Bogus Gold

The Waxman-Markey bill that recently passed the House, an attempt to install a cap-and-trade system regulating carbon dioxide emissions in the U. S., has certainly drawn a lot of attention. As is usually the case when a matter of ideological disagreement goes from abstract theory to actual legislation there is a lot to be said about it no matter which side you're on. In this case there seems to be no shortage of informed opinions debating the matter. There is also Tom Friedman's.

Tom Friedman has a fairly unique beat among American columnists. He's neither entirely a futurist nor entirely a pundit. He seems to be paid principally to jet around the world observing things almost always under the presumption he's discovering something others have completely missed. It sounds negative when you put it that way, but actually I think that's the secret to Friedman's popularity. He brings this wide-eyed, childlike perspective to his writing in which everything new and exciting to him must be new and exciting to everyone else too. He lacks the hesitation found in more sophisticated thinkers caused by uncertainty in this area. In fact he seems unaware that uncertainty should be any kind of barrier to offering his firm opinions in any area.

Witness today's Friedman column advising us that we desperately need to pass the cap-and-trade bill he describes as "a mess," which he "detests." What profound insight does he give us about the reasons we need this detestable mess to have the force of law?

Firstly, because not passing it would hurt our image with the other kids on the playground the other nations of the world. Or, in Friedman's words...

... for all its flaws, this bill is the first comprehensive attempt by America to mitigate climate change by putting a price on carbon emissions. Rejecting this bill would have been read in the world as America voting against the reality and urgency of climate change and would have undermined clean energy initiatives everywhere.

That was my emphasis above. It's necessary when parsing through a Friedman citation because he piles so much extraneous stuff around his subjects and predicates he often misleads you into thinking he's putting more substance in there than he really is.

Anyway, reason number one we urgently need a detestable mess governing our energy laws according to Friedman is for the sake of how rejecting it would be "read in the world." We may be damned if we do, but we're surely damned if we don't... damned by the world itself. Yikes! That all the myriad views across the world could possibly be so neatly and simply summed up in one single speculation is part of the magic of Friedman's style.

The second reason Friedman thinks we need a very bad bill passed into law is because he has some kind of hazy vision that it will lead to a change in the way people think. He doesn't pretend to be able to explain it. But he's just got a kind of gut feeling. And no, I am not putting words into his mouth here (again, my emphasis below):

More important, my gut tells me that if the U.S. government puts a price on carbon, even a weak one, it will usher in a new mind-set among consumers, investors, farmers, innovators and entrepreneurs that in time will make a big difference — much like the first warnings that cigarettes could cause cancer. The morning after that warning no one ever looked at smoking the same again.

Okay so, apparently we need a detestable bill passed into law for the sake of global image management and because of our abiding trust in Tom Friedman's gut feelings. This is beginning to appear as not so much a piece of analysis as a poorly supported opinion fueled by visions of a future in which the nations of the world are united as one and carbon dioxide is universally considered cancerous and gross. Compelling as that vision may sound it's not terribly solid reason to support this thing despite its already noted ickyness. Surely after realizing he has yet to connect the dots between the actual bill under discussion and its real-world implications Friedman would realize its time to get the the heart of the matter and give us some amazingly good reason to support this thing. And he attempts to do just that.

Reason the third we need detestable messiness in our laws:

Henceforth, every investment decision made in America — about how homes are built, products manufactured or electricity generated — will look for the least-cost low-carbon option. And weaving carbon emissions into every business decision will drive innovation and deployment of clean technologies to a whole new level and make energy efficiency much more affordable. That ain’t beanbag.

Well he tried anyway.

According to Friedman, after this bill is made law "every investment decision" is not only going to look for the lowest cost option - which is already what's done (spare me the quibbles and caveats, we're speaking at a very high level here). Ever after investors are also going to look for the lowest carbon option. Or, perhaps, Friedman means the lowest carbon option will automatically become the lowest cost option after this bill is passed. In either case he's very wrong so let's sort out the reasons why.

The reason the first version is wrong - the one in which investors look for least-cost AND low-carbon options for their investments - is that they are already able to do this without the need for any new law. If "least-cost" and "low-carbon" do not have to be the same thing for investors you wouldn't need "cap-and-trade." At most you'd need some kind of new labeling requirement so consumers could take "low-carbon" into their decision making the same way they can take "saturated fat" into their food purchase decisions. So, no, investors are not going to be looking for least-cost and low-carbon independently after this law is passed. They're not going to do so as a result of this bill anyway.

That leaves us with the other version: the least-cost option will also be the low-carbon option after this bill is passed into law. Except that is most definitely not true. And that's not a problem with the details of Waxman-Markey, its a problem with the very concept of taxing carbon emissions itself.

To understand why this is not true you simply need to think through the way this bill intends to impact cost in the first place. The bill intends to make carbon dioxide emissions, which currently cost producers nothing at all, into a taxable item. By way of analogy it's comparable to the 1696 British law taxing houses according to the number of windows they possessed. In that law there was a certain "floor" level established (six windows) below which there was no tax. Anything above the floor level would be taxed at an ever increasing amount based on the number of windows. In response to the tax, a number of home owners bricked up many of their windows to avoid paying the tax. Others lost some of their income to the government which they would have otherwise retained. Obviously either course of action cost home owners money, in the former case the cost of bricks, mortar and labor for bricking over existing windows, in the latter case the cost of paying the tax.

Cap-and-trade's cost mechanism works the same way. Below a certain floor level of carbon-dioxide emission there is no new cost at all. It's business as usual. If you're a little bit above the floor level, you might be able to find new ways to lower your carbon emissions by making a few changes to the way you do business - the analogue to "bricking over some windows." Any companies in this situation would obviously have to pay for these changes in some way that would show up to their customers as "increased cost." Thus favoring lower carbon alternatives that may be in competition with them in the short term. But in the long run the "business as usual" companies and the "bricked over some windows" companies would be competing once again on equal terms. Under the guiding principles of cap-and-trade, this is as it should be. The bill is intended to force those companies which can do business while emitting less carbon to "brick over the necessary windows" (i.e. make carbon emission improvements).

But the biggest area of "cost" intended by this bill is among the businesses which simply cannot "brick over" enough "windows" to avoid the tax. These are the biggest carbon emitters, and the main target of the bill. The idea is, since so many low carbon alternatives under current technology cannot compete with their high carbon counterparts on price, we need to artificially raise the price of emitting carbon dioxide. It's very cheap to produce energy by burning coal or oil - so let's make it more expensive to do so. As that cost is passed on to consumers of anything produced by energy (i.e. everything) natural market forces will drive investment into areas of low carbon emission in favor of high carbon emission. That's how it's supposed to work - even if it makes it prohibitively expensive for some businesses to stay in business at all. Cap-and-trade omelette? Meet your broken eggs.

The further intent of this bill, also alluded to by Friedman in the above quotation, is to drive investment into the area of energy production itself, prompting the creation new kinds of low-carbon energy production which would allow the cost of low-carbon energy to eventually compete with high-carbon energy even without an artificial tax distorting things. The market force intended to work here is "if you tax it, they will find a way around it."

Unfortunately lawmakers suffer from the same problem as Friedman and only think about the ways they intend people to respond to a new tax without sufficiently thinking through the unintended consequences. In the case of the 1696 window law, lawmakers didn't intend for homeowners to brick over their windows. They wanted them to pay the tax. The whole purpose of the bill was to raise revenue, not restrict sunlight. In this case lawmakers intend to reduce the emission of carbon dioxide. Higher costs are just means to that end the same way windows were a means to the end of government revenue in the window tax example. But will businesses within America and governments around the globe really just buckle under and penalize themselves financially while inventing as-yet-unknown low-carbon alternative energy sources? Don't you think some might look for ways to reduce their cost by avoiding the tax without having to reduce their carbon emissions? And might attempts to restrict those alternatives produce unintended consequences of their own?

Anyway, Friedman is finished explaining the urgency of passing an admittedly detestable piece of legislation leaving his reasons for doing so as:

1. Avoiding a bad global impression which would be created by not passing it.
2. Tom's "gut feeling" that it will change the way people think.
3. It will drive investment into low carbon alternatives over high carbon options.

