Jan 06 2015

An engineer explains why the IPCC climate models failed to predict the reality of the last 20 years

Category: environment,global warming,government,Group-think — harmonicminer @ 9:39 pm

This is all pretty theoretical, and may be hard for some to follow. But the point is simple: even in purely theoretical terms, IPCC climate models are fatally flawed because they are too simple, and allow themselves to be driven by only a single variable, CO2, and assumptions of CO2 climate sensitivity expressed as a constant (which those models make wild guesses at).

Thankfully, we don’t have to trust only the theoretical reasons that the IPCC climate models are flawed. We have actual data. Global warming essentially stopped around 16-19 years ago. Even the traditional “97 percenters” have had to admit that. The models of the mid 1990s that the so called “97 percent” relied on have been falsified. Simple as that. So the modelers keep coming up with ad hoc and post hoc explanations for why the models didn’t work, none of which can actually be tested, and none of which fit all the available facts. And I thought spinning was limited to political consultants. Oh, I forgot… the whole global warming enterprise IS essentially a political one, not a scientific one. But I digress.

One way to read the attached article is as one explanation for why the known bad models didn’t work. In a way, all of the attempts by the 97 percenters to come up with explanations for why their models failed are an acknowledgement of the second equation in the article linked above, ∆T = k.log( ∆CO2) + f(∆x), where the last term, f(∆x), has nothing at all to do with CO2. Apparently, there is at least one such term in any equation that actually describes the reality we now know. Read the article. It should make at least some sense to you. The triangle is read as “change in.”

The point: CO2 is not the only, or probably even a major, variable in climate change, which is reality, and has always happened over sufficient time.

Unfortunately, a lot of people don’t seem to have caught up with the facts of the situation (namely, that global warming has stopped, the IPCC is dead wrong, but so much entrenched power and privilege is driving the global warming scam that it won’t die easily), and still believe the scare-mongering. It’s kind of sad, really.

Apr 04 2011

California Prius woes: how not to catalyze the economy

Category: economy,environment — harmonicminer @ 9:13 pm

I drive a Toyota Prius.  It needs a new catalytic converter.  If I lived in any state but California, I could buy one for around $350, and pay maybe $100-200 to have it installed.  For example, here is a website selling the item, for any state but California (notice, it says “no sales to CA”).

Since I live in California, it will cost me $2200 to have a new catalytic converter installed, because it is a dealer only item, and since Toyota has no competition for the part, they have a legal monopoly on it…  which means they can charge whatever they want, and I really have no choice.

But wait, you say, aren’t monopolies illegal in the USA?  The answer, of course, is that monopolies have mostly only flourished where the government enforces them in some way (it’s called crony capitalism, and one of the earliest examples was the building of railroads in the 19th century, based on monopolistic leases from the federal government), and California, as we’ve mentioned before, is a state dedicated to the proposition that most businesses should be driven from the state, and all paying customers should be punished for being customers, or at least for having sufficient funds to be customers.

Call it another example of why California is going the way of the dodo.  And, as a state government, it has about the same IQ.

It would be cheaper for me to drive the car to Arizona and have it repaired there, then drive it home.

I asked the service manager at Toyota why the catalytic converter costs so much.  He said it “has precious metal in it.”  Maybe, if I get a new one, I’ll sell it and retire.

This is emblematic of California’s ridiculous posture on so many issues, where it is willing to pay (AND force the citizens to pay) 10 times as much as some other states, for a tiny increment of “improvement” in the quality of the thing purchased.  Is it possible this catalytic converter is 8-10 times as good as other catalytic converters on other cars?  Really?

It is a government imposed monopoly, and the sky is the limit on how much Toyota can charge, because they are literally the only legal game in town, so says CARB.

 

 

 

 

Jun 28 2010

Sleeves

Category: energy,environment,Obama — amuzikman @ 8:55 am

One can tell much by noting a person’s sleeves, that part of a person’s garment through which the arms pass.  As a musician I have had many opportunities to observe sleeves.  The favored condition among many of my peers is sleeves neatly pressed with cuff fixed neatly around the wrist by either button or better yet, by cuff link.  Less seen, especially just before or just after a performance is a musician with their sleeves rolled up.  This is because both literally and metaphorically when one has their sleeves rolled up it is an indication that they are doing or are about to do some sort of physical labor.

Many musicians I know feel such a condition is beneath them or to put it more politely, better suited for someone else.  After all, we are “artists”.  We have a gift.  We spend countless hours practicing, studying, preparing to bring glorious music to the world.  We can’t be expected to move chairs, carry equipment, or pick up the discarded sheet music from the floor.  That’s why we have roadies, cartage companies, and students.  Let others wrinkle their sleeves by rolling them up,  conductors, performers and composers must keep their sleeves fully deployed.

