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Another Big Lie from Obama, This Time Over Mass Shootings
President Obama has spewed a lie so brazen, so easily debunked, it's hard to believe a man supposedly so smart — and in such a high position of power — can speak so recklessly.
But here he is just a couple of days ago, speaking of mass shootings and saying:
We're the only developed country on Earth where this happens.
A 10-second Google search shows the United States is by no means alone. Incidents like these are happening and have been happening around the world, including in countries where they have strict gun control laws and none of the so-called "gun culture" that Obama and his ilk so often deride to slander America.
This timeline of mass shootings around the world since the 1980s through 2012 includes these incidents:
SOUTH KOREA – A police officer went on a drunken rampage in Sang-Namdo with rifles and hand grenades, killing 57 people and wounding 38 before blowing himself up.
BRITAIN – A 27-year-old gunman rampaged through the English town of Hungerford, killing 16 people and wounding 11 before shooting himself.
FRANCE – A French farmer shot and killed 14 people including members of his family in the village of Luxiol, near the Swiss border. He was wounded and captured by police.
CANADA – A 25-year-old war movie fan with a grudge against women shot dead 14 young women at the University of Montreal, then killed himself.
NEW ZEALAND – A gun-mad loner killed 11 men, women and children in a 24-hour rampage in the seaside village of Aramoana. He was killed by police.
FRANCE – A 16-year-old youth ran amok with a rifle in the town of Cuers, killing 16 people and then himself after an argument with his parents.
BRITAIN – A gunman burst into a primary school in the Scottish town of Dunblane and shot dead 16 children and their teacher before killing himself.
AUSTRALIA – A gunman unleashed modern Australia's worst mass murder when he shot dead 35 people at the Port Arthur tourist site in the southern state of Tasmania.
NEPAL – Eight members of the Nepalese Royal family were killed in a palace massacre by Crown Prince Dipendra who later turned a gun on himself and died few days later. His youngest brother also died later raising the death toll to 10.
GERMANY – In Erfurt, eastern Germany, a 19-year-old gunman opened fire at a school, killing 12 teachers, a secretary, two students and a policeman before killing himself.
FINLAND – A student opened fire in a vocational school in Kauhajoki in northwest Finland, killing nine other students and one staff member, then killed himself.
GERMANY – A 17-year-old gunman dressed in black combat gear killed nine students and three teachers at a school near Stuttgart. He also killed one other person at a nearby clinic. He was later killed in a shoot-out with police.
BRITAIN – A gunman opened fire on people in towns across the rural county of Cumbria. Twelve people were killed and 11 injured. The gunman then killed himself.
NORWAY – A gunman blew up a government building in Oslo and then opened fire at a youth summer camp of Norway's ruling political party, on the holiday island of Utoeya, killing 77 people.
There's also this list of shootings around the world, which includes many of the above incidents as well as these:
— March 11, 2012: Sixteen Afghan villagers, including nine children, are killed during a predawn attack in which Army prosecutors have charged Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, 39.
— April 30, 2009: Farda Gadyrov, 29, enters the prestigious Azerbaijan State Oil Academy in the capital, Baku, armed with an automatic pistol and clips. He kills 12 people before killing himself as police close in.
— Nov. 7, 2007: After revealing plans for his attack in YouTube postings, 18-year-old Pekka-Eric Auvinen fires kills eight people at his high school in Tuusula, Finland.
Not only are there mass shootings around the world, there are mass stabbings. In August 2012, a teenager in China killed eight persons and wounded five others in a knife attack. On December 14, 2012, the same day as the infamous shooting at the Sandy Hook elementary school in Connecticut, a man in China stabbed 22 school children and an adult. In 2010, nearly 20 children were killed and 50 injured in knife attacks at schools in China.
President Obama declares:
"Right now, it's not even possible to get even the mildest [firearms] restrictions through Congress, and we should be ashamed of that."
I'm old enough to remember when the Sears Christmas catalog was filled with firearms a person could buy through the mail. The firearms didn't need to go through a federally licensed firearms dealer because there was no such thing as a licensed dealer. There was no Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. There were no background checks or waiting periods. There were no age limits. Nearly every little hardware store sold guns and ammo that a person could buy, no questions asked.
I'm old enough to remember when many public schools had shooting teams. Many Scout groups also had them.
How is that school shootings were almost unheard of when there was no age limit to buy guns, no licensing of gun dealers, and no such thing as a background check or waiting period? Could the problem be people and not guns, which, after all, are inanimate objects? Do knives compel us to stab? Do baseball bats compel us to bludgeon? Do pills compel us to poison?
But this gets us into an area that many people, especially on the left of the political spectrum, don't want to get into because they don't like pointing fingers – unless those fingers are pointed at the overwhelming majority of peaceful sportsmen whose hobby they detest.
I live in suburban Chicago. Within five miles of my house there are at least eight gun stores and three shooting ranges. The last firearms-related murder in my town occurred in 2001. Why does my little hometown, filled with gun stores and shooting ranges, go decades at a time with no firearms-related murders?
There are no gun stores or shooting ranges in Chicago, yet parts of the city are a shooting gallery. Notice I said parts. Some parts of the city are as safe as any place else. The laws against shooting and killing people apply equally and everywhere in Chicago. The laws regarding possession of firearms apply equally and everywhere. Why are some parts of Chicago dangerous and others safe?
The Heartland Institute is based in Chicago. President Obama lived in Chicago. The Mayor of Chicago used to be on Obama's chief of staff. Surely someone in Chicago could send this article to the president. I'd love for him to answer my questions and respond to my refutation of his laughable claim that "We're the only developed country on Earth" where mass shootings happen.
The Long Term: Metro America Goes From 82% to 86% Suburban Since 1990
The major metropolitan areas of the United States experienced virtually all of their overall growth in suburban and exurban areas between 2000 and 2010. This is the conclusion of an analysis of the functional Pre-Auto Urban Cores and functional suburban and exurban areas using the Demographia City Sector Model.
The City Sector Model
The City Sector Model classifies zip code areas in the major metropolitan areas based on urban form (Note 1). These include four classifications, one of which replicates the urban form and travel behavior typical of the pre-World War II urban cores. These areas were typically higher density and dependent on transit and walking. The City Sector Model has three other classifications, Pre-Auto Urban Core, Auto-Suburban: Earlier, Auto-Suburban: Later and Auto-Exurban.
For simplicity the City Sector categories are referred to as urban core, earlier suburban, later suburban and exurban. The City Sector Model is described in a previous article, and illustrated in Figure 1, which is also posted to the internet.
The model makes it possible to analyze metropolitan areas based on smaller area functional classifications, rather than on jurisdictional (historical core municipality) borders, which among other things, mask as core large areas of suburbanization.
Suburbanized Core Municipality Examples: San Jose and Charlotte
This suburbanization in the historical core municipalities is illustrated by examples like San Jose and Charlotte. The City Sector Model indicates that neither of these metropolitan areas has a pre-auto urban core. This is because neither metropolitan area has a large enough concentration of houses with a median construction date of 1945 or before or sufficient area of 7,500 population density per square mile (2,900 per square kilometer) with a transit, walking and cycling work trip market share of at least 20 percent. As a result, virtually all of both metropolitan areas is automobile oriented suburban, including virtually all of the core municipalities.
This is true in Charlotte despite its development of one of the most impressive new central business districts in the nation, with high employment densities. Yet at the same time the core city of Charlotte itself is very low density (2010), at 2,500 per square mile (950 per square kilometer), less than the suburban area average for large US urban areas (2,600 per square mile or 1,000 per square kilometer). Charlotte, however, could develop the equivalent of a pre-auto urban core if its central population density rises enough and enough commuters use transit, walking and cycling.
The core city of San Jose is far more dense than Charlotte, at 5,800 per square mile (2,200 per square kilometer). However, it is less dense than the suburbs of Los Angeles (6,400 per square mile or 2,500 per square mile). Like Charlotte, the core city of San Jose is virtually all automobile oriented suburban and has a transit work trip market share a full third below the major metropolitan area average.
Overall Population Trend: 2000-2010
These phenomena reflect national trends, All major metropolitan area growth between 2000 and 2010 (100.9 percent) was in the functional suburbs and exurbs.
Between 2000 and 2010, the percentage of major metropolitan area population in the urban cores declined from 16.1 percent to 14.4 percent. The urban cores lost approximately 140,000 residents (a loss of 0.6 percent), despite strong gains very close to the centers of the historical core municipalities. Consistent with these findings, Census Bureau analysis showed that the focused gains in the cores of the urban cores were more than negated by losses in surrounding urban core areas (described in: Flocking Elsewhere: The Downtown Growth Story).
The earlier suburban areas gained only modestly, adding 280,000 new residents, for a 0.4 percent increase. These areas have median house construction dates between 1946 and 1979. The largest increase was in the later suburban areas, which added the most new residents, 11.4 million, for a gain of 33.4 percent. The later suburban areas have median house constructions of 1980 or later. Exurban areas added 5.0 million residents, for a gain of 21.3 percent. Exurban areas are located outside the principal urban areas (Figure 2).
Overall, the later suburban and exurban areas gained 16.4 million residents, compared to the combined gain of 130,000 in the urban cores and earlier suburban areas. Thus, more than 99 percent of the population growth in the major metropolitan areas was in the later suburban and exurban areas (Figure 3).
During the decade, the exurban areas overtook the urban cores in population, rising from 15.4 percent of the major metropolitan area population to 16.8 percent (Figure 4).
Contrast with 1990-2000 Population Trend
Despite all of the talk of an urban core renaissance, the 2000 to 2010 decade was less favorable for urban cores than the 1990 to 2000 decade. In the earlier decade, the urban cores (as defined in 2010) added 960,000 residents, for a growth rate of 4.0 percent. This compares to the 140,000 urban core loss between 2000 and 2010 (Note 2).
Virtually all of the difference was attributable to urban core population trend reversals in New York, Boston and Chicago, which combined experienced a drop in growth of 1.1 million. Between 1990 and 2000, the urban core of New York added 779,000 residents, far more than the 190,000 added between 2000 and 2010. Boston's 1990-2000 urban core growth was 296,000, but fell to 27,000 in the last decade. Chicago's urban core dropped from a gain of 139,000 to a loss of 175,000.
Over the past twenty years, the population of urban cores has diminished relative to that of major metropolitan areas. In 1990, the urban cores represented 18.1 percent of the population, but fell to 14.1 percent in 2010. Auto-oriented areas (suburban and exurban) have increased their combined share from 81.9 percent of the major metropolitan area population in 1990 to 85.6 percent in 2010 (Figure $$$).
Summary of Individual Metropolitan areas
In 30 of the 52 major metropolitan areas, all or more of the population growth was in suburban and exurban areas between 2000 and 2010. This includes the metropolitan areas that do not have Pre-Auto Urban Cores.
Chicago had the largest share of suburban and exurban population growth, at 148 percent. This occurred because of the substantial urban core population losses. The suburbs and exurbs of Providence captured 131 percent of its growth, slightly more than the 126 percent suburban and exurban share in St. Louis. Baltimore, Rochester and Milwaukee had more than 110 percent of their growth in the suburbs and exurbs. Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Louisville, and Kansas City rounded out the largest suburban and exurban growth shares, all over 105 percent.
Despite the substantial decline in its urban core growth in the last decade, New York had the lowest share of population growth in the suburbs and exurbs (meaning that it had the highest share of population growth in the urban core). The suburbs and exurbs of New York captured only 69 percent of the metropolitan area growth, well below second place, Virginia Beach – Norfolk (81 percent). Boston was next at 83 percent, followed by San Francisco – Oakland, at 88 percent. The bottom 10 in suburban and exurban growth share also included Seattle, Washington, Philadelphia, Richmond, Hartford and Portland. Even so, each of these six metropolitan areas had more than 90 percent of their growth in suburban and exurban areas (Figure 6).
Jurisdictional Analyses: Suburbs Masquerading in Cities
The functional analysis based on urban form and behavior reveals substantially different trends compared to the conventional jurisdictional analysis that compares historical core municipalities, principal cities or primary cities to the balance of metropolitan areas. For example a jurisdictional analysis shows that core municipalities added 1,290,000 residents between 2000 and 2010. In contrast, the urban cores, as indicated in the functional analysis, lost 140,000 residents. This indicates the extent of to which municipal boundaries can mislead in the analysis of urban form within metropolitan areas. The expansive city limits of most core cities masks the substantial automobile oriented suburbanization within their own borders.
Note 1: The City Sector Model is generally similar to the groundbreaking research published by David L. A. Gordon and Mark Janzen at Queen's University in Kingston Ontario (Suburban Nation: Estimating the Size of Canada's Suburban Population) with regard to the metropolitan areas of Canada. Gordon and Janzen concluded that the metropolitan areas of Canada are largely suburban. Among the major metropolitan areas of Canada, the Auto Suburbs and Exurbs combined contain 76 percent of the population, somewhat less than the 86 percent found in the United States.