Without going into exhaustive detail, here are the main problems with each of Tom's points:

1. The "globe" is far from unified in their opinion about capping carbon emissions. China and India have flat out refused to consider doing so in any manner that would limit their economic growth. That means no carbon restrictions in the fastest growing major economies in the world, including the world's largest carbon dioxide emitter, regardless of this legislation.

2. Tom's "gut feelings" don't have a great track record.

3. As the "bricked over windows" illustrate, investors will explore all sorts of alternatives beyond simply accepting artificially increased costs while they search for a technological breakthrough. The details - those detestable, messy things Friedman admits he doesn't like in this case - matter VERY much. It's not important to understand what you want the consequences of this bill to be. It's important to understand the unintended consequences at least as well.

But, like an affable college sophomore content that he has overcome his fellow classmates' possible objections with an unassailable mastery of all the relevant facts, Friedman charges on to point out the problems with this bill. They are, according to Friedman, as follows:

1. Republicans
2. President Obama
3. The American People.

Again, I am not making this up:

Now that the bill is heading for the Senate, though, we must, ideally, try to improve it, but, at a minimum, guard against diluting it any further. To do that we need the help of the three parties most responsible for how weak the bill already is: the Republican Party, President Barack Obama and We the People.

Oh Friedman does think some of the problems involve the people who actually wrote the bill. They're involved the same way the victim of a drive-by shooting is "involved" in that particular transaction:

This bill is not weak because its framers, Representatives Henry Waxman and Ed Markey, wanted it this way. “They had to make the compromises they did,” said Dan Becker, director of the Safe Climate Campaign, “because almost every House Republican voted against the bill and did nothing to try to improve it. So to get it passed, they needed every coal-state Democrat, and that meant they had to water it down to bring them on board.”

Please note that requiring compromise to pass legislation is how our system of government is supposed to work. It's designed to prevent a minority from plundering the wealth and/or freedom of the majority. Not that such trivialities apply in this case of course.

There are a whole host of reasons one might object to this particular piece of legislation, even if one believes as fervently as Friedman in the supreme imperative to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, though Friedman doesn't bother to explore any of them. There aren't really any reasons this legislation must be rushed through Congress at maximum speed before even allowing Congressmen to read the bill itself, though that goes without comment from Friedman. In that light the incredulous outrage regarding the need to make (sneer) compromises in such a bill is jaw-droppingly misdirected.

The bill's authors cannot be held to account for this deeply "compromised" bill why, exactly? If they had taken the time to work with other legislators - even if they shut out every single Republican - they should have been able to write a bill that could pass despite uniform Republican opposition. And this is largely what they did. With Democrats controlling the House by a majority of seventy nine, Waxman-Markey passed by seven votes, including eight Republicans. They gave Republican legislators the absolute minimum level of engagement necessary.

The lesson Friedman takes from this? Hold the crafters of this legislation to account for their incredibly partisan approach? Gosh no. Instead he begins a rant that goes on for four paragraphs beginning with "What are Republicans thinking?" The better question is: "Why does Tom Friedman think the minority party is more relevant to this discussion than the people who actually wrote and voted for this bill?"

On a side note, Friedman drops this gem of an observation in the middle of telling off Republicans:

Yes, this bill’s goal of reducing U.S. carbon emissions to 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 is nowhere near what science tells us we need to mitigate climate change.

So according to Friedman it's not just badly compromised, but it's also not going to accomplish much good even if it works as planned? Nifty! The disparity between Friedman's reasons for supporting this thing and the incidental details he doesn't seem to find as important is growing intriguing in its own right.

Oh, and remember that list of problems with the bill above? The one where he blamed Republicans, President Obama, and the American people? Yah, it's mostly just Republicans. Obama is suspect only because he hasn't been loud enough in his support... yet. And the American people part? That's really just a call-to-action for a mass movement among the youth to flood the Washington mall with protesters cap-and-trade enthusiasts. I am totally not kidding:

And then there is We the People. Attention all young Americans: your climate future is being decided right now in the cloakrooms of the Capitol, where the coal lobby holds huge sway. You want to make a difference? Then get out of Facebook and into somebody’s face. Get a million people on the Washington Mall calling for a price on carbon. That will get the Senate’s attention. Play hardball or don’t play at all.

"Play hardball or don't play at all." Where hardball equals mass demonstrations supporting a detestable, terribly compromised piece of legislation which "is nowhere near what science tells us we need to mitigate climate change." Or maybe just getting "into somebody's face." Because teenagers angrily lecturing us about complex energy legislation is just the thing we need to drive our policies at the moment.

As I've noted before, the most striking thing about climate alarmists, Friedman among them, is their dogmatic support for "taking action" even while admitting their preferred actions won't work, may cause harm, and there remain viable alternatives which could be explored. In this case Friedman wants to pass bad legislation which admittedly won't make a difference in combating global warming but will somehow make a difference in some fuzzy, hard to describe way making it totally worth Americans paying artificially higher costs somehow.

Some day I will attempt to construct a compendium of "things I wish I said." Whenever I do, this quote from George Will will have a place in it:

Our leaders are often wrong but rarely so precisely wrong.

That's pure rhetorical gold.

Remember when "Heck of a job, Brownie!" represented a stinging indictment of an administration's self-damning tendency toward cronyism and incompetence? You know the moment I mean. At the height of the Hurricane Katrina disaster, President Bush arrived on the scene in New Orleans and lauded his personal selection to lead the Federal Emergency Management Agency using that phrase. Of course most people didn't think FEMA had done an especially good job responding to the crisis, and a little digging discovered that "Brownie", a.k.a. Michael Brown, had essentially no qualifications for running FEMA in the first place. The resulting public outcry resulted in "Brownie" being forced to resign and left the Bush administration's reputation for competence in government irrevocably stained. Good times... good times...

But things are all better now, right? Feel the Hopenchange!

Brian Deese, the 31-year-old Yale Law School dropout charged with restructuring General Motors, takes a lot of flak for his inexperience.

Although a think tank researcher with zero business experience might be an unusual choice for such a big job, GM desperately needs a break from the past. Deese, a novice in an insular industry full of seen-it-all-before veterans, may be uniquely qualified to look beyond what "everyone knows" is possible and bring America's largest automaker into the future.

Emphasis mine, with my jaw still hanging open from the brazen chutzpa of that spin.
Can you think of any truly difficult situation in your life where you'd accept that logic? Just think about it for a moment and try to comprehend what is being said there.

"Every accountant you've seen so far has advised you to declare bankruptcy as you simply have no means to pay your debts. It's time to let someone with no knowledge of finance or your financial situation take a crack at it!"

"The electrical wiring in your house is not up to code and is going to cost thousands to repair, according to every licensed electrician who's looked at it. Why not grab some guy off the street who's knowledge of wiring begins and ends with flipping a light switch to fix it?!"

"Your cancer has proven inoperable so far, but all you've seen are experienced surgeons and oncologists. Let's split you open and have someone with absolutely no relevant experience have a go!"

Fun as that kind of riffing may be, please note that President Obama is actually, literally following that logic right now in his auto-industry intervention.

Ah, but not to worry. The dogged Washington Press Corps is on the case! They, who pride themselves in their fierce independence and uncompromising dedication to the truth, would surely never allow such a thing to go unremarked.

Here's the New York Times introducing the uniquely unqualified Mr. Deese:

It is not every 31-year-old who, in a first government job, finds himself dismantling General Motors and rewriting the rules of American capitalism.

But that, in short, is the job description for Brian Deese, a not-quite graduate of Yale Law School who had never set foot in an automotive assembly plant until he took on his nearly unseen role in remaking the American automotive industry.

Wow! What a stinging setup! I can't wait to see the smackdown that follows this! ...

Mr. Deese’s role is unusual for someone who is neither a formally trained economist nor a business school graduate, and who never spent much time flipping through the endless studies about the future of the American and Japanese auto industries.

Umm... well that's... a bit less stinging than I was expecting. Surely there's a criticism a bit harsher than "unusual" coming in regard to this. ...

