Climate Science And The Process Of Orthodoxy Enforcement

Recently several of my posts on the subject of climate change -- including one last week titled "In Climate Science, Predictions Are Hard, Especially About The  Future" -- have attracted large numbers of comments.  Most of the comments have been supportive, but many have been critical -- which is not surprising.  Among the critical comments, several of the most thoughtful have raised similar questions, that go something like this:  If there is really nothing to this global warming scare, then how and why have so many people calling themselves climate scientists gotten together to conspire to promote this story to the public?  After all, how would such a conspiracy even work?  Do hundreds of them hold clandestine meetings where they recognize each other with some kind of secret handshake?

As examples of relatively balanced comments raising this point, there are two from a guy named Steven Wangsness.  Excerpts:

What I want to know is why 95 percent or more of the world's climate scientists, most of whom drive gasoline-driven cars and probably own oil stocks in their 401Ks and IRAs, are engaged in a massive, world-wide conspiracy to push the idea of global warming. What is the incentive for all these presumably normal, well-educated folks to engage in such a pernicious hoax? . . .  

You also assume that thousands of PhDs around the world are engaged in a massive conspiracy and not one of them has broken ranks and busted the hoax.     

It just seems implausible to Mr. Wangsness, and many others, that such a "conspiracy" could be formed.  And perhaps, if thought of as a conspiracy, they are right.  But now think about the processes by which orthodoxies are created and enforced.  There are many, many examples in human affairs of large numbers of people -- even into the billions -- agreeing on the precise details of a complex belief system, otherwise known as an orthodoxy.  What processes lead to such huge numbers of people to enter into such an agreement?  Clearly part of the process relates to specific rewards and punishments handed out by the people who run the orthodoxy system.  But I would suggest that a far bigger part of what makes orthodoxies work is the universal human desire for peer acceptance.  If you don't go along with our official belief system, we will ostracize you!

Consider what is undoubtedly the archetypical example of a strictly-enforced orthodoxy system, namely the Catholic Church.  As background, I should mention that I was raised as a Catholic.  I continue to have large numbers of friends who are practicing Catholics, and I respect them both as people and for their beliefs.  I also have great respect for the Catholic Church as an institution (less so for its current head).  I do not regard Catholics as stupid or evil for having signed on to the Church's orthodoxy.  But, here we have a perfectly clear and, you will have to admit, somewhat quirky orthodoxy to which some 1.2 billion people have subscribed in great detail.

The bishops of the early Catholic Church gathered in 325 AD in the city of Nicaea, and agreed upon something called the Creed that states the fundamental beliefs of the religion.  With some minor modifications made in later years (mostly in 384 AD), every Catholic recites this list of beliefs at every mass, under the leadership of a priest.  Do they really all deeply believe every detail of this statement?  They certainly say that they do, at least once a week.  It's a basic requirement of being a practicing Catholic.  

For those who are not Catholics, I'll give you some examples of what's in the Creed.  I'm including the relevant Latin text, as well as the English translation:

• "I believe in one God."  (Credo in unum Deum.).  This is a monotheistic religion.  
• Oh, but it is one God in three persons, the Holy Trinity -- Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  Is this a contradiction?  We all agree that it is not.
• The Son was initially "born of the Father" (ex patre natum) at a time "before all ages" (ante omnia saecula), by a process described as "begotten not made" (genitum non factum).
• Later, the Son "became flesh" (incarnatus est) by a process in which the Holy Spirit impregnated a virgin (de Spiritu Sanctu ex Maria Virgine).
• The Holy Spirit "proceeds" not just from the Father, but also from the Son (Et in Spiritum Sanctum . . . qui ex Patre Filioque procedit).  The business about the Holy Spirit proceeding "also [from] the Son" (Filoque) is the basis of the rift between Roman Catholicism and the Eastern Orthodox religions.  The Eastern guys insisted that the Holy Spirit "proceeded" only from the Father.    

There are plenty of other items.  Does every Catholic actually fully understand and believe each of these precepts?  It doesn't really matter.  In return for regularly expressing these beliefs, they get to participate in the religion, which includes being part of a community of family, friends and peers, of ceremonies and sacraments, and of a promise of a happy afterlife.  The rewards are almost entire mental and spiritual, rather than material.  And on that basis some 1.2 billion people subscribe.  In the case of priests, adherence to the orthodoxy is further enforced by a hierarchy that controls access to the jobs, as well as promotions to positions of Monsignor, Bishop, Archbishop, and so forth.  If you demand a change to the Creed, you can't be a priest, period.

The Catholic Church is just one example of a detailed orthodoxy subscribed to by a huge number of people.  The Islamic religion is another example of comparable size, although I don't know the details of what they have agreed to as their orthodoxy.

