Politick

CO2 in the Atmosphere is Decreasing - How Will the Global Warming Crowd Explain THAT?

Al Gore starts his odyssey on global warming with the Keeling Curve - the chart of steadily increasing CO2 levels measured off the top of Mauna Loa. Very compelling and the cornerstone of the case for anthropogenic (man-made) global warming (AGW). Early this year, however, the annual rate of increase was the lowest measured, and on a monthly basis seemed to be coming to a dead stop - which means after seasonal adjustments would show a down trend. Now it appears there is a down trend in the CO2 levels.  See chart. If this continues it spells the coup de grace for the goofy AGW case.    

The core of the AGW case is industrial CO2 spews out and stays in the atmosphere, accumulating faster than natural processes can handle, and causing ever-increasing warming. Over the past few decades we have been emitting 4 ppm of CO2 per year, and the atmospheric levels have been increasing by 2 ppm. We continue to spew, but if CO2 levels drop, it means something else is going on. 

Problems with CO2

I have discussed some of the problems with the CO2 case previously.  The simplest rebuttal is that the vaunted ice core data that Al Gore touts shows CO2 lags warming.  Also, CO2 is a trace gas, measured in parts per million.  It isn't even the most important greenhouse gas - that honor goes to water vapor, which is 25x more prevalent and is measured in parts per thousand. This is why the theory of AGW has always been a bit goofy.

Another fact that is hard for the AGW theory to explain away is shown in this graphic: the models for the greenhouse effect require warming in the upper atmosphere where the greenhouse effect occurs, but satellite measurements say that isn't happening. Consequently, whatever has been warming the planet since the end of the Little Ice Age 250 years ago is NOT the greenhouse effect.  

Climate Sensitivity

The IPCC climate models have a deep secret that the AGW advocates try to obscure: they do not assume the minute increase in CO2 itself (remember - parts per million) is directly causing the greenhouse effect; instead they add a 'climate sensitivity' to the models to make the CO2 increase fit the actual warming.  A little CO2 goes a long way.  Scarier is that the models have positive feedback so as more CO2 accumulates, the warming effect accelerates.

Here as well the theory is in deep trouble.  This climate sensitivity can be measured, and not merely be a plug in a model to make it work. Prof. Lindzen of MIT has done the measurement, and found that the actual climate sensitivity is much less than in the models.  This chart is a bit complex but the measured sensitivity is about 0.65 rather than 1.2 or higher as assumed by the models.  This means (right axis) that the measured feedback is negative, not positive as in the models. This makes a huge difference - not only is warming less, but it will not become a runaway (positive feedback) process, like a nuclear bomb.  

Positive feedback is another reason why the AGW theory is goofy.  We have had periods of much higher CO2 in the atmosphere than now, and not turned in a hothouse like Venus.  Some natural process limits the greenhouse effect.  These IPCC models need to assume a runaway feedback in order to take the minute increase in CO2 and make it cause warming.  

Methane

Some AGW advocates have moved beyond CO2 to Methane (CH4) as an even more pernicious greenhouse gas, caused by SUVs, industrial activity and too many cows.  Methane is measured in parts per billion, so is even more of a trace gas than CO2.  Here again the AGW crowd is in trouble with their theory. While spewing of CH4 continues (although in the US at least at a lower rate), atmospheric CH4 has been plateauing.  

Ocean Temperatures

Maybe there is an alternative way to square all this data.  The most ardent AGW advocates, James Hansen and Gavin Schmidt of NASA have put a marker down that an ocean temperature alternative could scuttle their theory.  In their words: "Confirmation of the planetary energy imbalance can be obtained by measuring the heat content of the ocean, which must be the principal reservoir for excess energy” (p. 1432).  

We have put out sea bouys since 2003 to measure ocean temperatures, and the data is coming in.  The chart makes it clear that sea temperatures are decreasing.

The oceans can explain a lot of the mystery, since the oceans can absorb a huge amount of heat (emphasis added):

For any given area on the ocean’s surface, the upper 2.6m of water has the same heat capacity as the entire atmosphere above it!    ...

Ocean heat touches on the very core of the AGW hypothesis:  When all is said and done, if the climate system is not accumulating heat, the hypothesis is invalid.

