the kabbalist’s cabal

I recently got involved in an(other) debate (I use that term advisedly – the nitwits with whom I was in discussion are only capable of shouting slogans and regurgitating talking points filled with disproved pseudo-facts) with a small group of ersatz conservatives who have been drinking Glen Beck’s Kool Aid by the gallon – especially when it comes to climate issues. Please note that I refer to them as ersatz conservatives because real conservatives are inherently concerned about conserving the health of the environment – not allowing the commons to be spoiled in ways that threaten their lives, their families, their property, their livelihoods, and their freedoms.

One of the things that these dim bulbs kept pointing to is a conspiracy that links climate scientists (and others in the scientific community) to a global movement intent on imposing a new economic and social order on the world.  Their theory involves the UN and targets the IPCC.  And it reserves some special scorn for James Hansen and NASA – which, I was shocked (shocked!) to learn, is capable of sending men to the moon and robots to Mars, and taking photographs of the further reaches of the universe . . . but is incapable of accurately measuring atmospheric temperatures on earth.

I’ve never felt especially comfortable with this kind of unproven conspiratorial thinking.  I’m no fan of the UN – in fact, I’d be happy to see it disbanded (and replaced with an institution that consists only of democratic countries that subscribe to, and practice, policies based on fundamental freedoms – but that’s another story).  But I really don’t think there’s any more of a high probability for a conspiracy linking thousands of scientists, their support staffs, the institutions they work for, the governments that support them, and all of the rest of the moving parts needed for such a plan to have any basis in reality.  It’s more likely, to my mind, that 9/11 was engineered by the CIA. Which is to say, not very likely at all.

On the other hand, there are some good reasons to believe that the industries which stand to lose the most if the world determines there is merit in the emerging findings of climate science are behind a deliberate campaign of disinformation that is specifically intended to cloud the discussion and delay or derail the public policies required to meet the existential threat posed by climate extinction. These good reasons include the fact that the funding for the guys who are on the front lines “challenging” the climate science comes from the industries which stand to lose the most if the world decides to reduce or eliminate its dependence on fossil energy sources.  Guys like Richard Lindzen and Alan Watt are totally dependent on the largess of the oil, coal, gas, and electric companies.

Here’s a good example of what I mean.  Pat Michaels – who is a real climate scientist – has sold out to fossil energy industry.  Of course, the mainstream media has not raised this issue in any kind of substantive way, preferring, instead, to keep the pot boiling by creating the appearance of a rational and reasonable other point of view.  Not that other points of view are to be universally eschewed.  Like the proposition that Hamas, which clearly has another point of view, warrants equal time in the media, to say nothing of a seat at the negotiating table, is just a ludicrous as the notion that a small group of fringe thinkers – who are on the payroll of the fossil energy industry – have a point of view that warrants serious consideration.

All of this said, I’m waiting for someone to prove, to a standard of clear and convincing evidence, what the impetus for the climate change cabal is.  Once you get past the possibility that climate scientists will garner more research dollars by coming up with new facts that prove rising GHG levels are forcing rising temperatures (regardless of whether you measure them in the atmosphere, in the land, or in the ocean) and other phenomena (soil and ocean acidification, polar ice melt, reef collapse, forest decline), the conspiracy theory loses steam pretty quickly, there’s no place to go with the conspiracy.  Unless you think NASA and NOAA are part of some kind of fifth column being organized and led by Al Gore.  If you belive that’s the case, just relax, Nurse Ratchet will be along with your meds any minute.

So, what’s the point of the climate conspiracy – who’s behind it (is James Hanson really the Grand High Archon of the Illuminati?) – how does it operate ? ? ?

Just askin’.

the (negative) sum of the parts

I like my accountant.  He’s a really nice guy and does a really good job – for which I pay him a fair fee.  But the sad fact is he really doesn’t do anything that contributes, in a meaningful way, to anything important.  He does my taxes.  That’s not the most complicated thing in the world – and, yeah, I can buy some inexpensive software that will probably do much the same thing for less than I pay a CPA.  The issue isn’t the cost.  It’s that there is a whole industry (tax preparation) that is based on doing things that, if you think about their inherent value, are pretty meaningless.

In point of fact much of our economy is based on people doing things that add no value – or very little – to the overall quality of the products and services we need and use in our daily lives.  Car dealers could be substantially replaced by on-line, manufacturer-direct, ordering systems.  Insurance agents do very little beyond taking information you provide and submitting it to underwriters.  They could do more – like help their clients minimize risk – but I have never had an agent propose anything like that to me.

Much of the debate about health care isn’t really about health or care.  It’s about preserving jobs and revenues attached to a model that, rationally, makes little sense.  Health insurance companies don’t add anything of value in terms of health.  They don’t even mitigate costs because of the (similarly irrational) fee-for-service model employed by the health delivery system.  At the end of the day, they are a net negative.

