Here We Are At Al Gore's Climate "Tipping Point"

A favorite game of the climate alarmist movement is predicting that we are on the verge of the climate "tipping point," that is, the moment at which human carbon emissions push the planet over the brink and climate armageddon becomes unstoppable.  

But when will that "tipping point" be reached?  Or have we already passed it?  Many in the alarmism movement are clever enough to avoid ever putting out a specific date that can then be falsified.  For example, former NASA chief catastrophist James Hansen is famous for serial declarations of "tipping points," and has announced their imminence on multiple occasions, but always with a cover of vagueness as to the precise timing.  It's always just around the corner!  Here is his 2008 screed titled "Tipping Point: Perspective of a Climatologist."  Excerpt:

The warming that has already occurred, the positive feedbacks that have been set in motion, and the additional warming in the pipeline together have brought us to the precipice of a planetary tipping point. We are at the tipping point because the climate state includes large, ready positive feedbacks provided by the Arctic sea ice, the West Antarctic ice sheet, and much of Greenland’s ice. Little additional forcing is needed to trigger these feedbacks and magnify global warming. If we go over the edge, we will transition to an environment far outside the range that has been experienced by humanity, and there will be no return within any foreseeable future generation. Casualties would include more than the loss of indigenous ways of life in the Arctic and swamping of coastal cities.  

But does being on the "precipice" of a "planetary tipping point" mean that we will go over the brink tomorrow, a year from now, ten years from now, or a hundred years from now?  Note that Hansen is way too clever to get pinned down on this one.  And when nothing much had happened on his 2008 "tipping point" prediction, nonetheless he was back in 2013 with new and even more catastrophic predictions of a precipice, still at some seemingly imminent but unspecified time in the near future.  As the Guardian reported on July 10 of that year:

[A] new paper by James Hansen is just the latest confirming that we are on the verge of crossing a tipping point into catastrophic climate change.      

But of course no specifics on when the infamous moment would occur.  However, not all in the alarmism movement are quite so careful to keep their bets hedged.  Take, for example, Al Gore.  It seems that at the screening of his movie "An Inconvenient Truth" at the Sundance Film Festival back on January 25, 2006 (was it really that long ago???) Gore made the huge mistake of putting a precise 10-year time clock on the dreaded tipping point.  Gore was quoted by CBS News as follows:

[U]nless drastic measures to reduce greenhouse gases are taken within the next 10 years, the world will reach a point of no return, Gore said.  He sees the situation as “a true planetary emergency.”  “If you accept the truth of that, then nothing else really matters that much,” Gore said in an interview with The Associated Press. “We have to organize quickly to come up with a coherent and really strong response, and that’s what I’m devoting myself to.”            

And now here we are, just about three weeks away from the horrific deadline.  How have things gone?  Well, one thing we know is that there have been none of the "drastic measures to reduce greenhouse gases" that Gore said were so absolutely essential.  Here is a summary chart put out by Europe's Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research ("EDGAR"):

Yes, emissions in the U.S. and the EU have declined marginally in the intervening ten years.  In the case of the U.S., that has not at all been because of "drastic measures" taken by the government (cap-and-trade, for example, went down to defeat in Congress), but rather because the "fracking" revolution has caused the substitution of now-cheaper natural gas for some coal.  In Europe, comparable marginal declines in emissions have been achieved by governments' artificially driving up the cost of energy and impoverishing their people.  And meanwhile, emissions in China have exploded, while those in India have also dramatically increased, together swamping the marginal reductions in the U.S. and the EU.  Overall emissions are up, and by a lot.

So Al, is armageddon upon us?  Funny, but the guy seems to be strangely quiet these days.  One thing we know for sure is that global lower troposphere temperatures have been basically flat not just for the ten years since Gore's prediction, but going all the way back to 1997.  Here is the latest UAH satellite temperature record:

Looks like that record of high temperatures from 1997-98 is not too close to falling, despite China and India building literally hundreds of coal-fired power plants in the interim.  So, is this the "tipping point"?  If not, how will we know when we hit it?