Writing in 2005, Hansen, Willis, Schmidt et al. suggested that GISS model projections had been verified by a solid decade of increasing  ocean heat (1993 to 2003).  This was regarded as further confirmation the IPCC’s AGW hypothesis. Their expectation was that the earth’s climate system would continue accumulating heat more or less monotonically.  Now that heat accumulation has stopped (and perhaps even reversed), the tables have turned.  The same criteria used to support their hypothesis, is now being used to falsify it.

It is evident that the AGW hypothesis, as it now stands, is either false or fundamentally inadequate.  

Ocean Degassing of CO2

An overlay of this decrease with the CO2 levels at Mauna Loa suggest that atmospheric CO2 is directly related to ocean temperatures. When oceans warm up,they release CO2.  When they cool off, they absorb CO2. This is not disputed:

The solubility of CO2 in sea water is well established. Warmer waters dissolve less CO2. In fact, as the oceans warm they outgas CO2 to the atmosphere.

Could it all be as simple as, something was warming the planet other than CO2, and as the ocean surface warmed, the oceans outgassd CO2?  This explains why CO2 lags warming. And now, something is cooling the planet off, and CO2 is being re-absorbed into the oceans?

Cooling Trend Since 2001

The recent cooling trend is quite clear in satellite data, but less so in surface station data.  GISS is the NASA surface data, RSS and UAH are satellite data.  The source says: 

"Since the beginning of 2003, RSS has been dropping at 3.60C/century, UAH has been dropping at 2.84C/century, and GISS has been dropping at 0.96C/century. " 

Something is apparently off in the GISS data.  It is provided by James Hansen, one of the most ardent advocates of AGW.  It needs to be adjusted to take out the urban heat effect, as over time many ground stations have become surrounded by asphalt and concrete.  The impact of these adjustments is now so huge that the whole data set is becoming suspect. 

Maybe GW is caused by computers?  Take a look at this animated comparison: 

Polar Bear Alert! Polar Ice Really is Back to Normal Levels

This really is good news for folks who really worry about polar bears, not use them as foils for global warming.  The polar ice is greater than reports had indicated, due to an error in historical data.  There is also a problem with an aging satellite. The latest data shows the ice back to the normal range going back to 1979, when satellite observations began. (Picture courtesy of WattsUpWithThat.)  Credit goes to the handful of careful GW skeptics that track the gushy reports from the MSM and correct bad science.  

Bad science you ask?  Well, consider the now debunked Steig study of Antarctic temperatures.  Even though ground stations report cooling, and the British Antarctic Survey recently concluded there is cooling, Steig attempted to show warming.  Almost immediately there were problems with his analysis, including confusing one groundstation with another (see When Harry Met Gill).  Worse, it was even found he used negative weights for some groundstations, which makes no physical sense at all (were they upside down?)  It simply shows he played with statistics to get the result he wanted, and didn't even consider what the physical explanation for his regressions were. 

A further analysis of his work shows he smeared data from the small peninsula (4% of the Antarctica) that sticks up into warmer waters and applied that data to the vast continent to purport to show warming.  In the end, it appears 70% of the weighting was from the warm 4% of the continent!  Talk about smearing peanut butter.  He even took data from an island at 52 degrees south (the same distance Amsterdam is from the North Pole) and applied it.  As explained by ClimateAudit:

It is also unclear why Campbell Island (52°S) and 4 other temperate-zone oceanic weather stations were included in the 42 occupied weather stations used to measure Antarctic ice-sheet temperature, as listed in Table S2 of the SI. Amsterdam, at 52°N, would surely not be included in a study of Arctic temperatures.

I doubt any credible scientist believes Amsterdam temperatures can be used to determine Arctic temperatures; but Steig did the same sort of thing to show temperatures near the South Pole. A complete debunking can be found here.

Gavin Schmidt of NASA who runs the blog RealClimate has promoted the Steig study but now declines to rebut the falsification.  Instead he has narrowed the results of Steig back to a study of "regional climate change that may well be largely due to natural variability."  Oh boy, just four months ago he trumpeted "Antarctic Warming is Robust".  And before that they welcomed the MSM reaction to Steig with: "The most prevalent peg was the fact that the study appeared to reverse the 'Antarctic cooling' meme that has been a staple of disinformation efforts for a while now." The cooling of Antarctica has been a thorn in the side of GW advocates for a while.  And now it remains so. 

