Politick

US Temperatures Cooling at Striking Rate

The US has cooled in the past 11 years at a rate of minus 7.3F/century, or -4C/century. Global Warming since the end of the Little Ice Age has increased temperatures at an 0.8C/century rate. We are cooling at 5x the rate of prior warming. 

11 years may seem too short to derive a trend, but note that the GW hysteria came from trendlines over less than 20 years: 1979 - 1998. 

The anecdotes that made GW so compelling - glaciers, polar bears, hurricanes, etc.- have begun to go the other way. Chicago expects its earliest snowfall ever on record this weekend. Ski areas are gearing up for a very early start to ski season. The Antarctic is suffering its slowest summer melt in 30 years, and the Arctic is coming back stronger than expected. Spokane is suffering an unusually early polar blast. Last year was its third snowiest winter; this year may be the record setter. Accuweather reports an unusually early polar front sweeping into the upper midwest, with snow and freezing temperatures that are "almost unheard of so early in the season." UPDATE 10/18: over 4500 cold records set in early October. 

Satellite date since 1979 pegs the overall rise at only 0.42C  essentially 0 in 30 years. The chart shows we actually dipped below the 1979 level last year, and the updated chart from Roy Spencer below it shows we have just returned there. The recent pop up since then is due to an El Nino, which is now weakening. 

If this continues, the red line (moving average to smooth monthly fluctuations) may go back to even next year - no warming trend over the past 30 years. In any event, there is a clear downtrend since 1998. 

This cooling trend is also confirmed by the ARGO sea buoy data, which have shown oceans cooling since 2003. The ARGO buoys float in the currents, periodically dive deep, take a reading, head back to the surface, and radio the data home. 

Sea surface temperatures are dropping fairly fast. The most recent ocean temperature readings from a variety of sources is shown in the third chart,commentary here.

This chart is from the Arctic and helps explain why it is repairing itself so quickly. Other graphs show similar drops, except in the south Pacific where a mild El Nino has begun. 

In a more humorous vein, the Gore Effect has just struck in Wisconsin: he spoke yesterday in Madison amidst the surprising cold snap that is sweeping the upper midwest. The Gore Effect is a well recognized phenomenon that seemingly where-ever Al Gore goes to speak on Global Warming, a shocking cold spell hits the city. Over 20 such incidents have been recorded. Wikipedia used to have an entry on this, but it was deleted for unclear reasons. The Gore Effect has made the Urban Dictionary. 

A stunning list of recent cold anecdotes is below the fold from a recent DIGG post and comment. 

Global Warming Deception Unveiled UPDATED

A very disturbing report makes you wonder whether any Global Warming scientist can be trusted. The vaunted Mann Hockey Stock is at the heart of the GW case, and now it turns out the core data was cherry-picked to show warming. Use of the whole sample would have shown cooling! The red line is the Mann Hockey Stick. See it shoot up in recent years. The black line is the whole data set. See it shoot down. A completely contrary conclusion.

The tale is well-told here. And even better is to start here. Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit debunked the original hockey stick, but until just now was not able to get a hold of the core data.

Also below the fold I include a good summary of the history of the Mann Hickey Stick and its debunking, with links. 

Why Mann would resist revealing his source data was always a point of concern - real science would not work this way. What Steve found when he saw the data was that the tree ring data was cherry-picked - one of Mann's co-authors had selected a mere 10 rings out of a larger sample, specifically chosen to create the hockey stick. When the whole sample is used, the black line above results. Instead of warming, we have cooling.

The Mann Hockey Stick was a reconstruction from tree ring data of historic temperature that was then tied to recent surface temperature data. An explanation of tree ring data is here. The sharp spike up is an artifact of tying two disparate data sets together.

The hockey stick has been hugely influential on the GW debate; it caused the IPCC to completely reformulate the historical record.The second chart shows how the IPCC used to view the historical record, with a Medieval Warm Period and a Little Ice Age.

The whole point of the Mann Hockey Stick was to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period - it is warmer than now without SUVs. Also the rise off the Little Ice Age can explain all the anecdotal data (like glaciers melting) as natural, without blaming man-made CO2.

This broken hockey stick fiasco follows a whole series of questionable political acts by the British climate center (CRU). They had been refusing to open their data to scrutiny. They also either lost or purged core data. Another British center had been withholding tree ring data. And so it goes.

