When I visited the House of Lords’ minister, Lord Marland, at the Climate Change Department a couple of years ago, I asked him and the Department’s chief number-cruncher, Professor David Mackay (neither a climate scientist nor an economist, of course) to show me the Department’s calculations detailing just how much “global warming” that might otherwise occur this century would be prevented by the $30 billion per year that the Department was committed to spend between 2011 and 2050 -– $1.2 trillion in all.

There was a horrified silence. The birds stopped singing. The Minister adjusted his tie. The Permanent Secretary looked at his watch. Professor Mackay looked as though he wished the plush sofa into which he was disappearing would swallow him up entirely.

Eventually, in a very small voice, the Professor said, “Er, ah, mphm, that is, oof, arghh, we’ve never done any such calculation.” The biggest tax increase in human history had been based not upon a mature scientific assessment followed by a careful economic appraisal, but solely upon blind faith. I said as much. “Well,” said the Professor, “maybe we’ll get around to doing the calculations next October.” They still haven’t done the calculations -– or, rather, I suspect they have done them but have kept the results very quiet

The environment minister of Northern Ireland weighed in on related matters a few years ago.

Sugar and other sweeteners are, in fact, so toxic to the human body that they should be regulated as strictly as alcohol by governments worldwide, according to a commentary in the current issue of the journal Nature by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). The researchers propose regulations such as taxing all foods and drinks that include added sugar, banning sales in or near schools and placing age limits on purchases…

In the United States, more than two-thirds of the population is overweight, and half of them are obese. About 80 percent of those who are obese will have diabetes or metabolic disorders and will have shortened lives, according to the UCSF authors of the commentary, led by Robert Lustig. And about 75 percent of U.S. health-care dollars are spent on diet-related diseases, the authors said. Worldwide, the obese now greatly outnumber the undernourished…

Lustig, a medical doctor in UCSF’s Department of Pediatrics, compares added sugar to tobacco and alcohol (coincidentally made from sugar) in that it is addictive, toxic and has a negative impact on society, thus meeting established public health criteria for regulation. Lustig advocates a consumer tax on any product with added sugar…ban the sale of sugary drinks to children under age 17 and to tighten zoning laws for the sale of sugary beverages and snacks around schools and in low-income areas

In a country where the EPA has issued an endangerment finding about a gas that is necessary for life to exist on earth, it is possible to imagine the government requiring a photo ID and a prescription to buy a bag of sugar. How life has changed in the last half century, and in many ways not for the better.

There was no incentive to work hard — to go out to the fields early, to put in extra effort, Yen Jingchang says. “Work hard, don’t work hard — everyone gets the same,” he says. “So people don’t want to work.” In Xiaogang there was never enough food, and the farmers often had to go to other villages to beg. Their children were going hungry. They were desperate. So, in the winter of 1978, after another terrible harvest, they came up with an idea: Rather than farm as a collective, each family would get to farm its own plot of land. If a family grew a lot of food, that family could keep some of the harvest…

Despite the risks, they decided they had to try this experiment — and to write it down as a formal contract, so everyone would be bound to it. By the light of an oil lamp, Yen Hongchang wrote out the contract. The farmers agreed to divide up the land among the families. Each family agreed to turn over some of what they grew to the government, and to the collective. And, crucially, the farmers agreed that families that grew enough food would get to keep some for themselves. The contract also recognized the risks the farmers were taking. If any of the farmers were sent to prison or executed, it said, the others in the group would care for their children until age 18…

by changing the economic rules — by saying, you get to keep some of what you grow — everything changed. At the end of the season, they had an enormous harvest: more, Yen Hongchang says, than in the previous five years combined. That huge harvest gave them away…

fortunately for Mr. Yen and the other farmers, at this moment in history, there were powerful people in the Communist Party who wanted to change China’s economy. Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese leader who would go on to create China’s modern economy, was just coming to power. So instead of executing the Xiaogang farmers, the Chinese leaders ultimately decided to hold them up as a model. Within a few years, farms all over China adopted the principles in that secret document. People could own what they grew. The government launched other economic reforms, and China’s economy started to grow like crazy. Since 1978, something like 500 million people have risen out of poverty in China.

In 1623 William Bradford figured out the same thing after the Pilgrims spent two years on their communal farms: “they began to think how they might raise as much corn as they could…so assigned to every family a parcel of land, according to the proportion of their number…and ranged all boys and youth under some family. This had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious…The women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn; which before would allege weakness and inability.”

It is of note that terrible hardships preceded the discovery of simple truths. In the case of China, tens of millions of people died over decades in service of Mao’s utopian fantasies. In Plymouth it took them three hard years to figure out how to deal with the freeloaders. Small wonder that in our world today, ideas that have lived off a lazy prosperity, like green energy and global warming, are having some problems of their own.

the number of scientific “heretics” is growing with each passing year. The reason is a collection of stubborn scientific facts. Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now. This is known to the warming establishment, as one can see from the 2009 “Climategate” email of climate scientist Kevin Trenberth: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.” But the warming is only missing if one believes computer models where so-called feedbacks involving water vapor and clouds greatly amplify the small effect of CO2.

The lack of warming for more than a decade — indeed, the smaller-than-predicted warming over the 22 years since the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began issuing projections — suggests that computer models have greatly exaggerated how much warming additional CO2 can cause. Faced with this embarrassment, those promoting alarm have shifted their drumbeat from warming to weather extremes, to enable anything unusual that happens in our chaotic climate to be ascribed to CO2.

The fact is that CO2 is not a pollutant. CO2 is a colorless and odorless gas, exhaled at high concentrations by each of us, and a key component of the biosphere’s life cycle. Plants do so much better with more CO2 that greenhouse operators often increase the CO2 concentrations by factors of three or four to get better growth. This is no surprise since plants and animals evolved when CO2 concentrations were about 10 times larger than they are today. Better plant varieties, chemical fertilizers and agricultural management contributed to the great increase in agricultural yields of the past century, but part of the increase almost certainly came from additional CO2 in the atmosphere.

Although the number of publicly dissenting scientists is growing, many young scientists furtively say that while they also have serious doubts about the global-warming message, they are afraid to speak up for fear of not being promoted — or worse. They have good reason to worry. In 2003, Dr. Chris de Freitas, the editor of the journal Climate Research, dared to publish a peer-reviewed article with the politically incorrect (but factually correct) conclusion that the recent warming is not unusual in the context of climate changes over the past thousand years. The international warming establishment quickly mounted a determined campaign to have Dr. de Freitas removed from his editorial job and fired from his university position. Fortunately, Dr. de Freitas was able to keep his university job.

This is not the way science is supposed to work, but we have seen it before — for example, in the frightening period when Trofim Lysenko hijacked biology in the Soviet Union. Soviet biologists who revealed that they believed in genes, which Lysenko maintained were a bourgeois fiction, were fired

The list of heretics is getting pretty long now.

The lesbian parents of an 11-year-old boy who is undergoing the process of becoming a girl last night defended the decision, claiming it was better for a child to have a sex change when young. Thomas Lobel, who now calls himself Tammy, is undergoing controversial hormone blocking treatment in Berkeley, California to stop him going through puberty as a boy…The mothers say that one of the first things Thomas told them when he learned sign language aged three — because of a speech impediment — was, ‘I am a girl’. At age seven, after threatening genital mutilation on himself, psychiatrists diagnosed Thomas with gender identity disorder…This summer, he started taking hormone-blocking drugs…Tammy Lobel’s hormones are being blocked by an implant on the inside of the 11-year-old’s upper left arm, which must be replaced once a year. Ms Moreno explained: ‘In other words, she will stay as a pre-pubescent boy until she decides and we feel that she can make this decision about surgery.’

As VDH noted recently, civilizations often devolve. Exhibit A above. Unlike 50 years ago, we now live in a world where smoking a cigarette can get you in trouble, but this abusive freak show doesn’t.

millions of Americans remain unaware that this nation is broke –- broker than any nation has ever been. A few days before Christmas, we sailed across the psychological Rubicon and joined the club of nations whose government debt now exceeds their total GDP. It barely raised a murmur -– and those who took the trouble to address the issue noted complacently that our 100 percent debt-to-GDP ratio is a mere two-thirds of Greece’s. That’s true, but at a certain point per capita comparisons are less relevant than the sheer hard dollar sums: Greece owes a few rinky-dink billions; America owes more money than anyone has ever owed anybody ever.

