Links 11/22/09 « naked capitalism

Sunday, November 22, 2009

Links 11/22/09

Unburied bodies tell the tale of Detroit — a city in despair Times Online

Economists: Wrong Again Michael Panzner

The illusion of improving global imbalances Richard Baldwin and Daria Taglioni, VoxEU (hat tip reader Don B)

Unemployment rates rise in 29 states CNN (hat tip reader John D)

Wall St. Finds Profits Again, Now by Reducing Mortgages Louise Story, New York Times

Debt Dynamics Will Hold Back Economy Comstock Partners (hat tip DoctoRx) and Société Générale tells clients how to prepare for potential ‘global collapse’ Telegraph (hat tip reader John D)

Rethinking The Wall Street Business Model (Part 1) Roger Ehrenberg

The role of macroprudential policy Bank of England and Bank of England demands new tools to curb excess Daily Mail, which summarizes some of the main points (hat tip Swedish Lex)

Antidote du jour (hat tip reader Buzz):

lkjhlkjhlkjhl343

33 Comments:

kaan says:

November 22, 2009 at 3:56 am

I think Micheal Panzner provides a very good rebuttal of Crazy policies proposed by Krugman and his ilk.I was really dismayed to see even Yves Smith endorsing such policies proven to be utterly destructive in Japan in last two decades and in many developing countries in 70’s and 80’s.

i on the ball patriot says:

November 22, 2009 at 10:06 am

Panzer’s rebuttal sucks.

He beats up on aggressive spend-and-borrow policies theory in a veiled attempt to defend vanilla greed “professionals” with this limp dick lament in the closing section of his article;

“In my view, whatever predictive ability markets once had has been steadily eroded by years of monetary recklessness, a cultural shift away from long-term investing towards short-term trading and speculation, and the shrinking share of market participants — read professionals — who actually understand the fundamentals that matter.”

Boo hoo, bring back the good old vanilla greed days of FUNdamentals! Fun screwing people in the good old fashioned way.

But what is really wrong with his article is that it is an Orwellian deflection from the very real fact that the government has been hijacked by a fucking gang raping mob of wealthy ruling elite scum bags. Krugman, Baker, and Kwak — and those who validate them with their deflective attention — are tools, witting and unwitting, of the scum bag gangsters and their vanilla greed trumping pernicious greed.

The closest his limp dick can come to saying anything about the gang rape is “years of monetary recklessness”. Oh, that is sooooo harsh.

Panzer lives in the false normalcy (the scamerican illusion) created by years of aggregate generational corruption. If it was a good rebuttal, he would be calling for election boycotts as a vote of no confidence in a totally corrupt government. It is a time to rip up the streets.

Deception is the strongest political force on the planet.
DownSouth says:

November 22, 2009 at 11:00 am

A good rebuttal, yes, but limited in its scope and understanding.

It is extremely difficult for those trained and indoctrinated in a materialistic world—such as the world in which we live today–to transcend that world. Most insist upon limiting the scope of economics to the tangible products of natural resources, labor or work. But economics is so much more than that, for there’s also human action and speech, which encompasses, but is not limited to, politics.

Powerful ideologies, whether they be religious like Christianity or secular like classical economics, provide the glue that holds metasocieties together. It is not necessary for these ideologies to be based 100% in factual reality in order for them to serve this function, but only that people believe in them.

Robert Dudek, commenting on another thread this morning, said it beautifully:

Money is not a thing – it is a concept. Money has precisely those properties that people agree to believe it does.

In the Western tradition, beginning with Plato and Aristotle, we’ve invested great energy in denigrating human action and speech, which exist in the public sphere where individuals come in contact with each other. This denigration is a reaction to the fact that human action and speech are so complicated, so complex, so little understood and so unpredictable that, because of our extremely limited understanding of them, they fall more into the realm of magic than they do science. So instead of engaging the realm of human action and speech—and of politics—the tendency in the Western tradition has been to retract into the more simple and predictable worlds of philosophy, natural sciences and materialism. When human action and speech become dysfunctional, as they were in the days of Plato and Aristotle and as they are today in the USA, instead of trying to fix that problem, we instead throw human action and speech (the public realm) overboard and seek refuge in the worl of private thought and objects. This of course doesn’t work. It has never worked. It didn’t save the Greek city-states, and it won’t save America.