So too the Arctic Ice.  So intent on proving their case with anecdotes and not science, the GW advocates completely ignored an analysis by NASA's JPL that showed the great loss in 2007 was not due to GW but to currents and wind.  Essentially, the polar ice is not fixed to land, and can get twisted and pushed by winds and currents.  And so it did in 2007, pushing much of it down to warmer climates, where it melted.  A video of satellite photos from the Japanese makes this clear.  (Courtesy WattsUpWithThat.)  You can see the ice get pushed into warmer waters, and then break up. 

Comparing the US to those Vaunted Euro Health Systems

You see a lot of propaganda these days in the MSM touting the Euro nationalized health systems as providing better care than the US.  This is all a build up to support a grandiose new health system, which will come with a grandiose price tag.  But are those stories telling the real story?  We all know the 'trick' in those systems to keep costs down is to ration care.  We see that happening already in Mass with RomneyCare, way over budget and now holding care back to cut costs.  If care is kept away from the needy, how do these systems really perform? 

Well, it appears they do well for routine problems, and fall way short for serious problems. 

Consider this snippet courtesy of John Mauldin from Dennis Gartman's eponymous letter. It should give all of those who favor a nationalized healthcare system pause, before they jump right in. Quoting Dennis:

"Canada is a wonderful place to have a nasty gash on one's forehead stitched, or to break one's nose in a game of pick-up baseball; but have cancer, or need eye surgery, or want an MRI, and the business of medicine in Canada and/or the UK breaks down badly in favour of medical care here in the US. For example... and we wish to thank The Investor's Business Daily for the data noted here this morning...

"... here in the US men and women survived cancer at an average of just a bit better than 65%. In England only 46% survive. In the US, 93% of those diagnosed with diabetes receive treatment within six months; in Canada only 43% do, and in the UK only 15% do! For those seniors needing a hip replacement and getting one within six months, 15% get it done in the UK; 43% get it done in Canada ... and in the US 90% do! For those waiting to see a medical specialist, 23% of those in the US get in within four weeks, while 57% in Canada have not yet done so, and in the UK 60% are still waiting after four weeks.

"When it comes to proper medical equipment, in the US there are 71 MRI or CT scanners available per million people. In Canada there are but 18, and in the UK there are only 14! Ah, but the best figure of all is this: 11.7% of those 'seniors' in the US with 'low incomes' say they are in excellent health, which in and of itself sounds rather low ... rather disconcerting ... and an indictment of the system itself, doesn't it? But in Canada only 5.8% do!

More here at the IBD original article, which quotes from a National Center for Policy Analysis study: "10 Surprising Facts About American Health Care."

Obama is an Economic Illiterate UPDATED

 He went to G20 to ask all major nations to borrow and stimulate.  If everyone in the world does this at the same time, who lends to them?  Fact is we have to borrow $1T in the next 4 months and the major sources (China, Russia, Middle East) are selling not buying.  Bernanke had no choice but to pursue Quantitative Easing, which means the Federal Reserve prints money to finance the deficit, since the Fed is the only lender left. 

We got away with this in WWII by forcing US citizens to save a huge % of their earnings as part of a war effort.  Instead this time Obama wants the American consumer to spend spend spend and not save.

The numbers do not add up.  It is as if Obama is living in an academic fantasyland where he can apply Keynesian stimulus and Monetarist easing at the same time, whereas both schools thought their approach were mutually exclusive.  You do both and you blow up the economy into hyperinflation. 

Then his plan for balancing the horrific deficits is to nationalize healthcare.  Let's see, increase coverage, increase benefits, encourage usage - and overall costs go down?? 

This is utter nonsense. Even his own budget does not swallow this tripe: it has a $600B "down payment" increase in healthcare for his plan.  The CBO doubles that.  That extra $1.2T is NOT included in the deficit projections in this chart.  The deficit stretches out, widening in the out years - a completely untenable and irresponsible situation.

UPDATE 5/31:  John Taylor, the respected economist from Stanford, has calculated how bad an inflation will be needed to get deficits back in line:

To understand the size of the risk, take a look at the numbers that Standard and Poor’s considers. The deficit in 2019 is expected by the CBO to be $1,200bn (€859bn, £754bn). Income tax revenues are expected to be about $2,000bn that year, so a permanent 60 per cent across-the-board tax increase would be required to balance the budget. Clearly this will not and should not happen. So how else can debt service payments be brought down as a share of GDP?