Public debt has increased by 67 percent over the past three years, and too many Americans refuse even to see it as a problem. For most of us, “$16.4 trillion” has no real meaning, any more than “$17.9 trillion” or “$28.3 trillion” or “$147.8 bazillion.” It doesn’t even have much meaning…there is no politically plausible scenario under which the 16.4 trillion is reduced to 13.7 trillion, and then 7.9 trillion and, eventually, 173 dollars and 48 cents…

Our most enlightened citizens think it’s rather vulgar and boorish to obsess about debt. The urbane, educated, Western progressive would rather “save the planet,” a cause which offers the grandiose narcissism that, say, reforming Medicare lacks. So, for example, a pipeline delivering Canadian energy from Alberta to Texas is blocked by the president on no grounds whatsoever except that the very thought of it is an aesthetic affront to the moneyed Sierra Club types who infest his fundraisers. The offending energy, of course, does not simply get mothballed in the Canadian attic: The Dominion’s Prime Minister has already pointed out that they’ll sell it to the Chinese, whose Politburo lacks our exquisitely refined revulsion at economic dynamism and, indeed, seems increasingly amused by it…

Last January, the BBC’s Brian Milligan inaugurated the New Year by driving an electric Mini from London to Edinburgh, taking advantage of the many government-subsidized charge posts en route. It took him four days, which works out to an average speed of 6 miles per hour – or longer than it would have taken on a stagecoach in the mid-19th century. This was hailed as a great triumph by the environmentalists.

Steyn goes on to talk about the regulatory sclerosis that afflicts the country and is so evident over the march of decades. Of course it’s not all bleak. Some companies in the tech sector continue to show impressive growth. But the heavy lifting of massive job creation can’t occur unless government stops its spending binge and gets out of the way of business. 2013 can’t arrive fast enough.

1968 was a tumultuous year, really awful in some ways, hardly what you’d call the good old days. Yet it had its moments, including the first human spaceflight to leave the earth’s orbit. Merry Christmas from the three astronauts of the Apollo 8 mission.

When the EPA announced its new air pollution rules this week — designed to reduce power plant emissions of mercury and other to gases — Administrator Lisa Jackson blogged that: “Mercury is a neurotoxin that is particularly harmful to children, and emissions of mercury and other air toxics have been linked to damage to developing nervous systems, respiratory illnesses and other diseases.” At $10 billion a year, complying with the new rules won’t come cheap, and that assumes the EPA’s low-ball estimate comes true. According to the coal industry, this is the most expensive rule the EPA’s ever imposed.

For our part, we get our mercury from swordfish, about which the EPA also screams trouble. On the other hand, the EPA says that with mercury CFL’s “there is no evidence that the brief exposure to the mercury in a broken bulb presents a health risk to you.” Go figure. (The state of Maine begs to differ.)

BTW, both left and right, AEI and Brookings say that the $10 billion annual boondoggle by the EPA is totally unnecessary. Surprised?

Coca-Cola…withdrew the red cans and replaced them with snow-white cans as antiseptic as a bedpan. The white cans are decorated with shadowy images of polar bears, commemorating Coke’s contribution of $3 million to the World Wildlife Fund’s campaign to “save the polar bears.”

Maybe next year Coke will have cans illustrated with a hockey stick and no Medieval Warm Period. That’ll wow ‘em. (In our view, doctoring the data to remove the MWP was necessary in the minds of the global warming fraudsters so that they could claim that recent warming was “unprecedented” and would require spending vast unnecessary sums, which BTW would benefit them economically and professionally.)

Consider the case of global warming, another system of doomsaying prophecy and faith in things unseen. As with religion, it is presided over by a caste of spectacularly unattractive people pretending to an obscure form of knowledge that promises to make the seas retreat and the winds abate. As with religion, it comes with an elaborate list of virtues, vices and indulgences. As with religion, its claims are often non-falsifiable, hence the convenience of the term “climate change” when thermometers don’t oblige the expected trend lines. As with religion, it is harsh toward skeptics, heretics and other “deniers.” And as with religion, it is susceptible to the earthly temptations of money, power, politics, arrogance and deceit.

You know where we are on the issue. Our question is this: in 5 years and in 10 years, will AGW still be the conventional wisdom in the media and the academy?

We know the themes from obscure TV shows like Destry, which aired for less than 3 months, as well as famous themes like that of 77 Sunset Strip (“you meet the highbrow and the hipster, the starlet and the phony tipster). When we took the math SAT in high school the album version of the Doors’ Light my Fire played in the background. We often hear Tommy Dorsey and his orchestra, like this war ditty and other songs from the 40′s and also some tunes from quite a bit earlier as well. And of course there’s a lot of classical music in the mix. We used to hear a lot of Brahms, but lately Beethoven’s 6th symphony has been playing.

Memory is certainly cheaper than buying on iTunes. But our question is this: does everyone have a soundtrack? We know Bob Dylan does.

EU bans claim that water can prevent dehydration…EU officials concluded that, following a three-year investigation, there was no evidence to prove the previously undisputed fact. Producers of bottled water are now forbidden by law from making the claim and will face a two-year jail sentence if they defy the edict…

professors Dr Andreas Hahn and Dr Moritz Hagenmeyer…compiled what they assumed was an uncontroversial statement in order to test new laws which allow products to claim they can reduce the risk of disease, subject to EU approval. They applied for the right to state that “regular consumption of significant amounts of water can reduce the risk of development of dehydration” as well as preventing a decrease in performance.

However, last February, the European Food Standards Authority (EFSA) refused to approve the statement. A meeting of 21 scientists in Parma, Italy, concluded that reduced water content in the body was a symptom of dehydration and not something that drinking water could subsequently control.

Just how many millions of euros were spent on conferences in Parma and other things for a “three-year investigation” of whether water is wet? Niall Ferguson may well be right.

According to the IPCC, who produce the original numbers, humans produce approximately 9 gigatons of CO2 per year. This is within the error factor for the amount of CO2 from at least two natural sources. Estimates of CO2 from natural sources are very crude as evidenced by the large error factors…In 2010 humans produced 9 gigatons, but ocean output was between 90 and 100 gigatons and ground bacteria and rotting vegetation was between 50 and 60 gigatons

Maybe we’ll have to get rid of all the bacteria, rotting plants and those darned oceans if we’re going to make the five-year window to avoid doom.

the Obama administration has aggressively pushed a $433-million plan to buy an experimental smallpox drug, despite uncertainty over whether it is needed or will work. Senior officials have taken unusual steps to secure the contract for New York-based Siga Technologies Inc., whose controlling shareholder is billionaire Ronald O. Perelman, one of the world’s richest men and a longtime Democratic Party donor. When Siga complained that contracting specialists at the Department of Health and Human Services were resisting the company’s financial demands, senior officials replaced the government’s lead negotiator for the deal, interviews and documents show. When Siga was in danger of losing its grip on the contract a year ago, the officials blocked other firms from competing…

the government could draw on $1 billion worth of smallpox vaccine it already owns to inoculate the entire U.S. population and quickly treat people exposed to the virus. The vaccine, which costs the government $3 per dose, can reliably prevent death when given within four days of exposure. Siga’s drug, an antiviral pill called ST-246, would be used to treat people who were diagnosed with smallpox too late for the vaccine to help. Yet the new drug cannot be tested for effectiveness in people because of ethical constraints — and no one knows whether animal testing could prove it would work in humans.

Smallpox is lethal and nasty. When Edward Jenner created the smallpox vaccine by using cowpox, he arguably contributed to saving more lives than any single man in history, yet we have found no record of him receiving a $433 million contract.

You will recall that some years ago, people worried about a smallpox terrorist attack. The US government created a plan to deal with it, and an idiotic plan it was. A group a bad guys flying on Southwest for a week before they keeled over would render the government’s plan useless. They’d also render ST-246 useless. So this is another big waste of money. Far better and cheaper to encourage voluntary vaccinations, but apparently this is not being done. We are given to understand, however, that the government officials in charge of smallpox response have all been vaccinated. How nice for them.

World headed for irreversible climate change in five years…If the world is to stay below 2C of warming, which scientists regard as the limit of safety, then emissions must be held to no more than 450 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; the level is currently around 390ppm. But the world’s existing infrastructure is already producing 80% of that “carbon budget”, according to the IEA’s analysis, published on Wednesday. This gives an ever-narrowing gap in which to reform the global economy on to a low-carbon footing. If current trends continue, and we go on building high-carbon energy generation, then by 2015 at least 90% of the available “carbon budget” will be swallowed up by our energy and industrial infrastructure. By 2017, there will be no room for manoeuvre at all – the whole of the carbon budget will be spoken for, according to the IEA’s calculations.

Think of this: the difference between Have a Nice Day! and We’re Doomed! depends on 60 parts per million of the gas that plants breathe. That’s less than 1 out of 10,000 bits of air, as we tirelessly point out. If you think the earth is that fragile, well, good luck. Or maybe we’re just among the Gomers and Goobers of the world, as the WaPo reported: “It is not surprising that support for federal funding for clean energy drops among Republicans when their major source of information is a ‘news’ network that is pushing an anti-environment, anti-science, anti-government agenda 24/7.”

what Canada and Australia are paying to fulfill their entirely voluntary Copenhagen Accord climate change commitments. Australia committed $599 million and Canada $1.2 billion between 2010 and 2012. Both nations have already donated the first third of this commitment, an amount that is almost exactly the current shortfall in the international Horn of Africa Drought fund, a deficit that may lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people if it is not rectified.

