How Much Spending Will It Take To End "Homelessness"?

Bill de Blasio, when he ran for Mayor of New York in 2013, made "homelessness" one of his big issues.  Prior Mayor Bloomberg had had what City Limits here described as an "incredibly ambitious" program to tackle homelessness; but somehow after twelve years in office and dramatically increased spending, homelessness had only increased.  In December 2013, after his election and on the eve of taking office, de Blasio was quoted by Think Progress on the subject of homelessness as saying, “We are simply not going to allow this kind of reality to continue.”

On taking office in 2014, de Blasio immediately started implementation of all the policies on homelessness that the progressive advocates had been advocating for years:  more funding, more shelters, more permanent "affordable" housing.  He even appointed as Commissioner of the Human Resources Administration one Steven Banks, formerly of the Legal Aid Society, and the lead advocate for years of the forces demanding more government money as the solution to the homelessness problem.

On November 20, 2016, Josh Dawsey in the Wall Street Journal had an article summarizing, after nearly three years, how de Blasio's efforts were doing at solving homelessness.  The headline is "New York City's Homeless Spending Surges to $1.6 Billion":  

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration has increased spending on homeless services by about 60% since he took office nearly three years ago, reaching a historic $1.6 billion this year.  At the same time, the population in city shelters is up by nearly 20%, raising questions about whether the spending has been effective in combating homelessness. Last week, more than 60,650 people, including about 23,800 children, slept in a city shelter.

The $1.6 billion includes all direct spending on services to the homeless, which is more than just the shelters.  According to Dawsey, in addition to spending about $1 billion per year on the shelters, there are these additional categories:

$350 million a year on rent for those who they believe could become homeless or are leaving shelters. . . .  $79 million annually on street outreach, $62 million on legal services—up 10 fold from Mr. de Blasio’s predecessor, Michael Bloomberg—and $190 million on shelter security, up by $90 million. 

And yet somehow the numbers of homeless people just keep increasing:

When Mr. de Blasio took office in 2014, the city shelter system had a budget of about $1 billion and a population of about 50,700. . . .  Last week, more than 60,650 people, including about 23,800 children, slept in a city shelter.

And the $1.6 billion does not include plenty of other spending supposedly to solve the problem of homelessness, most notably subsidies to existing low-income housing and additional subsidies in the form of tax breaks for new "affordable" housing.  For example, the New York City Housing Authority alone absorbs about $2.5 billion of subsidies from federal and state governments every year.   

Funny how this works, isn't it?  It kind of reminds you of the results of government efforts to solve the problem of poverty:  When the War on Poverty began in 1966, the government's "poverty rate" was about 15%.  Then government spending to combat poverty began, and by the 2010s had been ramped up to some $1 trillion per year.  Yet somehow, by 2014, the poverty rate was still 14.8%.  (The government did report a drop in the poverty rate by 1.2% in 2015, to 13.6%, but that change was the result of a change in methodology engineered to assist Hillary's campaign, as discussed by me here.)  Meanwhile, the population of the country nearly doubled between 1966 and 2015, such that the number of people said to be in "poverty" had increased from under 30 million in the mid-1960s to over 43 million, despite the huge amount of spending.

It's as if these people have no idea that a gusher of government spending attracts people who try to get in on the handouts by defining themselves into the right categories.

But don't worry, Commissioner Banks is sure that the spending is actually working (without all the spending, the problem would have been a lot worse!), and moreover the next round of increased spending is going to turn everything around and solve the problem once and for all!

“The [shelter] population is significantly lower than it would have been had the administration not took the actions it took,” Mr. Banks said. “The additional investments are going to bend the curve back in the other direction.”

Sure, Steve.  

A Dose Of Renewable Energy Realism, Part II

In the campaign to jettison fossil fuels as the main source of our energy and replace them with so-called "renewables," a notable feature is the lack of discussion of the costs and practicalities of trying to make intermittent sources like wind and solar work to run a 24/7/365 electricity grid.  Is there any problem here that deserves consideration?  In Tuesday's post I noted that in my home state of New York we are about to try to replace our big Indian Point nuclear power plant with mostly wind-generated power.  Actually, we already have wind turbines with approximately the same "capacity" as Indian Point, but unfortunately over the course of a full year they only generate about one-quarter as much electricity as Indian Point.  Still, can't that problem be solved just by buying four times as many wind turbines?  It may be a little pricey, but is there any reason why that won't work?

