The Razor

Here’s an idea.

Warren Buffett thinks he makes too much money – and I agree. He is a big supporter of Obama, and Barry has a big drag on his brand courtesy of a little green outfit called Solyndra. Solyndra took a half billion from taxpayers and promptly went belly-up. It’s CEO had visited the Obama White House 16 times, and was a big “bundler” of donations for the ‘08 Obama campaign yet the administration is pulling a Sargent Schultz.

So here’s Uncle Warren’s opportunity: Cut a check for half a billion pay to the order of the US Treasury. That way he can assuage his guilt for being a corporate rapist, Obama can continue to promote green jobs without choking on his arugula, and my taxes can go to worthwhile things – like smart bombs that send jihadis to virgin-land.

I just finished calculating my taxes, and normally I don’t think too much about it. But this year is different. As a self-described patriot who supports the Global War on Terrorism, I have to accept that such a war needs someone to pay for it and as an American that someone has to be me. I imagine that the money the Wife earns doing paperwork or tending to a Medicaid patient or that I earn sitting in a meeting taking notes about some esoteric IT topic that few outside the room would understand or think important goes to buy body armor for US Army soldiers, bullets for Marine corps snipers or fuel for UAVs that send jihadis to their beloved 72 virgins. I also imagine the money we earn going to protect National and State Parks, or to pay for search and rescue training by the Coast Guard. Although I am viewed as an anti-government extremist by many on the Left, there is much that the federal government does that I have no problem paying for.

But this year is very different. Last year was the first full tax year spent living in North Carolina. North Carolina is a state with an above median state income tax along with a 7.75%/2.0% sales. The taxes that I just completed do not include this sales tax – which is a substantial hit on our household finances given that at this stage our family consumes almost as much as it takes in thanks to outgrown sneakers, a mortgage payment on a farm, and 35 lb bags of dog food for our mutt-ly crew.

The cost of gasoline hits us especially hard. While my wife and I drive economical cars living in a rural area requires a lot of driving. The Wife also makes house calls; she isn’t reimbursed for her time or for gas but she believes that it is part of her job regardless. I’d estimate that our fuel costs have gone up $1,500 or so over the past year and notice that gas at the local pumps jumped a dime again this morning. Rising transportation costs have been hidden in our grocery bill. I’ve found that many of the staple products that I buy like pasta, cereal and peanut butter now come in smaller containers, no doubt thanks to the rising cost of diesel fuel. It seemed to me that during the Bush administration, whenever a gallon of gas rose a nickel there was a New York Times article on the cozy relationship between the Bush family and the oil companies. Under the Obama administration the price of a gallon of gasoline has risen 67% and the mainstream media has uttered not a peep.

Even though I have a political science degree under my belt I’m not a complete idiot. I recognize that this isn’t Venezuela: Obama can’t order gas prices down the way Hugo Chavez can. However his policies of limiting drilling and more importantly, running huge deficits that can only be handled by printing money forces investors into commodities like oil – driving the prices up. The price of oil is calculated in dollars, and as the dollar weakens thanks to the feds spending more than it takes in, the price of oil and other commodities like gold, wheat, and copper – rise. And that’s exactly what has been happening and why Obama doesn’t get the same pass that President Bush got in 2006 (or that this article gives Obama).

It’s also tough to cut the check for the difference between the amount withheld from our paychecks and the amount we owe because of the sense of entitlement held by public servants. The recent fight in Wisconsin over the restrictions to collectively bargain that limited the practice to inflation rate wage increases is fresh in my mind. The behavior of the teachers especially was appalling and embarrassing to a former TESL teacher like me. Without getting into specifics (this is the Internet after all) let’s just say that our total tax bill this year could pay an entire year’s salary for a low-level public servant. Not a teacher (we don’t pay that much in taxes) but say, for one of those cheery people that meet you at the DMV.

Meanwhile I drive a 11 year old Honda with 150,000 miles, my family has catastrophic medical insurance that still runs me $4k/year and covers nothing, we are hundreds of thousands of (taxable) dollars in debt thanks to medical school, and I have avoided the dentist since the Wife left residency because we don’t have dental and about the only thing I inherited from the Irish side of my family besides alcoholism is bad teeth.

