Blogito, Ergo Sum
by Gregg Calkins
31 March 2010, a Wednesday
Obama is in trouble with the environmentalists for allowing some
offshore oil drilling. There’s nothing there anyhow, they claim....even as Mr. Obama curries favors with pro-drilling interests, he risks a backlash from some coastal governors, senators and environmental advocates, who say that the relatively small amounts of oil to be gained in the offshore areas are not worth the environmental risks.
It is not known how much potential fuel lies in the areas opened to exploration, although according to Interior Department estimates there could be as much as a three-year supply of recoverable oil and more than two years’ worth of natural gas, at current rates of consumption. But those estimates are based on seismic data that is, in some cases, more than 30 years old.
Which means some of that was gathered back in my time! It’s rather amazing how the environmentalists can know so much without any scientific investigations on their part...must be divine intervention, or something.
Beyond science, their economic theories are interesting, too:
"Drilling our coasts will doing nothing to lower gas prices or create energy independence," Michael Brune, executive director of the
Now drilling...and the exploratory work that leads up to it...is purely an expense. I worked 11 year in oil exploration so I have some idea what I’m talking about. It takes a lot of money just to locate a likely place to drill, and it takes a lot of money to drill a hole. Presuming it proves to be a discovery well, it takes a lot more money to turn it into a producing oil well and then to get the crude oil to a refinery somewhere.
You are probably looking at close to ten years for that "short-term profit" to appear. Michael Brune doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
On the other hand, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell called Mr. Obama’s proposal "a step in the right direction, but a small one that leaves enormous amounts of American energy off limits."
Unfortunately, McConnell does. Is it merely a gesture on Obama’s part, or is he serious?
I love
this one for spin:British lawmakers issue mixed report on 'Climategate'
In the first of three investigations into the scandal some have dubbed "Climategate," lawmakers here sharply criticized a British university Wednesday for what they said was a culture of withholding information, but they added that the integrity of its climate change research was not in doubt. ...
But although the committee expressed sympathy for Jones, saying he was a scapegoat for other clashes within the scientific community, they condemned the university for mishandling requests under Britain's freedom-of-information rules from climate-change skeptics.
"The leaked e-mails appear to show a culture of non-disclosure at CRU and instances where information may have been deleted to avoid disclosure, particularly to climate-change skeptics. The failure of the university to grasp fully the potential damage this could do and did was regrettable," Phil Willis, the committee chairman, said in a statement.
Uh...yoo hoo...sir...Mr Willis? Those things are violations of the law!
Note that this was by a parliamentary committee, not a scientific one, which, although unable to quite come out and say that the laws they had written had been broken (regrettably), the scientific facts of which they had no personal ability to evaluate were not in doubt!
Fantastic! Well, at least they did fast work, got to give them that much.
The panel members said their report was rushed because they wanted it released before the upcoming general election...
Whew...for a second there I had thought this was a scientific investigation!
...however, the university has commissioned two other investigations that are expected to be more in-depth. One, headed by Muir Russell, a former civil servant, is investigating allegations of malpractice, while the other, lead by Ernest Oxburgh, a geologist, is reviewing CRU's scientific publications.
We’ll see how those turn out.
Willis urged climate scientists at the University of East Anglia and around the world to practice greater transparency, including publishing raw data and detailed methodologies.
"Governments across the world will be spending trillions of pounds on climate change mitigation," Willis said. "The quality of the science therefore has to be irreproachable."
At this moment, obviously, we have opacity, unpublished raw data (actually they admitted to discarding some of it (!) and then claimed the rest of it was "lost"!), and the scientists have refused to reveal their methodologies.
Yet Obama wants a trillion dollar climate bill, anyhow.
Do liberals think before they write? Or even after?
Harold Meyerson has a classic:The Senate has shriveled into a body that routinely thwarts majority rule. The Supreme Court has ruled that big money can dominate our elections as never before.
The Supreme Court, of course, did this by a simple 5-4 majority vote. So is Meyerson for or against majority rule?
I think I can safely assure you that if the Supreme Court had gone 5-4 the other way, and if Republicans were the simple majority in the Senate, that he’d be quite happy the way things were.
