TGIF: Double-Rigging of the Auto Market

U.S. government interference with our lives often resembles a Russian matryoshka doll: regulation is nested in more regulation. Take the provision of Biden's pending Build Back Better bill that would create a big tax credit for people who buy U.S.-built electric vehicles (EV).

Not only would the government distort the domestic auto market by rigging it in favor of electric vehicles over conventional ones, but it also would rig the EV market, Trump-style, in favor of U.S.-made products. This implies that "foreign" EVs are so attractive to American buyers that the domestic offerings need help from the state to compete. That's an argument against the provision right there. If the vehicles that American companies and workers turn out aren't what American buyers would want to buy without subsidies, the manufacturers shouldn't be protected from that important information.

Why not? Because markets exist for consumers and not for producers. Makers of trade policy have no political incentive to operate on that principle because manufacturers of a given product can easily organize for government protection of their livelihoods and reward the politicians who do their bidding. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for consumers, who have too many other things to worry about. Any kind of trade restrictions hurt them because prices will be higher and product variety will be constrained, especially if a trade war breaks out through tit-for-tat retaliation.

Trade wars end up hurting producers as well, of course. Even without a trade war, when Americans buy less from foreigners, foreigners, having less money, will buy less from Americans and other foreigners. The bad effects ripple globally.

Understandably, electric-vehicle makers in Canada and Mexico are especially upset. Who could blame them? The San Diego Union-Tribune reports, "Canada and Mexico worry the provision would lead to dramatic reductions in EVs purchased in their respective countries and violates the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA, the trade pact the three countries passed last year to replace NAFTA."

So much for the alleged free-trade zone of North America.

But things are not quite so simple as the provision's backers make out, demonstrating that Donald Trump had no monopoly on willful ignorance about the reality of trade. The inhabitants of the United States, Canada, and Mexico do more than trade finished consumer goods with each other. For many years North America has been a single highly integrated market for producers' goods.

According to the Union-Tribune, Canada's consul general for Southern California, Nevada, and Arizona, Zaib Shaikh, points out that, in the newspaper's words, "Determining the country of origin of a given vehicle is complicated because the auto industry of the three North American countries has become so highly integrated."

In other words, It's not clear what an American, Canadian, or Mexican EV is exactly. “'When you think about vehicles assembled in Canada, they’re actually 50 percent U.S.-made,' Shaikh said, 'because the supply chain works so that things are crossed over six or seven times across the border' before a vehicle is finally assembled."

It's hardly the first time that the authors and backers of legislation were ignorant about the thing they sought to regulate.

As already noted, tilting the market toward American manufacturers, even if that were possible today, is not the only objectionable feature of the provision. The provision also aims at tilting the market toward EVs and against vehicles with internal combustion engines. EV purchasers would gain $12,500 in tax credits by 2027. This is in pursuit of the Biden administration's goal of cutting carbon-dioxide emissions 50-54 percent from the 2005 level by 2030 and reaching net-zero emissions across the economy by 2050.

Those targets are important for many people on the fallacious grounds that carbon dioxide is a pollutant that is ruinously warming the climate when in fact it is plant food that is greening the earth and bringing other palpable benefits to mankind. (Thanks to technology, the real pollutants in gasoline are already controlled in today's clean cars.)

To the extent that human-generated CO2 emissions through the use of fossil fuels have contributed to mild global warming since the Industrial Revolution began, they have helped to improve the lives of human beings everywhere by making the natural world more hospitable. During this time, population, life expectancy, and per-capita wealth have grown, while extreme poverty, infant mortality, and deaths from weather extremes have plummeted. Cold kills more people than heat, and the longer growing seasons made possible by warming help feed the world's nearly 8 billion people at a lower cost.

For the foreseeable future, nothing will be able to compete with fossil fuels in providing reliable, inexpensive, and abundant energy -- something billions of people in the developing world desperately need if they are to achieve the living standards that we in the West take for granted.

So rigging the market in favor of electric vehicles is a dumb idea.

Finally, we might welcome tax credits because they provide a chance to keep more of our money, but this principle is a snare and a delusion.  The power to tax (that is, steal) is bad enough without it also being a politician's tool to manipulate market outcomes. That only adds injury to injury.

TGIF: Another Climate Conference

Sometimes we've got to be grateful for hypocrisy. If those who pretend to be world leaders actually delivered a fraction of what they promise in Glasgow, Scotland, where the UN's COP26 (Conference of Parties) Conference on Climate Change runs through Nov. 12, we'd be far bigger trouble than we already are.

You know how these things go. Power-loving, sanctimonious politicians and their minions pontificate (for 12 days!?) on how the world will end in 20 minutes unless they force their subjects to behave in ways they don't wish to behave and to spend trillions of dollars they would rather keep. Meanwhile, cheap and dependable energy will be taken from or denied to them for their own good. It's an old song,

Fortunately, these charlatans haven't yet gone nearly as far as they purportedly intend or their most zealous supporters want them to go. But this is certainly not to say that they do no harm except to give kids nightmares and scarce some grownups. The politicians et al. have done immense harm for years, with their demonization of carbon dioxide (a foundation of all life), and their pushing of "solutions" such as unreliable and costly wind and solar power to imagined manmade problems. (Even Michael Moore has seen through those scams, for which he's paid a price by alienating himself from former fans. Spoiler alert: a movie he produced, Planet of the Humans, indicts so-called renewable energy  --Alex Epstein calls them the unreliables -- as environmentally hazardous.)

One reason for the welcome gap between promise and performance is that politicians worldwide realize that real people won't stand for the full program. First, they've heard the apocalyptic predictions (driven by GIGO computer models) for too many decades, and second, they care about their living standards. The West's affluent average don't want to become poor, and the rest in Asia, Africa, and Latin America don't want to stay poor.

In the developed world, that means people don't want higher energy prices, and for good reason: power, which comes largely from marvelous fossil fuels, underlies everything that makes life for the masses materially far better than it was only a couple of centuries ago -- however much we take it for granted.

And in the developing world, poor people would like to have the living standard that the average Westerner has. In essence, those who lack cheap electricity and gasoline want don't want to be kept waiting.

Whoever asks them to give up that dream and remain inhabitants of a tourist theme park ought to be ashamed of themselves. Their rulers give mixed messages on the matter because they prosper from the big money transfers from the developed world's taxpayers. But as the heroic economist P. T. Bauer taught us so well, government-to-government transfers are more likely to fuel central planning, corruption, and oppression than good things for real people. Rather, Bauer insisted, good things come from freedom, independent enterprise, and free markets.