The Copenhagen Accord specified that contributions should be split 50-50 between helping people adapt to climate change and stopping (or “mitigating”) climate change. Australia is generally following this formula, but 90% of Canada’s first $400 million donation is dedicated entirely to mitigation.

This undue focus on mitigation of a hypothetical human-caused dangerous warming that has yet even to be measured comes at the expense of the urgent needs of the world’s most vulnerable peoples. For example, ClimateWorks Foundation — an American climate activist group that has donated millions to Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection — received over $500 million from charitable foundations when they launched in 2008. This was twice as much as foundations contributed to the World Health Organization, and over seven times as much as they donated to UNICEF in that year.

Over the last two decades ending in 2009, the U.S. government spent a total of $68 billion for climate science research and climate-related technology development. Worldwide, it is estimated that Western countries alone are pouring at least $10 billion annually (2009) into global warming related research and policy formulation.

A million people die of malaria every year. It is easily and cheaply prevented by using DDT, for a fraction of the dollars spent on the fantasy of global warming. But DDT has been banned in many countries, and no doubt many of the same scientists who prattle on about the menace of global warming decades from now endorse the ban of a substance that can save human lives today. Al Gore has saved exactly zero human lives by scaremongering about the UFO that is global warming — in the years since he won the Nobel Prize he could have contributed to saving 4-5 million humans, mostly kids. Bad science, bad economics, opportunity to make a real contribution lost.

The scientific finding that settles the climate-change debate…For the clueless or cynical diehards who deny global warming, it’s getting awfully cold out there.

The latest icy blast of reality comes from an eminent scientist whom the climate-change skeptics once lauded as one of their own. Richard Muller, a respected physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, used to dismiss alarmist climate research as being “polluted by political and activist frenzy.” Frustrated at what he considered shoddy science, Muller launched his own comprehensive study to set the record straight. Instead, the record set him straight.

“Global warming is real,” Muller wrote last week in The Wall Street Journal. Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann and the rest of the neo-Luddites who are turning the GOP into the anti-science party should pay attention…

Muller’s plain-spoken admonition that “you should not be a skeptic, at least not any longer” has reduced many deniers to incoherent grumbling or stunned silence. Not so, I predict, with the blowhards such as Perry, Cain and Bachmann, who, out of ignorance or perceived self-interest, are willing to play politics with the Earth’s future…

The Berkeley group’s research even confirms the infamous “hockey stick” graph — showing a sharp recent temperature rise

There’s only one little problem with all this. Here’s the actual data from Best’s archives, without the ten-year “smoothing” and other features created to produce the graph above. As you can see, it shows cooling over the last decade:

However, Mr. Muller was already on the record: “Richard Muller, leader of the initiative, said that the global temperature standstill of the past decade was not present in their data.” Oops!

James Delingpole of the Telegraph is in high dudgeon: “I had my doubts about Muller’s findings from the start. I thought it was at best disingenuous of him to pose as a ‘sceptic’ when there is little evidence of him ever having been one….I really didn’t want my first blog post in a week to be yet another one about global bloody warming. Problem is, if those lying, cheating climate scientists will insist on going on lying and cheating what else can I do other than expose their lying and cheating?”

Of course, much of this is becoming irrelevant, since the US and the West can’t afford the expensive fantasies like cap-and-trade and so forth. But it’s nice for candidates for cutting government spending to stand up and draw attention to themselves as Muller has done.

On Oct. 22, 1844, thousand of Millerites, having sold all their possessions, climbed to the top of hills in Upstate New York to await the return of Jesus and the end of the world. They suffered “the great disappointment” when it didn’t happen. In 1212, or so the legends go, thousands of Children’s Crusaders set off from France and Germany expecting the sea to part so they could march peaceably and convert Muslims in the Holy Land. It didn’t, and many were shipwrecked or sold into slavery. In 1898 the cavalrymen of the Madhi, ruler of Sudan for 13 years, went into the Battle of Omdurman armed with swords believing that they were impervious to bullets. They weren’t, and they were mowed down by British Maxim guns.

A similar but more peaceable fate is befalling believers in what I think can be called the religion of the global warming alarmists. They have an unshakable faith that man-made carbon emissions will produce a hotter climate causing multiple natural disasters. Their insistence that we can be absolutely certain this will come to pass is based not on science — which is never fully settled, witness the recent experiments that may undermine Einstein’s theory of relativity — but on something very much like religious faith. All the trappings of religion are there.

– Original sin: Mankind is responsible for these prophesied disasters, especially those slobs who live on suburban cul-de-sacs and drive their SUVs to strip malls and tacky chain restaurants.

– The need for atonement and repentance: We must impose a carbon tax or cap-and-trade system that will increase the cost of everything and stunt economic growth.

– Ritual, from the annual Earth Day to weekly recycling.

– Indulgences, like those Martin Luther railed against: private jet fliers like Al Gore and sitcom heiress Laurie David can buy carbon offsets to compensate for their carbon-emitting sins.

– Corporate elitists, like General Electric’s Jeff Immelt, profess to share this faith, just as cynical Venetian merchants and prim Victorian bankers gave lip service to the religious enthusiasms of their days. Bad for business not too. And if you’re clever, you can figure out how to make money off it.

– Believers in this religion have flocked to conferences in Rio de Janeiro, Kyoto and Copenhagen, just as Catholic bishops flocked to councils in Constance, Ferrara and Trent, to codify dogma and set new rules.

But like the Millerites, the global warming clergy has preached apocalyptic doom — and is now facing an increasingly skeptical public. The idea that we can be so completely certain of climate change 70 to 90 years hence that we must inflict serious economic damage on ourselves in the meantime seems increasingly absurd.

Take a fishbowl and place 10,000 blue marbles in it. Take out just one little blue marble and replace it with a green marble. You have now illustrated to yourself how much additional CO2 has increased in the atmosphere in the last several hundred years. Predicating doom on such a truly trivial event is not science. Barone has explained it very well indeed.

it’s called the Affordable Care Act, and boosters argue that it will subdue runaway spending. It almost certainly won’t. One prominent skeptic is Arnold Relman, the former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.

Writing in The New York Review of Books, Relman says that “the law does very little or nothing to address some of the most important causes of the high cost of care and its rapid inflation.” Note: Relman isn’t a conservative crank. He’s a critic of insurance companies and advocates a single-payer, government-run health-care system.

The ACA, Relman writes, doesn’t alter fee-for-service reimbursement that gives “all physicians strong financial incentives to provide more services than needed.” The resulting “fragmentation of medical care … allows specialists to practice in isolation without restraints on cost, causes duplication and disorganization of services, and discourages the use of primary care physicians.”

Relman is unimpressed with the ACA provisions intended to control costs: for example, the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB). It’s a group of 15 experts who would recommend changes if government health spending rose too rapidly.

“However, the law stipulates that the IPAB cannot reduce Medicare benefits or increase Medicare premiums, and it defers any proposed reductions in payments to hospitals for a few years,” Relman writes. The IPAB would mainly cut physicians’ Medicare reimbursement rates, he says. But doctors could “easily” offset these cuts “by providing more services, such as performing more diagnostic tests.”

Relman also dismisses “accountable care organizations” (ACOs) that supposedly save money through coordinated care by doctors and hospitals. The regulations governing ACOs will be so complicated that there won’t be many of them

This was obvious more than two years ago, and yet so many people played along at that time. Pity that more people on the left weren’t writing things like this in the NY Review back in 2009.

Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the second-ranking Democrat in the Senate and an Obama ally, told a radio interviewer this past week that there were not 60 votes in the Senate now for Obama’s bill.

That’s not what he said; he said he couldn’t get to 50 Democrats. Then there’s Arianna Huffington:

voters, including those mythical swing-vote independents, want the same thing everyone does: jobs and a strong economy.

The mythical swing-vote independents aren’t so “mythical”: they flipped by 33 points in November 2010. And of course there’s the good ole NYT:

The devastation extends worldwide. The great euphorbia trees of southern Africa are succumbing to heat and water stress. So are the Atlas cedars of northern Algeria. Fires fed by hot, dry weather are killing enormous stretches of Siberian forest. Eucalyptus trees are succumbing on a large scale to a heat blast in Australia, and the Amazon recently suffered two “once a century” droughts just five years apart, killing many large trees. Experts are scrambling to understand the situation, and to predict how serious it may become. Scientists say the future habitability of the Earth might well depend on the answer…forests have been absorbing more than a quarter of the carbon dioxide that people are putting into the air by burning fossil fuels

Go out and buy a fishbowl and 10,000 blue marbles. Put the marbles in the fishbowl. Take out one blue marble and put in a green marble. You’ve just demonstrated how much CO2 has increased in the air in the last 300 years. If that’s a catastrophe, we’re all dead no matter what we do. So much rubbish, so little time.

