pick-a-little, talk-a-little

[Political Waves]

Boy, are we one confused species or what! Everybody has an opinion, facts are by and large irrelevant and we're so enamored of the 'way it's always been' [or at least has been in our own narcissistic memory vault] that we'll fight to keep it, by gawd! I know that's the human condition ... but we USED to attempt to lift ourselves UP and over the hackneyed, the plebian and the dumbed-down. Now we embrace it. We let anybody say anything, do anything, as long as it reflects the lowest common denominator of public sentiment.

And especially if they're a politician like lizard-brained Joe Lieberman, described by digby -- and rightly -- as "a sanctimonious, petty, vindictive egomaniac." Now HE'S the single obstacle to 60 votes in extending Medicare below the age of 65. Seems to me as though Holy Joe is exacting revenge for our pulling his platform out from under him in the last race. It's crazy-making to consider what cards he's holding, cozying up to the Dubby and his minions and then expecting the Left to embrace him as one of their own -- although he MUST have some, tucked up his sleeve -- and I presume we're all supposed to look the other way as he attempts to cover his obvious Republican tendencies, his portfolio thick with sponsors and cronies and his public record of having never taken responsibility for anything he couldn't quickly fudge, twist and reconfigure to cover his scrawny old ass.

Joe needs to be pulled from committees and lose his influence ... that's not only what he deserves, it's what 59 other Democratic colleagues that support Progressivism in one way or another have a right to expect. Sadly, the White House has told Harry Reid to compromise with his Holiness ... while holding their nose. In order to do that, we will have to water the bill down even farther. How to get folks like Bernie Sanders and Russ Feingold to vote for what's left will be another amazing trick. As much as Obama needs this win -- and we need the relief -- this whole thing could go south, thanks to Joe.

And it will be Joe that should receive the righteous anger of the American people if it does ... mine certainly, and I've got a memory like an elephant. A wolf in sheep's clothing is an initial shock to the sheep but we're waaaaay past that realization now -- a carnivore of Joe's level, pasturing as he does with those who expect some small bit of honesty and ethical consideration, needs to be quarantined at the earliest opportunity. You can urge such action here.

With all the squawking in Congress today, another place where there's flap and peck is Copenhagen. Healthcare reform and environmental concerns seem to have stumped us. 

Pick pick pick, talk-a-lot, pick a little more ...

We have a handful of reads today on Copenhagen, an odd little piece on the EPA that may have some legs and info on the bogus global warming emails -- bonus is plain-talk from Krugman.

Jude


Walkout in Copenhagen heightens fears of failure
Raw Story
Monday December 14, 2009
http://rawstory.com/news/afp/Walkout_in_Copenhagen_heightens_fea_12142009.html

The UN climate summit hit major turbulence Monday when developing nations walked out of key negotiations and China accused the West of trickery, as the spectre of failure loomed heavily over Copenhagen.

As campaigners warned that negotiators had five days to avert climate chaos, ministers acknowledged they had to start making progress before the arrival of 120 heads of state for the summit's climax on Friday.

Sources said the developing countries walked out of working groups at the start of the second week of negotiations here, angered that the conference was weakening in support for the Kyoto Protocol, the core emissions-curbing treaty.

"They have walked out, I am advised, of the working groups," one Western minister told AFP on condition of anonymity.

"This is salvageable. It depends if people want to be constructive."

The move was unleashed by African countries, with the support of the G77 group of developing countries.

They refused to continue negotiations unless talks on a second commitment period to the Kyoto Protocol were given priority over broader discussions on a "long-term vision" for cooperative action on climate change.

The Kyoto Protocol ties the rich countries -- but not developing countries -- that have ratified it to binding emissions curbs.

It does not include the United States, which says the Protocol is unfair as the binding targets do not apply to developing giants that are already huge emitters of greenhouse gases.

"Africa has pulled the emergency cord to avoid a train crash at the end of the week," said Jeremy Hobbs, executive director of Oxfam International. Related article: China might not take funds

The walkout delivered another blow to the summit which has already been marred by spats between China and the United States.

A top Western negotiator, speaking on condition of anonymity, said a round-table session of around 50 environment ministers Sunday had been soured by "growing tensions between the Americans and Chinese," saying delegates had merely repeated their previous stances rather than giving ground.

"At the back of everyone's mind is the fear of a repeat of the awful scenario in The Hague," she told AFP, referring to a climate conference in 2000 on completing the rulebook for the Kyoto Protocol that broke up angrily without agreement.

