In some places, it’s much warmer than usual. That’s so many instances of climate change, of course.
I some places, it’s much colder than usual. That’s also evidence of climate change.
Good technical article in the Wall Street Journal of 5/8/13 to remind us that CO2 is plant food. The more CO2 the more plants, and the more food for humans. It’s by NASA astronaut Harrison H. Schmitt and W. Happer, a professor of Physics at Princeton.
Filed under Facts Matter
Today, Easter Day of 2013, I had to become embroiled in a religious controversy, of course. It arose from a a long discussion on my blog in the form of comments to my posting Bush’s War -2. It’s about the religion of global warming. Why the discussion comes from this particular short political posting is both complicated and uninteresting. My main adversary is Prof Terry who went to the same graduate school as I. He is a frequent liberal critic of this blog. Here are the last things he said in the Comments:
“Maybe they’re not like the flat-earthers of yore; maybe they have reasonable objections. Perhaps the collective wisdom of climate scientists is wrong about the causation of the planet growing warmer.”
The essence of science is gathering data to try to falsify tentative explanations. Do you and Jacques actually believe that the same science that generated evidence of fluctuations in global temperatures is somehow unaware of those fluctuations?
Let me put it this way. On the one hand there is a global collection of scientists in different disciplines that gather and analyze data of various kinds. And you’re right – they’ve reached a collective judgment. The world’s climate is growing warmer and it’s due to human activity changing the composition of the atmosphere.
What’s on the other hand? Jacques’ collection of teapublican conspiracy theorists. The data is false. Christian creationists. The data is not relevant because the bible says so. The occasional mouthpiece of energy companies.
I await the ‘reasonable objections’. I hope at least one is better than the ‘it used to be warmer so global warming can’t be happening’ non sequitor that our host is so fond of.
Wow. Not only was it warmer in Greenland a thousand years ago….wait….wait…. THE WHOLE WORLD WAS WARMER 40 MILLION YEARS AGO!!!! For millions of years!!!!
Which means nothing. I sometimes wonder if you actually read what you write.
I don’t need to read what I write. I think about what I write before I write it.
And Prof Terry does not seem to know that a “sequitor” is a specialized ranching tool used to castrate steers!
Prof. Terry has frequent nightmares about imaginary but really threatening “teapublicans” who often borrow my face ( my ravaged face) in his sleep. He thinks attributing to me statements he thinks they have made and which I am sure I have not made will make his utterances sound real.
Prof. Terry knows for sure that I am not a “Christian creationist” nor that I am tempted to follow such. He is childishly trying to shame me before the whole faculty club by using the “C” word in connection with my name. Well, I don’t shame easily and I don’t give much of a (Saxon copulation word) about the faculty club. In my long academic experience, the faculty club was usually a good place to go to find the wrong, the false, the absurd, the ridiculous.
It’s probably useful to to others, so I am again reacting to Prof. Terry’s nightmarish vision. (See also my other essays on the issue. Just search my blog for “global warming.”)
I don’t think the global warming apocalyptic narrative results from a conspiracy. From time to time, I have made moderate statements I can easily resume, like this:
Global warming (now called something else) is a successful religious cult. Like new cults in general, it is sometimes served, but also possibly hurt by small-scale conspiracies. (Ask me for examples.) The mass of the people who think that there is a man-made significant trend of globally rising temperature that we must worry about now, or soon are not (NOT) conspirators. They are just not thinking. Many are misled by those who ought to know better, including college professors.
There are many examples in history of otherwise intelligent people who stop thinking in the service of their beliefs. Thus, the gold plates on which were written God’s New World revelations and that an angel gave Joseph Smith, the prophet of Mormonism. The plates were lost. Rotten luck!
Note: Mormonism is the common name for the faith of those in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
Understand what I am not saying: Those who believe the plates existed and were lost are suspending disbelief, often forever. That makes them weak, not stupid. I know one who is a distinguished scholar in Prof. Terry’s and my discipline.
Prof. Terry invokes the authority of a category he calls “climate scientists” Two problems with this.
There is no such category with a fixed meaning if you are allowed to exclude anyone you don’t like: “What, Peter the Prophet says that there will be no Second Coming of Christ? Why, Peter is a false prophet!”
If there were such a category and if you admitted anyone into it without a consistent test of credentials, the category would also have no value. It would be irrelevant. You may not say: “Carpenters think that….” if anyone at all is a carpenter.
Additionally, if there were such category as “climate scientists” and if most of its members said that the earth is flat, it would not make the earth flat. What is professor Terry thinking? Did climate scientists take a vote? Did the warmists win by 99,6%, like in People’s Republic Chinese democracy, or did they win by a moderate and more believable 56%?
Small digression here: During the primaries, one Republican candidate declared point-blank that “97% “ of climate scientists asserted that there was climate change. In my mind he was out of the race that very second, not because I did not agree with him but because if the 97% figure were correct, there would be no way for anyone to know it. That man was not thinking. He lacked criticality. I am even glad Barack Obama was elected rather than he!
In general, I refuse to fall into the common trap of having to chose to argue with specialists about their specialty or of accepting uncritically what they declare to be true (or, in this case what they are said to have said, as asserted by people who are obviously in the throes of religious experience.) I find that I rarely have to make this kind of freedom-constricting choice. I know little about the internal combustion engine, for example, but I know damn well when the mechanic who is working on my car reeks of beer! If I find out that many people die after submitting to a small, supposedly benign operation to erase their wrinkles, I chose to keep my wrinkles, smart guy that I am! I don’t initiate a discussion with medical doctors.
Prof. Terry thus invokes the “collective wisdom” of an undefined category. I have often been confronted by collective wisdom like that, by the sententious declarations of various kinds of priesthood. When I was thirty, all the social scientists I knew who were interested in the topic but four or five affirmed that capitalism was finished. They affirmed that a revolt of the poor countries would finish it (the “Lin-Piao thesis”) What has happened instead is that some of the same poor countries are catching up with us and some are about to pass us because they implement capitalism better than the old capitalist countries have ever done. (Singapore, that happy flagship of unrestricted capitalism, has for several years enjoyed a higher GDP/capita than its former colonial owner, welfarist UK.) So much for collective wisdom!
