Some facts about greenhouse and global warming
* The temperature effect of atmospheric carbon dioxide is logarithmic, not exponential.
* The potential planetary warming from a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide from pre-Industrial Revolution levels of ~280ppmv to 560ppmv (possible some time later this century – perhaps) is generally estimated at around 1 °C.
* The guesses of significantly larger warming are dependent on “feedback” (supplementary) mechanisms programmed into climate models. The existence of these “feedback” mechanisms is uncertain and the cumulative sign of which is unknown (they may add to warming from increased atmospheric carbon dioxide or, equally likely, might suppress it).
* The total warming since measurements have been attempted is thought to be about 0.6 degrees Centigrade. At least half of the estimated temperature increment occurred before 1950, prior to significant change in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. Assuming the unlikely case that all the natural drivers of planetary temperature change ceased to operate at the time of measured atmospheric change then a 30% increment in atmospheric carbon dioxide caused about one-third of one degree temperature increment since and thus provides empirical support for less than one degree increment due to a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide.
* There is no linear relationship between atmospheric carbon dioxide change and global mean temperature or global mean temperature trend — global mean temperature has both risen and fallen during the period atmospheric carbon dioxide has been rising.
* The natural world has tolerated greater than one-degree fluctuations in mean temperature during the relatively recent past and thus current changes are within the range of natural variation. (See, for example, ice core and sea surface temperature reconstructions.)
* Other anthropogenic effects are vastly more important, at least on local and regional scales.
* Fixation on atmospheric carbon dioxide is a distraction from these more important anthropogenic effects.
* Despite attempts to label atmospheric carbon dioxide a “pollutant” it is, in fact, an essential trace gas, the increasing abundance of which is a bonus for the bulk of the biosphere.
* There is no reason to believe that slightly lower temperatures are somehow preferable to slightly higher temperatures – there is no known “optimal” nor any known means of knowingly and predictably adjusting some sort of planetary thermostat.
* Fluctuations in atmospheric carbon dioxide are of little relevance in the short to medium term (although should levels fall too low it could prove problematic in the longer-term).
* Activists and zealots constantly shrilling over atmospheric carbon dioxide are misdirecting attention and effort from real and potentially addressable local, regional and planetary problems.
The Cap and Trade Scam.. more Junk Science.
This essay is the such a joke it is unbelievable that the Washington Post ran this. Obama is making excuses for his failures, he is still blaming the previous administration, and he is setting a timeline for his re-election campaign. When will the people of this country see through the facade of Obama?
Yes, even the mighty stumble. The perfect occasionally reveal a flaw.
Look at John F. Kennedy; beloved president, righteous leader, king of Camelot, son of bootlegger, womanizer of unprecedented proportion. Look at Michael Jackson; childhood star, dean of the dance floor, king of pop, poster boy of NAMBLA.
Even Barack Hussein Obam, the chosen one can slip, and I don’t mean when the teleprompter doesn’t work. According to TMZ “Babby Got Barack!”
While at the G8 summit Obama checked out a little more the usual sites…
I wonder what sort of change he is hoping for here?
NYP: “The beauty who prompted the president to channel his inner Bill Clinton was identified as Rio de Janeiro resident Mayara Tavares. The girl from Ipanema had been selected to attend a meeting of young people held in conjunction with the summit.”
From McNamara to Obama
This too is an era of soaring rhetoric, big plans and boundless self-regard.
by Bret Stephens
Dwight D. Eisenhower famously said that “in preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless but planning is indispensable.” Robert S. McNamara, who spent many years thinking about the Vietnam War, first as an architect and then as a critic (and getting it wrong on both ends), was a man who believed mainly in plans.
McNamara, who died yesterday at 93, will go down as a cautionary tale for the ages, and perhaps none more than for the Age of Obama. Whatever else distinguishes JFK’s New Frontier or LBJ’s Great Society from Barack Obama’s “New Foundation,” this too is an era of soaring rhetoric, big plans and boundless self-regard, issued by an administration convinced it can apply technocratic, top-down solutions to huge and unpredictable systems — the banking, auto and health-care industries, for instance, or the climate. These are people deeply impressed by their own smarts, the ones for whom the phrase “the best and the brightest” has been scrubbed of its intended irony.
When McNamara — the “Whiz Kid” from Ford — was first named defense secretary, in December 1960, Time magazine gushed that he “reads widely and well (current choices: The Phenomenon of Man, W.W. Rostow’s The Stages of Growth). . . . His mind, says a friend who has seen him in Ann Arbor discussions, ‘is a beautiful instrument, free from leanings and adhesions, calm and analytical.’” Nearly 50 years later, the Associated Press would lead its obituary by describing McNamara as “the cerebral secretary of defense.” In between, David Halberstam — who was for the Vietnam War before he was against it, but that’s another story — wrote that McNamara “symbolized the idea that [the Kennedy administration] could manage and control events, in an intelligent, rational way. Taking on a guerrilla war was like buying a sick foreign company; you brought your systems to it.”
