26 July 2010, a Monday

My, my, the New York Times seems almost determined to make Obama uncomfortable about his Afghanistan policy, don’t they? Nothing but bad news, no light at the end of the tunnel.

Maybe just what Obama needs, though, in order to pull out. He ought to practice some CYA and make every single member of both houses of congress put themselves on record first, though.

Not that that will work, for sure. Bush put them all on record prior to re-invading Iraq (the war was actually still continuing) and then many of them still wriggled and squirmed off later, claiming they were fooled by an idiot or various other excuses, so it’s one thing to make a politician sign his name but quite another to make him stand behind it.

Well, they say this will be a busy week in Washington as they prepare to improve the country by going on vacation for six weeks.

Here’s a NYT item that will cause controversy:

Only sensible since they don’t really know what Obama has in store for them, but liberals will be complaining about evil corporations worried more about profits than people.

And this part is REALLY funny!

This is almost as amusing as what I wrote yesterday about Maureen Dowd’s column, which said:

...and apparently those black people who were not consulted include President Obama, also insufficiently familiar with civil rights history to recognize her name.

Well, we all know how this story will turn out, don’t we? Obama will announce at some point that he’s taking the blame but it will still somehow be all Bush’s fault.

Never mind that it sure seems a lot like he just did...no, he says it’s the other guys.

Mr Krugman would prefer to forget that the previous record warm year was 1934, and in between those times, Newsweek, on April 28, 1975, published a graph produced by the National Center for Atmospheric Research showing the average temperature change falling steeply between 1942 and 1970, years which produced the greatest growth of industry the planet had ever known.

In that Newsweek article they report the NOAA revealing a drop in average ground temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968.

Columbia University described a sudden, large increase in Northern Hemisphere snow cover in the winter of 1971-72, and another study they include is that made by two NOAA scientists reporting that the amount of sunshine reaching the ground in the continental U.S. diminished between 1964 and 1972.

One University of Wisconsin scientist was quoted as saying that the earth’s average temperature during the great Ice Ages was only about 7 degrees lower than during its warmest eras, and the present decline had already taken the planet about a sixth of the way back there!

"Others" were described as regarding the cooling as "a reversion to the recent ‘little ice age’ conditions".

But here’s the key line that makes Krugman’s concern so amusing.

Those climatologists are a persistently pessimistic bunch, aren’t they?

But, fortunately for us, they were correct about the political leaders not moving, huh, Paul? Just imagine what it would be like if they had worked immediately to turn up the heat!

Of course, Paul is not any kind of earth scientist, himself, and he’s morphed even further in the direction of a political protagonist than the former economist he used to be, so he writes:

What does he mean by "long-term temperature averages" I (a geophysicist by training) have to wonder? Does he mean the retreat of the continental glaciers (not simply mountain-top glaciers) which once covered northern Europe and all of Canada and what is now the continental United States as far south as the Ohio Valley?

If he looked at his Rand-McNally Atlas he might read that "New York, Berlin, Stockholm, Montreal and Copenhagen would be buried beneath the ice..." and "Detroit and Chicago would be entombed in snow and the Midwestern prairies would survive only as wind-whipped steppe."

Not too good for the farmers, I don’t think.

About 14,000 BC, according to the Atlas, there began: "Major melting of the ice sheets. Sea level starts to rise; glaciers recede and the Great Lakes appear."

A "cold snap" took place around 9000-8000 BC, they say, but in "5000 BC: Warmer, wetter weather begins."

Now maybe that’s what Paul means by "long-term" but I sort of doubt if his mind reaches that far back, since even Newsweek from 1975 seems beyond his ken. But if you don’t know when the warmer and wetter weather began, or when the major melting of the ice sheets started in earnest, then you sure as hell don’t know why!

Here’s what concerns me about this Krugman column, when he says:

Can he possibly mean this? Has he read the Climategate e-mail messages he refers to as "supposedly damning", none of which have been denied by their authors? Every one of these supposed scandals was eventually unmasked as a fraud...only Paul’s readers are unaware because this has not received much publicity? Even Krugman did not get around to telling us until now? How much Liberal Logic goes into citing the Shirley Sherrod case as an example, since it was unmasked virtually overnight?

