I once declared baseball the “king of team sports”. But I would agree with anyone who says that baseball is past its prime. When was that prime? Arguably, it was the original lively ball era, which by my reckoning extended from 1920 through 1941. The home run had become much more prevalent than it was in the dead-ball era (1901 through 1919, in the American League). But the home run did not become so prevalent that it dominated offensive strategy. Thus batting averages were high and scoring proceeded at a higher pace than in any of the other eras that I’ve identified.
In 1930, for example, the entire National League batted .303. The Chicago Cubs of that season finished in second place and batted .309 (not the highest team average in the league). The average number of runs scored in a Cubs’ game was 12.0 — a number surpassed only by the lowly Philadelphia Phillies, whose games yielded an average of 13.8 runs, most of them scored by the Phillies’ opponents. Despite the high scoring, the average Cubs game of the 1930 season lasted only 2 hours and 5 minutes. (An estimate that I derived from the sample of 67 Cubs’ games for which times are available, here.)
In sum, baseball’s first lively ball era produced what fans love to see: scoring. A great pitching duel is fine, but a great pitching duel is a rare thing. Too many low-scoring games are the result of failed offensive opportunities, which are marked by a high count of runners left of base. Once runners get on base, what fans want (or at least one team’s fans want) is to see them score.
Baseball has declined since the first lively ball era, not just because the game has become more static — get on base and wait for a home run — but also because it now unfolds at a much slower pace. The average length of a game reached 3 hours in 2012, and has yet to fall below that benchmark. As recently as 1946, the average game was an hour shorter. And it was even shorter in the dead-ball and early live-ball eras:
Though the NL began play in 1876, I have analyzed its record from 1901 through 2022, for parallelism with the AL, which began play in 1901. The similarity of the two time series lends weight to the analysis that I will offer shortly.
First, what do the numbers mean? The deviation between a team’s won-lost (W-L) record and the average for the league is simply Dt = Rt – Rl , where Rt is the team’s record and Rl is the league’s record in a given season.
If the team’s record is .600 and the league’s record is .500 (as it always was until the onset of interleague play in 1997), then Dt = .100. And if a team’s record is .400 and the league’s record is .500, then Dt = -.100. Given that wins and losses cancel each other, the mean deviation for all teams in a league would be zero, or very near zero, which wouldn’t tell us much about the spread around the league average. So I use the absolute values of Dt and average them. In the case of teams with deviations of .100 and -.100, the absolute values of the deviations would be .100 and .100, yielding a mean of .100. In a more closely contested season, the deviations for the two teams might be .050 and -.050, yielding a mean absolute deviation of .050.
The smaller the mean absolute deviation, the more competitive the league in that season.
The mean absolute deviations change a lot from season to season, so I added polynomial regression lines (the curved lines), which help to distinguish long-term trends from annual “noise”. Remarkably, the regression lines for the NL and AL are identical; the red line for the NL data series nestles precisely in the center of the double black line for the AL data series.
The regression lines suggest that both major leagues became more competitive from the early 1900s until about 1975. The raw numbers suggest that the leagues remained relatively competitive until about 2000. In any case, the trend reversed — with a loud bang in the NL and erratically but emphatically in the AL.
Unfortunately, the trend toward greater competitiveness reversed even as games continued to grow longer. Thus my characterization of major-league baseball as a less-competitive yawn-fest.
Baseball is sometimes called a metaphor for life. (It’s a better metaphor than soccer, to be sure.) I venture to say that the decline of baseball is a metaphor for the decline of liberty in America, which began in earnest — and perhaps inexorably — during the New Deal, even as the first lively ball era was on the wane.
I [Koffler] am not in a position to write about the scenarios based on actual wargames that I participated in [because of their classification]. All I can say is that my experience is similar to that of RAND Corporation analyst David Ochmanek, who has participated in RAND wargames sponsored by the Pentagon, and former deputy secretary of defense (DEPSECDEF) Robert Work. “In our games, when we fight Russia and China, blue [the U.S. military] gets its ass handed to it,” Ochmanek disclosed to the publication Breaking Defense. Former DEPSECDEF Work echoed Ochmanek’s commentary: “The simulated enemy forces tend to shut down [U.S.] networks so effectively that nothing works.” Worst of all, both former DEPSECDEF and the RAND analyst said, “The [United States] doesn’t just take body blows, it takes a hard hit in the head as well.… Its communications satellites, wireless networks, and other command-and-control systems suffer such heavy hacking and jamming that they are suppressed, if not shattered.” And then, according to Work, when “the red force really destroys our command and control, we stop the exercise, … instead of figuring out how to keep fighting when your command post gives you nothing but blank screens and radio static.” This is exactly what the Russian doctrine envisions and counts on — breaking the U.S. forces’ will to fight by taking away their technological advantages and crutches.
Since then, I have heard from two esteemed correspondents who have, between them, extensive and impressive credentials in the fields of Soviet/Russian studies, war-gaming, and warfare analysis.
