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The Economist’s Hot Air on Climate Change By Norman Rogers

Posted By on December 8th, 2015

The November 28, 2015 issue of The Economist magazine has a 14 page special report on climate change. It is a pathetic example of how the media intellectual elite can get science wrong. It is apparently very easy for the self-interested and crony capitalist driven global warming establishment to fool the media elite. When The Economist does get a few important things right, it fails to draw the obvious conclusions. I don’t think it is just a matter of economics majors not understanding science. The problem is that the economics majors are listening to special interests without a proper degree of skepticism. They should have consulted with and listened to some of the many distinguished scientists that are protesting the climate scare. (See, for example, here, here, here and here.)

The promoters of the climate scare are loud and very positive that they are right. They accuse the skeptics of being tools of the fossil fuel companies, an outright lie. This crude approach seems to work, at least with The Economist or The New York Times.

One thing the Economist gets right is that wind and solar are ruinously expensive and create ancillary costs borne by other parts of the electric grid. Wind and solar are not the answer to reducing CO2 emissions. But, The Economist fails to draw the obvious conclusion that nuclear power is the solution. Nuclear power is proven and does not emit CO2. (The discussion is academic because there is little reason to undertake CO2 limitation. The science that predicts global warming doom is flimsy and global warming has been absent for a long time.)

Incredibly, The Economist does not bother mentioning the massive benefits of having more CO2 in the atmosphere. Plants take in CO2 from the atmosphere and create plant bodies from the carbon in CO2 and the hydrogen in water. It is an observed fact that plants grow faster when the atmosphere is enriched with CO2. Greenhouse operators often place CO2 generators in their greenhouses to promote growth. Enriching the air with CO2 makes plants more drought resistant. In one experiment soybean yield was increased by 68% when CO2 levels were doubled. There is no doubt that the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere during the 20th century greatly benefited agriculture, creating billions or even trillions of dollars of increased production.

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John Slater Climate Aid: Bait, Switch, Preen, Deceive

Posted By on December 8th, 2015

The $800 million the Prime Minister is diverting from foreign aid might have done real and genuine good in the Third World. Instead of funding clinics and clean water, that cash is underwriting a cynical exercise in climate showmanship and green-eyed moral vanity
Malcolm Turnbull, by way of making a splash at the Paris Climate Conference, has just pledged a billion dollars to help poor countries meet the challenge climate change. This forms part of a broader promise by ‘rich nations’ to provide $100 billion a year in ‘climate aid.’ What Turnbull was less keen to emphasise is that $800 million of the funds would be redirected from the existing foreign-aid budget. That means $800 million less for disaster relief, treatment for preventable diseases, access to clean drinking water and malnutrition. That list is bad enough, but the worthy causes shouldered aside in the name of warmism number many more than that.

How many people died from climate change last year? Directly, none.

But what about indirectly? That’s a tougher one. The earth’s weather patterns have defied prediction since long before multilateral climate love-ins became an annual entry in every posturing world leader’s travel diary. So we shouldn’t kid ourselves into thinking that isolating the impact of carbon emissions on natural disasters, bushfires and draughts is anything more than educated guesswork.

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Dissensus, the Spirit of Our Age Donald Trump could arise only in an atmosphere that is itself soaked in political derision. Joseph Epstein

Posted By on December 8th, 2015

We are living in a time of great dissensus, when political arguments are not merely rife but emotionally and verbally, if not actually, violent. People who are certain of the urgency of climate change often treat doubters as if they were hopelessly stupid flat-worlders. People who oppose abortion tend to consider those who feel otherwise as little less than murderers. Run down the list of the leading issues—and an issue, recall, is a subject still in the flux of controversy—and one discovers similarly tempestuous reactions, pro and con, everywhere.

Not that I am without my own political views. The English historian A.J.P. Taylor once claimed to have “extreme views, weakly held.” My own position is moderate views, extremely held. Whenever the subject of politics comes up in one or another of my social circles, I always jump in to offer a label warning: “I have never lost a political argument,” I say, adding, “which would be more impressive if I didn’t have to admit that neither have I ever won one.” As Jonathan Swift averred, one cannot hope to reason people out of those things they haven’t been reasoned into, which often enough includes politics.

