Global Warming: Garbage In, Garbage Out

With So Much Tainted Data ...

Doubt has been raised about essentially all the data used by CRU and NASA in their claims of AGW.  Due to the opaque operations, ill-kept data, and unsupported manipulation of data, it is probably impossible to duplicate the research and results that are claimed to be settled science.  The inability to reproduce a scientific study is grounds for its repudiation.

There is a fundamental reason for this:  CRU and NASA have done what every 8^th grade science fair participant is tempted to do, cherry picked and massaged the data to make it fit the hypothesis.  The integrity of their research has been shattered by the continuously unfolding story of manipulation and selection bias of the inputs, the process, and the conclusions.  Whenever a researcher independently looks at the underlying data, a different picture emerges from that of  the warmists. 

Within the last few months, the data used by CRU and NASA has been challenged in Russia, China, Canada, Australia, and the United States.   In each of these challenges, selection bias is demonstrated, and large error margins demonstrated.  In some cases, temperature measuring stations with favorable readings are included, and those which show less or no warming excluded.  Some stations are included during the periods they support warming and then mysteriously disappear for years when their inputs would be inconvenient.  Some station data were completely made up from non-existent stations.

Additionally, the process of “normalization” or "homogenization" of the data have consistently meant upward revision of readings.  For stations where urbanization has clearly caused an increase in temperatures, and normalization means lowering the measured temperature some, the result somehow is still always an upward trend, even thought there is no scientific basis for knowing what the appropriate adjustment should actually be.  Further, while NASA maintains that urbanization has little overall affect on the data, other research clearly shows evidence to the contrary. 

Even with the best research methodology (for example using station data that actually exists), trying to prove something about temperature trends with the available data is next to impossible.  It all comes back to the measuring stations.  Few have complete known histories, many have been moved multiple times, been subject to urban sprawl,  discontinuous service, or perhaps unknown  temperature affecting phenomena.  Even in the US, most of the recording is done by volunteers taking manual readings, so imagine what it is like in the rest of the world.  Here is a great report on the absurdity of some of the stations and how their measurements are used.  This is only thirty miles from where I live so I found it particularly interesting. And remember, if measurements can be so messed up in the US, what is the rest of the world like?

Creative Destruction In the Republican Party

We see the results of creative destruction all around us as new innovative businesses take market share and profits from older complacent companies.  Walmart displacing Sears and the business centers of small towns, Compaq and Dell unseating IBM, Microsoft rising and now Google ascending to challenge them.  Amazon changing an entire industry, and lest we forget, electronic media usurping print media in news delivery.

The Republican party is, hopefully, undergoing this type of reinvention right now.  This would be the third time the GOP has seen this happen in modern political times (since the Great Depression), while the Democratic party has remained essentially unchanged as demonstrated by the current administration's policies which hearken back to FDR and his grand coalition.

The first occurrence began with Reagan running in 1976 and resulted in his election in 1980.  Many events coalesced to bring about a sea change in the way Americans thought about themselves and their country.  The Republicans were at their lowest ebb after Watergate, but the 70's brought stagflation on the economic front, international failures from Vietnam to the Iranian hostage situation, a president in Jimmy Carter who was not up to the task and one who lost hope for America, and a nationwide frustration as the consequences of the anything goes 60's resulted in a loss of a sense of moral direction.  Roe v. Wade was the last straw for many religious Americans who had never been involved in politics before. 

Then, in the early 90's something else began to happen.  Newt Gingrich began to believe that Republicans could actually eat into the Democrat majority in the House and began to recruit exciting new candidates to run as Republicans.  Newt pushed aside the lame leadership of Bob Michaels and came up with the Contract With America, stating explicitly what the Republicans would do if they had the power to do it.  The GOP picked up 54 seats in the 1994 elections and ended forty years of Democrat control of congress.  While Newt spearheaded the revolution, it was once again main street Americans, tired of business as usual, who decided to get involved and vote for change.

Now, here we are at another cusp.  Even without a leader to rally around, main street has met the grass roots and we are all Tea Partiers now.  As in the late 70's, we have a president who seems in over his head, who scolds rather than inspires, we have dangers internationally that the administration bumbles and falters over, and a bad economy suffering from a hopefully brief return to failed Keynesian policies of the past.  And as in 1994, we have a horrible national health care plan that Americans know intuitively will be a budget breaker and boondoggle.  The stage is set.  Will the Republican party respond as it has in the past with creative destruction?  Or will it try to play both sides, hoping to benefit from the Tea Partiers without actually embracing the reason for the Tea Parties.  Let's hope history repeats itself.

Calvin and Keynes

I read The Institutes of the Christian Religion long ago and  I came away convinced that Calvin was not a Calvinist, or least would not be willing to boil his theology down to the five points of Calvinism. 

Reading recently about Keynes, I have come to a similar conclusion.  He introduced the concept of macroeconomics, which has become a fundamental part of everyone's thinking about economics.  And he thought deficit spending during downturns would mitigate unemployment.  But he also assumed  that surpluses during expansions would pay back any debt accumulated by the government.

