On the contrary, Landis noted that disability claims are up, as are SSI public assistance claims. And to some, including John Laitner, the director of the University of Michigan Retirement Research Center, that spells trouble.
The Old Age Survivors Insurance (OASI) fund, from which retirement benefits are paid, continues to grow modestly, Laitner said. The OASI fund is expected to grow from $2.4 trillion in 2010 to an estimated $2.5 trillion in 2011. (See page 3 of Facts & Figures.) But the Disability Insurance (DI) trust fund is shrinking, and has reached a very low level. The DI fund is expected to fall from $180 billion in 2010 to an estimated $154 billion in 2011.
What’s more, disability awards have grown faster since 1970 than those for retirees, Laitner said. The annual number of awards to disabled retired workers rose from 1.3 million in 1970 to 2.6 million in 2010, while for disabled workers it increased from 350,000 in 1970 to 1 million in 2010. And if that wasn’t bad enough, the average age of retired beneficiaries has risen slightly since 1960, but the average age of disabled beneficiaries has fallen.
According to Facts & Figures: “The average age of disabled-worker beneficiaries in current-payment status has declined substantially since 1960, when DI benefits first became available to persons younger than age 50. In that year, the average age of a disabled worker was 57.2 years. The rapid drop in average age in the following years reflects a growing number of awards to workers under 50. By 1995, the average age had fallen to a low of 49.8, and by 2010, it had risen to 52.8. By contrast, the average age of retired workers has changed little over time, rising from 72.4 in 1960 to 73.7 in 2010.” (See page 17.)
Said Laitner: “In my opinion, long-run concerns about the financial solvency of both OASI and DI are warranted, but between the two, DI seems to raise the most immediate alarm.”
I only have anecdotal evidence, and that can be dangerous, but I cannot tell you how many fully able-bodied people come to our company and say “I have a lifetime full disability payment but I am fully able to do any work. I can’t show any income because I would lose my disability… can you pay me under the table somehow? [of course we cannot].” My strong suspicion from observing the disability process from the outside is that there is a ton of fraud.
I have met people whose lifetime dream and goal is to get a disability designation. I once had a worker who was applying for a full disability. Asked by someone in the process about my assessment of her ability, I submitted some material about her job requirements and the types of things she seemed able to do. She actually hired a lawyer who threatened to sue me if I in any way interfered with the process of her getting her disability designation. It may not seem like a fortune to you or I, but I have met a number of folks who treat a lifetime disability designation as equivalent to hitting the lottery.
Of course, reform here will be nearly impossible. You only have to look at some of the public employees groups that have lucrative disability programs where union-vetted doctors routinely handout disability designations to nearly every retiree. Any attempt at reform will merely be met with heart-rending stories in the media about folks with true disabilities needing help, ignoring the fact that any effort to cut down on fraud is actually to help these folks by insuring the financial solvency of the fund that pays them.
I have written before that peer review is not a guarantee of correctness. Most academics would laugh at that portrayal, yet that is exactly how climate peer review is treated in the media.
A number of years ago, Charles Monnett, flying over the Arctic to do some sort of whale study, saw 3-4 polar bears floating dead in the water. Without either a) retrieving the bear carcasses or b) even getting a picture of them, he wrote up a paper that discussed the siting and hypothesized the bears drowned in a storm and further that more bears would likely drown in the future if global warming melts more Arctic ice in the summer. The findings were the basis for a lot of worry about polar bears, and played a key role in Al Gore’s movie. Panic over the dead bears and Monnett’s wild hypotheses about them helped fuel calls for declaring the bears endangered, despite all evidence that their populations have actually been increasing over the last few years. Monnett did quite well from the work, parlaying his fame into management of a $50 million study budget, the dream of all academics.
Monnett’s study has come back into the news because there has been some kind of investigation of him and his work by the Feds. There has been a lot of speculation among skeptics that the investigation focuses on academic fraud, but I thought that a stretch. As I wrote here
If you read between the lines in the news articles, we really have no idea what is going on. The guy could have falsified his travel expense reports
The likelihood that an Obama Administration agency would be trying to root out academic fraud at all, or that if they did so they would start here, seems absurd to me.
There is no room for fraud because the study was, on its face, facile and useless. The authors basically extrapolated from a single data point. As I tell folks all the time, if you have only one data point, you can draw virtually any trend line you want through it. They had no evidence of what caused the bear deaths or if they were in any way typical or part of a trend — it was all pure speculation and crazy extrapolation. How could there be fraud when there was not any data here in the first place? The fraud was in the media, Al Gore, and ultimately the EPA treating this with any sort of gravitas.
Seriously, you see four floating bear bodies from 1500 feet, once. You don’t have any facts about how they died. You only have one data point in time. Where is there room for fraud? It’s one freaking useless data point. Here is just a taste of what a joke this study was:
The actual survey Monnett was conducting when he observed the dead bears in 2004 was the migration of bowhead whales. Investigators questioned how he later obtained data for a table listing live and dead polar bear sightings from 1987 to 2004.
“So how could you make the statement that no dead polar bears were observed” during that time period? May asked.
“Because we talked to the people that had flown the flights, and they would remember whether they had seen any dead polar bears,” Monnett said.
They only mystery is how this unbelievably trivial piece of work was published.
Well, now we have a better idea. The reviewers for the article were Lisa Rotterman and Andrew Derocher. Incredibly, it turns out Ms. Rotterman is his wife – yes, some people are more peers than others – and Derocher was awarded a large research contract by Monnett just before he reviewed the article. Wow.
By the way, I think I will be both right and wrong. I was pretty sure any government investigation would be about misuse of funds, and that does seem to be the main thrust here, though I was wrong in that it does seem to touch on academic fraud as well, in particular the idea of giving out grant money as a quid pro quo for a positive review (a practice that skeptics have long sustpected in the climate community).
By the way, both Monnett and his partner Gleason now are claiming that everyone blew their study out of proportion and it wasn’t really about global warming. If this is true, they were sure silent about this when they were basking in all kinds of attention and press and grant money. Either of them could have stepped forward and stopped the momentum that built from this article and they did not.
By the way, for those who still want to believe that the EPA is drive by science,
Gleason concedes that the study had a major impact on the controversial listing of the bear as an endangered species because of global warming.
“As a side note, talking about my former supervisor, he actually sent me an e-mail at one point saying, ‘You’re the reason polar bears got listed,’” Gleason said.
One sighting in history of four floating dead polar bears and suddenly our whole fossil fuel economy has to be shut down.
The US Federal expenditures for 2007 were a total of $2.8 trillion. The US Federal expenditures for 2010 were $3.55 trillion. This is a more than 25% increase. Where has all of this increased spending gone, and why are the programs it went to fund so critical that cutting them is not a serious option? It’s not like 2007 was the dark day of anarchy, lawlessness, and starving seniors. Originally the increase was ‘stimulus spending’ of various kinds, but it seems to have morphed from ‘temporary increase’ into ‘permanent budget baseline,’ and any talk of serious cutting is treated as beyond the pale by the media and the Democrats alike.
