ShrinkWrapped

The Religion of Environmentalism

Apparently, environmentalists, under the auspices of the UN, decided two years ago that they were promulgating a religion.  [HT: Lubos Motl]

Document Reveals U.N.'s Goal of Becoming Rule-Maker in Global Environmental Talks

Environmentalism should be regarded on the same level with religion "as the only compelling, value-based narrative available to humanity," according to a paper written two years ago to influence the future strategy of the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP), the world's would-be environmental watchdog.

The purpose of the paper, put together after an unpublicized day-long session in Switzerland by some of the world's top environmental bureaucrats: to argue for a new and unprecedented effort to move environmental concerns to "the center of political and economic decision-making" around the world — and perhaps not coincidentally, expand the influence and reach of UNEP at the tables of world power, as a rule-maker and potential supervisor of the New Environmental Order.

This is very clarifying.  Since environmentalism is equivalent to a religion, that explains why the burden of proof needed to support their hypotheses is so minimal.  Who needs proof when you have faith?

The New Millennialism

(More properly, the title of this post should be The New Millenarianism, but Millennialism is more euphonious, in my opinion, and conveys the meaning, in any event.)

Eschatology is the study of the "end times" while Millennialism is the Christian version of Millenarianism, the belief that the end times will be ushered in by paradigmatic change, one variant of which  is the Apocalypse.

The belief that people are living in the end times has been ubiquitous in human history.  The intensity, depth, and breadth of the beliefs has waxed and waned, often in response to disorienting times of change.  It is easy to notice such beliefs when they are presented in the context of deeply held religious belief.  By this time most people have become familiar with the quasi-Millenarianism of the Sunni radicals of al Qaeda and related sects and the more overt Millenarianism cum Apocalypse of the Shia radicalism of the Iranian Mullahs.  What is less often recognized is the more covert Millenarianism that fuels many of our modern "crises".

The belief that the world will end is ubiquitous for a reason; it will, for each of us end:  Our self awareness, consciousness, is both a blessing that allows us to appreciate the world and impose our imprint upon it and a curse that leaves us aware of our impending death.  We take it on faith that the world will persist after we are gone but in a very real way, the world as constructed and contained within our minds ends when we do.  The solipsism at the core of our minds has been tacitly recognized from the beginning of history:

For the ancient Pharaohs of Egypt, the idea that the world ended when their consciousness faded was made literally true for those whose lives were entwined with the Pharaoh; the living were closed in with the deceased Pharaoh in his tomb in order to accompany him to the next world. 

The awareness of our own personal mortality makes us prone to too easily accepting evidence of "the end of it all."  The powerful attraction of various iterations of Millenarianism has fueled such divergent preoccupations as Y2K and AGW.  I suspect that the scientists who first discovered what they thought was evidence for human fueled global warming were led astray by their own unconscious infatuation with their New Millennialism.  Because most scientists are committed to rationality and eschew religious belief, they are quite prone to believing nonsense for which they can find rational explanations.  Once convinced that their findings were real, short-circuiting the usual tedious efforts at confirmation and peer review (actual peer review, whereby your scientific peers examine your raw data and statistical/computer manipulations to see if they can replicate your findings and minimize confounding variables) became not just a convenience but a moral necessity.  After all, if the world is about to come to an end and you have the ability to forestall the worst, any means become acceptable.  The cascade of deceitful behavior that followed their "Aha!" moment would be logical and rational given the stakes involved.

This is no different in form from the rationalizations that more overt Millenarianists engage in to  normalize and accept the most egregious of violence upon the innocent.  In the name of preparing the way for Paradise on earth, murdering innocents (many of whom will actually be "saved" by their passive contribution to the effort) is not only acceptable but imperative.  While the Warmists clearly believe their scientific "hedging" was necessary to save innocents, in reality, were the world's major economies to adopt all their recommendations, it would condemn many millions, perhaps a billion or two, of the world's poorest people to far greater penury than they already suffer.  Creating more starving impoverished people in order to "save the planet" might well have been considered a responsible and reasonable outcome, in any case, but was largely ignored by the Warmists.

In a more attenuated way, it is easy to see the same worry/certainty that "the end is near" in the terrified rage of ideologues who believe that if their opponents "win", it will destroy our way of life.  It is certainly possible that the West is ready to fall; after all, other civilizations have risen and fallen throughout history; but alarmism works best when it occurs in some proximity to the danger.  When alarms are raised in the absence of danger one time too often, we risk turning into "the boy who cried wolf".

As far as AGW goes, at this point all we can say for certain is that the CRU data has been hopelessly corrupted and is essentially worthless for determining if, and how much, the earth's climate has changed and, more importantly, what the actual engine(s) of climate change are.

J. Storrs Hall offers a reasonable summary of the current state of knowledge in Eine Kleine Nachtphysik; read the whole thing and pay special attention to his conclusion:

So what does this all mean, bottom line? Not an awful lot — but just take all those claims you hear, on both sides, with a grain of salt.