Ongoing Explosion Of Lawlessness At The Justice Department

I seem to remember a time when the Justice Department of the United States was an organization that had earned a high reputation for respect of the citizenry and behaving within the law.   It's amazing how fast these things can be lost.

Buried at page A17 of the print version of today's New York Times is an article by Stephanie Clifford headlined "Secrecy Orders By Prosecutors On Subpoenas Draw Criticism."   The article reports on a recent decision by Judge Raymond Dearie of the Eastern District of New York in the case of United States v. Gigliotti, in which Dearie was highly critical of prosecutors for ignoring their constitutional obligations.  I cannot find a publicly-available version of the opinion, so I will rely on the excerpts quoted in the Times.

It seems that the government was investigating the Gigliotti family for involvement in drug dealing or other illegal activities.  On March 11, 2015, the prosecutors of the Eastern District of New York issued a subpoena seeking information from the Gigliottis' accounting firm, Zuccarello, Zerillo & Co.  Here is a copy of the cover page of the subpoena.  The cover page contains the following legend in all capital letters:

YOU ARE HEREBY DIRECTED NOT TO DISCLOSE THE EXISTENCE OF THIS SUBPOENA, AS IT MAY IMPEDE AN ONGOING INVESTIGATION.

Now, where exactly do federal prosecutors come off throwing a line like that into their subpoenas?  For those unaware, here is a brief summary of the law on this subject:  Prosecutors and members of grand juries are sworn to secrecy as to their activities, but members of the public who receive a subpoena or are otherwise asked for information are under no duty of confidentiality, and have a First Amendment right to speak as they may see fit.  The prosecutors may request citizens to keep quiet to assist the investigation, but that is only a request.

There's plenty of case law on this subject that makes it absolutely clear that the prosecutors do not have the right to direct citizens to remain silent about government investigations.  In most parts of the criminal law, Congress has not purported to legislate on this subject.  But then there is the area of so-called "National Security Letters," in which Congress by statute has purported not only to authorize the FBI, in cases involving "national security," to demand information from citizens, but also to compel the citizens to remain silent and not tell the subject or anyone else that the request has been received.  Does that sound to you like it's OK under the First Amendment?  The Second Circuit certainly didn't think so.  In a 2008 case called Doe v. Mukasey, 549 F.3d 861, the Second Circuit ruled that the statutory provisions authorizing the FBI to compel such non-disclosure were unconstitutional, and that if a citizen who received a National Security Letter declined to keep it confidential, the burden would be on the government to obtain a court order requiring confidentiality, absent which the citizen would be free to speak.

So the Gigliotti subpoena did not by any means come against a blank slate.  The prosecutors were completely aware that their "direction" to Zuccarello Zarillo was completely lawless, but they just went ahead and issued it anyway because they thought they could get away with it.  What's the chance that some little accounting firm in Queens reads all the Second Circuit opinions and knows what their rights are?

Needless to say, Judge Dearie (by the way, himself a former U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York -- during the Reagan administration) was not happy.  According to the Times article, Judge Dearie in October instructed the prosecutors to "explain how and why the language was added to the subpoenas."  But in response the prosecutors declined to set out "the scope of the problem or how they planned to address it," and instead merely said that the language was "inadvertent" and "improper."  Well, I can tell you the scope of the problem.  Take a look at the cover page of that subpoena.  It's their form.  In other words, they were putting this language on essentially all the subpoenas.  There was nothing "inadvertent" about this.  They were engaging in systemic intentionally lawless conduct, and now they have lied about it to a judge.

Oh, and who was the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York when this subpoena was issued back in March, and when this improper language somehow crept "inadvertently" into the Eastern District's subpoena form?  That would be Loretta Lynch.  A few weeks later, on April 23, she was confirmed as Attorney General of the United States.  Her confirmation was somewhat controversial, for reasons that included her support for Obama's immigration enforcement regime (or lack thereof), but as far as I can find, the subject of her issuing unconstitutional gag orders to the citizenry did not come up.

