The Ottawa Citizen reports, “Hurricane experts admit they can’t predict hurricanes early; December forecasts too unreliable:”
Two top U.S. hurricane forecasters, famous across Deep South hurricane country, are quitting the practice of making a seasonal forecast in December because it doesn’t work.
William Gray and Phil Klotzbach say a look back shows their past 20 years of forecasts had no predictive value.
The two scientists from Colorado State University will still discuss different probabilities of hurricane seasons in December. But the shift signals how far humans are, even with supercomputers, from truly knowing what our weather will do in the long run.
Fancy that — weather and climate experts seemed much more confident a decade ago:
Whoops, sorry, that was Don Fowler, then chairman of the Democratic National Committee, back in late August of 2008, when Hurricane Gustav caused the first day of the 2008 Republican convention to be scrubbed:
This past Friday, Charles Krauthammer tweeted, “Earthquake, hurricane, Obamacare. When does it stop? Seven more and I vote we let the Israelites go…” It’s a funny line, and nobody thought that Krauthammer was directly invoking biblical wrath.
Responding to Michelle Bachmann expressing similar sentiments to Krauthammer, Ed Morrissey adds:
Bachmann certainly didn’t follow it up with warnings about God’s wrath, as one might if arguing this point seriously. Instead, her comments pointed to wrath of a kind more consequential in elections:
“I don’t know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians. We’ve had an earthquake; we’ve had a hurricane. He said, ‘Are you going to start listening to me here?’” Bachmann said at a campaign event in Sarasota, Florida on Sunday.
“Listen to the American people because the American people are roaring right now. They know government is on a morbid obesity diet and we’ve got to rein in the spending,” she said.
So yes, it’s a joke, which would be apparent to everyone who isn’t obsessing about the Dominionists and their secret plans to join the Illuminati, the Bildebergers, and the Freemasons to impose a Christian theocracy on the United States, in conjunction with space aliens. But at least the media is rational enough to tell us that space aliens know how to stimulate an economy.
Two posts at Instapundit highlight the circular logic of today’s society. First up, check out this New York Times paragraph, and the text highlighted by Gerard van der Leun on Mayor Bloomberg’s evacuation plans for Hurricane Irene.
Or the lack thereof:
On Friday, city officials issued what they called an unprecedented order for the evacuation of about 370,000 residents of low-lying areas, warning that Hurricane Irene was such a threat that people living there simply had to get out. Officials also made what they said was another first-of-its-kind decision, announcing plans to shut down the city’s entire transit system Saturday— all 468 subway stations and 840 miles of tracks, and the rest of the nation’s largest mass transit network: thousands of buses in the city, as well as the buses and commuter trains that reach from Midtown Manhattan to the suburbs. — Evacuations Ordered in New York as Hurricane Irene Nears – NYTimes.com
Mayor Bloomberg is one America’s most aggressive pushers of the Nanny State — but its escalating costs and concurrent dwindling demographics are rapidly turning it into the Granny State as Glenn Reynolds writes, leading an Insta-reader to ask:
Reader Clifford Grout writes: “Grandparents were often the family safety net before the fall of extended families and the rise of the welfare state. If we’ve come full circle, then… what’s the point of continuing the welfare state? Wondering…”
Empowering politicians and employing bureaucrats, apparently.
Sheesh. All of these double-standards are enough to make you want to find some politics-free entertainment somewhere.
“People on twitter might be joking, but in all seriousness, we would see a bigger boost in spending and hence economic growth if the earthquake had done more damage.”
Presumably Japan had a sufficient quantity of broken windows for Krugman’s liking.
Update: I doubt that Krugman would appreciate the humor, but Michael Ramirez’s latest cartoon dovetails perfectly with his quote.
Update:Allahpundit on the complexities and contradictions of a Timesman:
Update: And here’s the man himself weighing in. It wasn’t his Google+ page. Duly noted, and I apologize for the error. But I hope he addresses the argument in the fake tweet on his blog. If World War II ended the Great Depression, why is it outrageous to think a Keynesian might see an economic boon to a natural calamity?
“If Paul Krugman is wondering how and why so many people–myself included–could have been taken in by the fake Google+ page put up in his name, all he needs to do is to go back over his previous writings,” Pejman Yousefzadeh adds.
UPDATE: Readers felt it as far away as Baltimore, Delaware, and Lehigh, Pennsylvania.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Hard to believe, but reader Eric Halpern says he felt it in Hartford: “My vertical blinds were rocking back and forth, and we all came out of our offices to ask, ‘Did you feel that?’”