The speed of light is the Universe’s ultimate speed limit, and much of modern physics — as laid out in part by Albert Einstein in his special theory of relativity — depends on the idea that nothing can exceed it. Thousands of experiments have been undertaken to measure it ever more precisely, and no result has ever spotted a particle breaking the limit.

But Dr Ereditato and his colleagues have been carrying out an experiment for the last three years that seems to suggest neutrinos have done just that.

Neutrinos come in a number of types, and have recently been seen to switch spontaneously from one type to another. The team prepares a beam of just one type, muon neutrinos, sending them from Cern to an underground laboratory at Gran Sasso in Italy to see how many show up as a different type, tau neutrinos.

In the course of doing the experiments, the researchers noticed that the particles showed up a few billionths of a second sooner than light would over the same distance. The team measured the travel times of neutrino bunches some 15,000 times, and have reached a level of statistical significance

Lots of theories in the comments section here; we blame global warming for the anomaly. Time for the another look at the amusing LHC video again.

Climate scientists have long wondered where this so-called missing heat was going, especially over the last decade, when greenhouse emissions kept increasing but world air temperatures did not rise correspondingly…where did the missing heat go? Computer simulations suggest most of it was trapped in layers of oceans deeper than 1,000 feet during periods like the last decade

Thank goodness for computer simulations. Otherwise we might have thought something else.

China has sent the price of compact fluorescent light bulbs soaring in the United States. By closing or nationalizing dozens of the producers of rare earth metals — which are used in energy-efficient bulbs and many other green-energy products — China is temporarily shutting down most of the industry and crimping the global supply of the vital resources.

China produces nearly 95 percent of the world’s rare earth materials, and it is taking the steps to improve pollution controls in a notoriously toxic mining and processing industry. But the moves also have potential international trade implications and have started yet another round of price increases for rare earths, which are vital for green-energy products including giant wind turbines, hybrid gasoline-electric cars and compact fluorescent bulbs.

General Electric, facing complaints in the United States about rising prices for its compact fluorescent bulbs, recently noted in a statement that if the rate of inflation over the last 12 months on the rare earth element europium oxide had been applied to a $2 cup of coffee, that coffee would now cost $24.55. An 11-watt G.E. compact fluorescent bulb — the lighting equivalent of a 40-watt incandescent bulb — was priced on Thursday at $15.88

Actually, that’s the price for a pack of three. You can get a regular old light bulb for a dollar or less. But that’s a bad idea. Those old bulbs are terrible — they’re cheaper and they contain less poison than the new ones!

From thorninaz: “Hey #attackwatch, I saw 6 ATM’s in an alley, killing a Job. It looked like a hate crime!”

From chuckdevore (Republican state legislator in California): “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean a big majority of us isn’t out to get you…”

From EddieRobbins: “My neighbor removed his Obama bumper sticker. I think he’s a racist.”

From DickMeyers: “Bless me #AttackWatch for I have sinned. I have muttered naughty words about our Dear Leader 9 times & have doubted his divinity a few times”

From joaniekensil: “Ate refried beans & chips for breakfast which is sort of racist foodist – Carbon emissions to follow.”

From PoliticalGravity: “Saw a kid with a lemonade stand and she didn’t have a permit.”

From DrFreeLance: “I saw a werewolf drinkin a pina colada at Trader Vic’s, and his hair was perfect.”

Funny stuff. (More amusing things here and here.) But as the twitter revolution demonstrated, you don’t actually have to be using twitter to make a fool of yourself.

For some reason we happened to keep a copy of the Tuesday, October 20, 1970 city edition of the New York Times for all these years. The story pictured above was below the fold, in the lower left corner. Construction work on the north tower began in August 1968, though site preparation began earlier. So from the time that construction began until the WTC became the tallest building in the world was 26 months.

Now it’s 120 months since 9/11, and we’re told that the replacement for the north tower is “expected to open in the fourth quarter of 2013.” Pathetic. And that’s not the worst of it. Check out this NYT video of the memorial fountains and garden, which seem to have been designed with vast and unnecessary complexity in mind. The required maintenance alone boggles the mind.

We were in the rebuild the ugly muthas camp. Knock us down and we get back up, taller and better. The world’s biggest office building was completed in a mere 16 months after all. But alas, NYC has become the kind of town where the mayor manages the fats you eat, and it takes a dozen years or more to build a building. In 2006, New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin (yes, that Ray Nagin) said, “You guys in New York can’t get a hole in the ground fixed and it’s five years later.” Another five years have now passed. The country is in desperate need of a restoration of the can-do spirit that once built a great nation.

U.S. policies which encourage the development of new and existing resources could, by 2030, increase domestic oil and natural gas production by over 10 million boed, support an additional 1.4 million jobs, and raise over $800 billion of cumulative additional government revenue.

We’ve been saying this for a long time now (see Part II of this piece). It’s so painfully obvious what the country needs to do to get out of this mess, and it’s not even that hard to do. Yet, blinkered by a ridiculous ideology that borders on a strange religion, the effete among us oppose the things that are counseled by common sense.

Our question: how large is the group of Americans who believe the nonsense that prevents us from getting out of a self-inflicted economic mess? (Our guess is 25-30%, but it includes a disproportionate number of opinion shapers.) HT: PL

You reduce, reuse and recycle. You turn down plastic and paper. You avoid out-of-season grapes. You do all the right things. Good. Just know that it won’t save the tuna, protect the rain forest or stop global warming…

Leading scientific groups and most climate scientists say we need to decrease global annual greenhouse gas emissions by at least half of current levels by 2050 and much further by the end of the century. And that will still mean rising temperatures and sea levels for generations…individual action does not work. It distracts us from the need for collective action…

you’re willing to make real sacrifices. Sell your car. Forsake your air-conditioner in the summer, turn down the heat in the winter. Try to become no-impact man. You would, in fact, have no impact on the planet. Americans would continue to emit an average of 20 tons of carbon dioxide a year; Europeans, about 10 tons…

Every ton of carbon dioxide pollution causes around $20 of damage to economies, ecosystems and human health. That sum times 20 implies $400 worth of damage per American per year. That’s not damage you’re going to do in the distant future; that’s damage each of us is doing right now.

What an unpleasant life. Our advice: see below, for what’s it’s worth.

California was awarded $186 million in federal stimulus money to weatherize homes. So far, the program has created the equivalent of only 538 full-time jobs. A $59 million effort to train people for green jobs in California produced only 719 job placements. SolFocus designs solar panels in the United States, but the bulk of its employment is in China where the panels are actually made…Johnson Controls turned $300 million in green technology grants into 150 jobs — that’s $2 million per job…Evergreen Solar, the recipient of tens of millions of dollars in state support, moved its manufacturing facility to China before filing for bankruptcy protection. The U.S. Department of Energy poured $535 million in loans into Solyndra, a solar panel maker backed by George Kaiser, a major Democratic donor. The Government Accountability Office discovered that Solyndra had been permitted to bypass required steps in the government loan guarantee process…Solyndra announced that it was ceasing operations, laying off its 1,100 employees.

Don’t forget the 14 jobs in Seattle that cost a million and a half dollars apiece.

Let’s talk about the economics. Because the ozone decision is definitely a mistake on that front. As some of us keep trying to point out, the United States is in a liquidity trap: private spending is inadequate to achieve full employment, and with short-term interest rates close to zero, conventional monetary policy is exhausted.

This puts us in a world of topsy-turvy, in which many of the usual rules of economics cease to hold. Thrift leads to lower investment; wage cuts reduce employment; even higher productivity can be a bad thing. And the broken windows fallacy ceases to be a fallacy: something that forces firms to replace capital, even if that something seemingly makes them poorer, can stimulate spending and raise employment. Indeed, in the absence of effective policy, that’s how recovery eventually happens: as Keynes put it, a slump goes on until “the shortage of capital through use, decay and obsolescence” gets firms spending again to replace their plant and equipment.

And now you can see why tighter ozone regulation would actually have created jobs: it would have forced firms to spend on upgrading or replacing equipment, helping to boost demand. Yes, it would have cost money — but that’s the point!

Good faith beliefs, bad policy. Raising costs in a business today can be a good thing if you produce a better product that people are willing to pay more for. It’s not good business if you produce the same product and it just costs more. That costs jobs, since being anything other than the low cost producer of a commodity product fritters away money that would have been better spent elsewhere.

