The American Physical Society is Reviewing its Position on Catastrophic AGW

After many members of the American Physical Society (APS) objected that it was not clear that there is a catastrophic anthropogenic global warming crisis looming, the APS leadership has decided to review its policy on that hypothesis.  More recently, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and other professional scientific organizations sent a letter to the members of the Senate claiming that their organizations support the need for immediate action to prevent a crisis due to man's production of CO2 from fossil fuel use.  A new letter from 162 members of the APS was then sent to Senators telling them that these members did not support the catastrophic AGW hypothesis.  Some of the signers of this letter are also members and fellows of AAAS and noted that they were not polled for their opinions on the issue by AAAS.  The letter also notes that as far as they knew, the other 17 scientific organizations signing the letter with AAAS did not poll their members either.

Members of the American Chemical Society (ACS) have also complained that they have not been polled by ACS and yet ACS signed the same letter of support for immediate action on AGW with the AAAS.  Members have also been complaining that the C&EN Magazine sent to all members editorially supports catastrophic AGW.

Russia Complains that Hadley Centre Only Used Warm Station Data

The Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) of Moscow claims the Hadley Centre for Climate Change of the British Meteorological Office has probably distorted Russian climate data.  The IEA believes Russian weather station data does not support the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis.  The IEA says the Hadley Centre used data of only 25% of the statiions submitted and cherry-picked that data.  40% of Russian territory was excluded, the data of stations not supporting any substantial warming in the late 20th and early 21st Century was excluded, and incomplete data sets were commonly given preference to complete monthly data sets.  The IEA claimed that preference was given to data sets from large population centers with urban heat island effects, while data from more remote and therefore more accurate stations was ignored.

This information is extremely important.  It was often noted that the greatest warming had been observed in Siberia and virtually all of Russia was said to have warmed more than most of the rest of the world.  Russia has 12.5% of the world's land.

Other distortions of the data in the U.S., Australia, and New Zealand have also come to light.  The entire data set of land surface temperatures is clearly very unreliable.  A careful reassessment of all such data is badly needed before any major policy decisions are based on this data.

Marriage Penalty in ObamaCare Bill

Here is an interesting observation:

A Republican candidate for Congress in Minnesota says "a huge marriage penalty for the American middle class" is hidden in both the House and Senate healthcare bills.

Former Minnesota state legislator Allen Quist points out that two single people each making $30,000 per year would pay $1,320 combined for private health insurance if the Pelosi House bill was in effect now. However, if the two individuals were to marry, they would pay a combined cost of $12,000 a year for the same level of insurance under the Pelosi bill.

Quist notes this "marriage penalty" extends all the way from a two-person combined income of $58,280 to $86,640. The GOP candidate notes that that $28,000 spread encompasses a large number of Americans.

Good Times for Federal Workers.... Employees

From an editorial by Mark Tapscott in the Washington Examiner:

This recession has been such a boom time for the tax-supported bureaucracy that "federal employees making salaries of $100,000 or more jumped from 14% to 19% of civil servants during the recession's first 18 months -- and that's before overtime pay and bonuses are counted." USA Today was especially struck by the fact that there was only one career federal worker making an annual salary of $170,000 or more at the U.S. Department of Transportation when the current recession began. Today, 18 months later, there are more than 1,600 career employees making that much at Transportation. We can only hope that none of those additional 1,600-plus high-paid workers was responsible for the $2 billion Cash for Clunkers debacle run by the Transportation Department.

Solar Wind Flux Is Weakest Since Accurate Measurements Started

The Sun's solar wind provides a protective shield around the Sun from the solar wind of other stars.  This million mile-per-hour solar wind is at a minimum compared to all other measurements since accurate measurements have been performed, starting with the Space Age.  This plasma of charged particles cannot sweep other charged particles in the solar winds of other stars away once it comes into equilibrium with them in the heliopause.  The boundary of the heliopause should be shrinking as the solar wind diminishes, as measured by the satellite Ulysses in its polar orbit about the Sun in 2007.  This means that cosmic rays will no longer be shielded from Earth as effectively as they have been in the recent past.

The solar wind pressure and the magnetic field embedded in the solar wind were measured to have decreased by 20%.  The field strength at the spacecraft had decreased by 36%.  These are much bigger changes than the Sun's common irradiance changes of about 0.11% in amplitude or twice that from highest to lowest intensity.  Those who like to claim that the Sun is not the big actor in climate change, seem to believe that the only source of energy deposited by the Sun on the Earth is the direct irradiance.  It has been noted recently that cosmic rays nucleate cloud formation very effectively and clouds commonly provide net cooling of the Earth.  If the solar wind has dropped by 20%, then the shielding of cosmic rays may have dropped greatly and there may be much more cooling cloud formation on Earth.  In addition, there should be some deposition of energy in the Earth's atmosphere due to the interaction of the solar wind magnetic field with the Earth's magnetic field and due to the flux of charged particles themselves.  So, the 20% drop in the solar wind may have a large impact on the Earth's climate.