Now apply the principles of orthodoxy creation and enforcement to the field of "climate science."  A commenter responding to Wangsness made this point:  "The answer is simple. Follow the money."  I'm not saying there's nothing to that, but note that in the case of the Catholic Church (and for that matter Islam and any other religion) money has little to nothing to do with why people subscribe; and yet huge numbers do.  The main factor is peer pressure and acceptance; the second major factor is the forcible exclusion of heretics.  So consider what surrounds you if you want to be in the field of "climate science" today:

• In order even to start out, you need to get a job at an academic institution.  If you let it be known that you are even slightly skeptical about "climate science," you get branded as a heretic, and in all likelihood you will never get hired.
• To advance in academia, you need to get articles published in prestigious academic journals.  The most prestigious journals in the fields of science are Science and Nature.  In recent years those journals have been controlled by global warming zealots who have made it their business to be sure that no even slightly skeptical article in the climate field can see the light of day.  From 2013 to 2016 the editor of Science was one Marcia McNutt.  McNutt published an editorial in her magazine in 2015 that said about climate science: "The time for debate has ended. Action is urgently needed. . . .  [D]eveloped nations need to reduce their per-capita fossil fuel emissions even further. . . ."   In 2016 McNutt was elected as the head of the National Academies of Science. As a young, skeptical climate scientist, how are you going to buck this?
• For more examples of ruthless orthodoxy enforcement as to climate change in the academic world, see my posts here and here.

But here's the amazing thing:  given the relentless peer pressure to conform in climate science, and the ruthless exclusion of heretics from rights to publish and from awards and recognition in the field, in fact the level of subscription to the climate orthodoxy among people in relevant areas is far less than the 95% that Mr. Wangsness cites.  The frequently-made claim of a "97% consensus" among climate scientists famously originated in an article by Cook, et al., in 2013, that was then quickly debunked in multiple places, for example here and here.  

When Wangsness says that "not one of them has broken ranks and busted the hoax," he is wrong.  There are scores of top scientists in relevant fields like atmospheric physics and meteorology who have broken ranks and scream as loudly as they can on a daily basis that there is nothing behind this alarm.  Just last October I was involved in submitting a letter to EPA from 65 top scientists demanding a reconsideration of EPA's "Endangerment Finding" because of lack of scientific basis for climate alarm.  The list of skeptics among the very top people in physics includes the likes of Freeman Dyson ("My first heresy says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models.") and Will Happer of Princeton, Richard Lindzen of MIT, and Ivar Giaever of RPI.  It is truly an embarrassment to the profession of journalism that a relatively well-informed citizen like Mr. Wangsness can be unaware of this.

Do Justice And The FBI Investigate Crimes Or Manufacture Them?

The big recent news in the fundamental corruption of the Department of Justice and the FBI is that various Congresspeople have now been allowed to see the FISA application submitted in 2016 seeking authority to surveil the Trump campaign, and multiple sources are now confirming that at least part of the basis for the successful application was the piece of Clinton campaign-financed  phony opposition research known as the "Trump Dossier."  However, although the FBI allowed a viewing of the FISA application, it did not allow the making of copies.  (Try that gambit next time the FBI subpoenas you for documents!)  So we are now all awaiting additional details.  My assumption is that there is lots more disgusting information to come about how our "law enforcement" agencies weaponized their powers to support the favored political candidate against the disfavored adversary.  But meanwhile, rather than making speculations that may turn out to be wrong about what is to come, let me take this opportunity to educate readers about some of the other fundamental corruption of our exalted law enforcement agencies that gets far less attention.

Just a few weeks ago, in a post titled "The Reputation Of The FBI -- And Of The Justice Department -- In Tatters," I advised readers that "you would be out of your mind ever to cooperate in any way with these guys."  Reasons included not only that they regularly misuse their powers for political purposes and prosecute things that are not crimes, but also "they are entirely likely to create an entrapment scheme to manufacture a crime to nail you."  

The word is that in the last few days Special Prosecutor Mueller has been seeking an interview with President Trump.  Does my advice to not cooperate apply equally to the President in these circumstances?  Sadly, it applies especially to the President.  Let's review the output of the Mueller investigation to date.  When you look at it, the effort appears to amount to little more than the manufacturing of crimes that did not previously exist in order to nail disfavored people.

First, some background.  There is something in the U.S. Code known as 18 U.S.C. Section 1001 that makes it a crime to "make[] any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation" in any matter "within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative, or judicial branch of the Government of the United States."  Does that seem innocuous to you?  I mean, why would anyone lie to the government?  Unfortunately, it's not that simple.  Over time, the prosecutors, with the substantial acquiescence of the courts, have come up with more and more creative ways to use this statute.  By this time, it has become an all-purpose means to enable them to convict anyone they want to get, irrespective of whether an individual had committed any crime before the investigation of that individual began.  Prosecutors have also used this statute to substantially eviscerate the attorney-client privilege as it applies to lawyers for federal criminal defendants.  