In a publication called Energy Post on January 10, prominent German economist Heiner Flassbeck has a piece that addresses this question.  The headline is "The End of the Energiewende?"   Of course the problem is that the wind turbines don't just run steadily and predictably at one-quarter of capacity; rather, they swing wildly and unpredictably back and forth between generating at near 100% of capacity and generating almost nothing.  The "almost nothing" mode can persist for days or even weeks.  In Germany under a program called Energiewende ("energy transition"), in effect since 2010, they have been pushing to raise the percentage of energy they obtain from wind and solar, and have gotten the percent of their electricity supply from those sources all the way up to 31%.  But Flassbeck now looks at what just occurred during the month of December 2016:

This winter could go down in history as the event that proved the German energy transition to be unsubstantiated and incapable of becoming a success story. Electricity from wind and solar generation has been catastrophically low for several weeks. December brought new declines. A persistent winter high-pressure system with dense fog throughout Central Europe has been sufficient to unmask the fairy tale of a successful energy transition. . . .  

Here is a chart from Flassbeck's piece showing German electricity demand through the first half of the month of December, against the sources of the electricity that supplied that demand.  Among the sources, solar, on-shore wind, and off-shore wind are broken out separately:

As you can see, at some times wind and solar sources supplied as much as half or more of the demand for electricity, but at other times they supplied almost nothing.  Flassbeck:

The data compiled by Agora Energiewende on the individual types of electricity generation have recorded the appalling results for sun and wind at the beginning of December and from the 12th to 14th. . . .  Of power demand totaling 69.0 gigawatts (GW) at 3 pm on the 12th, for instance, just 0.7 GW was provided by solar energy, 1.0 by onshore wind power and 0.4 offshore. At noontime on the 14th of December, 70 GW were consumed, with 4 GW solar, 1 GW onshore and somewhat over 0.3 offshore wind. The Agora graphs make apparent that such wide-ranging doldrums may persist for several days.

By the way, according to charts at Wikipedia, Germany has about 40,000 MW of installed solar "capacity" as of 2015, and another about 44,000 MW of installed wind "capacity" as of the same year.  Thus, if only the sun had shone and the wind had blown both at full strength on December 12 and 14, those facilities would have been more than sufficient to supply 100% of German's demand of 69,000 MW on the 12th and 70,000 MW on the 14th.  But instead Germany got only about 3% of the electricity it needed from these sources on the 12th and 7% on the 14th.  If you wanted to get all of Germany's electricity from wind and solar on the 14th, you would have needed about 15 times as much "capacity" as the demand; and on the afternoon of the 12th, you would have needed 35 times as much "capacity" as the demand.

Hence what Flassbeck calls the "futility" of trying to solve the intermittency problem of wind and solar power by just trying to build more capacity.  Even in a country as large as Germany and with one hundred times as much capacity as usage, you could still have a completely calm night where the power goes out.  To have a full solution to the intermittency problem, and to make your system work 24/7/365 with full reliability, you will need not just massive excess capacity of wind and solar facilities, but also some combination of other expensive features, such as fossil fuel backup, storage capacity, and/or transmission capacity to bring in power from somewhere where the wind is blowing.  Germany continues to have the 100% fossil fuel backup.  They also have residential electricity rates about triple the American average.  Really, what good are all those wind turbines and solar arrays if you can't get rid of a single fossil fuel burning power plant?    

Andrew Cuomo: The Progressives' Next Best Hope?

The country has just dodged the bullet of Hillary Clinton as President; the Trump inauguration hasn't even happened yet; and already the forces of progressivism are looking for their next best hope.  Yet all of the prominent names that come immediately to mind look like they'll be ready for the old folks home by 2020, if not well before:  Bernie Sanders (75 now/79 in 2020); Joe Biden (74/78); Elizabeth Warren (a "kid" at 69/73); or Hillary herself (also 69/73).  Surely there must be someone younger!

Thankfully the New York Times today is ready with the answer to progressive prayers in a front page article headlined "Andrew Cuomo Raises His Profile, Stirring Talk of a 2020 Run."   By the lights of Pravda, it's hard to think of a better guy than New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to take charge of the country in the next cycle.  First, of course, he's the very face of youth: he just turned 59 in December, which means he'll still be clinging to 62 at the time of the next election.  Plus, he checks literally every box that the progressive pooh-bahs want to see checked: he's a dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker, deeply steeped in the New York groupthink; he gets all of his news from Pravda itself; he has never had an opinion on any subject of significance not in perfect alignment with Pravda's editorial page; he deeply believes that the taxpayer money is free and that all human problems can be solved with some more government spending; and, he is a scion of Democratic Party aristocracy, as son of ex-governor Mario and once married to a Kennedy.  How much to be preferred are the known quantities from the dynastic families rather than those tiresome outsiders!  Surely, Cuomo is the perfect candidate!  (The Times article does note that Cuomo himself has not encouraged talk of his candidacy in 2020.  But come on, that's what they all do!)