Yes it is a sad commentary on many, not just musicians, who for whatever reason decide they are above rolling up their sleeves.  Some feel as though they have paid their dues.  They spent a large part of their lives with sleeves rolled up, now it is someone elses turn.  Some have no idea how to roll up their sleeves.  The very notion that sleeves could be rolled up has never occurred to them.  Some understand the concept in theory only.  They are dreamers who  believe that if they have big enough dreams and can inspire others with a passionate articulation of the dream that those around them will be inspired, they will roll up their sleeves in admiration and then they will go about fulfilling the dream, having been captivated by the vision.

Sometimes this works.  Sometimes different kinds of sleeves can come together in a synergistic way.  The dreamer, with sleeves firmly buttoned leading a phalanx of those with sleeves wrapped up around biceps can bring a dream or vision into reality.  This can work great in the creative world of music, theater, film, and art.

But it doesn’t work so well when it comes to government. History has shown that.  Utopian dreams and those who dream them often become twisted, frightening caricatures of the dream when realized.  I fear such is the case with our nation now.  What will the dream of a “green” future look like when it has become reality?  Charles Krauthammer has a sobering commentary on this subject:

Obama is dreamer in chief: He wants to take us to this green future “even if we’re unsure exactly what that looks like. Even if we don’t yet precisely know how we’re going to get there.” Here’s the offer: Tax carbon, spend trillions and put government in control of the energy economy — and he will take you he knows not where, by way of a road he knows not which. That’s why Tuesday’s speech was received with such consternation. It was so untethered from reality. The gulf is gushing, and the president is talking mystery roads to unknown destinations. That passes for vision, and vision is Obama’s thing. It sure beats cleaning up beaches.”

I for one plan to pay great attention to sleeves in November.

May 26 2010

It’s time to take action! Part ONE

Category: education,environment,government,healthcare — harmonicminer @ 9:34 am

As slick spreads, so does frustration

The White House is being pounded for not acting more aggressively in the month-old oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. The administration is hitting back, mostly at BP. Louisiana is threatening to take matters into its own hands. The truth is, the government has little direct experience at either the national or state level at stopping deepwater oil leaks, and few realistic options.

“As the administration is being pounded,” eh? This is “pounding?” I invite the writer of this particular opinion piece to go back and review the press coverage of Katrina. Now, that was an administration getting pounded.

With the oil flowing and spreading at a furious rate, President Barack Obama has accused BP of a “breakdown of responsibility.” He named a special independent commission to review what happened.

But the administration seems to want to have it both ways, insisting it’s in charge while also insisting that BP do the heavy lifting. The White House is arguing that government officials aren’t just watching from the sidelines, but also acknowledging there’s just so much the government can do directly.

The problem here is that the administration is having a hard time being seen as doing something. 

When somebody didn’t have health coverage at a price they were willing to pay, the government could DO something.  What it did is incomprehensible, incoherent, and incompetent…  but it’s going to be a few years before the degree to which this is true is manifestly undeniable, so, for now, some people give the feds credit for at least having done something….  though the numbers of such people appear to be dropping daily.

Is somebody out of work?  Hey, the government is spending billions and billions and billions on makework projects (did you know you can create a $50,000 per year job for only half-a-million bucks of federal money?), unemployment benefit extensions, and shovel ready projects of all kinds (I have dogs…  so I have a few shovel ready projects I wouldn’t mind federal funding for…  and they’d do about as much good for the economy).

Are some children mentally disabled?  Let’s create a federal law that imposes on the states an enormous bureacracy whose net effect is to send an army of expensively educated people with Master’s degrees to work in small classes (or even private lessons!) trying to teach 3rd grade arithmetic to 15 yr olds who have no chance of ever remembering a significant amount of the instruction, let alone using it for anything.  Let’s make federal laws that force states to create educational policy by lawsuit, so that one parent sues under new federal law, and the entire state’s approach changes, very expensively, as a result.  And let’s remember to reserve names like “mean-spirited” and “cold-hearted” for anyone who thinks perhaps this isn’t a wise use of public resources.  In the meantime, let’s continue to complain about how financially strapped the state and county education establishments are.

At least we’re trying to do something.

So, just to get in the spirit of things, tomorrow (or the next day), I’ll be posting some suggestions for things the Obama Administration could do immediately to stop the Gulf oil leak.  Not that I’m promising any of them will actually work.  But one of them might….  and we have to try, don’t we?

