Warming Spin

I'm sure I've said it before but one reason I'm skeptical about global warming is that I know the news stories about it are slanted. Take this one. In brief, biologists found that plants retain moisture better in an atmosphere that includes higher levels of CO2. I can think of three ways that this could be spun:

1) Catastrophic global warming less likely. I'm serious. The driving factor in the weather models that give the really alarming forecasts is not carbon dioxide, it is water vapor. The theory is that CO2 emissions will drive up the temperature enough to reach a tipping point where enough H2O is in the atmosphere that it will take over as the dominant greenhouse gas. This will induce a positive feedback loop where more heat causes more water vapor which traps more heat. The plant study shows that plants will hold water instead of releasing it into the air thus reducing a potential source of water vapor.

2) Plants will be more drought-resistant. No question about this. A plant that is retaining moisture does not need as much rainfall.

But this is how the study was spun:

3) Plants will make greenhouse effect flooding worse. The theory is that plants will pull less water from the ground which will make it easier for the soil to become saturated which is a contributing factor for floods. Even at that, I can see some potential flaws. This would only be a factor in minor flooding. In a major flood, the soil is going to get saturated, anyway. It would not be a factor in the really big downpours where rain falls faster than it can be absorbed. Then there is the question - if plants are holding more water then will rainfall and therefor flooding be reduced?

In the meantime, talks at expanding Kyoto are stuck on a proposal to reduce CO2 emissions by 25-40% from 1990 levels (that would be something like 30-50% cuts in today's emissions) by 2020. That's only 12 years and a few months away. To put this level of cut in perspective, you would have to cut off all residential power in order to meet the high end. Forget compact fluorescents,  we would have to do away with all lights, heat, refrigeration, etc. Or we could shut down all businesses. Then we would still have heat and refrigeration but nothing to eat or wear. I hope that these talks fail miserably.

Disparate Standards

A few weeks ago a mistake was found in the figures used to calculate annual temperature averages for the US. Dr. James Hansen of NASA quietly replaced the old numbers with new ones. When asked why this was not accompanied with a press release, Hansen made some statements about the continental US only representing 2.5% of the earth's surface and the adjustments being so small that they were statistically insignificant. Skeptics wondered if the same standards would have been used if the new figures had supported global warming instead of undercutting it.

We found out this week. A new study was just released on 2006 showing that warming that year was due to global warming, not el Nino. Naturally, that got press coverage . All of the same factors are true here as in the first story. It is only about the continental US so it is still an insignificant 2.5% of the earth's surface. The amount of warming is still very tiny. If one story is news the other should be.

To be fair, Hansen is not with NOAA, he is with NASA and it was NOAA that put out the press release on warming. That doesn't let Hansen off the hook.

Remember Al Gore announcing that the debate on climate change is over? That the 2,000 scientists of the IPCC reached a concensus and no one is allowed to argue with it? This point has been raised numerous times in the last year or so. Hansen himself referred to skeptics as "court jesters" and paid stooges of the petroleum industry.

So, from all this we should assume that the IPCC report is the final word on global warming and that no dissenting opinions are allowed.

Enter (re-enter) James Hansen. The IPCC's most recent report predicts a two-foot rise in the sea level, much of it due to thermal expansion (if you heat something it grows). Hansen disagrees. His figures say that the ocean level with rise by at least 85 feet!

So what do we make if this? Again a double standard is in effect. You can disagree with the IPCC but only if you say that things will be worse than they predict.

Just a Joke?

> Huffington Post blogger Martin Lewis now insists that he was only joking when he called for the arrest of President Bush by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

And of course -- as befits those who worship at the shrine of Atwater and Rove -- my satire has been twisted into headlines such as "HuffPo Calls For Military Coup In USA" Yup -- these guys are the Chubby Checkers of politics. They sure know how to twist... Again and again.

If there is even a single person left in the progressive/liberal/Democratic world who doubts how vicious and malevolent these people will be in their desperate attempt to retain the White House and regain Congress next year -- be aware now. These people will literally stop at nothing. 2000, 2004 and 2006 will seem like church picnics compared to how dirty they will fight the 2008 elections.

So, everyone who took him seriously is a malevolent, humorless idiot.

Except...

Lewis wrote his entry on a blog which has been calling for the impeachment of Bush since it's creation. There have been numerous posts about seeing Karl Rove or Dick Cheney "frog marched" out of the White House. Huffington has given a forum to congressmen such as Conyers who are calling for Bush to be impeached.

Also, Lewis's column is totally deadpan. There is no over-the-top quality to it to tip off the reader that Lewis isn't serious. He says of this

In an ideal world one doesn't have to wink to the audience so that it gets a joke. And one doesn't have to label satire with a label that says "satire".

Considering the company that Lewis keeps, if he really meant the column as satire then he needed a lot more than a wink to indicate satire. If someone in the middle of a lynch mob suggests that the victim should be shot instead of hung, who is going to believe him later when he says it was a joke?

Someone posting a comment to Lewis's follow-up points out that the Lewis responded to many comments to the original post with total seriousness. Presumably the people commenting to Lewis were well-rounded liberals (make that progressives) who should have been intelligent enough to pick up on the satire.

Or maybe Lewis was completely serious and took the coward's way out. Rather than apologize, he claimed it was all a joke.