And in other news about the "Justice" Department, we learn from the Washington Post on November 23 that so-called "civil forfeitures" to the federal government have exploded to the point that in 2014 they exceeded all losses from burglaries in the United States.   Here is their chart:

Notice that as recently as 2008 (end of the Bush administration) asset forfeitures to the federal government were well under $2 billion annually, and only about a third as much as burglary losses.  But somehow under Obama the asset forfeitures to the federal government have exploded to well over $5 billion per year.  What's going on?  Law enforcement has turned to predation upon the citizenry, with the poor and the marginal most at risk.  From a Washington Post investigatory report in September 2014:

[A]n aggressive brand of policing [is spreading] that has spurred the seizure of hundreds of millions of dollars in cash from motorists and others not charged with crimes...Thousands of people have been forced to fight legal battles that can last more than a year to get their money back.  Behind the rise in seizures is a little-known cottage industry of private police-training firms…  A thriving subculture of road officers…now competes to see who can seize the most cash and contraband, describing their exploits in the network’s chat rooms and sharing “trophy shots” of money and drugs. Some police advocate highway interdiction as a way of raising revenue for cash-strapped municipalities.

That quote deals mostly with state and local law enforcement, but the explosion in the federal seizures shows that they are doing the same or very similar things.  Here is a summary from the Institute of Justice on the scope of the problem.  Or read my article from April 5 on how the feds systematically steal luxury cars from people who try to sell them to buyers in China.

I can't say that I expect much in the way of better behavior from Justice during the term of the current administration.  The question is, will a new administration bring about any reform, or is the formerly respected "Justice" Department now corrupted beyond hope of recovery?

Is Connecticut Self-Destructing?

Checking in on the most popular stories of the year on RealClearPolicy, I find that one of them is "Why Connecticut Is Self-Destructing," by Lewis Andrews.  The story dates from June 9.

"Self-Destructing" is a rather strong term.  Is it a fair characterization of the situation in Connecticut?  I'd say it's an exaggeration, but not by much.  Without doubt, Connecticut should serve as a warning to other states of where the blue state model of governance leads.

The immediate inspiration for Andrews' article was the passage of Connecticut's budget in June.  That budget included major tax increases, particularly on corporate entities, notably a permanent 20% surcharge on the corporate income tax and a new rule imposing taxation on corporations' foreign earnings.  According to Andrews, those changes brought Connecticut's tax burden to the third highest in the nation (although he doesn't say where he gets that figure; a Tax Foundation study from November 15 ranks Connecticut 44th of 50, or 7th worst, for "business tax climate").  The changes also brought threats to leave from several of the state's largest corporate employers, among them General Electric, Aetna and Travelers.  So far none of those has left, but then these things don't happen overnight.  So Andrews asks:

How did Connecticut, which just over two decades ago had no income tax and was widely known as "the Switzerland of New England," so quickly become the third highest-taxing state in the nation, the most indebted on a per capita basis, and, according to Barron's, the worst managed?       

Are things really that bad in Connecticut?  It's still at or near the top in the state rankings by  income.  In this ranking based on 2010 - 2013 U.S. Census data, Connecticut ranks first by per capita income (although D.C. is substantially higher) and fourth by median household income.   But its top income position has been gradually eroding.  According to data from the Connecticut Department of Labor here, the number of jobs in the state has been almost perfectly stagnant for 25 years:  1,640,000 jobs in 1990 and 1,690,000 jobs in 2015.  That would be "growth" of about 0.1% per year.  1990 would be just before the enactment of the state's first income tax in 1992.  It started at 1.5%.  Today the top rate is 6.7%, just a hair shy of New York's top rate. 

Remarkable about Connecticut is the concentration of the wealth in the New York suburbs in the southwest area of the state, and the simultaneous abject poverty of all the cities.  Among the states, Mississippi has the lowest per capita income at $20,618 (2014 data).  Here are the per capita income numbers for the main Connecticut cities:  Hartford, $16,798; Bridgeport, $19,854; New London, $21,110; Waterbury, $21,545; and New Haven, $21,789.  Whatever they are doing to ameliorate the income inequality is completely falling on its face.