Fortunately, along with the hypocritical politicians and despondent zealots, we find many voices of reason on the matters of climate and energy -- voices of people with impeccably strong credentials in all the relevant fields, from the atmospheric sciences to economics and related social sciences. Since they are not driven by the ambition to use climate to push for a Jacobin and authoritarian "great reset," they can see things clearly. That is, they are guided by evidence and logic, rather than computer models chock-full of controversial assumptions about something as complex as "the climate." You can see this in the climate optimists' (some call themselves "luke warmers) print and video presentations. Compared to them, the merchants of hysteria look like junior high school debaters who memorized a few talking points and scary scenarios the night before.

One optimist is the Danish political scientist Bjorn Lomborg of the Copenhagen Consensus Center. (To say he is an optimist is not the say he thinks we live in the best of all possible worlds.) I am inclined to disagree with some of what Lomborg says because I as a layman find the pro-CO2 scientists (Princeton's William Happer, the late Freeman Dyson of Princeton, MIT's Richard Lindzen, and many others) more persuasive. Lomborg takes the UN IPCC's climate assessment at face value and reserves a role for the government -- though he would spend far, far less than the alarmists -- that I find objectionable. Those reservations aside, as a non-alarmist he has sensible things to say.

Lomborg's book is False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet. As you can tell, he thinks the planet needs fixing with respect to the climate, but where he differs from the catastrophe lobby is that he sees no world-threatening emergency. Instead, he sees warming as one of many world problems -- and not even the most dire -- that could be addressed calmly, effectively, and much less expensively than the lobby demands. Panic, he says, is misplaced and assures bad responses. That in itself is refreshing. Have a look:

In the Financial Post in August, Lomborg wrote:

Because of economic development, the UN estimates that the average person in the world will become 450 per cent as well-off by 2100 as they are today [if nothing were done about warming]. But climate change will have a cost, in that adaptation and challenges become somewhat harder. Because of climate change, the average person in 2100 will “only” be 436 per cent as well off as today. [Emphasis added.]

This is not the apocalypse but a problem to which we should find smart fixes.

He went on:

[G]lobally, many more people die from cold than from heat. A new study in the highly respected journal Lancet shows that about half a million people die annually from heat, but 4.5 million people die from cold. As temperatures have increased over the past two decades, that has caused an extra 116,000 heat deaths each year. This fits the narrative, of course, and is what we have heard over and over again.

But it turns out that because global warming has also reduced cold waves, we now see 283,000 fewer cold deaths. You don’t hear this, but so far climate change saves 166,000 lives each year.

His bottom line is: "In reality, humans adapt.... Ultimately, this is why the scare stories on climate impacts are vastly overblown and not supported by this new [IPCC] climate report."

Lomborg sees that the obsession with climate overshadows far more urgent developing-world problems regarding malnutrition, disease, education, and more. And as he points out, these maladies are related to a deeper problem: poverty. He understands that these problems would be best addressed by increased production of wealth, a truism demonstrated repeatedly in modern history. And how is widespread wealth produced? Lomborg goes part of the way with libertarians: freedom.

In Fortune he wrote:

To help make the world better, we need to focus more on the very best policies. Top among these is freer trade. Free trade has recently been criticized by left- and right-wing politicians because it hurts vulnerable communities like manufacturing workers in the Rust Belt.

This misses the bigger picture.... Much of ... [the] benefits would go to the world’s poorest, who would have far more opportunities if they could become part of the global market....

By making people richer -- especially in the world’s poorest countries -- freer trade would also lead to societies that are far more resilient to climate shocks, more capable of investing in adaptation, and far less vulnerable to rising temperatures. In that way, free trade can be considered a smart climate policy as well as an excellent way to promote human thriving generally.

In other words, wealthier is healthier, as the political scientist Aaron Wildavsky used to say. And that means that freer is healthier, more resilient. Changes in climates are nothing new. They've always changed. What's made the natural world so much more hospitable since the late 18th century are: reason, greater freedom in all realms of peaceful action, the division of labor, innovation, free trade, and man's consequent adaptation to nature's sometimes perilous changes.

As Lomborg wisely counsels, the world isn't coming to an end -- to which I would add: unless those who want to deprive the world of cheap and dependable energy succeed.

TGIF: Looking for the Green New Deal

I was all set this week to plunge into the details of the Green New Deal so I could see what new impositions the climate-alarmist politicians have in store for us. Then I made a startling discovery. (Startling for me, that is. I'm behind the news curve.)

The Green New Deal isn't real. By that, I mean no bill in Congress sets out a list of specific government actions thought to be necessary to save the planet from carbon dioxide, heat waves, cold snaps, rising sea levels, ocean acidification, desertification, extinction, more rain and floods, more droughts, more trees, fewer tress, or whatever the latest existential threat de jour is. I wondered why we hear all the talk about a Green New Deal if that's the case.

According to Reuters, last April two of the usual suspects, Sen. Ed Markey and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez again introduced "their set of aggressive climate goals intended to transform the U.S. economy. Initially introduced in 2019, the non-binding resolution seeks to eliminate U.S. greenhouse gas emissions within a decade and transition the economy away from fossil fuels."

It's not a bill at all, but two nonbinding resolutions (H.Res. 332, in the House and S.Res. 166 in the Senate. Bills get a B) that list goals. That's it.

I found confirmation from a disappointed Robinson Meyer, who wrote in the Atlantic, "With so much ballyhoo, it’s become easy to miss the central, implacable fact about the Green New Deal: It does not exist.... Three years after the idea of a Green New Deal broke into the mainstream, you can’t find an authoritative and detailed list of Green New Deal policies anywhere. There is no handbook, no draft legislation, no official report that articulates what belongs in a Green New Deal and what doesn’t."

NPR elaborated in 2019:

In very broad strokes, the Green New Deal legislation [sic] laid out by Ocasio-Cortez and Markey sets goals for some drastic measures to cut carbon emissions across the economy, from electricity generation to transportation to agriculture. In the process, it aims to create jobs and boost the economy. [Emphasis added.]

In that vein, the proposal stresses that it aims to meet its ambitious goals while paying special attention to groups like the poor, disabled and minority communities that might be disproportionately affected by massive economic transitions like those the Green New Deal calls for.

Importantly, it's a nonbinding resolution, meaning that even if it were to pass..., it wouldn't itself create any new programs. Instead, it would potentially affirm the sense of the House that these things should be done in the coming years.