I’m of the opinion that going back to the 2007 budget (adjusted to account for population growth) should be a viable option, and would save something like $5-6 trillion over 10 years. It sounds (to me) both simple and feasible. What am I missing?”
Have you ever notices how “partisan bickering” seems to be defined asymmetrically? In most of the media, when such a term is used, it generally means “folks trying to reduce the size of the state have gotten uppity of late.” We have just such an example here in Phoenix:
A non-profit organization created by a former spokesman for the Phoenix Mayor’s Office is bankrolling the political committee aiming to recall Phoenix Councilman Sal DiCiccio.
The group, Protect Voters’ Rights, has contributed $50,000 to the anti-DiCiccio group called Save Phoenix Taxpayers, according to campaign-finance reports filed with the Phoenix city clerk. The contributions from Protect Voters’ Rights make up all but $100 of the funding Save Phoenix Taxpayers reported earning since the group formed to launch its recall campaign against DiCiccio in April.
Scott Phelps, a retired Phoenix employee who served as the spokesman for four different mayors during his 19-year tenure, said he formed Protect Voters’ Rights to protect the city from being destroyed by partisan politics.
“One of the things I find discouraging and destructive is the rush by folks to make city government more like Congress and the state Legislature,” Phelps said. “I can’t think of a single soul who looks at the partisan bickering there and says we can use a little more of that at City Hall.”
The latter statement is telling, as it seems to be in response to Republican and Tea Party influence in Congress since the last election. Phelps longs for a return to one-party (Democratic) rule, and for him “bickering” means any sort of political opposition to his agenda, which seems to be the continued growth of government size and power.
DiCiccio is certainly a hell-raiser. Most recently, he has complained about the mayor’s back-door efforts to slip large pay raises for city workers into the budget, despite the ongoing recession that has hit city finances hard. Further, he has suggested that private enterprises might be able to do things, like maintenance, janitorial, or clerical work, cheaper than government employees. It is this latter idea, which sounds good to me, which apparently puts him beyond the pale for agents of the state:
Save Phoenix Taxpayers received the first check because some of what DiCiccio has been doing is an example of what Protect Voters’ Rights aims to fight.
Phelps specifically cited DiCiccio’s lobbying of a bill during the last Legislative session that would have required Phoenix to competitively bid out city services that cost more than $250,000. Gov. Jan Brewer vetoed the bill.
“It’s not the right thing to do to run down to the Legislature and try to get that group’s leadership, which isn’t being filled by the deepest thinkers that have ever held those positions, to impose the will of one or two council members on the entire city,” Phelps said.
I will admit that seeking a state law to force Phoenix’s hand is an odd approach, but the core objection here is not the odd legislative approach but the threat to government worker jobs. DiCiccio suspects the group is a front for government workers unions, and I think he is probably right. After all, it is extremely odd to see a group that nominally calls itself a good-government group shocked by the very idea of seeking competitive bids for city services.
Newsweek has for a number of years been the poster child for the lost traditional media trying to find its way in the digital age. Tina Brown was supposed to have been the brilliant media mind brought in to save Newsweek, but if anything she has made Newsweek even more of a joke.
Her major focus seems to be to use Newsweek as a platform for self-promotion, beginning in her first issue when she used the cover to promote her upcoming women’s conference and stroke her friend Hillary. This week, she gives the cover over to promoting her biography of Lady Diana with a concept that People Magazine would probably have passed on — what would it have been like if Diana were still alive. Seriously. This is how far this magazine has fallen, trying to envision how the recent Royal Wedding would have been any more of a circus for the rich and over-dressed had Diana been in attendance.
But I probably would not have bothered to blog about it had it not been for this cover I saw in the airport. Check out the horrible zombie Diana. Jeez, is this a real story or a preview of Left 4 Dead 3? Pre-order now and get custom DLC including the solar-powered chainsaw and the zombie Lady Di. (You may have to click to enlarge to see the full horror).
Radley Balko wins journalist of the year award. I used to say he was the best reporter on the web but he is one of the to reporters in the country in any medium. His work on police and prosecutorial abuse has been critical in an era when the media is generally in the tank for tough on crime overreach (eg love affair of press with sheriff Joe).
Ages ago, I was an executive at Mercata, an Internet store whose strategy was to sell items whose price would go down as more people agreed to buy the item. In theory, this creates an incentive for viral marketing, as anyone who buys has a financial incentive to get their friends to join in.
The company died for a variety of reasons, in part just because like many startups in that weird era of the late 90′s, we just built up too many fixed costs too fast to reach breakeven in any reasonable amount of time. We were also ahead of our time in some ways — the model makes a ton more sense in the Facebook / social media age.
But we also failed, as did many Internet stores, because order fulfillment, product inventory, shipping, etc was and still is expensive.
Glenn Reynolds notices that a lot of folks (including Amazon in his link) are selling coupons. This may be a blinding glimpse of the obvious to all of you, but the appeal of a retailer of selling coupons online is that they are virtually free to inventory, to fulfill, and to ship. Think of it this way — you want to compete online on price. You can actually sell the physical stuff at a discount. Or you can sell the coupon, which gives access to the customer access to the same discount but is much easier to fulfill. It also lets you “sell” things you normally can’t provide over the Internet, like a restaurant meal.
The model is not that compelling to me, because I shop online for the convenience rather than the price. I buy some Groupon type coupons, but generally for things like restaurants rather than products.
Folks in other parts of the country hypothesize that their politicians may or may not have enemies lists, but these are all, frankly, wimpy initiatives when compared to our famous Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his treatment of enemies. You see, if Sheriff Joe sees you as a political enemy, he brings you up on charges. When he came in conflict with his bosses, he and his buddy former County attorney Andrew Thomas brought them up on racketeering charges. When a judge failed to deliver the rulings he wanted in that case, he brought the judge up on bribery charges that fell apart even before the ink was dry (read about some of the hijinx here).
Now there is an ongoing investigation of Sheriff Joe and his department around Arpaio’s attempts to get a political opponent, one of his bosses on the Board of Supervisors Joe Stapely, brought up on charges. Or at least, be seen in the media as brought up on charges, because it is fairly clear that Arpaio was less interested with the strength of the case (which like many of his other political attacks fell apart nearly immediatley) as casting negative media attention on a political opponent. Money quote highlighted in bold, from the Phoenix New Times which has a great history of staying on Arpaio’s case but does not write very well organized articles.
