Can We Learn Any Lessons From Brazil?

Probably, you haven't been much following the news coming out of Brazil.  If you had, you would have seen that last week ex-President and left-wing icon "Lula" da Silva was convicted in his corruption trial and sentenced to 10 years in prison.  Lula, who rose up as a charismatic labor leader and left-wing rabble rouser,  had served as President of Brazil from 2003 to 2011.  His hand-picked successor from the same political party, Dilma Rousseff, was accused in the same corruption scandal.  Rousseff was impeached (charged) back in April 2016, and formally removed from office by vote of the Brazilian Senate in August.

The corruption charges basically center around the cozy relationship that left-wing politicians seem inevitably to form with the major state-controlled economic institutions that are the hallmark of left-wing governance.  Wikipedia has a synopsis of the complex situation here.  During Lula's term in the presidency, Rousseff, as his right-hand woman, served as the Chair of the Board of Petrobras, the monopoly state-owned Brazilian oil company.  The most significant charges against Rousseff were that, during the time that she chaired the Petrobras board, she took large bribes from oil services contractors to get some billions of dollars worth of Petrobras business directed to them.  As to Lula, the charge on which he was just convicted involves a contractor refurbishing his beach apartment for the relatively modest sum of just over $1 million.  The Reuters article at the first link above notes that he is also accused of orchestrating the entire massive corruption scheme in which dozens of Brazilian politicians have been caught up, and that he faces some four more trials.  However, other articles I have seen do note that Lula (unlike many of his party colleagues) does not seem to have taken the opportunity to get extraordinary wealth for himself.

The easy lesson to learn here is that corrupt politicians need to be caught and punished.  Fair enough.  But before the world moves on from the tragedy of Brazil, I just want to note a few items that seem to be a pattern in essentially all populist left-wing governments:

• In the early years in power, government-produced economic statistics seem to show rapid economic growth, improvements in wages, declines in poverty and income inequality.
• Then one day, the economy suddenly goes into free fall, even as other surrounding countries continue to have growing economies.
• And finally, it turns out that the political leaders of the left-wing government were massively on the take for years.

For another example of this classic pattern, see my coverage of Venezuela, for example here.  

Is it fair to conclude that Brazil fell into the classic socialist trap -- falsely counting big increases in government spending as "economic growth," even as dependency was exploding and the real economy was hollowing out?  I don't know enough about the details to make a definitive evaluation, and in any event the policies undertaken in Brazil were far less extreme than those of Venezuela.  But still, the parallels to other situations like Venezuela are hard to miss.

Certainly, while Lula was President, the economy of Brazil seemed to be going swimmingly.  Here is a long write-up from the Economist in September 2010, toward the end of Lula's term of office, titled "Lula's Legacy."   A man-on-the-street is quoted as saying that Lula was "the best president ever."  Lula himself is given the chance to expound on his achievements, all of which seem to involve spending more on government programs to benefit the poor:

“Wherever you go in Brazil you will see work financed by the federal government,” he says, highlighting railways, power stations and basic sanitation. After 25 years in which the country failed to maintain its infrastructure, let alone build any more, it is “reacquiring the capacity to carry out the grand infrastructure works that Brazil needs.”  For many of the poor and working-class Brazilians who are his most ardent supporters, Lula's crowning achievements have been big rises in the minimum wage and pensions, and the Bolsa Família programme, which gives 12m families small but life-changing amounts of cash in return for having their children vaccinated and keeping them in school. By boosting domestic demand, these policies have also contributed to economic growth.

Note in that last sentence the abiding faith that more government spending is the sure-fire route to economic growth.  This report from CEPR records average growth of real GDP per capita in Brazil of 2.5% per year from 2003 to 2014 -- which would be quite impressive if it were real.  But then, who can forget David Sirota in Salon writing about Hugo Chavez's "economic miracle" in 2013, 15 years after Chavez's ascension to power and just as the bottom was starting to fall out?

A big recession then hit Brazil some time in 2014.  According to CNN here, Brazil's economy proceeded to contract by 3.8% in 2015 and 3.6% in 2016, even as the world economy continued in a basically expansionary mode.  (By contrast, according to Federal Reserve statistics here, the entire contraction of the U.S. economy from peak to trough in the "Great Recession" was 4.3%.)  Unemployment shot up from about 5% in 2014 to 12.6% early this year.  Nor is it clear that the recession is over for Brazil.