So how is the new budget working out?  On November 10 the Hartford Courant reported that the tax revenue from the newly increased taxes was running some $600 million below projections (over two years), on a total annual budget of about $26 billion.  An emergency legislative session earlier this month claims to have fixed the problem, for the moment.  The big employers in Stamford all seem to be in a Perils-of-Pauline game of downsizing and/or departure.  Pitney Bowes has just sold its headquarters building and downsized its operation substantially.  The big banks with operations in Stamford, notably UBS and RBS, repeatedly threaten to close and move away, although maybe they'll stay a little while longer for a big enough bribe from the state.

Connecticut is a tremendous lost opportunity.  It has opted for high taxes and a period of gradual relative decline compared to other states.  The lost opportunity is particularly tragic for the basket case cities and their inhabitants.      

What's The "Middle Ground" On Housing Policy?

At Newsday yesterday, a guy named Ruben Navarette has one of those usual laments about the terrible partisan divide and disappearing middle ground in American politics.  His prescription: we just need to have a civil and intelligent search for "solutions":

We'd be a stronger country . . . if we demanded — from elected officials and from one another — that we all put more thought, honesty and nuance into our discussion of policy issues, instead of drawing out our perspectives in stark black-and-white terms when the world comes in shades of gray.    

Well, Ruben, the problem here is that the other half of us don't buy the idea that the government can solve every human problem if it just puts enough smart people on the job of finding the "solution" and throws enough money in the right direction.  To take two big scourges that the government is endlessly trying to fix with programs and spending -- poverty and homelessness -- the evidence would seem to be rather strong that all government efforts to "solve" these problems only make them worse.  No amount of "thought, honesty, and nuance" is going to change that.

For today let's take Ruben's call to "thought, honesty, and nuance" and apply it to government policy for dealing with the homeless.  Here in New York, the administration of Mayor de Blasio has the idea that the cause of homelessness is lack of sufficient affordable housing, which can be fixed by the government subsidizing and/or mandating the provision of apartments at far-below-market rents.  And yet, New York for around 80 years has been ground zero for affordable and subsidized housing initiatives, not to mention rent control, and somehow the number of homeless never goes down and housing becomes more and more expensive relative to other cities.

Back in 2002 when prior Mayor Bloomberg took office, the City had a policy of giving priority in subsidized public housing to those who had become homeless and entered the shelter system.  Bloomberg and his people became convinced that that policy was giving an incentive to many people to declare themselves homeless in order to jump a long waiting list to get into the public housing.  So in 2005 the Bloomberg administration reversed the policy of giving priority in public housing to the homeless.  That brought withering criticism from homeless advocates, notably something called the Coalition for the Homeless, which called the idea that people would enter the homeless shelter system in order to jump the subsidized housing queue a "zombie lie."   Here is their advocacy piece from March 2014, at the beginning of the de Blasio administration:

In the area of homeless policy in New York City, there is no more persistent “zombie lie” than the notion that providing housing subsidies – in particular, priority referrals for federal housing programs like public housing or Section 8 vouchers – leads to a surge in families entering the homeless shelter system. . . .  [T]his “zombie lie” was long espoused by Bloomberg administration officials to defend their elimination of housing aid for homeless children and families.    

How's that for withering scorn?  After a few months, in July 2014 de Blasio and his people succumbed to the advocacy and reinstated the policy of public housing priority for shelter residents.  Did it work out?  A year and a half into the new policy and the local papers are filled with stories of the surge in homelessness and the new homeless "crisis."  The New York Post has had one article after another on the subject throughout the fall, for example here and here.  And yes, the New York Times has been unable to avoid noticing.  From October 26, "Despite Vow, Mayor de Blasio Struggles to Curb Homelessness":

The number of people entering city shelters has increased under Mayor Bill de Blasio, and when they enter the system, people are staying longer, striking markers of a crisis that has forced its way to the top of the mayor’s agenda.  As of Thursday, 57,448 people — more than 40 percent of them children — were sleeping in shelters overseen by the Department of Homeless Services. . . .        

The 57,000 shelter residents are up from a figure in the mid-30,000s during the Bloomberg tenure.  On December 17 the Times reported that Mayor de Blasio, after insisting for months that nothing was amiss, had finally announced new measures to combat the "homelessness crisis."