Every once in a while leaders or intellects come along who understand this, and can transcend the scientific-materialistic tradition of Western thought. Keynes and FDR were two of these, and to me they were as much artists or magicians as anything else. Keynes published The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money in 1936, and, as Robert Heilbroner points out in The Worldly Philosophers,

As a matter of fact, the cure had begun before the actual prescription was written; the medicine was being applied before the doctors were precisely sure what it was supposed to do. The Hundred Days of the New Deal had enacted a flood of social legislation that had been backing up for twenty years behind a dam of governmental apathy. These laws were meant to improve the social tone, the morale, of a discontented nation…

Hence when the “General Theory” came out in 1936, what it offered was not so much a new and radical program as a defense of a course of action that was already being applied. A defense and an explanation.
- i on the ball patriot says:
  
  November 22, 2009 at 12:56 pm
  
  DownSouth you might want to go a little deeper …
  
  All life is politics.
  
  Speech (language) is a tool of dominance.
  
  Alliances, based in speech, provide the glue that holds metasocieties together.
  
  The denigration of human action and speech is a reaction to the deception that has been intentionally put in speech by those who deceive so as to exploit others alliances.
  
  The complexity of speech facilitates the deception. There is nothing “magic” about it.
  
  The tendency to retract from the deception, rather than to engage it, is dependent on the individuals (or groups) assessment of whether or not the deception is continuing to provide for (his/her/their) real, or imagined, needs, i.e., whether or not the alliance still provides sufficient crumbs.
  
  Wandering off into the fantasy world of “philosophy” and seeking refuge in “the world of private thought and objects” (and I would add, ‘working within the system’), can be a successful avoidance of conflict (holding) strategy, if, the greater sphere of influence is not so corrupted by the aggregate deception sufficiently enough to disrupt crumb supply. That strategy has been useful in the past, less populated, more spacious world. But that is NOT the case now. Times have changed. Crumb supply IS being severely disrupted by the machinations of the few scum bag lying motherfucker ruling elite. Those avoidance of conflict actions now become aiding and abetting actions of the ruling elite (if you do not contest a deception you are in alliance with it, there is no neutral ground).
  
  “Every once in a while leaders or intellects” DO NOT “come along” and “transcend the scientific-materialistic tradition of Western thought”.
  
  NO ONE appears until the denigration is strong enough to beckon them. It is always denigration, fueled by lagging perception of the deception, that creates the conditions for these perceptive opportunists to appear and re-level the playing field. When the student is ready the master appears. YOU must create the conditions for that new master.
  
  Soooooo … Get denigrating!
  
  The common enemy here for all is the wealthy ruling elite and their misappropriation and misdirection of resource use. These pricks have to be removed from influence and their deceptions removed from the language!
  
  Deception is the strongest political force on the planet.
  - psychohistorian says:
    
    November 22, 2009 at 4:56 pm
    
    I agree 1000% Thanks for saying what you did even if I have struggle to keep up with your insightful mind.

charcad says:

November 22, 2009 at 9:34 am

What!!!??? No Global Warming links today? Oh, I forgot. The current Global Warming news is about how Phil Jones (East Anglia U CRU), Gavin Schmidt (GISS) and Michael Mann (faked hockey sticks and other Lysenko quality “science” promoted via the IPCC):

1. Cook data and graphs to reach predetermined conclusions
2. Manipulate the “peer review process” to exclude papers and people they don’t like.
3. Generally conspire behind the scenes to create a facade of overwhelming consensus.
4. Conspire behind the scenes to destroy emails and other evidence of their premeditated frauds and crimes mislabeled as “science”.

That is, when they aren’t busy collecting Brewsters Millions from governments and renewable energy companies.

“Antidote du jour”

Precisely where the global warming hoax is taking average people. Except the peasantry won’t be able to afford eating out. Too strapped after paying carbon taxes on the horse’s patut. Taxes that will mainly flow to a bunch lying pigs’ asses in NYC and environs.

Skippy says:

November 22, 2009 at 9:53 am

Hows your chemistry, do you have any idea whats in the air, water, food you and everyone else consumes. Forget the mercury in some of the flu shots try the amount coal fired energy puts into the environment. Funny thing it does not go away, just builds in concentrations through out the food chain, including you. Thousands of chemicals all blending as we live on this world, in combinations no one can study of wander what will be the out come.

Any way, see you in 20 years and then will see how the weather is…eh.

Their are too many people and not enough jobs on this planet, get used to it. One way or another their will be some form of rationing, be it tax or out right limits on what you can consume.

Skippy…unless some one has magic beans.
- charcad says:
  
  November 22, 2009 at 12:13 pm
  
  Hows your chemistry
  
  Fair to middlin’, Skip. I had to study a bit for a BSME. I physically work in the field of renewable energy. Biomass gasification development to be exact.
  
  A little familiarity with the chemical processes and products of pyrolysis and anaerobic exothermic carbonization is needed. This tends to get one familiar with hydrocarbon chemistry, cellulose, hemi-cellulose, lignin and what they produce under various conditions.
  
  Forget the mercury
  
  I assume you mean the half of environmental Hg attributed to burning coal? And not the other half emitted by volcanoes or naturally present? Too bad the Chinese and Indians already have big middle fingers sticking up at “Copenhagen”.
  
