Carbon, the Ultimate Sin Tax: Where all Taxpayers are Sinners!!

A tax on immoral or unseemly purchases is a sin tax. This includes alcohol, tobacco and a few other things. The advantage of pushing through such a tax is that it is easy to pass because it does not affect the majority of taxpayers. The disadvantage from the government's point of view is the very same thing: It doesn't tax the majority of taxpayers.

If they could only find something that is very, very bad but everyone uses. At least everyone with enough income to pay more taxes. And that's when it hit them: Petroleum usage. Make it bad, very bad to use. And then tax people for using it. It's the perfect sin tax!

The Cap and Trade Tax and the many other "energy" and "jobs" disguises it comes under are proposals to do just that. The clue is that they are tearing something down more than they are building up something else. It could be the oil industry (I hate to break it to you, we still need it), your personal wealth (you could use it) or the very fabric of society (might come in handy too). Unfortunately, the climategate emails tore it wide open for many, for others it was already clear: There is no connection between energy usage and the end of the world. Except that if one ends, so does the other.

Question: Why can't we have balanced research, studying both sides of the argument on Global Warming?

Answer: Because large scale government funding only comes about if there is an urgent crisis to be dealt with. If they open the debate to skeptical climate researchers, they would quickly establish that there is no case for catastrophic global warming, they would poke holes in the works by alarmists and they would kill the movement entirely.

By the time they did that, the funding would be gone. Which means they couldn't do that. In short, the closer we get to disproving the alarmist case for global warming, the less funding there is to study either side.

Thus, we can only exist in two states, one where there is no alarm about global warming (and no funding), the other where there is alarm (and funding for alarmists). We will never see a scenario where there is no alarm about global warming but there is tons of research examining both sides of the question.

Sustainability Achieved out of the Dying Global Warming Movement!

This has got to be the slowest, most painful death possible for the Warmists. If the mainstream media had just reported on the global warming scandal Climategate and related malfeasances as they happened, it would be a knife through the heart of the movement. There would be a period of chaos among the supporters, followed by their attention moving on to something else.

Instead, the powers conspired to prevent this from happening, some with lofty hopes. Grassroot environmentalists hoped the scandal was all a big mistake and when the smoke cleared, it would all stand as solid as before, reinforcing their long-held belief of how the world really is. And others with not so lofty hopes. The green organizations worried that billions of dollars in donations would dry up if this scandal was not answered. Government leaders worried that their long held dream of energy taxes, redistribution of wealth and a much larger government that must administer these great programs would be set back by years. And the scientists worried that their climate research labs, all of which support the narrative, would lose funding and face downsizing and closure. The mainstream media worried that the large corporations that were so convenient to malign (because they cannot fight back the way individuals and government can), may not have been the bad guys after all. This shatters their very belief system, at a time when news organizations are being pummeled into dust by the Internet. MSNBC may have hoped that if they could only paper over the problem, parent company GE would still receive huge subsidies for wind generators, sweeping legislation would require green appliances in homes and many other financial benefits would be reamed, er raped, I mean reaped from the public. Literally, from an unsuspecting public until now.

Once the scandal broke, it seemed that nothing could save them. What the movement needed was time. Time to stop the lifeblood from spilling out of the environmental body. Time to figure out what would fix the problem. A virtual news blackout in the U.S. ensued. But they overlooked one thing (or hundreds of little things). By being predisposed to the global warming narrative, they were uncritical in the extreme to the strength of every piece of evidence in favor, at the same time feeling they had to come to it's defense and block any evidence against. As a natural result, the evidence for became weaker and the evidence against became stronger. It was a house of cards ready to fall.

The house of cards now falls in slow-motion. By delaying and understating the scandal in the mainstream media for as long as possible, they prolong the death throes of the movement for that much longer. In the long run, it is indefensible, it cannot stand. Today, a tiny minority in the USA is even aware of the scandal, you can see this for yourself by asking people outside of your circle of friends, especially young people. Yet we have a situation where cap and trade legislation is blocked, where support for the UN IPCC is evaporating, where states are fighting back against the EPA CO2 mandates, citizens are railing against shoddy work by government funded research such as at NASA and against perpetuating biased education in the schools. Public opinion polls about the belief in global warming show a declining trend.

All this without the true story of climate fraud reaching most of the people. When it does, slowly, and it surely will, because their supporters made sure the case for is based on only the thinnest verneer of scientific backing, and because this is arguably the greatest scandal in the history of science, the outrage will only grow and the verdict will be complete. In the meantime, the warmists are allowed to believe they still have a chance to recover something meaningful from their efforts as they continue unabated toward the precipice and oblivion and an eventual anonymous grave for the cause.