May 24 2010

More potpouri

Category: environment,global warming,God,Group-think,Israel,politics,race,racism,religion,theology — harmonicminer @ 8:50 am

Racializing the news

It’s unseasonably cold at my house today, too.  It snowed this morning, a little, very unusual for this time of the year.

Why Israel Can’t Rely on American Jewish “Leaders”

This is what passes for “leadership” in American Jewry. A kabuki dance is orchestrated by an Obama fan to gather other Obama fans to air the mildest criticism and to avoid challenging the factual representations of an administration that is the most hostile to the Jewish state in history. As one Israeli hand who definitely isn’t going to be invited to any meetings with this president put it: “They may be fine rabbis, but they are out of their league here.” And by not directly and strongly taking on the president, they are, in fact, enabling the president’s anti-Israel stance. It is, come to think of it, more than an embarrassment; it is an egregious misuse of their status and it is every bit as dangerous as the quietude of American Jews in the 1930s.

Indeed.

Read Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy first, then read The Cost of Discipleship… again, if you’ve read it before, through the lens of knowing more about Bonhoeffer.

Apple removes app showing “violent and hateful passages from The Qur’an”; anti-Bible, anti-Christian app still on sale

Apr 30 2010

Another Simple Question

Category: energy,environment — amuzikman @ 8:55 am

There is a large oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico resulting from an oil rig explosion last week.  The mess is large, growing larger, and headed towards the US coastline.

When these disasters happen more than a few folks immediately jump up on their soapbox and denounce oil, drilling for oil, oil companies and everything else oil related except perhaps for Oil of Olay, and olive oil.  This is not to downplay the scope of the disaster, obviously oil spills cause a lot of damage.  But lest we forget…oil IS a natural resource.  But of course oil is not considered “green” in today’s world.

Wind energy, on the other hand,  is considered “green”.  It’s clean, renewable, and free for the taking.  Tornados are a type of wind. A recent tornado set down in Mississippi creating a swath of destruction almost a mile wide and killing ten people.

So, why isn’t anyone denouncing wind?

Mar 14 2010

Fear of global warming leads to suicide… and not just economically

Category: Al Gore,environment,global warming,media,society — harmonicminer @ 8:18 am

It would seem that Al Gore is winning converts all over.  Tragically.

Baby Survives 3 Days in Argentina with Bullet Wound in Chest

A 7-month-old baby survived alone for three days with a bullet wound in its chest beside the bodies of its parents and brother, who died in an apparent suicide pact brought on by the couple’s terror of global warming, the Argentine press said Saturday.

The incident, reported by the daily Clarin, occurred in a modest dwelling in the city of Goya in the northeastern province of Corrientes, where Francisco Lotero, 56, and Miriam Coletti, 22, lived with their two small children.

According to sources cited by the Buenos Aires morning paper, the couple’s neighbors smelled a strong odor coming from the Lotero’s house on Thursday.

Police entered the home and found a Dantesque scene: the lifeless bodies of the couple, each shot in the chest, and their 2-year-old son, who had been shot in the back.

In another room, police found a 7-month-old baby still alive but covered in blood from a bullet wound in the chest. It was taken to hospital immediately and its condition is improving hourly, according to doctors’ reports.

The cops found a letter on the table alluding to the couple’s worry about global warming and their anger at the government’s lack of interest in the matter.

Obviously, these tragically misguided parents hadn’t heard that Obama was elected in 2008, which means that the sea levels won’t be rising after all.

You probably won’t see any coverage of this in the US media, although if the suicide note had said the parents were worried about the socialist takeover of the entire Western Hemisiphere, led by the US, the suicide/murder would probably be blamed on talk radio…  and maybe Sarah Palin.

h/t: bazzbo

Mar 08 2010

Big Business is not in the Republicans’ pocket; its hands are in YOUR pocket, if you pay taxes… and everyone does, one way or another

Category: capitalism,corporations,economy,election 2008,energy,environment,global warming,Obama — harmonicminer @ 9:10 am

At Townhall, Jonah Goldberg points out that big business supported Obama 2 to 1 against McCain, because it hoped to cash in at taxpayer expense:

It’s worth remembering that Obama was the preferred candidate of Wall Street, and the industry gave to Democrats by a 2-1 margin at the beginning of last year. The top business donor to Democrats in 2008 was Goldman Sachs, and nearly 75 cents out of every dollar of Goldman’s political donations from 2006 to 2008 went to Democrats. Few can gainsay the investment, given how well Goldman Sachs has done under the Obama administration.

It’s not just Wall Street. Obama led in fundraising from most big business sectors, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Aside from the desire to back the winner, and the cultural liberalness of East and West Coast plutocrats, why did Obama get so much support from precisely the constituency he demonizes?