Of course it did not end well. Nor did it end well for McNamara with his next assignment as president of the World Bank, where he hugely increased lending on the theory that more inputs (money, “expertise”) meant better outputs (”development”). Instead, McNamara’s stewardship of the bank helped create the Third World debt crisis, fueled Africa’s descent into chaos, swelled Mobutu’s Swiss bank accounts, and backed the cruel and misbegotten campaign for population control.
A recurring pattern played itself out over the 20 years McNamara spent at the Pentagon and the Bank. Giant troves of quantitative data were collected, analyzed, disaggregated and reassembled. Plans — typically on a five-year timetable — were conceived and then, presumably, executed. He once called the Bank “an innovative, problem-solving mechanism . . . to help fashion a better life for mankind.”
Nobel Prizes in economics would later be awarded for disproving this mechanistic notion of institutions. But no Nobel was required to understand that rationalism isn’t a synonym for reason, much less common sense, or that a planned solution was a workable or desirable solution, or that war or poverty were “problems” in the same sense as, say, a deficit. There was also a human element, which — depending on whom you believe — McNamara either didn’t get or didn’t have.
None of this is to say that Vietnam was “unwinnable,” the liberal nostrum in which the late McNamara took comfort, or that poverty is unbeatable. On the contrary, hundreds of millions of people have worked their way out of poverty — no thanks to the World Bank — while a war that only three years ago was deemed unwinnable now looks very nearly won.
But all that happened only after the Planners gave way to what development economist William Easterly has called the “Searchers.” As Mr. Easterly writes in his book “The White Man’s Burden,” “a Planner thinks he already knows the answers; he thinks of poverty as a technical engineering problem that his answers will solve. A Searcher admits he doesn’t know the answers in advance; he believes that poverty is a complicated tangle of political, social, historical, institutional, and technological factors. A Searcher hopes to find answers to individual problems only by trial and error experimentation. A Planner believes outsiders know enough to impose solutions.”
So, from Chile to Taiwan, economic progress only came about when national governments junked the whole idea of the planned economy. So, too, in Iraq, America’s fortunes only changed when the Bush administration went from sticking to a concept (”light footprint”), to searching, and finding, an answer in the surge, which combined new counterinsurgency tactics with sensitivity to local conditions. The U.S. might have won in Vietnam, too, if it had sooner discarded McNamara’s concept of gradualism and gone after North Vietnam’s center of gravity — its dependence, via Haiphong harbor, on the resupply of Soviet arms.
Now that’s old history. But the mentality of the planner remains alive and well in Washington today, along with the aura of cool intellectual certainty. Barack Obama might take a close look at McNamara’s obituaries and note that he, too, is the whiz kid of his day.
How a Loophole Benefits GE in Bank Rescue
Industrial Giant Becomes Top Recipient in Debt-Guarantee Program
By Jeff Gerth and Brady Dennis
ProPublica and Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 29, 2009
It is no wonder that Brian Williams bowed to President Obama as he said good night to him at the White House, he was thanking Mr. Obama for his continued financial support, and job security in these troubled economic times.
I hope Al and Tipper don’t decide to go too green….
“Living more hours naked each day results in a dramatic drop in my laundry, which in turn reduces my water and energy use …” MORE
The use of planted questioners is a no-no at presidential news conferences, because it sends a message to the world — Iran included — that the American press isn’t as free as advertised. But yesterday wasn’t so much a news conference as it was a taping of a new daytime drama, “The Obama Show.”
We spent eight years watching the mainstream media circle the wagons, sharpen their sticks and perform daily attacks against George W. Bush, the Republican party and all those right of center, but now they have put their weapons down. It is not that the war is over, it is that the media has joined the administration. ABC is running an infomercial for nationalized health care and the White House is planting reporters into the press corp at a White House briefing.
Let the propaganda begin.
“But yesterday’s daytime drama belonged primarily to Pitney, of the Huffington Post Web site. During the eight years of the Bush administration, liberal outlets such as the Huffington Post often accused the White House of planting questioners in news conferences to ask preplanned questions. But here was Obama fielding a preplanned question asked by a planted questioner — from the Huffington Post.
Pitney said the White House, though not aware of the question’s wording, asked him to come up with a question about Iran proposed by an Iranian. And, as it turned out, he was not the only prearranged questioner at yesterday’s show. Later, Obama passed over the usual suspects to call on Macarena Vidal of the Spanish-language EFE news agency. The White House called Vidal in advance to see whether she was coming and arranged for her to sit in a seat usually assigned to a financial trade publication. She asked about Chile and Colombia.”
When will the country come to it’s senses about this administration? It may already be too late.
Wikipedia:Fascists explicitly promoted their ideology as a “Third Position” between capitalism and communism.[132] Italian Fascism involved corporatism, a political system in which economy is collectively managed by employers, workers and state officials by formal mechanisms at national level.[133] Fascists advocated a new national multi-class economic system that is labeled as either national corporatism, national socialism or national syndicalism.[24] The common aim of all fascist movements was elimination of the autonomy or, in some cases, the existence of large-scale capitalism.[134]