So I thought that Manhattan Contrarian readers, particularly those from places remote from New York, might be interested in exactly what initiatives our governor has been talking up lately to "raise his profile."  Two big ones have been featured in the headlines in the opening days of the new year:  (1) a "free college for the middle class" plan, and (2) a plan to close our local nuclear power plant, Indian Point.  I'll consider them one at a time.

Free college.  Cuomo canceled the traditional year-opening "State of the State" speech this year, in favor of a series of speeches to be given at locations around the state.  The first of the speeches was a week ago, January 3, at LaGuardia Community College in Queens.  Here is a picture of Cuomo delivering that speech:

And as you can see, "tuition-free college for New York's middle class" was the big proposal in this speech.  Yes, that is none other than "Mr. Free College" himself, Senator Bernie Sanders, who showed up to sit at Cuomo's side during the speech.  (The other guy is former New York City Comptroller and mayoral candidate -- and current CUNY Board Chair -- Bill Thompson.)  Here's a blurb on the proposal from Cuomo's official website:

Under this groundbreaking proposal, more than 940,000 middle class families and individuals making up to $125,000 per year would qualify to attend college tuition-free at all public universities in New York State. The Excelsior Scholarship program will ensure that students statewide, regardless of their socio-economic status, have the opportunity to receive a quality education and gain the skills they need to succeed in our global economy.

But, you ask, doesn't New York already have extensive programs in place to pay for college for its lower-income citizens?  Yes, it does.  The two big ones are the "Tuition Assistance Program" (TAP) and the "Get on Your Feet Loan Forgiveness" program.  Between the two of those, they basically pay the full tuition and then some for any New York resident going to a state or city college and with a family income up to about $80,000.  This web site has a handy calculator to tell you how much TAP you are entitled to based on your family income and the amount of annual tuition at your school.  For example, I put in a family income of $60,000 and tuition at your school of $6000, and I get an estimated TAP award of $5500.  $6000 is the approximate amount of annual tuition at the schools in the State University of New York system.  If in addition you took out some loans (for example, to pay room and board), the loan forgiveness program would be on top of the TAP. 

In other words, the new program has next to nothing, if not nothing, to do with providing assistance to the poor, the near-poor, or even those at the middle of the income distribution, all of whom already have their college costs at state colleges covered by pre-existing programs.  (According to the Department of Numbers here, median household income for New York State was $60,850 for 2015, the most recent year available.)  Instead this program is directed to those in the household income range of $80,000 to $125,000, which in very round numbers covers about the 65th to the 85th percentiles of the income distribution. 

Now, let us ask, how can it possibly make sense to engage in an income redistribution scheme where the recipients of the largesse are well into the upper third to upper fifth of the income distribution?  Aren't the people in that income range the very ones who bear most of the brunt of carrying the cost of government?  The answer is that it doesn't make any sense, and of course the people who think they will be "benefiting" from this government distribution of "free money" are precisely the ones who will be paying -- but with the usual vigorish raked off by the bureaucrats who handle the redistribution.  Well, we all knew that the fundamental characteristic of the progressive is inability to do basic arithmetic.  In the case of Bernie's core supporters of college students, they somehow think of themselves as just poor kids with no income.  Wait until they get that first job, and see the tax bite.  They'll be paying about double, if not more, for the "free" college.  By the time they figure it out, it will be way too late to undo this.

Closing Indian Point.   Indian Point is a large nuclear power plant, located on the banks of the Hudson River about 30 miles north of the New York City line (or about 40 miles north of midtown Manhattan).  It was built in the late 1960s.  It produces about a quarter to a third of the electricity used in New York City.  One of Cuomo's campaign pledges when he was first elected was to close Indian Point, and he has been whipping that horse ever since.  Yesterday he finally announced the imminent achievement of his goal, in the form of an agreement with the plant's operator, Entergy, to close it within four years.  

