Your Move, Global Warming Alarmists. Science Has Exposed Your Unwarranted Hysteria - Forbes

The authors of the report do not deny that there is some effect of warming the planet from mankind's emissions of CO2, primarily from use of traditional carbon fuels such as oil, coal, and natural gas.  The argument is over how big of an effect that is, how that compares to natural causes of climate change, and whether the human caused effect threatens a catastrophe, or even severe distress, to human civilization and the environment.  The conclusion of the report is that the U.N.'s IPCC has exaggerated the amount of global warming likely to occur due to mankind's emissions of CO2, and the warming that human civilization will cause as a result "is likely to be modest and cause no net harm to the global environment or to human well-being."  The primary, dominant cause of global climate change is natural causes, not human effects, the report concludes.  "The hypothesis of human-caused global warming comes up short not merely of 'full scientific certainty' but of reasonable certainty or even plausibility," the report states.

The fundamentals of the argument is that CO2 is not some toxic industrial gas, but a natural, trace gas constituting just 0.038% of the atmosphere.  For readers disadvantaged by excessive exposure to the party propaganda organ called the New York Times, that is less than 4/100ths of one percent.  The report states, "At the current level of 400 parts per million, we still live in a CO2-starved world.  Atmospheric levels (of CO2) 15 times greater existed during the pre-Cambrian period (about 550 million years ago) without known adverse effects," such as catastrophic global warming.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterferrara/2013/09/22/your-move-global-warming-alarmists-science-has-exposed-your-unwarranted-hysteria/

In addition, the temperature impact of increased concentrations of CO2 declines logarithmically.  Or as the report says, “Atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2)…exerts a diminishing warming effect as its concentration increases.”  That means there is a natural limit to how much increased CO2 can effectively warm the planet, as the effect of more and more CO2 ultimately becomes negligible as CO2 concentration grows.  Maybe that is why even with many times more CO2 in the atmosphere in the deep past, there was no catastrophic global warming.

What has been devastating to the theory of catastrophic, man caused, global warming is that there has been no significant increase in global temperatures for 16 years, even a slight cooling in more recent years.  Yet, during that time mankind’s emissions of CO2 that were supposed to be causing global warming continued to explode, with one third of all CO2 added to the atmosphere since the industrial revolution occurring during this period.  

Wishful Thinking Can't Hold Obamacare Together - Bloomberg

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-19/wishful-thinking-can-t-hold-obamacare-together.html
 This is part of McArdle's game theory analysis of obamacare with regard to the dance between politicians and the insurance industry.

"But it's such a small minority" is the administration's rejoinder; the entire individual market covers just 5 percent of the population, and some of those people will be net beneficiaries of Obamacare, thanks to the subsidies. This logic was always a bit shaky -- all the people who are ultimately expected to get additional coverage from the new law, including the Medicaid expansion, amount to only 7.5 percent of the population, so if 5 percent is too small to worry about, then probably so is the number of uninsured. But it's not even true. I mean, it's true that only 5 percent of the population gets its coverage from the individual market. But Obamacare is also making significant changes in the employer market. Twelve percent of workers are expected to be affected by the "Cadillac tax" on especially generous health-care benefits when it kicks in in 2018. When those people find out that they too will be in the group of people who can't keep their plan, even though they like it, they will be livid. The unions, who will be disproportionately affected by this, are already getting restive.

George Will: John F. Kennedy the conservative - The Washington Post

Folks will use the dead president's legacy to whatever purpose they would like to make it serve.  This is an interesting presentation of JFK as conservative, with LBJ being a much more transformative figure.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/geoege-f-will-john-f-kennedy-the-conservative/2013/11/20/92be8164-513d-11e3-a7f0-b790929232e1_story.html

He did not have history-shaping effects comparable to those of his immediate predecessor or successor. Dwight Eisenhower was one of three Americans (with George Washington and Ulysses Grant) who were world-historic figures before becoming president, and Lyndon Johnson was second only to Franklin Roosevelt as a maker of the modern welfare state and second to none in using law to ameliorate America's racial dilemma.
The New York Times' executive editor calls Kennedy "the elusive president"; The Post calls him "the most enigmatic" president. Most libidinous, certainly; most charming, perhaps. But enigmatic and elusive? Many who call him difficult to understand seem eager to not understand him. They present as puzzling or uncharacteristic aspects of his politics about which he was consistent and unambiguous. For them, his conservative dimension is an inconvenient truth. Ira Stoll, in "JFK, Conservative," tries to prove too much but assembles sufficient evidence that his book's title is not merely provocative.

JFK’s Berlin blunder - The Washington Post

No wonder he was so frustrated he sought solace with the interns.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/jfks-berlin-blunder/2011/08/12/gIQAGOcxBJ_story.html

Khrushchev treated Kennedy with brutal disdain. In excruciating pain from his ailing back and pumped full of perhaps disorienting drugs by his disreputable doctor (who would lose his medical license in 1975), Kennedy said that it was the "worst thing in my life. He savaged me." British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan said, "For the first time in his life, Kennedy met a man who was impervious to his charm." Kempe writes, "From that point forward Khrushchev would act more aggressively in the conviction that there would be little price to pay." Kempe says that when Robert Kennedy met with his brother back in Washington, "Tears were running down the president's cheeks."