Prof Terry is also trying to suggest that I am wrong and that he is right by wrapping himself in the scintillating mantle of science like a grotesque version of the statue of the Madonna in some Spanish processional. N. S. ! In fact, he momentarily forgets what he surely knows about science. A small example of what one should know:
If you throw a ball in the air and it fails to come down, if you make sure it’s not on the roof somewhere, if some joker or an athletic dog did not catch it, what are you supposed to think?
The answer is that if you are certain there is no mundane explanation, you are obligated to think that the Theory of Gravity maybe faulty or seriously in question. My point is that in good science, it takes only one non-conforming event, if you are certain it’s a real event. ONE! Try it yourself: If a single object is shown to travel faster than the speed of light, then ….
The importance of the warm Greenland story that Prof Terry alludes to is that it’s one of the many possible single instances that must undermine the belief that industrial civilization, cars, manufacturing, heating houses have recently raised average world temperature. You decide how fatally the facts of the story undermine the warmist view.
For a sub-period of 1,000 to 1,300 , approximately, the Norse settlers of Greenland ate significant quantities of beef. Now there were only two possible sources for that beef. They imported cattle from Iceland or from Norway in their little boats to eat them. Or they raised cattle right in Greenland. The first explanation, I discount as technically and economically absurd. So, the Norse evidently raised cattle in a part of the world where you could not do it now. You could not because Greenland is too cold to produce the hay necessary to feed cattle during long winter season. Greenland was warmer then than it is after nearly two centuries of big, human CO2 emissions.
Incidentally the now famous “hockey-stick” fraud perpetrated by major environmentalist leaders was made necessary by the fact that there is abundant evidence that the average temperatures of the known world were higher than than they are now for centuries during the Middle -Ages. Solution for this disturbing problem: Don’t show the temperatures for that period even if you have data.
Changists either refuse to talk about this matter or worse, they insist on telling us that we must believe that the latest rise in temperature is uniquely due to human activity although the dozens of other rises that preceded it could not possibly have roots in human activity. It’s like this:
“It’s rained often, but this particular rain comes from the fact that you peed in the sky last week.”
Incidentally, I don’t think there is any significant rise in global temperatures except, everywhere, every day between seven am and noon. I am just playing along.
As I said any single instance would do. I like the particular instance of the warm Greenland story because of its source. I gleaned the basic facts from reading Jared Diamond’s Collapse. Mr Diamond is the same respected intellectual to whom we owe the masterfully told story of the ruin of Easter Island by its inhabitants’ unsound exploitation of their physical environment. Mr Diamond is no “denier”! If he knew me, I am pretty sure he would dislike me.
If I were in the name-dropping business, by the way, I would also recommend reading the very skeptical Bjorn Lomborg, an environmental activist who also has the merit of being a trained statistician. Prof. Terry’s friends confronted by such a heretic would like to burn him at the stake. As they don’t have the power to do so, they will resign themselves to gross calumny. (Also, they don’t want to contribute to more warming by burning fagots.) Anyone who disagrees with them and who sounds the least bit credible must be brought down at all costs. Just as you would imagine with a cult. As Prof. Terry himself suggests in general, well-informed contrarians or heretics are (with no specific reference to L Diamond) merely the mouthpieces of (huge) “energy companies” Well, I am still awaiting my payment, damn it! What do I have to do?
Often, one is not sure of one’s competence to judge . That’s OK. You can usually assess, judge the credibility of a group, a tribe, a cult, by the company its members keep. It’s completely fair: Though you do not worship Satan yourself, if you regularly meet Satanists for drinks, you are probably evil. So, with changists.
This spring day, it’s snowing again in Brittany. It’s a peninsula bathed by the Gulf Stream and bordering the sea on three sides. Twenty years ago, local people would have told you that it “never” snowed in Brittany. The locals who never left their area could reach age fifty without ever seeing snow. What do I think the implications of the unusual abundant snow in Brittany now and earlier, in February, have for the global warming creed? Well, I keep telling you that I am a serious man. I think it’s interesting the way anecdotes can be interesting. I don’t think for a second that the unusual cold in Brittany and in much of Europe should ad anything to my incredulity. These events ad nothing (NOTHING).
Now conduct a mental experiment and imagine that it were today, Easter day, unusually hot in Brittany, or across the Channel, in England. Suppose it were 90 F in the shade. Do you have any doubt (ANY) that there would be many commentators, on the news and elsewhere, who would assert that, of course, the high temperature is another example of global warming (or something). Naturally, the scientific warmists would tell us that those are uneducated people who don’t know anything. Conduct another mental experiment. (It will hurt but it won’t take long.) How many credentialed, scientifically trained warmists, such as Prof. Terry, would raise their voice to tell the commentators that anecdotal evidence does not count, that it means nothing, that they should shut up? Would there be even one? Does it ever happen?
Warmists who ought to know better are passive but conscious accomplices to crimes of ignorance. Why should anyone in his right mind respect them?
I know there are warmists who would affirm that the unusually cold temperature in Brittany is a proof of warming. Likewise: the more neighbors my wife has affairs with, the more she must love me! I don’t have time for such nonsense until they describe with great clarity what kind of evidence would change their belief. (Footnote 1, below)
Warmists routinely try two things against people like me, “deniers.” First, they attempt to intimidate me: Do you think you are smarter than anyone, JD? The answer I have given many times is that I am often smarter than most because I don’t believe much. I don’t think the gold plaques of Mormonism were lost. I don’t believe, on this Easter Day, that Jesus walked out of his tomb looking fresh as a rose. And, for good measure, the Hebrews were not “slaves” in Egypt. I am inclined to libertarianism but the best example of statelessness right now is Somalia where you can die for a used tire. Skeptical there too. And, I was anti-communist in academia before conservatism was cool. It’s in the record. Not being encumbered with creeds is a kind of intelligence; I am not embarrassed to admit to it.
Note: I like many of the people who believe those things. I don’t want to argue with them but I don’t want to hide my disbelief either.