Mr. Deese’s route to the auto table at the White House was anything but a straight line.

Umm... (scrolling ahead)... it looks pretty straight to me. He proved an effective political foot soldier in a few Democratic campaigns. Rubbed some elbows at a couple of lefty think tanks. And then... BAM... he's in charge of "dismantling General Motors and rewriting the rules of American capitalism." Forget all that hard work and study, kids! In Obama's America politics trumps knowledge and experience every time.

If you're looking for someone pointing out that it may be just a wee bit irresponsible to put someone so young and inexperienced in charge of something so significant, about the only place to look is in the conservative commentariot. Because, of course, expecting qualifications for an appointee running a multi-billion dollar government project is an entirely partisan issue.

At the moment people seem so dazzled by Obama's Audacity of Hope Hype that niggling details like putting the government takeover / restructuring of the U. S. Auto Industry into the hands of a complete novice slip by largely unremarked. But I've got news for Obama's fans, including his media fan club... It's highly unlikely every single initiative undertaken by Obama is going to prove a dazzling success. And when things start to fail the public will examine things like this and wonder who the hell let such things slide. The political motivations on the Obama side will play easily enough into the usual public cynicism about their politicians. But what, exactly, is going to be the media's excuse for cheering this stuff on rather than sounding the alarm?

The scariest thing you'll read this week is something you'll probably be tempted to overlook. It is this:

Carbon Emissions Linked To Global Warming In Simple Linear Relationship

Damon Matthews, a professor in Concordia University's Department of Geography, Planning and the Environment has found a direct relationship between carbon dioxide emissions and global warming. Matthews, together with colleagues from Victoria and the U.K., used a combination of global climate models and historical climate data to show that there is a simple linear relationship between total cumulative emissions and global temperature change.

Big deal, you might say. All those already upon the Global Warming bandwagon have been acting like this was already known for a couple of decades now. That's how we came up with the "carbon dioxide is pollution" nonsense. That's how we got ideas floating around like "carbon taxes" and "Cap and Trade" schemes.

Well yes, but... No one is seriously proposing a flat out carbon tax simply because opposition to it is a political no-brainer. People like to vote for taxes on other people. It's political suicide to be the politician (or the party) who wants to raise everyone's taxes.

Which is the whole reason Cap and Trade has been the preferred route for democratic governments to go in their attempt to restrict carbon emissions. It cloaks massive new taxes under a veneer of markets and trading and capitalist enterprise. When higher prices are subsequently passed on to consumers, they never get to see a direct correlation between the defacto carbon taxes and the resulting increase in consumer prices.

But implementing Cap and Trade is not as easy as it sounds, and especially so in a litigious society like our own. The problem with the entire philosophy underlying Cap and Trade is that it has always been very, very complex to measure the true impact - and therefore the measurable value - of carbon emissions versus offsetting activities. The climate is not a linear system after all. It's complex and chaotic. How do you set the definitions around your basic tradable commodities if there isn't a simple, quantifiable and therefore measurable basis underlying the whole thing? You'd end up in endless and expensive legal disputes over the relative impact of carbon in one case versus another based on all kinds of potentially offsetting conditions. That has been a formidable barrier to the successful implementation of Cap and Trade from the start.

So how does this seemingly innocuous and virtually redundant study change things? I'm so glad you asked. From the same article linked above:

Until now, it has been difficult to estimate how much climate will warm in response to a given carbon dioxide emissions scenario because of the complex interactions between human emissions, carbon sinks, atmospheric concentrations and temperature change. Matthews and colleagues show that despite these uncertainties, each emission of carbon dioxide results in the same global temperature increase, regardless of when or over what period of time the emission occurs.

So there's this incredibly complex relationship running between carbon dioxide emissions and global warming running through all sorts of complicated factors. This very complexity has previously prevented a simple basis for bundling all the different circumstances of carbon dioxide emissions together to determine their impact. But now, suddenly, through clever use of modeling against a particular set of climate data, we now have that previously elusive formula by which we can take a single variable - in this case carbon dioxide emitted - ignore every other related factor and state with certainty what its proper impact in the overall "global warming" scheme will be! Amazing!

Why, that means it will be a snap to get this Cap and Trade thing under way. We now have a reliable means allowing us to ignore all the complicated uncertainties that could otherwise derail things.

Now where have I ever heard of anything like that before? Hmmm...

Oh yeah! It reminds me of a similar great discovery in the financial sector not too long ago. Remember this?

It was a brilliant simplification of an intractable problem. And Li didn't just radically dumb down the difficulty of working out correlations; he decided not to even bother trying to map and calculate all the nearly infinite relationships between the various loans that made up a pool. What happens when the number of pool members increases or when you mix negative correlations with positive ones? Never mind all that, he said. The only thing that matters is the final correlation number—one clean, simple, all-sufficient figure that sums up everything.

That's from Felix Salmon's brilliant article explaining how a single model built to simplify correlations of risk between different securities based on mortgages lead directly to the recent financial implosion. But of course, this model didn't operate in a vaccuum. In order to allow such a simple thing to wreak maximum damage throughout all the world's finances, one more thing was necessary.

No one knew all of this better than [the model's inventor] David X. Li: "Very few people understand the essence of the model," he told The Wall Street Journal way back in fall 2005.

"Li can't be blamed," says Gilkes of CreditSights. After all, he just invented the model. Instead, we should blame the bankers who misinterpreted it. And even then, the real danger was created not because any given trader adopted it but because every trader did. In financial markets, everybody doing the same thing is the classic recipe for a bubble and inevitable bust.

So what happened to the financial markets was:

A. A model was discovered which made previously impossible correlations simple and quantifiable.

B. The model was seized upon by people who didn't really understand it so that they could use the resulting quantification to commence buying and selling in areas previously too complex for them to attempt.

C. This model was adopted universally, meaning any flaw within it would have a universal impact.

D. When the underlying reality hit a situation the model couldn't handle the entire house of cards collapsed.

Interesting parallel, you might be thinking. But surely these things are so unalike as to make any such comparison irrelevant. After all, what would buying and selling carbon permits and offsets have to do with buying and selling mortgages?

The answer may surprise you.

You've heard of credit default swaps and subprime mortgages. Are carbon default swaps and subprime offsets next? If the Waxman-Markey [that's the main Cap and Trade legislation - ed.] climate bill is signed into law, it will generate, almost as an afterthought, a new market for carbon derivatives. That market will be vast, complicated, and dauntingly difficult to monitor. And if Washington doesn't get the rules right, it will be vulnerable to speculation and manipulation by the very same players who brought us the financial meltdown.

That article linked above is only really scratching the surface here because, while noticing the financial peril by identifying some of the same specific financial instruments as were involved in the housing crisis, it misses the larger picture: Cap and Trade requires a means to simply and universally quantify economic activity surrounding carbon dioxide in a way that translates into "warming impact." Only once this is determined can the market mechanism underlying the concept begin to work. And the way it would work (the way it is intended to work it should be noted - this is by design, not a loophole) is to issue emissions permits and offsets which subsequently market forces could buy and sell and trade and do whatever else it wants with them.

Obviously this would require some kind of regulation. And that is already taking shape.

Cap and trade would create what Commodity Futures Trading commissioner Bart Chilton anticipates as a $2 trillion market, "the biggest of any [commodities] derivatives product in the next five years." That derivatives market will be based on two main instruments. First, there are the carbon allowance permits that form the nuts and bolts of any cap-and-trade scheme. Under cap and trade, the government would issue permits that allow companies to emit a certain amount of greenhouse gases. Companies that emit too much can buy allowances from companies that produce less than their limit. Then there are carbon offsets, which allow companies to emit greenhouse gases in excess of a federally mandated cap if they invest in a project that cuts emissions somewhere else-usually in developing countries. Polluters can pay Brazilian villagers to not cut down trees, for instance, or Filipino farmers to trap methane in pig manure.

Let's think about those two main instruments for a moment: carbon allowance permits and carbon offsets. They're based on the same metric, one stated as a positive and the other as a negative. An allowance permit covers situations where carbon is emmitted - added. An offset covers situations where the warming impact of carbon is countered - subtracted. Which one is more valuable? Neither one, obviously. They are of equal value because they're both expressions of exactly the same thing - warming impact. How is this measured? By converting carbon dioxide into a single "warming" metric.