  Thousands of chemicals all blending as we live on this world, in combinations no one can study of wander what will be the out come.
  
  You’d probably faint dead away if you knew how many different phenyl groups are generated by your run of the mill forest fire. Your run of the mill forest fire puts more phenyl groups into the environment than half of the average state’s industries.
  
  I’ve commented on “Greenwashing” here in the past. The AGW fearmongers, environmentalist profiteers and other grant funded Friend$ of the People have pulled some real stage hypnosis over “organic”. BS. A century ago many chemicals were obtained by “retorting” wood in chemical works that looked like small scale oil refineries. This process left behind superfund sites that are just as contaminated with benzene and other phenols as the typical coal coke battery or oil refinery.
  
  What constantly amazes me is the medieval reactions of so many people imagining themselves to be modern and even “scientific”.
  
  Real Science is here starting on page 6:
  http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/surfacestationsreport_spring09.pdf
  
  A former TV weatherman wonders if NOAA’s 1979 specification change for instrument shelters from whitewash to latex paint affected the thermometers inside.
  
  “Latex paints have significantly different infrared properties due to the pigment, titanium dioxide, which
  differs from the calcium carbonate-based whitewash. I wondered if this change might affect the temperature readings inside the Stevenson Screens.”
  
  So he sets up an experiment with three shelters, one in whitewash, one in latex and one unpainted. And guess what? +0.3 to +0.8 F was the “latex difference”. And the hysteria is over what? A claimed 1.2 F rise over a century.
  
  What Anthony Watts did there and in his Surface Stations survey project was Real Science.
  
  James Hansen, Gavin Schmidt, Michael Mann, Phil Jones and the rest are not practicing “science”. What they’re practicing is descended straight from the Catholic Inquisition.
  - David says:
    
    November 23, 2009 at 1:40 am
    
    Beautiful. Thank you for this insightful post, debunking the “global warming” religion.
    
    By the way I’m a BSEE. If we don’t learn to detect bullshit, we are flunked out. That’s why engineers build things that work and don’t fall down.
    
    Let’s see how many things a global warming expert can build that would work. Wait, I forgot, Al Gore did, he invented the internet!
    - Skippy says:
      
      November 23, 2009 at 8:30 am
      
      Fantastic people that know their patch, much better than the zealots on both sides. You are most correct in your statement about Hg, but may I ask your professional position on our fantastic ability to match the effects of some kinds of volcanism *we match the historical average background emissions of the strongest force on the planet* with regards to Hg and many other compounds.
      
      Again you are correct about refinement, organic compounds, just like with cocaine. In its *natural* state it helps the indigenous people to supplement their poor diet, but when refined became a substance which could be used for medical purposes, bad thing about the major usage in the end.
      
      In essence we double the issuance of these compounds into an environment that has evolved at much lower exposure to said compounds. To whit are you suggesting this is not detritus to the state of all life, that we have little effect on our surroundings and have no idea what will transpire down the road compounded by increasing introduction of new compounds into the future based on profit as the sole reason for their manufacture…really?
      
      The study of man and his effects on all things at ground level is a closed case. Studies of people going back 40 thousand years show that with out doubt we change the world around us, we diminish it first and then we suffer. The advances in technology have allowed us to cheat the consequences of our actions many times over, allowing the holders of new tech to become masters until others surpass them.
      
      Really loved the paint bit by the weather man as protective coatings has been one of my major employs of the last 20 years. White wash or latex lol, both are poor products with regards to UV or or temp reduction after a few months as they become dirty. Both have rather hairy surfaces (even gloss products compared to enamel or two pack) that with out cleaning lose all the fancy proclamations by Mfg. Even the wiz bang 3M mirrored micro bead tech in white base loses its lauded effects shortly after application (now being sold as a wash and scratch resistant indoor paint, did the hole of the Vale ski resort parking lot steel with it). Hole non issue as it would have been smashed on and left to degrade quickly, Mfg warranty would have been void upon cracking the tin.
      
      Look for me the hole MSM temp thing is crap, our actions have and will change the world we live in. When will the effect become sufficient for you to lament you and yours actions when they come home to roost.
      
      Skippy…as of about 6 years ago physics was a not required coarse in engineering here is Australia. Good friend (64 years old, is a lecturer at a major university here in Australia and I agree with him, that most kids to day learn crap, cant think or work with out comps.
      
      Slide rules at dawn ok?
Dan Duncan says:

November 22, 2009 at 9:58 am

What I don’t get is why there isn’t an overwhelming sense of relief on the part of The Believers.

If they really believed in apocalyptic global warming, wouldn’t they be expressing a profound sense of relief right now? [If not relief, then wouldn't the normal emotion at this time be hope and excitement???]

