Consensus Science And Orthodoxy Enforcement

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post laying out the basics of the scientific method.  Not that I came up with this; it's just the basic stuff everybody learns (or should learn) in junior high school.  Essentially, the idea is that every hypothesis is open for challenge by all comers at all times, and when observation or experiment contradicts a hypothesis, then that hypothesis is wrong and must be rejected.

But then there's the small problem that arises when accumulating data contradict some scientific hypothesis on which a lot of careers and funding and public policy have already been built.  The acute version of this problem occurs when a hypothesis has become official scientific dogma and is currently in use by some powerful government bureaucracy to enhance its power and advance its preferred policy agenda.  All of a sudden the problem is not so small to the people whose funding, status, perks and careers are on the line.  And thus we find in the community calling themselves "scientists" people in positions of high power and prestige who in fact are the opposite of scientists, and who have taken on the role of enforcing orthodoxy and suppressing contrary evidence in service of pre-established public policy agendas.  This may be anti-science, but it turns out it's a good way to get yourself lots of fancy titles, awards, grants, perks, and compensation.

Which brings me to the story of Marcia McNutt.  Dr. McNutt is the Editor-in-Chief of Science magazine, one of those premier peer-reviewed scientific journals that a budding scientist absolutely must get published in to rise out of obscurity and become someone in the field.  Currently Dr. McNutt has been nominated to be the next head of the National Academy of Sciences.  There is no other candidate.  Here is a picture of Dr. McNutt:

Yesterday I received a copy of an extraordinary email on the subject of Dr. McNutt authored by Peter Wood of the National Association of Scholars.   The email was sent by Wood to the membership of the National Association of Scholars, and a full version of it appears on their website.    Mr. Wood raises serious issues of what he terms "threats to the integrity of science" arising during Dr. McNutt's tenure at Science.  Essentially the issue boils down to McNutt turning Science from a organ of science into a tool of orthodoxy enforcement. 

Dr. McNutt has in her career found herself faced more than once with the challenge of what to do when an entrenched orthodoxy meets a substantial scientific challenge.  The challenge in each case could itself prove to be mistaken, but it met what most scientists would concede to be the threshold criteria to deserve a serious hearing.  Yet in each case Dr. McNutt chose to reinforce the orthodoxy by shutting the door on the challenge. . . .  Dr. McNutt’s dismissive treatment of scientific criticisms is disturbing.         

Wood treats three particular controversies in detail.  In each case the hypothesis in question is a main underpinning of government regulatory and/or environmental policy in some respect.  In each case the hypothesis has come into serious question based on observation and data that appear to contradict it.  In each case McNutt has used her role as Editor-in-Chief of Science to make sure that no paper presenting evidence contrary to the hypothesis can see the light of day.  I will quote Wood extensively on each of the three controversies.  You can then judge for yourself:

1.  The status of the linear no-threshold (LNT) dose-response model for the biological effects of nuclear radiation.  The prominence of the model stems from the June 29, 1956 Science paper, “Genetic Effects of Atomic Radiation,” authored by the NAS Committee on the Biological Effects of Atomic Radiation.  This paper is now widely questioned and has been seriously critiqued in many peer-reviewed publications, including two detailed 2015 papers.  These criticisms are being taken seriously around the world, as summarized in a December 2, 2015 Wall Street Journal commentary.  In August 2015 four distinguished critics of LNT made a formal request to Dr. McNutt to examine the evidence of fundamental flaws in the 1956 paper and retract it.  However, on August 11, 2015 Dr. McNutt rejected this request without even reviewing the detailed evidence.  Furthermore, Dr. McNutt did not even consider recusing herself and having independent reviewers examine evidence that challenges the validity of both a Science paper and an NAS Committee Report.

This is a consequential matter that bears on a great deal of national public policy, as the LNT model has served as the basis for risk assessment and risk management of radiation and chemical carcinogens for decades, but now needs to be seriously reassessed.  This reassessment could profoundly alter many regulations from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Environmental Protection Agency, and other government agencies.  The relevant documents regarding the 1956 Science paper and Dr. McNutt can be examined at www.nas.org/images/documents/LNT.pdf.

