Climate variability

RealClimate has a guest column on climate variability. This is an important concession for them since they have spent years and considerable effort trying to prove that CO2 is the only driver for climate change. Al Gore, who cites them as a major source of his information is on record as saying that the only reason that Venus is hotter than the Earth is because of CO2. This shows how badly the cooling of the last few years has hurt their case.

On its surface, the column continues to defend global warming theory. It starts out with this statement:

A climate that is highly sensitive to radiative forcing (i.e., responds very strongly to increasing greenhouse gas forcing) by definition will be unable to quickly dissipate global mean temperature anomalies arising from either purely natural dynamical processes or stochastic radiative forcing, and hence will have significant internal variability. The opposite also holds. It's painfully easy to paint oneself logically into a corner by arguing that either (i) vigorous natural variability caused 20th century climate change, but the climate is insensitive to radiative forcing by greenhouse gases; or (ii) the climate is very sensitive to greenhouse gases, but we still are able to attribute details of inter-decadal wiggles in the global mean temperature to a specific forcing cause. Of course, both could be wrong if the climate is not behaving as a linear forced (stochastic + GHG) system.

That last disclaimer is interesting but the thrust of this paragraph argues that variable climate proves warming theory because it shows that the climate can be changed. As I said, it represents a major policy shift for RealClimate to allow anyone to suggest that the climate can change without human forcing. I will get to the implications of this later.

The rest of the paper deals with the period from 1998 to the present which they refer to as an episode. Their point is that something natural happened to the climate in 1998 skewing the averages. Because of this, only data prior to 1998 should be used in charting global warming.

We hypothesize that the established pre-1998 trend is the true forced warming signal, and that the climate system effectively overshot this signal in response to the 1997/98 El Niño. This overshoot is in the process of radiatively dissipating, and the climate will return to its earlier defined, greenhouse gas-forced warming signal. If this hypothesis is correct, the era of consistent record-breaking global mean temperatures will not resume until roughly 2020.

While this sounds quite reasonable there are two problems with it. The obvious one is that you can't just throw out data that doesn't fit your model and claim that the remaining data is correct. There is a prediction that we will see a return of the warming signal around 2020. This is valid scientific method but we have to wait another decade in order to validate it.

The other problem is the assumption that, with the exception of the 1998 event, world temperatures would have been naturally stable without human-induced warming. Now that it has been admitted that the climate can change without human intervention, it has to be admitted that other, natural, long-term trends can happen. RealClimate tried to keep this line of inquiry closed. That's why allowing any admission of it is such a policy change for them.

Malaise and Carter

Thirty years ago Jimmy Carter's presidency was failing. Gas prices were rising. Natural gas prices were also rising and gas line pressure had been noticeably down the  previous record-cold Winter. Word had gotten out that the Secret Service had saved the President from an attack rabbit. When the White House declined to provide footage, CBS showed a clip from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, instead. People were talking about how much the presidency had aged Carter.

Realizing that things were bad, Carter's aids called him in from a planned vacation to give a major speech. They quickly abandoned the original speech and spent the next ten days writing a new one. This one would address the mood of the country and energy policy. A press release described the country's mood as a "malaise". The word stuck and it became known as the "Malaise Speech".

Carter loyalists are quick to defend the speech was well received and his popularity rose after the address. Carter speechwriter Gordon Stewart says:

To this day, I don't entirely know why the speech came to be derided for a word that was in the air, but never once appeared in the text. Still, the "malaise" label stuck: maybe because President Carter's cabinet shake-up a few days later wasted the political energy that had been focused on our energy problems; maybe because the administration's opponents attached it to the speech relentlessly; maybe because it was just too hard to compete with Ronald Reagan and his banner of limitless American consumption.

The real reason is probably that there was never any way the Jimmy Carter we all know would avoid saying: "There is simply no way to avoid sacrifice." Where the speeches of Reagan and Barack Obama evoke the beauty of dreams, President Carter insisted on the realities of responsibility and the need for radical change. Mr. Carter's sense of our own accountability, his warnings about the debilitating effects of self-centered divisiveness were the speech's true heresies.

He is too kind to his former boss. Carter promised several actions. None of these ever took place. Instead, as Stewart alludes, Carter asked his entire cabinet for their resignations and accepted them from the most prominent members. This reinforced the impression that he was out of his league.

If Carter had followed up on his proposals he would be remembered differently. Instead he is lumped together with Gerald Ford as a president who could not work with Congress. Around 14 months later Iran invaded the US embassy and took diplomatic staff members hostage, making Carter look weaker than ever.