This is from the expert in Soviet/Russian studies and war-gaming:
Games are designed for a variety of purposes — to test operational strategies, to attempt to elicit a particular response from an adversary, to probe the capability and fidelity of friends and allies, and on and on. They are not attempts at determining the effectiveness or vulnerability of weapon systems…. Instead, those [estimates of effectiveness or vulnerability] are built into the game as system constants — or perhaps as variables to be determined by some algorithm (or the throw of the die). Umpires are not necessarily even handed: often there’s a thumb on the scale (or more) in order that the game not be terminated prematurely…. The games are not played to see who wins–that could never be an objective, nor could it be a coherent outcome. It’s all about process — move, countermove, and counter-countermove….
[W]e don’t “stop the exercise.” We make what are called “branches and sequels” to get around it to keep the game going. The carriers don’t all get sunk because that would end the game and we’d all go home, even though the game was scheduled to last a week…
Nevertheless, games can tease out ideas, tactics, and strategies that nobody ever thought of. That’s their value — and sometimes (perhaps always) it requires the game to be saved (or resuscitated) to get to the gems…
All of which, as the writer suggested, I already knew. But it is telling that U.S. estimates of Russia’s cyber-war systems and processes seem unfailingly to stymie U.S. forces — according to Robert Work, a former deputy secretary of defense. Why would Work lend credence to a surmise that U.S. military forces would be shut down by Russia’s cyber-war systems? Assuming the harsh truth of the assessment about Russia’s cyber-war prowess, Work could only be pleading for more emphasis (in the form of systems, redundancy, tactical counter-measures, training, etc.) on efforts to blunt Russia’s ability to shut down U.S. combat forces.
Which brings me to the other correspondent, who is expert in electronic warfare. He sent me a copy of a paywalled article that appeared recently in The Economist (“Lessons from Russia’s Cyber-War in Ukraine”, November 30, 2022), with this comment:
It details, open source, some of the actions, reactions, strategies, and tactics on both sides between Russia and Ukraine. Surely there are classified versions among the interested parties, including the US. It is short on opinion and long on documented evidence. Certainly worth reading.
I take that as an endorsement of the article, which includes these passages:
Western officials say that Russia failed to plan and launch highly destructive cyber-attacks on power, energy and transport not because it was unable to do so, but because it assumed it would soon occupy Ukraine and inherit that infrastructure. Why destroy what you will soon need? When the war dragged on instead, it had to adapt. But cyber-weapons are not like physical ones that can simply be wheeled around to point at another target and replenished with ammunition. Rather, they have to be tailored specifically to particular targets….
“Russia is almost certainly capable of cyber-attacks of greater scale and consequence than events in Ukraine would have one believe,” notes Mr Cattler. The war “has not yet involved both sides using top-end offensive cyber-capabilities against each other”, agrees Mr Willett.
If all this is true, those capabilities might yet be unleashed. The sabotage of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines in September, and missile attacks on Ukraine’s power grid, suggest that the Kremlin’s appetite for risk is growing. There are signs of this in the cyber-domain, too. One British official says that Russia, mindful of the NotPetya incident, was keen at first to confine its attacks to Ukraine, to avoid picking a fight with NATO. But that may be changing. In late September Sandworm launched the first intentional attack on targets in a NATO-country, with “Prestige”, a disruptive piece of malware that was directed at transport and logistics in Poland, a hub for arms supplies to Ukraine.
I am in no position to make technical judgments about such matters, but the thrust of what I have presented here leaves me worried that the U.S. has been deterred from engaging in direct combat with Russia, short of nuclear warfare.
And there, I believe, Russia also holds the edge because Putin (and presumably, his military commanders) is willing to make the first move. (See this, for example.) Putin probably believes — and rightly so — that U.S. “leaders” would not respond to a nuclear attack of any kind by Russia — not even by threatening a limited retaliatory strike. To threaten retaliation, let alone to undertake it, would lead Russia to conduct a massive nuclear strike (but not one that would involve its ultimate deterrent, the Russian fleet of submarines armed with ICBMS). And that would end in devastation that Americans cannot brook. And U.S. “leaders” know it.
As I said recently in another connection: “Woke” is weak, and Putin knows it.
The rhetoric of leftism has wide appeal because to adopt and echo it is to make oneself feel kind, caring, and generous. It matters not whether the policies that flow from leftist rhetoric actually make others better off. The important things, to a leftist, are how he feels about himself and how others perceive him.
It is easy for a leftist to seem kinder, more caring, and more generous than a conservative because a leftist focuses on intentions rather than consequences. No matter that the consequences of leftist dogma could match their stated intentions only if Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy ruled the world.
In the leftist’s imagination, of course, government is Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. Government, despite the fact that it consists of venal and fallible humans, somehow (in the leftist’s imagination) wields powers that enable it to make “good” things happen with the stroke of a pen and at no cost. Well, at no cost to anyone who matters to a leftist, which rules out most hard-working taxpayers.