My mom in South Jersey just called to tell me she and her neighbors felt the quake as well. She described it as feeling the floor was about to cave in, and then turned on the TV to see shots of office workers leaving their swaying skyscrapers in Philadelphia and NYC on the TV news. That jibes with what Tina Korbe at Hot Air writes: “Numerous bystanders and longtime residents evacuated from buildings in New York said they hadn’t felt shaking like this since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The same thought echoed in the corridors of the Pentagon, too.”
Bryan Preston has continuous updates and links at the Tatler.
While it is very expensive to tear down and replace, or reinforce, inadequate housing, it isn’t expensive at all to bolt heavy goods to the walls or to move heavy furniture away from beds. Rarely is this done in Istanbul. The odd thing is that everyone does fear the coming quake. Last year, a minor jolt panicked the city and sent the Turkish word for earthquake, deprem, to the top of Twitter’s trending topics, but almost no one knows what to do if it happens, or cares to know. I know many people in Istanbul who are wealthy enough to live in safer buildings but don’t.
They are fully aware of the risk. When asked why they don’t do anything about it, they shrug. They’re fatalistic. Most Turks think day to day, not long-term.
Contrast Turkey with Japan, where “there’s no such thing as an honest mistake,” as one American who has lived there for years puts it. “Every mistake is a moral failure. In other words, you should have worked harder, you should have prepared better, you should have been more careful. So even their [emergency] practice drills have to be rehearsed. Everybody has practiced.” After the March quake, journalist Kirk Spitzer, who lives in Japan, wrote about the culture of earthquake preparedness there: “Our shelves are lined with rubberized material to keep glasses and plate-ware from sliding; nothing fell over and broke, not even delicate champagne glasses we brought from Paris. Elsewhere, floor-mounted latches kept bedroom and hallway doors from slamming or breaking loose. Picture rails built into the ceiling kept even heavy frames from crashing to the floor.”
Ordinary, middle-class Japanese people take these steps to protect their drinking glasses. Many museums in Istanbul fail to take similar steps to protect priceless sculptures, ceramics, and cuneiform. They sit unsecured on pedestals or underneath light fixtures that would fall on them in heavy shaking. The storage rooms, according to people who work in them, are a hazard zone. This isn’t a matter of comparative wealth; it’s a matter of culture.
You see a similar failure to turn worry into action at the governmental level. Local officials in the municipality of Beşiktaş have elaborate earthquake plans—they showed them to me in a PowerPoint presentation. But they exist only on PowerPoint, where they have existed since 2008 without any progress made toward implementation. This is characteristic of the great majority of earthquake plans drawn up in Turkey since the 1999 quake. No one knows about them—certainly not the public; they look quite thorough, but they do not translate into action. No one seems to have the authority to act on the plans. No one seems to have the authority to release whatever funds would be needed to implement them. No one seems even to know who would have that authority. The funds and grants awarded by various international development agencies for retrofitting and earthquake preparation simply disappear.
Fatalism kills. Short-term thinking kills. But above all, corruption kills. On the anniversary of the Haiti earthquake, Nicholas Ambraseys and Roger Bilham published an extraordinary study in Nature. Using data from Transparency International’s Corruptions Perception Index, they calculated that 83 percent of all deaths from building collapses in earthquakes in the past 30 years took place in countries that were “anomalously corrupt”—that is, in countries that were perceived to be more corrupt than you would predict from their per-capita income.
* * *
A quarter of a million people were killed in Haiti, and God knows how many more were maimed, physically and emotionally, by collapsing buildings. This will happen again and again, in larger and larger numbers, with ever-weepier celebrity telethons to accompany the carnage. But you’ll see no calls to save the world from corrupt building practices on your grocery bags at Whole Foods. Nobody will suggest that the American government enter into seismic risk reduction treaties with other nations.
Spin the wheel: Bogotá, Cairo, Caracas, Dhaka, Islamabad, Istanbul, Jakarta, Karachi, Katmandu, Lima, Manila, Mexico City, New Delhi, Quito, Tehran. It will be one of them. It isn’t too late to save them. But we need to say the truth about why they’re at risk in the first place.
“Before I begin, I must point out that behind me sits a highly admired President of the United States and decorated war hero while I, a cable television talk show host, have been chosen to stand here and impart wisdom. I pray I never witness a more damning example of what is wrong with America today.”
