This story broke on Monday, but every day since then new info has come to light and there’s a lot we now know about the good Senator Larry Craig of Idaho--much more than we ever wanted to know. The first thing that came to my mind was the outing of Jim McGreevey of NJ, but that was different ‘cause he was hardly closeted in the first place and he immediately gave us the legendary “My truth...is that I am a gay American,” speech. It also reminded me of Mark Foley and especially Ted Haggard, the pastor from Colorado who got busted taking drugs with a male gigolo last October.
I really don’t know what to say. A conservative Republican with a 100% pro-family voting record and a good home life, and this happens? I cannot begin to understand what this guy was thinking. Now, of course, Craig is denying that he did what he clearly confessed to doing earlier this summer, which begs the question: If he didn’t do it, then why did he admit to doing it? Did he think he could sweep this under the rug? Either way, it leaves us with serious questions about the man’s judgment. It’s more than I can handle--realizing that there are people like this in positions of power in this country.
So, what do we do now? Well, most leaders in the Christian community--myself included--have called for Sen. Craig to resign. I think that Townhall.com’s Kevin McCullough is absolutely right when he says that Craig’s presence in the Senate will hurt the image of Republicans and, even if he stays on and continues to vote for legislation defending family values, we will all look like hypocrites. That is certainly not what either the Church or the Republican Party need right now. Don’t tell me that Craig is just another victim of mainstream media bias and that Barney Frank or Jim McGreevey haven’t been scrutinized nearly as much; as strange as it is to hear myself saying it, their political philosophies are consistent with their lifestyles while Craig’s is not.
As Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family remarked last year when Ted Haggard got caught, every time a purported man of God is caught in this lasciviousness, the enemies of God and the family are strengthened. He cited 2 Samuel 12:14, Nathan’s admonishment of David after his affair with Bathsheba and subsequent disposal of her husband, Uriah: (...by this deed thou hast given great occasion to the enemies of the Lord to blaspheme...). I couldn’t agree more. Remember, our most important witness is our lives, not our words.
Senator Craig must go. Bon voyage.
Friday, August 31, 2007
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Biofuels and Energy Policy
Given the recent rash of concerns about the environment, bringing with them a rediscovered interest in alternative fuels, it’s no wonder that biofuels have garnered so much international media attention. Government officials, entrepreneurs, scientists, environmentalists, and farmers have collaborated to help reduce dependency on petroleum. They have tried new technologies, retooled old ones, and, in some cases, virtually raided the kitchen cabinets to see if anything in them can be tossed into a gas tank and make an internal-combustion engine run. This has created one of the most bizarre dichotomies that economists have ever seen: should farmers use their land to grow substances that will ultimately be converted into biofuels, or should they continue to simply produce food? Before we recommend that they choose the former, we must examine the economic and environmental impacts of a mass agricultural shift from food to fuel.
Ever since Americans experienced the crippling fuel shortages brought on by the 1973 OPEC embargo, they have sought ways to avoid another energy crisis. One of the proposed solutions was to invest in biofuels, the name assigned to a group of alcohols known as ethanol (grain alcohol), and methanol (wood alcohol), which are very comparable to gasoline but cannot be used in place of it; and biodiesel, for use in trucks, tractors, generators and other heavy equipment. Nearly every first-world nation has since subsidized farmers, researchers, or both in an attempt to put biofuels to good use. Countries that are conducive to corn or sugar production, such as the United States and Brazil, respectively, are able to produce more ethanol; in Europe, the various types of crops grown there are usually turned into biodiesel, as it has the advantage of being able to be distilled from a wide variety of plant sources. Neither area suffers from food shortages, and petroleum prices are at all-time highs, so why not convert even more crops into biofuels?
The reason is because nothing in the economy happens in a vacuum. With the new demand for ethanol, more corn has been siphoned away from the food supply, which has doubled the price of cattle feed in some places. As ethanol demand is expected to steadily increase in the near future, the shockwaves of rising corn prices could be felt by everyone from cattle farmers to soda pop drinkers. When one considers the proportionately low demand for ethanol as opposed to gasoline, and the massive acreage required to grow the corn needed to produce such a trivial amount of it, we must ask ourselves if corn-based ethanol is really such a prudent use of resources after all. The fact cannot be overlooked that if it were not for political pressure from environmentalists, and, most importantly, government subsidies, the ethanol industry in the U.S. probably would not even exist in the first place.
In his 2007 State of the Union Address, President Bush called for an expansion of the Renewable Fuel Standard which would promote the use of biofuels, primarily ethanol and biodiesel. The anticipated output would be 35 billion gallons by the year 2017, which would be a nearly nine-fold increase from 2006 levels. Whether that figure is attainable or not depends on many factors such as population growth, automotive fuel efficiency, driving patterns, and trends in competing energy markets.
Of the many impending challenges associated with making Bush’s biofuels strategy a reality, there are two that warrant our immediate attention. The first is that if current petroleum consumption trends continue, 35 billion gallons of biofuels in the year 2017 will represent approximately the same percentage of the energy sector as it does now. There must be an concerted effort by Americans to control their aggregate fuel consumption, or else all the alternative fuel in the world will not satisfy their energy appetite.
Secondly, if today’s corn market is already starting to buckle under the weight of rising ethanol demand, and since the landmass available for farming is not going to multiply in size, what will happen in ten years when there is, in economic terminology, an 875% increase in the demand for corn? By that time, the population will have increased significantly, thereby necessitating more food production. In the present day, even if all of the corn grown in the United States were diverted away from the food industry and used exclusively for ethanol production, it would only replace about twelve percent of the gasoline used by Americans. In the future, we will need more energy, and more food, so it can be assumed that Bush’s optimistic agenda can be realized in only one of two ways, or both: someone must find a way to grow more corn faster, in the mode of the high-yield farming techniques pioneered during the Green Revolution of the 1960s, or we must simply find another way to make biofuels. The second choice might involve something as rudimentary as importing other ethanol-producing crops, like sugar beets a la Brazil, or an event as profound as an Edisonian discovery by some visionary researcher, perhaps the development of an invention or technique that could revolutionize worldwide renewable fuel production. Without an extraordinary occurrence along those lines, it is unlikely that the Renewable Fuels Standard will meet its ambitious expectations.
* * *
With our knowledge of the current technology and resources available, and taking into account all economic and environmental representation, the proposition that governments should have the final say in deciding which fuels to develop and commercialize is inadvisable. The market must be the driving force in the development of any new technology, and this is no exception. The race to develop an effective way to bring larger quantities of renewable fuels into the marketplace is underway because of climate concerns, national security issues, and the simple geological reality that fossil fuels will not be around forever. Let us engage the first two issues right away.
Although we are not entirely apathetic to the concerns of climate change activists, there is little reason to subscribe to their United Nations and European Union-funded apocalyptic propaganda, all of which has very little to do with science, but has everything to do with disrupting capitalist societies like the U.S. and propping up the failed socialist economies of Western Europe. The evidence is undeniable, as they like to say, that the world is coming to an end....that is, unless successful free-market nations all but shut down their powerful infrastructures in order to placate the specter of global warming. That would allow obstinate European welfare states, who refuse to come to terms with the demise of socialism and would rather stick their heads in the sand like the proverbial ostrich, as they accuse legitimate climate scientists of doing, to catch up in the economic race. They may be popular with the uneducated masses and egotistical elites in journalism and entertainment, but if we lend too much credence to the financially and politically-motivated Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and their quasi-religious encyclicals known as Climate Assessment Reports, we make a mockery of science, and eventually, our campaign to raise public support for alternative fuels will suffer.
Then there are the protectionists, who call for government intervention to drastically reduce importation of foreign energy sources, particularly Middle Eastern oil. This trade imbalance, they claim, enriches the leaders of totalitarian regimes, and makes America vulnerable to terrorist attacks from extremist groups incensed by oil being taken from ‘their’ homeland. In order to demonstrate the fallacy of this manner of thinking, it must be pointed out that the Middle Eastern oil producers are not the same as the Middle East-based terror groups, lest we confuse the two. Think of the countries in that part of the world, and where their economies would be without a steady oil trade with the United States. Consider this analogy: suppose there were a terrorist group, let’s say, somewhere in the Midwestern part of the United States, and, for some strange reason, that this group abhors the use of ‘their’ land for ethanol production. This reactionary organization then proceeds to threaten farmers, and conspires to commit terrorist acts against ethanol distilleries and refineries. Would the same ‘protectionists’ then say that we must find a way to reduce our dependence on energy that comes from the terrorism-plagued badlands of Iowa and Nebraska? What would that say about our concern for the poor farmers and families held hostage by the terrorists there? We must ask ourselves the same questions before we threaten to cut off the lifeblood of our neighbors in the Arab world, even if we think they deserve it.
Now, on to the real issue here. While it may be centuries before the well finally runs dry, the shrinking petroleum supply is a problem. There is always the danger of an impending worldwide fuel shortage, largely due to the growing energy needs of the rapidly progressing economies of China and India. The question is not whether there should be a push to develop alternative fuels; the debate is whether governments or markets should determine what fuels to promote and implement in commercial application. Certainly, the market strategy holds more promise than the command strategy.