I mean, even his fellow opinion columnist Maureen Dowd wrote:

But Obama is a black person who is also the president, so does this mean he was not consulted? Or maybe that he wasn’t familiar enough with civil rights history to recognize her name? Whatever, it’s a damn poor example of either a media coverup or a media fraud which has somehow gotten little media exposure.

So who does Krugman blame?

Sounds great if you don’t know any better and really like the idea of Big Bad Exxon Mobil, etc, being a villain. But if you happened to know that the first of the whistle-blowers who started raising the question, which was not really about climate change but MANMADE climate change, and before the sly change of title was all about WARMING, not change, (Krugman’s column is titled "Who Cooked The Planet?") were not only not all that well funded but also not even engaged in those industries, then you get a different picture.

Indeed, they were scientists from several disciplines who thought that the scientific claims coming from NASA’s Hansen and CRU, especially, didn’t seem to be justified so they filed Freedom Of Information Act requests to see the data upon which they were based so that they could satisfy themselves that the conclusions were rational.

And guess what? While you are reading the "hacked" e-mails, whose accuracy has never been denied, note how many times they write each other about either refusing to comply with the lawful requests, or else supplying incomplete and misleading data of their own selection, or else, in one case, vowing to DESTROY the data before complying. Read CRU’s own admission that they did, indeed, destroy their raw data for the flimsiest excuse you can imagine. Read in particular the e-mail from the frustrated computer programmer who was trying desperately to make coherent sense of the data he had, and failing, and finally admitting that in the end he was going to have to do what was usually done: fake the missing data.

Remember: the accuracy and authorship of these e-mails has never once been challenged or denied, although some interesting spins have been attempted, some on a par with explaining what the meaning of "is" is.

Krugman feels pretty confident that you, his readers, have not read any of those thousands of e-mails, and I have to wonder how many of them he has read, himself.

Krugman asks us his set-up question about what killed the climate bill just so he can give his pre-selected answer:

One might turn that question around and ask who would be the big beneficiaries in the case of a climate bill passing which pinned the blame for a burning planet on man’s use of carbon-based fuels and required a huge government-sponsored investment in new technologies and schemes (there is no better word) such as cap-and-trade?

One of the people who has already gotten the wealthiest off of this whole scheme also has one of the most gigantic "carbon footprints" on the planet. He justifies this because it turns out he can buy carbon credits from other people who are not using them. His carbon footprint has not been reduced, nor the total emissions reduced, as a result, but a lot of money has changed hands, just the same. And if the scheme ever truly managed to get into full operation, the amount of money we are talking about will make Exxon-Mobil look like a tiny oil company. In this new billionaire’s case, he’s making even more money because he’s buying his carbon credits from a company that he happens to own, himself.

Nor is he all alone in this scheme. As Krugman finishes with his threat...

...I find myself wondering who fitted him for his halo and concern for the fate of the whole world? When he worries loudly about Exxon-Mobil et al misbehaving to protect their profits I find myself wondering who else might misbehave if they expected to profit greatly from the passage of a climate bill which would make them millionaires, or billionaires, or even trillionaires as a result?

Do you know who would handle all of the carbon-credit trading, for instance, except perhaps to dimly suspect it might be the same people who gave us the wonderful recent economic collapse as a result of their creation and complicated manipulation of "derivatives", something even insiders admit to having as little understanding of the essential details as physicists do of quantum mechanics? The banking and financing industry and Wall Street? Yeah, I can just imagine Krugman’s surprise.

And where would Mr Krugman, an economist by training, find himself personally situated under these circumstances?

What’s that? He makes his money writing Op-ed columns for the New York Times? Oh, really? He’s a meat-and-potatoes economist who is deeply invested in Exxon-Mobil because he knows the big boys always win in the end?

Hmmm. Maybe. But he sounded more like a greedy but disappointed loser, to me.

Believe it. A lot of the states figure they can bear the burden somehow as long as it’s shared, but once they see some states getting out from under and them acquiring a greater share of the load, look out below.