What's so important about that single "warming" metric is that you need it to allow any business to determine how many permits or offsets - in any combination - they would require to engage in a planned activity. That number will drive their demand. And the aggregation of that demand throughout the entire economy would create a tremendous new market for permits and offsets - which would susequently create the opportunity for incredible fortunes to be made in speculating upon their value. That is not just "kind of similar" to what happened in the mortgage market, that is exactly what happened in the mortgage market.

For the sake of clarity I'll draw the parallel more explicitly. In the case of mortgages the complex element in need of a single quantifiable metric was "default risk." In the Cap and Trade market, that element is "warming impact."

In the case of mortages the complexity was overcome, not by solving for the complexity, but rather by finding a model which allowed them to ignore it entirely. In the case of cap and trade that very same kind of model is the "grand discovery" being trumpted in the article I noted at the beginning of this post.

In the case of mortgages the availability of this newly quantifiable metric spun off dizzying arrays of new financial derivatives greatly amplifying the importance and reach of all transactions based upon the certainty of their key measure - "default risk." In the case of cap and trade - well things are shaping up exactly the same. The only difference is the metric itself is "warming impact." And surely the model producing that could never prove prone to error.

In the case of mortgages the model achieved maximum impact throughout the financial system by its near universal adoption by those who scarcely understood the model itself. In the case of Cap and Trade that same effect is intended to be achieved by legislation mandating the adoption of such a model by implication. Think this is overstatement? Then try to think how a market would react to a wandering and arbitrary standard driven by political whim rather than predictable formula. That kind of uncertainty would kill this thing in the cradle. The only way to get this plan off the ground is to base it in the certainty of science and mutually agreed upon fact (or at least a compelling illusion of the same). That's why this "simple linear relationship" between carbon emissions and warming cited at the top of this post is so significant. It hands legislators a tool which doesn't require them to understand anything about the climate itself - they just need to measure one single thing. Once they have that legislated... Voilà! The market will do the rest.

Beware of conclusions that go searching for their supporting research. Double plus beware of such conclusions when trillions of dollars are on the line. And triple plus beware when the subsequently discovered supporting research relies upon speculative modeling in lieu of solid evidence. Taken together these have a collective quality of wish fulfillment. But genies belong in fairy tales and not our markets.

So whether you're the greenest of the green, or a card carrying global warming skeptic, you have plenty of reason for alarm. Another house of cards is being built before our eyes before we've even recovered from the collapse of the last one.

The new Federal Department of Unmeasurable Statistics estimated yesterday that super-extra focus on Hopenchange emanating from President Obama's transcendent consciousness, plus a few hundred billion dollars in deficit spending, will "create or save" precisely 600,000 more jobs by the end of the summer. This compares to how his slightly more distracted focus on Hopenchange (he was just moving in and had to take some time choosing the drapes, figuring out how to work the phone system, updating his business cards, etc) plus a few hundred billion dollars in deficit spending "created or saved" 150,000 jobs in his first 100 days. This comes as quite a relief as there were 345,000 jobs he forgot to "create or save" in May alone, and another 504,000 he forgot to "create or save" in April. All told there have been 1.6 million jobs which the president's glorious stimulativity didn't get around to "creating or saving" so far.

Or I mean there would be if that was measured by how many have been shed since the time we were warned how really, truly awful the jobs situation would get if we didn't let the president stimulate us back to a sound economy with gobs of borrowed money and a bevy or earmarks for his Democratic buddies in Congress. But I guess we're not doing that kind of measuring any more, preferring to focus on the far happier "created or saved" figure provided by magical pixies, or gnomes leaving post-it notes on white house computer screens in the wee hours of the morning, or however it's derived.

Of course reactionary cynics may note that it seems odd for the Obama administration to follow their prior attempt in "creating or saving" jobs by more of the same, when the economy actually shed 17% more jobs than said administration forecast would be lost if they did absolutely nothing to try to save them. This graph from Geoff at Innocent Bystanders illustrates this insolent observation of actual measurable employment numbers, rooted in the failed politics of the past which our Great Leader has promised to transcend:



But happy members of Obama-nation know this ignores the important foundational work going on in delivering us into a new era of Hopeyness. Can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, as the saying goes, and you can't "create or save" a few hundred thousand jobs without "collateral damage" to a few hundred thousand other jobs. That should just go without saying. I mean really people, does he have to spell everything out for you?

Next on the agenda... reforming the nation's health care system. We can surely look forward to President Obama providing the same kind of rigorous attention to detail and seriousness of thought in that arena as he's already demonstrating by "creating or saving" us toward double digit unemployment. And the same press corps which is boldly choosing not to question the president's transformatively non-falsifiable contentions is already gearing up to tell us how fantastically better it's going to make all of our lives. I for one can't wait.

UPDATE:

Yet another illustration showing how some people are still stuck in the tired old politics in which elected officials are expected to keep promises and are held to account for the actual results of their policies. It's sad how this guy just does not get Hopenchange.


(h/t Allah)

From Ed Morrisey, in the course of dissecting one of the latest intra-blogger feuds among the big blogs:

Rick, as is his wont, writes at length about his outrage:

Well yah... that's kind of the whole schtick, isn't it? After that it's just good for gossip. And we're surely above that.

Well this is the kind of thing that makes me shout spontaneous expletives!!

Restaurants come and restaurants go. Except, it seemed, D'Amico Cucina, which managed to maintain its lofty position at the summit of the Twin Cities' food chain for more than 20 years. No more. The luxury downtown Minneapolis restaurant, which regulars have long shorthanded to "Cucina," will serve its last dinner on June 27.

I am not shy in admitting I am ignoring the business angles here, since I can only assume this closing "makes sense" from there. I don't dispute that. I don't challenge that. I just hate the result.

Why? Because D'Amico Cucina can never be just a "business" to me. It will always be an experience ... an artistic assertion of the culinary order. You didn't go to D'Amico Cucina to be merely fed. You went to experience the culinary arts elevated to something... higher. Thankfully, in the Twin Cities, you can do that a lot of places now. But you know what? A lot of that is due to D'Amico Cucina...

...the restaurant's most enduring legacy might be its longtime role as an incubator of culinary talent. Its alumni have gone on to create the next generation of influential Twin Cities restaurants, including Tim McKee and Josh Thoma of La Belle Vie, Isaac Becker of 112 Eatery, Jim Grell of the Modern Cafe and a host of others.

As a pop culture metaphor, that's a legacy in Twin Cities dining not unlike saying the Beatles spun off the Stones, the Who, and Led Zep... I mean really.

You cannot even seriously TALK about food in the Twin Cities these days without reference to Tim McKee. La Belle Vie is far and away the best fine dining spot in town, which is where Josh Thoma adds to the McKee impact. And that doesn't even get into the handful of other top spots in town with McKee's name involved (Barrio, the new Cue, Smalley's Carribean Barbecue). Becker's 112 Eatery is pure gold and everyone knows it, even if it defies an easy niche. Grell's Modern Cafe is one of my personal favorite restaurants, and I eat there so often it's not even considered a special occasion. It's not a stretch to note that none of these would exist without D'Amico Cucina having been there developing its top talent in top of the line fashion.

What's more frustrating, food wise this was NOT a restaurant in decline!!

I personally LOVE what Chef John Occhiato has brought to the place. I've said before and I'll say once more, he's the best talent in that kitchen since Tim McKee. And I've tasted offerings from all the chefs since McKee.

Anyway I'm booking my final reservation for a restaurant that will undoubtedly be one of my all time favorites. I hope others do the same to give it a proper send off.

Kim Carlson is the Star Tribune's resident "green lifestyle" enthusiast. As such she fervently believes that making lifestyle changes in a direction called "green living" are not only a good idea, but constitute moral activity of the highest order. A few quick examples:

Kim spends time rating people on a scale from brown (i.e. despoilers of the planet) to deep green (i.e. the virtuous and pure). She's not an absolutist though. She allows that "brown" people can get "greener" over time. She's just fine with that... provided you are making an effort to move in a greener direction. Her world view is flexible like that.