C’mon, Yves. You just got word that much of the science behind global warming appears to be a giant fraud for grant money. Sure you must be pissed at these criminals…but aren’t you relieved?!?!?! Aren’t you hopeful that these fears appear to have been overblown?

After all the stories you’ve written on global warming, how could you at least not have a link to this story? The world as you know it may NOT be coming to an end….We may NOT be on the verge of the apocalypse!!!!

But this does not warrant even a link.

What a freaking joke.

The fact of the matter is…Believers are not relieved. Believers are not even hopeful.

Believers are pissed.

Believers would rather have all organic life face the specter of apocalyptic global warming, rather than be wrong. Quite pathetic, really.

Hell, at least the fraudulent scientists, General Electric and Al Gore had a reason for perpetuating the B.S. They wanted government money. But the other Believers?

They just wanted to be right.
- craazyman says:
  
  November 22, 2009 at 10:36 am
  
  I never bought the global warming hokum and I still don’t buy it. Another mass delusion that can easily be parsed by contemporary analysis.
  
  Water is the symbol for the unconcious. Rising sea levels = rising tide of unconscious id energy = global warming of id = made possible by breakdown of ego/superego structures = tribal and national boundaries breaking down through globalization.
  
  Globalization = breakdown of old order = breakdown of ego structures.
  
  Commerce = id energy = money. Global warming carbon trading = free money for the usual bankster suspects.
  
  Global warming hsyteria = fear of ego breakdown = dream metaphor of drowning in unconscious = overwhelmed by id energy.
  
  Excessively loose global monetary policy = global warming = licentous flow of id energy = rising mind sea levels = pyschological projection in imagination metaphor.
  
  These are highly symmetrical metaphorical structures that hang together in an order like a transformational matrix.
  
  However, I do completely buy the hard science of environmental toxins, mercury, etc. No question about that. If anyone ever buys a state fishing license, the warnings about toxicity in lakes and rivers and the warnings about eating the fish you catch are truly frightening.
- Anonymous Jones says:
  
  November 22, 2009 at 1:45 pm
  
  Dan — Why does this topic make you so angry? How are you so certain of being right about the future of this planet (which is inherently unknowable)? I read your comments every week and you seem indistinguishable from these ‘believers’ who rather see catastrophe than be wrong. You would rather reshape all of reality through your distorting prism solely to validate some bizarre beliefs about the world you formed when you were young.
  
  I have no idea whether the idea of global warming is a hoax or not. I understand that my innate belief in a power to predict and/or control the future is a delusion and a cognitive bias. I understand the limits of my own knowledge and the limits of my own power.
  
  At the same time, I’d still like to see debate on issues that seem important. I think the hysteria of many true ‘believers’ of the coming global warming catastrophe is overblown. At the same time, your hysteria over a ‘giant’ fraud for grant money seems just a little less than helpful.
  
  On top of that, from a purely strategic perspective, the vitriol exhibited by people like Charcad rarely seems to act as a successful advocacy tactic. You all might want to consider that venting in a seemingly angry and sarcastic manner doesn’t actually move the world closer to what you want it to be. Yet, I guess if it makes you feel better, who am I to judge…
  - Dan Duncan says:
    
    November 22, 2009 at 4:38 pm
    
    Let’s pretend for a moment that believing in global warming was career suicide for a budding scientist and that there was tremendous pressure and grant money associated with denying the hypothesis of apocalyptic climate change.
    
    Let’s also pretend that there was a prominent university that was responsible for much the information used by all the other universities and the scientific community and FOX News to denounce global warming…
    
    Finally, let’s pretend said University was hacked into and
    the same email exchanges, data manipulation and agenda stuffing was exposed…..
    
    Personally, I would be quite angry with this as well–even though I was already sympathetic to the Denier viewpoint. I would feel as though I was lied to and that I’m being manipulated. Additionally, I would then rethink my position on this issue, and yes, I would be quite alarmed at the prospect that maybe we are on the verge of apocalyptic climate change.
    
    No, this expose wouldn’t be enough to completely change my mind…but it sure as hell would open my mind to the possibility.
    
    I think the answer to your question as to why I find global warming “science” maddening is quite obvious.
    
    The question, instead, is why Believers aren’t angry that perhaps they’ve been duped.
    
    Even more pertinent, though—-If you really are fearful that the global warming means a dramatic restructuring of organic life with the end of humanity as we know it—-why aren’t you excited and hopeful that maybe things aren’t so bad????
    
    If you really believe in global warming, then this expose is GREAT news! We might actually be OK! We may have just had our death sentence commuted. Sure, it’s not conclusive…but it offers real hope that maybe the global warming hypothesis was a lie. Wouldn’t it be better for humanity if the hypothesis was actually a lie and that we are not in danger of extinction after all? Wouldn’t this prospect be a cause for celebration and hope?
    
