Yet Another Hottest Year on Record?

March 8, 2016

By Norman Rogers

The people selling global warming have been at it for more than 20 years.  For the last 18 years, on good authority, the Earth hasn't warmed.  It doesn't seem to matter.  The promoters of global warming are defending their turf, economic and ideological.  They dismiss or deny the lack of warming, making up science as they go.

President Eisenhower, in his farewell address, put his finger on part of the problem.  When science is funded by the government, it becomes less scientific and more political.  Around 1970, scientists as incorruptible seekers of truth gave way to scientists as political bosses collecting grants from the government.  Scientific organizations, such as the National Academies of Science, vigorously defend the financial interest of the science establishment while posing as high-minded seekers of truth.  For an insider's view, read Professor Lindzen's essay on the corruption of climate science.

It is not practicable to power the country with windmills and solar energy.  But the manufacturers of these things eagerly support global warming alarmism. A substantial part of the corn crop is wasted by mandating the production of ethanol, for global warming reasons. The ethanol industry draws political support from the corn belt.

In California, politically powerful eco-romantics are putting thousands of people out of work and bankrupting farmers in order to dump millions of acre-feet of water into the ocean for the benefit of a fish.

The romantic eco-left consists  of upper-middle-class people who can't put two and two together when it comes to economics or science.  They just assume that water will come out of their faucets and electricity out of their outlets.  These people love global warming because it provides a story that allows them to pursue their bizarre, anti-modern goals under the guise of saving the world.

Since science is no longer scientific, but political, global warming belief breaks down along political lines.  The Democrats believe, and the Republicans are skeptical.  Neither party pays much attention to the scientific facts.  The facts can be hard to ascertain amid the barrage of propaganda.  The president's science adviser, John Holdren, is not a scientist, but a longtime operator in the business of promoting eco-scares.  His job is to rally support from allies of the Democratic Party that work the eco-scare sector.

The promoters of global warming are not entirely without standards.  The scientists don't blatantly make things up or claim that established scientific principles are to be ignored.  They think up scientific excuses and reasons as to why global warming must be true.  It's hard to know if this is lying, unconscious lying, selective amnesia, confirmation bias, or failing to think things through.  Many scientists just keep quiet concerning global warming.  They know that if they criticize global warming theories, they may lose their jobs or be otherwise marginalized.

The hysterical groups, like the Sierra Club, have low standards.  They feel free to make things up, or perhaps they don't even realize that they are making things up.  The Sierra club's "beyond coal campaign" claims that children's brains will be damaged if they live near plants burning coal.

The 2004 book Strategic Ignorance was written by the executive director and the house magazine editor of the Sierra Club.  The book has a cover photo selected to make president Bush look dumb.  From page 160 of Strategic Ignorance:

[T]he science is, in fact, settled. Greenhouse gases – carbon dioxide, methane, water vapor, and certain other atmospheric chemicals – absorb heat from the sun during the day and do not re-radiate it at night[.]

This is scientific gibberish.  Greenhouse gases primarily absorb infrared radiation (heat radiation) emitted from the Earth, not the Sun.  They absorb and re-radiate infrared radiation all the time, day and night.  The highly influential Sierra Club, with a budget of $100 million, promotes global warming and the destruction of the coal industry, but its leaders have no conception of elementary science concerning the subject they promote with the intention of saving the Earth.  Apparently, they don't even bother to have a scientist read their manuscript before publishing it.  Why should they?  They are engaged in a political quest, not science.

To support the claim that the Earth has not warmed in 18 years, it is necessary to use a global temperature data set.  I consider the satellite lower troposphere temperatures to be the most reliable and least contaminated by politics, because the data is generated by two distinct groups.  One group, at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, is manned by global warming skeptics.  The other group, the Remote Sensing Corporation in California, is manned by scientists who go along with global warming.  That both groups agree on global temperature, in spite of being on opposite sides of the issue politically, is a sign that actual science is taking place.  There are also scientific reasons for favoring satellite temperature derived from measuring microwave radiation given off by oxygen in the atmosphere.

The graph shows global temperature change since 1997 as calculated by the two science groups.  The trend line is flat for the last 18 or 19 years.  That is 18 years with no global warming, while CO2 in the atmosphere increased.  In order to understand this graph, it is important to realize that "hottest year," meaning hottest calendar year, is an unscientific concept.  Nature does not use our calendar.  It does make sense to average global temperature over a year, because a year is a natural climatic cycle.  However, ending the year on December 31 is arbitrary.  To do this right, you have to use a one-year running average and look at years ending at any time.  Each point on the graph is a one-year average of temperature.

According to the graph, the hottest year since 1997 is the year centered on 1998.33.  Fractional years are expressed as decimal fractions rather than months.  The second hottest year is the year centered at 2010.16.  The large excursions are the result of the well-known El Niño and La Niña cycles in the tropical pacific ocean.