We all have within us the residue of our once (in retrospective fantasy) blissful union from which we were expelled at birth.  Many still yearn for a return to a perfect union with a transcendent Being.  Utopian fantasies have their roots in such yearnings and gain their power from our very human failings and awareness of loss.  Science works when, through the magic of replication, we allow others to test our hypotheses and our most cherished beliefs.  The Warmists' attempts to prevent scientific due diligence have led to a terrible scandal, a politicization of science as profound as anything the Church imposed upon Galileo.

For those in mind of an enjoyable, only somewhat Apocalyptic, account of the coming "fall of Western civilization", John Derbyshire offers a most entertaining review in We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism.  My response?  Of course We Are Doomed; if Y2K didn't get us, and AGW doesn't get us, and the Islamists don't get us, fear not, there will be another existential crisis coming as soon as the embarrassment of this failed crisis fades.  The history of Millennial movements that become specific (and AGW, as science must, became quite specific, which is part of its downfall) when the predicted Apocalypse fails to arrive on schedule is clear.  The true believers simply consult their arcane texts and move the date forward.  However, with each failed Apocalypse the number of followers diminish until the movements fade away, most often with a whimper, occasionally with a bang (cf Jonestown.)  AGW has lost the data driven foundation upon which its Millenarianism was constructed.  It should, as time passes, become less and less visible on the global scene.  Cap and trade will fade away and probably will not be reintroduced in the next Congress.  The momentum is gone.  In three years, or five, or ten, another existential threat will appear and the world will be thrown into turmoil.  (At the least, the MSM and governments will be thrown into turmoil.)  Millenarianism is simply too inextricably part of the human psyche for people to pass up the gratification of panicking over the end of the world; there will be many more to come.

Thanksgiving

There are so many things to be thankful for on this most quintessential of American holidays.  With all of our problems we remain the most successful experiment in self governance that has ever existed.  We retain the ability to self correct when our leaders go too far astray and still allow for any individual to make the most of his abilities.  A special thanks should go out to the brave men and women in our military who put their lives on the line everyday to keep us free.  Their courage and sacrifice are humbling and inspiring.

I would also like to thank my readers and commenters, without whom I would be writing in a vacuum.

May you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving.

For the next four days I plan on enjoying the company of most of my family (Oldest Son and his lovely spouse are coming in from Charlotte to join Only Daughter and her husband, Youngest Son, Mrs. SW and me for the holidays.)  Only Middle Son can't join in the festivities (though he will be coming in for two weeks at Christmastime.) 

Blogging will resume on Monday.

It is Starting

We will soon be dealing with two terrorism trials.  The defense team for KSM, et al, have already announced their intention to put the Bush administration on trial.  It will not be pretty.  The second terrorism trial is going to take a different tack.  This morning, I heard a report on NPR that Major Hasan's lawyer plans for a plea of not guilty, followed by an insanity defense.  As a Psychiatrist I find this appalling.  A trial is a poor locale to develop a new Psychiatric diagnosis, either "Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder" or "Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder by Proxy". 

J.R. Salzman is a soldier who was severely injured by an Iranian shaped charge in Iraq, spent months at Walter Reed Army Hospital and has had to deal with terrible physical wounds compounded by symptoms of PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) and TBI (Traumatic Brain Injury.)  He is angry, deservedly so, at the mis-use of Psychiatric jargon to ameliorate treasonous terrorism: [HT: Rich Lowry]

PTSD

I’m more than a little angry right now.  Yes, I’m irate that some sh-tbag Major (“sh-tbag” is often used as a technical term in the Army) opened fire on a group of his fellow Soldiers killing 12 and wounding 30. But that’s not even what is under my skin right now. What is bothering me is the general reaction of our media and those stupid enough to think this was not an act of terrorism, but was caused by supposed PTSD caused at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. 

You want to know what PTSD is like? I'll tell you.  You have nightmares that go on for weeks.  Mine would always be the same.  Wherever the window was in the room in which I was sleeping I would see a bright white flash. I would wake up screaming to my wife “Get up! Get the f-ck up! An IED just went off!”  Sometimes I would just wake up screaming in agony as I relived the moment where my right arm was ripped from my body by an Iranian shape charge.  (I may not know what childbirth feels like, but I know what it's like to go an hour with my arm ripped off without painkillers (I'm allergic to morphine).)  PTSD makes you paranoid as hell.  “Why is that person staring at me?  Are they a threat? Where is the nearest exit? Why are these people so close to me?  Why is no one pulling security? What was that noise? Where is the nearest cover?  I need to get out of here.” You lie wide awake in bed at night wondering if it's safe to go to sleep or if you should get up and start pulling security. When I got home from Walter Reed and started college (a week later, stupid idea) I would often stay up for days at a time without sleeping. Eventually my body would completely shut down from exhaustion and I would sleep for 12 hours or more only to complete the cycle all over again. (I still cannot believe I got all As and Bs.)  Since I was injured in a humvee I am especially susceptible on the road to the effects of my PTSD.  I still get nervous and hold my breath every time I drive by a piece of trash or tire debris on the shoulder or median.  I avoid guardrails and broken down cars on the side of the road.  On a couple different occasions I yelled out “tire!” to warn my wife (who was driving) of a potential IED in the road. There was nothing there (no tire, no nothing).  One late night while driving home completely exhausted on our small two lane country roads at slow speed I locked up all four tires on my car to keep from hitting a cardboard box in the middle of the road.  At that moment I would have bet the contents of my bank account it was an IED.  That's what PTSD is like.  At no point in time have I ever felt the desire or need to grab a weapon and go shoot someone or something up.  At no point in time have I ever grabbed a weapon and broken a law because I felt the need to protect myself.  PTSD urges you mitigate the risk of events that happened in your life.  But if you've never had anything traumatic happen in your life, you can't have PTSD.  [Emphasis mine-SW]