    Yet, that is definitely NOT the prevailing sentiment amongst Believers.
    
    The fact of the matter is….the findings of these hackers puts the certainty of global warming in doubt. [It does not mean Deniers are correct...it just means that the global warming hypothesis is suspect.]
    
    If the the certainty of global warming is suspect, then the doomsday scenarios are also suspect.
    
    If these scenarios are suspect, there should be a little relief, and a lot of hope and excitement all over the world.
    
    Yet, there is none of that. Instead, there’s a seething resentment…as the Believers wait for some new bit of information which will rebut the expose of the hackers.
    
    Once the rebuttal comes in and all of humanity is once again in danger of an apocalyptic extinction….then, and only then, will there be Hope again for the Believers.
    
    Yeah, I find this to be a croc of shit. Why don’t you?
    - Dave Raithel says:
      
      November 22, 2009 at 10:08 pm
      
      “Wouldn’t it be better for humanity if the hypothesis was actually a lie..”
      
      No, it would be better for humanity if the hypothesis were refuted by some “crucial” experiment or some definitive “counter-evidence”. But your way of talking about the issue assumes “the hypothesis” is false – that it has been refuted – though there are other sources of confirmation. I really doubt you or anybody here has yet trolled through 64? megs of files, half of which, if I read the news correctly? are the data.
i on the ball patriot says:

November 22, 2009 at 10:37 am

The wealthy ruling elite set the battlefield of discourse …

“Global warming” has always been an intentionally divisive abstract Orwellian deflection from the far more concrete and measurable term global pollution. It deflects from the concrete cause by focusing on the less concrete effect. And now they stir the divisive and deflective pot with a ‘hacked’ report.

“Carbon foot print” is a similar Orwellian deflection. It deflects from the causative exploitation and spreads blame to the victims. A better term might be the “exploitation footprint”. Calculate complete product cost — raw material and labor input costs (which would include carbon costs, cost of military, finance, etc.) to disposal of product costs. This would give a true cost of all products but more importantly would high light (by aggregating individual product exploitation) who is determining what the exploitations’ will be.

Deception is the strongest political force on the planet.
- DownSouth says:
  
  November 22, 2009 at 12:41 pm
  
  i on the ball patriot,
  
  Your comment is right on when you speak of the “intentionally divisive abstract Orwellian deflection from the far more concrete and measurable term global pollution.”
  
  Tony Haymet, director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, points out that “the CO2 problem is just one of a number of things that we’ve done to the planet since the late 50s.”
  
  Ocean acidity (and the fact we’ve already destroyed 90% of the biomass of the oceans) is something with consequences just as potentially devastating as global warming. And yet, as he comments as he is showing the graph of growing acidity in the oceans, “this is a curve that doesn’t appear in An Inconvenient Truth or any of the fictionalized accounts of global warming.”
  
  http://thesciencenetwork.org/programs/beyond-belief-candles-in-the-dark/tony-haymet
  
  All this harkens back to my comment above that we live in an era of a politically decaying society, just like Plato did, in which speech has become dysfunctional. Instead of, as Hannah Arendt puts it, human speech retaining its “revelatory capacity, so that it could be trusted as an instrument for communication between men as well as an instrument of ‘rational,’ that is, truth-seeking thought,” it has instead become Platonic. “To him,” Arendt goes on to explain, “such speech was mere opinion, and as such opposed to the perception of truth, unfit either to adhere to or express truth.” “Persuasion had become to him,” she continues, “a form, not of freedom, but of arbitrary compulsion through words.”
- DownSouth says:
  
  November 22, 2009 at 1:32 pm
  
  I should also point out that Plato’s solution, which lies at the heart of the Western tradition, was to dispense with the public realm (human action and speech) altogether and fall back on philosophy and the natural and mathematical sciences as the surefire route to truth.
  
  But ignoring speech and human action doesn’t make them, nor their consequences, go away. Nor is there any way to eliminate them from either philosophy or the natural and mathematical sciences, much less the behavioral sciences. The comments on this thread serve as a perfect example of that.
  
  Those at the apogee of the scientific community of course realize this, acknowledge it and deal with it every day. The way in which bias works its way into science was discussed by numerous presenters at the Origins conference at Arizona State University. Sue Rosser gives a nice overview, including comments from previous presenters at the conference, in her presentation:
  
  http://thesciencenetwork.org/programs/origins-symposium/panel-2-human-uniqueness
  
  Philosophy and science have proven to be failures in solving the perennial problems presented by human action and speech.
- John says:
  
  November 23, 2009 at 11:42 am
  
  “Exploitation footprint” is a perfectly descriptive phrase and one sure to replace “carbon footprint.” Thanks.
gordon says:

November 22, 2009 at 8:03 pm

To adapt a line from the TV series “Burn Notice”: “You know modellers! Bunch of bitchy little girls!”