Speaking of teeth, the fact that my family (2010 income: $—-) paid tens of thousands of dollars more in taxes than General Electric (2010 income: $10.8 billion) is a big roundhouse kick in them. I’m still waiting for my invitation from the Obama administration to head the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, since I funded government operations more than GE CEO Jeff Immelt did, but so far nothing. Maybe the email has been marked as spam in the Yahoo! mail account that I haven’t used since the 90’s.

Immelt might say “Scott, GE employed hundreds of thousands of workers so it shouldn’t pay taxes.” And I would reply, “Jeffrey, under your ‘leadership’ GE cut 30,000 jobs in the United States. Under my ‘leadership’ my family helped create jobs in one of the poorest counties in North Carolina by hiring local carpenters, an electrician and a plumber to fix up our house. Which is better for America?” And not only did that, but bought fuel for planes to bomb Libyans and hired public servants who are overpaid and hate their jobs.

Wait a minute…

Which brings me to our support of the “freedom fighters” in Libya. If ever there was such a thing as a politically correct military operation, the US/NATO operation in Libya is it. Only the likes of “the rather crazed Susan Rice” and Samantha “Israel is guilty of war crimes” Power could think up an operation that would send military support and arms to the same folks in Africa we were hunting down and killing in Asia. So the hours the Wife and I spend working will buy surface to air missiles that Obama’s Valkyries will hand to wide-eyed fanatics who will use them to shoot down American or Israeli civilian jet liners.

Perhaps Ms’ Rice, Power and Clinton should read the Koran to understand why we shouldn’t give weapons to Muslims (as if arming the mujahadin in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in the 1980s weren’t good enough lessons). “O ye who believe! Take not the Jews and Christians for your friends and protectors: They are but friends and protectors to each other. And he amongst you that turns to them (for friendship) is of them.” (Koran, 5:51) Since the Koran is the word of God, God is making it clear in no uncertain terms that Muslims cannot befriend non-Muslims without leaving their faith. Oh, and by the way, for the “Islam is just like any other religion” crowd: the punishment for leaving Islam is death. When I left the Catholic Church, I didn’t have to worry about being kidnapped by a Knights of Columbus member and having my head chopped off.

In fact the only circumstance it is allowed is when such friendship is used for deceit, as in the case where Muhammed orders Muhammad bin Maslama to kill a Jewish poet who wrote insulting verses about Muslim women. “Then allow me to say a (false) thing so that I may deceive him,” bin Maslama asked Muhammed. “You may say it.” (Muhammed Ibn Ismaiel Al-Bukhari, Shih al-Bukhari: The Translation of the Meanings, vol 5, book 64, no. 4037). If that isn’t clear to the Harvard Kennedy School professor, perhaps Muhammad’s statement that “War is deceit,” (Hadith, 4:269) will bring some clarity to the matter of Libya.

I have handed a terrific sum of money to my government. It is the result of months of hard work done by my wife and I at the pinnacle of our earning power. It’s the most it will ever get; it’s all downhill from here. She’s taken a lower-paying job and I’ll probably be unemployed by the Fall. I don’t resent the taxes themselves, but in 2011 I do begrudge a government that in its attitude and endeavors clearly doesn’t appreciate our sacrifice.

I like getting more bang for my buck so CFLs should be perfect for me. The same lumens of a 100w incandescent for 26w of energy should also be a no brainer. So I switched out my incandescents over the past two years; now I’m switching back and beginning to hoard bulbs. Why? Because I can’t stand the color of the light.

As a lifelong amateur photographer I have developed an eye for the color of light and how it illuminates subjects, and I have yet to find a CFL that can bring out warm skin tones the way an incandescent bulb can. Incandescents also bring out the warm tones of wood and even interior walls painted in off white or light browns. They help make a house feel warm and cozy – especially at night.

CFLs on the other hand inevitably give off a light green that makes most people look sick. The light clashes with warm colored rugs, walls and woods giving them what I can best describe as a plastic appearance. It gives any home that uses them a cold, sterile feel – not homey or cozy at all.

If CFLs matched the light color of incandescents 100% I wouldn’t mind them. But they don’t, and it doesn’t help that I feel pressured by the government and enviro-nuts to use them.

If I can’t feel comfortable in my own home, where can I?

Education bubble And climate change. An end of the year two-fer!

We are appropriately on guard when the head of research at a tobacco company tells us that studies of the dangers of smoking are unreliable; or the researchers at an oil company minimize the dangers of offshore drilling. But when advocates of global warming enunciate their views, many people, including many in the academic community, put their sensitivity to conflicts of interest on hold.

