New York Times Or The Onion? You Decide!

If you think it's getting harder and harder to tell the New York Times from The Onion, you have a point.  And it's not just the three front page stories every day trying to blame the big election loss on Russian hacking, as if the Russians haven't been trying to hack everything they can, ever since the very concept of hacking was invented.

For another example, consider this big headline today:  "As Donald Trump Denies Climate Change, These Kids Die of It."  Wait, that one must have been in The Onion.  Not at all!  It was a lead article on the front page of the Times's Review section, written by none other than Nicholas Kristof -- the very same guy who wrote the completely phony article on Thursday claiming that repeal of Obamacare will kill tens of thousands of people per year.  So who are we killing today, Nick?

She is just a frightened mom, worrying if her son will survive, and certainly not fretting about American politics — for she has never heard of either President Obama or Donald Trump.  What about America itself? Ranomasy, who lives in an isolated village on this island of Madagascar off southern Africa, shakes her head. It doesn’t ring any bells.  Yet we Americans may be inadvertently killing her infant son. Climate change, disproportionately caused by carbon emissions from America, seems to be behind a severe drought that has led crops to wilt across seven countries in southern Africa. The result is acute malnutrition for 1.3 million children in the region, the United Nations says.

So Nick, kindly tell us, how much have temperatures increased in Madagascar as a result of what you claim is human-caused climate change?  It goes without saying that you will not find that information in Kristof's article.  Real information is not what Pravda deals in these days.  And, by the way, the information on historical temperatures in Madagascar is not necessarily that easy to find, since Madagascar doesn't have particularly good weather stations.  However, with some looking, I find this from a World Bank report in 2011:

Recent Climate Trends: There is clear evidence that [since 1950] temperatures have increased by 0.2 deg C over northern Madagascar, and by 0.1 deg C over southern Madagascar.

It's an amount of temperature rise that you could never possibly feel, let alone measure without some sort of specialized thermometer.  Although that report is a few years old, we all know that world temperatures have been in a warming "pause" since about 1998, so it's hard to imagine that Madagascar temperatures have somehow gone wild in the last five years.  I guess you can see why Kristof has decided to suppress the actual amount of temperature rise that is supposedly causing these millions of deaths. 

But somehow we are to believe that a tenth or two of degrees of temperature rise is causing over a million deaths by inflicting a rare and unprecedented drought.  Can we find out anything about rainfall in Madagascar?  Not from Kristof, of course.  But in the same 2011 World Bank report we have this:

The character of rainfall across Madagascar has changed significantly, although no obvious trend in rainfall can be surmised from the available record. However, since 1950, the relationship between temperature and rainfall has varied greatly across Madagascar, with increased temperatures yielding decreased rainfall in the northern areas and the opposite in southern areas.

Don't you have to hate the way those crafty Americans can inflict decreased rains on northern Madagascar and increased rains on southern Madagascar just by driving SUVs? 

But wait a minute -- maybe it's the opposite!  The World Bank report is from 2011.  More current information on rainfall in southern Africa, including Madagascar, can be found in a February 2016 post from a NOAA website, climate.gov, showing rainfall in the region from October 2015 to February 2016 (last year's rainy season):

Now suddenly the northern part of Madagascar has rainfall way above normal, up to 200% of normal for a not small area at the northern tip of the island.  And in the southern part, it sure looks like rainfall in last year's rainy season varied mostly between about 80% and 120% of normal, depending on the exact location, with the exception of a small area along the west coast.

How about the precise spot that Kristof visited?  His report has a dateline from a town called Tsihombe, which is in the far southern part of the island, just about 19 miles north of the very southern tip.  Wait a minute!  There's a little blue dot at that very place on the climate.gov map, indicating that that little area had above-normal rainfall in last year's rainy season.  And this year?  This year, we're just getting into the rainy season, but according to weather.com here, rain is predicted for Tsihombe for the next two days.

