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Christopher Booker has written a book on global warming. He uses an op-ed in the Daily Telegraph, UK to retail his thesis.
… By any measure, the supposed menace of global warming – and the political response to it – has become one of the overwhelmingly urgent issues of our time. If one accepts the thesis that the planet faces a threat unprecedented in history, the implications are mind-boggling. But equally mind-boggling now are the implications of the price we are being asked to pay by our politicians to meet that threat. More than ever, it is a matter of the highest priority that we should know whether or not the assumptions on which the politicians base their proposals are founded on properly sound science.
This is why I have been regularly reporting on the issue in my column in The Sunday Telegraph, and this week I publish a book called The Real Global Warming Disaster: Is the obsession with climate change turning out to be the most costly scientific delusion in history?.
There are already many books on this subject, but mine is rather different from the rest in that, for the first time, it tries to tell the whole tangled story of how the debate over the threat of climate change has evolved over the past 30 years, interweaving the science with the politicians’ response to it.
It is a story that has unfolded in three stages. The first began back in the Seventies when a number of scientists noticed that the world’s temperatures had been falling for 30 years, leading them to warn that we might be heading for a new ice age. Then, in the mid-Seventies, temperatures started to rise again, and by the mid-Eighties, a still fairly small number of scientists – including some of those who had been predicting a new ice age – began to warn that we were now facing the opposite problem: a world dangerously heating up, thanks to our pumping out CO? and all those greenhouse gases inseparable from modern civilisation. …
… In words quoted on the cover of my new book, Prof Lindzen wrote: “Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly exaggerated computer predictions combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a rollback of the industrial age.”
Such is the truly extraordinary position in which we find ourselves.
Thanks to misreading the significance of a brief period of rising temperatures at the end of the 20th century, the Western world (but not India or China) is now contemplating measures that add up to the most expensive economic suicide note ever written.
How long will it be before sanity and sound science break in on what begins to look like one of the most bizarre collective delusions ever to grip the human race?
Turning our attention to health care, Matthew Continetti says maybe it won’t pass.
… But a left-liberal health care reform is a dicey proposition. Consider what happened last week in the Senate. Medicare is scheduled to reduce doctor’s payments by more than 20 percent in 2010. The Democrats wanted to restore those cuts at a cost of $247 billion in unfunded liabilities. But, when Harry Reid tried to end debate on the measure last week, he failed. Joe Lieberman and 12 Democrats voted against the Senate Democratic leadership and for fiscal responsibility. Reid can’t get 60 votes for a payoff to the American Medical Association. What makes the White House think he can get 60 for Obamacare?
The Calendar. Obama originally wanted a bill before summer’s end. Didn’t happen. Back in September, lawmakers expected Pelosi to hold a vote by the end of that month. No go. Then the deadline was the end of October. Another fantasy. Now we’re told the vote won’t come before early November.
But November features off-year gubernatorial elections that look favorable for Republicans. In Virginia, Republican Bob McDonnell holds a commanding lead over Democrat Creigh Deeds. When Obama won the state last year, the reigning opinion was that his coalition was strong enough to move the Old Dominion firmly into the Democratic column. A McDonnell victory would shatter this illusion. It would give pause to the center-right Democrats about to tie their fortunes to the president. It would show that the enthusiasm in American politics is all on the right. Southern and Western Democrats may begin to ask, What’s the rush? And then the longer the health care debate goes on, the more the momentum for grand reform will fade. Big schemes will be abandoned.
The health-reform Calvinists are wrong. Politics isn’t physics. Legislative logrolling isn’t gravity. Nothing is inevitable.
Let’s see, the government can’t get vaccine produced on time, and we’re supposed to hand over our health care to them? Mark Tapscott asks the question in his blog.
President Obama’s late-night declaration of a nationwide public health emergency last night shouldn’t be allowed to obscure the most important lesson of the developing swine flu crisis – The same government that only weeks ago promised abundant supplies of swine flu vaccine by mid-October will be running your health care system under Obamacare.
On Sept. 13, Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services, told ABC’s This Week program that the government was on schedule to deliver an “ample supply” of swine flu vaccine by mid-October:
“We’re on track to have an ample supply rolling by the middle of October. But we may have some early vaccine as early as the first full week in October. We’ll get the vaccine out the door as fast as it rolls off the production line.”