But then, even those 60,000 +/- shelter residents are just the tip of the iceberg of New York's population dependent on government handouts for their housing.  The numbers are staggering.  According to the Metropolitan Council on Housing here, New York has almost 180,000 subsidized low-income NYCHA apartments; almost 100,000 "portable" Section vouchers; another 90,000 "project-based" Section 8 vouchers; another 140,000 so-called "Mitchell-Lama" subsidized apartments; and about 1 million private-owned but "rent-regulated" apartments.  And yet somehow the "affordability" crisis and the "homelessness" crisis persist. 

So does Mr. Navarette actually believe that all it will take is a "thoughtful, honest and nuanced" discussion to figure out the one more program that will finally fix this?  On the other side they are advocating to just dismantle the entire mess.  Is there really a middle ground?

Are Most Published Scientific Research Findings False?

Readers interested in the subject of science versus consensus and orthodoxy enforcement might enjoy the article "Broken Science" by Ronald Bailey appearing in the current (February 2016) print edition of Reason Magazine.  (Here is the link for reason.com.  The article doesn't seem to be at the online site yet, although I assume it will show up within a few days.)

Bailey delves in some depth into the subject of the remarkable amount of published scientific research that cannot later be replicated and ultimately turns out to be wrong.  How much?  As much as half or more.  Citing extensive evidence of pervasive failed replication and/or complete falsification of previously published research results, Bailey reasonably asks whether "science" is "broken." 

If you have read my post from a few days ago on the scientific method, you know my answer.  No, this does not indicate that science is broken.  It is in the nature of science that huge numbers of hypotheses that seem brilliant and reasonable and intuitive and obviously true turn out to be false.  Science is not a process of "proof" of hypotheses, but rather a process of sequential falsification of some hypotheses in favor of better hypotheses.  Publication is just an indication that a hypothesis has survived an initial round of testing, inevitably by the very people who posed the hypothesis in the first place and therefore have a strong interest that the hypothesis should turn out to be right.  Even after initial publication of favorable results, every hypothesis should still be taken with a huge grain of salt; and, after multiple independent replications, a hypothesis should still be taken with a somewhat diminished but still substantial grain of salt.  Eventually most hypotheses -- and, given enough time, maybe all -- will fall, in some cases to a slightly improved hypothesis, in other cases to a completely different hypothesis, and in many cases to the dreaded "null hypothesis."

Bailey begins by citing the famous 2005 PLOS Medicine article by Stanford statistician John Ioannidis titled "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False."  

Ioannidis showed, for instance, that about one-third of the results of highly cited original clinical research studies were shown to be wrong or exaggerated by subsequent research.  "For many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias," he argued.  Today, he says science is still wracked by the reproducibility problem: "In several fields, it is likely that most published research is still false."

After that article was published, many criticized Ioannidis for exaggerating his own results; but Bailey cites multiple subsequent efforts that have repeatedly shown stunning rates of non-replicability of published results:

In 2012, researchers at the pharmaceutical company Amgen reported in Nature that they were able to replicate the findings of only six out of 53 (11 percent) landmark published preclinical cancer studies. . . .  In 2011, researchers at Bayer Healthcare reported that they could not replicate 43 of the 67 published preclinical studies that the company had been relying on to develop cancer and cardiovascular treatments and diagnostics. . . .  Ioannidis estimates that "in biomedical sciences, non-replication rates that have been described range from more than 90 percent for observational associations (e.g., nutrient X causes cancer Y), to 75-90 percent for preclinical research (trying to find new drug targets)" . . . .  In August, Science reported that only one-third of 100 psychological studies published in three leading psychology journals could be adequately replicated.  In October, a panel of senior researchers convened by the British Academy of Medical Sciences (BAMS) issued a major report on research reproducibility indicating that the false discovery rate in some areas of biomedicine could be as high as 69 percent.

