Here are the authors of a study critical of the consensus AGW narrative which the leaked CRU letters talk about how to suppress. The letters discuss how to stack peer reviewers in favor of AGW and against dissenters, and how to bypass the normal peer review cycle to cram a response in immediately after the critical paper.
Hint: this is not the way disinterested science is supposed to work.
Noted Constitutional law scholar Richard A. Epstein says Harry Reid’s ObamaCare bill is unconstitutional.
“The Supreme Court’s basic constitutional requirement is that any firm in a regulated market be allowed to recover a risk-adjusted competitive rate of return on its accumulated capital investment. See Duquesne Light Co. v. Barasch, 488 U.S. 299 (1988).
“The Reid Bill emphatically fails this test by imposing sharp limitations on the ability of health-insurance companies to raise fees or exclude coverage. Moreover, the Reid Bill forces on these regulated firms onerous new obligations that they will not be able to fund from their various revenue sources. The squeeze between the constricted revenue sources allowable under the Reid Bill and the extensive new legal obligations it imposes is likely to result in massive cash crunch that could drive the firms that serve the individual and small-group health-insurance markets into bankruptcy.”
I’m not even remotely enough of a Constitutional Law scholar to know if his argument is correction, but Epstein is certainly one of the heavy-hitters in that field, and his book Takings is is one of the most important works on the subject of the federal government exceeding its constitutional power in the last quarter century. And he actually appears to have read the bill, which probably puts him one up on, oh, more than half the Senators voting on it…
If there’s a theme for the Obama years, and for the Pelosi/Reid legislation Obama has embraced, it’s that of spending tremendous amounts of taxpayer dollars to accomplish almost nothing. Consider:
What all three have in common?
The way things are going, the slaughter of Democratic incumbents in the 2010 election could make 1994 look like a picnic by comparison…
Update:
Greetings Farkers!
<Troy McClure>Hi, I’m Lawrence Person! You may remember me from such Flamewars as “ObamaCare is all about choice, or rather, taking choices away from American citizens and giving them to government bureaucrats” and “From Iran to Honduras, millions of people around the world long for freedom and democracy. And wherever those seeking freedom can be found, Obama will be there…grinding his bootheel into their face”.</Troy McClure>
Come in and sit a spell. Have a beer and stretch your feet out to the toasty flamewar goodness. Feel free to buy a book or check out my other, completely non-political blog.
And, above all, Obey the Hypnotoad!
In a way however, this strange juxtaposition is deeply unfair, and even cruel. The chicken is a noble (if dimwitted) creature that provides desperately needed sustenance to a hungry world. It is an insult to conflate it with such a corrupt, evil and debased entity as Nancy Pelosi…
Given that it’s no so extrordinarily unpopular that it threatens to unseat numerous Democratic senators next year.
- “A recent Zogby poll showed 28% of state voters support ‘reform.’ A full 40% said they’d be less likely to vote for Democratic Sen. Byron Dorgan next year if he supports a bill. In a theoretical matchup with Republican Gov. John Hoeven (who has yet to announce), Mr. Hoeven wins 55% to 36%. Mr. Dorgan has been in the Senate 17 years; he won his last election with 68% of the vote.”
- “In Arkansas, 32% support this health-care legislation. Sen. Blanche Lincoln, also running next year, trails challengers by more than 50 points among the 56% of voters who strongly disapprove of the health plan.”
- “Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, the public face of health reform, can barely break 38% approval in Nevada.”
Maybe they should be calling it “doctor-assisted political suicide”…
According to this report CRU “probably tampered with Russian-climate data.”
It goes on:
“Analysts say Russian meteorological stations cover most of the country’s territory, and that the Hadley Center had used data submitted by only 25% of such stations in its reports. Over 40% of Russian territory was not included in global-temperature calculations for some other reasons, rather than the lack of meteorological stations and observations.
“The data of stations located in areas not listed in the Hadley Climate Research Unit Temperature UK (HadCRUT) survey often does not show any substantial warming in the late 20th century and the early 21st century.”
The deeper people look into the data, the more data manipulation they find. Insert your own “tip of the iceberg” joke here.
I’m not an expert, but if the information presented here is accurate, it makes a pretty compelling case that the warming trend we experienced in the 20th century was quite normal within the overall geological time-frame.
During the recession, government employees have had to make serious cutba–ha, ha, oh sorry, I could even keep a straight face while typing that. They’ve made out like bandits:
And just think of the additional billions they’ll be able to rake in for cap-and-trade and ObamaCare…
According to Pew: “Conservatives and Republicans report fewer experiences than liberals or Democrats communicating with the dead, seeing ghosts and consulting fortunetellers or psychics.”
Now, who was it that was part of the “Reality-Based Community” again?
A few bits on the ever-expanding, always boiling Climategate scandal.
First, here’s a link to, of all things, a single post in a Slashdot thread that concisely articulates a very important point: The lamentable tendency of many Global Warming boosters to label anyone who questions any part of the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) narrative as “deniers.” There are varying degrees of skepticism, ranging all the way from “Global warming is all completely bunk and nothing you ever say will change my mind” to “Hey, I believe it’s every bit as bad as the AGW proponents claim, but maybe Kyoto and Copenhagen aren’t the best way to address it.” I myself am in the “Global warming may be real, but we don’t know how bad it is, don’t know how much of it is natural and how much (if any) is man-made, and in any case we should do a lot more study and measurement before ceding control of vast stretches of our economy to unelected transnational bureaucrats” camp.
However, the response of Global Warming proponents to just about any criticism of the consensus AGW narrative seems to be “The science is already settled, and anyone questioning it is as bad as a Flat Earther, a Creationist, or a Holocaust denier. Now sit down, shut up, and hand over all your money and power to us.” (And here’s the LA Times attempting a textbook “scientists are smart, Americans are stupid, questioning global warming is as bad as Creationism, so shut the hell up” approach.) As long as they keep trying to pull this “Nothing to see here, now move along” crap about Climategate, more and more people are going to question what they say. And rightly so. Especially since the overwhelming majority of people pushing AGW are the very same people who push bigger government and higher taxes as the solution to just about every problem. A lot of the people questioning the consensus narrative aren’t just random bloggers, they’re people with PhDs in related fields who are saying the science just doesn’t add up.
Here’s the reply of Watts Up With That author Willis Eschenbach to the Economist article (which can be found as the source link for the aforementioned Slashdot thread), rebutting their analysis (or lack thereof) of his original article (which I linked to here). (For extra credit, diagram that previous sentence.)
Here’s the actual IPCC reports, which some who have read them all the way through (Disclaimer: I haven’t managed to do that myself yet. Mea culpa.) say don’t make anywhere near the ironclad case for AGW that many proponents claim.
Is Google trying to suppress Climategate? My own quick search would tend to suggest no, they aren’t. I see a few AGW-critical sources (American Thinker (hey, is that the same J. R. Dunn that writes science fiction?), Washington Times) near the top of my date-sorted list. Clearly Google leans fairly heavily to the left, and I’m nowhere near the “Google can do no wrong” camp, but sometimes it just takes time for their server caches to be updated. At least once before (antedating this blog by several years) I jumped the gun on accusing Google of hiding something, only to have it show up a day or two later. (Mmmm, egg. It’s what’s on my face.) If they are trying to suppress the story, they’re doing a pretty piss poor job of it.
Finally, here’s Ralph Peters in the New York Post: “A thriving economy can do more to protect the environment than a desperate one. And let’s not forget the ‘human ecology’ of families struggling to put food on the table. Extreme environmentalism is a rich man’s sport that rides hell-for-leather through the poor man’s fields.”