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Colby Cosh, in Macleans, writes about Stephen McIntyre, the global-warming skeptic who has quietly and methodically discredited some of the cherished creations of the militant environmentalists.
The private emails and logs leaked last month from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia can’t tell us whether industrial activity is really heating the earth’s atmosphere and endangering civilization. But they have settled the identity of the Great Satan of climate science. Torontonian Stephen McIntyre, a gentle, persistent amateur who had no credentials in applied science before stepping into the global warming debate in 2003, is mentioned more than 100 times. …
…McIntyre first became notorious in 2003 for his statistical critique, co-authored with economist Ross McKitrick, of the “hockey stick graph” that showed global temperatures rocketing upward in the 20th century. The hockey stick, featured in the 2001 report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, had a profound influence on policy worldwide, and played a starring role in presentations like Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. The McIntyre-McKitrick critique called attention to uncertainties in its temperature reconstructions dating back before 1600, to certain problems with dendrochronology (the use of tree rings to estimate past temperatures), and to issues with the statistical calculations underlying the hockey stick. Some climatologists insist that the graph tells the same story when you correct for all this, but much of the critique is now accepted, and the hockey stick, whose weaknesses are better understood, has itself become a somewhat inconvenient distraction for climatologists and environmentalists.
Meanwhile, McIntyre, working alone, has gone on to score further critical points. In 2007, he caught a mistake in the reporting of U.S. surface temperatures by NASA’s Goddard Institute that was quickly acknowledged, with thanks, and corrected. (NASA’s gracious manner contrasts sharply with the attitudes displayed behind the scenes at the CRU.)
The truth is that McIntyre, 62, little resembles the caricature of a wild-eyed climate-change “denier.” He is scrupulous about focusing his criticism on statistical procedures and disclosure practices. He is polite to, and about, climate scientists. He refuses to make grand categorical statements of the “Global warming is just commie horse puckey” type, preferring to remain agnostic, and he discourages such talk on his website, Climate Audit.
When reached for an interview, he interrupts briefly to turn down a request to appear on BBC television about the exploding “Climategate” scandal. “Anything I say now would just be piling on,” he remarks, noting that he has no interest in helping the media stage a drama of personalities. Given the opportunity of a lifetime to gloat over those who referred to him as a “moron” and “Mr. I’m Not Entirely There In The Head,” he demurs. …
Toby Harnden gives Obama props for his Nobel acceptance speech.
…The Obama who turned up was not just a Bush but also a Ronald Reagan, a John F. Kennedy and a Franklin D. Roosevelt – in short, an American president who articulated enduring American principles, values and interests. …
…True, the self-referential Obama who is confident in his own historical greatness was in there. Few men would have the audacity to speak of their “great humility” and then describe themselves a few breaths later as being “living testimony to the moral force of non-violence”.
And it is a stretch to argue that the speech outlined an “Obama doctrine” that fuses realism and idealism. In truth, there was little original in what Obama said. If anything, that was part of what lent the speech its significance – he was embracing the historical essence of what it means to be an American commander-in-chief. …
…We shall see whether Obama can fulfill the promise of his Oslo speech and follow through by making its moral clarity a guiding force rather than a mere momentary rhetorical flourish. …
Robert Samuelson has written numerous articles about healthcare reform and Obamacare fallacies. Here he discusses the savings that the Obami are currently touting.
We are witnessing a determined counterattack by the Obama administration and its political allies on the matter of health-care costs. Many critics (including me) have argued that President Obama’s “reform” agenda wouldn’t control rapidly rising health spending and might speed it up. The logic is simple. People with insurance use more health services than those without. If government insures 30 million or more Americans, health spending will rise. Greater demand will press on limited supply; prices will increase. The best policy: Control spending first, then expand coverage.
But the administration insists that it can insure most of the uninsured and tackle runaway health spending simultaneously. There’s so much waste in today’s health-care system that both goals can be pursued together, Peter Orszag, head of the Office of Management and Budget, has said. …
…Who’s right? Let’s start with the numbers. Unfortunately, the word “savings” is used misleadingly. It doesn’t mean (as is usual) actual reductions; it signifies smaller future increases. There’s a big difference.
In 2009, national health spending will total an estimated $2.5 trillion, or 17.7 percent of gross domestic product. By 2019, it’s projected to rise to $4.67 trillion under present policies, or 22.1 percent of GDP. With CAP’s “savings,” it rises a little less sharply to $4.49 trillion, or 21.3 percent of GDP, according to Harvard economist David Cutler, the study’s co-author, who provided these figures. Similarly, family health insurance premiums rise from 19 percent of median family income in 2009 to 25 percent in 2019 under present policies and 23 percent with CAP’s “savings.” The point is simple: Even with highly optimistic assumptions, health spending remains out of control. It absorbs more of government, business and family budgets. Higher health spending would put pressure on future budget deficits, already projected to total about $9 trillion over the next decade. If new taxes and Medicare “savings” are real, they could be used exclusively to pay down deficits, not finance new spending.