You can find other disconnected dots in other industries.  The ski industry is bemoaning the effects of climate change (one recent report says that Aspen will have the same climate in near future as Amarillo enjoys today).  It is also bemoaning the fact that many ski resorts are located in states in which the elected leaders have the most fossilized environmental outlook.  But the industry fails to understand that, regardless of how green it wants to make itself and its surroundings, the act of getting to and from the slopes puts it on the list of dumb things to promote if you want to reduce GHGs.

Don’t get me wrong.  I like to ski.  But it’ll be a cold day in Amarillo before I buy into the notion that flying from Newark to Steamboat and back is, somehow, part of the solution to Climate Extinction.

To bring this full circle, Paul Krugman recently published a really dumb idea in the New York Times.  Using tax policy to adjust behavior just gives the lawyers and accountants who, nice guys though they may be, another opportunity to contribute nothing of value to the world.  There is no reason to have a complicated tax policy that spawns and supports an entire, pointless, industry.  In fact, what Krugman is proposing is, essentially, a cop-out.  If financial speculation is the problem he is making it out to be, a better policy would be to increase the risk penalties to speculators.  Make them insure their bets, top to bottom, personally – without any backstop from government programs or institutions.

Krugman wants to hand out clean syringes to the addicts.  That won’t solve the problem – and it’s apt to have other unintended consequences.

so you think you can ride a bike part deux

For you fixed gear aficionados, try this.

another idea about the thing

Just when you thought everything was settled, along comes this.

Much better than one of the alternative theories I favored when the Bibliothumparians proposed to add  Unintelligible Design to the local science curriculum (since, after all, evolution, like gravitation, is just a theory).

Speaking from the audience in an auditorium reeking with gleeful anticipation of the End of Daze, I suggested that there should be many alternatives to which students should be exposed since, Praise Bob,  we all believe in free markets . . . and the free market of ideas counts as one of them.

And with that introduction, I suggested the Theory of Transportation, which was premised on the the idea that the universe had been delivered to the wrong address as a result of a cosmic bookkeeping error and had, further, been damaged en route.

Another audience member (I later found out that he was a flak for Popeil Products) suggested the inclusion of Silly String Theory in the physics curriculum – and then spent fifteen minutes deriding the Theory of Transportation using one of Zeno’s Paradoxes to demonstrate that transportation was impossible.

But becoming a Pastafarian certainly has great appeal – especially around dinner time.

So, may His Noodly Appendage touch you soon.

Ramen!

not ideas about the thing, but the thing itself

Modern reality is a reality of decreation, in which our revelations are not the revelations of belief, but the precious portents of our own powers. The greatest truth we could hope to discover, in whatever field we discovered it, is that man’s truth is the final resolution of everything.

– Wallace Stevens (from the essay “The Relations Between Poetry and Art” included in the collection published as The Necessary Angel)

As if to add insult to injury (again), science has now bitch-slapped the notion of “faith” by demonstrating (in ways that will, no doubt, be challenged by theoloons of every persuasion) that there’s absolutely no objective difference between knowledge of the reality of gravitation and belief in the possibility of miracles.

This explains a lot.

Unfortunately, the people who will benefit most from a working knowledge of the information will be the first to reject its factual validity.

They know better, after all.

so you think you can ride a bike?

Try this!

renaming the whirlwind

The climate science community is populated by a lot of very nice people who, unfortunately, believe in a kind of dainty political correctness when it comes to languaging.

The discourse is dominated by headlines that talk about climate “change”.  Now, there’s a powerful descriptor.  As in, “I think I better change the baby’s diaper.”  Or, “We’re going to dinner and then the opera, so I need to hurry home and change.”  Or, “He’s so obdurate, he’ll never change.”

And then there’s the more stick-in-your-eye alternative, climate “warming”.  That really has some frightening connotations.  Like, “I’m warming the milk for some cocoa.” Or, “We’re warming the tires on the Ferrari before Sir Stirling takes it out for the record run around the Nurburgring.”  Or, “The Phillies have two pitchers warming up in the Bull Pen.”

A few people have tried to break out of the trap of politically correct soft-and-fuzzy speech.  Some brave Brits have taken to climate “heating”.  That sounds like an optional method of keeping your house warm.  “Would you like forced air, hydronic baseboard, or climate heating in the new family room?”

Let’s get real about this.  Wit’s End thinks we should refer to it as “Climate Chaos” or, better, “Climaticide”.  Those are certainly improvements – but the first calls to mind things like “chaos theory” – which will invariably provoke the kind of asinine public debate that still surrounds evolution. [See, “it’s only a theory“]

I prefer “Climate Extinction” because, to my mind at least, it hits the nail squarely on the head.  It’s pretty hard to misinterpret extinction as something other than an existential threat.

It’s kind of like “Death Panel” or “Euthanasia”.  Even the more cretinous denizens of Teabagistan will be able to get whatever-passes-for-a-mind around the concept of extinction.

And it’s easier to spell than “annihilation” – a life preserver tossed to our brain-addled brethren still struggling on the far side of Da Nile.