Note 2: Changes in zip code definitions and boundaries could result in minor differences in comparability between the three censuses.
Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy and demographics firm. He is co-author of the "Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey" and author of "Demographia World Urban Areas" and "War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life." He was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, where he served with the leading city and county leadership as the only non-elected member. He was appointed to the Amtrak Reform Council to fill the unexpired term of Governor Christine Todd Whitman and has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.
Photo: Later Suburbs in New York Urban Area (Morris County, New Jersey), by author
Originally published at newgeography.
Google Skybox Spy-Satellites: Big Brother Inc. Always Watching
Who does Google think they are fooling?
Google just bought Skybox Imaging for $500m to gain access to its capability to take real-time, high-resolution satellite images/videos of the whole world daily. Last week Google sources told the WSJ that Google was planning to spend $1-3 billion on "180 small, high capacity satellites at lower altitudes than traditional satellites" to enable two-way Internet access. In April, Google bought Titan Aerospace – which makes solar-powered, high-flying drones that Titan calls "atmospheric satellites" — for Internet access to remote areas and for disaster relief. And in March Google CEO Larry Page shared his ambitions that Project Loon "could build a world-wide mesh of these balloons that can cover the whole planet."
Google's Cover Story
Google's public rationale for all these recent endeavors has been altruism, to supply Internet access to the two-thirds of the world that is not online. About Skybox, Google said: "Skybox's satellites will help keep Google Maps accurate with up-to-date imagery. Over time, we also hope that Skybox's team and technology will be able to help improve Internet access and disaster relief — areas Google has long been interested in."
Never mind that Google Inc. was caught secretly wiretapping hundreds of millions of Gmails before they were delivered for three years without anyone's knowledge via an NSA-PRISM-like device called Content One Box.
And never mind that Google was also caught secretly wiretapping the personal WiFi signals of tens of millions of households in 33 countries over three years.
Google now wants us to believe that Google will not be doing any secret surveillance, spying or illegal data collection when it builds a new worldwide, high-capacity, satellite grid with two-way, tracking, monitoring, and high-resolution video capabilities?
And the company that has long maintained publicly that any broadband access with less than Gigabit speeds are inferior, is now claiming it wants to offer inferior, slow-speed, satellite Internet access to the whole world?
Even if one believes Google's incredible cover story for a moment, that they will use their world-wide satellite network primarily to supply internet access where there is none, what does one surmise that Google Inc. will do with the unused surveillance capability in all the many geographies where there is already superior Internet access and where all Google's monetize-able customers routinely operate? And wouldn't it be more profitable and make more business sense to densely pack more satellites over-top of where most of Google's users and devices are?
Acquiring Military-Grade Capability
Importantly, SkyBox' produces dual-use technology that can be used for both military and civilian purposes. More importantly, SkyBox' technology offers military-grade capability. "No one outside the military has ever been able to access data like this: Theoretically, one could follow individual people from space, per Business Insider.
SkyBox' cutting edge SkySat satellite circuitry is phone book size and uses the power equivalent of a ~100 watt light bulb. The satellites also provide real-time high resolution video images. SkyBox current commercial value proposition is selling satellite surveillance of foreign company logistics to help estimate when certain business activities will occur. Interestingly, the Economist reports the prices for chipsets for nanosats like SkyBox' SkySat satellites are approaching just $25 a piece.
In a post-Snowden world, expect the rest of world to have big concerns about the growingmilitarization of Google as a leading DOD contractor for mapping analytics, soldier-robotics, artificial intelligence and now satellite production, operation and application.
Google's Superstate Ambitions
As the Internet's lone superpower, will Google's latest big move into military-grade satellite services make foreign governments and foreigners think that Google will become more valuable to, and a closer partner and technology supplier to NSA and the U.S. intelligence community than before?
Will Google's eye-in-the-sky ambitions make those who fear that Google has become an unaccountable "digital superstate" even more fearful that Google is becoming all-powerful and effectively digitally colonializing the world's data and private/secret information on Google's terms?
Could Google Big Brother Inc. covet the surveillance potential of a Google-owned-and-operated satellite network that could fill in the gaps where Google currently cannot yet surveil, watch and track people in real-time, because Google does not yet have a fully omnipresent satellite capability that is potentially real-time, continuous, high-resolution, and targetable to tracking individuals or groups of individuals' movements at any time?
That outcome is not what Google Chairman Eric Schmidt would have people believe. On CNBC April 30th Mr. Schmidt reassured the world that Google does not spy or surveil: "We actually don't track people. We are very very careful to respect people's privacy. We disclose exactly what we do."
Google's Eye-in-the-Sky, Sky-Eye, or Sky-Spy YouTube Channels?
As almost always, Google is way ahead of everyone here. Long term Google sees the potential for Google Earth and Google Maps to meld with its satellite capability to immediately film in real-time for YouTube any event of interest in the world, whether it be a natural disaster, terrorist attack, plane/train/car crash, boat sinking, political demonstration, battle/war-in progress, crime-in-progress, shooting, hostage taking, car chase, concert, sporting event, celebrity island wedding, etc.
What Google realizes that others do not is the commercial and business dominance value of being the only entity that can constantly surveil, spot, and then immediately respond with a live video feed in real-time to any breaking development or news of interest to some or many of its users.
One can imagine that many foreign governments will not be thrilled with Google having the new capability to broadcast live via YouTube a foreign government's dirty laundry via its soon-to-be constant aerial surveillance videos of their country, or to choose to give what it finds secretly to the NSA or another foreign government. The editorial, political, and military power of this dominant commercial surveillance capability could be staggering.
Like Google dominates mapping with Google Earth, StreetView, and Maps, a Google owned-and-operated satellite network integrated with all of Google's other dominant surveillance services: search, data, advertising, mobile, video, browser, etc. provides Google with the opportunity to globally dominate aerial surveillance as well.
In closing, it is telling that Google's latest satellite investment binge discussed above coincides with a another Google buying binge of eight military robotics companies several months ago, and also a targeted hiring and acquisition effort to bolster Google's leadership in artificial intelligence just a few months ago; (Google bought ethics-concerned, DeepMind, an acquired company that scarily-required Google to establish an Ethics Board as a condition for Deepmind being bought by Google.)
On top of this creepy predicate, Google's Head Futurist, Ray Kurzweil, told the Guardian in February that he had long thought the 'singularity' — the time when computers' artificial intelligence will overtake human thinking — will be 2029, and that "by 2045 computers will be a billion times more powerful than all of the human brains on Earth."
Fans of science fiction, and the Terminator movies in particular, will surely see the creepy parallels between Google's concentrated efforts over the last several months and the dystopian "Terminator movie future" where a satellite-enabled, artificial-intelligence named "SkyNet" becomes "sentient," i.e. smarter than humans, and then proceeds to see humans as a threat, and then proceeds to try and wipe out the human race.
Google's purposeful determination and actions over the last several months indicates that Google may be anticipating Kurzweil's "singularity" and wants to be sure that any future SkyNet artificial intelligence and robot army is Google owned, programmed… and controlled.
Forewarned is forearmed.
[Originally published at Precursor Blog]
Politicians Do Not Deserve Privacy
The right to privacy is enshrined in constitutions and law around the world. But does it have limits? The United States Constitution does not provide for any general right to privacy, though it is a right recognized with varying degrees of power in federal and state laws. Politicians frequently claim this right, contending that the public has no right to know about their private affairs. Is that a fair request?
Given their proclivity for diminishing the rights of citizens generally, as well as the peculiar power and trust placed in them, there is a strong case to be made that politicians should not be free of personal scrutiny.
Stepping into the Spotlight
When an individual seeks elevation to public office, he or she must accept that the role is a special one in society. As the representative of the people, the politician is more than just the holder of a job appointed by the people, but is the elected servant, whose duty is to lead.
Leadership includes leading by example as well as simply directing policy. It is a strange relationship, and it is one that demands the utmost confidence in the holder. But confidence can only be developed through increased scrutiny and transparency. This means understanding the private life of the politician, since it so often informs their public life. Thus, when citizens place their political power in the hands of an elected representative, they gain the reciprocal right over that representative to have his or her life and character laid bare for their approval. This is the only way true representativeness may be achieved.
The Right to Know
It is also important to understand the nature of representatives as stand-ins for the citizens who elect them. Politicians are basically surrogates. Their duty is to represent the people in public life across all issues and policies. Yet it is impossible to ascertain the desires of the citizens on all issues in the course of an election campaign.
Even harder is to understand political decision-making in a context that had not existed at the time of the election. For example, if a war was to begin suddenly in a country that had not expected any conflict and had not elected representatives on the basis of how they stood on fighting this war. But that is exactly why politicians are elected as much for who they are as for what their avowed policy aims are.
We elect politicians who we believe will act best under such changing conditions; the '3 am phone call', how a candidate will react in a crisis, is often a major issue in U.S. presidential elections and temperament is often the only way to judge this. Understanding the personal lives of politicians allows voters to elect one who best represents them in the sense of being able to act in their name in a changing world. Thus it is critical for the good electoral decision-making that the right to privacy of politicians be overruled.
The Boons of Scrutiny
When politicians see themselves constantly under the lens of public scrutiny, they are essentially forced to dedicate themselves wholesale to their duties as representatives. They are disincentivized in the extreme to pursue any transgressive or hypocritical activities behind closed doors, resulting in more energy dedicated to legislating, and less to lining their pockets or chasing interns, since the added risk of being discovered increases the cost of trying to conceal their foibles.
Having a culture of scrutiny of politicians' private lives will mean those who most see their work as a public service and so will be dedicated to it will be the ones who seek to become politicians. Dominique Strauss-Kahn's lurid sex life, for example, threw light on the sexual misconduct rife in French politics and has actually sparked a major effort to reform the system and a change to a more demanding culture towards politicians. Politicians are human, after all, and susceptible to the base human urges that power unchecked is wont to accommodate.
A powerful probe into politicians' private lives can only serve the cause of better governance.
Yes, Eric Cantor, There is a Virginia
It seems fitting that after such a momentous political evening, the Washington, D.C. area woke early this morning to the thundercrack of a summer storm, with a furious arrival and just as quickly faded and gone. The crushing and unexpected defeat of Eric Cantor – the first defeat of a sitting House Majority leader since 1899, which also happens to be the creation of the position – is sending ripples through a Republican Party which will have ramifications for this cycle and beyond.
In media terms, Cantor's loss wrecks the established narrative about the nature of this cycle (the establishment either crushes or learns to live with the remnants of the Tea Party); in policy terms, it wrecks the likelihood of immigration reform as anything taken up by Republicans under the Obama presidency; and in political terms, it wrecks the longstanding work of many in the business and donor community who have spent years cultivating relationships with Cantor as the presumptive next Speaker of the House, opening up a new contest for leadership in the party which will serve as a proxy battle over the speakership and the most prominent role on Capitol Hill.
I wish that as a Virginian I could have shared some particular advance insight on the nature of this loss – and indeed, there had been rumblings late last week that Cantor's challenger, Randolph-Macon economics professor and Princeton Seminary grad David Brat, was keeping things close – but you dismiss such things as noise when contemplating the possibilities of such an historic upset. He has since the beginning of his career been a man motivated by sheer ambition, and it is this double-edged sword which best explains his loss yesterday.
The narrative today was supposed to be amazement at how Lindsey Graham, one of the most patient political survivors in Washington – who worked hard to get where he is, and dedicated his days over the past several years to undermining or compromising his potential challengers – prevailed easily over weak opposition in South Carolina. Instead, Graham's victory and Cantor's loss provide a good contrast in the crippling danger of complacency in politics. And that's becoming the real lesson of the 2014 primary season: good candidates win, bad candidates lose – and the difference is often as simple as recognizing who you represent is not the collection of interests inside the beltway but the people who actually pull the lever back at home.
While Cantor has been gunning for the speakership now for several years, his ladder-climbing ambition leading him to attempt to position himself as all things to all people, he lost sight of the frustrations back home in his "real Virginia" district. Rob Tracinski, who has lived in Virginia's 7th for two decades, relates this story:
At the Republican Convention in 2008, I approached Cantor after an event, introduced myself as a constituent, and told him where I lived. It's a tiny place, more of a wide spot in the road than an actual town, so this was partly a test to see how well Cantor knew his own district. I turns out that he did recognize the town, and to prove it, he started to tell me about how he had worked on getting us an earmark for a local Civil War battlefield park. An earmark, mind you, just after Republicans had officially renounced earmarks in an attempt to appease small-government types. Cantor suddenly realized this and literally stopped himself in mid-sentence. Then he hastily added: "But we don't do that any more."