Do yourself a favor andread J. R.'s entire post.  My comments can wait.

To diagnose Major Hasan with some variation of PTSD is a travesty.  There may well be some Psychiatrist willing to testify in Major Hasan's court martial that there exists some heretofore hidden variant of PTSD that can befall those who merely hear about actual trauma or observe and treat the victims of such trauma, or may someday see trauma close up; there are people willing to lend their credentials to all kinds of nonsense these days.  I would like to state quite unequivocally, from the vantage point of a Board Certified Psychiatrist with more than 30 years of experience, and having treated hundreds of people who have been traumatized and have had all sorts of reactions to their trauma ranging from mild psychosomatic symptooms to full blown PTSD to overt psychosis, there is no such thing as PTSD by osmosis or by proxy or via time inversion (where one develops Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder.)  The single most salient feature of Major Hasan's case is that he took whatever psychopathology he had (and I believe he had a fair amount, none of it dispositive) and subsumed it into subservience (submission) to Allah whereupon he took it upon himself to perform his religious duty and murder infidels who he believed were part of an army attacking his people.  Everything else is BS.

Anti-Semitism and the Left: Addendum

For those who have difficulty understanding the provenance of modern anti-Semitism and its intimate relationship with the Left:

"Why should the German be interested in the liberation of the Jew, if the Jew is not interested in the liberation of the German?... We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time... In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.... Indeed, in North America, the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and normal expression that the preaching of the Gospel itself and the Christian ministry have become articles of trade... Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist".

Who said that? Hitler? No. It was Karl Marx.   For roughly two centuries now, antisemitism has, throughout the Western world, been principally associated with Leftism (including the socialist Hitler) -- as it is to this day. More here and here.

Courtesy of John Ray.

Jews, the Left and Anti-Semitism

In the last election 75% of American Jews voted for Barack Obama, primarily because he had the most liberal voting record in the Senate and was a minority.  In opposition to his support among the American Jewish population were the less well emphasized points, that he had a long history of closeness with minimally disguised and often overt anti-Semites, and that his inner circle was populated by people with longstanding positions inimical to Israel.  None of this is news.  Jews have been among the most reliably liberal voting blocs at least since the 1960s and there has been a significant delinkage of interests between secular American Jews and Israel over the last 30-40 years.  However, the marriage of Judaism and liberal politics is coming under increasing pressure.  It is quite possible that American Jews will be forced to choose between their liberalism and their Jewish identities in the not too distant future. 

[I strongly suspect that most Jewish liberalism is a matter of temperament and emotion rather than any particularly well refined political philosophy.  Jews, out of a mix of their history with their envy, fears of evoking envy, and a while host of other affective experiences, identify with those who can be seen as victims.  Even the most secular Jew grows up in a culture in which Tikkun Olum, ie improving the world, is an implicit substrate.  When combined with the post-baby boom narcissism that comes with ease and material success in America, such feelings collide and a stance supportive of using government to improve the lot of the less fortunate comes naturally.  Most liberal Jews are much more comfortable paying higher taxes than actually living among the less fortunate.  (This is why houses in Scarsdale, am almost wholly white suburban town cost a multiple of similar homes in New Rochelle, an integrated town complete with projects.) 

However, I don't mean this to be an explication of Jewish liberalism, John Podhoretz (Why Are Jews Liberals?) has already given a fair amount of thought to the question and I hope to review his book at some future time.]

Anti-Semitism and Leftism are inextricably linked.  Every generation Jewish leftists find this out anew' every generation Jews are surprised at the intensity and persistence of Left wing anti-Semitism. 

In many ways, the left must be anti-Semitic, just as they must be anti-American.  After all, part of their core philosophy is that in the perfect state of society under any particular iteration of left ideology, people will naturally all fall within a fairly narrow range of outcomes.  Whether explicit under communism ("from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.") to the watered down versions of ensuring equal outcomes under liberal affirmative action, those on the left by philosophy or temperament are uncomfortable or antagonistic toward those who range too far from the mean. 

For reasons not worth entertaining now, Jews have historically been successful wherever they have resided.  When Jews are visibly over-represented in the media, Hollywood, government, finance, etc, it is hard to miss.  (As a bonus, when Jews predominate in the media they tend to skew the attention of the media to those "newsworthy" items that are of interest to them and those who are like them.  If Israel were a normal country, the attention paid to it would be minimal.  After all, there were far worse atrocities committed in Chechnya by the Russians than anything Israel did in Gaza, yet the world's attention was riveted by the Israeli incursion into Gaza.)