About a month after the indictment, MACE [a division within Arpaio's organization] raided the offices of an associate of Stapley’s, developer Conley Wolfswinkel. The claimed justification was that the Sheriff’s Office was looking for evidence of additional crimes that detectives had uncovered in the disclosure-form case.
Knight [leader of MACE] had reviewed the search warrant before a raid on January 22, 2009, and believed that he had enough evidence based on testimony from Stapley’s bookkeeper, Joan Stoops, to carry out the raid. Stoops told detectives that it appeared Wolfswinkel had inked an agreement to pay Stapley hundreds of thousands of dollars in a land deal when Wolfswinkel had business before the Board of Supervisors.
Knight said Sheriff Arpaio reviewed the search warrant personally — and asked Knight why he hadn’t included more details about the case in the warrant. Knight, according to the report, told Arpaio that the details weren’t necessary to establish probable cause, the legal term for the level of evidence needed to persuade a judge to sign a search warrant.
The report doesn’t specify which details Arpaio wanted Knight to add, but it does describe how Arpaio pressed him on the issue, saying he wanted to make sure the warrant would hold up. Knight didn’t buy what Arpaio was saying, believing that the sheriff only wanted the extra information so he could sensationalize the case.
“Are we writing a press release or are we writing a search warrant?” Knight said he asked the sheriff. “I just need to be clear on what we’re trying to produce here.”
The sheriff stared at him and said sternly: “Get the information in there,” the report states. Arpaio then got up and walked out.
Knight did as he was told and included the superfluous information. He had the warrant signed and prepared his deputies for the raid on Wolfswinkel’s Tempe business office. He recalled that Arpaio’s right-hand man, then-Chief Deputy David Hendershott, called Knight numerous times, asking: “Are we in yet?”
Hendershott, Knight stated, told him that as soon as the search warrant was signed, Knight was to go to the nearest Kinko’s and fax a copy to sheriff’s headquarters.
“So we get in; we secure the place,” Knight said to investigators. “I run over to the nearest Kinko’s, which is three or four miles away, [and] fax the document over to him.
“By the time I get back to Conley’s business, I’ve already got a news helicopter flying overhead.”
Knight found out later that the search warrant had been handed to the media in conjunction with a press release.
A news conference was under way before Knight got back to his office.
Arpaio also tailored his public statement to emphasize the shocking revelation that Stapley and Wolfswinkel were being investigated in an alleged “bribery” scheme.
The bribery story fell apart within days, by the way, as the officers realized they had the dates wrong on the land deal such that the deal and the supposed political payoff could not be related.
Arpaio faces a myriad of charges. His defense was that it all happened without his knowledge, which is laughable given the way he is known to run the department. He is claiming in his PR that the whole department is created in his image but that he has no responsibility for what it does. Like any good mobster, he apparently had a consigliere named Hendershott who he is attempting to claim now was a loan wolf rather than Arpaio’s right hand man, in order to deflect accountability.
The entire article is worth a read for Arpaio-philes and phobes alike. It serves as a good summary of some of the worst excesses of Arpaio’s reign.
Update: By the way, does anyone feel comfortable with a police department (much less sheriff Joe) having the weapon shown in this picture. Can one imagine any legitimate use, short of perhaps a full-blow zombie invasion? (source)
Have you heard the news? Apparently Donald Trump is running for President. Of course you would have to be living in a hole not to know that. Over the last couple of weeks, based just on media stories tracked by Google News, there have been over a thousand news stories a day mentioning Trump’s potential run for the White House. In fact, there are more than double the number of articles on Trump’s potential run than their are on the actual candidacies of Gary Johnson, Ron Paul, and Tim Pawlenty combined.
Do you like candidacies by crazy populist billionaire reality TV stars? If so, then by all means, let’s have campaign spending limits.
Well, you now have a simple algorithm for sorting flakes and politicized hacks from honest scientists — anyone who is going around this week saying that the tornadoes in Alabama this week were due to manmade CO2 sit firmly in the former category. First up, Dr. Roy Spencer
If there is one weather phenomenon global warming theory does NOT predict more of, it would be severe thunderstorms and tornadoes.
Tornadic thunderstorms do not require tropical-type warmth. In fact, tornadoes are almost unheard of in the tropics, despite frequent thunderstorm activity.
Instead, tornadoes require strong wind shear (wind speed and direction changing rapidly with height in the lower atmosphere), the kind which develops when cold and warm air masses “collide”. Of course, other elements must be present, such as an unstable airmass and sufficient low-level humidity, but wind shear is the key. Strong warm advection (warm air riding up and over the cooler air mass, which is also what causes the strong wind shear) in advance of a low pressure area riding along the boundary between the two air masses is where these storms form.
But contrasting air mass temperatures is the key. Active tornado seasons in the U.S. are almost always due to unusually COOL air persisting over the Midwest and Ohio Valley longer than it normally does as we transition into spring.
For example, the poster child for active tornado seasons was the Superoutbreak of 1974, which was during globally cool conditions. This year, we are seeing much cooler than normal conditions through the corn belt, even delaying the planting schedule. Cool La Nina years seem to favor more tornadoes, and we are now coming out of a persistent La Nina. The global-average temperature has plummeted by about 1 deg. F in just one year.
An unusually warm Gulf of Mexico of 1 or 2 degrees right now cannot explain the increase in contrast between warm and cold air masses which is key for tornado formation because that slight warmth cannot compete with the 10 to 20 degree below-normal air in the Midwest and Ohio Valley which has not wanted to give way to spring yet.
The “extra moisture” from the Gulf is not that important, because it’s almost always available this time of year…it’s the wind shear that caused this outbreak.
More tornadoes due to “global warming”, if such a thing happened, would be more tornadoes in Canada, where they don’t usually occur. NOT in Alabama.
Thus we yet again run into the logic of the marketing campaign to change the effect of CO2 from global warming to climate change, as if CO2 could somehow make for random climate changes without the intermediate step of warming.
We all draw upon fallible memories to come to conclusions about whether events are more or less prevalent today, and in many cases our memories fail us (often due to observer bias, in particular the increasing frequency of an event in the media being mistaken for the increasing underlying frequency of the event). I will say that my memory is that the seventies were the time in my life with the most severe weather (including horrible regional famines) and the seventies were the coldest decade of my life so far.
Anyway, tornadoes are something we can measure, rather than just remember, so let’s go to the data:
In An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore and company said that global warming was increasing the number of tornadoes in the US. He claimed 2004 was the highest year ever for tornadoes in the US. In his PowerPoint slide deck (on which the movie was based) he sometimes uses this chart (form the NOAA):
Whoa, that’s scary. Any moron can see there is a trend there. Its like a silver bullet against skeptics or something. But wait. Hasn’t tornado detection technology changed over the last 50 years? Today, we have doppler radar, so we can detect even smaller size 1 tornadoes, even if no one on the ground actually spots them (which happens fairly often). But how did they measure smaller tornadoes in 1955 if no one spotted them? Answer: They didn’t. In effect, this graph is measuring apples and oranges. It is measuring all the tornadoes we spotted by human eye in 1955 with all the tornadoes we spotted with doppler radar in 2000. The NOAA tries to make this problem clear on their web site.