It follows that a leftist wants government to dictate (to others) the terms and conditions of human striving — what is made, how it is made, whether it is made, how much of it is made, and to whom it should be distributed. Such dictatorship has failed in many places because it omits economic facts of life: the variety of tastes and preferences, the benefits of competition, the importance of the profit incentive, and the beneficial inventions and innovations that are spurred by the foregoing.
Economic reality is of no consequence to a leftist. For him, human progress is attained by the magical powers of government, which can raise up the impoverished, cure the stricken, and banish strife from the land. It is up to government to do such things because, in the view of a leftist, nothing that happens to anyone who is on the left’s list of favored groups is that person’s fault. It is the fault of “society” or the uncaring, unkind, ungenerous exploiters who (in the left’s imagination) control society. The ultimate irony is that the uncaring, unkind, and ungenerous exploiters are the leftists who strive to write the rules by which mere mortals live.
In sum, the true nature of leftism is a blend of Utopianism and power-lust. Thus, in the left’s view of things, human wants can be met, but only without mussing the face of the Earth; people can live and work wherever they choose, as long as it is in compact cities in which government owns the only means of transportation; people can say what they want and associate with whom they please, as long as they say nothing to offend certain kinds of persons and are forced to associate with them, like it or not. (The list goes on, but that is more than enough to make my point.)
The idea of allowing individuals to make their own way (and sometimes to fail in the process of trying), to become sick and die because of the “lifestyles” they prefer, and to avoid one another (usually for very good reasons) is beyond the ken of the leftist. Imperfection — in the mind of a leftist — is impermissible, as long as the imperfect are favored by the left. Individuals must not be allowed to fail, to become ill, or to harbor ill feelings, except toward the enemies of leftism. The antidote to failure is to arrange our lives and business affairs as the leftist would like to see them arranged. All in the name of kindness, compassion, and generosity, of course.
In addition to their ability to believe and proclaim impossible and contradictory things, leftists have the advantage of being ruthless. They pull no punches; they project their proclivities onto their opponents; they skirt the law — and violate it — to get what they want; they use the law and the media to go after their ideological opponents; and on and on.
Why such ruthlessness? Leftists want to rearrange the world to fit their idea of perfection. They have it all figured out, and dissent from the master plan will not be tolerated. Their models aren’t Madison and Jefferson but Hitler and Stalin.
Conservatives, by contrast, simply want people to figure out for themselves how to arrange their private corner of the world within the roomy confines of traditional morality (don’t cheat, don’t steal, don’t murder, etc.) and with respect for the (moral) beliefs and (morally acquired) earnings and property of others. But that kind of quaint arrangement doesn’t have the public-relations appeal of the left’s never-ending search for “social justice” and its dispensation by Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.
It’s easy to see why the left slowly but surely has accrued power, changed the legal and moral landscape, and move “mainstream” thinking leftward: Its rhetoric and (false) promises are more appealing to the gullible and to those who believe in “free lunches” — which is probably a majority of mankind. Add ruthlessness to the mixture and it’s surprising that America didn’t long ago become a clone of the USSR, Cuba, and similar dictatorships.
The fact that America remains relatively free (though losing ground fast) is a testament to the moral courage of some American politicians (whose numbers seem to be dwindling) and the moral character of a large (but shrinking) percentage of Americans.
Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.
There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period….
And so, in this elastic anything-goes world where science — or non-science — is the hand maiden of questionable public policy, we arrive at last at global warming. It is not my purpose here to rehash the details of this most magnificent of the demons haunting the world. I would just remind you of the now-familiar pattern by which these things are established. Evidentiary uncertainties are glossed over in the unseemly rush for an overarching policy, and for grants to support the policy by delivering findings that are desired by the patron. Next, the isolation of those scientists who won’t get with the program, and the characterization of those scientists as outsiders and “skeptics” in quotation marks-suspect individuals with suspect motives, industry flunkies, reactionaries, or simply anti-environmental nutcases. In short order, debate ends, even though prominent scientists are uncomfortable about how things are being done.
When did “skeptic” become a dirty word in science? When did a skeptic require quotation marks around it?
Crichton’s lecture is the first entry in “‘Climate Change’: A Bibliography”. The bibliography is replete with quantitative analyses that support Cricton’s points and put the lie to the hysteria about “climate change” — hysteria that has been translated into economically devastating efforts to suppress the use of fossil fuels. This very long post would become an impossibly long post if I were to quote from the many relevant posts and articles listed in the bibliography, so I will just select from several of them and add some observations of my own.
Recent discussion about record weather events, such as the warmest year on record, is a totally misleading and scientifically useless exercise. This is especially true when restricted to the instrumental record that covers about 25% of the globe for at most 120 years. The age of the Earth is approximately 4.54 billion years, so the sample size is 0.000002643172%. Discussing the significance of anything in a 120-year record plays directly into the hands of those trying to say that the last 120-years climate is abnormal and all due to human activity. It is done purely for political propaganda, to narrow people’s attention and to generate fear.