She's also known for hectoring people about lawncare. You used chemical fertilizer on your lawn? She used fish guts and corn gluten. Simple lifestyle choice? Oh heck no. Remember, she's saving the planet. But what exactly does that make people who continue to fertilize their lawns the chemical way? Here's a hint... She characterizes her fish entrail strewn lawn compared to your lawn like this:

"[G]iven the choice, we would rather have a safe lawn than a painted green toxic lawn of perfection."

She probably has to wipe layers smug off the inside of her windows after driving down most suburban streets these days, with all those "painted green toxic and (sneer) perfect" lawns. Amazing what fish guts and plant waste can do for a greeniac's sense of self importance.

Oh but she's not done with your lawn. The grill in your backyard provides ample opportunity to engreen yourself as well. She wonders...

... is grilling still “ok” or is the environmental impact and carbon footprint of burning charcoal with a toxic liquid starter the equivalent of flying one person in a Airbus A380 to Paris -- an unforgivable eco-sin?

But relax, good reader. Saint Kim has concluded in our favor here, with a caveat of two...

Yes, you can, in fact, grill greenly if you pay attention to a few do’s and don’t’s:

After that come a few rules indicating that, among other things, you shouldn't use charcoal, or use charring or blackening on your meat, and also don't eat much meat in the first place. Have a great cookout... cooked over propane, without any char lines, and mostly meatless. Just a variation on a persistent theme in the green lifestyle - wringing the joy out of things you love.

Anyway, all that is a long set up so you know who Kim Carslon is and where she's coming from. It gives you a little context for understanding Kim's latest:

A couple of weeks ago it was a polar bear story that created an online uprising with cruel and biting comments about bear rugs and worse. Today, the story that climate change is killing people and causing billions of dollars in damage is causing another onslaught of anti everything green comments and even some bleeped out language from readers. ...

As for the seemingly out of proportion concern about bear rugs, please realize in Kim's world polar bears look like this:



But that's not really important. What's important is how Kim thinks through the groundbreakingly new issue of commenters disagreeing with her on a public discussion forum.

She, who's whole schtick consists of lecturing about how her own "greenness" makes her better than other people, tries to understand why people could possibly become hostile from one teensy reference to their benighted "brown" ways... "killing people and causing billions of dollars in damage." I mean really. She told you about putting fish guts on your yard, didn't she?! She told you to serve crappier food from your backyard grill, didn't she?! She can only assume if you didn't do it you wanted to cause death and destruction. If that's your lifestyle choice, why is it such a big deal when she points it out?

Luckily, Kim has a quick explanation for it... you're afraid of change. And not the sensible kind of fear about change - like fearing climate change. Lord knows Kim wants you to remain terrified of that particular change. No no, you're afraid because you hardly know anyone anymore who doesn't live their life according to Kim's green gospel. Her kind are inheriting the earth, while there's only like a dozen of you "brown"people left. As a result, you're lonely and scared and lashing out at polar bears.

As God and the Star Tribune website are my witnesses, I am not making this up...

I believe that the root of these negative sentiments is that some people can’t cope with change. Our world is changing and some simply can’t deal with it. They are part of a dwindling group of people who are on the brown end of the green behavior spectrum and they are very vocal because they have to be. They are dwindling in numbers and have lost support as people have been waking up to the serious environmental pickle that we have gotten ourselves in. The fact that the planet’s population is moving towards sustainability culturally, economically, and spiritually is threatening to them. The blog comments are the only way that they can make their voices heard. It almost makes me feel bad for them… but for pete's sake, leave the polar bears alone!

It doesn't even cross Kim's mind that there might be some more immediate source of reader hostility toward her new Green piety, with it's special combination of preening smuggery, uncritical acceptance and repetition of any news item castigating the modern American lifestyle, and cult-like refusal to consider alternatives to their emotion-heavy, fact-light view of the natural world. Actually amend that. It's not that she hasn't considered it. It's just that... gosh almost everyone she can think of believes in all that stuff already. It's only a couple dozen old cranks so set in their ways they probably don't adjust their clocks for daylight savings time who could even conceive of another perspective.

Of course, outside the happy green confines of Kim's worldview there is a real world slightly at odds with this perspective. The real world is not as neat and happily green as Kim imagines it to be. And you can tell this because in the real world, polar bears look like this:



And they also make great rugs.

Paul Krugman is concerned about inflation. No... That's not quite correct. He's concerned that YOU are concerned about inflation. In fact he thinks you're kind of a moron who just may be pissing away our unicorn and rainbow dreams in this era of Hopenchange by all your scaremongering about inflation.

The first reason Krugman says you shouldn't worry about inflation is because it could only be a problem if the economy ever actually recovered. But as there's no real indication this is happening (he's not a big believer in those "green shoots" the White House boasts about seeing apparently), forget about inflation. Depression era deflation should be the worry (soming soon: Paul Krugman's column calling you a moron for worrying about deflation).

Okay so... let's say some day in the distant future the economy actually recovers. Inflation could be a problem then, right? I mean... we're accumulating a massive debt "stimulating" our way into the recovery Paul Krugman thinks we needn't worry about. That eventually has to be paid to the people who loaned us all the money, right? And if the debt gets too massive, it could look awfully tempting to inflate the currency so the real value that needs to be paid back becomes relatively less. We should worry about that, right?

No, says Paul Krugman. You know why? Because it's just possible we won't do it, that's why. Belgium, Canada, and Japan didn't after all, when their debt exceeded 100 percent of their GDP. I mean... sure France did once after World War I. And, he doesn't mention, but I will, Argentina did it in the 90's. But look we don't have to do it, so just stop worrying about it. Shut up, that's why.

But then he gets to the heart of the matter... the shadowy reason he suspects all this nonsensical inflation scarin' is spreading around like Swine Flu... Because not everyone has embraced the free spending ways of the Lightbringer In-Chief...

But it’s hard to escape the sense that the current inflation fear-mongering is partly political, coming largely from economists who had no problem with deficits caused by tax cuts but suddenly became fiscal scolds when the government started spending money to rescue the economy. And their goal seems to be to bully the Obama administration into abandoning those rescue efforts.

I don't know. Call me a skeptic, but I have a feeling the inflation fear is not so much about whether or not the deficit comes from tax cuts or massive spending increases, but rather because folks see a bit of a difference between hundred billion dollar deficits sitting as the outliers of an economic plan and a projected stream of trillion dollar plus budget deficits with no plan to ever resolve them. You know... kind of like they looked at this old chart (which, I should point out, erred on the optimistic side by presuming the economy would be growing again by the end of the year - Krugman says we needn't "worry" about that):


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That's either one loooooong rescue, or just maybe we've got a spending problem that's going to catch up with us sooner or later. So we don't inflate when the debt hits 100 percent GDP, eh? How about when it hits 200 percent? 500 percent? What is the president's plan to prevent that from happening?

He hasn't given one yet. But it apparently has to do with creating a new health care entitlement to cover every American. Does that sound like deficit reduction or even more massive debt to you?

In other words, yes Mr. Krugman, there is some fear of inflation out there. And no, your assurances that all will be okay aren't quite the reassuring tonic for our nerves you seem to believe.

The code of the Aggressively Opinionated Political Blogging Association suggests that I am required to opine about President Obama's nomination of some judge named Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. No matter how fervently I may protest that I don't know anything about the nominee and only have a hazy understanding of proper qualifications for such an appointment, the code insists. Just click around the blogosphere if you doubt me. It's got a full range of opinions about this matter ranging from knee-jerk all the way to official political party talking points. You think that kind of uniform agreement to cover something just happens on its own? No, no. It's the demanding AOPBA code forcing all of our bloggy hands.