Among the many evergreen statements on progressive orthodoxy that I make on my ABOUT page, this one is one of my favorites:

[U]sage of energy is a human right, but all actual known methods of producing energy are environmentally unacceptable. . . .

And boy, does that perfectly capture Andrew Cuomo's approach to energy policy!  I don't personally agree with implacable opposition to nuclear energy, but I suppose if someone is seriously worried about the risks, there would be a basis for principled opposition to energy from this source.  But then, where is the energy to come from?  Cuomo is firmly in the camp of insisting that anything that might possibly work is completely unacceptable.  He has totally bowed to the environmental lobby in opposing energy from fossil fuel sources (global warming!!!!), and in adopting the illusion that wind and solar can somehow supply a top-end 21st century metropolis like New York City with the 24/7/365 energy that it needs to operate.  Most famously, in 2014, after several years of dithering, Cuomo banned "fracking" for natural gas within the boundaries of New York State.  He cited "health risks."  Sure.

From the Manhattan Institute today, both Mark Mills and Robert Bryce have some fun ridiculing Cuomo's energy proposals.  Bryce's piece appears in the New York Post here.  Mills' piece appears in Forbes here.  Mills recounts Cuomo's steadfast opposition to all energy that actually works:

New York is apparently going to tilt full on at windmills. What else are we to think now that Governor Cuomo finally got his long hoped-for wish with last week’s announced shutdown of Indian Point? That nuke’s output equals nearly one-third of New York City’s demand. What will fill the gap so that buildings and computers stay lit in one of the world’s great cities after Indian Point goes dark in four short years?  We know what won’t happen. New York won’t build a new nuke, new coal plants, or more pipelines to carry natural gas from the verdant Pennsylvania Marcellus natural gas fields – much less from the energy-rich shale in upstate where fracking is banned.

Mills then goes into some of the obvious problems of trying to use intermittent sources of power like wind to run a city like New York that needs steady, constant, reliable electricity.  Can you just buy wind turbines of the same capacity as the nuclear plant?  It turns out that we already have that -- but the same "nameplate capacity" in wind turbines only generates one-quarter of the electricity as the nuclear plant, because the wind doesn't blow at full strength most of the time:

Data from the New York State grid operator shows that the “nameplate” capacity of all the state’s wind turbines combined is about the same as Indian Point. But that nuke actually produces 4-fold more electricity annually. . . .  So, replacing Indian Point requires increasing NY’s windfarm capacity at least 400 percent. 

But even with four times excess capacity, you still don't get the power when you need it.  How about some batteries!  Mills:

Consider again that Indian Point’s output is equal to one-third of NYC’s use: supplying that one-third for just one day with no wind (let’s hope it’s not calm all day, or for days) means storing one-third of NYC’s daily 145 million kWh of use, or about 50 million kWh in batteries. The world, meaning, mostly Asia, today manufactures batteries (for all purposes) that can store 35 million kWh. So, purchasing about 40 percent of the planet’s entire lithium battery output for the next four years—before Indian Point is slated to be shut—would just about fill the gap.

But can't we have three or even five calm days in a row?  I guess we'd better buy up the entire world production of batteries for the next four years!  And then, a few comments about the potential cost:

And the cost? At least $50 billion in battery systems. [Ed.: Make that $150 billion if you want to prepare for three calm days in a row.]  Maybe NYC could get a volume discount. Add this to the $12 billion for new wind turbines. . . .  Instead, you could build $2 billion worth of natural gas turbines to burn fracked gas to supply the needed power. Or you could provide a few hundred million dollars of incentives to keep Indian Point on line for a couple more decades.

Yup, this Andrew Cuomo guy is really the one for us in 2020!  Perhaps, can we send him for a remedial class in arithmetic in the mean time?

But if you think about it, won't any possible candidate that the Democrats come up with support these same policies?  Yes.  But at least they will also insist on keeping the poor kids trapped in failing schools in order to benefit the teachers union! 

New York Times Or The Onion? You Decide!

If you think it's getting harder and harder to tell the New York Times from The Onion, you have a point.  And it's not just the three front page stories every day trying to blame the big election loss on Russian hacking, as if the Russians haven't been trying to hack everything they can, ever since the very concept of hacking was invented.

For another example, consider this big headline today:  "As Donald Trump Denies Climate Change, These Kids Die of It."  Wait, that one must have been in The Onion.  Not at all!  It was a lead article on the front page of the Times's Review section, written by none other than Nicholas Kristof -- the very same guy who wrote the completely phony article on Thursday claiming that repeal of Obamacare will kill tens of thousands of people per year.  So who are we killing today, Nick?

