Climate alarmism

For years I've been posting on the hypocrisy of some who decry so-called "climate alarmism" [anyone who makes a claim consistent with consensus climate models] while at the same time engaging in the worst kind of alarmism themselves. Today's example is an easy one to post on:

The moves now being made by the world's political establishment to lock us into December's Copenhagen treaty to halt global warming are as alarming as anything that has happened in our lifetimes. Last week in Italy, the various branches of our emerging world government, G8 and G20, agreed in principle that the world must by 2050 cut its CO2 emissions in half. Britain and the US are already committed to cutting their use of fossil fuels by more than 80 per cent. Short of an unimaginable technological revolution, this could only be achieved by closing down virtually all our economic activity: no electricity, no transport, no industry.

Scary stuff: world government intent on bringing everyone back to the stone ages. What's consistently hilarious about all this is that laws intending to reduce carbon emissions can actually be reversed if science eventually tells us that their models were wrong (let's say for the sake of argument that Sen. James Inhofe is correct); or if we collectively decide that--as "don't worry, be happy" proponents like Roger Pielke (Jr and Sr) suggest--the economic consequences of slowing climate change are far more onerous than the relatively smaller consequences of climate change itself. The same cannot be said about our current state-of-the-art understanding of climate models.

New science and politics poll

Is 6% Republican scientists even outside the margin of error?

I guess Newt has his work cut out for him...

May the force be with you

Senator Byrd is Darth Vader:

Though injured, like Darth Vader at the end of "Return Of The Jedi," he will have the strength to intercede as Emperor Obama slowly chokes the life out of a young warrior named Manchin. The irony of Byrd pitching the emperor down a reactor shaft or some such with a deciding Senate vote against cap and trade should not be lost.

"Help us Robert C. Byrd; you're our only hope."

It would be a fitting final act for our greatest senator, showing he's not with the party but with the people and their family budgets, selfless to the end, with nothing to lose and doing the right thing for West Virginia.

Of course later, while we all celebrate with the Ewoks our short-term win over those who would end our way of life, we'd see the senator again, as we want to remember him. A little younger, maybe playing that fiddle in a life-like hologram like at the end of the movie. He might be surrounded by other heroes of our past. Arthur Boreman, Stonewall Jackson, whomever floats your boat.

Vote against cap-and-trade. Then you're allowed to die. Nice.

Oh boy...

More from the Stanford group:

Clean Coal

Sad:

Reminds me of desperate PNW loggers in the 80s and 90s who were told they would lose their jobs to enviro-whackos who want to save the spotted owl, when in fact the companies ran out of easily harvested old-growth and their bosses were already preparing to move back to Georgia.

ZOMG!!!!1!

If this bill passes, who knows what will happen next? Maybe they'll start inspecting homes for indoor plumbing:

Let me introduce you to a little section of the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill called the "Building Energy Performance Labeling Program". It's section 304 of the bill and it says, basically, that your house belongs to the state. See, the Federal Government really wants a country full of energy-efficient homes, so much so that the bill mandates that new homes be 30 percent more energy efficient than the current building code on the very day the law is signed. That efficiency goes up to 50 percent by 2014 and only goes higher from there, all the way to 2030. That, by the way, is not merely a target but a requirement of the law. New homes must reach those efficiency targets no matter what.

ARRRRGGGGHHHHH, this will kill an industry that died in a speculative bubble needs to build more suburban McMansions! And the government is going to own your home and inspect it regularly, and...oh wait...retrofitting homes for energy efficiency is voluntary? And they'll even give you half the money it cost you to retrofit? Unbelievable! The socialist Democrat dictatorship won't even pay homeowners more than the costs they save from voluntary energy efficiency upgrades.

Poo-pooing the choo-choo twain

This sums up current right-wing libertarian thought on transportation policy:

Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood can't be serious.

Or, at least, I hope not.

When I had the chance to meet him here at The Post recently, I was fully prepared to endure a healthy dose of rambling about how antiquated, inefficient, money-losing choo-choo trains would replace cars.

One can also be prepared to only laugh on the inside when a Cabinet member asserts, in all earnestness, that cycling our kids to school en masse (and this adult has yet to master the art of driving his kids to school) was the answer to our national congestion problems.