Something is very wrong when scientists hide data and refuse to allow their work to be reviewed. Peer Review is not a review of the data and conclusions themselves, but of the approach - process not substance.

Something is very rotten when the data *finally* gets reviewed and found to be deceptive or plain wrong. This is not the only example; the Steig Antarctic study has been shown to be laughably false. Steig smeared data from the only warmish spot, the Peninsula, across most of the  Continent. A mere 4% of the area led to 75% of the temperature weighting. See chart.

The pro GW crowd must be absolutely sure they are right, regardless of the data, to engage in such shenanigans. Politics corrupts science. Absolute politics corrupts absolutely.

UPDATE 9/30: a lot more coming in on this topic. A detailed chronology of the events leading to this expose shows how fortuitous it was, and how hard the climate scientists resisted subjecting their analysis to scrutiny.  They resisted because they knew the importance of the cherry-picked tree rings to resurrect the debunked Mann analysis. Consider the author's conclusion:

But I think it is pretty obvious that pretty much all the relevant authors of the article must know that without any fabrication of the data, they don't get any hockey stick from the trees. It means that it can't be an innocent mistake and all of them, and not just Keith Briffa, are fraudsters who know very well what they're doing and why they're doing it. The next question is whether the society knows what it should be doing with such people.

The impact of this fraud includes having to revisit a number of peer-reviewed papers that used the cherry-picked data rather than the broader data set precisely because the cherry-picked set supported their conclusion, if not their science. Now, tree-ring data is fraught with difficulties - a discussion of the problems with tree-ring analysis here - but cherry-picking tree-rings is fraught with fraud. Maybe peer-review itself in the GW world needs to be revisited, not just the data sets.

Get a Grip, People, on Obama!

This brewing hysteria over Obama has gone over the edge.  What is the great fear of Obama talking to school kids?  That he will sweet-talk them into being little ObamaBots to pursue a glorious socialist revolution in Amerika?  Peggy Noonan captures the Independent Angst of the moment in her column today, that the feeling is growing the Obama Is Not One Of Us.  It has already begun to infect the moderate Democrats, particularly the soon-to-emerge Hilary '12! crowd.  It may take down the leftwing wingnut and Green Czar, Van Jones, for his intemperate remarks.   But are all these Czars a fifth column to take over control of the government unconstitutionally, or just a way to give Chicago-style patronage jobs to those people who helped Obama get elected?  And is the threat in '12 a moderate challenger, or a more radical candidate angry over the loss of the public option?  

The best assessment of this I have read comes from James Srode in the American Spectator article One term Obama.  You would expect this publication to be virulent against Obama, as it outed President Clinton's Paula Jones escapade that eventually cascaded into a special prosecutor and impeachment.  Yet this piece provides a reasoned historical perspective about past Presidents who got into similar situations, and gives a much needed perspective to quell the brewing hysteria.

The thesis is that during grave crises, the better Presidents will seize excessive and unconstitutional powers, and as the crisis abates the powers will be pulled back.  Lincoln for example went way beyond anything even imagined about Obama's purported power grab; and yet as the Civil War was being won his powers were pulled back.  If he hadn't been assassinated, he might have become a failed President in his second term, as Wilson was - another example of a Presient who went beyond Constitutional powers from 1915-1918, to prepare for war, and then found his legs cut out from under him at home when he tried to create the League of Nations.  The crisis had abated and the body politic took back what he had seized.

As our financial crisis has seemed to recede, the power pullback is already well underway.  This is very early in his Presidency. The mistake he made was to try to seize power in areas unrelated to the crisis. Our crisis is financial, and his agenda is to fix healthcare, global warming and education.  The two bills in process, healthcare reform and cap&trade, are hugely complex monstrosities which look more like power grabbing than problem solving.  He should be benefiting from the green shoots; but instead he is sinking from them. 

Ironically a W-Shaped Recession and a second wave down might do more to help Obama's Presidency than success against the Great Recession.  If his luck is we muddle through, his karma may be that he overplayed the Crisis Card, and it came back to bite him.  

The Republic is in crisis.  It is always in crisis.  Get a grip.  

Getting Philosophical Over Healthcare

Distressing to watch Obama's Presidency rapidly unravel over healthcare, and to see the Democrats' resolve dissolve in confusion.  The fault lies not in their policies but in their philosophies.  Wonkish reworking of the public option into co-ops will no longer disguise the philosophical morass that Obama got into in how he went about selling the bill. 