As Khrushchev turned up the temperature on Berlin, Kennedy studied the modalities of conducting a nuclear war. On July 25, he gave a nationally televised address, referring 17 times to the U.S. commitment to West Berlin, although the entire city was under four-power (U.S., Soviet, British, French) rule.

On July 30, in a Sunday morning television interview, Sen. William Fulbright said: "I don't understand why the East Germans don't close their border because I think they have a right to close it." He was wrong regarding the four powers' rights, and five days later he apologized for giving "an unfortunate and erroneous impression." But Kennedy, who did not dispute Fulbright's mistake, evidently welcomed it.
After Aug. 13, an unsympathetic Kennedy, who never asserted the indisputable legal right of free movement of people throughout Berlin, told New York Times columnist James Reston that East Germans had had 15 years to flee to the West. Reston wrote that Kennedy "has talked like Churchill but acted like Chamberlain." 

RealClearPolicy - New Evidence Raises Doubts on Preschool for All

By way of background, I'm a developmental psychologist by training and spent the majority of my career designing and evaluating programs intended to enhance the cognitive development of young children. For instance, I directed a national Head Start Quality Research Center; created a program, Dialogic Reading (which is a widely used and effective intervention for enhancing the language development and book knowledge of young children from low-income families); and authored an assessment tool, the Get Ready to Read Screen, that has become a staple of early intervention program evaluation. My point is that I care about early childhood education and believe it is important -- as witnessed by how I spent my professional life for 30 years.

My career since 2001 has largely been about advancing evidence-based education, which is the endeavor of collecting and using the best possible evidence to support policy and practice in education. Since the president's state of the union address, I've been writing that the evidence is decidedly mixed on the impact of the type of preschool investments the president has called for and that we now see in the legislation introduced in Congress. It may seem in the pieces I've written that I'm wearing only my evidence-based education hat. But in fact if you're an advocate of strengthening early childhood programs, as I am, you also need to pay careful attention to the evidence -- all of it. Poor children deserve effective programs, not just programs that are well-intentioned.

http://www.realclearpolicy.com/blog/2013/11/20/new_evidence_raises_doubts_on_obamas_preschool_for_all_742.html
Should you be able to take people's money at gunpoint and give it to an industry without proof that the desired effect will take place?

Pseudo-Economics

http://cafehayek.com/2013/11/pseudo-economics.html

The world is full of people who do not understand economics.  That's not a sin or a crime.  The world is full also of lots of people who do not understand ancient Greek texts, matrix algebra, the consequences of the Peace of Westphalia, and how to make authentic cajun gumbo.  But as one of my brilliant colleagues, Bryan Caplan, points out with special clarity, most people who do not understand these latter things do not fancy that they understand these latter things.  The typical person ignorant of any mathematics beyond basic arithmetic doesn't go about in public pretending to be expert in matrix algebra.

Economics is different.  People who have no exposure to the economic way of thinking typically think that they understand sufficiently the logic of markets to comment critically upon real-world market processes.  As frustrating as this reality is – with its incessant outpouring of wrongheaded diagnoses and demands for this or that government intervention – it's a reality that ain't gonna go away.

A Little Knowledge is A Dangerous Thing at Steven Landsburg | The Big Questions: Tackling the Problems of Philosophy with Ideas from Mathematics, Economics, and Physics

http://www.thebigquestions.com/2013/11/21/a-little-knowledge-is-a-dangerous-thing-2/

I like this analysis, but the author doesn't mention that an assumption of the "complainant" is that carbon is pollution - it's anything but that!

Sent by a reader:

(Click to enlarge.)

Some questions for the economics students:

• Which vertical line segment illustrates the carbon tax revenue?
• Which vertical line segment illustrates the compensation paid by the government?
• Where does the difference come from?
• What difference would it make if you changed the axis labels from "Polluting Products" and "Non-Polluting Products" to "Watermelon" and "All Things That Are Not Watermelon"?

Answers below.

Answer key: On the vertical line segment descending from B*, the distance from the black line to the red line represents tax revenue (measured in units of "clean products"). The longer vertical line segment descending from B* all the way to the red line represents compensation paid by the government. The difference comes from — hrm. We don't seem to have that information.

So what this sign proves is that if you pay $100 in carbon taxes and get back a $150 gift from the government, you might be better off. As a bonus, it also proves that if you pay $100 in watermelon taxes and get back a $150 gift from the government, you might be better off.

The moral of the placard, then, is not that carbon taxes can be good. It's that all taxes can be good, provided we all get back more than we pay in. All it takes to make that happen is a magic genie (not pictured).

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