NASA constantly makes press releases saying that this year or that year is the hottest on record.  Their record goes back only to 1880, but it is quite certain, according to temperature proxies such as ice cores, that there are times in the last 10,000 years when the globe was hotter than today.

There has been a general global warming trend since before 1880.  The warming trend predates increasing CO2 in the atmosphere.  Given the long-term warming trend, it is not surprising that the hottest year in the last 20 years will also be the hottest year since 1880.  NASA uses the less reliable and highly "adjusted" surface temperature data to support its hottest year propaganda.  NASA also uses the unscientific calendar year rather than a running one-year average.

The lack of warming for nearly 20 years is powerful evidence that something is wrong with the CO2 theory of global warming.  Rather than re-evaluate the theory and admit that the computer models don't represent reality, the global warming establishment weaves and dodges.  The influence of the CO2 warming theory built into computer models is so strong that the climate science establishment does not believe the data until the data has been manipulated to agree with the computer models.  No informed observer doubts that CO2 added to the atmosphere will cause warming.  The question is how much.  The evidence suggests that the effect of CO2 is small and that the doomsday scare scenarios are wildly speculative.

There are many excuses for the lack of warming.  Heat must be hiding in the deep ocean.  The lack of warming must be temporary.  The real problem is that the science community fails to give objective advice because it is self-interested.  Without objective science advice, it is very hard to distinguish sense from nonsense.  Without global warming, segments of the science community would lose prestige and funding.

The promoters of global warming fear ignore the great agricultural benefits of increased CO2 in the atmosphere.  Increased CO2 promotes plant growth and has generated billions of dollars of increased agricultural production in the last 50 years.

Norman Rogers is a senior policy adviser for the Heartland Institute.  He is a member of the advisory board of the CO2 Coalition.  He maintains a website.

The Current State of Climate Alarmism (American Thinker)

February 29, 2016

 

By Ari Halperin

America’s affliction with climate alarmism is shaped by two facts:

First, the main instigators have crossed the Rubicon and have no choice but to fight. How has this happened? Nature was one cause: the short-term natural warming in 1978-1998 was mistaken for anthropogenic warming through the confirmation bias. Natural cooling from 1999 onward has canceled the expected anthropogenic warming (which is small, beneficial, and caused by a variety of factors -- not just carbon dioxide release).

But other causes were entirely manmade.  In hindsight, it is clear that for almost two decades (approximately 1988 -- 2004) multiple groups of climate “scientists” have been fabricating results in parallel, unaware that others were doing the same. Mann with his hockey stick got the most fame, but he was just one among many. Computer models, descriptions of the carbon cycle, and even instrumental temperature records were forged to exaggerate climate sensitivity to carbon dioxide, to hide past climate variations, to argue that carbon dioxide release is irreversible, etc. The environmental movement, encouraging and encouraged by this perversion of science, made global warming its central theme. And so did many mainstream politicians. Al Gore was the towering figure among them. He used his two terms as vice president to gut American science, replacing scientists with environmentalists and lawyers (see the book Politicizing Science: The Alchemy of Policymaking, which contains essays by William Happer, Bernard Cohen, Patrick Michaels, Fred Singer and other scientists who experienced or witnessed this process). A vicious spiral developed: alarmist politicians handpicked scientists supporting the alarm, then they believed their claims, and so it went.  A hardened core of climate alarmism was formed from such politicians and their quasi-scientists. This core attracted multiple layers of followers, ranging from ordinary profiteers and leftist extremists to totally innocent duped believers.

This tower of lies started shaking in 2004, the sixth year without warming. At the end of 2003 Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick published an article in Energy & Environment, pointing to errors in the centerpiece of the latest IPCC report, Mann’s hockey stick. Mann was unrepentant, and other participants in the IPCC process jumped to defend their centerpiece. When the “errors” were exposed as a deliberate fraud, the alarmists decided to rally behind Mann and launched a major PR offensive. Such pattern of defending the dogma at any cost was repeated many times in similar situations. And each time the stakes rose, climate alarmism sank lower -- scientifically, ethically, and legally. More importantly, the core believers were pulling their followers further in, making them like partners in crime, sometimes without their awareness.  That made it impossible for the inner circle to come clean, or even to quit.

The second problem can be illustrated by the words of former Senator Timothy Wirth, which he said no later than 1993: "We've got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing, in terms of economic policy and environmental policy." Too bad he did not ask where the ride was heading and who was at the wheel. The result was that many liberal or left-leaning institutions, including the whole Democratic Party, hitched themselves to the hostile agendas of the UN and European Greens. Timothy Wirth became the Chairman of the UN Foundation. Unable to get off this hellish ride, some of his allies effectively became tools of foreign governments and NGOs. An example of such behavior at the highest level is the joint climate change statement with China, in which the U.S. promised to decrease carbon dioxide emissions, while China promised to increase them! This document was signed by Obama and praised by the formerly mainstream media as a breakthrough agreement.

