The NSA has been tracking details of every phone call and email by every American for years. I have no doubt that this is the case. Yes, this is in violation of the fourth amendment which states:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
I know people rightfully blame both parties, although we should remember which one is in power when the “loophole” in the patriot act was taken advantage of. There are still differences worth noting between political views. However, despite the future blame-game the loophole isn’t specific to the patriot act and it wasn’t even really created by the patriot act. The actual loophole is that a secret court can approve things by any convenient interpretation of nearly every applicable law is able to provide a legal basis for whatever goal a political party in power has in mind. When you give your power away to governments, elected or not, you are guaranteed to get corruption. People want … period. Whether that corrupts their decisions is up to them and no “party” or person is immune.
This not-really-secret court is designed to approve search warrants by the federal government. It operates without public review, and the approval of a warrant requires little effort for the truly overworked federal judges. When a ruling for a search warrant is rejected, a reason must be given by the first judge which requires a lot of work. Rejected applications then pass up the chain for review again by a panel of judges. So the federal agents who apply, get two chances to have their motion approved. Interestingly, the article claims that no request for a search warrant has been denied since 2002.
Basically, America has set up a false secret court, outside of the purview of even the powerful leftist media, for the explicit purpose of approving search warrants at a maximal rate. Recently it was discovered, that the tired federal agents found their own loophole (judge) and simply issued blanket search warrants for the entire American republic. The whole damned thing.
Why not? It’s legal after all. At least it is according to a certain political view and it saves money and time over the constant individual warrant approvals.
Despite Real Climate hopes, global warming politics are a symptom of the problem, not the center. These two events have one similarity, layer after layer of expense based on exaggeration and unproven accusation. It is flatly obvious now that giving others control over every detail your lives will result in an existence under the sole of their shoe. It is a mathematical problem weighted against the individual and for the collective.
But there is a problem with all of my thoughts above that is worth some consideration. I believe that this phone-search is likely one of the most effective anti-terrorist programs in the federal government. Do you ever wonder how they find out about some of these weird bomb-plots or terrorists? Like the FBI somehow hangs out with 100% of the bad guys to find the newly converted ones? Basically, I believe with only tangential evidence that the programs for monitoring existed prior to the bulk warrant. It just took more work then and the collected info wasn’t admissible in court. How hard is it for our government to tap major land based phone lines.
This program clearly means that we have essentially become a herd of humans being hunted by NSA, FBI, CIA for the outliers. They claim that they are only hunting the truly dangerous people today but does anyone know whether the FOX reporters phone conversations have been used to out anti-leftist informants? How about those who know or reveal the truth about Benghazi or fast and furious. If the IRS abused its power, why wouldn’t a far more secretive NSA group do the same? Nobody is policing the police so it is unlikely that their powers aren’t regularly being abused.
Still, despite the obvious situation, gathering all phone records is a substantial component of our anti-terror defense. Patterns in calls and emails reveal international connections, pending dangers and coordination between anti-US groups. At the same time, we would be naive to assume that the information would not be used against the innocent for political purposes. One thing is for certain, the United States Government is more powerful and more corrupt than any time in history.
In the balance, allowing this kind of power in their hands is more than a little foolish. Not that being a fool ever stopped anyone from charging ahead. As always, it isn’t up to me which way policy goes, but were it up to me, I would endeavor to create a more difficult and transparent warrant system which only allowed warrants for specific threats. This would leave us more open to attacks by terrorists but the silent destruction of individuals lives has already been practiced by this government on a large scale for purely political purposes. I believe the balance is worth the additional risk.
I will post useful stuff in the future but allowing Mr Cotton to take it over again was a mistake. It seemed reasonable to allow him to write, because the topic was PSI. It won’t happen again, even though I am starting to think a serious discussion on back radiation is necessary because people are very confused on the matter. Other PSI members will always be allowed to comment in the future, any time they wish, but they will be treated with an open mike reply as we all are.
Is it is my blog so I will highlight one more ridiculous Doug comment for which he will not be allowed to reply. He will attempt to, and his answers will be deleted when I have time, so don’t bother discussion with him here in the future months.
No it won’t be pretty and it is my fault for making this happen – my apologies.
(a) How the microwave radiation appears to pass through the opaque plastic bowl, not in a straight line like normal transmission, and not having its energy converted to thermal energy, and yet coming out the other side (in random directions) but with the same frequency.
For Fuck’s sake Doug, plastic is nearly perfectly transparent to household microwaves. [self snip]
Go away. I will delete your comments later.
New posts tomorrow, sorry again folks. I will be avoiding the blog so there will be a short time delay between deletions.
So PSI completely surrendered discussion of a highly emotional topic like…. thermodynamics after only a few days. It turns out that photons emitted from a cold body which then strike a warmer one, are the Kryptonite of the organization. A group so cocksure of itself that it would throw out an entire field of science based on its own superior scientific integrity and self-described intellect. Yet on all counts, they have failed to address any of the serious questions asked of their theory.
In the end, a simple question, a single one unanswerable by this group of people who have been so condescending, so self righteous, that they make Real Climate look humble and welcoming.
We have spent years listening to odd proclamations about the second law of thermodynamics. We have endured the extreme rhetoric against climate science. We have heard the absolute certainty of true zeal in their comments. PSI “science” is so distorted that many readers wonder why I would engage them at all. More faith than math in my opinon.
Why give them the credibility of a discussion here?
Because they have asked for an audience of science. A peer review of their work. Quite literally, I have been repeatedly asked to review their papers. Instead of a single paper, they got a little more than they bargained for. A chance to explain themselves, yet the group failed to understand the implications of the questions being asked here. That failure alone is enough to dismiss any further work on their part, yet they also failed to answer any simple questions of thermodynamics.
One last chance? Sure why not. Let’s make sure this backradiation duck is completely dead…
Lets say we have two perfect blackbodies, one at 100K, another at 200K. What happens to a single photon emitted by the cold body that strikes the warm one?
Holy crap. I have realized it isn’t practical to do a half of a blog. Did you know that the Internet is full of crazy people. I’ve heard rumors, read other blogs, often commented on the generally high quality of tAV readers but when I don’t blog on science for months, guess what happens.
Wierd stuff.
Anti-science stuff as far as the eye can see! So many people with a crazy, poorly understood concept of science on the planet seems to fill in the crevices of conversation. Enough to thoroughly upset my understanding of reality. Everyone who thinks they have solved a new form of backradiation, new thermodynamics, black body radiation, global warming or whatever asinine concept in the world seems to have a crazy opinion. Not one lick of common sense to regulate the mess. F-ing frustrating.
Then there is Joe Postuma, PSI “super-genius”,
who left a link explaining his new theory of zero backradiation locked up in a pile of chapter 1 thermodynamics equations. Joe has solved the problem! As I have found typical of the PSI crowd, he is unable to explain his physics using “English” or other earth language and many are confused.
As a fellow human who lacks a universal translator yet can handle basic math, let me help explain Josephs post. In science, certain variables are defined as dependent and others are independent. It is a simple concept which means that some variables are representations of physical processes driven by others. Often, you find the dependent letters on the left side of the equals sign. Joe gets a little carried away with the concept and decides that the form of the math in his first equation dictates which variables are which, and forgets to consider the physics to see if he is correct. Lo and behold!!, many Internet morons on his thread agree. —– Shocking, I know. Thus Joe decides that the “independent” Earth temperatures dictate the “dependent” power received from the sun. I know it is unusual but we humble observers are the idiots (or worse — undergrads) who need to open our minds!!
Vigorous rants ensue! Global warming is proven wrong again, even though there is no evidence in the post supporting or rejecting AGW presented.
It is frustrating because I left 4 questions. Four simple questions on the last thread for the entire PSI group and only one person attempted an answer. Joe.
In answering, he combined my questions, failing to note that they asked for explanation of the differentiation between PSI and standard physics. It isn’t his fault though because, as we have recently uncovered, PSI cannot tell the difference between their own theory and standard physics.
I am only partially surprised by that but that is because I have read some of their work. Below are my four original questions from the last post. Note that groups (1 and 3) and (2 and 4) request differentiation. Do you wonder why I did that?
1 Define and describe the probability characteristics of Second Law of Thermodynamics as interpreted in classical physics using your own words. Demonstrable understanding of the standard version of the second law is important so that we have common ground.
2 Describe standard physics interpretation of radiation absorption from a cold to hot body.
3 Describe the PSI interpretation of the Second law highlighting differences in energy transfer from the standard interpretations.
4 Describe the PSI interpretation of what happens to radiation from a cold to hot body, with focus on temperatures.
Joe’s, being the only PSI representative capable of attempting answers provided:
1) & 3) are related, so: A closed system tends to a state of maximum entropy. Basically this means that all energy density differentials disappear and the system becomes totally useless, unable to perform any work within itself. Energy spontaneously transfers from low probability to high probability states. Low probability is high density (hot), high probability is low density (cool). This will manifest as spontaneous heat flow from hot to cold. There is no PSI difference from the traditional laws.
2) & 4) are related: Cold radiation does not heat up hot bodies as this would be a violation of the laws of thermo as discussed. It is the hot body which transfers heat to the cold and causes the cold temperature to increase. The presence of a cold body does not mean that a hot body has to warm up – the cold body just warms up until the same energy states are shared by both the cold and hot bodies, and then energy is available to transfer to other things on the far side of the cold body if some condition exists there. The PSI position is the traditional one, whereas we routinely see GHE advocates argue that radiation from a cold body has to heat up a hotter body, or, that the cold body can heat the hot body as long as the “majority net” heating is from hot to cold, which is of course sophistry, but it sounds good. Energy can be shared both ways between hot and cold, but the cold does not cause or require the hot to become hotter – the cold is simply heated by the hot.
Regarding 1 & 3 from Joe’s answers above, excepting the indecipherable probability statements, there isn’t much to take home from it. Apparently PSI does recognize the second law of thermodynamics it even seems to realize the second law is a bulk property although the description left me confused. Regarding 2 & 4 though, it has more errors discontinuities than a first grade calculus exam. It is impossible to begin except that Joe claims radiation from a cold body doesn’t “heat up” or in other words, it doesn’t “add heat energy” to the hot body. Which leaves one wondering, just what the hell happened to those photons of energy?
Being a naturally curious person, I asked:
Lets say we have two perfect blackbodies, one at 100K, another at 200K. What happens to a single photon emitted by the cold body that strikes the warm one?
This seems a innocuous question, one which would deserve an answer, especially from individuals purporting to understand thermodynamics better than everyone else. Basically, I got this for an answer, along with a bunch of silliness:
“It is the macroscopic behaviour where heat flow is observed in net, and no heating occurs from cold to hot. Cold doesn’t heat hot up in aggregate or in partiality at all.“
It is a surprising answer which seems to be supported by others in the group.
And heat energy associated with the photon’s journey can only move from warm to cold (from the higher excitation state to the lower excitation state); just as water in a river only flows downhill – there is no backward journey (eg no back radiation heating).
Really!? I ask with incredulity. Just what happened to the effing photons then (Joe or anyone else at PSI)? Where the hell did they go? Wormholes, reflection, tri-synchronous absorption, WHAT!???
Stupid individual photons anyway but did they reflect, reverberate, re-incarnate, recirculate, reciprocate or simply retarderate? Since asking the obvious question about what happened to the energy in our universe, I have been told:
Discussing individual quantum events is beside the point of the 2nd Law
Jeff, surely you would agree that energy is not the same thing as heat
When photons enter a body they will not add heat if the receiver is warmer than the emitter.
The photons do generate light, which we can see, but there is not necessary any added heat.
Besides, Postma already did give the answer when he said heat flow is proportional to a temperature differential – this still doesn’t mean that photons from the cold source cause heating, it means the two objects find equilibrium, but the cold object does not heat the hotter object. What the photons from the cold source are doing is expressed in this equation: Q = s*(Th^4 – Tc^4). This does not mean that the cold source raises the temperature of the hot source.
They want us to believe gases respond to the heat radiated by the Earth’s surface and send that energy back, which makes the surface warmer.
For some strange reason you seem to want to focus on a SINGLE photon from cold to hot – when this still isn’t even what the laws of thermo are because the laws are about the whole behaviour of a large ensemble of trillions of trillions of entities and interactions etc.
Thus far not one PSI individual can answer my question. NOBODY with wits enough to answer what any reasonably studied student of standard physics can. So I tease on, waiting for the group to rise to the challenge, hoping for a reasoned answer to my questions.
In the meantime, the same guys who cannot provide the answer to a simple question are generating complex finite element climate models which assume the result before calculating it. Sound familiar?
This is awesome, the wife is downstairs watching a movie, I’ve finished my work and have a little time for blogging. Not a lot, but some…
There are too many pressures in my head. Today a commenter, who is anonymous to me, left a slayer-style comment which has none of the Doug Cotton inflections about it. (new guy!) I am truly curious about the understanding of this group because I have worked hard at it and they represent something which doesn’t make any sense to me. We know slayers see global warming as a complete farce rather than the pseudo-science based money printing machine it has become. I have different replies from each individual from this group and hope to gain some understanding of where they separate from basic science.
It is an interesting challenge which I think careful second-law readers here will find ironic. — So how does one find the bulk opinion of a group of moderately independent variables?
Anyway,
nope one more thermo-smiley
Two beers in and I’m already having fun.
Anyway, this is the comment left on the last (very old) thread:
If you believe that planetary surface temperatures are all to do with radiative forcing rather than non-radiative heat transfers, then you are implicitly agreeing with IPCC authors (and Dr Roy Spencer) that a column of air in the troposphere would have been isothermal but for the assumed greenhouse effect. You are believing this because you are believing the 19th century simplification of the Second Law of Thermodynamics which said heat only transfers from hot to cold – a “law” which is indeed true for all radiation, but only strictly true in a horizontal plane for non-radiative heat transfer by conduction.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics in its modern form explains a process in which thermodynamic equilibrium “spontaneously evolves” and that thermodynamic equilibrium will be the state of greatest accessible entropy.
Now, thermodynamic equilibrium is not just about temperature, which is determined by the mean kinetic energy of molecules, and nothing else. Pressure, for example, does not control temperature. Thermodynamic equilibrium is a state in which total accessible energy (including potential energy) is homogeneous, because if it were not homogeneous, then work could be done and so entropy could still increase.
When such a state of thermodynamic equilibrium evolves in a vertical plane in any solid, liquid or gas, molecules at the top of a column will have more gravitational potential energy (PE), and so they must have less kinetic energy (KE), and so a lower temperature, than molecules at the bottom of the column. This state evolves spontaneously as molecules interchange PE and KE in free flight between collisions, and then share the adjusted KE during the next collision.
This postulate was put forward by the brilliant physicist Loschmidt in the 19th century, but has been swept under the carpet by those advocating that radiative forcing is necessary to explain the observed surface temperatures. Radiative forcing could never explain the mean temperature of the Venus surface, or that at the base of the troposphere of Uranus – or that at the surface of Earth.
The gravitationally induced temperature gradient in every planetary troposphere is fully sufficient to explain all planetary surface temperatures. All the weak attempts to disprove it, such as a thought experiment with a wire outside a cylinder of gas, are flawed, simply because they neglect the temperature gradient in the wire itself, or other similar oversights.
The gravity effect is a reality and the dispute is not an acceptable disagreement.
The issue is easy to resolve with a straight forward, correct understanding of the implications of the spontaneous process described in statements of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Hence radiative forcing is not what causes the warming, and so carbon dioxide has nothing to do with what is just natural climate change.
As Nick says, the g/cp = 9.86/1.006 = 9.6°C/km lapse rate is a correct theoretical result only for dry air (note the lapse rate is defined as the negative of the change in temperature with elevation, hence Nick has an extraneous minus sign). This result is satisfying in that it can be derived exactly but it really is the “spherical chicken” approximation of climate. When you include moisture, the maximum sustainable lapse rate is reduced from ~ 10 to around 6.5 °C/km. This is referred to as the “environmental lapse rate”, and can be predicted from theory fairly accurately in the troposphere using the known vertical wind-speed profile and a prescribed vertical humidity gradient.