The misdirection is based on the false assumption that only a few variables and mechanisms are important in climate change, and they remain constant over the 4.54 billion years. It began with the assumption of the solar constant from the Sun that astronomers define as a medium-sized variable star. The AGW proponents successfully got the world focused on CO2 [emphasis added], which is just 0.04% of the total atmospheric gases and varies considerably spatially and temporally…. [I]t is like determining the character, structure, and behavior of a human by measuring one wart on the left arm. In fact, they are only looking at one cell of that wart….
Two major themes of the AGW claims are that temperature change is greater and more rapid than at any time in the past. This is false, as a cursory look at any longer record demonstrates…. The Antarctic and Greenland ice core records both illustrate the extent of temperature change in short time periods. Figure 1 shows a modified Antarctic ice core record.
Figure 1 (Original Source SPPI.org no longer available)
The total temperature range is approximately 12°C (-9°C to +3°C). The variability is dramatic even though a 70–year smoothing average was applied. The diagram compares the peak temperatures in the current interglacial with those of the four previous interglacials. The horizontal scale on the x-axis is too small to identify even the length of the instrumental record.
Steve Goreham shows how small a portion it is in this diagram of the last 10,000 years (Figure 2).
Figure 2
Another graph shows the same period, the Holocene Optimum, in a different form (Figure 3).
Figure 3
Christopher Monckton of Brenchley offers similar observations:
The Medieval Warm Period that [Michael Mann] the denizen of Penn State (or should those two words be transposed?) so ingeniously tried to abolish with his Hokey-Stick cartoon is revealingly present in both records. The Warm Period (I remember it well) was warmer than the year 2000. That was why we were able to build the great cathedrals of Britain and Europe.
Here is another record of global temperature changes, this time stretching back to the year dot. It was as warm in 100 AD as in 2000.
Again, the peak temperature of the medieval warm period is shown as warmer than the year 2000. Yet the planet somehow survived.
As Lord Monckton observes elsewhere in his post, it is easy to make the (purported) recent rise in temperatures look alarming: Just change the aspect ratio by stretching the vertical axis (temperature) and shrinking the horizontal axis (time). How else is one supposed to alarm the gullible portion of the populace with a story about a (purported) temperature change that is dwarfed by the daily experience of almost everyone on Earth?
With that in mind, let’s look at the federal government’s official temperature records (here), which are produced by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). The GISS database comprises surface thermometer records going back to January 1880. It takes a lot of massaging to construct a monthly time series of “global” temperatures that spans 142 years with spotty coverage of Earth’s surface (even now), and wide variability in site conditions. There’s the further issue of data manipulation, an egregious example of which was the erasure of the pause that had lasted for almost 19 years.
Taking the GISS numbers at face value, for the moment, what do they suggest about changes in Earth’s temperature (whatever that means)? Almost nothing, when viewed in proper perspective. When viewed, that is, in terms of absolute (Kelvin) temperature readings:
If the temperature record were correct — and it isn’t — the trend represented by the red line would suggest a rise of 0.72 degrees Celsius (1.296 degrees Fahrenheit) per century. Inasmuch as 1880 was smack in the middle of the Second Industrial Revolution, it is only reasonable to begin there, rather than in the late 1970s, where alarmists often prefer to begin (while ignoring long pauses in the rise of estimated temperatures since then). In any event, Dr. Ball and Lord Monckton (and many others) have put the recent rise in perspective, so I will say no more about that.
THE INADEQUACY OF THE DATA
The (purported) variation in Earth’s “average temperature” since 1880 been minute. The maximum of 288.52K is only 0.8 percent higher than the minimum of 286.34K. This minuscule difference must be swamped by measurement and estimation errors. It is credible that Earth’s average temperature — had it been somehow defined and then measured consistently over the past 142 years — would have changed less than the GISS record indicates. It is credible that the observed uptrend is an artifact of selective observation and interpretation. It became warmer where I used to live, for example, but the warming was explained entirely by the urban-heat-island effect.
Which brings me to another aspect of “global warming” which hasn’t been properly accounted for. Dr. Roy Spencer addresses the urban-heat-island effect here:
[The following figure] shows the raw temperature trends versus the de-urbanized temperature trends. When stations in each of the 37 states [in the sample] are averaged together, and the state averages are area-weighted, there is a 40% reduction in the average temperature trend for those 37 states.
[T]his might well be an underestimate of the full urbanization effect on eastern U.S. temperature trends.
There is also evidence that warming is exacerbated by the reduction of cloud cover, which is poorly modeled. Charles Blaisdell summarizes:
The key to [Cloud Reduction Global Warming] is water evaporation, transpiration, or run off on land. When water (rain or snow) falls on the land it can soak into the ground or run off…. [W]hen ground water is not available the relative humidity drops… [A]ny man-made structure that covers … land prevents water from soaking in and increases [run off], When water is not available for evaporation or transpiration, … relative humidity drops.,,, Some man-made … sources of relative humidity reduction are:
· Cities
· Any man-made structure that covers the natural ground
· Forest to farm land or pasture land
· Pumping water from aquifers
· Forest fire land change.
· Flood water prevention like dams and levees.
