Thursday, December 31, 2009

Evidence of AGW fraud Increases

Evidence of AGW fraud Increases

I took a lot of science courses in school, and once thought I might make my career in physics. I only say this so you'll understand that when I tell you that "Geophysical Research Letters" is the most important and serious peer-reviewed journal in physics, I know what I'm talking about. I spend a lot of time reading on the subject, although I do not subscribe to heavy journals anymore. Today I came across this article in "Science Daily" which is no kind of "skeptic" type site - far from it, but they saw the need to report on this study. Read it here, cause the MSM will never cover this, but if it is true, and it has to be pretty close to the truth, the entire underpinning of the global warming fraud is a lie.

No Rise of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Fraction in Past 160 Years, New Research Finds

ScienceDaily (Dec. 31, 2009) — Most of the carbon dioxide emitted by human activity does not remain in the atmosphere, but is instead absorbed by the oceans and terrestrial ecosystems. In fact, only about 45 percent of emitted carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere.
[Snip}
In contradiction to some recent studies, he finds that the airborne fraction of carbon dioxide has not increased either during the past 150 years or during the most recent five decades.

The research is published in Geophysical Research Letters.

Sunday, December 20, 2009

Global Fraud

Global Fraud

This is a sad time for science. Anyone who has been involved in the world of academic science is grieving right now. I thought that the situation in physics over string theory was bad - a researcher needs to be a true believer in string theory to get big grants and choice assignments - but there is no organized effort to discredit other schools of thought (that I am aware of). Now we have this.

The difference is caused by the sheer amount of money and resources at stake, plus the factor that some portion of humanity has a religious belief that humanity has spoiled his nest, and the AGW hypothesis fits that body of belief well. Then we have the statist left which plans to use this issue to garner great power for their cause. We are talking about trillions of dollars here, and the full involvement of politics and industry. Now we see from these emails that careers have been ruined, and governments led astray.

The dichotomy we face is immense. The political and industrial stakes have never been this large. The statist left and the Malthusian true believers will continue to act as if this is good science to further their agenda, even as anyone with a sound basis in science knows just how badly the cause of science and understanding of climate has been corrupted. This will not end well.

We are not being well served by the media either. Maybe they do not understand the issues, but they surely never present them honestly. The question is not even about warming climate. It is only opartially about man's contribution to whatever warming there might be. The real question, which science has not yet even addressed, is whether curtailing CO2 emissions will have any effect on world climate, and if it will have any effect, will this effect be negative or positive. Drowning bears and melting ice have nothing to do with it, but they make good television. Sad.


Note: Some great writing on the same subject:

How to Manufacture a Climate Crisis by Patrick J. Michaels

Climategate's Stubborn Facts by Dexter Wright

Understanding Climategate's Hidden Decline by Marc Sheppard,

Scientists Behaving Badly by Steven F. Hayward

Botch after Botch after Botch by Lorrie Goldstein

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Federal Employees at the Trough

Federal Employees at the Trough


By Paul B. Matthews
Originally posted at American Thinker


Last week, USA Today reported that nearly one in five federal government employees now earn over $100,000. The paper also reported the average federal salary rose to $71,260, almost $31,000 more than the comparative average private-sector wage.

Within the Department of Defense, over 10,000 employees (as of June 2009) now earn at least $150,000 per year, a 5½-fold increase in the number of employees eclipsing this salary threshold from just eighteen months ago.

At the same time as federal employee salaries have been soaring, total private sector earnings have steadily declined as the unemployment rate escalates (now at 10%) and the average workweek declines. In fact, in November, private-sector employees worked an average of just 33.2 hours, slightly above the all-time low set in October (33.0 hours) and well below the forty hours guaranteed to federal employees. Simultaneously, average private sector hourly earnings totaled $18.74 per hour, significantly below the implied hourly wage rates ($34.25 per hour) paid to the average federal employee.

However, simply analyzing the growth in total paid compensation fails to capture the true explosion in benefits paid to federal workers.

For example, government employees almost never work on weekends. And if a federal employee does work on Sunday, he becomes eligible for Sunday Premium Pay. Federal employees are also entitled to compensatory time off in lieu of overtime pay, a benefit few private sector firms are able to offer.

Paid time off for federal employees is also extremely generous. Employees with less than three years' tenure earn twelve paid days off per year. For service between three and fifteen years, workers are guaranteed eighteen days off with pay. And when an employee reaches fifteen years of service, this benefit grows to twenty-four days.

Federal employees are also guaranteed ten federal holidays with pay.

With all this time off, some government workers might be hard-pressed to use actually use it. No worries -- federal workers have a very liberal carryover policy: thirty days for all employees. However, if you get stationed overseas, this policy expands to forty-five days. And if you become classified as a "Senior Executive Service," a "Senior-Level" [employee], or a "Scientific or Professional Employee," the policy expands to ninety days.