Our goal is to implement alternative fuels into the real world, and the only way that will ever happen is if they perform in the marketplace. The situation may be drastically different in thirty years’ time, but in 2007 there is plenty of oil, coal, and natural gas, all of which have consistently outpaced every conceivable form of alternative energy that has tried to compete against them. Solar, wind, hydroelectric, and geothermal energy are collectively only an infinitesimal drop in the energy bucket, as well as unreliable and expensive. The same is true about biofuels: ethanol is highly corrosive and requires considerable modifications to the fuel systems of gasoline engines, not to mention its inferior combustive efficiency, which is only about 75% of that of gasoline. Biodiesel is only competitive where subsidized, such as in Germany. Right now, the best use for all types of biofuels is in blends where only 5-10% is biofuel and the rest is traditional gasoline or petrodiesel fuel. Most gasoline sold in the U.S. contains 10% ethanol as an oxygenate, especially after MTBE (methyl tertiary butyl ether) was outlawed because of the danger of groundwater contamination. To encourage wider usage of biofuels, we must remember that a vehicle can only go as far as the next gas station (or ethanol, or hydrogen, or whatever fuel is needed), and that maxim must be explained in detail.
The reason why gasoline and diesel-powered vehicles dominate the roads in the U.S. is because of the fact that, every few miles, there is a place to buy fuel. There is not a single region in the country where a person needs to worry that he will drive there and might not find a gas station within the fuel range of his vehicle. This is the single most important factor when experimenting with alternative fuels. A perfect example of how not to be successful with an alternative fuel strategy is California Governor Schwarzenegger’s asinine ‘Hydrogen Highway’ farce. Ask yourself this question: would you buy a car if its fuel requirements restricted your freedom of movement so much that you were forced to essentially follow a bus route? Where could you buy fuel if you deviated from the predetermined path? Exotic and scarcely available fuels will never work in the real world. One solid idea is to make vehicles which can run on different types of fuels, such as General Motors’ line of Flex Fuel cars and light trucks which are equipped to handle ethanol blends as high as E85 but run equally well on ordinary gasoline. Another method is to use biofuels in fleet vehicles, where purchasing large amounts of a rare fuel is less of a problem. However, unless an alternative fuel reaches the point where it is so readily available that it rivals gasoline, biofuels will continue to only be a niche in the energy market.
It is imperative that government stays out of the process until biofuels are ready to stand on their own two feet. To command industries and consumers to adapt to a product with uncertain capabilities when a well-established one is available in much greater quantities and for a lower price is absurd. Never before in the history of the world has a society discarded a reliable, plentiful, and inexpensive resource for a unproven, scarce, and costly one. Any attempt by bureaucrats to force such an inane fiat on the public will inevitably result in political and economic failure. The only way to integrate alternative fuels into the marketplace is to make them competitive.
All of the proposed alternatives to fossil energy are still in the developmental phase, and it will be decades before they will be ready for the Big Leagues, competing side-by-side, and maybe even surpassing, the established veterans in cost efficiency, plentitude, and combustive capability. That day will come when a renewable fuel demonstrates its superiority so conclusively that private industry, of its own volition and without any governmental interference whatsoever, decides to implement it in place of an old fuel, and not one moment before. The switch from the horse-and-buggy to the automobile didn’t come about because some bureaucrat forced it to be so with the stroke of a pen. Cars had been around for decades before they were accepted as a feasable alternative to animal power. When the time was finally right, it was the voluntary decision of the consuming public that made mechanized transportation a reality, and so must every form of technological progress be, in the twenty-first century and beyond.
Ever since Americans experienced the crippling fuel shortages brought on by the 1973 OPEC embargo, they have sought ways to avoid another energy crisis. One of the proposed solutions was to invest in biofuels, the name assigned to a group of alcohols known as ethanol (grain alcohol), and methanol (wood alcohol), which are very comparable to gasoline but cannot be used in place of it; and biodiesel, for use in trucks, tractors, generators and other heavy equipment. Nearly every first-world nation has since subsidized farmers, researchers, or both in an attempt to put biofuels to good use. Countries that are conducive to corn or sugar production, such as the United States and Brazil, respectively, are able to produce more ethanol; in Europe, the various types of crops grown there are usually turned into biodiesel, as it has the advantage of being able to be distilled from a wide variety of plant sources. Neither area suffers from food shortages, and petroleum prices are at all-time highs, so why not convert even more crops into biofuels?
The reason is because nothing in the economy happens in a vacuum. With the new demand for ethanol, more corn has been siphoned away from the food supply, which has doubled the price of cattle feed in some places. As ethanol demand is expected to steadily increase in the near future, the shockwaves of rising corn prices could be felt by everyone from cattle farmers to soda pop drinkers. When one considers the proportionately low demand for ethanol as opposed to gasoline, and the massive acreage required to grow the corn needed to produce such a trivial amount of it, we must ask ourselves if corn-based ethanol is really such a prudent use of resources after all. The fact cannot be overlooked that if it were not for political pressure from environmentalists, and, most importantly, government subsidies, the ethanol industry in the U.S. probably would not even exist in the first place.
In his 2007 State of the Union Address, President Bush called for an expansion of the Renewable Fuel Standard which would promote the use of biofuels, primarily ethanol and biodiesel. The anticipated output would be 35 billion gallons by the year 2017, which would be a nearly nine-fold increase from 2006 levels. Whether that figure is attainable or not depends on many factors such as population growth, automotive fuel efficiency, driving patterns, and trends in competing energy markets.
Of the many impending challenges associated with making Bush’s biofuels strategy a reality, there are two that warrant our immediate attention. The first is that if current petroleum consumption trends continue, 35 billion gallons of biofuels in the year 2017 will represent approximately the same percentage of the energy sector as it does now. There must be an concerted effort by Americans to control their aggregate fuel consumption, or else all the alternative fuel in the world will not satisfy their energy appetite.
Secondly, if today’s corn market is already starting to buckle under the weight of rising ethanol demand, and since the landmass available for farming is not going to multiply in size, what will happen in ten years when there is, in economic terminology, an 875% increase in the demand for corn? By that time, the population will have increased significantly, thereby necessitating more food production. In the present day, even if all of the corn grown in the United States were diverted away from the food industry and used exclusively for ethanol production, it would only replace about twelve percent of the gasoline used by Americans. In the future, we will need more energy, and more food, so it can be assumed that Bush’s optimistic agenda can be realized in only one of two ways, or both: someone must find a way to grow more corn faster, in the mode of the high-yield farming techniques pioneered during the Green Revolution of the 1960s, or we must simply find another way to make biofuels. The second choice might involve something as rudimentary as importing other ethanol-producing crops, like sugar beets a la Brazil, or an event as profound as an Edisonian discovery by some visionary researcher, perhaps the development of an invention or technique that could revolutionize worldwide renewable fuel production. Without an extraordinary occurrence along those lines, it is unlikely that the Renewable Fuels Standard will meet its ambitious expectations.
* * *
With our knowledge of the current technology and resources available, and taking into account all economic and environmental representation, the proposition that governments should have the final say in deciding which fuels to develop and commercialize is inadvisable. The market must be the driving force in the development of any new technology, and this is no exception. The race to develop an effective way to bring larger quantities of renewable fuels into the marketplace is underway because of climate concerns, national security issues, and the simple geological reality that fossil fuels will not be around forever. Let us engage the first two issues right away.
Although we are not entirely apathetic to the concerns of climate change activists, there is little reason to subscribe to their United Nations and European Union-funded apocalyptic propaganda, all of which has very little to do with science, but has everything to do with disrupting capitalist societies like the U.S. and propping up the failed socialist economies of Western Europe. The evidence is undeniable, as they like to say, that the world is coming to an end....that is, unless successful free-market nations all but shut down their powerful infrastructures in order to placate the specter of global warming. That would allow obstinate European welfare states, who refuse to come to terms with the demise of socialism and would rather stick their heads in the sand like the proverbial ostrich, as they accuse legitimate climate scientists of doing, to catch up in the economic race. They may be popular with the uneducated masses and egotistical elites in journalism and entertainment, but if we lend too much credence to the financially and politically-motivated Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and their quasi-religious encyclicals known as Climate Assessment Reports, we make a mockery of science, and eventually, our campaign to raise public support for alternative fuels will suffer.
Then there are the protectionists, who call for government intervention to drastically reduce importation of foreign energy sources, particularly Middle Eastern oil. This trade imbalance, they claim, enriches the leaders of totalitarian regimes, and makes America vulnerable to terrorist attacks from extremist groups incensed by oil being taken from ‘their’ homeland. In order to demonstrate the fallacy of this manner of thinking, it must be pointed out that the Middle Eastern oil producers are not the same as the Middle East-based terror groups, lest we confuse the two. Think of the countries in that part of the world, and where their economies would be without a steady oil trade with the United States. Consider this analogy: suppose there were a terrorist group, let’s say, somewhere in the Midwestern part of the United States, and, for some strange reason, that this group abhors the use of ‘their’ land for ethanol production. This reactionary organization then proceeds to threaten farmers, and conspires to commit terrorist acts against ethanol distilleries and refineries. Would the same ‘protectionists’ then say that we must find a way to reduce our dependence on energy that comes from the terrorism-plagued badlands of Iowa and Nebraska? What would that say about our concern for the poor farmers and families held hostage by the terrorists there? We must ask ourselves the same questions before we threaten to cut off the lifeblood of our neighbors in the Arab world, even if we think they deserve it.