In a way, that's quite a relief. If all our misrepresentatives and public self-servants promise to do issue sense-of-the-Congress resolutions about this, that, and the other, then I say, leave them to it. They can declare that the tide goes out at a particular time, for all I care as long at they don't do anything.

But the politicians see it another way. They want to do something, and while nothing they could do would actually achieve their bizarre goals, they would do irreparable harm to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the process. Even less ambitious programs, such as (arguably) President Biden's, will be all cost and no benefit. Nevertheless, Green New Deal champions like Ocasio-Cortez think Biden's "green"-infused so-called infrastructure plan is "not enough." In April, she said Biden should spend more than twice the $3 trillion-$-4 trillion he initially called for. (Because of resistance in his own party, his spending plans seem to have been revised slightly downward, but things also seem rather fluid.)

Green New Dealers particularly like Biden's January executive order calling for, among many other things, a strategy to create a Civilian Climate Corps, which echoes Franklin Roosevelt's 1930s Civilian Conservation Corps. The new CCC would "mobilize the next generation of conservation and resilience workers and maximize the creation of accessible training opportunities and good jobs. The initiative shall aim to conserve and restore public lands and waters, bolster community resilience, increase reforestation, increase carbon sequestration in the agricultural sector, protect biodiversity, improve access to recreation, and address the changing climate."

I don't know about you, but I am nervous when I hear the government talk about mobilizing workers. I just don't like the ring of that. I am also wary about Biden's goal to "place the climate crisis at the forefront of this Nation’s foreign policy and national security planning." That sounds like the U.S. government telling the poor of the developing world to be satisfied with their lot in life. If people there aspire to an American living standard, Biden could tell them not to worry because he'll be doing his best to lower that living standard through severe restrictions on the use of hydrocarbons. That's one way to achieve global equality. Meanwhile, the American taxpayers will be forced to bribe developing-world rulers to go along with policies that will kill the people who already suffer under them.

So what are the goals of the Green New Deal? How much time do you have? It contains everything including the kitchen sink. Yes, there's the expected stuff: it sets the goals of "global reductions in greenhouse gas emissions from human sources of 40 to 60 percent from 2010 levels by 2030; and net-zero global emissions by 2050." This would badly harm everyone, particularly the poorest Americans, because of the devastation it would wreak on our ability to produce goods that make our lives better. Wind and solar can't cut it. For the developing world, it would approach genocidal.

The authors are blind to the fact that fossil fuels are indispensable to human flourishing and that CO2 is plant food; indeed, it is essential for all life. And even if such a reduction were desirable and could be achieved (it couldn't be), it would reduce the average temperature by a negligible amount. Let's remember, the only way to protect against actual dangers from nature, as the human race has repeatedly demonstrated, is to get richer quickly. Innovation and adaptation require wealth and free exchange, so the government should get out of the way of wealth creation and the free-exchange system.

But the Green New Deal promises so much more than green-ness, including combatting systemic racism, reversing income inequality, providing "free" health care and college, and strengthening labor unions. There's something for everyone...well, except for most people. So-called renewable energy would doom us to costly and undependable substitutes, like wind and solar.

What's this all going to cost? The official estimate is: Who cares? (Okay, I made that part up.)

Bear in mind that the premise of the Green New Deal and Biden's version of it, as expressed in his executive order, is that "we face a climate crisis that threatens our people and communities, public health and economy, and, starkly, our ability to live on planet Earth."

It takes a herculean effort and a good set of blinders to ignore the mountains of evidence against that assertion and the voluminous demolition of the alarmists' cooked-up GIGO computer-modeled case, which has time after time proven itself to be wrong. Modern alarmists have been predicting the world's end for 60 years. Why does anyone still take them seriously?

But, then, the Green New Deal isn't really about climate at all, is it? It's just a long-standing interventionist wish list with a deceptive green tint. As Ocasio-Cortez's former chief of staff Saikat Chakrabarti told the Washington Post, "The interesting thing about the Green New Deal is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all. Do you guys think of it as a climate thing? Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing."

Not that this should surprise anyone.

 

 

 

 

TGIF: Why "Science Denial"?

In a new book two professors of psychology, Gale Sinatra and Barbara Hofer, seek to explain why what they call "science denial" is rampant today and how dangerous it is. They also give their account in a strange conversation with Michael Shermer, the editor of Skeptic magazine, from whom we might have expected a tad more "skepticism" or at least some devil's advocacy.

The views of all three are in some ways vague and even confused, but the condescension toward the unenlightened rubes who disagree with them on certain scientific controversies--primarily climate- and COVID-19-related--couldn't have been more clear.

While Sinatra and Hofer smear a large and diverse group of people as "science deniers," they undercut their own claim when they admit that no one actually rejects science per se. So their sensational but misleading title and broad statements are designed not to inform but rather to sell books to their progressive-minded audience. The rubes they are talking about, the authors admit, go to doctors, take prescribed medicines, fly on airplanes, etc. That hardly sounds like general science denial.

So what's the problem? What the authors have in mind is doubt about or rejection of particular scientific claims. They are willing to apply the label "cafeteria deniers." But why not call them "cafeteria skeptics"? Or would that hit Shermer too close to home?

My purpose is not to defend or criticize any particular scientific claim in dispute. Some are backed by strong evidence, while others have little or no evidence behind them. Laymen ought to exercise care in (tentatively) deciding who among the contending scientists are likely to be right. Here I only want to raise a big reason for doubt that the authors and Shermer ignore.

But first, to demonstrate authors' and Shermer's sloppiness (which may be too charitable an interpretation of what they're doing), please note that early on they embrace the allegedly near-unanimous (97 percent) consensus among climate scientists on ominous manmade global warming. Their point is that anyone who would take a position contrary to such an overwhelming consensus would have to be a jerk.

In fact, that so-called consensus was cobbled together by examining just the abstracts of a selection of climate scientists' journal articles over a certain period. Only a third of those papers expressed an explicit or implicit view on whether manmade global warming was happening. Of those, 97 percent agreed on--well, something. But what? What they all apparently agreed on was that an unspecified amount of warming has occurred and that human activity has had an unspecified degree of responsibility.

Notice that no magnitudes and no net assessment of harms and benefits are implied in that sentence whatsoever. By that low bar, most if not all climate scientists and laymen in the realist-optimist camp are part of the consensus! That takes a good deal of the force out of the consensus proclamation, wouldn't you say?