“When everything is evidence of the thing you want to believe, it might be time to stop pretending you’re all about science.” – Ann Althouse

UPDATE: Investors Business Daily notices the same thing:

Got that? No matter what the weather, it’s all due to warming. This isn’t science; it’s a kind of faith. Scientists go along and even stifle dissent because, frankly, hundreds of millions of dollars in research grants are at stake. But for the believers, global warming is the god that failed.

Link

Quote:

It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist.

by Popular Mechanics. Summary: Nuclear, wind, tidal, geothermal, solar useful; cellulose, algae, not really. Clean coal – oxymoron. Shale and drill baby drill, not so much.

When a large institution is faced with disaster which it is unprepared for, it freezes up. Disasters require action – usually fast. But institutions are hierarchical and subordinates can’t act without being told to do so by their superiors, so they do nothing, choosing to wait for superiors to tell them what to do instead. Meanwhile members at the executive level work at cross-purposes, doing their best to protect their “fiefs” from the brunt of the disaster while at the same time using it as an opportunity to expand their powers over their peers.

This type of “brain-freeze” can occur in any centrally organized hierarchical institution: the government, military, and corporations.  It even partly explains the Roman Catholic Church’s slow reaction to sex abuse scandals over the past two decades.

The solution? Effective leadership at the highest level.  Generals personally intervening to cut red tape that threatened their mission. Corporate CEO’s taking charge, choosing a remediation strategy, and implementing it. Governors declaring a hard-hit region a disaster area and co-ordinating relief across different branches of state government. Anyone standing in the way of these leaders is either run over or fired.

Unfortunately for the Gulf states with tar balls washing up on their beaches, America lacks effective leadership at the highest federal level. President Obama has struggled over the past 71 days to respond to the BP disaster. First he ignored the crisis, and when it became clear that wasn’t working to calm down the hysterical calls for leadership from the states that didn’t vote for him in ‘08, he held a flurry of meetings and photo ops proving that he was in charge and searching to learn “who’s ass to kick.” Next he sought to use the crisis for partisan political advantage as an excuse to drum up support for his climate change/energy bill. Becoming bored with that, he left the country, got ignored by the G20 and went golfing in Toronto.

Throughout the crisis President Obama has failed to fight the brain freeze gripping the federal government. Whereas his predecessor suspended the Jones Act to allow foreign crewed ships to help with the clean up, Obama has yet to do so two and half months into the crisis. Obama treats the disaster as a distraction at best, a political tool to leverage his agenda through Congress at worst. In no way has the President shown the leadership required to stop this disaster and help those affected by it to recover.

President Obama cannot single-handedly stop the oil from gushing out of the broken well, but being at the top of the federal food chain gives him the power to cut through red tape and to provide the ass-covering bureaucrats require to act.  His failure to grasp this perk of leadership – perhaps due to his lifetime spent campaigning for higher office – is typified by the red tape that prevented the Dutch from moving in skimmer ships. Each ship could take up to 400 cubic meters of sea water an hour, remove most of the oil, and spit it back into the ocean. The Dutch offered a whole fleet of the ships to the US, but the US refused because EPA regulations stated that the ships could not suck up the sea water and release it back unless oil in the water was less than 15 parts per million. That’s 99.9985% clean. The Dutch also offered to send dredges to help build 60 mile long sand dikes that could have kept the oil off Louisiana’s wetlands within 3 weeks of the disaster.

I had no idea that to comply with the EPA rules, US skimmer ships were sucking up sea water, storing it, then traveling to shore where it is offloaded in storage tanks for processing to meet the 99.9985% regulation. Has our government lost it’s collective mind? Yep: Brain freeze, an only the President has the authority to cure it by exercising leadership.

But America doesn’t have a president: it has a presidential candidate. Eventually the crisis will resolve itself without a president, but by then the environment and the livelihoods of millions will be destroyed and Candidate Obama will be out of a job.

I keep telling myself that the unwinding of the greatest scientific hoax since Piltdown Man is proof of the power of Science, that no matter how hard conspirators try to hide it, eventually the Truth comes out. As an anthropogenic global warming (AGW) skeptic (not a climate change denier – I don’t deny that climate changes; a basic understanding of natural history is enough to prove that) I’ve been relieved to see reality justify my faith in Science on the topic. But I’m wondering how much damage the AGW alarmists have caused.

