Coyote Blog

Via Valley Fever:

Republican senators submitted a report to Congress yesterday outlining billions of dollars of useless or stupid spending in the Obama stimulus plan.

What do we mean by useless or stupid? How about $100,000 for a puppet show in Minnesota or a $2 million replica railroad in Nevada....

The wasteful spending isn't isolated to Minnesota and Nevada, some of it is right here in Arizona.

According to the report, Arizona State University and the University of Arizona were given nearly a million dollars to study the work habits of ants.

"I had no idea that so much expertise concerning ants resided in the major universities of my state," McCain says. "I say that with an element of pride, but I'm not sure its deserving of these taxpayers' dollars."

Here are some I wish I had won grants for, at least in my youth:

Some of the other gems outlined in McCain's catalog of stupid spending are a $400,000 grant awarded to the University of Buffalo for a study on kids who smoke weed and drink malt liquor, a dinner cruise boat in Chicago that got $1 million to fight terrorism, and a $219,000 grant to the National Institute of Health to determine whether college chicks are more likely to "hook up" after drinking.

In other words, the federal government spent $219,000 to study beer goggles.

Via a reader, the article is about Madison, Wisconsin, but it could be about anywhere.  The author highlights at least three issues with the plans:

• Unelected tax authority

Dane County, for instance, plans to fund its transit authority with a half-percent sales tax. Members of the RTA board were told by the officials who appointed them to put the tax to voters in a referendum, likely next fall.And if the voters say no? In theory, said County Board member Al Matano, a key RTA backer, it means no funding. But "it's not on our list of things to worry about," he told me.

Why should it be? The legal fact is the tax needs no referendum. Gov. Jim Doyle vetoed that part of the transit authority law. Struck it right out. The decision is solely up to an unelected RTA board.

"Quite honestly, they don't need (a referendum), legally," said Dave Ripp, a County Board member who doesn't favor the RTA. "And if it fails, they don't have to follow it."

• Obsession with trains over more affordable solutions

Quite a few wonder why Madison, with 480,000 people and short distances, needs the expense of trains. Buses are much cheaper. They can go more places, and you can afford to run them more frequently. "We actually support buses," said Richardson. "They're very flexible."

"The main thing that worries me, and I'm not the only one," said Susan De Vos, head of the Madison Area Bus Advocates, a riders' group, "is that people put in rail at the expense of the existing transit system, and that's the bus." That's how things worked elsewhere, such as in Los Angeles, said De Vos. When train plans inevitably outstrip revenue, the money comes from cutting back the unsexy part of the system. She favors a series of limited-stop express "bus rapid transit" lines for a fraction of rail's cost.

• The real focus is on rigid government control of development (ie the Portland model)

"Their agenda really isn't about transportation," as Dane County Towns Association President Jerry Derr put it to a reporter. "It's about land use. They want to build a rail system so they have a reason to force all new development to within a half-mile of the rail corridor." Surely he exaggerates? No. The commuter rail plan's founding document lays out the rationale thus: "Goal 1: Promote Efficient Land Use/Develo

Sounds like a another great town (Madison is really a great place from my experience) is about to be screwed up, just like Portland has.

James Hansen wrote an editorial supporting a revenue-neutral carbon tax, and while I don't really agree with all of his justifications or economics, I do agree with his ultimate conclusion --that such a tax would be fairer, more efficient, less growth-killing, and ultimately more effective than the Frankenstein mess of parts that makes up the current cap-and-trade bill.

To be fair, I have been on this point for a while, having advocated a carbon tax offset by a payroll tax reduction to make it revenue neutral for some time, including in my most recent film.  I don't think I have to tell my readers that I am not big on taxes nor am I of the belief that any strong action on CO2 emissions is necessary.

However, I am largely indifferent between a sales tax on fuel and an equal sized sales tax on labor (which is effectively what payroll taxes are).  There is no doubt that a reduction in payroll taxes would be a helpful step in this recession, and if folks would sleep better at night with less carbon emissions, I can tolerate trading one for another.

Jonathon Adler has more, including Paul Krugman's negative reaction to the plan  (did this guy really once win the Nobel Price in economics?)

This is kind of scary -- shoplifters denied trial by jury.  A judge seems to think its too much of a hassle to do follow that old Sixth Amendment thingie. We've gutted the rest of our constitutional protections, why not jury trial too?

An Arizona appeals court is set to issue a ruling today about whether people accused of shoplifting are entitled to a jury trial. The decision stems from a Peoria woman who got pinched for shoplifting and was wrongly denied a jury trial by a Maricopa County Superior Court Judge last year, CBS 5 (KPHO) reports.

Because the penalties for shoplifting are often relatively minimal -- probation, or community service -- the judge seemed to think calling in a jury wasn't necessary and said a jury trial for shoplifters was open for debate.

First, let's settle something.  The world has warmed since 1850.  While there always is an error bar on nearly every statement about nature, I think there is little point in questioning this past warming.  There is ice core data that suggests that the little ice age, which ended some time in the very early 19th century, was perhaps the coldest period, or one of the two or three coldest periods, in the last 5000 years (ie in nearly the entire span of human civilization).  Temperatures are inevitably warming from this low point.(*1)

So, if the point is not to deny warming altogether, what is the point in discussions of Climategate of picking over and trying to audit historical temperature records like the Hadley CRUT3 or NASA's GISStemp?  Skeptics often argue that much of the warming is due to bogus manual adjustments in the temperature records and biases such as urban warming.  Alarmists argue that the metrics may understate warming because of masking by manmade anthropogenic cooling agents (e.g. sulfate aerosols).  Why bother?  Why does it matter if past warming is 0.6C or 0.8C or 0.3C?  There are at least two reasons.

1.  The slope of recent temperature increases is used as evidence for the anthropogenic theory.

We know greenhouse gasses like CO2 have a warming effect in the lab.  And we know that overall they warm planets because otherwise ours would be colder.  But how much does an incremental amount of CO2 (a relatively weak greenhouse gas) warm the Earth?  A lot or a little?  Is the sensitivity of the climate to CO2 high or low?