Because it was good business. A host of big corporations bet that the much-vaunted Obama era would materialize. For instance, nearly 30 major corporations and environmental groups invested in Obama’s promise to force the American economy into a new cap-and-trade system via the United States Climate Action Partnership (CAP).

Whatever the benefits of such a scheme for the economy and environment as a whole, these corporations, led by General Electric, were looking simply to cash in on government policies. GE, which makes many wind, solar and nuclear doodads that would be profitable under “cap-and-trade,” was poised to make billions if Obama succeeded in seizing control of the “carbon economy.” GE is still protecting its bet, but after the failure in Copenhagen, the “climategate” scandals and perhaps most significantly, that implosion of Obama’s new progressive era, several heavyweights — Caterpillar, BP and ConocoPhillips — have pulled out of CAP, with rumors that more will follow. There are similar rumblings of discontent within the ranks of PhRMA, the trade association for the pharmaceutical industry, which had cut an $80 billion deal with the White House last year for its support of ObamaCare, only to see the whole thing unravel.

The lesson here is fairly simple: Big business is not “right wing,” it’s vampiric. It will pursue any opportunity to make a big profit at little risk. Getting in bed with politicians is increasingly the safest investment for these “crony capitalists.” But only if the politicians can actually deliver. The political failures of the Obama White House have translated into business failures for firms more eager to make money off taxpayers instead of consumers.

That’s good news. The bad news will be if the Republicans once again opt to be the cheap dates of big business. For years, the GOP defended big business in the spirit of free enterprise while businesses never showed much interest in the principle themselves. Now that their bet on the Democrats has crapped out, it’d be nice if they stopped trying to game the system and focused instead on satisfying the consumer.

Go back and read the title of this post. Then read this, to which I’ve linked before.  Ignore the reviews, pro and con, and just take it on its own terms… and see if you can refute the history.  I think you can’t.

There hasn’t been a “free market” in the USA for sometime.  The government’s power to tax and regulate, and to give tax breaks and regulatory exceptions, is the reason there is so much lobbying in the Beltway.  It could not have been otherwise, once corporate taxes got high, and the regulation of business became one of the chief functions of government.  The merry-go-round career path of government “service” to lobbyist, and often back to government “service,” is the biggest indicator of this.  The essential role of a lobbyist in the modern world is to figure out who should get the money that the lobbyist’s principals have to donate.

When big business couldn’t count on government to help it get captive markets, and to restrain competitors, it had to compete for consumers on the basis of price and quality.  That’s why Rockefeller kept cutting the price of kerosene in the 19th century, not exactly an act of violence against the consumers of the day.

It’s unfortunate that so many people still believe that we live in a “free market” economy and that “the market” is the cause for so much economic woe today.  But we have had a “mixed economy” that often crossed the line into “crony capitalism” or just plain “state capitalism” (especially in time of war), for over a century.  The government is by far the most responsible for our current economic mess.  The lobbyists of big business (the johns) wouldn’t have any place to spend their money if politicians weren’t pimping themselves out.  Those lobbyists are often the ones who write campaign finance law and regulations.

It’s simple.  If big business didn’t think it was going to get something out of it, why would it donate so much money to politicians?  And more particularly, why did it give so much to Obama?

Let’s hope that if the Republicans do get some power back, they don’t blow it this time.

Dec 10 2009

The new fundamentalists

Category: environment,global warming,government,Group-think,socialism,society — harmonicminer @ 10:04 am

THE TOTALITIES OF COPENHAGEN: GLOBAL WARMING AND THE PSYCHOLOGY OF TRUE BELIEF

One of the deeper motivations that animate global warming true believers is the totalitarian impulse. This is not to say that global warmists are closet Stalinists, but their intellectual methods are instructively similar, says columnist Bret Stephens.

Revolutionary fervor:

* There’s a distinct tendency among climate alarmists toward uncompromising radicalism, a hatred of “bourgeois” values, and disgust with democratic practices.
* So President Obama wants to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 83 percent from current levels by 2050, levels not seen since the 1870s — in effect, the Industrial Revolution in reverse.
* Rajendra Pachauri, head of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, insists that “our lifestyles are unsustainable.”
* Al Gore gets crowds going by insisting that “civil disobedience has a role to play” in strong-arming governments to do his bidding (this from the man who once sought to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution).

Utopianism:

* In the world as it is, climate alarmists see humanity hurtling toward certain doom.
* In the world as it might be, humanity has seen the light and changed its patterns of behavior, becoming the green equivalent of the Soviet “new man.”
* At his disposal are technologies that defy the laws of thermodynamics; the problems now attributed to global warming abate or disappear.