Calling for a Coup?

Who would have thought that the Left would call for a military take-over of the country? There's no other way to interpret this entry at Huffington. Martin Lewis asks that General Pace, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, arrest President Bush and relieve him of his powers as commander in chief. Lewis dances around what he is asking for. He only wants Bush arrested and tried as commander in chief, not as president. He is unclear about how Bush would execute his duties as president while under arrest to say nothing of what would happen if he was court-marshaled.

The first commenter pointed out that this would be a coup. Lewis responded

As my post says - I am absolutely not advocating a de facto military coup. I am simply advising General Pace that he should relieve President Bush of his command of the military - pending a court martial.

It is an interesting question as to who would then become Commander-In-Chief. I'm not sure that it would be the Vice President. But if it was - the same course of action could be taken if the Vice President acted with "Conduct Unbecoming"

Sorry, but there is no way of separating the two. If the president is arrested and court-marshaled then the military will have circumvented the Constitution. Further problems - the president is a civilian commander. He cannot be tried as an officer. The Constitution lays out who can try a sitting president - Congress.

Lewis doesn't address what happens next. Would the Joint Chiefs direct themselves? Would the Vice-President? Then there is the precedent. This would have a chilling effect on all future presidents. I"m sure that Lewis thinks that this will make future presidents less likely to go to war but the opposite could as easily happen. The Joint Chiefs could advocate military action and threaten to arrest a president who does not agree.

This is really a sign of desperation. It is obvious that Congress is not going to end the war and many parties agree that the Surge is going well. When all legitimate avenues are closed, the the desperate turn to the illegal.

Of course, this is one single nut-job but he is writing for one of the most prominent political blogs.

Hansen and the Numbers

For years the global warming alarmists have insisted that we are already seeing the results of global warming. Almost all of the top ten hottest years occurred in the last decade. Now it turns out that this is not true, at least for the US. First I will describe what happened then what it really means.

As cities expand, they alter the local climate. This is known as urban heat island effect. you can feel it yourself - just walk across your yard and driveway on a hot day. Chances are really good that the driveway will be painfully hot as the cement absorbs and radiates heat. If you place a thermometer near the driveway,it will show the air as being warmer than over the grass.

There is a long-standing policy to fudge the data slightly in order to compensate for urban heat islands. Data from other weather stations that are in the wilderness is applied to the urbanized ones. NOAA does this in real time and forwards the results to NASA which then figures the national temperature.

The problem is that  NOAA stopped fudging the figures a few years ago and NASA didn't get the word. This meant that the effects of urbanization were introduced into the national temperature record which inflated the most recent readings.

A Canadian named Steve McIntyre noticed that the raw numbers looked strange. He sent a query to NASA and they discovered the difference in the numbers. After making the corrections, 1998 dropped from the hottest year in recorded US history to number two and the rest of the 1990s dropped out of the top ten.

So what does it mean? NASA's Goddard Institute says that the correction is meaningless because it only represents a tiny fraction of a degree and the US only represents 2% of the total surface of the Earth. I'll give them both of those butI see some other important implications.

The first is that the global warming hysteria machine has been using the incorrect numbers to insist that we are feeling the effects of global warming right here, right now. It's a harder sell tog et Americans to make most of the cuts when the effects are showing up elsewhere.

The next implication is that it might not be showing up elsewhere, either. The US is the only country that tries to filter out the effects of urban heat islands. Skeptics have long argued that urbanization was corrupting the figures and causing graphs to show warming where it is not.

Finally, there are the implications of NASA not noticing the error. The official guardian of the data is Dr. James Hansen. This is the same Dr. Hansen who first warned of global warming in 1988. It is impossible to know for sure but there is a good chance that he didn't notice the difference in the figures because he needed them to be correct. How many other figures have errors that went uncorrected because the results confirmed Hansen's or someone else's theories on global warming? There is no way to know.

NASA and Goddard should take a close look at all of the weather data currently being used to confirm that warming is happening. Without this, skeptcs like me can are justified in doubting the evidence.

Goodbye to Rove

Karl Rove announced his resignation yesterday. I'm not sorry to see him go. I think that most of what is wrong with the Republicans today came from his strategies. That includes abandoning fiscal conservatism in favor of big-spending social conservatism. Along the way Republicans wandered into territory normally occupied by Democrats - things like earmarks, trade wars, and general corruption. This let the Democrats win last year on a platform of being different (the difference is that they have no shame over earmarks).

But is he really gone? Liberals are sure that they drove him out. A quick look at Huffington shows that most posters think that Rove's departure was part of a deal over the Libby case or an attempt to get a lower profile before he could somehow be charged in the attorney firings.

Something none of them seem to have considered - did he really leave to go work on someone else's campaign? There's nothing for him to do in the Bush White House. The 2008 campaign will be managed by a new candidate and Bush will just be a bit player. Rove may have hopes of doing a repeat performance and putting the next Republican president in the White House.

I can hear the howls from the Democrats now if someone even suggested this to them. They always credited Rove with more power than is humanly possible. Remember the speculation that there would be an October Surprise in 2004 - that Rove had arraigned for bin Laden to be captured just before the election? Then there are the 9-11 Truthers who think that Rove planned the whole thing, probably with the help of the Jews.