– Conan O’Brien, during his recent commencement address at Dartmouth. The president he’s referring to is George H.W. Bush, who was voted out of office in 1992 for Bill Clinton.
And I guarantee that we’ll see even more damning examples of what’s wrong with America in the next year and a half.
At MSNBC, not surprisingly, it’s two networks in one, as James Taranto notes in today’s Best of the Web column:
Economic Disaster, Take 2
Our friends at NewsBusters.org offer this priceless juxtaposition from the MSNBC website. According to a report yesterday, natural disasters help explain the high unemployment rate:
Sadly not all workers have been so lucky. Their homes or places of business have been destroyed in this year’s wave of storms, tornadoes and flooding. That means thousands of workers in the South and Midwest could be out of work for some time, potentially pushing up the nation’s jobless rate and further taxing financially strapped state unemployment funds.
But an MSNBC report in 2004, when unemployment was much lower and a Republican was in the White House, made the opposite claim
Economists, who have been burned over the past few months by reports that fell short of expectations, are once again looking for a solid report, partly because of an expected rebound after four hurricanes tore through Florida and other southern states in August and September.
The 2004 report also observes: “With the election over, the monthly employment report due Friday lacks the sense of urgency and drama of recent months, when the closely watched figures were apt to set off waves of political rhetoric and spin.” Plus ça change!
No wonder it’s so hard for the left to decide when it’s the proper time to root for a hurricane.
Mr Verybigliar: (Michael Palin) Well there is a considerable financial advantage in using the services of El Mystico. A block, like Mystico Point here, (indicating a high-rise block behind him) would normally cost in the region of one-and-a-half million pounds. This was put up for five pounds and thirty bob for Janet.
Voice Over: But the obvious question is are they safe?
(Cut to an architect’s office. The architect at his desk. Behind him on the wall are framed photos of various collapsed buildings. He is a well-dressed authoritative person.)
SUPERIMPOSED CAPTION: ‘MR CLEMENT ONAN, ARCHITECT TO THE COUNCIL’
Architect (Graham Chapman): Of course they’re safe. There’s absolutely no doubt about that. They are as strong, solid and as safe as any other building method in this country provided of course people believe in them.
Think Progress, last week: “Catastrophic Climate: Storms Kill 292 In States Represented By Climate Pollution Deniers.”
James Surowiecki of the New Yorker is the latest writer to declare the broken windows fallacy invalid if the destruction is large enough:
In a study of eighty-nine countries, the economists Mark Skidmore and Hideki Toya, after controlling for every variable they could think of, found that countries that suffered more climatic disasters actually grew faster and were more productive. This seems bizarre: it’s close to the broken-windows fallacy identified by the nineteenth-century economist Frédéric Bastiat—the idea that breaking windows is economically useful, because it makes work for glaziers. But Skidmore and Toya argue that disaster-stricken economies don’t simply replace broken windows, as it were; they upgrade infrastructure and technology, and shift investment away from older, less productive industries. (After the Kobe quake, the city’s plastic-shoe factories never returned.) In Horwich’s somewhat ruthless phrase, disasters can function as a form of “accelerated depreciation.” Something similar often happens on the level of the individual consumer: homeowners rebuilding after a disaster take the opportunity to upgrade, a phenomenon known as “the Jacuzzi effect.” In ordinary times, inertia keeps old technologies in place; it may be easier to make dramatic changes when you have to start from scratch.
But note the double-bind argument also at work here as it was among those like Krugman who reflexively urged bigger and bigger FDR-style “stimulus” projects upon President Obama: if you’re as obsessed with global warming as the average leftist, isn’t “the jacuzzi effect,” not to mention the much larger components of this rebuilding effort bad for the environment, since it encourages additional electrical use and increases a homeowners’ carbon footprint?
Arguably, Keynes’ most famous bon not these days is that “In the long run we are all dead” — something that Japan knows first-hand considering its demographic woes, and Europe’s economy isn’t far behind, Robert Samuelson writes at Real Clear Politics, advising us to “Pray for Japan, Worry for Europe:”
Europe has arrived at this dismal juncture driven by three forces: (a) large welfare states that were too often financed with debt; (b) the financial crisis that led to recession and has pushed some countries (Ireland, Spain) to aid their banks; (c) the perverse side effects of the single currency, the euro.