“Global warming”, as shown above, is a minute phenomenon at best. If some fraction of “global warming” is caused by human activity, the use of fossil fuels can only account for a small fraction of the minute phenomenon.
CO2 FAIL
With respect to the role of CO2, I have observed that that there is no connection between CO2 emissions and the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. This suggests that emissions have little or no effect on the concentration of CO2. A post at Watts Up With That? notes that emissions hit a record high in 2021. What the post doesn’t address is the relationship between emissions and the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.
See for yourself. Here’s the WUWT graph of emissions from energy combustion and industrial processes:
Here’s the record of atmospheric CO2:
It’s obvious that CO2 has been rising monotonically, with regular seasonal variations, while emissions have been rising irregularly — even declining and holding steady at times. This relationship (or lack thereof) supports the hypothesis that the rise in atmospheric CO2 is the result of warming, not its cause.
For example, Dr. Roy Spencer, in a post at his blog, writes:
[T]he greatest correlations are found with global (or tropical) surface temperature changes and estimated yearly anthropogenic emissions. Curiously, reversing the direction of causation between surface temperature and CO2 (yearly changes in SST [dSST/dt] being caused by increasing CO2) yields a very low correlation.
That is to say, temperature changes seem to drive CO2 levels, not the other way around (which is the conventional view).
MODELING ISN’T SCIENCE
There is a recent legal brief challenging EPA’s Endangerment Finding about greenhouse gases — and the resulting effort to eliminate the use of fossil fuels in the U.S. The brief offers ample evidence of the inadequacies and errors the reside in climate models. Here are some relevant excerpts of that brief:
EPA uses climate models to “attribute” warming to human greenhouse gas emissions, and to set regulatory policy. EPA uses models for attribution by claiming that observed warming cannot be reproduced by climate models without including the warming effects of human greenhouse gas emissions. EPA reasons that it does not know what else could be causing the warming, so it must be caused by human greenhouse gas emissions. This is not how real science, or even simple logic, actually works….
If a proposition is contradicted or unsupported by valid empirical data, no amount of appeal to authority and consensus and degrees and credentials can change that. That is the position EPA finds itself in with the Endangerment Finding. And it does not take a “scientist” to point out obvious flaws in logic and evidence. Anyone of normal intelligence can see that EPA is blowing smoke….
[O]fficial temperature records relied on by EPA to show warming temperatures in fact use fabricated average surface temperature data for vast regions of the earth’s surface for much of that record. This fact invalidates not only the surface temperature records line of evidence but also the physical understanding and models as well because to be valid themselves they both require valid temperature data.
Second, multiple separate and distinct econometric structural analyses of more than a dozen different credible temperature time series records show that after adjusting for natural factors, there has been no statistically significant trend in temperature in any of these time series.
Third, … the key assumption supporting the global warming claim and the theory in all models, the Hot Spot theory, is invalidated by the fact that there is, in fact, no trend in natural-factor-adjusted temperature data in the tropics.
I urge readers to open the brief and read the evidence regarding the first and second points. Here, I will focus on the third point:
A critical and necessary component of both the “physical understanding” of climate and climate modeling is the Hot Spot. The Hot Spot is explained in U.S. Climate Change Science Program Synthesis and Assessment Product 1.1, Temperature Trends in the Lower Atmosphere – Understanding and Reconciling Differences, Chapter 1, § 1.1, The Thermal Structure of the Atmosphere, p. 17- 19, explicitly relies upon the Hot Spot:
The presence of such greenhouse gases (e.g., carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, halocarbons) increases the radiative heating of the surface and troposphere. … In general, the lapse rate can be expected to decrease with warming such that temperature changes aloft exceed those at the surface….
In adopting the Endangerment Findings, EPA irrevocably placed primary reliance on the U.S. Synthesis and Assessment Product reports and the Fourth Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change….
The U.S. Synthesis and Assessment Product cited above said that if the Hot Spot were missing, it would be a “potentially serious inconsistency.”… EPA also acknowledged in the Technical Support Document for the Endangerment Finding that if the Hot Spot were missing it would be “an important inconsistency.”
Dr. John Christy, in the previously cited Congressional testimony [link added], presented a comprehensible version of [the relevant figure] from the Fifth Assessment Report, in which the Hot Spot would be visible if it actually existed. Christy’s chart rewards a mere moment’s review, for it makes plain that observations invalidate the predictions of theory and climate modeling. His caption explains the chart:
Figure 5. Simplification of an IPCC20 AR521 Figure 4. The colored lines represent the range of results for the models and observations. The key point displayed is the lack of overlap between the GHG22 model results (red) and the observations (gray). The non-GHG model runs (blue) overlap the observations almost completely.
Dr. Christy explained the significance in his prepared testimony:
What is immediately evident [from Fig. 5] is that the model trends in which extra GHGs are included lie completely outside of the range of the observational trends, indicating again that the models, as hypotheses, failed a simple “scientific-method” test applied to this fundamental, climate-change variable. … Incredibly, what Fig. 5 shows is that the bulk tropical atmospheric temperature change is modeled best when no extra GHGs are included – a direct contradiction to the IPCC conclusion that observed changes could only be modeled if extra GHGs were included.