Perhaps contrary to the catastrophic AGW alarmists, it is not the case that man's emissions of CO2 have caused the temperature increases of the late 20th Century, because they claim they do not see natural forces capable of providing the necessary degree of climate change.  Perhaps there are natural forces they do not yet understand very well at all.

The Sovereign Rights of the Individual

The sovereign rights of the individual are well summarized by The Declaration of Independence as the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  But what then are these rights?  Some of them are given in the original Constitution and some more are given in the Bill of Rights of the Constitution.  But, the 9th Amendment of the Bill of Rights implies that there are more rights which are not enumerated.  What might some of these additional rights be?

In modern politics, it is common for the socialists to claim that a person has a right to adequate food, clothing, education, housing, and a good job.  This is nonsense, since any of these "rights" as they understand them mean that someone else is expected to provide these goods and services to the "right" claimer and that someone else is then enslaved to the right claimer to some degree.  No right can entail the enslavement of others or their involuntary labor or the taking of their income or property.  When one person claims their rights, those of others must not be thereby diminished.

It has, however, been often noted that the right to free speech means little if you are starving to death or freezing to death on a cold winter's night.  Food is a necessity of life, as is adequate clothing.  There is no question that education better prepares us for sustaining our lives and may provide us the information and some of the wisdom needed to pursue happiness with a decent chance of success.  Although we have no right to be provided with food, clothing, housing, education, and jobs, we very much have the right to pursue the attainment of each of these values.  No one has the right to act to prevent us from growing our own food or from trading for food with those who will join us voluntarily in such a trade.  No one has the right to prevent us from having a home, provided we provide ourselves with the land on which it sits and build it, or we trade with others voluntarily for the land and the house or the rent of some housing someone else wishes to rent us by mutual agreement.  It is in this sense that we each have the right to food, clothing, housing, education, and a job.  Others are never obliged to give these things to us, but they are obliged not to use force to keep us from them either through our own work directly or through our trading with others in a mutually voluntary trade.

To be perfectly clear, when we assert our freedom of speech, we do not require others to rent us an auditorium in which we can comfortably address a crowd who are comfortably seated.  We do not have the right to force a radio or television station owner to broadcast our speech.  But, others cannot shut us up if we speak in our own home or if we carry on a normal conversation while walking along a sidewalk.  Others are not obliged to provide us with a bullhorn or even a soap box, nor are they obliged to listen to us.  But, they can only stop us from speaking if we are on their property.  Generally, we are free to speak our minds wherever we can make an arrangement with the owner of the land or facility where we will speak.

There is no way in which we can be said to meaningfully have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness if we have no right to perform productive labor, to think, to trade with others, to acquire property, and to act to secure our good health.  These actions are all necessary to us if we really have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  It is these rights and other rights also necessarily subsumed by our right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness which are secured to each of us by the critically important 9th Amendment, which unfortunately is hardly ever enforced.

Why were these critical rights not explicitly mentioned as protected in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights?  I am sure it is because they were so well understood to be rights that they had not been seriously challenged in colonial times in America.  The quartering of troops in private homes during peacetime had been forced upon the colonists, so the Bill of Rights protected the right not to have to share one's home with troops involuntarily.  Implicit in this protection is the broader recognition that a man has a right to his property and he has a right to his home.

None of the enumerated powers of Congress give it any power to infringe upon the individual's right to their property without just compensation.  There is no power to prevent anyone from pursuing their chosen line of work.  There is no provision allowing the government to interfere with any citizen's education.  There is no power that allows Congress to interfere with the trades and arrangements any citizen might make for his health care.  None of these rights can be infringed by a Congress exercising its enumerated powers and no more. 

Yet all of these fundamental rights are routinely infringed by our unconstrained Congress and our similarly unrestrained state governments.  Sadly, many of our most fundamental individual rights are violated daily by the very governments which were instituted by sovereign individuals only for the purpose of securing our inalienable individual rights.  These governments are now generally illegitimate, since they are acting contrary to the purpose for which they exist and by which they are to be judged.

More on Weather Station Unreliability

Joseph D'Aleo, AMS Fellow, CCM has posted an interesting piece called How bad is the global temperature data? at Watts Up With That?  Among the problems, see what has happened to the number of reporting weather stations in the NOAA GHCH, which we now know to be the source of the raw temperature data for NASA's GISS and for Hadley's CRU:

Given that the rural stations are the only ones perhaps not suffering from heat island effects, the greater fractional decrease in rural stations will certainly bias the land surface temperature record upward.  The last thing that should be happening is a decrease in the number of rural stations.  A decrease in the number of urban and suburban stations is good.  It is good that there are more suburban than urban stations now, but this is hardly able to make amends for the severe lack of rural stations, especially given that a much larger fraction of the Earth's surface is rural than either urban or suburban.  This higher weight of urban and suburban stations is likely to bias the temperature upward strongly.