The second way warmists try to fight me is by adopting the Jehova’s Witnesses’ switching and crowding strategy. They keep changing the subject and they make me dizzy with a flood of words. It does nothing to persuade me. It does not do much to influence witnesses. It helps them however cling to their unexamined beliefs. I respond by requesting that my opponents give it their one best shot. I don’t have all day. All kinds of unimportant things call my attention. Don’t ruin my life with the misconceived products of your weakened brain. Say one thing and make it count. It’s not difficult if you are clear in your own mind about what you want to say. I can do it in three sentences.
Today, as it happened, I met briefly a young stranger who majors in environmental studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz, the environmentalist Rome and Mecca rolled in one. He volunteered that even a one inch rise in the ocean level is a serious matter. On the rare occasions when his fellows speak clearly, without detours, they seem always to demonstrate a lack of grip on reality. Or, they demonstrate that I lack a grip on reality. How can a one inch rise in the ocean be a serious matter? Until the advent of satellite measurement, we couldn ‘t even perceive changes with that degree of accuracy. It may have happened many times without anyone even noticing. A one inch rise is a small technical problem for the Dutch. Just call them!
The brief encounter was surprising. I liked the young man on sight and he also majors in history, a big plus in my book. I invited him to give it his best shot. His one best shot: tell me what terrible thing will happen if I am wrong. One! Of course, I promised him I would not censor him. What a strange request! What’s going on in his young mind? What mental world does he live in?
Any of you, patient readers, I hereby invite also to give it your best shot. Either, tell me of one thing about which I am wrong and why, one thing. Or, tell me also what horrible consequences there will be and when, if we do nothing, zilch. If you do, please begin with a sentence or two telling me why I should read you. Too many take my invitations as an offer to ramble on. I am not asking for much: “You should read this because….”
And don’t take any wooden nickels.
PS: The biggest rats leaving a sinking ship first: Economist Magazine Now Admits It’s Unsure About Global Warming
Footnote 1 : The next day, there is a big title on MSNBC:
Global Warming Increases the Antarctica Ice Area.
Would I make this up? Would I even dare?
OK, it was April 1st but you know that MSNBC does not joke with sacred matters. MSNBC does not joke, period!
Filed under Socio-Political Essays
Again (AGAIN) the Midwest is trying to operate in spite of a major snowfall. Its’ a snowfall of extraordinary magnitude for the season according to many of those who know. And, I have not heard or read any meteorologist arguing that, on the contrary, it’s a normal snowfall for the first week of Spring.
Snow is cold. This cold wave is yet another proof of the reality of a global warming trend that threatens civilization and, beyond it, Earth itself. Of course, this trend is the result of noxious human activities. It’s a done deal that there cannot be any other cause.
If you don’t see that the more industry and cars, the more cold, and the more cold, the more warming, you are just uneducated or stubborn, or both.
By the same reasoning, the unseasonal cold makes fuels, including natural gas, less essential to human happiness. The president, served by the supine press, must see the current snow storm in the Midwest as a signal to redouble its efforts to prevent the rational utilization of America’s abundant fuel resources.
Got it?
There is a pleasant-looking guy in his forties who often suns himself close to my coffee shop at the beach. He admires my grand-daughter. Of course, I took this to imply that he is a man of taste and discernment. We fell into casual conversation recently about a book I was holding. The conversation quickly turned casually political.
He is an Obama supporter. This being the People Socialist Green Republic of Santa Cruz, it would be surprising if he were not. So, I pried a little.
It took my beach acquaintance a few minutes to fold to the default option that President Obama at least looked presidential. He couldn’t name a single Obama achievement of which he was proud or satisfied. (I had unfairly deprived him of the opportunity to mention Obamacare by designating it a Pelosi victory.) This is not the fist time I hear Obamites refer to the president’s looks. It’s not clear how you turn such people around. Update: I don’t mean that I hope to turn all, or many around, just a small percentage would do, pehraps 3%..
Suntan Joe was seething with hatred of President Bush. This is remarkable five years later. Curiously, it did not seem to be about the Iraq War. I sense that the antipathy runs deeper, that it’s akin to what some chimps feel about a designated other chimp with an unusual facial expression perhaps. That is also hard to beat.
Since the Republican defeat last November, I have been perplexed by the post-mortem analyses of people I usually trust. I feel that they are off the mark because they are too obvious perhaps, too logical. I am not doing better myself.
Filed under Uncategorized
The Wall Street Journal has a long article on page A5 about how Anchorage Alaska has never had more snow in its recorded history than this ending winter.
What this tells us about the reality of alleged global warming is…absolutely nothing!
Rationalists and sober-minded people must resist the temptation to espouse the mental weakness of their religious global warmist opponents.
Isolated facts are isolated facts whichever side you are on: reason or unreason.
Filed under Current Events, Uncategorized
From Live Science, accessed 08/19/11:
“Charles Monnett, a wildlife biologist with the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, (BOEMRE) was placed on administrative leave on July 18 pending the conclusion of an Inspector General investigation into “integrity issues,” according to the suspension order. Monnett had been questioned by the Interior Department’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) in February about a 2006 research article published in the journal Polar Biology, in which he reported observations of drowned polar bears in the Beaufort Sea. In the article, Monnett and his co-authors speculate that bear drownings could increase if continued climate change resulted in less ice cover in the Arctic. The work was cited in the 2006 Al Gore documentary film, “An Inconvenient Truth.” [Gallery: Polar Bears Swimming in the Arctic] “
Here is what my own inquiry shows: Monnett and Gleason in their 2006 article abstract and introduction list at length diverse kinds of damage global warming might have on polar bears’ welfare. They present the fact that they had noticed four carcasses of polar bears off-shore incidental to a study of something else. They comment that similar studies conducted in the same general area in the past had turned up no polar bear mortality. They say that they “speculate” (their word) that continued warming would probably have bad consequences for the polar bear population. Nowhere is there any suggestion, in the abstract or in the introduction, that the warming in question is long term or, especially, man-made.
I have no objection to any of the above as a scholar although I can summarize my environmental position as follows:
Algore in Wonderland should be imprisoned at hard labor for his dishonest movies. There, he should be forced to make luminescent light bulbs.