Which brings me to another scientific finding — also by Dr. Christy. In the same testimony he presented this graph and followed it with his observations:
Here we have climate model results (i.e. “claims” or “hypotheses”) to compare with observational datasets in a test to check whether the model average agrees with the observed data (i.e. the “claim” or “hypothesis”). We test the model average because it represents the consensus of the theoretical models and is used to develop policy which is embodied in policy-related products such as the Social Cost of Carbon, the National Climate Assessment and the EPA Endangerment Finding.
I provided the model and observational information as annual temperature anomalies (both tropical and global) to Dr. Ross McKitrick (University of Guelph) who has published extensively as an applied econometrician on the application of statistical techniques to the testing of climate hypotheses. He applied the Vogelsang-Franses F-Test method to these data as described in McKitrick, Ross R., S. McIntyre and C. Herman (2010) “Panel and Multivariate Methods for Tests of Trend Equivalence in Climate Data Sets”…. This method is particularly suitable for determining whether the trends of two time series are equivalent or significantly different….
What we are really testing here are the rates of warming depicted by the models and the observations for the period 1979-2016. I have simplified a depiction of the test in [the previous figure] so the rate of warming is directly viewed, showing what the test is measuring.
The basic test question is, “Is the red line significantly different from the others?” The results are shown in Table 1 [not reproduced here] recognizing that there is no equivalence between the model average trend and the observational datasets whenever the value of the test is [statistically significant] at the <1% level. As shown, all test values exceed [the requisite value], and thus the mean model trend is highly significantly different from the observations.
In other words, the models are worthless.
CONCLUSION
A proper explanation of the recent and minute variations in Earth’s temperature — if real — would incorporate all of the factors that influence Earth’s temperature, starting from Earth’s core and going out into the far reaches of the universe (e.g., to account for the influence of cosmic radiation). Among many things, a proper explanation would encompass the massive upwelling of CO2 from ocean currents, changes in Earth’s core, movements of tectonic plates (including related volcanic activity), effects of the expansion of the universe, the position and movement of the Milky Way, the position and movement of the Solar System, and the position and movement of Earth within the Solar System, and variations in Earth’s magnetic field.
But global climate models (or GCMs) are limited to superficial factors that are hypothesized to cause those changes — but only those factors that can be measured or estimated by complex and often-dubious methods (e.g., the effects of cloudcover). This is equivalent to searching for one’s car keys under a street lamp because that’s where the light is, even though the car keys were dropped 100 feet away.
The deeper and probably more relevant causes of Earth’s ambient temperature are to be found, I believe, in Earth’s core, magma, plate dynamics, ocean currents and composition, magnetic field, exposure to cosmic radiation, and dozens of other things that — to my knowledge — are ignored by GCMs. Moreover, the complexity of the interactions of such factors, and others that are usually included in GCMs, cannot possibly be modeled.
In sum:
Changes in Earth’s temperature are unknown with any degree of confidence.
At best, the changes are minute.
The causes of the changes are unknown.
It is impossible to model Earth’s temperature or changes in it.
It is therefore impossible to say whether and to what extent human activity causes Earth’s temperature to change.
It is further impossible for a group of scientists, legislators, or bloviators to say whether Earth’s warming — if indeed it is warming — is a bad thing. It is a good thing for agriculture — up to some point. It’s a good thing for human comfort (thus the flight of “snowbirds”) — up to some point. But for all the reasons given above (and more), it’s truly unknown whether those points will be reached. But even if they are, human beings will adapt — as they have in the past — unless their ability to adapt is preempted or hampered by the interventions of government that have (and will) wreak economic devastation and foreclose the conduct and implementation of real science.
You’ve heard that many universities have abandoned the use of standardized tests (i.e., intelligence tests) for the sake of “equity”. You’ve heard about the push for reparations for “climate change”, slavery, and various other things for which non-affluent and blameless masses would be forced to pay non-victims to assuage the consciences of affluent elites. You’ve heard about rapes committed by “girls” and “women” (i.e., boys and men who claim to be women). You’ve heard about “white privilege”, which is supposed to explain all of the woes of blacks. You’ve heard about “patriarchy”, which is supposed to explain the failure of women to dominate the world (though they seem to be making a good show of it anyway). You’ve heard about the “unfairness” of vast differences in wealth and income, though not about the actual reasons for such differences (mainly intelligence and ambition).
If, like me, you’re tired of hearing about such things, I have come up with a simple solution to all of the failings of the “system” that allows for divergent outcomes in life. Here it is:
Establish a world government with the power to make and enforce decrees about the distribution of income and wealth. (How to get Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, and several other nations to go along with this is a separate issue.)
Monitor and record all transactions and accumulations of wealth.
Assign a trans-national monetary value to all transactions and accumulations of wealth.
Compute the global values of income and wealth and the per-capita average of each.
Assume that interpersonal differences are the result of the kinds of imperfections alluded to in the opening paragraph.