With increased national doppler radar coverage, increasing population, and greater attention to tornado reporting, there has been an increase in the number of tornado reports over the past several decades. This can create a misleading appearance of an increasing trend in tornado frequency. To better understand the true variability and trend in tornado frequency in the US, the total number of strong to violent tornadoes (F3 to F5 category on the Fujita scale) can be analyzed. These are the tornadoes that would have likely been reported even during the decades before Dopplar radar use became widespread and practices resulted in increasingtornado reports. The bar chart below indicates there has been little trend in the strongest tornadoes over the past 55 years.
Well, that certainly is different (note 2004 in particular, given the movie claim). No upward trend at all when you get the data right. I wonder if Al Gore knows this? I am sure he is anxious to set the record straight.
By the way, note the 2nd to last bar, which I believe it the 2008 bar (this chart is really hard to read, but it is the only way I have found the data from the NOAA). In spring of 2008, the media went nuts with a spring spate of tornadoes, saying that the apocalypse was here and this was the ultimate proof of global warming. In particular, ABC ran a story about how the frequency was twice the previous year. Beyond the insanity of drawing long term trends in a noisy system from 2 data points, notice that the previous year was virtually the lowest number in half a century, and despite being twice as high, 2008 turned out to be an average to lower-than-average tornado year. This is what the media does with the climate issue, and why you can trust almost none of it.
Update: By the way, 10 of the top 10 deadliest tornadoes occurred before 1955? An artifact of increasing wealth, better construction, and in particular better warning and communication systems? Likely — it is no accident, I think, these all occurred before the popularization of TV. However, remember this argument when you see charts of increasing property damage from hurricanes. These are also an artifact of increasing wealth, but the other way around — more rich people build expensive houses on the beech, the more property damage from hurricanes irregardless of hurricane strength or frequency.
Joe Arpaio, I suppose seeing how Ben Quayle rode his writing gig for the Dirty into Congress, has decided he wants to compete with all manner of bottom-fishing web sites. He has created a special web feature in a what he states is an attempt to drive more people to his web site — the goofy booking photo of the day.
Several local lawyers, including some mental health advocates, are asking if it is appropriate for a sheriff to run online contests to vote for the inmate with the worst booking photos. This is a great example of a situation (like video surveillance) where public officials have less, rather than more rights and privileges than ordinary citizens. Kudos to Scott Ambrose for making a point that is seldom made, and we should remind politicians of all the time:
Arpaio says that booking photos are aired in the news media every day. A local alternative weekly even took a page from Arpaio’s playbook earlier this year and let readers have fun with some of the sheriff’s mug shots.
“Sheriff Joe will argue that ‘I can do this because New Times can,’ ” Ambrose said. “There’s lots of things the government can’t do that you and I can.”
I have another question – for what possible public purpose is Arpaio spending taxpayer money to drive people to his web site? This is so incredibly self-serving its hard to believe, but fits right in with Arpaio’s whole history of taxpayer-funded self-promotion.
PS- I have always argued that booking photos should not be public information, as they amount to an improper punishment. The legal system has a technical term for someone who has been arrested but has not gone to trial: Innocent.
The sun follows an (approximately) 11-year cycle as sunspots ebb and flow. The peak of these cycles, ie the number of sunspots at the cycle’s maximum, is thought to correlate with the strength of the sun’s output. In the past, periods with very low sunspot activity through an entire cycle have correlated with very cold temperatures (e.g. the Maunder Minimum and the Little Ice Age).
Current prediction for the next sunspot cycle maximum gives a smoothed sunspot number maximum of about 62 in July of 2013. We are currently over two years into Cycle 24. The predicted size would make this the smallest sunspot cycle in nearly 200 years.
The low cycle 200 years ago coincided with a decade or more of wicked-cold temperatures, particularly in Northern Europe (think Napoleon’s army freezing to death in 1812).
One of the reasons this probably has not gotten much coverage is that climate scientists have worked hard in the media to attribute the vast majority of past warming, particularly in the period 1978-1998, to ppm changes in CO2 concentration. But this same 2-decade period saw extremely high solar activity (as measured by sunspots) and ocean cycles like the PDO in the warm phase. To maximize how much past warming was attributed to CO2, warming alarmists had to take the fairly absurd position that these ocean cycles and changes in solar output had only trivial effects on temperatures (much more here).
Well, we may find out over the next few years just how trivial Mr. Sun is or is not to the climate. And we may well find out something else many skeptics have said for years — for activities like agriculture, cooling is way more damaging than warming. In the Middle Ages, agriculture boomed from 1100-1300 even as temperatures rose higher than they are today (at least in Europe). In the first decades of the 1300′s, cooling led to agricultural failure and famine, famines that are often credited for weakening the population and thus increasing the mortality from the Black Death a few years later.
This is the most helpful article I have found yet on the problems at earthquake-damaged nuclear plants. As one can imagine, it is a lot more sensible than some of the garbage in the general media.
It cleared up one point of confusion I had – I was not sure why there was still heat generation after the control rods slammed down, killing the fission process. But apparently there are a number of intermediate fission products created that continue to decay for several days, producing about 3% of the heat of the full fission process. This heat is what boiled away the water in the reactor vessel once flow of cooling water stopped. It is this boiling that led to the necessity to release steam (to reduce pressure in the reactor vessel). It was this steam that was partially disassociated into hydrogen and oxygen, which led to the explosion.
One fact that has been lost in all the hype, and may continue to be lost, is that the earthquake alone (which was 7 times larger than the plant was designed for) was necessary but not sufficient to lead to the current problems. Everything probably would have been fine had it not been for the tsunami knocking off all the diesel generators the plant used in an emergency to keep the colling pumps running. Apparently the generators they rushed to the site later could not be used due to various incompatibilities, the type of real-world frustrating problem that will be immediately recognizable to any engineer who has a troubleshooting background.
Update: Unfortunately, the author may have been overly optimistic. The author implied the pile would stop producing new heat after a few days, but that does not seem to be the case, particularly since spent fuel rods apparently have to be kept in water to keep them cool months or years after they were in service. With the apparent rupture of the main presure vessel around the core, all bets would seem to be off in terms of containing the most harmful radioactive elements.
I did troubleshooting at a refinery for years, and almost every time the worst disasters were from improbable event and/or screwup after improbable event. The human mind seems to be unable to really grasp just how screwed up things can get. The novel Jurassic Park was as much about this problem as it was about dinosaurs.