She is just a frightened mom, worrying if her son will survive, and certainly not fretting about American politics — for she has never heard of either President Obama or Donald Trump.  What about America itself? Ranomasy, who lives in an isolated village on this island of Madagascar off southern Africa, shakes her head. It doesn’t ring any bells.  Yet we Americans may be inadvertently killing her infant son. Climate change, disproportionately caused by carbon emissions from America, seems to be behind a severe drought that has led crops to wilt across seven countries in southern Africa. The result is acute malnutrition for 1.3 million children in the region, the United Nations says.

So Nick, kindly tell us, how much have temperatures increased in Madagascar as a result of what you claim is human-caused climate change?  It goes without saying that you will not find that information in Kristof's article.  Real information is not what Pravda deals in these days.  And, by the way, the information on historical temperatures in Madagascar is not necessarily that easy to find, since Madagascar doesn't have particularly good weather stations.  However, with some looking, I find this from a World Bank report in 2011:

Recent Climate Trends: There is clear evidence that [since 1950] temperatures have increased by 0.2 deg C over northern Madagascar, and by 0.1 deg C over southern Madagascar.

It's an amount of temperature rise that you could never possibly feel, let alone measure without some sort of specialized thermometer.  Although that report is a few years old, we all know that world temperatures have been in a warming "pause" since about 1998, so it's hard to imagine that Madagascar temperatures have somehow gone wild in the last five years.  I guess you can see why Kristof has decided to suppress the actual amount of temperature rise that is supposedly causing these millions of deaths. 

But somehow we are to believe that a tenth or two of degrees of temperature rise is causing over a million deaths by inflicting a rare and unprecedented drought.  Can we find out anything about rainfall in Madagascar?  Not from Kristof, of course.  But in the same 2011 World Bank report we have this:

The character of rainfall across Madagascar has changed significantly, although no obvious trend in rainfall can be surmised from the available record. However, since 1950, the relationship between temperature and rainfall has varied greatly across Madagascar, with increased temperatures yielding decreased rainfall in the northern areas and the opposite in southern areas.

Don't you have to hate the way those crafty Americans can inflict decreased rains on northern Madagascar and increased rains on southern Madagascar just by driving SUVs? 

But wait a minute -- maybe it's the opposite!  The World Bank report is from 2011.  More current information on rainfall in southern Africa, including Madagascar, can be found in a February 2016 post from a NOAA website, climate.gov, showing rainfall in the region from October 2015 to February 2016 (last year's rainy season):

Now suddenly the northern part of Madagascar has rainfall way above normal, up to 200% of normal for a not small area at the northern tip of the island.  And in the southern part, it sure looks like rainfall in last year's rainy season varied mostly between about 80% and 120% of normal, depending on the exact location, with the exception of a small area along the west coast.

How about the precise spot that Kristof visited?  His report has a dateline from a town called Tsihombe, which is in the far southern part of the island, just about 19 miles north of the very southern tip.  Wait a minute!  There's a little blue dot at that very place on the climate.gov map, indicating that that little area had above-normal rainfall in last year's rainy season.  And this year?  This year, we're just getting into the rainy season, but according to weather.com here, rain is predicted for Tsihombe for the next two days.

Back to Kristof:

Trump has repeatedly mocked climate change, once even calling it a hoax fabricated by China. But climate change here is as tangible as its victims. Trump should come and feel these children’s ribs and watch them struggle for life. It’s true that the links between our carbon emissions and any particular drought are convoluted, but over all, climate change is as palpable as a wizened, glassy-eyed child dying of starvation. Like Ranomasy’s 18-month-old son, Tsapasoa.

I by no means want to make light of the struggles of Ms. Ranomasy and her young son.  But the idea that "climate change" -- let alone use of fossil fuels by westerners -- has anything to do with those struggles is completely preposterous.  Kristof, you should be ashamed of yourself.

UPDATE, January 9:  Plenty of other sites are out today with more well-deserved takedowns of Kristof's risible article.  At his Deplorable Climate Science Blog, Tony Heller comes up with this great quote from the New York Times, December 29, 1974, complete with photo of the article in the print edition, blaming severe droughts in Africa at that time on global cooling:

A number of climatologists . . . point to signs . . . [of] a steady global cooling trend since World War II. . . .  Some recent warnings from reputable researchers . . . have so worried policy-makers that last January certain scientists at a meeting of the National Academy of Sciences proposed the evacuation of some six million people from their parched homelands in the Sahel region of Africa. 

