How does the U.N. expect to run the world’s climate if it can’t manage a queue?

Posted on December 15, 2009 by Daniel

Ron Bailey reports from the U.N. climate change conference in Copenhagen:

I spent the day waiting with thousands of others in subfreezing cold to try to get into the proper building to obtain our credentials for the official United Nations Climate Change Conference. I clocked about 5 hours in line while my housemate, in town representing a Colorado NGO, waited 10.5 hours and was also turned away. The conference chaos makes one wonder how anyone expects the U.N. to run the world’s climate if it can’t manage a queue?

It turns out the U.N. accredited three times as many non-governmental organization delegates for the conference as the conference center could hold.

Al Gore finally gets called on the carpet

Posted on December 15, 2009 by Daniel

**Updated–See Below**

Al Gore’s Oscar-winning and Nobel peace prize contributing An Inconvenient Truth contains a number of important errors. But scientists didn’t call Gore on the carpet. That experience left me with a bad taste in my mouth about the honesty of many climate scientists. Yesterday Al Gore promoted a bold claim that seemed to be quite a stretching the truth again. He claimed that polar ice may vanish in 5-7 years:

“It is hard to capture the astonishment that the experts in the science of ice felt when they saw this,” said former U.S. Vice President Gore, who joined Scandinavian officials and scientists to brief journalists and delegates. It was Gore’s first appearance at the two-week conference.

This was obviously crazy talk. Here’s a graph that shows the sea ice extent of Arctic ice for 2002 through 2009:

The red line is 2009’s data. As you can see 2009 was a bit lower compared to 2002-2006, but there was more sea ice in 2008 than in 2007 and more ice in 2009 than in 2008. This is still lower than the 1979 to 2000 mean sea ice extent, but the data do not point to zero Arctic sea ice in 5 to 7 years.

Unlike with many of Gore’s claims, the press called him on the carpet with this distortion. The Times reports:

In his speech, Mr Gore told the conference: “These figures are fresh. Some of the models suggest to Dr [Wieslav] Maslowski that there is a 75 per cent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years.”

However, the climatologist whose work Mr Gore was relying upon dropped the former Vice-President in the water with an icy blast.

“It’s unclear to me how this figure was arrived at,” Dr Maslowski said. “I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this.”

Mr Gore’s office later admitted that the 75 per cent figure was one used by Dr Maslowksi as a “ballpark figure” several years ago in a conversation with Mr Gore.

Hopefully journalists will do a better job of fact checking Gore’s claims in the future. A week ago he tried to defuse the ClimateGate letters scandal by saying that the most recent emails were more than 10 years old. Al Gore is just not credible when it comes to matters of science.

**Update**

It appears that Al Gore had a basis for his claim. The claim is still nuts, but at least in this case he wasn’t just making stuff up. The paper that Gore was likely relying on is here. The graph looks like this:

Fullscreen capture 12152009 25454 PM

The freedom to innovate: wine edition

Posted on December 14, 2009 by Daniel

One of the reasons America has had a strong economy is because of the freedom to innovate. That freedom helped California vinters challenge the French:

Forcing taxpayers to pay for other people’s health care is not “being kinder and gentler”

Posted on December 11, 2009 by Daniel

Among some people there is a belief that spending tax dollars on certain program is charitable. This belief mistakenly assumes that people 1) pay taxes voluntarily and 2) the tax dollars are allocated according to people’s wishes. Both of these assumptions are wrong. Taxes are not voluntary and politicians spend money on political priorities which aren’t necessarily the same as taxpayer’s priorities.

Real charity is voluntary. It is done out of goodwill or love of humanity. Taxation is not voluntary. Only half of Americans pay income tax. And very would pay as much taxes if it were completely voluntary.

That why I get irritated when I read things like this from an economist named Uwe Reinhardt in the N.Y. Times:

The theory here is that in all modern nations, the better-off members of society would like to provide kind acts for the less well-off. The kind acts in question include financing health care for the less fortunate who cannot pay for that care with their own resources.

