January 2012

U.N. Climate panel pummeled for misinformation, high and low

by Michael Fumento on February 15, 2010 · 1 comment

in Global Warming

From the very top of the earth to the bottom, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) just can’t get it right.

I recently wrote of how the panel’s latest (2007) report, the one that split the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore, was finally caught on what was an obviously false statement: That the glaciers atop the Himalayas would be melted by 2035 because of global warming. It would take an incredible amount of sustained heat to do that. The only question was what source the panel used, and that proved to be an off-the-cuff assertion by a global warming activist as reprinted in an environmentalist journal – with a mathematical error to boot!

Now it’s been revealed that the panel grossly overstated how much of the Netherlands is below sea level.

Its latest report says 55 percent of the country is below sea level, leaving it highly prone to flooding along rivers that would ostensible rise with warming temperatures. But Netherlanders can take off their clogs and relax. According to the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, just 26 percent of the country is below sea level and 29 percent susceptible to river flooding. You can see a lot of pretty maps regarding the subject by the Dutch Ministry of Transport here.

The IPCC insists that it’s a minor point in a report 3,000 words long and doesn’t affect the core conclusions that human activities, led by burning fossil fuels, are warming the globe. Of course it doesn’t, any more than does the Himalayan nonsense.

But this latest wooden shoe to the butt again illustrates that this allegedly thoroughly documented reports by the allegedly top experts in world has a nasty tendency to simply include anything that will make its case seem stronger. Taken in light of the recent “Climategate” revelations that scientists who came to the “wrong” conclusions had their materially systematically excluded from the report and other IPCC documents, it shows just how shaky this house of cards is.

Space, the final private frontier

by Wayne Crews on February 15, 2010

in Mobility, Odds & Ends, Precaution & Risk, Regulation

Here’s a case for private space exploration in the Wall Street Journal. Indeed, if we can ever get rid of NASA and the FAA, we might actually be able to have a space program. Remains to be seen.

Preserve Liberty with an Opt-Out Principle

by Wayne Crews on February 15, 2010

in Features, Odds & Ends, Zeitgeist

Surely no one was surprised to read the New York Times headline “Obama Making Plans to Use Executive Power.” Renouncing the doctrine of separation of powers and exploiting executive power makes it easier for a president to impose, with swarms of regulatory agencies and administration officials, what the congressmen you actually elected could not even convince you to accept. This particular stage of this particular presidency is not unexpected; indeed it was explained to you during the State of the Union Address that all the big government you thought you didn’t want, you actually do want.

Obama’s plans, along with grants of cash (not his, yours) to this or that “technology” initiative, include establishing a tax-increase commission (the trillion dollars in individual taxes collected does not suffice). They also include imposing EPA greenhouse gas rules without waiting for clarification about corrupt datasets underlying the allegedly official reports that in turn underlie all calls for regulation. But of course the climate debate’s always been about control of energy as such; were the CO2 issue to vanish overnight, other rationales for politically administering your and even the world’s access to energy would quickly surface.

Note how the proposed uses of executive represent expansions of the state rather than pro-liberty reductions, like say, banning income-tax withholding by Treasury, or creation of a commission specfically commanded to propose reductions in regulations on small business, or a commission to eliminate government agencies altogether.

The constitutional Doctrine of Separation of Powers was meant to protect you from the things Washington is doing now. It would require (for one example) Congress in many instances to approve a president’s executive decrees before they could actually bind you.

Unfortunately though, separation of powers is no longer a principle of limited government. Now, all that separation of powers means is that there is no specific tyrant. Nealy all that the federal government does every single day is well beyond the proscribed powers of keeping order that a part-time and term-limited Congress could easily achieve.

We’ve argued often that a nation’s prosperity requires something apart from an expanded state, collectivism new government spending, yet more stimulus to nowhere, and today’s incarnation, the use of greater executive power. Restoring economic growth and healthy bounds on government only requires assurances that Uncle Sam will keep his hands in his own pockets and reject the model of government steering while the market is forced to row toward crosswind, collectivist, selfish political goals.

Thank You Just the Same, But NO
But we can outgrow an ill-advised American leviathan whatever mistakes are entrenched now, by applying liberty to the future.

Future generations of Americans, those not yet born, need not be forced into the preposterous government “entitlement” (more properly, “impoverishment”) programs of today, and the new programs being imposed even now.

Liberty will thrive if we end the business of binding posterity to the statist aspirations of contemporary politicians. The future of liberty lies in the direction of this reform, a new “Proscriptive Principle” that limits what today’s politicians can do to tomorrow’s Americans. Politicians and modern public policy forget that we are not immortal.