Every time I try to express this, it sounds so ridiculous that people think I must have it wrong.  But the main argument supporting a high climate sensitivity to CO2 is that scientists claim to have looked at past warming, particularly from 1950-2000, and they can't think of any natural cause that could behind it, which leaves CO2 by process of elimination.  Yeah, I know this seems crazy - one wants to ask if this is really a test for CO2 sensitivity or of scientists' understanding and imagination, but there you have it.

Now, they don't always say it this directly.  What they actually say is that they ran their climate models and their climate models could not produce the warming from 1950-2000 with natural forcings alone, but could reproduce this warming with forcings from CO2.  But since the climate models are not handed down from the gods, but programmed by the scientists themselves to represent their own understanding of the climate system, in effect this is just a different way of saying what I said in the previous paragraph.   The climate models perform the function of scientific money laundering, taking an imperfect knowledge on the front end and somehow converting that into settled science at the output.

Now, there are a lot of ways to criticize this approach.  The models tend to leave out multi-decadal ocean cycles and don't really understand cloud formation well.  Further, the period from 1957-2008, which supposedly can only be explained by non-natural forcings, has almost the exact same temperature profile and increase as the time from 1895-1946, which of necessity must be mostly "natural."  I go into this more here, among other places.

But you can see that the amount of warming matters to this argument.  The more the warming falls into a documented natural range of temperature variation, the harder it is to portray it as requiring man-made forcings to explain.  This is also the exact same reason alarmist scientists work so hard to eliminate the Medieval Warm Period and little ice age from the temperature record.  Again, the goal is to show that natural variation is in a very narrow range, and deviations from this narrow range must therefore be man-made. (*2)

This is the sort of unified field theory of everything we are seeing in the CRU emails.   We see scientists using every trick they can find to lower or smooth out temperatures numbers before 1950, and adjust numbers after 1950 upwards.  Every single trick and programming adjustment all tended to have this effect, whether it be in proxy studies or in the instrumental record.  And all the efforts to prevent scrutiny, ignore FOIA's, and throw out raw data have been to avoid third party replication of the statistical methods and adjustments they used to achieve these ends.

As an aside, I think it is incorrect to picture this as a SPECTRE-like cabal scheming to do evil.   These guys really, really believed they had the right answer, and these adjustments were made to tease out what they just knew the right answer to be.  This is why we are only going to see confused looks from any of these guys - they really, really believed they were doing God's work.  They are never going to understand what they did wrong.  Which doesn't make it any less bad science, but just emphasizes that we are never going to get data without spin until total sunlight is brought to this process

2.  It is already really hard to justify the huge sensitivities in alarmist forecasts based on past warming -- if past warming is lower, forecasts look even more absurd.

The best way to illustrate this is with a few charts from my most recent climate presentation and video.  We usually see warming forecasts by year.  But the real relationship is between warming and CO2 concentration (this relationship is called climate sensitivity).   One can graph forecasts at various levels:

The blue line corresponds to the IPCC no-feedback formula that I think originally goes back to Michael Mann, and yields about 1-1.2C of warming for greenhouse gas warming from CO2 before feedback effects.  The middle two lines correspond to the IPCC mid and high forecasts, and the top line corresponds to more alarmist forecasts from folks like Joe Romm who predict as much as 8-10C of warming by 2100 (when we will be at 650-800ppm CO2 per the IPCC).  By the way, the IPCC does not publish the lines above the blue line, so I have taken the formula they give for the blue line and scaled it to meet their end points.  I think this is reasonable.

A couple of things - all climate models assume net positive feedback, what skeptics consider the key flaw in catastrophic global warming theory.  In fact, most of the catastrophe comes not from global warming theory, but by this second theory that the Earth's temperature system is dominated by very high positive feedback.  I illustrate this here.  The blue line is from CO2 greenhouse gas warming.  Everything above it is from the multiplier effects of assumed feedbacks.

I won't go into the feedback issue much now - search my site for positive feedback or else watch my video for much more.  Suffice it to say that skeptics consider the feedback issue the key failure point in catastrophic forecasts.

Anyway, beyond arguing about feedbacks, there is another way to test these forecasts.   Relationships that hold for CO2 and warming in the future must hold in the past (same Earth).  So lets just project these lines backwards to the CO2 level in the late 19th century.

Can you see the issue?  When projected back to pre-industrial CO2 levels, these future forecasts imply that we should have seen 2,3,4 or more degrees of warming over the last century, and even the flawed surface temperature records we are discussing with a number of upwards biases and questionable adjustments only shows about 0.6C.

Sure, there are some time delay issues, probably 10-15 years, as well as some potential anthropogenic cooling from aerosols, but none of this closes these tremendous gaps.  Even with an exaggerated temperature history, only the no feedback 1C per century case is really validated by history.  And, if one assumes the actual warming is less than 0.6C, and only a part of that is from anthropogenic CO2, then the actual warming forecast justified is one of negative feedback, showing less than 1C per century warming from manmade CO2 -- which is EXACTLY the case that most skeptics make.

Those who control the past control the future. Those who control the present control the past.- George Orwell

Footnotes:

(1) More than once I have contemplated how much the fact that the invention of the thermometer occurred at perhaps the coldest point in human memory (early 17th century)  has contributed to the perceptions of current warm weather being unusual.

(2) For those who are on the ball, perhaps you can spot an amazing disconnect here.  Scientists claim that the natural variation of temperatures is in a very narrow band, that they never move even 0.2C per decade by natural means.  But they also say that the Earth's temperature system is dominated by positive feedback, meaning that very very small changes in forcings are magnified many fold in to large temperature changes.  I won't go in to it in depth from a systems perspective, but trust me that "high stability in a narrow range" and "dominated by high positive feedback" are not very compatible descriptions of a system.

We got over 2 feet of snow in Flagstaff, with six foot drifts, the most snow we have ever gotten this early in Northern Arizona.  We are opening our Flagstaff snow play area today.