Beyond the ideological problems with a visible group that is highly successfully (and the covert implication that any group thus successful must be taking advantage of either unfair advantages or must be leveraging their success over the failures and efforts of those they have oppressed) there is the historical, and always available, anti-Semitism that is easily exploited by those who need scapegoats for their own failures.

And this leads to the inevitable clash for the Jew and the Left.  Once allied with a left wing tribe, such as the Democratic party, tribal feelings become powerful perceptual screens.  In other words, once allied with a party (tribe) anything that the party supports is first perceived through the filter of the party line and only then can any critical thought take place.  Thus, for those who do not pay close attention, the party line that Israeli settlements is the major obstacle to peace in the Mideast is uncritically accepted since it so easily passes through the tribal filter.  It then requires affirmative work to gain a deeper understanding of the issues involved.  At the moment most American Jews are continuing to go along with the Obama Democratic party position.  This can only hold as long as the majority of American Jews remain ignorant of the depths of anti-Semitism on the Left and at the core of their party. 

The conflict is currently appearing in statu nascendi for my blog friend and rival Jay Adler*.  He is correctly horrified by the vilification of Israel that is a prominent feature of the international community and press.  (He does not want to close his eyes to The Faces of Evil and wonders Who Will Watch the Watchers II.)  What is particularly troubling, and should trouble Jay is that 20% of the Democrats in Congress not only want to close their eyes but refuse to recognize injustice when it seems obvious:

What a difference 35 years make

In an October 1974 cable to Democratic Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, following passage of his legislation helping Soviet Jews emigrate, Israel's Foreign Minister Yigal Allon wrote that "your efforts in this matter manifest once again your deep understanding of our needs and your constant support of the cause of Israel." What a difference 35 years make. 

Nowadays, liberal members of Jackson's party routinely cast votes against Israel, while the leftist commentators supporting them relish vilifying the Jewish state. Whether it's blasting the settlements, criticizing Israel's Lebanon or Gaza conflicts, or deferring sanctions on Iran, the American Left is more unified than ever in its opposition to Israel and its policies.

Nowhere has this disturbing trend emerged more clearly than in the recent debate in the US House of Representatives over a resolution calling on the president to "oppose unequivocally any endorsement or further consideration of the 'Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict' in multilateral fora."

The resolution chastises the UN Human Rights Council for "one-sidedly mandating the 'fact-finding mission'" by Justice Richard Goldstone to focus only on supposed Israeli wrongdoing while "mak[ing] no mention of the relentless rocket and mortar attacks…by Hamas and other violent militant groups in Gaza against civilian targets in Israel." It recites in painstaking detail the myriad factual, inferential, and legal errors that readers of this page well know render Goldstone's report fatally flawed.

The measure, sponsored by Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Florida Republican, earned an overwhelming 344 votes. But 36 members of Congress, all but three of them Democrats, voted against the resolution, while another 20 members voted "present," or abstained; thus, more than 20% of Democrats refused to support the bill.

SO WHAT'S motivating these Democrats, almost all of them from the party's liberal wing, to stand up for the Goldstone Report?

Being a little anti-Semitic is like being a little pregnant.  Unless the monstrous fetus of anti-Semitism is terminated, it will one day turn upon and devour its parents (including those Jews who have aided and abetted its germination.)  Anti-Semitism is already deeply embedded in many of our institutions:

Columbia and Rutgers funded by Iran-controlled group

An Islamic charity alleged to be a front for the Iranian regime has been funding anti-Israel and pro-Iran professors at Columbia and Rutgers Universities, the New York Post reported on Monday.

The Manhattan-based Alavi Foundation, which promotes Islamic charity and Persian education, has been accused by the American government of funneling money to U.S. schools supported by Iran and to a ring of Iranian spies in Europe, says The Post.

According to the report, the foundation has also given thousands of dollars to Columbia and Rutgers to fund its Middle Eastern and Persian studies programs.

"We found evidence that the government of Iran really controlled everything about the foundation," Adam Kaufmann, investigations chief at the Manhattan District Attorney's Office, told The Post.

The Post reported that the Alavi Foundation gave Columbia $100,000 in 2007, after the university agreed to host Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Columbia University spokesman Robert Hornsby told The Post that the money it received ahead of Ahmadinejad's visit was the largest single gift it had received from the foundation. He also told The Post that the university had been unaware that the charity was directly linked to the Iranian government.

In addition, says the report, the foundation gave $351,600 to Rutgers from 2005-2007 to fund its Persian Studies Program. That allegation was corroborated by a spokesman for the university, but no other comment was offered on the matter.

U.S. agents have begun confiscating as much as $650 million in assets from the foundation, according to the report.

