Coyote Blog

This video doesn't touch much on the science of global warming, but does make an eloquent case about the true cost of CO2 abatement legislation.

I will be making a free presentation in Phoenix on climate change and the science behind the skeptic's case.  It is free to the public, and in answer to numerous inquiries, it is not sponsored or paid for by any organization and I am not promoting a book or any commercial product.  This is simply my personal hobby and style of activism (e.g. cerebral lecture rather than circling around carrying a sign).

But here is the really interesting coincidence:  It turns out Al Gore will be making the keynote address at the Greenbuild Conference in Phoenix on the next day (Nov 11).  Those who would like to be immunized in advance against his silliness should come to my presentation the night before.

The web site and directions for the presentation are here.  Nov 10 Climate Lecture Brochure (pdf).   We have a pretty large auditorium, so everyone is welcome.  Feel free to send the link or brochure to your friends in the area.

You can sign up for email updates on the event here.

Update: I can see the local climate is already reacting to Gore's visit, as we get an early dose of the Gore effect:

Temperatures in the Valley are expected to fall more than 20 degrees to the 60s by midweek, according to the National Weather Service.

The email link in the earlier post was screwed up in a lot of feeds.  Here is the correct link.

The treaty draft is really hard to read, as it has all kinds of alternate language in brackets.  However, a few folks have already started reviewing the treaty, and what they are finding is less of a climate treaty and more of a blueprint for world socialism.  One example, via Anthony Watt, from page 122 of the draft:

17. [[Developed [and developing] countries] [Developed and developing country Parties] [All Parties] [shall] [should]:]
(a) Compensate for damage to the LDCs' economy and also compensate for lost opportunities, resources, lives, land and dignity, as many will become environmental refugees;
(b) Africa, in the context of environmental justice, should be equitably compensated for environmental, social and economic losses arising from the implementation of response measures.

Compensating for "lost opportunities?" Isn't that number just whatever they want it to be? And don't get me started on lost "dignity."

I have given a number of presentations on climate change around the country and have taken the skeptic side in a number of debates, but I have never done anything in my home city of Phoenix.

Therefore, I will be making a presentation in Phoenix on November 10 at 7PM in the auditorium of the Phoenix Country Day School, on 40th Street just north of Camelback.  Admission is free.  My presentation is about an hour and I will have an additional hour for questions, criticism, and rebuttals from the audience.

I will be posting more detail later, but the presentation will include background on global warming theory, a discussion of why climate models are likely exaggerating future warming, and an evaluation of various policy alternatives.  The presentation will be heavy on science and data, but is meant to be accessible without a science background.  I will post more details of the agenda as we get closer to the event.

I am taking something of a risk with this presentation.  I am paying for the auditorium and promotion myself -- I am not doing this under the auspices of any group.  However, I would like to get good attendance, in part because I would like the media representatives attending to see the local community demonstrating interest in at least giving the skeptic side of the debate a hearing.  If you are a member of a group that might like to attend, please email me directly at the email link at the top of this page and I can help get more information and updates to your group.

Finally, I have created a mailing list for folks who would like more information about this presentation - just click on the link below.  All I need is your name and email address.

I am constantly amazed at the totalitarianism of the global warming community and their absolute intolerance of dissent.  One suspects that a reason more people are skeptical of alarmist predictions is that they know enough about human behavior to distrust someone who claims to be correct but refuses to respond to or even allow questions or replication.

Anthony Watt has a good example from the world of polar bears:

Exile for non-believers (PDF, press release)

Mitchell Taylor is a world's leading polar bear expert. He has studied a greater number of polar bear populations than anyone else. He has caught more polar bears than anyone else.

He was going to attend the 2009 meeting of the Polar Bear Specialist Group (PBSG). The name sounds technical, doesn't it? Unfortunately, in one of his papers, he wrote this somewhat self-evident, yet detailed, balanced, and carefully worded description of the polar bears' situation:

"The concern that polar bears will decline if the climate continues to warm is valid. However, the assertion that polar bears will become extinct unless immediate measures are taken to curb greenhouse gas emissions is irrational because it is inconsistent with the long-term persistence of polar bears through previous periods of warming and cooling; and because the IPCC climate model predictions 50 and 100 years into the future do not suggest a future with insufficient sea ice to support polar bears as a viable species."