At Climate Depot, Marc Morano has extensive quotes from Roger Pielke, Jr., including from Congressional testimony, as to the complete lack of any association between global warming and droughts, let alone floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, or any other sort of extreme weather events:

"It is misleading, and just plain incorrect, to claim that disasters associated with hurricanes, tornadoes, floods or droughts have increased on climate timescales either in the United States or globally. . . ."  Drought has “for the most part, become shorter, less frequent, and cover a smaller portion of the U. S. over the last century.” Globally, “there has been little change in drought over the past 60 years.”

Just wondering if we can expect a correction on Kristof's article any time soon from the New York Times.

The Regular Fake News And The Really Evil Fake News

The subject of "fake news" seems to have faded from the headlines somewhat now that Hillary's defeat is receding in the rear view mirror.  But before the topic disappears completely, I'd just like to pause for a moment to make a distinction between two different kinds of fake news, which for these purposes I'll call the "regular" fake news and the "really evil" fake news.

The kinds of things that Hillary was complaining about I would put firmly in the category of "regular" fake news.  Things like "Pope Francis endorses Donald Trump," or "The Clintons are running a child sex ring out of a pizza parlor in Washington, D.C."  Did anybody actually believe those things, let alone then change their vote as a result?  It's not impossible, but I find it hard to believe that any material number of people could be that naive.  Moreover, it's not like there weren't plenty of comparable fake stories relating to Trump.  Do you remember "RuPaul claims Trump touched him inappropriately in the 90s"?  Just part of the normal political rough-and-tumble.

But here's something I consider to be in a wholly different category:  falsely accusing your political opponents of mass killings of tens or hundreds of thousands of people on no basis whatsoever.  Here I am talking about what seems to be the norm of acceptable advocacy by progressives as they try to preserve disastrous government programs designed and run by themselves.  The prime example of the moment is Obamacare.

The new Congress (with its vow to repeal Obamacare) has only been in session for less than a week, and already it has started.  For example, here we have Nicholas Kristof in yesterday's New York Times, under a headline "The G.O.P. Health Hoax":

The paradox of Obamacare is that it is both unpopular and saves lives. Preliminary research suggests that it has already begun saving lives, but it’s too early to have robust data on the improvements to life expectancy among the additional 20 million people who have gained insurance. It is notable that an Urban Institute study found that on the eve of Obamacare’s start, lack of health insurance was killing one American every 24 minutes. . . .  The American College of Physicians warned this week that the G.O.P. course could result in seven million Americans losing their health insurance this year alone, by causing parts of the insurance market to implode. Back-of-envelope calculations suggest that the upshot would be an additional 8,400 Americans dying annually.

They're going to kill tens of thousands of people!!!!!  But is there any real evidence that lack of health insurance actually leads to materially increased mortality?  Of course, the real evidence is firmly against that, and of course Kristof doesn't mention it.  In a post back in April, I reported on the results of the big three studies that have attempted to measure in a serious way whether there is any mortality benefit to having health insurance.  From that post (with internal quotes from this 2013 article by Megan McArdle summarizing the research):

• There was the big Oregon randomized study that ran for two years from 2008-10.  Oregon got some money to expand Medicaid, but only for about half the number of people they wanted; so they held a lottery to determine who got in.  And then they ran a randomized study on 6400 people who got in and 5800 who did not.  Results:  Not only was there no detectable difference in mortality, but "the study failed to find statistically significant improvement on the three targets associated with the most common chronic diseases.  This, mind you, is the stuff that we're very good at treating, and which we're pretty sure has a direct and beneficial effect on health."  
• Then there was the big observational study, conducted by Richard Kronick of UC San Diego, based on data from 672,000 insured and uninsured people as reported on the National Health Interview Survey from 1986 to 2000.  Results: "no mortality benefit from insurance."   
• Or, going back a ways, there was the big Rand randomized study of close to 8000 people, divided into five groups ranging from very to much less comprehensive health insurance, that ran from 1971 to 1982.  Results:  "[T]hey looked to see what differences emerged in health outcomes.  Shocker: none did."