Naturally, at retirement, or if an employee decides to leave government service, any unused time is compensated for with cash -- a lump-sum payout that could easily amount to between $6,000 and $17,800 based on the "average" federal salary figure. For senior-level employees who earn the highest pay levels, such payouts could easily total $30,000 and might even exceed $50,000, thereby eclipsing the average annual salary of an American in the private sector.

The benefits continue. On top of paid time off, federal employees are also eligible for half a day of sick time per biweekly pay period. Thus, in a 52-week year, each full-time employee may accrue 13 days of sick time. There are also no limits on the amount of sick leave an employee may accumulate. Moreover, when an employee retires, any unused sick pay is added to the calculation of the employee's retirement annuity, thereby increasing the value of the annuity payouts received by federal employees during retirement.

And yet there is still more. As part of the Student Loan Repayment Program, a benefit enacted by Congress in 2007, all federal government employees are eligible for up to $10,000 per year in student loan forgiveness, a benefit capped at $60,000 per individual. (This benefit requires ten years of government service.)

Health care benefits provided to federal employees are also quite extensive and lucrative. Notably, there are a minimum of nine national pay-for-service health care plans from which an employee may select. To supplement these nine national plans, there are a number of additional agency-specific plans as well as state-specific HMO, HDHP, or CDHP plans that are also employee options.

On top of basic health care insurance plans offered to its employees, the federal government also provides a full range of vision and dental care plans. Of course, all of these insurance programs are heavily subsidized (up to 50% of the total cost for a family policy) by the U.S. taxpayer.

Finally, the federal government even provides a subsidized life insurance to its employees. Under this program, employees pay only two-thirds of the monthly insurance premium while the U.S. taxpayer covers the rest.

On top of all these incentives, Congress has recently decided to expand the handouts. While consumer prices have steadily declined throughout 2009 (the annual CPI rate fell 0.2% through October), the U.S. Congress just passed legislation that would provide an across-the -board 2% pay raise for all federal employees. As such, federal employees will soon receive a 2.2% real pay increase as private sector wages remain stagnant or fall.

Currently, the U.S. Office of Personal Management estimates that there are just over 4.2 million federal employees. Thus, based on the average salary figures reported by USA Today, total wages paid to all federal employees now total nearly $300 billion per year, or about $1,000 for every man, women, and child in the United States. Add to this figure the costs of insurance, paid time off, and retirement benefits (which have not even been quantified here), and the total federal outlay to "pay" federal employees soars by billions more.

Simply stated, this trend cannot be sustained.

With last year's U.S. federal deficit of more than $1.4 trillion, it will become increasingly difficult to reduce the government's level of red ink, particularly if the federal government continues to expand. However, it now seems quite obvious that the government employment will continue to expand, especially under a nationalized health care system or once Obama's new Consumer Financial Protection Agency officially becomes part of the government Leviathan.

Americans and the media remain almost uniformly against the large bonuses being paid to Wall Street bankers -- even though these bonuses must come from the (albeit subsidized) revenues generated by these firms. Given what has been going on in the public sector, perhaps it's about time for Americans to refocus their anger on the public bureaucrats who feed daily at the trough of the tax dollars generated by their indentured servitude in the private sector.

Paul B. Matthews is a consultant and a Texas-licensed CPA. He is a former hedge fund manager.

Sunday, December 13, 2009

Innumerate Warmists

Innumerate Warmists

A recent article in Scientific American, one of the most virulent purveyors of Warmist hysteria, makes the case that we can all go on a WWS economy, that is, Waves, Water, and Solar. They claim that all we need is
3.8 million large wind turbines, 90,000 solar plants, and numerous geothermal, tidal and rooftop photovoltaic installations
That's all very nice, but it seems to me that they never ran the numbers. Let's give it a try.

3.8 million 5 MW wind turbines. These cost $5 million to $10 million each. Including land and installation, that's $40,000,000,000,000. (40 trillion dollars) They claim that we need to build 1,700,000,000 3 kW rooftop photovoltaic systems. At current prices each of these would cost $24,000, which is another 40 trillion dollars. These numbers are exclusive of installation costs and the cost of a new electric transmission grid needed to make use of it all. Let's be kind and call it a minimum of one hundred trillion dollars to install the hardware.

Where will the money come from? The entire debt of the United States government is officially supposed to be twelve trillion dollars, so this proposal calls for increasing that debt by eight times! That's an order of magnitude more debt, and that's just the money cost. What about the environmental cost? All the mountain tops that will have to be leveled for wind turbine installation, like the proposal they are starting to put into motion in Maine, is an interesting subject for study all by itself.