To many Democrats, Rove is evil incarnate. The policies that I see as having Rove fingerprints on them - the moderating of the Republican party in order to capture a permanent majority - goes under their radar. Instead they assume that everything that has happened since Bush took office January, 2001 has been part of some Rovian master plan.

Who will they blame when Rove is gone?

Inside the Global Warming Hysteria Machine

This week's cover story on Newsweek promising an inside look at the Global Warming Denier's well-funded machine. It is actually a hatchet job. This article is just one example of a concerted effort to convince the country that there is no real argument about Global Warming and that anyone who says differently has been paid by ExxonMobil. This begins in the first paragragh:

{...} As she left a meeting with the head of the international climate panel, however, a staffer had some news for her. A conservative think tank long funded by ExxonMobil, she told Boxer, had offered scientists $10,000 to write articles undercutting the new report and the computer-based climate models it is based on.

This is a clever statement. It is factually correct - Boxer was told this but what Boxer was told was incorrect, or at least misleading. The think-tank in question had received less than 1% of its funding from ExxonMobil and it was offering a standard honorarium to scientists to compensate them for the time needed to write a peer-reviewed article.

Since 2005 at least, there has been a movement to shout down any skepticism to Global Warming. It has several features reflected in this article. The primary one is to insist that Global Warming is settled science. Al Gore did this in an Inconvenient Truth. This article echoes Gore.

In the Leipzig petition, just over 100 scientists and others, including TV weathermen, said they "cannot subscribe to the politically inspired world view that envisages climate catastrophes." Unfortunately, few of the Leipzig signers actually did climate research; they just kibitzed about other people's. Scientific truth is not decided by majority vote, of course (ask Galileo), but the number of researchers whose empirical studies find that the world is warming and that human activity is partly responsible numbered in the thousands even then. The IPCC report issued this year, for instance, was written by more than 800 climate researchers and vetted by 2,500 scientists from 130 nations.

This paragraph also denigrates skeptics. It would be more accurate to call the skeptics "Meteorologists" than "TV weathermen" but that would imply that they know a lot about weather. Instead, the Hysteria Machine wants to depict skeptics as people working out of their field or paid stooges.

Look at this example:

Industry found a friend in Patrick Michaels, a climatologist at the University of Virginia who keeps a small farm where he raises prize-winning pumpkins and whose favorite weather, he once told a reporter, is "anything severe." Michaels had written several popular articles on climate change, including an op-ed in The Washington Post in 1989 warning of "apocalyptic environmentalism," which he called "the most popular new religion to come along since Marxism." The coal industry's Western Fuels Association paid Michaels to produce a newsletter called World Climate Report, which has regularly trashed mainstream climate science. (At a 1995 hearing in Minnesota on coal-fired power plants, Michaels admitted that he received more than $165,000 from industry; he now declines to comment on his industry funding, asking, "What is this, a hatchet job?")

Of course it is a hatchet job. There is no mention of the World Climate Report's total budget or what percentage that $165,000 was or the circumstances of how it was granted. The reader does not know if this was 100% of Michaels' budget or 0.1%. It is quite likely that Newsweek has received more money from ExxonMobil over the years than any of the skeptics.

Another way that the Hysteria Machine manipulates public opinion is through careful use of smear terms. There are no "skeptics", only deniers.

Through advertisements, op-eds, lobbying and media attention, greenhouse doubters (they hate being called deniers) argued first that the world is not warming; measurements indicating otherwise are flawed, they said.

Gee - why would they hate a term that equates them with Holocaust Deniers? This is the only time that they are not called deniers in the article.

The other smear is here:

Now they contend that the looming warming will be minuscule and harmless. "They patterned what they did after the tobacco industry," says former senator Tim Wirth, who spearheaded environmental issues as an under secretary of State in the Clinton administration. "Both figured, sow enough doubt, call the science uncertain and in dispute. That's had a huge impact on both the public and Congress."

Now warming skeptics have been equated with Nazi sympathizers and cigarette makers. As a topper, it's supposed to be the same companies charging you $3+ per gallon. It makes you want to stone them on sight, doesn't it?

The article also uses some of the same tricks it attributes to the skeptics. It has this to say of the skeptics:

ICE ads asked, "If the earth is getting warmer, why is Minneapolis [or Kentucky, or some other site] getting colder?" This sounded what would become a recurring theme for naysayers: that global temperature data are flat-out wrong. For one thing, they argued, the data reflect urbanization (many temperature stations are in or near cities), not true global warming.

Newsweek is not above picking and choosing its facts to prove global warming. They have a graphic showing the breakup of the Larsen B Ice Shelf in Antarctica. While this looks scary, they neglect to mention that Antarctic warming is limited to this small portion of the continent and the rest is staying constant or cooling. Giving that sort of factoid might lead you to think that there is some debate about climate science.

For a real look at the debate, look at the book Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming. The author meant this to be an attack on Republicans as a follow up to his book The Republican War on Science. ALong the way he discovered that the skeptics couldn't be dismissed so easily. In interviews he has said that he isn't sure which side is true. This doesn't fit in at all with the Hysteria Machine's world view so it is never mentioned.

Also missing from the article and the Hysteria Machine's message in general is any recognition of the limits of Kyoto.