Now you might argue that air with a little less ozone is a better product and that somebody, somewhere, someday might live a little longer on account of that. Who knows? You might be right. But the jobs are killed today, and the hypothetical person enjoying a hypothetically longer life is on a far horizon. The jobs are killed today, and no benefit is felt today.

We’ve argued repeatedly that fixing the economy is not that hard, and that is true. However, this NYT piece illustrates well that the vested interests in the academic-media-government-centric world are dead set against many of the kinds of things that are required to revive the economy, and it’s going to be a fight with them every step of the way. (The fight will not lack for amusing moments, however.)

CO2, a relatively minor greenhouse gas, has increased significantly since the beginning of the industrial age from about 280 ppmv to about 390 ppmv, presumably due mostly to man’s emissions. This is the focus of current concerns. However, warming from a doubling of CO2 would only be about 1 degree C (based on simple calculations where the radiation altitude and the Planck temperature depend on wavelength in accordance with the attenuation coefficients of well-mixed CO2 molecules; a doubling of any concentration in ppmv produces the same warming because of the logarithmic dependence of CO2’s absorption on the amount of CO2) (IPCC, 2007).

This modest warming is much less than current climate models suggest for a doubling of CO2. Models predict warming of from 1.5 degrees C to 5 degrees C and even more for a doubling of CO2. Model predictions depend on the ‘feedback’ within models from the more important greenhouse substances, water vapor and clouds. Within all current climate models, water vapor increases with increasing temperature so as to further inhibit infrared cooling.

Clouds also change so that their visible reflectivity decreases, causing increased solar absorption and warming of the earth. Cloud feedbacks are still considered to be highly uncertain (IPCC, 2007), but the fact that these feedbacks are strongly positive in most models is considered to be an indication that the result is basically correct. Methodologically, this is unsatisfactory…

Our study also suggests that, in current coupled atmosphere-ocean models, the atmosphere and ocean are too weakly coupled since thermal coupling is inversely proportional to sensitivity (Lindzen and Giannitsis, 1998). It has been noted by Newman et al. (2009) that coupling is crucial to the simulation of phenomena like El Niño. Thus, corrections of the sensitivity of current climate models might well improve the behavior of coupled models, and should be encouraged. It should be noted that there have been independent tests that also suggest sensitivities less than predicted by current models. These tests are based on the response to sequences of volcanic eruptions (Lindzen and Giannitsis, 1998), on the vertical structure of observed versus modeled temperature increase (Douglass, 2007; Lindzen, 2007), on ocean heating (Schwartz, 2007; Schwartz, 2008), and on satellite observations (Spencer and Braswell, 2010).

Most claims of greater sensitivity are based on the models that we have just shown can be highly misleading on this matter. There have also been attempts to infer sensitivity from paleoclimate data (Hansen et al., 1993), but these are not really tests since the forcing is essentially unknown given major uncertainties in clouds, dust loading and other factors. Finally, we have shown that the attempts to obtain feedbacks from simple regressions of satellite measured outgoing radiation on SST are inappropriate.

One final point needs to be made. Low sensitivity of global mean temperature anomaly to global scale forcing does not imply that major climate change cannot occur. The earth has, of course, experienced major cool periods such as those associated with ice ages and warm periods such as the Eocene (Crowley and North, 1991). As noted, however, in Lindzen (1993), these episodes were primarily associated with changes in the equator-to-pole temperature difference and spatially heterogeneous forcing. Changes in global mean temperature were simply the residue of such changes and not the cause.

Meanwhile from the UK:

CERN’s 8,000 scientists…have made an important contribution to climate physics, prompting climate models to be revised. The first results from the lab’s CLOUD (“Cosmics Leaving OUtdoor Droplets”) experiment published in Nature today confirm that cosmic rays spur the formation of clouds through ion-induced nucleation. Current thinking posits that half of the Earth’s clouds are formed through nucleation. The paper is entitled Role of sulphuric acid, ammonia and galactic cosmic rays in atmospheric aerosol nucleation. This has significant implications for climate science because water vapour and clouds play a large role in determining global temperatures. Tiny changes in overall cloud cover can result in relatively large temperature changes…

Climate models will have to be revised, confirms CERN in supporting literature: “it is clear that the treatment of aerosol formation in climate models will need to be substantially revised, since all models assume that nucleation is caused by these vapours and water alone.” The work involves over 60 scientists in 17 countries.

Apparently some of these folks may be found in the 2% of nincompoops cited here. HT: RS

the scientific consensus about man-made global warming — which includes 97 percent to 98 percent of researchers in the field, according to the National Academy of Sciences — is getting stronger, not weaker, as the evidence for climate change just keeps mounting.

In fact, if you follow climate science at all you know that the main development over the past few years has been growing concern that projections of future climate are underestimating the likely amount of warming. Warnings that we may face civilization-threatening temperature change by the end of the century, once considered outlandish, are now coming out of mainstream research groups…

multiple investigations into charges of intellectual malpractice on the part of climate scientists have ended up exonerating the accused researchers of all accusations…

only 21 percent of Republican voters in Iowa believe in global warming…one of these years the world’s greatest nation will find itself ruled by a party that is aggressively anti-science, indeed anti-knowledge. And, in a time of severe challenges — environmental, economic, and more — that’s a terrifying prospect.

So very sure of himself and his superiority to many of us. He’s fairly dripping with contempt for those who dare disagree with him. (And he shops for his statistics at the same store as Richard Cohen.) Final point: if this is what they say in public about those who disagree with them, what do you suppose they say in private?

“We are in, right, now…the right eye wall, no doubt about that…there you see the surf,” he said breathlessly. “That tells a story right there.” Stumbling and apparently buffeted by ferocious gusts, he took shelter next to a building. “This is our protection from the wind,” he explained. “It’s been truly remarkable to watch the power of the ocean here.” The surf may have told a story but so too did the sight behind the reporter of people chatting and ambling along the sea front and just goofing around. There was a man in a t-shirt, a woman waving her arms and then walking backwards. Then someone on a bicycle glided past.

All the cable news coverage was deeply offensive. They were all overacting, all breathlessly saying the same stupid things, as if the viewers had never seen it rain before. Someone could have made a career for himself by saying into the camera, “It’s just raining. There’s really nothing to see here.” Now that would have been good TV.

It looks like the time for this nonsense may finally have passed, and thank goodness for that. The leading GOP candidates are speaking very plainly these days about their opinions — the “monstrous lie” that is Social Security, the “radical environmentalists” who are preventing the exploitation of America’s enormous and untapped energy resources, and so forth. It is going to make the wise men in the media even more apoplectic than they already are, if that’s even possible.

We hope the moderator in the next debate tries the nonsense questions one more time, if only to hear the response he gets.

About half of both men and women in the U.S. will be obese by 2030…Obesity…will add an extra 7.8 billion cases of diabetes, 6.8 billion cases of heart disease and stroke, and 539 billion cases of cancer in the U.S. within the next two decades. Some 32 per cent of men and 35 per cent of women are now obese

Your government at work. BTW, we changed some numbers in the story above, but who notices these little details anymore?

Eat less meat to fight warming…”Industrial agriculture is a part of the problem,” Gore said Friday during an interview with FearLess Revolution founder Alex Bogusky. “The shift toward a more meat-intensive diet”…and the reliance on synthetic nitrogen for fertilizer are also problems…Gore advocated organic farming and relying on “more productive, safer methods that put carbon back in the soil”…

The former vice president also criticized climate change skeptics, urging those who support curbs to greenhouse gases to “win the conversation” when it comes to global warming. He compared the struggle against climate skeptics to the fight against racism during the civil rights movement.

It’s remarkable that we’ve reached this point in our nation — those who consider themselves elite believe such silly things, and evince such contempt for those who disagree with them that real debate is impossible. What to do, what to do?

As of the last few days “Rick Perry and His Eggheads: Inside the Brainiest Political Operation in America” has been making the rapid rounds on Kindle (#2 in “politics and current events”). This download is actually a longish chapter excerpted from a work-in-progress by Sasha Issenberg — “The Victory Lab” — about new, scientifically-based campaign techniques said to be transforming the American electoral process.

The chief architect of Perry’s strategies — and central figure in the chapter — is Dave Carney, a hulking three hundred pound, six foot four political pro from New Hampshire who once worked for George H. W. Bush. Said to be camera shy, if Perry wins, or even if he is nominated, Carney is likely to become as much of a household political name as Karl Rove or David Axelrod.

Indeed, if I were Axelrod, I would have been up last night poring over “Rick Perry and His Eggheads.” It’s filled with radical ideas about campaigning. Carney abjures such staples as lawn signs, targeted mailings, robocalls (Thank God!) and even, to a large extent, TV ads. He advocates instead personal appearances and flesh-pressing by the candidate, taking it to the people, as it were, something for which Perry clearly has a gift. This, in turn, generates a constant flow of media coverage on old and, perhaps more importantly, new media (Twitter, Facebook, even ye olde PJM).