But here we are five weeks later and news reports are coming in from across the nation of long waiting lines of people wanting the shot, but being turned away because of grossly inadequate supplies. The typical explanation from public health officials is that the swine flu vaccine requires more time to be cultivated than seasonal flu vaccine. …
NewsBusters wonders if the Obama folks are going to go after CBS after the “60 Minute” bit on Medicare fraud?
“60 Minutes” did a fabulous exposé Sunday on Medicare fraud that should be required viewing for all people who support a government run healthcare program in this country.
The facts and figures presented by CBS’s Steve Kroft were disturbing as were the details concerning how shysters bilk the system for an estimated $60 billion a year.
As Kroft warned viewers in the segment’s teaser, “We caution you that this story may raise your blood pressure, along with some troubling questions about our government’s ability to manage a medical bureaucracy” …
Rocco Landesman is Obama’s boot-licking head of the National Endowment for the Arts. John Steele Gordon posts in Contentions.
… It’s amazing how many people seem not to know where to look information up, or perhaps don’t care, as they have things other than accuracy on their agenda. Take Rocco Landesman, the new head of the National Endowment of the Arts. In a speech in Brooklyn last week, he said of Barack Obama, “This is the first president that actually writes his own books since Teddy Roosevelt and arguably the first to write them really well since Lincoln.”
Oh, dear, where do I begin? Well, let’s start with grammar. It’s “the first president who,” not “the first president that.”
Second, he implicitly accuses Presidents Clinton, Bush 41, Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy, Eisenhower, Truman, Hoover, Coolidge, and Wilson of having had their memoirs, autobiographies, and other works ghosted. …
The Vatican’s outreach to Anglicans attracted David Warren’s attention.
There has been very big news out of Rome, this past week, for all English-speaking Christians — regardless of denomination, as I have realized from much e-mail. (The reader may recall that I am myself a Roman convert, from Anglicanism, and thus a natural recipient of such mail.)
The North American media have downplayed it, and focused coverage on the pettiest controversial points: “Is the Pope a homophobe?” “Was the Archbishop of Canterbury blindsided?” “Does this mean Catholic priests can now marry?” and other such questions, to each of which the answer is, very obviously, no. (In England, it was rather more front-page.)
What happened? In a sentence, the Vatican announced arrangements by which traditionalist Anglican congregations, in all the English-speaking countries, may apply and be received into communion with the Roman “universal” or Catholic church. (The word “catholic” means universal.)
One crucial point: that this was not an instance of the Vatican “poaching.” For many years, since the Anglican communion started coming to pieces over the issue of female ordination in the 1970s, traditional Anglicans have been appealing to Rome for just what Rome finally offered: to be in full communion while also being allowed to keep their distinctive liturgical forms (founded in the magnificent Book of Common Prayer), and to “grandfather” several of their received customs, such as married priests. …
WaPo op-ed advocates legalizing pot.
And just as escalating the drug war over the past three decades hasn’t caused a decrease in supply and demand, there’s no good reason to believe that regulating drugs instead of outlawing them would cause an increase. If it did, why are drug usage rates in the Netherlands lower? People start and stop taking drugs for many different reasons, but the law seems to be pretty low on the list. Ask yourself: Would you shoot up tomorrow if heroin were legal?
Nobody wants a drug free-for-all; but in fact, that’s what we already have in many communities. What we need is regulation. Distribution without regulation equals criminals and chaos — what police see every day on some of our streets. People will buy drugs because they want to get high, and the question is only how and where they will buy them.
History provides some lessons. The 21st Amendment ending Prohibition did not force anybody to drink or any city to license saloons. In 1933, after the failure to ban alcohol, the feds simply got out of the game. Today, they should do the same — and last week the Justice Department took a very small step in the right direction.
Without federal control, states, cities and counties would be free to bar or regulate drugs as they saw fit. Just as with alcohol and tobacco regulation, one size does not fit all; we would see local solutions to local problems.
Even without federal pressure, most states and cities would undoubtedly start by maintaining the status quo against drugs. That’s fine. In these cases, police with or without federal assistance should focus on reducing violence by pushing the drug trade off the streets. An effort to shift the nature of the illegal trade is different than declaring a war on drugs.
Regulating and controlling distribution is far more effective at clearing the corners of drug dealers than any SWAT crackdown. One can easily imagine that in some cities — San Francisco, Portland and Seattle come to mind — alternatives to arrest and incarceration could be tried. They could learn from the experience of the Dutch, and we could all learn from their successes and failures.
Regulation is hard work, but it’s not a war. And it sure beats herding junkies.