Like many of the most obnoxious things about our government, this one does not have ancient lineage.  The common law tradition is that witnesses in judicial proceedings must swear an oath, the taking of which seriously notifies you that you must be careful not to lie.  This statute, enacted in 1948, upended all of that.  Yes, there were some predecessor statutes that made unsworn false statements crimes, but those statutes only applied in specific narrow contexts, such as claims for monetary compensation from the government.  From 1948 it became a crime to "lie" about anything at any time, whether or not under oath.

OK, what does it mean to "lie"?  Suppose, for example, an FBI guy comes up to you and says, "Have you committed any crime in the last ten years?"  You say "no."  They then go and figure out some crime that you have committed.  The fact is that you have committed many federal crimes in the last ten years.  Remember that there are 5000 or so of them, and you have no idea what they all may be.  Is simply denying that you committed any crime enough to get you convicted under 18 U.S.C. 1001?  The Supreme Court decided that one in a case called Brogan v. United States in 1998.  The answer is that the simple denial is sufficient to violate this statute.  Another reason why you must never talk to federal agents under any circumstances.

Now, let us apply this background to the Mueller investigation.  So far, Mueller has obtained guilty pleas or issued indictments against four individuals:  Manafort, Gates, Papadopoulos, and Flynn.  In each case, either the only crime, or the most important crime alleged is a violation of 18 U.S.C. 1001 regarding statements made to Mueller's people during the course of the investigation.  

Flynn and Papadapoulos entered into guilty pleas.  In both of those pleas, the only crimes pled to consist of lying to the FBI under 18 U.S.C. 1001.  The alleged "lies" took place during Mueller's investigation, meaning that Mueller found nothing to charge as a crime about anything either of these individuals did before being interviewed by Mueller's team.  And in both cases the "lies" are about minor things that were not themselves underlying crimes.

Here is the Flynn guilty plea.  Flynn's supposed "crimes":  (1) On December 29, 2016 (when working on the Trump transition) Flynn asked the Russian ambassador not to escalate things in response to sanctions imposed by the Obama administration that day; but when asked about that by the FBI, Flynn denied he had made that request on that day; and (2) On December 22, 2016, Flynn asked the Russian ambassador to delay or defeat a pending UN resolution; but when asked about that by the FBI, Flynn denied it.  That's it.  Obviously neither of the underlying conversations that Flynn is accused of having constituted a crime in any way, and indeed they were a core part of his job on the transition.  Nothing in the plea agreement mentions how inquiring about conversations with the ambassador that took place after the election is even a legitimate part of the Mueller investigation.  

So how does the FBI come to know that Flynn did in fact ask Kislyak on December 29 not to escalate things in response to the new sanctions?  Obviously, they (with the assistance of the NSA) have recorded all conversations involving Kislyak, and have had a transcript prepared.  But is it a legitimate part of an "investigation" to put someone like Flynn to a memory test of every statement he may have made in a particular meeting, when they already have a transcript of the meeting?  It isn't.  This is about one and only one thing, which is coming up with something that can be characterized as a "lie" so that they can nail Flynn under 28 U.S.C. 1001 if they feel like it.  You got a few details wrong about some conversations that were themselves completely non-criminal and non-controversial and that seem completely peripheral to the investigation?  Too bad -- jail for you!

How about Papadopoulos?  Again, the whole thing is supposedly about "lies" to the FBI.  I won't go into full detail, but some examples: Papadopoulos said a meeting with a Russian contact was before he joined the Trump campaign, but in fact it was after (a question of a few days one way or the other); Papadopoulos said that a professor he met with was "just a guy talk[ing] up connections or something," when in fact the guy had a real link to the Kremlin; Papadopoulos tried to use the connection of this guy to set up a meeting with Kremlin officials.  Oh, by the way, the meeting Papadopoulos was trying to set up never took place!  So did the guy have serious links to the Kremlin or no?  Doesn't matter -- Papadopoulos is guilty!

On to Manafort.  The Manafort/Gates indictment is here.  Both are charged with the same counts.  If you look at it, on first take you might think there is something more to it than the usual Section 1001 charges that appear here as counts 11 and 12 of a 12 count document.  Don't be so sure.  The core of the rest of it is failure to register as a lobbyist for foreign interests, a supposed crime that probably half of the swamp creatures in Washington are violating on a daily basis and nobody ever gets prosecuted for.  (From Politico, October 30, 2017: "The real news in the indictment of Paul Manafort on charges of laundering and failing to register as a foreign agent is that someone has actually been prosecuted under a foreign lobbying law that has existed for decades but has almost never been enforced.")  Then there is the "money laundering" count.  That just means you got paid for something that is a crime, namely the unregistered lobbying.  Then there's failure to file forms about foreign bank accounts.  All of this of course taking place well before any involvement of Manafort and Gates in the Trump campaign.  Really?  A team of sixteen top prosecutors and an unlimited budget and this is what they've got?  If they put that team of prosecutors on you, they could easily come up with a list of "crimes" at least as serious.  Thus, you can well understand the perceived need to manufacture a new crime or two.  Enter 18 U.S.C. 1001.