In an apparent concession, China said it might not take a share of any Western funding for emerging nations to fight climate change.

But in a pointer to the tensions backstage, Vice Foreign Minister He Yafei said China would not be the fall guy if there were a fiasco.

"I know people will say if there is no deal that China is to blame. This is a trick played by the developed countries. They have to look at their own position and can't use China as an excuse," he told the Financial Times.

Britain's climate minister, Ed Miliband, urged negotiators to work faster to break the deadlock.

"Leaders are practically on their way ... Leaders always have a very important role in this. But frankly it's also up to negotiators and ministers not to leave everything up to the leaders, but to get our act together," he said.

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, whose country is the industrialised world's biggest per-capita polluter, fretted at the possibility of failure without compromise all round.

"There's a big risk that we will have conflicting views between developed and developing countries," Rudd said in Australia. "And there is always a risk of failure here."

Campaigners were even blunter, with Greenpeace saying the summit had five days "to avert climate chaos" and that emissions targets so far offered by Western leaders such as US President Barack Obama amounted to "peanuts".

The gathering's daunting goal is to tame greenhouse gases -- the invisible by-product derived mainly from the burning of coal, oil and gas that traps the Sun's heat and warms the atmosphere.

Scientists say that without dramatic action within the next decade, Earth will be on course for warming that will inflict drought, flood, storms and rising sea levels, translating into hunger and misery for many millions.

The stakes were underlined when a new UN report said that some 58 million people have been affected by 245 natural calamities so far this year, more than 90 percent of them weather events amplified by climate change.

And a study from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), an intergovernmental group, said climate change threatens the survival of dozens of animal species from the emperor penguin to Australian koalas.

If all goes well, the conference will agree an outline deal of national pledges to curb carbon emissions and set up a mechanism to provide billions of dollars in help for poor countries in the firing line of climate change. ++


EPA Endangerment Finding – Could it Undo Climate Change Policy?
Lisa Reisman, Metal Miner Index
12/14/09
http://agmetalminer.com/2009/12/14/epa-endangerment-finding-%E2%80%93-could-it-undo-climate-change-policy/

Besides perhaps the health care debate, no single policy issue has created as much controversy as the EPA’s recent ‘endangerment’ declaration that greenhouse gas emissions cause people harm. And as my colleague Stuart posted last week, “whatever one may think of the whole concept of carbon trading and however flawed one believes existing trading systems are – and believe me this site has frequently criticized both – the fact remains that carbon trading is almost certainly here to stay and will have a major impact on business and our personal lives in the decade to come.”

Stuart didn’t touch the hot potato of whether the science supports the argument behind the case for global warming (or if the best way to address it involves carbon cap and trade or just a plain old carbon tax or curbing emissions via the Clean Air Act or some other scientific means making its way around such as injecting sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere which by the way, a very prominent metals subject matter expert who has posted on MetalMiner subscribes to but for which we are not yet at liberty to discuss).

 

We’ll steer clear of that one as well but the science behind global warming and the trail of hacked emails suggesting the science may not sit on as strong a foundation as some would like us to believe may very well turn out to be what will ultimately undermine the EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases. In addition, the fact that the EPA made the ruling, whereas Congress failed to act, may place the entire issue squarely on President Obama and his administration. And therein lies the rub – Congress, instead of tackling this controversial issue, can punt it to the EPA and leave the implementation of the ruling to the lawyers (you can be sure there will be lawsuits) as well as the burden of proof to the EPA (the EPA has to prove greenhouse gases are harmful to human health). And that’s where those ugly leaked emails can get a little tricky for the EPA.

Prior to the EPA’s ruling last Monday, organizations like the American Iron and Steel Institute, “has made it known it wants to make sure energy-intensive imports such as steel bear the same climate-related costs as domestic products.”  If the EPA sets policy, as opposed to Congress, the AISI concerns become very real. The EPA could only regulate domestic producers. A unilateral solution will have a devastating impact on US manufacturing. Consider the following:

A piece on manufacturer Quality Float Works a company that makes metal float balls used on flagpoles, weather vanes, plumbing and industrial devices raises concerns about how a middle market manufacturer will compete globally Nucor has not made a decision on where to put a new plant (it is deciding between Louisiana and Brazil) pending the outcome of climate change legislation, Copenhagen etc.