The insulating power of money or incumbency is still significant – but Cantor outspent Brat to the tune of more than five million to less than 200k, and it still wasn't enough. You can see why when you see what Cantor was doing with it – money for consultants, pollsters, travel, steakhouses, and ads like this:
Of course, most people inside the Beltway will view this outcome through the lens of the policy scrum over immigration, where advocates on both sides have done themselves no favors, even to the end:
In the room of downcast Cantor allies, a new energy suddenly erupted — but not the kind they wanted on election night. A group of immigration activists stormed the ballroom, screaming and waving a flag. "What do we want? Immigration reform! When do we want it? Now!" A few Cantor supporters tried to block the protesters' entrance into the ballroom, and pushing and shoving ensued. And before they reached the microphone, one Cantor supporter threw his glass of wine at a female protester. She swore at him in return.
The more hackish journalists will deploy this as a harbinger of GOP doom in 2016. But I'm unconvinced that in a field without a single prominent immigration hardliner (Ted Cruz, perhaps?) that this is the case.
And immigration policy is just one aspect of this. For years, the impression has been forming in Virginia that Cantor's priorities were with K Street and the Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable – not with the people who actually elect him:
The central theme of Brat's campaign is that Cantor is beholden to business — specifically the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable.
"If you're in big business, Eric's been very good to you, and he gets a lot of donations because of that, right?" Brat said at the meeting. "Very powerful. Very good at fundraising because he favors big business. But when you're favoring artificially big business, someone's paying the tab for that. Someone's paying the price for that, and guess who that is? You."
Cantor's allies say that is exactly the type of rhetoric that has left the state party struggling for cash.
So immigration mattered, yes – but it was just one piece of that broader narrative, a narrative which painted Cantor as a two-faced power broker whose priorities were elsewhere:
It's true that Cantor enjoyed a strong relationship with business, especially with Wall Street. The industry that gave him the most campaign contributions was the securities and investment sector. Individuals from the private equity firm Blackstone were his biggest financial supporters. Cantor went to bat for the industry repeatedly over politically unpopular issues, including the taxation of income at private equity firms at the lower capital gains rate.
That's no surprise: for decades, the GOP and big business have worked closely together to build a political alliance that until recently appeared airtight. But now with Tea Party activist groups charging the traditional wing of the GOP with "crony capitalism"—and Cantor's loss—the balance of power is creeping away from the pro-business faction of the Republican Party.
After spending so many years framing himself as the all things to all people future of the party, Cantor now serves as a walking cautionary tale for the dangers of ambition which becomes out of touch with the priorities of the people back home. Cantor has used his YG Network in recent months to recast himself as a reform conservative. Along with Mitch McConnell, he's nodded in the right direction toward Main Street priorities and the like, but the sincerity of such interest was always a question among those who viewed Cantor as an unctuous faux conservative climber. Now it's a moot point – you can't chart an agenda if you can't get re-elected – and Cantor risks becoming the American version of Michael Portillo.
This race was not about the Tea Party – Dave Brat may have been backed by voters sympathetic to the Tea Party, but not by any significant organization, money, or groups. It was instead about the question of whether a politician can serve two masters – big business and the people – and get away with it. The answer is yes, but only if you are very good at politics. Lindsey Graham is. Eric Cantor wasn't. And that made all the difference.
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[Originally published at The Federalist]
Activists Try to Take the Joy out of Summer for Children and Adults
National Center for Public Policy Research Risk Analysis Director Jeff Stier is responding this week to a range of stories bubbling up in the news and in social media recently that have one common denominator, according to Stier: "ideologically-driven scares."
Stier warns that as we begin the summer, "we should remember that it is important not only to stay safe while having fun, but to not let agenda-driven scares interfere with how we spend the warmer months."
Stier believes that "narrow-interest activists are using the onset of summer to make former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg look like a libertarian by comparison."
A school district in Texas won't allow children to bring in sunscreen without a doctor's note. ABC affiliate KSAT in Austin reports this month that North East Independent School District spokeswoman Aubrey Chancellor said that, "Typically, sunscreen is a toxic substance, and we can't allow toxic things in to be in our schools."
The news item continued, "Chancellor said if parents know their child may be outdoors, they should come to school fully covered in sunscreen. At this time, she said, sunscreen can't be brought by students to school campuses."
Of course, Stier reminds us, sunscreens should be reapplied at least every two hours, longer than the school day, according to the Food and Drug Administration, so rules of government-run schools are conflicting with the government's own advice.
As children finish school for the summer, and they may again be allowed to use sunscreen, others warn parents about letting the kids have too much fun, at least in "bounce houses." Time magazine says the inflatable activity-boosters are causing an "epidemic" of injuries. "'Epidemics'" almost always precede another phenomenon," says Stier, "regulations."
"Activists aren't only trying to regulate us to protect children," says Stier. "Adults who consume beer are also the subject of consumer warnings." Going Viral on Facebook is an article titled "8 Beers That You Should Stop Drinking Immediately." Stier says, "The Buzzfeed-worthy headline shouldn't cause you to put down your brew, but rather to raise your level of skepticism."
"Indeed," says Stier, "the story is a click-generating piece meant to advance big government agendas including anti- genetically modified food warning label campaigns, chemical bans (BPA), and ingredient restrictions (caramel colorings).
Stier has a warning of his own: "Buy into these warm-weather scares at the risk of helping the left expand the regulatory chokehold on not only businesses, but consumers."
National Center Chairman Amy Ridenour, a mom, says some warnings do make sense; for example, advice to put purses or briefcases on the backseat with the baby so you don't accidentally forget to drop the baby off at daycare on your way to work. "But unfortunately," she said, "there are so many unnecessary warnings out there, the good advice parents can actually use gets drowned out by pointless warnings about everything from feeding kids genetically-modified foods or letting them bounce. Really. Kids are going to bounce."
The National Center for Public Policy Research, founded in 1982, is a non-partisan, free-market, independent conservative think-tank. Ninety-four percent of its support comes from individuals, three percent from foundations, and three percent from corporations. It receives over 350,000 individual contributions a year from over 96,000 active recent contributors.
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[Originally published at Jeffstier.org]
A Lawless Administration: Andrew McCarthy at the Heartland Institute
Author and former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy joined the Heartland Institute on June 12th to talk about his new book, Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama's Impeachment, with a packed and lively crowd of Heartland supporters. McCarthy was incisive and exceptionally convincing.
McCarthy began his talk by bemoaning the fact that an author must eventually stop writing and submit a book for publication, which means that events occurring between the final draft's submission and the actual publication cannot be included in the text. This fact means that his book is "two or three impeachable offenses behind." Even still, the list he presents in Faithless Execution is enthralling and terrifying.
The talk then turned briefly to the subject of Bowe Bergdahl, whose release has stirred up tremendous controversy in Washington and across the nation. McCarthy explained that the focus in Congress was all wrong, and that the issue was not really about the violation of the statute requiring the president to talk to Congress 30 days before the release of prisoners from Guantanamo Bay. Rather, the issue of concern is the fact that releasing five Taliban leaders represents a clear case of replenishing an enemy that is still fighting the United States, which is an "irresponsible dereliction of duty of a commander-in-chief."
McCarthy explained that, despite the focus going awry, the Bergdahl case has had two positive effects. First, it was perfectly timed to publicize his book. Second, it had finally led mainstream politicians to start using a word they have constantly avoided: impeachment.
Impeachment has ceased to be muttered behind closed doors alone and is now being spoken openly. "Even Lindsey Graham is comfortable uttering it," McCarthy said.
The Obama administration has been, according to McCarthy, deliberately "overloading the system," engaging in a cascade of scandals that takes advantage of ordinary people's finite ability to deal with crises. McCarthy gave the example of how the new EPA regulations that may have profound impacts on the health of the economy have barely been discussed, sandwiched as they are between the Bergdahl and VA hospital scandals.
It is because of these scandals and persistent abrogation of duty that McCarthy proposes the process of impeachment. McCarthy explained to the audience that, "Impeachment is a political remedy, not a legal one." In other words, despite the trappings of the courtroom, impeachment proceedings are not about assessing criminal liability. Rather, the "high crimes and misdemeanors" to which the Constitution refers are concerned with breaches of fiduciary duty and violations of the public trust. McCarthy stated that he could identify many such breaches committed during Obama's tenure.
Chief among the president's impeachable offenses, McCarthy explained, is his failure to execute laws faithfully. The president is the only federal official under the Constitution required to take an oath to execute the laws faithfully and to defend the Constitution. McCarthy cited Obama's unilateral amendments of Obamacare and his selective and arbitrary enforcement of certain laws to benefit his allies and harm his opponents as evidence of unfaithful execution.
Another offense McCarthy identified was Obama's dereliction of duty. He identified the atrocities committed to Americans in Benghazi and the previous unauthorized military actions in Libya as clear examples of this offense.
After outlining these offenses, McCarthy turned the discussion to the political climate and the prospects for impeachment. McCarthy was adamant that impeachment must not be a frivolous exercise. After all, it takes a two-thirds majority in the Senate to convict, which is only possible if there is wide bipartisan support for the proceedings both among legislators and in the public.
McCarthy then pointed out that there is no appetite in the American people for impeachment. He pointed to Bill Clinton's impeachment as a clear example of the dangers of impeachment when there is no popular will for it. When an impeachment fails, the media can paint it as an endorsement of the very actions under censure.
What McCarthy proposed, in his book and during the talk, is a concerted effort to change the political environment so that the issue of lawlessness is front-and-center in the public discourse. Changing that environment would likely push Obama to actually execute the laws faithfully and to act within the bounds of the Constitution.
Failure to change the discourse could have serious negative effects for the future of the American republic, as McCarthy deftly explained. He described how the accretion of presidential power erodes citizens' liberty, and that this is "not a conservative issue, not a Republican issue, it is an American issue." Unless something is done about it, the powers Obama takes for himself will belong to his successors, of whatever party.
McCarthy explained that he was still hopeful for the republic's future, a hopefulness he expanded upon during the Q&A session after his talk. When asked about what people can do if impeachment is not yet possible, he said, "Let's make a big issue out of lawlessness."
It is that issue that must be won before the imperial presidency can be stopped. Andrew McCarthy's magisterial book will go a long way to winning it.
Should the Government Define the American Dream?
I have not written anything of significance about the YG Network's Room to Grow agenda, but Ross Douthat writes a piece here about an aspect of it, the child tax credit expansion, which I have criticized in the past, along with Scott Lincicome. It also provides a glimpse of an interesting underlying question about the motivations of reform on the right.
The politics of dramatically expanding the child tax credit entitlement (and yes, it is an entitlement) just don't make all that much sense to me. Consider the landscape of America today, where more people are staying single longer and having fewer kids of their own volition, as they pretty much always do all over the world as cultures become more highly educated. These are not recent developments:
"Between 1970 and 2012, the share of households that were married couples with children under 18 halved from 40 percent to 20 percent. The proportion of one-person households increased by 10 percentage points between 1970 and 2012, from 17 percent to 27 percent. Between 1970 and 2012, the average number of people per household declined from 3.1 to 2.6."
I understand that the people behind this agenda think this is a bad thing, and I largely agree (from a more libertarian perspective, intact families are the greatest hedge we have against the expansion of government, as it rushes in to do the things that intact families do). But why is it conservative or even an example of limited government to use tax policy to essentially reject that steady decision-making over the course of decades? Is it because there are too many young people voting for Republicans? Isn't there something better that could be offered to single people 18-34 – a disturbing portion of whom are still living with their parents – without suggesting that they're pursuing the wrong American dream if they're unmarried or don't have children?
How about instead cutting taxes for working Americans broadly by getting rid of the payroll tax entirely? You could even create big tax advantaged savings accounts attractive for families and for single people who don't have retirement accounts through work – like Canada did, but perhaps with a large HSA component. If you assume that people still want to get married and have children, but are simply too burdened financially to do it… shouldn't the obvious limited government policy solution here be about removing government-imposed burdens, not expanding an entitlement that subsidizes one portion of society and alienating those outside of it?
What is good for society may be good for the soul, but government policy ought to set that aside and instead focus on the idea that what is good for your wallet is good for society. This is something that Wall Street recognizes, where smart people are increasingly concerned about the consumer expenditure side of stagnant wages and slow family formation:
"The problem is that new jobs often pay less than the ones destroyed in the recession, said Jack Ablin, chief investment officer at BMO Private Bank, which manages $66 billion in Chicago. "New jobs are coming through at lower wages. Collectively, people have fewer dollars in their wallets even though they have jobs again," he said. That helps explain why consumer spending fell in April for the first time in a year, according to a May 30 Commerce Department report. Weak wage gains also are making it hard for the housing market to return to normal, Mr. Ablin said. He calculates that new single-family home construction is running at less than 500,000 a month. Demographics say it should be twice that, he said. "People are waiting longer to get married and they are having fewer kids," Mr. Ablin said. That is making them delay home purchases. "It is certainly making us a little more cautious on the economy."
The answer to this challenge is that we ought to reform the tax code just as we would seek to reform regulations and redistributive subsidies: to lower burdens on everyone so that they can make choices for themselves absent the market-warping force of government, not to merely reform to help people who live a certain way. Eliminate the ability to offer the carrot and the stick and just see what people do.
