Ken Nelson

Who pays for the sign?

Economists call costs that fall outside the buyer seller relationship “externalities”.  So, for example, if you hire a cheap illegal alien landscaper, you get landscaping, he gets money, and I get the externalities of his healthcare bill, lower wages if I’m a landscaper, school trouble, cultural impacts and gang crime.

When I bitch about illegal alien costs, economists say “just put the externals in the price”.  Okay… how?  I don’t have access to the off the books transaction between the sleazy homeowner (you) and the illegal alien landscaper.  And if I did make it harder, say for instance, by building a fence, might that hurt our economy?

So we have three things we need to know when dealing with externalities:

• where to collect the cost
• what is the cost
• what are the costs/side effects of collecting the cost

Now lets flip the situation… Imagine you have the perfect place to charge for externalities, but gosh darn it, no externals in sight. But you want money… what to do?

You invent an externality!

I just described global warming.  Different groups invented the global warming externality for various money centered reasons.  Scientists found that the threat of global warming yielded research funding. Politicians like that global warming can be used to regulate, control and tax. And socialists find it useful to distribute wealth or prevent wealth creation.  There was no “grand conspiracy” – just recognition of a useful tool.

But what of the three requirements to properly use externalities do we know about the proposed global warming externality?  Only one of three.  We know where externalities costs could be collected (Cap & Trade, Carbon Taxes).  We do not know if the externality cost really exists (google “climategate”).  And if it does we don’t know what the impact would be of collecting the externality cost (high energy costs, bad economy, etc..) .

Why prematurely collect externality costs on CO2?  Come back when you know more than how you will charge me.

The Daily Express offers 100 reasons why climate change is natural but just the first 10 should convince you:

1) There is “no real scientific proof” that the current warming is caused by the rise of greenhouse gases from man’s activity.

2) Man-made carbon dioxide emissions throughout human history constitute less than 0.00022 percent of the total naturally emitted from the mantle of the earth during geological history.

3) Warmer periods of the Earth’s history came around 800 years before rises in CO2 levels.

4) After World War II, there was a huge surge in recorded CO2 emissions but global temperatures fell for four decades after 1940.

5) Throughout the Earth’s history, temperatures have often been warmer than now and CO2 levels have often been higher – more than ten times as high.

6) Significant changes in climate have continually occurred throughout geologic time.

7) The 0.7C increase in the average global temperature over the last hundred years is entirely consistent with well-established, long-term, natural climate trends. 

8 The IPCC theory is driven by just 60 scientists and favourable reviewers not the 4,000 usually cited.

9) Leaked e-mails from British climate scientists – in a scandal known as “Climate-gate” – suggest that that has been manipulated to exaggerate global warming

10) A large body of scientific research suggests that the sun is responsible for the greater share of climate change during the past hundred years.

The first 10 convinced me, but read the other 90 too…

Start with 27 stations:
 

Use just one to estimate temperature for all of Antarctica:

Guess which one they chose? 

The one showing temperature increase.  The others… ignored.

The other interesting item about that station?  It is amidst a heat island of development of the largest station on Antarctica.

We can’t trust climate science right now.

Funky data, charts, & peer reviews – is anything trust worthy from climate science?

Global Warming faithful spent the weekend lying about what the e-mails said, what the professors did, and about how this doesn’t put at question the entire basis of global warming theory…. but if you want a nice summary of what they REALLY mean, read this DailyMail special report:

Yet some of the scientists who helped to draft it, The Mail on Sunday can reveal, harboured uncomfortable doubts.

In the words of one, David Rind from the US space agency Nasa, it ‘looks like there were years around 1000AD that could have been just as warm’.

Read the whole thing.

Fox News Business hired away John Stossel from ABC News recently. His new show, Stossel, began airing this week.

I’ve watched two episodes and recommend it highly.  His show entertains, informs and does not descend into guest over-talking shout fests. He also takes time to cover an issue in detail. 

For tonight’s show on climate change he had two guests and packed the audience with climate change faithful.  Polite, informative, discussion followed. The climate faithful, including a number of climate science students, gave it their best shot but he and his guests countered effectively in ways that clearly made them uncomfortable about the views they held.  And everybody was happy at the end.  And I didn’t feel like throwing a remote control into the TV.

Well done Mr. Stossel!

Learn more here; http://www.foxbusiness.com/on-air/stossel

In 2007, this was the record for the Orland, CA weather station:

It shows a nice cooling trend, doesn’t it?

But gosh, sometime between now and then it has been “adjusted” to remove data that would show temperature dropping over the last century:

Apparently this was done at other stations as well.

You might get the idea that climate scientists ratchet temperature just one direction – up!

In 1883 the volcano Krakatoa erupted and cooled the planet:

In the year following the eruption, average global temperatures fell by as much as 1.2 degrees Celsius. Weather patterns continued to be chaotic for years, and temperatures did not return to normal until 1888. The eruption injected an unusually large amount of sulfur dioxide (SO₂) gas high into the stratosphere which was subsequently transported by high-level winds all over the planet. This led to a global increase in sulfurous acid (H₂SO₃) concentration in high-level cirrus clouds. The resulting increase in cloud reflectivity (or albedo) would reflect more incoming light from the sun than usual, and cool the entire planet until the suspended sulfur fell to the ground as acid precipitation.^[10]

^{Earlier that century gave us the “Year without Summer”:}

Most consider the climate anomaly to have been caused by a combination of a historic low in solar activity and a volcanic winter event; the latter caused by a succession of major volcanic eruptions capped off by the Mount Tambora eruption of 1815, the largest known eruption in over 1,600 years.