Part of the reason that Reagan left such an impression is that he was such a contrast with his predecessors. Both men came to Washington promising to change things. Only Reagan actually did. Carter was voted out of office by people who thought of him as a nice man who was not competent to be president. The more Reagan accomplished the worse Carter looked.

Carter apologists want his speech to be remembered as a high point of his administration. In fact, it was simply a lofty set of promises that he never followed up on. That makes it representative of the Carter presidency.

Sotomayor

I probably will not agree with most of Sonia Sotomayor's decisions on the Supreme Court but she should be confirmed. She is well qualified and one of the perks of being president is being able to appoint someone who matches your views. Senate Republicans are welcome to grill her but they should not make a cause out of it. That's how the process is supposed to work.

That said, the Democrats including President Obama have violated this principle for decades. The NOW and the related abortion lobby are principally to blame. They have made abortion a litmus test and assume that anyone nominated by a Republican will fail it. This is a perversion of the process. Republicans have had to resort to "stealth nominees" - people whose judicial history is too short to draw conclusions from.

The Roe v Wade decision was possibly the worst since the days of slavery. It invented a constitutional right where none is clearly written. The gyrations every since have been devoted to protecting or overthrowing that single decision.

The Supreme Court is too important to be hostage to a single issue.

A Strange Circle

The headline says Obama's visit to fort a "Full-Circle Experience". The full circle is an American black returning to the location where his ancestors were forcibly removed from their homeland.

Except this has different implications for Obama. His mother was white and her family owned slaves at one point (there was speculation a year ago that one of Obama's ancestors may have owned one of Oprah's). His father was African. His family never left Africa except Barack senior for a few years to attend college and father an American child. Any connection between Barack senior and slavery would have involved Obama's family benefiting from selling the compatriots.

Obama made a different circle on the same trip. Rather than appologize for slavery and colonization, he told Africans to get their act together. He passed over his father's native Kenya in favor of Ghana because of Ghana's dedication to free, open elections and the corruption in most other African countries. These comments were personal for him. His father had been a member of Jenya's government and was pushed out due to corruption.

Obama's speech to Africa was a welcome change from Bush and Clinton who both felt the need to appologize for not solving all of Africa's problems for them.

The Awesomeness of Obamacare

Bob Cesca has a post on Huffington in which he talks about how great the public option will be. Some quotes:

The fact remains that the only downside to the public option is that it's just too awesome. We don't deserve anything that good. Simply put: it's Medicare, but for anyone who wants it. And this is somehow a nightmare scenario -- one that we must never be allowed to experience even though it would cost much less than our current system, it would cover everyone who wants it, and it would be accountable to the American people.

{...}

The "it's too awesome for your own good" argument was the one we heard from both Republicans and centrist Blue Dog Democrats for several months recently. But now it's back to the good old fashioned socialized-healthcare-is-awful frame, most notably trotted out by Republican minority leader and Deep Space Nine shapeshifter Mitch McConnell, who has been peppering his floor speeches with the tear-jerking story of the one person from Canada who doesn't like her free and universal healthcare.

Imagine that. Free. And this one person hates it so bad, you don't even know!

Too bad there's nothing free and universal in God's non-socialist America. Like roads, police protection, fire departments, public schools, and public parks where we can protest against public programs like funding for parks.

But Mitch McConnell says that in Canada people have to wait for a knee replacement. See now, if I'm getting a free knee replacement surgery without fear of being dropped by my health insurance carrier or having to run up credit card debt in order to cover the co-pay, the co-insurance and the deductible, I want my damn knee replacement yesterday.

Waiting eight weeks (the average wait time) for a free Canadian knee replacement surgery is eight weeks too long. In America, I can have my knee surgery over lunch, yes? Of course I have to pay more for such a convenience. And I'm participating in an enterprise that could easily screw me out of the coverage entirely. But I can have my surgery whenever I want it. (Actually, it's about a 21 day wait.)

 

There are so many problems with Cesca's post I'm not sure where to begin.

Let's start with "free". He tosses that term around a lot but he doesn't seem to realize that none of his examples are free. Someone pays for the roads and parks and police. Specifically, it is the taxpayers who pay for them. So go back and reread his screed but replace "free" with "taxpayer funded" or "paid for by other people".

Now that that is settled, I'll start from the top. Yes, the public option is like Medicare - except it isn't. Medicare is subsidized medicine and it is quickly running out of money. Last year it paid out more than it took in. The public option is being sold as revenue neutral. That means that it is supposed to support itself through premiums, just like a private insurance company. In reality, it will have to be subsidized for the poor and it will probably be subsidized for everyone enrolled. Congress is already looking at new taxes to pay for this. And they are looking at people who make a lot less than $250,000 a year.