Further, he thought Hayek's Road to Serfdom was a great book.  Hayek asked Keynes just weeks before his death "... if he wasn't getting alarmed about what some of his pupils were doing with his ideas. And he said,' Oh, they're just fools. These ideas were frightfully important in the 1930s, but if these ideas ever become dangerous. you can trust me--I'm going to turn public opinion around like this.'" (Reason interview ) In light of this, I imagine Keynes would be horrified to see how his theory has become an excuse for redistributing wealth, and for bloated, deficit financed government, in good times and in bad.

Neo Keynesians have gone far beyond what Keynes would have found acceptable, just as latter day Calvinists have gone far beyond what John Calvin believed.

With Climategate, The Other Shoe Begins To Fall Quietly, But With Inevitability

Will MSM Hear It?

Phil Jones, former head of the East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, and one of the world’s leading proponents of AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming) has finally started to come clean concerning the supposed soundness of the “underlying science.”  Not that he would put it that way, of course.

But before we get to what he revealed to the BBC yesterday, we need to take a look at the way the mouthpieces for the fraud that is AGW have emerged from one embarrassment after another with a common reassurance.  As if reading from talking points, warming alarmists worldwide have repeated the mantra that the basic science is sound, and all these errors are merely fringe stuff, nothing that affects the basic premise that man-made carbon emissions are creating a green house effect that will cause global temperatures to rise several degrees over the next century and result in massive catastrophes of many sorts.

So, let me get this straight.   The part of the 2007 IPCC report that dealt with actual physical predictions is fraught with errors, but that is not important.  The underlying science is still good.  The stuff about glaciers melting, rainforests vanishing, Africa frying, the frequency and severity of hurricanes and storms escalating, all within the next few decades was wrong, (not to mention the inability to understand geography enough to figure out how much of Holland is below sea level), but, ah, don’t be alarmed, everything else in the report is accurate. 

We shouldn’t worry about other parts of the report?  What about  NASA being forced to revise their figures when caught dishonestly claiming all the warmest years of the last century were recent, when in fact they were not.  Or the fact that the CRU’s own programmer could not figure out how to make the original temperature data transmogrify into the data set used to produce the infamous “hockey stick?”

Which brings us back to Mr. Jones latest revelations.  He now admits that the data were not “well organized,” and that is why he has refused to let anyone else look at it.  Nice euphemism, very scientific indeed.   Then he goes on, now that someone is going to actually look at real data and not just their manipulated data, and fesses up that maybe, just possibly, the medieval warming period might actually exist.  If the science is not settled about the medieval warming period, then the science is not settled at all, since if that that period were as warm or warmer than the last few decades, AGW is left with very little support on which to rest.  Unless we were producing a lot of greenhouse gases back in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

It is entirely possible that humans have contributed to some warming, but it appears the amount will eventually be found to be insignificant compared to the natural but poorly understood cycles the earth goes through.   AGW is another Piltdown Man.   Al Gore, please return all Oscars, Nobels, etc.  And all of you on the AGW gravy train please return those trillions of dollars to the tax payers; and let us pray we don’t get fooled again.

Burning Question: Is Obama a Socialist?

Despite what many conservatives would like to think, the short answer is no.  Obama, at least from what we know, is not a socialist.  A true socialist believes that workers should control the means of production, (whatever that may actually mean).  Obama clearly believes that there should be a private sector from which the government harvests huge tax revenues to stoke the engine of the state.  Yet he is clearly not a free market capitalist as he favors vigorous regulation and supervision of the private sector to the point that the state is superior to, and involved in, much of corporate governance.   So what is he?

In Europe, many who identify themselves as socialist are not true socialists either, but the name is not political poison there.  They do not want the state to run everything, just the important industries such as health care, education, and utilities , but they do want the state to have control over other industries so that state goals can be met   Government spending of the average EU country accounts for slightly more than half of their GDPs.  This is not true socialism but certainly not capitalism either.  Those who favor this mix are called both socialists and social democrats.

But the inconvenient and uncomfortable truth is that these policies resemble the economic theory of corporatism more than anything else.   While EU countries evolve towards corporatism, China is the most notable example of modern state corporatism as it moves from a pseudo-socialist economy to a mixed economy.  (Some highly regarded liberals in our country longingly survey China as a model for us to move towards both politically and economically).  Modern corporatism puts the state either directly or indirectly in control of the vast majority of the economic output of a country.  If one were to notice Chinese xenophobia, eugenics tendencies, nationalistic spirit (which was greatly disappointing to the USSR) and combine that with its current economic trends ... well, I won't mention what one is reminded of.  Theses same tendencies are growing in Europe, the nationalism being to the EU of course.

If you wnat to know what Obama is, well look this way. 

Once More Into The Breach

I began my first blog in 2004 and managed to make into the Large Mammals section of the Blogosphere.  In 2005 I had to give it up for a variety of reasons, but now I am back in business.  Guess we'll see what happens.