MIT's Lindzen told NEWSWEEK in 2001, he was summoned to the White House. He told Bush he'd done the right thing. Even if you accept the doomsday forecasts, Lindzen said, Kyoto would hardly touch the rise in temperatures. The treaty, he said, would "do nothing, at great expense."

This is exactly right. Kyoto was originally meant as a "first step" with most of the cuts being made by America. If Kyoto had been successfully implemented, emissions would still be higher than in 1990 because China and India are excluded from making cuts.

The Hysteria Machine does not represent science. They pick and choose. They exaggerate (remember Gore's prediction of a 20+ rise in ocean levels - that didn't come from any scientist). When a preliminary copy of the most recent IPCC report failed to be scary enough they lobbied the writers to punch it up. They also pressured the IPCC to put numbers on their estimates - a percentage of how sure the IPCC is that their figures are correct.

With this article, Newsweek established itself as a partner on the Hysteria Machine. They didn't quote scientists, they quoted Democrats. They used the Hysteria Machine's terminology. We can only be thankful that they didn't join Robert F Kennedy jr and call for skeptics to be treated as traitors - just corporate stooges.

The Long and the Short of It

Is height a good measure of health? That is the basis of a UN study written about in Newsweek. The study shows that Americans have fallen from the tallest people in the world out of the top ten. The authors of the report and the Newsweek article assume that the only factor is child health care. In order to make the report more accurate, the authors only looked at native-born whites and blacks.

The Newsweek article picks up on this and uses it to bash Americans for not instituting socialized medicine.

There are a lot of problems with the report. A big one is the assumption that Americans should have the same genetic basis for height as the Europeans. Their basis for this is sort of a shrug, pointing out that Americans were taller than Europeans for a long time. The flaw here is that, outside of genetics, the biggest factor limiting height is nutrition.  Americans may well have reached their genetic maximum decades before Europeans.

There is some indication of this in the report itself. All of the countries with tallest populations are from northern Europe. Since white Americans are from a wide mixture of Europeans, you would expect us to be a bit shorter than the tallest. The opposite is true for American blacks. Most Africans brought as slaves came from a the area close to the so-called Slave Coast. I have no idea how this sub-group compares with Africans as a whole but it could account for differences.

A second flaw in the assumptions is that the lack of insurance equates to a sicker population. The biggest factor here is childhood vaccinations.  The American rate is as high as anyone's nearly 100% and is already highly subsidized.

The final problem with the report is contained in the report itself. If universal health care is the determining factor then you would expect the British to come in at the top of the list. After all, they were the first country to institute it and are often held up as the model for the US to emulate.

Instead they come in right after the US. Even with socialized medicine and the rest of the welfare state, they are still shorter than the US population, although not by much. What does that tell you about biases in the report?

Obama Retrenches

If I didn't know better I'd think that Obama reads my blog. No sooner do I point out his potential problems in wooing the dove wing of the Democrats than he redefines his position.

Yes, he is still for an immediate pull-out from Iraq. He sees no purpose in the US troops being there. Instead he would use them to invade Pakistan - a friendly government.

I'm afraid that he lost me. Yes, there are AQ in Pakistan and they are gaining influence. The problem is that they will gain a lot more influence if we are seen pushing Pakistan's government too hard.

Then there is the whole unseemly problem of invading an ally. It would be different if the Pakistani government was inviting us in in greater numbers to fight AQ but they aren't. Instead they are incensed when innocents are killed.

I'm also a bit hazy on the idea of abandoningIraq in order to pursue AQ. What about AQ in Iraq? What if we pull our of Iraq and bin Laden moves in. Will we invade again?

Obama is making really basic mistakes, the sort of mistakes you would expect from a first-term senator with no foreign policy experience. Hillary is actually starting to look good in comparison.

Obama stakes out the pacifist wing

Obama is trying hard to position himself as the dove candidate. First he announced that potential genocide is not a good enough reason to keep troops in Iraq - or anywhere else. This is a strange attitude for the supposedly caring party but it distinguishes him from Hillary. She said, at least a few weeks ago, that she would keep enough troops in Iraq to prevent ethnic cleansing.

In last week's debate, Obama was asked if he would be willing to meet with leaders hostile to the US without precondition. He said that, yes, he would. Later in the week, he slammed Hillary as being Bush-lite for refusing to meet with leaders she disapproves of. Hillary, who knows how the White House works, knows better.

Obama is trying to carve out a position that will appeal to anti-war activists. There are dangers here.

The first problem is that some Democrats may be uncomfortable with such an iron-clad position. Since the Holocaust, the cry of the Jews has been "never again". Obama contradicts this. Will Jews vote for a candidate who would allow a second Holocaust happen?

Assuming that the strategy works and Obama gets the nomination, he faces a new set of problems. While most Americans are tired of the war, it is not clear that most Americans want a bloodbath on their hands or that they want a president who has essentially announced his surrender to terrorists and insurgents. His willingness to meet with foreign leaders who openly mock the US will make us look week.

Worse, if another terrorist strike happens on US soil, Obama has already fenced himself in. It will be hard to assure an anxious country that he will reply to terrorism with strength when he is so against military action.

John Edwards and RFK

Edwards is duplicating Robert Kennedy's poverty tour and wondering why no one is paying attention. I can think of four reasons.