Manabe and Strickland 1964 is the classic reference for from-first-principles calculation. It is written in a very comprehendible way for people with a physics/engineering background.
What you see from this is that the radiative lapse rate is even larger than the dry-air lapse rate, and hence is never physically realized in the troposphere.
I don’t think Nick is right that radiative transfer is an “underrated factor”, unless he means in the semi-lay blogosphere. I think it’s role has been well understood since Manabe’s days.
Basically radiative transfer acts to keep the tropospheric lapse rate to be maintained near the maximum stable value (the radiative equivalent of keeping tension on a string). So it plays a critical role in atmospheric dynamics and converts a dynamic calculation into basically a static one (read simpler problem), but doesn’t play a direct major role in the vertical transfer of heat energy (see below for numbers).
If convection were impossible, the temperature at the top of the atmosphere would be the same, but the surface temperature would be about 35°C warmer than it is now (using Fig 4 of Manabe). Note that a dry atmosphere it would be about 10°C warmer.
What Fig 4 is basically saying is that a radiation-only atmosphere has a much larger greenhouse gas effect than a convective dry atmosphere, and an atmosphere with moisture acts to further reduce the greenhouse gas effect from what it would be in the radiative only model. I think these are as, now well, agreed to results.
There’s a bit additional non-controverial results, which are summarized in Ramanathan 1981.
Note that about 3/4s of the net feedback effect from GHGs is due to convective heat energy transfer in this model.
I should mention there is an important controversy relate to the tropical lapse rate & the “missing hot spot”. Probably its resolution is the violation of the assumption you can treat the atmosphere as a vertical stack of air.
I think all of this is appropriately “off topic” for a thread on “DC”. Note that in online gaming, DC also mean “Dis-Connected” which also seems like an appropriate alternative moniker for the individual in question.
There is a pile of information there so nobody – except a couple of us – would literally check all of the links but the discussion doesn’t need to get this deep with those who don’t believe CO2 warming is a real effect. In order to understand this phenomenon, what we need to do is find out where the standard physics and those who don’t agree with it, part ways.
So this was my reply to the individual, whom the readers here are far more likely to know the identity of than myself.
Work, heat, entropy are all bulk concepts. The second law is a law only in the bulk context. It is a law in that after twenty trillion rolls, the probability is toward the heavy side of the die.
Backradiation is a sub-process which in no way “violates” the second law. This is a common misunderstanding from those who didn’t grok the meaning of their basic physics rules. Saying it can or can’t be explained by either theory is rather amusing to me because mathematically – en bulk – they are equivalent. Where slayers here have faltered is that they don’t give a coherent message and too many members are scientifically weak.
I would be very happy to debate this issue. We have to start with fundamentals though and work our way up from there. This is necessary because I have been taught classical physics and we need to determine where our understanding bifurcates.
Why make this post?
Tis’ a good question. Recently there was a minor kerfuffle between the slayers and Roy Spencer. Some gauntlets were thrown challenging mathematical proofs with models. I really failed to understand the point of the “modeling” — mostly because of the discontinuity of the slayer argument but there was another reason. My interpretation of the discrepency is that both standard theory and PSI theory are mathematically equivalent WRT bulk properties, yet fail on other levels. Still, not a single PSI member has succintly explained to me the difference between standard physics and their version. Tellingly, nobody from the group has demonstrated a basic working understanding of the main-stream principles of the second law of thermodynamics such that they could address and refute the discrepancies. The problem is apparent enough to shut the group out entirely and ignore them but I would rather understand the discontinuity.
The other reason for this post is that when you consider the second law, the sum of the rate of energy transfer is delta temperature only. Therefore, from my known slayer energy transfer explanations the energy transfer is the same no matter which religion you subscribe to. They have said, electromagnetic energy stops going backward when other greater energy is coming forward, thus E = E1 – E2. Standard physics also says E = E1-E2 . The real challenge for slayers should be to mathematically show any difference at all for physics rather than show how one is better. Instead we have a lot of PSI “papers”, chock full of unsupported conclusion.
I am frustrated with the whole thing.
While writing this post, the discussion continued on the previous thread. This has to be kept short because we are here to understand not nitpick. My very simple challenge to the slayers therefore is as follows, each of the 3 points with 300 words or less and no links:
1 Define and describe the probability characteristics of Second Law of Thermodynamics as interpreted in classical physics using your own words. Demonstrable understanding of the standard version of the second law is important so that we have common ground.
2 Describe standard physics interpretation of radiation absorption from a cold to hot body.
3 Describe the PSI interpretation of the Second law highlighting differences in energy transfer from the standard interpretations.
4 Describe the PSI interpretation of what happens to radiation from a cold to hot body, with focus on temperatures.
The discussion below will be open to all. 300 words, no links will be strictly enforced.
So all you skeptics want answers to how much warming we should expect from adding CO2 to the atmosphere? An interesting new study has been released which matches quite closely to Nic Lewis’s work. The difference is that 14 of the authors are lead-coordinating lead authors of the pending AR5 IPCC report. It is being hosted at Bishop Hill blog and WUWT.
Since Skeptical Science pooped all over Nic’s result just last month, and that result has now been replicated by 14 lead authors for the IPCC AR5, I wonder if they will take back their critiques…. Seriously though, these studies represent an important result because it seems like we are finally coming to realize the magnitude we should expect from CO2 based warming. It also seems like the leaked AR5 draft is going to need an update for its projected warming — downward. This is the very issue that has given most of us science-minded critics the label skeptic. You know the label that causes people to put us on lists and declare that skeptics are dangerous, should be charged with crimes and such. So now that a large group of IPCC authors agree with us that higher projections from models aren’t matching observed sensitivity, are they skeptics or are skeptics now climate scientists?
From Nic:
The take-home message from this study, like several other recent ones, is that the ‘very likely’ 5–95% ranges for ECS and TCR in Chapter 12 of the leaked IPCC AR5 second draft scientific report, of 1.5–6/7°C for ECS and 1–3°C for TCR, and the most likely values of near 3°C for ECS and near 1.8°C for TCR, are out of line with instrumental-period observational evidence.
In a less politicized field, there might need to be some additional time for the IPCC to absorb this information through all of its chapters. Because of our long history with the advocate crowd controlling this field, I’m sure it still means doom for us all, but at least we won’t be as hot when the world ends. ;D
John Cook (of the inaccurately named Skeptical Science blog) sent me a link to a new survey. The survey has been discussed around the internet for the last couple of days because John was involved in the last Lewandowsky paper which combined poor methodology with libelous remarks directed at the “subjects” being “studied” to justify the authors pre-determined conclusion personal attacks. Lucia’s blog has an interesting discussion on the survey. She decided that she would not to link the new survey at all. It is an understandable decision as we can be certain that this new survey will result in another propaganda piece attacking those of us who live in reality.
I am so certain of the pending result, that before providing the link at this blog, you will be mirandized — Skeptical Science style:
You have the right to remain silent.
Anything you say WILL be misrepresented to your detriment in the court of public opinion.
You have the right to consult an attorney before the survey and to have an attorney present during questioning now or in the future.
If you cannot afford an attorney, you are on your own.
If you decide to answer any questions now, without an attorney present, you will still have the right to stop answering at any time until you talk to an attorney.
Knowing and understanding your rights as I have explained them to you, are you willing to answer John’s questions without an attorney present?
I will not take the survey myself, because of my certainty of the authors biased motivations but it still might be fun to guess their conclusions so I think we will have a contest. Guess the title of John’s new paper! After the paper is released, I will categorize the results of our contest and we will vote on the best guesses for both creativity and closest match. To guess right, we need to find some clues!!
First, a clue as to where the survey conclusions are going on the first page:
Please read each title and abstract then estimate the level of endorsement that is expressed in that paper for anthropogenic global warming (e.g., that human activity is causing global warming).
It is hard for me to understand how you “rate” a scientific paper based on its acknowledgment of a completely uncontested fact like CO2 based temperature change. It seems a bit like rating a paper on its acknowledgment that the sky is blue. Fortunately there is more detail to work with on the survey page:
Survey of Peer-Reviewed Scientific Research
Below are listed the titles and abstracts (summary) of 10 randomly selected scientific papers; mouseover each title to read the abstract (summary). Please read each title and abstract then select from the drop down to categorize each abstract. Your rating should be based on the abstract text. Your submission will be anonymous. The drop down indicates indicates the level of endorsement within the abstract for the proposition that human activity (i.e., anthropogenic greenhouse gases) is causing global warming (e.g., the increase in temperature).
Note: AGW is Anthropogenic Global Warming or human-caused global warming.
Options are:
Explicit Endorsement with Quantification: abstract explicitly states that humans are causing more than half of global warming.
Explicit Endorsement without Quantification: abstract explicitly states humans are causing global warming or refers to anthropogenic global warming/climate change as a given fact.
Implicit Endorsement: abstract implies humans are causing global warming. E.g., research assumes greenhouse gases cause warming without explicitly stating humans are the cause.
Neutral: abstract doesn’t address or mention issue of what’s causing global warming.
Implicit Rejection: abstract implies humans have had a minimal impact on global warming without saying so explicitly. E.g., proposing a natural mechanism is the main cause of global warming.
Explicit Rejection without Quantification: abstract explicitly minimizes or rejects that humans are causing global warming.
Explicit Rejection with Quantification: abstract explicitly states that humans are causing less than half of global warming.
NOTE:These papers have been rated by the scientists who authored the papers. After submission, you may view a comparison of your ratings with the ratings by the authors of each paper. –MY RED
In order to compose a title, we have to guess the results he will find. A reader at Lucias noted that the abstracts the reader sees are “randomized” based on the proxy address you are using and that repeated abstracts at different proxy addresses are common. That suggests a low pre-selected paper count which is confirmed by the additional fact that the survey answers can be compared to the authors own answers. Of course not every author would participate in the study, they can only have a small set of abstracts. It is also possible that in order to gain cooperation, some authors were aware of the intent of the survey. This may have been justified in John Cook’s mind, since they are oft represented by his Skeptical Science blog as unimpeachable.
So here is what I am guessing will happen. Some skeptics will give low ratings for the papers because their obviously biased support of catastrophic warming and the pervasive poor level of science in climate change. Those who are advocates for climate catastrophe science (including the authors) will be biased toward giving 1′s (top ratings) for their endorsement but will slide on papers which are less extremist in the abstract. We already know that the Climate Science field is comprised nearly universally of politically left advocates, so the authors your answers are compared to will be biased in the same direction as the advocate blogging crowd.
The opening page of the survey notes a “proven consensus” paper coming out, so adding to that conclusion is unlikely to be the point.
This survey mirrors a paper, Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature, to be published soon in Environmental Research Letters, that analysed over 12,000 climate papers published between 1991 to 2011.
Additionally, those who link from skeptic blogs or from advocate blogs will probably be sorted by their links (I am guessing). So with that little bit of guesswork, here are some of my predicted titles:
Skeptics Deny Science Literature
Motivated Denial of Scientific Literature
Skeptics are so stupid! — I am formally registering the exclamation point as an integral part of the title.
Skeptics Reject Scientific Consensus
Scientific Rejection, A Manipulated Manifestation of Morons.
It is possible that those taking the survey will be unsorted, but I doubt it. That does lead to a whole slew of other potentially winning titles!
UPDATE: Nic Lewis left this interesting comment down below -
Actually, in Chapter 9 of AR4 WG1, dealing with observationally-constrained estimates of climate sensitivity, the IPCC only discuss medians and modes. Not a mean in sight! And it refers to the mode as the “best estimate”. Nor does Figure 9.20 (where the estimated PDFs for climate sensitivity from Forest 2006 and other studies are shown, labelled EQUILIBRIUM climate sensitivity) mark the means. And Forest 2006 itself only reported the mode.
So I’m not being either misleading on any count, or misrepresenting anything. But Dana is both misrepresenting my study and being misleading. What a surprise.
—
Skeptical Science has another silly post up which attempts to pick at the edges of Nic Lewis’s climate sensitivity paper. They titled the critique “Climate Sensitivity Single Study Syndrome, Nic Lewis Edition” We all know that Skeptical Science is filled with those who are certain that oil money is brown and corrupts minds, while government money is green and makes scientists infallible. I normally ignore the site but WUWT pointed me to it and sometimes SS is a bit of fun:
It’s most important not to fall into the trap of thinking that any single study will overturn a vast body of scientific evidence, derived from many different sources of data (or as Andrew Revkin calls this, single-study syndrome).
It isn’t the quote which caught my attention but Dana’s ankle-biting point here forgets much more important quotes from much smarter people.
“No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.”– Albert Einstein
Nic’s study found a best probability climate sensitivity of 1.6C/doubling CO2, now there should be nothing inherently wrong with that number but the know-nothings at Skeptical Science realize that it falls below their preferred sky-is-falling-so-we-need-to-empower-the-UN-and-stop-capitalism goals. In other words, 1.6C would mean that there is no immediate doom on which to base their already ridiculously self-destructive political intent on. Shame that eh? So we get a bunch of emotion from their crowd.
Unfortunately for Dana (and the rest of the crowd there), there is a large body of evidence which has been piling up against these high climate sensitivity models. MMH10 for instance, showed that the mean of the primary climate models is running statistically outside of observation, Lucia has done a number of posts to that effect. Recently Roy Spencer put up a post showing the same problem.
From Dr. Roy Spencer, experiment vs observation:
This is one of my favorite plots from MMH10, which shows the same thing as Dr. Spencer with a bit of added stats.
MMH10 also has this plot:
Then there is this one from Chad Herman that incorporates surface temperature measurements:
Although surface temperatures are closer to the models than lower troposphere, again and again, the shotgun of government funded model simulations runs high against observation. It is only in politicized forms of science where actual observations that contradict theory are rubbed out. You would think the models would move instead. Chucking unloved temperature proxies out in paleoclimate is another great example of theory trumping observation.
Anyway, there is hardly only one avenue of data which supports Nic’s lower sensitivity as Dana’s article implies. The claim is so off the wall that it leaves one wondering why they would pull the wool over their readers eyes. What caught my attention though was just how hard Dana was working away at Nic’s ankle bone. I’m taking the whole paragraph this time, because it is that funny:
Even though Lewis refers specifically to “equilibrium climate sensitivity,” The methodology used by Lewis is also not even necessarily an estimate of equilibrium sensitivity, but rather of effective climate sensitivity, which is a somewhat different parameter. The two may hypothetically be the same if all energy changes in the global climate system are accounted for (and to their credit, Forest and Lewis do include estimates of ocean heat content, including for the deep oceans), and if climate feedbacks remain constant. However, recent research by Armour et al. (2012) suggests that the latter may not be the case.
I literally laughed out loud when I read this paragraph. So the argument becomes first, don’t trust a single paper, then if you do trust it, don’t forget that climate sensitivity may change based on unknown and unmodeled factors which SS has just spent like 5 years telling us don’t exist. I do happen to agree that climate sensitivity is not a fixed number, so does everyone else, but Nic was estimating equilibrium sensitivity on this planet ….today… How this potential change in future sensitivity refutes Nic’s work can only be understood on Dana’s planet but it sure sounded foreboding.
After this paragraph, Dana moved on to some paleo-studies demonstrating high sensitivity from proxies which only a silly person would give the same credibility as present day measured data. To finish it all off, Dana then humorously attacked Nic’s accuracy in claiming agreement with Aldrin et al.
One significant issue in Lewis’ paper (in his abstract, in fact) is that in trying to show that his result is not an outlier, he claims that Aldrin et al. (2012) arrived at the same most likely climate sensitivity estimate of 1.6°C, calling his result “identical to those from Aldrin et al. (2012).” However, this is simply a misrepresentation of their paper.