Of course, the expected sources rushed to take Dr Monnett’s suspension as evidence of persecution of Dr Monnett and persecution of polar bears:
Here is what green reporter Kassie Siegel said in the Huffington Post:
“Since Dr. Monnett published his paper, bears have continued to starve, drown, and even resort to cannibalism as the Arctic sea ice melt has accelerated, and many more papers documenting these impacts have been published. Some, like Senator Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, have jumped on the investigation to attack protection for the polar bear and the science of global warming. But even were there some credible complaint regarding Dr. Monnett’s paper, which there is not, that paper is but one drop in the tsunami of evidence showing that unchecked global warming will drive polar bears to extinction. 
“
Director, Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute
Ms Siegel is the kind of person one loves to dislike on sight. First, she is the lawyer. That’s from UC Berkeley, of course. It’s easy to dislike lawyers’ ignorance because they seem to be giving themselves blanket permission to be ignorant: “I passed the bar, they appear to say. There is nothing harder, therefore I know everything and what I don’t know is probably unimportant.” Of course, there is no evidence that I could find on the Internet that Ms Siegel has any competence in biology or climate science, or any science at all. I suspect she is a virgin that way. In her PR pictures, she wears one of those annoying cute wool hats with an arctic motif. (If that anyone turns up any evidence of any scientific training for this person, including an AA degree – a junior college degree – in biology, I will immediately publish the fact here).
Correspondingly, Ms Siegel parades her ignorance of zoology without provocation. Polar bears do not “resort” to cannibalism because they have nothing normal to eat. (Like I would, say, “resort” to vegetarian pasta if no prime steak were unavailable). Cannibalism is one of their normal behaviors. All large carnivores do this. Bears even share with lions a predilection for dinning on babies of their own species. Everyone who watches “Animal Planet” knows this.
Ms Siegel further invokes a “tsunami” of evidence about global warming, polar bears, and their extinction. Of course, there is no such tsunami. If you are an average working stiff with children and a mortgage (under water or not), you might take her word for granted. If you are anyone under 20, almost certainly, you will take her word for it. Personally, I think there is no such evidence at all, just more or less informed speculation, some of which may be worth reading.
I am waiting form Ms Siegel, the lawyer-guru-authority, to give me a reasonable reading assignment, or any of her followers, drawn from the “tsunami.” Go ahead, if you are reading this, give it your best shot. Begin with two references. Please!
In the meantime, do I think it’s impossible for a federal bureaucracy to persecute one of its employees that is a whistle blower? To ask the question is to answer it. It’s certainly plausible but plausible is not the same as sure. Here is what the AP reported recently on Dr Monnett’s suspension:
By BECKY BOHRER, Associated Press – Jul 29, 2011
JUNEAU, Alaska (AP) — The recent suspension of Alaska wildlife biologist Charles Monnett is unrelated both to an article that he wrote about presumably drowned Arctic polar bears or his scientific work, a federal official said Friday.
The director of the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Enforcement and Regulation, told agency staff in Alaska via email that it instead was the result of new information on a separate subject that was recently brought to officials’ attention.
The email, written by Michael Bromwich, was obtained by The Associated Press.
The Anchorage-based Monnett was placed on administrative leave July 18, pending final results of an inspector general’s investigation into “integrity issues.”
Monnett coordinated much of the agency’s research on Arctic wildlife and ecology and had duties that included managing about $50 million worth of studies, according to a complaint filed with the agency. The complaint was filed on his behalf by the watchdog group, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.
A memo dated days before July 18, sent to Monnett by contracting officer Celeste H. Rueffert, said that information raised by the investigation “causes us to have concerns about your ability to act as the Contracting Officer’s Representative in an impartial and objective manner on the subject contract.”
That same day, July 13, a stop-work order was issued for a polar bear tracking study, entitled “Populations and Sources of Recruitment in Polar Bears.” [That's a different study. - JD]
In the meantime, I am reaping again the benefits of multilingualism. It’s not that I get better treatment in a foreign restaurant, or in any French restaurant here, or in France, or in any Chinese restaurant anywhere (See my story “Life With an Accent….” recently published on this blog. There is another essay on the topic whose title I don’t remember.) I don’t; none of the above. Rather, I get info on the same topics from disparate sources with different frames of mind. So, I am watching a French documentary about a crew of French people who are traveling on a large sailboat from Norway to the Pacific through the northwest passage.(“L’odyssée climatiques du Sout,” caught on TV5, on 8/19/11) Now, let me tell you things about the French you probably don’t know: They tend to be good at adventure and bad at commentary. They make original documentaries that are often excellent from a visual standpoint to which they add feeble-minded voice-overs. The rarely do their reading before they leave for such a trip. Often, there is no reading available in French. Monolingualism in languages other than English is a sort of informational prison. It may be hard for you to believe but I believe that the average middle-class French person has a poorer general culture than his American counterpart. (And if I don’t know this, who does?)
So, the French crew is stopping over in Pond Inlet, a small arctic village in Nunavik, Canada. To a man and woman, they believe in man-made (woman-made?) and worrisome global warming, of course. Their journey is meant to illustrate its ravages. The expedition captain does his job well. He makes it a point to interview (in his halting English) Inuit hunters and others with official or informal connections to hunting. What he finds is a general complaint that there are too many polar bears and that the Canadian federal government does not deliver enough permits to hunt them. Let’s be fair as well as discerning: The Inuit up there are not environmentalist sissies. And what, with the price of groceries being three or four times higher than in California, bear stew is a valued option. One professional hunter opines on camera that the increase in polar bears results from a new abundance of seals. The seals themselves have multiplied in unprecedented ways because the water in the vicinity of their village is ice-free for a longer period than used to be the case. Let me summarize:
Global warming > ice-free sea > more seals > more polar bears !!!!
Now, I would be the first to doubt the accuracy of traditional people in recording cold facts (no pun) over any but short periods. To a large extent, modernity means learning how to count and taking numbers seriously. However, you can be sure that if it were the case that Inuit hunters reported a new shortage of polar bears in their area because of a decrease in ice cover, the report would be exploited by the likes of Ms Siegel, officiating on the Huff Post, and in other Greenleftie outlets. Algore in Wonderland would say again, “I told you so “ instead of having a meltdown on television (no pun) as he did recently.
