Sunday, July 23, 2017
Sunday, July 16, 2017
The moral hazard of climate change.
Tuesday, July 11, 2017
Monday, July 3, 2017
Fwd: Do the math
That's a failure rate of 83 percent. This has nothing to do with conservative vs liberal. These are just facts.
Here in Nevada, our last two insurance carriers just pulled out. Fourteen of 17 counties in Nevada will not have any insurance option for the Nevada Obamacare exchange in 2018. That's a failure rate of … you guessed it, 83 percent. Hey, at least Obamacare is consistent!
By the way, the Obamacare exchanges failed in both Vermont and Hawaii. Two tiny, liberal states couldn't make it work. Hundreds of millions of taxpayers' dollars lost.
In California, the Democrat Assembly leader is getting death threats because he tabled the idea of universal health care. Democrats are threatening to kill a Democrat because he realized there isn't enough money in the world to pay for free health care. The cost in California for universal health care? $400 billion. That's more than twice as much as the entire California budget.
Eroding common identity
Historically, a nation-state stipulated the primacy of a nation brought together by a common culture, which in turn went on to generate an overarching national identity strong enough to attenuate regional, ethnic or religious differences. In both their American and European systemic varieties, democratic institutions have preserved and protected the rights of the people, while the culturally grounded dominant national identity has given the nation-state its requisite resilience, while also imbuing it with the power to make demands of its citizens. So long as this shared national identity remained strong—call it patriotism, love of country, or belonging beyond one's immediate family and local community—the nation-state retained its cohesion, resting on a sense of reciprocity between the government and the citizen.
Today after decades of espousing multiculturalism and group rights buttressed by the politics of grievance, the foundations of a larger shared national identity have eroded such that governance—or better yet, governability—has become an increasingly scarce commodity across the West. We are at an inflection point, where a growing systemic disorder is stoked not just by shifts in the global power distribution, but by the progressive decline in governability. The dismantling of the core principle that the national homeland should be under the sovereign control of its people lies at the root of this problem.
The hypothesis that institutions ultimately trump culture has over the past quarter century morphed into an article of faith, alongside the fervently held belief that nationalism and democratic politics are at their core fundamentally incompatible. The decades-long assault on the very idea of national identity steeped in a shared culture and defined by a commitment to the preservation of the nation has left Western leadership frequently unable to articulate the fundamentals that bind us and that we thus must be prepared to defend. The deepening fight over the right of the central government to control the national border—which is at the core of the Western idea of the nation-state—is emblematic of this situation.
https://www.the-american-
Friday, June 23, 2017
Wednesday, June 21, 2017
Climate Change
Tuesday, June 20, 2017
Fwd: The growing divide
If you want a video representation of this mindset, I could do no better than to offer this footage from a recent conversation with the leaders of Google dealing with an uncomfortable question last month about the monolithic nature of their engagement with politics.
Note the response from Eric Schmidt, who rejects the idea that anyone disagreeing with him politically could be operating from a position of "science-based thinking". The level of diversity and inclusiveness welcomed by Google is precisely as much as is needed to achieve their corporate aims. "You'll also find that all of the other companies in our field agree with us" – yes, we know.
In an economy that is increasingly driven by the global elite, will the values that have been central to our nation's history exist in a meaningful sense? Or will they be discarded as inconvenient bugs, virulent viruses passed on from our ignorant forefathers that must be cured? Can free speech and religious liberty survive in an environment when our corporate leaders see honor in stamping out fake news and non-science based thinking?
And this leads us back to the question of why we hate each other. The New York Times looked into rising contempt across partisan lines: "Democrats and Republicans truly think worse of each other, a trend that isn't really about policy preferences. Members of the two parties are more likely today to describe each other unfavorably, as selfish, as threats to the nation, even as unsuitable marriage material.
"Surveys over time have used a 100-point thermometer scale to rate how voters feel toward each other, from cold to warm. Democrats and Republicans have been giving lower and lower scores — more cold shoulder — to the opposite party. By 2008, the average rating for members of the other party was barely above 30.