Yet this "consensus" is decisive for climate alarmists Sinatra, Hofer, and Shermer. (If you think humility is a virtue in scientists, don't look for it in these writers.) Shermer says what impressed him is that all those in the 97 percent "converged" on that view (again, what view?) "independently," while the others, he says, converged on no particular theory about the climate. Has he looked into the facts? Or does he go along with whatever is called a consensus by the news media? Is this is how he decides on matters outside his specialty? They're growing a strange crop of skeptics these days.

Here is the problem: when the authors and Shermer call someone a "climate change (or just a climate) denier," they are making a slickly illegitimate move; for what's being denied is not climate change or warming between 1850 and 1998, but a looming climate catastrophe, natural or manmade. Catastrophe denial does not equal climate-change denial. No one--no one!--thinks that climate does not change. Well, actually one group does seem to think this: the alarmists who imply or say outright that except for human activity, climate would not change (or not change very much). But that of course is absurd. The concept change is baked into the concept climate. The only sense in which the climate is not changing today is that it never stops changing.

Sinatra, Hofer, and Shermer spent an hour and a half talking about "science denial," with no disagreement among them. In all the time none of them mentioned the word politicization, that is, the perverse incentives from government meddling in scientific research. They discussed lots of possible reasons for "denial"--like confirmation bias and other well-known cognitive biases--but it seems never to have occurred to any of them that some people are more inclined to distrust particular scientific claims these days than previously because they have observed that purportedly objective claims (and not just about scientific matters) are used to advance political causes. Sinatra, Hofer, and Shermer have no trouble believing that so-called deniers have hidden political and cultural agendas, but they show no sign of suspecting that those who make the claims, along with the politicians who translate them into coercive government policy, may also have political and cultural agendas--and often not so hidden.

This seems like a serious shortcoming. While Sinatra and Hofer acknowledge that scientists are human beings and subject to the same imperfections as everyone else--envy, greed, ambition, a desire for peer approval, etc.--they assure us that these faults are rooted out by an internal checks-and-balance system. Because of these, no threat to science can arise from within, but only from outside, that is, from "deniers."

That, however, isn't how it works out. Checks and balances on paper often bear little relationship to checks and balances in practice. (This is true of constitutions too.) For example, the peer-review process for academic publication and promotion has become incestuous "pal review." Paradigms are protected against challenges and patched up through ad hoc salvage operations when a paradigm's shortcomings are exposed.

Moreover, politicians are naturally inclined toward research that identifies "crises" that allegedly only government can address. As H. L. Mencken pointed out, "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”

In need of government grants to secure promotion and tenure at their universities, many scientists are inclined to give the politicians what they want. Those are the ones who will get the money, at any rate. An orthodoxy arises, and independent thinkers, no matter how qualified, are marginalized and smeared as, say, "science deniers." (The obvious association with the properly stigmatized term Holocaust deniers is no coincidence.) It's happened repeatedly before. It's happening now. (Again, I don't mean that every scientific claim that is criticized is necessarily wrong.)

Politicians demand research that goes in one direction, and some scientists are happy to supply it. The politicians then use the research to justify expanded power (the Green New Deal and economic shutdown in a pandemic), which stimulates further research in that direction. I'm not saying that every participant is a cynic, but it is fun to be near the action. To borrow a trope from the analysis of the military-industrial complex, it's a self-licking ice-cream cone. And all of this is further amplified by the 24/7 news media, which will always prefer reports of looming disasters to good news, and of course the social networks, which are the lookout for "misinformation."

If you want to see how politicization can create doubters, here's one case apart from scientific controversies: Russiagate. For years the American people were assured by most of the "objective" mainstream media, fed by "public-spirited" leaks and retired government spies working as dispassionate commentators, that the allegedly nonpolitical intelligence apparatus had solid evidence that Vladimir Putin had rigged the 2016 election to put his puppet Donald Trump in the White House. None of that was true, as shown by the massive FBI investigation led by a sainted special counsel. Don't you think that a good portion of the American people realize that this establishment campaign was intended to drive Trump from office or at least cripple his presidency, effectively reversing the election? (One need not be a Trump fan--I'm certainly not--to see this.) Germane to my point, if that kind of gross abuse can occur in one matter, why can't it be occurring in other matters?

A key part of the politicization of science is government finance of research, which Sinatra and Hofer predictably want more of. As I noted recently, in his 1961 farewell speech President Dwight Eisenhower warned about the emerging government-science complex, which he said was just as dangerous as the military-industrial complex.

If climate alarmists regard private support for research as tainted by self-interest, the rest of us are entitled to regard government support as similarly tainted. Sinatra, Hofer, and Shermer really should grow up and embrace what Public Choice political economist James Buchanan called "politics without romance."

Maybe if politics had not tainted institutional science, fewer people would distrust so many of its claims. Politics is the craft of winning and maintaining power by assembling self-serving coalitions in order to impose costs on everyone else. Some people have justifiably come to assume that many government-financed scientific claims are formulated for that purpose.

If I'm right, then the use of science to advance an interventionist political agenda has sown the very distrust the authors and Shermer abhor. Laymen should certainly be discriminating when they judge scientific claims, and real consensuses should be taken into account. But that does not exonerate the scientists who have actively fed policymakers' efforts to control our lives.

Why Do Climate Alarmists Dislike Climate Realist-Optimists So Much?

F. A. Hayek, the Nobel-Prize-winning economist of the Austrian tradition, provided a possible answer to the question posed in the title. Although Hayek (1899-1992) to my knowledge had nothing to say about the climate controversy, his views on macroeconomics met with a similarly critical attitude from those who practiced economics at a level far, far removed from individual action. He too was in essence called a science denier, in this case the science was economics. Here's what he said when contrasting the method of the natural sciences of "simple phenomena" with the methods of social and other sciences of "complex phenomena" (transcribed from an interview at 33:00):

All the things I have stressed--the complexity of phenomena in general, the unknown character of the data, and so on--really much more points out limits to our possible knowledge than our contributions which makes specific predictions possible. This incidentally [is] another reason why my views have become unpopular. Conception of scientific method became prevalent during that period [the 1930s, when he worked on his "pure theory of capital"] which valued all scientific theories from the nature of specific predictions at which it would lead. Now somebody who pointed out that specific predictions which it could make were very limited and that at most it could achieve what I sometimes call "pattern predictions," or predictions of the principle, seemed to the people who were used to the simplicity of physics or chemistry very disappointing and almost not science. The aim of science in that view was specific prediction, preferably mathematically testable, and somebody who pointed out that when you applied this principle to complex phenomena, you couldn't achieve this seemed to the people almost to deny [!] that science was possible.