Incidentally, another hunter waxed enthusiastic about the incomparable beauty of tundra flowering in recent seasons. I know it’s neither here nor there but it was nice to hear.
Why bother, you might ask? After all, the belief that human activities have been causing significant warming of the planet with predictably catastrophic consequences has receded considerably in the past couple of years. Algore’s meltdown is proof that this cult belief may not be much of a danger to our economy or to our welfare in general anymore. My answer is that I have the time, the leisure to study the morphology of collective delusions, of which global warming fear is a late manifestation. There will be others. The more we know about collective delusions the better we will be able to guard against the next ones.
Filed under Current Events, Socio-Political Essays
About forty pelicans sit around in the Santa Cruz harbor. Those are birds that migrate south for the winter. Normally, there are only four or five pelicans in the harbor in January. They are welfare types who manage to make a living without fishing. Those forty are more than a month early according to my observational memory. It’s true that at 3 pm, it’s warmer on the beach than it is in the middle of August. That’s because there is neither wind nor fog right now. If these warm days are an effect of global warming, why don’t advocates name them in the “Benefits” column of their ledger? It make me wonder if they are in bad faith. (Just kidding!)
I take my two year-old grand-daughter to the beach often. She is a pretty, vivacious child with dark hair and skin coloration also on the dark side. I know most grand-parents describe their grand-everything in glowing terms but, in this case, I have the photographic documents to prove it. Besides, she has no more genes in common with me than with a zebra (a long story). So, I don’t have much reason to brag stupidly. This child is sociable. She wanders on the beach making friends with other children. She does it pretty well for someone so young. She is not pushy, she smiles a lot, and she shares her toys readily. Well, I would swear little gangs of little blondes snub my golden-skinned grand-daughter with great regularity. Only blondes do this. I don’t know why. I am still thinking. You have to admit there is something about blondes and that it starts early.
Speaking of the same harbor beach. This country is on the ropes economically. Yet the coffee-shop right on the beach has not altered its short winter hours. People come to the beach after work at 4, 5, even 6, to take in the warm air and to watch the great sunsets. Many are hungry, could use a cup of coffee and a scone or two. They find the doors closed. The coffee shop, a pleasant enough small establishment, apparently has a management that is not flexible enough to grab obvious opportunities. I am puzzled. Staying open a couple extra hours and posting this fact on the door does not seem expensive. The shop normally has only one attendant. Is it that difficult to find someone competent to work two hours? In the meantime, the large bar-restaurant next door is thriving; it always thrives; it thrived before and during the worst of the recession. I am not puzzled, I am perplexed.
Similarly, I am still waiting for someone to knock at my door and to offer to clean my windows. I estimate someone like that could easily take $100 from me in less than five hours. He could leave his phone number with me for further work. There are dozens of old geezers in my area who should be similarly well-disposed judging from their filthy windows. The one-time investment in tools for such work would be around $30, I think. I guess we are not as poor as we think.
I keep saying that news anchors are mostly dingbats. I mean American news anchors. Recently, I have been watching (re-watching) TV5, the French language channel. I don’t know who or what produces its news program but I am pretty sure it’s a direct reflection of French national television. Two nights ago night, the French-speaking news anchor was introducing the son of the Rosenberg, the couple convicted of espionage and executed in 1953. The anchorman explained with a straight face that the Rosenberg had been executed by the Americans “because they were communists.” There was no correction in the next news cycle.
The implications of such ignorance are staggering. The fact is that there were tens of thousands of American communists in the forties and fifties. Either the FBI’s ability to catch them was appallingly low, or there must have been thousands of executions of “communists.” On such lack of judgment, on such cocksure but ignorant naivety is built knee-jerk, petty anti-Americanism among the European quasi-intelligentsia.
In fact, I have a good idea about the collective psychological mechanism that perpetrates this kind of inanity. I will develop it if someone asks me.
In the meantime, I am looking for a good French translation of “dingbat.” It’s tough going. French is not as rich as English in that department.
PS Every country has a quasi-intelligentsia. It’s made up of people who attended college long enough to develop the illusion that they know something. Many underdeveloped countries have thousands of those, with no jobs. They are a major factor of political instability. Often, they turn to cruel extremism as with the Shining Path terrorists in Peru. Pot Pol, the man who invented self-genocide in Cambodia was a joint production of the Third World and of the Sorbonne. The French quasi-intelligentsia does seem especially presumptuous and malevolent both. I dare not continue on the damage caused by a pseudo college education. I have too much to say. I wouldn’t know how to stop.
My radio show is Sundays 11 am to 1 pm on KSCO radio Santa Cruz, 1080 AM (It’s AM.) It’s called “Facts Matter,” of course. It’s also available on the internet but only in real time.
Filed under Uncategorized
I am getting back, one month at a time, a little of the money the federal government confiscated from me throughout my working life. I am talking about Social Security, of course. This year, like last year, there will be no SS cost of living raise. Frankly, I don’t see why there should be. Nevertheless, the President and the senior Democrat leadership want to send me $250 as a compensation for not giving me a raise.
The decision to “adjust” or not is made yearly based on a specific way to to measure inflation, in place for many years. You don’t throw away the tape measure because you don’t like the measurement. It’s this kind of self-indulgent thinking that put us in the trou de caca ( French) we are in. Second, who else gets automatic income inflation adjustment except for a few union members who need to get a life anyway? Third, if you think about it, it’s hard to find an economic category less affected by the current crisis than “seniors.” Most of them are out of mortgage trouble. They don’t have children in school to suffer reductions (if any) in educational expenditures, except for a handful of Hollywood actors on speed. A handful of seniors get laid, as I said, but most seniors can’t get laid off since they are already retired.
President Obama and the Democrat losers want to give me a $250 bribe to buy my November vote. Pathetic! If it passes, I vow to spend the money entirely on tea-party Republican candidates. If the money comes to late for that, I will just send it to Sarah (Palin).