This is what Nic claimed in the abstract:
Employing the improved methodology, preferred 90% bounds of 1.2–2.2 K for ECS are 20 then derived (mode and median 1.6 K). The mode is identical to those from Aldrin et al. (2012) and (using the same, HadCRUT4, observational dataset) Ring et al. (2012).
Now you would think even a math novice would recognize the “mode and median” claim and realize that they must be something different. Unfortunately Dana did not, and proceeded to stomp around and stuck his foot firmly within a dark area. In his defense, perhaps Dana was tired and wasn’t reading as carefully as one would expect when critiquing a peer reviewed paper. The claim WAS all the way to the bottom of the abstract after all, and advocacy is tiring work. Tom Curtis pointed out the error in the comments last night at 4am but the post remains uncorrected.
I think the alarmist advocate crowd is in full Gaian prayer mode that temperatures will skyrocket soon. It is the either the data or the climate models at this point, someone must move. In the meantime, it is entertaining watching the advocates squirm.
In the huge amount of justified complaints made here about what I think of paleo-reconstructions, one detail is probably lost in the chaff.
I really wish I knew what historic temperatures were. You can’t read that much paleoclimate information and not want to know. Steve McIntyre clearly inspired my reading, and unfortunately the inspiration came through a wholly skeptical lens. In time it has turned out that the skeptical perspective of the statistics and data in paleoclimate were 100% justified.
With data so noisy, yet so full of potential revelations, scientists are also justified in their interest. As time has passed, I’ve grown to understand that there isn’t really any known solid way to divine the history of climate. We have enough clues to see past warmth and plenty of clues to show deep past ice ages, yet the trivial level of understanding of past temperature is quite distant from the equivocation-ridden certainty of present day scientific publications.
Ed Cook was no small player in the paleoclimate field. His own words have a ton of meaning for those who have enough understanding of the pervasive nuance in the field:
the results of this study will show that we can probably say a fair bit about <100 year extra-tropical NH temperature variability (at least as far as we believe the proxy estimates), but honestly know fuck-all about what the >100 year variability was like with any certainty (i.e. we know with certainty that we know fuck-all).
This statement is an absolute scientific truth to my understanding. There are multiple sentiments in it which have very solid meaning in interpreting these hockey stick plots. First, and most interesting for those of us who actually want to know the truth, dendros seem to have discovered a way to see short term climate variation a very long time ago. Variations on a scale of <100 years are also important because they give us some partial understanding of climate. Unfortunately, Ed and I disagree as to the certainty of the meaning of even these short term variations.
That known correlation in itself is extremely cool. Skeptics of dendro question the linearity of these fluctuations with respect to temperature, but the short-term fluctuations themselves are highly correlated in local regions. We can say that whatever was happening in climate to those regions, is measurable, and good plant growth years in one location were good plant growth years. Not exactly known temperature “climate”, but growth climate is still a very cool thing.
Ed Cook knows the difference between short and long term variations, and after performing tree ring standardizations as I have, you get an understanding of why the long term signals (trends) in dendro hockeysticks are not likely represented by the data. The math and physics simply don’t allow it. Long term temperature trends derrived from tree rings, are necessarily quite meaningless.
Paleoclimate is noisy, and little is truly known in my opinion. Better data is required, and despite the every-month premature conclusions from the experts, we shouldn’t lose site of the fact that once we discover the right proxy (or proxy combination), the math will not be the issue and finally we will know a true piece of our distant climate history.
Whatever we find out, that day when we finally know, will be an interesting day for me.
Something interesting at WUWT happened today. This isn’t a typical issue as of late and requires a bit of math skill. A post by Willis Eschenbach brought up some old memories of days where skeptic blogs like this one, were math centric. Fortunately the math which Willis discusses this time, is relatively lightweight stuff, and it happens to involve the fortuitous filtering activities of Mannian filter-matics.
I highlighted an email on the topic a few weeks ago here which contains a quote that I thing belongs in Willis’s article. Michael Mann has long been interested in filtering methods which promote the “Cause”, I have to say that Willis’s example puts a spotlight on how awkward the team has been at promoting fortuitous filters.
5 PM 10/14/2003 -0400, Michael E. Mann wrote:
Dear All,
To those I thought might be interested, I’ve provided an example for discussion of
smoothing conventions. Its based on a simple matlab script which I’ve written (and
attached) that uses any one of 3 possible boundary constraints [minimum norm, minimum
slope, and minimum roughness] on the ‘late’ end of a time series (it uses the default
‘minimum norm’ constraint on the ‘early’ end of the series). Warming: you needs some
matlab toolboxes for this to run…
The routines uses a simple butterworth lowpass filter, and applies the 3 lowest order
constraints in the following way:
1) minimum norm: sets mean equal to zero beyond the available data (often the default
constraint in smoothing routines)
2) minimum slope: reflects the data in x (but not y) after the last available data
point. This tends to impose a local minimum or maximum at the edge of the data.
3) minimum roughness: reflects the data in both x and y (the latter w.r.t. to the y
value of the last available data point) after the last available data point. This tends to impose a point of inflection at the edge of the data—this is most likely to preserve a trend late in the series and is mathematically similar, though not identical, to the more ad hoc approach of padding the series with a continuation of the trend over the past 1/2 filter width.
The routine returns the mean square error of the smooth with respect to the raw data. It
is reasonable to argue that the minimum mse solution is the preferable one. In the
particular example I have chosen (attached), a 40 year lowpass filtering of the CRU NH
annual mean series 1856-2003, the preference is indicated for the “minimum roughness”
solution as indicated in the plot (though the minimum slope solution is a close 2nd)…
By the way, you may notice that the smooth is effected beyond a single filter width of
the boundary. That’s because of spectral leakage, which is unavoidable (though minimized
by e.g. multiple-taper methods).
I’m hoping this provides some food for thought/discussion, esp. for purposes of IPCC…
mike
It never seems to end, and the “happy” filtering nonsense started being noticed by Willis Eschenbach some time ago.
I wanted to see the 2012 ice loss in the Arctic so I updated the video’s. The first video is full length, the second is just a clip of more recent years. I repeated the result for the Antarctic which has seen increases in sea ice.
John Cook continued his path of self destruction at “Skeptical Science”. I’ve often wondered if the blog title was meant as a sarcasm. Today, we know neither word can apply accurately to their work in any other sense. When others noticed that Richard Betts of the met office Climate Impacts was accidentally included in their recent paper’s SI, John tried to play it off as just raw data on that list in a tweet on Dr. Betts twitter account. Interesting considering the title of the comment section in the SI was “Excerpt Espousing Conspiracy Theory”, and the fact that Richard Betts, wasn’t identified as Dr. Betts in the SI or by any other means that would associate him with the met office. Is it possible that they didn’t know the famous scientist?
As well as the Recursive Fury paper, we also published Supplementary Material containing excerpts from blog posts and some comments relevant to the various observed recursive theories. In the paper, we characterise this as “raw data” – all the comments that we encountered that are relevant to the different theories. In contrast, the “processed data” are the excerpted quotes featured in the final paper, where we match the various recursive theories to the conspiracist criteria outlined above.
One misrepresentation of Recursive Fury is that we accuse Professor Richard Betts of the Met Office of being a conspiracy theorist because one of his quotes appears in our raw data. This inclusion of a relevant comment in the raw data of a Supplementary Material document was reported in hyperventilating fashion by one blogger as a spectacular carcrash. However, there is no mention of Professor Betts in our final paper and we are certainly not claiming that he is a conspiracy theorist. To claim otherwise is to ignore what we say about the online supplement in the paper itself. The presence of the comment in the supplementary material just attests to the thoroughness of our daily Google search.
Nevertheless, I can see how this misunderstanding arose. The Supplementary Material features the heading “Excerpt Espousing Conspiracy Theory” referring to the excerpted quotes that we pasted into the spreadsheet. In hindsight, the heading should have been ”Excerpt relevant to a recursive theory”, because the criterion for inclusion was simply whether or not they referred to one of the hypotheses. The analysis of conspiracist ideation occurred after that, and involved the criteria mentioned at the outset.
In this context, it is important to point out that one reason we made the raw data available is for other scholars to be able to cast an alternative interpretative light on the public discourse relating to LOG12. As we note explicitly in the abstract, it is possible that alternative scholarly interpretations can be put forward, and the peer-reviewed literature is the appropriate forum for such analysis.
If that explanation holds water, one has to wonder, whom else from mainstream climate science was included in the SI?
NOBODY?!!
It is obvious to any non-plant life that Dr. Betts was clearly picked up with the rest of us by accident, and the authors including Cook look like the complete incompetent idiots they are. Their unscientific advocacy is plain as day. As with all AGW advocates, logic does not override emotion and Skeptical Science type Skeptics simply cannot make mistakes. It hurts their self-image.
A friendly note to Cook, The boat is sinking!!! Stop drilling holes. Nope, Nope, strike that. KEEP GOING!! The entertainment is priceless.
So the good docktor finally got his contribution to scientific understanding past the rigorous peer review of Frontiers of Psychology. I have to say, I’m actually pleased with his improved and only moderately distorted reference to me.
Conspiracist ideation is arguably also exhibited on climate blogs, for example when expressing the belief that climate scientists “colluded with government officials to ignore the law”(Condon,2009)
The new entry was in reference to an email I sent to the editor regarding the avoidance of FOIA by UEA scientists, where I pointed out that Jones stated:
When the FOI requests began here, the FOI person said we had to abide by the requests. It took a couple of half hour sessions – one at a screen, to convince them otherwise showing them what CA was all about. Once they became aware of the types of people we were dealing with, everyone at UEA (in the registry and in the Environmental Sciences school – the head of school and a few others) became very supportive.
But this post isn’t about me. Lewandowsky has placed a comment in his supplementary information from the excellent bishop Hill blog, authored by fellow conspiracy theorist Richard Betts:
The thing I don’t understand is, why didn’t they just make a post on sceptic blogs themselves, rather than approaching blog owners. They could have posted as a Discussion topic here at Bishop Hill without even asking the host, and I very much doubt that the Bish would have removed it. Climate Audit also has very light-touch moderation and I doubt whether Steve McIntyre would have removed such an unsolicited post. Same probably goes for many of the sceptic blogs, in my experience. So it does appear to that they didn’t try very hard to solicit views from the climate sceptic community.
Richard is Head of the Climate Impacts strategic area, which includes climate impacts research and also the climate change consultancy unit.
The Met Office’s main role in climate impacts research is to facilitate a more integrated approach to the assessment of climate change impacts, in collaboration with specialists across the wider academic community. A large part of our impacts research, therefore, involves examining the interactions between different impacts areas, such as agriculture, natural ecosystems, water resources, glaciers, urban areas and human health.
Richard leads the impacts theme of the JULES community land surface modelling programme. This collaborative project forms part of UK-wide efforts to assess impacts in an internally-consistent manner.
The Met Office’s climate change consultancy area works directly with end-users in a wide range of sectors, to ensure climate change information is used effectively for decision-making. This end-user contact also informs our research direction to keep it relevant to user needs.
Career background
BSc (Physics), University of Bristol, 1991.
MSc (Meteorology and Applied Climatology), University of Birmingham, 1992.
PhD (Meteorology), University of Reading, 1998\
This absolutely made my day. What a riot Lewandowsky has been. I literally laughed to tears that he would pick up this comment and label the head of the Met Office Climate Impacts as well as a lead author for the IPCC a conspiracy theorist.
Well folks, some of you were wondering why nobody touched the publication of that CG3 password, I have been contacted by a UEA law firm regarding the recently released Climategate password. Some even asked for FOIA to come clean as to their identity. I have pointed out repeatedly that an angry activist lawyer can make a mess out of any law, and the UEA has plenty of them. When the police came out with the statement that the statute of limitations had run out, I pointed out that each release could be considered separately by any lawyer.
Anyone with access to the recent password must be exceedingly careful in its use. These emails were not released publicly by someone else so legally they are hot potatoes. The UEA law firm did attach the standard “this email is confidential” bullcrap on the bottom, but it seems more prudent to head off any problems with a public release so I choose to ignore it. A lot of bloggers received the password so I doubt very much it will stay private for long. It won’t be here that it comes out.
Dear Sir
We understand from a blog post made by you on 12 March 2013 that you have either
received an unsolicited email from someone going by the name of ‘Mr FOIA’ or that this has
been forwarded to you. The email from Mr FOIA provides a password to access a
substantial number of documents. It is our understanding from the blog postings which we
have seen that the password does work and that the information can be accessed. We do
not know what information has been made available in this way but have a very real concern
that it may include ‘personal data’. This is data which, under the Data Protection Act 1998,
might enable the identification of a living individual and which is strictly regulated under the
provisions of the Act. Unlike previous releases, and from what we understand from the
publication of Mr FOIA’s email, the information appears to have been left entirely unredacted
or filtered in any way.
The information contained in these document is likely to have been illegally obtained from
the University’s servers in October 2009. The on-going dissemination of any ‘personal data’
obtained in this way would amount to a further criminal offence. Given that the sharing of
the password would enable any third party to access any of the documents there is a very
real danger that personal data will be disclosed in breach of the Data Protection Act.
The University has no desire to stifle debate around climate change but the University must
take steps where information has been obtained illegally and to protect employees and
students at the University as well as third parties from unnecessary harm arising from the
unregulated and widespread disclosure of personal data.
Accordingly, please confirm by return:
•
That you will not publish the password with which you have been provided nor the
information it protects
That you will forward a copy of this notice to any person to whom you have supplied
the password
That you will not publish any ‘personal data’.
•
•
If you are in doubt about what is meant by ‘personal data’ then please follow the attached
link to the Data Protection Act. Please note in particular the provisions of section 17, 21 and
55. http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1998/29/contents
Interestingly, “personal data includes” one’s political opinions among other things.
In this Act “sensitive personal data” means personal data consisting of information as to—
(a)the racial or ethnic origin of the data subject,
(b)his political opinions,
(c)his religious beliefs or other beliefs of a similar nature,
(d)whether he is a member of a trade union (within the meaning of the M1Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992),
(e)his physical or mental health or condition,
(f)his sexual life,
(g)the commission or alleged commission by him of any offence, or
(h)any proceedings for any offence committed or alleged to have been committed by him, the disposal of such proceedings or the sentence of any court in such proceedings.
I recommend extreme care in release of any of these emails. To date I have only re-published emails from CG1 and CG2, there is a reason for that.
I have been enjoying climate blogs recently again. Joe Romm provided a bit of entertainment on March 8 with his delightfully uncritical eye to the new Marcott, Shakun, Clark and Mix hockeystick. The paper, which unfortunately was the wishful extension of a thesis (some pun intended), that was debunked by Steve McIntyre before most of us had read the SI. By debunked, I mean really, really trashed. I have seen some weak engineering work but wow, this paper was special. Jean S even noted that there was no blade on the stick in the original thesis but the publication picked up by the press had a dad-would-be-proud blade on it.
I really wouldn’t have noticed except for the fact that Mr. Pete commented on it at Climate Audit.
So was the fake blade of the rewritten thesis enough for Joe Romm’s advocacy? Oh hell no—
He pasted an even bigger fake-er blade on the end!!! Gotta love it.
Unfortunately, we have decided to change the setting on the thermostat from “Very Stable, Don’t Adjust” to “Hell and High Water.” It is the single most self-destructive act humanity has ever undertaken – Dr. Joe Romm
So for that bit of scientific wizardry, I hereby appoint Dr. Romm the highly regarded honor of the Air Vent – Loser of the month.