What was the answer? He wasn't allowed to participate. Here is Mr Andrew Derocher's letter:

Hi Mitch,

The world is a political place and for polar bears, more so now than ever before. I have no problem with dissenting views as long as they are supportable by logic, scientific reasoning, and the literature.

I do believe, as do many PBSG members, that for the sake of polar bear conservation, views that run counter to human induced climate change are extremely unhelpful. In this vein, your positions and statements in the Manhattan Declaration, the Frontier Institute, and the Science and Public Policy Institute are inconsistent with positions taken by the PBSG.

I too was not surprised by the members not endorsing an invitation. Nothing I heard had to do with your science on harvesting or your research on polar bears - it was the positions you've taken on global warming that brought opposition.

Time will tell who is correct but the scientific literature is not on the side of those arguing against human induced climate change. I look forward to having someone else chair the PBSG.

Best regards,
Andy (Derocher)

If you are not familiar with Taylor's positions that are alluded to, as I understand it they include:  1) The fact that most polar bear populations have been rising rather than falling over the last decades and 2) polar bears have survived interglacial periods in which we believe all sea ice disappeared.

Most of y'all know I have a parallel blog on climate over at Climate Skeptic.  I get accused of being "anti-science" all the time, I suppose for pursuing scientific evidence where it takes me rather than accepting the scientific "consensus" that I am told I should shut up and accept.

One response I often make to this accusation is the to compare the comment policy of leading skeptic and alarmist climate sites.  Which seem more "anti-science" to you?  Here is part of my blog's comment policy:

I have never tried to moderate my comments (except for spam, which is why you might have  a comment with embedded links held for moderation "” I am looking to filter people selling male enhancement products, not people who disagree with me.)  In fact, I relish buffoons who disagree with me when they make an ass of themselves - after all, as Napoleon said, never interrupt an enemy when he is making a mistake.  And besides, I think it makes a nice contrast with a number of leading climate alarmist sites that do not accept comments or are Stalinist in purging dissent from them.

Leading sites that are skeptical or at least are willing to ask questions of the climate orthodoxy like Watt's Up with That or Climate Audit have similar policies - their comment threads are full of people with strongly opposing opinions to the site's authors.

Now check out a comment policy from an alarmist site:

Climate "skepticism" is not a morally defensible position. The debate is over, and it's been over for quite some time, especially on this blog.

We will delete comments which deny the absolutely overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change, just as we would delete comments which questioned the reality of the Holocaust or the equal mental capacities and worth of human beings of different ethnic groups. Such "debates" are merely the morally indefensible trying to cover itself in the cloth of intellectual tolerance.

So, if you're a climate skeptic, you may be well-intentioned and you're certainly welcome to your opinion, but we're not interested.

The leading alarmist site, Real Climate, founded and run by people the media portrays as leaders in climate science, such as James Hansen, routinely purge all dissent from posts and comments.  For example, Anthony Watt wrote this after Steve McIntyre found huge problems in a recent version of a hockey stick temperature recontruction:

Realclimate.org continues deleting the ongoing river of comments posted on their threads ( Note: Any of you who find that your posts to those sites are being rejected {as usual without any explanation} can keep a copy of the post, and post it at http://rcrejects.wordpress.com if you want

I find that amazing -- someone is maintaining a blog populated with everything the "leading scientists" at Real Climate purge.  Check the stuff out there, this is not foul-mouthed mindless rants, but real scientific challenges that are being deleted.

One of the dirty secrets of climate science is that the so called "settled" science of global warming is often never challenged or replicated as we expect science should be.  When someone claims to have produced cold fusion, if they want their work to be accepted it is their obligation to publish their data and methodology for others to try to replicated.  In climate, this seldom happens.  Members of a small community all replicate and review each others' results, and claim this to be sufficient for "consensus."  When outsiders or mavericks attempt to test or replicate the results, they are stonewalled.

Here is my favorite quote to illustrate the whole mindset, and should make any reasonable person nervous who understands that Congress is on the verge of committing trillions of dollars of our money to certain courses of action based on the science.  It is from Phil Jones, who put together one of the first global temperature metrics at the Hadley Center, to Warwick Hughes, an Australian scientist who had some questions about the data and was having trouble replicating some of Jones' results.  Jones wrote, in response to Hughes request for data (data which underlies much of the early IPCC reports and so is the basis for a lot of public policy discussion):

"We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?"