We see all kinds of alarmist spin being attempted on the CRU emails.  For those who are interested, this is best layman's article I have found to discuss the now-famous Michael Mann "trick," what it is, and the obfuscation in the CRU's response.

I have at least one experience with the core alarmist community responding where I pointed out an error.  The responses I got in that case are very similar to the ones today for the CRU - basically the responses either are tangential to the basic point or try to retroactively change the alarmists original assertions.  They are responses that stand up only if the questioner is unwilling or unable to do the smallest amount of verification work (in other words, they work with most of the media).

The series of posts began with this image from the recent US government climate assessment.  Its point was to provide electric grid outages as a proxy measurement variable for severe weather, the point being that severe weather must have increased.

I thought this chart smelled funny

This chart screams one thing at me:  Basis change.  Somehow, the basis for the data is changing in the period.  Either reporting has been increased, or definitions have changed, or there is something about the grid that makes it more sensitive to weather, or whatever  (this is a problem in tornado charts, as improving detection technologies seem to create an upward incidence trend in smaller tornadoes where one probably does not exist).   But there is NO WAY the weather is changing this fast, and readers should treat this whole report as a pile of garbage if it is written by people who uncritically accept this chart.

So I called the owner of the data set at the EIA

He said that there may be an underlying upward trend out there (particularly in thunderstorms) but that most of the increase in this chart is from improvements in data gathering.  In 1997, the EIA (and Makins himself) took over the compilation of this data, which had previously been haphazard, and made a big push to get all utilities to report as required.  They made a second change and push for reporting in 2001, and again in 2007/2008.  He told me that most of this slope is due to better reporting, and not necessarily any underlying trend.   In fact, he said there still is some under-reporting by smaller utilities he wants to improve so that the graph will likely go higher in the future....

At the end of the day, this disturbance data is not a good proxy for severe weather.

The author of that section of the report, Evan Mills, responded and then I dealt with his response here.  Here is just one example of the BS we have to slog through every time we criticize even a tangential analysis like this.  See the links for his whole response, but he says in part:

As noted in the caption to the figure on page 58 of our report (shown above)"”which was masked in the blogger's critique [ed.  actually it was not masked- the source I got the chart from had left off the caption]"”we expressly state a quite different finding than that imputed by the blogger, noting with care that we do not attribute these events to anthropogenic climate change, but do consider the grid vulnerable to extreme weather today and increasingly so as climate change progresses, i.e.:

"Although the figure does not demonstrate a cause-effect relationship between climate change and grid disruption, it does suggest that weather and climate extremes often have important effects on grid disruptions."

The associated text in the report states the following, citing a major peer-reviewed federal study on the energy sector's vulnerability to climate change:

"The electricity grid is also vulnerable to climate change effects, from temperature changes to severe weather events."

This was pretty amazing - citing his chart's caption but hoping that somehow I or other readers would miss the very first line of the caption which he fails to quote:

To Dr. Mills' point that I misinterpreted him "” if all he wanted to say was that the electrical grid could be disturbed by weather or was vulnerable to climate change, fine.  I mean, duh.  If there are more tornadoes knocking about, more electrical lines will come down.  But if that was Dr. Mills ONLY point, then why did he write (emphasis added):

The number of incidents caused by extreme weather has increased tenfold since 1992.  The portion of all events that are caused by weather-related phenomena has more than tripled from about 20 percent in the early 1990s to about 65 percent in recent years.  The weather-related events are more severe"¦

He is saying flat out that the grid IS being disturbed 10x more often and more severely by weather.  It doesn't even say "reported" incidents or "may have" "” it is quite definitive.  So which one of us is trying to create a straw man?   It is these statements that I previously claimed the data did not support, and I stand by my analysis on that.

I deconstructed a lot of the rest of his longer post, and you can follow it all, but the bottom line is that if a you are drawing a trend line between two points, and you have much more data missing from the begginning end point than the end, your trend is going to be SNAFU'd.  Period.  No point in arguing about it.  See the chart below.  It represents the situation at hand.  The red is the reported data.  The blue is the unreported data, which declines as a percentage of the total due to a push for better data reporting by the database owners.  My point was simply that the red trend line was meaningless.  Its amazing to me that even accepting the basics of this picture, Dr. Mills wants to fight that conclusion.

I am reminded by one of the now-famous quotes from the CRU emails

I really wish I could be more positive about the Kyrgyzstan material, but I swear I pulled every trick out of my sleeve trying to milk something out of that. I don't think it'd be productive to try and juggle the chronology statistics any more than I already have - they just are what they are...

Yep, sometimes the measured results from nature are what they are.  Well, I actually that most of the time they are what they are, but not in climate apparently.  Never give up a flawed analysis that yields the "right" answer without a fight.  I concluded:

Look Dr. Mills, I don't have an axe to grind here.  This is one chart out of bazillions making a minor point.  But the data set you are using is garbage, so why do you stand by it with such tenacity?  Can't anyone just admit "you know, on thinking about it, there are way to many problems with this data set to declare a trend exists.

Taxpayers in Maricopa County (which includes Phoenix) are paying millions of dollars for officials within the county government to sue each other:

Lawsuits between county agencies including the Sheriff's Office, the County Attorney's Office and the Treasurer's Office against county administration have cost more than $2.5 million in legal fees according to the county's records through early November.

The Sheriff's Office has used attorneys from Ogletree, Deakins, Nash, Smoak and Stewart to wage legal battles with the county on issues including control of a law-enforcement computer system and the need to release surveillance footage of sheriff's deputies arresting Supervisor Don Stapley

in a county parking garage.

Next year, the Sheriff's office has asked for $7 million for this purpose.  Wow.  Given that I despise Sheriff Arpaio, I would love to lay this all at his door step but my sense is that the dysfunctionality goes broader and deeper.