Inflation will do it. But how much? To bring the debt-to-GDP ratio down to the same level as at the end of 2008 would take a doubling of prices. That 100 per cent increase would make nominal GDP twice as high and thus cut the debt-to-GDP ratio in half, back to 41 from 82 per cent. A 100 per cent increase in the price level means about 10 per cent inflation for 10 years. But it would not be that smooth – probably more like the great inflation of the late 1960s and 1970s with boom followed by bust and recession every three or four years, and a successively higher inflation rate after each recession.

[An] 100 per cent inflation would, of course, mean a 100 per cent depreciation of the dollar. Americans would have to pay $2.80 for a euro; the Japanese could buy a dollar for Y50; and gold would be $2,000 per ounce. This is not a forecast, because policy can change; rather it is an indication of how much systemic risk the government is now creating.

To summarize, we either need to raise taxes 60%, or debase the USD in half.  Both are disasters for the US economy.  Or, we could wake up and cut spending! 

We got into this pickle because Obama is over his head.  He thinks like a Community Organizer: how to shake down "The Man" for goodies for his constituents.  I guess that is all he knows, since that is all he ever did.  But now he is The Man!  So he is shaking down himself!  Which means, the rest of us.  He will soak the innocent and the prudent to take care of the hucksters and the reckless, and bring down the US Global Economy in the process. 

How Irrelevant the Bill in Congress Is to Global Warming

A bill is floating in Congress to reduce US emissions of carbon dioxide by 83% in the next 40 years.  Good idea?  Two recent analyses show that It will be completely inconsequential to reducing global warming.  The bill itself would only reduce warming by a mere one-three-thousandth a degree.  Not even measurable.  And the huge increase in cost of cheap fuels would have the perverse consequence of accelerating the use of oil and coal in the developing world, overwhelming all the reduction by the US.  This analysis is so even if we get the whole developed world (US, Europe, Japan, Australia) to go along with it.  The problem lies not with the West, but the Rest (of the world).  Read on, below the fold.

Why The Stimulus Won't Work: The Marginal Productivity of Debt

This chart should give you pause about stimulating the US economy with more debt.  What it says is that for every Dollar of new debt (private or public) we have had diminishing returns.  According to Antal Fekete, if you take this chart further back, we used to get $3 of GDP for every $1 of debt.  Sometime in the late '60s, the line crossed below $1, meaning every new Dollar of debt returned less than that in GDP.  Antal thinks we actual went negative in 2006, but regardless of whether his data is the same as this chart, we are approaching that point. 

This is truly a point of no return.  This means every new $1 borrowed reduces GDP.  We borrow ourselves into collapse.  If we are at that point, the $2T expected deficit in 2009 means we drop GDP by some percent of $2T - if for example we lose $1 of GDP for each $1 of new debt, the deficit itself would cause a $2T in GDP, or a 14% drop, on top of the already declining GDP - collectively a level of destruction not seen since the Great Depression.  I guess it is fortunate that the line would not immediately go to a negative $1 of GDP for each new $1 of debt; but as the curent Federal deficit is unprecedented in peacetime, we might find the fall below the trendline to be serious. As usual, Karl Denninger gives an entertaining and informative rant on this topic. 

It is also worth noting that PPI was down 3.5% year over year - the largest drop since 1950.  Deflation is here. Bernanke has tried to reflate with around $9T of easy credit, but it is like pushing a wet noodle.  All around him credit is being destroyed faster than the central bank can reflate.  We are living the Austrian School argument, that after a credit bubble bursts, you cannot reflate it.  Deflation is inevitable. And so it has arrived. 

An Inadvertent Study Shows All 20 IPCC Models Flawed

There has been some criticism of the 20 global climate models (GCMs) relied upon by the IPCC, specifically that they deal poorly with clouds.  All 20 assume a positive feedback from warming - the warmer it gets, the better the greenhouse effect works.  (Simplified, the greenhouse concept is that visible light is reflected off the planet, and the infrared heat is captured by greenhouse gases, including clouds, water vapor and to a much lesser extent since it is a trace gas, CO2.  Positive feedback means that emissions into space should therefore decrease with warming.)  The IPCC admits it handles clouds poorly; if warming leads to more cloud formation, light is reflected before it ever gets to the planet, and the world cools.

