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You thought I was going to say something about the battles in DC? Think again.

And of course in totally unrelated news, you might want to check out all of the sciency goodness from the former VEEP here, it looks like it’s going to be fun following the mess that is the next IPCC report (I am going to make my students read it). Watch only the last few minutes if you don’t get the message. It’s only a matter of time before he utters that climate skeptics should be gassed. Actually, now that I think of it, that’s already happened. By the way, folks need a new term for climate skeptics. That’s like calling me an economics skeptic.

I thought of that after reading this excerpt from a new book:

In an orgy of false accusations and arbitrary denunciations, few escaped with their reputations intact.  By February no more than 10,000 of a total 50,000 ‘capitalists’ in Beijing were considered honest.  Similar figures came from other parts of the country.  To punish all would wreck the economy.  Mao had a solution to this conundrum.  He came up with a quota, ordering that a few should be killed to set the tone, while exemplary punishment should focus on 5 per cent of the most ‘reactionary’ suspects.  Across most cities, by a rough rule of thumb, about 1 per cent of the accused were shot, a further 1 per cent sent to labour camps for life, and 2 to 3 per cent imprisoned for terms of ten years or more.

We’re all just being scientific now, right? OK, tuning off for a while again, the whole blood pressure thing ain’t good for one’s health.

And here’s some goodies from Coyote: hypocrites need not apply (on the Administrations marketing of the PPACA):

  • The whole campaign aimed at young people is simply obscene.  I understand that folks like Ms. Perry honestly believe that young people are getting a better deal, and that she is doing them a service.  Fine, millionaires can be low information voters too.  But people in the Administration have a much more cynical purpose, which explains the magnitude of the campaign described by Chait:  For Obamacare to work and not be a fiscal disaster, it depends on young people overpaying for health insurance.  The Administration knows that young people are overpaying — the whole system depends on it — and yet they are telling them it is in their interest to sign up.   A private company that did this would be in jail.
  • I think this whole campaign is going to fail due to a basic fallacy of Progressive thinking.  Progressives are convinced that consumers are helpless dupes of advertising.  They in fact criticized health care advertising expenses in the private world for years for this reason, making this whole campaign incredibly ironic.  Obama and company are convinced that with enough advertising, average consumers will buy anything, even if it is a bad deal, because they are convinced that this is how consumer capitalism works (it got him elected, didn’t it?)  I think they are going to be disappointed.

More goodies from Coyote: let’s play ball!

And this wasn’t a surprise. Again, the “skeptic” claim is not that humans do not influence climate warming. Nice to see that we’ve completely institutionalized a straw man. Note just how sciency good this all is. Just toss under the rug the fact that it’s not that the current temperature hiatus is weird, or that it depends on picking a hot year to start to prove that point, the REAL point is that regardless of that issue, the data over the last 15 years are nowhere near what the majority of IPCC sciency-good models predicted. We’re outside the 95% confidence intervals from their earlier assessment. Any mention of that? Showing the 1998 year is a total red herring and not what the “skeptic” argument is asking folks to focus on. And where in this news report is the new “consensus” that climate sensitivities seem to be falling (at least our estimates of them)? And where is all of the scientific evidence that any of this actually, um, matters. For reference, over a billion people on the planet don’t have access to a toilet or clean water. What are the worst scenarios for what climate change is going to do to people? Seriously folks. What are they? And do you really believe that we as humans are so awesome as to be able to warm up an entire planet are too enfeebled to respond to whatever that may bring.

By the way, one simply incredible thing about the summary for policymakers, and presumably the main report document (I read the entire 4th assessment, that was fun) is that if you look at what earlier drafts said were some of the absolutely major, crucial, horrific things that would result from global warming, … how many are still in the current report. I can surely tell you one glaring omission: deaths from malaria. And look at how all of that sciency goodness in the news story and draft for policymakers points out that what was once thought to increase global death rates from malaria by something on the order of 1,000,000 per year (for fun, go see how many die from malaria already) is no longer in the report. Why? Well, you should go look up what happened. And should ask why this sort of thing is not reported in something as sciency-good as an IPCC report.

You lost me at hello. I was once on the bandwagon too.

4 Responses to “This Week’s Sign of the Economic Apocalypse …”

  1. Harry says:

    Glad you are not blogging anymore, just feeding us raw meat, and I am not talking about sashimi. Hope you have a nice weekend not denying yourself or any crackpot ideology.

  2. Harry says:

    Al Gore might have been President, and that may have hastened an acopylapse or two. Just listen to this guy.

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