If you do this, people have the flexibility to pursue their own path – and many of these people who want families and homes but just can't afford to go down that path (from their risk averse perspective) will start them and purchase them. Using the alternative approach amounts to slapping Band-aids over existing problems, and future administrations can always warp policies to help people who live the way they prefer (such as buying houses and college educations even if they can't afford them or don't need them). And back and forth and back and forth … and that's how we got here in the first place.
This argument reminds me of a George Will quote cited in a little disagreement concerning Will's evolution away from his book Statecraft As Soulcraft. Pete Wehner at the time wrote in defense of laws which more aggressively "shape the dispositions and habits of the polity", which is just a nice way of saying it forced them to do or not do things that Wehner believes improved the country. By comparison, Will today is making the case for a different view, one which Jonah Goldberg found to be a positive development:
"And these [natural] rights are the foundation of limited government – government defined by the limited goal of securing those rights so that individuals may flourish in their free and responsible exercise of those rights. A government thus limited is not in the business of imposing its opinions about what happiness or excellence the citizens should choose to pursue. Having such opinions is the business of other institutions – private and voluntary ones, especially religious ones – that supply the conditions for liberty."
Between the old Will and the newer, the latter seems like the better approach to reform in general, but particularly in the arena of taxation. And in the tug of war between those who favor an approach which "shapes the dispositions and habits of the polity" and one which does not impose its opinions about what happiness or excellence the citizens should choose to pursue, I suspect the limited side is winning the argument.
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[Originally published at The Federalist]
Evidence Trumps the Phony Consensus
We are lectured monotonously about the "consensus" that carbon dioxide produced by human activities is "highly likely to cause dangerous global warming". The alarmist computer models are all based on this assumption, with predicted warming multiplied by also assuming strong positive feedbacks.
A consensus of opinion never determines a scientific question – real proof depends on evidence and logic. Consensus is a tool of politics and a guidepost for lemmings.
The so-called "Greenhouse Effect" depends entirely on the known property of carbon dioxide gas to intercept radiant heat in certain wavelengths. This process starts operating as soon as the extra gas enters the atmosphere.
If this influence is strong enough to drive "dangerous global warming", its effect should be noticeable even in the short term, with Earth's surface temperature increasing in step with increasing carbon dioxide.
Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been steadily increasing for over a century, but global temperatures have fluctuated in broad cycles decades long, and there has been no warming for the last 17 years.
This evidence suggests that increasing carbon dioxide is not a major driver for dangerous global warming, no matter what the consensus says – even if a million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.
We may still get natural global warming, as the vast restless oceans roll over or the solar cycles change, but man-made carbon dioxide is not driving these processes. Moreover, a bit of warming is not our greatest risk – history shows that ice ages extinguish more species and habitats than warm eras.
The consensus of alarmists is trying to lynch an innocent party.
President Obama's Plan To "De-develop" America Shifts Into High Gear
President Obama's own Administration officially reports that the U.S. economy DECLINED by 1% in the first quarter of this year. That follows 1.9% reported total annual growth for all of 2013.
The U.S. economy sustained a real rate of economic growth of 3.3% from 1945 to 1973, and achieved the same 3.3% sustained real growth from 1982 to 2007. Before President Obama, it was only during the stagflation decade of 1973 to 1982, reflecting the deeply misguided reigning intellectual leadership of the time, that real growth fell to only half long term trends.
This 3.3% long term economic growth trend line is the minimum standard by which to judge President Obama's economic performance. That sustained 3.3% real economic growth was the foundation for America's world leading, post World War II, economic and military dominance, not battlefield victories 70 years ago (ok, those did help for a while too). As Brian Domitrovic explained in Econoclasts: The Rebels Who Sparked the Supply Side Revolution and Restored American Prosperity, "The unique ability of the United States to maintain a historic rate of economic growth over the long term is what has rendered this nation the world's lone 'hyperpower.'"
But President Obama should have done better than that, precisely because the economy was in recession when he entered office! That is because the American historical record is the deeper the recession the stronger the recovery, as the economy grows faster than average to catch back up to the long term trendline. That observation originally stemmed from Milton Friedman, the greatest economist of the 20th century. So it comes by way of a top pedigree.
It certainly worked that way under President Reagan. After the 1981-1982 recession that greeted him soon after entering office, the economy took off on a boom that lasted 92 months without a recession, until July, 1990, when the tax increases of the 1990 budget deal killed it. That set a new record for the longest peacetime expansion ever, the previous high in peacetime being 58 months.
During those 7 years, the economy grew by almost one-third, the equivalent of adding the entire economy of West Germany, the third largest in the world at the time, to the U.S. economy. In 1984 alone, real economic growth boomed by 6.8%, the highest in 50 years. President Obama has not had a year of economic growth even half that large.
Indeed, in the 11 post-Depression recessions before President Obama, the economy recovered all the GDP lost during the recession within an average of about a year (4.5 quarters) after the recession started. But it took Obama's recovery 16 quarters, or 4 years, to reach that point. And the economy has bumbled along in slow growth stagnation since then. By sharp contrast, at this point in the Reagan recovery, the economy had boomed by over a fifth.
In fact, that Reagan recovery grew into a 25 year boom, from late 1982 until the end of 2007, with just slight interruptions by shallow, short recessions in 1990 and 2001. As Art Laffer and Steve Moore wrote in their book, The End of Prosperity,
"We call this period, 1982-2007, the twenty-five year boom – the greatest period of wealth creation in the history of the planet. In 1980, the net worth – assets minus liabilities – of all U.S. households and business…was $25 trillion in today's dollars. By 2007.…net worth was just shy of $57 trillion. Adjusting for inflation, more wealth was created in America in the twenty-five year boom than in the previous two hundred years."
Similarly, Steve Forbes wrote in Forbes in 2008,
"Between the early 1980s and 2007 we lived in an economic Golden Age. Never before have so many people advanced so far economically in so short a period of time as they have during the last 25 years. Until the credit crisis, 70 million people a year [worldwide] were joining the middle class. The U.S. kicked off this long boom with the economic reforms of Ronald Reagan, particularly his enormous income tax cuts. We burst from the economic stagnation of the 1970s into a dynamic, innovative, high tech-oriented economy. Even in recent years the much maligned U.S. did well. Between year-end 2002 and year-end 2007 U.S. growth exceeded the entire size of China's economy."
In other words, the growth in the U.S. economy from 2002 to 2007 was the equivalent of adding the entire economy of China at the time to the U.S. economy.
The Hopeless President
So what is President Obama doing to inspire a real, booming recovery for the American economy at long last, now in the sixth year of his Presidency? On June 2, the EPA unveiled a new blanket of regulations (645 pages) that will only further smother economic growth and opportunity in America. The regulations would require the states to adopt policies to reduce carbon dioxide emissions (CO2) by 30% by 2030 from 2005 levels.
The states could each choose the policies to achieve that goal, such as a new tax on "carbon," or "cap and trade" which means paying for limited permits for CO2 emissions, which come from burning fossil fuels such as oil, natural gas, coal, and gasoline. This is what Obama meant when he privately told supporters at the San Francisco Chronicle editorial board in 2008, "Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity costs would necessarily skyrocket."
These regulatory burdens would be like a new tax further squelching the economy with additional, artificial costs. In the 1970s, the Washington Establishment told us the bad economy was due to the oil price spikes caused by Arab oil embargoes. Now the Washington Establishment, which wildly supports shutting down the American economy, because the vast riches it can produce morally embarrass them, is telling us we have to do the same thing to ourselves.
David Rothbard, President of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, correctly explained the ultimate results of such regulatory madness in his column on June 3, writing, "Millions of Americans will endure lower quality of life and be unable to heat or cool their homes properly, pay their rent or mortgage, or save for college and retirement….As Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) points out, 'A lot of people on the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum are going to die.'" Manchin should be preparing to run for Senate Majority Leader next year, as a Republican.
The Wall Street Journal further explained on June 3, "Consumers may not realize how these regulations will affect their daily lives. Groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Brookings Institution support a policy known as 'direct load control' that would manage when you are allowed to run the air conditioner or washing machine." Big Brother is here, watching you. Check out Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism.
Rothbard cites President Obama saying, "the costly regulations are needed to reduce 'carbon pollution' that he claims is making 'extreme weather events' like Superstorm Sandy 'more common and more devastating." But no honest, educated person can use the term "pollution" to refer to carbon dioxide emissions. For the easily manipulated, low information voters out there, carbon dioxide is not some toxic industrial gas. It is a natural substance essential for the survival of all life on the planet. Plants need CO2 to grow and conduct photosynthesis, which is the natural process that creates food for animals and fish at the bottom of the food chain.
Moreover, there is no demonstrated connection anywhere in what passes for "science" these days between CO2 emissions and Super Storm Sandy. As Rothbard accurately explains in regard to this whole global warming scare behind the regulations,
"[A]verage global temperatures have not risen in almost 18 years. We have now gone over eight years without a category 3-5 hurricane hitting the United States – the longest such period in over a century. Tornadoes are at a multi-decade low. Droughts are no more frequent or intense than since 1900. There were fewer than half as many forest fires last year as during the 1960s and 1970s. Sea levels rose just eight inches over the last 130 years and are currently rising at barely seven inches per century. There's still ice on Lake Superior – in June."
Sea levels have been rising, in fact, since the end of the last ice age, 12,000 years ago! But there has been no acceleration in the rate of that sea level rise for at least 200 years. There also is exactly zero real science to back up wildly manipulative claims that CO2 emissions cause asthma attacks or even heart attacks.
The Journal also correctly explained, "The irony is that all this [economic] damage will do nothing for climate change. Based on the EPA's own carbon accounting, shutting down every coal-fired plant tomorrow and replacing them with zero carbon sources would reduce the Earth's temperature by about one-twentieth of a degree Fahrenheit in a hundred years."
Green v. Blue
Politically, all of this involves an historic, dramatic change of course for the Democrat Party, as the Journal further observed on June 4: "The [EPA's] mammoth rule is an important political moment because it shows that national Democrats have come down decisively on the side of modern environmentalists over the working class voters who were once their base. The richer coasts dominated by gentry liberals now trump the union jobs of the Midwest." In other words, Democrats have chosen green over blue. This opens up the same huge opportunities Reagan so successfully exploited to win over millions of Reagan Democrats. As Reagan used to say so often, "I didn't leave the Democrat Party. The Democrat Party left me."
When I began studying the concern over potentially catastrophic global warming years ago, I was shocked at how weak the argument for it was. It is basically broad theory which does not specify how much warming and when. And it is 73 climate models collected by the U.N. projecting catastrophic warming on our current course long term. But these models, which have never been validated, meaning they cannot even predict the past, are diverging farther and farther from real world temperatures. Global temperature records do not remotely track anywhere near rising carbon dioxide emissions over time, especially throughout the 20th century to today. The cyclical up and down temperature patterns track much more closely instead with the natural cycles of ocean churning currents, as cold water from the deep cycles up to slightly cool the planet for a couple of decades at a time, and cycles of sunspots and other solar activity.
The argument for ultimately catastrophic, man caused global warming has been corrupted by political correctness, political ideology, the special interest of governments in expanded power and authority, and billions in overwhelming government money paying to get the results desired. Bottom line: there is zero chance that the possibility of ultimately catastrophic, man caused global warming is greater than zero. The real world cannot bear trillions in artificial costs to satisfy the scientific equivalent of Lysenkoism.
Yes, you can cite scientific societies that have disgracefully sold out to this Lysenkoism. But in not one instance have the politically correct bureaucracies running those societies reached that conclusion by canvassing their members. Instead, in at least one instance a rebellion among the rank and file has forced the leadership to reevaluate by appointing worthy competing rival committees of alarmists versus skeptics to conduct an investigation of the issue. Following the results of that real debate will be highly illuminating.
For decision-makers in government and business who need to be sure and make responsible decisions, the full truth of the issue is completely and thoroughly discussed in the thousands of pages of Climate Change Reconsidered II, authored by dozens of serious, top scientists serving on the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), and published this year in ultimately 3 volumes of thousands of pages each by the Heartland Institute. Those volumes are "double peer reviewed," in that they discusses thousands of peer reviewed articles published in scientific journals, and are themselves peer reviewed. Last year, the Cato Institute published a thorough, comprehensive refutation of the publicly released draft of the National Climate Assessment, The Missing Science from the Draft National Assessment on Climate Change, by Patrick J. Michaels, et. al. You can learn more by attending the Ninth International Conference on Climate Change, to be held at the Mandalay Bay Resort in Las Vegas, July 7-9, with more than 1,000 scientists from around the world (where I will be speaking).
The scientific truth of the matter will be determined not by counting how many scientists or their professional societies take on side or another, but by counting the real world data on the issue, which intelligent laymen can judge by reading the sources above.