The other day, around 10/10/10, I caught Rush Limbaugh making a big geopolitical mistake on air. It’s a rare event; Limbaugh is usually very well informed. He confused South Sudan, which is about to split from Sudan after a referendum, with Darfur in the west of the country. The slow genocide continues in Darfur. Here is the summary: The Islamist National Congress, in power in the capital, believes it can enslave the southerners because they are not Muslims. It thinks it can enslave the people of the west because they are not Arabs (though Muslim).
Men have more upper body strength than women, almost everyone agrees and they run faster. Often, when you make comparisons between well-defined categories, it’s more useful to look at extremes than at averages. For one thing, there are always real people at the extremes while the “average woman,” for example may not exist; she is just an arithmetic calculation.
The Wall Street Journal has a feature on 10/14/1 about women who run marathons. As a rule, they are given 30 minute handicap over men. This means that the first woman who arrives 30mn after he (invariably male) winner is considered an equal. It also means, in theory, that if a woman arrives 25 minutes after the first man, she should logically be declared the winner. The piece in the WSJ points out that in many recent marathons, the fastest woman was only 15 minutes or so behind the fastest man. And the gap is closing
This, to my mind, is a better measure how much faster than women men are. For one thing, the fastest woman and the fastest man are comparable on other, tacit but nevertheless important, dimensions such as dedication to the sport. Female marathon runners who are in the middle of their pack might be less devoted, or more devoted than men who are in the middle of their pack. Fast women are like fast men: They want to get there first. (I am only referring here to women who run fast, not to the other kind of fast women, another topic altogether.)
All this brings me back to a question I have raised before: Why are there very few female bridge Grand Masters when it is likely that more women play bridge, world-wide, than men? The feminists among you, if any, might get cheap thrills at my expense by showing me either that there are many female Grand Masters or that fewer women than men play bridge. Rough figures will be fine.
And, of course, I have to ask why women and men still play professional chess in different categories. Is it possible that the best women have less than the best men of whatever it takes to succeed at bridge or at chess? One thing I am certain of is that it’s not upper-body strength.
Some questions have become forbidden, many in academia, for sure. Rationalists must hit political correctness in its disdainful and pious mouth wherever and whenever the occasion presents itself. It clouds judgment in every way.
Global warming upon us: the consensus. Below, a formulation I plagiarize from the current issue of Skeptic magazine (vol 16-1. Irwin Silverman, PhD). I hate myself for not having thought about it first.
Hardly anyone had used the term “climatologist” before the current controversy. And the term covers a variety of realities, in terms of training. Those who give themselves the title are linked mostly by ideology, an apocalyptic ideology. To say that 99% of climatologists agree that there is dangerous, man-made global warming is analogous to stating that 99% of Christian ministers believe in God. No shit!
Filed under Current Events
Yesterday, Zionist agents took advantage of Ramadan to bomb a Muslim Shiite religious procession in Pakistan, killing 65, all civilians, including women and children. Another Zionist atrocity!
OK, I was messing with your minds. The Pakistan Taliban proudly claimed responsibility for the mass assassination of Shiites. They have good reasons of course. The Taliban (“students of religion”) are Sunni. They think religious processions are idolatrous, close to infidel (Christian or Hindu) practice. I don’t blame the Taliban much for their manner of fighting heresy. My ancestors did about the same. OK again, that was 400 years ago and more.
Today, thousands of Muslims are demonstrating in front of an embassy in Indonesia. They are protesting the slaughter of their fellow Muslims in Pakistan. OK, lying to you again. They are in front of the American Embassy. They are actually protesting the burning of a Koran by an extremist American Protestant pastor scheduled for 9/11. Those people have their priorities clear.
I wonder how many of the Indonesian protesters are aware of the fact that President Obama has no legal way to prevent the event. I think maybe four or five. The others wouldn’t believe you if you explained it to them text in hand. We are facing two problems here: First, most Muslims are used only to authoritarian government. (It is not the case in Indonesia as of the past ten years.) Second, our governments (plural) are doing an inconceivably bad job of presenting brand America abroad.
The French centrist newspaper Le Figaro, one of the biggest dailies, has the good idea of allowing instantaneous readers’ email in response to its articles. It all appears quickly in the on-line edition. I say “allow,” with reserved because the comments seem to be heavily censored. I say this because all three of my submissions were rejected outright for being too controversial. Each of them would have easily made my daily newspaper.
Anyway, there has been an online discussion among readers about the causes of the New Zealand earthquake. Specifically, some media commentators apparently blamed….global warming. I am pleased to report that more readers disagree than agree with this interpretation.
You think Americans are stupid and ill-educated?
Filed under Current Events
The climate change cult is dying. Unfortunately, it’s mostly for the wrong reasons. A very cold winter on the east coast of the US, even fifteen consecutive years of cooling, are not enough to undermine any climate change model based on a thousand years of observation. There are better reasons to finish off the beast though. Unfortunately, they are usually presented in a way that is too difficult or too time-consuming for the normal working person.
Fortunately, there is a very good summary of the debacle in the WSJ of Fr 26/2010. I am going to try to summarize the summary. There is going to be a quiz but it will not be that hard. The summary is mostly about the way scientific reports were handled by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ( the “panel”).
1 According to the UN panel that has been caught with its pants down repeatedly, the average yearly rise in temperature since 1900 amounts to 6/10 of a degree centigrade. That’s very small. If it happened while you were sitting outside, you would not feel it. A cloud going over the sun does more in the opposite direction.
2 The geo-physicist who wrote the panel’s chapter on the melting of ice (North Pole, South Pole) said that, “Ice-sheet models are not very good.” Repeat, “…not very good.” He teaches at Penn State.
3 There is a graph going back 1,000 years showing clearly a sudden rise in average temperature beginning a little before 1900. That’s important because this abrupt rise is compatible with man-made causes. (But it does not constitute strong evidence; many other things may have happened between the late 1800s and today.) Let’s talk about this graph, often called the “hockey-stick” graph.
From about 1900 until now, the graph is based on temperature readings from thermometers. No problem. From 1000 to about 1900, the graph is based on tree- rings reading.
The sudden rise in temperature around 1900 corresponds almost exactly to the period of thermometer reading.