Why? Well, because airplanes are safe and bicycles...

Oh, I do. Why wouldn't I? There wasn't a single U.S. airline passenger death due to an accident in 2007 and 2008, years in which commercial airliners carried 1.5 billion passengers. If you are a skateboarder, skier, pedestrian or train rider, your chances of dying are far higher.

In both 2007 and 2008, around 700 bicyclists reportedly died on U.S. roads. This doesn't count the immense cost of other cyclist-related injuries and the unseemly sight of those preposterously kaleidoscopic tights the rest of us are exposed to.

...bicycles cause girly-injuries.

Daddy will take you to school in his flying car.

It's this jumbled mess of illogic--what distances do bicycles and airplanes have in common, and why would providing practical alternatives to air and road transportation be such a bad thing in places like the NE corridor and California?--that is so instructive. Conservatives, libertarians, and Republicans--Ray LaHood being one notable exception--don't get it and apparently they never have. And that's presumably why they tend to reside in far-flung corners of the country where the only practical modes of transportation include driving the car to the airport.

Machu Picchu

Machu Picchu Post from Machu Picchu Post Team on Vimeo.

Uhm,

Wanker Street Journal...

General Motors is likely to become profitable only if it is allowed to specialize in what it does best -- namely, midsize and large sedans, sports cars, pickup trucks and SUVs. The company can't possibly afford to scrap billions of dollars of equipment used to produce its best vehicles simply to please politicians who would rather see GM start from scratch, wasting more taxpayer money on "retooling" to produce unwanted and unprofitable subcompacts and electric cars. The average mileage of GM's future cars won't matter if nobody buys them.

...GM entered bankruptcy before Obama's fuel efficiency standards kicked in. Toyota barely escaped a similar fate in part because it sells cars where GM can't: its home market, which coincidentally has tough fuel economy standards. That should tell you something.

Though I agree that higher gas taxes are needed in addition to (not as a substitute of) CAFE standards.

Gird your loins

Malkin:

Killing cap-and-tax won’t happen without massive resistance and persistence. Gird your loins and get on the phone next week.

Indeed. Gird your loins, Michelle.

And who better to demonstrate loin girding than Chris Horner:

So when the EPA got caught suppressing the sole substantive report submitted as part of its "internal deliberation" over whether and how to seize the energy sector of the U.S. economy, you knew ad hominem was sure to follow. In the Washington Times story about the suppressed report, we read that a spokeswoman for EPA administrator Lisa P. Jackson — who made the determination that CO2 threatens the world — "noted that the memo's author, Alan Carlin, is an economist, not a climate scientist." Funny how people tasked with certain jobs become unqualified only when they are inconvenient.

Which is then followed by...wait for it...an ad hom attack!

Carlin is, indeed, a Ph.D. economist from MIT, a degree he obtained after earning a degree in physics from Cal Tech — both of which probably explain why he holds the job of reviewing such proposals. But this reflexive ad hom raises several obvious questions, none more obvious than: What makes Lisa P. Jackson a climate scientist? (She's a chemical engineer.)

For that matter, who the hell are Barack Obama, Henry Waxman, Ed Markey, Nancy Pelosi, Carol Browner, Al Gore . . . need I continue? They all apparently are perfectly suited to reach informed judgment on the issue. Waxman is a scientist (bachelor's in political science, UCLA ‘61) like Batman's a scientist.

Given that now the criteria is that only Senator-scientists are allowed to propose and vote on any legislation involving any sort of science, we might ask whether Senator Inhofe--quoted in Michelle Malkin's post--is qualified to vote and gird loins against climate legislation. More Horner:

The alarmists, now joined by the Obama administration, are bullying, sneaking, dissembling, and on occasion openly lying to the public to get their way. You've got a little bit of time left to be outraged. My colleagues and I are flattered that so many people just assume we're handling these things, and the public can go about their lives. I have a life on the outside, too, with a wife and children. So, please, if this should come to be, don't call me. We told you.

I for one take pity upon senior fellows at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Tough life, I'm sure. Fighting in the trenches and girding loins for a pittance and no respect.