Update #2: This is the piece that was missing from the earlier linked report:
The sharp deterioration came after a frantic day and night of rescue efforts focused largely on the No. 2 reactor. There, a malfunctioning valve prevented workers from manually venting the containment vessel to release pressure and allow fresh seawater to be injected into it. That meant that the extraordinary remedy emergency workers had jury-rigged to keep the nuclear fuel from overheating no longer worked.
As a result, the nuclear fuel in that reactor was exposed for many hours, increasing the risk of a breach of the container vessel and more dangerous emissions of radioactive particles.
By Tuesday morning, Tokyo Electric Power said that it had fixed the valve and resumed seawater injections, but that it had detected possible leaks in the containment vessel that prevented water from fully covering the fuel rods.
My novel BMOC is now $0.99 at Amazon. With my second book coming out sometime soon (I hope) I thought I would experiment with online pricing models. I sold about 30 a month at the old price, but Glen Reynolds linked an article praising the 99-cent Kindle price point. So what the heck, let’s try it. My loss is your gain, as the ads say.
Reasons you might like the novel:
It’s a sort of combination of Harvard Business School case study and murder mystery, with some humor thrown in
The business at the center of the novel is actually the good guy (err gal, I guess, since the protagonist is female). While sympathetic to capitalism, the book is primarily a light crime novel, not some sort of Randian morality tale.
The villains include a media mogul, a tort lawyer, a local news anchor, and a US Senator – just like life!
Several of the business models were made up on the fly when I attended boring cocktail parties and entertained myself creating whimsical businesses for myself. Since that time, readers of the book have emailed me with news stories of recent startup companies following almost identical strategies.
This is the whole history of the climate debate, with alarmists trying one technique after another to avoid engagement. Skeptics are funded by Exxon — Don’t listen to them, they are just shills! The science is settled — No need for debate! Skeptics are violent and helped kill Gabriella Giffords — everything they say is hate speech and must be ignored!
… I left one off the list — that rather than disputing a particular scientific hypothesis, alarmists like to claim that skeptics are engaging in a “war on science.” I suppose I could ask the author, as she tries to shift the debate from science to politics, exactly who is politicizing science. Certainly there are skeptical morons in the Republican party who understand none of the issues and knee-jerk oppose the alarmist position. Just as there are numerous progressive morons who claim to be all about the science while signing petitions to ban dihydrogen monoxide. When Judith Warner chooses to focus on the morons, rather than the skeptics making scientific arguments, what is she telling us by this choice? In fact, she tries to take the very existence of the morons as evidence no one is doing fact-based science on the skeptic side, a proposition absurd not only by its tortured logic but also because its so easy to disprove by example.
This anti-science meme has, until recently, actually been a powerful argument in the alarmist arsenal. Not particularly for its effect on the voters at large, though it certainly helps support the in-group progressive mythology about themselves and their enemies that helps confirm their own smugness. No, I think for years this has had an effect on scientists outside of the climate community. Normally such scientists would not wade in to a field they know little about to express an opinion, or, God forbid, sign a petition on issues in that field. But so many academics were fooled into believing that skeptics were actually engaging in a war on science (a la evolution denying) that they felt the need to support climate alarmists. Their signatures on petitions did not necesarily mean they agreed with the science, but represented for them a plea of support of science itself.
As scientists from outside the climate community have begun actually looking at the science, or observing the science via the climategate emails, they are horrified by what they see, e.g. the secretiveness, the resistance to replication, and the flat out shoddy science. Many of them are starting to understand that when they signed these petitions supporting alarmists in the name of science, they were in fact supporting Jenna Jamison in the name of chastity.
By the way, lets not forget which side of this argument began the politicization and ad hominem attacks. I will offer just this one example, from the Economist way back in 2002 (eight years before the tea party — and note the key quote is over 20 years old)
Stephen Schneider, [who ironically has the famously corrupt "hide the decline" chart on his personal web page] spoke we suspect not just for himself when he told Discover in 1989: “[We] are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place…To do that we need to get some broad-based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have…Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.” In other words, save science for other scientists, in peer-reviewed journals and other sanctified places. In public, strike a balance between telling the truth and telling necessary lies.
Younger readers will be forgiven for not fully understanding just how credulous the American public became during the late 80′s and early 90′s as the media, prosecutors, and various advocacy groups worked hard to convince us every school was a sort of Road-Warrior-like playground for child predators. Adult after adult were convicted based on bizarre stories about ritual murder, sexually depraved clowns, and all kinds of other dark erotic nightmares. In most cases there was little or no physical evidence — only stories from children, usually coerced after numerous denials by “specialists.” These specialists claimed to be able to bring back repressed memories, but critics soon suspected they were implanting fantasies.
Scores of innocent people went to jail — many still languish there, including targets of Janet Reno, who rode her fame from these high-profile false prosecutions all the way to the White House, and Martha Coakley, just missed parleying her bizarre prosecutions into a Senate seat (Unbelievably, the Innocence Project, which does so much good work and should be working on some of Reno’s victims, actually invited her on to their board).
Radley Balko has yet another example I was not familiar with. The only thing worse than these prosecutions is just how viciously current occupants of the DA office fight to prevent them from being questioned or overturned.
I am particularly sensitive to this subject because I sat on just such a jury in Dallas around 1992. In this case the defendant was the alleged victim’s dad. The initial accuser was the baby sitter, and red lights started going off for me when she sat in the witness box saying that she turned the dad into police after seeing another babysitter made a hero on the Oprah show. The babysitter in my case clearly had fantasies of being on Oprah. Fortunately, defense attorneys by 1992 had figured out the prosecution game and presented a lot of evidence against, and had a lot of sharp cross-examination of, the “expert” who had supposedly teased out the alleged victim’s suppressed memories.
We voted to acquit in about an hour, and it only took that long because there were two morons who misunderstood pretty much the whole foundation of our criminal justice system — they kept saying the guy was probably innocent but they just didn’t want to take the risk of letting a child molester go. Made me pretty freaking scared to every put my fate in the hands of a jury (ironically the jury in the famous McMartin pre-school case was hung 10-2 in favor of acquittal, with two holdouts).
Anyway, one oddity we did not understand as a jury was that we never heard from the victim. I supposed it was some kind of age thing, that she was too young to testify. As it turns out, we learned afterwards that she did not testify for the prosecution because she spent most of her time telling anyone who would listen that her dad was innocent and the whole thing was made up by the sitter. Obviously the prosecution wasn’t going to call her, and her dad would not allow his attorneys to call her as a witness, despite her supportive testimony, because he did not want to subject his daughter to hostile cross-examination. This is the guy the state wanted to prosecute — he risked jail to spare his daughter stress, when in turn the state was more than happy to put that little girl through whatever it took to grind out a false prosecution.