A link to the emails is here:

http://www.anelegantchaos.org/index.php
Dave Raithel says:

November 22, 2009 at 9:53 pm

Your work “in the field of renewable energy gasification…” could well be to renewable energy what Whole Foods is to “organic” food: Another corporate scam to centralize production and control distribution, when neither are renewable nor organic. What Monsanto, Con-Agra, The Farm Bureau, et al want in the way of “biomass” ain’t necessarily progress.

Preferably, all scientific data collected everywhere by anyone would be openly available – but I’m a commie about such things. Try making this point to a business that considers its research proprietary, and you’ll at best be dismissed as naive or impractical – if not labeled a fool.

Until I can see (and yes, I am still looking) for a clear demonstration of what data was manipulated and how that weakens the evidence for the hypothesis that human activity is altering the climate to the detriment of living things on Planet Earth by raising its mean temperature, I don’t see more than a piss fight. (I avoid big egos by avoiding people generally, but each to his own.) The link you provide is to a paper published by The Heartland Institute. I’d usually say “Fuck them and the horse they pretend to ride in on” but I have downloaded and glanced over the text, and I will read it closer to see if I can read the crimped graphs. But seriously: the same people who would challenge the measurements for the devices’ proximity to structures would object to paying for maintenance in remote spots. Teabaggers and their ilk are congenital bellyaches. (Whether it is relevant to have some measurements in urban spots, given that urban heat banks affect the weather, is a different topic for a bona fide climatologist to consider.)

The numbers which you suggest were manipulated to perpetuate a hoax are hardly the only numbers collected by everyone; and more importantly, the temperature numbers are hardly the only evidence that the climate is changing and, despite whatever “natural” variability one attributes to solar flares or volcanoes, there are observable changes consistent with the greenhouse effect supplemented by industrial effluents and agricultural practices.

Lastly (for here for now, I bet): If you’re going to call people liars, and it is not simply immediately apparent they’ve lied, then at least give me a motive on their part. Their livelihoods? Well that sure does put them apart from the research finance by the oil and coal companies, now don’t it? Sheeeitgoddamn.

BuzzP says:

November 22, 2009 at 11:18 am

Lest we forget -

Where were you on 11/22/63?

Dikaios Logos says:

November 22, 2009 at 1:40 pm

I have no interest in getting into a shouting match, but I think the Global Warming kerfuffle is worth mention.

There is (IMHO) a decent overview here at the CSM: http://bit.ly/8Xqdx4 . This piece has a link to the ‘actual’ hacked data, a 69MB or so zipped archive.

The email that gets the most attention, 0942777075.txt, is referenced in the comments for the CSM piece. The guy who wrote that email has a response here: http://bit.ly/8t4GRA I am not sure how dastardly it is to use “real temps” in place of data that is imputed by a model based upon tree rings, UNLESS the documentation for the WMO 913 report lead one to believe otherwise. I am guessing that something like “authors estimates” or “methodology available upon request” will be found.

I have given a cursory glance to a few emails and found them pretty dry and harmless. I think someone with serious skills in say, Python, ought to pour over them and find out if there is something more incriminating, but I doubt it is there, at least regarding anything like a “hoax” or a “conspiracy”. In fact in my cursory text search of the archive for the word “trick”, I found the following emails all of which cast skepticism on the usability of data sets: 0843161829.txt, 1065636937.txt, and 1065785323. I do expect there to be some nasty politics uncovered, as the CSM piece states.

Mostly, I think it is fascinating that people who liked being called “skeptics” are suddenly “believing” there was a hoax. Any discussion of this should note that real science is just too messy for crystal clear answers and that a human element is always present.

Since conjecture seems to be a big thing in NC’s comments today, let me add my own. I kind of wonder who thought to steal these emails and docs and bundle them together and release them one highlighted to imply a vast conspiracy. I note the seeming absence of personal emails: I have looked for incriminating ones and found none, perhaps the archive was highly edited? I leave you with the fact that the emails where hacked by someone in a very large country that has highly inefficient energy use, an enormous energy sector, a newsmedia with a long history of distortion, and a ruling clique of military and intelligence officials whose grip on power is increasingly tenuous. Why might they want to discredit global warming?

DownSouth says:

November 22, 2009 at 2:20 pm

Dikaios Logos,

Framing this imbrogio within a historical context may also provide some insight.

Naomi Oreskes is Provost of Sixth College, Professor of History and Science Studies and Adjunct Professor of Geosciences at UC San Diego and one of the nation’s leading experts on the history of the earth and environmental science, and in this presentation gives the history of the global warming debate:

http://thesciencenetwork.org/programs/beyond-belief-candles-in-the-dark/naomi-oreskes
charcad says:

November 22, 2009 at 7:47 pm

There is a pregnant pause right now. The real news will be coming in the weeks leading up to “Copenhagen”.

