Glenn Greenwald On the Right Side But No Props for Ron Paul
I don’t mean to be a complainer, but look at the people Glenn Greenwald credits with getting the Fed audit passed by the House Financial Services committee:
One can count on one hand the number of times that establishment attacks like this fail, but this time — at least for now — it did. And it reveals a winning formula: where there is a strong and principled leader in Congress willing to defy the Party’s leadership and the Washington establishment (Grayson), combined with leading experts lending their name to the effort (economists Dean Baker and James Galbraith), organizations standing behind it (labor groups), and a shrewd and driven organizer putting it all together (FDL’s Jane Hamsher), even the most powerful forces and opinion-enforcers can be defeated, as they were here. Those progressive advocates’ refusal to be distracted by trite partisan considerations, and their reliance on substantial GOP support to pass the bill (as hypocritical as the GOP’s position might have been), was particularly crucial — and smart.
Again, I don’t want to be the guy complaining about his tax bill right after he wins the lottery, but still… Would progressives have even known what the Fed was up to were it not for Ron Paul? I’m being quite serious. Nobody talked about the Fed before Ron Paul’s last presidential run.
I understand that Greenwald is arguing–correctly I think–that Ron Paul alone wasn’t enough, that he needed the help of the other factors Greenwald lists. But c’mon, how do you talk about this without citing the principled Congressman willing to buck party leadership etc.?
Global Warming Bombshell–or "Mushroom Cloud"?
Folks, I don’t use sensational headlines too often. Also, I am in Auburn, AL after spending all day at a conference, and I’m headed out the door. So I haven’t been able to carefully parse all the blogs on this issue.
Having given that caveat, this seems HUGE. The Climate Research Unit (CRU) is the world record keepers of global temperature data; it keeps the numbers that the IPCC bases its reports on. There have been some very dubious things recently where outside skeptics want the original temperature readings before CRU “smooths” them and does other things, and CRU basically stonewalled before saying, “We don’t have the original readings anymore. All we have is the corrected data at this point.”
So anyway, apparently a whistleblower couldn’t live with him or herself anymore, [UPDATE: The official story is that the University’s webmail server was hacked from the oustide, see the comments] and dumped a 61 MB file of CRU emails, data, etc. to an outside server, and now the blogosphere has gone nuts.
Some of the emails (if legitimate) are pretty amazing. I haven’t been able to look at this too much, but here are the two most jaw-dropping ones I’ve come across so far. Note that Phil Jones is the head of CRU, and once again CRU is the group that maintains the global temperature data on which the IPCC reports are based. Also note that Michael Mann is the creator of the infamous “hockey stick” temperature graph that is so controversial. (I have bolded the parts below.)
=======================
To: “Michael E. Mann”
Subject: HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL
Date: Thu Jul 8 16:30:16 2004
The other paper by MM is just garbage – as you knew. De Freitas again. Pielke is also losing all credibility as well by replying to the mad Finn as well – frequently as I see it. I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is !
========================
From: Phil Jones
To: ray bradley ,mann@xxxxx.xxx, mhughes@xxxx.xxx
Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000
Cc: k.briffa@xxx.xx.xx,t.osborn@xxxx.xxx
Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,
Once Tim’s got a diagram here we’ll send that either later today or first thing tomorrow.
I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps
to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from
1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. Mike’s series got the annual
land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land
N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999
for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with
data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.
Thanks for the comments, Ray.
Cheers
Phil
Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit Telephone +44 (0) xxxxx
School of Environmental Sciences Fax +44 (0) xxxx
University of East Anglia
Norwich Email p.jones@xxxx.xxx
NR4 7TJ
UK
=================================
Now of course, the question is: Are these emails legit? Well let’s turn to the RealClimate response. I’ll reproduce a large portion of what they say, in light of the above bombshells (or “mushroom cloud” as Pat Michaels called it). So anyway here is how the NASA climate scientists defend their colleagues across the pond:
As many of you will be aware, a large number of emails from the University of East Anglia webmail server were hacked recently (Despite some confusion generated by Anthony Watts, this has absolutely nothing to do with the Hadley Centre which is a completely separate institution). As people are also no doubt aware the breaking into of computers and releasing private information is illegal, and regardless of how they were obtained, posting private correspondence without permission is unethical. We therefore aren’t going to post any of the emails here. We were made aware of the existence of this archive last Tuesday morning when the hackers attempted to upload it to RealClimate, and we notified CRU of their possible security breach later that day.