D'Aleo also points out that the Pipogenus Dam weather station site in Maine, which had been reporting data since 1925, was officially closed in 1995.  However, the NOAA USHCN database of land surface temperature data reports data from the date of closing to at least 2006.  Not surprisingly, the data after 1995 averages higher than the data before the station was closed!  See that data below:

The survey of the climate stations in Maine found that everyone of them had microclimate or urbanization biases of the temperature data.

As I have noted before, the land surface temperature data is simply not reliable.

Darwin, Australia Temperature Adjustments Invent a Huge Increase

Willis Eschenbach has been looking into concerns expressed by Professor Wibjorn Karlen about the temperature data used in the 4th UN IPCC 2007 report for northern Australia.  What he has found is very disturbing.

He observes that:

There are three main global temperature datasets. One is at the CRU, Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, where we’ve been trying to get access to the raw numbers. One is at NOAA/GHCN, the Global Historical Climate Network. The final one is at NASA/GISS, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The three groups take raw data, and they “homogenize” it to remove things like when a station was moved to a warmer location and there’s a 2C jump in the temperature. The three global temperature records are usually called CRU, GISS, and GHCN. Both GISS and CRU, however, get almost all of their raw data from GHCN. All three produce very similar global historical temperature records from the raw data.

The temperature data of the UN IPCC 2007 report for the area of longitudes 110E to 155E and latitudes 30S to 11 S according to CRU, which still has not released the record of its data manipulations, is

This shows a clear temperature increase of more than 0.5 C from about 1910 to 2000 for this area of northern Australia.  But what does the raw temperature data look like for that area?  We cannot get that from the CRU, but the recently dumped e-mails indicate that their raw data actually came from the Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN) at NOAA.  Eschenbach found 3 temperature data stations for northern Australia, just as Prof. Karlen had said.  The averaged raw data for those 3 stations is shown below:

Whoa!  Where is that more than 0.5 C temperature increase from 1910 to 2000 shown in the IPCC 2007 report?  Here, it looks to be about a 0.3 C increase.  One also sees higher temperatures in about 1890, which makes the temperature in 2000 seem a good deal less alarming.  How on Earth did this raw data become the UN IPCC 2007 report data?

Eschenbach did some sleuthing and was able to figure out how the NOAA GHCN adjusted the raw data to get the adjusted data they reported for northern Australia.  The adjustment supposedly uses at least 5 other stations outside the area, but in 1941 there was only one other station within 750 km of Darwin and that was 500 km away.  So the normal homogenization technique would not apply.  Nonetheless, NOAA's GHCN people thought some considerable manipulation of the raw data was needed, so here is what they did:

They subtracted about 2 C in the period from 1880 to about 1930 and then they began adding step after step of temperature increases to that as shown with the black line.  Meanwhile, Darwin had a population of only 43,000 in 1974 when the city was wiped out by Cyclone Tracy.  Its population is now 120,000 people, so there would likely be a sizable urban heat island effect which ought to have been subtracted in the recent years of rapid growth.  Instead, only positive increases were made.  This is how raw data showing a net temperature decrease since 1890 can be manipulated to create the required strong positive temperature increase so desired by NOAA today.  Eschenbach found the manipulations by NASA GISS on the raw data of GHCN to be somewhat different, but the outcome was similar.

As Eschenbach sums this up:

Yikes again, double yikes! What on earth justifies that adjustment? How can they do that? We have five different records covering Darwin from 1941 on. They all agree almost exactly. Why adjust them at all? They’ve just added a huge artificial totally imaginary trend to the last half of the raw data! Now it looks like the IPCC diagram in Figure 1, all right … but a six degree per century trend? And in the shape of a regular stepped pyramid climbing to heaven? What’s up with that?

Indeed.  What kind of scientist would do such nonsense?  Perfectly good taxpayer's earnings are being used to pay these jokers.  Then these jokers provide the EPA with the ammunition to shoot us through and through with a ruling that the very act of human breathing is polluting the atmosphere with CO2 emissions!  What is the common cause that unites the NASA GISS, NOAA GHCN, the CRU of East Anglia University, our EPA, and the UN IPCC?  I believe it is an international and national power grab by socialists and man-hating environmentalists.

Lies and More Lies

Steve Schneider of Stanford, a catastrophic man-made global warming alarmist, has just claimed that the hockey stick data was never used by the UN IPCC reports as evidence for that hypothesis!  If you lie and lie and just stick with the Big Lie, some people will believe you.  Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Castro, and Chavez all believe in this.  So do many other socialists and rabid, anti-man environmentalists.