Here is a list of a few of the trade associations who have come out against the EPA endangerment finding:

American Trucking Association
Air Transport Association
National Association of Manufacturers
The American Forest and Paper Products Association

So here is my prediction: Congress will do nothing on carbon cap and trade because now it no longer needs to do anything. According to this Forbes article, “Around March, look for the EPA to finalize its ruling for the auto sector (editor’s note: to federally regulate automotive emissions). It will also put the finishing touches on its decision to tailor greenhouse gas regulation under the Clean Air Act. What happens then? Lawsuits.”

And that’s my second prediction. ++


Science not faked, but not pretty
AP
12/12/09
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gRa5F7Lv_zO0ZKaHmbQENlyV3KdgD9CHPLC00

LONDON — E-mails stolen from climate scientists show they stonewalled skeptics and discussed hiding data — but the messages don't support claims that the science of global warming was faked, according to an exhaustive review by The Associated Press.

The 1,073 e-mails examined by the AP show that scientists harbored private doubts, however slight and fleeting, even as they told the world they were certain about climate change. However, the exchanges don't undercut the vast body of evidence showing the world is warming because of man-made greenhouse gas emissions.

The scientists were keenly aware of how their work would be viewed and used, and, just like politicians, went to great pains to shape their message. Sometimes, they sounded more like schoolyard taunts than scientific tenets.

The scientists were so convinced by their own science and so driven by a cause "that unless you're with them, you're against them," said Mark Frankel, director of scientific freedom, responsibility and law at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He also reviewed the communications.

Frankel saw "no evidence of falsification or fabrication of data, although concerns could be raised about some instances of very 'generous interpretations.'"

Some e-mails expressed doubts about the quality of individual temperature records or why models and data didn't quite match. Part of this is the normal give-and-take of research, but skeptics challenged how reliable certain data was.

The e-mails were stolen from the computer network server of the climate research unit at the University of East Anglia in southeast England, an influential source of climate science, and were posted online last month. The university shut down the server and contacted the police.

The AP studied all the e-mails for context, with five reporters reading and rereading them — about 1 million words in total.

One of the most disturbing elements suggests an effort to avoid sharing scientific data with critics skeptical of global warming. It is not clear if any data was destroyed; two U.S. researchers denied it.

The e-mails show that several mainstream scientists repeatedly suggested keeping their research materials away from opponents who sought it under American and British public records law. It raises a science ethics question because free access to data is important so others can repeat experiments as part of the scientific method. The University of East Anglia is investigating the blocking of information requests.

"I believe none of us should submit to these 'requests,'" declared the university's Keith Briffa. The center's chief, Phil Jones, wrote: "Data is covered by all the agreements we sign with people, so I will be hiding behind them."

When one skeptic kept filing FOI requests, Jones, who didn't return AP requests for comment, told another scientist, Michael Mann: "You can delete this attachment if you want. Keep this quiet also, but this is the person who is putting FOI requests for all e-mails Keith (Briffa) and Tim (Osborn) have written."

Mann, a researcher at Penn State University, told The Associated Press: "I didn't delete any e-mails as Phil asked me to. I don't believe anybody else did."

The e-mails also show how professional attacks turned very personal. When former London financial trader Douglas J. Keenan combed through the data used in a 1990 research paper Jones had co-authored, Keenan claimed to have found evidence of fakery by Jones' co-author. Keenan threatened to have the FBI arrest University at Albany scientist Wei-Chyung Wang for fraud. (A university investigation later cleared him of any wrongdoing.)

"I do now wish I'd never sent them the data after their FOIA request!" Jones wrote in June 2007.

In another case after initially balking on releasing data to a skeptic because it was already public, Lawrence Livermore National Lab scientist Ben Santer wrote that he then opted to release everything the skeptic wanted — and more. Santer said in a telephone interview that he and others are inundated by frivolous requests from skeptics that are designed to "tie-up government-funded scientists."

The e-mails also showed a stunning disdain for global warming skeptics.

One scientist practically celebrates the news of the death of one critic, saying, "In an odd way this is cheering news!" Another bemoans that the only way to deal with skeptics is "continuing to publish quality work in quality journals (or calling in a Mafia hit.)" And a third scientist said the next time he sees a certain skeptic at a scientific meeting, "I'll be tempted to beat the crap out of him. Very tempted."

And they compared contrarians to communist-baiting Sen. Joseph McCarthy and Somali pirates. They also called them out-and-out frauds.

Santer, who received death threats after his work on climate change in 1996, said Thursday: "I'm not surprised that things are said in the heat of the moment between professional colleagues. These things are taken out of context."