2.  Extensive evidence of scientific misconduct in the epidemiology of fine particulate air pollution (PM2.5) and its relationship to mortality.  Since 1997 EPA has claimed that lifetime inhalation of about a teaspoon of particles with diameter less than 2.5 microns causes premature death in the United States and it established an national regulation based on this claim.  Science has provided extensive news coverage of this issue and its regulatory significance, but has never published any scientific criticism of this questionable claim, which is largely based on nontransparent research.

Earlier this year, nine accomplished scientists and academics submitted to Science well-documented evidence of misconduct by several of the PM2.5 researchers relied upon by EPA.  The evidence of misconduct was first submitted to Dr. McNutt in a detailed June 4, 2015 email letter, then in a detailed July 20, 2015 Policy Forum manuscript “Transparent Science is Necessary for EPA Regulations,” and finally in an August 17, 2015 Perspective manuscript “Particulate Matter Does Not Cause Premature Deaths.” Dr. McNutt and two Science editors immediately rejected the letter and the manuscripts and never conducted any internal or external review of the evidence.  This a consequential matter because many multi-billion dollar EPA air pollution regulations, such as, the Clean Power Plan, are primarily justified by the claim that PM2.5 is killing Americans.  The relevant documents regarding this controversy can be examined at https://www.nas.org/images/documents/PM2.5.pdf.

3. Science promotes the so-called consensus model of climate change and excludes any contrary views.  This issue has become so polarized and polarizing that it is difficult to bring up, but at some point the scientific community will have to reckon with the dramatic discrepancies between current climate models and substantial parts of the empirical record.  Recent evidence of Science bias on this issue is the June 26, 2015 article by Dr. Thomas R. Karl, “Possible artifacts of data biases in the recent global surface warming hiatus”; the July 3, 2015 McNutt editorial, “The beyond-two-degree inferno”; the November 13, 2015 McNutt editorial, “Climate warning, 50 years later”; and the November 25, 2015 AAAS News Release, “AAAS Leads Coalition to Protest Climate Science Inquiry.”

Dr. McNutt’s position is, of course, consistent with the official position of the AAAS. But the attempt to declare that the “pause” in global warming was an illusion has not been accepted by several respected and well-informed scientists. One would not know this, however, from reading Science, which has declined to publish any dissenting views.  One can be a strong supporter of the consensus model and yet be disturbed by the role which Science has played in this controversy.  Dr. McNutt and the journal have acted more like partisan activists than like responsible stewards of scientific standards confronted with contentious claims and ambiguous evidence.  The relevant documents and commentary regarding the Karl paper and McNutt editorials can be examined at https://www.nas.org/images/documents/Climate_Change.pdf.

So how does a Marcia McNutt come to be the unopposed shoo-in candidate to head the National Academy of Sciences?  My hypothesis is that those promoting her candidacy know that she can be counted on to protect any important orthodoxy from serious challenge.  This is one hypothesis I'd like to see proved wrong; but don't count on it.

The Folly Of "Affordable Housing" In Manhattan Marches On

Early in the history of this blog (September 2013), I nominated affordable housing in Manhattan as the "worst possible public policy."  I mean, creating subsidized housing that by its nature traps people in poverty for life is pretty bad for starters; but doing it on the most expensive real estate in the country and at the highest possible cost per subsidized family -- could anything be stupider?  Of course I naively thought that people would read my post, get dazzled by its brilliance, and shortly start to unwind the vast empire of subsidized housing that looms over Manhattan.  Or, whatever might be done with the existing subsidized housing in Manhattan, at least we wouldn't go on creating more and more of it at astounding cost.  Hah!

The voters taught me my lesson by promptly electing Bill de Blasio as the new mayor in November 2013.  At the top of his announced policy agenda was lots more subsidized "affordable" housing, and of course much of that would have to be in Manhattan.  Both the Wall Street Journal and New York Times have had updates in the past couple of days.