The bottom line is that when June, 2016 rolls around, when states are supposed to submit "compliance" plans to the EPA for approval, Governors should send letters explaining that they and their legislatures decided not to trash the economies of their states with unjustified "carbon taxes" or cap and trade burdens designed to ensure that their "electricity costs would necessarily skyrocket." And if the EPA thinks that is not acceptable, the state will see them in court. Because under the Constitution, neither the EPA, nor the entire federal government, nor his majesty Barack Obama, have any authority to impose any penalty on any state if the state does not adopt some tax or costly, crippling regulatory burden.
This issue should be affecting now state political races between Democrats and Republicans for Governor, the legislature, and all other state offices. Let Democrats say vote for us and we will impose on you carbon taxes and cap and trade burdens under which your electricity costs will necessarily skyrocket. And let Republicans say vote for us and we will tell the Feds they can go to Hades.
Obamanomics: The De-development of America
It should be no surprise to anyone that President Obama's economic policies have all but terminated any economic growth and opportunity in America. Because every one of those policies has been decisively anti- growth.
Obama has led increases in the top tax rates of virtually every major federal tax — income taxes, capital gains taxes, taxes on corporate dividends, death taxes, even payroll taxes. The only marginal tax rate he has not increased, the federal corporate tax rate, is already the highest in the world.
Obama has led massive increases in regulatory costs, burdens and barriers, from health care to finance to energy to see above.
Obama and his Administration have cheerled the Fed to pursue wild, zero interest rate monetary policies, buying up most national debt, for years now, laying the foundation for the future return of inflation.
The only pro-growth policy has been the sequester, and other cuts in spending, imposed on him, by the Republican House majority. But Obama is working mightily to reverse that, proposing to restore wild-eyed spending in every budget, and speech relating to the subject.
Some commenters have asserted that President Obama has failed to produce economic growth because Congressional Republicans refuse any compromise with him. But name any policy President Obama has proposed that would lead to more economic growth and jobs that Congressional Republicans have refused to support. You can't, because there isn't one. Some of you are so easy for professional politicians to fool.
The real explanation for what is going on here with Obamanomics was actually revealed years ago by the President's Science advisor, John Holdren. Holdren said, "A massive campaign must be launched to…de-develop the United States…bringing our economic system (especially patterns of consumption) into line with the realities of ecology and the global resource situation….We must design a stable, low consumption economy in which there is a much more equitable distribution of wealth."
And that is what you have with the President's economic policies, a massive campaign to de-develop the United States. Even I have to say, if that is what the President's plan is, it's working.
For any other President engaged in this, we would have to impeach him for pursuing such a war on his own people. But in this case, Obama just represents the true heart and soul of his own party, which protects and enables him in this foolish endeavor. So the conclusion to take away: don't blame President Obama, blame the Democrat Party, which you have a clear chance to do this fall.
Why is the U.S. Government in the Mortgage Loan Business?
It is often truly astonishing to me the harm done by the way the federal government was expanded well beyond its constitutional limits during the 1930's New Deal era. One dramatic example is the government's role in the housing mortgage loan marketplace.
I recently read a commentary by Steve Stanck, a research fellow at The Heartland Institute, a free market think tank, whose title was "Don't Replace Fannie and Freddie; End Them." He began by pointing out that "For every 100 mortgages being sold in the United States these days, at least 94% of them have government backing."
Fannie is shorthand for the Federal National Mortgage Association and Freddie is short for the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation. Both are referred to as "government sponsored enterprises" and Stanck points out that "The housing market was nearly ruined several years ago, and the government's involvement is a big reason" because, before the 2008 financial crisis, both "were bundling mortgages into mortgage-backed securities and selling them to investors", primarily banks.
Still largely unknown to the public, the financial crisis was triggered on September 15, 2008 when the Federal Reserve noticed a tremendous drawdown of money market accounts in the U.S. amounting to $550 billion dollars in the matter of an hour or two. This was revealed in a 2008 congressional closed door session and later reported by Rep. Paul Kanjorski of Pennsylvania. Had the Federal Reserve not closed down the accounts by 2 PM that day, the entire economy would have collapsed, followed by the world economy a day later.
To this day, the identity of those who initiated the withdrawal has not been revealed, but the banks that were heavily invested in Fannie and Freddie's bundled mortgage-backed securities were most at risk. Those securities were regarded as a safe investment precisely because both are, as noted, "government-sponsored enterprises", implying that they were backed by the government—taxpayers.
When the housing bubble burst in 2008, the federal government put Fannie and Freddie into conservatorship "and handed them $188 billion to stay afloat. The actions of both entities had artificially lowered mortgage interest rates in order to increase home buying and required lenders—banks—to loan money to riskier borrowers.
As Brian M. Carney noted in a July 26, 2010 Wall Street Journal editorial opinion, "The official version of the housing boom and bust, and subsequent panic and recession, tells us that greedy bankers took unacceptable risks, assumed too much leverage, made irresponsible loans, and left the government to clean up the mess. The causes of the crisis, in this version, include banker bonuses, deregulation ideology and predatory lending. Most of this is nonsense."
Carney noted that "There's simply no room in this story for two giant government-sponsored enterprises that distorted the housing and credit markets…" Those would be Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Stanck notes that there is a bill in Congress to "wind down Fannie and Freddie. This is good. But they want to replace those organizations with private mortgage bond issuers who would each have government guarantees back by a new entity called the Federal Mortgage Insurance Corporation. This is bad."
It is bad for the same reason that Fannie and Freddie are bad. The government needs to get out of the mortgage loan business. The bill barely squeaked through the Senate Banking Committee on May 15 with minimal support.
The new entity that the bill would create would charge fees to the private mortgage bond issuers—"fees that would be based on how many people in 'underserved' demographic groups receive mortgages" leading to "more of the subprime lending that played such a big role in the most recent housing mortgage collapse." It is nothing more than Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac with a new name.
Stanck sensibly says "Let borrowers and lenders strike their own deals without government meddling. In that way, mortgage interest rates would better reflect true risk, there'd be almost no way for legislators to inject corruption and cronyism into the system, and taxpayers would not be at risk of shelling out more hundreds of billions of dollars."
You may read or hear that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are returning to solvency, able to turn a profit in the first quarter of 2014 and this is true. Those profits are going straight into the U.S. Treasury to resolve their debt incurred when they were bailed out. When they pay it back, they should, as Stanck says, be ended, not replaced.
So long as they exist, another housing boom and bust, and another financial collapse will repeat what occurred in 2008.
Jay Lehr on Fox News
On May 16th, Jay Lehr, science director at The Heartland Institute went on "Your World with Neil Cavuto" to discuss the issue of living in high risk areas. Lehr argues that the current system requires serious change in order to more justly deal with individuals who choose to live in high risk areas. Lehr explains how the current system allows individuals to live in high risk areas like San Diego with minimal regulations or burdens. Considering the high activity of fire fighters in places like San Diego, Lehr believes that those who choose to live in such locations should pay an increased tax. Instead of placing the tax burden of compensating fire fighters and other public servants on everyone in the area, Lehr calls for a shift of that burden onto those who choose to live in particularly high risk areas.
Cavuto went on to ask Lehr about other risks, such as floods or hurricanes. While he adamantly defends the individual's freedom to choose their place of residence, Lehr also advises caution. He argues that some regulation is necessary. For example, Lehr references Ohio's policy that disallows the construction of permanent structures on 100 year flood plains. This regulation exists to combat the risk of serious flooding and avert any potential disaster. Lehr argues for vigilance and flexibility in these regulations as new information continues to come to light about high risk areas.
Lehr and Cavuto go on to discuss the issue of homeowners being grandfathered into new building codes and regulations. Lehr outlines the foolishness of such a system. He contends that all homeowners, regardless of when they move into an area, should be required to abide by the newest codes and regulations. Such a requirement comes at a small price and carries the potential for huge reward.
Transform The VA Into A Pro-Growth Model For First Rate Health Care
The VA (Veterans Administration) scandals show why so many people have been so highly motivated for so long to fight against Obamacare. That is because of the perfectly rational fear that Obamacare will end up doing to the entire American health care system what the VA has done to health care for America's veterans.
Many have already commented that the VA system is actually pure socialized medicine. The government doesn't just pay for health care or health insurance under the system for our nation's veterans. The government actually builds and owns the hospitals and their clinics, and hires the doctors and nurses, who serve as government employees. The government then finances the operation of these facilities, actually providing the health care directly itself. Those eligible for VA benefits then go to these government facilities to get their health care.
This is basically how the notorious British National Health Service (NHS) operates. I say notorious because the National Health Service is famous for running a strict rationing system, with the government determining who gets what health care and when, and deciding who gets told when its time to go home and die. In my 2011 book, I suggested that Britain's National Health Service is probably responsible for the deaths of more British subjects than the Nazis and Adolf Hitler. But a thorough study would be necessary to document that.
The NHS does not do this out of malevolence. It does it because when the government is dispensing free health care, there must be some means to control costs. With no market prices, incentives, or competition to control costs, the only choice is for the government to decide when the money train stops at the station to let some off. Ironically, a system originally adopted supposedly so everyone could get health care becomes an institutionalized means for deciding when some shall be denied health care.
The British people accept the cold, calculating, health care rationing of the NHS because of a social belief that it is necessary for everyone to get health care. That is deluded because market competition and incentives will work in health care the same as for everything else. But when social mores prevent anyone from questioning the status quo, and alternatives from being considered, the people and the society suffer. That is essentially the same social process more generally which left many societies around the world stagnant with no economic growth for centuries going back to the Dark Ages. British health care could ultimately be liberated by starting social experiments with Health Savings Accounts, which would teach eye opening social lessons.
America's VA, with all market prices, incentives and competition excluded from the system, operates with similar health care rationing. The VA is given a "global budget" each year that it can spend for health care for our nation's veterans and no more. With no prices or competition for anyone in the system to weigh costs against benefits, the only way total costs for essentially free health care can be kept within that budget is for the VA bureaucracy to deny health care through some form of rationing. That is primarily accomplished within America's social mores with long wait times for the free VA health care granted to veterans, effectively denying or at least stretching out health costs.That is why Larry Kudlow is so right when he says in his May 23 column, "The VA problem is not Shinseki, it's socialism." That is why America's VA operates like the socialized medicine systems of Great Britain, Canada, and continental Europe, with long delays for the sick to obtain necessary health care, and other bureaucratic means of reducing access to quality care to control costs (again without consumer choice and market competition to control costs, there must be some means to control costs). These problems are so serious that at dozens of veterans are now documented to have suffered premature deaths due to lack of health care, and the full scope of the problem may involve the same for many more.
The problem is not inadequate spending on the VA, which socialist Democrats are trying to argue. As John Merline reported in Investor's Business Daily on May 20, from 2000 to 2013, VA spending nearly tripled while the population of veterans declined by 4.3 million. Moreover, as Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute reports, 344,000 veterans' care claims are now backed up and waiting to be processed. But it takes 160 days, almost half a year, for health benefits approval. For those who have to appeal a decision, the wait is 1,598 days, or more than four years.
Forbes' own Avik Roy in his thorough May 23 column explains how America fell into the VA experiment with socialized medicine. The roots of the VA go all the way back to 1827, before the modern American health care system had even developed. So the federal government itself had to establish homes for disabled military veterans, and facilities to provide the more rudimentary health care of the time.
By the end of World War II, the VA was responsible for a burgeoning veterans population including aging veterans from World War I as well. This population swamped the available health care at the time. So the VA undertook the burden of sharply expanding the supply of hospitals, clinics, and medical facilities. From 1930 to 1947, the number of VA hospitals more than doubled, from 54 to 120. Today, the VA maintains and operates 153 hospitals, and with 300,000 mostly medical employees, it is the second largest department of the federal government.
But America's private health care system is all grown up now, and the best in the world, by far in my opinion, in providing critical health care to the sick. Just consider premature babies, and the miracles America's health care system achieves with those born less than a foot long, and less than a pound in weight. No other country even really tries to save these most vulnerable newborns today. But in America they now almost routinely are saved to grow up and lead normal lives. Or compare the health care and survival and recovery rates of America's seniors with those of the same age in any other country.
America's veterans now would do far better participating in this same private health care system, along with everyone else. That can be achieved by dividing up the VA budget in equal shares for every veteran, and freeing them to use those sums to help purchase the private health insurance of their choice. That would include Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), which maximize the freedom of control and choice by patients over their own health care, and their own health care dollars. Such HSAs are also the only health policy innovation that have proven to control health costs in the real world, without a third party empowered to deny health care to the patient.
Similar reforms can and should be extended to liberate the poor on Medicaid to obtain better health coverage and care of their own choice. Block grants of federal Medicaid funds back to the states, which were so successful in reforming the old New Deal, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program in 1996, could be adopted while giving the states broad authority to reform Medicaid to best suit the poor in their state. Each state could then experiment with providing the poor with vouchers that could be used to help pay for the health insurance of their choice, including again HSAs. The voters of each state would then decide how much should be given in assistance at each income level to assure that the poor would be able to buy essential health insurance.