Nonetheless, these emails (a presumably careful selection of (possibly edited?) correspondence dating back to 1996 and as recently as Nov 12) are being widely circulated, and therefore require some comment. Some of them involve people here (and the archive includes the first RealClimate email we ever sent out to colleagues) and include discussions we’ve had with the CRU folk on topics related to the surface temperature record and some paleo-related issues, mainly to ensure that posting were accurate.
Since emails are normally intended to be private, people writing them are, shall we say, somewhat freer in expressing themselves than they would in a public statement. For instance, we are sure it comes as no shock to know that many scientists do not hold Steve McIntyre in high regard. Nor that a large group of them thought that the Soon and Baliunas (2003), Douglass et al (2008) or McClean et al (2009) papers were not very good (to say the least) and should not have been published. These sentiments have been made abundantly clear in the literature (though possibly less bluntly).
More interesting is what is not contained in the emails. There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to ‘get rid of the MWP’, no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no ‘marching orders’ from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords. The truly paranoid will put this down to the hackers also being in on the plot though.
Instead, there is a peek into how scientists actually interact and the conflicts show that the community is a far cry from the monolith that is sometimes imagined. People working constructively to improve joint publications; scientists who are friendly and agree on many of the big picture issues, disagreeing at times about details and engaging in ‘robust’ discussions; Scientists expressing frustration at the misrepresentation of their work in politicized arenas and complaining when media reports get it wrong; Scientists resenting the time they have to take out of their research to deal with over-hyped nonsense. None of this should be shocking.
It’s obvious that the noise-generating components of the blogosphere will generate a lot of noise about this. but it’s important to remember that science doesn’t work because people are polite at all times. Gravity isn’t a useful theory because Newton was a nice person. QED isn’t powerful because Feynman was respectful of other people around him. Science works because different groups go about trying to find the best approximations of the truth, and are generally very competitive about that. That the same scientists can still all agree on the wording of an IPCC chapter for instance is thus even more remarkable.
No doubt, instances of cherry-picked and poorly-worded “gotcha” phrases will be pulled out of context. One example is worth mentioning quickly. Phil Jones in discussing the presentation of temperature reconstructions stated that “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” The paper in question is the Mann, Bradley and Hughes (1998) Nature paper on the original multiproxy temperature reconstruction, and the ‘trick’ is just to plot the instrumental records along with reconstruction so that the context of the recent warming is clear. Scientists often use the term “trick” to refer to a “a good way to deal with a problem”, rather than something that is “secret”, and so there is nothing problematic in this at all. As for the ‘decline’, it is well known that Keith Briffa’s maximum latewood tree ring density proxy diverges from the temperature records after 1960 (this is more commonly known as the “divergence problem”–see e.g. the recent discussion in this paper) and has been discussed in the literature since Briffa et al in Nature in 1998 (Nature, 391, 678-682). Those authors have always recommend not using the post 1960 part of their reconstruction, and so while ‘hiding’ is probably a poor choice of words (since it is ‘hidden’ in plain sight), not using the data in the plot is completely appropriate, as is further research to understand why this happens.
The timing of this particular episode is probably not coincidental. But if cherry-picked out-of-context phrases from stolen personal emails is the only response to the weight of the scientific evidence for the human influence on climate change, then there probably isn’t much to it.
There are of course lessons to be learned. Clearly no-one would have gone to this trouble if the academic object of study was the mating habits of European butterflies. That community’s internal discussions are probably safe from the public eye. But it is important to remember that emails do seem to exist forever, and that there is always a chance that they will be inadvertently released. Most people do not act as if this is true, but they probably should.
It is tempting to point fingers and declare that people should not have been so open with their thoughts, but who amongst us would really be happy to have all of their email made public?
Let he who is without PIN cast the the first stone.
By all means, I encourage you to look at the Google hits yourself and draw your own conclusions. But my quick reaction after 20 minutes of reading is that this is huge. And the coverup by RealClimate is comparable to Paul Krugman dismissing it as “legal quibbling” when the Freako authors showed Joe Romm was being very dishonest with his readers.
Who Wrote It?
“I would find it very difficult to be a multimillionaire making money by denigrating people who were so desperately poor. Lou Dobbs was dead wrong about the immigration issue. He thought it would kill the country. It can now be seen as a self-inflicted wound made worse by subsidies and the Fed’s housing bubble. Perhaps we are all better off and Lou can return to his earlier venture of traveling into outer space.”
What do you think? Someone from the ACLU? Maybe a group devoted to Hispanic issues? Perhaps a compassionate Cato commentator? Maybe a gregarious GMU professor?