The euro’s role is especially ironic. Adopted in 1999 — and now used by 17 nations — the euro was intended to promote prosperity and political unity. Countries could enjoy similarly low interest rates and the convenience of common money. It seemed to work for a while. But low interest rates in Greece, Spain and Ireland encouraged unsustainable booms or housing bubbles that, when burst, aggravated their recessions and budget deficits. Now unity has turned to discord. Countries that back the debt bailout — particularly Germany — resent the possible costs; countries being bailed out resent the harsh austerity that’s imposed as a condition of aid.
There is a fragile debtor-creditor consensus that could crumble, posing yet another danger to economic recovery. Already, unemployment rates in Greece and Ireland hover around 13 percent. How much budget stringency (spending cuts, tax increases) will countries accept before social unrest or national pride cause politicians to say “enough”? Even European countries not facing an immediate debt problem need to reduce budget deficits to retain market confidence. All confront a common dilemma. Too much austerity too quickly could create a recession, widening deficits. Too little austerity too slowly could unnerve investors, raising interest rates and deficits.
It’s understandable that the human suffering, physical destruction and nuclear hazards in Japan compel our attention. But we ought to remember that a greater menace to global stability and prosperity lies halfway around the world.
And caused by a similar conjunction as Japan’s fiscal woes: decades of Keynesian welfare state spending on steroids, ultimately combined with a graying and shrinking population.
Profiles from the future of litigation: “The following memo was unearthed as part of the litigation, now entering its 50th year, over the Great Japan Nuclear Incident of 2011. Addressed to General Electric’s then-CEO Jeff Immelt, the memo appears to have been drafted by an executive in the company’s office of strategy:”
None of us at GE needs to be reminded that there is no natural “private” market for nuclear reactors. All our customers are governments, government-owned companies, or nominally private companies regulated by government. In the U.S., demand for reactors depends on the availability of federal loan guarantees and the Price-Anderson nuclear indemnity law (private insurance being unavailable for nuclear reactors).
Politics thus being the mother’s milk of the nuclear business, GE’s Institute of Ecomagination (aka our Washington lobbying shop) highlights a disturbing new correlation: Whenever President Obama endorses an energy option, disaster promptly ensues. His ringing support of expanded offshore drilling came just weeks before the BP oil spill. The Japanese reactor mess followed not long after he lauded nuclear energy as a weapon to fight global warming.
On the site Politico.com, George Mason University political scientist Jeremy Mayer recently opined: “I don’t think Obama’s cursed on energy policy, but this is a string of bad luck.”
We disagree. Though on the advice of PR we’ve stopped referring to it as the “Obama Black Swan Effect,” this powerful yet mysterious indicator is too important to ignore. Accordingly, this office recommends a new corporate strategy: Whatever Mr. Obama says, GE should do the opposite, starting with investing in coal-burning power-plants and health care reprivatization.
This, of course, would represent a 180-degree reversal of current GE strategy, informally known around headquarters as the “jump how high?” strategy. This office nevertheless believes the evidence warrants such a change in direction.
As always, whatever Obama recommends, bet on the opposite. As I wrote in December:
Then: Joe Biden seen as example of Seinfeldian opposite theory, akin to George Costanza in the New York Yankees’ front office, a comparatively plodding backbencher tapped to join a political juggernaut.
NOW: Joe Biden seen as example of Seinfeldian opposite theory, the comparatively grown-up voice of sanity and reason in an otherwise hapless trainwreck of an administration.
John Bolton, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, tells National Review Online that President Obama is dithering on Libya. “Every hour that goes by shows me how [Obama] is not ready for this,” he says. “I am feeling sick to my stomach that we are into something where the president does not know what he is doing.”
Mr. Ambassador — we all have that feeling — for well over two years now.
Remember back in ’50s and early ’60s, when we set off something like 900 atomic bombs in Nevada? And how we just let the fallout blow wherever and it landed all over the eastern US? And how it wiped out life as we know it and all that was left from Colorado to the Atlantic were six-legged rats battling two-headed cockroaches in the glowing ruins?
There’s no doubt the nuclear emergency in Japan is serious, so it’s perfectly reasonable for the media to help us understand the complexities of nuclear reactors, meltdowns, radiation levels, and the like. But having watched with the rest of us, I’m wondering when the identifying crawler on CNN or MSNBC or even Fox will identify an expert commentator as an “anti-nuclear activist.” Given their non-stop air time, several must be sleeping in network green rooms. Before the earthquake/tsunami they could be found opposing our nuclear strategic posture, opposing modernization of our strategic deterrent, opposing civilian nuclear power and arguing for eliminating all nuclear weapons. It may be hard to get the physics right, but the crawler should be easy.
