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Mark Steyn takes note of a quiet climb down by climate scolds.
Something rather odd happened the other day. If you go to NASA’s Web site and look at the “U.S. surface air temperature” rankings for the lower 48 states, you might notice that something has changed.
Then again, you might not. They’re not issuing any press releases about it. But they have quietly revised their All-Time Hit Parade for U.S. temperatures. The “hottest year on record” is no longer 1998, but 1934. Another alleged swelterer, the year 2001, has now dropped out of the Top 10 altogether, and most of the rest of the 21st century – 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004 – plummeted even lower down the Hot 100. In fact, every supposedly hot year from the Nineties and this decade has had its temperature rating reduced. Four of America’s Top 10 hottest years turn out to be from the 1930s, that notorious decade when we all drove around in huge SUVs with the air-conditioning on full-blast. If climate change is, as Al Gore says, the most important issue anyone’s ever faced in the history of anything ever, then Franklin Roosevelt didn’t have a word to say about it.
And yet we survived.
So why is 1998 no longer America’s record-breaker? Because a very diligent fellow named Steve McIntyre of climateaudit.com labored long and hard to prove there was a bug in NASA’s handling of the raw data. He then notified the scientists responsible and received an acknowledgment that the mistake was an “oversight” that would be corrected in the next “data refresh.” The reply was almost as cool as the revised chart listings.
Who is this man who understands American climate data so much better than NASA? Well, he’s not even American: He’s Canadian. Just another immigrant doing the jobs Americans won’t do, even when they’re federal public servants with unlimited budgets? …
Joshua Muravchik notes the Dems are facing an inconvenient truth.
It’s time to declare victory and go home. That was the formula that Senator George Aiken famously suggested for Vietnam in 1966. Today, it bears relevance to Iraq. No, not to the U. S. military presence in that country, but to the Democrats in Congress.
Since November, the Pelosi-Reid Democrats have demonstrated shocking disdain for the well-being of our country. Their only concern has been to defeat or embarrass George W. Bush. Once, one of the noblest American traditions held that politics stops at the water’s edge. But, for the Pelosi-Reid Democrats, it seems that the inverse is true: namely, that national interests stop when the opportunity arises for partisan point-scoring.
In the last few weeks, however, a number of Democratic voices have been raised to observe that General Petraeus’s surge strategy seems to be working in Iraq. …
Jonah Goldberg writes on the terrorist/criminal debate.
Bank robbers rarely use suicide bombers. Forgers don’t declare war on capitalism, democracy and modernity. Kidnappers rarely behead their victims without asking for a ransom. And when they do ask for ransoms, only rarely do they demand infidels submit to the will of Allah instead of asking for unmarked bills.
These incandescently obvious observations illuminate, in a small way, the resplendent stupidity of the notion that we should treat members of al-Qaida like run-of-the-mill criminals.
Al-Qaida’s business plan is to make money and kill people in order to impose a global caliphate of Islamic rule. The Mafia’s business plan is to make money in order to … make money. Murder is, as Tony Soprano might say, the cost of doing business. Murder for al-Qaida is the business (and if you die in the process, you get to spend eternity at an Islamic Bada-Bing Club). …
Power Line posts on Spitzer’s troubles and NASA’s climate snafu.
The Captain tells a story about an LA hospital.
Martin Luther King Hospital in Los Angeles has one of the worst reputations in the nation among major metropolitan hospitals. In 2004, the Los Angeles Times ran a devastating exposé on the hospital, showing how federal funds went to waste in a mismanaged muddle that spent far more per patient than any other hospital in the area. Yesterday, the federal funding disappeared — and so will MLK Hospital:
Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital shut down its emergency room Friday night and will close entirely within two weeks, a startlingly swift reaction to a federal decision to revoke $200 million in annual funding because of ongoing lapses in care.
The extraordinary developments mark an end to nearly four years of failed attempts to reform the historic institution, treasured by many African Americans as a symbol of hope and progress after the 1965 Watts riots.
Los Angeles County health services director Dr. Bruce Chernof announced the closure plan Friday afternoon, hours after the hospital learned that it had failed its final test, a top-to-bottom review by the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The hospital, formerly known as King/Drew, has shown itself unable to meet minimum standards for patient care since January 2004, according to the regulators.
This is a catastrophe for that area of Los Angeles, and an entirely avoidable catastrophe at that. …
King Corn by Rich Lowry.
Republican presidential candidates flocked to Ames, Iowa, for the Iowa straw poll this weekend, an event that is both an early winnowing process for the GOP presidential field and an object lesson in how one state can hijack the nation’s energy policy.