Now, on to the real issue here. While it may be centuries before the well finally runs dry, the shrinking petroleum supply is a problem. There is always the danger of an impending worldwide fuel shortage, largely due to the growing energy needs of the rapidly progressing economies of China and India. The question is not whether there should be a push to develop alternative fuels; the debate is whether governments or markets should determine what fuels to promote and implement in commercial application. Certainly, the market strategy holds more promise than the command strategy.
Our goal is to implement alternative fuels into the real world, and the only way that will ever happen is if they perform in the marketplace. The situation may be drastically different in thirty years’ time, but in 2007 there is plenty of oil, coal, and natural gas, all of which have consistently outpaced every conceivable form of alternative energy that has tried to compete against them. Solar, wind, hydroelectric, and geothermal energy are collectively only an infinitesimal drop in the energy bucket, as well as unreliable and expensive. The same is true about biofuels: ethanol is highly corrosive and requires considerable modifications to the fuel systems of gasoline engines, not to mention its inferior combustive efficiency, which is only about 75% of that of gasoline. Biodiesel is only competitive where subsidized, such as in Germany. Right now, the best use for all types of biofuels is in blends where only 5-10% is biofuel and the rest is traditional gasoline or petrodiesel fuel. Most gasoline sold in the U.S. contains 10% ethanol as an oxygenate, especially after MTBE (methyl tertiary butyl ether) was outlawed because of the danger of groundwater contamination. To encourage wider usage of biofuels, we must remember that a vehicle can only go as far as the next gas station (or ethanol, or hydrogen, or whatever fuel is needed), and that maxim must be explained in detail.
The reason why gasoline and diesel-powered vehicles dominate the roads in the U.S. is because of the fact that, every few miles, there is a place to buy fuel. There is not a single region in the country where a person needs to worry that he will drive there and might not find a gas station within the fuel range of his vehicle. This is the single most important factor when experimenting with alternative fuels. A perfect example of how not to be successful with an alternative fuel strategy is California Governor Schwarzenegger’s asinine ‘Hydrogen Highway’ farce. Ask yourself this question: would you buy a car if its fuel requirements restricted your freedom of movement so much that you were forced to essentially follow a bus route? Where could you buy fuel if you deviated from the predetermined path? Exotic and scarcely available fuels will never work in the real world. One solid idea is to make vehicles which can run on different types of fuels, such as General Motors’ line of Flex Fuel cars and light trucks which are equipped to handle ethanol blends as high as E85 but run equally well on ordinary gasoline. Another method is to use biofuels in fleet vehicles, where purchasing large amounts of a rare fuel is less of a problem. However, unless an alternative fuel reaches the point where it is so readily available that it rivals gasoline, biofuels will continue to only be a niche in the energy market.
It is imperative that government stays out of the process until biofuels are ready to stand on their own two feet. To command industries and consumers to adapt to a product with uncertain capabilities when a well-established one is available in much greater quantities and for a lower price is absurd. Never before in the history of the world has a society discarded a reliable, plentiful, and inexpensive resource for a unproven, scarce, and costly one. Any attempt by bureaucrats to force such an inane fiat on the public will inevitably result in political and economic failure. The only way to integrate alternative fuels into the marketplace is to make them competitive.
All of the proposed alternatives to fossil energy are still in the developmental phase, and it will be decades before they will be ready for the Big Leagues, competing side-by-side, and maybe even surpassing, the established veterans in cost efficiency, plentitude, and combustive capability. That day will come when a renewable fuel demonstrates its superiority so conclusively that private industry, of its own volition and without any governmental interference whatsoever, decides to implement it in place of an old fuel, and not one moment before. The switch from the horse-and-buggy to the automobile didn’t come about because some bureaucrat forced it to be so with the stroke of a pen. Cars had been around for decades before they were accepted as a feasable alternative to animal power. When the time was finally right, it was the voluntary decision of the consuming public that made mechanized transportation a reality, and so must every form of technological progress be, in the twenty-first century and beyond.
Saturday, June 16, 2007
Overview: Global Warming Report (May 2007)
The legendary humorist Mark Twain once sarcastically quipped, "Everyone talks about the weather, but nobody ever does anything about it," as if feeble humans had the power to affect the rain and wind any more than they had the ability to stop the planets from orbiting the sun. He was ironically prophetic, because now there is a rapidly growing, quasi-religious movement that actually intends to do just that. Proponents of anthropogenic (man-made) global warming are insistent on their two major truth claims: first, that the industrial pollution that mankind creates is causing the Earth to warm; and secondly, that this artificial warming will bring about climate changes that could have deleterious effects on the entire planet. These alarmists have become deeply entrenched in the political sphere. By contrast, there are a great many scientists who have been highly skeptical of the claims of climate alarmists and their bizarre suggestions on how to try to improve the environment. An examination of the evidence on both sides will show that, despite their certitude, the sophistical theories of the global warming alarmists are nothing more than hot air.
The ecologists' current fascination with global warming began in the early 1980s when climate researchers reported that they were beginning to notice progressively higher surface, oceanic, and atmospheric temperature readings. The data lead some scientists to predict that the trend would continue until the planet's mean temperature was so high that geological catastrophe would occur. NASA climate researcher James Hansen's article in Science in 1981 was one of the first proclamations of the warming and the theory behind it. It was followed by oceanographer Roger Revelle's article in the August 1982 edition of Scientific American which claimed that the warming phenomenon confirmed his earlier findings linking global average temperature deviations with carbon dioxide (CO2) levels. The exponential increase in the use of fossil fuels in the last half of the twentieth century was hastily identified as the source of the increase in carbon dioxide, and therefore the newly discovered warming trend. Climatologists started to warn that the waste products of these fuels included greenhouse gases, which are compounds that trap solar rays in the Earth's atmosphere. The fear was that the release of additional man-made climate forcing agents into the atmosphere could unbalance the natural greenhouse effect, and have severe environmental implications. Shortly after Revelle began studying the level of atmospheric CO2 in 1957, he predicted that it would gradually rise from its starting point of around 320 parts per million (by volume) to somewhere around 370 ppm by the year 2000. His predictions turned out to be remarkably precise, although the anticipated climate disasters never materialized.
In the broader scientific community, global warming became an overnight sensation. Climatologists climbed over each other to see who could scare the gas-guzzling public the most. Long ignored by society at large, the men in white lab coats now commanded the attention of everyone, from world leaders on down. It is no small wonder that so many scientists concluded that the world was ending; their egos and wallets multiplied in size with every new press release about the extinction of this species, or the inundation of that low-lying island, or the heatwave that will kill this number of citizens. It wasn't long before timorous politicians were forced to take action regarding climate change.
The Europeans were the first to use the global warming hype to their advantage, and in 1988 the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which has since become the most powerful political force when it comes to global warming advocacy. Not surprisingly, however, the American public, as well as their elected leaders, did not pay much attention to the alleged threat of global warming throughout most of the 1980s. The first time Americans viewed climate change as a viable political issue was after the twentieth anniversary of Earth Day in April, 1990. New environmental movements began forming around issues such as the exploration of renewable energy sources, the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, and the promotion of lifestyle alternatives that would lead to a decrease in fossil-fuel consumption. Although U.S. President George H. W. Bush reluctantly attended the 1992 Rio Earth Summit organized by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)[1] and signed a treaty which was aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions, the president insisted that the agreement would be non-binding, thereby virtually assuring that no substantial action would be forthcoming. The first real executive attempt at mitigating global warming did not come until 1993 when President Bill Clinton called for an ill-fated proposal known as the 'BTU Tax'. This was an effort to reduce petroleum consumption by placing an excise tax on certain types of fuels, which, as an American University study showed, were never clearly defined (1). The poorly drafted bill was quashed after justifiable scrutiny from both political parties. After that embarrassing episode, Clinton wisely avoided the issue of climate change, preferring to let his tree-hugging vice president assume the lead role in environmental policy.
Albert Gore, Jr. was one of the first politicians to make global warming a central policy issue, first in the Senate, and then during his first failed presidential bid in 1988. It is ironic that during the eight years he was Vice President of the United States, when he wielded the most influence to make the nation aware of the seriousness of his pet issue, no real executive action was taken to combat global warming. The only time the Clinton Administration came close to introducing a policy that would curb greenhouse gas emissions was when Vice President Gore was dispatched to Japan in December, 1997 to attend the latest UNFCCC fiesta. Like Rio, this was another gathering of unelected, autocratic UN officials and marginally educated environmental activists with the purported aim of protecting the Earth from man-made warming (Singer 56). After a few rounds of squabbling over details, Gore put his signature on an international treaty that became known as the Kyoto Protocol, a contract between 'developed' nations whereby they would all agree to reduce their respective greenhouse gas emissions by certain levels and according to specified timetables (Article 3.1). However, as soon as Gore got back to the States, he found that the administration deemed the treaty such a political hot potato that they dropped it immediately and never even submitted it to be ratified by the Senate.[2]
In the ten years since Kyoto, there has not been much of a push for comprehensive legislation on climate mitigation, although some American politicians have expressed a desire to reach some sort of agreement with the nations that endorsed the treaty. Eventually, the U. S. will have to take a decisive stance and defend its policies, or lack thereof, from the onslaught of the European Union, the UN, and the Greens' conformist agenda. Perhaps the best way to do that is to actually investigate the evidence, rather than simply nodding at whatever wild predictions are put forth by non-scientists like Al Gore. The truth might not be what we would expect.
