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November 24, 2008
An attempt to restore Michael Mann's discredited hockey stick - the one that claimed last century's warming was unprecedented - is smacked down.
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=4428#comments
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/forecast_this/
Warmest Regards
Bonzo
On Mon, 24 Nov 2008 11:30:08 +1100, bnzoo wrote:
November 24, 2008
An attempt to restore Michael Mann's discredited hockey stick - the one that claimed last century's warming was unprecedented - is smacked down.
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=4428#comments
It's accessible to the math-challenged like myself, and well worth reading. It shows not only that the hockey stick is bogus, but which proxies are screwing it up. Let's see how they try to dodge this one.
"Lloyd" wrote in message On Nov 23, 9:31 pm, Bill Ward wrote:
On Mon, 24 Nov 2008 11:30:08 +1100, bnzoo wrote:
November 24, 2008
An attempt to restore Michael Mann's discredited hockey stick - the one that claimed last century's warming was unprecedented - is smacked down.
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=4428#comments
It's accessible to the math-challenged like myself, and well worth reading. It shows not only that the hockey stick is bogus, but which proxies are screwing it up. Let's see how they try to dodge this one.
I'll see your blog and raise you Nature and the National Academy of Sciences. *************************************
I'll raise you the "New Socialist"!!!!!
New Scientist Is Now A Socialist, Agenda-Driven, Political Rag
Peter Foster
October 27 2008
The magazine uses the canard that money doesn't buy us happiness, echoing the Soviets' Central Plan
With the threat of worldwide economic stagnation, and given the central role of governments both in creating and exacerbating the current global financial debacle, a clarion call for much greater government control of a deliberately no-growth world seems almost satirical.
And yet the British magazine New Scientist recently devoted an issue to "Beyond Growth." This equates to an economic journal producing a "science" issue promoting alchemy or necromancy.
The magazine makes the hysterical claim that "our economy is killing the Earth." Thus we need a new economy, which essentially means new people. It's hoary and wobbly thesis is based on the alleged incompatibility between "finite" resources and growth. This "problem" - endlessly regurgitated since Malthus - is in fact primarily one of failure - or even refusal - to understand the role of markets and human ingenuity in perpetually increasing the amount of resources available.
Radical environmentalist are much given to apocalyptic forecasts, but the New Scientist instead projects a Utopia in 2020, 10 years into a glorious totalitarian experiment in promoting a "steady-state" economy based on centrally mandated resource use and draconian controls on waste. The rules are set by "scientists." (One is reminded of the impractical and deadly agents of "Reason" who populated the tyrannical floating island of Laputa in Gulliver's Travels).
According to the magazine, these scientists "work out what levels of consumption and emission are sustainable - and if they're not sure they work out a cautious estimate (so much better than the incautious variety). Then it's up to the economists to work out how to achieve those limits, and how to encourage innovation so we extract as much as possible from every scrap of natural resource we use."
Just like the Soviets' Central Plan!
These orchestrated wonders, in which all innovation is presumably to be vetted by committees of Laputans, are to be achieved under a carbon cap-and-trade system, plus hefty resource taxes. Of course, the implied price hikes will bash the poor worst, but since economic growth has been outlawed, poverty will have to be tackled "differently."
Having suggested earlier that income taxes would disappear ( la a Dion-esque Green Shift) the New Scientist now tells us that there will be upper limits to income inequality, although the calculations are admittedly "tricky," since they involve the assessment of "real" contributions. Welcome to global pay equity!
Much of the new master plan is pure mysticism. Punishing taxes on private travel will somehow magically "trigger" huge new investments in public transports and new technologies. Just where these huge investment funds will originate is a mystery in a no-growth world, especially since commercial lending has disappeared along with growth expectations.
"Today," claims the magazine (that is, in 2020), "we only make what we need, and products are built to last - so no more fun consumer tech that has to be updated every six months." Indeed, no more fun at all in a world in which we only consume what our masters decide we really "need."
There will be new "models of ownership." Maintenance and repair will become much more important relative to production, just as in, say, current Cuba or the old Soviet Union.
Where will the big job opportunities lie? Government-funded ecologists will beaver away researching "carrying capacity." Sea level modellers will be in great demand. Meanwhile there will still be room for entrepreneurs keen on inventing on command, as long as they don't insist on excessive rewards.
The magazine's fantasy admits that this new economy won't be able to accommodate full employment, but apparently people will be happier with less income, less freedom and more forced leisure. Trade will be regulated according to ecological principles which will eventually embrace the entire world.
There will be nowhere to hide.
Population and immigration will be rigidly controlled, creating potential crisis for pension systems, but have no fear; the all-wise ruling clique will work out the contributions required to make the system "sustainable."
The magazine concludes by regurgitating the canard that money doesn't buy us happiness, and that the most important thing is to keep our envy in check by making sure that others aren't too rich either: yet again the Cuban communist model.
But what of market "externalities" such as climate change? Reflexive power seekers claim that globally coordinated force is the only answer. But to the extent that the issue is real - and whatever its causes - the most sensible and effective response is one of relying on the kind of wealth and ingenuity that is promoted by economic growth.
That response would be banned under the new eco-dictatorship.
It is perhaps beyond hope that the purveyors of such horrifying nonsense might ever study economics or history, but they might be directed towards a little literature: say Orwell's Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, or Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.
However, consumed by their own ecological virtue, and the fatal conceit of their blinkered rationalism, they just wouldn't get it.
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2008/10/27/brave-new-scientist.aspx
Warmest Regards
Bonzo
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