Indeed, the MSM is almost purposefully disdained (up to a point, anyway). In his recent campaign for governor, Perry refused even to meet with the editorial boards of leading Texas newspapers, preferring to spend time with actual voters.

This strategy — which is counter to decades of conventional political wisdom — comes from research undertaken for Perry and detailed by Issenberg in the chapter. Several years ago Carney brought in a pair of liberal Yalie academics to test the efficacy of various traditional campaign techniques and came up with the surprising findings. This resulted in changes in tactics and the supposedly-dumb Texas governor won re-election big, twice.

One of the most interesting issues in current politics (for the right side of the aisle anyhow) is how to deal with a media establishment that votes 90% or more for your opponent, and often worships the ground he deigns to trod. How does a conservative candidate deal with that? Maybe by using the media’s disdain to generate street cred, at least of this stage of the campaign. It will be very interesting to see how this develops.

Perry waxed wrongly on global warming. He rejected the notion that it is at least partially a product of industrialization, asserting that “a substantial number of scientists have manipulated data” to make it appear that mankind — our cars, trains, automobiles, not to mention China’s belching steel mills — is the culprit. He said that an increasing number of scientists have challenged this notion and that, in conclusion, he stood with them — whoever they might be…

there are some scientists who are global warming skeptics, but these few — about 2 percent of climate researchers — could hold their annual meeting in a phone booth, if there are any left. (Perhaps 2 percent of scientists think there are.)

Perry’s quaint belief in the utter innocence of mankind when it comes to polluting our precious atmosphere might seem like a innocuous tick, a conviction without consequence. In this, it could be likened to the entirely wacky conservative belief of yore that the fluoridation of drinking water was a communist tactic…

just as important is the reason Perry clings to his belief. It’s not that he has studied the science, pored through the reports and all. It’s rather that global warming is global and reversing it would take global programs. This means that standards and limits have to be imposed by the much-reviled federal government — and it, in turn, has to cooperate with other nations.

This is how those on one side of the aisle think and, given the tone of moral superiority, it is a legitimate question whether any evidence could convince them otherwise; we’ve seen that before. As you know, the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere in recent centuries has been trivial, and AGW, whether it exists or not, is neither important nor urgent. But our betters think otherwise, and we’re going to be hearing a lot more of this in the days to come.

Wednesday, 2:40 p.m. ET: After calling the USDA’s main line, I am told to call the Illinois Department of Agriculture. Here, I am patched through to a man who is identified as being in charge of “support services.” I leave a message.

3:53 p.m.: The man calls me back and recommends in a voicemail message that I call the Illinois Farm Bureau — a non-governmental organization.

4:02 p.m.: A woman at the Illinois Farm Bureau connects me to someone in the organization’s government affairs department. That person tells me they “don’t quite know who to refer you to.”

4:06 p.m.: I call the Illinois Department of Agriculture again, letting the person I spoke with earlier know that calling the Illinois Farm Bureau had not been fruitful. He says “those are the kinds of groups that are kind of on top of this or kind of follow things like this. We deal with pesticide here in our bureau.”

“You only deal with pesticides?” I ask.

“We deal with other things … but we mainly deal with pesticides here,” he says, and gives me the phone number for the office of the department’s director, where he says there are “policy people” as well as the director’s staff.

4:10 p.m.: Someone at the director’s office transfers me to the agriculture products inspection department, where a woman says their branch deals with things like animal feed, seed and fertilizer.

“I’m going to transfer you to one of the guys at environmental programs.”

4:15 p.m.: I reach the answering machine at the environmental programs department, and leave a message.

4:57 p.m.: A man from the environmental programs department gets back to me: “I hate to be the regular state worker that’s always accused of passing the buck, but noise and dust regulation would be under our environmental protection agency, rather than the Agriculture Department,” he says, adding that he has forwarded my name and number to the agriculture adviser at IEPA.

On Thursday morning, POLITICO started the hunt for an answer again, this time calling the USDA’s local office in Henry County, Ill., where the town hall took place.

9:42 a.m.: Asked if someone at the office might be able to provide me with the information I requested, the woman on the phone responds, “Not right now. We may have to actually look that up — did you Google this or anything?”

When I say that I’m a reporter and would like to discuss my experience with someone who handles media relations there, I am referred to the USDA’s state office in Champaign. I leave a message there.

10:40 a.m.: A spokeswoman for the Illinois Natural Resources Conservation Service calls me, to whom I explain my multiple attempts on Wednesday and Thursday to retrieve the information I was looking for.

“What I can tell you is our particular agency does not deal with regulations,” she tells me. “We deal with volunteers who voluntarily want to do things. I think the reason you got that response from the Cambridge office is because in regard to noise and dust regulation, we don’t have anything to do with that.”

She adds that the EPA would be more capable of answering questions regarding regulations.

Finally, I call the USDA’s main media relations department, based here in Washington, where I explain to a spokesperson about my failed attempts to obtain an answer to the Illinois farmer’s question. This was their response, via email:

“Secretary Vilsack continues to work closely with members of the Cabinet to help them engage with the agricultural community to ensure that we are separating fact from fiction on regulations because the administration is committed to providing greater certainty for farmers and ranchers. Because the question that was posed did not fall within USDA jurisdiction, it does not provide a fair representation of USDA’s robust efforts to get the right information to our producers throughout the country.”

Finally, this: “The response — eventually — from a USDA representative was that “the question that was posed did not fall within USDA jurisdiction,” but rather the Environmental Protection Agency.” So the reporter followed up:

Thursday, 3:37 p.m.: I call the EPA’s main number, where the operator connects me to someone else. When I explain that I would like to find out information about regulations concerning noise, dust and water runoff regulations and their possible effects on Illinois farmers, I am told that Illinois falls under “Region 5” and given their number.

3:41 p.m.: At the regional office, I am transferred to somebody that deals with “clean air.”

“Have you gone through our website by any chance?” the person asks. “Our online information is very useful. Just in general practice, it’s good.”

I said I was hoping to get some information over the phone and am given contact numbers for two people: one that handles “compliance enforcement” and someone else that works with “water compliance.” I call both numbers and leave a message.

3:50 p.m.: Then I call back the regional office, explaining that both people were not at their desks.

“Normally Friday is not a good time — a lot of people don’t work on Friday,” the same person from earlier says. I mention that today is Thursday, to which they respond: “A lot of people take Friday off, but some people take Wednesday or Thursday off, too. And I know it’s the end of the summer, but people grab the opportunity to take a vacation before school.”

The person gives me two more people’s contact information: one who is an “environmental engineer” there, and another one who is at the “air and radiation division.” Both of them are also not at their desks, and I leave messages.

4:46 p.m.: I hear back from the “environmental engineer,” who tells me I should speak to the person at the air and radiation division, with whom I left a message earlier.

5:27 p.m.: The person from the air division calls back, who explains he wouldn’t be the best person to talk to about water and noise regulations, and because noise regulations are not federally enforceable, the Illinois EPA would be the place to call.

As for dust regulations, he says he would just need to know what kind of dust the farmer was talking about. “Without knowing what kind of source he’s talking about, it’d be pretty hard to generalize what requirements there are,” he says, adding that he would be happy to speak to the farmer from the town hall.

5:38 p.m.: At the end of the day, I ask EPA spokesman Brendan Gilfillan for a comment on our experience with calling the EPA to follow up on USDA’s response to Thursday’s story. This was his response via email:

“Below is an update on farm dust — while we do have statutory authority on noise pollution, I’m not aware of any pending rules or standards on that. “Farm dust: This is a myth the Administrator has debunked personally on several occasions. While EPA is mandated by the CAA to review air quality standards for pollutants like farm dust every five years, and that review is currently ongoing, we have no plans to put stricter standards in place. That review, at Administrator’s direction, has involved extensive outreach to farmers and ranchers”

Of course this might be a truthful response. But consider that it came after the first embarrassing story, and that it was a spokesman’s belated response to a reporter whom he knew was going to write another story embarrassing to the administration and to the government generally. Please remind us why it’s a good idea to give any more power or tax dollars to these buffoons.

The economy’s changing, and the days when, just because you’re willing to work hard you can automatically find a job, those days are over. The truth of the matter is that everything requires an education. I don’t have to tell the farmers here, you guys, you’re looking at GPS and have all kinds of equipment and looking at all kinds of markets around the world. It is a complicated piece of business and you’re engaged in it. It’s not just a matter of goin’ out with a plow in a field.