Of course my real aim was that the possible aims must be much more limited once we've passed from the science of simple phenomena to the science of complex phenomena. And there people bitterly resented that I would call physics a science of simple phenomena, which is partly a misunderstanding because the theory of physics [runs?] in terms of very simple equations. But that the active phenomena to which you have to apply it may be extremely complex is a different matter.... [On the other hand, in "intermediate fields" such as biology and the social sciences] their complexity becomes, I believe, an absolute barrier to the specificity of the predictions that we can arrive at. Until people learn themselves that they cannot achieve these ends, they will insist [on] trying and think somebody [who] believes it can't be done is just old-fashioned and doesn't understand modern science. 

The relevance to the climate debate ought to be clear. Climate realist-optimists often point out that climates are too complex--with too many interacting and moving parts--to be spoken of and "projected" in the simplistic way that the alarmists routinely try to do. So alarmists naturally dislike when credentialed scientists come along and point this out. This is why alarmists outrageously call the realist-optimists "deniers" and worse. 

Global Warming and Intuition

I recently was asked whether the proposition that a "dramatic increase" in CO2 since industrialization could cause worrisome global warming was "intuitive" or not. My interlocutor wanted simply a yes or no answer. But I replied that I couldn't answer either yes or no because, in my view, the question had contestable if not incorrect premises. For the same reason, the question "Have you stopped beating your wife?" is widely regarded as unfair. It's called a loaded question.

I pointed out that whether the CO2 increase is properly called "dramatic" is at least contestable. The descriptor is subjective. The increase from both natural and human causes since 1850--roughly 300 to 400+ parts per million) amounts to about one-third; at times long ago CO2 was many times higher than it is today, and fauna and flora flourished--we are their descendants. Princeton physicist William Happer says that according to geological standards we are in a "CO2 drought."

I also noted that the question implicitly assumes a highly oversimplified notion of "the climate," as if it were one unified thing and only two or three things mattered: CO2, which is only 0.04 percent of the atmosphere; water vapor; and global average temperature, a statistical construct compiled in part by using a noisy surface-temperature record. (The computer models that the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC] relies on have badly overpredicted warming at every turn. They can't even predict the past!)

Since the day I was asked that question, I've thought a lot about how else I might have answered it. The word intuition is interesting. Consider the relationship between CO2 and the climate. A person who knew nothing about those two things, when asked what his intuition was about the effect of a dramatic increase in CO2, might well reply, "Since I know nothing about CO2 or climate, I have no intuition at all. How could I?" If you can't see the reasonableness of that answer, imagine you were asked to intuit what would happen to a beaker of water with the addition of hafnium (Hf), which by stipulation you've never heard of. (I hadn't until I wrote this post.) Would the water freeze, boil, overflow with foam, or do nothing? How could you possibly have an intuition about that? And what would it be worth if you did? You could guess, but that's not the same thing. 

(For the record, over geological time the correlation between CO2 and temperature is virtually nonexistent. See this graph. Looking at the last few hundred thousand years, a correlation can be found, but the causation runs the "wrong" way, that is, the rise in temperature preceded the rise in CO2 by several hundred years and even as much as a thousand years. NASA states, "While it might seem simple to determine cause and effect between carbon dioxide and climate from which change occurs first, or from some other means, the determination of cause and effect remains exceedingly difficult. Furthermore, other changes are involved in the glacial climate, including altered vegetation, land surface characteristics, and ice sheet extent." Why don't alarmists tell the public this?)

Thus the value of a person's intuition about anything depends on how much he knows. Or so it seems to me.

Here's another thing. If someone intuits that a rise in CO2 would cause the earth to warm, that is not terribly informative because it leaves open the question of magnitude and consequences. How much will the earth warm, and--importantly--would that magnitude of warming help, hurt, or be neutral for human beings? In other words, someone could answer yes to the question without being very informative at all.

Intuition without good information isn't worth a wooden nickel. At best it's a starting point for an honest inquiry.

CO2 and Global Cooling

If CO2 is implicated in global warming, not in its own right, but because it ​indirectly ​​leads to more water vapor, the dominant greenhouse gas, which amplifies what would otherwise be minor warming, then it could just as reasonably be implicated in global cooling, or at least reduced warming, because the resulting water vapor could condense into clouds, which reflect the sun's incoming radiation--preventing them from reaching the earth's surface​ and then being absorbed by the greenhouse gases​. (Scientists agree that clouding is highly complex and hasn't been captured by the climate computer models relied on by climate alarmists. See this from the American Chemical Society, which is in the climate alarmist camp.) 

This is an important point. According to alarmists, CO2 by itself is not the problem. The problem is the amplification by water vapor. But what if reduction is a possibility? Scientists don't know enough about clouding to regard it as unimportant. (Matt Ridley has a good discussion of this in this video.)

Similarly, the data from observations consistently show that the computer models overestimate the climate's sensitivity to changes in CO2. (See the Ridley video.)

So why the obsession with CO2? Renee Cho gives the answer at the Columbia (University) Climate School website: "while we have no way to control water vapor, we can control CO2." 

Controlling CO2 of course means controlling us.

TGIF: Bad Sign?

When I see four of those yard signs on my morning walk, I chuckle. If I'm in a mischievous mood I might someday suggest a couple of memes that the owners might add.

I could embrace all of those memes, but not without some qualification and in several cases, a good deal of qualification. But that's for another day.

Today I want to focus on numbers 5 and 6: "Science Is Real" and "Water Is Life." I wouldn't comment on these were it not for their ominous implications for government policy. Some people are ready to spend trillions of other people's money because of what they suppose those sayings mean.

They are true of course, but they are misleading because they are incomplete. (Would many people actually deny that science per se is unreal or that water is essential to life?)

My suggestion to the sign owners would be, first, to take a Sharpie and squeeze in these words after "Science Is Real": "But Scientists Are Human Beings Too." Not every passerby will get it, but some may interpret it correctly to mean that scientists, despite the white lab coats, are subject to the same imperfections as other people: among them, bias, vanity, greed, insecurity, what Herbert Spencer called "the pressing desire for careers," and a wish to protect the psychological investment that can result when one spends a good deal of time mastering a subject.

The climate row provides a good example here. If one comes to think of oneself as having mastered climatology, one hardly wants to hear other scientists with impeccable credentials say that "the climate" is too complex a subject to be mastered by anyone. In fact, complex doesn't even begin to describe it. As the scientists who are climate optimists point out to the alarmists, "the climate" is not a thing but a mind-blowing collection of many moving and interrelated parts, the behavior of which is inherently unpredictable and maybe beyond complete comprehension.