Warmists, your intentions were nothing but the best but your methods, and unknown to you, the improper methods by those you believed were supporting the narrative perverted all of that. The only outcome is the progressive demise and death of the movement as one percentage point at a time, the public excruciatingly slowly learns the truth. And that, ironically, is how the movement achieved some level of long-term sustainability.

The warmists methods did not kill the movement, it was the facts. Put another way, the movement would not have happened had the facts been given due regard. But since it did, we get some extremely valuable benefits:

1. The eventual death of the movement and the resultant correction of the errs of its ways. The environmental movement has had some important successes in the past but have defintely ventured too far into the ether (and perhaps inhaled it),
2. A deep abiding mistrust of the reliability of scientific claims that will be made in the future, ranging from health risks to asteroid impacts. While I really, really wanted to believe scientific research was objective and illuminating, it is far more valuable to believe that it sometimes will not be,
3. Fresh skepticism of our mainstream media who we thought were watching the science and now we know were - and are - actively hiding it,
4. Renewed wariness of our politicians, who, on some level exist to promote the growth of the political body, always at our expense.

And politics is where we will end. This is where the rubber meets the road, where government regulations and taxes incur real and major costs to taxpayers. Not just by soaking the energy producers, not just the rich but all of us as we pay more for everything they tax, regulate and restrict. And as the taxes, almost a living entity ever hungry for more, spread to more and more of the taxpayer's "environment", the burden on our pocketbooks only increases.

NASA's Alarmist James Hansen's Credibility on Global Warming is Hovering Right at Absolute Zero

I've been a big fan of NASA all my life, but I know an overblown bureaucracy when I smell one. My Taxes pay for this scientist and I don't like the job he's doing. He is on the string of Barack Obama to promote cap and trade legislation, part of Obama's unconstitutional control of government policies here. In his most recent letter here, he reinforces his claims about global warming that have increasingly been shown to be supported by weak and flimsy arguments. We still have his dismal temperature database that John Coleman and Joseph D'Aleo reported on in segment 4, and that surfacestations.org surveyed, but Hansen has not cleaned up his act. So how does he respond to such weaknesses?

"We are continually burdened by sweeping FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests, which reduce our ability to do science and write it up"

In other words, the complete documentation, which he has refused to provide in the past and which offers the only way to redeem his credibility (if it did not show such shoddy work and flawed data) is the very thing that he objects to addressing most of all.

Hansen's methods are closely tied to the climategate scandal and his refusal to recognize and act on what is most important to resolving credibility has one positive benefit. It will forever hamper his ability to promote his alarmist agenda.

We should downsize NASA since it has shown itself to have grown to a size that now produces irrelevent, conflicting work and has slid from the cause of science to that of advocacy. I previously talked of downsizing the EPA for passing the point of diminishing returns, and now we have another government agency that has proven itself to have grown beyond usefulness. Second best if we cannot downsize NASA immediately, we can make sure the dysfunctional department continues with the widely discredited James Hansen as the head so that we never forget that this organization has fallen from the true faith of the pursuit of science.

Ink Blot Rorschach Test: What do you see?

Graph of global temperatures as portrayed by Wikipedia.

The reconstructions used, in order from oldest to most recent publication are:

1. (dark blue 1000-1991): P.D. Jones, K.R. Briffa, T.P. Barnett, and S.F.B. Tett (1998). , The Holocene, 8: 455-471.
2. (blue 1000-1980): M.E. Mann, R.S. Bradley, and M.K. Hughes (1999). , Geophysical Research Letters, 26(6): 759-762.
3. (light blue 1000-1965): Crowley and Lowery (2000). , Ambio, 29: 51-54. Modified as published in Crowley (2000). , Science, 289: 270-277.
4. (lightest blue 1402-1960): K.R. Briffa, T.J. Osborn, F.H. Schweingruber, I.C. Harris, P.D. Jones, S.G. Shiyatov, S.G. and E.A. Vaganov (2001). , J. Geophys. Res., 106: 2929-2941.
5. (light green 831-1992): J. Esper, E.R. Cook, and F.H. Schweingruber (2002). , Science, 295(5563): 2250-2253.
6. (yellow 200-1980): M.E. Mann and P.D. Jones (2003). , Geophysical Research Letters, 30(15): 1820. doi:10.1029/2003GL017814.
7. (orange 200-1995): P.D. Jones and M.E. Mann (2004). , Reviews of Geophysics, 42: RG2002. doi:10.1029/2003RG000143
8. (red-orange 1500-1980): S. Huang (2004). , Geophys. Res Lett., 31: L13205.doi:10.1029/2004GL019781
9. (red 1-1979): A. Moberg, D.M. Sonechkin, K. Holmgren, N.M. Datsenko and W. Karlén (2005). , Nature, 443: 613-617. doi:10.1038/nature03265
10. (dark red 1600-1990): J.H. Oerlemans (2005). , Science, 308: 675-677.doi:10.1126/science.1107046