One of the great appeals of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming theory in certain sectors is the fact that what it takes to fight the imagined threat  (reduced trade, reduced economic growth, government controls on the economy, populist hammering of energy companies, micro-controls on individual decision-making) are exactly the things the socialists wanted to do before their schtick became tired.  Global warming has become the back-door to state control, combining some exaggerated science with a lot of folks' uninformed desire to "do the right thing", to create a new vector for old objectives.

Today, 56 newspapers  are all allowing some global warming activist to take over their newspapers to run the same panicky plea.   Bruce McQuain picks up the story:

In reality, I've come to understand this isn't about "climate change", this is about the politics of income redistribution. I've spoken of it in the past. This has been a goal of the third-world debating club, also known as the UN, since it has come into existence. The IPCC is just a convenient vehicle on which to base their claims and put them forward to the industrialized countries for fulfillment. The underlying "science", like a wet paper box, is coming apart at the seams. And not a single mention in the editorial. But it becomes clear, the further you get into it, that it is about what I contend it is about:

Social justice demands that the industrialised world digs deep into its pockets and pledges cash to help poorer countries adapt to climate change, and clean technologies to enable them to grow economically without growing their emissions. The architecture of a future treaty must also be pinned down "“ with rigorous multilateral monitoring, fair rewards for protecting forests, and the credible assessment of "exported emissions" so that the burden can eventually be more equitably shared between those who produce polluting products and those who consume them. And fairness requires that the burden placed on individual developed countries should take into account their ability to bear it; for instance newer EU members, often much poorer than "old Europe", must not suffer more than their richer partners.

If you were playing buzz word bingo with this paragraph you'd be at the prize table right now picking one out. It hits all of the favorite themes of income redistributionists. And its blatancy should scare you. This is about your wallet, your money and the rest of the world making a claim on it. This is the third world's dream come true.

I have to object somewhat to his last line.  This is the third world leader's dream come true, as I think most adults understand from past experience that aid like this gets siphoned off by the ruling regime.  What the Third World's people really need is what Southeast Asia and India and China have - real private investment making for real economic growth (to be fair, I think Bruce would accept this correction).

I thought this bit was hilarious:

It is in that spirit that 56 newspapers from around the world have united behind this editorial. If we, with such different national and political perspectives, can agree on what must be done then surely our leaders can too.

Apparently we are supposed to be dazzled that 56 institutions that all, in unison, blindly cling to the same 150-year-old failed business model, hoping that some other group can be prevailed upon to bail them out, would actually think alike about some issue.  Amazing!

Via the Telegraph:

On a normal day, Majken Friss Jorgensen, managing director of Copenhagen's biggest limousine company, says her firm has twelve vehicles on the road. During the "summit to save the world", which opens here tomorrow, she will have 200.

"We thought they were not going to have many cars, due to it being a climate convention," she says. "But it seems that somebody last week looked at the weather report."

Ms Jorgensen reckons that between her and her rivals the total number of limos in Copenhagen next week has already broken the 1,200 barrier. The French alone rang up on Thursday and ordered another 42. "We haven't got enough limos in the country to fulfil the demand," she says. "We're having to drive them in hundreds of miles from Germany and Sweden."

And the total number of electric cars or hybrids among that number? "Five," says Ms Jorgensen. "The government has some alternative fuel cars but the rest will be petrol or diesel. We don't have any hybrids in Denmark, unfortunately, due to the extreme taxes on those cars. It makes no sense at all, but it's very Danish."

The airport says it is expecting up to 140 extra private jets during the peak period alone, so far over its capacity that the planes will have to fly off to regional airports - or to Sweden - to park, returning to Copenhagen to pick up their VIP passengers.

As well 15,000 delegates and officials, 5,000 journalists and 98 world leaders, the Danish capital will be blessed by the presence of Leonardo DiCaprio, Daryl Hannah, Helena Christensen, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Prince Charles. A Republican US senator, Jim Inhofe, is jetting in at the head of an anti-climate-change "Truth Squad." The top hotels - all fully booked at £650 a night - are readying their Climate Convention menus of (no doubt sustainable) scallops, foie gras and sculpted caviar wedges.

I am trying to emulate these brave reformers.  In that spirit, I drove all the way across town to take my daughter to the Trans-Siberian Orchestra concert -- very likely the band with the largest carbon footprint in the world (if you have seen their concerts, you know what I mean).

A couple of years ago I wrote:

Activist: A person who believes so strongly that a problem needs to be remedied that she dedicates substantial time to "¦ getting other people to fix the problem.   It used to be that activists sought voluntary help for their pet problem, and thus retained some semblance of honor.  However, our self-styled elite became frustrated at some point in the past that despite their Ivy League masters degrees in sociology, other people did not seem to respect their ideas nor were they particularly interested in the activist's pet issues.  So activists sought out the double shortcut of spending their time not solving the problem themselves, and not convincing other people to help, but convincing the government it should compel others to fix the supposed problem.  This fascism of good intentions usually consists of government taking money from the populace to throw at the activist's issue, but can also take the form of government-compelled labor and/or government limitations on choice.

So now, we have the next step -- advocating that others spend their time convincing government to use compulsion to solve some imagined problem.  Kevin Drum urges:

The only real way to address climate change is to make broad changes to laws and incentives.  It puts everyone on a level playing field, it gives everyone a framework for making their own choices, and it gives us a fighting chance of making the deep cuts we need to.  So listen to Tidwell: "Don't spend an hour changing your light bulbs. Don't take a day to caulk your windows. Instead, pick up a phone, open a laptop, or travel to a U.S. Senate office near you and turn the tables: 'What are the 10 green statutes you're working on to save the planet, Senator?'"

Jackboots seem to be "in" this season.

Postscript: In the language of mathematics (I mentioned before I am in the middle of Goedel-Escher-Bach) if actually aiding someone is "helping," then I guess organizing people to help is meta helping, and lobbying government to force other people to help is meta meta helping and so advocating on your blog that people should lobby the government to force other people to help is meta meta meta helping.  Must really warm Drum's heart to be so directly connected with helping people.

Via Wawick Hughes, this "voting" site is pretty funny.