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Notable & Quotable: Benno Schmidt on Free Speech ‘The most serious problems of freedom of expression in the U.S. today exist on our campuses.’

Posted By on December 8th, 2015

From “Universities Must Defend Free Speech” in the May 6, 1991, Journal, adapted from remarks by Benno C. Schmidt Jr., who was at the time president of Yale University:

The most serious problems of freedom of expression in the U.S. today exist on our campuses. Freedom of thought is in danger from well-intentioned but misguided efforts to give values of community and harmony a higher place than freedom. The assumption seems to be that the purpose of education is to induce “correct” opinion rather than to search for wisdom and to liberate the mind.

On many campuses, perhaps most, there is little resistance to growing pressure to suppress and to punish, rather than to answer, speech that offends notions of civility and community. These campuses are heedless of the oldest lesson in the history of freedom, which is that offensive, erroneous and obnoxious speech is the price of liberty. Values of civility, mutual respect and harmony are rightly prized within the university. But these values must be fostered by teaching and by example, and defended by expression. When the goals of harmony collide with freedom of expression, freedom must be the paramount obligation of an academic community.

Much expression that is free may deserve our contempt. We may well be moved to exercise our own freedom to counter it or to ignore it. But universities cannot censor or suppress speech, no matter how obnoxious in content, without violating their justification for existence. Liberal education presupposes that a liberated mind will strive for the courage and composure to face ideas that are fraught with evil, and to answer them. To stifle expression because it is obnoxious, erroneous, embarrassing, not instrumental to some political or ideological end is—quite apart from the invasion of the rights of others—a disastrous reflection on the idea of the university. It is to elevate fear over the capacity for a liberated and humane mind. . . .

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Hope at Last in Venezuela A revolt at the polls against the Cuban-backed government. see note please

Posted By on December 8th, 2015

This is welcome news…both Venezuela and Argentina- where Iran has wielded great influence have overturned tyrants….rsk

It isn’t every day that a police state takes such a beating at the polls that it has to admit defeat in its own rigged election. So kudos to the Venezuelan opposition, which thrashed the government’s United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) in Sunday’s national assembly election, even taking the two-thirds supermajority needed to pass major economic and judicial reforms.

After 16 years of repressive left-wing rule, this is cause for hope in Venezuela and across the Americas. An impressive 75% of the electorate turned out to vote, driven by plummeting living standards. Hyperinflation, food shortages, crumbling public works and soaring murder rates have made the country miserable.

President Nicolás Maduro, the late Hugo Chávez’s handpicked successor, accepted the vote—at least for now. It’s doubtful he would have done so without pressure from the military, which also seems to be fed up with the country’s accelerating decline.

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Fighting Terror by Self-Reproach How did we become a country more afraid of causing offense than playing defense? Bret Stephens

Posted By on December 8th, 2015

Nobody who watched Barack Obama’s speech Sunday night outlining his strategy to defeat Islamic State could have come away disappointed by the performance. Disappointment presupposes hope for something better. That ship sailed, and sank, a long time ago.

By now we are familiar with the cast of Mr. Obama’s mind. He does not make a case; he preaches a moral. He mistakes repetition for persuasion. He does not struggle with the direction, details or trade-offs of policy because he’s figured them all out. His policies never fail; it’s our patience that he finds wanting. He asks not what he can do for his country but what his country can do for him.

And what’s that? It is for us to see what has long been obvious to him, like an exasperated teacher explaining simple concepts to a classroom of morons. Anyone? Anyone?
That’s why nearly everything the president said last night he has said before, and in the same shopworn phrases. His four-point strategy for defeating ISIS is unchanged. His habit of telling us—and our enemies—what he isn’t going to do dates back to the earliest days of his presidency. His belief that terrorism is another gun-control issue draws on the deep wells of liberal true belief. His demand for a symbolic congressional Authorization for Use of Military Force is at least a year old, though as recently as 2013 he was demanding that Congress kill the AUMF altogether. Back then he was busy boasting that al Qaeda was on a path to defeat.