The main official bodies of climate alarmism are two United Nations agencies -- the UNFCCC and the IPCC. Next, there is a large number of NGOs, mostly foreign and transnational, united under the Climate Action Network, headquartered in Lebanon. These NGOs communicate the IPCC’s message to the public. The daily sources of the alarmist propaganda, other than the Obama administration, rank as follows:

1. The Guardian – a rabidly anti-American British newspaper.
2. The Quantum Group of hedge funds (aka George Soros) -- a hysterically anti American financial-political entity, domiciled in Curaçao and the Cayman Islands. It operates through a network of front groups, of which thinkprogress.org and mediamatters.org are the most involved in climate alarmism.
3. The Government of Qatar, operating through the al Jazeera network.

Most of the climate change media coverage originates either from one of these entities or from the Obama administration, which listens to them. Google’s chairman, Eric Schmidt, is also on Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, co-chaired by the infamous John Holdren. There are reasons to believe that Google search is unnaturally slanted in favor of climate alarmism (disclosure: I host my own Sane Climate Search to help people to discover the realist side of climate debate).

By casting their lot with foreign powers (not always knowingly), Democrat politicians, university administrators, government bureaucrats, and many prominent individuals gave those powers leverage over them. And the alarmists have been ruthlessly exploiting this leverage to push their sympathizers toward more and more damaging actions: halting research and development into safer nuclear power plants (under the Clinton administration), preventing companies from building new nuclear power plants, harassing the oil and gas industry’s exploration and construction of pipelines, establishing Climatism as the state religion with mandatory indoctrination of children in public schools, and much more. These relations involve a vicious spiral as well: with each concession to foreign alarmists, their domestic accomplices become more dependent on them. 

Here we stand right now. The alarmist movement cannot de-escalate the situation after the dramatic “end of the world” claims it made. It cannot achieve any reasonable goal (like a 10% decrease in CO₂ release), declare victory, and move on, because it has already committed to UN control over the global climate (keeping warming below 2 degrees). Some foreign governments and NGOs still intend to use climate change rhetoric to rob the U.S. on an unprecedented scale (see From Billions to Trillions --Transforming Development Finance).

Most climate alarmism supporters belong to the soft outer layers. Their only loss from untangling themselves from the alarmism will be acute embarrassment, which they will experience for lending their support to this anti-scientific medieval cult. Of course, the sooner they let alarmism go, the less embarrassed they will be. But the inner core (a few hundred individuals at most) has no way out, and has no intent to release its followers. The administrators and senior faculty of universities, research institutes, and government agencies, who have either failed to stop or even assisted climate alarmism in taking over their institutions, might be in trouble too. Many of them exploited the reputations earned by these institutions to peddle the lowest forms of climate alarmism. For example, Harvard University had built its reputation for almost four centuries, only to see it destroyed within a couple decades or even years, in large part by promoting climate alarmism. This letter from Harvard President Dr. Faust is an example.

When their less committed followers, including Democrat congresspersons, Senators, editors of major media outlets, liberal billionaires etc., suspect foul play, the alarmist core throws a fit and demands that they stop thinking, acting, and most of all listening to the “deniers.” Amazingly, the followers obey, even though some of them are extremely smart and experienced. Apparently, these people do not notice that the so-called “climate scientists” have no scientific achievements outside of the insular “climate science,” and that whatever honors they received were given either by their non-distinguished peers or by politicized bodies (Heinz Awards, MacArthur Foundation Awards, etc.). The “scientific consensus” is not an argument but passive-aggressive acknowledgement of a lack of arguments, and their allegations of a denial machine, secretly funded by “fossil fuels,” are just conspiracy theories. The alleged 97% agreement is closer to election results in the former Soviet Union than to the opinions of actual scientists.

The forecast is not comforting: the alarmist core has no choice but to escalate its assault on society, and to push its powerful followers (including the Obama administration) to more and more desperate acts.

Ari Halperin researches and writes about climate alarmism as a complex and dangerous phenomenon.

America’s affliction with climate alarmism is shaped by two facts:

First, the main instigators have crossed the Rubicon and have no choice but to fight. How has this happened? Nature was one cause: the short-term natural warming in 1978-1998 was mistaken for anthropogenic warming through the confirmation bias. Natural cooling from 1999 onward has canceled the expected anthropogenic warming (which is small, beneficial, and caused by a variety of factors -- not just carbon dioxide release).