Through taxes and subsidies, arrange a new distribution of income and wealth that results in equal incomes and wealth.
Voila: All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
I should add, however, that such a glorious result would require the realization of some magical thinking; for example:
None of the above would adversely affect incentives to produce goods and services of value to others. (Otherwise, everyone would have equal slices of dramatically smaller income and wealth “pies”.)
None of the above would adversely affect social comity or ersatz empathy. (The effete elite would gladly share bathrooms with the homeless.)
None of the above would lead to a war that decimates the world’s populace and its productive capacity. (Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, and others would go hand in hand with Western elites down the yellow-brick road.)
Oh, well, maybe it would be easier to let present trends run their course. The results will be about the same.
One of the most astonishing things about the woke is their high boredom threshold. They seem to have the same thoughts about the same subjects, expressed in the same language, all their waking lives. They never tire or let their vigilance down. They look at Raphael or Botticelli and see only social injustice. They are terrible bores.
The explanation of their persistence, which resembles that of flies on a corpse, is that truth, which holds no interest for them, is not their object, but power, the cynosure of every ambitious mediocrity’s eyes.
It occurred to me recently that I had a box seat for one of wokeism’s earliest performances: the replacement of “Christmas Party” by “Holiday Party”.
The company where I was a senior manager had laid on an annual Christmas Party for many years. One quipster characterized the refreshments as a box of Ritz crackers, a slab of Velveeta, and jug of cheap, red wine. It wasn’t that bad, but certainly toward that end of the cheap-lavish scale.
Somehow or other a party committee was established, and the parties grew more lavish: fully catered affairs with roast beef, various luscious tidbits spanning hors d’oeuvres to dessert, and a full (free) bar that included a palatable sparkling wine. At the same time, however, the party began to be billed as the Holiday Party.
The culprit, behind the scenes, was the Human Resources Department — which I had grudgingly allowed to be re-christened after decades of existence as the Personnel Department. Well, the real culprit wasn’t a department, which is an insentient abstraction, but the ladies women females cis-females of the department who attended to such matters in the interest of employee morale (or for the sake of their inner bossiness).
Our company was far from the only one to be complicit in the politically correct adoption of euphemistic language, lest anyone by offended. But it was certainly one of the horde of unwitting abettors of the advancement of wokeism at the expense of inoffensive and binding tradition. (Perhaps that’s why it was easy for me to put the kibosh on the Holiday Party several years after it became known as such, during a budget squeeze.)
Our Christmas Parties, before they had been renamed, were gladly attended by atheists, agnostics, Hindus, Muslims, Jews, Christians of various sects, and who knows what else. That the parties became better attended after their renaming had everything to do with their increasing lavishness and nothing to do with what they were called. There had not been, in our company, a complaint about the use of “Christmas Party”. It was just that someone in HR had picked up on a trend that had begun somewhere else — probably in California, at the instigation of an exceptionally sensitive cis-female.
The substitution of “Holiday Party” for “Christmas Party” may seem like an inconsequential matter, but it was not. It was the proverbial camel’s nose. And now, because too many persons (like me) who were in a position to fight political correctness but did not, Americans are living a linguistic nightmare: The use of the wrong word in the wrong place at the wrong time can mean the loss of a job, social ridicule and censure, and financial devastation.
Mea culpa.
See also, “Writing: A Guide — Part IV” (scroll to B.5)
I am using “wokesters” as a convenient handle for persons who subscribe to a range of closely related movements, which include but are not limited to wokeness, racial justice, equity, gender equality, transgenderism, social justice, cancel culture, environmental justice, and climate-change activism. It is fair to say that the following views, which might be associated with one or another of the movements, are held widely by members of all the movements (despite the truths noted parenthetically):
Race is a social construct. (Despite strong scientific evidence to the contrary.)
Racism is a foundational and systemic aspect of American history. (Which is a convenient excuse for much of what follows.)
Racism explains every bad thing that has befallen people of color in America. (Ditto.)
America’s history must be repudiated by eradicating all vestiges of it that glorify straight white males of European descent. (Because wokesters are intolerant of brilliance and success of it comes from straight white males of European descent.)
The central government (when it is run by wokesters and their political pawns) should be the sole arbiter of human relations. (Replacing smaller units of government, voluntary contractual arrangements, families, churches, clubs, and other elements of civil society through which essential services are provided, economic wants are satisfied efficiently, and civilizing norms are inculcated and enforced), except for those institutions that are dominated by wokesters or their proteges, of course.)
[You name it] is a human right. (Which — unlike true rights, which all can enjoy without cost to others — must be provided at cost to others.)
Economics is a zero-sum game; the rich get rich at the expense of the poor. (Though the economic history of the United States — and the Western world — says otherwise. The rich get rich — often rising from poverty and middling circumstances — by dint of effort risk-taking, and in the process produce things of value for others while also enabling them to advance economically.)
Profit is a dirty word. (But I — the elite lefty who makes seven figures a year, thank you — deserve every penny of my hard-earned income.)