The situation is complex, and again, the government excess is not nearly as extreme as that of Venezuela.  A boom and subsequent bust in commodity prices --on which Brazil is unusually dependent for such a large country -- is very likely to have exacerbated the damage from socialist-style programs.  But Brazil is definitely emerging as another example where big portions of government-led economic growth ultimately prove illusory.  Oh, while the political leaders became wealthy via their crony capitalist friends.       

Keeping Up With The Manhattan Contrarian: Sheldon Silver Conviction Reversed

Those of you living outside New York may not be familiar with the name Sheldon Silver.  Until January 2015, Silver, a Democrat, was the Speaker of the New York Assembly -- effectively the second most powerful politician in New York State after the Governor.  That's when our then-U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara launched his crusade to "clean up" New York State politics by issuing back-to-back charges against Silver and also against Silver's Republican counterpart as Majority Leader of the State Senate, Dean Skelos.  The charges against Silver came down in January 2015.  In November of that year he was convicted, and in May 2016 he got a 12 year sentence.  However, he has remained free on bail pending his appeal.

Yesterday the Second Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the conviction.  Here is a copy of the decision.  

Of course, if you have been a reader of the Manhattan Contrarian, you will not have been at all surprised by the reversal.  On the occasion of the criminal complaint against Silver in January 2015, I took the opportunity to get the document and go through it carefully, leading to a long post on January 25, 2015 titled "Is Sheldon Silver A Criminal?"    The theme of the post was that just being a thoroughly and deeply corrupt pol -- and Silver certainly was that -- does not make you a federal criminal.  Becoming a federal criminal requires violating an applicable federal criminal statute, and in a way not protected by the Constitution.  This is a concept that U.S. Attorney Bharara could never seem to grasp.  (Nor can a single person in the mainstream media seem to grasp the same concept with regard to President Trump.  Really, is it that complicated?)  

From my January 2015 post:

The fact that Silver is completely corrupt does not mean that Bharara has charged him with anything that does or should constitute a crime.   Here's a copy of the prosecutors' Complaint setting out the charges against Silver.  My main take is that there is almost nothing there.

That post gives the tortured history of the federal criminal law in the context of political corruption.  Silver was prosecuted -- as had become the norm in political and corporate corruption cases -- under a statute making it a crime to cause the public to suffer "depriv[ation] . . . of the intangible right of honest services."  (18 U.S.C. Sec. 1346)  What the hell does that mean?  Nobody could figure it out, least of all the Supreme Court.  In a 2010 decision reversing the conviction of Jeffrey Skilling (of Enron fame), the Supremes avoided declaring the statute void for vagueness by limiting its applicability to situations where the prosecutors could prove "bribery" or "kickbacks."  The "bribery" piece then refers you over to the federal statute defining that term (18 U.S.C. Sec. 201(a)(3)), which for a politician requires that he commit some "official act" in return for the bribe.

The main allegation against Silver was that a doctor referred him (in his capacity as a lawyer) some lucrative asbestos injury cases, and in return Silver had directed $500,000 of state funds to the doctor's research program at Columbia University.  But there were a number of weaknesses in the theory.  From the post:

• There is no mention in the complaint that Silver or anyone on his behalf ever told Doctor-1 that he could get state money for his research if he referred cases to [Silver's law firm].  Rather, the Complaint states that Doctor-1 first asked Silver if [the law firm] would support his research, and Silver said it would not, and in the face of that Doctor-1 referred cases without any other promise (page 26).  The state money came several years later.
• There is no mention of what portion, if any, of the $500,000 went to Doctor-1 himself.
• After the state funding ended in about 2008, Doctor-1 continued to refer cases to [the law firm] through Silver. 

Faced with an iffy case, the prosecutors worked strenuously to obtain the squishiest possible jury charge on the question of what it means to do an "official act" in return for a bribe.  The trial court adopted the prosecution's proposed jury charge, over Silver's objection, as follows (from the Second Circuit opinion):

To satisfy this element [that Silver received bribes or kickbacks as part of a scheme to defraud], the Government must prove that there was a quid pro quo. Quid pro quo is Latin, and it means “this for that” or “these for those.” The Government must prove that a bribe or kickback was sought or received by Mr. Silver, directly or indirectly, in exchange for the promise or performance of official action. Official action includes any action taken or to be taken under color of official authority. 

And the prosecutor in his closing argument emphasized the point from the instruction that any act "taken under the color of official authority" could be the basis for a conviction.  Big mistake.  In June 2016 -- after Silver's conviction and at a time when his appeal was just getting started --  the Supreme Court reversed the conviction of former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell under the same statute.  In McDonnell the Supremes restricted the definition of "official act" in the bribery statute to only include "a decision or action on a ‘question, matter, cause, suit, proceeding or controversy’” involving “a formal exercise of governmental power."  That's not consistent with the instruction given to the jury in Silver's case.  Thus the reversal.

