People who read the newspapers know my pro-free-market, pro-Western Civ, politically conservative values were much at odds with this increasingly unidirectional university.
Go to the UM website, and this in-your-face command-and-control-type environmentalism is likely the first thing you will see:
This and similar causes now pervade almost everything at UM.
So despite many positives in my experience, I greet “retirement” with a great deal of relief.
I put “retirement” in quotes because that is the administrative term. I’m actually just switching jobs – expanding a long-time affiliation into serious work for the Independence Institute, a free-market think tank based on Golden, Colorado.
And that converts “relief” into “joy.”
The Independence Institute is one of the oldest and most effective of the 40+ state-based think tanks. Those involved in gun rights issues may recognize it as the home for Dave Kopel, possibly the nation’s foremost Second Amendment scholar. Many talk show fans will recognize the Institute’s president, Jon Caldara, whose Denver-based radio program is heard weekday evenings throughout much of Montana. Tax activists may know of the Institute’s work on Colorado’s Taxpayer Bill of Rights, the granddaddy of comprehensive tax-and-expenditure limitation.
I’ve received a few letters and postcards from Montana “progressives” expressing delight at my leaving Montana, but their delight is misplaced. At Independence, I’ll be able leverage to my constitutional and other interests in a way I never could do while at UM. I’ll also be doing regular radio interviews in Montana (and throughout the country).
And over the next few months, I’ll be continuing a series of public lectures on the Constitution throughout Montana: The next two are in Bozeman: 7 p.m., May 4 at MSU and noon, May 5 at the Bozeman Holiday Inn.
Research by hurricane scientists may force the UN’s climate panel to reconsider its claims that greenhouse gas emissions have caused an increase in the number of tropical storms.
[...]
The cover of Gore’s newest book, Our Choice, even depicts an artist’s impression of a world beset by a series of huge super-hurricanes as a warning of what might happen if carbon emissions continue to rise.
However, the latest research, just published in Nature Geoscience, paints a very different picture.
It suggests that the rise in hurricane frequency since 1995 was just part of a natural cycle, and that several similar previous increases have been recorded, each followed by a decline.
Of course we’ve been informed that we should follow the scientific consensus as a sort of insurance policy in case it’s right. Well, we did:
The “scientific consensus” that has held sway for four decades regarding both exposure to the sun and vitamin D has collapsed. What has emerged in place of the old “settled science” is the knowledge that most people in America are seriously vitamin D deficient or insufficient. The same is true for Canada and Europe, and the implications are staggering.
Simply put, unless you are one of the few people with optimal serum D levels, such as lifeguards and roofers in South Florida, you can cut your risks from most major diseases by 50 to 80 percent. All you have to do is get enough D. It also means we can significantly reduce both health care costs and the staggering national deficit by taking a few simple steps.
[...]
The stakes are huge, as are the benefits of attaining optimal vitamin D levels. The embarrassment for those who must admit past error, however, may be even greater. The reason is that untold millions have suffered and died prematurely because those who challenged the “settled science” regarding sunshine and vitamin D decades ago were treated like crackpots and demonized.
Now we know that very few people have optimal serum levels of 25-hydroxyvitamin D [25(OH)D], the principal form of vitamin D circulating in the blood. Moreover, those with more melanin manufacture less vitamin D in their skins, so they suffer disproportionately from diseases exacerbated by vitamin D deficiencies.
Read the whole thing – and then make sure you treat yourself.
Senator Dianne Feinstein introduced legislation in Congress on Monday to protect a million acres of the Mojave Desert in California by scuttling some 13 big solar plants and wind farms planned for the region.
Well, it must be the environmentalists getting in the way of environmental change which has swayed Senator Feinstein (D – NIMBY).
Which leads me back to the only real solution for those who so desperately want to save the planet and who keep getting in the way to do just that: They should take themselves out in sufficient numbers to save the planet.
I saw it a couple days ago. Way too long. Had to step outside for an intermission and a tip from the hip-flask just to get through. This and the 3D effects were sufficient in their coalescence to bring about a vague nausea.
And then there was the movie’s message, which was, frankly, stupid — and not ameliorative of the nausea. The movie might as well have been Pocahontas, for its rendering of “the natives” (who dress and speak like extras from Pocahontas, giving reference to the Earth Mother, etc., except they are tall and blue).
Anyways, the movie’s main theme is that Homo sapiens have become disconnected from their earth; yet here are these lovely indigenous people who are uniquely wedded to the forest (through nodes in their long, braided “Indian” hair) and innately protective of the land.
There is, in fact, something to the argument that indigenous peoples better understand their natural environment in terms of its taxonomy and usefulness. (This is the coda of Claude Levi-Strauss’s work.) Yet the assumption that native peoples somehow exist in harmony with “nature” is simply wrong. Probably the best work on this is William Cronon’s Changes in the Land, which far from showing how East Coast indigenous populations “left things alone,” portrayed them as avid arsonists and a people who killed for reasons other than food, burning down large swathes of the forest and managing animal habitats aggressively. (A similar thesis, re: East Africa’s indigenous peoples, is laid out in Helge Kjekshus’s Ecology Control and Economic Development in East Africa; Kjekshus points out that there are likely many more elephants in modern-day Tanzania, for instance, than there were in times when indigenous people were allowed to control them). In either case — America or Africa — it was Europeans who laid out romantic notions of preserving wilderness — a concept which simply did not exist in precolonial times.
The point is, for most indigenous peoples around the globe, “stewardship” means something like “slash-and-burn.” This does not mean that the indigenous do not care about the land — again, they understand it better than anyone — it’s just that they don’t exist in cult-like James Cameron thrall to the ascetic majesties of nature. They make aggressive use of the land, and not always in a manner we would call “renewable.”