Or to put it in simpler terms, call it Opt-Out. Liberty requires preserving the right of future generations with no voice today to opt-out of government programs created by transitory politicians they never even knew.

Note: Image “Liberty Bell” by basykes; CC Attribution.

Swine flu and heterosexual AIDS

by Michael Fumento on February 15, 2010

in Health and Illness

About 57 million Americans, or something less than a fifth of the population, have contracted swine flu since April, the CDC says, of whom it estimates about 11,690 have died.

Never mind that data from other countries like France and Japan indicate the ratio of deaths to infections is probably much lower than CDC
assumes and therefore that 11,690 figure is probably far too high. It could be just 5,000 or even lower. It remains that this same agency says that on average 36,000 Americans a year die of regular old garden variety seasonal flu.

Anyway you figure it, as I’ve repeatedly written, and as the rest of the U.S. media have repeatedly not written – thereby giving the U.S. policy makers and the World Health Organization (WHO) free rein – swine flu is so mild that it acts as an inoculation and actually prevents a lot of deaths. In early October I noted we saw that pattern in New Zealand and Australia, where they had their flu seasons before we did and even had no swine flu vaccine, and therefore we would see it here.

That despite apocalyptic estimates of 30,000 to 90,000, according to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology or "89,000 to 207,000," according to a Washington Post op-ed by flu book author John Barry. (Not incidentally, the Post has repeatedly turned down anti-hysteria pieces of mine that were good enough to appear in other prestigious publications.)

In the meantime, the federal government has probably spent over $10 billion "fighting" the “roaring razorback” that proved to be a pathetic piglet, and a lot of people have been scared out of their wits. Around the world, other governments did likewise after the WHO declared its phony pandemic in an effort to cover for yet another hysteria that it fomented, that of avian flu.

That’s not to mention Secretary-General Margaret Chandler’s invocation to her minions to use the swine flu scare to convince governments that "changes in the functioning of the global economy" are needed to "distribute wealth on the basis of" values "like community, solidarity, equity and social justice."

Why fight disease when you can fight capitalism?

Yet as with the first phony epidemic I began writing about, heterosexual AIDS way back in 1987, these data were out there all along for anybody to pick up and relate. The Internet has made it all the easier. Nobody sent me anything in a plain brown envelope. There was no “Deep Throat” informant and none required. Likewise with other phony infectious disease scares I’ve written about, including "pandemic Ebolavirus," SARS, and avian flu. Twenty-two years on and it’s the same old thing.

Am I a reincarnation of Nostradamus who, inexplicably rather than making billions playing the lottery, is doing work that doesn’t begin to cover his mortgage payments? Or is there something horribly, horribly wrong with our media? And for you "new media" fans, sorry but those teeming millions of bloggers missed the boat as well.

Scientist at center of email scandal admits no recent warming

by Michael Fumento on February 14, 2010 · 1 comment

in Global Warming, Odds & Ends

There has been no global warming for a long time, as I wrote recently in Forbes Online (“Show Me the Warming,” Nov. 30, 2009).

I noted that Kevin Trenberth, a lead author of the warmist bible, the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report—told Congress two years ago that evidence for manmade warming is “unequivocal.” He claimed “the planet is running a ’fever’ and the prognosis is that it is apt to get much worse.” Yet in one of the released emails he admitted that data showed there was no warming “at the moment.” I then explained:

But Trenberth’s “lack of warming at the moment” has been going on at least a decade. “There has been no [surface-measured] warming since 1997 and no statistically significant warming since 1995,” observes MIT meteorologist Richard Lindzen. “According to satellite data, global warming stopped about 10 years ago and there’s no way to know whether it’s happening now,” says Roy Spencer, former NASA senior scientist for climate studies.

Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide
The atmospheric concentration of CO2 keeps going up, yet temperatures for the last decade have been flat

The importance of this is that during the past decade, we’ve belched so-called “greenhouse gases” (GHGs) into the atmosphere at ever greater rates, from 6,510 million metric tons in 1996 to 8,230 in 2006—a 26% increase. Atmospheric concentrations have also reached the highest levels ever observed.

Now Professor Phil Jones, director the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Center and the central figure in the ‘Climategate’ affair, has conceded there’s been no ‘statistically significant’ warming. Naturally he said it was a “blip” and not a trend, and he may well prove right. But that doesn’t eliminate the problem that this “blip” has been occurring with historic GHG emissions, therefore the grossly simplistic formula of GHG emissions = warming is false.