1) Poverty in 2007 is not what it was 40 years ago. People were shocked to discover extreme poverty in their midst. One famous photograph showed children with their stomachs swollen from starvation within sight of Congress. Today the poor are more likely to be suffering from obesity.

2) The poverty tour didn't do that much for RFK, either. When he was assassinated, the nomination for the Democratic candidacy was still in question. Kennedy was in real danger of losing to Humphrey. Why duplicate a campaign that wasn't a winner the first time it was tried?

3) RFK was no JFK. Many people wanted to believe that Bobby had grown into his brother's shoes. Much of his support came from people who felt the loss of his brother. If he had been Bobby Smith he never would have gotten as far with his campaign.

4) Swiping another politician's shtick never works. Even if the poverty tour had propelled RFK into the White House it would not work now.
The 1960s were a different era. Voters expect a modern campaign and they want something original. The poverty tour is neither.

Sicko is ailing

After the war, Democrats are counting on health care to be the big issue of 2008. Every presidential candidate has some plan for universal coverage. Even more important, Michael Moore released a new "documentary" showing the problems in the current system and pushing for a French-style system.

The Dems and universal health care are in trouble. Moore's Sicko is bombing at the box office. In five weeks it has taken in less than $20 million. That's not bad for a documentary but it is terrible for a grassroots movement. Moore's last movie, Fahrenheit 911 was supposed to drive George Bush from office and it set box office records for a documentary. It turned out that the only people who went to see it were the true believers. The people whose minds Moore wanted to change stayed away from the movie.

The same is happening here except even the already-converted are staying away, also. It turns out that this is not the pressing issue of the day. The irony here is that Moore toned down his usual approach in order to make a more persuasive movie.

The Democrat's Dance

Seven and a half month into the new Democratic control of Congress and their new strategy on ending the war is a sleepover. Are the Democrats really serious about ending the war?

No. Granted it is difficult to push through controversial legislation with a razor-thin majority but there are reasons that the Democrats do not want the war to end.

Democratic strategists are sure that the war is why they won control of Congress in 2006. They hope to leverage the same voter anger in 2008. If the war ends before 2008 then it will be ancient history. This means that Democrats will dance around the issue but will never force Bush to withdraw the troops. At the same time, Democrats will use the issue as a fund-raiser. Their all-nighter was accompanied by action parties which mainly raised funds.

This is also being used as a wedge to try to defeat marginal Republicans. I've gotten two anti-Pryce phone messages in the last two of weeks. These are similar to the anti-Pryce calls I was getting just before the 2006 election when Pryce was almost defeated.

All of this means that the Democrats have to make war support a Republican issue. According to a Newsweek article, Democratic leaders are discouraging alliances with wavering Republicans. A bipartisan effort to end the war would ruin the Democrats' plans.

This will also cause problems for the Republican presidential candidates. It is unlikely that an anti-war candidate will win the primaries but that means that the winner of the nomination will be running on Bush's record. Most of the Republicans want to distance themselves from Bush right now.

While the Democrats have every reason to want the war to continue, they have to appear against it. If the public senses that the Democrats have been continuing the war on purpose then they lose their advantage.

They also have to keep the anti-war left from calling for their heads. Cindy Sheehan already realized that the Democrats betrayed her and announced that she will run against Pelosi. This trickle could turn into a gusher as the Democrats' most active supporters bleed away.

Maybe this is why Nader is running again. As usual, he insists that there is no difference between the parties. If the Democrats have no intention of ending the war then he is correct and he could siphon off enough support to give the election to the Republicans.

Stunts like the all-nighter are supposed to make the anti-war left think that the Democrats really are opposing Bush. In the movie Chicago, the defense lawyer is shown doing a dance as he dodges difficult questions and eventually gets two clients freed. The Democrats are trying to do this dance now - distracting people with fancy footwork while approaching their real goal.

They may well fail. There are a lot of stumbling blocks. I can't imagine the anti-war left having enough patience to wait until after the 2008 election for the war to end. They expect success by the end of the year.

A worse nightmare for the Democrats is that Iraq might stabilize. Most of the frustration against the war comes from the nightly death toll. The networks tell us how many troops died in the last 24 hours. If none died or were injured then they list Iraqi fatalities. They never mention terrorists or insurgents killed.

What if that turns around? What if the tribes continue to make peace with the US and to turn against al Qeada?

The ultimate nightmare would be for Bush to fold and start withdrawing the troops. Everyone except John Murtha is sure that this will bring an increase in violence. This could turn public opinion around. The Republican presidential candidate would not be supporting the war, he would be running against genocide.

The Republicans may own the war but the Democrats would own the defeat and its aftermath. This could lead to a Republican sweep.

So the Democrats have to make a show of being against the war but they cannot afford to actually stop it.

What Should Al Do?

Al Gore wants the developed world to cut CO2 emissions by 90% by 2050. My feeling is that I want to see Al go first. I'm serious. We just had a huge rock concert attended by celebrities who have no intention of cutting back on their lifestyle but want to send the rest of us back to the stone age. Gore made the news last Winter when his power bills came out. He burns more energy than a block of regular folks. His apologists say that he is a rich man (currently estimated as being worth $100 million) so he is entitled to live like the rich do.