UPDATE: Here is a great example of the way it should be done -- Steve McIntyre posts Keith Briffa's response in full, invites other responses:

In spite of suffering a serious illness (which I understand to be a kidney problem), Keith Briffa has taken the time to comment on the Yamal situation. The comment should be read by interested readers. If Briffa or any of his associates wishes to post a thread here without any editorial control on my part, they are welcome to do so.

I am considering making a climate presentation in Phoenix based on my book, videos, and blogging on how catastrophic anthropogenic global warming theory tends to grossly overestimate man's negative impact on climate.

I need an honest answer - is there any interest out there in the Phoenix area in that you might attend such a presentation in North Phoenix followed by a Q&A?  Email me or leave notes in the comments.  If you are associated with a group that might like to attend such a presentation, please email me.

From the comments of this post, which wondered why Americans are so opposed to the climate bill when Europeans seem to want even more regulation.  Leaving out the difference in subservience to authority between Europeans and Americans, I wrote this in the comments:

I will just say:   Because it's a bad bill. And not because it is unnecessary, though I would tend to argue that way, but for the same reason that people don't like the health care bill - its a big freaking expensive mess that doesn't even clearly solve the problem it sets out to attack. Somehow, on climate change, the House has crafted a bill that both is expensive, cumbersome, and does little to really reduce CO2 emissions. All it does successfully is subsidize a bunch of questionable schemes whose investors have good lobbyists.

If you really want to pass a bill, toss the mess in the House out. Do this:

1. Implement a carbon tax on fuels. It would need to be high, probably in the range of dollars and not cents per gallon of gas to achieve kinds of reductions that global warming alarmists think are necessary. This is made palatable by the next step....
2. Cut payroll taxes by an amount to offset the revenue from #1. Make the whole plan revenue neutral.
3. Reevaluate tax levels every 4 years, and increase if necessary to hit scientifically determined targets for CO2 production.

Done. Advantages:

1. no loopholes, no exceptions, no lobbyists, no pork. Keep the legislation under a hundred pages.
2. Congress lets individuals decide how best to reduce Co2 by steadily increasing the price of carbon. Price signals rather than command and control or bureaucrats do the work. Most liberty-conserving solution
3. Progressives are happy - one regressive tax increase is offset by reduction of another regressive tax
4. Unemployed are happy - the cost of employing people goes down
5. Conservatives are happy - no net tax increase
6. Climate skeptics are mostly happy -- the cost of the insurance policy against climate change that we suspect is unnecessary is never-the-less made very cheap. I would be willing to accept it on that basis.
7. You lose the good feelings of having hard CO2 targets, but if there is anything European cap-and-trade experiments have taught, good feelings is all you get. Hard limits are an illusion. Raise the price of carbon based fuels, people will conserve more and seek substitutes.
8. People will freak at higher gas prices, but if cap and trade is going to work, gas prices must rise by an equal amount. Legislators need to develop a spine and stop trying to hide the tax.
9. Much, much easier to administer. Already is infrastructure in place to collect fuel excise taxes. The cap and trade bureaucracy would be huge, not to mention the cost to individuals and businesses of a lot of stupid new reporting requirements.
10. Gore used to back this, before he took on the job of managing billions of investments in carbon trading firms whose net worth depends on a complex and politically manipulable cap and trade and offset schemes rather than a simple carbon tax.

Payroll taxes are basically a sales tax on labor.  I am fairly indifferent in substituting one sales tax for another, and would support this shift, particularly if it heads of much more expensive and dangerous legislation.

Update: Left out plan plank #4:  Streamline regulatory approval process for nuclear reactors.

Update #2: Readers of TJIC wonder if this is effective, calling it just a rebate of the tax.  I answered in the comments as follows:

I think "rebate" is the wrong way to think of it. Of COURSE if you paid a higher price and then had the exactly that amount rebated to you, then it would not be a very powerful incentive. But that is not what is being proposed.