…

In our holiday card, my wife and I put forth the hypothesis that, for all we know, the American people are just as kind and charitable in health care as are people in Taiwan, Japan, Europe and Canada, even though it may not appear to be so in light of the demonstrated hardships we tolerate in health care for millions of families at the bottom of the income scale.

…

A tongue-in-cheek holiday card of this nature does, of course, take poetic license, so to speak, but we did try to make a serious point. Namely, thanks to the expensive and often wasteful manner in which our country’s health care providers and insurers have managed their affairs, they have helped to price kindness out of America’s soul.

Federal spending on health care is not charitable spending. Charity is when I voluntarily give my hard-earned money to causes I believe in, such as my church, fighting cancer, or give more transportation options to poor people. That is charity. Real health care charity would involve giving money to people in need, not government programs.

What Earth would look like with rings like Saturn’s

Posted on December 10, 2009 by Daniel

The views from space are boring, but from land, they are very interesting:

Your tax dollars hard at work

Posted on December 9, 2009 by Daniel

A $700,000 Italian sports car that originally was brought into the United States in 2001 for maintenance was seized today in Orange County as part of a federal investigation into violations of environmental and transportation safety regulations.

Agents with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement found the 1994 Cizeta V16 sports car at the Family Classic Cars showroom in San Juan Capistrano, eight years after an agreement specified that the car would be sent back to where it came following repairs.

The car is one of fewer than a dozen such vehicles produced by automotive engineer Claudio Zampoli in a joint venture with music composer Giorgio Moroder, said Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman Virginia Kice.

The government alleges that Zampoli and his agent violated U.S. customs and environmental laws, Kice said They allegedly claimed the vehicle was worth $125,000, even though the car originally sold new for approximately $600,000.

In addition, Zampoli and his representative failed to export the vehicle within a reasonable period of time, according to the allegation.

“Make no mistake, the illegal importation of gray market vehicles like this is not just a technical violation,” said Miguel Unzueta, special agent in charge for the customs agency’s Office of Investigations in Los Angeles. “Cars that don’t meet U.S. standards are outlawed for a reason. These vehicles can pose a real threat to public health and safety.”

Really? Like what threat to public health and safety?

Power for the future–thorium reactors?

Posted on December 6, 2009 by Daniel

This video is a compilation of nearly 3 hours of talks at Google about thorium reactors. I thought it was a very interesting. It sounds plausible, but I have no way to evaluate the claims these guys are making.

Fantastic pictures from Glacier National Park

Posted on December 4, 2009 by Daniel

On a whim, my sister and I once decided to go on a road trip from Utah to Glacier National Park and to Banff. It was a spur of the moment decision and I have never regretted it. Both Glacier and Baniff are gorgeous and these two pictures beyond from Glacier show you why. The Big Picture has some great snaps from Glacier. These pictures were part of project by the editor of Glacier National Park Magazine. His blog with 100 of the best pictures he shot in Glacier this year is here.

Fritz Henderson forced out at GM—daughter not happy

Posted on December 2, 2009 by Daniel

Eight months ago the Obama Administration ousted former GM CEO Rick Wagoner for Fritz Henderson. Now Fritz has been forced out as well.

Fritz’s daughter isn’t very happy. Here’s what she wrote on GM’s Facebook page:

HE F*****G GOT ASKED TO STEP DOWN ALL OF YOU F*****G IDIOTS. I’M FRITZ’S F*****G DAUGHTER, AND HE DID NOT F*****G RESIGN. WHITACRE IS A SELFISH PIECE OF SHIFT [sic], WHO CARES ABOUT HIMSELF AND NOT THE F*****G COMPANY. HAVE FUN WITH GM, I HOPE TO NEVER BUY FROM THIS GOD FORESAKEN [sic] COMPANY EVERY [sic] AGAIN. F**K ALL OF YOU."

Federal laws stand in the way of stimulus jobs