Silver is by no means out of the woods.  The prosecutors are saying that they will re-try him.  You can evaluate for yourself whether his conduct as described above will meet the new legal test.  In my view, a jury could come out either way.

Even more interesting now is the question of whether the conviction of Dean Skelos will stand.  Skelos was Bharara's other big take-down of a major New York State pol.  Or maybe the prosecution of Skelos was the real point all along.  While Silver was the Democratic leader of the state Assembly, and with a huge legislative majority, Skelos was the Republican leader of the state Senate, with a razor-thin majority.  The Republican-controlled New York Senate stands as the only obstacle to the imposition in New York of every bad progressive idea that you can think of.  Thus, while the Silver prosecution involved no potential for altering New York's political balance, the Skelos prosecution very much did.  There was huge reason for the Democrats in New York -- including Bharara, a former staffer for U.S. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer -- to want to take out Skelos.  Bharara indicted Skelos just a few months after Silver (May 2015), and the Skelos conviction was just a month after Silver's, in December 2015.  Skelos's appeal is still pending, and could be decided any day now.  

At least on the major charges in his indictment, Skelos has a far better case for reversal than did Silver.  Here is my summary of the charges against Skelos from a post on May 20, 2015:

[R]ead the charges against Skelos and you will find them remarkably thin.  This is all about Skelos allegedly trying to help his son Adam get some paying work.  There is no allegation of any money improperly going to Skelos himself.  The total amount of money alleged to have improperly changed hands seems relatively trivial -- $218,000 if I am counting correctly, and over a period of four years.  Of the $218,000, almost all, $198,000, is from a consulting contract that Adam got with an unnamed and uncharged environmental technology company.  Supposedly the company gave Adam the consulting gig because the dad got the company a $12 million contract with Nassau County.  But wait a minute -- Skelos didn't have any position with Nassau County.  The contract was subject to approval by the County Legislature, and got that.  These legislators may well all be friends of Skelos (his State Senate seat is in Nassau County), but it can't possibly be that he controlled this decision in any real sense.  That's rather a large gap in this thing.    

So how exactly could Skelos have done an "official act" on behalf of Nassau County, under the new McDonnell definition of the term, when he had no position or authority with Nassau County of any kind?  By comparison with Silver, Skelos stands a real chance of ultimate vindication.

It's getting more and more embarrassing for Bharara, as one after another of his high-profile convictions gets reversed.  (Don't forget that three of his six insider trading convictions after trial got reversed on appeal.)  

Trump Derangement Syndrome: Yes, They Have All Gone Completely Insane

How long is your memory?  For example, can you remember as far back as a month ago?  Way back on June 15, the big, big news was that five sources, all anonymous, had leaked to the Washington Post that, at the end of a meeting with then-FBI Director Jim Comey, President Trump had cleared the room and then asked Comey to go easy in his investigation of short-term National Security Advisor Michael Flynn.  Cries of "Obstruction of Justice!" rang out from every corner of elite Washington.  The story completely dominated the news for multiple days.  It fell of course to the Manhattan Contrarian to make the obvious point that the President holds the full prosecutorial discretion power of the government, and under direct grant of power in the Constitution he can order that anyone he wishes not be prosecuted at his complete whim, for any or no reason.  Admittedly, I wasn't the only one who made that obvious point, although the ratio of the insane commenters to the sane ones was at least 10 to one.  But the meme was so ridiculous that it was forgotten within a few days.  By now it seems like ancient history -- although possibly subject to revival by Special Prosecutor Mueller.  (If that happens, we'll really know that the world has gone irredeemably nuts.)

But what is it about humans that, when a few people lose their minds, thousands and millions more join in and mass hysteria ensues?  There have been dozens of examples in my lifetime.  Philip Terzian, in the current issue of the Weekly Standard, helpfully reminds us of "The Great Day-Care Sexual-Abuse Panic" of the 1980s and 90s.  If you aren't old enough to remember back that far, you may not even believe that this possibly could have occurred.  The case that started it all came out of the McMartin pre-school in Manhattan Beach, California:

A generation of preschoolers had [allegedly] been subject to all manner of sexual degradation and physical abuse, including rape; small animals had been ritually sacrificed and children fed their blood; there had been field trips to local cemeteries to dig up corpses. Peggy McMartin Buckey was accused of “drilling” the limbs of students, and her 26-year-old son was alleged to have levitated inside the schoolhouse.  In retrospect, of course, the details were not just lurid but ludicrous.