We’re not talking about the failures of one man but of rationality itself as an entire generation of intelligent, educated, and hardworking people were fooled into perpetuating what is at heart not a simple mistake but a bald lie. As the supposed scientific evidence for that lie falls one domino after another I’m beginning to wonder where the domino chain will end and how scientists will rebuild the trust squandered by the politicization of their discipline. Those of us who grew up on a steady diet of Isaac Asimov always believed that a world run by scientists would be a better world than we have today, that the banishment of irrationality by those steeped in the tools of logic could lead us into a Golden Age.

What we believers ignored was the dark side of science, the venality of faculty meetings, the anonymous character assassinations in journal refereeing, the naked power present from faculty advisors forcing their graduate students to work on their own pet projects and ignoring the needs of their charges all the way up the food chain to science committees advising presidents and prime ministers. The global warming alarmists have made it impossible for us to ignore the dark side of science, and in so doing all science becomes suspect.

The issue is not that science changes. Science itself is dynamic, and to reflect that change scientists must never forget John Maynard Keynes’s statement to a questioner who claimed his position on monetary policy flip-flopped during the Depression: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” Each should strive to keep an open mind, but balance that need with healthy skepticism. When that skepticism is lost, and as in the case of anthropogenic global warming used as a pejorative, scientists debase their own discipline and become no better than the propagandists and politicians they believe themselves better than.

The CIA claimed that Saddam Hussein was building nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. The claim was used to justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq, but those weapons were never found. Two years ago the CIA claimed that Iran was not building nuclear weapons. Yet even Iran’s sympathizers in the IAEA say that Iran has an active nuclear weapons program. How can we trust the CIA anymore? Since bad information is worse than no information it would be better for the CIA to be disbanded after its 60 year run and replaced by a more effective intelligence tool.

It’s interesting to note that the CIA’s recent mistakes stem from its increasing politicization (the intelligence leaks that undermined the Bush administration’s foreign policy) just as the global warming alarmists have exchanged the laboratories and lecture halls for UN negotiating tables and Congressional hearings.

The trouble is that we can replace the CIA but it’s nearly impossible to replace the alarmists. We can embarrass them and cause a few resignations here or there but for the most part we’re stuck with them for the foreseeable future. They will just continue to politicize science and people will tune them out just as they tune out other political voices. And in the end when there is truly an emergency that scientists agree on – say a future collision of an asteroid with the earth for example – they will be ignored.

It’s rare these days to see the term “global warming” preceded or followed by the the term “consensus” as if this word alone makes global warming unassailable. Besides being a fallacy the usage of a subjective term “consensus” to describe a scientific hypothesis merely suggests its weak underpinnings. We don’t talk about the consensus of Newtonian physics or the quantum physics consensus. We don’t have to appeal to popularity in order to prove these ideas. We have solid experimental evidence supporting them. Historically science has had numerous agreements on principles and ideas that were later proven wrong. Steady state universe consensus? Wrong. The consensus supporting the geosyncline theory of that explained sea animal fossils on mountain tops? Replaced by plate tectonics.

Science isn’t about perfection. The people who believed that the stars and planets moved through ether weren’t fools or bad scientists. Their work advanced Science until it reached a point where a new idea explained the universe better than existing ones; in the case of the ether theory, Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. It’s not as important to be right than it is to be methodical and skeptical of one’s evidence and results. This is a basic tenet of science that today’s climate scientists have lost. These people should be stripped of the term “scientist” to protect the reputation of scientists who don’t fall victim to fads.

Climategate: a conspiracy worth believing in. Here’s how the press has been slanting coverage in favor of AGW alarmists, and how reporters themselves have been actively supporting them.

Try as he might our president cannot seem to please the Left. He bows to foreign leaders, kowtows to China, rubs shoulders with Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, and allows Iran to develop nuclear weapons so that it can finish off what the German ultra-right started 77 years ago: cleansing the world of Jews. Obama traveled to Copenhagen two months ago to beg for the Olympics to come to Chicago and left empty-handed. Now he’s preparing to leave Denmark without a climate deal, and the Left is blaming him. The Guardian newspaper, an outfit that makes Pravda and Izvestya look as conservative as Fox News, writes:

Tim Jones, a spokesman for the World Development Movement, said: “The president said he came to act, but showed little evidence of doing so. He showed no awareness of the inequality and injustice of climate change. If America has really made its choice, it is a choice that condemns hundreds of millions of people to climate change disaster.”

