Posted by
RME KRNL on Tuesday, December 08, 2009 11:05:51 PM
Paul Krugman -- oh, I'm sorry, Dr. Paul Krugman, Professor Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize Laureate Paul Krugman (I say all that just in case anyone thinks that means his opinions shouldn't be challenged) -- recently wrote a New Yawk Times op-ed about the climate conference in Copenhagen entitled An Affordable Truth. (Note what I'm sure was Krugman's deliberate wordplay off of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth -- chuckle, chuckle -- I am so bemused at your cleverness -- and, yes, I do read the NYT. It's useful to know what those in the liberal [enemy] camp are doing, you know.)
Krugman's op-ed begins: "History shows that cap and trade, a system specifically designed to bring the power of market incentives to bear on environmental problems, does work."
Now, Krugman does have some relatively serious economics "chops." He majored in economics as an undergraduate at Yale, obtained a Ph.D. from MIT and then taught at Yale, MIT and Stanford before joining the faculty at Princeton in 2000 as professor of economics and international affairs. Well, my gosh, can we say Ivy League all the way? Makes one wonder how he missed doing something at Harvard, as well.
He is also a centenary professor at the London School of Economics and a member of the Group of Thirty international economic body, as well as the Council on Foreign Relations. His field is macroeconomics and one of his main influences is John Maynard Keynes. That last gives me some pause, because Keynesian economics is what Obama and his economic advisors also believe in and are following -- and we all can see how well that's been working out so far.
And in 2008, Krugman won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. Of course, that impresses me less that it once would have, because Al Gore also won a Nobel for his An Inconvenient Truth and his world-wide posturing, pontificating and proselytizing first about the more alarmist "global warming" (until maintaining that rubric became simply unsustainable, PC-wise) and now for the more generic "climate change," all based on so-called "settled science" which has always had a significant contingent of fellow scientist debaters and doubters (derisively dubbed and dismissed as "deniers" by the Goracle and his greeny, gadfly "true believers"). Oh, yeah, and Krugman's award (and everyone else's Nobel Prize, for that matter) is also diminished by Obama also getting one for.....um, what? Oh, yeah, naively talking a lot about something which will never happen -- global nuclear disarmament -- and being in office for two weeks at the time he was nominated.
So, who am I to challenge Krugman on anything "economic"? No one, really. My goodness, you couldn't be much more well-credentialed than he is, now, could you? Well, except, as I said, that I don't think Keynesian economics works very well. But that's just based on my experience in watching Team Obama (loaded up with a whole bunch of other really smart folks -- er, in fact, many of them like Krugman) trying to make it work.....and it not working. (I know, my lying eyes again, huh?) Besides, the best I can do is balance my checkbook and manage my credit and my debt. (But, hmmm, even that means that I'm still doing better than all those super smart folks in charge of the federal government are doing with our tax money right now, doesn't it? Hey, just askin' - just sayin'.)
Krugman goes on in the article to express his optimism that the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference can make a real difference in getting the world on the right track to capping off what's bad and trading on what's good about this whole climate-change-and-cap-and-trade "thingy."
And Krugman's optimism seems further boosted now that we know President Obama is not only going to the conference, whereas before he wasn't going at all, but also that he's now going toward the end of the conference, rather than attending the beginning as penultimately planned, so he can maybe endorse something positive being accomplished -- oh my! Goodness gracious, I guess hope does spring eternal, after all.
Plus, of course, there's that conference goal of getting industrialized countries to pay developing countries under some kind of sovereignty destroying, "global governance" or "one world order" kind of thing for all the past pollution the wicked and powerful industrialized countries (that's us and Europe and more recently China and India) have inflicted on the world, especially those poor, picked on and undeveloped countries (I guess that's just about everybody else) who now want lots of the industrialized countries' money to, uh, become more "developed" themselves. I guess, so they can then become wicked and powerful polluters, too.
It's an idea somewhat like so-called African-hyphenated-Americans wanting reparations for slavery which was abolished in the U.S. over 140 years ago, whose ancestors may or may not have ever suffered slavery but who certainly personally never suffered it themselves, from, I guess for comparability's sake you would have to call them, European-hyphenated-Americans who have never been slave owners or slave masters and who likely never had any ancestors who ever were, either.
So, on all this optimism and economics stuff, I can doubt Krugman but can't really challenge him. I can challenge him, however, on the climate change issue, especially antrhopogenic change, because being an economics expert doesn't mean you know diddly squat more about something like climatology than I, or Fred, or Tom, do. And, like many Ivy League educated and Ivory Tower thinking liberals, it is Krugman's intellectual smugness and inability to resist getting into an area of pure opinion where he overreaches and attempts to "lecture" and where I can not only challenge him but also reveal his bias.
First, Krugman's credibility and objectivity suffer a little bit with me simply because he writes for the liberal NYT, which loves to leak national security secrets and undermine our military but which keeps getting scooped on "other" news stories by the likes of FOX News' Glenn Beck, an avowed non-journalist.
Second, Krugman's credibility on the issue here recently suffered even more with me when he appeared as a guest panelist this past Sunday on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos and, when asked about the leaked emails he mentions here, looked straight into the TV camera, as if he really believed what he was saying (and that of course we should also), and said that what the climate change scientists had said in those leaked emails is not what they meant; that it was just scientists "informally" talking to each other -- wink, wink, nod, nod; and that the leaked emails did not mean what they clearly do mean -- and said -- that there is disagreement about unexplained and so far unexplainable data even among some climate change scientists (so that "science" is obviously not "settled" as so long claimed); that certain climate change scientists had been hiding data, manipulating other data, destroying still other data and denying legitimate Freedom of Information requests for some of their data, as well as avoiding full peer review of their work by other qualified scientists in the field who disagreed with them, instead denouncing the "disagreers" simply as "deniers" for years.