And in the wake of the McMartin case, dozens more such cases with remarkably similar allegations, involving hundreds of defendants, were brought around the country.  I can remember cases from places as disparate as Malden, Massachusetts, Wenatchee, Washington, and Edenton, North Carolina.  Reading articles about these situations at the time, I could only shake my head at the insanity, and wonder when -- if ever -- people would return to their senses.  Over time, all or nearly all of the cases fell apart, and the defendants were exonerated -- some having served jail sentences in excess of 20 years.

The blunt fact is that the “satanic” day-care ritual-abuse cases of the 1980s and early ’90s were our contemporary version of the Salem witch trials of the 1690s; and since human nature tends to be immutable, they featured many of the same symptoms across the centuries: mass hysteria, impressionable and unreliable child-witnesses, prosecutorial zeal and abuse, a mob tendency to prey on the hapless and defenseless.   

So dare I mention "Russia"?  This one is right up there as perhaps the most pervasive mass hysterias of my lifetime.  The only real rival is catastrophic climate change hysteria.  After now about 8 months of non-stop "Russia collusion" stories and literally nothing emerging as evidence to support them, yesterday the majority of the top stories on RealClearPolitics were more of same.  Donald Trump, Jr. met with a Russian operative in June 2016 hoping to get some dirt on Hillary Clinton!  That just has to be a crime!  How about TREASON!!!!!  I can choose from among dozens of the completely unhinged, but for now I'll pick on Ruth Marcus, writing in the Washington Post on Tuesday, "The Donald Trump Jr. emails could hardly be more incriminating."

By explicitly linking the source of the information to the Russian government and by describing it as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump,” Goldstone made crystal clear that he was offering the campaign a chance to collude — yes, that word is appropriate here — with a foreign government to “incriminate Hillary” Clinton and help win the presidency.  By reacting as he did, eagerly accepting the offer of this foreign aid, Trump Jr. made clear that he was a willing part of this incipient conspiracy — and yes, that word is appropriate here, too. “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer,” he responded, within minutes of receiving the inquiry.

Hey, Ruth, can you bother to tell us what is the supposed crime?  I think that after too many years at the Post poor Ruth is under the impression that "conspiracy" is a crime without any underlying wrongdoing, at least as long as the perpetrator is a Republican.  How about conspiracy to buy a vanilla ice cream cone at the DQ?

For a sane take on the situation, I recommend Eugene Volokh's post "Can it be a crime to do opposition research by asking foreigners for information?"  To be fair to them, Eugene's site is affiliated with the Washington Post as well.  Most important nugget:

Americans have the right to receive information even from speakers who are entirely abroad. See Lamont v. Postmaster General, 381 U.S. 301 (1965). Can Americans — whether political candidates or anyone else — really be barred from asking questions of foreigners, just because the answers might be especially important to voters?

The question answers itself.  Eugene goes on to eviscerate arguments made by various deranged TDS sufferers about such information being a "thing of value" under the statute that restricts campaign contributions from foreigners.  If you are interested in the subject, you might want to read the whole thing.  But frankly, at this point I would recommend that you don't waste any more of your valuable time on this Trump/Russia hysteria.

Law professor Alan Dershowitz also weighed in at Newsmax on Tuesday, and then in an appearance on Neil Cavuto's program on Wednesday night, as reported in the Washington Times:  

Mr. Dershowitz . . . said he doesn’t “see any crime at this point” in Mr. Trump Jr.’s behavior.  “Even if the worst case scenario as far as we know now, is the Russians get in touch with Trump Jr. and say, ‘we have some dirt on Hillary Clinton, come we’ll give it to you’ and he goes and gets the information. That’s what the New York Times did with the Pentagon Papers, that’s what the Washington Post did and many other newspaper did with information with Snowden and Manning,” he told Newsmax Tuesday. “You are allowed legally to use material that was obtained illegally as long as you had nothing to do with the illegal nature of obtaining the information, so at the moment I see no legal jeopardy for Trump Jr.”

Alan, you are doing your best to keep your friends from making fools of themselves, and you're getting nowhere.  Maybe you need a new group of friends.