Friends of the Earth said in a statement, “Obama has deeply disappointed not only those listening to his speech at the UN talks, he has disappointed the whole world.”

Well, good. These are the same idiots that gave Chavez a standing ovation and allowed a genocidal African dictator Robert “Comrade Bob” Mugabe to speak and blame the West for failing to improve the lot of his people so that he could rape and pillage them some more. Seeing so-called “environmentalists” in league with some of the worlds most despicable dictators shows what a sham the fantasy of AGW really is. So Friends of the Earth: What will be the effects of the fallout from Iranian nuclear explosions in Israel, Jordan and Lebanon? Mr. Jones of the WDM, how much dosh do you get from Robert Mugabe and the people of Zimbabwe? Given that the former was once the wealthiest country in African and the latter now struggles to survive, I doubt that you have to worry much about converting Zimbabwean currency to the American dollars that constitute the majority of funding of your sucky little organization.

The issue that even the most liberal American politician cannot stomach is China’s refusal to allow inspections of their CO2 emissions. China wants to say that it cut emissions by X% and have the world believe it without actually checking. Meanwhile the US, Europe and Japan will be monitored (and hectored by the likes of Mr. Jones) for every cow fart and football hooligan belch emitted in these countries.

But Leftists have always given China a pass, probably due to the cool posters of Mao that they used to hang in their dorm rooms while getting stoned on Moroccan hash paid for by their wealthy parents. They tend to ignore things like Mao’s Great Leap Forward which forced China back into the middle ages technologically and killed anywhere between 30,000,000 and 100,000,000 depending on whose estimates you go by. They have forgotten the Cultural Revolution which forced intellectuals and academics like themselves out of the cities to slave on farm communes in the countryside where they were starved to death for not being peasants. Chinese communism is quite cool until you study it. Then it’s pretty uncool no matter how stoned you are.

So Obama will leave Denmark a failure once more. This makes me question why he went in the first place. Does he really believe that he alone can fix something as fucked as a UN Climate Conference? If not him, then is Rahm Emmanuel to blame? Whomever it is should be sent away to silk-screen Obama t-shirts.

But the conference wasn’t a total disaster. It did inspire the following from Gerald Warner writing for the Daily Telegraph:

What a bunch of buffoons. Not since Neville Chamberlain tugged a Claridge’s luncheon bill from his pocket and flourished it on the steps of the aircraft that brought him back from Munich has a worthless scrap of paper been so audaciously hyped. There was one good moment at Copenhagen, though: some seriously professional truncheon work by Danish Plod on the smellies. Otherwise, this event is strictly for Hans Christian Andersen.

Some seriously professional truncheon work by the Danish Plod on the smellies. Now that’s the kind of change I can believe in!

UPDATE: Obama has announced that a “meaningful deal” has been reached at the Summit, but it’s nonbinding and a step towards an agreement instead of an actual agreement. It saves some face for the thousands who traveled from around the world, filling the atmosphere with the very gases they believe will change the planet’s climate. Since it was a UN conference, your tax dollars helped pay for around a quarter of it. Hope you feel that you got your money’s worth.

I’m surprised that this is even necessary, but the propaganda of AGW alarmism is so pervasive (I even fell for it myself two years ago) that it’s good to have it spelled it in one place.

Too bad the word “chutzpah” would be banned by the United Nations for being “Zionist” because UN official Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, the chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,sure has it. To believers of anthropogenic global warming, air travel is one of the largest contributors to global warming, producing not only CO2 but nitrous oxide which is believed to be twice as damaging. It has even led to protests by greens at Heathrow Airport, calling air travel non-essential and demanding that it be regulated.

Dr Rajendra Pachauri flew at least 443,243 miles on IPCC business in this 19 month period. This business included honorary degree ceremonies, a book launch and a Brookings Institute dinner, the latter involving a flight of 3500 miles.

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So strong is his love for cricket that his colleagues recall the time the Nobel winner took a break during a seminar in New York and flew in to Delhi over the weekend to attend a practice session for a match before flying back. Again, he flew in for a day, just to play that match.

Yep, that’s chutzpah.

