The Warning in the Stars By David Archibald

This analysis does a nice job showing that there is a strong correlation to swings in the Earth's temperatures and the Sun.

If climate is not a random walk, then we can predict climate if we understand what drives it. The energy that stops the Earth from looking like Pluto comes from the Sun, and the level and type of that energy does change. So the Sun is a good place to start if we want to be able to predict climate. To put that into context, let’s look at what the Sun has done recently.

The great global warming collapse by Margaret Wente

This article in Canada's The Globe And Mail nicely summarizes the meltdown in the human-caused global warming camp. The article contains a sentence that captures the essence of this growing scandal.

By exaggerating the certainties, papering over the gaps, demonizing the skeptics and peddling tales of imminent catastrophe, they've discredited the entire climate-change movement.

Climategate Analysis by John P. Costella

Late in 2009 a story broke, quickly named Climategate, about e-mails that were either leaked or hacked from the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom. The initial stories that broke centered on the reference to using a “trick” to hide the decline in earth’s overall temperatures since 1998. But, if you’ll pardon the pun, this is only the tip of the iceberg. If you want to see a more detailed discussion about this disturbing affair I strongly recommend reading the 149-page analysis published by the Science & Public Policy Institute. It details how a small cadre of scientists shaped their data to support the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW), popularized by Al Gore in his An Inconvenient Truth. It also shows how these scientists routinely resisted requests from “deniers” to confirm their conclusions and methodology. Instead of freely sharing “their” data (funded by taxpayer dollars so the data wasn’t really theirs to horde) these scientists ignored the requests or provided the bare minimum information while deriding the requestors in the private e-mails with their fellow co-conspirators.

As I’ve said in earlier posts I see this as a consequence of postmodernism in which the “truth” is what we want it to be. The facts are shaped to match our conclusions, which are shaped by our politics. It also reflects the belief that the ends (allegedly saving the earth from humans) justify the means (distorting or changing the facts if they don’t match our judgments). In other words political ends trumps inconvenient truths.

Here are a few excerpts.

Instead of seeing large collaborations of meticulous, careful, critical scientists, we instead see a small team of incompetent cowboys, abusing almost every aspect of the framework of science to build a fortress around their “old boys’ club”, to prevent real scientists from seeing the shambles of their “research”.

Phil Jones to Ray Bradley, Mike Mann, Malcolm Hughes, Keith Briffa, and Tim Osborn, regarding a diagram for a World Meteorological Organization Statement:

I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temperatures to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.

Those thirty-three words summarize the hoax so magnificently succinctly that the Nobel Committee should consider retrieving their Peace Prize from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore, and re-issuing it as a Literature Prize to Phil Jones.

Again, Wigley perpetuates the arrogant myth that this small club of scientists should have the right to interfere with, and ultimately veto, the review and publication process for each and every paper published in their field. Such censorship is not how a healthy discipline of science operates; indeed, any discipline that operates in this manner is not “science” at all, but mere religious dogma.

Wigley continues:

I suspect that de Freitas deliberately chose other referees who are members of the skeptics camp. I also suspect that he has done this on other occasions. How to deal with this is unclear, since there are a number of individuals with genuine scientific credentials who could be used by an unscrupulous editor to ensure that “anti-greenhouse” science can get through the peer review process (Legates, Balling, Lindzen, Baliunas, Soon, and so on). The peer review process is being abused, but proving this would be difficult.

This is a damning admission by Wigley: he acknowledges that these skeptics have impeccable scientific credentials; the only reason that they should be banned from reviewing papers for journal publication is that they don’t buy into their dogma of global warming! This email dispels any doubt that this cozy club redefined “peers” to mean “scientists who agree with us”—which makes a mockery of the entire idea of “peer review”.

The ultimate irony in all this, of course, is that skepticism is not a scientific insult, but rather an essential tenet of the scientific method. Only fundamentalist theological debates brand skepticism a heresy.

Conrad Black: Incompetent Obama teeters on the edge

Conrad Black: Incompetent Obama teeters on the edge

The Pro-Life Election of Scott Brown by William R Thomas

The Atlas Society has posted an article on the recent Scott Brown victory in Massachusetts to fill the senate seat vacated by the death of Ted Kennedy. The title of the article has another meaning than you might think at first glance.

Here are some excerpts.

Republican Scott Brown has been elected to fill the U.S. Senate seat for Massachusetts that arch-Liberal Ted Kennedy had filled. Startlingly, Brown ran on a fairly free-market platform, advocating tax cuts and opposing the Federal takeover of health care. He contrasted with his opponent, Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley, not only on the economic issues, but also in advocating the ardent prosecution of the war on terror. The only policy they shared was a pro-abortion rights stance. But the election was “pro-life” in a deeper moral sense.

...

[O]n January 19, 2010, the people of the bluest of blue states declared, once again, that America should be the home of opportunity, growth, and wealth—of life, in other words. Let’s hope everyone in Washington heard that loud and clear.

ClimateGate: The Fix is In

ClimateGate: The Fix is In

This is an enormous case of organized scientific fraud, but it is not just scientific fraud. It is also a criminal act. Suborned by billions of taxpayer dollars devoted to climate research, dozens of prominent scientists have established a criminal racket in which they seek government money-Phil Jones has raked in a total of £13.7 million in grants from the British government-which they then use to falsify data and defraud the taxpayers. It's the most insidious kind of fraud: a fraud in which the culprits are lauded as public heroes. Judging from this cache of e-mails, they even manage to tell themselves that their manipulation of the data is intended to protect a bigger truth and prevent it from being "confused" by inconvenient facts and uncontrolled criticism.

Golden No Longer

George Will's article, Golden No Longer, does a nice job of identifying what ails the country's current economic state by focusing on one state, California.

It took years for liberalism's redistributive itch to create an income tax so steeply progressive that it prompts the flight from the state of wealth-creators: "Between 1990 and 2007," Voegeli writes, "some 3.4 million more Americans moved from California to one of the other 49 states than moved to California from another state."

And the state's income tax -- liberalism codified -- intensifies the effects of business cycles on the state's revenue stream: During booms, the stream surges and stimulates government spending; during contractions, revenues dwindle but the new government spending continues. Voegeli says that if California's spending had grown no faster than population growth and inflation from 1992 to 2006, it would have been $65 billion less in 2006, and per capita government outlays then would have equaled not those of Somalia or Mississippi but of Oregon, which is hardly "a hellish paradigm of Social Darwinism."

It took years for liberalism's mania for micromanaging life with entangling regulations to make California's once creative economy resemble Gulliver immobilized by the Lilliputians' many threads. The state, which between 1990 and 2007 lost 26 percent of its factory jobs and 35 percent of its high-tech manufacturing jobs, ranks behind only New York, another of liberalism's laboratories, in the number of outward-bound moving vans.

It took years for compassionate liberalism to make California's welfare menu contribute to the state becoming an importer of Mexico's poverty. It took years for servile liberalism to turn the state into what Voegeli calls a "unionocracy," run by and for unionized public employees, such as public safety employees who can retire at 50 and receive 90 percent of the final year's pay for life.

By coincidence I just read a chapter in Arthur Laffer's The End of Prosperity: How Higher Taxes Will Doom the Economy--If We Let It Happen that digs even deeper into California's policy follies. I'll review it here when I'm done reading the book.