And that’s happened to every industry. When I go to factories these days, what’s amazing is how clean and quiet they are, because, you know, what it used to take a thousand folks to do now only takes a hundred folks to do. And one of the challenges in terms of rebuilding our economy is that businesses have gotten so efficient, you know, when was the last time you went to a bank teller instead of using an ATM, or used a travel agent instead of just going online.

A lot of jobs that used to be out there requiring people now have become automated, and that means, us investing in our kids’ education, nothing is more important

Observations: (a) so the solution to joblessness has to wait until today’s kids become tomorrow’s workers a decade or two from now — how vapid and ridiculous is that? (b) this guy’s not responsible: he inherited the ATM problem from Nixon and Ford; and (c) the degree to which this guy knows nothing about American business and technology of the last hundred years is truly scary.

This ad appeared in August 1981. 140 million eh? Adding smartphones to other PC’s, the total is more like 3 billion today. As for “distribute this American technology to the world,” well………. The tone of the ad is annoying, given that Apple was such a pipsqueak at the time. But things seem to have worked out rather well for the company. Can’t imagine how things will look in another 30 years.

what do they do? They pay pseudo-scientists to pretend to be scientists to put out the message: ‘This climate thing, it’s nonsense. Man-made CO2 doesn’t trap heat. It may be volcanoes.’ Bullshit! ‘It may be sun spots.’ Bullshit! ‘It’s not getting warmer.’ Bullshit!…When you go and talk to any audience about climate, you hear them washing back at you the same crap over and over and over again…There’s no longer a shared reality on an issue like climate even though the very existence of our civilization is threatened. People have no idea!…It’s no longer acceptable in mixed company, meaning bipartisan company, to use the goddamn word climate. It is not acceptable. They have polluted it

The lad is upset that no one seems to be paying attention to the planetary emergency. We have an idea about where this fellow might better use his righteous anger: make him ambassador to Syria.

All economic crises begin differently — this one began in housing — but eventually they morph into the same old crisis of forgetting what works. Think about the last big crisis of faith in American capitalism in the early 1980s. The panic was eventually crystallized in dueling Harvard Business Review articles by George Gilder and Charles Ferguson…

Mr. Gilder championed the then-emerging Silicon Valley paradigm. He quoted technologist Carver Mead: “We depend on the innovations of the citizens of a free economy to keep ahead of the bureaucrats and the people who make a living on control and planning. In the long term, it’s the element of surprise that gives us the edge over more controlled economies.”…

Mr. Ferguson, an MIT-based consultant, argued the U.S was dooming itself to vassalage unless Washington brushed aside small, poorly-funded entrepreneurs and concentrated regulatory favors and subsidies on giant firms like IBM, AT&T, Digital Equipment and Kodak.

Funny guy, Jenkins. The four companies he named have either disappeared or have been so thoroughly restructured or downsized that they bear little resemblance to their 1980′s incarnations.

A majority of Americans knew that the $800 billion “stimulus” was a bad joke. They knew that giving insurance to 30 million additional people couldn’t possibly result in the promised lower costs. And they were disgusted with an establishment media machine that aggressively marketed the lies and defamed the majority that were on the other side of the debate.

Back in 2009 we explained that the deficits planned by this government were simply unfinanceable. There wouldn’t be enough foreign demand for Treasury debt at acceptable interest rates, and that taxing the rich at 100% wouldn’t do the trick. Moody’s had already warned the US about losing its AAA rating (and has kept doing so), and by the fall of 2009, The Economist was on board as well. Yet in 2010 the NYT was urging increased spending and opining that “the downgrade will never happen.”

In the fall of 2010 the electorate shouted Stop! at the top of their lungs, but even quite a few GOP senators refused to listen. Meanwhile, the media reacted predictably, accusing the majority of bad motivations on a wide variety of issues.

Suddenly it’s 2011. The government’s reckless spending has become a front page issue. The administration’s representatives in the media turn up the rhetoric even more on those who insist on tough debate and firm lines in the sand on spending. It’s a genuine and deep conflict of visions of the proper role of government; nothing could be more appropriate to have a fight about, but the name-calling only escalated.

And now there’s the downgrade. The “more spending” crowd has nowhere to go. Well, there are tax hikes of course, but that’s rhetoric more than reality. Spending is at least 80% or 90% of the problem even in a world with some tax hikes. But if that’s what the media has to work with, we’ll expect to see more about corporate jet owners and billionaires in the days to come.

Right now, we’re reflecting on the utter strangeness of the last two and a half years. The government should have been occupying itself with clearing the way for job growth and better finances, as we’ve outlined in detail many times in this space. Instead, the government piled on more and more regulations and added trillions of dollars of superfluous and counterproductive spending.

In a sense, time is the only commodity we possess on this planet, and we’ve just wasted a precious two and a half years of it on utter nonsense and worse. Disgraceful.

If Khan’s formula is an excellent replacement for the college lecture, Leo Laporte’s Tech Guy Labs offers something of a replacement for the college seminar. Laporte broadcasts a technology radio program for six hours on the weekend, and offers all sorts of other tech programming live and on podcasts. One of the interesting features is his seminar — really, it’s a chatroom — with a thousand participants or more online during the broadcasts. In those instances when the highly knowledgeable Laporte doesn’t know the answer to a particularly arcane question, the hive often provides real-time answers to questions that come in live over the phone lines. We’ve never encountered a more well-informed group of seminar participants.

There’s one other improvement over current college practices that both Khan and Laporte offer — participation is free. College education in most cases does not deliver good value for the money. Expanding educational opportunities in this country by expanding scholarships is clearly a vastly inferior policy approach to lowering delivery costs. But politicians prattle on, do they not?

NASA satellite data from the years 2000 through 2011 show the Earth’s atmosphere is allowing far more heat to be released into space than alarmist computer models have predicted, reports a new study in the peer-reviewed science journal Remote Sensing. The study indicates far less future global warming will occur than United Nations computer models have predicted, and supports prior studies indicating increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide trap far less heat than alarmists have claimed.

Study co-author Dr. Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and U.S. Science Team Leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer flying on NASA’s Aqua satellite, reports that real-world data from NASA’s Terra satellite contradict multiple assumptions fed into alarmist computer models.

“The satellite observations suggest there is much more energy lost to space during and after warming than the climate models show,” Spencer said in a July 26 University of Alabama press release. “There is a huge discrepancy between the data and the forecasts that is especially big over the oceans.”…

Scientists on all sides of the global warming debate are in general agreement about how much heat is being directly trapped by human emissions of carbon dioxide (the answer is “not much”). However, the single most important issue in the global warming debate is whether carbon dioxide emissions will indirectly trap far more heat by causing large increases in atmospheric humidity and cirrus clouds…The new NASA Terra satellite data are consistent with long-term NOAA and NASA data indicating atmospheric humidity and cirrus clouds are not increasing in the manner predicted

In other news, the polar bear population has quintupled, and the scientist who said the population was shrinking has been suspended from his government post and is being investigated for misconduct.

Some signal facts of our progress in the last century. If you were born in 1900, your life expectancy was in the forties, and GNP per capita was about $4000. If you are born today, your life expectancy in about eighty, and statistically, as an average American, you are ten times richer. In reality you are a hundred or a thousand times richer, if you factor in your ability to be in Paris tomorrow for $500, your ability to watch events from fifty years ago as they actually happened, etc. – not to mention that your toddler’s severe pneumonia can be reliably cured in 48 hours or so. Only a little of this has to do with government.

Mostly it is because perhaps more than 50% of everything ever invented in the history of humanity was invented in the last 130 years, and perhaps 50% of that was invented by Americans. Milton Hershey invented the candy bar, Carrier invented the air conditioner for a tire plant, Sears invented catalogue distribution, Henry Ford invented cheap cars, some guys from Texas Instruments invented the transistor. It is almost impossible to overstate the importance of the invention and wide use of brand names, which communicate the quality and dependability of every product we buy. This alone deserves the Nobel Prize. And it was a large and growing market, the availability of risk capital, the development of standardized accounting principles, and protection of intellectual and personal property by the courts that made this possible.

We are at the end of an era; soon, there will be no one in America who remembers what life was like without telephones, running water, indoor plumbing, cars, airplanes, central heating, or electric lights; for our purposes here, we’ll include the children and grandchildren of these men and women as participating in a chain of continuity to those old days. One of our favorite quotes from Henry Adams is apt: “The American boy of 1854 stood closer to the year 1 than to the year 1900.” Soon, almost no one in America will have a visceral understanding of what 1854 was like, and what the heck Adams was talking about.

It is even worse than that. The transistor was invented in 1947 and patented shortly after, and since that time devices of all sorts have been getting smaller, smarter and less mechanical. There is another loss happening because of this, and Americans — including us — have no idea what it means for the future, though we think it is, on balance, bad:

A typical boy of 1854 knew what farming was like and may well have worked on a farm, knew horses and other animals, and learned how to maintain and fix things, from houses to wagons to furniture. A typical young man of 1947 had been in the army, knew people who lived on farms, could tune and maintain his own car, and could change the fan belt on the refrigerator and refill it with Freon. Both the boy and the young man had some feel for the technologies that were developing and changing around them, since the technologies were often sized on a human scale and involved mechanical processes that they had some acquaintance with.