To that end, here is my opinion on the nomination of Judge Sotomayor to the Supreme Court:

Ever since the Democratic Party broke from precedent and politicized Supreme Court nominations with their infamous "Borking" of President Reagan's nominee in the 80's (by some cosmic coincidence he was actually named Judge Bork!), these things have become ever more naked exercises of pure political muscle. The process isn't yet quite debauched enough to get a barnyard animal appointed to the nation's highest court, but it's headed down that same path. The kind of intra-party revolt that greeted the last president's nomination of a good personal buddy with few serious qualifications to a Supreme Court vacancy is a rarity I expect to get rarer over time.

Besides, most of the opinions getting generated over this matter have only a tangential relationship to the nominee in question. Partisan rivals are mostly looking for reasons to expose flaws in one another rather than seriously considering the merits of the nomination.

Democrats are writing articles about how the Republicans better not oppose her. Why? Because she's eminently qualified and carrying impeccable credentials, the integrity of which would shame any critic into silence? No, no. Because she's Hispanic and a woman. And if Republicans try to oppose her their opponents will label them racist and sexist and attempt to destroy their ability to get votes from either of those demographics. So that's one version of responsible vetting for the most powerful unelected position in the land.

Republicans, by careful contrast, are looking for evidence in the nominee's record that she holds liberal political views and allows them to influence her judicial decisions. In other words, they're looking for evidence that the nominee might be someone a liberal president would be inclined to nominate. Talk about closing the barn door after the horse is out.

Still there are other lines of careful vetting going on... like trying to find any possible angle that would make undecided voters see their opposition as something other than a knee jerk partisan reaction. This will go on with great enthusiasm for some time. But let's try to put it onto a bit of context.

The Democrats don't need a single Republican vote to confirm the nominee. And they need only one - none if Al Franken is seated in the Senate shortly - to overcome a possible Republican filibuster. Also the Democrats, with very, very few exceptions, couldn't care less what any Republican thinks about this nominee. What they care about is how they might be able to use what the Republicans do and say in the course of the confirmation process against them. And the feeling across the aisle is mutual.

So what we are engaged in here is just another exercise in posturing, positioning, and grandstanding. A Supreme Court nomination is involved here to the same extent that a football game is involved with the Tournament of Roses Parade. Neither one really requires the other, but it's become a venerable tradition to hold them together.

Oh, as for Judge Sotomayor herself? I hope she's well qualified for the office; that all her judgey experience looks properly judgey and experienced; and that she isn't caught on tape somewhere engaging in strange and/or illegal personal hobbies. If all that's in order she's going to be seated anyway so I don't see the great need for me to get worked up about it. I'm under no expectations that His Presidential Coolness made this pick with any intention of pleasing me. And should this nomination fail he'll just nominate another with more or less the same kind of views. So forgive me if I don't bother to look too deeply into the matter.

If you're disturbed by this kind of judge getting onto the Supreme Court, ignore all this confirmation kabuki and try to get someone more to your liking elected president to make the nominations next time.

From: Sheldon Comics
Enjoy the giggle, peasants.

The truth is some of the chefs who earn the big bucks actually do know how to make dessert. And they are already well aware of "mom & pop" fare. It's one basis - among many others - upon which they build their dishes.

But laugh, you proletarian pie-eaters. Enjoy your delusions of thinking all those people dropping hundreds of dollars for a dinner are fools because your local diner has better food. It keeps you happy, and that's really important too.

Wow, has this season of Idol ever seemed to fly. It feels like just a couple of weeks ago I was yucking it up over the comedic skills of Nick "Normund Gentle" Mitchell, jazzing on the psycho-personality (but very good voice) of Tatiana del Toro, declaring Jasmine Murray the "teen to beat" of the season, and a bit surprised when Von Smith failed to make the final 13.

And suddenly it's down to just the final two: Adam "Glambert" Lambert, and Kris "20-1" Allen.

And where do I get that "20-1" thingy about Kris from? Well after the top 13 were announced, some doofus blogger handicapped the top 13, and those were the odds he he assigned to Kris. In said blogger's defense, he did qualify that ranking thusly:

I have to admit there is some breakout potential here. Compared to some of the consensus front-runners so far, he's definitely flown under the radar. What's more he's definitely got serious vocal talent and stage experience. He'll need to expand his boy-band niche to have a serious shot, but stranger things have happened.

Consider that challenge capably met, the potential breakout broken open wide, and an expansion from the boy-band niche nicely accomplished.

As for Adam, here were the comments:

Adam Lambert 2-1

If there is any contestant who has the capacity to bring something totally new to the Idol stage, it's Adam. He has ridiculous vocal skill and versatility. He has extensive stage experience, so expect no jitters here. Could he take a wrong turn by going too far into threatrical showmanship? Sure. Just as likely he'll find a way to tap into that to find a performance or two that blows the rest of the contenders away. A quick stroll around the Internet tells me he's already the contender people look to for originality and creative spins on whatever theme they announce. That kind of excitement can go a long way. If he performs to the best of his ability, it might be good enough to overwhelm the best from any other contender.

There have been times this season when Adam threatened to run away with the competition all by himself. But the strong efforts of his rivals and the inevitable "less than perfect" performances on Adam's part some weeks kept things close enough. And now we enter a finale which is simply too close to call.

Perusing the internet I notice a persistent theme in the coverage of this finale, and it's pretty tiresome. So can I just go on record as not believing there is some great social symbolism in which portion of America Adam or Kris supposedly represents. Yes, one of them does hail from the left coast, while the other one is from the south. Yes, one of them has pursued his musical interest in the theater while the other one did so in his church. But honestly, following the whole season, has either one of them presented himself as representing anything more than a love of performing the kind of music they like? And as for the "tradition" versus" innovation" meme, did anyone making this contention take the time to notice that Kris' stripped down accoustic arrangement of Kanye's "Heartless" was more innovative and daring than Adam's theatrical presentation of U2's "One" last week? Come on, these guys are different people from different backgrounds but they don't represent some sharp dividing line. Amercian musical interest doesn't work like that, no matter how people try to make it. < /soapbox>

So now we come to the big showdown itself. They're going to each sing three songs. One will be chosen for them by Simon Fuller, another will be their own choice of something they performed earlier in the season, and then they'll each take a crack at this year's "championship" song, which Kara DioGuardi had a hand in crafting. Sounds like a decently fair way to compare the two, provided Simon Fuller doesn't screw it up with his choices for them.

And I, for one, do not miss the contributions of the average song-writing schlubs who penned the past couple of years' "championship" songs in a viewers' song-writing contest. The same kind of shmaltzy crap that was written for the show previously seemed to be exactly what the contest produced anyway. I'll never forgive the stupid "magic rainbow" lyric David Cook was forced to release as part of his first single after winning last season. This way if the song stinks we'll know who to mock for it - Kara. And we've gotten pretty used to that by this point in the season.

So let's get this finale started. Lights... camera... medicate Paula... cue the b-dow, b-dow, b-dow machine... it's....

Paul Krugman today:

"In a way, it was easy to take stands during the Bush years: the Bushies and their allies in Congress were so determined to move the nation in the wrong direction that one could, with a clear conscience, oppose all the administration’s initiatives."

To me this is the clearest explanation cum confession offered by an ostensibly thoughtful lefty about where the heck their common sense and intellectual integrity went during the past eight years. They left them behind "with a clear conscience," in the name of morally pure opposition.

Krugman is not an idiot. And yet anyone from quick-thinking geniuses to nose-picking morons knew exactly what Krugman's opinion was going to be about any issue for the past eight years - his opinion was the opposite of whatever the Bush administration supported. Krugman substituted a reliably pure strain of reactionism for thoughtful commentary and bleated it with all the gusto of an agitated sheep. Only now that scary Republicans do not inhabit the land's highest offices does he feel free again to flex his long neglected thinking parts.

Without getting into a whole "the media is biased" diatribe, this is the problem when media classes turn into left-right cliques. Krugman spent the last eight years in blind, unthinking opposition, and probably made himself more popular because of it. The lefties didn't want to hear careful thought about a Republican administration. They wanted their smart people to give them smart sounding justifications for their automatic opposition to everything that administration attempted. Krugman more than happily danced to that tune. The fact that this schtick works just as well for right-leaning pundits doesn't change the basic point - it's a fundamentally anti-intellectual approach to punditry. Rather than using reason to determine one's opinion, the opinion comes first and reason is used simply to justify it after the fact.