That such a complex phenomenon might boil down--sorry about that--to just the CO2 and (noisy) average-global-temperature records dating back, say, a century is something that even we lay people can balk at. As the climate scientist Patrick Frank of Stanford University--who has demonstrated the error-riddled nature of the IPCC's computer models, which cannot even predict the past--wrote in Skeptic magazine, "Earth's climate is warming and no one knows exactly why. But there is no falsifiable scientific basis whatever to assert this warming is caused by human-produced greenhouse gases because current physical theory is too grossly inadequate to establish any cause at all."

Want to hear it from a physicist who was in Barack Obama's energy department?  Here's Steven Koonin, author of the new book Unsettled? What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters: "[T]he science is insufficient to make useful projections about how the climate will change over the coming decades, much less what effect our actions will have on it."

Okay, then how about a leftist physicist? Canadian Denis Rancourt: "There are more unknown and unforeseeable CO2 evolution feedback mechanisms [than] there are climate research institutes on the planet."

This leads to my second proposed addition to the sign. After "Water Is Life" I would suggest adding, "And So Is Carbon Dioxide!" Just as all living things depend on water, so all living things depend on CO2. Plants devour it with gusto, so even we carnivores love CO2 because it feeds the plants that nourish our animal food sources.

To drive the point home: "At the current level of ~400 ppm [parts per million] we still live in a CO2-starved world. Atmospheric levels 15 times greater existed during the Cambrian Period (about 550 million years ago) without known adverse effects." (Emphasis added. Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change “Executive Summary,” Climate Change Reconsidered II: Physical Science, 2013. For details see this chart going back 600 million years for details.)

Moreover, "CO2 is a vital nutrient used by plants in photosynthesis. Increasing CO2 in the atmosphere 'greens' the planet and helps feed the growing human population." (See this world map illustrating the global greening that the increasing CO2 seems to be producing, much of it in the Amazon rainforest.) Everyone knows that operators of greenhouses pump in CO2 (not "carbon") to get bigger plants because it isn't a pollutant--it is plant food.

So which office does CO2 go to to get its reputation back?

Really?

Someday our descendants will laugh with embarrassment at the people today who pore over weather records prepared to proclaim an existential threat from a fraction-of-1-degree rise in the average global temperature over any previous year "on record," that is, unless the government spends trillions of dollars on a program of virtually totalitarian control of our lives. "On record" actually means "in the last century and a half" because that's how far back "the record" goes. And that, by the way, roughly coincides with the beginning of the end of the Little Ice Age in 1850, which continues to this day. The earth of course is 4.5 billion years old.

Who Are the Real Climate Change Deniers?

Seems to me that the real climate change deniers are those who say that but for human beings, the climate would not change or change very much.

TGIF: Safety Can Be Hazardous to Our Health

Kudos to Glenn Greenwald, a rare leftist voice of sanity on so many issues, for opening his recent article this way:

In virtually every realm of public policy, Americans embrace policies which they know will kill people, sometimes large numbers of people. They do so not because they are psychopaths but because they are rational: they assess that those deaths that will inevitably result from the policies they support are worth it in exchange for the benefits those policies provide. This rational cost-benefit analysis, even when not expressed in such explicit or crude terms, is foundational to public policy debates — except when it comes to COVID, where it has been bizarrely declared off-limits.

He goes on to write that the "quickest and most guaranteed way to save hundreds of thousands of lives with policy changes would be to ban the use of automobiles, or severely restrict their usage to those authorized by the state on the ground of essential need (e.g., ambulances or food-delivery vehicles), or at least lower the nationwide speed limit to 25 mph." (Watch the video version.)

But no one advocates any of those restrictions, and anyone who did would be dismissed as a fringe character. But why, considering how many lives would surely be saved (1.3 million worldwide)? It's not because opponents don't care about human life; it's because people understand that the costs in so many ways would be far worse the benefits:

It is because we employ a rational framework of cost-benefit analysis, whereby, when making public policy choices, we do not examine only one side of the ledger (number of people who will die if cars are permitted) but also consider the immense costs generated by policies that would prevent those deaths (massive limits on our ability to travel, vastly increased times to get from one place to another, restrictions on what we can experience in our lives, enormous financial costs from returning to the pre-automobile days). So foundational is the use of this cost-benefit analysis that it is embraced and touted by everyone from right-wing economists to the left-wing European environmental policy group CIVITAS....

Exactly so. Once you put safety not just first but above everything else you're able to come up with the most insane proposals for reshaping society. Heaven help us from those who are concerned only about safety.

Risk is integral to life, social life included. As Thomas Sowell puts it, there are no solutions, only trade-offs--you can't do only one thing. So each of us does cost-benefit analyses all the time in everyday life. As individuals we could be completely protected from other people simply by living as hermits. But few choose to do so for entirely understandable reasons. Instead we live among others, taking reasonable precautions. Indeed, some of the most admired places to live are the most densely populated places on earth. We accept the costs because the the benefits dwarf them--so much so that we don't normally have to explain it to other people.

But some people forget to apply this common sense in particular matters. Greenwald's target is draconian COVID-19 policy: "It is now extremely common in Western democracies for large factions of citizens to demand that any measures undertaken to prevent COVID deaths are vital, regardless of the costs imposed by those policies." Yet, he continues, "It is impossible to overstate the costs imposed on children of all ages from the sustained, enduring and severe disruptions to their lives justified in the name of COVID.

"However, "The latest CDC data reveals that the grand total of children under 18 who have died in the U.S. from COVID since the start of the pandemic sixteen months ago is 361 — in a country of 330 million people, including 74.2 million people under 18."

Children, of course, are not the only ones who have suffered from lockdowns and lesser restrictions on their activities.

Unfortunately, opponents of these blunt-instrument, liberty-violating approaches, such as the authors and signers of the Great Barrington Declaration, are smeared, if not as uncaring sociopaths, then as blind ideologues or sell-outs.

Greenwald also properly see a class conflict in how the COVID policy has affected people:

The richer you are, the less likely you are to be affected by these harms from COVID restrictions. Wealth allows people to leave their homes, hire private tutors, temporarily live in the countryside or mountains, or enjoy outdoor space at home. It is the poor and the economically deprived who bear the worst of these deprivations, which — along with not having children at all — may be one reason they are assigned little to no weight in mainstream discourse.

He emphasizes that "this is not an argument in favor of or against any particular policy undertaken in the name of fighting COVID. What it is, instead, is an attempt to highlight the pervasive and deeply misguided refusal to assign any costs to the harms caused by anti-COVID policies themselves."