Beyond that consider that the deserts will need to be covered with photovoltaic arrays. And we have not even considered the tidal dams, the wave energy collectors, and all the other pie in the sky neato-tech that will need to be invented to make this pipe dream come true. And for what? The AGW debate starts with a supposed increase in temperatures, but it seems to end there as well. Forgotten, beyond the question of human causeation, is whether any of this investment and destruction of habitat will change the course of terrestrial weather. Further, we need to see a debate on the effect of warming itself. Is it a bad thing, or a good thing for humanity? Making Canada and Siberia productive for food agriculture might just be a good thing. But to the true believer, this is not even part of the debate. Maybe Gaea is providing for burgeoning population by removing the protective ice cover from immense regions for human habitation and exploitation. Maybe that is what this entire debate is really about.

This all presupposes that climate conditions will remain the way they are, which seems to be to be a revealing bit of the Warmist mentality. If they truly believe that climate is changing due to human activity, then they should also believe that weather will also be changing. After all, isn't the utility of a solar generation site linked to the local weather? If a trend to more cloud cover develops, that would affect generation. And should changing conditions act on the viability of wind farms, should they look to possible changes in wind patterns? Wouldn't the mere existence of massive wind farms remove wind energy from the system, and thus slow the wind itself?

One might say that is all hypothetical, but then the entire body of AGW science is hypothetical. There are no experiments in climate science, only observations and predictions. To the extent that the models in use are now twenty years old, could we not consider the fact that those predictions predict the first ten of those years pretty well, but they fail to predict anything of value for the second decade at all? And now data has been collected that seem to show that wind velocity, and thus power available for harvesting, is reducing. Amazingly, Warmists dismiss this research, because the observations are not predicted their models. Isn't that the exact opposite of the scientific method? Shouldn't the prediction, the theory itself, change when new observations, new data, come to light?

Sunday, December 06, 2009

Fin de Siècle

Fin de Siècle

Fin de siècle is a term that refers to the end of an era of impending doom and emerging into a new, brighter future. It seems to me that is a great way to describe the current changes occurring now in the dynamics of the cult that has arisen over the issue of anthropogenic global warming, or AGW.

Until a couple of weeks ago, society seemed destined to accept a fundamental change in the way the resources of the world would be distributed, a power shift that would move humanity incrementally closer to a one world government. We may well be headed toward such a future, and at a certain point it might even become necessary, but now we know that this shift will not happen today - and that's a good thing.

The entire enterprise was predicated on the premise that the AGW "science is settled," the "debate is over." But then a silly thing like reality asserted its will over the proceedings. An unpredicted cooling overcame the earth, and the AGW science teams couldn't explain it without abandoning the very models that had given them such power and predominance in the scientific community. Instead of reacting like scientists should, which would be to take a close look at the data, reevaluate their procedures of analysis, and try to understand why their models could not predict the future. Instead, they reacted in a purely political way, which was use their power to try to move public opinion, rather than seeking a better technical understanding of the dynamics of climate. That act will be the downfall of the predominance of their movement, now that the world has seen the cult leaders at their cynical game, in the leaked CRU emails and files.

All signs point to a cold winter for the northern hemisphere, where the economies designated to supply the cash to the AGW cult all live. They still all have some form of democratic governance in place, and the power grab was based upon having these electorates under the impression that the consequences of failing to accept the prescription would be dire. A couple of decades of brainwashing in grade school has convinced most of the younger generation that the AGW hypothesis is a fact. Seeing behind the methods and motivations of the leaders of the cult will have a profound effect on the discourse, and ultimately the zeitgeist, and the way people reflect and react to discussion of the future will have to change. They will have attained a bit more skepticism. It is natural for youth to be skeptical of the establishment. The Obama campaign tapped into this skepticism effectively. Now the bloom is off that rose.

When you finally realize that the CRU emails show that the observed facts do not fit any known theory of anthropogenic warming, you MUST come to the conclusion that science does not know what the next ten or twenty years of climate will be like. It would therefore be immoral for the governments of the rich countries to implement an unproved and not well understood plan to make serious changes to the way the human race manages international problems.

Back to the drawing board fellas. IF indeed the human race is to take such serious measures, we need to solidify the science. This can not be done unless and until those scientists who are skeptical of Al Gore's "theory" are allowed a full throated part of the public debate. Anything else is junk science, more politics than the quest for objective truth, and the honest seeking of solutions. We the People deserve nothing less from those who choose to rule us.

Friday, December 04, 2009

Bill Ayers Dumps, Demonstrates Against, Obama

Bill Ayers, who tried to blow up the Pentagon, has finally had it with his erstwhile friend. After ghostwriting his autobiography, Billy boy draws the line at war, as in war against Jihad, not war against Israel.