But other causes were entirely manmade.  In hindsight, it is clear that for almost two decades (approximately 1988 -- 2004) multiple groups of climate “scientists” have been fabricating results in parallel, unaware that others were doing the same. Mann with his hockey stick got the most fame, but he was just one among many. Computer models, descriptions of the carbon cycle, and even instrumental temperature records were forged to exaggerate climate sensitivity to carbon dioxide, to hide past climate variations, to argue that carbon dioxide release is irreversible, etc. The environmental movement, encouraging and encouraged by this perversion of science, made global warming its central theme. And so did many mainstream politicians. Al Gore was the towering figure among them. He used his two terms as vice president to gut American science, replacing scientists with environmentalists and lawyers (see the book Politicizing Science: The Alchemy of Policymaking, which contains essays by William Happer, Bernard Cohen, Patrick Michaels, Fred Singer and other scientists who experienced or witnessed this process). A vicious spiral developed: alarmist politicians handpicked scientists supporting the alarm, then they believed their claims, and so it went.  A hardened core of climate alarmism was formed from such politicians and their quasi-scientists. This core attracted multiple layers of followers, ranging from ordinary profiteers and leftist extremists to totally innocent duped believers.

This tower of lies started shaking in 2004, the sixth year without warming. At the end of 2003 Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick published an article in Energy & Environment, pointing to errors in the centerpiece of the latest IPCC report, Mann’s hockey stick. Mann was unrepentant, and other participants in the IPCC process jumped to defend their centerpiece. When the “errors” were exposed as a deliberate fraud, the alarmists decided to rally behind Mann and launched a major PR offensive. Such pattern of defending the dogma at any cost was repeated many times in similar situations. And each time the stakes rose, climate alarmism sank lower -- scientifically, ethically, and legally. More importantly, the core believers were pulling their followers further in, making them like partners in crime, sometimes without their awareness.  That made it impossible for the inner circle to come clean, or even to quit.

The second problem can be illustrated by the words of former Senator Timothy Wirth, which he said no later than 1993: "We've got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing, in terms of economic policy and environmental policy." Too bad he did not ask where the ride was heading and who was at the wheel. The result was that many liberal or left-leaning institutions, including the whole Democratic Party, hitched themselves to the hostile agendas of the UN and European Greens. Timothy Wirth became the Chairman of the UN Foundation. Unable to get off this hellish ride, some of his allies effectively became tools of foreign governments and NGOs. An example of such behavior at the highest level is the joint climate change statement with China, in which the U.S. promised to decrease carbon dioxide emissions, while China promised to increase them! This document was signed by Obama and praised by the formerly mainstream media as a breakthrough agreement.

The main official bodies of climate alarmism are two United Nations agencies -- the UNFCCC and the IPCC. Next, there is a large number of NGOs, mostly foreign and transnational, united under the Climate Action Network, headquartered in Lebanon. These NGOs communicate the IPCC’s message to the public. The daily sources of the alarmist propaganda, other than the Obama administration, rank as follows:

1. The Guardian – a rabidly anti-American British newspaper.
2. The Quantum Group of hedge funds (aka George Soros) -- a hysterically anti American financial-political entity, domiciled in Curaçao and the Cayman Islands. It operates through a network of front groups, of which thinkprogress.org and mediamatters.org are the most involved in climate alarmism.
3. The Government of Qatar, operating through the al Jazeera network.

Most of the climate change media coverage originates either from one of these entities or from the Obama administration, which listens to them. Google’s chairman, Eric Schmidt, is also on Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, co-chaired by the infamous John Holdren. There are reasons to believe that Google search is unnaturally slanted in favor of climate alarmism (disclosure: I host my own Sane Climate Search to help people to discover the realist side of climate debate).

By casting their lot with foreign powers (not always knowingly), Democrat politicians, university administrators, government bureaucrats, and many prominent individuals gave those powers leverage over them. And the alarmists have been ruthlessly exploiting this leverage to push their sympathizers toward more and more damaging actions: halting research and development into safer nuclear power plants (under the Clinton administration), preventing companies from building new nuclear power plants, harassing the oil and gas industry’s exploration and construction of pipelines, establishing Climatism as the state religion with mandatory indoctrination of children in public schools, and much more. These relations involve a vicious spiral as well: with each concession to foreign alarmists, their domestic accomplices become more dependent on them. 

Here we stand right now. The alarmist movement cannot de-escalate the situation after the dramatic “end of the world” claims it made. It cannot achieve any reasonable goal (like a 10% decrease in CO₂ release), declare victory, and move on, because it has already committed to UN control over the global climate (keeping warming below 2 degrees). Some foreign governments and NGOs still intend to use climate change rhetoric to rob the U.S. on an unprecedented scale (see From Billions to Trillions --Transforming Development Finance).

Most climate alarmism supporters belong to the soft outer layers. Their only loss from untangling themselves from the alarmism will be acute embarrassment, which they will experience for lending their support to this anti-scientific medieval cult. Of course, the sooner they let alarmism go, the less embarrassed they will be. But the inner core (a few hundred individuals at most) has no way out, and has no intent to release its followers. The administrators and senior faculty of universities, research institutes, and government agencies, who have either failed to stop or even assisted climate alarmism in taking over their institutions, might be in trouble too. Many of them exploited the reputations earned by these institutions to peddle the lowest forms of climate alarmism. For example, Harvard University had built its reputation for almost four centuries, only to see it destroyed within a couple decades or even years, in large part by promoting climate alarmism. This letter from Harvard President Dr. Faust is an example.