Just to be clear, the hockey stick data of both Mann and Briffa was central to the main argument of the UN IPCC reports of both 2001 and 2007 for catastrophic anthropogenic global warming.  The basic argument took the form of a very dubious claim:  The temperature rise in the late 20th Century was extraordinary since nothing like it had been seen since 1400, natural forces could not explain it, so it must have been caused by man's CO2 emissions, which had risen steadily since 1850, but more rapidly since 1960.  Wow.

As you saw in the my last post, there was a sudden temperature rise from 1840 to 1880, at least in Greenland, which CO2 emissions were not likely to have caused.  There was also a rapid rise in temperature leading into the Medieval Warm Period, following the Dark Ages.  Perhaps the late 20th Century rapid rise was partly due to not really understanding the natural forces which were at work at earlier times and were perhaps at work again in the late 20th Century?  And, perhaps a part of the late 20th Century rise was due to heat island effects and data manipulations anyway?

Our understanding of climate science is not so advanced that any scientist should feel comfortable with an argument that claims that a climate change cannot be due to natural causes, therefore it must be due to man.  But, if you are a socialist or a man-hating environmentalist, you will never feel any constraints due to lack of knowledge.  Actually, ignorance is good.  If ignorant, you can claim anything.

More Hockey Stick Temperature Data

I found the short version of J. Storrs Hall's history of temperature in the the Greenland ice from Watts Up with That?  I am going to present a shorter version here with my comments, but it is worth looking at the original version, which also goes further back in the history of the Earth.  Meanwhile, let us all be very sure that we have a solid understanding of the relatively recent steady and stable climate provided to us by beneficent natural forces prior to man's industrial age, in which man acquired the capability to kill the Earth and promptly set out to do so.  Yes, we all on board with Obama and so many leaders of governments all over the world gathered in Copenhagen who are only too happy to lay down the law and restrict our energy use for the good of the Earth.  ......Good, you know me well enough to know that the last couple of sentences were tongue in cheek, mimicking the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming nuts!

At the Foresight Institute, J. Storrs Hall had some interesting graphs made from NOAA ice core data (Alley, R.B. 2000. The Younger Dryas cold interval as viewed from central Greenland. Quaternary Science Reviews 19:213-226.)

Let us look at the recent history of this Greenland ice core data and note how stable the temperature was prior to 1840 during the Little Ice Age.

Note the unique rise from 1840 to about 1880.  This is a terribly sudden rise.  Now just as Mann and Briffa look at their bristlecone and tree ring data sets with flat temperature histories in much of this same period and then append the land surface instrumental measurement data to the late 20th Century as enhanced by the urban heat island effect to create a similar hockey stick set of temperature data, we examine this data in the same mindset.  Well, clearly the early industrial age, though limited to Britain mostly at that time, with the U.S. and Germany as minor players, was very effective in altering the world's climate!  Shame on those Brits!  It's really their fault.  They should pay us punitive taxes!  Indeed, the Brits owe everyone in the whole world.

We should note that there has been a further temperature rise in fits and starts after 1900 of about another 0.5 C.  Dare we look further back in history as seen by Greenland ice?  Awwww......sure, why not.  We are intrepid explorers here!

Hmm.....You mean before the Little Ice Age there was a warm period which was much warmer than it was in 1900?  It was even warmer than now!  Who woulda thunk?  And look at that awful temperature rise from 900 AD to 1025 AD of 1.7 C.  What do you suppose those people coming out of the Dark Ages in Europe did to cause that?  Were they really roasting that many Christian heretics in bonfires?  Was it due to all the blacksmiths hammering out armor and making swords?  I guess whatever they were doing must have stopped in about 1025 AD.  Maybe they noted the fact that their activities had caused man-made global warming.  I bet they all got together in Copenhagen and signed a treaty to burn less wood and charcoal!  Apparently, after that, it got colder and everyone was really happy again!  Man warming the Earth being such an awful bad thing and all.

 

Dare we look still further back?  Of course, we are all fearless here!

Oh my!  It was as warm (at least in Greenland) from about 2500 BC to 500 AD as it is now!  What on earth were those Romans and Greeks and Persians and Indians and Chinese doing then to cause those high temperatures?  Oh, and how come there was ice on Greenland at all?  How dare the ice in Greenland not have melted in 1200 BC when it was about 2.2 C warmer than now.  Al Gore, the inventor of the internet, says it should melt when that warm and flood the Earth with sea levels 20 feet higher than now.

J. Storrs Hall keeps going back and shows us what we really should worry about.  Namely, the Earth has had a real fascination with ice ages in earlier times.  He reminds us, as I have in the past, that if you want to worry about climate change, worry about the way natural forces tend to give the Earth many an ice age.  We should be very thankful it is warm.  Of course, if it were as warm as it was from 2500 BC to 500 AD, we might actually have good reason to be happy.  After all , man made some pretty good advances in that time, when according to Obama and Gore, man should have been too miserable to function.  He should have been hiding deep in his cool caves.