So I spent several hours today writing scripts which parse the emails. I was hoping for continuations of some of the more interesting conversations we are familiar with but so far have found little more than a group of advocates for catastrophic climate change, doing what they do. They fully believe that the fact that proxy data doesn’t match temperature, in no way calls into question the randomly selected proxy data. Some question whether it is it ok to paste data on the end of a series. Still there are others who advocates of more study, stating that the “act-now” advocates are not honest scientists. Again, I’m reminded of the organized and funded attacks against anyone who notices the problems with their work. It is really shocking to read how they followed through with attacks against those who don’t fall in line. Mann in particular, is thin skinned and his angry attacks on other advocates not pushing his version of history, pressure those with little backbone to play both sides of the fence.
If you want the meaning of the emails, you have to be able to read and CG1 and 2 have most everything we need to know in them so far. Beyond a three word “hide the decline”, the average public has no interest. So far, I have found no new pithy quote with the kind of clarity that CG1 revealed. I did find a large number of emails which we have covered in topic before. Some have new replies but I’ve noticed nothing which was tremendously interesting.
There were so many nuances in these emails. Remember this email from Michael Mann (my bold):
Date: Tue, 14 Oct 2003 17:08:49 -0400
To:
Subject: Re: smoothing
Bcc: >
correction ’1)’ should read:
’1) minimum norm: sets padded values equal to mean of available data beyond the
available data (often the default constraint in smoothing routines)’
sorry for the confusion,
mike
At 05:05 PM 10/14/2003 -0400, Michael E. Mann wrote:
Dear All,
To those I thought might be interested, I’ve provided an example for discussion of
smoothing conventions. Its based on a simple matlab script which I’ve written (and
attached) that uses any one of 3 possible boundary constraints [minimum norm, minimum
slope, and minimum roughness] on the ‘late’ end of a time series (it uses the default
‘minimum norm’ constraint on the ‘early’ end of the series). Warming: you needs some
matlab toolboxes for this to run…
The routines uses a simple butterworth lowpass filter, and applies the 3 lowest order
constraints in the following way:
1) minimum norm: sets mean equal to zero beyond the available data (often the default
constraint in smoothing routines)
2) minimum slope: reflects the data in x (but not y) after the last available data
point. This tends to impose a local minimum or maximum at the edge of the data.
3) minimum roughness: reflects the data in both x and y (the latter w.r.t. to the y
value of the last available data point) after the last available data point. This tends to impose a point of inflection at the edge of the data—this is most likely to preserve a trend late in the series and is mathematically similar, though not identical, to the more ad hoc approach of padding the series with a continuation of the trend over the past 1/2 filter width.
The routine returns the mean square error of the smooth with respect to the raw data. It
is reasonable to argue that the minimum mse solution is the preferable one. In the
particular example I have chosen (attached), a 40 year lowpass filtering of the CRU NH
annual mean series 1856-2003, the preference is indicated for the “minimum roughness”
solution as indicated in the plot (though the minimum slope solution is a close 2nd)…
By the way, you may notice that the smooth is effected beyond a single filter width of
the boundary. That’s because of spectral leakage, which is unavoidable (though minimized
by e.g. multiple-taper methods).
I’m hoping this provides some food for thought/discussion, esp. for purposes of IPCC…
mike
After reading from these same people, how well funded “right-wing” skeptics with ties to industry are so biased, to read that reflection of a trend at the end of a hockey stick “might” be proper science is a little difficult to swallow. Don’t forget that this is a 2003 email, and we now know that temps have stayed relatively flat since then. The reflection Mr. Mann proposed, is therefore ad-hoc, and can now be proven inaccurate.
In the end, today’s reading was 99.9 percent review of just how loose a game is being played. It shouldn’t be overlooked that the purpose of the enzyte filter Dr. Mike proposed is for publishing in the premier global warming report of all time.
Steve McIntyre has a nice post up which I missed for 4 days. He is very good. Imagine the work it takes to go to AGU, sit through a Mann lecture expecting bad graphs to be used and be ready with a camera.
Hell, even if I had the time, I sure as shit wouldn’t spend it that way, but look at the brilliant post it made. The fakery of climate advocacy in full view again.
Despite my last post, apparently the fake science still gets me wound up [grammar improved]. Mann literally avoided showing measured temperature data in his graphs on models vs observation when describing predictions of global “temperature” trend. Climate science, truncating climate records again, all for the cause. Now that is scientifically IN-credible!!!
Were the rest of the team a little smarter, they would excise the cancer now because if the danger is so real, they cannot afford false exaggeration. Of course they won’t, and it is good news for us because if team Mann didn’t exist, skeptics of global doom would be forced to invent them…… Lewandowsky would then be forced to publish…. well the same old garbage he always does.
—-
When did it become unreasonable to discount imminent global destruction anyway?
I am having a hard time generating the will to write as of late. It didn’t use to be that way. I used to get really upset when I read some alarmist garbage or other, all pushing the same fake lines of global doom. Now there is so much progressive propaganda in the global environment, (yes it has increased dramatically) I spend most of my time being upset about other things stupid and climate alarmism is just a symptom of the much broader disease. Just look across the various localities of the world and you can see the result of leftist progressivism. Heck, you can see it on a state by state, or even city by city basis.
Craig Loehle wrote a nice article which sums up my thoughts reasonably well at WUWT. He refers to alarmism in terms of categorical thinking. Basically making the point that alarmists as a whole do not critically challenge the fact that warming is automatically a disaster. They see all change to the environment as unnatural and therefore universally bad. He notes that alarmists cannot separate climate change from negative change:
It is irrelevant how much we have changed it, we have changed the state, like spitting into the swimming pool makes everyone get out. The climate is now broken. And with a broken, human-altered climate, anything is possible, even super storms (which we can conveniently create by naming them such). It doesn’t matter if we only changed it a trivial amount, we’ve ruined the Garden of Eden with our sinful ways.
I don’t see it as categorical thinking, as described by Dr. Loehle, perhaps I’m wrong, but I do see it as feel-think. Our world has become so messed up with everything-is-equal-progressivism that feelings have replaced logic. It is no small irony that progressivism is nothing new, it holds the key features of the most repressive governments on the planet yet re-branded and resold, people think feel they are doing something new. Something less dangerous and deserving of a new brand. Handing massive power to the central government, stealing money from economic creators and handling it for redistribution, always corrupts. Political favorites are being paid off in droves with tax money by Obama’s administration, yet progressives feel it is good to pay off anti-business unions and green companies, so it isn’t a problem.
I listened to a breakdown of a group of voters commenting on a couple of speeches delivered and the host asked the individuals what they thought about different aspects of the speakers. Several of them ‘felt’ that one person was more honest, so that person got their support. The youngest man in the audience based his entire opinion on how he felt, his answer was flat stupid but he justified it by feelings on honesty of the speaker, not logic.
Besides the fact that I disagreed with him and that his reply was entirely ignorant, answering in that manner seemed fully reasonable to him. Worse, nobody in the audience seemed bothered by it.
Feelings are not logic.
We should help the poor by giving them money. If they can’t find a job, we should support them long term on welfare. While these are noble ideas which make everyone feel good, they neglect the long term result that people will often not try to do anything with themselves if they don’t have to. Through generations of these policies we have created a culture of unemployable people who will never create a thing for this world. Fifty percent unemployment in Detroit is a direct result of hard-left Obamaesque policies. Take the money from the rich, they have a lot more than me, fails to recognize that there is a negative impact on other peoples jobs for that. Guns kill people, take the guns away! It feels good, yet the fact that criminals aren’t concerned with laws, is not incorporated into the feeling.
The problem is far deeper than that though. We have an administration which has ignored the constitution, bent the rules, and done a huge variety of things outside of the legal structure of this country. There is very little we can do to stop the erosion of our constitution under this regime. The EPA is completely out of control, as is employment law interpretation. The left makes little sound because they “feel” that the laws are helpful to the people. Besides missing the hugely negative impacts of these policies on businesses and individual rights, they flatly fail to consider what the next person will do with that wildly expanded power.
Fracking is bad, because they feel it and windmills are good, for the same reason. It doesn’t matter one lick that windmill production has trashed huge areas of China’s land, nor does it matter that there have been no serious impacts from natural gas production. No consideration is given to positive effects of the much cleaner burning natural gas just as Nuclear power is a bad word no matter what the context.
All of these thoughts by the liberals are flatly wrong. Feeling is an important part of being human, but in an adult society, it cannot replace logic.
I predicted a strong economic spring despite the tax increases. Most liberals have already taken that feeling and internalized it into the category of more taxes are ok. They feel it because they see the weakly positive sounding news, in the same general time frame as the tax increases. It won’t matter that the true effect on the economy is the difference of where we are to where we would have been without the taxes. It also won’t matter that the economy slows in a year (I’m not predicting that), because the feelings already happened. They feel it is ok.
The first 6 hours of my day are spent working to send money to the government so that it can be redistributed to those who support feeling based thought, while they sit on their couches watch their government paid big-screen TV’s and collect checks. I’m allowed to make money with the last 4. How would that make you feel.. I just got off the phone with one of our suppliers at 8pm and I went to work at 6 am today. That is a normal day for me.
Until we grow up as people, stop pretending that fingers are firearms and giving a ribbon to everyone win or lose, the disease will grow progressively worse. The examples are endless, and frustrating for those of us who rely on our minds for making determinations rather than our feelings.
So it is hard for me to give a crap about climate change. I miss the data and the constant puzzles handed out by advocates pretending to be scientists, so it will be fun to go back. In the meantime, I’m a grumpy business owner who can’t afford to operate by feeling and who is being robbed by ignorant people with negative “feelings” toward businesses which feed them.
As you can tell, I have been very busy lately. I still have been lurking the same blogs and reading the comment threads so my time isn’t quite reduced to zero. Recently, an article came out regarding some Ohio State researchers who claimed to have invented a process to burn coal and emit no CO2. You don’t need to have a lot of chemical engineering chops to be skeptical of a process like that but I was interested enough to investigate it. Articles with headlines like this were common so it sounded like real progress toward retarding the global warming aspect of the pending progressive economic suicide:
Of course every every news source I found made the fundamental assumption that CO2 emission (plant food) is actually hurting something. Plenty of readers here agree with that premise, however I don’t see any evidence for that claim. The mere fact that CO2 can alter climate, does not preclude the possibility that the climate for our existence can improve. This is beside the point though, a true zero emission technology is hard to argue against in our feelings-are-equal-to-logic world, and if it gets people moving in the right economic direction, I’m on board too.
Note that the resulting process on the bottom line looks very similar to the old fashioned process of actually burning coal in a fire pit. In fact, it is exactly the same, so it leaves one wondering just what “scheme” these people have invented.
This rather convoluted process has at least two advantages. It produces a pure stream of carbon dioxide that’s easy to capture and ready to be stored underground. And the burning of iron in air also takes place at lower temperatures that don’t produce nitrogen oxide.
So what we have is a process which uses Iron oxide (rust) to transport oxygen to pulverized coal. The Iron is then re-rusted with air, to recycle the material and burn more coal. The process happens slower than simply pumping air through coal so the material burns slower and the scientists separate the CO2 from the water rather than dropping it all into the sky. In a nutshell, rather than some great technological leap forward, the process is a convoluted way to transport the oxygen to burning coal. I can’t find anything of revolutionary properties that cannot already be achieved with other technologies. Separating gasses from the H20 in the emission stream of a standard coal plant and compressing it into a tank, is not technologically challenging. The emission fraction of CO2 from a standard coal plant is already 99ish percent and if you are putting the Co2 gas into a tank, why not put all of it except the water into it? Other technologies already produce a more pure CO2 stream than most coal plants (if that is actually important) and do it at a high temperature more standard process.
One would think this would be a near non-story but this isn’t a world where logic trumps sensationalism. There was plenty of money spent on it though.
The government has invested over 3 million and coal/oil companies have invested hundreds of thousands, and both of these groups have direct knowledge that the project cannot actually be successful because it doesn’t address what to do with the carbon dioxide. Worse, the reduced efficiency to capture, grind and separate the CO2, it actually produces MORE CO2 per watt than standard coal plants. I suppose that since there aren’t any good alternatives for investing green money, they have to dump the cash somewhere. It is really too bad that the givernment is stealing it from me in huge wads first, because I could have actually done something with that cash.
You would think that the project would stop there until we had a place to actually put the CO2. The scientists have shown the capability to burn stuff this way but we have nowhere to put the stupid compressed CO2 gas. That isn’t how the left thinks feels. Instead, our glorious economic superiors are “investing” confiscated money toward actually implementing powerplants with this technology.
It is unfortunate that we have to look to Hollywood for an explanation of anything, but South Park probably has the most apt description of these particular “clean burning” zero emission technologies:
So Dr. Lewandowsky did it again. He, and his coauthors, falsely used my name in order to support some kind of psychology paper on climate skeptic bloggers titled – “Recursive fury: Conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation.” There were a lot of false (and funny) claims against bloggers on the internet, however, the Lewandowsky team chose to again single out my name in particular regarding specific false attributions of beliefs regarding the global temperature record. Readers will recall that in his previous contributions to scientific understanding, Lewandowsky et al. had made the claim:
and climate deniers believe that temperature records have been illegitimately adjusted to exaggerate warming (e.g., Condon, 2009).
Being surprised at the accusation, I pointed out in multiple emails to Dr. Lewandowsky that the Air Vent blog has published many articles using those exact records (here for instance) both on line and in peer-reviewed literature and no such claim regarding global temperature had ever been made by me. I have even created on-line global temperature results which have been compared favorably to many of the professionally funded series by others publishing global temperature series for climate science. A short chain of emails ensued where I explained in detail how my scientific positions have never supported his accusation. After a short while, with no hope of resolution, I was forced to go directly to the editor of Psychological Science, who eventually agreed to remove the citation.
Dr. Lewandowsky has agreed to remove your citation not because it was misleading–he does not believe it was–but because I think it is best replaced by a source other than a blog post. Any other blog post cited in the manuscript is also being replaced, for the same reason. … Eric Eich
Like pulling teeth right?
Humorously, the Air Vent was the single blog which made the citation list. I am not a naturally vindictive person so I took the editor at his word and let the matter rest. I have not had time to follow through as to whether the citation removal was completed, however Stephan Lewandowsky has continued to link to the unpublished original, University of Western Australia hosted, libelous document.
It seems that Lewandowsky is apparently less forgiving than I have been. He recently published a new paper based on blog reactions to his previous scientific breakthrough. This new paper astoundingly contained an even less supportable claim:
“Conspiracist ideation is arguably particularly prominent on climate blogs, such as when expressing the belief that temperature records show warming only because of systematic adjustments (e.g., Condon, 2009) …..”
My bold!
I would link to the paper, except that his new editors were far more rational than Eric Eich, and on notification, have simply removed the paper from publication. They have additionally agreed to remove the false reference before any publication continues. Original link here. I am impressed with the quality of the Frontiers in Psychology Journal response, and hopefully Lewandowsky will now let the unfounded personal attacks rest.
As Dr. Lewandowsky and his team were aware, the conspiracy claims against me regarding the adjustment of temperature records were unsupported. This is was a psychology paper of which I am at least an “alleged” subject. A misrepresented data point, like so many other bloggers, who’s identity was unethically revealed. Since I did originally take the time to inform Lewandowsky of my actual opinions on temperature records, and since he was fully aware that the article in question did not support his claims, it is my opinion that Lewandwosky and his coauthors intentionally introduced false data into a peer-reviewed paper. Ironically for a paper on conspiracy ideation based on others (read non-authors) pre-conceived bias, the authors scientifically irrational accusations were completely unnecessary to the point their paper purports to make…..
.. unless one believes in the Lewandowsky conspiracy.
I have been receiving emails from the authors of the condensation driven wind theory for several days now as they have published a new paper. Since I have no time whatsoever, I haven’t even read their latest work.