Since its inception, the global warming movement has had its critics, from conservative politicians and business tycoons worried about the economic implications of attempted climate mitigation, to religious leaders and humanitarians concerned about how the proposed UN mandates might adversely affect developing nations. All kinds of objections have been raised, especially from economists, but for our study only scientific criticism of anthropogenic global warming will be permitted. The global warming pushers are perfectly right about one thing: tumbling stock prices or increased unemployment won't matter a whole lot if the Earth burns up like a gasoline-soaked newspaper. This is a matter of planetary importance.
One of the favorite arguments of global warming advocacy groups, such as climatecrisis.net, is that "[t]he vast majority of scientists agree that global warming is real....and that it is the result of [man's] activities and not natural (1)." This is a highly dubious statement, as there is rarely unanimity in an eclectic group of professionals in any field. Also, the statement is a half-truth at best; almost every scientist does agree with the premise that the Earth is warming, but there is an astonishing plurality as to the question of whether the warming is natural or anthropogenic. The above platitude falls on its face when we look at the Oregon Petition, organized by Dr. Arthur B. Robinson of the Oregon Institute for Science and Medicine and former president of the National Academy of Sciences Dr. Frederick Seitz, which railed against the climate change hysteria and compelled the U.S. government to reject the Kyoto treaty (37). The petition was signed by some 17,000 scientists and other experts, and the site claims that almost every name on the list was verified as legitimate (357). There are, of course, a great many scientists who believe in man-made warming and neither their credentials nor their motives will be impugned here, even though the radical "green" activists have disparaged the skeptical scientists on both grounds. However, since we know that the number of skeptics is not insignificant, our task now becomes to try and understand why so many of these experts disagree with the alarmists.
Let us begin with the greenhouse theory, which we have already investigated. Annex A of the Kyoto Protocol listed six chemical compounds under the heading, "Greenhouse Gases". The first three face the strongest indictments by the UNFCCC: CO2, CH4 (methane), and N2O (nitrous oxide).[3] The last three co-defendants are hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), perfluorocarbons (PFCs), and SF6 (sulfur hexafluoride). Conspicuously absent from this line-up are sulfur dioxide (SO2) and other radiative forcing compounds, which tend to counteract the greenhouse effect and cool the Earth by reflecting solar rays back into space rather than trapping them inside the atmosphere.[4] The list also leaves out the most notorious greenhouse gas of all: H2O! As climate physicist Dr. S. Fred Singer tells us, "Water vapor makes up about 60 percent of the natural greenhouse effect, with CO2 making up an estimated 20 percent (40) ." Dr. Singer also refutes the primacy of the greenhouse theory as it relates to climate change; he states that focusing on CO2 alone is insufficient for "explaining known [climate] realities" for no less than eight reasons, not the least of which is that all three of Kyoto's prime suspects are, for the most part, created by Mother Nature, not man (10). CO2, which accounts for 76% of climate forcing, comes mostly from animals and decaying biomass, while CH4 is given off by rice paddies and cattle. Enormous quantities of N2O are emitted when volcanoes erupt.
Typically, scientists who have been heavily invested in the IPCC from its earliest days, such as British physicist Sir John Houghton, tend to overstate the role of man-made CO2 and ignore other important factors in global temperature change such as changes in solar radiation. In the IPCC's Third Assessment Report (2001), Houghton claims that the surface temperature warming in the last half of the twentieth century cannot be fully explained by changes in total solar irradiance (10). Astrophysicist Dr. Sallie Baliunas questions the conclusiveness of that statement, given that the exo-terrestrial climate indicators are extremely difficult to measure (Michaels 210).
The experts on both sides agree that the planet has been slowly warming since the mid-1970s, but the alarmist camp ignores the fact that from 1940-1975 a cooling trend took place.[5] This is another quagmire for those who contend that CO2 is the primary driver of atmospheric temperature; we are told that more greenhouse gases mean higher global temperatures, so why did they fall in an era of increasing CO2? Another anomaly on the timeline is that from 1850-1940, and, specifically, from 1920-1940, there was a huge surge in mean temperatures and CO2 could scarcely have had much to do with it; the meteoric rise in greenhouse gas emissions from industry and transportation did not occur until after World War II.
We now look even further back at the extended climate timeline, which has been compiled from a careful examination of various types of proxy .. ice cores, tree rings, seabed sediments, coral reefs, and stalagmites, just to name a few. The records tell us that since the last Ice Age ended approximately 11,000 years ago, the natural global temperature fluctuations occurred in fairly predictable stages. Global temperatures fell from 600-200 B.C., rose during the Roman Warming period from 200 B.C. to 600 A.D., fell again during the Dark Ages cold period until about 900 when the Medieval Warming began, then fell once again starting circa 1300, marking the beginning of the Little Ice Age. This lasted until around 1850, commencing our current era known as the Modern Warming.
If these figures sound different than the ones disseminated by the alarmists, it's because they are, and this brings us to what is, quite possibly, the most embarrassing episode in the short history of the global warming crusade: the tale of the "hockey stick". In 1998, a paper was published in Nature by M. Mann, R. Bradley, and M. Hughes titled "Global-scale Temperature Patterns and Climate Forcings Over the Past Six Centuries," usually called MBH98 (IPCC 2001 Q9). The article featured a graph that looked like a hockey stick lying on its back. The implication of the graph, with its steady pattern of climate history prior to 1850, and then a drastically increasing slope designating unnatural modern global warming, was that for the last 1000 years there was little deviation from the mean until the Industrial Revolution.[6] This is patently absurd, but IPCC 2001 used the supposedly peer-reviewed chart to further its fear-inducing agenda. It wasn't until 2003, when statistics expert Stephen McIntyre checked the math used by Mann and company to calculate the "hockey stick" that the errors were uncovered. Equally disconcerting was the discovery that, during his non-partisan audit, not only did McIntyre realize that the math which Mann used to calculate the graph was all wrong, but that no one before him had even bothered to verify the graph at all! McIntyre, along with his partner Ross McKitrick, an economist, subsequently published a report known as MM03 in the fourteenth edition of Environment and Energy, in which the fallacies of the MBH98 graph were exposed (751-71).
The reliance on fabricated charts, models, and prognostications, especially computer-generated ones called General Circulation Models (GCMs), is the Achilles' Heel of the alarmists. According to Earth scientist Eric Posmentier and physicist Willie Soon, the theory that climate forcing due to increased CO2 levels will cause precipitous global warming is not a hypothesis proven by scientific experimentation, but a prediction generated by those notorious computer models (Michaels 242). In a handful of sophisticated laboratories across the globe, data is fed into titanic supercomputers which are then trusted to project the outcomes of current climate trends. Since NASA and other agencies began using the new, impressive-looking equipment, not only have all of the highly-touted models been unacceptably inaccurate when forecasting climate scenarios, they have not even come close to predicting the known results of temperature fluctuations in the last ten or twenty years since their inception. The latest models are no more trustworthy than the primitive designs from the 1980s, and most honest climatologists are aware of their shortcomings, so why do they continue to have such indefatigable faith in the GCMs? It could be the fact that it is very easy to manipulate data in order to project a desired outcome, which is, almost without exception, a frightening apocalyptic scenario that reads like the Book of the Revelation: the Earth becomes so hot that glaciers melt, seas rise, extinctions and famines occur, both floods and droughts wreak havoc in different locations, storms become fiercer and more frequent, etc. This is distressing indeed, as it is meant to be; no charitable organization is going to raise much money by telling the public that everything's just fine, and some academics have accused eco-groups of exaggerating the potential destructive effects of climate change as a fundraising gimmick (Day 24). This may give us a clue as to what really motivates the alarmists.
The rhetoric from the global warming crowd probably will not cease anytime soon, no matter how foolish their arguments sound in lieu of the evidence. Despite Al Gore's assertion that skeptical climatologists have financial motivation to misinform the public, the converse is true. There can be no denying that professional climate alarmists, not just in the scientific community, but in the news media, entertainment, politics, and even business have carved out a niche in the fear-induction business and created a cottage industry for themselves. Wherever any cataclysmic event occurs, whether it be a hurricane, flood, mud puddle, melted ice-cream cone, or small cloud hovering over a spot where some disgruntled baby-boomer thinks the sun should be allowed to shine, some EU spokesman or Newsweek editorial writer will be on hand to gleefully confirm that it was the result of SUV-driving Americans and President Bush's energy policy. Bet on it.
This essay opened with a quote from Mark Twain, and it shall close with one. For anyone who still believes in the anti-scientific dogma of the alarmists like Gore, and stubbornly clings to the notion that his 'science' is concrete and irrefutable, I would encourage you to listen to the words of the former vice-president himself, from his Academy Award-winning global warming documentary, An Inconvenient Truth:
"What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know, it's what we
know for sure that just ain't so." --Mark Twain
NOTES
1. American University, Trade and Environment Database, "TED Case Studies: US BTU
Tax".
2. Climatecrisis.net, "The Science",
3. Day, Elizabeth, "Charities 'Spread Scare Stories on Climate Change to Boost Public
Donations'", Weekly Telegraph/UK, 24 February 2005.
4. Hansen, J., and D. Johnson, A. Lacis, S. Lebedeff, P. Lee, D. Rind, G. Russell,
"Climate Impact of Increasing Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide",
Science 213, 957-966 (1981).