To an important extent, this is no longer true. You can’t fix an iPod the way you can fix a record player; indeed you can’t even easily open up an iPod to understand it, as you could unscrew the turntable cover to figure out how 33 1/3 rpm became 45 rpm. Nor can you fool around with a Toyota Prius the same way you could try to replace a 283 with a 327 in a ’57 Chevy.

We hope we are not romanticizing a world we have lost; it is common enough, as well as wrong, to excessively mythologize the past. Today’s technology provides far greater health and wealth to a vastly larger world population than existed in those other times. We love refineries, steel mills, job shops, machine tools and oil rigs, but we are not suggesting, like Mao, a steel mill in your back yard or some form of return to a isolationist’s vision of a manufacturing economy. However, we are saying that it is fit and proper to understand such things.

We hypothesize that, to some extent, the microchip culture we have now, where miraculous tiny things just somehow work, without moving parts, has produced a form of magical thinking in our country. (We also blame the Hollywood Utopians for this too — their creations often seek, not to mirror or enhance reality, but to create rather harmful alternative realities, but that is another matter.) Americans complain about gas prices, but they don’t like refineries, and they oppose oil drilling in godforsaken wastelands; yet somehow the gas is supposed to be readily available at low prices: this is but one example of a sort of magical thinking that seems to us very unlike the way Americans thought in 1854 or 1947.

We think it is urgent for our future that Americans understand and teach our young people about the enormous developments that have happened since the nineteenth century. So far, such efforts seem to us to be largely centered on self-congratulatory sociological claptrap, where the current generation, with all its diversity, change, and hope, thinks itself superior to all those who have come before. Such flummery is also as destructive as it is common.

In some small way, we think that standing on its head the thinking of Charles Eliot is what is required today. Harvard President Eliot was a great educator and thinker who changed the classical curriculum to make it more suitable for fast-developing America, through increased specialization. (Eliot began teaching at Harvard in that year of 1854, by the way.) We quote him via an unusually well-written entry in Wikipedia:

“As a people, we do not apply to mental activities the principle of division of labor; and we have but a halting faith in special training for high professional employments. The vulgar conceit that a Yankee can turn his hand to anything we insensibly carry into high places, where it is preposterous and criminal. We are accustomed to seeing men leap from farm or shop to court-room or pulpit, and we half believe that common men can safely use the seven-league boots of genius. What amount of knowledge and experience do we habitually demand of our lawgivers? What special training do we ordinarily think necessary for our diplomatists? — although in great emergencies the nation has known where to turn. Only after years of the bitterest experience did we come to believe the professional training of a soldier to be of value in war. This lack of faith in the prophecy of a natural bent, and in the value of a discipline concentrated upon a single object, amounts to a national danger.”

We agree with Eliot of course that the modern world needs specialization, but it needs anew the inculcation of a general understanding of and feel for the development of our technologies and businesses and how we came so far as a people so fast. There is no argument for Americans’ being as cut off from the world of 1854 or 1947 as they are today; only harm can come from such ignorance.

Today those who style themselves the most learned among us often live in a bubble we sometimes characterize as the university/media/political complex. Their dire predictions are often downright silly. However, they hold these views not only with a fervent passion, but with the conviction that they have the right to impose their fatuous and expensive notions on the rest of us. Like the ancients, we Americans have to return ad fontes, for if we forget the past we leave the future to the fabulists and utopians. That would be a tragic outcome for both America and the world.

The United Nations (UN) on Tuesday warned that humanity is coming close to breaching the sustainability of Earth, urging a greater and faster technological revolution to avoid “a major planetary catastrophe.”

The UN’s yearly report titled “The World Economic and Social Survey 2011: The Great Green Technological Transformation,” underlined the importance of scaling up clean energy technologies…”Business as usual is not an option,” the report concluded….

Two years ago, U.N. researchers were claiming that it would cost “as much as $600 billion a year over the next decade” to go green. Now, a new U.N. report has more than tripled that number to $1.9 trillion per year for 40 years…That works out to a grand total of $76 trillion, over 40 years — or more than five times the entire Gross Domestic Product of the United States

It’s been 50 years since the Kanamits appeared at the UN. We thought it was fiction at the time, but maybe the aliens actually took over back then.

Steven Chu, the Energy Secretary who came into office saying “we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe“, has now offered up another soundbite for our times. On Friday, he defended the ban on Edison’s iconic incandescent in economic terms: “We are taking away a choice that continues to let people waste their own money.”

As if CFL’s were any kind of answer. It’s really become very annoying that these smart people with advanced degrees, who have never worked a day in their lives outside the political/university complex, think they are entitled to run other people’s lives.

One of the great issues of our time is how to undo the damage inflicted by the political/media/university axis. But how do you undo religious beliefs?

the Atlanta Public Schools system has spent the last decade systemically cheating on its tests. Not the students, but the Superintendent, and the union, and 38 principals, and at least 178 teachers –- whoops, pardon me, “educators,” and some 44 of the 56 school districts. Teachers held “changing parties” at their homes at which they sat around with extra supplies of erasers correcting their students’ test answers in order to improve overall scores…its fake test scores got its leader, Beverly Hall, garlanded with the National Superintendent of the Year Award, the Administrator of the Year Award, the Distinguished Public Service Award, the Keystone Award for Leadership in Education, the Concerned Black Clergy Education Award, the American Association of School Administrators Effie H. Jones Humanitarian Award and a zillion other phony-baloney baubles with which the American edu-fraud cartel scratches its own back. In reality, Beverly Hall’s Atlanta Public Schools system was in the child-abuse business: It violated the education of its students

This abuse was hidden. Other abuse occurs in plain sight. Revolting.

As part of its effort to combat the economic recession, the federal government pumped nearly $80 billion in direct investment and tax credits into the clean energy sector, catalyzing an unprecedented industry expansion. Solar energy, for example, grew 67 percent in the United States in 2010. The U.S. wind energy industry also experienced unprecedented growth as a result of the generous Section 1603 clean energy stimulus program. The industry grew by 40 percent and added 10 GW of new turbines in 2009…The global clean energy industry is set for a major crash. The reason is simple. Clean energy is still much more expensive and less reliable than coal or gas, and in an era of heightened budget austerity, the subsidies required to make clean energy artificially cheaper are becoming unsustainable…we need a comprehensive energy innovation strategy to develop, manufacture and deploy riskier but more promising clean energy technologies that may eventually compete with fossil energy

Oh, we get it. We need smarter subsidies for things that don’t work and are uneconomic. Apparently it’s true that common sense is uncommon.

Australia’s population of wild camels, the Financial Times reveals, may soon be shot in order to earn carbon credits under the country’s forthcoming emissions trading scheme. Each one of the creatures is estimated to produce a tonne of carbon dioxide a year –- about the same as a 7,000km flight

Question: if the camel was also the pilot of the plane, what would the emissions be? And what about the methane? What a ridiculous world we have.

World temperatures did not rise from 1998 to 2008, while manmade emissions of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuel grew by nearly a third…A peak in temperatures in 1998 coincided with a strong El Nino weather event…Natural cooling effects included a declining solar cycle after 2002…”It has been unclear why global surface temperatures did not rise between 1998 and 2008,” said the study…

Smoke belching from Asia’s rapidly growing economies is largely responsible for a halt in global warming…The paper raised the prospect of more rapid, pent-up climate change when emerging economies eventually crack down on pollution…A U.N. panel of climate scientists said in 2007 that it was 90 percent certain that humankind was causing global warming.

We get the feeling that we’re going to be seeing ever more arcane explanations as the darn facts seem not to fit the theory as well as first thought. Remind you of anything?

if Britain is to spend £100 billion on building thousands of wind turbines, it will require the building of 17 new gas-fired power stations simply to provide back-up for all those times when the wind drops and the windmills produce even less power than usual.

We will thus be landed in the ludicrous position of having to spend an additional £10 billion on those 17 dedicated power stations, which will be kept running on “spinning reserve”, 24 hours a day…

it will be amazingly costly and wildly uneconomical, since the dedicated power plants will often have to run at a low rate of efficiency, burning gas but not producing electricity. This will add billions more to our fuel bills for no practical purpose.

The other absurdity, as recent detailed studies have confirmed, is that gas-fired power stations running on “spinning reserve” chuck out much more CO2 than when they are running at full efficiency -– thus negating any savings in CO2 emissions supposedly achieved by the windmills themselves.

But on the plus side, wind farms kill fewer birds than cats do.