Now a study for other purposes has shown a devastating flaw in all 20 models: where they predict lower emissions, recent satellite measurements show higher emissions with warming, sometimes as much as 7x the prediction.  See this chart, where the red line is the measured emissions in space, and the dotted line is the mean prediction of the models.  (The gray is the band of predictions around that mean.) 

Bottom line:  where the models predict a positive feedback (more warming leads to more greenhouse absorption of infrared), the satellite measurements show negative feedback - more warming leads to less greenhouse effect.  The climate sensitivity in the models to CO2 is much less than predicted.  As Dr Lindzen concludes (emphasis added):

The earth’s climate (in contrast to the climate in current climate GCMs) is dominated by a strong net negative feedback. Climate sensitivity is on the order of 0.3°C, and such warming as may arise from increasing greenhouse gases will be indistinguishable from the fluctuations in climate that occur naturally from processes internal to the climate system itself.

The AIG Show Trial

What is going on today with Ed Liddy, CEO of AIG, is a show trial of the sort that used to grace the Soviet Union.  Ed Liddy was not put in place by AIG, but the government.  The current Treasury Secy, Tim Geithner, while he was head of the NY Fed, put in place the AIG bailout and allowed the bonus deals.  Chris Dodd, Demo Senator, put an amendment in the 'Porkulus' bill to protect executive bonses - including these AIG bonuses.  Now that the political heat is falling on Obama and not Bush (you don't hear Bush's name anymore, do you?  All Obama, all the time), the Demo leadership from Obama to Dodd are 'shocked, shocked' to find bonuses are being paid.  They hope the show trial will deflect public anger; if it doesn't, expect Tim Geithner to take the fall. No one will shed a tear for an incompetent tax cheat.

This show trial is all political noise, but beware of what Obama said today at a press conference, which shows how clueless he is of the real world.  He never really held a job, after all.  He first said he wanted to end the 'culture of bonuses' - meaning he has no understanding of how to motivate sales people, in or out of Wall Street.  (BTW, if he removes these bonuses, expect the remaining sales people at the AIG trading desk to vacate, leaving virtually no one to manage $2.4T of credit default swaps - what a huge potential fiasco that will cause, all to save $165M of bonuses). Next he said he wanted to end the boom & bust cycle of the economy - a pattern built into human nature.  Even God wouldn't try that!  Finally he said he would have Barney Frank come up with the answer - Barney Frank! the fox in the henhouse who thwarted 12 attempts by Republicans to end the excesses of Fannie/Freddie that was the proximate cause of the housing bubble.

No wonder Obama's political support has dropped hard - his incompetence is showing. The spread of strongly approve vs strongly disapprove has dropped from 30% to 7%, and got as low as 4%, according to Rasmussen.  He gets poor grades from economists, according to a WSJ poll. And at one time, 60% of MSNBC viewers in an unscientific poll rated him an F  - this from his must supportive TV network! 

This show trial is distractig the public from a much worse AIG issue - $120B of the $170B of bailout went right out to the counter-parties of these swaps.  Goldman Sachs got $13B, etc.  And none of them has any responsibility to pay it back.  Who is responsible for that?  It should make us very cautious to let the governent get its hooks into any other companies. It has destroyed AIG through inattention and now massive political meddling. Maybe the real trial should put the real culprits up, nt the fall guy. 

Greenspan's Defends His Grand Experiment With History

An extremely important debate is being carried out in the WSJ.  First, Anna Schwartz (co-author of Milton Friedman's most important book) criticized Bernanke for fighting the wrong war (link to WSJ editorial in this post).  Then John Taylor criticized Greenspan for having caused the credit bubble (link to WSj editorial in that post).  Now Greenspan offers his defense as a direct rebuttal to John Taylor: the problem was not holding short term rates too low for too long, but the unusually low long term rates due to the savings glut of mercantilist economies like China.  These low long term rates then fed a worldwide housing bubble.  Greenspan acknowledges the critical importance of this issue on policy:

"How much does it matter whether the bubble was caused by inappropriate monetary policy, over which policy makers have control, or broader global forces over which their control is limited? A great deal.

"If it is monetary policy that is at fault, then that can be corrected in the future, at least in principle. If, however, we are dealing with global forces beyond the control of domestic monetary policy makers, as I strongly suspect is the case, then we are facing a broader issue."