He also made what may be the strongest admission by a major warmist that the earth could have been warmer during medieval times (about 800 – 1300) when mankind was emitting essentially no GHGs. (Viking ships did use sails, you may recall.) And he said that the debate over whether the world could have been even warmer than now during the medieval period, when there is evidence of high temperatures in northern countries, was far from settled.

Heretofore, warmists tried to dismiss this altogether or say it only applied to northern climes.

Nevertheless, “There is much debate over whether the MWP was global in extent or not,” Jones admitted, adding “The MWP is most clearly expressed in parts of North America, the North Atlantic and Europe and parts of Asia.”

He said that, “For it to be global in extent, the MWP would need to be seen clearly in more records from the tropical regions and the Southern hemisphere” and “There are very few palaeoclimatic records for these latter two regions.” Still, “If the MWP was shown to be global in extent and as warm or warmer than today, then obviously the late 20th Century warmth would not be unprecedented.”

In that case, he should be informed of a Nature magazine study last year indicating water temperatures in the area of Indonesia were the same in the MWP as they are today.

You can read some of the specific questions and answers here with annotations by Indur Goklany.

Let’s salute Phil Jones’s honesty – even if he only came by it relatively late in life.

Roundup of wisdom regarding the current weather icebox and the global warming debate

by Michael Fumento on February 14, 2010

in Global Warming

The Washington Post Sunday edition devotes a page to the discussion of what impact the current cold snap and immense amount of snow (a record in the nation’s capital) has and should have on the global warming debate generally and legislation specifically. Most of the space goes to the liberal but often thoughtful Dana Milbank, with snippets to others.

Score one for both science and humor when Milbank asserts “As a scientific proposition, claiming that heavy snow in the mid-Atlantic debunks global warming theory is about as valid as claiming that the existence of John Edwards debunks the theory of evolution.”

He’s right of course. For the zillionth time, weather and climate are two entirely different things. A hot year with a drought doesn’t prove the globe is heating up, much less than the alleged heating up is man-made. But the greens make such claims time and again. It’s no more valid for other to say a cold, snowy winter shows the opposite. That’s just the point Milbank goes on to make:

Still, there’s some rough justice in the conservatives’ cheap shots. In Washington’s blizzards, the greens were hoist by their own petard.

For years, climate-change activists have argued by anecdote to make their case. Gore, in his famous slide shows, ties human-caused global warming to increasing hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, drought and the spread of mosquitoes, pine beetles and disease. It’s not that Gore is wrong about these things. The problem is that his storm stories have conditioned people to expect an endless worldwide heat wave, when in fact the changes so far are subtle.

Other environmentalists have undermined the cause with claims bordering on the outlandish; they’ve blamed global warming for shrinking sheep in Scotland, more shark and cougar attacks, genetic changes in squirrels, an increase in kidney stones and even the crash of Air France Flight 447. [There's a website that lists over 600 things that have allegedly been caused by global warming, from "acne" to "yellow fever."] When climate activists make the dubious claim, as a Canadian environmental group did, that global warming is to blame for the lack of snow at the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, then they invite similarly specious conclusions about Washington’s snow — such as the Virginia GOP ad urging people to call two Democratic congressmen “and tell them how much global warming you get this weekend.”

Says Milbank, “Argument-by-anecdote isn’t working.”

The Post then asked “political and environmental experts whether the record snowstorms buried climate change legislation this year.” Here are some excerpts:

CHRISTINE TODD WHITMAN
Environmental Protection Agency administrator from 2001 to 2003; governor of New Jersey from 1994 to 2001; chair of the Republican Leadership Council

It shouldn’t, but it will. Among the reasons winter storms will make this issue more politically challenging are overreach and simplification – on both sides of the debate. “An Inconvenient Truth” brought the issue of climate change to the fore, but many of the charts implying that the world’s end is near were overly dramatic.

KENNETH P. GREEN AND STEVEN F. HAYWARD
Resident scholar and F.K. Weyerhaeuser fellow, respectively, at the American Enterprise Institute

The corpus of climate legislation was already cooling before Snowmageddon. The cold wind that buried its chances this year didn’t come off the snow burying Washington: It came off horrific unemployment reports, lackluster economic growth, massive Tea Party rallies and vicious town hall meetings. After the breakdown in Copenhagen, the explosion of “Climategate” and the election of Scott Brown, the Democrats’ rapid pivot to focus on jobs was inevitable.