So OK, Kristof just fails to mention that the big, real, serious studies completely contradict his contention.  We know that that is how they do business at Pravda.  But what is the supposed evidence that he relies on instead?  For example, what is that Urban Institute "study" that he links to?  Go to his link, and you find that this "study" is just an update of a much-criticized Institute of Medicine report from 2002.  Here is a 2009 comment on the IOM report (and related advocacy "studies" including the Urban Institute update) from John Goodman of Health Affairs:

Last year [2008], a report by Families USA made the astounding claim that 6 people die every day in Florida because they are uninsured. Seven die every day in Texas, 8 in California, and 25 in New York.  How was Families USA able to tally up all that carnage with such pinpoint precision? As Linda Gorman explains, these claims are based on a 15-year cascade of studies — each repeating the errors and misinterpreting or mischaracterizing the findings of the previous one and ultimately relying on data that is 37 years old.  It begins with a paper by Peter Franks et al. published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1993, estimating that being uninsured increased the probability of death by 25%. Although the subjects were interviewed only once, for the study’s inference to be meaningful, one is forced to make the unverified assumption that the uninsured stayed uninsured for a full 19 years!  Continuing the saga, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) uncritically used the Franks result to claim that 18,000 deaths a year in the U.S. are attributable to a lack of health insurance. The Urban Institute updated the IOM report, and Families USA updated the Urban Institute report.

That's how you do it:  Instead of studying two populations over a period of years, you just interview some people once.  From that you make up a preposterous "estimate" that being uninsured increases mortality by an astounding 25%.  Project that "excess mortality" out over the whole population, and voila! you claim "18,000 excess deaths per year" (IOM), or "22,000 excess deaths per year" (Urban Institute).  And then you sit back and watch as Pravda uncritically parrots these ridiculous numbers endlessly without ever describing how they were invented or mentioning that the real and serious studies show exactly the opposite.  By the way, there's an even more preposterous 2009 advocacy "study" from Harvard University and Physicians for a National Health Program that claimed that the annual number of "excess deaths" for the uninsured was 45,000.  The methodology is basically similar -- this time they just assumed 40% excess mortality for the uninsured.  This one and the Urban Institute "study" were part of the coordinated 2009 advocacy program for Obamacare, which was enacted shortly afterward in early 2010.  Suppose you want to claim 100,000 excess deaths per year?  Easy!  Just assume 100% excess mortality!

I actually believe that the people who produce these fake "studies," as well as the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof, et al., think that they are on the moral high ground when they do this.  Their thinking goes something like this:  We're just doing what we need to do, and saying what we need to say, to achieve the moral imperative of bringing the holy grail of universal health insurance to the poor and the vulnerable.  Sure it has been difficult to establish empirically that lack of health insurance causes excess mortality.  But it's just obvious that that has to be true!  So we are completely justified in fudging things and making up tales of thousands of deaths to scare people and thus get to the morally right end point.

The problem is that something like Obamacare is not free.  Far from it.  It comes with hundreds of billions of dollars of extra government spending to fund Medicaid expansion and private insurance subsidies -- all of which is taken away from things the people would rather do with the money if they were free to spend it themselves.  It also comes with forcing millions of the relatively young and healthy to wildly overpay for health insurance that is uneconomic for them and that they would not buy unless forced to do so by government coercion.  Loss of freedom and loss of wealth (much of that for relatively low income people) count for nothing in the progressive/New York Times world view.

But, making up tall tales about tens and hundreds of thousands of deaths to scare people into accepting loss of freedom and loss of wealth and increasing government control over their lives?  Is that really OK?  I'd call it really evil fake news. 

The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time -- Part XI

If you have been following my series on The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time, you know that I am referring to the world temperature data tampering fraud, by which the guardians of world surface thermometer records (in the U.S., NASA and NOAA) "adjust" old temperatures down and new temperatures up in order to provide fake support for the official "global warming" narrative.

My last post in this series (Part X) was back in July.  Meanwhile, 2016 has proved to be a rather suspenseful year for those following this issue.  The start of the year was a time of a massive El Nino.  El Ninos (warm surface conditions in the equatorial Pacific Ocean) are known to be highly correlated with somewhat lagged spikes in atmospheric near-surface temperatures, as the oceans give up some heat into the air.  Unsurprisingly, the years of the strongest El Ninos have also been the years of highest recorded lower tropospheric temperatures in the now 38-year (back to 1979) satellite temperature record -- most notably the year 1998, until now the record-holder for the warmest year in the satellite record.  But with a comparably massive El Nino extending well into 2016, would 2016 now end the 18-year global warming "pause," break the prior record, and give new support to the cause of climate alarmism?

