point -- Republicans will love this -- he compared congressional Democrats with robbers who have passed the point of no return in deciding to hold up a bank. Whatever they do, they're guilty of something. "They're in the bank, they've got their guns out. They can run outside with no money, or they can stick it out, go through the gunfight, and get away with the money."

That's it. Democrats are all in. They're going through with it. Even if it kills them.

Strong-arm tactics in Copenhagen and Washington

Powerline:

Global warming alarmist Stephen Schneider gave a press briefing in Copenhagen today. No one was impolite enough to remind Schneider of the days when he claimed the world was about to be destroyed by global cooling, but Phelim McAleer. . . showed up to ask a question about Climategate.

Schneider's response, suggesting that the emails that were leaked by a whistleblower might have been "edited," was wholly disingenuous. A considerable number of the emails were Schneider's, so if they were somehow inauthentic, he certainly could have said so. . . . Which means that Schneider had nothing whatsoever to say in response to McAleer's question.

Except to call security and make McAleer's cameraman stop filming, even though the event was ostensibly a press briefing open to the media. . . .

Global warming hysteria isn't science, it's politics. And totalitarian politics at that.

"If only the UN were this tough on terrorists." Somebody feels their will to power being thwarted.

More strong-arm tactics - proposed EPA regulations designed to intimidate business into supporting cap and trade:

The easiest way to get rich is to legislate yourself some money. P.J. O'Rourke.

(Registration for videos free.) Past energy boondoggles outlined. Even a straight energy tax would be better than cap-and-trade, but provides much less opportunity for graft.

Shadow Conference in Copenhagen: The conference concerning the science.

Teaching Math and Science the New-Fashioned Way

Barbara Oakley, Fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineers and an engineering professor at Oakland University, writes about the influence of government grants on the ways teaching is done in America:

Each year, I get invited to Washington DC to serve as a pimp. A scientific pimp. I’m expected to join a small legion of volunteers to beg my senators and representatives to spend tax money on a program called the Math and Science Partnerships. This program is supposed to help improve how math and science is taught in this country. What could be wrong with that?

Climategate gives us a whole new way of understanding what’s wrong with that.

The breathtaking dishonesty and incompetence of climatology’s intellectual leadership clearly reveals that a discipline can become dominated by a small group of ideologically-motivated intellectual gatekeepers. . . .

Read the whole thing. Follow some of the links. Some interesting points:

Narrow intellectual gatekeeping is omnipresent in academia. Want to know why the government wastes hundreds of millions of dollars on math and science programs that never seem to improve the test scores of American students?[3] Part of the reason for this is that today’s K-12 educators—unlike educators in other high-scoring countries of the world—refuse to acknowledge evidence that memorization plays an important role in mastering mathematics. Any proposed program that supports memorization is deemed to be against “creativity” by today’s intellectual gatekeepers in K-12 education, including those behind the Math and Science Partnerships. As one NSF program director told me: “We hear about success stories with practice and repetition-based programs like Kumon Mathematics. But I’ll be frank with you—you’ll never get anything like that funded. We don’t believe in it.” Instead the intellectual leadership in education encourages enormously expensive pimping programs that put America even further behind the international learning curve. . .

There's more concerning business ethics, prison guards and the rarity of paradigm shifts in science.

I find it interesting that when paradigm shifts do come, they are often brought about by people who have not specialized in the field where the shift occurs.

Limos and Private Planes: Must be a Climate Conference

Like Glenn Reynolds says, I'll believe it's a crisis when the people telling me it's a crisis start acting like it's a crisis. (And when Big Media starts reporting as if the crisis is based on science rather than politics).

Taking a private jet to a conference on stopping global warming is a bit like traveling in a sedan chair carried by indentured servants to a summit on stopping human trafficking.

Plus, It’s too cold to walk from the hotel to the convention on global warming. Let’s take a limo!

To be fair, lots of attendees went to Copenhagen via the "Climate Express" party train across Europe (no word yet on how they'll get home).

But Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the UN Star Chamber for global warming), who has called for “hefty aviation taxes … to deter people from flying,” himself flew at least 443,000 miles on alleged IPCC business during a recent 19-month period.

State of the Science: Quick summary of ClimateGate issues.

Most Influential Tree in the world. Dilbert, Climate Scientist. Breach in the bunker.

Thinking about the poor.

ClimateGate and the social validation of knowledge. The decline they hid. And now, physicists speak out against corrupt data in paleoclimatology. Political fallout - conflicts of interest among physicists supporting the UN position? Like working for Big Oil?