Sex gender is assigned arbitrarily at birth. (Ludicrous).
Men can bear children. (Ditto.)
Women can have penises. (Ditto.)
Children can have two mommies, two daddies, or any combination of parents in any number and any gender. And, no, they won’t grow up anti-social for lack of traditional father (male) and mother (female) parents. (Just ask blacks who are unemployed for lack of education and serving prison time after having been raised without bread-winning fathers.)
Blacks, on average, are at the bottom of income and wealth distributions and at the top of the incarceration distribution — despite affirmative action, subsidized housing, welfare payments, etc. — because of racism. (Not because blacks, on average, are at the bottom of the intelligence distribution and have in many black communities adopted and enforced a culture the promotes violence and denigrates education?)
Black lives matter. (More than other lives? Despite the facts adduced above?)
Police are racist Nazis and ought to be de-funded. (So that law abiding blacks and other Americans can become easier targets for rape, murder, and theft.)
Grades, advanced placement courses, aptitude tests, and intelligence tests are racist devices. (Which happen to enable the best and brightest — regardless of race, sex, or socioeconomic class — to lead the country forward scientifically and economically, to the benefit of all.)
The warming of the planet by a couple of degrees in the past 150 years (for reasons that aren’t well understood but which are attributed by latter-day Puritans to human activity) is a sign of things to come: Earth will warm to the point that it becomes almost uninhabitable. (Which is a case of undue extrapolation from demonstrably erroneous models and a failure to credit the ability of capitalism — gasp! — to adapt successfully to truly significant climatic changes.)
Science is real. (Though we don’t know what science is, and believe things that are labeled scientific if we agree with them. We don’t understand, or care, that science is a process that sometimes yields useful knowledge, or that the “knowledge” is always provisional, always in doubt, and sometimes wrong. We support the movement of recent decades to label some things as scientific that are really driven by a puritanical, anti-humanistic agenda, and which don’t hold up against rigorous, scientific examination, such as the debunked “science” of “climate change”; the essential equality of the races and sexes, despite their scientifically demonstrable differences; and the belief that a man can become a woman, and vice versa.)
Illegal immigrants migrants are just seeking a better life and should be allowed free entry into the United States. (Because borders are arbitrary — except when it comes to my property — and it doesn’t matter if the unfettered entry to illegal immigrants burdens tax-paying Americans and brings disruption and crime to communities along and near the southern border.)
The United States spends too much on national defense because (a) borders are arbitrary (except when they delineate my property), (b) there’s no real threat to this country (except for cyberattacks and terrorism sponsored by other states, and growing Chinese and Russian aggression that imperils the economic interests of Americans), (c) America is the aggressor (except in World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, Gulf War I, the terrorist attacks on 9/11, and in the future if America significantly reduces its defense forces), and (d) peace is preferable to war (except that it is preparedness for war that ensures peace, either through deterrence or victory).
What wokesters want is to see that these views, and many others of their ilk, are enforced by the central government. To that end, steps will be taken to ensure that the Democrat Party is permanently in control of the central government and is able to control most State governments. Accordingly, voting laws will be “reformed” to enable everyone, regardless of citizenship status or other qualification (perhaps excepting age, or perhaps not) to receive a mail-in ballot that will be harvested and cast for Democrat candidates; the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico (with their iron-clad Democrat super-majorities) will be added to the Union; the filibuster will be abolished; the Supreme Court and lower courts will be expanded and new seats will be filled by Democrat nominees; and on, and on.
Why do wokesters want what they want? Here’s my take:
They reject personal responsibility.
They don’t like the sense of real community that is represented in the traditional institutions of civil society.
They don’t like the truth if it contradicts their view of what the world should be like.
They are devoid of true compassion.
They are — in sum — alienated, hate-filled nihilists, the produce of decades of left-wing indoctrination by public schools, universities, and the media.
What will wokesters (and all of us) get?
At best, what they will get is a European Union on steroids, a Kafka-esque existence in a world run by bureaucratic whims from which entrepreneurial initiative and deeply rooted, socially binding cultures have been erased.
Somewhere between best and worst, they will get an impoverished, violent, drug-addled dystopia which is effectively a police state run for the benefit of cosseted political-media-corprate-academic elites.
At worst (as if it could get worse), what they will get is life under the hob-nailed boots of Russia and China; for example:
Russians are building a military focused on killing people and breaking things. We’re apparently building a military focused on being capable of explaining microaggressions and critical race theory to Afghan Tribesmen.
A country whose political leaders oppose the execution of murderers, support riots and looting by BLM, will not back Israel in it’s life-or-death struggle with Islamic terrorists, and use the military to advance “wokeism” isn’t a country that you can count on to face down Russia and China.
Wokesters are nothing but useful idiots to the Russians and Chinese. And if wokesters succeed in weakening the U.S. to the point that it becomes a Sino-Soviet vassal, they will be among the first to learn what life under an all-powerful central government is really like. Though, useful idiots that they are, they won’t survive long enough to savor the bitter fruits of their labors.
Politics and Prosperity 