Right wing anti-Semitism in American (the KKK, John Birch Society)  long ago led to American Jews alienation from the Right, an alienation which, for too many, continues to this day.  Many Jews, despite the foreign experience of anti-Semitism being prevalent on the Left, have never imagined left wing anti-Semitism to exist.  Many will continue to close their eyes to the phenomenon.  There are those ideologically committed Jewish leftists who will continue to support the anti-Semites on the left in America.  However, those who refuse to remain blinkered will find it increasingly difficult to deny that at the core of the Left, and in many ways in the core of the current Democratic party, the rot of anti-Semitism has taken hold. 

*My advice to Jay Adler is to continue our series of discussions (and I in no way equate his delay in returning to the fray to a paucity of decent arguments; that is tongue in cheek, Jay), continue your series of investigations into that particularly virulent form of oppression known as anti-Semitism, and remember that those of us who are on the Libertarian Right, aka Classical Liberals, will always welcome you whenever you are ready.

How Gubbmint Works!

This is making the e-mail rounds and is simply too good to pass up:

Once upon a time the government had a vast  scrap yard in the middle of a desert.  Congress said, "Someone may steal from it at night."

So they created a night watchman  position and hired a person for the job.
 
Then  Congress said, "How does the watchman do his job  without instruction?" So they created a planning department and  hired two people, one person to write the instructions, and one  person to do time studies.
 
Then Congress  said, "How will we know the night watchman is doing the tasks  correctly?" So they created a Quality Control department  and hired two people. One to do the studies and one to write  the reports..
 
Then Congress said, "How are these  people going to get paid?" So they created the following  positions, a time keeper, and a payroll officer, then hired two  people.
 
Then Congress said, "Who will be accountable  for all of these people?"  So they created an administrative  section and hired three people, an Administrative Officer,  Assistant Administrative Officer, and a  Legal Secretary.
 
Then Congress said, "We  have had this command in operation for one Year and we are  $18,000 over budget, we must cutback overall  cost."
 
So they laid off the night  watchman.
 
NOW slowly, let it sink  in.
 
Quietly, we go like sheep to  slaughter..

Does anybody remember the reason given for  the establishment of the DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY.... during the  Carter  Administration?

Anybody?

Anything?

No?

Didn't  think so!

Bottom line. We've spent several hundred  billion dollars in support of an agency....the reason for which  not one person who reads this can  remember!

Ready??  

AGW Fraud?

[Update at end]

From M. Simon:

 Have the AGW folks have been cooking the books? Do we have a smoking gun? No. A fire at the Colt factory. An explosion at the ammo dump. Three fish just above the keel. Abandon ship. Sauve qui peut.

http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/2009/11/climate-files-hacked.html

http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/2009/11/some-verification-of-hadley-cru-files.html

This may be the most important news to date about AGW:

Hadley CRU hacked with release of hundreds of docs and emails

The University of East Anglia's Hadley Climatic Research Centre appears to have suffered a security breach earlier today, when an unknown hacker apparently downloaded 1079 e-mails and 72 documents of various types and published them to an anonymous FTP server. These files appear to contain highly sensitive information that, if genuine, could prove extremely embarrassing to the authors of the e-mails involved. Those authors include some of the most celebrated names among proponents of the theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW).

There have already been e-mails posted proving that the AGW proponents cooked the books:

Some of the most embarrassing e-mails are attributed to Philip Jones, the Director of the CRU; Keith Briffa, his assistant; Michael E. Mann of the University of Virginia; Malcolm Hughes at the University of Arizona; and others. One such e-mail makes references to the famous "hockey-stick" graph published by Mann in the journal Nature:

I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline. Mike's series got the annual land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999 for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.

The emphasis in the above quote was added.

Mr. Mosher offered this summary of the rest of the e-mails that he had found:

And, you get to see somebody with the name of phil jones say that he would rather destroy the CRU data than release it to McIntyre. And lots lots more. including how to obstruct or evade FOIA requests. and guess who funded the collection of cores at Yamal.. and transferred money into a personal account in Russia[.] And you get to see what they really say behind the curtain.. you get to see how they “shape” the news, how they struggled between telling the truth and making policy makers happy. [Y]ou get to see what they say about Idso and pat micheals, you get to read how they want to take us out into a dark alley, it’s stunning all very stunning. You get to watch somebody named phil jones say that John daly’s death is good news.. or words to that effect. I don’t know that its real.. But the CRU code looks real

John Daly (not to be confused with the professional golfer of the same name) is identified in one of the e-mails as a global-warming skeptic who died in January of 2004.

[Please note M. Simon's second link to his post,  which offers Some Verification Of Hadley CRU Files Hacked; it looks like these files are the real deal.]

It will take time for the "skeptics" (who thankfully were never successfully silenced by the AGWers who likened skeptics to Holocaust deniers and wanted to make AGW denial a crime against humanity) to go through all the files but what has already shown up is damning.

When scientists refuse to release their raw data, they short circuit the workings of the scientific method which looks for independent confirmation of hypotheses in order to avoid unconscious bias and the even more egregious fraud.  The AGW academia-governmental complex is an industry that has siphoned off many, many billions of dollars in grants; it has spawned an entire parasitic industry devoted to managing and minimizing our Carbon output; it has threatened to cripple the global economy and return us to pre-industrial subsistence while empowering  non-accountable bureaucrats in their attempt to gain never before imagined power over every human on the planet.  How fitting that this construct which has been seized upon by the radical environmentalist left may well turn out to have been constructed upon a fraud.   