Most the CRU archive is not salacious emails, fascinating as these are. And which emails are a lot worse than your tepid attempts at innocently spinning them. At least so long as a pretence is maintained that Jones, Briffa, Mann, Hansen et al are engaged in “science”.

http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2009/11/20/climate-cuttings-33.html

No, most of the archive is data and software code. Data and software code that Jones, Briffa & Company have been trying to keep hidden for years. And obviously they have a great deal to hide. If it were teflon clean then ideologues of that stripe would have long ago released it all to bolster their case. Instead they behaved just like Michael “Piltdown” Mann behaved over his data and code.

The real news will come once statisticians like Wegman, McKitrick and McIntyre start giving this material some genuine “review”. And not the whiffle ball reviews the emails show “The Team” busily arranging behind the scenes of the snake oil and patent medicine show called “AGW”.

Any discussion of this should note that real science is just too messy for crystal clear answers

No. This is where you are wrong. “Real science” in fact does yield crystal clear and, most importantly, independently reproducible and verifiable answers. Particularly “science” claiming to employ mathematical modeling. The values of Pi, Boltzmann’s and Planck’s Constants and the permittivity of a vacuum are just that. They are constant, independently verifiable and consistently reproducible to many decimal points.

It is precisely by this test of independent reproducibilty that AGW’s climatology modeling fails as “science”. A second failure point in the case of “The Team” is the fact that their precious temperature “proxies” for the 18th Century and earlier (as few as one tree in Briffa’s case) fail to predict periods for which an independent instrumented record exists.

Junk science otoh yields unclear messes that require elaborate explication by adepts. (So does religious revelation and prophecy) An example is the discredited hockey stick of MBH-98. For which Michael “Piltdown” Mann also resisted releasing either data or source code.

Rightly so considering his fundamental and fatal errors in basic statistics methodology. Plus the fraudulent methods employed to data mine for hockey stick data shapes. These features were repeatedly discovered and exposed by numerous statistics Ph.Ds, including the chairman of the National Science Foundation’s statistics sub-committee.

Religious cults also regularly conceal their sacred writings and relics from the unhallowed gaze of profane unbelievers. AGW Believers should take a cue from the recent British court decision finding that AGW belief qualifies as “religion”. Just surrender up the public subsidies and the claim to dictate public policy. But they don’t want to do that and move into dingy storefront “churches”.

Oh well. Guess they’ll have to get used to being unfavorably compared to the “King” and the “Duke” of Huckleberry Finn.
- Dave Raithel says:
  
  November 22, 2009 at 11:10 pm
  
  “No. This is where you are wrong. “Real science” in fact does yield crystal clear and, most importantly, independently reproducible and verifiable answers.”
  
  I suspect that you’ve never read much philosophy of science – or if you did, you chose to ignore everything done after the most classic statements of the standard most associated with Karl Popper and Carl Hempel. Particular experiments either reproduce or do not reproduce “crystal clear” etc.
  
  The theory of evolution no more meets your standard than does the theory of planetary climate change – for which global warming is an hypothesis to account for observations. For most anything outside the laboratory experimenting with lifeless things (though even there, Quine-Duhem lurk – it was BORN there), science is the accumulation of claims forming the most coherent story (explains more observed things) invoking the fewest unobserved elements and which is committed to the eventual demonstration of observables for what is not yet observed. Science seeks to explains the most of what we see without invoking a lot of shit we never do. No deus ex machina allowed.
  
  Darwin’s “natural selection” can be used as an example for my meaning. Though he believed “natural selection” true, he also was committed to the necessity of some process by which the selected traits would pass – some kind of “germ cell theory” – which we know as DNA, genetic strings, etc. He acknowledged that should no such entity be found, then his theory of natural selection would be insufficient to account for the variety of species by selective decent and mutation alone. (This history can be found in Gould’s Structure of Evolutionary Theory.) You might note that even in this model, there’s the notion of “refutation” – the theory fails for lack of what it needs to find; but that even finding what’s needed does not categorically “prove” the theory. The theory is confirmed; and as confirmed, it serves as the research construct – which may yet fail.
  
  Now it could well be that you are of the opinion that nothing which is not manipulable in a lab, such that concomitant variation is categorically predictable, is “scientific.” And there is that school of thought – but that means the rest of the world is pretty much known through custom, myth, rumor, superstition, anecdote and my favorite – “common sense.” It also makes it hard to know why exactly predictive measuring of physical properties would be scientific conduct, but getting exactly 1 pound of smoked turkey at the deli is just commerce.
  