Manafort and his team appear to have sensed the risk at least in part, and came up with a strategy of having their lawyers do the talking to the government.  Turns out that that strategy only made things worse.  Manafort's lawyers sent letters to the FBI describing circumstances of Manafort's representation of some Ukrainian groups that supported the Russian position.  In the Section 1001 counts in the indictment, the government claims that some of the statements in those letters were false.  Whereupon the investigators subpoenaed Manafort's lawyer, and demanded that she testify before the grand jury.  When she asserted attorney-client privilege, the government said that it did not apply because the communications were in furtherance of a plan to violate 18 U.S.C. Section 1001.  The Chief Judge of the DC District Court (Howell) bought the government's argument and compelled the lawyer to testify.  

An excellent summary of this situation can be found in this piece by lawyers at the Morvillo Abramowitz firm.   As recently as a few decades ago, it was completely unheard-of for prosecutors to subpoena the defense attorney and demand that she testify about the preparation of the defense of the case.  But over time, prosecutors have taken more and more to this tactic.  The logic of Judge Howell's decision would make subpoenaing the defense lawyer a legitimate and standard tactic in pretty much every case.  Hey, there might be something in the communications with the government that is not 1000 percent accurate!  The effort to try to avoid Section 1001 problems by having the lawyer do the talking not only doesn't avoid the problems, it now exposes the whole defense strategy to the government's scrutiny, and probably also gets your lawyer disqualified and requires you to start over.  

Somehow our Justice Department and FBI think that all of this is perfectly OK.  As their fundamental corruption has gotten deeper and deeper, they have completely lost all perspective.

Having read this, what is your take on whether President Trump should agree to be interviewed by Mueller's people?

Exxon Starts To Push Back Against The Climate Mob

The basic operating principle of corporate America is that you can't push back against the government, no matter how outrageous the campaign against you may be.  Fight the government, and they can put you out of business, either by indicting you, or maybe by holding up hundreds of regulatory approvals that you need to operate.  Your better bet is always to buy off the corrupt and predatory regulators and prosecutors by throwing shareholder money at them.  They get their headline and their career advancement, and you move on with life.  See my Phony Prosecutions tag for a few hundred examples of this phenomenon:  big banks making multi-billion dollar payments over and over again for the most preposterous of shake-downs; pharmaceutical companies paying multi-billion dollar amounts over and over for constitutionally-protected truthful marketing speech that is nevertheless prosecuted criminally; hedge funds making billion dollar payments over trading on market tips and rumors, something not prohibited by any statute; etc., etc., etc.  This is how the reputation of the Justice Department and FBI (as well as many state-level counterparts) originally got into "tatters," at least among those who follow the subject, long before these organizations were also revealed as corruptly advancing the interests of the favored political party over the adversary.

Over in the field of the climate wars, it has long been the same.  Might you think that companies in the business of producing and selling fossil fuels would make some effort to stand up for their products in the face relentless attacks that they are "destroying the planet"?  After all, even if there were something to the hypothesis that human CO2 emissions might be warming the atmosphere (I don't think so, but assume that hypothesis is true for these purposes), you would think that the purveyors of the fossil fuels would be loudly proclaiming that their products provide light and heat and electricity and transportation, and at far lower prices than anyone else can, and that they have enormously furthered human advancement.  But you would be wrong.  Instead, the major energy-producing companies have done their very best for years to lie low in the shadows and hope that no one notices them.  Who, us?

Well, as we all learned in history class, enough appeasement eventually gets you the invasions of Poland and France.  The analog to the invasion of Poland came back last summer, when a series of California municipalities, including the counties of Marin and San Mateo and cities of San Francisco and Oakland, sued five major oil companies (Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, BP, Royal Dutch Shell) in multiple lawsuits, seeking billions of dollars supposedly to protect against rising sea levels projected to be caused by "climate change."  Not to be outdone, it appears that New York City has piled onto this bandwagon just as of yesterday, filing its own suit in federal court in New York.  (The New York suit is so new that I can't even find it on the court's public access system; but there is a WSJ report on the case here, probably behind paywall.)

Even if you believe in the basic global warming narrative, the idea that sea level rise will threaten to swamp San Francisco within anyone's current lifetime borders on the delusional.  Still, if these companies intended to follow the normal form of prior corporate capitulations, you would expect that after some decent interval (say one to two years) there would be settlements of a few billion dollars or so.