Physical evidence vs. computer models. The enemies of science on the Left. Not just ClimateGate.

Global warming and the media:

Google won't autosuggest on ClimateGate. Remember, their motto is "Don't be Evil". Makes you feel good about the web histories they're keeping from your personal computer searches. Meanwhile, 54 newspapers publish the same editorial.

If the most challenging public relations problem for "your side" is that you have conspired -- either to suppress science or to suppress the news of suppressing science -- you might want to reconsider responding with, well, a conspiracy.

Contessa Brewer, ClimateGate Denier: Note that Erica Lovely says, that after so many decades of trying to get some traction on the global warming science the scientists "really can't afford to have much detracting science get out". (So, suppressing inconvenient data is O.K., I guess). Examples of "everyday-speak" among scientists: 1. "Mike's Nature Trick", 2. "Hide the Decline", 3. “Plots (1 at a time) yearly maps of calibrated (PCR-infilled or not) MXD reconstructions of growing season temperatures. Uses ‘corrected’ MXD—but shouldn’t usually plot past 1960 because these will be artificially adjusted to look closer to the real temperatures.” 4. “ARGH. Just went back to check on synthetic production. Apparently—I have no memory of this at all—we’re not doing observed rain days! It’s all synthetic from 1990 onwards. So I’m going to need conditionals in the update program to handle that. And separate gridding before 1989. And what TF happens to station counts?" 5. “I support the continued collection of such data, but I am disturbed by how some people in the paleo community try to oversell their product.” 6. "I suppose the earlier talk implying that we should not ‘muddy the waters’ by including contradictory evidence worried me." 7. "All of our attempts, so far, to estimate hemisphere-scale temperatures for the period around 1000 years ago are based on far fewer data than any of us would like. None of the datasets used so far has anything like the geographical distribution that experience with recent centuries indicates we need, and no one has yet found a convincing way of validating the lower-frequency components of them against independent data...." It's all part of how the science became settled.

Global warming and international politics:

Canada: international villain. India and Saudi Arabia want payoffs for retrictive green measures (for different reasons). Russia will get billions in credits from the Kyoto accord (because their economy tanked -- not because they made progress concerning CO2-reducing technology or policies).

The UK government tries to stop re-examination of ClimateGate data.

“Today’s debate about global warming is essentially a debate about freedom. The environmentalists would like to mastermind each and every possible (and impossible) aspect of our lives.”

Vaclav Klaus
Blue Planet in Green Shackles

Devil' Dictionary: skeptic's guide to Copenhagen.

Global Warming as a Religion (complete with free prostitutes, sort of like in ancient Babylon - though maybe not with official sanction this time.):

We're doing affirmations now? "Skeptics"... affirmations... is this religion?

Yes...just substitute caviar wedges for communion wafers and you've got it.

Latest Advice to the Faithful: Don't go green. "Individual voluntary action is a big distraction from what we really need — compulsion."

Well, I guess that lets all the faithful who flew to Copenhagen in private jets off the hook.

Update: Reporting on the conference in "Hopenhagen" first-hand (Registration for PJTV is free): Heavy on the anti-Western, anti-American and anti-capitalist themes, along with gender issues, etc. Climate scientists were also allowed a small venue, "bringing some complexity" to the simplistic scientific picture painted for the public. But politics prevailed, because of the huge differences "between capitalist patriarchy carbon and women's socialist carbon." Obviously. More here on excess and waste, controlling the message, promoting socialism, irrationality, etc.

Fascinating. Including: "Cuba, another, better world" That is, if you like countries with health care for all and food rationing for most, high literacy rates and librarians in prison, little economic activity and billionaire dictators. Worth registering with PJTV if you haven't registered already.

The CRUtape letters: Good summary of ClimateGate issues

The first reaction at the Powerline blog to the leaked CRU data was:

The emails I've reviewed so far do not suggest that these scientists are perpetrating a knowing and deliberate hoax. On the contrary, they are true believers. I don't doubt that they are sincerely convinced--in fact, fanatically so--that human activity is warming the earth. But the emails are disturbing nonetheless. What they reveal, more than anything, is a bunker mentality. These pro-global warming scientists see themselves as under siege, and they view AGW skeptics as bitter enemies.