Update: Luboš Motl links to a statement by Phil Jones confirming the provenance of the files; Luboš notes:

The conclusion looks pretty clear. These people should be put in jail as soon as possible. You know, these are not just small tricks in an academic discussion. These people have acquired millions if not billions of taxpayers' money by methods that seem to be provably fraudulent.

I concur.

The Senates Attempts to Trump the House

There is now an avalanche of commentary concerning the Senate healthcare bill released with much fanfare by harry Reid last night.  Those in favor of the bill tout its provisions to increase the availability of care to almost all.  Nicholas Kristof does a representative job by pointing out that opposition to the original Medicare program, as well as to the establishment of Social Security before it, were overblown and have in time proven to be unfounded:

The Wrong Side of History

... ferocious hyperbole was unleashed on the proposal for Medicare. President John Kennedy and later President Lyndon Johnson pushed for a government health program for the elderly, but conservatives bitterly denounced the proposal as socialism, as a plan for bureaucrats to make medical decisions, as a means to ration health care.

The American Medical Association was vehement, with Dr. Donovan Ward, the head of the A.M.A. in 1965, declaring that “a deterioration in the quality of care is inescapable.” The president of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons went further and suggested that for doctors to cooperate with Medicare would be “complicity in evil.”

The Wall Street Journal warned darkly in editorials in 1965 that Medicare amounted to “politicking with a nation’s health.” It quoted a British surgeon as saying that in Britain, government health care was “crumbling to utter ruin” and suggested that the United States might be heading in the same direction.

“The basic concerns and arguments were the same” in 1935 against Social Security, in 1965 against Medicare, and today against universal coverage, said Nancy J. Altman, author of “The Battle for Social Security,” a history of the program. (The quotes against Social Security above were taken from that book.)

These days, the critics of Medicare have come around because it manifestly works. Life expectancy for people who have reached the age of 65 has risen significantly. America is no longer shamed by elderly Americans suffering for lack of medical care.

Yet although America’s elderly are now cared for, our children are not. A Johns Hopkins study found that hospitalized children who are uninsured are 60 percent more likely to die than those with insurance, presumably because they are less likely to get preventive care and to be taken to the doctor when sick. The study suggested that every year some 1,000 children may die as a consequence of lacking health insurance. [Emphasis mine-SW]

[I emphasized the may because I want to call BS on this.  Those children may also be dying because their parents are neglectful.  Unless Kristof can show me some data, compete with controls, all we have is a factoid of uncertain significance.  There is too much of that in this discussion already.] 

I don't mean to be churlish but Medicare is now going bankrupt and a sizable percentage of Doctors will not accept new Medicare patients because the compensation has not kept up with costs.  Those do not seem to be attributes of a system that can work long term.  Further, the innovation that has led to increased survival rates for the elderly has been fueled by the profit involved in Medical care; for most Doctors Medicare is not a source of profit but a service that is subsidized by those able to pay at closer to market (or above market) rates.  However, that is not my main point in this post.

I suspect there are almost no Doctors and very few commentators who do not believe we should try to maximize the accessibility of health care for Americans.  The problem with the bill(s) is that they do not do what they claim to do, they all end up costing far more than suggested, and they will do significant damage to the innovation in Medicine that can keep us all alive for longer and healthier extents. 

As luck would have it, the Dean of Harvard Medical School agrees with me on almost all of these points: [HT: Roger Simon]

Health 'Reform' Gets a Failing Grade

As the dean of Harvard Medical School I am frequently asked to comment on the health-reform debate. I'd give it a failing grade.

Instead of forthrightly dealing with the fundamental problems, discussion is dominated by rival factions struggling to enact or defeat President Barack Obama's agenda. The rhetoric on both sides is exaggerated and often deceptive. Those of us for whom the central issue is health—not politics—have been left in the lurch. And as controversy heads toward a conclusion in Washington, it appears that the people who favor the legislation are engaged in collective denial.

Our health-care system suffers from problems of cost, access and quality, and needs major reform. Tax policy drives employment-based insurance; this begets overinsurance and drives costs upward while creating inequities for the unemployed and self-employed. A regulatory morass limits innovation. And deep flaws in Medicare and Medicaid drive spending without optimizing care.

...

In discussions with dozens of health-care leaders and economists, I find near unanimity of opinion that, whatever its shape, the final legislation that will emerge from Congress will markedly accelerate national health-care spending rather than restrain it. Likewise, nearly all agree that the legislation would do little or nothing to improve quality or change health-care's dysfunctional delivery system. The system we have now promotes fragmented care and makes it more difficult than it should be to assess outcomes and patient satisfaction. The true costs of health care are disguised, competition based on price and quality are almost impossible, and patients lose their ability to be the ultimate judges of value.