Consider the "precautionary principle," the admonition that nothing should be allowed unless it's proven to be totally safe. Now think of where mankind would be today had our ancestors had adopted this principle. The human race would be considerably smaller. Has it ever occurred to its advocates that the precautionary principle cannot even pass its own test?

COVID is only the latest example of how the obsession with safety can be hazardous to our health. It is by no means the only one. The other most prominent case relates to fossil fuels and climate change. As I discussed recently, if the economic way of thinking--that is, the cost-benefit trade-off approach--informed the discussion of the environment and our place in it, that discussion would look very different. Why? Because people would realize that the elimination or radical reduction of fossil-fuel use worldwide literally would shorten billions of lives, and make the rest of them miserable. Even a small benefit from oil, gas, and coal would outweigh that cost. But in fact the benefits are immense.

TGIF: Thinking about Energy

The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued its sixth "assessment report" earlier this month. As usual it generated its share of alarmist headlines. The report is several thousand pages long, and I'm certainly not qualified to digest, much less judge, it. I do think it's wise, however, to view the headlines and politicians' statements about it critically. The poppycock quotient of rhetoric about the supposedly looming environmental catastrophe is extremely high, not to mention toxic.

At the risk of being accused of cherry-picking, I will point out that one expert on the matter, by no means unfriendly to the IPCC, Roger Pielke Jr. of the University of Colorado, writes, "Instead of apocalyptic warnings about 'immediate risk' a top line message of this report should be: Great News! The Extreme Scenario that IPCC Saw as Most Likely in 2013 is Now Judged Low Likelihood. I am actually floored that this incredible change in such a short time apparently hasn’t even been noticed, much less broadcast around the world."

Instead, Pielke notes, UN Secretary General António Guterres said the report is "a code red for humanity" and that "billions of people [are] at immediate risk." To which Pielke replies: Not only is this wrong, it is irresponsible. Nowhere does the IPCC report say that billions of people are at immediate risk."

That's from a guy who says if the IPCC didn't exist, we'd need to invent it. (Pielke has a follow-up article here, and Nick Gillespie of Reason interviews him here.)

I don't want to leave the impression that we nonspecialists should be agnostic on the climate question. The most prominent of the political solutions to the problems (real or imagined) associated with climate change would be unimaginably expensive for the world. So new problems--associated with poverty and liberty--would thereby arise. As Thomas Sowell points out, in our world, there are no solutions, only trade-offs. This is woefully unappreciated. I recall hearing an environmentalist say that the first law of ecology is: you can't do just one thing. But he apparently forgot it in the next moment. That's also a fundamental law of economics--and indeed all of life.

We face choices, and we must always ask those who propose "solutions": at what cost--not just in money terms but in terms of human life and well-being?

Enter Alex Epstein, author of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels and founder of the Center for Industrial Progress. (He has a sequel on the way, Our Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas--Not Less.) Epstein's work is in the tradition of Julian Simon, author of The Ultimate Resource, whom Epstein acknowledges in his book. See a summary of Epstein's book here.)

What I want to draw attention to is not his case for fossil fuels per se, which I find persuasive, but his "framework"--a word he is appropriately fond of--for thinking about energy and the environment. The importance of how one frames an issue may seem obvious, but how many people actually ask what the right framework is? Because of its dubious framework, Epstein sees the campaign against fossil fuels as riddled with bias, sloppiness (or vagueness), and an animus toward human beings. The last seems to account for the others.

Before we can decide whether something is good or bad, we need a standard. Good for what or whom? Moreover, in environmental matters it makes a difference whether you see mankind as an invader and destroyer of benignly stable nature or as a species that flourishes by taming often dangerously volatile nature, that is, making it a safer, more hospitable place.

In this regard, Epstein stresses the basic Simonian point that human beings don't find and then deplete natural resources; rather they create them out of mere stuff, which does not come with a user manual. That makes human intelligence the "ultimate resource" (Simon's term), a fact that an astounding corollary: as technology increases our efficiency in creating and using resources--as we learn to make more with a smaller quantity of resources--we in effect increase the supply of those resources, which we can use to make new things we couldn't afford yesterday. In a way, human intelligence frees us from physical limitations. That takes the bite out of scary depletion scenarios.

You can see the implications for the controversy over energy. It is not enough to say that a given type of power has risks. We must be unbiased, meaning that we must look at the pros as well as the cons and compare them to other forms of energy; we must be specific about the magnitudes and probabilities of any actual risks; and, most important, we must judge the energy form by what it does on net for human welfare, not whether it interferes with nature. To live is to "interfere" with nature. For human beings, to live is to transform nature. What matters is whether change improves the prospects of human flourishing or undermines them.

Within this context Epstein goes on to the vindicate fossil fuels and argue that we need more (as well as nuclear and hydroelectric energy, which, oddly, are also opposed by most CO2-phobes). Oil, natural gas, and coal have provided abundant, inexpensive, and reliable energy that has been and remains life-saving. After all, energy underlies all production. The biggest challenge is to get them to the billions of people in the world who have no electricity or very little energy.

But what about the predicted apocalypse? We need to realize that the environmental alarmists' record of predictions, which stretches back to antiquity, is pathetic. Moreover, the current state of the world does not support the dire scenarios. I'll pick just two examples that Epstein emphasizes. First, deaths from the climate (extreme temperatures and extreme events) have been plummeting: a "98% decrease in the rate of climate-related deaths since significant CO2 emissions began 80 years ago." Second, CO2, the most-feared greenhouse gas, is plant food not pollution. The earth is greening.

In summary, he writes, "Fossil fuel use doesn’t take a safe climate and make it dangerous, it takes a dangerous climate and makes it safe." As a result, billions of people are alive today who otherwise could not be. Cutting back on fossil fuels would require an enormous human die-off. Who wants to volunteer? (No, unreliable and unscalable wind and solar apparently won't fill the gap.)

This doesn't mean that particular problems can't arise: remember, there are no solutions, only trade-offs. The problems, however, should be addressed specifically (tort law has a role), while understanding that individual rights and freedom, private property, competitive markets, entrepreneurship, and the profit motive are the best ways to discover the best remedies.

A Question of Motives

People who regard themselves as members of the ideological environmental movement may or may not have good science on their side in any particular matter, but they do themselves no service when they speculate wildly about the motives of their opponents.

I frequently hear such environmentalists characterize their opponents as people who want to make the planet uninhabitable for human beings and other living things. I suspect I'm not alone in finding that motivation highly implausible, and I'm surprised that those who traffic in such accusations don't realize that they undermine their own cause when they try to sell that implausible story to the public. It may explain why they have yet to close the sale after all these years.