I remember feeling like they didn’t pick just anybody–they picked me because I had a good memory of what they wanted, and they could rely on me to do a good job. I don’t think they thought I was telling the truth, just that I was telling the same stories consistently, doing what needed to be done to get these teachers judged guilty. I felt special. Important….
I remember going in our van with all my brothers and sisters and driving to airports and houses and being asked if we had been [abused in] these places. I remember telling people [that the McMartin teachers] took us to Harry’s Meat Market, and describing what I thought the market was like. I had never been in there before, and I was fairly certain I was going to get in trouble for what I was saying because it probably was not accurate. I imagined someone would say, “They don’t have that kind of freezer there.” And they did say that. But then someone said, “Well, they could have changed it.” It was like anything and everything I said would be believed.
The lawyers had all my stories written down and knew exactly what I had said before. So I knew I would have to say those exact things again and not have anything be different, otherwise they would know I was lying. I put a lot of pressure on myself. At night in bed, I would think hard about things I had said in the past and try to repeat only the things I knew I’d said before.
The NFL encapsulates, perhaps better than any other single business entity, the popular conceptions — and misconceptions — about capitalism and the nature of markets. The league is the epitome of statist “crony” capitalism. Its franchise operators demand huge government subsidies for stadiums while jealously guarding its prerogatives as a “private” business. Governments (and their media enablers) largely go along with this because they’ve been led to believe the NFL’s popularity is so immense that no respectable city can go without a franchise.
Professional football is the ethanol of the entertainment industry. Since 1990, nearly every NFL franchise has either opened a new stadium, made substantial renovations to existing stadiums, or is currently in the process of obtaining a new stadium. Over this 20-year period the league’s franchises obtained over $7 billion in taxpayer subsidies raging from direct taxes to publicly backed bonds. Ten stadiums are 100% government-financed, while another 19 are at least 75% government-financed. Every single franchise receives some amount of government subsidies.
Here is a great way to think about it — many new NFL stadiums cost in the one billion dollar range. That is a billion dollars for a building that is used 3 hours per day for 10 days a year (8 regular season and 2 preseason games). A billion dollars for a building with 0.3% occupancy. How can a private entity afford such an investment and still pay multi-million dollar salaries to their employees? They can’t. Which is why you and I as taxpayers are so often on the hook for the costs.
Mark Thornton of the Mises Institute wrote a few years ago about the “skyscraper index,” a correlation first studied by economist Andrew Lawrence, which purports to connect downturns in the business cycle with the construction of the world’s largest skyscraper. Thornton did not suggest the “skyscraper index” was an infallible predictor of economic downturns, but there was ample empirical evidence to suggest “the cause of skyscrapers reaching new heights and severe business cycles are related to instability in debt financing and that the institutions that regulate debt financing should be reevaluated, if not replaced with more efficient and stabilizing institutions.”
Cowboys Stadium may prove to be the NFL’s version of the Chrysler Building, where the groundbreaking occurred a month before the stock market crash of 1929. By most accounts “Jerry World” is the most opulent, luxurious stadium ever built for an NFL team. Not surprisingly, it is also a debt-ridden project that exists only because Jerry Jones had easy access to a government-backed credit card.
Take all the psuedo-quasi-scientific stuff you read in the media about global warming. Of all that mess, it turns out there is really only one scientific question that really matters on the topic of man-made global warming: Feedback.
While the climate models are complex, and the actual climate even, err, complexer, we can shortcut the reaction of global temperatures to CO2 to a single figure called climate sensitivity. How many degrees of warming should the world expect for each doubling of CO2 concentrations (the relationship is logarithmic, so that is why sensitivity is based on doublings, rather than absolute increases — an increase of CO2 from 280 to 290 ppm should have a higher impact on temperatures than the increase from, say, 380 to 390 ppm).
The IPCC reached a climate sensitivity to CO2 of about 3C per doubling. More popular (at least in the media) catastrophic forecasts range from 5C on up to about any number you can imagine, way past any range one might consider reasonable.
But here is the key fact — Most folks, including the IPCC, believe the warming sensitivity from CO2 alone (before feedbacks) is around 1C or a bit higher (arch-alarmist Michael Mann did the research the IPCC relied on for this figure). All the rest of the sensitivity between this 1C and 3C or 5C or whatever the forecast is comes from feedbacks (e.g. hotter weather melts ice, which causes less sunlight to be reflected, which warms the world more). Feedbacks, by the way can be negative as well, acting to reduce the warming effect. In fact, most feedbacks in our physical world are negative, but alarmist climate scientists tend to assume very high positive feedbacks.
What this means is that 70-80% or more of the warming in catastrophic warming forecasts comes from feedback, not CO2 acting alone. If it turns out that feedbacks are not wildly positive, or even are negative, then the climate sensitivity is 1C or less, and we likely will see little warming over the next century due to man.
This means that the only really important question in the manmade global warming debate is the sign and magnitude of feedbacks. And how much of this have you seen in the media? About zero? Nearly 100% of what you see in the media is not only so much bullshit (like whether global warming is causing the cold weather this year) but it is also irrelevant. Entirely tangential to the core question. Its all so much magician handwaving trying to hide what is going on, or in this case not going on, with the other hand.
To this end, Dr. Roy Spencer has a nice update. Parts are a bit dense, but the first half explains this feedback question in layman’s terms. The second half shows some attempts to quantify feedback. His message is basically that no one knows even the sign and much less the magnitude of feedback, but the empirical data we are starting to see (which has admitted flaws) points to negative rather than positive feedback, at least in the short term. His analysis looks at the change in radiative heat transfer in and out of the earth as measured by satellites around transient peaks in ocean temperatures (oceans are the world’s temperature flywheel — most of the Earth’s surface heat content is in the oceans).
Read it all, but this is an interesting note:
In fact, NO ONE HAS YET FOUND A WAY WITH OBSERVATIONAL DATA TO TEST CLIMATE MODEL SENSITIVITY. This means we have no idea which of the climate models projections are more likely to come true.
This dirty little secret of the climate modeling community is seldom mentioned outside the community. Don’t tell anyone I told you.
This is why climate researchers talk about probable ranges of climate sensitivity. Whatever that means!…there is no statistical probability involved with one-of-a-kind events like global warming!
There is HUGE uncertainty on this issue. And I will continue to contend that this uncertainty is a DIRECT RESULT of researchers not distinguishing between cause and effect when analyzing data.
I was doing something today that I generally avoid, which is thinking about Sarah Palin. How bizarre would it be to wake up one morning and find that some random maniac you had never met in a city you might never have visited had gone on a killing spree and prominent people were all over the media blaming you for the killing. Not your political party, not all those who shared your views, not all those from a similar group, but you personally. Blood on your hands. How weird would that be (and how pissed off would I be — I can say that I would have lashed out publicly early and hard and often, much harder than Palin’s video, though no one ever has called me “presidential” in temperament).