But wait!  Perhaps someone has recognized that further appeasement is not the right strategy in this case.  On Monday, Exxon filed a Petition in state court in Tarrant Count (Fort Worth), Texas, seeking "pre-suit depositions" of a list of people including environmental activist attorney Matthew Pawa (who appears to be the guy orchestrating this campaign against the oil companies) plus some fifteen of the attorneys for the various city and county plaintiffs in the California lawsuits.  This is not your usual lie-down-while-they-kick-you response.  In particular, the complaint accuses the plaintiffs of wrongly using governmental powers to suppress political dissent, and accuses the named attorneys, including government attorneys, of "dishonesty."  For example, from Paragraph 1 of the Petition:

A collection of special interests and opportunistic politicians are abusing law enforcement authority and legal process to impose their viewpoint on climate change. This conspiracy emerged out of frustration in New York, Massachusetts, and California with voters in other parts of the country and with the federal government for failing to adopt their preferred policies on climate change. But rather than focusing their efforts in the marketplace of ideas and adopting a strategy of persuasion, the members of this conspiracy chose to advance their political objectives by imposing unlawful burdens on perceived political opponents.         

The Petition describes the development of a strategy, led by Mr. Pawa, to "delegitimize" Exxon and the other oil companies from participating in the climate debate, through a series of lawsuits accusing them of harm to the climate and the citizenry.  For purposes of their complaints against the oil companies, the California municipalities cooked up wild projections of climate-change-driven sea level rise threatening to swamp them all.  Unfortunately, no one seems to have thought to check prior statements made by the same municipalities on the same subject.  Much of the Petition consists of contrasting the statements in the complaints to such prior statements, particularly statements made in prospectuses intended to sell bonds.

The stark and irreconcilable conflict between what these municipal governments alleged in their respective complaints and what they disclosed to investors in their bond offerings indicates that the allegations in the complaints are not honestly held and were not made in good faith. It is reasonable to infer that the municipalities brought these lawsuits not because of a bona fide belief in any tortious conduct by the defendants or actual damage to their jurisdictions, but instead to coerce ExxonMobil and others operating in the Texas energy sector to adopt policies aligned with those favored by local politicians in California. 

The Petition goes one-by-one through the statements of each of the municipalities.  For example, there is San Mateo County, home of Silicon Valley.  From the San Mateo Complaint against the oil companies:

[T]here is a 93% chance that the County experiences a devastating three-foot flood before the year 2050, and a 50% chance that such a flood occurs before 2030. Average sea level rise along the County’s shores are expected to rise by almost three feet by the year 2100, causing multiple, predictable impacts, and exacerbating the impacts of extreme events. 

But unfortunately there is then this from San Mateo County's 2014 and 2016 bond prospectuses:

The County is unable to predict whether sea-level rise or other impacts of climate change or flooding from a major storm will occur, when they may occur, and if any such events occur, whether they will have a material adverse effect on the business operations or financial condition of the County and the local economy. 

Or consider the City of Oakland.  This is from its Complaint against the oil companies:

[B]y 2050 a ‘100-year flood’ in the Oakland vicinity is expected to occur . . . once every 2.3 years . . . by 2100. . . almost once per week. 

And this is from Oakland's 2017 bond prospectus:

The City is unable to predict when seismic events, fires or other natural events, such as searise or other impacts of climate change or flooding from a major storm, could occur, when they may occur, and, if any such events occur, whether they will have a material adverse effect on the business operations or financial condition of the City or the local economy. 

Of course, having been caught red-handed, these California municipalities may now back down, or alternatively regroup and start some other more-carefully-vetted lawsuit.  But it does look to me like ExxonMobil is gearing up for a long, hard fight.  Welcome to the struggle, guys!  Now, what about those other four wimps who are also defendants in these cases?

Full disclosure:  I have never received a penny from Exxon, and I wouldn't take anything if they offered.

Who Is More Insane, Trump Or His Critics?

The concept of insanity is not necessarily so easy to get a fix on.  Sure, there are the people who wander the streets screaming -- you run into lots of those here in Manhattan.  They are easy cases.  But even among the seemingly "smart," the veneer of sanity and rationality is remarkably thin.  For example, back in my days at fancy Ivy League schools, I was always amazed at how many of the seemingly smartest students (as measured by standardized test scores or grades) had fallen hook, line and sinker for Marxism.  This was at a time (late 60s/early 70s) when the mass murders of Stalin had been fully exposed and the mass deaths and famines of the Chinese "Great Leap Forward" and "Cultural Revolution" were fresh in the minds of anyone paying attention.  The Harvard Crimson in those days explicitly followed the Maoist party line, Brezhnevism being not nearly pure enough for them.  Today, the "smart" students of those days have moved into senior positions in university faculties without modifying their political views in the least, while the acceptance of Marxism among the current students has if anything increased.

So the trendy thing in academia and journalism today is to declare that President Trump is "insane," or some close variant of same.  Among many examples from academia, the prize for attention-grabbing goes to one Bandy Lee, "Yale psychiatrist," who claims she has provided her expert diagnosis of our President to multiple members of Congress.  As quoted in Newsweek on January 4:

A Yale psychiatrist who spoke to more than a dozen lawmakers about Donald Trump’s mental health believes the president is “unraveling” and “falling apart under stress" . . .  “Trump is going to get worse and will become uncontainable with the pressures of the presidency,” she added, having warned lawmakers: “He’s going to unravel, and we are seeing the signs.” . . .  The psychiatrist is also the editor of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, which looks into the president’s “dangerousness” and features interviews with a number of mental health experts.