The December 15 report from Josh Barbanel in the Journal focuses on 456 Washington Street, a brand-new top-end rental project in the Tribeca neighborhood, about to open with spectacular waterfront views over the Hudson River.  Here is a picture: 

456 Washington Street, Tribeca, Manhattan

Barbanel reports that the market-rate rentals in this building will be offered at up to $50,000 per month.  Meanwhile, the building contains 22 so-called "affordable" apartments, to be allocated by a lottery, going for as little as $800 per month.  For comparable size apartments, market rate two bedrooms "start" at $9995 per month, while the "affordable" two bedrooms will go for about $1041 per month (for a family size of four and an income between the precise levels of $37,132 and $51,780 -- it's exquisitely perfected fairness!).  A little arithmetic and we know that each such non-poor family will get an annual subsidy of well over $100,000, not just this year and next year, but year after year for as long as they don't move out.  It's a handout worth at least $2 million per family, although impossible to turn into cash.  Oh, and meanwhile the City gives up $837,000 of annual real estate taxes through its so-called 421-a program; the state issues $7.5 million of tax-exempt bonds to support the project; the developers become eligible for federal tax credits (Barbanel does not specify the amount); and the building gets a zoning bonus to increase its size.  All so we can give handouts of $2+ million each to 22 non-poor families?  How can this possibly make sense?

Barbanel at least shows a modicum of skepticism:

The estimate [of $16.7 million foregone real estate taxes over 20 years], prepared at the request of The Wall Street Journal, found that was enough money to finance the construction of 93 apartments in the Bronx through a cash grant.

Or probably more like 250 apartments in Detroit.  But hey, we have infinite money here, so what's to worry?

Meanwhile, don't expect any skepticism from the New York Times.  Their article by Charles Bagli today has the headline "Sale Keeps 975 Rents Affordable In Harlem."   This one concerns the Riverton Houses in Harlem, not exactly the most beautiful buildings in the City, but long home to some of Harlem's gentry.  (Among notable residents have been former Mayor David Dinkins and former HUD Secretary Samuel Pierce.)  Here is a picture (sorry it's so small, but you can click to enlarge):

View fullsize

Riverton Houses, Harlem, Manhattan

In the Times's narrative, Riverton "fell victim to speculators" in the run-up to the financial crisis.  The lenders took over, and they are now selling the buildings to new buyers.  Of course the buyers might have the crazy idea of trying to maximize the rents they will get in the buildings.  Well, we can't have that, so the City has swooped in with a 30-year tax abatement quantified by the Times as worth about $100 million.  Here is de Blasio:

“It’s been our mission to keep tenants in their homes and keep Riverton affordable for the next generation,” Mr. de Blasio said in a statement. “This is preservation on a grand scale, and it is going to protect the kind of economic diversity that’s always been part of Harlem.”

In return for the $100 million the developers must protect the "affordability" for tenants earning up to $97,125.  (Once again, that exquisite fairness!  Don't try earning $97,126, or you're out!)

Well, considering it's affordable housing in Manhattan, $100 million might sound ridiculously cheap for almost 1000 apartments -- it's only about $100,000 per apartment.  But don't let yourself be fooled; this is just the Times's complete lack of skepticism.  In fact the suppression of the rents will in turn suppress the market value of the buildings, and thus the taxable value.  The City will easily lose multiple hundreds of millions more on the deal.  Handouts per family will not be in the same range as the Tribeca building, but only because market rents in Harlem have not yet reached the stratospheric levels of Tribeca.  A good estimate would be $1 million per family instead of $2 million.  And remember, these are not poor people.

With a few chirping little voices like my own continuing to point out the massive costs and tiny benefits of these programs, the development community has lined up to protect its bread and butter in the tax breaks.  Crain's New York Business today has an interview with Lisa Gomez of L+M Equities, a rental developer.  Ms. Gomez does her best to defend the tax breaks, arguing that without them developers just can't make new projects work at today's land prices:

 It’s all about land price. We have a scarcity of land. . . .   In strong neighborhoods, you can afford to make it work, but in weaker neighborhoods, I don’t know. I don’t know how that happens at all without 421-a, or some other replacement tax abatement.  

Of course Ms. Gomez has it exactly backwards.  The tax breaks are precisely the cause of the inflated land prices.  The most likely effect of the expiration of the tax breaks would be for land values to fall back down and development to resume after some period of adjustment.  Of course, developers who had bought land speculatively at the current inflated prices would lose a bundle of money.  You can bet that plenty of cash is getting sprinkled around the legislature to prevent that from happening.  Affordable housing in Manhattan marches on!

How's That Scientific Consensus Working Out For You?