Throughout the year, the temperature "adjusters" at NASA have been working to prepare the ground for the big end-of-year announcement that temperatures have finally broken the old record.  In the first several months, as the effects of the El Nino lingered, they put out breathless monthly press releases announcing that month to be the "hottest [March, April, May, whatever] since records began," or something like that.  Here is NASA's release from July 20.  Excerpt:

Each of the first six months of 2016 set a record as the warmest respective month globally in the modern temperature record, which dates to 1880, according to scientists at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York. The six-month period from January to June was also the planet's warmest half-year on record, with an average temperature 1.3 degrees Celsius (2.4 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than the late nineteenth century.

But then a few months after the break-up of the El Nino, the atmospheric temperatures started their inevitable sharp decline.  By October, NASA had suspended the breathless press releases; but its director of GISS, Gavin Schmidt, put out a tweet in that month that made it into the Guardian:

Dr Gavin Schmidt, director of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, tweeted:  "With data now available through September, 2016 annual record (~1.25ºC above late 19th C) seems locked in."  Last month was only just over the previous record, coming in at a razor-thin 0.004C above the previous high for the time of year, reached in September 2014. That tiny margin may be revised in future, as monthly temperature data can be nudged up or down retrospectively as later reports come in. For instance, June 2016 was initially reported as the warmest on record but was subsequently revised downward slightly to the third warmest.

June 2016 was revised down and no longer a record?  Funny, I missed any press reports on that one.

Anyway, yesterday Roy Spencer of UAH (provider of satellite-based data) put out the results for December and full-year 2016.  The UAH global lower troposphere anomaly declined a full .21 deg C in December, going from + 0.45 deg C to + 0.24 deg C.  And with that sharp drop, 2016 ended in what Spencer calls a "statistical tie" with 1998:

The resulting 2016 annual average global temperature anomaly is +0.50 deg. C, which is (a statistically insignificant) 0.02 deg. C warmer than 1998 at +0.48 deg. C. We estimate that 2016 would have had to be 0.10 C warmer than 1998 to be significantly different at the 95% confidence level. Both 2016 and 1998 were strong El Nino years.

So, too bad for those hoping for a big new full-year record in the satellite data.  The "pause" resumes.  But still no word from NASA as to their year-end figures.  Not to worry.  NASA has a different data source from the satellites, namely the network of surface weather stations whose data can be "adjusted" and "homogenized" to get essentially whatever answer NASA wants in support of its favored political narrative.  The excellent Tony Heller, in a post titled "Why Temperature Fraud Matters," is already on top of the stream of NASA data, and provides this graph as of yesterday to compare recent NASA ("adjusted" surface station) data to UAH (satellite) data:

Yes, NASA has baked in a good 0.2 deg C or so of "adjustments" just since 1995 to give it a comfortable margin to claim a "record" for 2016.  Expect that breathless announcement from NASA within the next couple of weeks.  (Prior experience indicates that NASA press releases come out around the 18th to 20th of the month.)  

If you want to make a prediction of the future about as safe as predicting the time of tomorrow's sunrise, you can predict that every mainstream news source in the country will parrot the upcoming NASA press release without mentioning that the new supposed "record" is not supported by the far-more-accurate satellite data.  Nor will any mainstream news source ask the obvious question of how it is that global warming is supposed to be caused by CO2 emissions, yet temperature records always and only seem to be associated with El Ninos, and there is no plausible mechanism to explain how CO2 emissions into the air have any causative effect on the El Nino ocean current phenomenon.  Hey, that would ruin our good sin-and-redemption story!  We can't have that!

In related news, famed climate scientist Judith Curry, long head of the department at Georgia Tech, has announced her early retirement and an intended move into the private sector.  Here is her post at her own blog.  She began her transition to skepticism all the way back in 2005, and the years since have only seen a growing disgust:

A deciding factor was that I no longer know what to say to students and postdocs regarding how to navigate the CRAZINESS in the field of climate science. Research and other professional activities are professionally rewarded only if they are channeled in certain directions approved by a politicized academic establishment — funding, ease of getting your papers published, getting hired in prestigious positions, appointments to prestigious committees and boards, professional recognition, etc.  How young scientists are to navigate all this is beyond me, and it often becomes a battle of scientific integrity versus career suicide.

Well, that's the legacy of the Obama-era bureaucracy and its lackeys in academia.  The funding situation may be about to change by 180 degrees.  We'll see.