(black 1856-2004): Instrumental data was jointly compiled by the Climatic Research Unit and the UK Meteorological Office Hadley Centre. Global Annual Average data set TaveGL2v [2] was used.

Notice that the references are chock full of names under investigation in association with the Climategate scandal.

The most important feature of the Wikipedia graph is the upward spike on the right side, to be interpreted as rapid, out of control global warming.

Temperatures in the distant past were estimated by studying the signs left by nature. These are called "proxies" because they are not actually thermometers. We would expect thermometers to be the very best means to measure temperature.

Modern temperature records in the graph are heavily dependent on thermometer measurements made at stations all across many continents. They should be the most accurate, but they have been subjected to recent urbanization: Buildings, pavement and more. Here is a picture of a station that has been making measurements for a century but only recently surrounded by buildings and roads:


Here is the temperature recorded at this site since 1900. Of course the air conditioner, buildings and other hot surfaces were not present when this sensor was first installed. Notice the sharply rising trend.


The above graph shows temperatures rising by more than three degrees. But how much is due to global climate and how much from local urbanization? Unfortunately, how much change to the local terrain, and when are not documented. The accuracy of such sites are given a rank, as follows.


The above temperature station rates a 5, "worst". It is no exception. I photographed a station near my house in the country, but the station only qualifies as 4, "poor", surrounded by buildings and pavement, with errors that could exceed 2 degrees C according to the chart above. The majority of stations in North America have been compromised by urbanization effects to a comparable extent. In the below map, the desired color of sensors is blue. Unfortunately, blue is an all but nonexistent Waldo:

The country as a whole remains undeveloped. Yet virtually all sensors are located next to developed structures that get hot in sunlight. Returning to the original graph, how much can we trust the right side of the graph, the only time period which uses modern temperature sensors? The global warming graph at beginning of this article is attempting to show tenths of a degree increase. But urbanization can introduce up to five degrees. We don't have records of precisely how much the change is or when it happened, so the sensor record is fairly useless. It cooks the data and burns a big tall spike on the right side of the graph.

And we thought the temperature record based on thermometers would be the gold standard. It is next to useless for this purpose. Does that mean that farther in the past proxies are more accurate, say within tenths of a degree to match the accuracy implied in the graph? Not a chance! We have even more difficulty verifying their accuracy due to many confusing and contaminating factors. The entire graph is in serious doubt now.

All those errors assume people did the best job humanly possible to collect and analyze their results. But they did not, so the errors are likely much greater. A large percentage of the people who made the graph at the top of the page are under investigation for the climategate scandal and they are global warming activists, factors which seriously questions the science. At this point it is appropriate to throw all conclusions out the window and wait decades for new data to be collected. Just don't let it hit the sensor next to the building on its way out.

Putting it all together, the wikipedia graph says very little factually. About the only thing you can see here is whatever you expect to see. You either see warming or sure signs of misleading "noise", completely opposite conclusions depending on what is in your mind. Like an ink blot, nothing in the drawing is real, it's all about how you interpret it. The warming interpretation is incorrect.

Climate Scientists Should Stick to Avocacy. I Mean Science.

In chemistry, you try to isolate the variables. Hydrogen and oxygen plus a spark and POOF! You have water. You mustn't introduce impurities that might obscure what is going on, might bias the amount of heat generated and every other measurement. Only by being a careful, impartial observer can the untainted truth be learned.

The same is true with the scientific process itself. There are advocates and there are scientists. When the two are intertwined, they cease to be credible as either. The purity of the scientist is lost. And the advocacy falls into disrepute too, because the basis in science is no longer trustworthy.

It's entirely human to have a hunch, a purpose and follow one's convictions. These motivate scientists to dig deeper yet raises the probability of biasing them toward a preconcieved notion, especially if the community is already biased in the same direction.