Japan may be on the verge of an unprecedented catastrophe. Saudi Arabia is all but colonizing Bahrain. Qaddafi is close to retaking Libya, with bloodbath to follow. And, as Jim Geraghty notes, the president of the United States is going on ESPN to talk about the NCAA and delivering speeches today on his rather dull plan to replace No Child Left Behind with No Teenager Left Behind, or something like that.
It’s hard to overstate how poorly Barack Obama is doing in the face of these crises — and I don’t even mean how he’s doing substantively, which is a scandal in itself. I mean how he’s doing politically. Recall how much hay Michael Moore made of the fact that George W. Bush read My Pet Goat for nine minutes in that Florida classroom on 9/11 after being informed that the first plane had struck.
We’re going on four weeks now, or more, that Barack Obama has been reading My Pet Goat.
He is largely notable by his absence, which is itself the result not only of not knowing what to do but also apparently believing it is better for the world if he remains a minor player as a bloodbath approaches in the Middle East and something more ominous seems to be approaching in Japan. When he talks, as he did in Friday’s press conference, he only makes matters more confusing; there is little reassurance that there is a hand anywhere near the tiller.
He’s done what he [was] designed to do — from the earliest stages of his education on through his studies at Columbia, his tenure as a community organizer, his tutelage under the erstwhile Weatherman, his time in Rev Wright’s church, and his final polishing acts at Harvard, Chicago, and short stints in state and federal government: fundamentally change the US into another Europeanized socialist state run almost entirely by a professional political class and their bureaucratic enforcers.
And he knows the current GOP lacks the political will to roll back those very things he and his fellow travelers have implemented to put the final institutional nails in the republic’s classically liberal coffin.
So, sh*t. Why not just play golf and eat burgers? The f*ck you bitter clingers gonna do about it?
Not much based on the current GOP presidential line-up, which Steve Green compares to the Democrats in 1992 — before Bill Clinton arrived. (Remember the milquetoast line-up of Paul Tsongas and Bob Kerrey?)
Anyone on the right with Clinton’s charisma want to get into the game sometime between now and January?
The Japanese are a resilient people who proved themselves capable of a miracle recovery after World War II. Even so, their 2011 population is an aging one, with almost one in four Japanese over 65. As difficult as such demographics are for a stagnant economy to support, rebuilding economic prosperity to its previous levels with such a workforce challenges credibility. It seems to me–even should the nation avoid the ultimate disaster of Chernobyl-type nuclear accidents rendering its scarce land resource even scarcer through 1,000-year half-life contamination–reconstructing Japan will require something like the Marshall Plan.
The United States no longer can provide that level of assistance, but perhaps the Chinese–their coffers bristling with reserves from years of trade surpluses–can. Thus far, I am not aware of any large-scale assistance from the one long enemy to the other, and it seems that a Japanese decline should, in fact, benefit the Chinese. Nevertheless, a competitor’s misfortune may be a wise investment opportunity.
Thus, aside from all the human tragedy that has thus far occurred and the risks for far greater that could well end in making this the greatest natural disaster in modern times–recall that the fire after the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 caused 90 percent of the damage–I also see a great loss for America.
As Amity Shlaes wrote at the very beginning of 2007′s The Forgotten Man, brilliantly — and tacitly — linking a natural disaster in the late 1920s which inadvertently stage set for Hoover, FDR, and the calamity of the following decade with Katrina and our own dormant economy,”Floods change the course of history, and the flood of 1927 was no exception.”
The America of the 1920s was a still largely rural nation with a few urban pockets about to face all of the challenges of the 20th century and ultimately very much up to the task. Japan has a demographically exhausted population and a rapacious neighbor right next door. As Kronos writes, “Undoubtedly this disaster has knee-capped our loyal ally Japan’s regional power for some time to come and perhaps permanently. China enjoys the best position to move into the resulting vacuum and exploit Japan’s hobbling.”
What happens next?
(And what about us? Jeff Goldstein boils America’s potential fate down to six simple words: “USA Inc.: Bought high, selling low.”)
