Current View (original) (raw)
Tuesday, January 8, 2008
Coldest year on record. Record snowfalls in dozens of places. It must be global warming. Meanwhile, retreating glaciers in Canada show that trees grew where the glacier now stands. About 800 years ago. This near Calgary. But of course it wasn't really warmer during the ear of the Viking settlements in Greenland, that was a purely local phenomenon -- one that stretched west to Calgary. Interesting, but the scientists can't possibly be wrong. Big locality, I guess.
Let's see, they have met in Rio, in Kyoto, and in Bali. Where will the great climatologists hold their next big scientific meeting? Oh, the sacrifices they make for humanity!
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Addendum: it's the warmest primary day in New Hampshire history. So the globe is warming after all. It's Global Warming!
So last year was the coldest year in some time, and the warming trend sort of stopped in 2001, but we have some record warms in some places, and record colds in others. Which sounds like the computer models are all fouled up.
If I had to guess -- and it would only be a guess, but one informed by a long time of thinking about this and some familiarity with the data as well as normal physics -- I'd say that world climate is driven by:
- Solar output, which varies in cycles we understand, but also varies over longer periods in ways we don't understand.
- Volcanism, which may have some cyclical aspects and may have some predictability, but we don't understand it well and can't do much about predictions.
- Human activity, of which the best example I know is desertification caused by destruction of vegetation: goats at the edge of the Sahara is the one that comes to mind. Clear cutting of forests. Plowing the Great Plains. Building cities and paving over green areas.
- This goes both ways. Painting rooftops white. Using oyster shell for long driveways. In general, changing albedo to adjust the temperature to our liking.
- Atmospheric gas composition.
I believe the data support my hypothesis that items 1 and 2 above overwhelm item 3, but we can make some adjustments in albedo that will have a significant effect if we really work at it.
In looking at the climate models I find that the simplification assumptions (necessary to allow the mathematical models to be solved at all even given supercomputers and numeric analysis approximations) make the models, not entirely worthless perhaps, but useless as a guide to policy. No model I know of can take the data known in 1990 and produce the results observed in 2006; and the further back you go as the starting point, the worse the prediction of observed data.
The computer models don't seem to be any better for policy guidance -- date for planting crops, for example -- than the Farmer's Almanac, which uses a much simpler model.
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There is a good discussion of the Huckabee "Fair Tax" in today's TCS Daily. http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=010808A Arnold King (Cato Institute) looks at the effects on both revenue and "fairness" and presents data on the present situation in a calm and comprehensible analysis. He concludes that what we need is a "Semi-Fair Tax" that combines some "progressive" income tax features with a sales tax.
I note that if we want you not to do something -- don't speed, for example, and if you do speed don't really cut loose and rip -- we fine you. Progressive fines for multiple offenses and more severe expenses, and such like. So if you improve your house, we fine you by raising your taxes; and if you make more money, we fine you by increasing your income tax. If you save money, we fine you by taxing the interest income.
Clearly the message is that society doesn't want you to increase your income, improve your property, or save money. Instead, we want you to spend it all lest we fine you for keeping it.
The "Fair Tax" would change that by abolishing the income and payroll taxes (i.e. income tax and FICA) and putting all revenue on a sales tax of -- they say 23%, but you and I would call it 30%. King looks at the effect of this to come up with his conclusions. His essay is worth reading.
As for me, I'd accept King's analysis and try it his way, but I would also impose a 10% across the board tariff on all imports. All imports. If that requires renegotiating all our treaties, so be it; that's better than the European "Value Added Tax" which has a major feature of being nearly invisible.
A fixed "progressive" income tax that can't be changed and is adjusted for inflation; a 10% tariff with the option of adjusting it between 5% and 15% since its purpose is to make US goods produced under US regulations competitive with imported stuff produced by slaves and environmental negligence; and a national sales tax that is easy to see and hurts like hell. That ought to work.
Of course we will never try it. Both parties are conspiracies of elites against the voters and taxpayers. But at least we would be discussing something that could work, and who knows, maybe one or more of the conspirators would bolt and come out on our side...
