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Saturday was the 99th anniversary of Reagan’s birth. Paul Kengor, professor of political science at Grove City College, and one of Reagan’s biographers shares a story.
… Reagan was just plain likable. Of all the subjects I’ve studied, few were as universally liked. Sure, Reagan, as president, was demonized by the Left, but that’s what the Left does: indecent, ugly rage. Still, even most liberals muster nice words about Reagan personally.
Central to that likability was Reagan’s humility. The word “I” didn’t dominate his conversation, unless he was poking fun at himself. He was no narcissist. Ronald Reagan was not full of pride; he was thoroughly unpossessed of self-love.
And so, with that background, I’d like to take the opportunity presented by Reagan’s time of year — not to mention the month of Presidents’ Day — to share an anecdote that was told to me by Bill Clark, Reagan’s close friend and most significant adviser. …
David Warren discusses how every major claim of “climate science” was fabricated.
…To my survey, there is not a single aspect of the “anthropogenic global warming” hypothesis that has been left standing by recent revelations, and more shoes drop every day. …
…the disgraced Dr. Phil Jones, the former boss of the East Anglia operation, now implicated in various cover-ups, attempts to intimidate and silence skeptics, and purposeful breaches of Britain’s freedom of information act. I’m sure he “believed” in what he was doing.
Like communist apparatchiks in the good old days, a global warm-alarmist may “honestly” think he is serving a higher purpose, that he is on “the right side of history,” that he must cut a few corners for the greater good, that the end will eventually justify the means. Read Dostoevsky on this. The book is Crime and Punishment, and the character is Raskolnikov. By subtle increments a failure of candour degenerates into major-league crime.
Not only all the numbers, but all the assumptions behind “AGW” — not “most,” but all — have depended on the manipulation of facts by persons who had an interest in manipulating them. Often the specific incident is small, but the falsehood is cumulative. Investment in the illusion grows, the stakes become too large to forfeit. Yet the reality remains: that we still don’t know any more about long-term human influence on climate than Punxsutawney Phil can know by observing his own shadow. …
Michael Barone says climate scientists are on his list of the most distrusted professions. We take exception to his inclusion of trial lawyers being on the list, as we know some who are good, principled people. Perhaps he might include politicians and MSM reporters instead. Speaking of the MSM, where are they on this story?
Quick, name the most distrusted occupations. Trial lawyers? Pretty scuzzy, as witness the disgraced John Edwards, kept from the vice presidency in 2004 by the electoral votes of Ohio. Used car dealers? Always near the bottom of the list, as witness the universal understanding of the word “clunker.”
But over the last three months a new profession has moved smartly up the list and threatens to overtake all. Climate scientist. …
…”The global warming movement as we have known it is dead,” writes Walter Russell Mead of the Council on Foreign Relations in The American Interest. “The movement died from two causes: bad science and bad politics.”
Some decades hence, I suspect, people will look back and wonder why so many government, corporate and media elites were taken in by propaganda that was based on such shoddy and dishonest evidence. And taken in to the point that they advocated devoting trillions of dollars to a cause that was based on flagrant dishonesty and dissembling. …
It’s Mark Steyn’s turn to roast the global-warming-sky-is-falling crowd.
Whenever I write about “climate change,” a week or two later there’s a flurry of letters whose general line is: la-la-la can’t hear you. Dan Gajewski of Ottawa provided a typical example in our Dec. 28 issue. I’d written about the East Anglia Climatic Research Unit’s efforts to “hide the decline,” and mentioned that Phil Jones, their head honcho, had now conceded what I’d been saying for years—that there has been no “global warming” since 1997. Tim Flannery, Australia’s numero uno warm-monger, subsequently confirmed this on Oz TV, although he never had before. …
…But where did all these experts get the data from?…
…That’s it? One article from 12 years ago in a pop-science mag? Oh, but don’t worry, back in 1999 Fred did a quickie telephone interview with a chap called Syed Hasnain of Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi. And this Syed Hasnain cove presumably knows a thing or two about glaciers.
Well, yes. But he now says he was just idly “speculating”; he didn’t do any research or anything like that.