Now that the need for automatic rejection of an administration's efforts has passed, we're actually getting some punditry that doesn't start with a pre-determined conclusion. As an unintended consequence Paul Krugman is actually starting to become interesting again, and it's kind of amusing that this is something he himself realizes and admits, albeit not in quite those terms.

Don't get me wrong - he's still not right. He advocates the same collection of warmed over late 20th century liberalism as any of the other conventional lefty pundits. But at least now he feels like he has to explain it. And that makes a striking difference in his commentary.

I'll come back and do a proper take down of his bad opinions later. But for now I offer a simple congratulations and welcome back to a Man of the Left. You are once again becoming readable to people who don't necessarily share your conclusions, and that's an accomplishment I didn't think you had left in you.

And then there were three. And what a three they are.

All but the best Idol seaons have stumbled around a bit with their top three week. Even last season, certainly one of the best, stumbled a bit on this particular week, as things built toward the long awaited David vs. David showdown.

And yet this year as things were supposed to be building toward the great Lambert / Gokey showdown too much talent got in the way and we have a third strong contender rather than a sacrificial victim. Kris Allen very much belongs in the midst of things here. What's more he brings a distinctive style which is not quite what either Adam Lambert or Danny Gokey offer. We have three disctinct and strong voices still vying for the title. It should be quite the penultimate challenge.

Of course we do have to suffer through the judging. And never has a season of Idol offered up a panel quite as certain to try to make the show all about themselves. I don't entirely blame Kara, the new judge, for this vibe. Paula's newfound sobriety is probably just as much to blame. Still.

But we shall suffer through it. The schtick this week is that the judges will pick one song for the contestants, and they will pick another of their own choice. My pre-call is that the judge's calls won't matter much. The individual choices of the contestants are going to blow wide open the audience preferences already established, as all of them will strongly assert their personalities which are VERY different from one another. We'll see how that plays out.

Anyway let's get rolling before Seacrest breaks in with a cute stunt to take us to commercial break...

Anthony Watts has been performing a long running survey of the surface stations monitoring temperature in the United States. With 70% of his survey completed, he posted his updated report, entitled: Is the U.S. Temperature Record Reliable?

From the executive summary (all emphases mine):

Global warming is one of the most serious issues of our times. Some experts claim the rise in temperature during the past century was “unprecedented” and proof that immediate action to reduce human greenhouse gas emissions must begin. Other experts say the warming was very modest and the case for action has yet to be made.

The reliability of data used to document temperature trends is of great importance in this debate. We can’t know for sure if global warming is a problem if we can’t trust the data.

The official record of temperatures in the continental United States comes from a network of 1,221 climate-monitoring stations overseen by the National Weather Service, a department of the National Oceanic and atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Until now, no one had ever conducted a comprehensive review of the quality of the measurement environment of those stations.

The obvious truth of the first statement I bolded above renders the final sentence nearly scandalous.

As anyone who works with data in the private sector knows, challenges to the integrity of data happen routinely - especially when the data seems to point to unexpected or alarming issues. If your project produces a report that suggests a multi-million dollar strategic initiative is failing, you'd better be damned certain that your numbers will hold up under the kind of intense scrutiny such a conclusion will inevitably bring. That's how it works in the private sector anyway.

And yet, here we are, how many years into a full blown "climate change crisis", and the government agency responsible for collecting a great deal of the data upon which the alarm is based hasn't bothered to check to see if there might be a data quality problem at the data collection points. This isn't just a minor matter. The current administration has announced plans to "transform" the entire energy sector of the economy based to a large extent on this very data.

Of course, if this survey was performed and only a few minor problems were discovered it wouldn't be much on an issue. Unfortunately for the NOAA, that is not what is being found:

In fact, we found that 89 percent of the stations – nearly 9 of every 10 – fail to meet the National Weather Service’s own siting requirements that stations must be 30 meters (about 100 feet) or more away from an artificial heating or radiating/reflecting heat source.

In other words, 9 of every 10 stations are likely reporting higher or rising temperatures because they are badly sited.

A failure rate of 20% should be considered appalling in this case. But a failure rate of 90%? Words fail.

Garbage in, garbage out - that's one of the essential aphorisms in the world of computing, and it applies especially to situations where one is relying on predictive modeling. It is only owing to such predictive models that a "climate crisis" has been declared. And yet for some reason no government agency has bothered to check the input for the kind of "garbage" Mr. Watts has uncovered on his own initiative.

There is very good reason for skeptics to question the honesty of those who grow shrill about the impending catastrophe coming from human induced climate change when the most basic of tests for data integrity seem to have escaped their attention.

Watt's conclusion is inevitable and yet still remarkable:

The conclusion is inescapable: The U.S. temperature record is unreliable.

The errors in the record exceed by a wide margin the purported rise in temperature of 0.7º C (about 1.2º F) during the twentieth century. Consequently, this record should not be cited as evidence of any trend in temperature that may have occurred across the U.S. during the past century. Since the U.S. record is thought to be “the best in the world,” it follows that the global database is likely similarly compromised and unreliable.

That statement about the global database is remarkable for two reasons. The first is that it would beg for an explanation of why and how the notion of U. S. temperature record gained such a lofty reputation. Obviously something other than actual evidence was involved here, and it certainly wasn't any track record of rigorous attention to detail.

Secondly, with all the money being thrown around by governments of the world toward "combatting global warming," shouldn't there be some spare funds to pay for a similar surface station survey outside the U. S.? Let's find out where the data truly may be reliable, and weed out where it isn't.

Read the full report (pdf link) for a far more detailed picture of the situation. The extent to which Watt's survey is ignored by the very government agencies responsible will tell us a lot about their dedication to science and integrity.

I'm going to put this out there right from the start: Best. Top 4. Ever. At least that's my impression going into this week.

I don't mean any one of these is guaranteed the post Idol success of Carrie Underwood or Chris Daughtry or anything. I mean as a group, based on their talent, they stack up with the very best. On a drama level of not knowing who will win, this top four stacks up with the very best prior seasons. And I quite like the odds for post Idol success of this top four compared to other seasons as well, though that's a lot easier to see after the fact than before.

To see where I'm coming from, let's compare to the top fours of prior Idol seaons:

Season 1: Kelly Clarkson, Justin Guarini , Nikki McKibbin, Tamyra Gray - With the exception of Kelly, this season's talent level wasn't even close to later seasons. After all, it was not yet a runaway phenomenon.

Season 2: Ruben Studdard, Clay Aiken, Kimberley Locke, Josh Gracin - For a long time after this was the gold standard among Idol seasons for drama, with a season long frontrunner (Ruben) pressed down to the wire by three who were almost laughable longshots early in the season, and all of whom would follow the season with some recording success.

Season 3: Fantasia Barrino, Diana DeGarmo, Jasmine Trias, La Toya London - The "3 divas" Idol season limped into the finish after Jennifer Hudson was eliminated. Half of this field wouldn't place so highly in any other Idol season save perhaps the first.

Season 4: Carrie Underwood, Bo Bice, Vonzell Solomon, Anthony Fedorov - Carrie and Bo were running away at this point, rendering Vonzell and Anthony mere filler. Also forgotten in her post-Idol success is how Carrie often struggled not to be boring despite her obvious talent in her Idol days.

Season 5: Taylor Hicks, Katharine McPhee, Elliott Yamin, Chris Daughtry - Oddly enough biggest post-Idol stars from this field were the two who placed third and fourth - Yamin and Daughtry. Taylor Hicks, likable as he was, remains probably the weakest Idol champion ever based on post-Idol success. With the "Soul Patrol" in full swing, Taylor making it into the finals was never in doubt by this stage.

Season 6: Jordin Sparks, Blake Lewis, Melinda Doolittle, LaKisha Jones - This season was a bit of a mess, with only Jordin Sparks capturing much post-Idol mojo. Blake Lewis is remembered more for his beatboxing than his singing. Melinda Doolittle's amazing vocal talent is scarcely remembered at all.