Let me say it another way: When we use thermometers, the temperature keeps rising. When we use tree rings, the temperature is lower and fairly steady. It’s lower from 1000 to 1900. If it were not lower, there would be no reason at all to say that human activity has been making the temperature rise. None given by the panel.
What does the man who invented the tree rings reading method of re-constructing past temperatures have to say? (His name is Briffa.) He says that when you look side by side at thermometer readings and at tree rings – using his method – they don’t agree. Of course, you can do this for contemporary times, since 1900. This practice is a basic check on the validity of your measurements. That’s true in any field, including carpentry. If you have two measurement methods for the same thing, you check them against each other. If you don’t, you are negligent. Or something, or someone, is stopping you.
In good logic, if the panel cannot reconcile the tree-ring readings with the thermometer readings for the period when we have both, one of two things must happen: We must throw away the tree-ring method of re-constructing temperature; or, we must throw away thermometers.
Summary of summaries: There is no solid reason to believe that temperatures have risen since the industrial revolution and since the automobile. There may be nothing going on!
What happened? The scientists interviewed by the WSJ, the people on whose work the panel report is based, all complain of having been pressured. By whom? Politicians, policy-makers. When one of them said: “ It’s possible that the ice is melting” it became in the panel report: “ The ice is melting.”
It gets worse: The panel has a chairman named Pachauri, an Indian scientist (not a cousin of my Indian-born wife, I checked). Dr Pachauri does consulting for multinationals on environmental issues in addition to his high position with the UN. “No conflict of interest – he says – because I give all my fees to my private foundation.”
Not good enough. How many of his worthless sons are supported by the foundation? How many lazy nephews, nieces, siblings? I don’t see how one can be a successful Indian, career-wise, and not practice nepotism. You heard me right. (I will post unedited and unbridged any contradiction to this statement by anyone born and reared in India. Use the comment form.) Even if the answer is, “zero relatives,” there are other reasons why people have their own foundations. Some of these are: vainglory, prestige, earning forgiveness for one’s sins. This is all psychic income. It all counts. It undermines your objectivity.
Dr Pachaury is a political appointee of the UN, an organization with a long history of extreme corruption. Is he going to be fired? No.
Instead, intellectually corrupt Dr Pachaury has promised to enforce at the panel the rules that were on the book all along: “OK, we cheated some but no more, we promise to be honest from now on!” This is more amazing than anything I imagined.
Does any of this prove that there is no man-made global warming? It does not. It tells me that the advocates should start again from scratch, in full daylight, with frequent public audits. And it tells me that there is no rush. Same as American health care reform.
The most alarming, the worst panel prediction – based on exaggerations, we know now – was of a less than three-foot rise in the Ocean in the next hundred years, Lots of time to build dikes and move cities to higher elevation, I think. And yes, I know about the Maldives, a small country of very low-lying and poor islands.
I want to show my open-mindedness in spite of the scientific meltdown at the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. We should think of building the best dike money can buy for the Maldives. I say: Let’s have a public subscription and invest the proceeds at 3% per year compounded annually. I will be first and contribute $3. By the time the water has risen one and half foot around the archipelago, there will be in the fund: $_______________ Then, we should start building.
If the sea never threatens to engulf the Maldives, I want my share to be forwarded to an institute for the intellectual independence of science. You, on the other hand, should feel free to use your share to take a winter vacation in that wonderful country. Watch out for the local toddy; it’s a killer!
Filed under Current Events, Socio-Political Essays
WELCOME MBA STUDENTS. IF YOU NEED A BREAK, IF YOU FEEL LIKE SCHOOL AND WORK ARE GETTING TO YOU, TAKE A WALK THROUGH MY BLOG. YOU WILL BE AMAZED, PLEASED AND SHOCKED. WELCOME.
JD
Global warming update: In its 2007 report, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stated that 40% of the Amazonian rain forest could be gone in a short time because of climate change. The source cited is not peer-reviewed. Its authors are a public policy analyst, that is, an advocate, and a journalist at the Guardian of London. Neither is a scientist. The main thing is that they did not even try to get their piece published in a real, scholarly, and therefore peer-reviewed journal.
Reliance on sources that are not peer-reviewed is forbidden by the UN Panel’s own rules. The fact that the IGPCC violated its own rules does not imply an evil intent but carelessness or zealots’ quasi religious enthusiasm. ( I keep telling you that climate change is a religion) I ask myself: How long would I continue to patronize a car mechanic who told this level of untruths?
The story was in the Telegraph, a UK left-wing newspaper, on January 25th. This came up after the 300+ mistake I talked about before about the time it will take for Himalayas glaciers to melt down. (It’s 300 years longer than announced by the Panel, according to the correction given by the Panel itself!)
You can find everything including linked to references in the
“ Watt’s Up With That” site, linked to this blog under “Climate change.”
In the English-speaking world, the one I know well, scholars make their careers by publishing in scholarly journals. Most scholars are also university professors but most university professors are not scholars.
In every discipline, such as Economics, or Physics, there are only two or three journals that matter a lot, and a multitude that matter a little or hardly at all. There is sometimes overlap between disciplines such as Sociology and Management ( my own disciplines). Scholars in one discipline frequently try to publish in journals of a different but related discipline.
All scholarly journals that matter are peer-reviewed. I think there is no exception. This is how peer review works. First the traffic directors of the process of peer review.
In my experience, journals’ chief editors are always well-known scholars who have themselves published uncommonly much in first-rate refereed journals. They may be controversial; their appointment may trigger unseemly rage but never because they are judged incompetent. Journal editors are normally not paid for their hard, time-consuming work but they often receive course relief and office space from their university. Editors get huge prestige and satisfaction from the job. There is much competition for the position of editor of any major scholarly journal. There is no formal way to achieve the position. (I got an offer once and I decided not to pursue it. Too much work for me.)
This is how editors of scholarly journals organize peer reviewing.
An individual or, more often, a team of scholars, works on a study and then, writes it up. In the disciplines I know, this process often takes three years. The final result is a 20 to 30-page paper.
Then, they choose a journal and they submit their paper for publication. Choosing a journal is difficult and delicate. The most prestigious journals may not be the best ones for the particular study depending on subject matter and originality of findings. Yet, publishing is a prestigious journal insures a readership and career advancement.