Some states might choose to reform their Medicaid programs primarily focusing on providing the poor on Medicaid with HSAs, like Indiana has recently done. Or they might focus more on covering the poor with managed care programs, like Rhode Island has recently done. Or they might leave the choice completely to each poor family. The important point is that broad opportunities exist for states to assure the poor much better access to essential health care than Medicaid currently does, like both Indiana and Rhode Island have done, even with more efficient control of Medicaid spending.
Such reforms should also be extended to replacing Obamacare, with much broader benefits. Because Obamacare is not only a serious threat to the quality and supply of American health care. It also is a major drag on the American economy, due primarily to the costly regulatory burdens imposed by the program, and the perverse, counterproductive incentives involved.
The employer mandate is the source of much of the problem. The mandate raises the cost of employment, and so results in less of it. This effect is exacerbated by the high cost of the health insurance the Obamacare law requires to satisfy the mandate. That is in the process of raising costs even for employers that already provide health insurance for their workers.
President Obama recognizes this, which is why he has unilaterally and without legal authority delayed implementation of the employer mandate required by the Obamacare law, for years now. He knows, in fact, that the high costs of the Obamacare employer mandate will perversely and counterproductively cause millions to lose the employer provided health insurance they already have.
Because employers and the labor market plan ahead, we have already seen real world effects of this problem. Since the employer mandate only applies to full time employment involving 30 hours a week or more, millions of workers have already seen their hours cut back to part time work below the 30 hours a week threshold. And millions of others have already dropped out of the work force, because they have given up on finding work. This is all documented in the monthly Bureau of Labor Statistics reports. The real world effects can also be seen in the badly lagging U.S. economic growth we have now long suffered under Obama, as the economy never has fully recovered from the recession, which is now years overdue based on the American historical record.
This means that Obamacare can be replaced with reforms that would have major pro-growth effects, spurring the economy to return to the world leading economic growth and prosperity deeply ingrained in America's heritage. Such reforms are needed as well to prevent Obamacare from deteriorating into single payer, socialized medicine, similar to the VA, regardless of the foolish sentiments favoring precisely that we hear from Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and other "Progressives." That can be done while more assuredly achieving the original supposed goal of Obamacare of health care for all.
Even the Congressional Budget Office, which we too easily forget is a bastion of the Washington establishment, has always foreseen that Obamacare would not achieve anywhere near universal coverage, estimating that 30 million would still be uninsured 10 years after full implementation! For careful, reasoned observers, it is not even clear whether Obamacare so far is reducing rather than increasing the number of uninsured, as millions have already lost their health insurance, with millions more to come once the employer mandate is implemented, especially apart from just expanding Medicaid, which adds even more to unmanageable, long term entitlement costs.
By extending similar reforms to those proposed above for both the VA and Medicaid to the replacement of Obamacare, we can, in fact, assure health care for all, with no individual mandate, no employer mandate, sharply reduced regulatory burdens more broadly, and trillions in reduced federal spending and taxes over the years. John Goodman, President of the National Center for Policy Analysis, has long advocated a universal health insurance tax credit for all, which everyone could use to help purchase the private health insurance of their choice. That would involve broadening out the tax preference currently provided only for employer provided health insurance to everyone. He is now advocating a credit of $2,500 per person per year, which would not completely finance essential health insurance, but provide help and an incentive for it, just like the tax preference for employer provided health insurance does not completely finance, but does provide help and effective incentive for it.
That credit can be used by those on Medicaid to opt out of it for the private health insurance of their choice, including HSAs. Concomitantly, it can be used to opt into Medicaid, assuring coverage for any pre-existing condition is always available. Those with employer provided coverage can still use the credit for alternative private coverage of their choice if they prefer, again including HSAs. This provides working people with a critical check and balance on their employers, assuring access to the health care of their choice, even when their employer plan does not. For any worker who does not use the credit to purchase private coverage, the $2,500 for the year goes to indigent care facilities in the worker's local area.
Along with Medicaid block grants to the states, which states could use in part to finance uninsurable risk pools for the uninsured, such reforms would feasibly assure health care for everyone. At the same time, these reforms would be more broadly pro-growth. With no employer mandate requiring the purchase of very costly health insurance for every employee, the cost of employment would be substantially reduced, encouraging more jobs, and higher wages. There would be no longer be any incentive to cut working people back to part time hours. Eliminating the costly Obamacare regulatory requirements on insurance, along with the broader availability of cost reducing HSAs, would reduce unnecessary health costs, further boosting the economy with an effective tax cut for everyone. Reducing taxes and federal spending due to Obamacare by trillions over future years would further enhance economic growth and general prosperity for all. Republicans in Congress are presently drafting such an alternative to Obamacare.
All of this comprehensive health care liberation, from the VA, to Medicaid, to Obamacare, would mean ultimately better health care for all, along with helping to restore economic growth and prosperity, and the American Dream.
[Originally published at Forbes]
Scandal Exhaustion
Listening to President Obama respond on May 21 to the latest scandal regarding something about which he knew and did nothing—the mess at the Veterans Administration—was such a familiar event that I have reached a point of exhaustion trying to keep up with everything that has been so wrong about his six years in office. As he always does, he said was really angry about it.
Writing in the May 20 Washington Post, Jennifer Rubin said, "Forget ideology for a moment. Whether you are liberal or conservative, the Obama presidency's parade of miscues is jaw-dropping."
Stacked against the list of Obama scandals and failures, Rubin could only cite the Bush administration's 2005 handling of Hurricane Katrina, the seventh most intense ever, and, as anyone familiar with that event will tell you, the failure of FEMA's response was matched by the failures of Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco and the New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin. Bush had declared a national emergency two days before it hit the Gulf coast.
Rubin concluded that the Obama administration scandals "reflect the most widespread failure of executive leadership since the Harding administration", adding "The presidency is an executive job. We hire neophytes at our peril. When there is an atmosphere in which accountability is not stressed you get more scandals and fiascos."
Obama spent his entire first term blaming all such things on his predecessor, George W. Bush, until it became a joke.
One has to wonder about the effect of the endless succession of scandals and fiascos have had on Americans as individuals and the nation as a whole.
While it is easier to lay all the blame on Obama, the fact is that much of the blame is the result of a federal government that is so big no President could possibly know about the countless programs being undertaken within its departments and agencies, and all the Presidents dating back to Teddy Roosevelt's progressive initiatives have played a role in growing the government.
It is, however, the President who selects the cabinet members responsible to manage the departments as well as those appointed to manage the various agencies. Kathleen Sebelius, the recently resigned former Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, responsible for the implementation of Obamacare, comes to mind. She had solicited donations—against the law—from the companies HHS regulates to help her sign up uninsured Americans for Obamacare and signed off on the millions spent on HealthCare.gov and other expenses leading up to its start.
There are lists of the Obama scandals you can Google. One that continues to fester is the attack on September 11, 2012—the anniversary of 9/11—that killed an American ambassador and three security personnel in Benghazi, Libya. It has been and continues to be investigated, mostly because of the lies told by Obama and then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of "What difference at this point does it make?" fame. Clinton was asked what she had accomplished in her four years as Secretary and was unable to name anything.
Eric Holder, our Attorney General, continues in office despite having been held in contempt of Congress, professing that he knew nothing about "Fast and Furious", the earliest scandal involving a gun-running scheme to Mexican drug cartels by the ATF presumably to track them, but they lost track and many were used in crimes including the killing of a Border Patrol agent.
Holder also told Congress that he was not associated with the "potential prosecution" of a journalist even though he had signed the affidavit that named Fox News reporter, James Rosen. as a potential criminal. Holder was also in charge when the Justice Department culled the phone records of Associated Press reporters to find out who they deemed was leaking information.
Keeping track of the solar power and other "renewable" and "Green" energy companies like Solyndra that received millions in grants and then rather swiftly went bankrupt became a fulltime effort and, of course, there was the "stimulus" that wasted billions without generating any "shovel ready jobs" qualifies as a fiasco.
In the midst of the recession that was triggered by the 2008 financial crisis various elements of the Obama administration continued to spend money in ways that suggested their indifference. In 2010 the General Services Administration held a $823,000 training conference in Las Vegas, complete with a clown and mind readers.
An Agriculture Department program to compensate black farmers who allegedly had been discriminated against by the agency turned into a gravy train that delivered several billion dollars to thousands of recipients, some of whom probably had not encountered discrimination.
The Veterans Affairs agency made news when it spent more than $6 million on two conferences in Orlando, Florida, and is back in the news for revelations about alleged falsified records concerning the waiting times veterans faced amidst assertions that many died while waiting for treatment surfaced. This was a problem of which the then-Senator Obama was already aware, but six years into his presidency it still existed despite his early promises to fix it.
Obama has been the biggest of Big Government Presidents since the days of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, and Obamacare put the federal government in control of one sixth of the nation's economy while putting the government in charge of the care Americans expect to receive. Obamacare will dwarf the problems associated with the Veterans agency.
Meanwhile, we have been living with a President who is so indifferent to working with Congress that he has gained fame for his use of executive orders such as the decision to not deport illegal immigrants. His aides have promised more executive orders.
All this over the course of the last six years has left Americans exhausted by the incompetence and wastefulness of an administration that now presides over the highest national debt in the history of the nation and the first ever downgrade of our credit rating.
It has also left them angry if they were conservatives and disillusioned if they were Obama supporters. The Veterans Administration scandal is likely a tipping point for the independent voters and even for longtime Democrats who will want a change.
It is increasingly likely that the November midterm elections give the Republican Party control over the Senate as well as the House and then to hope that it will begin to rein in the spending and save the nation from a financial collapse that will rival the one in 2008.
© Alan Caruba, 2014
Sorry, Jerry Brown, Global Warming Is Reducing Wildfires
California Gov. Jerry Brown blames global warming and Republicans for recent wildfires in California, but objective scientific data show a decline in wildfires as our planet modestly warms.
2013 was one of the quietest wildfire years in U.S. history, according to objective data from the federal government's National Interagency Fire Center. The 47,000 wildfires last year may seem like a very large number – and it certainly gives global warming alarmists like Brown plenty of fodder for misleading global warming claims – but the 47,000 wildfires was less than half the average number of wildfires that occurred each year in the 1960s and 1970s. Importantly, the Earth was in a cooling phase during the 1960s and 1970s when so many more wildfires occurred.
The unusually quiet 2013 fire season continued a long-term trend in declining wildfires. From 1962 through 1982, for example, at least 100,000 wildfires occurred in the United States every year. Since 1982, however, not a single year has registered 100,000 wildfires. During the past decade, an average of 73,000 wildfires occurred each year. During the 1970s, by contrast, an average of 155,000 wildfires occurred each year.
The 2014 wildfire season, moreover, has been relatively quiet so far. The total number of wildfires is well below the 1962-2013 average, and is even below the average for the past decade. Even so, the below-average 22,000 wildfires so far this year give global warming alarmists plenty of opportunities to mislead the public about the scientific facts.
The long-term decline in wildfires reflects an ongoing improvement in global soil moisture and an ongoing decline in global drought.
A scientific study in the peer-reviewed Journal of Hydrology reports, "Evidence indicates that summer soil moisture content has increased during the last several decades at almost all sites having long-term records in the Global Soil Moisture Data Bank."
Similarly, a scientific study in the peer-reviewed Geophysical Research Letters reports, "An increasing trend is apparent in both model soil moisture and runoff over much of the U.S. … This wetting trend is consistent with the general increase in precipitation in the latter half of the 20th century. Droughts have, for the most part, become shorter, less frequent, and cover a smaller portion of the country over the last century."
Droughts and wildfires have always occurred and will always occur. While global warming is reducing the frequency of droughts and wildfires, global warming will not completely eradicate droughts and wildfires. They will continue from time to time despite their long-term decline. This allows alarmists and political responsibility-shirkers like Jerry Brown to blame global warming and his political opponents for the relatively few droughts and wildfires that still do occur.
Jerry Brown can invent his own political narrative but he cannot invent his own scientific facts.
[Originally published at Forbes]
Common Core and K-12 Science Education — Could This be a Start to Climate Youth?
At a Chicago fundraiser May 29, 2013, President Obama said "I don't have much patience for people who deny climate change." At his swearing in ceremony May 21, 2013, Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz declared he is "not interested in debating what is not debatable." These remarks echo long-standing pleas of climate alarmists the "science is settled" with regards to burning fossil fuels causing catastrophic global warming.
Would these statements come from true scientists interested in pursuing truth about whether carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuel is a global threat? The remarks are very clear about United States government policies with regard to education or research on climate science. If proposed education materials or research don't support abandoning fossil fuels, go somewhere else for financial support and airing your views. Close the door on the way out.