Season 7: David Cook, David Archuleta, Syesha Mercado, Jason Castro - This group looks stronger than it truly was by the time it became the top four. Jason Castro was spent by this point, struggling hard just to learn his songs on time. Syesha Mercado was battling back against a loooong stretch of mediocrity just to stay alive. Everyone knew this was really just a contest between the Davids by now.

And that brings us to...

Season 8: Adam Lambert, Danny Gokey, Allison Iraheta, Kris Allen - Every one of these singers has enough talent to hold their own against any other season top four contestant. And each of them has shown enough combination of versatility and performance skill that they still might shake up the expected finish order. The expectation has long been it will be a Lambert/Gokey final. But would it shock anyone to see Allison OR Kris in there? It wouldn't shock me.

And that brings us to another thing - Rock Week. Best. Top 4. Theme. Ever.

Seriously, last year the climactic top 4 theme was - Rock and Roll... Hall of Fame. That's like what Rock sounded like back in the day when your dad walked to school sixteen miles uphill both ways. With all the devotion to sounding "current" paid by the Idol judges, that seemed like a bit of a joke. It was also random as heck.

But themes at this stage have been even worse before. In Season Five this was Elvis week.

This year's top 4 theme? Rock. Mentor? Slash. Any questions?

This would be a really difficult theme for most seasons to even attempt. Scroll up a bit to where I listed previous seasons' top fours and just try to imagine it. I'll wait. ... That hurt, didn't it? And that was just thinking about it.

But this season, Adam and Allison are both expected to easily handle rock. Kris is expected to be versatile enough to roll with it. Danny might go a bit too ballady, but he certainly has the vocal chops to take on the theme. It's got us wondering. It's got us speculating. It's got potential for awesome good OR awesome bad. Hit the jump to find out which.

Say remember this?

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That's the chart that shows the Obama administration & CBO's projected deficits based on the Obama administration's budget plan. We've got a new little development to it. It was, apparently, too optimistic. (h/t Ed)

So those numbers above? We're not actually expecting to hit those numbers anymore. Now we're planning on them being even worse - even bigger deficits in the short term as well as the long term.

This is, of course, being entirely ignored by a fawning media who still want to declare O-ba-ma! the greatest president evah! on the basis of his first 100 days in office. That would be the period within which he delivered that little plan charted out above. Ginormous structural deficits ballooning as far as the eye can see are apparently now evidence of progress.

Which reminds me I keep meaning to ask all those "Progressives" what it is we're supposed to be "progessing" toward. Because if that chart above is any indication, it's not going to be a very pleasant destination.

Not that I seriously expect much of a rational explanation from the "progressive" wing. Trying to follow their reasoning so far, they seem to believe that the Bush deficits were totally awful and irresponsible. But Obama is not Bush. Therefore his doubling or tripling of the deficit isn't a problem. I mean just, duh. That's reality-based.

Call me crazy, but I have a feeling there might be a negative effect or two from trying to run the nation on a credit card indefinitely. And maybe... just maybe... O-ba-ma! might not remain so popular if people ever come to share that opinion.

As anyone with even basic experience running a project knows, assuming infinite resources can make it look like you can accomplish anything. And as long as no one actually expects you to deliver, I suppose that's a neat trick. But when it's time to deliver (which may be a moment Obama has yet to experience in his professional life), that "infinite resources" assumption tends to bite back hard. And when your "project" is "The United States of America," people may get a wee bit impatient if your delivery schedule slips as a result.

It's Rat Pack Night on Idol, and I don't care who wants to snark about it I love this theme. The songs are jazz standards, almost all of which have aged well. They can be arranged to suit a ton of different styles, but many lend themselves to being sung simply and sincerely. I also like that we're trying this particular theme with this particular set of Idolateers, because it will challenge every one of them in different ways. No one has the excuse of being a theme casualty this week. Anyone should be able to make this theme work for them.

I am, however, dreading the judges comments this week. Listening to Randy regale us with tales of how he played with Sammy Davis Jr. back in the day, or Kara wondering why Allison picked such an old song, or Paula... alright, that one's pretty much always dreaded. And of course, Simon is going to goof around terribly if the other judges get too far off base, which they will, possibly depriving us of the only decent commentary.

Anyway, the Rat Pack were fabulous fun. The birth of cool, ring-a-ding-ding and all that. It will be hard to capture the "cool" if they try to push up the contestants to two songs apiece tonight, so I hope previous rumors to that effect are wrong. Let them give a full three minutes on one song instead of 90 seconds of two, please. That will mercifully cut the judgey babble in half also, and I don't think America would protest that a bit.

Just my opinion of course. And as the Rat Pack joke goes: As the fly said as he was walking across the mirror... that's one way of looking at it. Let's see how it went down...

After an American Idol performance broadcast, thousands of viewers rush to Dial Idol to try to get a sense of who's going home well before the results are broadcast. Dial Idol made its name a few years back, when it proved uncannily correct in some of the more shocking results predictions.

However, few seem to have noticed it's been giving itself a wider and wider margin of error lately, until it has finally hit the point of farce.

The way Dial Idol performs its predictions is by "measuring the busy signal" when trying to call in to vote for all the Idol contestants. The ones with the most busy signal time are the safest. The ones with the least are most likely to go home. Then they display their busy signal measuring results in sequential order in a friendly brightly colored bar graph on their site. But their prediction isn't quite as precise as that.

You see at the end of the bar graph they display a helpful "range," which is their actual prediction for where the contestants respectively place, and subsequently who is safe and who is at risk to go home. This has become quite a hedge in recent seasons, but especially this one.

Last night Dial Idol predicted, I kid you not, that any one of the contestants might go home. Lil Rounds had the highest score, meaning she should have had the MOST busy signal time, rendering her the safest from elimination. But in that "range" they predicted she would finish anywhere from first to sixth. And since the sixth and seventh highest vote getters would go home, Dial Idol technically predicted that she could go home. And on that basis today they displayed this happy little icon next to their "prediction":

That's the graphic showing how incredibly accurate their predictions are. When they get it right they give themselves a thumbs up. Isn't that cute?

But since last night they predicted that every single contestant might go home, they "earned" a happy thumbs up for their flawless predictive skills. As far as they reckon.

They actually gave themselves three of them:

Because Lil Rounds went home, which could mean she came in sixth. And even though she has the most busy signal time, they said she could finish from first to sixth.

And then because Anoop Desai went home, which could mean he came in seventh. And even though he had the fourth most busy signal time, they said he could finish from first to seventh.Got that? They predicted that one of seven contestants could finish from first to seventh. That isn't a prediction at all, but they decided they earned another...

And then, because Allison Iraheta finished in the bottom three, and even though she had the least amount of busy signal time, they said she could finish from third to seventh that earned another...


Here's the screen cap to capture their moment of uncanny prediction for posterity:



Meanwhile, without measuring anything at all, I predicted Lil Rounds and Anoop Desai would go home. And I didn't hedge that in any way by saying "or maybe one or two of the five others" or any stupidity like that. So I guess I earned myself something a bit bigger than...

Hey, sorry for my cop out on the Idol recaps last week. But I do think it's pretty cool that by some cosmic coincidence, the one week I had to mail-it-in on the recapping, the entire week became a huge cop out for Idol as well, eliminating no contestant after its nothing of a theme week.

Well this week is different, baby! We've got a potentially awesome theme with Disco Week (remembering that awesomely bad still counts for awesome). We've got not one but TWO contestants going home, dropping our Top 7 to a Top 5 in record time. We've got my keen insight back in action recording the fantabulousness of the whole thing for posterity. And we've got Ryan Seacrest being... all Seacresty I'm sure.

They've done Disco Week once in the past as I recall. Season 2 or 3, I think? And then back in Season 6 we had BeeGees week, which was pretty darned close, and I remember as somehow being awful in a compelling way. Anyway it's a good theme, if the goal is tripping up the contestants to weed out the weak. Not so good if we're serious about "good song choice" and "making it sound relevant," but then Simon doesn't actually choose these themes.

So let's get down with Disco and see how our Idolateers fare against the musical cheese-whiz which dominated the music charts shortly before the oldest among them was born. Because we're cruel like that.