When a climate scientist claims that 2 + 2 =5 and the rest of the scientists tell them it doesn’t, CS turns a blind eye. Michael Mann’s hokey stick nonsense drives those of us who actually read math completely wild. When they add extreme need for compulsory planet wide behavioral change to correct for the new fact that 2 + 2 = 5, those of us who read math are unimpressed. Adding the even less convincing concept that “5″ is really bad for your health, education, economic success etc., leaves the ordinarily math-competent individual in a ball of confused tears ;D
However, even in today’s science 2 + 2 does still approximately equal 4, and despite the dragon slayers best efforts, that is more than zero.
Based on this reasoned logic, Tom Fuller has started a new blog based on a lukewarmer’s perspective. Tom is an excellent writer and it is worth checking out.
—-
On lukewarmer status. I still cannot accept my card, not that I would not be happy to. From my perspective, it would be comforting to accept a middle ground on the matter of climate science. Who doesn’t like fresh air or happy non-threatening wildlife? As this blog has endlessly beaten to death, I agree with all of the premise of CO2 warming, I agree that the “recent” data leads to the middle ground, but I’m not convinced that warming won’t actually be greater than the low trends thermometers have been measuring. I’m also not convinced that long term trends won’t be less than we are measuring. So my Id is still stuck without a home, however, were I to bet $1000, I would put it on Tom’s side. Climate does seem to me to have a middle ground with far less damage or consequence than the IPCC has presented, and it looks like GOD might just be putting his thousand bucks on being a lukewarmer as well.
On another subject, we bought a 360 HP Taurus SHO with an eco-boost engine this fall for my wife. At 18 MPG, it is a bit more “boost” than “eco”. Our company has a huge parking lot which is “private property” for me, so I have had a bit of fun over the past several months. I’ve read of some of the extremist climate goofs not lighting pilot lights on their water heaters and not taking showers every day. I wonder if the stinky geniuses would agree that since I am owner of a “green” company that saves more CO2 than they ever will, that it’s ok for me to spend a little extra on fuel…! haha.
Ex-spurt is a commonly misunderstood term. The true definition of Ex-spurt is, “A drip under pressure”, or perhaps in past tense form, “a drop under pressure.” Often an ex-drip will self-identify as a spurt, but on closer examination he is really just a drip. Reader (Alan D McIntire) left a link on the Yellow Science thread, to a “scientific” paper written by this latter sort of expert, which is a rather humorous contribution to science. The paper was message-motivated its conception, but the inspiration to write this post came from the machinations the authors exhibited in trying to rationalize the unfortunate data they collected.
Dan M. Kahan is the main author of the “work” which employs statistical techniques to interpret a questionnaire. Anyone can critique a question, and many readers of the technical climate blogs do, but the reasoned questioning of a stupid question makes me glaze over so that is not the topic of this post. What is interesting is that the authors really attempted to discern why the public has expressed such a wide rejection of “climate science™” in the face of the “National Academy of Science”, and how better to communicate their (the authors) own beliefs.
The paper uses a lot of obtuse language which will dissuade most casual readers from actually parsing the intent. Psychology is likely to be a permanently soft science due to the difficulty and occasional unwillingness to define well qualified, limiting parameters for statistical tests. This is the central reason that psychology has never actually achieved the true “gold star” rating of physics. There is simply too much room in the field for opinion to interpret weakly fulcrumed data. e.g. you write a question which intends to differentiate subjects and then interpret the question with complex statistics. The actual result of both the question and the statistics are beyond most human scientists abilities to interpret, but that doesn’t stop any of us.
Meh…
Reality doesn’t change funding, the authors note states:
Authors’ Note. Research for this paper was funded by the National Science Foundation, Grant SES 0922714.
The abstract begins:
The conventional explanation for controversy over climate change emphasizes impediments to public understanding: limited popular knowledge of science, the inability of ordinary citizens to assess technical information, and the resulting widespread use of unreliable cognitive heuristics to assess risk.
Translation:
The people which the authors regularly associate with state that skepticism of climate change alarmism is rooted in misunderstanding of science, inability to access the technical results mentally, and the general stupidity of the population.
The rest of the abstract indicates quite obtusely when the “science” ends and the activism begins:
On the whole, the most scientifically literate and numerate subjects were slightly less likely, not more, to see climate change as a serious threat than the least scientifically literate and numerate ones. More importantly, greater scientific literacy and numeracy were associated with greater cultural polarization: Respondents predisposed by their values to dismiss climate change evidence became more dismissive, and those predisposed by their values to credit such evidence more concerned, as science literacy and numeracy increased. We suggest that this evidence reflects a conflict between two levels of rationality: The individual level, which is characterized by citizens’ effective use of their knowledge and reasoning capacities to form risk perceptions that express their cultural commitments; and the collective level, which is characterized by citizens’ failure to converge on the best available scientific evidence on how to promote their common welfare. Dispelling this, “tragedy of the risk-perception commons,” we argue, should be understood as the central aim of the science of science communication.
Translation:
Those who understand science and math, are less likely to see climate change as a serious threat to their existence, but those who are predisposed by their “values” to reject climate science, have a stronger correlation to rejection of science. The authors “suggest” that the subjects lack of rationality is caused by cultural commitments which override reason. The individual understands the collective need, yet overrides it with individual interest.
Old song eh?
I do love that song. But why does the increased rejection of a conclusion by “cultural rationale” make any point regarding the rejection by scientifically literate individuals? Culture and reason are uncorrelated by definition. To those of us who value data over result, the fact that the correlation is higher for cultural rejection of climate science, has literally zero influence on the scientific rejection of the same. Still, the current bed-wetting phase of psychological science allows plenty of room for motivated, sophistic, discussion as to why people make decisions that others, particularly authors, don’t agree with.
The “irrationality” of every human are defined in the paper as:
But an even more fundamental objective is to advance a more precise diagnosis of the kind of irrationality that afflicts public deliberations on climate change. “Irrationality” describes a state of antagonism between an agent’s goals and the decision-making capacities that the agent uses to attain them.
So, in climate science, “public deliberations” are some kind of irrationality…. Because an agent’s goals don’t match the authors “expected” results.
The meat of the paper is shown in the following sets of graphs:
Interesting that the more adept a person is in science and math, the less likely they are to agree with climate change! A similar result was found for nuclear power as well:
The more educated people are, the less worried they are about nuclear power. The problem the authors have though is that they cannot understand how education on climate change results in less concern. They don’t seem to suffer the same personal disdain regarding nuclear power, but the issues discussed in this paper were comprised entirely of current US liberal (egalitarian-communitarian) hot-button topics. On reading, it is no stretch to assume that these are the issues which the authors deem important concerns for society.
The cultural cognition theory also generates a testable prediction. This theory posits that persons who subscribe to a “hierarchical, individualistic” worldview—one that simultaneously ties authority to conspicuous social rankings and eschews collective interference with the decisions made by individuals possessed of such authority—can be expected to be skeptical of claims of environmental and technologi-cal risks. Such people, according to the theory, intuitively perceive that widespread acceptance of such claims would license restrictions on commerce and industry, forms of behavior that Hierarchical Indivi-dualists value. In contrast, persons who hold an “egalitarian, communitarian” worldview—one that favors less regimented forms of social organization and greater collective attention to securing individual needs—tend to be morally suspicious of commerce and industry, which they see as the source of unjust disparities in wealth and power. They therefore find it congenial, the theory posits, to see those forms of behavior as dangerous and thus worthy of restriction. On this view, then, we should expect Egalitarian Communitarians to be more concerned than Hierarchical Individualists with climate change risks (Doug-las & Wildavsky 1982).
The authors point out here that politics affects peoples opinion to a greater degree than education. However, in the near standard circular-reasoning mode of soft-science, the authors imply the correct answer for both the nuclear and the climate change cases, and generate conclusions from there. They fail to notice how their own bias affects their conclusions. For instance, climate change:
The result is the failure of the public—or at least a large propor-tion of it—to form the views of climate change risk held among more knowledgeable, dispassionate ex-perts (Weber & Stern 2011).
We will call this position the “public irrationality thesis” or “PIT.” Our claim is that PIT is con-trary to empirical evidence of who believes what about climate change.
And on nuclear:
This result is arguably consistent with PIT. Historically, members of the public have been understood to be more concerned about nuclear power than they should be based on the best available scientific evidence. If, consistent with PIT, we attribute the public’s view to deficits in reason, then we should expect to see concern with nuclear power risks abate as science literacy and numeracy increases.
So the authors are self-certain that the graphs above mean that the smart people got Nuclear power more right, but climate change wrong.
Unfortunately, this is absolutely a climate change activist paper, we shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking anything else of it. It also has a strong communitarian leaning. The concept of it is entirely centered around using psychology to empower science to act on our behalf and direct the public as they see fit. Irrational decision making based on political views are fingered as the culprit for the publics “incorrect” decisions on climate change.
The authors of the paper do make some good points of course but again, nothing which jeopardizes the authors intent. The following paragraph correctly notes the anti-industrial stance of the “communicators”, the fake carbon-emission limit “solutions” but again blames only misunderstanding and misinterpretation of the science based on non-communitarian political views for the disagreement.
In fact, such inattention can deepen polarization. Citizens who hold hierarchical and individualis-tic values discount scientific information about climate change in part because they associate the issue with antagonism to commerce and industry. That association is aggravated when a communication identi-fies carbon-emission limits as the exclusive policy remedy for climate change (Kahan in press). Individu-als are prone to interpret challenges to beliefs that predominate with their cultural community as assaults on the competence of those whom they trust and look to for guidance (Kahan, Braman, Cohen, Gastil & Slovic 2010). That implication—which naturally provokes resistance—is likely to be strengthened when communicators with a recognizable cultural identity stridently accuse those who disagree with them of lacking intelligence or integrity.
I Believe that in their humorous machinations on irrational decision making, the authors have missed a simpler alternate explanation that happens to fit their own data better.
Negative slope of the risk with increased education.
This means that the generally dumber people see nuclear power and climate change as more risky. Sorry dumb people! The smarter people, who didn’t need much education to answer the brain-sorting questions, see it as less risk (slightly). To be fair to the study, there is an extreme bifurcation of risk in climate change between the individualistic and the communistic groups. This large-scale bifurcation of risk assessment on climate change, combined with a negative overall slope WRT education, is not an insignificant fact and the huge differential of opinion is not satisfactorily explained by the authors.
My explanation is that the smart people are more right……
Genius!
Climate change science is a self-sorted group of communitarian personalities, funded by government with a strong belief that they know best for society. Of interest to me was that general climate science results and beliefs, are at the extreme end of the data collected in this paper. The dangers are systematically exaggerated, and their solutions to the problems posited are singularly anti-industrial. Additionally, these authors made the false claim that the climate scientists are the least-emotional and biased source. A brief review of the general public behavior of climate scientists as well as private emails, indicates that fact the opposite is true. You don’t hide the decline, if you aren’t interested in a particular result.
It takes little imagination to understand that communitarian personalities see climate change as their best chance to enact global changes to energy and governance. Backing this point up, there is substantial evidence that their decision process is based heavily on emotion. For example, we know low-energy density technologies like biofuels, wind and solar don’t do anything to solve the “scientific problem” yet viable high-output technologies like nuclear and natural gas are held back by the same people. These are examples of “feel good” science. All of these examples point directly and singularly to rationality of decisions for political gain by the anti-industrial communitarians.
Let’s look briefly at how this alternate conclusion has explained the data in the paper. Climate risk is being heavily exaggerated by the climate science community as evidenced by their opinions being on the extreme end of the collected data, and smart recognize it. Communitarians, also at the extreme end of the spectrum, emotionally approve of the result and see the advantage of the argument which they help exaggerate to their own perceived benefit. Individualists look at the same data, recognize that climate science has NOT made an adequate case for any danger whatsoever, and further recognize that the political goals of the science are highly-destructive to their economic well-being. Logically, the individualist still sees the lack of an adequate argument as still having some risk associated with it.
We shouldn’t forget that there isn’t a single piece of evidence that anyone has been hurt by global warming — anywhere — ever. We are often told the opposite is true by the communitarian scientific thinkers, against all evidence. Hurricanes, drought, shrinking fish, sheep etc… All fake results today, which may start to show trends in the future. In the case of nuclear energy, the communitarian groups have consistently and dramatically overestimated risk. The situation is so bad that all nuclear is lumped together into a single concept completely ignoring the realities of differing technologies. To me the anti-nuclear people are completely delusional, and some even express concern about the nuclear pollution of space! Dumber than hell in my opinion. Still there is less political advantage to be had in fighting nuclear power than fighting for climate change “solutions”, and the two groups in Figure 2 above are much closer in conclusion.
So there you have it, an explanation for the authors results which requires zero irrational thought on anyone’s behalf. It explains the huge discrepancy between the different political viewpoints on climate change, without resorting to making decisions that are not in their own best interest. It also employs the fact that “climate science™” sits at the extreme end of the risk spectrum, despite having literally zero evidence of any damage to date and substantial evidence of models running too hot. It does all that while providing a rationale for political bifurcation on nuclear power being closer together than climate.
Adding irrationality to explain why people don’t converge on the most extreme end of climate change opinion, makes no sense whatsoever, and shows a form of irrationality by the authors of this paper. A loose and irrational(adjective) variable called “irrationality”, added to a paper to create a perceived data fit, without messing up the authors world-view.
And this concludes another episode of communitarian climate change insanity brought to you by the “experts” of the crazy world we live in.
Reader Skiphil has left a link to some incredible commentary by our good friend Stephan Lewandowski who apparently holds a PhD in bovine scatology. There is nothing wrong with being educated in scatology, however, Stephan’s propensity to practice his chosen craft publicly leaves one wondering if anyone actually believes his nonsense. Still, the Journal of Psychology took the time to interview this obviously dimwitted man, and then publish his answers under the guise of “observations”. What grabs my attention about his (and his coauthors) “work” is the delusional self-referencing that the paper and commentary glosses right over. The full paper is linked here.
The gist of the paper, which must seem complicated to the authors, is that information repeated, is assimilated better than information that is not. Also, information which “makes sense” to you, is more likely to be accepted by you. Haha… who would have guessed. Unfortunately, they took this basic concept of psychology and turned it into a highly biased political article which tells us more about the authors than about the population they allege to study.
From his interview:
Your paper indicates that social networking is a contributor to misinformation. Do you think that social media can also act to counter misinformation?
In principle, yes. And indeed there are some terrific science blogs with large numbers of twitter followers (e.g., skepticalscience.com) that have made it their mission to combat misinformation in specific arenas, such as climate science.
Now we all know that Skeptical Science is nothing but a political propaganda outlet designed to attack any reasoned discussion on global warming, which doesn’t support the alarmist agenda. Not just the science, but the agenda, and like politicians “helping the poor”, the blog’s name has nothing to do with its intent.
Do mainstream media outlets care about retracting misinformation?
In my experience, sadly, not always. Some media outlets are better than others, but in my experience some media outlets act quite irresponsibly with far-reaching consequences: There is fairly good data to suggest that, overall, viewers of Fox News are the most misinformed across a range of crucial issues whereas listeners of National Public Radio are the least misinformed.
It seems to me that in the past year this sort of commentary on Fox News being a disinformation outlet has become a commonly repeated theme in the leftist dialog. Although, I get my news from all sources, I strongly disagree with Stephan’s claim because Fox is the only source which doesn’t require a full blown dissection to remove the biased nonsense, not that some parsing isn’t required. Each time I watch/listen to a leftist news outlet like CNN, ABC, NBC, MSNBC, CBS, or National Public Radio, I hear literally dozens of twists and half-truths and it leaves me wondering just what kind of uneducated people don’t recognize that they are being repeatedly lied to. Compound that with the nearly 100% leftist print media, and the entire globe is saturated with repeated left-wing dogma. Hell, China state news is more conservative than the New York Times. So then Lewandowsky, with obviously extreme political views, writes that Fox news viewers are misinformed, in a paper which purports to be analyzing the difference between reality and endlessly repeated misinformation. It is a funny world when lies have changed places with truth even in science. It has become a modern fact that yellow journalism is empowering yellow science, and to me the government/media/science collaboration can only lead only to very bad places.
