Category Archives: politics

Climate and Atmospheric CO2

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In a piece on Watts Up With That, Eric Worrall explored the relationship between atmospheric CO2 and temperature.  (Yes, yes, I know the science is settled, but the fact is the only thing settled is the pseudo-science nesting in the fetid imaginations of climate “science” funding industry personages.  The rest of us keep asking rude questions.)

Using data consisting of meteorological records back to the 1850s and other data collected from sources like “isotope ratios in gas samples extracted from ice cores and seabed cores,” temperature records of Earth dating back hundreds of thousands of years (ice core data from Greenland and Antarctica reach back 400,000 years, for example), Worall was able to generate an interesting pair of graphs.  The upper graph of the two-parter below is one such easily constructed graph.  The red dotted line at the end of the measure period is the current “warming” put in context.

Figure 1. After Professor Bob Carter (lecture at the 10th International Conference on Climate Change at the Heartland Institute on June 12, 2015). Air Temperatures above the Greenland ice cap for the past 10,000 years reconstructed from ice cores using data from Alley, 2000 (The Younger Dryas cold interval as viewed from central Greenland. Quaternary Science Reviews 19, 213-226) (top panel), with a time scale showing years before modern time. Lower panel shows the carbon-dioxide concentrations of the atmosphere over the same period from EPICA Dome C ice core.

The caption of the graph gives the data source for the lower graph: they’re from ice core data collected by the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica from the Antarctic Plateau.

A number of things jump out at me about this graphed relationship between temperature and the atmosphere’s CO2 content.

One is the clear cyclical nature of global temperature.  There clearly is more going on with planetary temperature than any putative CO2 pumping.

Another is the absolute lack of relationship between temperature and CO2 in our atmosphere.  Atmospheric CO2 was at its nearby (as such things go on a geologic time scale) low when temperature cycles were achieving apparent highs over the 11,000 years presented.  While atmospheric CO2 has been rising since that low, it has been doing so more or less slowly and steadily, especially compared with the wild (relatively) swings of the temperature cycles.

Another goes back to the upper, temperature graph.  The average planetary temperature over the geologic time frame sure looks like it’s been decreasing, slightly, across the period.  While the atmospheric CO2 content has been rising.

And one more thing: that current rise in temperature represented by that dotted red line.  It’s indistinguishable from any of the other sharp rises into a warm cycle.

Settled, indeed.

Obeying the Law

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In a piece about President Donald Trump’s domestic business policies—specifically, his administration’s lawsuit to block the merger of AT&T with Time Warner Inc and his parallel move to facilitate other kinds of close relationships between companies like AT&T and Time Warner, The Wall Street Journal described a rationale for these apparently conflicting moves: follow existing law, rather than piling on regulation after regulation to govern (new) behaviors.

[T]he actions reveal one consistency, and what might be viewed as an emerging Trump administration regulatory philosophy: instead of new bright-line rules, such as those put in place under the Obama administration, it is stressing the enforcement of longstanding laws and regulations.

Indeed.  A properly free, capitalist market will do its own regulation just fine, with customers voting—and enforcing—with their dollars.

And

The moves are a shift in emphasis from the approach taken by the Obama administration, which in 2015 adopted highly specific rules governing [for instance] internet providers….

Which were simply insulting to adult Americans.  We don’t need to be told, down to the veriest jot or tiddle, how to perform in the market.  We can operate just fine without Government’s micromanagement.  Better, even.

And there’s the illogic of new regulations: if current law or regulations are being disregarded (hence the push for new regulations), how is it possible to expect any new regulations to be followed?

Affirmative Action Liberal Style

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I’ve written before about the inherently racist and sexist nature of the Left’s “affirmative” action programs.  Here’s another example of that, courtesy of Harvard University.

The US Department of Justice has opened an investigation into the use of race in Harvard University’s admissions practices and has accused the university of failing to cooperate with the probe, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

The Justice Department is investigating complaints that formed the basis of a federal civil lawsuit filed in 2014 in Boston, according to the documents. That suit alleges Harvard intentionally discriminates against Asian-Americans by limiting the number of Asian students who are admitted.

Apparently, the only thing affirmative about such programs is the affirmation of the Left’s view of minorities (and of women, come to that) and their ability to compete on a level playing field, an affirmation first made appallingly plain by President Woodrow Wilson (D, and proud Progressive):

[S]egregation is not a humiliation but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen [of the black press].

Wilson held this position because he considered blacks inherently inferior and so needed to be protected from competition he assumed they could not win.  Today, the Left takes the same view, using a different tool. Today, the Left’s “affirmative” action also assumes blacks (and women) cannot compete on a level playing field, so it gives, openly and blatantly, additional weight to race and gender—because without that additional weight blacks and women can’t compete.

In Harvard’s case, too, the “affirmative” action program also apparently affirms that Americans with Asian heritage are so inherently superior that they must be held back so that those inherently inferior blacks (and women, mind) can keep up.  It’s unimportant to the Left that this denies those held-back Americans their own equal opportunity right, the right as another Progressive icon, Theodore Roosevelt, put it at Osawatomie, Kansas, that

each man shall be guaranteed the opportunity to show the best that there is in him.