If you ask me, all of this is totally normal and to be expected.  This is not an indication that science is "broken," but is rather the very nature of how science works.  I just have two questions: (1) Why does the news service in the elevator at my office building in Manhattan breathlessly report literally every newly-published piece of research in the field of bio-medicine as if it is likely to be true (e.g., people who drink green tea are 17% less likely to develop colon cancer!! people who eat tomatoes are 23% less likely to get breast cancer!! etc., etc.)? Don't they know that almost all of this stuff will ultimately prove to be wrong? and (2) Why is the field of climate science immune to the process of hypothesis falsification that is the essence of the scientific method in all other fields claiming the mantle of the term "science"?  

Markets Serve A Purpose

Regular readers here know well of the unfolding disaster of New York's vast socialist-model public housing empire known as the New York City Housing Authority, or NYCHA.  In a post back in May, I compiled data on NYCHA's catastrophic financial state from a report put out by the de Blasio administration titled NextGeneration NYCHA.  The problems include: multi-hundred million dollars of admitted annual operating losses; rent collections that cover barely a third of operating expenses and nothing at all for capital improvements or property taxes; an annual federal operating subsidy of over $2 billion, which effectively hides that the real operating deficit of the projects far exceeds $2 billion per year; $16+ billion of unmet capital needs, and no source of money to fund that gap; and a complete lack of any plan to fix the financial crisis other than transferring many NYCHA expenses off its budget and into other places in the $70+ billion City budget where they can be hidden outside of public view.

Well, you will be glad to know that in an op-ed in today's Crain's New York Business, philanthropist Laurie Tisch is announcing the latest initiative to turn things around, which is -- to establish farms on otherwise-underused NYCHA real estate.

You wouldn’t expect to find a vegetable farm at a public housing development in New York City. But a one-acre farm at Red Hook Houses—the first-ever large farm on New York City Housing Authority property—is growing cabbage, collard greens, butternut squash and basil. Soon, new urban farms will sprout on five more NYCHA properties in Brownsville and Canarsie in Brooklyn, East Harlem, the Bronx and Staten Island.

These new farms will increase access to fresh produce in communities with high levels of poverty, food insecurity and diet-related diseases, while also serving as hubs for education, community engagement, and job training for residents. The workers will be supplied by Green City Force, a nationally recognized AmeriCorps program that recruits and trains 18- to 24-year-old NYCHA residents and pays them to work on environmental sustainability and energy-efficiency programs at Housing Authority sites. These young people gain rigorous job training and career planning support that propels them into jobs.

Really, you can't make this up.  Of course this is a "public-private partnership" with the full backing of the de Blasio administration.  Indeed, according to Tisch, the initiative is part of de Blasio's "Building Healthy Communities" program. 

Ms. Tisch appears to be one of those well-intentioned but completely uninformed New Yorkers with more money than she knows what to do with.  She acquired her wealth by inheritance from her father, Preston Robert Tisch, who was a principal in Loews Corporation and an owner of the New York Giants football team.

I wonder if Ms. Tisch or anybody in the de Blasio administration might stop for a moment to ask why there are no farms in New York City on private land.  It's not too hard to figure out.  The reason is that the land is way too expensive to make it possible to farm profitably.  Here are some listings for land for sale in Brooklyn.  It's $10 million per acre and up.  And by the way, there's no such thing as a full contiguous acre.  Mostly it goes by tenths and even hundredths of an acre.  In Sullivan County -- less than 100 miles away -- you can get land for $4000 - 5000 per acre in multi-hundred acre parcels. 

But since the NYCHA land is publicly owned in a socialist-model arrangement, we can pretend it's free!  At huge effort we have provided the people with $100 tomatoes and $200 squashes, and then suppressed the costs through public ownership so that nobody realizes how completely nonsensical this is.

Meanwhile, of course, we have what is officially designated as a "crisis" of lack of affordable housing.  But instead of using that underused NYCHA land in Brooklyn for more housing, where it might actually make sense economically, we'll require developers to provide "affordable" apartments on land in Manhattan that costs not $10 million per acre, but more like $100 million.  It's how North Korea and Cuba found the route to starvation.  In New York, the great and the good think that it all makes perfect sense.