So, Obama and Gore, the UN, and all those European leaders, and the reluctant Indians and Chinese are all sitting down and trying to put the blacksmiths out of work.  If they put enough blacksmiths out of work, do you suppose they can bring on the return of the Little Ice Age?  Wouldn't that be just grand?

Climate and Environment Scientists Challenge the Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming Hypothesis

Open Letter to Secretary-General of United Nations

His Excellency Ban Ki Moon

Secretary-General, United Nations

New York, NY

United States of America

8 December 2009

Dear Secretary-General,

Climate change science is in a period of ‘negative discovery’ - the more we learn about this exceptionally complex and rapidly evolving field the more we realize how little we know. Truly, the science is NOT settled.

Therefore, there is no sound reason to impose expensive and restrictive public policy decisions on the peoples of the Earth without first providing convincing evidence that human activities are causing dangerous climate change beyond that resulting from natural causes. Before any precipitate action is taken, we must have solid observational data demonstrating that recent changes in climate differ substantially from changes observed in the past and are well in excess of normal variations caused by solar cycles, ocean currents, changes in the Earth's orbital parameters and other natural phenomena.

We the undersigned, being qualified in climate-related scientific disciplines, challenge the UNFCCC and supporters of the United Nations Climate Change Conference to produce convincing OBSERVATIONAL EVIDENCE for their claims of dangerous human-caused global warming and other changes in climate. Projections of possible future scenarios from unproven computer models of climate are not acceptable substitutes for real world data obtained through unbiased and rigorous scientific investigation.

Specifically, we challenge supporters of the hypothesis of dangerous human-caused climate change to demonstrate that:

1. Variations in global climate in the last hundred years are significantly outside the natural range experienced in previous centuries;
   
2. Humanity’s emissions of carbon dioxide and other ‘greenhouse gases’ (GHG) are having a dangerous impact on global climate;
3. Computer-based models can meaningfully replicate the impact of all of the natural factors that may significantly influence climate;
4. Sea levels are rising dangerously at a rate that has accelerated with increasing human GHG emissions, thereby threatening small islands and coastal communities;
5. The incidence of malaria is increasing due to recent climate changes;
6. Human society and natural ecosystems cannot adapt to foreseeable climate change as they have done in the past;
7. Worldwide glacier retreat, and sea ice melting in Polar Regions , is unusual and related to increases in human GHG emissions;
8. Polar bears and other Arctic and Antarctic wildlife are unable to adapt to anticipated local climate change effects, independent of the causes of those changes;
9. Hurricanes, other tropical cyclones and associated extreme weather events are increasing in severity and frequency;
10. Data recorded by ground-based stations are a reliable indicator of surface temperature trends.

It is not the responsibility of ‘climate realist’ scientists to prove that dangerous human-caused climate change is not happening. Rather, it is those who propose that it is, and promote the allocation of massive investments to solve the supposed ‘problem’, who have the obligation to convincingly demonstrate that recent climate change is not of mostly natural origin and, if we do nothing, catastrophic change will ensue. To date, this they have utterly failed to do so.

Signed by:

141 Signers

Obama Government Declares The People Original Polluters

Yesterday, Obama's EPA declared CO2 a pollutant gas.  This allows Obama to regulate CO2 emissions under the draconian Clean Air Act.

But, take note that the People breathe out CO2 as an act of life.  Thus, the sovereign People who instituted government to protect their sovereign rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, are now sanctioning a government of elitists who can look down their noses at the People for yet another reason.  No doubt these elitists already consider the People to be Original Sinners, who cling to their religion and guns and ignorance.  But now, they can also be perfectly politically correct in terming the People Original Polluters!

Yes, the elitists are also polluters, but in their minds, they have offsetting social value.  This is why it is perfectly fine for Al Gore to jet around the world giving speeches on man's destroying the world because he uses too much fossil fuel energy.  But Al Gore's use of jet fuel energy is OK.  He is doing mankind a service and has earned his CO2 emissions rights!  But have most of the rest of us?  Well, according to many environmentalists, there are already too many people.  They actually talk about the desirability of getting rid of some of us.  So now they can just make an assessment of our social value and weigh that against the fact that each of us is a polluter by virtue of breathing.  Is that social value great enough to justify the pollution costs of each of us breathing?

There is a very interesting synergy now with the health care reform plan.  The Democrats know very well that their plan is going to require massive rationing of health care.  They know there are not enough doctors to go around, so many of us will be forced to take on nurses and nurse practitioners as primary care givers.  They know there will never be enough tax money to cover all of the expenses.  Indeed, the incoming Medicare tax money will fall below the outgo expenses as early as 2013.  Cutbacks in care are a given.  Some will just have to be allowed to die because their care will be too expensive.  But, the health care legislation pussy foots around the issue of who will be given care and who will not.  They want this legislation passed, so they will have to smuggle in the means to cull the population of the weak and the non-contributors.  They will want to preserve the right-minded, no make that the left-minded, elitists, but let the mere People who cling to their guns and their religion go.  But how can they do this?  Don't most Americans still think every life or nearly every life has considerable value?