The paper is rife with similar points for which their veracity can be discussed ad-naseum:
In one study, retractions of nonfictitious misperceptions (e.g., the mistaken belief that President Bush’s tax cuts in the early 2000s had increased revenues; the idea that there were WMDs in Iraq) were effective only among people whose political orientation was supported by the retraction (Nyhan & Reifler, 2010). When the corrections were worldview-dissonant (in this case, for Republican participants), a “backfire” effect was observed, such that participants became more committed to the misinformation.
I mean, isn’t the issue of taxation/revenue more complicated than a snapshot statement. After all, the economy lags any impetus by some amount of time. Bush inherited a recession, so the question becomes did the tax cuts create more revenue than the government would have received from the point they were enacted to the far future, not whether they immediately gained more. Still, it is stated here as though lost revenue from tax cuts were fact. It is a true irony that this “fact” of lost revenue is heavily repeated in left-wing media outlets and comports with the authors worldview. While the revenue of the federal government shows an initial drop in the 9-11 recession (blue line below), they quickly rose upward until the 2008 recession. Certainly, this alleged “fact” deserves some proper discussion, yet it is presented as a known reality in their paper. What’s worse is that economics are also polluted by the same “cash for results” feedback which exists in climate science. More economic tax papers are blatantly leftist than neutral or conservative, and like Steig’s Antarctic work, it is not because of their superior accuracy.
Lewandowsky’s left-saturated mental state seems to penetrate every aspect of his thoughts.
Is there a correlation between misinformation and education?
Not necessarily. In fact, when it comes to global-warming misinformation, there are data to suggest that education can have an ironic effect. Specifically, for Republicans, increasing education translates into a decreasing concern with climate change and a greater willingness to accept misinformation over the true state of the science—so worldview trumps facts, and education can increase that disparity.
This paper is chock full of half-truths and blatant falshoods. I compare it to a MSNBC report on climate change or listening to an Obama speech on gun control. To read it properly, you must check every sentence for accuracy or exaggerated meaning. For example:
Similarly, people who oppose climate science because it challenges their worldview may do so less if the response to climate change is presented as a business opportunity for the nuclear industry (cf. Feygina, Jost, & Goldsmith, 2010). Even simple changes in wording can make information more acceptable by rendering it less threatening to a person’s worldview. For example, Republicans are far more likely to accept an otherwise identical charge as a “carbon offset” than as a “tax,” whereas the wording has little effect on Democrats or Independents (whose values are not challenged by the word “tax”; Hardisty, Johnson, & Weber, 2010).
So the first sentence indicates that most people who understand the really obvious anti-industrial bias in climate science, and further recognize that the proposed “green” solutions are malarkey, also recognize that nuclear energy is the only economically and physically functional improvement we can technologically do that can even dent the issue. Lewie twists it into something else entirely. The second sentence indicates to me that either that the language in the questionnaire tricked some people, or the study is statistically biased as government funded left-wing studies so often are. Yellow science stated as fact.
For other examples of the disease penetrating government science, Obama is about to legislate more funding for gun control studies. Does anyone really question whether these government funded studies will garner more left-wing authors than conservatives or what these studies will conclude? How many will tweak the stats, and how many citations will they get from Lewandowsky? The same is true for the fake second hand smoke studies which have been repeated so often that left-saturated people like Madonnna flip out on stage at the sight of a cigarette. These ideologically saturated actors and musicians do heavy street drugs, yet are panicked about second-hand smoke at a distance! All caused by government funded yellow science.
I like to make controversial statements here, in case you didn’t notice, so I’ll add another. The yellow journalsim, misinformation and yellow science are far more prevalent in the left-wing agenda than the conservative. This fact occurs just for the reason stated in Lewandowsky’s paper. The leftist-version of “facts” are repeated over and over in the global media so often that they cannot be escaped by the public and retractions are not even considered. Higher tax = more revenue, business = anti-little guy, global warming = doom, etc… Additionally, their thought process is based on central government control of every aspect of the population empowered politicians are the beneficiaries of the groupthink and are all too happy to provide funding for more of the same. It is an obvious feedback loop which I don’t expect we can escape from easily. In my opinion, Lewandowsky is just an unknowing halfwitted cog in the human grinding machine. The function of his cog to use taxpayer money to create yellow science that promotes the left-wing central planning agenda.
Tom Fuller and I have always had a cordial relationship despite the fact that his politics are Pelosi-left. He left a comment on the last thread in relation to taxes and the deficit which depicts exactly how the left-wing media is trying to portray our current debt situation. While he is refreshingly honest in his beliefs, they do not match objective reality.
Hiya Jeff (and all…)
If I can focus first on the debt argument here, I must say I am not at all worried by American levels of public debt.
Our debt has been higher in the past as a percentage of GDP, which is the only sane metric to use. The people who are lending us money are in line to do so. They have more confidence in our ability and intention to pay than maybe you do. They like us so much they’re willing to lend us money at effectively zero interest.
If America were a ‘household’, its debt would be considered very manageable–a bit more than 100% of annual income. Anybody reading this who has a mortgage may well hold a much higher percentage of debt.
What worries me is that our obligations are set to grow dramatically, to help seniors stay out of poverty and get some sort of medical care. That is why I am not overly upset at taxes returning to levels last seen during the Clinton administration, when we managed to grow the economy quite well, even with taxes at a respectable level.
We’ve had much higher debt in the past and done just fine. We’ve had much higher taxes in the past and done just fine. We have problems ahead that we need to prepare for–but we can and we will.
Happy New Year!
On Taxes
Now the only time in history that debt hit a higher percentage of GDP in the US was in WW2. I like this first graph because it doesn’t try to blame one party or the other for spending but it does show how serious the situation is in recent years. Everyone likes to hate Bush Jr. because that is what is popular today, but unlike most people, my beef with him was that he didn’t fight congress enough on spending. You can see that as a percentage of GDP, he barely tweaked the debt level until the last two years of his presidency when the Democrats controlled two branches of government and massive spending bills were passed under the false guise of “saving the economy”. The 2012 point at the end of the graph is an out-of-date estimate.
So when you look at that plot, the only time we had a debt level this high was when we were in the middle of a world war. Not just an ordinary little war, a world-wide battle for our lives.
The next graph shows the continual cancer-like growth of the largest and most powerful government in world history as a percentage of its populations Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Note that the plot is of “total government receipts” rather than the receipts from income tax so popular in leftist newspapers. Receipts from income tax have remained flat, and the media continually confuses its audiences with this tax fact that represents a small fraction of the picture. Total government receipts, is the Federal-only tax load on the economy in dollars, and does not include State taxes. When discussing historic tax levels, this is the majority of the real tax that you should be looking at, as these are the actual tax dollars being sucked out of the “free market” by our “limited” central government.
Tom wrote – “We’ve had much higher taxes in the past and done just fine.”. While his opinion that taxes were “much higher”, is an admittedly widely held belief, it is flatly incorrect. The total governmental tax load on the US economy is the highest it has been in history, and as Tom pointed out, the future load already put into law is much greater.
So the next time you hear that US taxes were much higher in the past….
Now there are a number of countries with higher receipts as a percentage of GDP than this, that the left likes to use as examples. However, these countries are either very much business repressed or in unusual economic circumstances like Denmark experiences, where exports provide the funding to allow a relatively successful left-wing society on a very tiny scale. I like the Denmark example because its often used as a counter example to a US style of government, yet it is comprised of 5 million people who are ironically dependent on oil and gas for their funding. There is nothing wrong with that in my opinion, but it cannot be scaled to function here as the amount of gas and oil required to support the same system for 300 million people would quite literally “flood” the market. You might even need an actual boat! We also have that little problem that the left seems to think CO2 emissions are killing the planet so instead of moving forward with common sense production of gas, there is great resistance to it.
On Causes
I like this next graph taken from usgovernmentrevenue.com. It depicts several of the primary sources of income for the US governement and you can see fairly clearly where the increases in figure 2 above come from.
The blue line is total revenue, red indicates income taxes, green is business and other revenue, gray is ad valorum (property tax), and yellow is social security/medicare tax. Now we often look at the volatility of a timeseries while studying climate here, note the extreme fluctuations at the most recent end of the graph. These are caused by dynamics in the economy as the government borrows and spends to try and prop up our over-taxed free market economy. Notice the business and income taxes are the lines which create the recent short term variability in the total, not the social tax, and not the property tax. These taxes are profit based tax, rather than asset based. This fluctuation represents extreme losses of income in the private sector (loss of profitability). This income loss was unequivocally created by government loads on the economy which come in all forms. e.g. People like to say the housing “bubble” was the cause in 2008, but providing housing to those who couldn’t afford it, was just one of the many government loads created nearly exclusively by the Democrat party in the interest of fairness. Of course there are other examples as well but that one is a pet-peeve of mine.
One theme here is that ever-tightening regulations are also taxes on the economy. These costs are true and real expenditures from business (taxes), and real checks are written to pay for them, yet the increases in cost are not shown in the plot above. These costs should not be ignored lightly but are difficult to quantify as they are not easily tracked. I find that today’s anti-industry climate makes the Democratic party completely deaf to the consequences of these realities, and while we are about to experience them in very clear and unfortunate economic terms over the coming decades, the yellow journalism of today will not discuss the problem.
On Debt
So now that we have figured out that taxes as a percentage of the US economy have never been higher, let’s look at the total government debt. Tom wrote, “We’ve had much higher debt in the past and done just fine.” This seems reasonable at first glance but let’s look a little closer at figure 1. In World War II, the US debt skyrocketed over 4 years from 52 percent to 121 percent of GDP. This expenditure was massive and I think even most Germans of today would admit it was necessary. Reading an expanded view of the graph, the WWII expenses took 16 years under a booming economy to pay them off to pre-war levels. Our net government revenue at the time was under 25% of GDP, and the hidden social/regulatory costs to operate a business were far lower than today.
So in reality, we paid much less tax in the 50′s than today and it took over a decade to recover from the WWII expenditure in a booming economy. To me this indicates that Tom is right, we can recover from our current debt, yet in order to do it we have to bring government spending, anti-business regulations and taxation down dramatically. If we don’t reduce business regulation, the same government revenue means that you have a hidden net-higher rate than a numerically comparable rate in history.
Let’s look again at Figure 3 above to see if we can tell what is responsible for our currently massive tax levels. After WWII, income taxes were increased dramatically. Overall tax rates were low enough that the economy continued to grow, yet this is the time when Social Security programs were enacted. Social Security was a liberal social program designed with the best intention and the yellow line represents the tax level for social security as a percentage of GDP. What I notice is a continued growth of social security income to nearly ten percent of the total economy before 1990. Visually this represents the majority of the federal tax increase between 1960 and 1990.
I am pretty sure that we are fully stuck with the SS and Medicare tax for the foreseeable future, yet it is very clear that by looking to emergency spending of WWII, we are overspending in an unprecedented manner. Don’t forget that even with the high taxes, the social programs are famously under-funded.
Together these plots show that we are currently spending more money as a percentage of GDP than we were in WWII and that taxation growth up to 1990 was largely a function of liberal social programs. In WWII, we were smart enough to stop the spending and rebuild our economy. At that time, we had reduced tax law that favored manufacturing and did not have the insane employment laws, environmental laws and compliance costs we have now. The plots indicate to me that nothing about the US situation is even remotely similar to history. The addition of an underfunded Obamacare expense to our budget is a guarantee that everything will not just be alright in the future either. To sum up, we have government expenditures in excess of a WWII scale, during peacetime, with nothing but increases in spending and taxation as far as the eye can see.
What’s more is that the information in the graphs above, combined with the present recession, is a strong indicator that we are on the wrong side of the Laffer curve. Ignore that little detail at your own peril.
On Debt vs GDP
So Tom then wrote this statement which also needs discussion: “If America were a ‘household’, its debt would be considered very manageable–a bit more than 100% of annual income. Anybody reading this who has a mortgage may well hold a much higher percentage of debt.”
This is also a complete misnomer often sold by left-wing media that many reasonable people believe. Gross Domestic Product is not “Income”, it is gross sales. The profit on GDP is Income, and it is a tiny fraction of GDP. The comparison is therefore a non-sequitur. If you sell a box of oranges to your friend for the same cost at which you bought them, how much of your personal GDP (gross sales) from the oranges, is available for payment of debt?
It is more sensible to look at the national debt other ways. If we take the 16 trillion of debt and divide it by the 300 million population, we get a nice low number of $53,000 usd per man, woman and child. This is not a bad number to work with and doesn’t sound insurmountable by itself. Unfortunately, only working people pay taxes, and they only work for a fraction of their lives. Currently we have about 110 million employed people in the US which brings the total debt that working people owe to the government to 145,000 dollars per working person. There are about 110 million households so this is very similar to the dollars owed per household as well.
But the annual deficit is what contributes to debt, and our government spending is so massive that and we are presently borrowing $10,000 per household per year. This means that every home needs to send $833 more per month to the federal government in taxes just to break even with our current expenses, and does not include the coming spending increases with Obamacare. Most readers will agree that that is a fairly huge amount of money for the government to be borrowing on our behalf during peacetime. Those households on social security would really need to tighten their belts to pay that bill.
None of this includes the also massive debts being incurred by left-wing State governments like California and Illinois. Illinois currently carries a debt of 55,000/private worker for example.
The financial situation of this country is terrible. The latest tax bill was full of payoffs to left-wing campaign supporters for Obama. I have never witnessed the kind of quid-pro-quo corruption of his administration, like Benghazi, that doesn’t even make a footnote in the media today. The media excoriates big business conservatives, then giggles as the Democrats hand out huge piles of cash to big business, right after receiving campaign cash from them.
Common Sense Solutions
While people can interpret the numbers above differently, the range of reasonable interpretation does not include the possibility that what our government is doing might somehow be ok. It doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to work out what we need to do to fix it. It also doesn’t take much of a crystal ball to see what the future will bring if we don’t change our ways.
Spend less, tax less, spend less, control less and spend less and we will all have a better future.
I still owe everyone some commentary on Steig’s 3rd (or is it the 4th) victory lap. I have spent several hours on the new Antarctic doom paper, hopefully I will have some time shortly to write on that. In the meantime, we are awaiting some movement on the “fiscal cliff” and as usual, I have a few thoughts on that.
My first thought is that the “deep spending cuts”, is that they don’t even touch the overspending by the Federal government, yet we are told that these cuts are disastrous. I do agree that they are cut from the wrong areas, i.e. defense instead of EPA, but disastrous is not how I would describe any cuts at this point. We desperately need to reduce spending, so I’m ready for whatever we can get. The defense spending will be reinstated at the first opportunity anyway.
My second thought leaves me more confused. Democrats are pretending concern about the middle class paying too much tax, yet this is exactly what they have so often demanded. Raising taxes is the only way under the worldview of the anti-industrial left to logically balance the budget. Cutting spending is simply not an option. Keynesian economics is literally driven by the ignorant view that theft from business and spending of money by government, drives business. So they must spend or the economy will die and they will have less money to spend. Of course, like so much of life, they are partially right. The US government has so ingrained itself into business at this point, that they are in control of massive percentages of the workforce and the economy.
And this brings me to the Laffer curve.
The Laffer curve is basic economic theory representing a tax vs revenue curve, which represents how much revenue is gained at different tax levels. Wikipedia has a typically extreme leftist view of the subject here and like taxation, the public understanding of the subject is a huge irritation to me. If you tax personal income at 100 percent – or greater – then there is no incentive to make income and the government receives zero tax. If you tax at zero percent, the government gets zero tax so somewhere in-between, the government makes more than zero. The left will have you believe that you can maximize income at about 70% tax rate, which is just dumb, but that is what they think. Often, the argument the “blogging left” makes for higher tax is based on revenue as a percentage of GDP, but capitalism doesn’t exist to maximize a percentage of dollars sold, it exists to maximize total dollars earned. Because taxes retard the gross economy, maximizing a percentage of GDP is not related to the Laffer curve.