Greenspan then shoots his cannon across the bow of the Obama administration and the mantra of 'deregulation' having caused the bubble:  "[T]he appropriate policy response is not to bridle financial intermediation with heavy regulation. ... The solutions for the financial-market failures revealed by the crisis are higher capital requirements and a wider prosecution of fraud -- not increased micromanagement by government entities."

We cannot rewind history, but we can conduct a thought experiment to test Greenspan's argument: absent his reflation of US credit, plus his coterminous relaxing of requirements (such as bank reserve levels), would the exponential growth of credit have exploded in 2004-8?  Specifically to Greenspan's defense, since he focuses on the housing bubble, would housing have exploded? 

Methinks Greenspan protests too much.  Before the Greenspan reflation, global housing was rising but not exponentially.  Fannie & Freddie had already been pushing subprime mortgages and relaxed lending requirements, but the bubble had not emerged.  Globalization and the savings glut had begun in the early '90s, and may have contributed to the dot-com bubble; but even that one was sparked by Greenspan pumping liquidity in 1997 after the Asian Flu, in 1998 after the failure of Long Term Capital Management, and in 1999 to avoid the spurious Y2K problem.  Does he really want to argue that the well-recognized Greenspan Put (to bail out investors of their excesses) did not enbolden an environment of "euphoria" and excessive risk-taking? 

As a coda to his argument, the policy solutions he proposes, of higher capital requirements for banks and prosecution of fraud, are entirely consistent with Taylor's contention that excessive easing caused the bubble.  If Greenspan really thought the mercantilist Asian economies caused the problem, he should propose counters to that.  But he welcomes globalization and believes it caused prosperity in the US.  Hence his defense contains its own rebuttal. 

The Root Causes of the Current Financial Crisis

Last October I summarized a trenchant analysis by Anna Schwartz, co-author with Milton Friedman of the seminal A Monetary History of the United States.  She pointed out that Bernanke was solving the wrong problem - in a misguided attempt to replay history and prevent the last Great Depression, he was treating the banking crisis as a liquidity problem when instead it was a solvency problem.   Today in the WSJ the Stanford economist John B. Taylor explains how we got into this mess in How Government Created the Financial Crisis.  For those who do not get the online version of the Journal, let me summarize:

Greenland Saved! Al Gore Called for Icing UPDATED

The most strident, the most hysterical warning in An Inconvenient Truth is that the ice on Greenland was melting at a prodigious rate, the meltwater was seeping all the way down to the bedrock on which the ice sat, and we were facing a potential catastrophe when the ice lubricated by this melt water slid off the land and fell into the ocean, creating huge tidal waves and potentially raising sea levels by an astounding 20 feet in short order.  (The IPCC view remains a more modest rise of a few inches.)

Thus it should come as a great relief to find that all these claims have been shown to be wrong.  The melt water is not seeping all the way down but refreezing part way.  The earthquakes that Al Gore thought were evidence of a great pending instability have turned out to due to glacier calving not ice slipping and sliding off the surface.  Most significant, the retreat of the glaciers has slowed and may be reversing. They are now back to 2000 levels.  And their fastest ice melt remains back in the '30s, before anthroprogenic global warming was thought to have started. 

UPDATE 5/18: a more recent study concurs.  Gore's argument of a catastrophic sliding off of ice is unsupported. 

The Barack O'Bama Irish Song

We are all mongrels now!  Worth a listen and a moment to celebrate the meaninglessness of race.  Barack may be more Irish than African.  Let the world embrace him for who he is, not what he is.  Lyrics here.

Polar Bear Alert! Sea Ice Back to 1979 Levels! UPDATED

You gotta wonder how soon Al Gore will turn up on SNL as a comic foil.  In the past two years, global temperatures have reversed the warming of the past 30 years.  In the past two quarters, Arctic sea ice is back to levels last seen in 1979.  You can say two years is too short to generalize, but you can also say the blip from 1979-1998 is also too short to conclude that man-made carbon dioxide is about to result in runaway warming.  In either event, spending untold $Trillions to prevent an uncertain calamity is now being seen as the colossal Folly it always was.  Rather than saying the Polar Bears are now safe from an horrific lack of ice, better to say WE are now safe from this hysterical lack of common sense. 