I think things are easier if you consider payroll taxes to be a sales tax on labor, which they are in effect. So we have a sales tax regime, with differing tax levels on different types of products. If we raise taxes on one item, but drop taxes on the others, then sales of that one item are certainly going to suffer. Its price just went up relative to all the other things we buy. Let's imagine a simplified world where we can buy any of 10 items (call them A, B, C, etc), each priced at $10, and we have $100 in income. Now imagine the same world tilted such that we have $105 of income and all items are $10 except "A" which now costs $20 each. On average, most people will buy less "A" and more of other stuff.

I'm a libertarian, so I grit my teeth at such games. I don't like the taxes in the first place. I don't like the government playing outcomes games with taxes. But my point is that if we are going to insist on doing something to limit CO2, then shifting the sales tax burden so that total taxes are the same but taxes on fuels are higher while taxes on labor are lower strikes me as a substantially lower cost solution than any of the other alternatives being suggested.

The author of one of the charts I criticized in the recent government climate report has responded directly to my post.    Generally unimpressed, I counter in this post at Climate Skeptic.

A bit over a week ago, I forecast that we had passed the economic bottom and would soon be back on the way up.  The IBD lists a number of reasons why I may be correct:  (ht:  Carpe Diem)

"¢ A broad rally in stocks, confirmed last Thursday, continuing into this week and led by the beaten-down financials.

"¢ A surprising 22% surge in February housing starts to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 583,000 units.

"¢ A back-to-back jump in retail sales ex autos, in both January and February.

"¢ A return to profitability at several major banks, including Citigroup, Bank of America and JPMorgan.

"¢ A doubling in the obscure but important Baltic Dry Index, a key indicator of global trade flows.

"¢ An upwardly sloping yield curve, which Fed research suggests all but ensures a rebound by year-end.

"¢ A Housing Affordability Index that has hit an all-time high.

"¢ A two-month improvement in wholesale used-car prices, measured by the Manheim Index.

"¢ A rise in Monster's Employment Index in February, suggesting a turn in the job market may be around the corner.

"¢ A 4 1/2-year high in the dollar against other major currencies, on a trade-weighted basis.

"¢ A sharp increase in the money supply, as measured by M2 and M1. Weekly M2 growth has averaged 10.1% year-over-year since the start of 2009, while M1 has grown at a 14.6% rate.

"¢ A two-month rally in the Index of Leading Indicators.

"¢ A growing body of evidence that the "liquidity crunch" is dead. Data show nearly $14 trillion in liquidity on the sidelines of the markets, ready to boost consumer spending, credit growth or further stock market gains.

Of course, this makes the entire argument for the trillion dollar plus stimulus bill moot.  If my company had started spending itself into debt to fight some sort of emergency, and then found the emergency did not exist, you can bet we would be spending every hour of the day to stop as much of that emergency spending as possible.  Not so in Washington.  Despite now forecasting an improving economy, and basing his budget on this being a milder-than-normal recession, Obama has not even suggested any roll-back in the massive spending and debt-creation program.  Which just goes to prove that the "stimulus" bill had nothing to do with stimulus in the first place, but was a leftish spending plan sold based on panic, in exactly the same way the Bush administration sold the Patriot Act.

In fact, much of Obama's remaining legislative agenda (including nationalization of parts of the health care system and a Co2 cap-and-trade system) include what are effectively large tax increases that cannot realistically be passed in the depths of a recession.  So expect a lot of talking up of the economy to prepare the way for these tax increases, not to mention the tax increases that will be necesary, but have not yet been proposed, to pay for the servicing of the huge debt and new spending we just took on.

One final prediction:  As the economy improves enough for the average person to see the improvement, expect the Obama administration to be spinning like mad.  Their first objective will be to take credit for the recovery.  This is absurd, as it appears that the recovery will start long before the first dollar of spending occurs.  The media may, however, let him get away with this.  If it does not, his second story will be that the confidence exuded by the passing of the stimulus bill created the recovery.  This is also absurd on its face, given the crash in equity prices after the stimulus bill was passed and the extreme general skepticism about the stimulus in poll numbers.

Postscript: By the way, I would argue the whole story of this stimulus bill is a microcosm of the climate debate.  Extreme panic was generated based on a fear that their might be some possibility of a catastrophe (ie a second Great Depression) and that on the precautionary principle, we spent a trillion dollars just in case.  Remember that in January, Obama said there will be - not might be - another 5 million job losses, a number we will come nowhere near.