DAVID G. HAWKINS
Director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s climate programs

Sorry, nothing worth excerpting!

DOUGLAS E. SCHOEN
Democratic pollster and author

The recent bout of wintry weather and the overall political climate have almost certainly killed climate-change legislation this year.

The science that supports the causes and effects of global warming has become increasingly open to doubt and question. The weather this winter, particularly in the past week or so, makes it more difficult to argue that global warming is an imminent danger and suggests that global warming may well not be as inexorable a force as some believe.

Further, the political downside to supporting the legislation is unambiguous. Americans are primarily concerned with jobs and the economy. Any significant effort spent on other legislation will reignite charges, originally hurled during the lengthy and unsuccessful health-care debate, that the White House and Democrats in Congress are out of touch with voters’ needs.

EMILY FIGDOR
Federal global warming program director of Environment America

The snowstorms that ground the nation’s capital to a halt only underscored the need for bold action to fight global warming. Heavier, more frequent snowstorms are just what scientists predict in a warming world, as extreme weather events – whether blizzards or heat waves – become more common.

Well! I guess there’s something to be said for predictability!

ED ROGERS
White House staffer to Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush; chairman of BGR Group

There is global climate science and then there is the Global Warming Movement. The movement hijacked the science a long time ago, and it has had its share of setbacks lately. Its leaders have tried to stiff-arm their way past errors, lies, fraud, pointless tax increase proposals and some really peculiar posing in Copenhagen.

Now they have suffered a coup de grace: public ridicule brought on by a record-breaking blizzard blasting their East Coast home base. The movement was already dead in Congress for 2010 (its climate-change bill has been sidelined), but Snowmageddon buried it. How could it be that heat waves evidenced global warming, but so did a cold wave? The public isn’t buying it anymore.

In November, the public will give a cold shoulder to a bunch of intellectually frozen hypocrites who demand economic sacrifice to solve a problem that voters don’t see or feel. At least for a while, the left will have to think up a new way to dictate a lifestyle for the rest of us. Maybe now the science can continue without the clumsy overreaching of the movement’s priestly class.

And finally, on a different page, uber-environmentalist Bill McKibben argues that, yes, the cold weather and blizzards are the result of global warming. So it goes.

Pundits wiping “sneer” off Toyota’s face

by Michael Fumento on February 13, 2010

in Employment, Precaution & Risk, Sanctimony

Noteworthy is a tsk, tsk on page A1 of today’s Washington Post, “‘Toyota Way’ was lost on road to phenomenal worldwide growth.”

More noteworthy is a Financial Times column , “How Toyota Engineered its own Downfall.” Writer David Pilling sniggers, “Rather than admitting the problem early, Toyota tried to lay the blame on anything or anyone – floormats, suppliers, even drivers.”

[The inset is a Dr. Seuss characterization used during WWII to sell war bonds. The title: "Wipe that sneer off his face."]

Even drivers? It never occurred to Pilling that some of the alleged incidents of sudden acceleration might be driver error, when in fact driver error was behind the entire Audi 5000 hysteria in the mid-1980s?

As to floormats, in the single most horrific accident related to sudden Toyota acceleration, it appears a floormat was indeed to blame.

The bottom line appears to be that Toyota doesn’t know what the problem is because there are no patterns. As I note in a forthcoming article, a Consumer Reports analysis of sudden acceleration complaints regarding Toyota-built vehicles state “Drivers reported that sometimes their car lurched from a standstill, fighting the brakes. Other times it took off while cruising the highway, or while parking, or even while going in reverse.”

This lack of consistency does indeed indicate at least some incidence of driver error and certainly would befuddle anybody trying to fix “the problem.” Just what exactly is “the problem” anyway? All Toyota can do is to replace a lot of things.

But a better “fix” might be moving its worldwide headquarters to the U.S., notwithstanding that directly and indirectly it already employs about 200,000 Americans and Cars.com has rated the Camry, built in Kentucky and Indiana, the most “American” car sold.

Indeed, one auto analyst told Pilling that “The venom in the rhetoric [against Toyota] is quite stunning. I rather fancy the fact that they surpassed GM in 2008 and are seen to be hurting a proper American company is part of the issue.” This, he added, “is an opportunity to give Toyota a bit of a kicking.”

Presumably it could be worse. It could have happened to Mitsubishi. After all, they’re the ones who manufactured the famous (or infamous) “Zero” that proved so devastating at Pearl Harbor.

Postscript: As further evidence that satire is indeed dead, it turns out there is a bumper sticker that reads “Toyota: From the same folks who brought you Pearl Harbor.”