UPDATE:  This news article generated enormous interest and alarm from the AGW advocates.  The report is accurate, as indicated here with pictures, in that the extent of sea ice did match the 1979 extent, but this does not mean the ice itself is as thick as it was in 1979.  A good analysis is here. The scientists' reaction the story is here.  But then another shoe dropped: sensor drift from the satellite data had under-reported the polar ice extent by a huge 193,000 square miles (500,000 sq km), the size of Spain! This calls into question the purported rebuttals to the original story.  Satellite data from Japan shows the ice in 2009 is running ahead of the polar sea ice of any of the past four years (2005-2008). 

New Stock Market Terms

Well, we all learned the old monikers - "Don't confuse brains with a bull market", or "Bears make money, Bulls make money, but Pigs get led to the slaughter".  Now even the tried and true names need a bailout  Here goes:

CEO -- Chief Embezzlement Officer

CFO -- Corporate Fraud Officer

BULL MARKET -- A random market movement causing an investor to mistake himself for a financial genius

BEAR MARKET -- A 6 to 18 month period when the kids get no allowance, the wife gets no jewelry, and the husband gets no sex

VALUE INVESTING -- The art of buying low and selling lower

P/E RATIO -- The percentage of investors wetting their pants as the market keeps crashing

BROKER -- What my broker has made me

STANDARD & POOR -- Your life in a nutshell  

STOCK ANALYST -- Idiot who just downgraded your stock.

STOCK SPLIT -- When your ex-wife and her lawyer split your assets equally between themselves

FINANCIAL PLANNER -- A guy whose phone has been disconnected

MARKET CORRECTION -- The day after you buy stocks

CASH FLOW-- The movement your money makes as it disappears down the toilet

YAHOO -- What you yell after selling it to some poor sucker for $240 per share

WINDOWS -- What you jump out of when you're the sucker who bought Yahoo @ $240 per share

INSTITUTIONAL INVESTOR -- Past year’s investor who is now locked up in a nuthouse                       

PROFIT -- An archaic word no longer in use.

Global Warming Smoking Gun (CO2) Points Backwards

Al Gore starts his An Inconvenient Truth with carbon dioxide (CO2) readings from Mauna Loa showing an increasing trendline since the '60s, and further emphasizes the connection with ice core data showing warming is correlated with increased CO2 back 600,000 years. Yet close studies of ice core data show that the increase in CO2 lags warming by as much as 1073 years (best fit to data), which is very close to a 1200 year cycle of thermohaline circulation (deep water to surface) in the oceans.  Gore seems to have uncovered a self-regulatory mechanism of the planet, where the surface waters absorb atmospheric CO2, pull it into the deep currents, and a millennium later it gets released.   If so, he inadvertently solves a huge problem with his CO2 theory: if increasing CO2 leads to runaway global warming, why haven't we become a lifeless Venus long ago? 

His argument has to be we are somehow overwhelming the natural self-regulatory mechanism due to spewing out man-made CO2.  Perhaps, but the GW advocates have been in a pursuit of the missing CO2, since only about half of this industrial CO2 seems to remain in the atmosphere.  Maybe it ends up in rain forests. Or maybe it is but a bit player in a larger climate drama of how warming changes CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. 

Now they have another problem to solve: a close look at the data over the Mauna Loa period also shows CO2 growth lags warming, by 6 - 9 months. So rather than causing warming, recent CO2 growth seems to be a consequence of it.

If the currrent trend towards global cooling continues, we should notice a drop in CO2 growth and then in CO2 quantity, creating a top in atmospheric CO2 and a flip in the CO2 trendline to downwards sloping.  In other words, the smoking gun of anthrogenic (man-made) global warming is pointing the wrong way, and is about to go off right into the GW advocates' faces.  Of course, they will blame the current economic downturn.  Maybe we need a GW bailout?

Greatest Bank Robbery in History?