When their less committed followers, including Democrat congresspersons, Senators, editors of major media outlets, liberal billionaires etc., suspect foul play, the alarmist core throws a fit and demands that they stop thinking, acting, and most of all listening to the “deniers.” Amazingly, the followers obey, even though some of them are extremely smart and experienced. Apparently, these people do not notice that the so-called “climate scientists” have no scientific achievements outside of the insular “climate science,” and that whatever honors they received were given either by their non-distinguished peers or by politicized bodies (Heinz Awards, MacArthur Foundation Awards, etc.). The “scientific consensus” is not an argument but passive-aggressive acknowledgement of a lack of arguments, and their allegations of a denial machine, secretly funded by “fossil fuels,” are just conspiracy theories. The alleged 97% agreement is closer to election results in the former Soviet Union than to the opinions of actual scientists.

The forecast is not comforting: the alarmist core has no choice but to escalate its assault on society, and to push its powerful followers (including the Obama administration) to more and more desperate acts.

Climate Science Is Settled, Except When It’s Not (KARMA)

 

• Tim Blair, The Daily Telegraph

During the past decade, researchers at the CSIRO — along with global warming alarmists everywhere — have been telling us that the “science is settled” when it comes to climate change. In other words, they’ve delivered their verdict. Bad move.

 

CSIRO chief Larry Marshall has recently been examining his organisation for areas where he might achieve some $110 million in budget cuts. Inevitably, his gaze fell upon the climate change crowd — the guys who, by their own admission, have already finished their jobs. Last week Marshall sent this memo to CSIRO staff:

“CSIRO pioneered climate research, the same way we saved the cotton and wool industries for our nation. But we cannot rest on our laurels as that is the path to mediocrity. Our climate models are among the best in the world and our measurements honed those models to prove global climate change. That question has been answered.”

Reasonably enough, with that question answered, Marshall is now taking steps to throw most of the CSIRO’s climate researchers out on the street like common circus midgets. More than 300 climate scientists are set to be dismissed over the next couple of years. “Climate will be all gone, basically,” one senior scientist told Fairfax as news of the cuts emerged.

Naturally, this caused an immediate reversal of opinion among Australia’s cashed-up climate change community. Suddenly the science wasn’t settled at all. In fact, the science was almost completely unknown! Author and climate change sceptic Jo Nova rounded up some of the more hilarious reactions at her excellent website.

“Climate science is not solved,” declared Todd Lane, president of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society. “Most of the uncertainty in climate projections is due to uncertainty about the ways to represent physical processes in climate models. Cutting funding in this area now doesn’t make any sense.”

“This is deeply disturbing news,” wailed distressed Will Steffen, Emeritus Professor at ANU and a Climate Councillor at the Climate Council of Australia. “The impacts of climate change are already being felt around Australia at an increasing rate, and there is more to come. We absolutely need to know more about the basic operation of the climate system — how it is changing and how best can we respond to the climate change challenge.”

“The latest round of job cuts from CSIRO is nothing short of appalling,” announced Dr Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick, Research Fellow at the Climate Change Research Centre UNSW. “While we know that the climate is changing because of human activity, we have not simply ‘answered’ that question after the Paris agreement — many more questions remain.”

Perkins-Kirkpatrick continued: “Research in any field does not, and cannot stop after an apparent question has been answered.” Actually, in most fields research does stop once the central question is answered. Otherwise video referees at NRL matches would never go home; they’d remain in their reviewing suites forever, endlessly examining the same disputed try.

“I worry about [Marshall’s] statement that there is no further need post-COP 21 to understand climate change,” fretted UNSW’s Professor Steven Sherwood. Hey, prof, the science is settled. Time to move on.

“There is need for climate science,” said John Church, a CSIRO climate researcher since 1978 who anticipates losing his job. “There is a clear need for ongoing sustained and enhanced observations. The science community is actually struggling to address these issues.”

Note that word: “struggling”. So much for the absolute certainty — the alleged “consensus” — we’ve previously heard about from our climate chancey friends. The only consensus among scientists now is that taxpayer funding is really cool and climate researchers want a whole lot of it, forever. Well, those days are gone.

Economic and political priorities have shifted, in Australia and around the world. Climate change has been declining as an issue of public concern since peak panic in 2006, when Al Gore’s dishonest documentary An Inconvenient Truth succeeded in spooking so many gullible saps.

Speaking of Gore, his net worth is around double the level of the CSIRO’s budget cuts. Let’s see him put his money where his global warming gob is and fund local climate change types. The science demands it.