N.B. I had these thoughts, and then I read a column by Ross Douthat on Avatar – Ross & I are members of the small and eccentric group of editors emeritii of the Harvard Salient, and I have to wonder what unspoken indoctrination occurred since we share so many opinions. He addresses this issue through a more theological lens, and you should read his take, too.
I wrote a couple of weeks back about the corruption of “peer review” revealed by the CRU leaks. But, once it’s got the peer-reviewed label, it’s hard to dislodge. The famous hockey stick graph created by Dr. Michael Mann played a critical role in persuading millions of people we’re all gonna fry. In the National Post of April 2, 2001, after the UN had adopted this graph as the official proof of global warming, I pointed out that the first nine centuries of the millennium were measured by using tree-ring cycles, and the modern era was represented by temperatures. Now I’m not a climatologist. I’m not even a railroad engineer. But, if you show me a graph that looks like a long bungalow with the Empire State Building tacked on the end, I’ll go, “Whoa! That looks pretty serious. We better head for the hills.” If it then emerges in the fine print that the bungalow was created with one unit of measurement and the skyscraper another, I’ll postpone my departure and go, “Er, hang on, what’s the deal with that? If we’ve got tree rings for the first nine centuries, why can’t we stick with the tree rings through the 20th?”Answer: because after 1960 the tree rings show no express elevator up the thermometer, but in fact a decline. That’s the “decline” that Dr. Phil Jones, in his leaked email, is trying to “hide.” Because, if you don’t hide it, a basic truth emerges-that the Medieval Warm Period was warmer than today, and the planet managed to survive and indeed prosper during it. It took two dogged Canadians, Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, to demolish the hockey-stick fraud, and the enraged priests of the Settled Science cult have spent the years since 2006 trying to stick it back together. Dr. Keith Briffa had a crack in 2007 for the IPCC report. As usual, the CRU refused, in defiance of basic scientific etiquette, to reveal its raw data, but eventually the Royal Society ordered them to. And, when they did, it emerged that Dr. Briffa had cherry-picked a few trees from the Yamal peninsula in Siberia to obtain the desired result.
Imagine a planet in which global warming was averted without the periodic need for thousands of people to fly around the world to promise to stop burning fossil fuels.Imagine no international conferences wrangling over the details of climate policy. Imagine entrusting the tough questions to a referee: Mother Earth.
That is the intriguing suggestion of Ross McKitrick, an economist at the University of Guelph in Ontario who, like me, is virtuously restricting his carbon footprint by staying away from Copenhagen this week. Dr. McKitrick expects this climate conference to yield the same results as previous ones: grand promises to cut carbon emissions that will be ignored once politicians return home to face voters who are skeptical that global warming is even a problem.
To end this political stalemate, Dr. McKitrick proposes calling each side’s bluff. He suggests imposing financial penalties on carbon emissions that would be set according to the temperature in the earth’s atmosphere. The penalties could start off small enough to be politically palatable to skeptical voters.
Addendum: As predicted most of the objections (in the comments) are from climate change proponents. In essence, they argue that the problem is so serious that we must act before the evidence is in. Aside from the obvious epistemic problems with such a position do note that a) this is a way of getting agreement where otherwise there might be none b) the tax can be non-linear so it rises (in Bayesian fashion) with the strength of the evidence, i.e. the tax need not always lag.
My knee jerk reaction is to resist such a thing. But I think, conceptually, I need to give it further consideration.
These 500 families are apparently still waiting for the effects of the Green Revolution:
A Pittsburgh-based coal company, CONSOL Energy, will lay off nearly 500 of its West Virginia workers next year and its CEO blames environmentalists dead-set against mountaintop mining who have waged “nuisance” lawsuits for the job loss.
The Obama administration is warning Congress that if it doesn’t move to regulate greenhouse gases, the Environmental Protection Agency will take a “command-and-control” role over the process in a way that could hurt business.
Which reminds me of this:
But I think we should call their bluff. If Obama and congressional Dems want to wreck the economy they’ll have a lot of explaining to do.
Now, for those of you who presuppose what I think, don’t suppose that I buy all, or even any, of this. I just found it to be clear and compelling for us plebeian observers.
I’m not attesting to the veracity of this but I do find it “ironical”
n 1985, scientists from the British Antarctic Survey found a giant hole in the ozone layer of Earth’s atmosphere over the South Pole. This discovery prompted a largely successful international effort to ban CFCs, the chemicals largely responsible for man-made thinning of the ozone layer.
Unfortunately, a new analysis from Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) suggests that stopping ozone depletion may actually increase global warming and speed up sea level rise. This discovery pits two important environmental missions against each other, while highlighting the complexity of our effect on the planet.
Maybe we’ve found a fix – aerosol deodorant. It would surely help the French too.
I’ve been chuckling, nearly without pause, since the CRU email hack as the staunch defenders of the “settled science” argument have held up idea that “peer review” cements as fact that AGW is real and decided. The reason I chortle is that, although I’m neither a scientist nor a statistician, is that I know the limitations of statistical modeling. Let’s just look at the simple mathematics of combinations and permutations of a group of independent variables. If we have a set of 3 input variables the total number of combinations is represented as “3!” (3 factorial) which is equal to 3X2X1 = 6. Then, as statisticians, we need to determine the influence that B has on A and C has on A to come up with correlation coefficients. Of course it gets much more complicated than that as we try to figure out if the correlations between B and C have interrelationships that either exacerbate of reduce the independent coefficients. Until the 1960’s, with the advent of computers, it was almost impossible to build such complicated models of higher orders because the manual math was simple too involved. Just to demonstrate how exponentially more difficult this task becomes we just need to know that 10! = 3,628,800.