As a bonus, Dr. Flier notes that our leaders apparently think we are idiots and/or fools:

Selling an uncertain and potentially unwelcome outcome such as this to the public would be a challenging task. It is easier to assert, confidently but disingenuously, that decreased costs and enhanced quality would result from the current legislation.

So the majority of our representatives may congratulate themselves on reducing the number of uninsured, while quietly understanding this can only be the first step of a multiyear process to more drastically change the organization and funding of health care in America. I have met many people for whom this strategy is conscious and explicit.

We should not be making public policy in such a crucial area by keeping the electorate ignorant of the actual road ahead.

The problem for the Kristofs of the world is that the bills currently being discussed in Congress are extraordinarily complex, written by people who are hidden in the shadows and have clear ideological biases, and have been neither read nor understood by our esteemed solons.  Further what they purport to do can be done much more simply and cheaply; why do we need a 2000+ page bill?

Yuval Levin (who no doubt has his own bias) sums up:

So, to sum up: the idea is to spend trillions even as our debt is mounting, inflict massive tax increases on a troubled economy, impose costly mandates on employers as unemployment hovers above 10%, squeeze money out of Medicare not to fix the program’s finances but to create a whole new enormous federal entitlement alongside it, insert the government in countless new ways between doctors and patients, and cause millions of middle-class families to lose the employer-based insurance they have today, pay even higher premiums, and find themselves herded toward a government insurance provider. Oh, and at the end of it all, if we use the methods of counting the uninsured favored by the Democrats, there are still 24 million people without health insurance.

I would add that my favorite aspect of the Congressional dishonesty is the idea that the (fantasied) cuts and revenues (taxes) start three years before the program takes effect, which allows the Congress to claim that they will save money that they know will never be saved.  In fact, expanding Medicare while avoiding cuts means that the cost of our already bankrupt system will sky rocket.

Finally, please go to Maxed_Out_Mama's site and offer her a hearty "Thank you."  She has helpfully posted the entire table of contents of the Senate Health Care Bill and plans to read it.  I am awed by her courage and look forward to her findings.  It should be fascinating.

Thomas Friedman: an Appreciation

I am grateful to Thomas L. Friedman  because he supplies a significant function and gives good value.  For anyone desirous of understanding the most conventional of elite conventional wisdom, Tom Friedman is one of the go-to writers.  His column today is a compendium of conventional wisdom, of the kind that  holds up poorly under any kind of scrutiny but has the virtue of adhering to the liberal party line.  His offering today is that special breed of snark that presumes to understand the motivations and beliefs of those who disagree with him:

What They Really Believe

If you follow the debate around the energy/climate bills working through Congress you will notice that the drill-baby-drill opponents of this legislation are now making two claims. One is that the globe has been cooling lately, not warming, and the other is that America simply can’t afford any kind of cap-and-trade/carbon tax.

But here is what they also surely believe, but are not saying: They believe the world is going to face a mass plague, like the Black Death, that will wipe out 2.5 billion people sometime between now and 2050. They believe it is much better for America that the world be dependent on oil for energy — a commodity largely controlled by countries that hate us and can only go up in price as demand increases — rather than on clean power technologies that are controlled by us and only go down in price as demand increases. And, finally, they believe that people in the developing world are very happy being poor — just give them a little running water and electricity and they’ll be fine. They’ll never want to live like us.

In almost every sentence there is nonsense.  As just a few instances, it is not a belief that "the globe  has been cooling lately", it is a conclusion based on the best data we have accrued about the global climate and temperature over the last 10 years.  The reasons for the cooling in the last ten years are not well understood (though the decreased output of the sun must be considered high on the list)  but only those impervious to changing data can insist that AGW is a fact in the face of contrary evidence.  His logic is more impressive when he declares that those of us who think we should be utilizing our own energy resources to the fullest in order to ease the transition to cleaner, more environmentally friendly energy, prefer the world continue to be dependent on oil controlled by our enemies rather than on clean power.  Somehow wanting to extract more American energy (with all that means for high paying jobs, increased tax revenues, and decreasing our dependence on unstable, unfriendly regimes) means we want the world to continue to be dependent on others for their energy.  Where Thomas Friedman also fails is in noting that thus far there exist no alternative, clean energies that can scale properly to replace petroleum based products as sources of energy.  Germany, a bastion of wind power, has found the need to build coal fired electric plants in order to make up the shortfall when the wind doesn't blow; as a result their power generation is more inefficient and costly than if they had just built the plants in the first place and concentrated the money spent on windmills for already extant technology that could manage the coal fired plants' pollution. 

Finally, Friedman manages to confuse himself within his own article.  He insists that once a Carbon tax raises the price of energy alternative energy will flourish (although the technology is not yet mature and none of it is now scalable.)  He then proceeds to allege:

So either the opponents of a serious energy/climate bill with a price on carbon don’t care about our being addicted to oil and dependent on petro-dictators forever or they really believe that we will not be adding 2.5 billion more people who want to live like us, so the price of oil won’t go up very far and, therefore, we shouldn’t raise taxes to stimulate clean, renewable alternatives and energy efficiency.