The estimable Dr. Lee and her coterie of "mental health experts " seem to have lost track of Rule 7.3 of the Principles of Medical Ethics of the American Psychiatric Association.  That Rule states:

[I]t is unethical for a psychiatrist to offer a professional opinion unless he or she has conducted an examination and has been granted proper authorization for such a statement.

As David Patterson points out in The Federalist today, the APA's Rule, sometimes known as the "Goldwater Rule," was promulgated after a debacle where some 1189 of the APA's members purported to have declared 1964 Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater "unfit for office" without ever having met the man.

Journalists appear to have no comparable ethical rule (do they have any ethical rules at all?), so we should not be surprised to find many journalists even more emphatic in their proclamations of presidential insanity.  Among New York Times opinion columnists, I think it's completely unanimous, but my favorite is relative newcomer Michelle Goldberg.  From her December 1 column, "Trump is Cracking Up":

There is a debate over whether Trump is unaware of reality or merely indifferent to it. He might be delusional, or he might simply be asserting the power to blithely override truth, which is the ultimate privilege of a despot. But reports from the administration all suggest an increasingly unhinged and chaotic president.

Unhinged!  Or, there is this from January 4:

They [members of the administration] are willing, out of some complex mix of ambition, resentment, cynicism and rationalization, to endanger all of our lives — all of our children’s lives — by refusing to tell the country what they know about the senescent fool who boasts of the size of his “nuclear button” on Twitter.

Senescent fool!

So I guess we need to look among some of Trump's prominent critics for examples of the few grains of sanity remaining in this crazy world.  For some easy examples, I'll turn to my favorite subject, that of climate change alarmism.  Trump has famously proclaimed climate change alarmism to be a hoax.  Insane!  So let's see what some of the "sane" people have to say about the subject, recognizing that we have just gone through two weeks of record-breaking winter cold throughout the center, east, and south of the country.  Surely record cold cannot be blamed on "global warming"?  Don't be so sure!  Paul Matthews at Climate Scepticism has helpfully compiled a collection for our perusal.  Examples:

• Al Gore, January 4:  "It’s bitter cold in parts of the US, but climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann explains that’s exactly what we should expect from the climate crisis."  
• Climate "scientist" Michael Mann, January 4:  The bitter cold and snowy conditions gripping the US are “an example of precisely the sort of extreme winter weather we expect because of climate change.”
• New York Times, January 3, "Why So Cold?  Climate Change May Be Part of the Answer":  "As bitter cold continues to grip much of North America and helps spawn the fierce storm along the East Coast, the question arises: What’s the influence of climate change?  Some scientists studying the connection between climate change and cold spells, which occur when cold Arctic air dips south, say that they may be related."
• IndyStar, January 3, "This is how science links cold weather and global warming":  "[W]hile it may be counterintuitive, Indiana's cold spell — with wind chills as low as -20 to -35 degrees — may be a result of rising global temperatures, according to climate scientists."  However, "Cold snaps are not exclusively a global warming-caused phenomenon. . . ."

Of course, all of those examples come from journalism sources intended to be read by the general public.  But how do climate alarmists talk about climate change when they are among their own crowd of friendly academics?  Matthews has a good example of that as well.  The following is from an academic journal called Environmental Politics.  I'll bet you can't read all the way through the whole thing:

Investigations of the interconnectedness of climate change with human societies require profound analysis of relations among humans and between humans and nature, and the integration of insights from various academic fields. An intersectional approach, developed within critical feminist theory, is advantageous. An intersectional analysis of climate change illuminates how different individuals and groups relate differently to climate change, due to their situatedness in power structures based on context-specific and dynamic social categorisations. Intersectionality sketches out a pathway that stays clear of traps of essentialisation, enabling solidarity and agency across and beyond social categories. It can illustrate how power structures and categorisations may be reinforced, but also challenged and renegotiated, in realities of climate change. We engage with intersectionality as a tool for critical thinking, and provide a set of questions that may serve as sensitisers for intersectional analyses on climate change.

Got that?  And, of course, we can all agree that Donald Trump is insane!

In Climate Science, Predictions Are Hard, Especially About The Future

You probably think that the classical reference in the title is to a saying originating from baseball humorist Yogi Berra.  But Quote Investigator traces the origin of the saying back to an unnamed wag in the Danish parliament in the 1930s.  Early users of the phrase included Danish atomic physicist Nils Bohr and movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn.