Go figure.  And then go vote next fall and again in 2020.

Charlie Rose is…Embarrassed

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Read the whole thing over at the Washington Post, it’s a long and shameful description of NLMSM icon Charlie Rose’s fall from grace—and a shocking between-the-lines read that Rose got to that position of grace in the first place—but I’m struck by a couple of comments in particular that Rose has made about these revelations and associated accusations.  The first is this gem:

I am greatly embarrassed. I have behaved insensitively at times….

Wow.  How does Rose suppose his embarrassment compares to the humiliation and damage suffered by those eight (and more?) women he abused?  And his abuse was insensitive behavior, yet….

And this one:

I accept responsibility for that, though I do not believe that all of these allegations are accurate. I always felt that I was pursuing shared feelings….

Now, as readers of my stuff know, and particularly from what I’ve written in this sort of scandal recently breaking, I’m a firm believer in innocent until proven guilty at trial, and Rose should be afforded the same consideration, but—again, wow.  “I did some of this stuff, but not all of it; and it was all a big misunderstanding, anyway!?”  This utterly destroyed what was otherwise a (structurally, anyway) sound apology.

Separately, but just as important, how is it possible that CBS, PBS, and Bloomberg TV were unaware of these abuses over that long stretch of time?  Because no formal complaints were made?  Who believes that?

That would be utter nonsense, unless we were to believe that those three teams of executives, every single one of them high-powered, highly intelligent, highly alert, fully grown adult humans were in fact just a couple of monkeys busily hearing no evil and seeing no evil.

Every organization has its rumor mill; these abuses were being talked about around the water coolers, in the wash rooms, in workers’ cubicles.  It boggles the sensibility to claim that these things didn’t eventually bubble up to “management” separately from formal complaints.  It boggles the sensibility yet further, that having heard these rumors, the executives were so lacking in initiative that they couldn’t look into them on their own initiative.

Furthermore, at least one knew from direct testimony.  Here’s Yvette Vega, Rose’s longtime executive producer, responding to one women with an explicit complaint:

That’s just Charlie being Charlie.

Vega thought everything was jake.  Guys are guys.  No worries, dearie.  Vega added, claiming to have learned better:

I should have stood up for them. I failed. It is crushing. I deeply regret not helping them.

Yewbetcha.  Now, what is Vega doing with her “regret?”  Besides bodice-ripping and wallowing in it, I mean.

And this, from an unnamed PBS spokeswoman:

PBS was shocked to learn today of these deeply disturbing allegations[.]

We’re shocked—shocked—to learn that inappropriate behavior is going on in this establishment.  Right.

Maybe it’s time that, in addition to holding the miscreants to account, we started firing and, yes, jailing, supervisors and executives who actively condoned, if not outright encouraged, these behaviors through their own conscious decisions to ignore rampant rumors and their deliberate choices to hide their heads in the sand and not investigate—whether to protect the abused employees or to clear the good names of other employees subjected to salacious, but baseless, rumors.

These guys shouldn’t be allowed to hide under their desks in their corner offices anymore.

German Democracy

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Germany’s President, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, whose position is less than that of the Chancellor’s (the current incumbent is Angela Merkel of the Christian Democratic Union) but currently has a critical role, has let the cat out of the bag regarding the attitude of that nation’s political elite toward democracy and the people of the nation.

Recall that Germany held an election a few weeks ago in which the governing CDU/SPD coalition was heavily defeated.  The Social Democrat Party, a center left party, lost most heavily, and it has announced that it will not ally with the CDU in any new government.  The CDU also lost heavily, although it retains the most seats in the German parliament, the Bundestag.  That most seats, though, is a bare plurality, not enough to govern effectively.  Merkel entered talks with The Greens Party and the Free Democrats Party, whose numbers combined with the CDU’s would have given such a coalition a (bare) majority in the Bundestag.  These were difficult talks since the three parties are polar opposites socially, economically, politically, pick a dimension (and yes, I’m aware of the difficulty of a three-way opposite construction—as were Merkel and the heads of those two parties, but they went for it, anyway).

The talks broke down, and with the SPD in firm opposition, Merkel is left with the choice of a minority government or new elections.  She prefers new elections.

Here’s where Steinmeier has exposed the elite’s Know Better attitude.  The Wall Street Journal has quoted his position:

The parties have campaigned for responsibility in the Sept 24 elections, a responsib[ility] that Germany’s constitution says can’t simply be handed back to voters.  This responsibility goes far beyond someone’s own interests.

Except that the German Constitution says exactly that, were the newly elected Bundestag unable to agree on a new coalition or a Chancellor.  However, the elites Know Better, and they insist that the people—the voters, Germany’s citizens—can’t be trusted with governance.  After all, they screwed up their just concluded chance, right?

Hmm….