Of snow, shovels, and property rights

by Michelle Minton on February 12, 2010 · 2 comments

in Odds & Ends

Imagine that you brave the cold to complete the laborious task of carving out a parking space on some snow encrusted street. How pissed off would you be if you come home from work to discover that some other motorist decided to take advantage of your effort and park their car in the space you created?

Does the labor you put into “creating” the space in the snow give you a right to that stretch of public parking? In some cities like Boston, MA you have a legal right to reserve cleared parking spots with lawn chairs or cones, but in DC it isn’t so. And according to this Mercatus Center article and the Washington Post over 75% of people polled favor a right to reserve a public parking space if s/he cleared the space of snow.

Perhaps this snowpocalypse, snowmageddon, or unusually large snow storm (whatever clever name you’d like to assign to the recent weather events) affords those of us who champion the classical labor theory of property rights a chance to tap into the apparently intrinsic idea of property rights with our neighbors.

Image via Ben’s Breakfast Blog

CEA’s Annual Report: Trade is good, but we need to make sure it’s good for everyone

by Fran Smith on February 12, 2010

in Economy, International, Trade

While snowstorms were raging in the D.C. area, the White House released the Economic Report of the President and the Council of Economic Advisers’Annual Report 2010. I haven’t had a chance yet to study  the 462-page document, but did review the chapter dealing with international trade – Chapter 10, beginning on page 274.

The start of that chapter provides a strong defense of open trade, following the theories of both Adam Smith and David Ricardo regarding specialization and comparative advantage:

“Initially, trade was about introducing products (such as spices) from one market to another, providing consumers with choices they previously did not have. Still today, trade can offer consumers different goods and different varieties of products already available to them and bring new technology from other countries. By allowing countries to specialize based on skills or endowments, trade can also allow countries to improve their standards of living. Trade can also help a country increase its overall output by allowing firms or industries to take advantage of economies of scale or by encouraging the growth of more productive firms. Thus, trade has the potential to increase the overall quantity of goods and services that a given economy can produce with its resources-and hence increase the overall standard of living-making global commerce a cooperative, not a competitive venture.”

Yet the discussion soon veers off  to promote the need to make sure that everyone shares in the benefits of trade:

“In the past, however, the gains from our trade policies have not been shared sufficiently, and technological change and globalization have left many behind.”

What to do about those people who don’t benefit quickly and equally from trade?  Here’s where the true message is revealed.  The CEA report notes that the federal government already has numerous programs on “trade adjustment assistance, worker retraining, and temporary relief programs,” to help them, but much more is needed – progressive taxation, expansion of the social safety net, as well as changes in the health care and education systems.  Here’s the argument for more progressive taxes:

“A progressive tax rate combined with trade allows those who realize substantial income gains from globalization to still prosper a great deal relative to the state where there is no trade and incomes are taxed at a flat rate. And it does so while making sure that those who face lower incomes from globalization also obtain benefits-not just through the lower prices and expanded choices associated with trade, but also through lower taxation.”(Boldface added.)

Besides the illogic of the boldfaced statement, guess what is used as an example of someone who prospered a great deal from trade and globalization but may have crowded out others who were disadvantaged by that success?  J.K. Rowling!

“At the same time, it is distinctly possible that some American authors who would have captured a larger share of the “magic-oriented book” market had there been no trade in literature were crowded out by Rowling’s success . . .”

Was that a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgment that the argument makes no sense?  One can only hope.

Flu Report Feb. 12 – What Swine Flu ISN’T Doing

by Michael Fumento on February 12, 2010 · 2 comments

in Health and Illness

As the CDC’s FluView Web site puts it, “During the week of January 31 – February 6, 2010, most key flu indicators remained about the same as during the previous week.”

Tellingly, Dr. Anne Schuchat, who heads the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in warning against complacency, declared “Individual cases of H1N1 continue to occur.” Hello? At the height of flu season you’re talking about “individual cases” occurring?

Again, the only area of interest is to what extent has swine flu swept aside the vastly more severe seasonal flu. Again, at the height of flu season, CDC labs have only received two flu samples that might not be swine flu.

Also in the news, CNN reports Schuchat “sounded pleased” that a CDC survey estimates 23.4 percent of the population have received the swine flu vaccine, including slightly over a third of children under age 18.

That’s pleasing? Lady, that’s a failure. Part of it is the government’s fault and part is that despite government-fomented hysteria most Americans just aren’t taking this thing too seriously, and rightly so.

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