  And as you’ve returned to the matter of keeping data away from others: Let’s get it all out. I want everything the carbon-based producers have on file opened up. Let every climatologist open his (or her) books. Let’s just call everyone’s bluff (as that’s what real skeptics do ….)
- Dave Raithel says:
  
  November 23, 2009 at 1:34 am
  
  Ok, I’ve spent a while reading through the Bishop Hill, RealClimate, AR4, and Mr. Watts. Here’s NOAA’s reply to Watts:
  
  http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/about/response-v2.pdf
  
  and also: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/crn/#
  
  The latter goes to the point that even if Watts is correct, his point is irrelevant. (Most pseudo-science promoted by phony “populist” groups fronting business interests is.)
  
  If one goes to here: http://www.pewclimate.org/brief/science-developments/June2009
  
  and downloads the pdf and goes to the references, you’ll see none of the CRU people allegedly pulling a hoax are even cited.
  
  I guess I could just keep doing this, on the theory that it’s relevant to finance and macro-econ because somebody’s money is on the line, somewhere, but I won’t. To paraphrase DownSouth: People just be all fed up with talking …
  
  One minor qualifier (since it bugged me after not saying it): In the logico-deductive / refutability model of science mentioned above, one should understand that an astronomer’s lab is the observatory. Would that all things were so distantly observed or contrived in controlled situations…
- Yves Smith says:
  
  November 23, 2009 at 3:55 am
  
  charcad,
  
  I must echo the comments above, that your remarks about science are remarkably ill informed. No reputable working scientist would back them.
DownSouth says:

November 22, 2009 at 9:41 pm

Dikaios Logos,

The “vast conspiracy” might be a little more believable if the IPCC were alone in its conclusions regarding global warming.

However, as this 2004 article from Science Magazine indicates, the American Meteorological Society, the American Geophysical Union, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science all have expressed similar positions.

And of the 928 articles published in scientific journals between 1993 and 2003 that dealt with “climate change,” it was found that “none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position.”

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/5702/1686#

Oreskes concludes:

This analysis shows that scientists publishing in the peer-reviewed literature agree with IPCC, the National Academy of Sciences, and the public statements of their professional societies. Politicians, economists, journalists, and others may have the impression of confusion, disagreement, or discord among climate scientists, but that impression is incorrect.

MyLessThanPrimeBeef says:

November 22, 2009 at 2:18 pm

I know it’s a bad poem, but still this one is mine:

Whether the planet is
Getting warmer or not
I have no clue at all.
In these times of need
Hearts are getting colder
This I have no doubt!

Downsouth – here is what I know about truth…Socrates might disagree though:

I have been trying to teach my cat quantum realities and parallel universes after watching The Golden Compass. But he doesn’t seem to have any clue what I am talking about.

‘Why?’ I ask myself. ‘Why doesn’t he understand what I am talking about?’

Then, I realize his brain is too limited.

And so, his reality is different from my realities.

One day, there will be beings with less limited, more powerful brains (not just computers – bigger computers will not do the job), their realities will be different from our realities, so that all the things we can’t imagine will be simple stuff they teach their 3 year olds. And, here is the best part, they will probably laugh at our science as nothing more than voodoo magic. They will know things, beyond concepts such as space-time dimentions, that we can’t comrehend, just as a cat has no clue what a dimension is. We have no such brains and so we can’t even imagine what they will be. We puzzle over questions like what was before time, what was before the Big Bang – we have no answer because the human brain is too limited. Perhaps we struggle to find the best route to truth because, again, our brain is too limited. And these new beings will wonder why we humans trifle over things like, which one of us is a genius, just as we find it trivial in comparing which cat is smarter than other cats. The difference between the smartest man and the dumbest man today, compared to them, is like the difference between today and yesterday in geologic time.

So, in short, it’s the brain to blame.

craazyman says:

November 22, 2009 at 8:58 pm

Dear Querelous Relics of Bygone Daze in the Sun,

I can tell you that your limited brain doesn’t understand that we are doing Lord’s work.

Sincerely Yours,

Lord Reginald P. Blank-in-brain, Esquire, 3rd Artillery
President and CEO
Goldmanistan Sackstanislov and Partners
“Financiers to the Gods”

Cynthia says:

November 22, 2009 at 6:11 pm

“Wall St. Finds Profits Again by Reducing Mortgages”

So now the hedg-sters have joined the banksters in making a killing on the backs of taxpayers. And given that Larry Summers is a hedg-ster himself coupled with the fact that he was one of the masterminds behind the Russian oligarchs rise to power, he’s probably also behind this corporate welfare scam to enrich our already enriched oligarchs.

gordon says:

November 22, 2009 at 8:29 pm

I don’t want to carp, but that bloody glitch which prevents access to “older posts” is still there.

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