Politicians of all types are fond of saying, X tax will create additional revenue to pay for Y program. This language has then been regularly repeated by the ever-compliant and rarely understanding media. On the left, both the media and the politicians firmly believe that increasing tax on the wealthy will bring them more money, and in the short run, they will be correct.
This is where it all falls apart.
The same Democrat politicians and extreme left media are today making the claim that raising tax on the middle class, would be economic disaster and less government income would be had.
So on which side of the Laffer curve are we? We cannot be on both. Either more tax is more revenue with a decent economy and more ability for government investment, or more tax is less revenue and a terrible economy. It cannot be both. Yet the Democrats freely admit that taxing the middle class will ruin the economy. These same leftists often point out the increasing separation in wealth between the rich and poor to justify the taxes, rarely noting the indirect economic pressures that their re-distributive policies create on the poor. The reality is that a good economy has guaranteed for nearly a century that America’s poor, are some of the wealthiest poor people in the world. It isn’t about the wealth of the rich, or it shouldn’t be, it should be about the wealth of the rich and the poor, and despite the propaganda, that is what capitalism has done best. Provide money for the people, from rich to poor.
The Laffer curve is a funny thing. If you want to maximize tax revenue, you need to find the balance of where business is competitive and making a strong profit, and government is taking just enough green blood out, such that the gross economy isn’t dragged below the optimized limit. Currenlty, many countries are taxing businesses at under 20%, yet the near-bankrupt Europe is far higher. China is right at 20% by this table, but the laws are also written to allow many deductions. US business competes with these countries today. Business is war, and business in these countries are what we are at war with. Looking deeper into the table, the US is listed as taxing business at 40%, yet the reality is far worse. We are faced with many taxes, such that the true rate is north of 50% already - keeping in mind that we haven’t yet experienced the next 5% tax increase in the next few hours, and another percent for the affordable health care act.
This all fits together when you realize that when other countries tax business at a lower rate than the US or Europe, they are shifting the maximum income which can be gained through tax to a lower percentage level. If we tax the US more, and other countries tax less, their competitiveness is increased, and ours is reduced. Laffer teaches that less tax revenue for the government is a guaranteed result of a tax hike after some optimized yet unknown percentage rate, and international competition in general means that the magic point at which less government revenue is realized, is guaranteed to have shifted to a lower percentage.
Now this whole subject is way to complicated for most people, and most won’t spend more than a minute or two even thinking about it, it is key to understanding what they are voting for. Unfortunately, it literally hurts their stupid little uneducated brains, but they are not the readers of this blog.
Many economists have spent time trying to calculate the peak government revenue point (shape of the Laffer curve), but the subject is as elusive as moisture and condensation in a climate model. My impression is that the widely differing results are more based on author belief than in true accuracy. Still, it is my opinion that you can look at the successes of other countries and spot which tax levels are working, and which are not. Unfortunately, there is a great deal of noise in the data created by individual political and resource situations that allows plenty of obfuscatory argument for any direction you want to go so there are no solid answers. A low tax in a country like Somalia, cannot correct the insane government situation which destabilizes any business viability. A high tax on a country like Saudi Arabia, is equally confused by the massive oil reserves, they have a 20% rate though.
So, since I have declared a true calculation all but impossible, I will tell you my belief of where we sit on the curve. If the US government cut taxes on business income in half, halved the capital gains tax, reduced some of the stupid employment laws and the unreasonable environmental controls, slash the IRS code and filing requirements, we would see a massive influx of international business looking for a politically stable ground to put their headquarters. We could double the size of America’s economy in very short order, putting nearly everyone who wanted a job to work. Such a move would take the world by complete surprise and again, companies would compete for workers and America’s poor would stay near the top of the world in wealth. There would be a huge influx of cash from the rest of the world that over twenty years could eliminate our National Debt- except that politicians would have their hands in the cookie jar. More than that, it would again allow America the economic power to lead the world toward the freedom and health that they all deserve. If it were done suddenly, there would absolutely be a huge drop in revenue in the first few years though, just as a huge tax hike creates more revenue in the short term, yet could kill the economy in a decade.
Even if you disagree, the thinking person should not forget that more tax does not necessarily equate to more revenue.
Liberals are in a froth over a new gun ban on semi-automatic rifles (fire once per trigger pull). While these are powerful and dangerous weapons, I flatly don’t believe this new ban will have any impact at all on violent crime. Like so many things from the unbiased media, I cannot see any logical path that achieves their stated intent of reducing public harm. A new regulation based on banning of one completely-fake classification of gun, can’t do much when there are so many smaller, faster, and more easily concealed weapons. Yes, the primary design purpose of an “assault weapon” is killing, but it is also the primary purpose of any pistol ever made. In reasonably practiced hands, pistols have more potential to be dangerous to the general public, just because of their size.
Sure you can ban “clips” or “high-capacity” magazines, but there are so many already available, how would that stop a crazy person from purchasing them? Of course it won’t. Small magazines might limit the number of people killed in one of those rampage style slaughters, but I doubt it actually would. Motivated people are smart enough to find a way. Mass injury is actually done quite effectively with knives in China, because gun ownership is not allowed and civilians are often too impoverished by the communist system to actually purchase an illegal gun. Tax the ammo is another “solution” offered, and all you do is make it expensive for good people to shoot and for the insane to accomplish the same thing.
There is another relevant secret in America, which is rarely reported by the unbiased media, our jails are full of people who suffer from psychological problems. I’m not just talking about criminal murderers, but everything in the spectrum of the low-functioning mind. From dimwits to violent outbursts to thieves to killers, the jails are a catch-all for people who cannot “think” of a better solution to their lives. Our jails have replaced our otherwise rudimentary mental health system, and today America imprisons more people than any other nation. Oddly enough, it is usually conservatives who primarily support this draconian system.
Yet our crime rates are still high. To me, it is an example of another government solution, which doesn’t really work.
Americans have a lot of money or at least that is what the world tells us. All of us can purchase an item for $1000 — if we really want it. We are not an island, can own boats and planes, and can travel on the ocean without restriction. Travel across a border is as easy as finding a vehicle. What would happen if we banned all guns in the US, not just a fabricated class of “assault weapons”? Would that stop criminals and gangs from owning weapons? Would that law stop anyone with intent, from finding a gun and taking revenge? I don’t think so, I think a complete gun ban would generally empower those with criminal intent, because they know that the victim is likely defenseless. Like the control aspect that psychologists say drives a rapist, a full ban probably even encourages some types of defective personalities to be violent.
We should never forget that despite their best intentions, the typical role of the police is not to protect you. They usually investigate, and subsequently ruin the life of whomever they decide did something wrong, well after the event actually occurred. Evidence of crime is perception based, so the rule of law is far more flexible than people in general typically grasp. The protection aspect of the police is therefore primarily driven by fear of their power. In practice, it is actually up to you to protect yourself. People of all viewpoints often make the same mistakes on this and demand more severe punishment to maximize an already frightening deterrent, without considering what sort of people actually violate the rules. The point is that when someone makes the decision that they have nothing left to live for, or to lesser extent that they want to commit an illegal act which they will get away with, the police and law for that matter become completely moot.
Do you need an “assault weapon” to protect yourself from what is essentially a person bent on kamakazi attack? Nope, any gun will do the same.
Will banning “assault weapons” protect our defenseless from attack? Nope.
Will a ban reduce the danger of the attacks? Nope, not according to the data.
Is it ok for everyone to carry a weapon? Nope.
This is the point where every article tells you that it is a “complex issue” and that lawmakers will be working on the solution. Trust me, their solution will be nothing but more government spending and crap. A useless weapons ban, with useless people to enforce it, etc… The NRA issued a statement regarding the recent murders, which while mostly reasonable, was flatly stupid in its solution. We cannot afford to place full time police in every school when we already overspend the government budget by stupidly large margins.
However, we do have teachers who are apparently willing to throw their bodies between guns and our children. We know that teachers are generally people who would never intentionally harm our most valuable assets, and they already protect them all day long. The leftists insist, against all forms of logic, that these same people remain unarmed. Amazingly, the left-leaning politicians further demand that all schools are gun-free zones, which of course applies only to law abiding citizens, including teachers and administrators. The situation is now obviously stupid to the point were it is dangerous, yet the same leftists react by demanding “gun bans”. How many times do you stick your finger in the empty light socket before you realize it is on?
It is obvious that America needs a proper mental health care system, as well as protection for our schools and public areas. Since a mental health system is more than a slow moving object, I demand reasonable and proper correction of the predictable outcome of the no-guns-at-school laws. I demand that an absolute minimum of two, trained first responder, concealed carry, teachers/administrators are on property at all times. I demand that my state-educated children are protected by armed and vetted “good guys”, whom we already pay for, at all times.
In my opinion, this is no longer a negotiable issue. When they are home, my children are protected by numerous child-safe firearms. Both they and you are safer from harm where I am sitting, than at my son’s elementary school, and that is a completely unacceptable situation. Even if the leftist media succeeds in creating support for a ban of all weapons including sharpened chopsticks, I demand the same thing. Gun-free policy has made the schools, stadiums and theaters the targets of choice, because everywhere else in America is personally dangerous to the untreated psychopaths who snap and wish to maximize law abiding citizen’s anguish.
Do what you will with gun bans, but remember that until we do something reasonable to physically “defend” our children, they are nothing more than low-hanging meat-targets for the insane.
Thanks to some very hard working bloggers and readers who care at WUWT, the IPCC second order draft has been released. Steig 09 appears to be much less prominently referenced in the second order draft than in the zero order which is still too often. I take it as an indication that some people have actually figured out that S09 was not in any way accurate. Still, in the Second order draft, the IPCC is reporting warming values so high that they are not supported by either the S09 paper or the O’Donnell correction.
From Chapter 5 – Information from Paleoclimate Archives:
Currently there is no compelling observational evidence for a robust CO2-induced polar amplification in
Antarctica. Whereas the Antarctic Peninsula is experiencing one of the strongest regional warming trends
(0.5°C decade–1 over the past 50 years), almost twice that of the global mean temperature, zonal mean
Antarctic surface warming has been modest at 0.1°C per decade over the same time period (O’Donnell et al.,
2010; Steig et al., 2009). West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) Divide borehole measurements indicate warming
of 0.8°C per decade during the last two decades (Orsi et al., 2012), but it remains unclear if this trend
represents long term polar amplification, or is within the range of regional decadal variability (see also AR5
Chapter 2). Polar amplification in the Southern Ocean and Antarctica is virtually absent in the transient
CMIP5 RCP4.5 future simulations (see Chapter 12).
Below are the actual numbers from Steig (far right column) and O’Donnell’s two methods E-W and RLS in the center and left column. At 0.1C/decade for the continent, the IPCC is reporting approximately 2X the actual Antarctic trend measured by the skeptic-leaning “thermometers”. It is also right at the farthest edge of the 95% margin of error threshold for the continental Eigenweighted calculation (0.4+/- 0.06). The peninsula was reported too low by S09 as we have long discussed, but in O10 some regions do reach 0.5C/decade (again according to the thermomters) but the peninsula regional average is only 0.35 +/- 0.11. Therefore the IPCC reporting 0.5C/Decade for the peninsula is completely outside the margin of error for both papers. Not surprisingly to those of us who spend time reading climate science and IPCC UN politics, the reported values fail in the alarmist direction.
Region
RLS C/Dec
E-W C/Dec
S09 C/Dec
Continent
0.06 ± 0.08
0.04 ± 0.06
0.12 ± 0.09
East Antarctica
0.03 ± 0.09
0.02 ± 0.07
0.10 ± 0.10
West Antarctica
0.10 ± 0.09
0.06 ± 0.07
0.20 ± 0.09
Peninsula
0.35 ± 0.11
0.32 ± 0.09
0.13 ± 0.05
.
It is really unfortunate that they have chosen to report the Orsi borehole mathmagic as though it were a thermometer, but this is the paleoscience chapter so they need to put something in. That paper claimed a 0.8C/decade warming in the last two decades. Readers will recall that this was the paper which Steig famously claimed “proved” O’Donnell was wrong. Besides the whole field of borehole thermometery being ridiculous, it seems to me that the 0.8C/decade value is completely outside the realm of any possibility. I write that because it is 13 times the continental average and were the trend real, nearby thermometers would have obviously detected it.
I don’t know folks, it doesn’t look like the world of Climate ever changes. Maybe they will get it right in a few more drafts.
What will we do when the US runs out of money? A few months ago it seemed that the American public may actually grasp the size of the numerical problem, but the elections revealed that people in bulk are not capable of basic math. It only takes the most cursory of reviews to understand that increased taxes will not even dent the overspending, yet somehow that is not a problem. Unfortunately, it takes a slightly larger intellect to understand that more taxes do not always equate to more revenue. It takes still more for people to understand that top-loading the wealthy, dramatically affects the poor.
For myself, as a business owner, it is difficult for me to understand how people think our current situation ‘might’ be ok. It clearly is not, and more of the same will simply destroy our future, as well as that of our children. After this past election, I’m expecting future generations to experience tremendous difficulties in America as well as the world. It doesn’t take much historic review to see where liberal cradle-to-grave policies will take us. There is nothing wrong with wanting to give people everything, except that we require them to create in order to be able to give it. When you incentivize people to stay home and not work, that is exactly what you get.
See, the basic problem with government control of populations is that the people making the rules, don’t focus on the incentives they create. They never will and that is why less government is nearly always beneficial. If you make a rule that allows life-sustaining payment for extended unemployment, the people are incentivized to remain unemployed. Yes, some will seek jobs, but many times they chose unemployment as a reasonable and understandable alternative. In the past two years, I have seen dozens of examples of people who turned down employment in favor of government checks. When you allow “permanent disability” to mean anything from a broken back to emotional harm, a lot of people are suddenly incented to experience serious emotional harm! Duh.. Disability claims have absolutely skyrocketed in recent years and people who really qualify are being left off the list in favor of those who should not. It has been a common theme of this blog that groups of people incentivized to a certain path, are numerically biased to that path. It is no different than the fake Mannian math which preferentially choses data to create hockey sticks. If you bias the population, you skew the “average” result toward the bias.
But tax hikes are still the solution to insane overspending…
Just a little more from the “rich”.
The numbers don’t add up, and worse yet, they are not even close! So…… When a tiny little country like Greece, with less per-capita debt than the US, economically collapses and sends shudders through the global economy, what will the world do when the US does something far worse? I can’t even imagine what it will be like, and at the same time, after this election, I can’t even imagine how we will manage to avoid it.
While the liberals in America make the false argument that the rich don’t pay their “fare share”, whatever that is, it is business owners who are actually being targeted. Of course the truly rich politicians won’t tell you that. When real wages are dropping across the country and a minimum wage job draws a thousand applicants, does it really make any sense to tax business further? Liberals tax cigarettes because they say they want less of them. Obama taxes the rich because he believes that redistribution is the key to happiness. This government has not enacted one single pro-business reform in the last 4 years and we are reaping the benefits in spades. Guess what that means for the workers wages a company hires when high unemployment creates an oversupply of qualified candidates?
In the past decades, regulations and costs have been added to business operations. Business owners have continually pointed out the consequences and are regularly ignored or demonized in return. Higher electric cost, higher compliance cost, higher reporting requirements, hundred page tax filings, higher employment compliance costs, communication taxes, gas taxes, border crossing taxes, foreign business taxes……on and on. These are all added costs. These have continued to increase over the past 20 years, the result has been a herkey-jerkey decrease in real income for the middle class and poor in America. Just like every socialist country in the world, the population is generally poorer, and the separation between those with money and those without is generally larger. Of course the media blames corporate greed rather than the obvious governmental problem.