- See more at: http://www.thegwpf.com/climate-science-is-settled-except-when-its-not/#sthash.ongJeQzY.dpuf

Pictures from London

To ALL my Canadian & American friends...........

---

So saddened and helpless about all the latest terrorist attacks – God help us!! No matter how much we do for these people, it will never be enough to satisfy them   Those of you receiving these pictures in the U.S.A. please see the last paragraph. And please forward them to everyone. These pictures are of Muslims marching through the STREETS OF LONDON during their a ‘Religion of Peace Demonstration’.   Why would anyone think that we should be at war with such nice, peaceful Muslims?! You need to forward this one to everyone! These pictures tell it all! Muslims have stated that England will be the first country they take over! These are pictures not shown on American TV or in American Newspapers – WHY?! (but were forwarded by a Canadian friend who thought ALL in the US and Canada ought to know!)

Free Speech? What's That? (The Market-ticker)

 

So now the truth is an act subject to fines?

Did you call a transsexual person “he” or “she” when they preferred to be called “zhe?” According to a newly updated anti-discrimination law in New York City, you could be fined an eye-watering $250,000.

In the latest, astonishing act of draconian political correctness, the NYC Commission on Human Rights have updated a law on “Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Expression” to threaten staggering financial penalties against property owners who “misgender” employees or tenants.

What part of the First Amendment did you miss?

And exactly how does this square with both the truth and First Amendment, which is now an unlawful utterance?

Again, where are all the women tranny-cum-men who want to use the boys room?  I'll tell you where they are -- they're non-existent.  Now unless you happen to believe that "gender mis-identity" runs only one way, something that is extremely unlikely from both a statistical and scientific point of view.

So what's really going on here?  Simple: This is yet another attack on "traditional" or, if you prefer, "normal" people.  Yes, normal folks.  Not being normal doesn't mean you're bad, or inferior, or whatever -- it just means you not common -- that is, not normal.

The premise that everyone is the "same" and thus everyone is entitled to the same results is wrong.  It is wrong on facts and it is wrong on law.  Oh you can try to change the law to make it so but in doing so you destroy any reason for anyone to do business where that location is.

You're going to fine someone $250,000 for calling a person that is male "Mr."? Really?  So exactly why should I do business in NY, set up a business in NY, or do business with anyone in NY that is funding this particular piece of unconstitutional stupidity?

My response to this is simple: No.

And by the way, I still want to know where all those women who think they're men are, and why they're not in the men's room showing off their***** as they to***** standing up.

2016 Is An Easy Year To Predict (Zerohedge.com)

Submitted by Raul Ilargi Meijer via The Automatic Earth blog,

No year is ever easy to predict, if only because if it were, that would take all the fun out of life. But still, predictions for 2016 look quite a bit easier than other years. This is because a whole bunch of irreversible things happened in 2015 that were not recognized for what they are, either intentionally or by ‘accident’. Things that will therefore now be forced to play out in 2016, when denial will no longer be an available option.

A year ago, I wrote 2014: The Year Propaganda Came Of Age, and though that was more about geopolitics, it might as well have dealt with the financial press. And that goes for 2015 at least as much. Mainstream western media are no more likely to tell you what’s real than Chinese state media are.

2015 should have been the year of China, and it was in a way, but the extent to which was clouded by Beijing’s insistence on made-up numbers (GDP growth of 7% against the backdrop of plummeting imports and exports, 45 months of falling producer prices and bad loans reaching 20%), by the western media’s insistence on copying these numbers, and by everyone’s fear of the economic and financial consequences of the ‘Great Fall of China‘.

2015 was also the year when deflation, closely linked -but by no means limited- to China, got a firm hold on the global economy. Denial and fear have restricted our understanding of this development just as much.

And while it should be obvious that 2015 was the year of refugees as well, that topic too has been twisted and turned until full public comprehension has become impossible. Both in the US and in Europe politicians pose for their voters loudly proclaiming that borders must be closed and refugees and migrants sent back to the places they’re fleeing due to our very own military interventions.

And that said politicians have the power to make that happen, the power to close borders to hundreds of thousands of fellow human beings arriving on their countries’ doorsteps. As if thousands of years of human mass migrations never occurred, and have no lessons to teach the present or the future.

The price of oil was a big story, and China plays the lead role in that story, even if again poorly understood. All the reports and opinions about OPEC plans and ‘tactics’ to squeeze US frackers are hollow, since neither OPEC as a whole nor its separate members have the luxury anymore to engage in tactical games; they’re all too squeezed by the demise of Chinese demand growth, if not demand, period.

Ever since 2008, the entire world economy has been kept afloat by the $25 trillion or so that China printed to build overleveraged overcapacity. And now that is gone, never to return. There is nowhere else left for our economies to turn for growth. Everyone counted on China to take them down the yellow brick road to la-la-land, forever. And then it didn’t happen.