I’m not sure if the explosion is radioactive or not, and if it is, how serious it is. But I do know that you never want to see the words “Explosion” and “Nuclear Plant” combined in the same sentence:
Sky News is reporting, “Japan nuclear plant update: Area residents told to stay indoors, not drink tap water and to cover faces with wet towels or masks.” Michael van Poppel of Breaking News Online adds, “The extent of the incident at the nuke plant is not known.. still very sketchy. Officials appeal for calm.”
I’m sure the Tatler will have much more on this later in the AM today.
As I mentioned at the Tatler late last night, CNN posted a horrifying clip from the inside of their Tokyo office the moment the earthquake hit:
I don’t know what floor CNN’s office is on, but here’s how the Tokyo cityscape looked from street-level, where office buildings can be seen visibly shaking:
I know Japan’s architects and engineers have decades of practice refining how earthquake-proof their structures are; I wonder what magnitude they’re typically built to withstand?
And finally, one more clip; video of the tsunami wave hitting Sendai Airport, about 225 miles north of Tokyo, and much closer to the epicenter of the earthquake:
As one of Ace’s co-bloggers writes, “Considering all of the security cameras in Japan that this will be the most well documented disaster in human history, at least in terms of video evidence.”
A 7.9-magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of northern Japan, shaking buildings violently as far away as Tokyo. The highest tsunami warning was issued for the country’s northeast coast.
The quake struck at 2:46 p.m. local time off the coast of Sendai north of Tokyo, the Japan Meteorological Agency said. A wave of as high as 6 meters is expected to hit the coast of Miyagi prefecture, the agency said.
An updated report places the quake at a mammoth 8.8 rating. Steve Herman, a Voice of America journalist based in Seoul also has numerous updates on Twitter, including at least one possible tsunami sighting. There’s a photo of buildings on fire here.
CNN’s Lateef Mungin tweets, “There have been only 5 other earthquakes larger than this one since 1906.”
Breaking News on Twitter has numerous updates; more as it comes in will be posted here, and at the Tatler as well, the Pajamas group blog, which will likely have updates throughout the day on Friday.
Update: I revised this post at the Tatler (including the most recent magnitude rating of 8.9); where others are now posting updates as well.
Late Update: The rest of the gang is now starting to post updates at the Tatler; click here to be taken to the top of the homepage there and start scrolling. And Elizabeth Scalia a.k.a the Anchoress notes that Google has launched a person finder for Japan.
As we noted on Wednesday, global warming doomsday activist Mark Hertsgaard’s ambush interview of Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) went so badly, that Inhofe uploaded the complete video of his exchange to his own Website. But watch the start of the clip, where Hertsgaard identifies himself as being with Politico.com.
At the time, that struck us as being a bit odd. Politico frequently toes the Democratic party line, and has had several members associated with the leftwing JournoList that colluded with then-Senator Obama’s presidential campaign. But I can’t recall it going all in on the global cooling/warming/climate change/climate chaos (or whatever it’s called this week) issue. Based on Hertsgaard claiming on-camera that he was associated with the Politico, I thought perhaps that had changed with his hiring, where’s he’s contributed at least one rather strident op-ed.
At the Daily Caller, Caroline May writes that the Politico is pushing back from Hertsgaard’s on-camera claim that he was with that news outlet:
The best way to get the attention of a lawmaker: Say you’re from a legitimate news outlet and proceed with your questioning.
A great way to discredit yourself: Lie about your affiliation with a news outlet and proceed with your questioning.
The problem? Hertsgaard is not with the D.C. insider publication at all.
Dan Berman, energy editor at Politico, told The Daily Caller that while Hertsgaard has written one opinion article for them, he was not and is not affiliated with Politico.
“Mr. Hertsgaard is not a POLITICO reporter or employee and we have asked him not to portray himself as one,” Berman wrote in an email to TheDC.
Well, that’s good to see.
Hertsgaard lives in Northern California; his wife is a San Francisco Public Utilities Commission vice president, according to this Website. On February 12, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Hertsgaard was planning to jet from California to DC to challenge what he calls the “climate crooks,” the “politicians, propagandists and fossil fuel companies that have funded a misinformation campaign,” the Chronicle quoted him as saying.
(The gushing piece in the Chronicle is also a reminder of how that paper could ignore the headlines of the year then-Senator Obama calmly dropped in their lap three years earlier, when he told that he’d bankrupt the coal industry and “electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.”)
Bryan Preston noted at the Tatler that Hertsgaard’s crusade seems like something out of the pre-Hide the Decline past, not to mention, as we noted, rather hypocritical in the wake of the eco-doomsday crowd’s puritanical paranoia in recent years of excessive jet travel.