I'm confused.  If I believe we should drill, that means I want us to continue to be dependent on petro-dictators?  Who ever said the new Middle Class wouldn't want to live like us?  If the demand on oil increases, so will the price and supply will follow and as alternative energy gets cheaper and matures, the markets will naturally migrate to cheaper energy.  Why would we want a tax now that will damage the economy and make the natural maturation of technology slow down?  Wouldn't that condemn billions to continued poverty or a return to poverty?  Am I missing something here or do those who espouse the conventional wisdom not know what they are talking about?

As luck would have it, we have two recent examples that show that neither logic nor mathematics are strengths of the elite conventional wisdom doyens; the first features Al Gore on the Conan Program, via the magic of Youtube:

Video: The Goracle on geothermal temperatures

Conan: … to create energy, and it sounds to me like an evil plan by Lex Luthor to defeat Superman. Can you, can you tell me, is this a viable solution, geothermal energy?

Al: It definitely is, and it’s a relatively new one. People think about geothermal energy — when they think about it at all — in terms of the hot water bubbling up in some places, but two kilometers or so down in most places there are these incredibly hot rocks, ’cause the interior of the earth is extremely hot, several million degrees, and the crust of the earth is hot …

Where Gore is off by several orders of magnitude on the earth's interior temperature, John Kerry performs a marvelous, analogous transformation for our greenhouse gases, claiming that the emissions have increased in the last 8 years 4 times faster than in the 1990s; the facts?

Video: Kerry was against correct data after he was for it

 The Institute for Energy Research catches John Kerry using hyperbolically wrong numbers on carbon emissions in the US as a means to use the Chicken Little approach to passing legislation:

...

According to the government’s own numbers, CO2 emissions didn’t increase even by a factor of 1 during that period.  In an eighteen-year period (1990-2008), the total growth of CO2 emissions was only 15.9% from energy production and 30% from the energy-use sectors.  Moreover, the rate of growth year-on-year has slowed in both instances.  In 2008, CO2 emissions dropped 2.8% in energy production and 2.1% in energy use, likely as a result of the recession.  In 2006, though, while the economy remained overheated, CO2 emissions dropped 1.45% in energy production and 2.22% in energy use.

I don't mean to focus on the conventional wisdom of AGW, but these two examples were just too tempting.  They are, in fact, perfect exemplars of the tendency of the elites to ignore actual facts when it might interfere with their desired beliefs.  Barry Rubin places this tendency in its historical context, in a must-read posting today:

In Search of Déjà vu: For Intellectuals, Political Correctness is Twenty-First Century Communism

We are all searching, in this bizarre era we inhabit, for a healthy sense of déjà vu. By this I mean, we seek precedents for some of the strange things that Political Correctness forces onto people and current political debates bring into play.

Unfortunately, the virtually sole candidate brought up play in such matters is summarized by the word “fascism.” But the extremities of Nazi Germany generally don’t fit well with the relatively mild forms of mischief gotten up to in Western democratic states. Actually, the best parallel I can think of is the way that the Communist party and its fellow travelers tried to impose a cultural line on intellectual life, a process at its peak in the United States and in Britain during the 1930s, while continuingfor many decades longer in countries like France and Italy.

The experience described below by George Orwell in 1937 is a wonderful example of how history is repeating itself. I want to add quickly that I am not speaking here of subservience to a foreign state (the USSR) or even the kind of discipline exercised on party members, but how it permeated into the broader cultural, media, and intellectual scene.

To sum up the three themes:

--There is a party line which should be followed by everyone, even if they aren't in the party.

--Those who don’t follow it will be called all sorts of awful names which even horrifies the victim since these insults have nothing to do with what he was trying to do or say. In those days, it was fascist or Trotskyist; today it is racist, neo-conservative, or Islamophobic.

--The line is justified because not following it is said to lead to terrible results (historically, the triumph of fascism and big business; today, the triumph of racism, Islamophobia, and big business). Another reason is that telling the truth would help the enemy, in those days, fascism or capitalism, in these days, Republicans, George W. Bush, or various reactionary, Christian fundamentalist, or fuddy-duddy forces.

--The punishments are not torture, prison, and execution but ridicule, denial of a teaching job or tenure, or just not getting your book or articles published.

Please do yourself a favor and read Barry's whole article.  Our current climate is a near perfect imagining of "liberal fascism" where for the good of all of us, an enlightened few who know what is true,  must use all means at their disposal to enforce proper thinking in order to "save the planet", redress inequality, undo racism, colonialism, sexism, and any other -ism that captures their fancy.  AGW has been declared beyond the bounds of scientific inquiry for quite some time and the international consensus, that the West must pay for their assaults on the planet (while simultaneously enriching elites, impoverishing the most vulnerable, and beggaring the Western Middle Classes) is unassailable.  Rational discourse and true science, ie gathering data, testing hypotheses, and allowing conclusions to arise from the weight of the evidence, our wonderful and rich inheritance from the enlightenment, is an impediment to all that is good and must be jettisoned.

So, an appreciation for Thomas Friedman, who puts the conventional into conventional wisdom.

PS Here is some data that is bad news for the liberal elites:  Capitalism works miracles!