Forbes blog flunks rhetoric

Waxman-Markey flunks math. Points made:

1.) Rolling brownouts occur right now
2.) We get much of our electricity from coal
3.) We don't get much electricity from wind and solar
4.) Therefore, we shouldn't try to get more electricity from wind and solar.

This is akin to the equally dishonest yet slightly more coherent argument of 'Oh my what shall we do when the wind stops blowing and the sun refuses to shine?'

Because we don't have much solar and wind power generation currently, we should not attempt to increase the percentage of solar and wind either. The argument put forth here involves an additional layer of weirdness, namely that our current electric grid isn't as good as we might hope, so therefore we should make sure not to change anything about it. Why does this make so much sense to some?

There,

I fixed it.

Wasn't Assrocket offended by the term "denier"?

That was then, this is now:

Global warming zealots are a bit like Iran's mullahs. They are fanatically devoted to a series of false propositions.

Last I heard, mullahs deny the holocaust too.

Looks who's alarmist now...

Al Gore looks like such an amateur alarmist compared to this:

IBD:

It's what Janet Napolitano, secretary of Homeland Security, might call a "man-caused disaster," a phrase she coined to replace the politically incorrect "terrorist attack." But no terrorist could ever dream of inflicting as much damage as this bill. [...]

Consumers would pay through the nose as electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket, as President Obama once put it, by 90% adjusted for inflation. Inflation-adjusted gasoline prices would rise 74%, residential natural gas prices by 55% and the average family's annual energy bill by $1,500.

Hit hardest by all this would be the "95% of working families" Obama keeps mentioning as being protected from increased taxation. They are protected, that is, unless they use energy. Then they'll be hit by this draconian energy tax.

Ed Morrissey

Cap-and-trade is a tax, one imposed through an artificial scarcity model onto an industry that drives the economy. The AP reports the CBO and EPA cost estimates without mentioning that those predictions only cover the actual mechanical costs of cap-and-trade. They do not predict the economic impact on American families from the loss of economic power as energy becomes more scarce and expensive. This bill will lose the US 2.5% of its GDP each and every year in the years after the first decade of implementation. [...]

Call your Representative today to tell them not to strangle the American economy.

Vox Popoli:

I've always had my doubts about the credibility of scientists due to their demonstrated willingness to sell biological philosophy as genuine science. But their collective behavior in what will eventually be known as the Great Global Warming Scandal really demonstrates what a bunch of greedy, power-tripping scum so many of them are. The amusing thing is that scientists like PZ Myers and Sam Harris, ex-scientists like Richard Dawkins, and would-be scientists like Daniel Dennett constantly worry about the "danger" supposedly posed to science by religion, while blithely and unquestioningly accepting the fraudulent gospel of global warming because it came wrapped in scientific clothing. They truly don't seem to understand how utterly devastating this ongoing scandal is going to be to the public regard for science and scientists alike.

The Moderate Voice:

The Waxman-Markey Cap and Trade bill basically forces companies and individuals to switch from using relatively cheap, abundant energy sources like oil, coal and natural gas to more expensive “alternative” sources. That’s my interpretation and it’s difficult for me to sway from that. Looking at the Great Recession that we are in, coupled with the growing skepticism of human based global warming, why push the Waxman-Markey bill through? I understand President Obama ran a campaign on fighting global warming. But the evidence that a large amount of jobs will be lost coupled with the not-realized “Green Jobs Explosion” as of yet, is just a recipe for on-going and worsening pain if the Waxman/Markey Bill has its way.

AmSpec blog:

Given this situation, the hurry to ram through the "massive job-killer" can only be compared to lemmings rushing toward a cliff. If Nancy Pelosi can impose party discipline, Democrats will find themselves under intolerable pressure to vote "yes" and the lemming impulse will prevail. But, as with the stimulus bill, no Republican should join this lemming rush.

Gateway Pundit:

Democrata know this program will cost American families thousands of dollars. [...]

Barack Obama admitted cap and trade legislation would cause electricity prices to skyrocket. [...]

Democratic Congressman John Dingell (D-MI) summed up cap and trade at a Congressional hearing on April 24th-- "It's a Great Big Tax!"
It's not just a great big tax... It's the biggest tax in US history.