But just as the regulation of CO2 was never envisioned when the Clean Air Act was passed, its future use in solving the health care funding and rationing problem is not now envisioned.  Well, at least not until this outcast of the Ivy League educated elite realized that it is as of today politically correct to measure the harm of each person's breathing CO2 emissions against their social value.  If that social value, by the standards of the socialist elitists is not sufficiently high, then the medical care plug can be pulled.  They have a civic duty, a duty even to Mother Earth, to pull the plug on any nasty polluter who cannot pay for the right to emit CO2 with a valid permit granted by a government panel of experts using EPA provided pollution guidelines, Department of Labor guidelines for service value, and medical experts estimates of the cost of medical care.

If medical care is needed, it is denied if the harm of breathing out CO2 exceeds the social value.  Let us suppose the social value exceeds the harm of breathing.  Then guidelines have to establish how the harm of medical costs is added to the harm of breathing and that sum must not be higher than the person's social value as perceived by an "objective" government socialist minion elitist panel.  The government now has a great means to lower medical expenditures, since every penny of cost assigned to those who pollute by breathing is  pennies saved in medical costs.

Let us suppose the government says it cannot afford to spend more than $27,000 a year to extend a life by a year.  Lots of people will be very upset that Granny is only worth $27,000 per year to our government.  But, suppose the government tells us that Granny is worth $50,000 per year, but as a polluter by breathing, she costs us $23,000 a year.  Now, they can allow Granny to die and avoid spending $50,000 a year to keep her alive, while claiming she is worth $50,000 per year to them.  All those who care about Granny will say, "Oh yeah, I can understand why Granny's health care is rationed at $50,000 a year.  If she costs more than that, it is OK to pull the plug on Granny."  So now, the government never actually has to spend more than $27,000 a year to extend Granny's life by a year, but they can tell the stupid People that Granny is so important to them that she is worth $50,000 a year!

This is the ultimate win-win situation.  Look at all the special interests you can make happy and beholden to you, the politician:

• The caring people who think everyone must have medical insurance coverage.
• The labor unions controlling the Dept. of Labor who assess everyone's social value.  People will be crazy to volunteer for labor union sanctioned projects to build up their social value quotient.
  
• Hack doctors who want a government position free from medical malpractice suits.
• Those who want to cull the population of excessive numbers of people in the name of the environment and climate tuning.
• The taxpayers who cannot otherwise afford government-run health care.
• All those who think Granny is worth $50,000 a year, but would be offended to hear that she was really only worth $27,000 a year.

So Obama can now not only impress the socialist leaders of other countries at Copenhagen by telling them that he had the EPA declare CO2 a pollutant, but he can also tell them he feels so strongly about catastrophic anthropogenic global warming and the environment that he is also committing to sacrificing, say, 1,000,000 additional Grannies a year.  Then he can pose solemnly and ask, "How many of your Grannies will each of your countries contribute to the cause of fighting AGW a year?"

Yes, it is now clear that Grannycide is the only way to go if you are environmentally conscious!  Where is your commitment?

Phil Jones of CRU Infamy Ate the Raw Data

For years the head of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of East Anglia University, the supposedly most respected climate research group in the world according to the UN IPCC, either hid the fact that the raw land surface data was long ago lost or he has recently destroyed it as he said he would do if he were forced to turn it over to critics of the catastrophic AGW hypothesis.  Either way, the man is guilty of serious fraud.

The scientific fraud is also overwhelming.  The data has been manipulated and altered many times.  According to the internal journal of a CRU researcher trying to reproduce results published by CRU scientists, those manipulations and changes were not properly documented.  He was unable to reproduce the published results.  There is no mention on his part of his being able to examine the raw data, either.  Yet, Jones wrote e-mails a number of times that implied that he had the raw data in the context that he would destroy it if necessary.  This may well have been a pretense.  He may have been too embarrassed by not having the raw data to even allow his conspiracy colleagues to know that.  If he did, he would have looked so incompetent even to them that he could not have kept up the appearance that the CRU was the leading research group in climate science in the world.  He may have been desperate to keep up the appearance that he was at least a scientist, even if one willing to bend the facts a bit to back his favored hypothesis from the viewpoint of his colleagues.  I think he bent the facts into pretzels and fashioned an alternative universe.

It is interesting to read the many newspaper and news magazine articles (see this Times article as an example) that are still trying to maintain that there is a consensus among scientists for catastrophic AGW and that the information released in the CRU document dump is not important.  The misrepresentations are truly awful.  On the other hand, there are some good assessments also being done.  See this Washington Times article as an example.