5. Third Assessment Report: Climate Change 2001, The Scientific Basis,
"Summary For Policymakers", pp98, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,
Geneva, Switzerland.
6. "Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change",
7. Mann, M. E., R. S. Bradley, and M. K. Hughes,
"Global-Scale Temperature Patterns and Climate Forcings Over the Past Six
Centuries", Nature 392, 779-87 (1998).
8. McIntyre, S. and R. McKitrick, "Corrections to the Mann et al. (1998) Data Base and
Northern Hemispheric Average Temperature Series", Environment and Energy 14,
751-71 (2003).
9. Michaels, P. J., Shattered Consensus: The True State of Global Warming, Lanham:
Rowman and Littlefield, 2005.
10. Revelle, R., and H. Suess, "Carbon Dioxide Exchange Between Atmosphere and
Ocean and the Question of an Increase of Atmospheric CO2 During the Past Decades",
Tellus 9, 18-27 (1957)
11. Revelle, R., "Carbon Dioxide and World Climate", Scientific American 247 (2):35-
43 (1982).
12. Seitz, Frederick, "Petition Project", 1998-2007,
13. Singer, S.F., and D. Avery, Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 Years,
Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] As is the case with most UN subcommittees, the UNEP, UNFCCC, and IPCC are thoroughly political, not technical, in membership and mission. Reports are edited by non-scientists, sometimes with embarrassing consequences. Their much-ballyhooed "findings", "assessments", etc. should not be assumed to have been peer-reviewed by legitimate experts and therefore must, by no means, be considered canonical.
[2] In the summer of 1997, prior to Gore's trip, the Senate voted unanimously on a proclamation rejecting any treaty that would specifically try to damage the American economy, which would later come to describe the Kyoto Protocol almost verbatim. On 21 July the Byrd-Hagel resolution passed, 95-0.
[3] Other nitrogen-oxygen structures, designated by the chemically meaningless term, NOx, have climate forcing capability although N2O is the only one listed in Kyoto.
[4] Technically speaking, SO2 and other sun-blocking agents are not greenhouse gases, but they do have considerable power to counteract global warming, especially after major volcanic eruptions. The measurable cooling anomalies following Krakatoa (1883) and Pinatubo (1991) epitomize this phenomenon.
[5] The alarmist camp has never reconciled the 'global cooling' and 'Ice Age' scares of the 1970s with the current global warming hype, mainly because both eras had very comparable emissions levels but diametrically opposed temperature patterns. Despite their attempts to shrug them off, we cannot take what the alarmists say seriously until they deal with their own contradictory overreactions from thirty years ago.
[6] A year after the 'hockey stick' graph was unveiled, the same team of Mann et al. updated the data to extend the timeline all the way back to 1000 A.D. It was just the same data as MBH98 with another 400 years of climate history tacked on and was known as MBH99. MM03 lists the errors in both graphs.
The ecologists' current fascination with global warming began in the early 1980s when climate researchers reported that they were beginning to notice progressively higher surface, oceanic, and atmospheric temperature readings. The data lead some scientists to predict that the trend would continue until the planet's mean temperature was so high that geological catastrophe would occur. NASA climate researcher James Hansen's article in Science in 1981 was one of the first proclamations of the warming and the theory behind it. It was followed by oceanographer Roger Revelle's article in the August 1982 edition of Scientific American which claimed that the warming phenomenon confirmed his earlier findings linking global average temperature deviations with carbon dioxide (CO2) levels. The exponential increase in the use of fossil fuels in the last half of the twentieth century was hastily identified as the source of the increase in carbon dioxide, and therefore the newly discovered warming trend. Climatologists started to warn that the waste products of these fuels included greenhouse gases, which are compounds that trap solar rays in the Earth's atmosphere. The fear was that the release of additional man-made climate forcing agents into the atmosphere could unbalance the natural greenhouse effect, and have severe environmental implications. Shortly after Revelle began studying the level of atmospheric CO2 in 1957, he predicted that it would gradually rise from its starting point of around 320 parts per million (by volume) to somewhere around 370 ppm by the year 2000. His predictions turned out to be remarkably precise, although the anticipated climate disasters never materialized.
In the broader scientific community, global warming became an overnight sensation. Climatologists climbed over each other to see who could scare the gas-guzzling public the most. Long ignored by society at large, the men in white lab coats now commanded the attention of everyone, from world leaders on down. It is no small wonder that so many scientists concluded that the world was ending; their egos and wallets multiplied in size with every new press release about the extinction of this species, or the inundation of that low-lying island, or the heatwave that will kill this number of citizens. It wasn't long before timorous politicians were forced to take action regarding climate change.
The Europeans were the first to use the global warming hype to their advantage, and in 1988 the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which has since become the most powerful political force when it comes to global warming advocacy. Not surprisingly, however, the American public, as well as their elected leaders, did not pay much attention to the alleged threat of global warming throughout most of the 1980s. The first time Americans viewed climate change as a viable political issue was after the twentieth anniversary of Earth Day in April, 1990. New environmental movements began forming around issues such as the exploration of renewable energy sources, the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, and the promotion of lifestyle alternatives that would lead to a decrease in fossil-fuel consumption. Although U.S. President George H. W. Bush reluctantly attended the 1992 Rio Earth Summit organized by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)[1] and signed a treaty which was aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions, the president insisted that the agreement would be non-binding, thereby virtually assuring that no substantial action would be forthcoming. The first real executive attempt at mitigating global warming did not come until 1993 when President Bill Clinton called for an ill-fated proposal known as the 'BTU Tax'. This was an effort to reduce petroleum consumption by placing an excise tax on certain types of fuels, which, as an American University study showed, were never clearly defined (1). The poorly drafted bill was quashed after justifiable scrutiny from both political parties. After that embarrassing episode, Clinton wisely avoided the issue of climate change, preferring to let his tree-hugging vice president assume the lead role in environmental policy.
Albert Gore, Jr. was one of the first politicians to make global warming a central policy issue, first in the Senate, and then during his first failed presidential bid in 1988. It is ironic that during the eight years he was Vice President of the United States, when he wielded the most influence to make the nation aware of the seriousness of his pet issue, no real executive action was taken to combat global warming. The only time the Clinton Administration came close to introducing a policy that would curb greenhouse gas emissions was when Vice President Gore was dispatched to Japan in December, 1997 to attend the latest UNFCCC fiesta. Like Rio, this was another gathering of unelected, autocratic UN officials and marginally educated environmental activists with the purported aim of protecting the Earth from man-made warming (Singer 56). After a few rounds of squabbling over details, Gore put his signature on an international treaty that became known as the Kyoto Protocol, a contract between 'developed' nations whereby they would all agree to reduce their respective greenhouse gas emissions by certain levels and according to specified timetables (Article 3.1). However, as soon as Gore got back to the States, he found that the administration deemed the treaty such a political hot potato that they dropped it immediately and never even submitted it to be ratified by the Senate.[2]
In the ten years since Kyoto, there has not been much of a push for comprehensive legislation on climate mitigation, although some American politicians have expressed a desire to reach some sort of agreement with the nations that endorsed the treaty. Eventually, the U. S. will have to take a decisive stance and defend its policies, or lack thereof, from the onslaught of the European Union, the UN, and the Greens' conformist agenda. Perhaps the best way to do that is to actually investigate the evidence, rather than simply nodding at whatever wild predictions are put forth by non-scientists like Al Gore. The truth might not be what we would expect.
Since its inception, the global warming movement has had its critics, from conservative politicians and business tycoons worried about the economic implications of attempted climate mitigation, to religious leaders and humanitarians concerned about how the proposed UN mandates might adversely affect developing nations. All kinds of objections have been raised, especially from economists, but for our study only scientific criticism of anthropogenic global warming will be permitted. The global warming pushers are perfectly right about one thing: tumbling stock prices or increased unemployment won't matter a whole lot if the Earth burns up like a gasoline-soaked newspaper. This is a matter of planetary importance.
One of the favorite arguments of global warming advocacy groups, such as climatecrisis.net, is that "[t]he vast majority of scientists agree that global warming is real....and that it is the result of [man's] activities and not natural (1)." This is a highly dubious statement, as there is rarely unanimity in an eclectic group of professionals in any field. Also, the statement is a half-truth at best; almost every scientist does agree with the premise that the Earth is warming, but there is an astonishing plurality as to the question of whether the warming is natural or anthropogenic. The above platitude falls on its face when we look at the Oregon Petition, organized by Dr. Arthur B. Robinson of the Oregon Institute for Science and Medicine and former president of the National Academy of Sciences Dr. Frederick Seitz, which railed against the climate change hysteria and compelled the U.S. government to reject the Kyoto treaty (37). The petition was signed by some 17,000 scientists and other experts, and the site claims that almost every name on the list was verified as legitimate (357). There are, of course, a great many scientists who believe in man-made warming and neither their credentials nor their motives will be impugned here, even though the radical "green" activists have disparaged the skeptical scientists on both grounds. However, since we know that the number of skeptics is not insignificant, our task now becomes to try and understand why so many of these experts disagree with the alarmists.