From the preceding remarks it is apparent bias toward accepting as fact carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels is the driver for climate change the past century. Support for carbon dioxide threats are a series of 5 Assessment Reports by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (UNIPCC) released since 1990. To counteract omissions, half-truths, and false statements in these reports, the Non-governmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) was formed in 2003. Since 2009, the NIPCC has released 6 Reports that give authoritative, easily-read information about vast amount of experimental data showing negligible influence of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels on climate, benefits of increased atmospheric carbon dioxide, financial losses from mitigation, and proper role of adapting to climate change. The NIPCC is supported by three non-profit organizations—Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, Science and Environmental Policy Project, and The Heartland Institute.
The science portion of Common Core called "A Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts, and Core Ideas" is written from material provided by The National Academy of Sciences (NAS). The report is 400 pages and I examined PART II: Dimension 7 dealing with Earth and Space Sciences from pages 169 to 201. The coverage is cursory due to the shortness of material. Part ESS3.D: Global Climate Change covers global warming from pages 196-199. The coverage mentions computer models are used for predicting future climate and weather conditions for the planet. The report claimed, "However, it is clear not only that human activities play a major role in climate change but also that impacts of climate change—for example, increased frequency of severe storms due to ocean warming—have begun to influence human activities . The prospect of future impacts of climate change due to further increases in atmospheric carbon is prompting consideration of how to avoid or restrict such increases." There is insufficient coverage that computer models fail to replicate what happens in the future when data for comparisons are available. In my opinion climate models should not be included in K-12 education because our understanding of forces influencing climate is incomplete and model's failure to be validated. Material in the book does not make this clear.
Four references are cited at the end of the discussion. One is the 2009 Report "Climate Literacy: The Essential Principles of Climate Change" by the United States Global Change Research Project (USGCRP) which contains scary predictions for the future of the world because of global warming. One example is "C. The impacts of climate change may affect the security of nations. Reduced availability of water, food, and land can lead to competition and conflict among humans, potentially resulting in large groups of climate refugees." The material says carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels is causing global warming which is a highly controversial topic.
No doubt numerous copies of the 2009 USGCRP Report will be sent to schools as reference material showing fossil fuel use should be abandoned in order to save the planet. This report, and other U. S. government printed reports, provides numerous reference materials to indoctrinate students to accept catastrophic climate change is occurring unless fossil fuel use is abandoned. This all confirms political bias on climate change shown by remarks of President Obama and Energy Secretary Moniz.
The 32 pages of a 400-page report convinced me global warming science should not be used in education of students at the K-12 level. More material of this nature could be in the NAS Report. This is sufficient reason to abandon the science education portion of Common Core.
The official website for the PUBLIC BROADCAST SERVICE provides discussions of the following features of Common Core: (1) Climate Literacy: The Essential Principles of Climate Science, (2) National Science Education Standards, (3) A Framework for K-12 Science Education, and (4) Common Core State Standards for Mathematical Properties. The threat of catastrophic global warming due to carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels is again emphasized in areas outside the science portion of Common Core.
More climate science education material is provided by the NAS, in conjunction with The Royal Society, with the February 27 release of Climate Change: Evidence and Causes. This booklet is highly criticized for inaccuracies and ethical lapses in a paper by James Rust "U.S. National Academy of Sciences: Doubling Down on Climate Alarmism (and taking science down a notch with it)".
On April 15, NAS released an interactive version of Climate Change: Evidence and Causes booklet with the following announcement: "Attention teachers, NGOs, and other organizations with public interfaces. The National Academies has developed a new sharable, interactive version of "Climate Change: Evidence and Causes", the booklet produced jointly with The Royal Society that was released in February 2014. Users can click on any one of the 20 questions in the document and jump to related information throughout the document. The interactive is embeddable on third party sites. Explore the interactive and find the embed code here."
More reasons to assume NAS plans to be a major source of information for the science portion of Common Core.
On May 6, 2014, USGCRP issued its third National Climate Assessment that predicted a scary future for the United States broken down into regions. No attention is given to history showing no increases in hurricanes, tornados, ocean level rise, wild fires, droughts, floods, etc. over the past century when atmospheric carbon dioxide increases were not taking place. This report most likely will be additional reference material for Common Core.
The United Kingdom's Global Warming Policy Foundation issued a report" Climate Control—Brainwashing In Schools ". Statements in the Report's Executive Summary are as follows: "We find instances of eco-activism being given a free rein within schools and at the events schools encourage their pupils to attend. In every case of concern, the slant is on scares, on raising fears, followed by the promotion of detailed guidance on how pupils should live, as well as on what they should think. In some instances, we find encouragement to create 'little political activists' in schools by creating a burden of responsibility for action on their part to 'save the planet', not least by putting pressure on their parents.… Surveys show that many children are upset and frightened by what they are told is happening to the climate."
In the main body of the report is the statement, "The chairman of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri has suggested that a focus on children is the top priority for bringing about societal change, and that by 'sensitizing' children to climate change, it will be possible to them to 'shame adults into taking the right steps'".
An April 12, article in The Telegraph by Christopher Booker "No A-level for 'climate change denier" criticizes climate science education in the United Kingdom being illegal because it makes a mockery of the 1996 Education Act that requires students be taught in a balanced way that allows them to form their own views on evidence. Mr. Booker wrote, "So relentless is this brainwashing that it percolates throughout the curriculum, so that even exam papers in French, English or religious studies can ask students to explain why the world is dangerously warming up, or why we must build more wind turbines."
Australia has a similar problem of climate science corrupting education in a paper titled "Schools places of indoctrination rather than learning". The report cited, "The current Australian Curriculum is full of references to "sustainability", which is a concept without any intelligible meaning in most of the contexts in which it is used, apart from in the very short-term."
Another approach to outcomes of teaching climate science to young people is reported by Robert Bradley Jr. in his paper "Adults Reject Climate Catastrophe, Alarmists Bring In the Children (thoughts on Hansen's latest)". Mr. Bradley protested the rhetoric of climate alarmist's labeling those who disagree with carbon-dioxide-caused global warming as "deniers" implying they are in league with those who are "Holocaust deniers". The Holocaust is a tragedy occurring during the reign of terror from Hitler's National Socialism.
After a meeting with children at a Plant-for-the-Planet meeting in Seattle, Dr. James Hansen wrote "Children and Adults on Climate Policy: Evidence that They 'Get It'". The children wanted to put a "price on carbon pollution", "pledge no new carbon pollution", and "plant trees". Naturally Plant-for-the-Plant was founded in Munich, Germany.
Other exploitations of children are done by organizations like Our Children's Trust and Kids vs. Global Warming that claim action is needed to force abandoning use of fossil fuels to save the future for children. A three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit recently denied oral arguments from these groups suit under the Public Trust Doctrine.
National Socialism used the Hitler Youth from 1922 to 1945 to train young men to be obedient to their goals, enforce their rulings, and provide fanatical defense of the Fatherland. This use of propaganda and brainwashing to enlist support of the young is analogous to attempts to enlist young people in promoting climate change due to fossil fuel use is a threat to society.
A link between National Socialism and Conservation movements is reported by German historian Frank Uekoetter's The Green and the Brown: a History of Conservatism in Nazi Germany published by Cambridge Press in 2006. A detailed review of this book is written by William Walter Kay. The conservation movement started in Germany in the late nineteenth century and found easy mixing with National Socialism with conservationists having memberships in their local groups and the National Socialist Party. Millions of trees were planted in the name of Adolf Hitler.
It is easy for teachers to be caught up in promoting teachings of the catastrophic climate change movement because of "warm feelings" from working to save the planet. Over-zealous teachers, perhaps in concert with environmental groups, may wish to develop slogans, songs, T-shirts, and even arm bands for students to use to help spread the gospel of human-caused global warming. An example of a song can be changes to the song "Tomorrow Belongs To Me" from the 1972 musical Cabaret. Who can resist the words, "But somewhere a glory awaits unseen. Tomorrow belongs to me."
Potentials for mischief to the country over teachings of perverted science are enormous.
Thus playing tit-for-tat, Mr. Bradley suggests we could label brainwashed youth from Common Core and other programs "Climate Youth". In fairness to Mr. Bradley, he correctly states this name-calling and comparisons with National Socialism should cease immediately.
Even greater dangers from science portions of Common Core are teaching people to accept the political use of science and not follow fundamental principles of scientific inquiry–propose a theory about the behavior of Nature and continually test that theory by experiment. Never accept propositions of "science is settled". Additional problems are painting the planet's future in a dismal fashion with reduced living standards and poverty for many parts of the planet. This may lead to psychological damage to students.
The United States has vast fossil fuel energy resources; an inventive, resourceful population; and one million square miles of farm land with the best farmers on the planet. With correct policies exploiting our superior assets, the future of the United States is bright and the nation can be of great assistance leading the rest of the planet to an enhanced life.
Our science programs should stimulate students to be adept in analysis and have an inquiring mind. Never be exposed to ideas of "the science is settled". It is my opinion the science portion of Common Core is dangerous for the country. Damage from its implementation for a few decades could harm the country for many years.
The entire Common Core program provides opportunities to instill propaganda in our young people ages 5 to 18. Common Core should be discarded from an intellectual point of view. The program also provides opportunity for unbelievable amounts of "crony capitalism". States most likely will have increased financial burdens due to greater expenses from testing, which is another strong reason for Common Core's rejection.
James H. Rust is a retired professor of nuclear engineering and a policy adviser for The Heartland Institute
The Tea Party's Coming Rorschach Moment
With his renomination this week, prepare for a slew of "how Mitch McConnell crushed the Tea Party" pieces over the next few days. Here's a good one from Peter Hamby. But the story reads less like a crushing than a co-opting: not just in tropes like coming out on stage brandishing a musket, but in McConnell's hires, issue framing, and language.
McConnell won by carefully eliminating the ability of a Rand Paul-backed opponent within his state. For all the talk about Tea Party prowess in primaries, they really have not beaten many incumbents – and the combined power of incumbency and the Washington money machine can only be beaten by a really excellent candidate or a well-run grassroots campaign.
Over the past five years, the Tea Party's agenda and efforts have been subsumed into the larger Republican mantras in a number of ways. Their movement is now effectively one more chunk of the Republican base – and just as different candidates appeal to different factions (social conservatives, defense hawks, small business), the Tea Party's priorities are heeded or ignored to different degrees. McConnell's approach has been to sound the gong on all sorts of Tea Party issues this election season, and this has been the approach adopted by several others as well – Thom Tillis was full-throated on the Medicaid expansion in North Carolina, Jack Kingston and David Perdue did their best to depict themselves as having an affinity to the more palatable aspects of the Tea Party agenda, and Monica Wehby made Obamacare issue number one for her campaign.
To a certain extent, McConnell, Eric Cantor, and other establishment figures are conceding a key premise of the Tea Party's complaint: that the Republican status quo is unacceptable, that it's damaged in a fundamental way, and needs a serious overhaul in order to win. The Tea Party wants that overhaul to look a certain way, and the establishment and the party's corporate backers want it to look a certain way; but the majority of both factions seem to be arriving at the conclusion that in 2016, it won't just amount to getting the band back together for the typical three-legged stool candidate. It'll have to be someone who alters the Republican agenda in one direction or another, or takes pieces from each side and cobbles them together in an appeal which cuts across traditional lines.
John Hart, communications director for Tom Coburn, notes this accurately:
[T]he transformation of McConnell's campaign from 2008 to 2014 shows the overwhelming persuasive and redemptive power of the Tea Party. In 2008, the Senate minority leader ran a series of ads touting his success at bringing home the bacon. In 2014, his campaign had lost that aroma. McConnell himself helped end earmarks in 2010 and recently said no to Majority Leader Harry Reid's call to restore the disgraced practice. McConnell's evolving message shows how the real Tea Party can co-opt and win over the GOP establishment when it sticks to its principles.
In fact, thanks to the Tea Party, the old-style "bring home the bacon" campaigns have largely been wiped off the electoral map. Even Democrats have joined the Tea Party's anti-pork campaign. Mark Udall, Claire McCaskill and Elizabeth Warren have all vocally opposed earmarks, a rare challenge to Reid's rigid party discipline. The Tea Party's influence, of course, extends well beyond earmarks. In race after race, candidates are embracing its message of less government, less spending, less regulation and more freedom, particularly on Obamacare.
The problem, of course, is that if you win, this campaign season lip service has ramifications for the policy agenda you actually put forward. If a McConnell-led Senate majority makes battling Obamacare about insurance bailouts, it's different than if they make it about repealing the medical device tax. The simple truth is that the establishment and the Tea Party need each other to win, just like McConnell needed Rand and Rand's people to avoid a serious challenge.
There's risk for the establishment in this, of course. Republicans who espouse a populist conservative agenda to get a job and then implement a K Street agenda will have to deal with the political fallout of a Rorschach moment. The view is that they've corralled the Tea Party, domesticated it without giving it a real seat at the table. But I still think they misunderstand who's locked in with whom.