If you put some time into looking at various situations where a scientific "consensus" has developed, you will be stunned at how often the consensus has later proved to have been dead wrong.  The phenomenon is particularly prevalent in fields involving complex and poorly understood systems.  The human body is one such system.  The climate is another.

Back in my law school days, one of my friends developed a case of severe and debilitating stomach ulcers.  In those days (early 1970s) the "scientific consensus" was that ulcers were caused by some combination of stress and harsh and spicy foods.  Of course my friend went to doctors, and of course their diagnosis was that stress was mainly to blame.  Hey, what could be more stressful than the first year at law school?  (This was actually the year that the book The Paper Chase came out.)  Next thing you know the poor guy was told that he needed to take a year off from school and go on a diet of bland mush.  After a hiatus he came back, but somehow the ulcers had not really improved. 

Turned out that the whole idea of stress as a cause of ulcers was plain wrong.  Experiments in the mid-80s by Barry Marshall and Robin Warren established the bacterium Helicobacter pylori as the principal cause.  In 2005 Marshall and Warren won the Nobel Prize for medicine.  Now most ulcers can be cured by a couple of weeks of antibiotics.  But before their hypothesis was established, Marshall and Warren underwent a good deal of scorn and ridicule for bucking the "consensus."  Here is a summary from Bahar Gholipur of Live Science, citing Dr. Arun Swaminath of Lenox Hill Hospital:

The discovery of H. pylori's role in ulcers led to the Nobel Prize in 2005 for Barry Marshall and Robin Warren, who were ridiculed when they suggested the idea, Swaminath said. It is a myth that peptic ulcers are caused by stress and spicy food.             

Meanwhile, as the consensus persisted, people like my law school friend had to suffer for no reason.

Or how about the consensus that the way to reduce the risk of heart disease is the low fat diet.  The geniuses in our government, based on consensus science, started recommending to reduce fat in the diet about 40 years ago.  Today the campaign against dietary fat remains literally everywhere, and you can't go to the grocery store without getting bombarded with sales pitches for low fat products.  The following line continued to appear as recently as the 2010 guidelines that were not superseded until early this year:

A strong body of evidence indicates that higher intake of most dietary saturated fatty acids is associated with higher levels of blood total cholesterol and low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol. Higher total and LDL cholesterol levels are risk factors for cardiovascular disease.

And what "evidence" was that exactly?  I would say the whole thing was based on myth from the get-go, but it gets worse.  This was/is one of those myths that was just so intuitively obvious and had such a strong consensus backing it that it became literally impossible to destroy.  Study after study completely contradicted the hypothesis that dietary fat increased the risk of heart disease, but the consensus went on undisturbed for decades.  To take just one of the largest and most definitive studies among many, in the 90s the government commissioned a gigantic randomized study of 50,000 women called the Women's Health Initiative Diet Modification Trial.  After a full eight years of following the women, in 2006 the Harvard School of Public Health came out with a report summarizing the results:

The results . . . showed no benefits for a low-fat diet. Women assigned to this eating strategy did not appear to gain protection against breast cancer, colorectal cancer, or cardiovascular disease. And after eight years, their weights were generally the same as those of women following their usual diets.

But even that devastating conclusion couldn't kill off this one.  Four years after that report -- and plenty of others with similar results -- the government reissued its dietary guidelines without change.  And those guidelines remained in effect right up until this year.  Finally in February of this year the government's Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee began the slow backdown from the bogus recommendations it has been disseminating for decades.  Here is the February 2015 Report, couched in endless bureaucratese.  Or try a summary from the Washington Post wonkblog on February 10:

The nation’s top nutrition advisory panel has decided to drop its caution about eating cholesterol-laden food, a move that could undo almost 40 years of government warnings about its consumption.  The group’s finding that cholesterol in the diet need no longer be considered a “nutrient of concern” stands in contrast to the committee’s findings five years ago, the last time it convened. During those proceedings, as in previous years, the panel deemed the issue of excess cholesterol in the American diet a public health concern.    

And by the way, it's not just that the government's guidelines were dead wrong for 40 years.  Many assert that the guidelines in addition were actively harmful to the health of the American people, basically because reducing fat in the diet inevitably leads to increase in consumption of more-harmful carbohydrates.  Here is one such assertion (by a heart surgeon named Dwight Lundell).  (For myself, I continue to follow the guidance of eating what tastes good.)