Let us begin with the greenhouse theory, which we have already investigated. Annex A of the Kyoto Protocol listed six chemical compounds under the heading, "Greenhouse Gases". The first three face the strongest indictments by the UNFCCC: CO2, CH4 (methane), and N2O (nitrous oxide).[3] The last three co-defendants are hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), perfluorocarbons (PFCs), and SF6 (sulfur hexafluoride). Conspicuously absent from this line-up are sulfur dioxide (SO2) and other radiative forcing compounds, which tend to counteract the greenhouse effect and cool the Earth by reflecting solar rays back into space rather than trapping them inside the atmosphere.[4] The list also leaves out the most notorious greenhouse gas of all: H2O! As climate physicist Dr. S. Fred Singer tells us, "Water vapor makes up about 60 percent of the natural greenhouse effect, with CO2 making up an estimated 20 percent (40) ." Dr. Singer also refutes the primacy of the greenhouse theory as it relates to climate change; he states that focusing on CO2 alone is insufficient for "explaining known [climate] realities" for no less than eight reasons, not the least of which is that all three of Kyoto's prime suspects are, for the most part, created by Mother Nature, not man (10). CO2, which accounts for 76% of climate forcing, comes mostly from animals and decaying biomass, while CH4 is given off by rice paddies and cattle. Enormous quantities of N2O are emitted when volcanoes erupt.
Typically, scientists who have been heavily invested in the IPCC from its earliest days, such as British physicist Sir John Houghton, tend to overstate the role of man-made CO2 and ignore other important factors in global temperature change such as changes in solar radiation. In the IPCC's Third Assessment Report (2001), Houghton claims that the surface temperature warming in the last half of the twentieth century cannot be fully explained by changes in total solar irradiance (10). Astrophysicist Dr. Sallie Baliunas questions the conclusiveness of that statement, given that the exo-terrestrial climate indicators are extremely difficult to measure (Michaels 210).
The experts on both sides agree that the planet has been slowly warming since the mid-1970s, but the alarmist camp ignores the fact that from 1940-1975 a cooling trend took place.[5] This is another quagmire for those who contend that CO2 is the primary driver of atmospheric temperature; we are told that more greenhouse gases mean higher global temperatures, so why did they fall in an era of increasing CO2? Another anomaly on the timeline is that from 1850-1940, and, specifically, from 1920-1940, there was a huge surge in mean temperatures and CO2 could scarcely have had much to do with it; the meteoric rise in greenhouse gas emissions from industry and transportation did not occur until after World War II.
We now look even further back at the extended climate timeline, which has been compiled from a careful examination of various types of proxy .. ice cores, tree rings, seabed sediments, coral reefs, and stalagmites, just to name a few. The records tell us that since the last Ice Age ended approximately 11,000 years ago, the natural global temperature fluctuations occurred in fairly predictable stages. Global temperatures fell from 600-200 B.C., rose during the Roman Warming period from 200 B.C. to 600 A.D., fell again during the Dark Ages cold period until about 900 when the Medieval Warming began, then fell once again starting circa 1300, marking the beginning of the Little Ice Age. This lasted until around 1850, commencing our current era known as the Modern Warming.
If these figures sound different than the ones disseminated by the alarmists, it's because they are, and this brings us to what is, quite possibly, the most embarrassing episode in the short history of the global warming crusade: the tale of the "hockey stick". In 1998, a paper was published in Nature by M. Mann, R. Bradley, and M. Hughes titled "Global-scale Temperature Patterns and Climate Forcings Over the Past Six Centuries," usually called MBH98 (IPCC 2001 Q9). The article featured a graph that looked like a hockey stick lying on its back. The implication of the graph, with its steady pattern of climate history prior to 1850, and then a drastically increasing slope designating unnatural modern global warming, was that for the last 1000 years there was little deviation from the mean until the Industrial Revolution.[6] This is patently absurd, but IPCC 2001 used the supposedly peer-reviewed chart to further its fear-inducing agenda. It wasn't until 2003, when statistics expert Stephen McIntyre checked the math used by Mann and company to calculate the "hockey stick" that the errors were uncovered. Equally disconcerting was the discovery that, during his non-partisan audit, not only did McIntyre realize that the math which Mann used to calculate the graph was all wrong, but that no one before him had even bothered to verify the graph at all! McIntyre, along with his partner Ross McKitrick, an economist, subsequently published a report known as MM03 in the fourteenth edition of Environment and Energy, in which the fallacies of the MBH98 graph were exposed (751-71).
The reliance on fabricated charts, models, and prognostications, especially computer-generated ones called General Circulation Models (GCMs), is the Achilles' Heel of the alarmists. According to Earth scientist Eric Posmentier and physicist Willie Soon, the theory that climate forcing due to increased CO2 levels will cause precipitous global warming is not a hypothesis proven by scientific experimentation, but a prediction generated by those notorious computer models (Michaels 242). In a handful of sophisticated laboratories across the globe, data is fed into titanic supercomputers which are then trusted to project the outcomes of current climate trends. Since NASA and other agencies began using the new, impressive-looking equipment, not only have all of the highly-touted models been unacceptably inaccurate when forecasting climate scenarios, they have not even come close to predicting the known results of temperature fluctuations in the last ten or twenty years since their inception. The latest models are no more trustworthy than the primitive designs from the 1980s, and most honest climatologists are aware of their shortcomings, so why do they continue to have such indefatigable faith in the GCMs? It could be the fact that it is very easy to manipulate data in order to project a desired outcome, which is, almost without exception, a frightening apocalyptic scenario that reads like the Book of the Revelation: the Earth becomes so hot that glaciers melt, seas rise, extinctions and famines occur, both floods and droughts wreak havoc in different locations, storms become fiercer and more frequent, etc. This is distressing indeed, as it is meant to be; no charitable organization is going to raise much money by telling the public that everything's just fine, and some academics have accused eco-groups of exaggerating the potential destructive effects of climate change as a fundraising gimmick (Day 24). This may give us a clue as to what really motivates the alarmists.
The rhetoric from the global warming crowd probably will not cease anytime soon, no matter how foolish their arguments sound in lieu of the evidence. Despite Al Gore's assertion that skeptical climatologists have financial motivation to misinform the public, the converse is true. There can be no denying that professional climate alarmists, not just in the scientific community, but in the news media, entertainment, politics, and even business have carved out a niche in the fear-induction business and created a cottage industry for themselves. Wherever any cataclysmic event occurs, whether it be a hurricane, flood, mud puddle, melted ice-cream cone, or small cloud hovering over a spot where some disgruntled baby-boomer thinks the sun should be allowed to shine, some EU spokesman or Newsweek editorial writer will be on hand to gleefully confirm that it was the result of SUV-driving Americans and President Bush's energy policy. Bet on it.
This essay opened with a quote from Mark Twain, and it shall close with one. For anyone who still believes in the anti-scientific dogma of the alarmists like Gore, and stubbornly clings to the notion that his 'science' is concrete and irrefutable, I would encourage you to listen to the words of the former vice-president himself, from his Academy Award-winning global warming documentary, An Inconvenient Truth:
"What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know, it's what we
know for sure that just ain't so." --Mark Twain
NOTES
1. American University, Trade and Environment Database, "TED Case Studies: US BTU
Tax".
2. Climatecrisis.net, "The Science",
3. Day, Elizabeth, "Charities 'Spread Scare Stories on Climate Change to Boost Public
Donations'", Weekly Telegraph/UK, 24 February 2005.
4. Hansen, J., and D. Johnson, A. Lacis, S. Lebedeff, P. Lee, D. Rind, G. Russell,
"Climate Impact of Increasing Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide",
Science 213, 957-966 (1981).
5. Third Assessment Report: Climate Change 2001, The Scientific Basis,
"Summary For Policymakers", pp98, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,
Geneva, Switzerland.
6. "Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change",
7. Mann, M. E., R. S. Bradley, and M. K. Hughes,
"Global-Scale Temperature Patterns and Climate Forcings Over the Past Six
Centuries", Nature 392, 779-87 (1998).
8. McIntyre, S. and R. McKitrick, "Corrections to the Mann et al. (1998) Data Base and
Northern Hemispheric Average Temperature Series", Environment and Energy 14,
751-71 (2003).
9. Michaels, P. J., Shattered Consensus: The True State of Global Warming, Lanham:
Rowman and Littlefield, 2005.
10. Revelle, R., and H. Suess, "Carbon Dioxide Exchange Between Atmosphere and
Ocean and the Question of an Increase of Atmospheric CO2 During the Past Decades",
Tellus 9, 18-27 (1957)
11. Revelle, R., "Carbon Dioxide and World Climate", Scientific American 247 (2):35-
43 (1982).
12. Seitz, Frederick, "Petition Project", 1998-2007,
13. Singer, S.F., and D. Avery, Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 Years,
Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] As is the case with most UN subcommittees, the UNEP, UNFCCC, and IPCC are thoroughly political, not technical, in membership and mission. Reports are edited by non-scientists, sometimes with embarrassing consequences. Their much-ballyhooed "findings", "assessments", etc. should not be assumed to have been peer-reviewed by legitimate experts and therefore must, by no means, be considered canonical.
[2] In the summer of 1997, prior to Gore's trip, the Senate voted unanimously on a proclamation rejecting any treaty that would specifically try to damage the American economy, which would later come to describe the Kyoto Protocol almost verbatim. On 21 July the Byrd-Hagel resolution passed, 95-0.
[3] Other nitrogen-oxygen structures, designated by the chemically meaningless term, NOx, have climate forcing capability although N2O is the only one listed in Kyoto.