As it turned out, there was never a realistic chance of a catastrophe, but the costs will remain, and all the while the panic over the issue was used as cover to pass a whole range of freedom-reducing initiatives.   Naomi Klein was half right in the shock doctrine -- there are folks who use emergencies to successfully push for radical change, but it is almost always the forces of more government control who win out, not the supporters of laissez faire.

Update: A similar list here from Forbes.

I don't think that anthropogenic global warming will be substantial enough to justify massive and expensive interventions to limit Co2.  I won't go into the reasons for this statement, as I have a whole other blog dedicated to climate.  If you are unfamiliar with the arguments that Co2 is likely warming the Earth, but not by nearly as much as alarmists claim, you might start with some of these videos.

However, it seems almost inevitable that the new Congress and Administration will do "something" on Co2, if for no other reason that it has become a self-image issue on the left  (i.e. I am a good person because I care about global warming).  We libertarians are seldom very good at engaging on issues of how such government interventions should be done best.  Every time people ask us our opinion of how to structure such a program to do the least harm, we get about 5 seconds into an answer before we just break down and start yelling, "this is crazy!  Do nothing!  Leave us alone!" (actually, emissions laws are one of the few areas where government regulation helps to protect private property rights).

Bryan Pick at Q&O points to a number of folks advocating an increase in carbon taxes offset by reductions in payroll taxes (Bryan's plan is more comprehensive than this, and is here).  I actually advocated something similar over a year ago.  Here is my logic chain:

1. The carbon tax is a much, much better approach to reducing CO2 than cap-and-trade systems.  Cap-and-trade is bad for the same reason that politicians like it -- it offers a near infinite playing field for lobbying, special rules, influence-peddling, special exemptions, government chosen winners, etc. while hiding the fact that it is in fact a huge new tax.  My more detailed argument on this can be found here and here and here.
2. A new carbon tax should be revenue neutral.  After all, the point in the first place is not to raise revenues, but to provide a pricing signal that Americans need to switch away from carbon-based fuels.
3. A good place to offset revenues is the payroll tax.  Both fuel taxes and payroll taxes are criticized for being regressive, so it is an easy place to try to forge a compromise with the left.  Further, the payroll tax acts effectively as a tax on hiring, so a reduction would certainly be welcome any time, and particularly in a recession.
4. We need to create a streamlined licensing program for nuclear reactors.  Utilities, particularly ones dependent on coal today, need a realistic option to continue to provide power at reasonable cost in their communities.  Solar and wind are just not reasonable alternatives today.  Nukes are the only carbon-free scalable generating technology we have.

Again, I don't think the dislocations required here are worth the effort, but this is the best way to do it if we must.

Postscript: By the way, here is one thing no one is telling you.  Folks in Congress have tossed around carbon and fuel tax ideas that might add, say 25 cents per gallon.  But if we are truly in thrall to the climate alarmists and take their recommendations, then Co2 outputs must be reduced 50-80% in this country.  We are talking about reducing Co2 output to levels before 1920!  To do this will require a truly massive tax.  Just to scale it, over the last year gas prices doubled by about $2 a gallon, and total miles driven fell by less than 5%.   Europe is at around $8-$9 gas and are nowhere near these climate goals.  I don't think it would be too much to say that gas prices would have to top $20 to reach these goals.

This is why I think the most likely case for climate regulation is that we will have some kind of tax or cap system but that this system will be far short of anything that will really reduce Co2 or even stop its growth.  The costs are just too high, and the benefits too shaky.  You can see that in Europe, as countries back off Kyoto goals  (and even Kyoto goals are far short of what alarmists think we need to be hitting).  And any progress they have made against Kyoto goals has mainly been accidents of changing enconomic and political structures rather than the result of any real targeted action.  What we will get is something that costs a lot without accomplishing much, but will make the left feel better about themselves.  Sound familiar?

I have finally been able to publish a video of my presentation at the climate debate held by the Regional Council of Rural Counties last September.  The entire video is about an hour long.  As usual, I am offering several ways to view it.  First, it has been posted on YouTube but had to be broken into seven parts.  The playlist of all seven parts is below:

The playlist link is here:  RCRC Climate Debate (Skeptic's Side)

Unfortunately, YouTube crushes the resolution so many of the charts are hard to read.  You can download the full resolution windows media version (about 96MB) as long as my bandwidth holds out by right-clicking and downloading form this link:  Download RCRC Climate Debate (wmv)

Also, you can stream higher resolution version of this film (and all my other climate films) at this site.  The resolution is not as good as the downloadable version but is much better than YouTube.  Again, bandwidth pending.