The most remarkable thing about the high-fat-diet/heart-disease hypothesis is that the accumulation of decades worth of devastating contrary evidence has still not killed it off completely.  Even the latest report from the Advisory Committee is only a partial backdown from the recommendation to reduce fat.  Hey, it's consensus!  Everybody knows it's true!  Same thing, of course, is going on in climate science.  Eighteen plus years of contrary evidence?  So?  The leader of every single country in the world knows that consensus trumps the evidence!

Does The FBI Have Enough Resources To Deal With The Terror Threat?

My view of the general range of Obama administration officials is that they go from, on the one hand, empty suits to, on the other hand, ideologues who are trying their best to take us down the road of Venezuela to the maximum extent they can get away with.  But one guy in this collection who actually gives at least the appearance of being a relatively serious person trying (mostly) to do his job is James Comey of the FBI.  Even so, there's just something about being a government operative that means that you can't help yourself from devoting every day trying to grow your budget and your empire, and you never spend one minute identifying the waste in your budget and trying to eliminate it.

So Comey has been in the news quite a bit recently, and every time it's basically the same thing -- how we're working really hard, day and night, to protect the American people against terror generally and ISIS specifically, but it's really labor-intensive work, and our people are really stretched and stressed, and I'm just not sure that we have the "resources" we need to do this job as well as we should.  In other words, it's the usual bureaucrat's plea to grow his budget and his empire.  As just a couple of examples, consider this report from HNGN on October 24 ("Comey suggested the FBI might not have enough resources to meet the mounting demand[for terror-related investigations]"), or this report from the Washington Times on November 17 ("Bureau officials are deeply worried that they don't have enough resources to track a growing number of radicalized Americans inspired by the Islamic State . . . .").    

Having enough resources to combat foreign and domestic terrorism does seem like an important mission for the FBI.  On the other hand, I'd feel a lot more sympathy for the beleaguered FBI agents if I wasn't personally aware of thousands upon thousands upon thousands of hours of their time wasted on the ridiculous campaign of the Obama administration to seek criminal convictions of Wall Street bankers and traders for normal activity and thereby keep up a pretense that criminality in the financial sector was the cause of the recent financial crisis.

For information on some of the many dozens of hugely expensive phony prosecutions of the last seven years, see my tag on Phony Prosecutions.   Leading the list of such phony prosecutions has been the jihad against insider trading, particularly the branch of same involving non-insiders.  See coverage on that subject, for example here and here.  These prosecutions have been hugely expensive and involve many thousands of man hours each.  The whole non-insider branch of the field was invalidated by the Second Circuit in the Newman/Chiasson case, and a score or so of wrongly-prosecuted individuals vindicated.  And nobody can even identify a victim of insider trading, let alone articulate an economic theory under which it is harmful to the markets.  And then there have been the endless shakedowns of banks that the government knows will never take a case to trial and will always back down and pay a billion or two or five to move on.  Here's coverage of one example out of dozens.  Add in the endless prosecutions of pharmaceutical companies for constitutionally protected free speech in "off-label" marketing, and now you're easily into the multiple millions of hours of wasted FBI time during the course of the Obama administration.  Funny that Comey never seems to mention how millions of hours of his people's time is wasted on political and shakedown prosecutions of non-criminals.  But we need more "resources" to combat terror, so you'll just have to give us more money! 

The latest development in this line came down just yesterday from the Second Circuit, reversing the conviction of a guy named Jesse Litvak, former bond trader from Jeffries & Co., for allegedly lying about certain mortgage-backed securities to his counterparties in bond trades, who in these instances were the government itself.  The alleged "lies" involved things like how much Litvak had bought the bonds for, and whether he owned them himself versus acting as an intermediary.  In other words, the alleged lies were things that did not go to the current value of the securities; and the government asks to be treated like a babe in the woods, instead of like the gorilla it is in the bond markets.  Is there actually someone out there who thinks that this prosecution is a good use of limited government resources?  Unlike the Newman/Chiasson case, the court did not fully exonerate Litvak, and has given the government the opportunity to retry the case.  So Jim, how many hundreds or thousands of hours of your guys' time is going to go down this particular drain while you devote insufficient resources to the terrorist threat?