He started out selling us on the philosophy of Something For Nothing: we could expand coverage without raising taxes!  This ran afoul of the CBO's Trillion Dollar estimate of the cost of covering 5% more of the population, a mere third of the 47 million uninsured.  (Why so few?  The rest are either illegals, are in transition between jobs or are young and healthy who opt out.) 

He then tried the approach of Nothing Will Change: we could keep our current doctor, and health insurance if we wanted!  This ran afoul of simple reading of the bill, where it was clear any stumble (eg change jobs, require new coverage) would force you into the public option - even if you wanted your old insurance, you were precluded from continuing with it!

Now he is trapped in a philosophical debate over Who Controls My Life: 

if we need (say) a hip replacement, do we and our doctor get to decide or does the government?  Do we as Americans, the land of the free and the home of the brave, now allow faceless bureaucrats to control our very bodies? 

Make no mistake, the deterioration of support for his health reform is directly running in the shoals of personal freedom. This is now the battleground: will the government be able to decide what care is given, or will it remain a private matter between doctor and patient? 

The facile answer is always, we ration care now! What is different whether an insurance company or the government does it?  But this is sophistry, since an insurance company is not 'rationing'.  If the plan covers it, they have to pay.  This issue is usually raised in an indirect way, about insurance companies dropping people whose circumstances change, or raising premiums, or not being affordable in the first place.  We all have anecdotes of insurance companies acting badly, and this is exacerbated by employer-based health insurance, where the big companies are in cahoots with the insurance providers to limit costs, and only a small handful of plans get offered without much choice.  All valid issues that can be resolved with reform within the philosophical paradigm of personal freedom.  The bipartisan Wyden Plan is one such reform, and may be gaining support.  In contrast, if we have problems with the Public Option, we can never change it. Ever. Again.

How did Obama get from Something For Nothing to Taking Away Personal Liberty?  He got out maneuvered by of all people Sarah Palin, whose Death Panel facebook page captured the essence of the philosophical problem: to control costs, the government system will have to ration care, and as she put it:

And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.

The Obama side when ballistic.  I doubt the rebuttals to her comment ever read her original piece. She was not talking of the 'end of life' counseling provision that many pundits said she was; she was talking about a philosophy of government healthcare to have to ration to control costs.  This is why so many got the story wrong.  How sad for example to see the Old Grey Lady drop an editorial on the front page (as if it were news) claiming no one had ever proposed death panels.  Their statement that "[t]here is nothing in any of the legislative proposals that would call for the creation of death panels or any other governmental body that would cut off care for the critically ill as a cost-cutting measure" brought the philosophical challenge of who-decides-about-my-care front and center in the debate.  They began to backtrack on this storyline just a few days later.  They probably would never have run it in the first place if they had only read their own paper on the subject!  Just a few months earlier the New York Times had run a conversation with Obama which started with the story of his grandmother, who was terminally ill with cancer when she had an expensive hip replacement procedure so that she would not be bed-ridden for the last three to nine months of her life:

THE PRESIDENT: So that’s where I think you just get into some very difficult moral issues. But that’s also a huge driver of cost, right?

I mean, the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care bill out here.

LEONHARDT: So how do you — how do we deal with it?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I think that there is going to have to be a conversation that is guided by doctors, scientists, ethicists. And then there is going to have to be a very difficult democratic conversation that takes place. It is very difficult to imagine the country making those decisions just through the normal political channels. And that’s part of why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance. It’s not determinative, but I think has to be able to give you some guidance. And that’s part of what I suspect you’ll see emerging out of the various health care conversations that are taking place on the Hill right now.

Ah, there's the rub!  What is that 'independent group' and what powers does it have? In their own coverage of the Obama interview Peter Baker of the Times wrote this on May 1:

Some conservatives have cited Mr. Obama’s story to make the case that his plan to expand access to health care and reduce costs ultimately will result in rationing, of the kind that might have denied his grandmother the surgery unless she paid the bill on her own.

To me, Obama is laying out the intellectual case for health care rationing while acknowledging the potential human costs of such a policy,” wrote Matthew Continetti on the Web site of the Weekly Standard magazine. “He’s saying that,in order to contain costs, under a universal health care program his grandmother might have been denied that hip replacement, or forced to pay for it herself. This is the natural consequence of a universal policy, which would bankrupt the country without some form of rationing care.”