For most of its history, Science has always made room for amateurs or non-science professionals. However the 20th Century pushed these scientists to the edges in favor of professional chemists, physicists and biologists using advanced tools at large well-funded laboratories, leading the authors of a 1996 paper to write “Modern science can no longer be done by gifted amateurs with a magnifying glass, copper wires, and jars filled with alcohol.” Writer, teacher and amateur scientist Forest M. Mimms III has published numerous scientific articles in publications like Science and Nature and disagrees, “The term amateur can have a pejorative ring. But in science it retains the meaning of its French root amour, love, for amateurs do science because it’s what they love to do. Without remuneration or reward, enthusiastic amateurs survey birds, tag butterflies, measure sunlight, and study transient solar eclipse phenomena. Others count sunspots, discover comets, monitor variable stars, and invent instruments.”

More importantly is a deep understanding and appreciation of the Scientific Method and its application in our daily lives. One doesn’t have to have beakers boiling away in their basement to apply the method to everyday problems. Science is a powerful tool; one could argue it’s the most powerful tool ever invented.

Skepticism plays an integral role in Science. In a sense it begins with the null hypothesis that attempts to prove the claim under investigation is not true until proven otherwise. The purpose of the null hypothesis is to weed out biased results.

One could say that it’s easier for an amateur scientist to be mislead by the media. In response, the amateur scientist could state that working alone she is less likely to be mislead by group think and the unwillingness to voice a contrary opinion in the corporate setting. How easy is it for a scientist to disagree with the opinions of his peers or his superiors? In a professional setting one exchanges autonomy in exchange for support: a paycheck, equipment, peers. How easy is it for a scientist to disagree in this environment? Go back even further. How difficult is it to dissent in college or graduate school when from your advisors decide whether you advance in your field or not?

The amateur scientist has the freedom to think and dissent if necessary, whereas the professional scientist has been indoctrinated throughout his entire career to accept the validity of a theory on faith. Express disagreement at any step along the way and forget tenure, hiring or the next promotion.

That’s why I find the emails stolen from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia troubling. These emails show a clear pattern of intellectual character assassination against anyone who is skeptical of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) theory. Instead of a healthy clash of ideas supported by evidence we have “scientists” acting more like medieval inquisitors to prevent the publication of arguments and evidence that question the current scientific orthodoxy. I

The emails support what global warming skeptics have said all along – that theories and evidence that undermined AGW were being buried, hidden and in some cases outright destroyed in order to shore up AGW. In an exchange between Professor Phil Jones, the head of the Climate Research Unit, and professor Michael E. Mann at Pennsylvania State University, Jones writes, “”If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone” and, “We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind.” Mr. Jones further urged Mr. Mann to join him in deleting e-mail exchanges about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) controversial assessment report (ARA): “Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re [the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report]?” All this to hide the fact that the earth has been cooling over the past decade instead of heating up as the models predicted.

Add the inability of AGW to be disproven (if global temperatures rise – it’s due to anthropogenic global warming. If they fall as they have been doing for the past ten years, it’s due to anthropogenic global warming), and it’s easy to see how James Delingpole at the Daily Telegraph calls the emails the “final nail in the coffin of ‘anthropogenic global warming’,” and what Andrew Bolt calls the greatest scandal in modern science.

I don’t expect the theory to die so easily. There is too much money behind the current orthodoxy, and worse, an entire generation of scientists have been raised to not question anthropogenic global warming. Fighting money and faith… Well I’m confident that in the end Truth will win out but before it does trillions of dollars will be wasted on solutions to a problem built on a shaky scientific foundation.

The Anthropogenic Global Warming theory points out the danger of professional science straying from the path of legitimate scientific inquiry into faith and orthodoxy. Science needs the amateur scientist and the skepticism and freedom of thought he or she brings now more than ever.

Update: Ilya Somin at Volokh Conspiracy writes:

Most of us, however, lack expertise on climate issues. And our knowledge of complex issues we don’t have personal expertise on is largely based on social validation. For example, I think that Einsteinian physics is generally more correct than Newtonian physics, even though I know very little about either. Why? Because that’s the overwhelming consensus of professional physicists, and I have no reason to believe that their conclusions should be discounted as biased or otherwise driven by considerations other than truth-seeking. My views of climate science were (and are) based on similar considerations. I thought that global warming was probably a genuine and serious problem because that is what the overwhelming majority of relevant scientists seem to believe, and I generally didn’t doubt their objectivity.