Lots of analyses how the bailouts to be approaching $7T in commitments (not draw downs), which, as a percent of GDP, is approaching the level reached during the Great Depression from all of the various bailouts/stimulus/jobs programs.  Much of this seems to be going to the banking sector, the same sector that got us into this mess peddling snake oil like subprime mortgages, SIVs, CDOs, ARS, CDSs and so much more - and pulled huge amounts of profit out of the economy.  Bill Bonner at The Daily Reckoning puts this in perspective:

Before 1987, only about one of every 10 dollars of corporate profits made its way to the financial industry – in payment for arranging financing, banking and other services.  By the end of the bubble years, the cost of ‘finance’ had grown to more than 3 out of every 10 dollars.  Total profits in the United States reached about $6 trillion last year; about $2 trillion was Wall Street’s share.  What happened to this money?  Other industries use profits to build factors and create jobs.  But the financial industry paid it out in salaries and bonuses – as much as $10 trillion during the whole Bubble Period.  And now that the sector finds itself a few trillion short, it waits for the government to open its purse

It is as if the last few years were an illusion foisted on Main Street by Wall Street and the Fed, and while Main Street ran hard to stay in the same place, Wall Street took out a grossly disproportionate share of profits. Consider this analysis: 

Real median household income in the U.S. was $50,577 in 2000 when George Bush took office—it is $50,233 today. The government has added over $4 trillion to the national debt during that time. ... The only way people have been able to maintain their lifestyle has been to borrow against their house and run up their credit cards. That is a phony improvement in lifestyle.

Alaskan Glaciers Increasing For The First Time in 250 Years

 The GW advocates are fond of pointing to anecdotal evidence like glaciers retreating to substantiate their argument that man-made carbon dioxide is causing global warming.  Their argument gets a bit fuzzy more than 30 or 40 years ago, before the SUV so to speak, or more specifically, before the increase in industrial CO2 pointed to by Gore in his documentary An Inconvenient Truth. 

I'm fond of pointing out that global warming has been going on for at least 200 years, if not longer, ever since a period known to history as The Little Ice Age.  Glaciers have been receding for at least the last 200 years.  The GW advocates have to find 200 years of man-made causality beyond natural climate change to explain that! 

Now we have the beginnings of anecdotal evidence that glaciers are growing again, at least in Alaska.  GW has flatlined since 1998 and has dropped in the last two years, probably due to the Pacific Decadel Oscillation, the source of El Nino's and La Nina's, which also appears to be chilling Alaska.  The PDO flipped from cool to warm in 1977, and most of the anecdotal evidence for man-made GW comes from the period 1979 to 2006 when the PDO was in a warm phase.  It recently flipped back to a cool phase. 

Now, a couple of years does not make a change of climate trend, but it does show up the overt and unscientific confirmatory bias of GW advocates who see GW in any climate change.   

Polar Bears Saved! Polar Ice Growing Back At Record Pace

Nothing caught the hearts and minds of the public than pictures of drowning polar bears, cast adrift when the Arctic sea ice melted out from under them.  Of course it didn't matter that polar bear groups remained at record levels, since they were now at severe risk!  So it must come as a huge relief that the polar sea ice is coming back at stunning speed.  For a deeper discussion of the sea ice situation, check here, where the GW theory would show an anomaly in winter whereas the recent drop off was in summer.  Maybe something else is going on?  Perhaps Black Carbon (soot) from China?  Man-made, but not carbon-dioxide. 

Is global warming forcing Bigfoot to move north?

You still don't think GW is riddled with junk science? This headline speaks for itself. Article here.  Think this is an isolated example?  Check out this 9 minute video. Or check out this list of all the problems caused by GW!

Hope and Disillusionment in Obama

Springtime for Obama, and Pelosi!  Winter for Palin and Bush ...

Everyone has their personal hopes, all put into the hands of Obama, the vessel of their dreams.  Many of my friends and relatives hope for subsidized healthcare, or maybe free!  My VC friends hope for subsidies for their cleantech deals (they may need something as oil heads towards $40) and special capital gains treatment for small business investments.  They and their private equity brethren are hoping against hope that their carried interest maintains capital gains treatment.   My overseas friends hope for a new friendly face of America.  Maliki hopes to call in his chit for helping Obama win (something I commented on at the time).  Iran's leader hopes Obama will renounce US "war-oriented" policies and express remorse for past dealings with Iran.   Gays marched in SF and LA following the loss of gay marriage in California fully expect Obama to restore it, despite the uncomfortable truth that many Obama supporters voted to overturn it, especially black voters.  And some Obama supporters now expect Obama will pay for their gas and their mortgage! 

Obama's bucket of hope runneth over.  What will spilleth to the floor?