[4] Technically speaking, SO2 and other sun-blocking agents are not greenhouse gases, but they do have considerable power to counteract global warming, especially after major volcanic eruptions. The measurable cooling anomalies following Krakatoa (1883) and Pinatubo (1991) epitomize this phenomenon.
[5] The alarmist camp has never reconciled the 'global cooling' and 'Ice Age' scares of the 1970s with the current global warming hype, mainly because both eras had very comparable emissions levels but diametrically opposed temperature patterns. Despite their attempts to shrug them off, we cannot take what the alarmists say seriously until they deal with their own contradictory overreactions from thirty years ago.
[6] A year after the 'hockey stick' graph was unveiled, the same team of Mann et al. updated the data to extend the timeline all the way back to 1000 A.D. It was just the same data as MBH98 with another 400 years of climate history tacked on and was known as MBH99. MM03 lists the errors in both graphs.
Sunday, February 25, 2007
Final Thoughts on the Death of Air America Radio-Pt. 2
When liberal talk radio network Air America went bankrupt last October, it was the dullest, loneliest, least surprising one-car funeral in the history of media. There were no screaming talk-show hosts whining about ‘right-wing conspiracies’ from the unemployment line, no ‘mission accomplished’ speech from Al Franken on the deck of an aircraft carrier; nothing. The legitimate media barely stooped to cover the story of how the once loud-and-proud communist radio network finally ran out of resources and was pronounced DOA well before its third birthday.
I will make no secret of the fact that I’ve had the proverbial champagne on ice, with party hats and streamers at hand, ready to start the celebration the day Air America finally crashed and burned. It’s funny. When it finally happened, their demise was so anticlimactic, so pathetically weak, that I simply couldn’t bring myself to rejoice when I heard the news. It felt like when Saddam was hanged. There was no desire nor cause for celebration.
Should we mourn, laugh, or simply scoop Franken and his buddies up and flush them down the toilet like the dead fishes they are? Before we answer too quickly, let’s examine the brief history of Air America and decide whether or not they deserve our pity.
Air America began life in AM radio as a self-proclaimed oasis for the long-neglected liberal talk radio listeners, an escape from the countless Rush clones and moderate newbies like Bill O’Reilly. NPR was too soft and boring; Rush had amassed his enormous radio audience through entertainment, the libs reasoned, so it was time to fight fire with fire. It cannot be overlooked that virtually all of the hosts recruited for the nascent network were stand-up comedians: Al Franken, Mark Maron, Jeanine Garafalo. None had rudimentary knowledge of radio or politics their upon signing. Nonetheless, if wisecracking truly was the way to win the hearts and minds of NASCAR Nation and turn staunch Republicans into malleable Mensheviks, then Air America could not fail. Failure, however, for the network would come literally within days of its launch on March 31, 2004.
The dream of Air America’s founding fathers was to be able pump a steady audio stream of left-wing talking points into the brain cells of red-state Americans, thereby washing them clean of the RNC propaganda they had been fed for far too long by Limbaugh and Hannity. A second, although unstated, but even more important aim was to install a Democrat in the White House that November by giving the then-unnamed candidate a national radio platform. After all, wasn’t that how the nation turned to the Right in the first place?
No, actually, it wasn’t, as Franken and co. soon found out. Rush got started in the eighth year of the Reagan Revolution, and wasn’t a household name until the Clinton years. He had also failed several times in sundry locations before finally getting his big break twenty years ago. Air America’s pipe dream of competing with, and maybe even surpassing, veteran conservative talk giants like ABC or WOR in its rookie season proved to be ephemeral. By the end of April 2004, it was obvious that the station was not going to come close to reaching its ratings or ad revenue estimates. Panic ensued. With a critical presidential election underway, the network was in as much chaos as the Democrat Party itself. All through the Summer and Fall 2004, not a single one of their highly touted hosts could garner a large enough audience to attract important guests to appear on Air America. After the Democrats were massacred in the election, many wondered what would happen to the network, which from the beginning looked like nothing more than an ad hoc committee to push the Democrats back into power. Failing that mission demoted Air America from laughingstock to non-entity.
Over the next two years, nothing improved. Changes in management didn’t help. Lineup changes did nothing. Jerry Springer came in like a roaring lion and whimpered off after less than a year with his tail between his legs. With the furniture on the Titanic being rearranged constantly, no one had the courage to address the undeniable fact that the ship was sinking fast. When the books were finally opened after Air America filed for bankruptcy protection on Oct.13, 2006, it was discovered that the station had lost nearly 40 million dollars since its debut ($9.1M in ’04; $19.6M in ’05; and $13.1M in ’06--up until the Oct. 13 bankruptcy filing). Other low points include the discovery by the City of New York’s Department of Investigation that prior to its launch in 2004, Air America co-founder Evan M. Cohen pilfered $875,000 from the youth center in the Bronx where he used to work and shifted the stolen funds to the then-unborn radio network. It was the least-reported major misappropriation scandal in the history of the United States. Ask Media Matters about that one; they seem to have a very selective memory about just which media stories seem to matter.
When front-man Franken retired this month to begin his next incarnation as the opponent whom Senator Norm Coleman (R-Minn.) will beat in next year’s election, the network officially lost all hope. He will be replaced by some guy named Thom Hartmann. Raise your hand if you’ve ever heard of Thom Hartmann. I thought so.
So finally, Air America has been given new life by another fantastically wealthy liberal, bailed out by multimillionaire real estate mogul Stephen Green, brother of disgraced New York politician Mark Green, who is delusional about the future possibilities of the network. For a guy who’s failed at everything he’s ever tried, I think he and Air America are a match made in Heaven.
There is no future for liberal talk radio now, just as there was no future for liberal talk radio in 2004, or at any other time in history. If anyone is foolish enough to take the new reincarnation of Air America off the Green brothers’ hands, then there will be no future for that moron, either. Stop kidding yourself. It’s over.
I will make no secret of the fact that I’ve had the proverbial champagne on ice, with party hats and streamers at hand, ready to start the celebration the day Air America finally crashed and burned. It’s funny. When it finally happened, their demise was so anticlimactic, so pathetically weak, that I simply couldn’t bring myself to rejoice when I heard the news. It felt like when Saddam was hanged. There was no desire nor cause for celebration.
Should we mourn, laugh, or simply scoop Franken and his buddies up and flush them down the toilet like the dead fishes they are? Before we answer too quickly, let’s examine the brief history of Air America and decide whether or not they deserve our pity.
Air America began life in AM radio as a self-proclaimed oasis for the long-neglected liberal talk radio listeners, an escape from the countless Rush clones and moderate newbies like Bill O’Reilly. NPR was too soft and boring; Rush had amassed his enormous radio audience through entertainment, the libs reasoned, so it was time to fight fire with fire. It cannot be overlooked that virtually all of the hosts recruited for the nascent network were stand-up comedians: Al Franken, Mark Maron, Jeanine Garafalo. None had rudimentary knowledge of radio or politics their upon signing. Nonetheless, if wisecracking truly was the way to win the hearts and minds of NASCAR Nation and turn staunch Republicans into malleable Mensheviks, then Air America could not fail. Failure, however, for the network would come literally within days of its launch on March 31, 2004.
The dream of Air America’s founding fathers was to be able pump a steady audio stream of left-wing talking points into the brain cells of red-state Americans, thereby washing them clean of the RNC propaganda they had been fed for far too long by Limbaugh and Hannity. A second, although unstated, but even more important aim was to install a Democrat in the White House that November by giving the then-unnamed candidate a national radio platform. After all, wasn’t that how the nation turned to the Right in the first place?
No, actually, it wasn’t, as Franken and co. soon found out. Rush got started in the eighth year of the Reagan Revolution, and wasn’t a household name until the Clinton years. He had also failed several times in sundry locations before finally getting his big break twenty years ago. Air America’s pipe dream of competing with, and maybe even surpassing, veteran conservative talk giants like ABC or WOR in its rookie season proved to be ephemeral. By the end of April 2004, it was obvious that the station was not going to come close to reaching its ratings or ad revenue estimates. Panic ensued. With a critical presidential election underway, the network was in as much chaos as the Democrat Party itself. All through the Summer and Fall 2004, not a single one of their highly touted hosts could garner a large enough audience to attract important guests to appear on Air America. After the Democrats were massacred in the election, many wondered what would happen to the network, which from the beginning looked like nothing more than an ad hoc committee to push the Democrats back into power. Failing that mission demoted Air America from laughingstock to non-entity.
Over the next two years, nothing improved. Changes in management didn’t help. Lineup changes did nothing. Jerry Springer came in like a roaring lion and whimpered off after less than a year with his tail between his legs. With the furniture on the Titanic being rearranged constantly, no one had the courage to address the undeniable fact that the ship was sinking fast. When the books were finally opened after Air America filed for bankruptcy protection on Oct.13, 2006, it was discovered that the station had lost nearly 40 million dollars since its debut ($9.1M in ’04; $19.6M in ’05; and $13.1M in ’06--up until the Oct. 13 bankruptcy filing). Other low points include the discovery by the City of New York’s Department of Investigation that prior to its launch in 2004, Air America co-founder Evan M. Cohen pilfered $875,000 from the youth center in the Bronx where he used to work and shifted the stolen funds to the then-unborn radio network. It was the least-reported major misappropriation scandal in the history of the United States. Ask Media Matters about that one; they seem to have a very selective memory about just which media stories seem to matter.