And on we go, down the same stupid path.
This time though, is very different than any other in history. America holds a huge fraction of the wealth of this planet. An enormous amount of business is controlled by this country, yet these American customers of the globe are about to go flat broke. No amount of tax increase on the wealthy can even dent the over 1 trillion per year deficit. In fact, it is my contention that a further tax increase will result in a reduced net revenue. Of course you have to adjust for inflation and you have to estimate GDP with and without the tax. A second method, which is far easier to understand, is to simply calculate what a manufacturing business would have do to react to higher taxes!
Unlike the fake government economics, business actually has to live within their budget or they go broke. In the current banking environment, often there is literally zero backup.
Below are a hundred individual numbers. 10 rows of 10 representing the income of a 10 million dollar fictitious S corporation manufacturing company.
Twenty five percent of the income goes to pay employees including the company contribution to federal taxes.
67890
1234567890
1234567890
1234567890
Five percent goes to employee benefits.
1234567890
1234567890
1234567890
Five percent goes to material transport.
67890
1234567890
1234567890
Five percent goes to various utilities, insurance, supplies and materials which support operations
1234567890
1234567890
Two percent more is invested in commissions and sales activities leaving about 18 percent profit after every possible writeoff has been taken. This is the money reported on an S corporations owners personal tax return as income. One point eight million dollars.
34567890
1234567890
Currently the Federal government taxes this money at 35% and the state of Michigan taxes it at 5%. Then there are various property taxes and fees which must be paid so the effective rate is about 45% on income.
1234567890
So 10 percent is left to invest in growth, savings and profit for distribution. If the company doesn’t invest in growth, it will die.
The company above invests 5% into growth leaving 5 percent for the owners to distribute or save for a less productive time.
12345
Now in a 10 million dollar company, that 5 percent represents 500,000 dollars which is not an insubstantial amount of money. Except that that 10 million dollar company burns through an average of about 40,000 dollars for every weekday it exists, so 500K isn’t much of a cushion for operations. The federal government sees that 18 percent profit as personal income of course, and taxes it as though the owners were professional hockey players who actually took home 1.8 million dollars.
Today these owners are being asked to pay their “fare share” and are looking at a 5% tax hike along with a massive increase in health care costs, as well as increased capital gains tax which will massively limit investment opportunity.
So now assume that the federal portion of our hypothetical company’s taxes went from 35% to 40% as is currently proposed. Then we are looking at about a 50% rate of taxation. If you are an investor in the company who contributes less than 500 hours of work per year, your rate goes up an additional 3.8% from Obamacare, but we will assume you are an active partner and we will ignore the projected twenty to forty percent increase in health care costs.
After tax, you have then:
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Or 9 percent to spare from your 10 million dollar company.
If you invest 5% as before, you only have:
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Four percent left from your nice 10 million dollar manufacturing company that just paid 900,000 in taxes. That is actually 20% less take-home income after tax from a 5% increase. What’s more is that your company just paid the federal government 900,000 dollars instead of a measley 800,000, while retaining 400,000 for the owners to either save or distribute. Over two times the money you can actually spend on growth or personal profit is paid in tax.
Something is going to have to give, and my guess is that it won’t be the liberals. After the economy gets worse, they will just blame something else and find a new way to attack business. The media has completely brainwashed the public into believing that this tax hike is about ‘increased revenue’ and paying your fair share, when the propaganda has literally zero basis in reality.
Now while this example does not represent my company, this is a very typical scenario for a manufacturing firm in the United States. Just to add a little more “real world” flavor to the discussion, one of our largest competitors just got bought out by a Taiwanese company. Of course Taiwan only taxes their corporations at 17 percent so it is no surprise to see American business being bought out. This Taiwanese company will manufacture at its own plant and charge the maximum amount of cost to the American branch to limit US tax. Even a mental midget can guess what Obama’s expansion of that tax differential means for American competitiveness with Taiwan in a global economy.
In my case the numbers have worked out such that I will pay 4 times more in taxes to the various United States Governments than my personal take home income in 2012. Not 40% tax but 400%.
The general public is completely ignorant of these things. Consider for a moment though what a business must do to react to this massive cost increase. In our case, price hikes are not possible as it is a global economy, so the cash will have to come from somewhere else in the company. Benefits, pay, number of employees, investment, etc… In the end, investment and growth will necessarily suffer as both our company and our customers have less purchasing power. It is absolutely clear that both the government and employees will actually receive less money from us than they would have in the long run.
If you are an employee in private industry, you will likely continue to watch the un-reported inflation of prices rise faster than your check. This isn’t corporate greed, as the idiots on MSNBC would tell you, it represents the cold fact that evil business owners will have less money to pay out. So when you are asking your boss for a raise in the coming years, don’t be surprised if his answer is – go get it from Uncle Sam.
Another deer season gone, no luck for me. This time I did see several doe and maybe a spike buck in the morning of the first day but it was too dark to tell. Camp is a special place and I have a few minutes so here are some of my favorite images and videos from camp.
First a quick 360 video of the cabin:
Then we have the second of two deer taken by one of the camp owners. A very nice 10 point which weighed 180 lbs dressed.
A typical gourmet dinner at camp:
Deer warning sign explaining the rules of the woods in plain English:
Gorgeous shot of lake Superior Beach at the mouth of the two-heart river. Yes it was cold!!
This is a short video of the aftermath of a huge forest fire which burned 33 sq miles this summer. None of the trees in this video are alive. Even in the most distant background, they are simply cooked at their bases with dead needles on the trees. The logging companies have come in and cut most of the useful standing wood before the beetles moved in. Lots of cabins were destroyed but fortunately the fire was a substantial distance from our cabin.
As always, the trip was an excellent break from the world with plenty of laughing and relaxation for everyone. Well….except the deers!
Gone hunting for invisible deer again. It is climategate season!! The week will probably end with nothing new (including deer-s) but the UK police managed to leak (publish) that nobody involved in Climategate could be prosecuted after three years.
Hopefully, the boys/(manly girls) aren’t so eager for recognition that they fall into that trap. There are always ways to prosecute. Was the second release really not a second alleged violation? Is there really no other way to prosecute? I don’t know UK law but breaking and entering, theft of personal property, copyright, illegal accessing of national security data, who knows!? The rule is, if you have done something difficult to those who make the rules, you have broken whatever rule they can think of. Just another reason to stay away from leftism.
Be smart instead!
Anyway, if I see bambi, I’m taping some antlers on his fuzzy head and shooting them back off! I will be back in a week.
The media complain that Blogs are too powerful for their own good, but when a story of serious consequence has negative political implications to the left, the media reactions are universal. Ignore it!
This time they have gone too far.
I wouldn’t vote for anyone involved in this situation no matter which party they were affiliated with. The ex-Seals, you know the dead ones, apparently broke their orders to go and save the incessant calls for help in Benghazi. Oh, you haven’t heard yet? That is because Fox news is the only major outlet covering it – even hours after it was released.
Michael Mann has decided to sue for defamation because someone compared him to Sandusky. Besides the general disgust for the Penn State sexual scandal, there was a certain irony for me in that brought about an article discussing what is a solidly apparent cultural deficiency in the university. I compared the decades of head-in-the-sand treatment of Sandusky to a very similar Penn State investigation of Mann’s work In Case You Were Wondering.
Before I revisit the story, I believe a disclaimer is in order. There is no accusation of any criminal activity against Mann. I can’t imagine what comparison’s anyone could make between Michael Mann and Sandusky, they look nothing alike and Mike likely stinks at football as well as all other athletic endeavors. The money the two made for Penn State was vastly different. Oddly enough, they probably are about equally accurate at math and science but that is a different story. There simply is no rational comparison to be made between the damaging of young lives and the tweaking of obscure nearly useless statistical methodologies for love of money and politics.
This is what I wrote about Penn State, and I believe it is a reasonable interpretation of the news:
Well Penn state, which famously ignored its own employee’s role in climategate, has been caught pretending another situation didn’t exist. This time the situation was so horrific on an individual level that the comparison to previous indiscretions is nearly impossible but the amount of Penn State money involved was so much greater that it can legitimately be made. Recently Penn State President Graham Spanier was forcibly retired from office. This is not proof or even evidence that the president was directly involved or even had any knowledge of the insane sexual behavior by PSU employees which appear to have been deliberately ignored by senior management, but firing was the right thing to do. PSU has an illness in the form of a culture in management which ignores even hideous error in favor of business-as-usual cash flow. Morality at PSU has taken a back seat to gold.
The money in the organization simply overwhelms doing the right thing. “Don’t be evil” used to be the childish corporate slogan at Google. That was before they realized that their true value to the corporate world was collection of information about the public. Don’t bash Google though as Apple and Microsoft never seem to have suffered these childish delusions. I suppose the new unspoken slogan probably is “Don’t be evil unless it is wildly profitable!”
I also wrote:
When the Penn state climategate reviews came out, the typical media’s uncritical acceptance of nonsense words out of Penn State was stunning. It revealed to all who were paying attention just how deeply invested the university and media are in insuring that the global warming message and money flow not be reduced by even the most blatantly false actions. The result was that Penn State has been successful in maintaining its public scientific reputation (and cash flow) in the same pre-climategate mode and the enviro-team has continued down their paths undaunted and likely re-invigorated that they are untouchable. The only thing I can do is write about it here on my blog and make a personal guarantee to Penn State University that when my sons go to college (which they will), not one dollar will intentionally come from our family to this corrupt, and truly disgusting institution. Don’t think for a moment that these messages are not being unintentionally communicated to Penn State students as thousands were idiotically rioting in the streets over the football coach’s firing.
The brainwashing of the public in favor of profit has spread across all media outlets distorting everything from sports to politics to climate science™. There has to be a functional backlash at some point though where Penn State, and the like ,are held accountable for their distortions of the truth in favor of profit. It isn’t only big ‘private’ business which can corrupt the system after all, and Michael Mann not being Sandusky, is far from Michael Mann being innocent of other lesser improprieties — for “the cause”. We all know that propaganda and spin have become the norm on all news channels. We should aslo know that it is the not-s0-meek lawyers whom have inherited the Earth to date. When I think about the future, it seems that the deeper we sink into the morass of poverty, mediocrity and false uniformity, the harder and more violent the backlash will be. Not many claim to know the future though, and I certainly won’t count myself as one who does.
To me, there is a sad irony in watching what is in my opinion one of the most undeservedly arrogant and disingenuous public figureheads file a lawsuit, wholly supported in his own gamesmanship by a broken and corrupted university, against others for a comparison to another man who was protected by the same university’s defunct managerial culture.
It should be interesting to see how this latest waste of a few hundred thousand dollars turns out.
PROPOSAL 12-3
A PROPOSAL TO AMEND THE STATE CONSTITUTION
TO ESTABLISH A STANDARD FOR RENEWABLE ENERGY
This proposal would:
Require electric utilities to provide at least 25% of their annual retail sales of electricity from renewable energy sources, which are wind, solar, biomass, and hydropower, by 2025.
Limit to not more than 1% per year electric utility rate increases charged to consumers only to achieve compliance with the renewable energy standard.
Allow annual extensions of the deadline to meet the 25% standard in order to prevent rate increases over the 1% limit.
Require the legislature to enact additional laws to encourage the use of Michigan made equipment and employment of Michigan residents.
Should this proposal be approved?
YES __
NO ____
Envirowhackos want us to produce 25% of our power from things that don’t work. What’s more is that they want to incorporate the idiocy right into the State constitution. My guess is that the media propaganda about “renewable” energy has brainwashed the public into thinking that this is probably ok. What linguistic magic empowers the thinking that it will only add a little cost because the price increase is legislated in the bill?
Surprisingly they forgot to list potato batteries as one of the renewable sources. What is the problem? We know potato batteries can’t effectively replace combustibles either, so why aren’t they on the list?
I am tired of politics but in the recent debate a topic which I have frequently discussed here took center stage. Taxation of private business in America. Recently, I was critiqued by several readers for making the exact same points that were stated by Romney and Obama. Those unknown wealthy people Obama would tax by allowing parts of an old law to expire, are actually comprised heavily of business owners. Some here even felt I was being disingenuous and several believe that what I wrote was tainted by political views and cannot possibly be realistic. The fact is that about ninety five percent of all businesses in America are forms of S corporations. The profits in these types of corporations are reported by shareholders directly on their tax returns. These profits are never fully spendable cash by the shareholder as reinvestment is absolutely necessary for the continued function of the company. The net tax rate vs personal cash in a pass through S corporation is often very high.
Ok Jeff, we get it.
So remember what happens when a politician wants to limit something they don’t like, something unpopular that a small fraction of the population uses to their own detriment, what do they do? Hmmm…….
They tax it to increase the cost and limit usage. Examples are Cigarettes, Alcohol, CO2, sugary drinks, speeding, junk food, energy, or whatever product becomes the target in the popular media that day. The cost is a load which reduces the buying power of the consumer to direct them away from the behavior.
About half the jobs in the country are created by pass-through S corporations known as “small business” even though they can have hundreds or even thousands of employees. Obama had the guts to actually say, I don’t want to tax them all, only the top 3% of the businesses. Unfortunately, those 3% he mentioned are are comprised of the successful owners who employ a huge portion of America. Many of the rest have little or no income whatsoever. I also own part of a technology holding corporation which by intent creates almost zero income. Those top earning individuals (businesses) are the same people who fall into the 1% known as the “wealthy” that Obama has been intending to hammer all along.
I have to tell you folks, you don’t need to be a very big business to fall in that 1 percent. You also don’t have to be very rich. All you have to really do is be successful at growing to a moderate size and you will get hammered and looking at the various other tax increases proposed, none of it is good for business. No surprise considering the relentless demonization business owners have been suffering for the last 50 years by the left-wing press.
“Jeff it is only a return to the Clinton era tax he is proposing. It isn’t that much money.”
Not true my friends, not at all. Many large expenses have increased faster than inflation since the Clinton days. Fuel – due to left leaning law. Employment insurance – due to left leaning law. Health care premiums (way more than 4%/year by the way) – due to left leaning law. Minority favoritism due to left wing fairness. Environmental regulation, accounting reporting, tax filing, product liability, workmans comp, all skyrocketing due to left wing law. Not that conservatives haven’t added cost also, but this is absolutely the result of a left sided anti-business mentality in media and popular culture.
All of these are hidden costs which could be considered taxes for the common good, that have gone up faster than inflation. Some of it might be ok, but taken together, it has become amazingly destructive to the economy. So after decades of anti-business policy, the economy has weakened severely and almost 20% of the employable workforce is sitting on the couch watching Phineas and Ferb and less tax is collected as a percentage of GDP.
Obama’s answer!! Tax the millionares. AKA, the 3% of small businesses that are actually still successful at creating jobs…..
This simply cannot be due to rational hope for a solution to the lack of jobs. There must be some other motivation because in every other case, when politicians from either party want less of something, they tax it. When they want more of it, they cut the tax.
In fact, Obama was so mixed up that after stating he would increase taxes on millionaires (business owners), he proposed a gigantic 1/4 tax cut on C corporations to create jobs!!! A good idea in my opinion but when you think about it rationally, he is saying we must cut tax for giant corporations (which are easily identified in popular culture as corporations) to create jobs, yet raise tax on other corporations which due to the nuanced tax law can be used to “trick people” by calling them “the millionaires”.
Tthe Obama proposed small business “millionaire” tax will literally have a cost equal to the salary of 10% of our company’s workforce. That money will come from somewhere important because the government still frowns on personal cash printing presses even though theirs are working overtime. It would be fun to try to make a good one though What I don’t get is why people can easily grock that a cigarette tax must limit cigarette usage, gas tax limits CO2 production, yet not notice the consequences of a business tax increase when jobs are nearly non-existent.
The world class irony is status-quo in my view, and that is the memo.
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