By 2016, that average dropped by about five more percentage points, dragged down in part by a new phenomenon: For the first time, the most common answer given was zero, the worst possible option. In other words, voters on the left and right now feel downright frigid toward each other."
Today, the centralized power among the leaders of the global tech industry – who have little use for free speech and religion, and are thoroughly onboard with the Messianic aims of the environmental movement are steadily prodding governments to seal up the valves and the hatches. In a world where all the companies agree, what use are they after all?
The implicit motto of the global elites today is "no escape" – no escape valve from a permanently politicized life, where the only legitimate perspective is their monopolistic, secularized, authoritarian-friendly
When we do not view each other as legitimate – particularly when decisions are not coming from the people or properly elected officials, but from some other force – it leads to resentment, escalation, and eventually something much worse.
http://thefederalist.com/2017/
Friday, June 9, 2017
Garrison Final Show
Thursday, June 8, 2017
Monday, June 5, 2017
Friday, June 2, 2017
How to ruin a teenager's life.
Thursday, June 1, 2017
Monday, May 29, 2017
Milton Friedman on Bernie Sanders
Wednesday, May 24, 2017
Friday, May 5, 2017
Minimum wage.
Wednesday, May 3, 2017
Monckton's Mathematical Proof - Climate Sensitivity is Low
In other words, if you argue that the Earth has a low climate sensitivity to CO2, you are also arguing for a low climate sensitivity to other influences such as solar irradiance, orbital changes, and volcanic emissions. In fact, as shown in Figure 1, the climate is less sensitive to changes in solar activity than greenhouse gases. Thus when arguing for low climate sensitivity, it becomes difficult to explain past climate changes. For example, between glacial and interglacial periods, the planet's average temperature changes on the order of 6°C (more like 8-10°C in the Antarctic). If the climate sensitivity is low, for example due to increasing low-lying cloud cover reflecting more sunlight as a response to global warming, then how can these large past climate changes be explained?
https://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-sensitivity-advanced.htm
Sunday, April 30, 2017
Climate Sensitivity Reconsidered
Final climate sensitivity
Substituting in Eqn. (1) the revised values derived for the three factors in ΔTλ, our re-evaluated central estimate of climate sensitivity is their product –
ΔTλ= ΔF2x κ f ≈ 1.135 x 0.242 x 2.095 ≈ 0.58 °K (30)
Theoretically, empirically, and in the literature that we have extensively cited, each of the values we have chosen as our central estimate is arguably more justifiable – and is certainly no less justifiable – than the substantially higher value selected by the IPCC. Accordingly, it is very likely that in response to a doubling of pre-industrial carbon dioxide concentration TS will rise not by the 3.26 °K suggested by the IPCC, but by <1 °K.
Discussion
We have set out and then critically examined a detailed account of the IPCC's method of evaluating climate sensitivity. We have made explicit the identities, interrelations, and values of the key variables, many of which the IPCC does not explicitly describe or quantify. The IPCC's method does not provide a secure basis for policy-relevant conclusions. We now summarize some of its defects.
The IPCC's methodology relies unduly – indeed, almost exclusively – upon numerical analysis, even where the outputs of the models upon which it so heavily relies are manifestly and significantly at variance with theory or observation or both. Modeled projections such as those upon which the IPCC's entire case rests have long been proven impossible when applied to mathematically-chaotic objects, such as the climate, whose initial state can never be determined to a sufficient precision. For a similar reason, those of the IPCC's conclusions that are founded on probability distributions in the chaotic climate object are unsafe.
Not one of the key variables necessary to any reliable evaluation of climate sensitivity can be measured empirically. The IPCC's presentation of its principal conclusions as though they were near-certain is accordingly unjustifiable. We cannot even measure mean global surface temperature anomalies to within a factor of 2; and the IPCC's reliance upon mean global temperatures, even if they could be correctly evaluated, itself introduces substantial errors in its evaluation of climate sensitivity.