What 2015 should have made clear, and did in a way but not nearly clear enough, is that the world economy is falling apart due to a Ponzi bubble of over-production, over-capacity, over-investment, over-borrowing, all of which was grossly overleveraged. And that this now is, for lack of a better word, over.

Most people who read this will have noticed the troubled waters investment funds -hedge funds, mutual funds, money market funds et al- have recently landed in. But perhaps not many understand what this means, and where it may lead. These things tend to be seen as incidents, as is anything that diverts attention away from the ‘recovery just around the corner’ narrative.

Not only do the losses and redemptions at investment funds drive these funds to the brink, everything they’ve invested in also tumbles. Add to this the fact that most of the investments are highly leveraged, which means that typically a loss of just a few percent can wipe out all of the principal, and a notion of the risks becomes clear.

Of course, since many of the funds hold the same or similar investments, we can add yet another risk factor: contagion. Things will blow up first where the risk is highest. Then everything else becomes riskier. Low interest rates have caused many parties to chase high yields -junk bonds-, and that’s where risks are highest.

This is the 2015 story of investment funds, and it will continue, and aggravate, in 2016. Ultra low interest rates drive economies into deflation and investors into ever riskier assets. This is a process of unavoidable deterioration, unstoppable until it has played out in full. A 0.25% rate hike won’t do anything to change that.

Why do interest rate hikes pose such a problem? Because ZIRP has invited if not beckoned everyone to be up to their necks in debt. The entire economy is being kept lopsidedly upright, Wile. E style, by debt. Asset prices, even as commodities have now begun to fall in serious fashion, still look sort of OK, but only until you start to look at the amount of leverage that’s pinning it all up.

Once you see that, you understand how fragile it all is. Go one step further, and it becomes clear that this exponentially growing ‘machinery‘ can only be ‘sustained’ by ever more debt and leverage. Until it no longer can.

Commodities prices have nowhere to go but down for a long time to come. These prices have been propped up by the illusionary expectations for Chinese growth and demand, and now that growth is gone. So, too, then, must the over-leveraged over-investments both in China and abroad.

Growth that was expected to be in double digits for years to come has shrunk to levels well below that ‘official’ 7%. China’s switch to a consumer driven economy is as much a fantasy as the western switch to a knowledge economy has proved to be. If you don’t actually produce things, you’re done. And producing for export markets is futile when there’s no-one left to spend in those markets.

Ergo, commodities, raw materials, the very building blocks of our economies, from oil all the way to steel, are caught in a fire sale. Everything must go! Eventually, commodities prices will more or less stabilize, but at much lower levels than they -still- are at present. That we will need to figure this out in 2016 instead of 2015 is our own fault. We could have been healing, but we’ve yet to face the pain.

Trying to guesstimate how low oil will go is a way of looking at things that seems very outdated. It’s interesting just about exclusively for people who ‘invest’ in the markets, but the reality is that the Fed, BoJ, PBoC and ECB have first made sure through QE and ZIRP/NIRP that there no longer are functioning markets, and they are now losing their relevance because of these very ‘policies’.

Price discovery has already started (oil, commodities), and central banks have benched themselves. They could only re-enter the game if they quit interfering in the markets, but they’re too afraid, all of them, of the consequences that might have, not even so much for their economies but for their TBTF banks.

Yellen’s rate hike will mean some extra profits for those same banks at the cost of the rest of the financial world, but with growth gone to not return for a very long time, and with deflation hitting everything in sight and then some, there is no pretty picture left.

And none of this is really hard to process or understand. It’s just that there’s these concerted efforts to keep you from understanding, that keep you believing in some miracle salvation effort. Which would, so goes the narrative, have to come from the same central banks and the same Wall Street banks that put everyone and their pet guinea pig as deep in debt as they are.

If you have been reading the Automatic Earth over the past 8 years and change, you know what this is about. There are a few, but unfortunately only a few, other sources that may have put you on the same trail.

I was impressed with the following earlier this month from David Stockman, Reagan’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget, who now seems to have firmly caught up with the deflation theme Nicole Foss and I have been warning about ever since we started writing – pre-TAE – at the Oil Drum 10 years ago. Stockman today says that we are entering an epic deflation and the world economy is actually going to shrink for the first time since the 1930s. (!)

The End Of The Bubble Finance Era

There has been so much over-investment in energy, mining, materials processing, manufacturing and warehousing that nothing new will be built for years to come. [..] .. there will be a severe curtailment in the production of mining and construction equipment, oilfield drilling rigs, heavy trucks and rail cars, bulk carriers and containerships, materials handling machinery and warehouse rigging, machine tools and chemical processing equipment and much, much more.

It’s good to see people finally acknowledging this. It’s still rare. But there’s another, again interlinked, development that is very poorly understood. Which is that in a debt deflation, the ‘money’ that appears to be real and present in leveraged investments more often than not doesn’t get pulled out of one ‘investment’ only to be put into another, it just goes POOF, it vanishes.