I disagree. Someone who asked millions of people to pledge to push for a 90% cut in CO2 should be willing to lead the way. Here are some steps I would like to see Al make. All are doable.

Turn off the air conditioning. It makes life pleasant but people lived without it for thousands of years. Heck - I grew up without it and Al certainly didn't have air conditioning when he plowed fields behind his uncle's mules.

Turn off most of the heat. Al has a huge house but he can only occupy one room at a time (even if he has put on weight). Put in zone heating so that the room he is in has a little heat. Do the same for his wife and maybe some of the staff. He can heat the rest of the house enough to keep the pipes from freezing in the Winter but otherwise don't waste power heating rooms that aren't used. This is how the rich lived for centuries. Al can survive. He can afford heavy clothes and he's put on some natural insulation of his own.

Turn off the lights. Forget Compact Fluorescents. Our forefathers often lit a room with a single candle. Al could use one or two white LEDs per room that would more than equal a candle. He could use an LED-based book light for reading. Oh - and don't light empty rooms.

Scrap a jet. I don't know if Al owns a private jet or just leases one. If he owns one he should have it cut up for scrap. If he doesn't own one then he should buy one and cut it up. The idea is that private jets are one of the biggest emitters of CO2 that an individual can have. It's not enough to sell one so that someone else can use it. Al has to take one off of the market - maybe two.

Cut back on travel. Al travels a lot. He jets all over the world telling people to stop creating CO2 even as his travels dwarf their own emissions. Al should do more teleconferencing. If he has to travel he should be driving a Prius or a Smart Car. He should also install a governor on his cars so that they cannot be driven faster than 50 MPH. A Prius loses its advantage over other cars as it goes faster. At 100 MPH it will get terrible millage. While he's at it, Al should plan his speaking trips so that he can do one long road trip across the country per year.

Switch to Windows 98. A modern Intel dual-core chip with two gig RAM and a high-end graphic card uses a lot of power. A PC or MAC made ten years ago can do just about everything the newer PCs can do and not much slower. They just don't look as flashy doing it.

Condemn the Kennedys. At Live Earth RFK jr proclaimed that anyone who denies global warming is a traitor and should be treated as such. These are strong words coming from someone who opposes a major wind farm. His uncle Ted is against the wind farm, also. Why? Because they don't want to see it in the distance from their expensive properties. This makes them bigger hypocrites than Gore (although consorting with RFK jr raises Al's hypocrisy points). If Al is serious about cutting emissions then he should condemn anyone standing in the way of a wind farm.

Until Al does something from this list (or something similarly radical), I'm not going to alter my lifestyle. Why should I?

Losing to the Terrorists

In the next three years we could see al Qaida make a major come-back. By my count, four different countries are at risk of takeover by a Taliban-style government that is friendly to al Qaida. In order of increasing probability, these are:

Iraq.
Recently the New York Times ran an editorial admitting that a troop pull-out from Iraq would lead to increased violence, possibly even genocide. They called for a pull-out anyway. Even if Bush manages to hold against congressional Democrats, there is a good chance that the next president will order a pull-out. Al Qaida is hoping that they will be able to use the ensuing chaos to create a new Islamic government. They have invested a lot of time and effort in this project.

Somalia
This has been a failed state for decades. The closest that they have come to stability since the US pulled out was the establishment of the Islamic Courts. While some on the left insisted that this was not what it sounds like, a; Qaida says that it is. They have officially aligned themselves with the Islamic Courts and hope to re-establish themselves there.

Afghanistan
This is supposed to be the "good war" but it is dragging on. The left is beginning to call for a pull-out from here, also. All of the reasons for pulling out of Iraq can be applied here. There is a direct link between Afghanistan and 9/11 but this is often forgotten. Michael Moore insisted that we are only there to build an oil pipeline.

Worse, the left has been announcing that we already lost Afghanistan except for a small area around the capitol as part of the drum-beat calling for a withdrawal. If we leave the Taliban will be back.

Pakistan
The reason the Taliban is still active in Afghanistan is that they have a safe harbor in Pakistan. The government has ceded two provinces to them. Comparing the current government tot he Shaw of Iran, the New York Times is calling for us to withdraw our support. No good can come of this. Pakistan is a nuclear-armed nation.

Regardless of our support, the government in Pakistan might not be able to hold on much longer. There is a very real danger that the Taliban will take over. This is the ultimate nightmare. Pakistan has come close to a nuclear exchange with India already. It has also shared nuclear secrets with Iran. and both of those happened under a moderate government. A radical Islamic government in Pakistan will threaten world stability.

Just Sick

A few weeks ago Andrew Speaker learned that he had a rare form of tuberculosis while in Italy. Warned that he would be barred from flying back to the US, he went to Germany where he caught a flight to Canada and drove back to the US.

Square this with Michael Moore's new film Sicko which quotes a WHO study showing that the US is ranked number 37 in health care, between Costa Rica and Slovenia (and two spots ahead of Cuba). This means that Speaker left Italy (#2), and went through Germany (#25) and Canada (#30) before coming back to the US( #37). Speaker was quoted as saying that he was sure he would die if he didn't get back to the US.

Was he crazy? Or does he know something that Moore doesn't want you to know?