Anti-humanism:

* In his 2007 best seller “The World Without Us,” environmentalist Alan Weisman considers what the planet would be like without mankind, and finds it’s no bad thing.
* The U.N. Population Fund complains in a recent report that “no human is genuinely ‘carbon neutral'” — its latest argument against children.
* John Holdren, President Obama’s science adviser, cut his teeth in the policy world as an overpopulation obsessive worried about global cooling.
* But whether warming or cooling, the problem for the climate alarmists, as for other totalitarians, always seems to boil down to the human race itself.

Today, of course, the very idea of totalitarianism is considered passé. Yet the course of the 20th century was defined by totalitarian regimes, and it would be dangerous to assume that the habits of mind that sustained them have vanished into the mists, says Stephens.

It’s fashionable to speak of “religious fundamentalists” in a phrase designed to obscure the essentially benign intent of Christian fundamentalists (if you can find one anymore), by using a single-breathed phrase that also includes Islamic fundamentalists of the Islamo-fascist variety.  A couple dozen leftist columnists and some government officials have darkly hinted that, before long, “sexist, homophobic, anti-choice Christianists” will be as dangerous as Osama bin Laden, if they aren’t already.  After all, didn’t they just shoot that nice abortion doctor who was just rescuing women from a difficult situation?

I think, however, that the only non-Islamic fundamentalists who pose a real danger to the West are the eco-pagan totalitarians, who believe they have the divine dispensation to control how the rest of us live our lives and conduct our businesses, because only they have the pure vision and the purer hearts to make the judgments about just how we should be using energy, how much we should be using, when we should use it, in what form we should use it, how much we should pay for it, and what our punishment should be if we don’t comply with their enlightened prescriptions…  not to say proscriptions.

It is difficult to think of a more anti-human agenda.

But these particular fundamentalists want a LOT more than a mere tithe.  They mean to control just about every aspect of your life, to one degree or another.

Baptism may continue to be a sacrament in the eco-totalitarian regime…  but it will be in cold water.

Nov 23 2009

Climategate? Or just business as usual?

Category: environment,global warming,science — harmonicminer @ 10:20 am

The lies of the global warming eco-panic crowd may finally be exposed in Climategate: the final nail in the coffin of ‘Anthropogenic Global Warming’?

If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW. The conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth (aka AGW; aka ManBearPig) has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed after a hacker broke into the computers at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (aka Hadley CRU) and released 61 megabites of confidential files onto the internet. (Hat tip: Watts Up With That)

When you read some of those files, including 1079 emails and 72 documents, you realise just why the boffins at Hadley CRU might have preferred to keep them confidential. As Andrew Bolt puts it, this scandal could well be “the greatest in modern science”. These alleged emails, supposedly exchanged by some of the most prominent scientists pushing AGW theory, suggest:

Conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more.

One of the alleged emails has a gentle gloat over the death in 2004 of John L Daly (one of the first climate change sceptics, founder of the Still Waiting For Greenhouse site), commenting:

“In an odd way this is cheering news.”

But perhaps the most damaging revelations , the scientific equivalent of the Telegraph’s MPs’ expenses scandal, are those concerning the way Warmist scientists may variously have manipulated or suppressed evidence in order to support their cause.

It is, of course, early days in the investigation of the stolen emails.  Perhaps it will all turn out to be a huge hoax.  But, here are more details.

Of course, the AGW eco-panic mongers of the world will say that this isn’t the only data, that many other independent data sources have confirmed the same conclusions, and it can’t ALL be a hoax.

Maybe not.  Some of it could be just simple, politically motivated non-science.  There are probably some well-meaning sorts who have particular data that doesn’t, by itself, refute AGW, so they have trusted those who are sure they have data that confirms it.  But it seems that maybe there aren’t as many scientists as previously claimed who are “sure” they have confirming data…  so they cook the books.

Here is an attempt at damage control.  You can decide how successful you think it is.  My impression: while accusing the hackers of “cherry picking”, they have “cherry picked” the emails the hackers “cherry picked” to try to make their points.  Your mileage may vary.  But I wonder how many of these bleats about the nasty, illegal, immoral hackers were issued by people who were similarly distressed when the New York Times exposed critical US programs to protect us from terrorists.  (You may say this is a loose connection, but the political dimension of the AGW controversy is the entire point….  and the politics of eco-panic mongers and anti-American Leftists are remarkably parallel.)  Here is someone who takes it more seriously.

This seems like a good time to review all those scientists who have thought all along that AGW was, if true, a very minor contributor to whatever overall warming may exist (which it seems is less and less).

h/t:  Mike

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