There is a lot more insight now into the leaked documents and the reactions of scientists to the information in them. This article by Steven F. Hayward on what we know so far is a good summary. Read the whole thing - click the "printer-friendly" button for an easier-to-read copy, on screen or on paper:

As tempting as it is to indulge in Schadenfreude over the richly deserved travails of a gang that has heaped endless calumny on dissenting scientists (NASA's James Hansen, for instance, compared MIT's Richard Lindzen to a tobacco-industry scientist, and Al Gore and countless -others liken skeptics to "Holocaust deniers"), the meaning of the CRU documents should not be misconstrued. The emails do not in and of themselves reveal that catastrophic climate change scenarios are a hoax or without any foundation. What they reveal is something problematic for the scientific community as a whole, namely, the tendency of scientists to cross the line from being disinterested investigators after the truth to advocates for a preconceived conclusion about the issues at hand. . .

The distinction between utterly politicized scientists such as Jones, Mann, and NASA's James Hansen, and other more sober scientists has been lost on the media and climate campaigners for a long time now, and as a result, the CRUtape letters will cast a shadow on the entire field. There is no doubt plenty more of this kind of corruption in other hotbeds of climate science, but there are also a lot of unbiased scientists trying to do important and valuable work. Climate alarmists and their media cheerleaders are fond of warning about "tipping points" to disaster, but ironically this episode may represent a tipping point against the alarmists. The biggest hazard to serious climate science all along was not so much contrarian arguments from skeptics, but rather the damage that the hyperbole of the environmental community would inflict on their own cause. . . .

Fourteen days now that the major networks have not reported on ClimateGate.

Al Gore cancels Copenhagen appearance: Too late to save polar bears?

Re-cap of the ClimateGate controversy, with some historical background here. Tim Blair reports on tragic activists disappointed by Al Gore's cancellation of a personal appearance in Copenhagen. Quoting Mark Steyn:

It may well be that Warmergate has come along too late. I won’t pretend to know the motivations of Jones, Mann and their colleagues, but judging from recent eco-advertising their work appears to have driven worshippers at the First Church of the Settled Scientist literally insane. A new commercial shows polar bears dropping from the skies onto city streets and crushing the cars below …

As the ad explains, “An average European flight produces over 400 kg of greenhouse gases for every passenger. That’s the weight of an adult polar bear.”?Oooookay. It’s A Warmerful Life: every time they call your flight, a poley bear loses its wings.

Blair observes:

Meanwhile, tragic activists who’ve flown to Denmark in the hope of shaking Al Gore’s hand may have killed their share of bears for nothing:
Al Gore has canceled his $1,209-a-handshake appearance in Copenhagen.

Al Gore staunchly refused to debate anyone concerning global warming even before ClimateGate broke. Guess there's no chance of a debate now.

Steyn has a list (somewhat different from mine) concerning how the science became settled. Read the whole thing.

The science is so settled it’s now perfectly routine for leaders of the developed world to go around sounding like apocalyptic madmen of the kind that used to wander the streets wearing sandwich boards and handing out homemade pamphlets. Governments that are incapable of—to pluck at random—enforcing their southern border, reducing waiting times for routine operations to below two years, or doing something about the nightly ritual of car-torching “youths,” are nevertheless taken seriously when they claim to be able to change the very heavens—if only they can tax and regulate us enough. As they will if they reach “consensus” at Copenhagen. And most probably even if they don’t.

How did we reach this point? Ah, well. Like the proverbial sausage factory, you never want to look too closely at how the science gets settled.

He then gets kind of technical. And he considers the quality of the data with which the CRU was working to be an even greater scandal than their attempts to "hide the decline" - don't stop at the "how the science was settled" list.

The Deceiver website (Motto: Do as you say or we'll say what you do) broke the news about Gore's cancelled appearance, and also has some Global Warming news about Sting.

Tigerhawk on the "moral imperative" to stop global warming via control of the world's economy:

How about we do a bunch of easy stuff first with deregulation and money that is already committed, like making it a lot easier to build nuclear power plants and spending that "stimulus" money on a massive upgrade of electrical grid instead of repaving 12 miles of highway in each Congressional district? Maybe some experimental seeding of the Arctic atmosphere with reflective particulates. All cheap, reversible stuff that will give governments some chance to show competence.

No, really.

When you start with a massive transfer of wealth and an almost gleeful deconstruction of consumer capitalism, you are bound to trigger equally massive resistance, almost no matter how swell your science and how scary your predictions of catastrophe. That is so obvious, one is forced to wonder whether the real point is the massive transfer of wealth and the deconstruction of consumer capitalism.