As hard as they may be to get right, predictions about the future are the core of the field that goes by the name of "climate science."  Because of predictions about the future by climate scientists, everybody knows that human burning of fossil fuels will cause world temperatures to increase by multiple degrees over the coming century, leading to a series of calamities ranging from sea level rise to droughts to floods to hurricane and tornadoes.  After all, the climate scientists have sophisticated computer models!  If you don't believe the predictions of the models, you must be a "science denier."  The predictions of significantly rising temperatures are so certain that you are to be required by government coercion (unless President Trump can head it off) to dramatically reduce your use of fossil fuels and restrict your lifestyle.

You and I are not going to be around in 2100 to see if any of these predictions about the future have come true.  But meanwhile the climate alarm crowd obliges us with shorter term predictions to help us get some handle on how reliable they are.  Unfortunately, nobody seems to be doing a very good job of keeping track of these predictions and seeing how they are turning out.  So once again it falls to the Manhattan Contrarian to do some leg work.  On this subject, I am assisted today by some very useful work from my friend Benny Peiser and the Global Warming Policy Foundation in the UK.

For example, there was the prediction that our national weather bureaucracy (NOAA) came out with back in October as to the severity of the upcoming winter.  How do they come up with that prediction?  Eric Niler at Wired wrote a post on the prediction on October 29 that revealed that the seasonal predictions rely on models using the same theories of "heat trapping" greenhouse gases as they use for the longer-term models:

NOAA climate scientists incorporate heat-trapping carbon dioxide levels when they run the models that produce their seasonal climate predictions.

So what was the prediction?

Warmer-than-normal conditions are most likely across the southern two-thirds of the continental U.S., along the East Coast, across Hawaii and in western and northern Alaska.

Oops!  For those who haven't checked up on the weather on the East Coast of the U.S. lately, it's been record-breaking deep freeze around here for the last week, and expected to go even lower over the approaching weekend.  It has snowed as far south as the Florida panhandle.  Well, fortunately, the NOAA guys were ready with plenty of hedging language when Niler asked about their official prediction:

Mike Halpert, deputy director of NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center [said], “There is a lot of natural climate variability in the system that can trump any kind of background signal.” 

Or in other words, predictions are hard, especially about the future.  At least when the predictions are for a short enough term that anybody might check up on them.

And here's a related question:  Have you heard much lately about how the polar bears are about to go extinct due to global warming?  No?  Better check up on that prediction and how it has turned out.

Susan Crockford is a scientist specializing in polar bears, who writes scholarly articles on the subject, and also has a blog called Polar Bear Science.  She has been making a thing lately about taunting the alarm community for their failed polar bear predictions.  For example, Crockford points to this report in Canada's National Post in May 2007 of a presentation by Al Gore:

[Gore pointed to] an iconic photograph that was distributed worldwide last month by Canada's Environment Ministry, . . .  The photo, taken in the summer, shows two polar bears on a melting ice floe in the Beaufort Sea, north of Barrow, Alaska.  "Their habitat is melting -- beautiful animals, literally being forced off the planet," Mr. Gore said, with the photo on the screen behind him.  "They're in trouble, got nowhere else to go."  Audience members let out gasps of sympathy . . . .

Crockford also points to scholarly articles, particularly by a guy named Steven Amstrup, predicting rapid decline of polar bear populations if sea ice levels reach . . . levels that they actually did reach in years including 2012.  But unfortunately, from Crockford's blog on December 21:

This is the truth the world needs to hear: the experts were wrong. Polar bears have not been driven to the brink of extinction by climate change, they are thriving. This is the message of each of my two new books.

 And from Crockford's blog on January 4:

Polar bear experts who falsely predicted that roughly 17,300 polar bears would be dead by now (given sea ice conditions since 2007) have realized their failure has not only kicked their own credibility to the curb, it has taken with it the reputations of their climate change colleagues. This has left many folks unhappy about the toppling of this important global warming icon but ironically, consensus polar bear experts and climate scientists (and their supporters) were the ones who set up the polar bear as a proxy for AGW in the first place.

So now, how much faith are we to put in the predictions of climate armageddon by 2100?  Enough to shut down the fossil fuel industry? 

Surprise: When The Government Goes To War Against The Economy, The Economy Fails To Grow

You probably were rubbing your eyes thinking you were having a hallucination yesterday when you saw the headline on the front page of the New York Times, "The Trump Effect: Business, Anticipating Less Regulation, Loosens Purse Strings."   Here's the lede:

A wave of optimism has swept over American business leaders, and it is beginning to translate into the sort of investment in new plants, equipment and factory upgrades that bolsters economic growth, spurs job creation — and may finally raise wages significantly.  While business leaders are eager for the tax cuts that take effect this year, the newfound confidence was initially inspired by the Trump administration’s regulatory pullback, not so much because deregulation is saving companies money but because the administration has instilled a faith in business executives that new regulations are not coming.

Huh?  Has the Times suddenly decided to end a full year of Trump bashing and give him credit for accelerating economic growth?  Given the depth of Trump hatred up there on Eighth Avenue, that hardly seems plausible.  The alternative hypothesis is that there is a wave of exceptional economic news about to come out, and Times wants to put the best possible spin on it before things get out of hand.  