When front-man Franken retired this month to begin his next incarnation as the opponent whom Senator Norm Coleman (R-Minn.) will beat in next year’s election, the network officially lost all hope. He will be replaced by some guy named Thom Hartmann. Raise your hand if you’ve ever heard of Thom Hartmann. I thought so.
So finally, Air America has been given new life by another fantastically wealthy liberal, bailed out by multimillionaire real estate mogul Stephen Green, brother of disgraced New York politician Mark Green, who is delusional about the future possibilities of the network. For a guy who’s failed at everything he’s ever tried, I think he and Air America are a match made in Heaven.
There is no future for liberal talk radio now, just as there was no future for liberal talk radio in 2004, or at any other time in history. If anyone is foolish enough to take the new reincarnation of Air America off the Green brothers’ hands, then there will be no future for that moron, either. Stop kidding yourself. It’s over.
Friday, February 23, 2007
Final Thoughts on the Death of Air America Radio
In Wednesday’s Daily News, writer David Hinckley did a short piece about the long-overdue collapse of the Air America talk radio network. For a little less than three years, Air America had been the nation’s largest wholesale supplier of vitriolic hate-speech for all ranges on the ideological spectrum: not only the Extreme Left, but also the Ultra-Extreme Left, and even the hard-to-please Mega-Ultra-Extreme Left.
Hinckley’s article dealt mostly with the current situation of the bottom-of-the-barrel radio hosts whom the station currently employs, such as Rachel Maddow, who is an NPR leftover, and Randi Rhodes, who has been as successful as anyone on ‘progressive’ talk radio in history. What does that mean? It means that her audience is about one-tenth of the lousiest nationally-sydicated conservative talker on any given day.
This week, the feeble network is being purchased in bankruptcy court for the unimpressive sum of 4.25 million dollars. Even though it’s all over but the funeral service, Air America will continue to have some function as a kind of left-wing Old Faithful: a perpetual fountain of venom for that new breed of communist who just isn’t astute or patient enough for NPR. I want my Bush-is-Hitler diatribe NOW, not after having to sit through twenty minutes of intellectual debate, dammit! I don’t have a problem with that. Actually, until we taxpayers come to our senses and demand that all funding for PBS and NPR be cut off completely, I’m glad to hear a differing viewpoint put forth by a privately-funded business that I know I’m not paying for. As an added bonus, we can all take delight in the fact that George Soros has lost millions of his stolen American dollars, throwing bad money after bad, as he desperately tried to keep this wreckage afloat. We’ll deal with all the fiscal and managerial bungling in a later blog. Right now, I want to critique Hinckley’s analysis of the current state of left-wing talk radio, particularly as he cites some input from a fellow who should, ostensibly, know something about talk radio, Talkers magazine’s Michael Harrison.
If anyone has tuned into AM radio at least one time in the last twenty years, then that individual should have a major problem with this statement from Harrison:
“There were liberals on the radio before....And there’s other progressive talk now: Ed Schultz, Stephanie Miller. They will continue regardless of Air America, which is really just a couple of good shows and a brand name.”
Harrison is right about one thing. There were plenty of liberal talkers on the radio before, but that was because of one of the most flagrantly unconstitutional fiats this country had ever seen: the Fairness Doctrine. However, even after it was repealed, yes--it is true, there were a substantial number of libs on the airwaves during the Rush era in big time slots and with national audiences. Lynn Samuels, Joy Behar, Jay Diamond, Richard Bey...hell, Lionel was the morning drive guy--the most important slot on radio--on WABC for years.
Well, what happened? In the month of September in the year 2001, the world was changed by a genocide which occurred on American soil, thus rendering anti-intellectual political viewpoints untenable. The ivory-tower utopianism of the lefties no longer held a sustainable position in the media, especially radio, which is a medium of cold facts, logic, and reason. Television, and film, on the other hand, can be manipulated to induce a certain pre-programmed viewer reaction through the use of sensationalized visual images. If you’ve ever seen a Michael Moore ‘documentary’, then you know what I’m talking about. I agree completely with Michael Medved, the film and cultural critic (who may have been quoting Bernie Goldberg when he said this; I’m not sure who said it first), who said that radio is, by nature, rational and must use intellectual arguments to make points, and therefore tends to lean to the right, while TV is sensational and relies on imagery, not logic, to produce an emotional reaction and thus tends to lean toward the left. That truism makes this next statement of Harrison’s so perplexing:
“Most talk radio is not political....You have sports talk, black talk, car talk, NPR. Conservative talk is very successful, but it’s not the majority of talk radio. It’s a niche. That’s what liberal talk can be.”
Black talk is not political? NPR is not political?!? Are you kidding me? And, Conservative talk is not the majority of talk radio? A NICHE?!? These are not the words of a person who knows the first thing about radio. These sound like Air America talking points. And that is why they are being read their Last Rites on their deathbed as they sign up some character named Thom Hartmann to donate yet another organ to their lost cause. More on him later.
In the past six years, no liberal radio talk show has been remotely successful on any level. No one ever will be. It has nothing to do with the talent or charisma of any of the lib talkers; the simple fact is that the average American farmer or laborer is more intelligent and knows more about history, economics, politics, and world affairs than the smartest voice on Air America or NPR. Until George Soros and his ilk come to terms with that undeniable fact, the Rushies, who have crushed the lefties since the eighties (and even before that), will continue to steamroll the libs for the next thirty years and beyond.
Hinckley’s article dealt mostly with the current situation of the bottom-of-the-barrel radio hosts whom the station currently employs, such as Rachel Maddow, who is an NPR leftover, and Randi Rhodes, who has been as successful as anyone on ‘progressive’ talk radio in history. What does that mean? It means that her audience is about one-tenth of the lousiest nationally-sydicated conservative talker on any given day.
This week, the feeble network is being purchased in bankruptcy court for the unimpressive sum of 4.25 million dollars. Even though it’s all over but the funeral service, Air America will continue to have some function as a kind of left-wing Old Faithful: a perpetual fountain of venom for that new breed of communist who just isn’t astute or patient enough for NPR. I want my Bush-is-Hitler diatribe NOW, not after having to sit through twenty minutes of intellectual debate, dammit! I don’t have a problem with that. Actually, until we taxpayers come to our senses and demand that all funding for PBS and NPR be cut off completely, I’m glad to hear a differing viewpoint put forth by a privately-funded business that I know I’m not paying for. As an added bonus, we can all take delight in the fact that George Soros has lost millions of his stolen American dollars, throwing bad money after bad, as he desperately tried to keep this wreckage afloat. We’ll deal with all the fiscal and managerial bungling in a later blog. Right now, I want to critique Hinckley’s analysis of the current state of left-wing talk radio, particularly as he cites some input from a fellow who should, ostensibly, know something about talk radio, Talkers magazine’s Michael Harrison.
If anyone has tuned into AM radio at least one time in the last twenty years, then that individual should have a major problem with this statement from Harrison:
“There were liberals on the radio before....And there’s other progressive talk now: Ed Schultz, Stephanie Miller. They will continue regardless of Air America, which is really just a couple of good shows and a brand name.”
Harrison is right about one thing. There were plenty of liberal talkers on the radio before, but that was because of one of the most flagrantly unconstitutional fiats this country had ever seen: the Fairness Doctrine. However, even after it was repealed, yes--it is true, there were a substantial number of libs on the airwaves during the Rush era in big time slots and with national audiences. Lynn Samuels, Joy Behar, Jay Diamond, Richard Bey...hell, Lionel was the morning drive guy--the most important slot on radio--on WABC for years.
Well, what happened? In the month of September in the year 2001, the world was changed by a genocide which occurred on American soil, thus rendering anti-intellectual political viewpoints untenable. The ivory-tower utopianism of the lefties no longer held a sustainable position in the media, especially radio, which is a medium of cold facts, logic, and reason. Television, and film, on the other hand, can be manipulated to induce a certain pre-programmed viewer reaction through the use of sensationalized visual images. If you’ve ever seen a Michael Moore ‘documentary’, then you know what I’m talking about. I agree completely with Michael Medved, the film and cultural critic (who may have been quoting Bernie Goldberg when he said this; I’m not sure who said it first), who said that radio is, by nature, rational and must use intellectual arguments to make points, and therefore tends to lean to the right, while TV is sensational and relies on imagery, not logic, to produce an emotional reaction and thus tends to lean toward the left. That truism makes this next statement of Harrison’s so perplexing:
“Most talk radio is not political....You have sports talk, black talk, car talk, NPR. Conservative talk is very successful, but it’s not the majority of talk radio. It’s a niche. That’s what liberal talk can be.”
Black talk is not political? NPR is not political?!? Are you kidding me? And, Conservative talk is not the majority of talk radio? A NICHE?!? These are not the words of a person who knows the first thing about radio. These sound like Air America talking points. And that is why they are being read their Last Rites on their deathbed as they sign up some character named Thom Hartmann to donate yet another organ to their lost cause. More on him later.
In the past six years, no liberal radio talk show has been remotely successful on any level. No one ever will be. It has nothing to do with the talent or charisma of any of the lib talkers; the simple fact is that the average American farmer or laborer is more intelligent and knows more about history, economics, politics, and world affairs than the smartest voice on Air America or NPR. Until George Soros and his ilk come to terms with that undeniable fact, the Rushies, who have crushed the lefties since the eighties (and even before that), will continue to steamroll the libs for the next thirty years and beyond.
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