Jawa Report:

Two massive, unprecedented Democrat-created anti-stimulus bills that nobody's read within the first 200 days. Massive, Democrat-created unsustainable deficits for the next decade and beyond that will not be paid down. Rampant cronyism, corruption and patronage rackets being orchestrated by the Chicagoland mobsters in the White House. Thousands upon thousands more private-sector jobs being eliminated each month.

Classical Values:

Awful. Truly awful. Long term, this is going to make the bailout fiasco look like child's play.

I'll say this for the bailout scheme. At least there were some well meaning people who thought it would aid the country's economic recovery.

The goal here is to deliberately harm the economy. And for what? To advance an unproven theory that deliberately harming the economy might lower the planet's temperatures by a smidgen?

Strata-Sphere:

I mean, how many job destroying policies have to be enacted to kill finally our economy? We shall soon find out it seems. The stimulus bill is piling up the national debt and annual deficit, both of which pull investment money out of the economy for expansion and new jobs. The energy taxes will further pull more money out of the economy, money that would be spent by consumers. The health care policy will shutter much of the only industry not in recession - the health industry. Insurance companies will close, small private doctors’ practices will close, local private practices will close.

We are heading into a disaster of epic proportions economically - all thanks to foolish liberal policy experiments.

Q and O

Bottom line: this bill is an economy killer, plain and simple.

Hugh Hewitt

If this bill or anything remotely like it becomes law, the American economy will be pushed into a deep recession that will make the past six months look like the good old days.

And many more...

What if their predictions--based on flawed economic models--turn out to be wrong? Will this be teh greatest hoax pulled on the American public EVAR? Time will tell, but for now conservatives are resorting to the tired old propaganda of fear.

Train stations...

...and what becomes of them. If I were any more conspiratorial than I am now, I'd say appears as though someone wanted to intentionally make rail travel as unappealing as possible last century. But no, that'd be crazy talk.

Dear David Williams

Hahaha. You're funny:

"This government is so out of whack with what the priorities are that this actually makes sense that we'd be wasting money on a condom study rather than the real problems facing the country," said David Williams, vice president for policy at Citizens Against Government Waste, which tracks wasteful spending in the federal budget.

For American men -- many of whom have already undergone years of awkward sex ed in the care of gym teachers -- the study might not offer much of a boost, Williams said.

"Are they going to hand out the study and are people going to go, 'Ohhh ... I'm going to do things differently this time?'" he asked, noting that the private sector was successfully handling issues related to erectile dysfunction.

"I don't think they should have any delusions of grandeur that what they're doing is going to change behavior and that it's really going to fundamentally change the way men and women get together."

May I suggest you learn a little about the NIH's scientific review process before you comment on it? Or maybe 15 years at CAGW has made you and your target audience a bit...childish?

Sincerely,

Coeruleus

[Adding...] There are many reasons besides snickering about condoms disguised as policy critique why David Williams is a wanker, the peer review process in which this grant competed against a large number of other grants and was determined to be worthy of funding being just one. I suspect the other is that if a grant has currently been funded, it must have been submitted before the Obama stimulus and the Obama budget. In other words, it was funded by Bush budget money.

Good news for now in Peru

Peru Overturns Decrees That Insighted Protests

Peru’s Congress on Thursday overturned two decrees by President Alan García that were aimed at opening large areas of the Peruvian Amazon to logging, dams and oil drilling but set off protests by indigenous groups this month in which dozens died. [...]

The decrees, issued by Mr. García as part of a regulatory overhaul for a trade deal with the United States, were intended to open parts of jungle to investment and allow companies to bypass indigenous communities to attain permits for petroleum, biofuels and hydroelectric projects. [...]

The repeal of the decrees and the apology by Mr. García open a new phase of uncertainty in Peru, where economic growth is sharply declining amid a decline in commodities prices.

Well, their economy had been growing like crazy without opening the Amazon up to timber and fossil fuel exploration.

In recent years Peru has been the economic star of Latin America, and has become an important destination for foreign investment, particularly in the mining and energy sectors. The economy has grown uninterruptedly since July of 2001. Only recently in April did the economy finally slow, reporting a 2.01% contraction when compared to April of last year. Decades on, poverty levels have finally started to come down thanks to almost 20 years of responsible, pro market economic policies that have held strong despite a coup d'état that overthrew parliament, a scandal over the corrupt national intelligence system, the fleeing and resignation by fax of a president and the installation of a transitional government, among other serious political crises.