But so what? His musings were wafted upwards through the New Scientist to the World Wildlife Fund to the IPCC to a global fait accompli: the glaciers are disappearing. Everyone knows that. You’re not a denier, are you? India’s environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, says there was not “an iota of scienti?c evidence” to support the 2035 claim. Yet that proved no obstacle to its progress through the alarmist establishment. Dr. Murari Lal, the “scientist” who included the 2035 glacier apocalypse in the IPCC report, told Britain’s Mail on Sunday that he knew it wasn’t based on “peer-reviewed science” but “we thought we should put it in”—for political reasons. …
V. K. Raina, of the Geological Survey of India, produced a special report demonstrating that the run-for-your-life-the-glaciers-are-melting IPCC scenario was utterly false. For his pains, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, the self-aggrandizing old bruiser and former railroad engineer who serves as head honcho of the IPCC jet set, dismissed Mr. Raina’s research as “voodoo science.” He’s now been obliged to admit the voodoo was all on his side. But don’t worry. By 2008, Syed Hasnain’s decade-old casual chit-chat over the phone to a London journalist had become “settled science,” so Dr. Pachauri’s company TERI (The Energy & Resources Institute) approached the Carnegie Corporation for a grant to research “challenges to South Asia posed by melting Himalayan glaciers,” and was rewarded with half a million bucks. Which they promptly used to hire Syed Hasnain. In other words, professor Hasnain has landed a cushy gig researching solutions to an entirely non-existent global crisis he accidentally invented over a 15-minute phone call 10 years earlier. As they say in the glacier business, ice work if you can get it. …
In the WSJ, Eric Felten says that the corruption, deception, and back-stabbing we are witnessing in various scientific communities is better drama than most soap-opera writers could produce.
This has not been the proudest of weeks for science. Twelve years after publishing an article purporting to prove a link between childhood vaccines and autism, the prominent British medical journal Lancet finally retracted the paper in its entirety. But only after Britain’s General Medical Council found that the author of that article had been “irresponsible and dishonest” in his research, bringing medical science “into disrepute.”
That wasn’t the only controversy involving scholarly journals and the repute of researchers to flare up this week. Also in Britain, two prominent stem-cell researchers went to the BBC with their complaint that the peer review system has become corrupt. Flawed and unoriginal work gets published and promoted, while publication of truly original findings is often delayed or rejected, according to Austin Smith of Cambridge University and Robin Lovell-Badge of the National Institute for Medical Research.
…Not all such news comes from Britain, of course. Scott S. Reuben, formerly of Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Mass., and until recently a prominent researcher in pain medications, agreed last month to plead guilty to a federal charge of fabricating scientific data. The anesthesiologist had phonied-up results in as many as 21 articles published in scientific journals to secure funding from credulous pharmaceutical companies.
Or how about the case of Cello Energy of Alabama? Investors had poured millions into the company, which claimed it had devised a high-tech process for turning wood pulp and grasses into biodiesel. The Environmental Protection Agency had been counting on the firm to produce more than half of the “cellulosic biofuel” in the country this year. Belatedly, the moneymen decided to do some due diligence and took a sample of Cello’s biodiesel to an independent lab—and found that it was just old-fashioned fossil fuel dressed up in a new green bottle. In June a federal jury in Alabama found that investors had been defrauded and ordered Cello to pay $10.4 million in punitive damages. What are the odds that, with the government belching billions into green technology research, we will see repeats of the Cello fiasco?…
David Harsanyi has an interesting opinion on Rahm Emmanuel’s comment.
…In truth, in nearly every way the lives of the mentally disabled have vastly improved, from the care they receive to the quality of their lives to the respect they are given.
Though I’ve heard the r-word thrown around plenty (often, I’m sure you’ll be shocked to learn, directed at me) I can’t recall anyone using it as a pejorative to describe a person who was actually disabled. Far from ridiculing the disabled, our culture has humanized them.
Emanuel certainly deserves to be reprimanded. But if his offense is worthy of losing a job, you have to wonder if we really are a nation of the perpetually offended.
In American.com. Max Schultz takes a fascinating look at the new technology in drilling and transporting natural gas, and discusses the political and economic implications that will be felt worldwide. Here is an overview of the drilling advances:
…The first profound shift was made possible by a little-noticed technological breakthrough in the last three years that has changed the way we extract natural gas. Engineers now make use of two important innovations. One is horizontal, or directional, drilling, which permits wells to move laterally beneath the surface instead of going straight down. This technology minimizes the number of holes that have to be drilled, leaving a smaller surface footprint and accessing a larger area. The other technology is hydraulic fracturing, used to extract gas trapped in porous shale rock. In this process, also known as fracking, water and chemicals are pumped at tremendous pressure into shale rock formations to push gas into pockets for easier recovery.
By marrying and perfecting the two processes into a technology called horizontal fracking, engineering has virtually created, from nothing, new natural gas resources, previously regarded as inaccessibly locked in useless shale deposits. Suddenly, the mammoth shale formations in Texas, Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York, North Dakota, and elsewhere have the potential to produce abundant amounts of gas for decades to come. …
Proven reserves of natural gas in the United States have been revised upward by 50 percent in the last decade, and those numbers are sure to climb higher as more shale gas is discovered. Perhaps not surprisingly, other nations are sending geologists to the United States to study techniques for extracting gas from unconventional sources. China, India, and Australia all have enormous shale fields. In the coming decades, the shale gale won’t be just an American phenomenon; it will blow all over the globe. …