Amazingly such a panel has already been established - in the Stimulus Bill!  It granted $1.1B for a Council to make the hard decisions about rationing care.  In the terrible interview where Obama said to a questioner that maybe her grannie would have been better off taking the painkiller, he went on to say: 

[W]e want to use science, we want doctors and — and medical experts to be making decisions that all too often right now are driven by skewed policies, by out-dated means of reimbursement, or by insurance companies.

Hmmm, "medical experts".  Left out of the answer was the patient and her family.  Normally he is fairly careful in his answers, but he has dug himself a deep hole and will have a difficult time getting out of it.  It is clear he philosophically is NOT on the side of personal freedom but of a panel of experts.  We have seen where this leads: to the Orwellian-named panel of death in the British National Health System called NICE, which sets appallingly uncompassionate guidelines to refuse care and treatment to the needy in order to ration care that the national system finds it cannot afford to cover.  

(Doubt this?  Read this horror story. Think I am picking on the Brits?  Check out this coming fiasco in Canada.  Think it cannot happen here?  It appears to be already be happening over at the VA system, which just updated a pamphlet for vets dealing with end-of-life decisions. )

Maybe the very framework that started this reform movement - to somehow contain the increasing costs of healthcare - is itself the wrong place to start.  Like the Jesuit's Premise, it inevitably leads to panels of medical experts rationing care to contain costs.  While health spending as a percent of GDP has risen, consumer spending on essentials (food, housing, transport and healthcare) has been essentially flat for 60 years,  Maybe as costs of transport and food have dropped, we have decided to spend more on our health.  This is not a bad thing at all, given a paradigm of personal freedom.  

As discussed in a prior post, it is NOT total healthcare that has been spiraling out of control, but government healthcare, specifically medicare, which has grown on a per-patient spending level much faster than private healthcare.  It is difficult to find ANY area in which we would trust a government subsidized entitlement to contain costs better than a private market-based system.  When you add the risk of loss of personal freedom over our very bodies, it makes the direction of ObamaCare antithetical to American values. Time for a restart and a look at market-based solutions. 

Scientists Rebel Against Global Warming "Consensus"

The attempted suppression of dissent through mockery, pronouncements of consensus and censorship is creating a backlash.  The members of the American Chemical Society are revolting against their editor for attempting to push through this statement:  “the science of anthropogenic climate change is becoming increasingly well established.”  The American Physical Society is reviewing its climate change stance. These physicists were apparently embarrassed by a pro-AGW statement in 2007 that said "{T]he evidence is incontrovertible." A petition from 50 past and current members circulated.  Now Nature reports that the stance is being reconsidered.  The petition:

[R]equests that an objective scientific process be established, devoid of political or financial agendas, to help prevent subversion of the scientific process and the intolerance towards scientific disagreement that pervades the climate issue.

A huge outcry of scientific criticism accompanied the recent pronouncement of the Obama Administration on climate science, the CCSP Report.  It fell like a hot potato into a black hole of irrelevance, particularly because it "systematically and repeatedly misrepresented the science of disasters and climate change." 

The main science publications are finally publishing articles in dissent.  The Journal of Geophysical Research published a peer-reviewed article which largely disproves man-made global warming.  

The climate activists may be turning on their own. When the venerable James Hansen spoke out against Cap & Trade, his name has become poison.  The mainstream media is now pointing out the trap the activists have made for themselves: their bills like Cap & Trade will be ineffective without India and China going along, and without convincing them any such legislation will be self-destructive of their movement, their eco-Vietnam. 

Now the NOAA has admitted what has been reported in his blog and is fairly obvious to anyone looking at temperature charts: global warming has flatlined for the past decade.  See chart.  

They claim such a decade long event is rare; a little calculation found it a 5% likelihood.  The NOAA goes on to put out a test for AGW; if the flatlne goes out as far as 15 years, it essentially disproves all the climate models.  

Let Them Eat Painkillers!

No wonder Obama's poll numbers are sinking.  The more he talks off the cuff about healthcare, the more he sounds callous and arrogant, like another famous failed figure from history - Marie "Let them eat cake!" Antoinette.