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[First published at The Federalist.]
Editor: I can't let this post pass without a clip of that line by Rorschach from the movie "Watchmen," which Ben linked to above:
Joe Bast vs. Oxfam on CNBC
In a discussion that took place on CNBC on Wednesday, President of Oxfam America Raymond Offenheiser and the President of the Heartland Institute Joe Bast squared off regarding a new Oxfam study. The study suggests that large food producing companies like Kellogg's, Pepsico and Nestle create a large amount of carbon dioxide which contributes to global warming.
Offenheiser, citing the study, challenged these companies to "fully disclose the carbon emissions in their agricultural supply chains." He said that these companies have an enormous responsibility to take action.
Bast responded by saying that the study has an "overreliance on the IPCC" findings. He went on to say that the debate on global warming is not over and the evidence is not as clear as some suggest. Bast said that it "hurts the profitability of a company to do unnecessary reductions in its carbon dioxide emissions."
The Coming Nine Months: Mud in the Eye of the So-Called 'Permanent' Drought?
My last couple of posts have dealt with major weather/climate stories I think are lurking. The worry about the upcoming hurricane season is something I will have every year for the East Coast until we reverse the pattern we were in during the 1950s. I think we have another five to seven years, and I am very surprised it has not been worse. But it takes just one 1954 or a '54-'55 back-to-back season to get that score close fairly quickly.
I am on this "kick" to expose before the fact some of the nonsense being spewed and accepted by what I see as an increasingly desperate AGW crowd. It's now or never for them, though to their credit, they have the political will backing their interests in the form of the EPA that could care less about the fact the department's lines of evidence have nothing to do with reality.
My one month electricity bill in January was higher than the total of the seven months ending in November. And it's going to get worse, as I discussed here.
There were places in the Northeast this past winter that were within a few days of running out of fuel for electricity. At the very least though, I give the president credit for keeping his word on what he was going to do. I believed him then when he said, "Under my plan … electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket," and I certainly believe him now. Here's the video, so you can see I am not putting words in his mouth.
I was taught to respect the president, whether I agree with him or not, so his own words are what I judge him on in this matter, along with the results I see. He is keeping his word with the policies enacted, which are not nearly as draconian as some of his backers want. They are attacking him for not being even more aggressive. Believe me, if you saw some of the things I see, you would actually discover that, as bad as it's getting, it could be – and will be – a lot worse compared to what is being advocated by his supporters. Do you realize North Korea is being lauded as a champion in the fight against "climate change"? Look at this headline out of the Guardian: "North Korea: an unlikely champion in the fight against climate change."
Ever seen a picture of North Korea at night?
The driving force behind all this – the facts on what was said about the actual climate and what is happening – is what I am taking apart piece by piece. Consider Arctic ice. We showed how the ice cap may be run a positive anomaly this summer. The modeling is actually getting stronger in its forecast! The summer melt season has been the object of the so-called "Arctic Death Spiral," and while one summer does not indicate it's over, it means the cycles in the Atlantic are the cause for the increase and retreat. This is the first cold year in the north Atlantic since the AMO went into its warm phase. When it flips to cold for good, it's over for that hysteria. But no one on their side will bring this up – that is, the direct cause and effect! It's certainly not CO2.
Wildfires are below normal again this year. You wouldn't know it given the hysteria. The wildfires chart shows no recent increase, and in fact the opposite!
Tornado activity is not at a record low like last year, but it's still less than 25% of normal. AGAIN.
And now comes the latest: mud in the eye of those trying to say the U.S. is in some permanent Dust Bowl again.
First of all, major U.S. dry periods are a product of a cooling tropical Pacific. In the decades such as the 1950s through the 1970s, when the tropical Pacific is cooler overall, the U.S. is drier than normal in much of the nation. It is exactly opposite in the years the Pacific warms, which by the way correlates nicely to an increase in global temperatures until the atmosphere adjusts to the warming tropical ocean and temperatures level off. But the idea that global warming causes drought here in the U.S. is opposite of the facts! It's when the Pacific starts to cool and global temperatures start to drop that we see it dry out. The chart below shows it all.
When the tropical Pacific is predominately cold as it was in the 1950s-1970s, as shown by the multivariate ENSO index, the U.S. is very dry during the growing seasons.
When warm, like it was between 1981-2005, it's wet.
You can see more blue starting to show up again as of late, and the drying is starting anew – but so is the drop in the global temperature! So it's not global warming causing the reaction that leads to the drying over the U.S., but the lessening of available moisture because the source region for so much U.S. moisture – the tropical Pacific – is cooling. The temperature chart for the last 10 years shows the slow, jagged cooling that has begun, after the adjustment to the warming that occurred when the Pacific went into the warm cycle in 1978.
You cannot draw it up better than this; it's clear as to what is going on. What happened before, naturally, is happening again, as is to be expected given the cyclical nature of climate due to the design of the planet.
One can see clearly the reaction to the warming Pacific, the adaptation (leveling off of temperatures) and then the slow decrease starting as the tropical Pacific turns cooler overall. This is from the website http://woodfortrees.org/plot/.
I inserted the correlating periods.
The first period is the global warming that occurred in reaction to the Pacific flipping from its cold cycle to warmer. The second is the adaptation period and the third is the slow downfall we see close up in the graphic before.
As far as this permanent drought, here's something funny. Thanks to the hard work of scientists (I am not anti-science, I am pro-fact), the results of their research is producing hardier plants. Look at corn yields.
One notices though, in the MEI chart above, that during the cold cycles, there are warm spikes, and these are the short lived El Ninos that develop in the overall colder periods. We think there is one on the way. There is a lot of talk about the so-called Super Nino coming, but we do not find the physical drivers present for that. Quite the contrary: The coming El Nino looks similar to 2002 and 2009, and that means that the winter is likely to be cold and stormy, and we are already warning our clients about that. However, the rain issue is huge. Weatherbell.com believes that the dust bowl will get mud in its eye the next nine months as much of the drought stricken plains from the Texas panhandle to Nebraska gets above normal rainfall June-March. We believe another great growing season is on the way for the nation's breadbasket, and I believe we will get some relief for California in the fall and winter! Additionally, we are seeing the modeling getting wetter and wetter. Models are tools, and we set our forecast up and then see what modeling agrees with us to fine tune it. But I like the idea the modeling is seeing, which is what we have been seeing!
June/July/August precipitation.
Some may wonder, why do I agree with the models now, when so many times I am pointing out they are wrong? Because I believe they are right now, since this is what my partner Dr. Joe D'Aleo and I have been thinking is going to happen based on our research. Therefore, if the models come to us (most of them are) it is a good extra opinion that is backing us up. Models are tools for the answer, and when they can be used, you use them!
I think because overall we will go back to the colder signal next year, this is a one year event. But the fact is, it will show that it's nature in control and we are forecasting it beforehand! The climate model sees it too. I might add that in the the middle of the 1950s, the drought across the U.S. was worse overall according to the Palmer Drought Severity Index.
It is true California is worse this year. The patterns are similar, but not exactly the same. However, no one in their right mind can say increased CO2 is the cause of more rain in one place and less in the other. Such events are products of natural variations in what is a similar cycle.
By the way, you can see a lot of rain being forecasted in California in the maps above,, which will give them a break. But again, this is not over yet; as you saw, this is a multi-decade event that was well forecasted by a lot of us, though no one would listen 10 years ago. I coined the phrase "time of climatic hardship" and was on the O'Reilly Factor with it around 2008 because of what we saw coming with the overall cycle, the similarity to the 50s drought and the worry about hurricanes which, so far, have not been as bad as I feared. Then again, five of the eight majors storms that ran the East Coast between '54-'60 occurred in just two years, so we are not out of that woods by any means.
Now here is something interesting. In 1972, Albert Hammond observed how dry it is in southern California and the occasional major rains that occur, and made a hit record out of it with these lyrics:
Seems it never rains in Southern California
Seems I've often heard that kind of talk before
It never rains in California, but girl, don't they warn ya
It pours, man, it pours
It was actually one of my favorite songs my junior year in high school. Perhaps Governor Brown, who is really ramping up the global warming talk in spite of some questionable policies that are cutting irrigation to protect a Smelt, listened to different music. Wasn't the Jefferson Airplane big around that time? (Ha ha. Even they sang, "When the truth is found… to be lies…")
When you have rock and roll artists observing nature, then you know it's something obvious.
But here is the problem. We have many more people living in these areas and, unfortunately, this gullible population is ripe to be exploited by those with an agenda not based on facts. It's easy to refute them; you are seeing me do it in the time it takes to write this. Every time something comes up, it takes me only the time to go to the maps I know from the past to counter it. It's all there. So as I've previously opined, it's the climate agenda (rather global warming – they said it, they own it), not the climate, that is the biggest threat to our freedoms. Then again, I believe it was Thomas Jefferson who said, "The government you elect is the government you deserve."
As in so many things in life, we reap what we sow, and if you wish to simply follow along without verifying, you will go where you will no longer be able to decide for yourself. I never ask anyone to believe me. Go look for yourself … while you still can.
Joe Bastardi is chief forecaster at WeatherBELL Analytics, a meteorological consulting firm.
The Slow, Sure Death of "Climate Change" Lies
Even though President Obama continues to lie about "climate change" and employs the many elements of the federal government to repeat those lies, this huge hoax is dying.
Obama is on record saying that climate change "once considered an issue for the distant future, has moved firmly into the present" and is "affecting Americans right now." Climate change as studied by climatologists is measured in terms of centuries whereas the weather is what is happening today. It has been happening before and since the rise of civilization. Obama's claim that "climate-related changes are outside of recent experience" and "have become more frequent and/or intense" is a lie from start to finish.
The White House recently released its latest "National Climate Assessment." It is 841 pages of outlandish claims that reflect the lies generated by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. When you consider that the federal government spends an estimated $2.6 billion annually in grants for climate research, about the only beneficiaries are those "scientists" employed to further the hoax.
The UN's IPCC was created in 1983 and has issued a series of reports whose sole intention has been to frighten people around the world with claims of global warming that are scientifically baseless.
The Heartland Institute, a non-profit market-based think tank, responded by creating the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) and by sponsoring a series of international conferences. The 9th conference will be July 7-9 in Las Vegas. That effort began in 2003 in cooperation with the Science & Environmental Project led by Dr. S. Fred Singer and was joined by the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change.
I am an advisor to the Institute, having written about environmental and energy issues for several decades at this point.
Calling on thousands of scientists around the world, in 2013 the NIPCC published the first of a three-volume response to the IPCC's fifth assessment. This year, it has published a volume of Climate Change Reconsidered devoted to biological impacts, a 1,062 page opus. The NIPCC is an international panel of scientists and scholars with no government affiliation or sponsorship, and it receives no corporate funding.
Writing in the Financial Post in October 2013, Lawrence Solomon, the executive director of Energy Probe, a Toronto-based environmental group, noted that "solar activity is now falling more rapidly than at any time in the last 10,000 years." The Earth's climate is primarily a reflection of solar radiation or the lack of it. From 1300 to 1850, the Earth was subject to a mini-ice age. While the global warming hoax began in the late 1980s, Solomon noted that, in the 1960s and 1970s, the scientific consensus was that the Earth "was entering a period of global cooling. The media in those years was filled with stories about a pending new ice age.
It was only the intervention of the UN's IPCC that changed the "consensus" to one of global warming. A cooling cycle that began around fourteen years ago could lead to another mini-ice age or the planet could be on the cusp of a full-fledged one. On average, the interglacial periods of the Earth have lasted about 11,500 years and we are at the end of such a period.
Climate Change Reconsidered II devoted to biological impact features scientific studies that conclude:
# "Atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) is not a pollutant." Considering that all vegetation on Earth depends on it, it is not surprising that another conclusion was that the ongoing rise in the air's CO2 content is causing a great greening of the Earth.
# As a result, "there is little or no risk of increasing food insecurity due to global warming or rising atmospheric CO2 levels and that terrestrial ecosystems have thrived throughout the world as a result of warming temperatures and rising levels of atmospheric CO2. Multiple lines of evidence indicate animal species are adapting, and in some cases, evolving, to cope with climate change of the modern era."
# In addition, "rising temperatures and atmospheric CO2 levels to no pose a significant threat to aquatic life and that a modest warming of the planet will result in a net reduction of human mortality from temperate-related events."
The irony of the latest NIPCC report, of course, is that it responds to the claims of global warming and carbon dioxide's role at a time when the Earth is cooling. It makes one wish that all the talk about "greenhouse gases" is true enough to help us escape from the present cooling.
One thing we do know for sure is that the Greens talk of climate change has lost its grip on the public imagination and attention. As the cooling cycle continues, people around the world will be far more focused on increased evidence of massive ice sheets at both poles, on frozen lakes and rivers, on shortened growing seasons, and on the desperate need for more fossil fuels to warm our homes and workplaces.
© Alan Caruba, 2014