Al Gore Cancels Presentation in Copenhagen

Apparently, Al Gore is afraid of the possible heat from 3000 ticket holders for his 16 December 2009 presentation called Climate Conclusion.  Yes, he has a new presentation based on his book Our Choice.  Those who paid $1200 for tickets were going to be allowed to shake his hand.  He has backed out, the heat from the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia document dump and the resulting scandal, in which most of the leading climate scientists strongly backing the idea of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming have been revealed as data manipulators and schemers to prevent the scientific airing of opposing viewpoints, being too much for him.  Being the politician he is, he can only stand to be loved and cannot take criticism.  His future will be full of criticism now.

The 3,000 Danes who bought tickets will have their money refunded if they take their tickets back to the ticket window where they had bought them.  Would it not be great if everyone who has already been fleeced with higher energy prices or had their jobs threatened by idiot politicians who say they want to kill the coal industry or want no more coal-fired power plants built could be reimbursed?  There surely are coalminers out of work in this recession who would still be employed were it not for the catastrophic AGW fraud.  The same is true for the industries that transport coal.  Perhaps the Democrats in Congress would have allowed a bit more oil drilling if it were not for this AGW nonsense.  The sales of more SUVs might have employed more Americans. Of the 15.7 million Americans unemployed, how many are out of a job due to Obama's tough talk on destroying the coal industry, bankrupting coal-fired power plants, and his threatened energy restrictions?  How many are out of work in anticipation of new foolish regulatory rulings by the EPA, which will not listen to its internal dissenters?

There are many reasons why the unemployment in America has hit such high numbers, the most unemployed since the Great Depression.  But the attacks on energy use and the negative effects of subsidies for alternative energy developments must surely already be responsible for several hundred thousands of the unemployed.  If we allowed more drilling for oil, a few 100,000 more Americans could easily be employed.  Exxon Mobil says it can create 160,000 new jobs with the development of oil fields on and off shore.  Many other oil companies could create tens of thousands of new jobs each.  Yet, we allow the rabid environmentalists and the catastrophic AGW alarmists to cripple our economy still.  When will these wrongheaded policies change?

Obama's Job Creation Summit

This is really a funny event.  Obama has gathered together some executives from large companies, government Labor and Commerce Department people, and his ever popular labor union leaders for a jobs creation conference.  After taxing small business owners to death and wanting to tax them still more beyond the grave, after threatening everyone with energy restrictions under the ridiculous claim that CO2 is a pollutant causing catastrophic man-made global warming, after telling businessmen in industry after industry that he has a Marxist hatred for them, after threatening to saddle companies with new health care expenses, after a Stimulus Package that creates no private sector jobs, after threatening business contracts and property, and after making all investment decisions a roll of the dice, Obama is having a job creation conference.  Is he admitting finally that he who sits at the feet of every Marxist professor he can find in college has no idea how the economy works?

Indeed, he does not.  Including labor union leaders in such a meeting flies in the face of its purpose: job creation.  Labor union leaders are experts in one thing related to jobs: killing them.  This is why private sector employees have been avoiding labor unions now for decades.  They have come to understand this.  This is also why the labor union bosses so badly need card check.  Without intimidation, they cannot force private sector employees to join the unions.

The executives of large businesses are not really interested in spurring job creation either.  The large businesses do not hire many people.  It is small businesses that hire most people.  So, if a large business executive were to spur more jobs in the economy in general, he is doing more to grow his competition, the lean and mean small companies who are always trying to make inroads in his product and service areas.  The big businessman usually fears small business.  The last thing he wants to do is to help them grow.

With 15.7 million Americans unemployed, this jobs summit should have an easy job creating new jobs.  There are plenty of sufficiently skilled and interested potential employees available for hire.  All we need is for large numbers of small business owners to gain the means and the confidence to hire them.  Within a framework of Marxist theory, there is no way to motivate the small businessmen to hire.  No, it would require Capitalist theory to understand what government actions and inactions are needed to spur job creation.  The answers are tried and true.  Most small businessmen can tell you what is needed.  They just need these very simple encouragements:

• No new payroll taxes.
• No threats to take down their businesses when they die with a death tax.
• Lower individual income taxes for higher income brackets.  Finally come to understand that the net government revenues increase with lower upper bracket income tax rates than those we presently have, while encouraging growth of the economy.  The onlyreason for higher rates is to punish the rich.
• Remove the minimum wage laws or at least lower the minimum wage.
• Stop increasing unemployment insurance rates.
• Control Workmen's Compensation Insurance costs with tort reform.
• Do not raise the cost of health insurance as ObamaCare will certainly do.
• Do not increase energy costs and lower energy reliability as carbon cap and trade or the EPA's plan to declare CO2 a pollutant will do.
• Do not threaten businesses with union takeovers as card check will do.
• Cut back on government spending so investment capital is available for the private sector.
• Lower corporate income taxes, so American companies can compete with companies abroad, almost all of which now have lower taxes than do American corporations.
• Reduce barriers to trade.  Simplify both import and export laws and regulations.
• Understand that Medicare and Social Security will both be turning in their IOUs in just a very few years and that increasing payroll taxes on them at that time will kill many jobs.
• Reduce the burdens of government regulations, instead of constantly increasing them.
• End subsidies that distort the markets into inefficient activities.
• Allow the drilling of oil and gas fields in the US and its offshore waters.
• Sell off much of the federal lands which are not being used productively, so that private owners can use them productively.  Use the income to reduce government tax rates.
  
• Encourage the states to stop business discouraging activities, such as those common in California, New York, Michigan, and Ohio to name a few.

OK, so if we saw Obama and the Democrat Congress doing these things, rather than the opposite in every case, we small businessmen would be hiring people instead of firing them.  As long as Obama and his cadres of comrades refuse to recognize these basic factors in the economy, there is simply no justification for companies to hire.  It is all very simple, if you are not a childish, Marxist blockhead.

Proposed Republican Policy List for RNC Supported Candidates

It has been proposed that any candidate to be supported for election in 2010 by the Republican National Committee must support at least 8 of the following 10 policies:

(1) We support smaller government, smaller national debt, lower deficits and lower taxes by opposing bills like Obama’s “stimulus” bill;
(2) We support market-based health care reform and oppose Obama-style government run health care;
(3) We support market-based energy reforms by opposing cap and trade legislation;
(4) We support workers’ right to secret ballot by opposing card check;
(5) We support legal immigration and assimilation into American society by opposing amnesty for illegal immigrants;
(6) We support victory in Iraq and Afghanistan by supporting military-recommended troop surges;
(7) We support containment of Iran and North Korea, particularly effective action to eliminate their nuclear weapons threat;
(8) We support retention of the Defense of Marriage Act;
(9) We support protecting the lives of vulnerable persons by opposing health care rationing and denial of health care and government funding of abortion; and
(10) We support the right to keep and bear arms by opposing government restrictions on gun ownership.

 I am going to comment on those of these that I disagree with or have some reservations about.  Here goes:

5)  I do support legal immigration and I wish to make it much easier for those who wish to immigrate with larger quotas and lower fees.  I do believe that immigrants should be encouraged to learn English and citizens should be required to know English.  I favor guest worker status which is relatively easy to obtain, so large numbers of those who are now illegal will have future options which are legal.  Those who are now illegal, but have otherwise not been convicted of any crime, who can obtain the recommendations of past employers, who are willing to pay a reasonable fee to alter their status to a legal guest worker status, and who then work 5 years as a guest worker with a continued clean record and further employer recommendations, should be able to obtain legal resident status.  These terms are simply approximations to what I think is a reasonable policy which will benefit the United States and I am open to further discussions on this complex issue.  My views may not be considered consistent with the intent of the resolution enforcers, however.

8)  I flat out reject the Defense of Marriage Act as an infringement of the right of individuals to live in accordance with their own chosen values and their own conscience.  I reject it also because marriage is a spiritual state of union between people and government has no proper role in such a spiritual matter.  Spiritual matters are the realm of individuals, who may chose to make their spiritual values those of a religion or give them a different basis.  What government does have a legitimate role in is domestic partnerships or civil unions by means of enforcing a contract between the parties.  These contracts should no more limit the persons by number or gender than do small business partnerships.  The legal contracts should have multiple standard terms for the care and responsibility for children, for the sharing of property, and for the sharing of medical expenses and decision-making.  The sexual orientation of the partners should be of no concern to the government.  Those of a religious conviction are free to be guided by their convictions in their domestic partnership and are free to have it blessed as a marriage by their religious authorities, but such status will have no legal bearing at all.  Government for its part will refrain from attempting to make any definition of marriage and will leave that to the religions and to the sovereign People.

9)  If the denial of health care is done by government edict, I agree with this statement.  However, I do not agree with it in the context that medical providers are to be forced to provide medical care, if that is the intent of this ambiguously worded statement.  While I support a woman's right to an abortion if she chooses one, it is also clear that taxpayers, many of whom disagree with this, have the right not to play a role in paying for abortions.  They have the right to their convictions and any attempt to make them complicit in an abortion is morally wrong.  Furthermore, partial birth abortions are too marginal to birth to be allowed by law.  They should clearly be illegal.  Once a child is no longer a part of a woman's body, it has the rights of any individual not to be murdered.  I am therefore in agreement with this statement with respect to abortions.

These 10 required positions are simply a proposal at this point.  It will be interesting to watch what happens to this proposal and whether any of my concerns will be addressed.