Higher taxes is one way to cover the expenses. Rationing medical treatment is another. Cesca dismisses this, saying that the average waiting time in Canada is only eight weeks. If you follow his link you will find that he got that figure from an article published in 1994 which was based on data from 1992. Here is an article from this year. It's statistics are much less awesome.

Knee replacement surgery is a common surgical procedure that allows for an effective reduction of pain and adequate restoration of function for the vast majority of patients suffering from advanced knee osteoarthritis or other forms of arthritis. [1] In the last decades, the growing needs of the population have made this procedure, along with hip replacement, the second most popular orthopaedic surgery. [2] In Canada, in 2006, the rate of knee replacements reached 106.9/100 000 persons, in sharp progression from the past decade. [3] This sharp rise in demand has translated into growing waiting lists. Governments have tried to tackle this problem, and with the allocation of new funding and the development of new policies, more patients are being operated. [4] But wait times remain a problem; recent Canadian data show that, depending on the province, the median pre-surgery wait time range from 112 to 291 days and still today an important proportion of patients are not operated within six months, the maximum acceptable waiting time benchmark established in Canada.

Then there is the awesome British health care. Liberals (or progessives) don't talk about the Brits much anymore. It is too easy to find stories like this one which says that hospital overcrowding makes patients likely to contract "superbugs". Canada has an easier solution for overcrowding - they've been sending their overflow to the US for a decade.

Cesca doesn't really care about any facts or figures. He is sure that single-payer health care is the best solution and he has no interest in looking any further. This is troubling because of the prominence that the Huffington Post has been given. It now feeds stories into MSN broadcasts and sends journalists to presidential press conferences. His bio says He's been a featured blogger/columnist for the Huffington Post since August, 2005. His posts appear on the front page above-the-fold every Wednesday (sometimes Thursday). That makes him pretty prominent for being so wrong.

Stimulus Woes

Unemployment is at a 26 year high. This wasn't supposed to happen. After all, Congress passed a massive stimulus bill during Obama's first few weeks in office. So what happened?

A bigger question is how a package that spends most of its money after 2009 could possibly have affected the economy now?

Vice-President Biden may have let something slip when he said that they had underestimated how bad the economy was. The cynical take on his statement is that they expected the economy to turn around this Summer on its own. They would then take credit for it and continue spending the bulk of the $800 billion.

With the economy still doing poorly, people are taking a second (or first) look at the stimulus. Last night NBC led with a New York Times story about stimulus-related road construction. It seems that most of the spending is in rural counties but most of the unemployment is in urban counties.

According to an analysis by The New York Times of 5,274 transportation projects approved so far — the most complete look yet at how states plan to spend their stimulus money — the 100 largest metropolitan areas are getting less than half the money from the biggest pot of transportation stimulus money. In many cases, they have lost a tug of war with state lawmakers that urban advocates say could hurt the nation's economic engines.

It should also be pointed out that "shovel-ready" construction projects only get $26 billion out of $800 billion.

Economists such as Paul Krugman say that this proves their prediction that $800 billion wasn't enough money and that a second, larger stimulus bill is needed. The White House is denying that they plan a second stimulus "at this point".

But the White House press secretary, speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One, suggested that could change if the country continues to lose jobs.

The idea of passing a second huge spending bill before most of the money from the first one is due to be spent is troubling. The first one will cost $1 trillion by the time interest is paid. We may have already overspent. Some economists are predicting a double-dip recession with debt-induced inflation triggering a new recession late next year. Adding in a new stimulus could ruin the economy for years to come.

Why Did Sarah Quit?

There are been a number of guesses about why Sarah Palin announced that she will resign as governor later this month. Most assume that she plans to run for higher office and wanted to devote all of her time to this. It is true that being Governor of Alaska didn't help her much on the 2008 ticket so it is not likely to help in 2012.

But I don't think that is why she is stepping down. I think that she is doing it because it is the right thing for both the state and her family.

Since her ascension to national prominence, her effectiveness as governor has diminished. Democrats who used to be her allies would no longer be caught dead helping her. Even some of her allies have deserted her. There are constant new ethics allegations, each draining her time. None of this helps Alaska. Without her as a lightening rod, these problems will vanish and the state government can get back to business.

On a personal level, she has a special needs child whose disability will become more obvious as he grows up. Trig will need more and more of someone's care. At the same time, her oldest daughter is now a teen-age, single mother and probably needs help with her own baby.

And those ethics probes are hurting her financially. So far her legal bills have been around a half million dollars.

I think that Sarah is planning on cutting back from politics. She will still make some speaking engagements and a book tour. The money is good and she still has those legal bills. But I don't think that she plans any big campaigns for 2012.