And then, third, there was this. Krugman goes on in the article cited here to say, "Of course, if things go well in Copenhagen, the usual suspects will go wild. We’ll hear cries that the whole notion of global warming is a hoax perpetrated by a vast scientific conspiracy, as demonstrated by stolen email messages that show — well, actually all they show is that scientists are human, but never mind."
Oh, Paul. Paul, Paul, Paul. You do so sorely disappoint. However smart you may be economically, does this put you, climatologically, in the camp of those who simply call any who question and doubt the so-called "settled science" of global warming/climate change the "deniers"? My, my, my, how intellectually insufficient, not to mention intellectually dishonest. The "usual suspects" will go wild? Does the "usual suspects" mean the hundreds and hundreds of reputable scientists world-wide who not only question but many of whom have also proven the global climate change "science" to not be "settled" but to be at least questionable, if not some of it outright false in many instances?
Example 1: So, Al Gore's no snow on Africa's Mount Kilimanjaro equals global warming? No, no snow on Mount Kilimanjaro equals a long-standing drought in the area, which means no moisture equals no snow. Duh! Example 2: Well, the Goracle's polar bears are trapped on alarmingly diminishing little ice floes, can't hunt and are all dying and that means global warming? No, the polar bear population is the highest it's ever been since it's been monitored, having increased from about 5,000 to 25,000 in recent decades. Oopsie! Example 3: And if the Arctic ice really is melting, it was also doing that back in the early 1900s when northern route shipping could freely go in the ordinary ships of the day where it now takes huge ice breaking ships to go. Example 4: And it's also true that the Antarctic ice is increasing, as evidenced by satellite imaging.
So, overall, what does all that mean? Well, certainly that the so-called "settled science" is, well, not so settled. Probably that the Earth is undergoing some climate changes, as it always has and as it always shall, whether we do anything about it, or think we can to any significant degree (no pun intended), or not, but that it is not "globally warming," much less that man-made CO2 emissions are any significant cause of the climate changes, notwithstanding a 2-year-old Supreme Court ruling and Obama's EPA director's recent "regulatory" announcement.
(And, as an aside, you do realize, I hope, that Obama's EPA director just now using a 2-year-old court ruling to threaten drastic regulatory action by the EPA under the Clean Air Act to reduce all CO2 because it's a "pollutant" is a purely political ploy -- attempted blackmail, really -- intended to "nudge" more people into supporting the Democrat Congress' current cap-and-trade legislation instead.)
And, Paul, please -- "We'll hear cries that the whole notion of global warming is a hoax perpetrated by a vast scientific conspiracy"? First, you and I both know that one way to seemingly (but not really) reduce the credibility of an opposing point of view is to so overstate it that it sounds ridiculous, don't we? Nice try, but it doesn't work on all of us all the time, and it hardly ever works on those of us who have engaged in forensic debate and recognize the tactic.
Second, well, yes, "global warming" is just that, a hoax, or at least just bad science based on faulty computer models fed with inaccurate input data (GIGO) and propagated by global warming scientists hungry for government grant money and fame and opportunists like Al Gore who also want fame and to make millions from selling so-called "carbon credits." The "bad science" part of "global warming" has been pretty well proven by now; hence, in part, the shift from its advocates calling it "global warming" to now calling it "climate change."
So far as the "whole notion" of "climate change" being a hoax perpetrated by a "scientific conspiracy" of whatever size, "vast" or not, however, I don't know. Perhaps. The recently divulged emails to which you refer have certainly confirmed that not all the "climate changers" are among the most honest and forthright clutch of conspiracists caught by their own inadvertent confessions.
And, no, Paul, I won't "never mind" when you say, "...stolen email messages that show — well, actually all they show is that scientists are human, but never mind."
I won't "never mind," and neither should anyone else, because what those emails really show is that climate change so-called "scientists" -- you know, those supposedly sincere and objective seekers of scientific truth on whom the rest of us rely to use their training and expertise to tell us what we need to know -- have been actively involved in not only being "human" but in also being "dishonest humans," humans engaged in fraud for fame and fortune -- in fact, one of the biggest and longest-running frauds ever perpetrated on the world, with almost unimaginably significant, severe and long-reaching world-wide implications.
And that makes them crooks. In fact, crooks of the first order. And crooks should be punished, not forgiven for just being "human." And shame on you, Paul, for even suggesting otherwise. I don't think there's much doubt about your liberal leanings, but where's your intellectual, much less your moral, integrity? The same place as that of the climate change scientists whom you attempt to excuse and defend? If so, enough said.
When Bill Clinton became president, he considered Krugman for a leading post. Krugman was interviewed but his outspokenness was reportedly "the main reason the Clinton administration didn't offer him a job." Krugman says he would not have been interested in such a job, anyway. (Well, then, Paul, why did you go for the interview -- just for "funsies"?) He told Newsweek, "I'm temperamentally unsuited for that kind of role. You have to be very good at people skills, biting your tongue when people say silly things." In his New York Times blog, Krugman repeated that statement, saying that he was "temperamentally unsuited to politics."
Well, Paul, here, I think you're right. You probably are "unsuited to politics." You're "suited" to economics, so perhaps you should just stick with that. You know, something you no doubt know a lot about. Because you're also apparently "unsuited" to an intelligent discussion about climatology, climate change and whatever conspiracies may or may not be afoot about all that. On those things, your liberalism apparently blinds you, or at the least gives you tunnel vision.
And, I'm sorry, but I also sometimes choose not to be "very good at people skills," at biting my tongue when people say silly things, too. That's why I didn't bite my tongue when I saw the silly things you said on TV and have now written in your article.