Separating sciency and advocacy seems impossible, so the best we can hope for is checks and balances. Verifiability has been the most obvious one lacking in the climate debate. Work needs to be duplicated, not lost or destroyed. The other lacking piece has been the one-sidedness of the research. There wasn't much demand for verifiability, since the majority of climate work was slanted toward the warming thesis. There was no "market" for research of the opposite thesis. It's not quite as exciting so it wasn't missed. Now we see the error in our ways.

To continue the H2O analogy, we don't want scientists to say, "Hydrogen reacts with water and you are very bad people for those of you doing this. Too much heat is generated! And too much water! And it uses up valuable oxygen!" When we get science from scientists, we are eternally grateful. And I do mean eternally, since the purest truths are enduring, whereas opinions mixed in often contaminate the whole story.

Why Climate Simulations Fail

As an engineer, I've written several computer simulations for electrical circuits and the behavior of networks in FORTRAN (the language used by climate scientists at the CRU), in BASIC (a FORTRAN-like language that is more interactive) and to a lesser extent in C (a more modular, reusable language than the other two). I don't have to know every detail of climate science to know there is something rotten in the simulation models that predict temperature rise a century from now.

My simulations taught me several things:

1. There is the feeling of exhilaration with getting the computer to actually do work for you and produce a result that you can use. It's an amazing feat.
2. Some simulations exhibit divergent behavior, that is, as you add more precision, they do not converge toward the same result. This is an important warning to those that would attach too much importance to today's early results.
3. Even a simple computer model involving less than ten variables, all of which are well understood, can quickly balloon into an vastly complicated and slow simulation that would take years to complete without shortcuts. By contrast, earth's climate involves millions of variables, some with small impact, others large, all of which are not precisely understood.
4. The computer is equally loyal about producing bad results as good (remember early programmable calculators and the popularity of biorhythms?). Unless the result is outrageous (such as a climate model generating millions of degrees or below absolute zero, both being impossibilities), it's impossible to discern good data from bad without further investigation. For example, the climate simulation will never tell you if you forgot to take into account the shapes of continents or clouds or mountains when formulating your conclusions. Independent methods of verification are needed, the best being a reality check against the climate itself.
5. A simple nonlinear system is hundreds of times harder to simulate than a linear one. An example of a linear system is a guitar amp where if you pluck the string twice as hard, the speaker plays it twice as loud. An example of a nonlinear system is the same amplifier driven to distortion. When you pluck louder, the amplifier puts out a fuzzier sound at almost the same volume, the exact details depending on how the system clips at the power limits, what kind of transistors or tubes are used, how the circuit is biased, the power supply and so forth. Climate simulation is a non-linear system on many levels, just one example being the idea of "tipping points", which by their hidden nature are obscure and not well understood. It is like predicting how pleasingly an amplifier distorts and exactly at what volume, without ever having played it so. Simulating small amounts of climate change is beyond our ability today. Simulating tipping points is hundreds of times beyond that.
6. Once the first simulation is done, a second one, known as sensitivity analysis is needed to avoid another important gotcha. Let's say you simulate a circuit, double-check it, build it and prove it works as expected. So you launch your new product, only to find the factory yield is dropping as none of the circuits seem to be working. On further examination, it turns out you needed capacitors with a precision of one tenth of a percent, which are simply not available. A sensitivity analysis proves to be an important practical part of any simulation. Sensitivity analysis also provides the best hope for climate change: A slight nudge here has a larger effect there. Expensive brute force efforts to control climate won't work, not only because we can't afford them (or stay sustainably focused on them), but it goes against nature itself. Nature gives us the secrets of the best ways to solve problems, we just have to find them, that is, understand the relationships between the variables.

Climate simulations lack the robustness that comes from being testable. In electronics, many a simulation has fallen by the wayside after failing the simple reality check. The only tests so far on climate have been the results of the last fifteen years, which already contradict the simulations that predicted significant warming. But notice that my article did not even depend on this fact. My point was that the climate simulations were incapable of generating worthwhile results at the current state of knowledge. I would have discredited the models even if the last fifteen years have been correctly predicted, since it would have been a roll of the dice.

In electronics, simulations of well-defined linear circuits of ten variables (components) took years to evolve and improve. Climate simulations have just begun. They have millions of variables, the variables are not well understood, are nonlinear and the testibility of the simulations is virtually nonexistent. In short, we have decades to centuries to go before we can say the simulations predict anything of relevence.