Keeping Up With The Manhattan Contrarian: Wind And Solar Power Don't Work

Here's the big headline in the middle of the front page of today's print edition of the Wall Street Journal:  "The Energy Shortage No One Saw Coming."  (Admittedly, the online headline is different.)  Sub-headline:  "Australia, a major global gas exporter, can't keep the lights on in Adelaide."  For those who don't know, Adelaide is the capital and largest city of the Australian state of South Australia, which occupies about a seventh of the land area of Australia in the south-central part of the continent.

No one saw it coming?  Could they have missed the Manhattan Contrarian post of October 6, 2016?  The title was "Pay Attention To South Australia."  The specific subject was that South Australia had put on a big push to become the world leader in getting its electricity from wind and solar sources, and in the process had made itself hugely vulnerable to power shortages and blackouts:

[O]n September 28[, 2016], the entire state of South Australia was plunged into a power blackout in the midst of a major rain and wind storm.  Those who follow the subject know that South Australia has made a big thing in recent years of turning itself into the world leader of "renewable" energy, principally from the wind.  Immediately prior to the blackout, SA was getting some 50% or more of its electricity from its wind farms.  I have written several posts here (for example, this one) about how difficult it will be to make a fully-functioning 24/7/365 electricity system for a modern economy when production from intermittent sources like wind gets above about 30% of total electricity supply.

So how's that romance with intermittent wind and solar energy going, South Australia?  From the WSJ:

A nationwide heat wave in Australia [in February] drove temperatures above 105 degrees Fahrenheit around the city of Adelaide on the southern coast. As air-conditioning demand soared, regulators called on Pelican Point, a local gas-fueled power station running at half capacity, to crank up.  It couldn’t. The plant’s operator said it wasn’t able to get enough natural gas quickly to run its turbines fully. At 6:03 p.m., regulators cut power to 90,000 Adelaide homes to prevent a wider blackout.  Resource-rich Australia has an energy crisis. . . .      

You won't be surprised to learn why the WSJ thinks that "no one saw this coming."  The theme of the article is that Australia produces lots of gas, but then exports most of it, thus leading to unexpected shortages at home.  But there is barely a mention that South Australia has created its own crisis, in a way that everybody should have seen coming, by making a huge push to increase reliance on wind and solar sources of power, without ever thinking through how such intermittent sources can be integrated into an electricity system that must produce reliable power 24/7/365.  In a long article of several thousand words, this is all they say about the subject:

As exports increased from new LNG facilities in eastern Australia, some state governments let aging coal plants close and accelerated a push toward renewable energy for environmental concerns. That left the regions more reliant on gas for power, especially when intermittent sources such as wind and solar weren’t sufficient. 

This is an embarrassment for the Journal.  Has environmental religion penetrated even the Wall Street Journal's news pages to such an extent that they can't give an honest account of what is going on?  Sure the gas plant's unavailability that day was the immediate precipitating cause of the particular problem.  But what goes unmentioned is that the South Australians have painted themselves into a corner where one after another of such situations is inevitable, and if they didn't see it coming they are really blinded by their environmental faith.  First they increased renewable capacity, particularly wind, to the point of getting over 50% of their power from wind when it blows.  Then they forced closure of all coal capacity.  Then they prioritized the power from wind in the dispatch scheme, leaving the few remaining natural gas plants sitting idle much of the time and having no clue when they might be required to crank up at a moment's notice -- a regime under which the gas plant operators can't make money.  And finally, they claim to be "surprised" when the wind suddenly stops blowing and the gas plant operators can't or won't come on at a few minutes' notice.  Why should the gas plant operators contract to buy gas that they may never need at prices that they can't recoup?

To be fair, I'm not the only one who predicted that the push for wind and solar was going to leave South Australia subject to regular periodic shortages and blackouts.  For example, Australian blogger Joanne Nova has been all over it.  See for example, this post from March 29:

The [South Australia] Blackout on Sept 28 last year was an accident waiting to happen, and it wasn’t storm damage to lines that caused it.  The blackout would not have happened if wind power had not been so dominant.  The transition to a 35% wind powered system left the SA grid very vulnerable.

Well, at least this WSJ story was not as stupid as the New York Times this morning wetting its pants over the discovery that Donald Trump, Jr. once talked to some Russian.

Looks Like Global Action On "Climate Change" Is Dead

As a basic starting point, I suggest that on any story of political importance in the New York Times, the truth is probably exactly the opposite of what they report.  Consider that lead story on the front page of yesterday's Sunday print edition: "World Leaders Move Forward on Climate Change, Without U.S."   Scary!  The U.S. is getting completely isolated from the world community!

