Tag Archives: ethics

Anthropogenic Climate Change

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…and dishonesty.  More is beginning to leak out, this time from of all places the UN.  That august body’s IPCC has had leaked a draft of its latest “study” on the man-caused disaster in climate, and it isn’t a pretty example of the outcome of climate “scientist” incestuousness.

High points on the leak are from Matt Ridley, in The Wall Street Journal, and they concern a “pollutant” that our present administration is going after, and damn the economy—and damn the

poor people whose lives are being ruined by high food and energy prices caused by the diversion of corn to biofuel and the subsidizing of renewable energy driven by carboncrats[.]

The question at hand:

How much warming will a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide actually produce?

Ridley’s information comes from Nic Lewis.

A semiretired successful financier from Bath, England, with a strong mathematics and physics background, Mr Lewis has made significant contributions to the subject of climate change.

Per Lewis [emphasis added]:

[T]he latest observational estimates of the effect of aerosols (such as sulfurous particles from coal smoke) find that they have much less cooling effect than thought when the last IPCC report was written.  The rate at which the ocean is absorbing greenhouse-gas-induced warming is also now known to be fairly modest.  In other words, the two excuses used to explain away the slow, mild warming we have actually experienced—culminating in a standstill in which global temperatures are no higher than they were 16 years ago—no longer work.

Thus [again, emphasis added],

We can now estimate, based on observations, how sensitive the temperature is to carbon dioxide.  We do not need to rely heavily on unproven models.  Comparing the trend in global temperature over the past 100-150 years with the change in “radiative forcing” (heating or cooling power) from carbon dioxide, aerosols and other sources, minus ocean heat uptake, can now give a good estimate of climate sensitivity.

The conclusion—taking the best observational estimates of the change in decadal-average global temperature between 1871-80 and 2002-11, and of the corresponding changes in forcing and ocean heat uptake—is this: A doubling of CO2 will lead to a warming of 1.6°-1.7°C (2.9°-3.1°F).

This is much lower than the IPCC’s current best estimate, 3°C (5.4°F).

In the end,

A cumulative change of less than 2°C by the end of this century will do no net harm.  It will actually do net good—that much the IPCC scientists have already agreed upon in the last IPCC report.  Rainfall will increase slightly, growing seasons will lengthen, Greenland’s ice cap will melt only very slowly, and so on.

There’s more to this climate pseudo-science failure, and it flows from the CO2 interactions via alleged feedback loops [emphasis added]:

A little warming (from whatever cause [including atmospheric CO2]) heats up the sea, which makes the air more humid—and water vapor itself is a greenhouse gas.  The resulting model-simulated changes in clouds generally increase warming further, so the warming is doubled, trebled or more.

[The problem is,] water vapor may not be increasing.   A recent paper from Colorado State University concluded that “we can neither prove nor disprove a robust trend in the global water vapor data.”  [On top of that], as one Nobel Prize-winning physicist with a senior role in combating climate change admitted to me the other day: “We don’t even know the sign” of water vapor’s effect—in other words, whether it speeds up or slows down a warming of the atmosphere.

One reason for the uncertainty of the sign is that atmospheric water vapor means more clouds, and clouds reflect inbound sunlight while trapping outbound heat.  Which has the greater effect—reducing the inbound inputs or holding onto the outbound outputs?  Only a climate pseudo-scientist claims to know at this point in the data collection and analysis.  Especially given the…quality…of their data and of their models.

There’s a whole lot more at the Watts Up With That? site, both on the present topic and on anthropogenic climate change, generally.

Some Government Spending

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Progressives in Congress and the White House are loathe to reduce spending—especially actual reductions, not just the reduced rates of growth that they, along with too many Republicans, masquerade as spending reductions.  This reluctance is part of why they’ve been so indisposed toward passing a budget, which would make their spending excesses even more apparent.

Bret Baier, of Fox News, though, has dug out some numbers illustrating the present excesses.  Just last November, for instance, the Federal government collected $5 billion in total revenue, while spending $11 billion, each day of the month, for a spending excess of $6 billion per day.  The table includes Baier’s numbers and provides some of the biggest spending sources.  (The Totals sums won’t agree  between across and down due to rounding.)

Spender Daily Tab ($billion) Monthly Tab ($billion) Projected Annual Tab ($billion)
Department of Health and Human Services

3

90

1,080
Social Security

2.5

75

900
Department of Defense

1.8

54

648
interest on the national debt

0.85

25.6

307.4
Totals

8.2

244.6

2,935

Notice that the two biggest spenders are Obamacare—HHS—and Social Security: two of the entitlements which the Progressives have already said are not negotiable—no matter the damage to our economy.