Finally, you can download the actual powerpoint presentation shown in this video here or you can view the presentation online here.

In the future, all of my videos and presentations will be available via the links just under the banner at Climate Skeptic.

This article from Climate Resistance about the sustainability movement is terrific.  I want to excerpt a relatively long chunk of it:

It is our belief that Oxfam's increasingly shallow campaigns reflect the organisation's difficulty in understanding development and poverty, and the relationship between them. In other words, it seems to have lost its purpose. This is a reflection of a wider political phenomenon, of which the predominance of environmentalism is a symptom. We seem to have forgotten why we wanted development in the first place. It is as if the lifestyles depicted in Cecil's painting were to be aspired to, were there just a little more rain. Development is a bad thing. It stops rain.

If we were to add a city skyline into the background of Cecil's painting it might ask a very different question of its audience. Why are people living like that, with such abundance in such proximity? Of course, in reality, many miles separate the two women from any such city, but the question still stands; there is abundance in the world, and there is the potential for plenty more. Yet Oxfam have absorbed the idea from the environmental movement that there isn't abundance. This changes the relationship between development and poverty from one in which development creates abundance into one in which development creates poverty; it deprives people of subsistence. But really, the city (not) behind the two women could organise the infrastructure necessary to irrigate the parched landscape, the delivery of fertiliser, and a tractor. The field could be in full bloom, in spite of the weather. The two women could be wealthy.

Oh no, says Oxfam. That's not sustainable....

The myth of sustainability is that it is sustainable. The truth is that drought and famine have afflicted the rural poor throughout history "“ before climate change was ever used to explain the existence of poverty. Limiting development to what "˜nature' provides therefore makes people vulnerable to her whims. Drought is "˜natural'. Famine is "˜natural'. Disease is "˜natural'. They are all mechanisms which, in the ecologist's lexicon are nature's own way of ensuring "˜sustainability'. They are checks and balances on the dominance of one species. To absorb what Hitler called "˜the iron logic of nature' is to submit to injustice, if famine, drought and disease characterise it. We can end poverty, but not by restricting development. Yet that seems to be Oxfam's intention. That is why we criticise it.

Hat tip:  Tom Nelson.

One of the reason my posting has been light of late is that I was working on a climate presentation for the California Regional Council of Rural Counties.  That's behind me now, but you can read a brief report on the meeting and download my presentation here.

I have not been able to figure out how Obama gets to a 5 million job creation number from his alternative energy plans.  As I pointed out,

OK, so the total employment of all these industries that might be
related to an alternate energy effort is about 2.28 million.  So, to
add 5 million incremental jobs would require tripling the size of the
utility industry, tripling the size of the utility construction and
equipment industry, tripling the size of the auto industry, tripling
the size of the aircraft industry, and tripling the size of the
shipbuilding industry.  And even then we would be a bit short of
Obama's number.

But now I think I am starting to understand.  Tom Nelson gave me the clue with this article from the town of Frankfort, Kentucky:

Commissioners again discussed the possible creation of a sustainability coordinator position for the city.

Andy MacDonald, of the Mayor's Task Force on Energy Efficiency and
Climate Change, told commissioners that the creation of the position is
"the next critical step" to reduce the city's environmental footprint.

Commissioner Doug Howard brought up the possibility of asking the
city's recycling coordinator to fulfill part of the proposed position's
duties until money is available.

OK, so we need both a recycling coordinator and a sustainability coordinator for a town of 27,741 people (2000 census).  At this rate, that would imply nearly 22,000 government jobs across the country just in the government recylcing and sustainablity coordination field.  Now I am starting to understand.  Obama means five million new government jobs.

I have an interesting global warming eye test up at Climate-Skeptic.   The two graphs below are both scaled exactly the same, and are each 51-year periods from the global temperature record of the last 150 years.  The only difference is that one period of warming is described by scientists as "natural" (1895 to 1946) and the other is described as "man-made" (1957 to present).

Which is which?  Which is man, and which is mother nature?