In a final communiqué at the conclusion of the Group of 20 summit meeting in Hamburg, Germany, the nations took “note” of Mr. Trump’s decision to abandon the pact and “immediately cease” efforts to enact former President Barack Obama’s pledge of curbing greenhouse gas emissions 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025.  But the other 19 members of the group broke explicitly with Mr. Trump in their embrace of the international deal, signing off on a detailed policy blueprint outlining how their countries could meet their goals in the pact.   

You can definitely count on Pravda not to look into what these other 19 countries have promised to do and let you know if there is any substance to it.  So the hard work falls once again to the Manhattan Contrarian.  If you just Google the letters "INDC" ("Intended Nationally Determined Contribution") along with the name of a country, you can find out exactly what that country has promised to do as part of the Paris Agreement.  So let's take a look at what a few of the big countries are up to.

• China.  We already know that answer from my post just last week.  China, through its companies, is planning to build over the course of the next decade or so well more than double the number of coal power plants that the U.S. has today.  Its INDC calls for its proceeding to increase carbon emissions as much as it wants through 2030, and only then (when everyone in China presumably has electricity and a couple of cars)  to level things off.  By that time its emissions will probably be at least triple those of the U.S.
• India.  India's INDC openly admits that it intends to increase its electricity supply by more than triple between now and 2030, with no commitment whatsoever as to how much of that will come from fossil fuels.  Oh, they say that they plan to lower the "emissions intensity" of their energy generation, and greatly expand (useless) wind and solar capacity, as well as nuclear.  Whoopee!
• Indonesia.   These things get more comical the more of them you read.  The first thing you learn in reading Indonesia's INDC is that the large majority of its emissions come from burning down the rain forest ("most emissions (63%) are the result of land use change and peat and forest fires") and very little from using fossil fuels for energy ("fossil fuels contribute[e] approximately 19% of total emissions").  So they'll promise to burn down less of the rain forest, and nothing whatsoever as to reducing use of fossil fuels for energy.  Their (completely illusory) "reduction target" of 29% by 2030 is not against a fixed amount of past usage (like the United States' benchmark of 2005 emissions), but rather is against what they call a "business as usual" scenario of projected future emissions that are a multiple of today's.
• Russia.  What, you didn't know that Russia was a member of the G20?  What is the chance that Russia would make an honest promise about emissions reductions?  Their INDC calls for reducing emissions by 25-30% below 1990 by 2030.  Impressive!  Wait a minute!  The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.  Then they closed down all that inefficient Soviet industry.  According to a graph at Climate Action Tracker here, by 2000 their emissions were down by almost 40% from the 1990 level, and they have only crept up a little from there since.  In other words, Russia's supposed "commitments" again represent increases from today's level of emissions.  Yet another total scam.
• Germany.  Germany is part of the supposed EU commitment to reduce emissions by 40% below 1990 levels by 2030.  Oh, but now that Germany has gotten its electricity production from renewables up to about 30%, it seems that it has hit a wall, and its carbon emissions have actually gone up for both of the last two years (2015 and 2016), according to Clean Energy Wire.  Exactly how do they plan to meet their goal?  Excellent question.

In other words, this whole thing is a total farce.  The G20 "climate" thing -- let alone New York Times reporting on same -- is nothing more than an international effort to bully the United States into crippling its economy while everyone else goes right ahead and uses fossil fuels exactly as they please.  Whatever else you might say about President Trump, he seems to be unusually immune to this kind of bullying.  

Without the U.S. in the game, all the biggest players are going to be increasing emissions, not decreasing them.  In reality, the whole "global action on climate change" thing is completely dead.  

I can't leave this subject without mentioning this great quote from former Obama State Department official Andrew Light:

[T]he U.S. has isolated itself on climate change once again, and is falling back while all other major economies step up and compete in the clean energy marketplace created by the Paris Agreement estimated to be worth over 20 trillion dollars,” said Andrew Light, a senior climate change adviser at the State Department under Mr. Obama.

As you can see, knowledge of basic economics was not a requirement to work at the Obama State Department.  Andrew apparently has no understanding that the forced use of less efficient energy sources destroys wealth.  

The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time -- Part XV

It's been several months since I've added a post to this series, since this one back on February 22.  There's good reason for that.  With the breakup of last year's big El Niño, global temperatures declined significantly.  The latest global temperature anomaly from the UAH satellite temperature series is +0.21 deg C for June 2017 -- down a remarkable 0.65 deg C from the February 2016 global anomaly of +0.86 deg C.  The Northern Hemisphere anomaly dropped even more, by 0.86 deg C, from +1.19 deg C to only +0.32 deg C.  Those declines represent well more than half of the entire warming that had been present in the satellite record at the peak of the El Niño, and bring recent temperatures below those recorded during many months in the 1980s and 90s.  It's no wonder that the breathless press releases from NASA and NOAA trumpeting "hottest [April, May, June, etc.] ever!" have at least temporarily ceased.