And though it may seem strange, conventional economics has a very hard time with that. In the eyes of that field, if you don’t spend your money, you must be saving it. The possibility of losing it altogether is not a viable option. Or, if you lose it, someone else must be gaining it, zero-sum style.

But that view ignores the entire ‘pyramid’ of leveraged loans and investments and commodity prices, which precisely because that pyramid contained no more than a few percentage points of ‘real collateral’ to underpin everything it kept afloat, should have been a red flag. Because this is the very essence of debt deflation.

Just one little example of how and why this happens comes from this Bloomberg item. The key word is ‘evaporates’:

$100 Billion Evaporates as World’s Worst Oil Major Plunges 90%

Colombia is nursing paper losses of more than $100 billion after its oil boom fell short of expectations, wiping out 90% of the value of what was once Latin America’s biggest company. From being the world’s fifth-most valuable oil producer at its zenith in 2012, worth more than BP, state-controlled Ecopetrol now ranks 38th. Its market capitalization has fallen to $14.5 billion, down from its peak of $136.7 billion. “They just haven’t found oil, it’s as simple as that,” Rupert Stebbings at Bancolombia said from Medellin. “The whole oil sector got massively over-bought, and people assumed that one day they’d hit an absolute gusher.”

2016 will be the year when a lot of ‘underlying wealth’ evaporates. Trillions of dollars already have in the commodities markets, but, again, our media don’t tell us about it, or at least they frame it in different terms. They use deflation to mean falling consumer prices, but then insist on calling falling prices at the pump a positive thing. Without recognizing to what extent those falling prices eat away at the entire economy, and at society at large.

To summarize for now: we have elected to deny and ignore what has happened to our economies, our societies and our lives in 2015, only to be forced to face all of it in 2016. That makes the year an easy one to predict. But there are of course a lot of other possible spokes and wheels and other things.

Any government that sees its nation slide down into a deep enough pit will always consider going to war. One or more central banks may opt for a Hail Mary helicopter ride. A volcano may erupt. But none of these things will prevent the bubbles we have blown from deflating. They may divert attention, they may delay the inevitable a bit more, sure. But bubbles never last.

I have a whole list of key words I wanted to use in this, but I think I’ll turn them into a separate article. The main point is you understand the gist of it all. There are no markets, and what has posed as markets is crumbling before our very eyes, inexorably. The best we can do is say ‘see you on the other side’, if we’re lucky.

Average:

Was President Eisenhower Prescient on Global Warming Alarmists?

Michigan Capitol Confidential ^ | 12/8/2015 | Jack Spencer

Posted on ‎12‎/‎10‎/‎2015‎ ‎8‎:‎53‎:‎46‎ ‎AM by MichCapCon

Former U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower passed away in 1969, long before claims of man-made global warming came into vogue. Yet in his farewell address, his most enduring speech, Eisenhower warned of what he called a scientific-technological elite that might, through unwarranted influence, achieve a position of unassailable ascendancy within the U.S. government.

In that 1961 speech, he said:

   Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.

   The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

   When Eisenhower penned this speech, his focus and concern was that the nation could be misled and public policy manipulated in the name of national defense by what he called the military-industrial complex.” However, a closer look at what he was actually describing reveals a broader context.

Eisenhower was alerting the public to the danger that dogma could someday permeate and dominate their government. He envisioned the source for promoting this transcendent dogma as a scientific-technological elite, whose viewpoints and policy recommendations would become blindly accepted.

The clear implication behind Eisenhower’s words is that whether the motivation is sincerely held beliefs, cynical self-serving opportunism or both working in combination, the resulting impact of such pervasive and unchallenged dogma is bound to lead to the suppression of necessary debate. What he couldn’t possibly have foreseen was that within 50 years this dynamic could play out in the name of something called man-made global warming.

As we watch so many government officials and politicians passively submit to climate-crisis dogma, too fearful to challenge it, Eisenhower’s description of a scientific-technological elite wielding unwarranted influence over public policy seems clairvoyant. The degree to which policymakers uncritically follow the advice of this elite, as though its declarations were undeniable and its motives unimpeachable, shows that our 34th president profoundly understood the true nature of government.

All You Need to Know about the Gun Debate in Two Charts (Powerline Blog)

 

Gun “epidemic” the New York Times says? Well, we know they are data-challenged there, but for what it’s worth, take in these two charts from my old pal Mark Perry:

The only thing that appears to be an “epidemic” about guns right now is liberal hysteria. Have that many liberals gone vegan? Read more here from Mark Perry on the subject, including a clinic on the visual display of quantitative information (hat tip to Ed Tufte, though).

This is how They Lie to US (global warming)

https://www.youtube.com/embed/lQqPQ0i_fl0

The Real Answer to Guns in America

OBAMA AND GUNS