As to the economic news that is anticipated but not yet out, my favorite source is the New York Fed's "Nowcast" that provides a day-by-day read on the status of certain indicators used to predict GDP growth in the current quarter.  The guys over at Pravda are well aware of the Nowcast.  For the just-ended fourth quarter of 2017, the latest Nowcast as of December 29 anticipates GDP growth for the quarter of 3.87%.  If that proves out in the final numbers due in several weeks, after growth of 3.1% in the second quarter and 3.2% in the third, it will mean that GDP growth could approach or even break the 3% barrier for 2017 (a level never achieved for a full year in eight years of Obama), and with an acceleration of growth heading into 2018.  You will recall that the official Times/Krugman line to justify eight years of sluggish growth and stagnation under Obama was that this had nothing to do with government attacks against the economy and entrepreneurs, but rather reflected a "new normal" of "secular stagnation" in the post-modern economy.  (From Krugman, November 2013:  "[T]he evidence suggests that we have become an economy whose normal state is one of mild depression, whose brief episodes of prosperity occur only thanks to bubbles and unsustainable borrowing.") 

And is the Times trying to spin the currently-accelerating Trump growth as having little to do with the President's actions?  Of course.  From the linked article, consider this:

The evidence is weak that regulation actually reduces economic activity or that deregulation stimulates it.     

And this:

“The notion that deregulation unleashes growth is virtually impossible to find in the data,” said Jared Bernstein, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities who served as the chief economic adviser to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Those two lines focus specifically on "regulation" and "deregulation."  But how about the more general proposition that government attacks against businesses and entrepreneurs (of which regulations are one example), making their lives difficult or impossible, cause economic growth to slow or stop?  Is there any evidence that government attacks on business and entrepreneurs correlate with economic growth or lack thereof?

Actually, there is enormous evidence for that proposition.  Probably, if you have studied economic history a little, you haven't been taught about this at all, because instead you learned nothing but Keynesian fallacies.  But let's just take some of the most obvious examples:

• When Roosevelt and the New Deal came in in January 1933, you would think that the depressed economy would have been poised to take off.  But one of the first things they did in the "100 days" of the New Deal was pass the National Industrial Recovery Act, providing for each industry in the country to impose a "code of fair conduct" on all participants in the industry.  Those codes quickly became a parody of micro-managing regulation, fashioned by industry leaders to make life difficult or impossible for upstarts.  The NIRA was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in the 1935 Schechter Poultry case, often called the "Sick Chicken" case.  The Sick Chicken case involved the "Live Poultry Code," that had been adopted by the poultry industry.  Read the case to get an idea of the endless deadening, micromanaging regulations that just this one industry had so quickly managed to impose to tie little guys like Schecter up in knots.  The regulations in the Code were enforceable by criminal penalties, and Schechter was an appeal of a criminal conviction.  The particular piece of the Code that was the focus of the Schechter case was a requirement that a buyer of live poultry "accept the run of any half coop, coop or coops" -- in other words, they purported to make it so that buyers could not select the better animals and reject the sick ones.  The case provides a little window into what happened in just one industry, but this is what the New Deal did on an economy-wide basis.  The economy did grow in 1933-36, but way below its potential.  At the end of Roosevelt's first term, the unemployment rate was still 16.9%.
• After the Sick Chicken case in 1935 got rid of the NIRA and its Codes, you would think that the economy again would have been poised to take off.  Oh, but that's the year they enacted the National Labor Relations Act, sometimes known as the Wagner Act, that created the NLRB and put the government firmly on the side of unions in organizing workplaces.  1936 through 1938 were the glory years of union organizing, including the famous "sit-down" strikes at GM and Chrysler in 1936 and 1937, and the violent battles at Ford in 1938 and beyond.  The minimum wage began in 1938.  The 1936 campaign is when Roosevelt took to bashing what he called the "malefactors of great wealth."  In 1937-38 the weak Roosevelt economic recovery turned into another sharp downturn, sometimes referred to as the "recession within the depression."    
• And then there are the Obama years.  Obamacare.  Dodd-Frank.  (I used to keep a copy of the 1000+ page Dodd-Frank Act on my desk to remind me of what crazy over-regulation looks like.)  Environmental zealotry run rampant.  Labor relations zealotry run rampant.  Tax increases.  Seemingly it never occurred to anyone in government or the media that any of this might have an impact on economic performance.  In this 2013 post I called the overall approach of the Obama administration the "War Against the Economy."  Is it any wonder why many entrepreneurs (and potential entrepreneurs) would choose to sit on their hands and wait for a better climate?

Anyway, I can't wait to read all the attempts to explain away the robust economic growth that is about to come our way.  Do you think that Paul Krugman is going to be issuing an apology for all of his "new normal" and "secular stagnation" nonsense?