Seems like there should be a novel in there somewhere. Yeah, I know the falsely accused thing is done all the time (e.g. the Prisoner) but I can’t shake the feeling there is an interesting concept here.
If you had told me last week that half the media would be blaming Sarah Palin for the actions of a leftish nutcase, or that Keith Olberman would be accusing, well, anybody, of being too immoderate in their rhetoric, I would have said you were crazy. Seldom have I found the tone and tenor of the media coverage of any event to be less satisfactory than with the Giffords shooting this weekend. So of course, I have joined the fray with my own column on Forbes.
We libertarians cringe when presented with a “national tragedy” like the shooting of Gabriella Giffords. Not because we are somehow more or less sensitive to vilence and loss of life, but because we begin bracing for the immediate, badly thought-out expansion of state power that nearly always follows any such tragedy, whether it be 9/11 or Columbine or Oklahoma City or even Pearl Harbor. Those looking to expand the power of the state, and of state officials, make their greatest progress in the emotional aftermath of a such a tragedy. These tragedies are the political equivilent of the power play in ice hockey, when defenders of liberty find themselves temporarily shorthanded, and those wishing to expand state power rush to take advantage.
Here is one example from later in the piece:
After 9/11, Republicans argued that it was time to put away political differences to rally around the President in a time of war. They implied that criticizing the President in such a time was somehow unpatriotic and counter-productive. Was this true? I thought the opposite — that the momentous decisions to be made post-9/11 demanded more rather than less debate. America would eventually wake up from this celebration of unity with a hangover in the form of the TSA, the Patriot Act, detention at Guantanamo Bay, and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The fact is that politicians, particularly those in power, find every excuse to ask Americans to “moderate their public discourse,” in large part because this request translates in the real world to “reduce the criticisms of those in power.” So it should not be surprising that many of those who represent our current ruling party blamed the Giffords shooting on the hate-filled rhetoric of the opposition party, even before we knew the name of the killer,.
From a larger historical perspective, I would argue that current political discourse is really rather tame. Even the wackiest cable opinion show pales in comparison to the fire-breathing political attacks that could be found in nearly any 19th century newspaper. In the 1960’s, political discourse became so heated that it spilled out into the streets in the form of urban riots. In fact, what we should fear far more than our rhetoric is the current threats by politicians like Jim Clyburn of South Carolina to use this tragedy as an excuse to put new restrictions on speech. A number of high-profile comentators have spent more time blaming this shooting on Sarah Palin than on the shooter himself. Given the complete lack of evidence for any such connection, such efforts can only be viewed as an effort by those on power to silence a prominent opposition leader.
Migrated about 20 web sites to my new server (actual a virtual private server rather than a dedicated server, but it seems to have most of the functionality of dedicated at a lower price — performance remains to be tested). This was sort of a death march as it was incredibly dull and repetitive, especially since many of the sites use WordPress as the content management system so they required database setup and migration as well. Basically got almost everything done except this site. I am sure after 20 smooth moves Murphy’s Law will cut in on the largest and most complicated.
Created our Christmas / Holiday card. Some 20 years ago I set the unfortunate precedent of trying to do something unique for our cards, so I have made this a double extra more time consuming process than it has to be. (past examples here, here, here)
Made a lot of progress laying track on my model railroad. All my track is scratch built (from rails and ties) and so it takes a while, but I have nearly all the major switches in place, which are the real time consumers when hand laying track
Created a second RAID for my home theater system. Incredibly, the original 8Tb raid (5×2 TB drives in a RAID 5) is almost full. Chalk this up in part to Blu Ray rips (which can be 30Gb each) but also to my finally ripping TV series I have on disk (Sopranos, Mad Men, Firefly, etc). These involve a lot of disks.
At some point soon I want to write a review of my experience with the new SageTV version 7.0 software, which is an ENORMOUS improvement over their old versions. The Sage system is still for advanced users, but the process for managing plugins and extensions (the whole point of Sage is its customizability) is greatly improved. The new HD300 set top box is also improved, though with a flaw or two. You are welcome to email me if you are considering Sage (or if you want something more capable than most media streaming boxes) and I can give you the pros and cons.
Now all I need is a few Christmas present ideas for my wife.
That’s the position of Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard on the failed case of Mario de la Fuente Manriquez, a Mexican media millionaire accused of organized crime.
Manriquez was arrested and charged earlier this year with 19 counts of money laundering, assisting a criminal syndicate, conspiracy and fraud. Seven other suspects, including Manriquez’s son, were arrested in the alleged scheme to fraudulently own and operate several Valley nightclubs and exotic car dealerships.
But the state still wants to keep $12 million of Manriquez’s money that was seized in the case, a spokesman for the AG’s office tells New Times today.
The folks involved don’t strike me as particularly savory characters, but due process is due process and if you drop charges against the guys, the money should be considered legally clean, especially when the authorities confess
Prosecutors acknowledged the money funneled to the United States from Mexico was earned legitimately by Manriquez. In the end, they couldn’t prove he knew what was happening with his dough.
What happened to the money, by the way, is that is was invested in a series of businesses that appear to be entirely legal, their only apparent crime being that the incorporation paperwork omitted the name of Manriquez as a major source of funds. Wow, money legally earned invested in legal businesses, with the only possible crime a desire for confidentiality (at worst) or a paperwork mistake (at best). Sure glad our state AG is putting his personal time in on this one.
I do not know Arizona’s forfeiture laws, but if they are like most other states’, they probably allow state authorities to keep the seized money to use as they please, an awfully large incentive for prosecutorial abuse.
I suppose one cold say that climate alarmism jumped the shark years ago. But they have certainly moved to a new level, one for which there is not even a term, in this video. This video has everything – the government school teacher politically indoctrinating the kids, followed by bloody gory death dealt out to the kids who refuse to toe the government line. I am not kidding.
When I first saw it, I was sure it was a skeptic satire, ala Jonathon Swift’s ‘A Modest Proposal,’ and I am still afraid that this may be some elaborate put-on because the video and its message — that skeptics need to be killed — is so obscene. But apparently, according to this article at the Guardian, it is totally for real and includes contributions from some fairly prominent artists, as well as funding from the UK government and the 10:10 program (a plea to reduce carbon emissions by 10% per year, eerily with a name probably purposely similar to 9-11).
Our friends at the 10:10 climate change campaign have given us the scoop on this highly explosive short film, written by Britain’s top comedy screenwriter Richard Curtis, ahead of its general release….
Had a look? Well, I’m certain you’ll agree that detonating school kids, footballers and movie stars into gory pulp for ignoring their carbon footprints is attention-grabbing. It’s also got a decent sprinkling of stardust – Peter Crouch, Gillian Anderson, Radiohead and others. But it’s pretty edgy, given 10:10′s aim of asking people, businesses and organisations to take positive action against global warming by cutting their greenhouse gas emissions by 10% in a year, and thereby pressuring governments to act.