In this exchange, the questioner's mother needed a pacemaker or she would die, but she was 100 years old, and the arrhythmia specialist declined to do it because of her age.  He made that decision like a government bureaucrat would, by reading her file rather than seeing her. When the arrhythmia specialist actually saw her in person - at her doctor's insistence - he changed his mind about the level of risk and went ahead. As the questioner put it, he did so when he saw "her joy of life." Here is Obama's answer:

Question: "Outside the medical criteria for prolonging the life of someone who is elderly, is there any consideration that can be given for a certain spirit, a certain joy of living, or quality of life; or is it just a medical cut off at a certain age?"

President Obama: "Yeah, we're not gonna solve every difficult problem in terms of end of life care. A lot of that is going to have to be we as a culture and a society making better decisions within our own families and for ourselves. But what we can do is make sure that at least some of the waste that exists in the system that is not making anybody's mom better that is loading up on additional tests or additional drugs that the evidence shows is not going to improve care, that at least we can let doctors know and your mom know that, you know what, maybe this isn't gonna help. Maybe you're better off not taking the surgery, but taking the painkiller."

I think people are turning on him the more they hear how he really thinks.  It is one thing to express empathy with other people's money and cry about the uninsured, but it is something else to hear him say that your grannie should die rather than receive care.  Is this America, where you would no longer be free to take care of your ailing mother?  Or is it Amerika? 

No wonder his Presidency is beginning to unravel. 

This is not an isolated incident.  Consider this answer:

Right now, doctors a lot of times are forced to make decisions based on the fee payment schedule that’s out there. So if they’re looking and you come in and you’ve got a bad sore throat or your child has a bad sore throat or has repeated sore throats, the doctor may look at the reimbursement system and say to himself, “You know what? I make a lot more money if I take this kid’s tonsils out.”

Oh my. Now some faceless bureaucrat will refuse to let you take your child's tonsils out.  And guess what - pediatricians in general do not do the operation; they refer it to a surgeon and receive no kickback.  Obama's comment is not only insulting to pediatricians, nea appalling, it is profoundly ignorant:

PBHO's pediatrician scenario just goes to show that he's either very uninformed about the issues or trying to mislead the public on the issues.

The pediatrician stands to make more money NOT referring the kid to an ENT. He makes more money by continuing to see the kid in the office every other week because he isn't getting better. If he refers the kid to an ENT and the ENT yanks out the tonsils, the kid gets better and stops coming in to the ped's office for repeated visits.

Given his callous ignorance on the doctor-patient relationship, maybe it is no surprise that he is delusional on costs.  He keeps claiming that we can increase coverage, subsidize care, and lower overall spending on medical.  This is so far out of the realm of reality that you must wonder at his economic illiteracy - and shake your head over how far the mainstream media has fallen to keep shilling for him on this point. 

The answer is not to add even more third-party subsidy to healthcare, but to increase incentives in the doctor-patient relationship for cost consciousness.  It is nuts to fantasize that a government program will contain costs.  RomneyCare in Mass. is already grossly over-budget and considered a failure by the Boston Globe.  Absurdly, the paper goes on to shill for ObamaCare.  Are we in the Twilight Zone yet? 

The following chart says it all: medicare has risen much more per patient than private care.  The gap is now in the range of $200B a year - more than enough to give every uninsured who cannot afford health insurance (a number estimated at around 8 - 12 million Americans) subsidized health insurance with $170B left over to reduce the deficit.

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

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.  

UPDATE 7/23: Lindzen has issued his analysis in a note, reported by WattsUpWithThat.

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 UPDATED

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.

UPDATE 8/22: a recent study shows some surprising results.  Here is a chart on cancer survival rates, where the US is much higher than Europe.  

Consider also 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."

UPDATE 8/26: Perhaps the best capstone on this point is to compare systems for health issues not overall mortality.  In the US, we have higher rates of homicide and car accidents.  A little reporting at the Chicago Tribune concluded: "We are 12 times more likely than the Japanese to be murdered and nearly twice as likely to be killed in auto wrecks."  So where would the US rank of accidents and homicides were removed?  According to "The Business of Health" by economists Robert L. Ohsfeldt and John E. Schneider:

Where [would] the U.S. would rank in life span among developed nations if homicides and accidents are factored out. Their answer?  First place.

As the Tribune concluded:  "our health-care system is doing a poor job of preventing shootouts and drunk driving but a good job of healing the sick."

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.