Kind of makes the claim that "current warming is unprecedented" ring kind of hollow, huh?

Some thoughts on the obsession with peer review as the gold standard guarantee of climate science goodness, from Climate Skeptic:

One of the weird aspects of climate science is the over-emphasis on peer
review as the ne plus ultra guarantor of believable results.  This is absurd. 
At best, peer review is a screen for whether a study is worthy of occupying
limited publication space, not for whether it is correct.  Peer review, again at
best, focuses on whether a study has some minimum level of rigor and coherence
and whether it offers up findings that are new or somehow advance the ball on an
important topic. 

In "big
boy sciences" like physics, study findings are not considered vetted simply
because they are peer-reviewed.  They are vetted only after numerous other
scientists have been able to replicate the results, or have at least failed to
tear the original results down.  Often, this vetting process is undertaken by
people who may even be openly hostile to the original study group.  For some
reason, climate scientists cry foul when this occurs in their profession, but
mathematicians and physicists accept it, because they know that findings need to
be able to survive the scrutiny of enemies, not just of friends.  To this end,
an important part of peer review is to make sure the publication of the study
includes all the detail on methodology and data that others might need to
replicate the results  (which is something climate reviewers are particularly bad at).

In fact, there are good arguments to be made that strong peer review may even
be counter-productive to scientific advancement.  The reason is that peer
review, by the nature of human beings and the incentives they tend to have, is
often inherently conservative.  Studies that produce results the community
expects often receive only cursory scrutiny doled out by insiders chummy with
the authors.  Studies that show wildly unexpected results sometimes have trouble
getting published at all.

 As I read this, it strikes me that one way to describe
climate is that it acts like a social science, like sociology or gender studies,
rather than like a physical science.  I will ahve to think about this -- it
would be an interesting hypothesis to expand on in more depth.  Some quick
parallels of why I think it is more like a social science:

• Bad statistical methodology  (a hallmark, unfortunately, of much of social
  science)
• Emphasis on peer review over replication
• Reliance on computer models rather than observation
• Belief there is a "right" answer for society with subsequent bias to study
  results towards that answer  (example,
  and another
  example)

This is cross-posted from Climate-Skeptic, but it is very much in the spirit of the Canadian tribunals and University speech codes.  There are increasing efforts, mainly on the left, to make the world a better place by limiting speech of those who don't agree with them.

If you are going to lecture skeptics on science, it is probably a good practice not to begin with an analogy that gets the most basic physics incorrect (hint:  the fact that falling objects of different masses fall at the same rate has been "settled science" since the late 1500s).  Also, using the children's book "If you give a mouse a cookie..." as proof of the existence of positive feedback loops will not be very persuasive to practitioners of big-boy physical sciences and other non-post-modernist researchers.

So, apparently Lawrence Summers was correct:

Wall Street Journal -- Girls
and boys have roughly the same average scores on state math tests, but
boys more often excelled or failed, researchers reported. The fresh
research adds to the debate about gender difference in aptitude for
mathematics, including efforts to explain the relative scarcity of
women among professors of science, math and engineering.

The
latest study, in this week's journal Science, examined scores from
seven million students who took statewide mathematics tests from grades
two through 11 in 10 states between 2005 and 2007.

The
researchers, from the University of Wisconsin and the University of
California, Berkeley, didn't find a significant overall difference
between girls' and boys' scores. But the study also found that boys'
scores were more variable than those of girls. More boys scored
extremely well -- or extremely poorly -- than girls, who were more
likely to earn scores closer to the average for all students. The study found that boys are consistently more variable than girls, in every grade and in every state studied
(see crude diagram above - showing distributions where mean
intelligence is the same, but the standard deviation of male
intelligence is greater than female intelligence).

In Minnesota, for example, 1.85% of white boys in the 11th grade hit the 99th percentile, compared with 0.9% of girls -- meaning there were more than twice as many boys among the top scorers than girls.

Of course, Summers did not get in trouble for being incorrect.  He got in trouble for saying something he was not supposed to say.  And it seems that the media are trying to avoid the same mistake, reporting what they want to believe, and not what the study actually says.

As I write in a post at Climate Skeptic, this is part and parcel of a new post-modernist science, where (as MaxedOutMamma writes) "If a
research finding could harm a class of persons, the theory is that
scientists should change the way they talk about that finding".