Well... It turns out that the WHO studies are not really based on a nation's health. There are other factors including "fairness" and payment method. In fact, the same study that ranks the US #37 overall puts us at #15 for overall health attainment. This WHO paper admits that, given the uncertainty factor, Switzerland (#2) could be doing worse than the US (#15). We lose points overall because we are ranked #54 in "fairness" (defined as government payments to health care). On the other hand, we are first in responsiveness and expenditure by a wide margin!

We are only ranked #32 in equality of child survival but this is misleading since it depends on member countries to define live birth. In the US, we rank many babies as premature live births where other countries would rank the same child as a miscarriage.

We are ranked #25 for live expectancy but, again, the uncertainty interval is big enough that we could actually be higher.

None of this is really meaningful in a policy debate. By including fairness of financial contribution as 25% of the total score, the people writing the report assured that countries with socialized medicine would score high, regardless of the quality of medicine received.

One thing that should be addressed in the US is the cost. We pay more than anyone else. While this results in high-quality care, much of this cost is wasted. Personally, I blame trial lawyers whose baseless suits have caused innumerable unneeded tests. Presidential candidate John Edwards personally raised the number of Caesarian Sections through class-action suits. Unfortunately, there has been no corresponding rise in health so this is wasted pain and money.

The last thing in the world that is likely to improve health care is a government take-over. This was tried in England 60 years ago. The result is that their medical system is overloaded and 40% of their doctors are from overseas (including a few jihadists). Canada tried this a couple of decades ago. When a bi-partisan panel looked into health care during Bush (41), they liked the Canadian system. A couple of decades later, it is showing its cracks. The waits for treatment, including life-saving treatment, are legendary. Many doctors living near the border have a thriving practice treating Canadians who don't want to wait (or cannot wait) for their number to come up at home. since health insurance is illegal in Canada, these people are paying for treatment out of their pockets.

My father was a doctor and I grew up with stories about how difficult it was to file with Medicare. Their reporting requirements are much worse than insurance companies. This is to be expected. The insurance companies have to process the paperwork on the other side so they also suffer financially if there is too much paperwork. The government has no such limitations. Converting everyone over to a single-payer system would mean putting everyone on Medicare.

The British have recently discovered something else about government-run health care. In the US we look at someone with an unhealthy lifestyle and assume that it is between him and his insurance company. When the government becomes the insurance company then this equation changes. The government has power than no insurance company will ever wield. Just look at some of the excesses done in the name of public health in the last year. New York City banned trans-fats on shaky grounds. Imagine how much more of this we will see if government officials think that it will save public funds.

A few months ago a medical center in England announced that it would stop doing certain procedures on overweight patients. They are strapped for cash and someone needed to be cut. So much for universal health care.

Tort reform and easing testing requirements for new drugs would do more for people than socialized medicine.

Why are they so upset about Libby?

The Huffington Post is buzzing. Keith Olbermann is calling for Bush's resignation. Why? Because he commuted the unusually harsh sentence given to Scooter Libby. Why so much anger?

By the standards used to excuse Clinton (everybody lies), Libby didn't do anything. Even the special prosecutor on the case admitted that no crime had been committed but he still charged Libby with having obstructed the investigation of the non-crime.

Again, why does this upset the left so much?

The left seems to be suffering from a combination of collective amnesia and an extra case of Bush Derangement Syndrome.

The facts of the case - Former ambassador Joseph Wilson was sent to Niger to investigate reports that Saddam Husein was trying to buy yellow cake (unprocessed uranium) to restart his nuclear program. Months later Wilson wrote a column for the New York Times saying that he had been sent by the Vice President, that he found the reports were false, and that he immediately knew that a separate report was a forgery. This ignited a firestorm. Along the way, it slipped out that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA. Wilson cried foul - his wife was classified undercover and exposing her identity was a crime. Wilson went on to write a best-seller claiming that the Bush administration deliberately exposed her identity in order to put her life at risk and as a warning to others.

This is all that the left remembers. What they have forgotten is that Wilson later admitted under oath that his report indicated that he had been sent at his wife's suggestion, that Iraq was inquiring about yellow cake, and that he had never even seen the report he claimed was a forgery. It also eventually turned out that the leak came from a Bush critic in the State Department, not from the White House.

What is more, since the whole thing involves Iraq and WMDs, the left sees this as the thin edge of the wedge that will pry open the secrets about the run-up to the war.

During the investigation they were convinced that the leak must have come from Cheney or Karl Rove. They were in ecstasy over Easter weekend, 2006 when it was rumored that either Cheney or Rove was about to be arrested. The left-wing bloggers couldn't wait for one of these men to be frog-marched out of the White House.

Of course it didn't happen. The investigation ended. No charges were filed except against Libby for giving conflicting dates.

But the left wants blood. Someone has to go to jail to satisfy them. Plus some of them are under the impression that an investigation is still going on and that Libby will cut a deal if he has to serve jail time.

Yesterday Olbermann went on about Libby's victim (how can there be a victim if there was no crime?). Today he went further:

And now, when just one cooked book gets corrected by an honest auditor, when just one trampling of the inherent and inviolable fairness of government is rejected by an impartial judge, when just one wild-eyed partisan is stopped by the figure of blind justice, this President decides that he, and not the law, must prevail.