Notice further that those $300+ billion in debt interest are utterly withdrawn from our economy; it’s just the vig on our debt.  Those dollars don’t circulate.  Moreover, that vig doesn’t pay down the debt a single fēn (分).  Then, too, when interest rates revert to our historical levels in the neighborhood of 5% from our current roughly 0.25%, those interest payments will explode to the region of $6,148 billion—over $6 trillion.  Per year.

No wonder the Progressives are so reluctant to discuss spending or actual deficit elimination and debt reduction.  That would be hard.

The Future of American Youth?

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In France, we’re seeing the impact on the nation’s youth of their government-managed economy, magnified by the union-driven difficulty (near impossibility, actually) of getting rid of extraneous labor (or even bad workers).  Spiegel Online International offers some insight.

Kafui Affram doesn’t feel at home in either environment, not in the suburb where the 22-year-old still lives in his childhood room in his parents’ little house [or in Paris, his suburb’s parent city].

Still living with his parents.  Just like America’s youth, especially in the Age of Obamacare.

Some 23 percent of the country’s 18- to 24-year-olds live in poverty, according to a study by the National Institute for Youth and Community Education (INJEP).

The poverty rate for America’s youth as recently as 2009 was 20%.  It’s not going to improve any time soon; the unemployment rate for America’s youth was 17.1% in July 2012, at the height of the summer season for employing our youth, and the unemployment rate for their parents has been hovering around 10% for the last four years after factoring in the effect of our shrinking labor participation rate.  Then,

Youth unemployment in France has been high for some time, but it has now climbed to 26%.  For decades, regardless of their political affiliation, lawmakers have been promising to create a better situation for young people.  But exactly the opposite has happened.  Labor laws protect those who already enjoy steady jobs, while the economic crisis and recession have limited the number of new jobs created.

On Socialist President François Hollande and his program for creating of “future jobs,” Affram says,

We’re used to politicians constantly coming up with new ideas.

Yeah, we’ve heard that, too, and from the same sort of source.  With the same degree of confidence that Affram has:

I know I should be optimistic and have goals, but it’s mostly all just bleak.

Now is Not the Time

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…to surrender.  Yet that’s what Peter Berkowitz advocates Conservatives do in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed [emphasis added].

Conservatives should…come to grips with two entrenched realities that pose genuine challenges to liberty, and whose prudent management is critical to the nation’s well-being.

The first entrenched reality is that big government is here to stay.  This is particularly important for libertarians to absorb.  Over the last two hundred years, society and the economy in advanced industrial nations have undergone dramatic transformations. And for three-quarters of a century, the New Deal settlement has been reshaping Americans’ expectations about the nation-state’s reach and role.

…

In these circumstances, conservatives must redouble their efforts to reform sloppy and incompetent government and resist government’s inherent expansionist tendencies and progressivism’s reflexive leveling proclivities.  But to reform sloppy and incompetent government and resist government’s inherent expansionist tendencies and progressivism’s reflexive leveling proclivities reflects a distinctly unconservative refusal to ground political goals in political realities.

Conservatives can and should focus on restraining spending, reducing regulation, reforming the tax code, and generally reining in our sprawling federal government. But conservatives should retire misleading talk of small government. Instead, they should think and speak in terms of limited government.

Yet the only way to “reform sloppy and incompetent government and resist government’s inherent expansionist tendencies and progressivism’s reflexive leveling proclivities” is to shrink the government back to a manageable size—to regain the small, limited government we used to have and that is created in the documents of our social compact.  Limited government and small government are inseparable; they are two sides of the same coin.  Yes, yes, monarchies can be small governments, too.  But they’re not limited.

Accepting the status quo and declining to seek to “reform sloppy and incompetent government and resist government’s inherent expansionist tendencies and progressivism’s reflexive leveling proclivities” by shrinking—limiting—that over-large and out of control government is most assuredly an unconservative thing to do; it is to accede to the modern Liberal’s goal.

Berkowitz seems not recognize the role reversal that has occurred.  The modern Conservative is the 18th Century Liberal—the champion of limited government that protects and enhances individual liberty, individual responsibility, and the resulting national prosperity.  The modern Liberal is the 18th Century Conservative, a man who favored government control over men’s lives on the theory that both the common man was too stupid to see to his own ends and that Government—the King—Knows Better.  The only difference between the modern Liberal and that 18th Century monarchist is the accepted superficial structure of the Big Government that Knows Better.

Berkowitz’ second entrenched reality,

…this one testing social conservatives, is the sexual revolution, perhaps the greatest social revolution in human history[]

is wholly irrelevant without the individual freedom and responsibility available only with small, limited government.  With government determining what our lives should be like and how we should live them, things like the sexual revolution and our responses to them also are for governments to determine.