Cross-Posted From Climate Skeptic. 

In
1497, Savonarola tried to end the Italian Renaissance in a massive pyre
of books and artwork (the Bonfire of the Vanities).  The Renaissance
was about inquiry and optimism, neither of which had much appeal to
Savonarola, who thought he had all the answers he needed in his
apocalyptic vision of man.  For him, how the world worked, and
particularly the coming apocalypse, was "settled science" and any
questioning of his world view was not only superfluous, it was evil.

Over at Climate Skeptic, I discuss a recent claim by ABC that year-to-date tornado frequency has nearly doubled vs. 2007, and that this is because of global warming.  I will take their word for it that tornado frequency is up, but there is one tiny problem:  The US in Jan-Apr of this year was almost a full degree cooler than last year.  So if tornado frequency is up, and ABC is correct that yearly changes in this metric are due to changes in global temperature, then it can only mean that global warming reduces, rather than increases, tornadoes.

I want to thank Tom Nelson for the pointer, because I usually don't hang out much at the Socialist Unity site.  But I thought that this post was telling.

While it may be urgent that we create a red green alliance to
strengthen radical social action to stop climate change, our collective
problem is how are we going to do that?

The Climate Change Social Change Conference
held in Sydney Australia during April tried to tackle that
challenge.This was a bold attempt to bring together left and green
activists in order to locate a shared perspective around which we could
begin more consciously organize....

Foster and Perez urged the conference's participants to consider
socialism as the only viable solution to the climate emergency. This
was a persistent theme discussed throughout the three day event as
speakers were drawn from a range of environment movements and
organisations (such as the Australian Greens and Friends of the Earth)
as well as academic specialists "” who preferred solution packages which
were not consciously committed to a socialist transformation of
society..

Here is something I didn't know:  Way back in the 1990's, Enron was lobbying hard for cap and trade legislation to create a lucrative new trading profit center for the company (HT Tom Nelson)

In the early 1990s Enron had helped establish the market for, and
became the major trader in, EPA's $20 billion-per-year sulphur dioxide
cap-and-trade program, the forerunner of today's proposed carbon credit
trade. This commodity exchange of emission allowances caused Enron's
stock to rapidly rise.

Then came the inevitable question, what
next? How about a carbon dioxide cap-and-trade program? The problem was
that CO2 is not a pollutant, and therefore the EPA had no authority to
cap its emission. Al Gore took office in 1993 and almost immediately
became infatuated with the idea of an international environmental
regulatory regime. He led a U.S. initiative to review new projects
around the world and issue "˜credits' of so many tons of annual CO2
emission reduction. Under law a tradeable system was required, which
was exactly what Enron also wanted because they were already trading
pollutant credits.

Thence Enron vigorously lobbied Clinton and
Congress, seeking EPA regulatory authority over CO2. From 1994 to 1996,
the Enron Foundation contributed nearly $1 million dollars - $990,000 -
to the Nature Conservancy, whose Climate Change Project promotes global
warming theories. Enron philanthropists lavished almost $1.5 million on
environmental groups that support international energy controls to
"reduce" global warming. Executives at Enron worked closely with the
Clinton administration to help create a scaremongering climate science
environment because the company believed the treaty could provide it
with a monstrous financial windfall. The plan was that once the problem
was in place the solution would be trotted out.

With Enron out of the picture, the way is clear for new players to dominate this multi-billion dollar new business.  And look who is ready to take over from Enron:

The investment
vehicle headed by Al Gore has closed a new $683m fund to invest in
early-stage environmental companies and has mounted a robust defence of
green investing.

The Climate Solutions Fund will be one of the biggest in the growing market for investment funds with an environmental slant.

The fund
will be focused on equity investments in small companies in four
sectors: renewable energy; energy efficiency technologies; energy from
biofuels and biomass; and the carbon trading markets.

This is
the second fund from Generation Investment Management, chaired by the
former vice-president of the US and managed by David Blood, former head
of Goldman Sachs Asset Management.

The first, the Global Equity
Strategy Fund, has $2.2bn invested in large companies the company
judges have "sustainable" businesses, from an environmental, social and
economic viewpoint. Mr Blood said he expected that fund to be worth
$5bn within two years, based on commitments from interested investors.

Going green indeed.