At the very least, the Climategate revelations should weaken our confidence in the above conclusion. At least some of the prominent scholars in the field seem driven at least in part by ideology, and willing to use intimidation to keep contrarian views from being published, even if the articles in question meet normal peer review standards. Absent such tactics, it’s possible that more contrarian research would be published in professional journals and the consensus in the field would be less firm. To be completely clear, I don’t think that either ideological motivation or even intimidation tactics prove that these scientists’ views are wrong. Their research should be assessed on its own merits, irrespective of their motivations for conducting it. However, these things should affect the degree to which we defer to their conclusions merely based on their authority as disinterested experts.

Update #2:
While packing for our move to North Carolina I found the Wife’s data books from her master’s research in Japan – a small boxed brick of penciled in data books.  That data was used for her degree resulted in several published papers. Not that the data was ever lost; I knew pretty much where it was at all times. I even know where all the Statistica, Excel, and other data files are on my home office network for that work, as well as her more important chimpanzee research that netted her her doctorate. Even though those files haven’t been touched in a decade they are backed up and stored. Why? Because you don’t throw out data.

Unless you believe in AGW - then it’s okay evidently.

Scientists at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.

It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.

Science isn’t supposed to be this sloppy which is why I would hesitate calling the University of East Anglia personnel “scientists.” I believe “charlatans” and “hucksters” would be better terms.

Update #3:
Christopher Booker at the Daily Telegraph calls ClimateGate the “worst scientific scandal of our generation.” What I find particularly troubling is that by injecting science into politics, as AGW believers have done, they are also creating one of the worst political scandals of our generation.

Update #4:
Investors Business Daily takes issue with the lack of ClimateGate coverage by the mainstream media:

So the dominant media no longer check the growth of government, especially when government is poised to impinge on our freedoms.

Rather, they feed public perceptions in a propagandistic loop. Those fearless watchdogs of the press? Gone.

They’ve been gone for awhile – at least since becoming propagandists for Obama. Given the press’s infatuation with Leftist icons like Mao, Che, and Stalin (the New York Times was propagandizing about Comrade Josef almost sixty years ago) and adoration of collective action, it’s not a surprise. Thankfully there is the Internet – which they haven’t shut down. Yet.

Update #5:
Wired magazine explains how scientists screw up and some eventually overcome their own biases to make discoveries.

Dunbar came away from his in vivo studies with an unsettling insight: Science is a deeply frustrating pursuit. Although the researchers were mostly using established techniques, more than 50 percent of their data was unexpected. (In some labs, the figure exceeded 75 percent.) “The scientists had these elaborate theories about what was supposed to happen,” Dunbar says. “But the results kept contradicting their theories. It wasn’t uncommon for someone to spend a month on a project and then just discard all their data because the data didn’t make sense.” Perhaps they hoped to see a specific protein but it wasn’t there. Or maybe their DNA sample showed the presence of an aberrant gene. The details always changed, but the story remained the same: The scientists were looking for X, but they found Y.

One of the myriad ways I manifest my geekness is that I track my gas mileage. After moving to rural North Carolina I began to notice that the mileage on my 10 year old Honda had improved by roughly 4 mpg to 27 mpg. At first I thought it was the fact that I don’t do much interstate driving anymore. Most of my driving is now on double lane rural roads with 55 mph speed limits, and it’s tough to go much faster with a pickup truck or grandmother in front of you. 80 mph on multilane interstates is a thing of the past.

The answer came a couple of weeks ago at the gas pump. Most of the gas stations do not offer gasohol whereas in the Philadelphia area E10 - or 10% ethanol – is the norm. I’m a big supporter of ethanol, especially the cellulosic kind, but being also a math geek I thought I would take the opportunity to figure out how much using E10 had cost me over the past 5 years.

I drive roughly 20,000 miles a year. Let’s assume that the average price per gallon of gasoline during the past 5 years was $2.75/gallon.

So had I driven 100,000 miles on pure gasoline at 27 mpg I would have needed a smidge over 3,700 gallons and spent $10,186 on gasoline during that 5 year period. On E10 at 23 mpg I actually used 4,350 gallons of fuel and spent $11,963.

MPG	Gallons	Cost
27	3,704	$10,186
23	4350	$11,963
	646	$1,777

So over a five year period I paid almost $1800 more in fuel using E10 than I would have using pure gasoline. That’s about $1/day more in fuel costs.

E10 is mandated in the Philadelphia area by clean air laws. Is it worth it? Since I make more than the average I can afford the additional cost, so it’s worth it to me. However for many others who drive 20,000 miles the additional $350+ dollars a year is an unnecessary burden.