The proven, frequent, even likely, threat to our society is from COLD.  We need more energy and a broad mesh of different food creation and distribution networks.

Does what the Greens and Socialists propose make you feel warm and fuzzy about being cold?

J Storrs Hall provides a 50,000 year graph of temperature in Greenland. The data is estimated from ice core samples, but not adjusted afterwards.

10 degree swings, not an industry in sight

Gosh, aren’t we lucky to live now, when it is warm, because toasty sure ain’t the norm:

In other words, we’re pretty lucky to be here during this rare, warm period in climate history.  But the broader lesson is, climate doesn’t stand still.  It doesn’t even stay on the relatively constrained range of the last 10,000 years for more than about 10,000 years at a time.

This backs my case that we have to prepare society for the worst, mainly through economic and technical progress.  Cold is the norm.   Warming, no matter the cause, should be welcomed not fought.

Days after the “job summit” the real work of killing jobs gets back into full gear:

The Obama administration is warning Congress that if it doesn’t move to regulate greenhouse gases, the Environmental Protection Agency will take a "command-and-control" role over the process in a way that could hurt business.

Students, blacks, single Moms and all the other morons that voted for Obama and are now unemployed….    I hope you understand the serious error you made and intend to correct it in 2010 and 2012.

 
Node graph of pesky internet

ClimateGate is even more popular than “Tiger Woods” on the internet, ensuring it is well known in spite of a dearth of media coverage:

Updating the comparisons, “Climategate” has 32,000,000 google hits as compared to 4,080 news stories (Google), while “Tiger Woods” has 29,500,000 google hits with 54,018 news stories (Google). Although Tiger has over 10 times as many news stories, Climategate (remarkably) has more google hits than Tiger Woods (and many other famous search items e.g. Britney Spears, NFL, NBA or for that matter “climate”).

And… Al Gore can lie and say the ClimateGate e-mails are all older than 10 years ago but… the Internet he invented knows:

And there are dozens to hundreds more within the last month, the last year, and the last 10 years.

Search for yourself here: http://eastangliaemails.com

Jeeez!! Gore. What a vacuous nimrod, and people pay to listen to him.

You can run, but you can’t hide!

Global warming faithful and skeptics continue back and forth about “ClimateGate”.   But what is the real issue?

The earth warmed slightly in the last century. Is this because of man?

To answer this you must look at temperature data when man did not have industry, and, alas, also did not record temperature. Temperature must be reconstructed and compared to modern times.  If warmer back then, the “man caused warming” theory doesn’t hold.

“ClimateGate” reveals three core things about modern climate science:

• it was hotter in the 11th century, with no green house gas producing industry, than now. 
• statistical error introduced by incomplete data, small amounts of data, and programming error exceeds the estimated change in temperature.
• the scientists themselves seem scurrilous and petty

Climate warming faithful focus you on the 3rd core problem because if you look at the first two, what they believe in, what funds their work, and what enables their other policy goals, shatters.

WIllis Eschenback slaps down those that say “oh those CRU guys are bogus, but the data is fine” by taking a peek at a weather station in Australia.  The station showed cooling over time, but not once they “adjusted” it.  Adjusting purports to account for differing environment, station movement, or equipment… but why would adjustment happen so predictably:

See the square step… seems a bit funky/artificial doesn’t it?   It is as if somebody wanted the resulting graph to look a certain way, don’t you think?

I don’t envy the climate scientists the job of reconciling this climate data. Eschenback doesn’t either but makes a cogent case the adjustments seem to be more in line with a desired picture than with scientific reality, and that in any event the rationale and adjustments made for each station should be public and peer reviewed.

The first sign that this science was not kosher was their secrecy about their data and methods.

 
Liar

From George Will:

Barack Obama, understanding the histrionics required in climate-change debates, promises that U.S. emissions in 2050 will be 83 percent below 2005 levels. If so, 2050 emissions will equal those in 1910, when there were 92 million Americans. But there will be 420 million Americans in 2050, so Obama’s promise means that per capita emissions then will be about what they were in 1875. That. Will. Not. Happen.

So is Obama lying?   Or is he stupid?  Both?

All I know is that I have NO INTEREST in keeping a President who promises to return me to 1875.  You?

5 to 8 inches of SNOW? Here…  Unacceptable!

See the hot spot long ago – no human carbon around then…

Marc Sheppard digs further holes in the arguments of those pooh-poohing the Climategate e-mails.  The “decline” they were hiding wasn’t JUST in the actual data for this century. They were hiding a much more important decline – one that their models would generate if they weren’t fudging it.  The models are important because we have no decent records before 1850 or so – so we have to rely on, apparently fudged, models:

In fact, the decline Jones so urgently sought to hide was not one of measured temperatures at all, but rather figures infinitely more important to climate alarmists — those determined by proxy reconstructions. As this scandal has attracted new readers to the subject, I ask climate-savvy readers to indulge me while I briefly explain climate proxies, as they are an essential ingredient of this contemptible conspiracy.

The political climatologists HOPE was to make a chart that showed cooling temperatures until human industry started to put CO2 into the air.  So they ignored certain temperature recordings, spliced in separate data sets, and in some cases just added “adjustments matrices” designed to make it look “right”.

Political climatology has costs us hundreds of billions so far. We now stand on the brink of ruining our lifestyles and killing millions – isn’t it time we started IGNORING these fake scientists?