But the lack of "record warming" announcements coming out of the government has not stopped independent researchers from further examining the surface temperature records from NASA and NOAA (and also from a British group called Hadley CRU that gets its starting data from the same source) to try to quantify and understand the "adjustments" that continue to be made.  Readers of my series know that NASA, NOAA and Hadley CRU report global temperatures derived from a different source from the satellites, namely a network of land- and ocean-based surface weather stations known as the Global Historical Climate Network, or GHCN.  These so-called "surface temperatures" are inherently in need of some ongoing adjustments, to account for things like station moves and nearby urbanization.  But somehow the adjustment process has gotten into the hands of some committed global warming zealots, and next thing you know each round of adjustments seems progressively to make the past cooler and the present warmer, thus always enhancing the apparent warming.  Oh, plus the adjusters refuse to release details of the bases and methodology for the adjustments.  After a few decades of this, reasonable people come to have serious and well-justified doubts about whether the reported warming trends can be trusted.

The latest effort at analyzing the adjustments comes from a team of independent researchers led by James Wallace, and including Joseph D'Aleo and Craig Idso.  Their new Research Report can be found at this link, titled "On the Validity of NOAA, NASA and Hadley CRU Global Average Surface Temperature [GAST] Data & The Validity of EPA’s CO2 Endangerment Finding."  The new Research Report has seven highly qualified peer reviewers identified in the paper itself.  From the Abstract:

In this research report, the most important surface data adjustment issues are identified and past changes in the previously reported historical data are quantified. It was found that each new version of GAST has nearly always exhibited a steeper warming linear trend over its entire history. And, it was nearly always accomplished by systematically removing the previously existing cyclical temperature pattern. This was true for all three entities providing GAST data measurement, NOAA, NASA and Hadley CRU.  

As others have previously noticed, the periodic revisions to GAST data from all three entities have brought with them a systematic cooling of the past and warming of the recent and the present, to a degree that hugely strains credulity.  But the new Wallace, et al., paper takes another step, and examines the equally systematic removal from the surface temperature record of a cyclical pattern widely reflected in raw temperature data from multiple regions.  As the paper notes, if you look at much raw (unadjusted) data, a cyclical pattern is immediately obvious:  temperatures gradually increase from the beginning of records in the late nineteenth century through about 1940; then temperatures decrease through about the 1970s; then the increase resumes through about 2000; and finally temperatures level off through the present.  This cycle results in a temperature peak around 1940, sometimes referred to as the "blip."  The "blip" has long been recognized to be a problem for the hypothesis that human greenhouse gas emissions are the principal control knob for global temperatures, because human emissions had barely begun before 1940 -- when temperatures were increasing -- and then human emissions began to increase sharply from the 1950s to the 1970s -- when temperatures were declining.  Doesn't that significantly undermine the hypothesis?  The successive rounds of adjustments to the surface temperature records have systematically removed this "blip," making for a temperature record seemingly supporting the hypothesis.  Could this possibly be honest?  From the Wallace, et al., paper:

As has been clearly shown in Section IV above, the consequences of the changes made to previously reported historical versions of GAST data have been to virtually eliminate the previously existing cyclical nature of their previously reported trend cycle patterns. The notion that there was a 1930 and 40s warm period followed by a mid-1970 cool period now gets lost in the noise so to speak. 

As just one example from the paper, a comparison of the GAST data from NASA from May 2017 versus May 2008 shows that, in between the issuance of those two versions of the data, nearly all annual mean temperatures from approximately 1920 to 1940 have been reduced by between 0.05 deg C and 0.20 deg C, while nearly all annual mean temperatures from approximately 1980 to 2000 have been increased by between 0.05 deg C and 0.20 deg C.  The obvious effects have been substantially to remove the 1940s "blip" and to strongly enhance the warming trend.  Other data revisions at different points in time have made additional changes to the same effect.  The basis and methodology for these adjustments have never been explained.