Apparently Google has launched a site where you can "vote" on climate change and the IPCC process.  Except that you can only vote "yes." Fill in your name and hit submit, and you are counted as having voted the party line.  Seriously.  Since when does this meet anyone's definition of "vote?"

Every day Google innovationist Justin Baird pedals to work at the internet giant, where he is thinking big in his global campaign to act on climate change.

"My personal mission is to drive positive change through technology," he said.

"I am in a position where I can understand the issues surrounding climate change. And understanding the technology solution that can empower us to communicate collectively."

I guess we know now why Google did not have any qualms about cooperating with the Chinese government. They have been "communicating collectively" in their elections for years.

"From your local postcode it aggregates it together to a state level, then country level, then across the world, so what we're doing is generating a global statistic. Over time it starts to generate and show the strength of public support of what's happening," Mr Baird said.

Wow - I am predicting his point of view wins in a landslide

Chairman of the Copenhagen Climate Council, Tim Flannery, says the Google tool is an interesting invention.

"I can imagine a day not so long from now where the UN secretary-general is elected through Show Your Vote. It's a very interesting world that we're entering into," he said.

Yeah, unfortunately, I can imagine a day too.  Already leaders around the world in countries like Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran are elected just this way.

When someone starts to shout "but its in the peer-reviewed literature" as an argument-ender to me, I usually respond that peer review is not the finish line, meaning that the science of some particular point is settled.  It is merely the starting point, where now a proposition is in the public domain and can be checked and verified and replicated and criticized and potentially disproved or modified.

The CRU scandal should, in my mind, be taken exactly the same way.  Unlike what more fire-breathing skeptics have been saying, this is not the final nail in the coffin of catastrophic man-made global warming theory.  It is merely a starting point, a chance to finally move government funded data and computer code into the public domain where it has always belonged, and start tearing it down or confirming it.

To this end, I would like to share a post from year ago, showing the kind of contortions that skeptics have been going through for years to demonstrate that there appear to be problems in  key data models -- contortions and questions that could have been answered in hours rather than years if the climate scientists hadn't been so afraid of scrutiny and kept their inner workings secret.  This post is from July, 2007.  It is not one of my most core complaints with global warming alarmists, as I think the Earth has indeed warmed over the last 150 years, though perhaps by less than the current metrics say.  But I think some folks are confused why simple averages of global temperatures can be subject to hijinx.  The answer is that the averages are not simple:

A few posts back, I showed how nearly 85% of the reported warming in the US over the last century is actually due to adjustments and added fudge-factors by scientists rather than actual measured higher temperatures.  I want to discuss some further analysis Steve McIntyre has done on these adjustments, but first I want to offer a brief analogy.

Let's say you had two compasses to help you find north, but the compasses are reading incorrectly.  After some investigation, you find that one of the compasses is located next to a strong magnet, which you have good reason to believe is strongly biasing that compass's readings.  In response, would you

1. Average the results of the two compasses and use this mean to guide you, or
2. Ignore the output of the poorly sited compass and rely solely on the other unbiased compass?

Most of us would quite rationally choose #2.  However, Steve McIntyre shows us a situation involving two temperature stations in the USHCN network in which government researchers apparently have gone with solution #1.  Here is the situation:

He compares the USHCN station at the Grand Canyon (which appears to be a good rural setting) with the Tucson USHCN station I documented here, located in a parking lot in the center of a rapidly growing million person city.   Unsurprisingly, the Tucson data shows lots of warming and the Grand Canyon data shows none.  So how might you correct Tucson and the Grand Canyon data, assuming they should be seeing about the same amount of warming?  Would you

average them, effectively adjusting the two temperature readings

towards each other, or would you assume the Grand Canyon data is cleaner

with fewer biases and adjust Tucson only?   Is there anyone who would not choose the second option, as with the compasses?

The GISS data set, created by the Goddard Center of NASA, takes the USHCN data set and somehow uses nearby stations to correct for anomalous stations.  I say somehow, because, incredibly, these government scientists, whose research is funded by taxpayers and is being used to make major policy decisions, refuse to release their algorithms or methodology details publicly. They keep it all secret!  Their adjustments are a big black box that none of us are allowed to look into  (and remember, these adjustments account for the vast majority of reported warming in the last century).

We can, however, reverse engineer some of these adjustments, and McIntyre does.  What he finds is that the GISS appears to be averaging the good and bad compass, rather than throwing out or adjusting only the biased reading.  You can see this below.  First, here are the USHCN data for these two stations with only the Time of Observation adjustment made (more on what these adjustments are in this article).

As I said above, no real surprise "“ little warming out in undeveloped nature, lots of warming in a large and rapidly growing modern city.  Now, here is the same data after the GISS has adjusted it:

You can see that Tucson has been adjusted down a degree or two, but Grand Canyon has been adjusted up a degree or two (with the earlier mid-century spike adjusted down).  OK, so it makes sense that Tucson has been adjusted down, though there is a very good argument to be made that it should be been adjusted down more, say by at least 3 degrees**.  But why does the Grand Canyon need to be adjusted up by about a degree and a half?  What is biasing it colder by 1.5 degrees, which is a lot?  The answer:  Nothing.  The explanation:  Obviously, the GISS is doing some sort of averaging, which is bringing the Grand Canyon and Tucson from each end closer to a mean.

This is clearly wrong, like averaging the two compasses.  You don't average a measurement known to be of good quality with one known to be biased.  The Grand Canyon should be held about the same, and Tucson adjusted down even more toward it, or else thrown out.  Lets look at two cases.  In one, we will use the GISS approach to combine these two stations"“ this adds 1.5 degrees to GC and subtracts 1.5 degrees from Tucson.  In the second, we will take an approach that applies all the adjustment to just the biases (Tucson station) "” this would add 0 degrees to GC and subtract 3 degrees from Tucson.  The first approach, used by the GISS, results in a mean warming in these two stations that is 1.5 degrees higher than the more logical second approach. No wonder the GISS produces the highest historical global warming estimates of any source!  Steve McIntyre has much more.