Somehow Perfect Justice And Fairness Keep Eluding Our Grasp

Down in Venezuela a claimed majority of the population for some 16 years has bought into the line, sometimes going under the name of "socialism," that perfect justice and fairness between and among people could be achieved by the government ordering that it be so.  As payback for their foolishness, the Venezuelans have been rewarded with near complete loss of freedom and rights, plummeting GDP, sinking incomes, soaring real poverty, empty stores, endless waits in lines, plus a dictator's daughter who has stolen $4 billion from the people, and a former treasury secretary who somehow has over $11 billion is Swiss bank accounts.  With the recent election, the Venezuelans may now finally begin to extricate themselves from their self-inflicted predicament.  Then again, this was only a legislative election, and the ruling overlords who have been empowered by the "socialist" revolution are not about to give up their power easily. 

Here in New York City, our local political grandees thankfully don't have many of the powers that enabled the Venezuelan kleptocrats to wreak such complete economic destruction, like control over the currency, sway over the banks, and ownership of major businesses and oil reserves.  But New York's rulers do have the same mentality that perfect fairness and justice can be achieved by government order.  I've previously reported, for example here, on how that plays out in the "affordable housing" arena.  For today's lesson, let's consider the question of preventing people from learning who has a criminal record.

Perhaps you haven't been following this issue, but there has been a big push among "progressives" in recent years for something called "Ban the Box" legislation, that is, new laws that place restrictions on the ability of employers to ask an applicant about his or her criminal record.  The stated rationale of the legislation is to make sure that people with criminal records have a "fair chance" to work.  Hey, who could be against "fairness"?  For an example of one of many organizations advocating for this sort of legislation, see the website of the National Employment Law Project here.  Here is NELP's description of what one such law requires:

Under the Fair Chance Act, it is illegal to ask about criminal history on job applications and during initial job interviews. Only after a job offer is made may employers ask about criminal convictions and—with the applicant’s permission—run a background check. After reviewing the applicant’s conviction history, employers may withdraw the job offer only if the candidate’s criminal record is directly related to the job or if hiring the individual would pose an unreasonable risk.      

As you probably have guessed by now, uber-progressive New York City is in the forefront of the "Ban the Box" movement, and indeed the "Fair Chance Act" cited in the excerpt is New York City's brand new legislation, that took effect on October 27.  The law gives no direct answer to the question of whether this guy's five convictions for armed robbery are or are not "directly related" to the job he has applied for in your company's IT department.  What do you think?  What do you think the New York City "Human Rights" enforcers think?

Meanwhile, in other news that nobody but me seems to think is related, the New York City Department of Investigation came out with a report yesterday addressing the question of why it is that the crime rate in New York City Housing Authority projects is around four times the crime rate in the remainder of the City.  I can't seem to get the report itself to download, but there is a long article about it in today's New York Times, page A33 of the print edition.  And what is the principal reason given for the disparity?  You guessed it:  failure to identify the people who have criminal records and to exclude them from the projects.

In a report released on Tuesday, the Investigation Department found that, without explanation, the police in 2011 stopped sending reports about crime on public housing property to the Housing Authority as required under a 1996 agreement between the two agencies. In recent years, they found, the Police Department also frequently neglected to inform housing officials when its residents were arrested on accusations of serious offenses, hampering efforts to remove them from public housing apartments. . . .  Specifically, the agency has not effectively enforced an existing policy to exclude criminal offenders from apartments permanently, allowing those accused of crimes such as gun possession and drug dealing to continue living in public housing.

But wait -- shouldn't people with criminal records have a "fair chance" to live in subsidized public housing?  The DOI Report seems to dwell specifically on the case of one Tyrone Howard, who fatally shot a police officer on October 20.  Seems that Mr. Howard lived in one of the projects.  Here's an excellent question:  would Mr. Howard have been any less likely to kill a cop if he had lived somewhere else other than a NYCHA project?

Be that as it may, the DOI does seem to be admitting rather forcefully that a criminal record may have a lot to do with the likelihood of someone committing more crimes of a similar sort in the future.  Should anyone tell Mayor de Blasio and the City Council?  Something tells me that the effort to compel perfect fairness through the "Fair Chance Act" is not going to end well. 