Have these adjustments been part of an intentional program to alter data to fit the desired hypothesis -- in other words, classic scientific fraud?  The 2009 Climategate emails give additional evidence.  For example, one of the best known of those emails is the September 27, 2009 message from Tom Wigley of NCAR to Phil Jones, head of Hadley CRU.  In that email, Wigley proposes an intentional effort to reduce the ocean part of the surface record by 0.15 deg C, not to make the record a better representation of reality, but rather to make the evidence fit the narrative.  Excerpts:

So, if we could reduce the [1940s] ocean blip by, say, 0.15 degC, then this would be significant for the global mean -- but we'd still have to explain the land blip. I've chosen 0.15 here deliberately. This still leaves an ocean blip, and i think one needs to have some form of ocean blip to explain the land blip (via either some common forcing, or ocean forcing land, or vice versa, or all of these). . . .  My 0.15 adjustment leaves things consistent with this, so you can see where I am coming from. Removing ENSO does not affect this. It would be good to remove at least part of the 1940s blip, but we are still left with "why the blip".

From the conclusion of the Wallace, et al., paper:

While the notion that some “adjustments” to historical data might need to be made is not challenged, logically it would be expected that such historical temperature data adjustments would sometimes raise these temperatures, and sometimes lower them. This situation would mean that the impact of such adjustments on the temperature trend line slope is uncertain. However, each new version of GAST has nearly always exhibited a steeper warming linear trend over its entire history.  That was accomplished by systematically removing the previously existing cyclical temperature pattern. This was true for all three entities providing GAST data measurement, NOAA, NASA and Hadley CRU. . . .  

The conclusive findings of this research are that the three GAST data sets are not a valid representation of reality. In fact, the magnitude of their historical data adjustments, that removed their cyclical temperature patterns, are totally inconsistent with published and credible U.S. and other temperature data. Thus, it is impossible to conclude from the three published GAST data sets that recent years have been the warmest ever – despite current claims of record setting warming.  

The adjustments to the GAST record have been part of a coordinated effort to influence public policy by supporting restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions.  In the United States, the EPA's finding that CO2 constitutes a "danger" to human health and welfare rests on what EPA calls its three "lines of evidence," one of which is the supposedly "record warming" as shown in the GAST data.  Oh, it now seems that the "record warming" is not present in the raw data, but is nothing more than an artifact of adjustments made by government bureaucrats.  The final conclusion of the Wallace, et al., paper:

[S]ince GAST data set validity is a necessary condition for EPA’s GHG/CO2 Endangerment Finding, it too is invalidated by these research findings.      

 On July 6 my co-counsel and I submitted a Supplemental Petition to EPA, citing this new paper, seeking to have EPA reopen and reconsider the Endangerment Finding.  We have called upon EPA to hold hearings on the record and under oath, at which hearings the people who have made the "adjustments" to create supposedly record warming should be called upon to set forth their detailed methods.  It is high time that the people who have made these adjustments justify their handiwork to the American people.

UPDATE, July 9, 2017:  It occurs to me that readers may be interested in this tidbit of information:  That September 27, 2009 email from Wigley to Jones has a cc -- to a guy named Ben Santer.  Do you recognize the name?  He is another "scientist" on the government/taxpayer dime, and another serious global warming zealot, who works at the Livermore Lab in California.  You may have seen his op ed in the Washington Post on June 21, 2017, title "Attention Scott Pruitt: Red teams and blue teams are no way to conduct climate science."  Excerpt:

[C]alls for special teams of investigators are not about honest scientific debate. They are dangerous attempts to elevate the status of minority opinions, and to undercut the legitimacy, objectivity and transparency of existing climate science.

What are you afraid of, Ben?  Time to get this guy under oath!

And here's yet another bit of similar news.  You may recall that several years ago (real) Canadian climate scientist Tim Ball wrote of (fake) Penn State climate scientist Michael "Hockey Stick" Mann that "he belongs in the state pen, not Penn. State."  Mann sued Ball for libel in a court in Vancouver, Canada.  Ball demanded to get in discovery the underlying data and computer code that support Mann's "hockey stick" temperature reconstruction.  Back in February, the Canadian court ordered Mann to produce that information.  According to Principia Scientific, Mann has now defaulted on that obligation and has gone into contempt of court.  According to PS:

[U]nder Canada’s unique ‘Truth Defense’, Mann is now proven to have wilfully hidden his data, so the court may rule he hid it because it is fake. 

That may turn out to be an overprediction of how bad this will prove for Mann.  Still, it is very remarkable that Mann would think he could be a plaintiff in a libel case and not have to produce the data and code that support his statements.  Another guy to get under oath!

For all articles in this series on government temperature data tampering fraud, go to this link.