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It's articles like this complete package of garbage that make me stop getting real work done and have to blog. Check out the picture – global warming causes trees to smash cars into pieces. Here is a sampling:

 

Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in fire-charred Colorado, said these are the very record-breaking conditions he has said would happen, but many people wouldn't listen. So it's I told-you-so time, he said.

As recently as March, a special report an extreme events and disasters by the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned of "unprecedented extreme weather and climate events." Its lead author, Chris Field of the Carnegie Institution and Stanford University, said Monday, "It's really dramatic how many of the patterns that we've talked about as the expression of the extremes are hitting the U.S. right now."

"What we're seeing really is a window into what global warming really looks like," said Princeton University geosciences and international affairs professor Michael Oppenheimer. "It looks like heat. It looks like fires. It looks like this kind of environmental disasters."

 

Let me make a quick segue from this – dissecting this nonsense is not worth my time. 

  1. I would like folks to think about me making the same points about the European crisis (and in fact the American debt crisis). I could write "I told you so" blogs until I really went to the actual slaughterhouse and they would be laughed at, ridiculed, harangued and otherwise dismissed as reactionary, pedantic, ideological despite their being the insights from "consensus" and sound economic theory. Europe is the "I told you so" of failed progressive political-economy, just as the death and destruction of the communist empire was the "I told you so" of efforts to eliminate property rights and the price system. But screw all that actual evidence, just plow ahead on our new road to serfdom. Would the folks who are quoted in this above article recognize this?
     
  2. Stay tuned for tomorrow, where we will demonstrate the utter deprivation in the thinking in the linked-to article.

By the way, thanks to the many of you who have e-mailed me and basically turned yourselves into my Italian grandmothers. We had a saying in my family any time one of us wanted to do something that may lead to less time spent with the family: "Pack up your bags … you're headed for a guilt trip." Well boy did you guys step in nicely for my late grandmothers! One of you even told me it was a moral imperative to continue blogging! 

Changes will be coming for sure, let's see if I can keep my sanity and somehow remain productive while keeping this thing afloat for a little while longer. One of my reasons for quitting was to make more serious progress on two books I am in the early stages on. Another reason was that I wanted to begin writing content for my institute's website. Another reason was that I wanted to develop additional supplementary research materials for my Environmental Economics class. Another reason is that I am asking the students in my writing section of that class to conduct research with me and I need to get preliminary work done before I set them out on that task. Another reason is that I really need to get several papers written and published that I think are important right now. Another couple of reasons are personal. Those still probably dominate. More on that to come I suppose.

 

6 Responses to “Getting Back Up on the WinterCow”

  1. Speedmaster says:

    Ha! Great to see you back so soon!
    Been meaning to email you, I was going to recommend  taking a few weeks or a month off to recharge.

  2. Harry says:

    Right on Speedmaster.
     
    To celebrate Wintercow's declaration of independence, I will complain about the addition of the editor created by the aptly named fckededitor of wordpress. True, it limits my ability to clutter Wintercow's day from my iPhone3, but if you could possibly nuke it, then fancy things like strikethroughs, italics, and happy faces will be limited to the HTML-literate, like Speedmaster. I know I can do it if I dust off a ten-year old instruction book, filed next to the Private Pilot manual.  Then we (millions of iPhone users) can reach you from Italy or Greece. Yes, I am going to get a 4s, but I do not want to have to lug my laptop (what is a laptop) around and go to a hot spot, et cetera. Note that is the first time I have used the stupid editor.
     
    Glad you are back, intermittently for now. I will not send you any more emails about the WordPress editor, that is, as long as you eliminate it. Like eradicating the use of organic compounds to produce energy, it is not an an improvement to any blog, not to mention the world's best Bastiat blog. Hope you are somewhere tranquil, or at high altitude.

  3. Harry says:

    The fallacy is post hoc, ergo propter hoc. Maybe not the only fallacy, but a fallacy nonetheless.

  4. Harry says:

    Meant to say, "If you would kindly nuke the stupid editor, I will be in your debt."

  5. Michael says:

    In some ways, I have difficulty in seeing how green house gases would cause climate change.  Greenhouse gases tend to be a climate stabilizer; the reason it doesn't get below zero each night and over a 100 in the day time is because of green house gases that moderate the temperatures from rising and falling drastically.  Although that is daily temperature versus a yearly deal, I would think that the overall impact would be similar, not an unusually cold and wet winter one year followed by an unusually hot and dry a few years later. 

  6. rox_publius says:

    Thanks for the unretirement.
    Only recently discovered you through Warren Meyer's links and was disappointed to get in on the action just as it was shutting down.

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