** I got to three degrees by applying all of the adjustments for GC and Tucson to Tucson.  Here is another way to get to about this amount.   We know from studies that urban heat islands can add 8-10 degrees to nighttime urban temperatures over surrounding undeveloped land.  Assuming no daytime effect, which is conservative, we might conclude that 8-10 degrees at night adds about 3 degrees to the entire 24-hour average.

Postscript: Steve McIntyre comments (bold added):

These adjustments are supposed to adjust for station moves "“ the procedure is described in Karl and Williams 1988 [check], but, like so many climate recipes, is a complicated statistical procedure that is not based on statistical procedures known off the island. (That's not to say that the procedures are necessarily wrong, just that the properties of the procedure are not known to statistical civilization.) When I see this particular outcome of the Karl methodology, my mpression is that, net of the pea moving under the thimble, the Grand Canyon values are being blended up and the Tucson values are being blended down. So that while the methodology purports to adjust for station moves, I'm not convinced that the methodology can successfully estimate ex post the impact of numerous station moves and my guess is that it ends up constructing a kind of blended average.

LOL.  McIntyre, by the way, is the same gentleman who helped call foul on the Mann hockey stick for bad statistical procedure.

It is amazing that a scandal that has appeared on something like 14 million web pages (per Google, though ymmv as I see people getting all kinds of numbers) in a matter of just 2 weeks has yet to appear on the US mainstream network news.  I mean, these were the guys who spent breathless hours of live coverage reporting every breaking rumor about changes to Michael Jackson's coffin.

No real point.  Not calling for government intervention, obviously.  Just amazing how irrelevant the networks have become.  If it weren't for Time and Newsweek, and I would say they were the least relevant major news outlets in the country.

Some major, must-report outcome is going to come out of this Internet hype, and at that point the networks will find themselves in a position they have already been in several times this year -- trying to explain significant actions resulting from a long-standing scandal or controversy they never reported.

I thought this was funny.  I am not going to deconstruct or lampoon this guy's beliefs, nor am I knowlegeable enough to argue whether Genesis 1:28 really mandates that man should forecast the climate system.  I am in fact trying really hard to say that I am not making an ad hominem attack here, but merely pointing out an irony:  Many dismiss skeptics as all part of the religious fundamentalist Right, I presume to try to lump us in with evolution deniers.  I can't tell you how many emails I get calling me some sort of religious fundamentalist freak, which is actually hilarious given a) I never mention religion of the g-word on either of my sites almost ever and b) the actual nature of my beliefs.

So this is funny in an ironic way:  The guy that originally wrote a bunch of the CRU code that has since been criticized as forcing a warming result is Tim Mitchell, who has shared some of his thoughts online (via Odd Citizen):

The climate system is made up of the earth's atmosphere, oceans, ice, vegetation, and streams. It is both beautiful and complex. Humans have a mandate to forecast its behavior and use it (Genesis 1:28). However, we feel in awe of its destructive potential, seen in such things as hurricanes and floods, which are part of the curse inflicted upon the earth following the Fall (Genesis 3.17). Moreover, control and certainty belong to God alone (Job 38-41). So there is a possibility that our actions may affect the climate system in unexpected ways. It was claimed in the 1970s that the earth might be about to enter an ice age. The evidence for this was minimal, but the decades of painstaking research that have followed the 1970s have unveiled both the natural variability in the climate system, and the dramatic effects of human actions....

What can individual Christians do? Some, but not many, are called to be scientists and politicians. However, we all have the vote, and environmental issues ought to be among those that we weigh up carefully before casting our vote. We are also each responsible for a small part of the daily emissions of greenhouse gases. Do we use our energy-intensive cars wisely? Are we guilty of worldly attitudes to public transport? With domestic heating and insulation, do we spend more and pollute more than is necessary? The government urges us to reduce our energy usage so that we may indulge ourselves in other ways, but we have a higher motive for reducing waste (1 Timothy 6.17-19). Although I have yet to see any evidence that climate change is a sign of Christ's imminent return, human pollution is clearly another of the birth pangs of creation, as it eagerly awaits being delivered from the bondage of corruption (Romans. 19-22).

Tim Mitchell works at the Climactic Research Unit, UEA, Norwich, and is a member of South Park Evangelical Church.

Again, I am not trying to purge the scientific ranks of Christian fundamentalists, I just think this is funny given all the accusations of blind Christian fundamentalism aimed (often with no basis) at skeptics.

Some good news after years of bad decisions:

New York's Supreme Court Appellate Division (First Department) handed down a massive victory for property rights yesterday in the case of Kaur v. New York State Urban Development Corporation. At issue was the state's highly controversial use of eminent domain on behalf of Columbia University, which wants free rein over the West Harlem neighborhood of Manhattanville, where it plans to build a fancy new research campus.

As I discussed in an article last February, there is overwhelming evidence that the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC) actively colluded with Columbia in order to produce the very conditions that would then allow ESDC to seize property on the university's behalf. At the time of ESDC's 2006 blight study, for instance, Columbia owned 76 percent of the neighborhood and was thus directly responsible for the overwhelming majority of blight that the report alleged, ranging from overflowing basement trash heaps to major roof and skylight leaks. As numerous tenants have reported, the university refused to perform basic and necessary repairs, which both pushed tenants out and manufactured the ugly conditions that later advanced Columbia's long-term interests. Preliminary findings delivered to the ESDC admitted as much, noting "Open violations in CU Buildings" and "History of CU repairs to properties" among the "issues of concern."

Thankfully, the New York court recognized this shameful mess for what it is: eminent domain abuse. As Justice James Catterson wrote for the majority:

the blight designation in the instant case is mere sophistry. It was utilized by ESDC years after the scheme was hatched to justify the employment of eminent domain but this project has always primarily concerned a massive capital project for Columbia. Indeed, it is nothing more than economic redevelopment wearing a different face.