Back in 2007, we first highlighted the essay that ran in Editor and Publisher, old media’s house organ titled, “Climate Change: Get Over Objectivity, Newspapers.” Of course, as we’ve seen in the years since, there isn’t much objectivity left for old media to get over.
Evidently the Politico has taken their advice, as Mark Hertsgaard, who identifies himself on camera as working for that increasingly left-leaning and formerly JournoList-affiliated Website badgers Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK). As Inhofe’s YouTube page notes, “Global warming alarmists led by Mark Hertsgaard attempted to ambush Senator Inhofe following a hearing this morning. See for yourself who ended up winning the argument.”
But simply by being online, Hertsgaard has lost part of the argument. Take a look at Hertsgaard’s latest essay at the Politico:
Will it take the Republican Party as long to accept modern science as it took the Roman Catholic Church? The church waited 359 years to admit Galileo was right — the earth does move around the sun. Not until 1992 did the Vatican officially withdraw its condemnation of the man Albert Einstein called the father of modern science.
Today, even children know that the earth revolves around the sun. But that idea was heresy to the 17th-century church. When Galileo would not abandon his views, the Inquisition put him on trial in 1633. He was forced to recant under penalty of death, then lived under house arrest for the rest of his life.
Unpack that a bit and you have fallacious appeals to authority, followed by ad hominem attacks and insults. That’s not science, though having worked around more than a few scientists in my time, it’s unfortunately not uncommon behavior for scientists to engage in. Hertsgaard never deals honestly with the ClimateGate emails, which provide extremely strong evidence that the scientists at the heart of the debate were and still are cooking the books. It’s as if “hide the decline” never entered the debate. It’s as if none of the pile of information showing real and widespread fraud done in the name of global warming alarmism never happened at all.
But if Hertsgaard is serious about his language and his eco-apocalypticism, to paraphrase Instapundit, I’d be more likely to believe there’s a crisis when he starts to act like there’s a crisis. That means setting an example and getting off the Internet, to cut down on electricity and air-conditioned server room use. Hertsgaard is based in San Francisco; how did he get to DC? Think of the polar bears, man! And additionally, to borrow from Ann Althouse, the following rules should be observed by journalists who take global warming seriously:
3. Free time should be spent sitting or lying still without using electricity. Don’t run the television or music playing device. Reading, done by sunlight is the best way to pass free time. After dark, why not have a pleasant conversation with friends or family? Word games or board games should replace sports or video games.
4. Get up at sunrise. Don’t waste the natural light. Try never to turn on the electric lights in your house or workplace. Put compact fluorescent bulbs in all your light fixtures. The glow is so ugly that it will reduce the temptation to turn them on.
5. Restrict your use of transportation. Do not assume that walking or biking is less productive of carbon emissions than using a highly efficient small car. Do not go anywhere you don’t have to go. When there is no food in the house to make dinner, instead of hopping in the car to go to the grocery store or a restaurant, take it as a cue to fast. As noted above, your weight should be at the low end of normal, and opportunities to reach or stay there should be greeted with a happy spirit.
Also, the iPod that Hertsgaard carries in his ambush interview with Inhofe is right out as well, given its use of the Internet and petroleum-based byproducts to manufacture it. And note the obligatory use of children as human shields. Nothing like telling a young girl that her future is completely hosed. Near the end of the video, Hertsgaard “salutes” Inhofe for having plenty of children and grandkids — but doesn’t that contradict the global warming alarmists’ fear that large families cause global warming?
In contrast to Hertsgaard, this is a man who takes his climate change and the transportation requirements it imposes upon on hairshirt true believers seriously.
The European Union’s energy commissioner Gunter Oettinger points out something so basic and true that it routinely eludes our political-environmental superiors:
We need industry in Europe, we need industry in the U.K., and industry means CO2 emissions.
Of course, to our greener pals the premise of that argument – “we need industry” – is false.
Related: “Today, six years ago, the Kyoto Protocols, intended to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, came into force. I’ll bet dollars to donuts that no country has followed its commitment. That’s good, but also a cautionary tale about the validity of international agreements built on unicorns and pixie dust.”
Update: It gets better: “CANCELED: HOT—Mark Hertsgaard in Conversation with NASA’s James Hansen — Due to snow storms in New York City, this event has been canceled. Please check back again for a new date and time.”
Previous Posts