Murphy Twin Spin
You’ve been working hard all year, you’ve been a good boy, and you just need something to kick back and relax. Today makes it all worthwhile, my friend.
* At Mises.org I show that economists are actually quite hilarious. No, they don’t tell rabbi jokes or ask you to pull their supply curve. Instead, they use their clever minds to come up with all sorts of defenses for the “efficient markets hypothesis” even after what just happened.
* After you wipe the tears of laughter away, you can begin shedding tears of sadness when you read about California’s plans to ban (most) TVs wider than 40 inches, and to require California cars to get special tinting to fight global warming. After I explicitly criticized Schwarzenegger, he sent me the following odd note:
Dear Mr. Murphy,
Regarding your op ed in the
Orange Count Register, I think
perhaps you should
determine just how much the
environment would suffer
after we followed your
dreary market “solutions.”
Car Czar Rips Free Market and Praises Mao?
I heard the audio clips on Glenn Beck a while ago, and my cousin just sent me the YouTube. The “shocking” things are quite shocking indeed, but Obama car czar (and former assistant to the president of United Steel Workers) Ron Bloom says the stuff so nonchalantly that I would like to know the context. In the YouTube below I got you at least 30 or 45 seconds before the money quotes kick in, but I still can’t understand what the heck he is talking about.
Do I just need to accept the fact that Obama’s got plenty of people who (a) not only believe socialism is better than capitalism but (b) have traveled in such circles that they don’t even realize how shocking their views sound if stated plainly?
Or is this just a Glenn Beck hit piece, and Bloom is talking about a dream he had or something?
Just in Case You Missed It Yesterday: CNBC Considers 3.7% Annualized Inflation "Tame"
I won’t bore you with the full analysis, since it’s virtually the same as for yesterday’s PPI figures.
So the quick version: The CNBC main page blurb says “Housing Starts Drop; Inflation Tame,” yet the actual story is that (seasonally adjusted) CPI rose 0.3% from September to October.
So with rounding, that’s an annualized increase of 3.7%. Is that really “tame”? And for the record, during the ten months from December 2008 to October 2009, the unadjusted CPI rose 2.8%, which translates to an annualized 3.4% inflation rate. Again, I’m not saying it’s time to get out the wheelbarrows for your daily wages, but at what point are people going to stop saying we’re on the edge of a deflationary cliff? If 3.4% (annualized) year-to-date inflation is tame, at what inflation rate is Bernanke going to say, “OK now we need to start doing something about rising prices”?
Geeconosphere Joke of the Month
From Zdeno in the comments at EconLib:
How many neo-keynesian economists does it take to change a lightbulb? Wait for it….
… Answer: Two. Paul Krugman learns how to do it from Scott Sumner, while Brad Delong deletes any comments that disagree with his technique. Oh no I di-int.)
Ohhhhh! Thanks for coming. Be sure to grab your tricorder and Vulcan ears on the way out.
Krugman: "If This Were a Dictatorship Things Would Be Easier…Just So Long As I’m the Dictator (Heh Heh)"
No, he didn’t literally say that; who the heck would literally say that?!
Even so, Krugman has bared his inner Mussolini as of late. Like Matt Yglesias, Krugman comes just shy of calling for the abolition of the Senate (though in fairness his post is far more tongue-in-cheek than Yglesias’). And in today’s post, Krugman laments that Tim Geithner paid full price for bank assets during the AIG bailout instead of saying to them (strikethrough in the original):
Also, individual banks are in a long-term relationship with the public and the government. They have an interest in preserving that relationship. The Epicurean Dealmaker offers an imaginary speech that
Tim Geithneran anonymous government official could have given:[T]hose people and institutions in this room which did not help us, which put their own narrow personal and corporate interests before the interests of this nation and its people, will be remembered as well.
And let me tell you something, gentlemen, banker to banker: you do not want to be on that list. That list will be a world of pain. That list will be Death.
Indeed. Bear Stearns famously refused to participate in the rescue of LTCM — and it’s widely believed that the lingering bad feelings from that exercise in free riding had a lot to do with the firm’s demise last year.
I encourage you to read the post. (Just to clarify, Krugman is lifting that hypothetical speech from the link. But he’s obviously agreeing with the basic idea.) Not a single word about the possible downside of having regulators threaten banks in this way. Nope, Geithner’s failure to do this–and let’s just pretend for a moment it was because of his timidity, and not because the whole )(*#$#$ point of TARP was to shovel hundreds of billions to bankers–is bad because it weakens the public’s faith in government bailouts and stimulus, leaving the whole economy at risk if there is another downturn.
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