Upon receiving the submission, the editor give it a quick read. He rejects outright those submissions that are an obvious waste of time. That may be most submissions. For the remainder, he looks through his stable of reviewers for a few who might be competent to judge the particular submission. The reviewers are scholars who have themselves published in his journal. They know the standards and they are usually not eager to open the doors wide: A bad article in the journal in which I published mine six months ago makes mine look bad. Poor quality is contagious in the minds of readers. It’s like high-school: If I hang out with sluts, everyone will think I am a slut too.
The editor then sends the paper to two or, more often, three reviewers. The reviewers do not know the names of the authors of the paper they are reviewing. They are expected to excuse themselves if they recognize the authors or if there might be any potential conflict of interest. The reviewers don’t know each other either until after they have done their review. They are not told who their co-reviewers might be. This cuts down on the possibility of conspiracy for or against the paper they review.
The reviewers do not get paid for their work. They do it as a public service with the intent to act as gate-keepers. They are motivated to let what they think is important and believable get published. They are motivated to stop garbage and falsehoods, and even suspicious-looking findings.
The submitters, the paper’s authors, do not know who their reviewers are. They are never supposed to find out. This practice cuts down on any reviewer’s fear of retaliation. The reviewers are thus roughly “peers” of the submitters. The important point is that they are not superiors in some organizational hierarchy. They are all scholars with a doctorate playing the same game. It’s common for the submitters to be seniors to their reviewers.
This process, is known technically as “double-blind peer review.”
It’s “double” because the reviewers don’t know who the submitter is and he does not know who they are.
Reviewers are expected to critique everything about the paper, the quality of the study, the credibility of the findings, the technical worth of the methods used, the quality of the data. They are explicitly charged with paying attention to the rigorousness of the conclusions drawn from the results: “ We discovered that twenty cats out of a hundred are black, therefore, dogs are white,” would not pass muster. That’s climate science logic. I am sorry, that was a bitchy thing to say!
Reviewers even make comments on the quality of the writing. As a reviewer, I rejected several papers (submissions) outright because they were too difficult to read or because I suspected the authors were not clear in their own minds about what they were discussing.
In practice, it’s not rare for reviewers to specialize in one aspect of a paper. One will be a methods judge, another, a data person (that was me), another a logic expert. That’s one reason to have two or three reviewers rather than one. The other reason is an honest attempt to achieve fairness for the submitters.
There are more exotic specializations: For several years, several social science journals would send me papers to review that they suspected were written – in English – by French speakers. I did what needed to be done. No vacillation; no compassion!
After a delay that may be as long as three or even six months, the editor receives and studies the contributions of all the reviewers.
I surmise that often the several reviews agree substantially well. Personally, every time I have seen the critiques of co-reviewers, of people who had done what I had done in parallel, I was pleased. I never saw incompetent or silly critiques. When there is convergence, the editor has little trouble formulating a response to the authors. When there is no convergence between the reviewers, the editor calls on a fourth, and even on a fifth reviewer. It does so until a clear judgment emerges.
It happens almost never that the response is, “Done.” In my whole career, I sent back a submission I had reviewed to the editor only once saying, “This is very good. Publish it.” My co-reviewers did not agree.
In prestigious, first-rate journals, most submissions simply get rejected. The only good outcome that is likely is called, “Revise and resubmit.” The words speak for themselves. The editor is saying” If you can satisfy reviewer 1 on this point, and reviewer 2 on that point, and reviewer 3 on these other points, I will look at your re-submission with favor .” Again, that’s just about the best you can expect. This response implies no guarantee of future publication.
Remember that your career depends on the outcome. It’s common for five years to elapse between the beginning of a study and the publication of the paper. I begun a study in 1977 that was finally published in a good journal in 2,000, after rejections from five good journals. I did stop working on it for about fifteen years though. Yes, that was an extreme case.
What I have just described (thank you for your patience), is a fiercely competitive gate-keeping system. It may be one of the most competitive systems this side of the Olympics. It’s hated by many academics for a variety of reasons, most bad, some good. One of the good reasons to hate it is that it keeps out many good contributions. Many innovative scholars become bitter because their good work is rejected for bad reasons. The system is also not immune to fads, academic fads that is, that you would not recognize as fads unless you were in the discipline. The system also throws a tarpaulin over forbidden areas of inquiry, especially in the social sciences. So, right now you cannot publish anything on the relationship between race and intelligence, no matter how good the research and the writing. That’s a fact, at least in the US. It might be slightly different in other English-speaking countries but my intuition says not.
Scholarly journals may sometimes be captured by activist or zealot minorities. It would take too long to go into this rare phenomenon. Ask me in a comment if you want to know more. Finally, practically all scholarly journals have a bias against what’s known as “negative findings.” It’s an interesting issue. Again, ask me in a comment if you want to know more.
The peer review system is mostly suppressive. In this respect, it works extraordinarily well. It rarely allows garbage to pass. It’s absolutely harsh on opinions in general. It’s pitiless toward opinions not supported by strong findings. In this respect, peer-reviewed journals are unlike any other source of information on the planet.
Here is another contribution to truth of double-blind peer-reviewed publication: Having an article published in one the prestigious journals is like asking for contradiction. If you present strong evidence that dogs chase cats because cats look to them like food, within a short time, there will be someone submitting research showing that dogs don’t chase cats, that when dogs chase cats, they do it because the cats provoked them, or that cats chase dogs. Editors like to publish replications of published studies. They especially like contradictory replications. The best career ladder for a young upstart researcher is to demonstrate that some older, well-established scholar (like me) is full of it. If you are dreadfully wrong in a double-blind peer-reviewed journal, chances are you are not going to be allowed to stay wrong for a long time.
Double-blind peer review is not perfect but I think it’s the best truth-seeking device we have for the moment. Everything else is inferior.
That’s why it matters whether any policy-making or policy-influencing body such as the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change relies on peer-reviewed studies or on someone’s agenda, religious belief, or pseudo-scientific nightmare.
Filed under Current Events, Socio-Political Essays