This, from the Court's majority decision, was especially heartening post-Kelo:

The time has come to categorically reject eminent domain takings solely based on underutilization. This concept put forward by the respondent transforms the purpose of blight removal from the elimination of harmful social and economic conditions in a specific area to a policy affirmatively requiring the ultimate commercial development of all property regardless of the character of the community subject to such urban renewal.

This was pretty unexpected given how the Atlantic Yards case went.  I am not sure how to reconcile the two decisions.  Damon Root at the link above has the same concerns.

It was pointed out to me that a number of my old posts from my unlamented Typepad era are full of comment spam that carried over into the wordpress database.  My current comment spam filtering for new comments works fine.  Does anyone know of a solution that will actually go back through the data base and mine out old spam?

Via Maggies Farm

Related:  the total BS that is the Volt's 230 mpg rating.

I hope JD is wrong:

Further complicating this picture is that Sheriff Joe Arpaio, despite erratic and confrontational conduct that has repeatedly put him at the wrong end of lawsuits and press coverage, is immensely popular with Maricopa County voters. In fact, recent polling suggests that the governor's office is his for the asking. He's a favorite for the Republican nod and an apparent shoe-in in the general election.

I was under the impression that the Repub's cut Arpaio loose in the last election, but I don't really follow the politics stuff much.  JD has an update on the latest Arpaio shenanigans, as does Radley Balko:

• The Maricopa County Sheriff's Office announced on Tuesday that Stoddard would surrender to jail ahead of his midnight deadline to aplogize. But when Stoddard showed up, the jail refused to book him, citing a "clerical error." Stoddard insisted on spending the night in jail anyway.
• Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio announced he has filed a federal lawsuit against the county and its judges, alleging a "widespread conspiracy" against Arpaio and his officers. Arpaio remarkably and apparently with no self-awareness whatsoever called the county a "good ole boys network," and commented that he had "never seen these kinds of things occur in the justice system." Arpaio also called Donahoe's contempt finding against Stoddard a "vendetta," and said, "For political reasons, [Stoddard's] been thrown to the wolves."
• Yesterday, the day after Stoddard spent a night in jail, 19 sheriff's deputies scheduled to work security at the courthouse called in sick, throwing the day's court proceedings into disarray. The building also had to be evacuated after a phone-in bomb threat.
• As crowds returned after the bomb threat was cleared, the law enforcement unions commenced with a conveniently-timed rally in front of the courthouse, calling Stoddard a "victim" and demanding that he be released from jail.

Wow, it sure is a real coincidence when a bomb threat against the public defenders (it was a public defender the deputy originally stole the document from) at the exact same moment the sheriff's were trying to disrupt the courthouse over a dispute involving the public defenders office.

Those who don't live here would be appalled and disgusted by how such a large segment of the local population absolutely revere this man.  He's like the right-wing Obama, living off a manufactured image.

From the AZ Republic, which just can't stop itself from shamelessly cheerleading any effort to spend billions on rail in Phoenix (perhaps the world's worst candidate for rail transit given its density and distribution of businesses).

Enough people would board a train in the Valley's suburbs that a future commuter-rail system would be as popular as some of the busiest lines in the West, new studies have found.

Well, that's a low bar.

A trio of yearlong rail studies, in nearly final form, indicates commuter rail could carry almost 18,000 passengers a day by 2030. Planners at the Maricopa Association of Governments

say, based on the findings, they favor a 105-mile, X-shaped system that could feature 33 stations and cost roughly $1.5 billion. That's a little more than the Valley's 20-mile, light-rail starter line.

If this was presented to me as a business opportunity, I would have had them stop right there.   Even before inevitable cost overruns and over-confidence in ridership, even with the supporters' numbers, they want $1.5 billion to carry 18,000 people a day.   That is a capital cost of $83,000+ per daily rider, beating the old record of Phoenix light rail which cost around $75,000 per daily rider.

Planners assume the trains will recoup about 40 percent of their expenses, based on the national average for similar service. The average fare would be about $6 to $7, Wallace said, although no detailed study has gone into fares. Generally, rates would go up the farther the trip.

Can you imagine any other investor in the world other than the government making an investment knowing that in the best case of its strongest supporters revenues will only cover 40% of costs?  And why should the rest of us subsidize folks who live in outlying areas to commute?  They moved to those areas in large part because housing was cheap and cost of living was low, with the knowlege they had a long commute.  So those of us with the forsight to live close to work have to subsidize them?  This is a really valuable service for them but they can't even pay half the cost?

Further, lets look at those cost estimates.  If we get 18,000 a day on weekdays and a third that on weekends, that yields 5 million round trips.  Given an 8% interest rate over 30 years, the capital charge is $134 million a year before overruns.  That means the fare would have to be $27 round trip or $13.50 one way just to cover the capital cost alone, without even considering operating costs.

This means their figures are nuts.  $6-$7 one-way fares barely covers 40% of the capital costs, much less the operating expenses.  We are talking about an offering that is deep in the red.  $13 round trip at 5,000,000 round trips equals $65,000,000 of revenue.  That means that taxpayers will have to foot the bill for all the operating costs  ($30 million?  $60 million) and at least $69 million of capital charges.   It is not unfair to assume that this would punch a minimum $100 million hole each year in the government's budget that we will have to make up with taxes.

Update: Gotta achnowlege this bit of sanity in the AZ Republic comments from "astonished"

Light rail is such a boondoggle. It's expensive to build and always runs at a loss. It is very hard to change the routes to respond to ridership needs. It's a vanity project for hip liberals.

If public transportation is a goal, then get some buses going. Buses are flexible, cost effective, cheap to run and maintain, and if ridership changes, you just change the routes and schedules.

Via the WSJ:

His first impulse was to dismiss the ominous email as a prank, says a young Iranian-American named Koosha. It warned the 29-year-old engineering student that his relatives in Tehran would be harmed if he didn't stop criticizing Iran on Facebook.

Two days later, his mom called. Security agents had arrested his father in his home in Tehran and threatened him by saying his son could no longer safely return to Iran.