Note what I am not saying. I am not saying that those environmentalists accuse their targets of being in denial or of being ignorant about the alleged dangers of their policy preferences. No, they accuse them of wishing to destroy the planet. If you don't believe me, watch this video in which Noam Chomsky, a bright guy who has made many important intellectual contributions, does just that. (In this video Chomsky says that Trump is more dangerous than Hitler was because Trump seeks an end to life on earth.)

Are we really to believe that the individuals named as public enemies seek an end to life or just don't care if human life becomes impossible in the near or distant future? Do these people have no children, grandchildren, nephews, nieces, or friends with such? Even in the unlikely case that the answer is no, what motive could they possibly have for not caring about what happens to humanity after they die? Greed? Don't many of them think they have enough money--or are we to believe they're all Scrooge McDucks?

My point is not to take the side of the alleged public enemies in this or that matter. It is only to insist that the environmentalists need a more plausible story for their opponents' policy preferences. But I've yet to encounter one offered by the environmental movement. Simply portraying the enemy as nihilist is inexcusable, not to say (as a friend put it) lazy. I have a hard time believing that anyone on the fence would find the standard claim convincing.

I suspect that the reason for this ridiculous tack is that to assume good-faith disagreement would violate the environmentalists' take-no-prisoners attitude. If they allowed for good faith in their opponents, they might then have to acknowledge that much of the environmentalists' apocalyptic claims are disputed by reputable and well-credentialed scientists--which is something ideological environmentalists are loathe to do. They'd much rather portray their adversaries as greed-crazed or religiously fundamentalist or ideological monsters, if not all three, however incompatible those things might be.

The principle of charity holds that you should take on your opponents' strongest case, even if no opponent makes that case himself. Lazily conjuring up the most malevolent case will fail to convince any decent listener. All it will do is reinforce the feelings of those already convinced. If the goal is to actually effect beneficial change, where's the gain in that?

That question may answer itself. Perhaps the goal is not to effect change but rather merely to engage in holier-than-thou self-pleasuring.

Withdrawal from the Paris Accord Won’t Impede American Business

My latest article for the American Institute for Economic Research is "Withdrawal from the Paris Accord Won’t Impede American Business."

A New Thought Crime

From the Competitive Enterprise Institute:

The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) today denounced a subpoena from Attorney General Claude E. Walker of the U.S. Virgin Islands that attempts to unearth a decade of the organization’s materials and work on climate change policy. This is the latest effort in an intimidation campaign to criminalize speech and research on the climate debate, led by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and former Vice President Al Gore.
“CEI will vigorously fight to quash this subpoena. It is an affront to our First Amendment rights of free speech and association for Attorney General Walker to bring such intimidating demands against a nonprofit group,” said CEI General Counsel Sam Kazman. “If Walker and his allies succeed, the real victims will be all Americans, whose access to affordable energy will be hit by one costly regulation after another, while scientific and policy debates are wiped out one subpoena at a time.” 

The subpoena requests a decade’s worth of communications, emails, statements, drafts, and other documents regarding CEI’s work on climate change and energy policy, including private donor information. It demands that CEI produce these materials from 20 years ago, from 1997-2007, by April 30, 2016.

On March 30, 2016, Attorney General Schneiderman, former Vice President Al Gore, and attorneys general from Massachusetts, Virginia, Connecticut, Maryland, Vermont, as well as Attorney General Walker, held a press conference in New York City to announce “an unprecedented coalition of top law enforcement officials committed to aggressively protecting and building upon the recent progress the United States has made in combating climate change.” Schneiderman said that the group, calling itself “AGs United for Clean Power,” will address climate change by threatening criminal investigations and charges against companies, policy organizations, scientists, and others who disagree with its members’ climate policy agenda. 

CEI has long been a champion of sound climate change policy, and opposed previous attempts to use McCarthy-style tactics by officials aiming to limit discussions between nonprofit policy groups and the private sector regarding federal policies. CEI is being represented in this matter by attorneys Andrew M. Grossman and David B. Rivkin, Jr., who recently founded the Free Speech in Science Project to defend First Amendment rights against government abuses.

Sanders Keeps Blowing it.

Bernie Sanders blows every chance he has to be the peace candidate in the presidential race. The latest example: blaming climate change for terrorism.

Matthews Demagogues Climate Change ... Again

Chris Matthews does it again: Yesterday's show featured a discussion of the latest report on climate change with a climate scientist who believes that catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) is happening (Michael Mann) and ... a Republican consultant (who kept saying, "I'm not a scientist."). Matthews's mission is to make sure his viewers never have to encounter a credentialed climate scientist with evidence against CAGW -- there are such -- so he can maintain the pretense that anyone who denies CAGW must be an anti-science religious fanatic.

Worth reading: Alex Cockburn's "Is Global Warming a Sin?"

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TGIF: Fixing Global Warming for Fun If Not Profit

Amateur global-warming skeptics can make me uncomfortable.... I sense that under the surface some of them are saying, “Global warming had better not be happening because if it is I see no way for the free market to fix it. Therefore I would have to accept major government intervention, and I don’t want to have to do that.”

Read TGIF here.

German Physicists Reject Greenhouse Effect

I'm not a climate scientist. I don't even play one on TV. There do seem to be serious problems with the catastrophic anthropogenic global-warming (AGW) thesis, but I remain an agnostic, and I refuse to use political-economic criteria to judge scientific credibility.

Nevertheless, this interesting article about German physicists who insist that AGW is bunk is worth reading.

From the physicists' paper:

(a) there are no common physical laws between the warming phenomenon in glass houses and the fictitious atmospheric greenhouse effects, (b) there are no calculations to determine an average surface temperature of a planet, (c) the frequently mentioned difference of 33 degrees Celsius is a meaningless number calculated wrongly, (d) the formulas of cavity radiation are used inappropriately, (e) the assumption of a radiative balance is unphysical, (f) thermal conductivity and friction must not be set to zero, the atmospheric greenhouse conjecture is falsified.

HT: Brad Spangler

On DDT, Global Warming, Junk Science, and Libertarians

Kevin Carson has some interesting things to say about DDT, global warming, junk science, and libertarians: here. (I'm more skeptical about anthropogenic catastrophic global warming than he is -- but I'm not climate scientist and I refuse to choose which scientists to believe on the basis of their political-economic convictions.)

Check out the comments section, too, if you have the stomach for it. Hang in there, Kevin!