Again - Libby was convicted of knowingly giving the wrong dates for when he first found out what Wilson's wife did for a living and in a very unusual move, was told that his jail sentence would not be suspended while he appealed. This hardly counts as a "cooked book" or a "wild-eyed partisan". But Olbermann's rants raise the ratings so NBC encourages him.

Then there is Hillary. When asked about the pardon she insisted that it was much worse than the 140 that her husband made in his last days in office. These were unrepentant felons and at least one got on the pardon list by making a substantial donation to the Clinton Presidential Library and two more hired Hillary's brother to defend them.

This alone should disqualify Hillary from the presidency but the left has selective outrage. They don't care what the Clinton's did, only what Bush did.

Update: I had forgotten that Clinton pardoned his own half-brother who had a drug conviction.

Gore's assault on truth

Al Gore wrote an editorial for sunday's New York Times. In it he makes this claim:

Consider this tale of two planets. Earth and Venus are almost exactly the same size, and have almost exactly the same amount of carbon. The difference is that most of the carbon on Earth is in the ground — having been deposited there by various forms of life over the last 600 million years — and most of the carbon on Venus is in the atmosphere.

As a result, while the average temperature on Earth is a pleasant 59 degrees, the average temperature on Venus is 867 degrees. True, Venus is closer to the Sun than we are, but the fault is not in our star; Venus is three times hotter on average than Mercury, which is right next to the Sun. It's the carbon dioxide.

A lot of environmentalists make this comparison but there is a major flaw hidden in it. When Gore says that Earth's carbon was deposited in the ground over 600 million years he implies that prior to that it was in the atmosphere and that Earth had Venus-like temperatures.

Now - here's the thing. Live developed in the oceans. Without life, according to Gore, the Earth was like Venus. But if the temperature was 867 degrees, or even 300 degrees, then there would be no oceans and therefore no life. There's just no way around this.

This may not be what he meant but it is what he said. either Gore himself doesn't understand that Venus was always different from the Earth or he is willing to make mis-statements in order to scare people. Neither option is very comforting.

Scooter Libby

Obama has this to say about the pardon:

"This decision to commute the sentence of a man who compromised our national security cements the legacy of an Administration characterized by a politics of cynicism and division, one that has consistently placed itself and its ideology above the law. This is exactly the kind of politics we must change so we can begin restoring the American people's faith in a government that puts the country's progress ahead of the bitter partisanship of recent years."

Obviously presidential pardons should be reserved for major campaign contributors and clients of the First Lady's brother. The presiding judge wanted to make an example of Libby so the sentence was disproportionate and the insistence on jail time while the appeal is being filed was just mean. That Bush would reduce Libby's sentence down to something more proportionate is fair but the left cannot see that. For example, tomorrow MSNBC's Keith Olberman plans to call for both Bush and Cheney to resign (conveniently leaving President Pelosi).

CAFE Craziness

Last week the Senate reached an agreement on raising the CAFE standards by 40%. This is the average fuel economy ratings of all cars and light trucks that a manufacturer sells. I mentioned this in a previous post but I want to go into more detail.

Currently the standards are different for cars and trucks with trucks getting a slight break. Also the definition of a truck is loose enough that, for CAFE purposes, my PT Cruiser is classified as a truck. This offsets Chrysler's bigger SUVs.

The new standards will establish a single standard for everything - cars, trucks, vans, and hybrids.

There are some serious problems with the new standard. There is no way to wring much more efficiency out of the gasoline motor. The only way to increase fuel economy is to make the car lighter or to give it a weaker motor.

Note - hybrids do not change this equation. Most of the hybrids on the market disguise the smaller gasoline engine by giving a short-term boost from an electric motor. The electric motor is powered by batteries which are charged by the gasoline motor. The net result is a fuel savings but nowhere near the new CAFE standards. The exception is the Prius which does average substantial fuel savings but mainly for city driving. The Prius runs on its electric motor and uses the gasoline engine to charge the batteries. During stop and go driving which is the worst for fuel economy, the gas motor doesn't even run much of the time. The Prius is not for everyone. It is slow and its expected life is half of conventional cars. Also, all of those batteries are heavy and take up a lot of room. In addition, on the highway, the Prius's economy drops and it is comparable to any other under-powered car.

This is the big problem. Current fleet economy is what it is because of consumer choices. If everyone put economy at the top of their priorities then no one would be buying SUVs.

The new standard is pretty high - 35 MPG. I just saw a Honda ad promoting their fuel economy being 34 MPG. Car makers will have trouble raising cars past 35 MPG. That means that they will have to cancel the less-efficient models.

I'm sure that ecologists are thrilled with this news. They would like nothing more than to outlaw the SUV. But they speak for a small minority of car-buyers.

Congress is dictating the the car manufacturers will have to make cars that the consumers do not want to buy and will fine the car makers if consumers buy too many of the wrong car.

This is not how a free economy works.

Worse, it probably will not save much fuel. By raising fuel efficiency, Congress is lowering the cost of driving. simple economics says that when the cost of something goes down, the demand goes up.

If Congress really wants to increase fuel economy, they should raise gas taxes. If people were paying $6/gallon they would reevaluate their car-buying priorities and driving habits. The Democrats would probably lose the next election but they would have the satisfaction of knowing that they made a real, direct difference.

Instead, the most likely result will be the death of the American car manufacturer.