When the journal, Climate Research, published a skeptical study, Penn State scientist Mann discussed retribution this way: "Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal."

That skeptical study turned out to be partly funded by the American Petroleum Institute.

The most provocative e-mails are usually about one aspect of climate science: research from a decade ago that studied how warm or cold it was centuries ago through analysis of tree rings, ice cores and glacial melt. And most of those e-mails, which stretch from 1996 to last month, are from about a handful of scientists in dozens of e-mails.

Still, such research has been a key element in measuring climate change over long periods.

As part of the AP review, summaries of the e-mails that raised issues from the potential manipulation of data to intensely personal attacks were sent to seven experts in research ethics, climate science and science policy.

"This is normal science politics, but on the extreme end, though still within bounds," said Dan Sarewitz, a science policy professor at Arizona State University. "We talk about science as this pure ideal and the scientific method as if it is something out of a cookbook, but research is a social and human activity full of all the failings of society and humans, and this reality gets totally magnified by the high political stakes here."

In the past three weeks since the e-mails were posted, longtime opponents of mainstream climate science have repeatedly quoted excerpts of about a dozen e-mails. Republican congressmen and former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin have called for either independent investigations, a delay in U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulation of greenhouse gases or outright boycotts of the Copenhagen international climate talks. They cited a "culture of corruption" that the e-mails appeared to show.

That is not what the AP found. There were signs of trying to present the data as convincingly as possible.

One e-mail that skeptics have been citing often since the messages were posted online is from Jones. He says: "I've just completed Mike's (Mann) trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (from 1981 onward) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline."

Jones was referring to tree ring data that indicated temperatures after the 1950s weren't as warm as scientists had determined.

The "trick" that Jones said he was borrowing from Mann was to add the real temperatures, not what the tree rings showed. And the decline he talked of hiding was not in real temperatures, but in the tree ring data which was misleading, Mann explained.

Sometimes the data didn't line up as perfectly as scientists wanted.

David Rind told colleagues about inconsistent figures in the work for a giant international report: "As this continuing exchange has clarified, what's in Chapter 6 is inconsistent with what is in Chapter 2 (and Chapter 9 is caught in the middle!). Worse yet, we've managed to make global warming go away! (Maybe it really is that easy...:)."

But in the end, global warming didn't go away, according to the vast body of research over the years.

None of the e-mails flagged by the AP and sent to three climate scientists viewed as moderates in the field changed their view that global warming is man-made and a threat. Nor did it alter their support of the conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which some of the scientists helped write.

"My overall interpretation of the scientific basis for (man-made) global warming is unaltered by the contents of these e-mails," said Gabriel Vecchi, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientist.

Gerald North, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, headed a National Academy of Sciences study that looked at — and upheld as valid — Mann's earlier studies that found the 1990s were the hottest years in centuries.

"In my opinion the meaning is much more innocent than might be perceived by others taken out of context. Much of this is overblown," North said.

Mann contends he always has been upfront about uncertainties, pointing to the title of his 1999 study: "Northern Hemisphere Temperatures During the Past Millennium: Inferences, Uncertainties and Limitations."

Several scientists found themselves tailoring their figures or retooling their arguments to answer online arguments — even as they claimed not to care what was being posted to the Internet

"I don't read the blogs that regularly," Jonathan Overpeck of the University of Arizona wrote in 2005. "But I guess the skeptics are making hay of their (sic) being a global warm (sic) event around 1450AD."

One person singled out for criticism in the e-mails is Steve McIntyre, who maintains Climate Audit. The blog focuses on statistical issues with scientists' attempts to recreate the climate in ancient times.

"We find that the authors are overreaching in the conclusions that they're trying to draw from the data that they have," McIntyre said in a telephone interview.

McIntyre, 62, of Toronto, was trained in math and economics and says he is "substantially retired" from the mineral exploration industry, which produces greenhouse gases.

Some e-mails said McIntyre's attempts to get original data from scientists are frivolous and meant more for harassment than doing good science. There are allegations that he would distort and misuse data given to him.

McIntyre disagreed with how he is portrayed. "Everything that I've done in this, I've done in good faith," he said.

He also said he has avoided editorializing on the leaked e-mails. "Anything I say," he said, "is liable to be piling on."

The skeptics started the name-calling said Mann, who called McIntyre a "bozo," a "fraud" and a "moron" in various e-mails.

"We're human," Mann said. "We've been under attack unfairly by these people who have been attempting to dismiss us as frauds as liars.