But many may not be real. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Dr. Jeffrey Flier, dean of the Harvard Medical School, gave the various health bills a “failing grade” and said they wouldn’t “control the growth of costs or raise the quality of care.” Quoted in Newsweek, Dr. Delos Cosgrove, head of the Cleveland Clinic, said much the same. Richard Foster, the chief actuary of the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, doubts the cost-saving provisions touted by CAP would save much money. He’s also skeptical that Congress, facing complaints from hospitals and a squeeze on services, would allow all the Medicare reimbursement cuts to take effect. True, Congress has permitted some reimbursement reductions to occur, but it has repeatedly blocked the Sustainable Growth Rate adjustment for doctors, which most resembles the new proposals. …
Thomas Sowell’s fourth installment on the housing bubble could be titled ‘Why Congress should not be in charge of anything important.’
Many in Congress and elsewhere never really got it.
Rep. Barney Frank, in response to warnings about growing riskiness in housing markets, said in 2003: “Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have played a very useful role in helping make housing more affordable.” Critics “exaggerate a threat of safety” and “conjure up the possibility of serious financial losses to the Treasury, which I do not see.” …
…He said, “I would like to get Fannie and Freddie more deeply into helping low-income housing and possibly moving into something that is more explicitly a subsidy.” He added: “I want to roll the dice a little bit more in this situation towards subsidized housing.” …
…Frank was by no means the only member of Congress to dismiss warnings and assert that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were safe and sound institutions. His counterpart in the Senate, Chairman Christopher Dodd of the Senate Banking Committee, was equally adamant on the subject and continued to be so equally long — well into 2008, long after the financial system had already gone into a historic collapse. …
…After accounting errors totaling $11 billion were discovered in the books of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, President Bush in 2007 said that these government-sponsored enterprises should complete “a robust reform package” before being allowed to expand their mortgage portfolios. Sen. Dodd said that President Bush should “immediately reconsider his ill-advised” position. …
In Forbes, Richard Epstein makes some suggestions as to what Obama can do to improve the economy.
…Exhibit A is Christina Romer’s recent Wall Street Journal column, “Putting Americans Back to Work.” Romer heads the president’s Council of Economic Advisers. Her column rates as a bit of transparent propaganda that belongs in a fan magazine, not a serious newspaper. If she wrote it of her own volition, she should be fired for economic incompetence. If, as seems more likely, the White House wrote it for her, or told her just what to say, she should resign in protest. …
…Instead of her presidential genuflection, Romer should have given this blunt advice to the president:
You can only improve labor markets by freeing them up. Scrap the talk about goofy ad hoc subsidies, and tell the president, for the first time in his life, to think hard about deregulation. Roll back the three recent minimum-wage increases that have blunted job creation for low-skilled workers in a stagnant labor market. Announce he will veto any effort by Congress to pass the Employer Free Choice Act, whose uncertain threat of compulsory unionization has prompted many businesses to shelve any plans for expansion. Abandon the monstrous health care bills winding through Congress, whose panoply of taxes, subsidies and regulations are job killers of the first magnitude. Put a halt on legislation for carbon caps and taxes until the science gets sorted out. Don’t let the EPA make a hasty endangerment finding on carbon dioxide.
Deregulation costs nothing to administer, increases jobs and adds to the tax base. It is only an added benefit that sound economics reduces presidential power. …
In Science News, Lisa Grossman reports that a new theory has emerged about how water poured into the Mediterranean at the Straits of Gibraltar.
A cataclysmic flood could have filled the Mediterranean Sea — which millions of years ago was a dry basin — like a bathtub in the space of less than two years. A new model suggests that at the flood’s peak water poured from the Atlantic into the Mediterranean basin at a rate one thousand times the flow of the Amazon River, according to calculations published in the Dec. 10 Nature.
“In an instantaneous flash, the dry Mediterranean became a normal Mediterranean like we see it today,” says lead author Daniel Garcia-Castellanos of Spain’s Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (CSIC) in Barcelona
He and his colleagues calculate that at the height of the flood, water levels rose more than 10 meters and more than 40 centimeters of rock eroded away per day. The model also shows that 100 million cubic meters of water flowed through the channel per second, with water gushing at speeds of 100 kilometers an hour. Rather than a Niagara Falls-esque cascade from the Atlantic into the Mediterranean, the team’s results imply a torrent several kilometers wide at a fairly gradual slope.
“It would be an exciting rafting place,” Garcia-Castellanos says.
“As a hypothesis it makes sense, though it’s still in early stages,” says Sanjeev Gupta of Imperial College London. “There’s lots more to be done to explore this idea. It’s quite exciting, and I think it will get people interested in this topic.” …