When The Narrative Proves Wrong, The Story Will Just Fade Away

As the clothes-less would-be emperors of the world meet in Paris to try to impose mandatory energy restrictions on everyone else's life, the big news is the latest effort to silence the handful of little kids who would point out the pooh-bahs' obvious nakedness.  The Washington Times reports on a demand from an environmentalist group SumOfUs to deny press credentials to any who don't toe the official climate line:

The climate-change group SumOfUs submitted a formal complaint Monday to U.N. conference organizers “asking for notorious climate denying groups to be denied accreditation to the Paris climate talks,” according to a press release.    

So at least as of today, they still think they can keep everybody from laughing at President Obama, Pope Francis, Bernie Sanders, Al Gore, et al., by shutting the little kids up.  But, as I have predicted, when this whole thing dies, as it inevitably will, none of those who promoted it for decades will ever admit they were wrong or be called to account.  The whole subject will just quietly fade away as if it had never existed and it will never be spoken of again in polite company.  That's how it works with these heavily-promoted narratives when they just prove to be so embarrassingly wrong that they can't be mentioned any more.

For another example of the same phenomenon, consider the campaign against the belt-tightening fiscal regime by governments that goes by the name of "austerity."  "Austerity" is that muddled pseudo-Keynesian term favored by the likes of Paul Krugman and the IMF in their campaign to stop any cuts to government spending.   By one count Krugman has written over eighty articles since the financial crisis attacking anyone who dares to advocate cutting government spending as an economic policy for any country.  Back in 2012, the IMF weighed in on the effort to maintain all government spending everywhere without any cuts with a report claiming that "austerity" was causing massive "economic damage."

But when was the last time you saw one of these anti-"austerity" articles?  The most recent one I can find by Krugman is from September.  They just get fewer and fewer and gradually disappear.  So what happened to that narrative?

Let's compare a couple of examples of spending cutters versus blowout spenders.  First, the UK.  Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne has an op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal titled "How Britain Got Its Mojo Back."    It seems like the newly-re-elected Tory government plans to continue the program of spending cuts that got it re-elected.  According to Trading Economics here, UK public spending as a percent of GDP has come down from 49.7% of GDP in 2009 all the way to 44.4% in 2014, a cut of more than 5%.  Osborne says that there is lots more to come:

Over four years, [our economic plan] will eliminate our budget deficit and deliver a surplus, putting Britain in its strongest fiscal position for almost half a century.  Total public spending will fall to 36.4% of national income . . . .  With the exception of demobilization after world wars, this will be the biggest reduction in government consumption in Britain for a century—and the biggest in any G-7 economy for at least 50 years.     

And how has that been playing out in GDP?  Again from Trading Economics, we find an annual GDP growth rate of 2.3% in the year to September 30, 2015, 2.9% for the prior year, and 2.1% for the year to 9/30/13.  Not gangbusters, but very respectable by European standards.  Compare it to most recent reported annual growth (same source) of 0.3% for France and 0.1% for Germany.

And now for the world champion of blow-out government spending -- Venezuela!  Its economy is a total shambles.  They have literally destroyed everything.  Bill Neuman at the New York Times has been doing a very respectable job on reporting on the impossible economic conditions and empty stores.  From an article on October 18:

The eagerness to dump bolívars or avoid them completely shows the extent to which Venezuelans have lost faith in their economy and in the ability of their government to fix the mess.  A year ago, $1 bought about 100 bolívars on the black market. These days, it often fetches more than 700 bolívars, a sign of how thoroughly domestic confidence in the economy has crashed. 

Meanwhile, the government has stopped publishing any economic statistics at all.  But the IMF projects that the Venezuela economy will shrink by a full 10% in 2015.  Oh, and that's with the usual fraudulent IMF GDP accounting that counts government spending in GDP at 100 cents on the dollar.  A more realistic view of the one-year shrinkage of the Venezuelan economy would be 15 - 20%.  I guess all that government "stimulus" spending didn't work out too well.

Meanwhile, in the all-time champion of low government spending, Singapore (government spending less than 20% of GDP) the per capita GDP has now comfortably passed that of the U.S., and the gap continues to widen.  Same in Switzerland (government spending about 33% of GDP).  I'm not saying we won't ever see another one of these anti-austerity rants, but it's fewer and fewer.  They're just fading away.  Global warming will too.