However, Peruvian economic success has not been accompanied by the institutional strengthening that's necessary to sustain such long-term economic growth. Political parties are weak and public institutions are considered highly untrustworthy. In the latest study by Barómetro de las Américas from Vanderbilt University, Peru was listed as one of the countries where citizens least trust their institutions (congress, central government, the supreme court and municipal governments) in all of Latin America, coming in at 19 out of 22 nations. With so little trust, holding successful dialogues and reaching effective consensus is nearly impossible, while developing personality cults is all too easy. Peru, it could be said, has become a hyper-democracy where those who scream loudest are the only ones heard.

...and with a new highway linking two of the worlds fastest growing economies through Lima, one might conclude that it's not the lack of oil and timber resources souring Peru's economy (though commodities prices are in fact down currently), but rather that is might be due to the current and past President doing what he does best. Ruining Peru's economy:

Despite his initial popularity among Peruvian voters, García's term in office was marked by bouts of hyperinflation, which reached 7,649% in 1990 and had a cumulative total of 2,200,200% over the five years, thereby profoundly destabilizing the Peruvian economy. Owing to such chronic inflation, the Peruvian currency, the sol, was replaced by the Inti in mid-1985, which itself was replaced by the nuevo sol ("new sun") in July 1991, at which time the new sol had a cumulative value of one billion (1,000,000,000) old soles. During García's administration, the per capita annual income of Peruvians fell to $720 (below the level of 1960) and Peru's GDP dropped 20%. By the end of his term, national reserves were a negative $900 million.

This time around he's apparently bent on messing up the economy and the environment at the same time:

For Peruvian President Alan Garcia, in an editorial in El Comercio, the jungle is currently just a big waste: "There are millions of hectares of timber lying idle, another millions of hectares that communities and associations have not and will not cultivate, hundreds of mineral deposits that are not dug up and millions of hectares of ocean not used for aquaculture. The rivers that run down both sides of the mountains represent a fortune that reaches the sea without producing electricity."

But why did he back down? Was it really because of navel-gazing self-reflection on the negative effects of globalization on Peru's people? Maybe not:

The protests have disrupted oil production and pipelines, blocked commerce on roads and waterways, and halted flights at remote airports. While shortages of fuel and food have been reported in some jungle areas, the real concern is that the protests will succeed in cutting energy supplies to major coastal cities.

So next time they'll secure the pipelines before debating legislation to disown indigenous people of the rain forests they inhabit. We shall see. For our part, we might best hope that the Obama Administration clarifies some of the free trade agreement with Peru so that scenes like this can be avoided.

Car sharing market research

Car sharing more predictive than California auto sales. Zipcar CEO Scott Griffith on CNBC this morning:

HAINES: Are you buying new cars?

GRIFFITH: We are buying new cars.

HAINES: GM and Chrysler cars?

GRIFFITH: We are not buying GM and Chrysler cars. In fact, we have never bought a GM or Chrysler product. What we do is we survey our members, we ask them what kind of car do they want to drive. And when we hear back what they want to drive, if we don't have it, we consider it and look at it. We have never had a request for a GM product. That's unfortunate, but that's the way it is. Out of 300,000 users that we survey every six months, I have never had a request.

BURNETT: That might be the most damning thing I have heard yet.

I remember when Portland Car Sharing, the first one of its kind in this country and one that I had a minor part in creating, bought Dodge Neons. While I personally preferred the Neons over the Saturns that they bought to replace them, the whole idea of buying American cars was far less popular than anyone could have predicted. Once hybrid cars came out, Toyota and Honda fast became the most popular car-sharing vehicles. Now that the more trendy (less DFH) ZipCar dominates this market niche, motorists have a very wide selection of vehicles they can drive.

Schips

Potato chips aren't mentioned in the Constitution? I had no idea. Though I'm sure someone could propose a ballot measure to at least make a mention of it in the California state constitution.

SMOOCH!

Now that my intertubes aren't tied any longer and things are getting back to normal again...