Obama Sides with Enviro Extremists over Jobs

Wait, that's dog bites man stuff. H/T W.C. Varones. The State Department has put off approval of a pipeline from the "tar sands" of Canada to the United States until 2013, despite the pressure it would put on Mideast dictators. Of course the decision was portrayed as a result of the administration's purported concern over the Sand Hills environment, but we know this is about global warming. Obama is just too big of a pusillanimous vacillator to say so. From a previous discussion on the real reason this is being opposed:

Opposition to the Keystone pipeline, designed to bring so called "tar sands" oil from Canada to the United States is usually couched in language about the potential impact to water supplies and the like. However, famous global warmist James Hansen, also director of the Goddard Space Flight Center, explicitly links opposition to the pipeline to preventing global warming.

Phase out of emissions from coal is itself an enormous challenge. However, if the tar sands are thrown into the mix it is essentially game over. There is no practical way to capture the CO2 emitted while burning oil, which is used principally in vehicles.

Note that this is a tacit admission that there is plenty of oil in the ground, by a leading warmist. It is interesting to note that the enviros try to have it both ways, arguing simultaneously that our dependency on oil will come a cropper as we run out of oil, and also saying that if we keep burning oil we will wreck the environment. If we were really running out, then they wouldn't have to worry, would they?

Meanwhile, no mention of the whole AGW thing in the presser associated with the another job killing Obama administration decision.

Carbon Conservatism in British Columbia

I have been pilloried in the comments section of this blog before for my support for a carbon tax. It is not because I believe in catastrophic AGW that I support a carbon tax, but because it would help reduce air pollution and could be used to lower income tax rates. Turns out that British Columbia has already gone this route. As opposed to disastrous cap and trade schemes proposed by Democrats or California's horrendous AB32 that targets specific sources of power, this tax is technology agnostic, allowing the free market to influence the best way to reduce carbon based power consumption, whether through conservation, shifting to natural gas or some other means. But best of all the economy has not been harmed, because our northern neighbors on the left coast have used the proceeds to, drum roll please, reduce income taxes for individuals and corporations. I believe that the burning of carbon based fuels is the primary source of air pollution in the world and reducing those emissions is a worthy goal.

The effects on the British Columbia economy of the Carbon tax, implemented in 2008, appear to have been minimal. I believe this is because it was used to offset income taxes. The tax is simple and easy to administer, and has been implemented in a predictable manner; unlike recent tax code changes in the United States. The U.S. income tax is a nightmare of complexity and pork barrel politics. Reducing our federal government's dependency on it, by replacing it with what is essentially a consumption tax also seems like a worthy outcome.

The Truth About Global Warming

Andrew Coyne has one of the best articles explaining the difficulties of untangling the arguments about AGW that I have read. It is titled Coyne on Climategate. The Truth is out there. Somewhere. I recommend a full read. But I also offer a few comments. To my friends on the right who doubt AGW, I offer the following two incontrovertible facts. Carbon dioxide is one of the green house gases that keeps the earth livable by raising the temperature above the black body equilibrium. Levels of CO2 have been rising steadily in a measurable and statistically significant manner for at least fifty years, for a total increase on the order of 35%. It is therefore unscientific and unreasonable to presume that this results in zero impact on earth's climate. How much impact, and how catastrophic, are of course subject to debate.

To those on the left who might be reading I offer this. The science is not settled. Eminent scientists such as Freeman Dyson, who offer nuanced critiques of AGW, are not ignorant "denialists" in the pay of energy companies. The magnitude of past and present warming is very difficult to measure, the use of modeling and proxies only makes the issues more complex. To say that the added CO2 in the atmosphere will result in catastrophe is certain to stretch credulity, when much is still unknown about other sources of climate change. I offer as trump card the following. Prior to the current age, the Holocene, the earth has gone through a series of ice ages only briefly interrupted by warm period such as ours, and the general trend of each ice age has been to be colder than the prior one. And no one has a widely accepted theory as to why. If this widely known phenomenon can not be explained by the models in use by global warming advocates today, we categorically can not put full faith in predictions of disaster.

Which brings us to the political part of the equation. The debate would not be so important if the left had not seized the science to argue, ex cathedra, that we must trust the science and that the only possible solution is a new world socialist order. Even if the science was settled, and it is not, the question of how to proceed is primarily a political and not a scientific question. Better for all parties to have a debate about the best shape of policy that admits to the possibility of some error in the scientific consensus. That way the scientists could cease to be advocates and perform real science and we would debating the issue in the realm of politics and economics, where policy should be debated.

Climate Conspiracy Explained by Iowahawk with Mathy Stuff

Ace, of Ace of Spades, has liberated a comment from Iowahawk who normally provides hysterical satire for our amusement (see link in this morning's post). Iowahawk explains the shenanigans behind the climate research scandal in East Anglia, complete with mathy explanations of linear regression. It is a bit of a tough read, but I recommend anyone who can follow read the article. Some highlights:

2. Next, Mann et al. regressed the 100 years or so of observed temperatures against the proxy variable principle components:

y = b0 + b1*PC1 + b2*PC2 + ... + bp*PCp + error

the regression coefficients (b's) estimated from recent data were then applied to the older proxy PCs to obtain retrospective "backcasts" or "hindcasts" of the temperatures in 1015, 1016,... 1850.

Voila! The Mann et al. statistical model resulted in the now infamous hockey stick, showing a radical increase in global temperatures in recent years versus the relatively flat milenial variation. This was in large part the basis for the IPCC report.

...

Now, if you've been following this, Mann's entire temperature reconstruction method rests on knowing (observing) recent periodic global temperatures, y. Quibbling about principle components aside, that's the dependent variable in the backcasts. But as is now becoming increasingly plain, y was constructed from an undocumented process that took raw ground station data and ran it through a black box that included smoothing, filtering, inference, manipulation, baling wire, glue and the juice of one whole lemon. This is what the CRU people are calling "valued added homogenized data." Or what normal people call "made up horseshit." It's also the temperature data that dozens, if not hundreds of AGW studies are based on.

This is in fact scandalous to good scientific process and the real scandal is not that some emails were compromised.



We should ask ourselves why we came to this end. I believe it is because we asked science to perform a task it will never be up to. Future predictions based on scientific method will always be imprecise and will necessarily not answer the question of what to do about the situation posed. Even if it were proved that man's carbon emissions are causing temperatures to rise, it is not clear what the best policy would be to deal with it. Our values, our ideology, economics, and yes, politics, all come into play in determining a way ahead. By putting all of the pressure on SCIENCE to answer the question of what to do about increased carbon dioxide in the air, we have shifted the political fight to the realm of science, where it does not belong. The result is science that is conducted like politics. As someone else said, science may be objective, but scientists clearly are not. Given the pressure to produce an answer that would result in more grant money, one can see the economic incentives that tempted climate researchers to fudge their data. This does not excuse their ethical lapses, but in fact shows that ethics matter most when the stakes are so high. Given the defensive nature of the "researchers," the skeptics necessarily became more aggressive and unapologetic in their criticisms, which provoked an even greater "circle the wagons response." In the compromised emails, we see the East Anglia team ever more fearful that the raw data would fall into the wrong hands.

Finally and most tragically I must state that AGW is not proved, nor is it disproved; and we may never know the truth because so much raw data has been lost. And that is a real crime, because, while science may not be able to answer policy questions, it should certainly be called upon to intelligently and dispassionately inform the debate.

I would like to end on a lighter note, so here is a nice youtube video explaining it all, to music. H/T again, to Ace.