The IPCC overstates the radiative forcing caused by increased CO2 concentration at least threefold because the models upon which it relies have been programmed fundamentally to misunderstand the difference between tropical and extra-tropical climates, and to apply global averages that lead to error.
The IPCC overstates the value of the base climate sensitivity parameter for a similar reason. Indeed, its methodology would in effect repeal the fundamental equation of radiative transfer (Eqn. 18), yielding the impossible result that at every level of the atmosphere ever-smaller forcings would induce ever-greater temperature increases, even in the absence of any temperature feedbacks.
The IPCC overstates temperature feedbacks to such an extent that the sum of the high-end values that it has now, for the first time, quantified would cross the instability threshold in the Bode feedback equation and induce a runaway greenhouse effect that has not occurred even in geological times despite CO2 concentrations almost 20 times today's, and temperatures up to 7 ºC higher than today's.
The Bode equation, furthermore, is of questionable utility because it was not designed to model feedbacks in non-linear objects such as the climate. The IPCC's quantification of temperature feedbacks is, accordingly, inherently unreliable. It may even be that, as Lindzen (2001) and Spencer (2007) have argued, feedbacks are net-negative, though a more cautious assumption has been made in this paper.
It is of no little significance that the IPCC's value for the coefficient in the CO2 forcing equation depends on only one paper in the literature; that its values for the feedbacks that it believes account for two-thirds of humankind's effect on global temperatures are likewise taken from only one paper; and that its implicit value of the crucial parameter κ depends upon only two papers, one of which had been written by a lead author of the chapter in question, and neither of which provides any theoretical or empirical justification for a value as high as that which the IPCC adopted.
The IPCC has not drawn on thousands of published, peer-reviewed papers to support its central estimates for the variables from which climate sensitivity is calculated, but on a handful.
On this brief analysis, it seems that no great reliance can be placed upon the IPCC's central estimates of climate sensitivity, still less on its high-end estimates. The IPCC's assessments, in their current state, cannot be said to be "policy-relevant". They provide no justification for taking the very costly and drastic actions advocated in some circles to mitigate "global warming", which Eqn. (30) suggests will be small (<1 °C at CO2 doubling), harmless, and beneficial.
Conclusion
Even if temperature had risen above natural variability, the recent solar Grand Maximum may have been chiefly responsible. Even if the sun were not chiefly to blame for the past half-century's warming, the IPCC has not demonstrated that, since CO2 occupies only one-ten-thousandth part more of the atmosphere that it did in 1750, it has contributed more than a small fraction of the warming. Even if carbon dioxide were chiefly responsible for the warming that ceased in 1998 and may not resume until 2015, the distinctive, projected fingerprint of anthropogenic "greenhouse-gas" warming is entirely absent from the observed record. Even if the fingerprint were present, computer models are long proven to be inherently incapable of providing projections of the future state of the climate that are sound enough for policymaking. Even if per impossibile the models could ever become reliable, the present paper demonstrates that it is not at all likely that the world will warm as much as the IPCC imagines. Even if the world were to warm that much, the overwhelming majority of the scientific, peer-reviewed literature does not predict that catastrophe would ensue. Even if catastrophe might ensue, even the most drastic proposals to mitigate future climate change by reducing emissions of carbon dioxide would make very little difference to the climate. Even if mitigation were likely to be effective, it would do more harm than good: already millions face starvation as the dash for biofuels takes agricultural land out of essential food production: a warning that taking precautions, "just in case", can do untold harm unless there is a sound, scientific basis for them. Finally, even if mitigation might do more good than harm, adaptation as (and if) necessary would be far more cost-effective and less likely to be harmful.
In short, we must get the science right, or we shall get the policy wrong.
https://www.aps.org/units/fps/newsletters/200807/monckton.cfm
Monday, April 24, 2017
Saturday, April 22, 2017
Wednesday, April 5, 2017
Friday, March 31, 2017
The Winner of the Google Doodle contest