Even under the shadow of big government and in the wake of the sexual revolution, both libertarians and social conservatives, consistent with their most deeply held beliefs, can and should affirm the dignity of the person and the inseparability of human dignity from individual freedom and self-government. They can and should affirm the dependence of individual freedom and self-government on a thriving civil society, and the paramount importance the Constitution places on maintaining a political framework that secures liberty by limiting government.

Indeed, but a modern Conservative is not a libertarian—and he never was.  Moreover, the “social conservative” is a modern invention, defined less by social mores than by opposition to the mores of the modern Liberal.  And the affirmation of the need of civil society as one means of guaranteeing “individual freedom and self-government” and that “political framework that secures liberty by limiting government” separately and together demand an actual limiting of government—its size and the reach of its powers.

Republicans, Fiscal Cliff, and Spending

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We’ve wondered here, there, and elsewhere why the “fiscal cliff” negotiations are occurring in secret.  Is it because the Republicans have been planning on folding all along, and they’re trying to keep that quiet until the last moment?  Is it because they naively think Democrats will negotiate in better faith if they don’t have to be seen as folding to the Republicans until the last moment?

Whatever the excuse, it’s got to stop.  Tried that the last several weeks, it’s failed utterly.  Now it’s time for the Republicans to take overt, public action.  Marc Thiessen, in The Washington Post, has some thoughts on what that overt, public action should look like.  In the main, I agree with him; excerpts below.  RTWT.

…pass legislation extending current tax rates for all Americans.  Let Obama reject it and take us over the “fiscal cliff”—and then be prepared to live under the Clinton tax rates while negotiations on tax reform continue.  In the short term, Americans may blame you.  You can recover from that.  What you will never recover from is surrendering your principles and giving up your brand as the party of low taxes and limited government.

But those Clinton tax rates are wonderful, don’t you know: when Republicans got them cut, across the board, during Bush the Younger’s administration, those tax cuts were, according to our Progressive betters, only good for the rich; the middle class could never benefit from them.  Thus, it’s plain that reverting to those rates can’t possibly harm the middle class since the lower rates never did us any good.   And, of course, those wonderful Clinton tax rates went along with Clinton’s spending rates—some one-third of President Barack Obama’s.  But never mind about that.

Additionally, Obama and his publicity machinethe NLMSM will ensure that Republicans get the blame; there’s no “may” to it.  As Thiessen points out, though, they can recover from this—see below.

Go on the offensive.  Immediately put forward a plan to fundamentally reform the tax code.  You will be able to outbid Obama and the Democrats in any tax-cut fight.  And the intellectual groundwork has already been done.  During the supercommittee negotiations last year, Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) put forward a plan to lower rates, raise revenue and limit deductions.  Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) has a revenue-neutral corporate tax reform plan that lowers the rate to 25 percent and moves to a territorial system.

On the spending side, “soak the rich” by getting rid of the billions of dollars in government benefits, taxpayer subsidies and corporate welfare the wealthy receive each year and don’t need, and by means-testing government programs from unemployment benefits to farm subsidies.

On entitlements, put forward a plan to save Social Security and Medicare through structural reforms and by reducing benefits for well-off retirees and eliminating them entirely for the wealthiest seniors.  Propose a “Buffett Rule” of your own: Warren Buffett does not need taxpayers to subsidize his retirement and health care.

The Romney tax reform proposal is a good place to start: personal income tax rates cut 20% across the board with total deductions capped at $50,000, and business income tax rates cut to a peak rate of 25% (still too high, but it’s a start).  Also, include in the tax reform the Obamacare investment taxes and the medical device tax—these should be withdrawn entirely.  There’s already significant Democratic support for getting rid of these jobs killers.

The corporate welfare cuts should include subsidies to oil and gas companies (chump change) and to “green energy” businesses and dependencies (not at all chump change) alike.

Social Security and Medicare should be privatized altogether; however, that’s…unlikely…this year.  Severe means-testing is a good start, though.

Pass your plans.  If the president refuses to negotiate and no progress is made by February, inform him that you will attach all or part of your plan to legislation raising the debt limit and pass it in the House.  Then do so.

Obama’s failure here will put both serious spending and tax reform, and default, on his plate.  Not even the NLMSM will be able to cover up Obama’s disaster here.  Moreover,

According to Bob Woodward, when Obama told his advisers he intended to veto the debt-limit bill the Republican-controlled House had passed, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner told him he couldn’t—that if Republicans didn’t give in, he had no choice but to sign their bill.  “You can’t veto,” Geithner reportedly told Obama, because the consequences “would be indelible, incurable.  It would last for generations.”

Now Republicans know better.

We’ll see if they’ve found any courage.  So far, I’m not sanguine.