"When they arrested my father, I realized the email was no joke," said Koosha, who asked that his full name not be used....

In recent months, Iran has been conducting a campaign of harassing and intimidating members of its diaspora world-wide -- not just prominent dissidents -- who criticize the regime, according to former Iranian lawmakers and former members of Iran's elite security force, the Revolutionary Guard, with knowledge of the program.

Part of the effort involves tracking the Facebook, Twitter and YouTube activity of Iranians around the world, and identifying them at opposition protests abroad, these people say.

Interviews with roughly 90 ordinary Iranians abroad -- college students, housewives, doctors, lawyers, businesspeople -- in New York, London, Dubai, Sweden, Los Angeles and other places indicate that people who criticize Iran's regime online or in public demonstrations are facing threats intended to silence them.

Although it wasn't possible to independently verify their claims, interviewees provided consistently similar descriptions of harassment techniques world-wide. Most asked that their full names not be published.

I am currently, finally reading a book that most of you who know how much of a geek I am probably already assumed I had read:  Geodel- Escher- Bach.  I guess I was turned off by how hip the book was when it came out, so I assumed it was some new age goofiness.  As many of you know, it turns out to be a very readable book on modern number theory and all sorts of related mathematical topics.  I'm really enjoying it.

But I would add that it is a blessing I waited until today to read it.  20 years ago I was way to impatient to really savor and appreciate it.  The book is working on 3 or 4 levels at the same time at every turn, and I am not sure I would have been mature enough to appreciate it earlier.  I can just see myself screaming, "and what's the deal with this stupid turtle?"

I had a similar reaction after recently reading Les Miserables.  I couldn't understand it 30 years ago - a 100 pages in and we are still talking about this freaking priest and haven't met the main characters yet?  What gives?  Others may have been more mature at 17, but I needed a few decades to really appreciate it.  This time around, I thought the book was beautiful.  Really enjoyed it.

Next up in this vein?  Probably Foucault's Pendulum, which I pick up and give up on every decade or so.

One of the points I make in my climate lectures - global warming panic has sucked the life out of environmental concerns that matter.  Illustration - US sewage plants still making massive untreated dumps.

I know this might sound retro to some readers. But we need to finish what the early 1970s environmental pollution control laws set out to do: clean up all the sources of air and water pollution. The environmental movement has run out of steam and gotten distracted. Get back to the basics.

Agreed.  Another point I often make - we don't know how to keep growing China without creating CO2, but we do know how to grow China without making the air in cities like Beijing breathable.  Instead of talking to them about CO2 capture, what about air pollution 101 type things like ash bags and exhaust scrubbing?

And while I am on the topic, do we have to keep destroying the Amazon just to clear land to grow more plants for ethanol that in the end does nothing to abate CO2 emissions?

Being a red state, maybe if AZ fails before CA, it will be less likely that Congress and the Administration will do some sort of bailout to head off local accountability.  It sure seems we might be able to pull off an early failure:

Arizona state government has managed to blow through a $700 million loan from the Bank of America in less than a week, and that wasn't even enough to keep things going.According to Treasurer Dean Martin, his office had to dip into internal sources to come up with the extra $73 million the state needed just to keep the lights on.

"Government spending in Arizona is out of control. We are more than three-quarters of $1 billion in the red for daily operations," Martin says. "As we predicted in our forecasts, just one week after setting up essentially the largest line of credit in state history, the state of Arizona has maxed it out. The governor and Legislature need to [rein] in excessive spending; we can no longer afford to continue spending more than we make."

The state is currently about $1.6 billion in the hole, and the $700 million loan the state spent last week is just the beginning of excessive spending of borrowed money.

This was simply amazing to me.  For years, I and others have said that putting more health care spending under insurance plans was going exactly the wrong direction, both from an individual choice as well as a system cost perspective.  By eliminating the need or incentive to shop by the consumer of services, prices almost inevitably rise.

Here is a fabulous smoking gun example from my windshield repair today.  I happen to have free windshield replacement in my insurance policy.   I called the insurance company and said I had an auto glass claim.  I was transferred to Safelite Auto Glass, who apparently (very intelligently) have a contract to process claims for my insurance company.  They said I could use any provider, but would I like them to call out someone for me -- if I used their choice, the insurance company would guarantee the work.

Well, what did I care -- I wasn't paying for it -- so I had them make an appointment for me.  Unsurprisingly, it was with Safelite Auto Glass.

I must add here that Safelite did an exceptional job, the guy who showed up at my workplace was friendly and competent.  No complaints at all about the service or workmanship.

Anyway, I got a bill for which I owed zero dollars, which I suppose is heading right this minute for the insurance company.  Before I show it to you, I was curious what I would have paid for this service if it hadn't been insured and I shopped around.  I got just one quote - from the Safelite Auto Glass web site.   This is a bit unrealistic because for a purchase this large, I would have gotten several quotes.  But this was the only quote I needed.  The charge to me if I bought the new glass service with my own money without insurance was$321.05  (click to enlarge).

And this was the bill I signed for the insurance company:

For a total of $710.40.  Same service.  Same car.  Same customer.  Same part.  Probably the same repair guy.  2.2x higher price.

Now, I suppose I might be willing to believe there is some invoice pricing game here and the insurance company may get a discount over invoice, similar to car sales, though I am not sure what their incentive would be for this game -- it should be the opposite.  In fact, we can be nearly positive they are marking up the price to insurance companies given a) the web quote says right up front it is not good for insurance work and b) I have already shown how glass companies give enormous consumer kickbacks for insurance work.

If I had cared, I would have eschewed the offer on the call to have them set up the appointment and shopped around for the best kickback.  All a cross subsidy from those who don't use the insurance to those who do use the insurance.  Talk about a terrible incentive.

I think the conclusion is pretty strong.  Anything we shift to insurance from having individuals pay out of pocket gets substantially more expensive.  And this doesn't even address my changing willingness to live with a small windshield crack and avoid this purchase altogether when I am paying the bills vs. when I am not.