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Despite Clampdown on Foreign Fighters, Extremists Ranks Swelling, Study Finds by Felicia Schwartz

Posted By on December 8th, 2015

Number of fighters from North America steady but number from Western Europe more than doubled since 2014, report says

WASHINGTON—More than a year of international efforts to stem the flow of foreign fighters into Syria and Iraq have fallen short, with the number of militants taking up arms for Islamic State and other extremist groups more than doubling in that time frame, a report released Monday found.

Between 27,000 and 31,000 people from at least 86 countries have traveled to the Middle East to join the extremist movement, according to the report, by the security consulting firm The Soufan Group, founded by a former federal official who investigated the 2001 terrorist attacks. By comparison, a June 2014 by the firm issued identified approximately 12,000 foreign fighters from 81 countries who had traveled to Iraq and Syria.

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Hillary Clinton Plans a Corporate ‘Exit Tax’ Proposal would be meant to deter companies from merging with smaller overseas firms By Richard Rubin And Laura Meckler

Posted By on December 8th, 2015

WASHINGTON—Hillary Clinton’s plan to deter companies from leaving the U.S. will include an “exit tax,” her campaign said Monday, making it even more restrictive than President Barack Obama’s proposals.

Like Mr. Obama, Mrs. Clinton wants to prevent companies from leaving the U.S. tax system by merging with a smaller foreign firm. That rule could have discouraged Medtronic PLC from putting its tax address in Ireland and could complicate the similar transaction that Pfizer Inc. is attempting now. Both of those deals use a law that allows such inversions as long as the U.S. company’s shareholders own less than 80% of the combined business.

The Obama proposal has gone nowhere in Congress, stopped by Republicans who say it amounts to erecting walls around the U.S. tax system rather than making it more favorable. Mrs. Clinton would go further, requiring companies to pay U.S. taxes on deferred foreign earnings if they attempt to “game” her new threshold, a campaign aide said Monday.

Mrs. Clinton, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, will speak about corporate taxes on Wednesday in Iowa. The aide said she would unveil “another major component” of her plan then.

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Parsing Obama’s Palaver by Edward Cline

Posted By on December 8th, 2015

President Barack Obama’s speech to the nation of “reassurance” and “resolve” on the evening of December 6th had all the substance of cotton candy. It took up a lot of space but essentially there was nothing there. It was a fluffy repeat of the same old deception, misdirection, taqiyya, and dissimulation. The only thing his fifteen-minute, nineteen-hundred word spiel reassured us of was that he wasn’t going to change his policy towards ISIS (aka ISIL) or his determination to protect Islam. Let’s examine the speech.

The first paragraph was a howler.

Good evening. On Wednesday, 14 Americans were killed as they came together to celebrate the holidays. They were taken from family and friends who loved them deeply. They were white and black, Latino and Asian, immigrants, and American born, moms and dads, daughters and sons. Each of them served their fellow citizens. All of them were part of our American family.

Actually, Obama wasn’t so much talking “with us” as he was talking down to us. Also, he failed the bean-counting test. He forgot to mention that the victims were also someone’s cousins, nephews, nieces, uncles, aunts, and in-laws. But, apparently, there were no Muslims among the victims. What a relief! Well, to Obama it was a relief.

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COP 21 agrees on draft climate agreement, divisions remain :Craig Rucker

Posted By on December 8th, 2015

Week one of COP 21, the UN climate conference in Paris, concluded with the adoption of a draft “outcome.” You can read it at CFACT.org.

This was the must-have first step if the UN is to have a chance of adopting a full treaty this week.

While the COP (Conference of the Parties) reached a milestone, the draft is riddled with unresolved divisive issues. The draft contains multiple versions of many key provisions within square brackets and placeholders for future text.

For instance, did the UN adopt a draft of a binding treaty or a toothless nonbinding agreement? No one in Paris can say for sure.

Resolving these disputes is what the negotiators in Paris will be working on as they reconvene at a ministerial level.

It remains to be seen whether the COP can bridge all divides and agree to a final text.

Two factors argue the UN might pull it off.