“Doing nothing about climate change is still a fairly common affliction, even in this day and age. What to do with those people, who are together threatening everybody’s existence on this planet? Clearly we don’t really think they should be blown up, that’s just a joke for the mini-movie, but maybe a little amputating would be a good place to start?” jokes 10:10 founder and Age of Stupid film maker Franny Armstrong.
But why take such a risk of upsetting or alienating people, I ask her: “Because we have got about four years to stabilise global emissions and we are not anywhere near doing that. All our lives are at threat and if that’s not worth jumping up and down about, I don’t know what is.”
The latter claim is hilarious. Over the next four years, CO2 levels will likely increase, if they stay on trend, from .0392% of the atmosphere to .0400% of the atmosphere. I would love to see these so-called science-based folks demonstrate how the next .0008% shift in atmospheric concentration triggers the point-of-no return tipping point. In actual fact, the have just latched onto the round number of 400ppm and declared, absolutely without evidence, that this number (which the Earth has crossed many times in the past) will somehow lead to a runaway chain reaction.
Anyway, I have teased it long enough, here is the video. Beware — there is gore (no pun intended) here worthy of a zombie movie.
Wow, its sure good that the world has decided that skeptics are the mindless, thuggish, anti-science side of this debate, because if that had not already been made clear, we might think that key climate alarmism groups had lost their freaking minds. It will be interesting to see if this gets any play in the US media — my guess is it will not. Magazines are happy to spend twenty pages dissecting the motives of the Koch family in funding skeptic and libertarian causes, but environmentalists get a free pass, even with stuff like this.
Lubos Motl is all over this, and has mirror sites for the video if (or more likely when) the video gets taken down. This is one of those propaganda offers that are the product of an echo chamber, with a group of like-minded people all patting themselves on the back only to be surprised at the inevitable public backlash.
I have mirrored the video here in case it gets a youtube takedown.
Update: As a reminder, this is not satire. It is made by a group of true believers. It was funded and approved and released by a climate alarmism group, which paid top dollar (including UK taxpayer funds) for a large professional team of actors, writers, and directors. All interviewed participants, including the first little actor blown up, have stated how proud they were of the film and its contribution to educating people on the need for immediate action on global warming.
For the last hour, I have sat and tried to think if, as a skeptic, I had wanted to make a satire critiquing the excesses of global warming alarmism, could I have made a better video. The only thing that might have made it better would have been if the final button-pusher was someone famous like James Cameron or Bono, who after then pushed the button climbed on their Gulfstream jet to fly home. But that’s just a quibble. I have changed my opinion. This may be the greatest skeptic video ever, and the Koch family didn’t even have to pay a dime for it. Thanks 10:10.
Update #2: This movie reminds me of nothing so much as Tarantino’s Inglorious Bastards. It is clearly not reality, but the author’s fantasy. Tarantino fantasizes about a group of jews kicking ass on the Nazi high command and ending the war early. 10:10 fantasizes about blowing up skeptics, in a video that, amazingly, is more blood-spattered than Tarantino’s.
Update #3: The group pulls the video with a classic “I’m sorry you guys are so easily offended” apology.
Update #4: Unsurprisingly, Joe Romm (in the italics in this post) goes to the kindergarten argument of “he started it,” arguing that the video is just the flip side of the stuff skeptics are doing all the time. In making his pitch, he shows the mindset that allowed this stupid film to get made.
I am not sure exactly what comparable films skeptics have produced that are similar, and the only example he can cite is Anthony Watt’s blog post comments on the shooting of an eco-terrorist. I did not even go back and look at Watt’s comments, but I generally think that lots of people are too gleeful when suspected criminals, who are innocent before the law, are gunned down by police.
Never-the-less, its seems a stretch to equate the offhand comments in real time of an independent blogger with a film involving probably a hundred people (including those who commissioned it in the 10:10 organization), commissioned in an official and thoughtful act (after all this had to be months in the works), and funded in part by the British government. He takes the opportunity of his team’s screw-up to launch this broadside on people like me (in bold no less).
None of this excuses that disgusting video. But the difference is that those who are trying to preserve a livable climate and hence the health and well-being of our children and billions of people this century quickly denounce the few offensive over-reaches of those who claim to share our goals — but those trying to destroy a livable climate, well, for them lies and hate speech are the modus operandi, so such behavior is not only tolerated, but encouraged.
Is anyone else getting tired of this working definition that “hate speech” is any speech by people who disagree with me, because I have the best interest of humanity in mind so clearly those who oppose me hate the human race?
Note you can see this right in his statement — “for those trying to destroy a livable climate.” That’s absurd. Does he really think anyone is trying to destroy a livable climate? I could say that through CO2 controls he is trying to impoverish billions of poor people in lesser developed countries by halting development, but I don’t think that is really his motive. I think that is an outcome of what he advocates, just as he thinks an unlivable climate is an outcome of what I advocate, but I can distinguish between motives and assumptions, but he apparently cannot. This attitude is EXACTLY what causes this kind of unfortunate video to be made — it is only a small step from believing, as he says he does, that skeptics are “trying to destroy a liveable climate” to making a movie that jokes about killing them all (or, to be frank, to feeling justified in acts of eco-terrorism).
I encourage you to watch my climate video and decide if folks like me are trying to thoughtfully decipher nature or are engaging in hate speech.
Update #6: I guess this was inevitable, but all the rats in the 10:10 ship are claiming that they had no idea what the video would be like and were appalled when they saw it. Right. An organization funds a major film production, including any number of high profile participants, and no one asked to see a script, screened the video before release, or even asked for some kind of written treatment of the concept? Yeah, right. No one in the 10:10 organization or who funded the video even peeked at it before it was released to the entire planet? This is so utterly lame but will probably be enough of a fig leaf for most of the media to hide behind and allow them not to follow up on a video whose basic premises they likely agree with.
Patrick at Popehat observes how a media outlet probably missed the fact that they were hearing sarcasm. But there is a very good explanation of why sarcasm does not work on the web. Think of a couple of sarcastic comments, like “Boy that Joe Arpaio is sure a friend of civil rights” or “wow, that Cynthia McKinney is one sharp legislator.” The problem is that on the web, there are likely any number of people arguing, quite seriously, that Arpaio is the greatest friend the Constitution ever had or that McKinney is a bastion of well-reasoned, sober deliberation. We are getting to the day that without regularly reading an author on the web, it is virtually impossible to be sure a given remark is sarcasm. I mean, if I didn’t know where he stood politically, I would have initially pegged Kevin Drum’s assertion that Tip O’Neil cut a deal to have poor people pay the taxes of rich people as some sort of clever joke.