The AP is mentioned several times in the e-mails, usually in reference to a published story. One scientist says his remarks were reported with "a bit of journalistic license" and "I would have rephrased or re-expressed some of what was written if I had seen it before it was released." The archive also includes a request from an AP reporter, one of the writers of this story, for reaction to a study, a standard step for journalists seeking quotes for their stories. ++

Associated Press writers Jeff Donn in Boston, Justin Pritchard in Los Angeles contributed to this report. Troy Thibodeaux in Washington provided technical assistance. Satter reported from London, Borenstein from Washington and Ritter from New York.


bonus


Disaster and Denial
PAUL KRUGMAN, NYT
December 13, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/14/opinion/14krugman.html

When I first began writing for The Times, I was naïve about many things. But my biggest misconception was this: I actually believed that influential people could be moved by evidence, that they would change their views if events completely refuted their beliefs.

And to be fair, it does happen now and then. I’ve been highly critical of Alan Greenspan over the years (since long before it was fashionable), but give the former Fed chairman credit: he has admitted that he was wrong about the ability of financial markets to police themselves.

But he’s a rare case. Just how rare was demonstrated by what happened last Friday in the House of Representatives, when — with the meltdown caused by a runaway financial system still fresh in our minds, and the mass unemployment that meltdown caused still very much in evidence — every single Republican and 27 Democrats voted against a quite modest effort to rein in Wall Street excesses.

Let’s recall how we got into our current mess.

America emerged from the Great Depression with a tightly regulated banking system. The regulations worked: the nation was spared major financial crises for almost four decades after World War II. But as the memory of the Depression faded, bankers began to chafe at the restrictions they faced. And politicians, increasingly under the influence of free-market ideology, showed a growing willingness to give bankers what they wanted.

The first big wave of deregulation took place under Ronald Reagan — and quickly led to disaster, in the form of the savings-and-loan crisis of the 1980s. Taxpayers ended up paying more than 2 percent of G.D.P., the equivalent of around $300 billion today, to clean up the mess.

But the proponents of deregulation were undaunted, and in the decade leading up to the current crisis politicians in both parties bought into the notion that New Deal-era restrictions on bankers were nothing but pointless red tape. In a memorable 2003 incident, top bank regulators staged a photo-op in which they used garden shears and a chainsaw to cut up stacks of paper representing regulations.

And the bankers — liberated both by legislation that removed traditional restrictions and by the hands-off attitude of regulators who didn’t believe in regulation — responded by dramatically loosening lending standards. The result was a credit boom and a monstrous real estate bubble, followed by the worst economic slump since the Great Depression. Ironically, the effort to contain the crisis required government intervention on a much larger scale than would have been needed to prevent the crisis in the first place: government rescues of troubled institutions, large-scale lending by the Federal Reserve to the private sector, and so on.

Given this history, you might have expected the emergence of a national consensus in favor of restoring more-effective financial regulation, so as to avoid a repeat performance. But you would have been wrong.

Talk to conservatives about the financial crisis and you enter an alternative, bizarro universe in which government bureaucrats, not greedy bankers, caused the meltdown. It’s a universe in which government-sponsored lending agencies triggered the crisis, even though private lenders actually made the vast majority of subprime loans. It’s a universe in which regulators coerced bankers into making loans to unqualified borrowers, even though only one of the top 25 subprime lenders was subject to the regulations in question.

Oh, and conservatives simply ignore the catastrophe in commercial real estate: in their universe the only bad loans were those made to poor people and members of minority groups, because bad loans to developers of shopping malls and office towers don’t fit the narrative.

In part, the prevalence of this narrative reflects the principle enunciated by Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” As Democrats have pointed out, three days before the House vote on banking reform Republican leaders met with more than 100 financial-industry lobbyists to coordinate strategies. But it also reflects the extent to which the modern Republican Party is committed to a bankrupt ideology, one that won’t let it face up to the reality of what happened to the U.S. economy.

So it’s up to the Democrats — and more specifically, since the House has passed its bill, it’s up to “centrist” Democrats in the Senate. Are they willing to learn something from the disaster that has overtaken the U.S. economy, and get behind financial reform?

Let’s hope so. For one thing is clear: if politicians refuse to learn from the history of the recent financial crisis, they will condemn all of us to repeat it. ++

I’m asking you to believe. Not just in my ability to bring about real change in Washington … I’m asking you to believe in yours.”
~ Barack Obama

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