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Posts Tagged ‘CATO Institute’

Did You Hear That Loud Thud, Over The Weekend?

by Flyovercountry ( 127 Comments › )
Filed under Democratic Party, Economy, Marxism, Progressives at March 25th, 2014 - 12:00 pm

Political Cartoons by Henry Payne

That was the sound of of something momentous happening. That was the sound of the American Physical Society taking up the cause of Man Made Global Warming Theory, and asking some tough questions in the process. Those tough questions include, but are not limited to such things as, why have the computer models failed to get one single prediction correct in two decades of time? Exactly how much failure of matching empirical observations to virtual world predictions can be tolerated before rethinking the entire premise? What if anything either proves or disproves the theory, like real science would demand?

Your less intelligent friends who still believe in the Tooth Fairy, Easter Bunny, Great Pumpkin, and Global Warming may wonder what the big deal might be with the imminent finding by the APS that Catastrophic Anthropocentric Global Warming is entirely fictitious. The big deal is that this represents an organization of Physicists some 50,000 strong who are real scientists, and not a bunch of United Nations stooges with hands outstretched for grant money. The entire field of Climatology is a hoax, and peer review with their various forms of research has been so incestuous for such a long time that even the find of massive amounts of emails between them all discussing the mechanics of perpetrating a fraud on the entire world seems to have been completely swept under a very dirty rug.

From the Investors Business Daily article linked to above:

At the risk of being accused of embracing what alarmists call the flat-earth view of climate change, the American Physical Society has appointed a balanced, six-person committee to review its stance on so-called climate change that includes three distinguished skeptics: Judith Curry, John Christy and Richard Lindzen. Their credentials are impressive.

Christy is director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, and was a lead author of the 2001 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Curry is a professor and chairwoman of the School of Earth & Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Lindzen, an Alfred P. Sloan professor of meteorology at MIT from 1983 to 2013, is currently a distinguished senior fellow in the Center for the Study of Science at the Cato Institute.

A question the American Physical Society panel will address is one we ask repeatedly: Why wasn’t the current global temperature stasis, with no discernible change in the past 15 years, not predicted by any of the climate models used by the IPCC, part of the United Nations?

The APS announcement lists among its questions to be answered: “How long must the stasis persist before there would be a firm declaration of a problem with the models?”
In a nod to the likelihood that nature, not man, calls the shots, another APS audit question asks the panel: “What do you see as the likelihood of solar influences beyond TSI (total solar irradiance)? Is it coincidence that the stasis has occurred during the weakest solar cycle (i.e., sunspot activity) in about a century?”

The other three American Physical Society members, reports Quadrant Online, maintain that climate change is real, disaster is imminent and man is at fault. They are long-time IPCC stalwart Ben Santer (who in 1996 drafted, in suspicious circumstances, the original IPCC mantra about a “discernible” influence of man-made CO2 on climate), IPCC lead author and modeler William Collins, and atmospheric physicist Isaac Held.

The APS, to its credit, is addressing the chasm between computer models that cannot even predict the past and actual observations suggesting that warming is on hold and largely influenced by natural factors.

That loud thud you may have missed was the sound of Global Warming Theory smacking head long into the harsher surface of reality. The incantations of, “the debate is over,” seem to have only served to obscure a clear view of reality on a most temporary basis. Like any cheap magician’s trick, there’s always somebody in the room who’s seen it before, bought the same book, or just flat out is not fooled. For years, we have been labeled as, “deniers,” decried as charlatans, ridiculed at Thanksgiving dinner tables, or just been singled out at cocktail parties as the less enlightened uncool dupes of the Koch Brothers. But as time will also tell, it was those of us who were skeptical who were right all along.

It would seem that the days of taking any weather event and playing six degrees of Kevin Bacon in arrears with it to prove that their theory holds water are drawing quickly to a close. For multiple decades now we have lived in a world where rising temperatures, falling temperatures, static temperatures were all explained to produce the same conclusion. Global warming caused too much moisture, and drought. Global warming created increased and decreased snow fall. Global warming has been responsible for increased and decreased tornadoes, hurricanes, thunder storms, floods, and foot fungus, all of it simultaneously. We, “deniers,” have always been ridiculed as, “anti-science,” for questioning such well thought out and admittedly eloquent explanations that made this fairy tale possible.

This is a big deal, if for no other reason than that it signifies the dawning of that age when I can state at family gatherings, “I remember when you were so gullible that you fell for that global warming nonsense.” Don’t get me wrong here, this fight against the tools of the political left will never really be over, just changed somewhat. After all, the same lying liars who are using this fear to push for a one world government and authority will still be there, and still want to inflict Marxism on a global scale. They’ll just have to find something else with which to create their crisis. Chicken Little will just have to find a different reason to proclaim that the sky is falling. I even hear that Hydraulic Fracturing causes Earthquakes now. Last week I read a proclamation that our Ozone was once again a problem. It’ll just be a welcome change of pace to change the topic of catastrophe, this one’s gone a little stale of late.

Cross Posted from Musings of a Mad Conservative.

UPDATE: Just for fun, here’s the APS Climate Change Discussion Framing Document.

The CATO Institute responds to Obama’s Pant’s on Fire SOTU Pontificating.

by Guest Post ( 205 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Democratic Party, Libertarianism at January 29th, 2014 - 1:00 pm

Guest Blogger: Doriangrey


Nothing to say here except, watch the video

(Cross Posted @ The Wilderness of Mirrors)

The Republican Party’s foreign policy delusions

by Phantom Ace ( 1 Comment › )
Filed under Headlines, Republican Party at March 26th, 2013 - 12:01 pm

The Republican Party learned the wrong lesson from 9/11, Rather than accept the reality that Islamic civilization is our enemy, they have deluded themselves into think they want freedom and democracy. Wilsonian nation building, which is a Progressive concept that is directly descended from the Jacobin ideology, has become the cornerstone of Republican foreign policy. With the exception of Rand Paul, Republicans officials love wars and nation building.  This goes against the GOP’s claim of being for limited government.

As thousands of young true believers gather this weekend for the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the Republican Party and the broader conservative movement continue to operate on a fundamental contradiction. Despite their rhetoric, many supporters of limited-government still embrace unchecked government power in one respect: war. A movement that opposes the leviathan state at home but empowers the government to centrally plan the world muddles its message and compromises its principles.

[….]

It was telling when Tea Party champion and Florida Senator Marco Rubio said last April, “I always start by reminding people that what happens all over the world is our business.” For years, President George W. Bush boasted of using U.S. taxpayer dollars to build schools, roads, and hospitals — in Iraq.

Conservatives and Republicans generally argue that the federal government’s primary constitutional function is national defense, and that America’s security and prosperity is linked to stability abroad. Few see the contradiction between their grandiose global ambitions and their principled opposition to the welfare state. Nation-building in the name of the “war on terror,” itself a counterproductive tool against terrorism, entails what conservatives deride: nationalist collectivism, curtailed due-process rights, and huge, open-ended fiscal commitments supported by government borrowing.

The GOP’s addiction to nation building has become a political liability. Americans are tired of spending blood and treasure on Islamic savages. Being against nation building does not make one an isolationist. The GOP needs to return to the cautious peace through strength foreign policy of Eisenhower and Reagan.