Ethanol is to Iowans what marijuana is to Rastafarians: a substance that is considered quasi-holy, but only because it delivers really good times. Presidential candidates become fanatical supporters of the corn-based fuel as soon as they begin to compete in the Iowa caucuses. Before it’s over, Mitt Romney might have to promise to use ethanol as pomade and Mike Huckabee — in a naked play for the religious right — to baptize people in the stuff. …
Ilya Somin in Volokh works to set the Che record straight.
Few people still admire Lenin and Stalin. Mao Zedong also has few remaining fans in the West (though he still hasn’t gotten the negative recognition he deserves for being possibly history’s greatest mass murderer). One communist icon, however, still has staying power: Che Guevara. Go to any college campus or hip hangout and you’ll find no shortage of Che T-shirts, Che posters, and even Che cell phone messages. The truth, however, is that Che was no less a brutal killer than other communist leaders. If he failed to rise to the same “heights” as Lenin or Mao, it was largely for lack of opportunity. …
National Review shorts.
Adam Smith tells us how bad the nanny state in England has become.
The nanny state in overdrive was witnessed this week in Urchfont, near Devizes, in Wiltshire. A pensioner, who for eight years has been tending the local flowerbeds (at her own expense), is being told she must stop unless she gets three “men at work†signs, a bright yellow jacket and another person to watch for traffic.
A highways inspector spotted June Turnbull at work and asked the parish council chairman Peter Newell if the council had the necessary “Section 96″ safety license. Apparently the parish has health and safety responsibilities for volunteers on county-owned land. …
WSJ with a nice surprise concerning the level of high school econ knowledge.
Pop quiz. Which has been most important in reducing poverty over time: a) taxes, b) economic growth, c) international trade, or d) government regulation?
We know what our readers would say. But lest you think American young people are slouching toward serfdom, you’ll be pleased to know that 53% of U.S. high school seniors also answered “b.” …
Division of Labour posts on the value of donkeys protecting herds. Would that the political donkeys be good at protection.
Tuesday’s Dallas Morning News runs the (literally) most ass kicking story I’ve read, “Guard Donkeys Used to Protect Texas Herds.” It illustrates some interesting examples of entrepreneurial discovery, tacit knowledge and substitution between animals as productive inputs.
MILANO, Texas – Coyotes and wild dogs were slaughtering calves on Herbie Vaughan’s ranch in the Cedar Creek valley south of Milano until about eight years ago when he took an old-timer’s advice and installed guard donkeys in the herd.
“When I put the donkeys out there, I no longer had a coyote problem,” says Vaughan. “It’s like they disappeared. I don’t know why, but it worked.” …
Jay Ambrose on Newsweek’s abuse of global warming skeptics.
NEWSWEEK magazine, which tells us in a recent edition about a “well-funded,” global-warming “denial machine,” is itself something of a trashing machine, a journalistic pretender that mistakes smear for substance.
The stumbling, bumbling exercise in ad hominem McCarthyism takes it as an unchallengeable truth that global warming is a human-induced catastrophe that could be readily prevented, and concludes there is just one way to explain the “naysayers” to this holy writ: They are part of a “well-coordinated,” heavily financed scheme cooked up by self-serving corporate interests to dupe the public and confuse or buy off politicians. …
John Lott answers Freakonomics with Freedomnomics.
Freedomnomics is John Lott’s free market retort to the wildly popular book, Freakonomics — that pastiche of thin analysis that skims over topics as diverse as sumo wrestling, real estate rip-offs, used car prices, and children’s names.
In particular, Lott disputes the most explosive claim in Levitt and Dubner’s work — that Roe v. Wade was a major factor in the stunning drop in crime in the 1990s. That huge assertion, based on four pages of analysis that included the negative impact of Communist Romania’s no-abortion policy, could easily have been labeled “fewer blacks, less crime.”
Lott argues, by contrast, that the Supreme Court’s legislative fiat in 1973 actually increased crime by boosting out-of-wedlock births and single-parent households. These crime-correlated statistics exploded in the 1970s and ’80s as social sanctions against extra-marital sex disappeared and as the legal but odious option of abortion was rejected by millions of now-pregnant unmarried women.
If abortion isn’t the life-saving procedure that Levitt and Dubner suggest it is, other factors must have caused crime rates to plummet during the last decade of the 20th century. Accordingly, Lott provides evidence that the reinstitution of capital punishment in the early ’90s explains some of the drop — a conclusion that coincides with the findings of other analysts and confirms what most folks, including criminals and police officers, sense intuitively — that people go out of their way to avoid being killed. Stated otherwise: harsher penalties, less crime. …