Here’s some whistling by the graveyard:Former President Bill Clinton's top political strategists, who had a front-row seat for the Republicans' 1994 electoral successes, said Wednesday that the GOP today is peaking too early and is unlikely to see a repeat performance this November.
It’s not a bad argument, actually, but it omits a couple of important things.
One is the complexity of the health-care bill. Even the policy geeks haven’t been able to read and digest all of it, let alone the senators and representatives. This means that there’s going to be revelation after revelation of one obscure or hidden point after another, all summer long as they get pried out of the details. And, by November, some of the negative effects will have actually been felt. If anything, the health-care bill passed too soon for Democrats, giving 7 full months for analysis before the election. And every single negative one of them is going to hurt Democrats and only Democrats.
Two is the fact that Obama, the narcissist, feels even more empowered, despite his increasing negative ratings. Remember his famous "I won, and you lost" statement ending debate? He’s going to try to jam through a climate bill the same way and the summer will be full of that sound and fury.
The Republicans not only haven’t peaked, they lost the vote, after all, but are just getting started. Who wants you to believe otherwise? Why, bless mah bones, it’s none other than
Mr. Greenberg and James Carville, his partner at Democracy Corps.
Who wouldn’t mislead you or spin you if their lives depended on it! Count on that! You can take it to the bank. Their bank. Still, even Carville can’t spin too much...
Mr. Carville predicted Republicans will net about 25 House seats and six or seven Senate seats -- not enough to give them control of either chamber, but enough to drop Democrats' margins dramatically.
This, of course, is not very reassuring to the 25 House members and six or seven Senators who aren’t quite sure who they are yet and could quit right now and save themselves a lot of grief if they did.
Mark my words...it’s going to be a long, hot summer.
From an article speculating on the relative intellectual ability of Obama and Palin:
The two minds may or may not be of different quality. Knowing the results of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) that both took before college would provide a relative comparison. But neither Obama's nor Palin's test scores are public. In fact, it seems that the more any person's public standing depends on his or her being perceived as bright, the less willing they are to disclose their scholastic record. Obama, specifically has gone to some lengths to block access to his academic records.
Few probably remember when the Yale records of Bush and Kerry came to light...and Bush’s grades were better than Kerry’s! The MSM buried that one quickly and deeply.
When you are proud of your record you do not hide it. Modesty is not a vice common to any politician.
This item made me feel kind of sad:
I wept because I was once a major baseball fan, yet as I read his predictions I recognized scarcely one name among them...except the team names, of course. I knew virtually none of the individuals he mentioned.
It’s better to have loved, and lost, then never to have loved at all. Sure.
From
an item explaining how interconnected the temperature data sets are for all of the major institutions reporting global warming:Of course, that’s hardly the only damage to AGW credibility over the last few months:
The East Anglia CRU
threw out their raw data, undermining any effort to check their workNOAA/GHCN "homogenization"
falsified climate declines into increasesEast Anglia CRU’s
below-standard computer modeling No rise in atmospheric carbon fraction over the last 150 years: University of Bristol IPCC withdraws claim that AGW will wipe out Himalayan glaciers by 2035IPCC chief Rajendra Pachauri
knew Himalayan claim was bogus for months before exposureAmazonian rainforest conclusions not based on scientific research but
on advocacy group claimsMountain glacier claims based on
unsubstantiated student theses and anecdotes from climber magazineSearch of IPCC report footnotes exposes
ten more student dissertations presented as peer-reviewed researchMedieval Warming Period temperatures
may have been global, undermining entire AGW caseMeasurements used for AGW case were influenced by
urbanization, poor location, bad data sets African-crop claims exposed as falseIPCC researchers excluded Southern Hemisphere data to
exaggerate effects of warming on hurricanesHurricane claims further
exposed as false by actual peer-reviewed research — including by some AGW researchersMajor scientific group concludes IPCC-linked researchers "
complicit in the alleged scientific malpractices"When will the rest of the media catch up to this academic scandal?
Uh...they are staffed with people who prefer to believe the AGW notion, so when do you think? My own analysis would be...not anytime soon.