Oh, and while we’re on the subject of languaging, I’ll address another pet peeve: let’s pound a stake into the heart of “renewable energy”.  This is another one of those friendly sounding concepts that, when you pop the hood and get a good look at the mill, makes you wonder how many cylinders are really firing.

There’s been a good deal of critical commentary aimed at the underlying economics of making fuel additives from corn, soybeans, and biomass (none of which work without substantial gummint subsidies).  But there’s another factor in this equation that hasn’t received much airtime.

Burning ethanol produces tropospheric ozone and a number of carbonyls including acetaldehyde.  Acetaldehyde reacts in the atmosphere to become peroxyacetal nitrates (PANs).   These pollutants are remarkably efficient herbicides (trees, crops, flowers – they are an equal opportunity annihilator).  And they are alarmingly carcinogenic.

Renewable?  Sure, it’s renewable funding for the corporate welfare queens who are living on the gummint crop subsidy and fake science dole.

Let’s stop talking about “renewable energy” and ratchet up the discussion about “free energy” – solar, wind, geothermal, tidal – because those are proven, scalable, off-the-shelf technologies that can completely transform our energy economy with little heavy lifting and fewer environmental downsides.

how to make qom go “boom”

Were you surprised by the revelation that Iran had built a second nuclear enrichment facility in secret?  Really?  Would you be interested in buying a bridge?

There’s nothing good that can possibly occur if a country run by crazed Islamists obtains the means to construct and deploy nuclear weapons.  Nothing.

And there’s also not a lot – short of nuking the f***ers – that is likely to cause the regime to change course.

Except for one thing.

End our dependency on fossil energy and they will become irrelevant in terms our national interests – and those of our allies.

In fact, there is nothing we could possibly do that would alter the significance of the Middle East – and the position it occupies as a focus of our national concerns – than to make it a non-factor in our economy.

Without a product to supply that occupies a position of such seemingly irreplaceable need in our lives, Iran and its neighbors will revert to a status of relative insignificance.

And they will no longer have the economic means to develop weapons – or sustain the forces required to be players on the global stage.

An alternative energy economy will cause heads – and economies – to implode from Qom to Mecca.

The sooner the faster.

creative destruction

Whenever there is a paradigmatic shift in market forces, entrenched interests battle to maintain their share.  More often than not, they lose and are swept into history’s dustbin.  The automobile supplanted the horse and carriage.  Diesel electric locomotives spelled the extinction of the steam engine.  Jet propulsion eclipsed propellers powered by reciprocating internal combustion engines.  Vacuum tubes gave way to transistors.

(A good interview with Ira Magaziner – snatched from Climate Progress – on this subject here.)

Invariably, every time the fundamental nature of a technology changes, there are winners and losers.  The fossil fuel industry is on the brink of extinction.  The resistance to change that is expressed in different ways and by different spokesfools – from fossilized politicians like Senators Imhofe and Byrd to birdbrained pseudo-scientists like  Anthony Watts and Bjorn Lomborg – are just part of the death rattle of the soon-to-be-displaced special interests.  (Even the smarter guys among the established interests – like Duke Energy and Exelon – are already jumping ship and lining up for a place in the fossil-less energy future.)

There are only two important questions that have yet to be answered as the shift from fossil energy to free energy rolls out:

1.  Who will the winners (other than the inhabitants of the planet) be?  Clearly guys like Jeff Immelt, who has bet the future of GE on new energy technologies is going to be among the winners – as will GE shareholders.  There’s a good chance that Shai Agassi will be among the winners – as will investors in his electric car venture, Better Place.  But there will be many others.  From the development and deployment of high efficiency photovoltaic solar panels.  And the invention of new quick charging, long lasting battery technologies.  And many other technological wonders that are just over the horizon.

2.  Will we get there in time?  This is the most important existential question the world now faces.  The science says we have until 2015 to cap GHG output – and then begin to roll it back to 350 ppm or lower.  What’s the over and under on that?

glimmer of dopes

Call me a sentimentalist, but I get increasingly partial to the idea of a world without the UN towards the end of September every year.

The General Assembly is the international relations equivalent of the Mutter Museum (located at the College of Physicians in Philadelphia) – with displays by Ghadaffi-Duck, Ahmadimwitjihad, and the other denizens of the Turd World – a veritable freak show of geopolitical disease and deformity.

And a terrible waste of good real estate, too!

On a related note, there’s been talk over the years of finding a permanent home for the Olympics.  Among many meritorious arguments, this would greatly simplify the development and testing of performance enhancing drugs.  No need to build new and expensive lab facilities every four years.  With all of the test subjects in the same place, performing under the (relatively speaking) same conditions, the chemists will have a solid baseline and will be able to track their progress more easily.  And with the emerging addition of genetic modification, the one minute mile will soon be in reach.

Combining the two would be a real stroke of international genius.  Having the UN nestled among the temples on Olympos would certainly harmonize with the godlike qualities often displayed by the leaders of its member states.  And those mentally limp and morally flaccid dweebs would certainly benefit from the development of drugs to enhance the performance of the state of their members.