Back to Kristof:

Trump has repeatedly mocked climate change, once even calling it a hoax fabricated by China. But climate change here is as tangible as its victims. Trump should come and feel these children’s ribs and watch them struggle for life. It’s true that the links between our carbon emissions and any particular drought are convoluted, but over all, climate change is as palpable as a wizened, glassy-eyed child dying of starvation. Like Ranomasy’s 18-month-old son, Tsapasoa.

I by no means want to make light of the struggles of Ms. Ranomasy and her young son.  But the idea that "climate change" -- let alone use of fossil fuels by westerners -- has anything to do with those struggles is completely preposterous.  Kristof, you should be ashamed of yourself.

UPDATE, January 9:  Plenty of other sites are out today with more well-deserved takedowns of Kristof's risible article.  At his Deplorable Climate Science Blog, Tony Heller comes up with this great quote from the New York Times, December 29, 1974, complete with photo of the article in the print edition, blaming severe droughts in Africa at that time on global cooling:

A number of climatologists . . . point to signs . . . [of] a steady global cooling trend since World War II. . . .  Some recent warnings from reputable researchers . . . have so worried policy-makers that last January certain scientists at a meeting of the National Academy of Sciences proposed the evacuation of some six million people from their parched homelands in the Sahel region of Africa. 

At Climate Depot, Marc Morano has extensive quotes from Roger Pielke, Jr., including from Congressional testimony, as to the complete lack of any association between global warming and droughts, let alone floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, or any other sort of extreme weather events:

"It is misleading, and just plain incorrect, to claim that disasters associated with hurricanes, tornadoes, floods or droughts have increased on climate timescales either in the United States or globally. . . ."  Drought has “for the most part, become shorter, less frequent, and cover a smaller portion of the U. S. over the last century.” Globally, “there has been little change in drought over the past 60 years.”

Just wondering if we can expect a correction on Kristof's article any time soon from the New York Times.

The Regular Fake News And The Really Evil Fake News

The subject of "fake news" seems to have faded from the headlines somewhat now that Hillary's defeat is receding in the rear view mirror.  But before the topic disappears completely, I'd just like to pause for a moment to make a distinction between two different kinds of fake news, which for these purposes I'll call the "regular" fake news and the "really evil" fake news.

The kinds of things that Hillary was complaining about I would put firmly in the category of "regular" fake news.  Things like "Pope Francis endorses Donald Trump," or "The Clintons are running a child sex ring out of a pizza parlor in Washington, D.C."  Did anybody actually believe those things, let alone then change their vote as a result?  It's not impossible, but I find it hard to believe that any material number of people could be that naive.  Moreover, it's not like there weren't plenty of comparable fake stories relating to Trump.  Do you remember "RuPaul claims Trump touched him inappropriately in the 90s"?  Just part of the normal political rough-and-tumble.

But here's something I consider to be in a wholly different category:  falsely accusing your political opponents of mass killings of tens or hundreds of thousands of people on no basis whatsoever.  Here I am talking about what seems to be the norm of acceptable advocacy by progressives as they try to preserve disastrous government programs designed and run by themselves.  The prime example of the moment is Obamacare.

The new Congress (with its vow to repeal Obamacare) has only been in session for less than a week, and already it has started.  For example, here we have Nicholas Kristof in yesterday's New York Times, under a headline "The G.O.P. Health Hoax":

The paradox of Obamacare is that it is both unpopular and saves lives. Preliminary research suggests that it has already begun saving lives, but it’s too early to have robust data on the improvements to life expectancy among the additional 20 million people who have gained insurance. It is notable that an Urban Institute study found that on the eve of Obamacare’s start, lack of health insurance was killing one American every 24 minutes. . . .  The American College of Physicians warned this week that the G.O.P. course could result in seven million Americans losing their health insurance this year alone, by causing parts of the insurance market to implode. Back-of-envelope calculations suggest that the upshot would be an additional 8,400 Americans dying annually.

They're going to kill tens of thousands of people!!!!!  But is there any real evidence that lack of health insurance actually leads to materially increased mortality?  Of course, the real evidence is firmly against that, and of course Kristof doesn't mention it.  In a post back in April, I reported on the results of the big three studies that have attempted to measure in a serious way whether there is any mortality benefit to having health insurance.  From that post (with internal quotes from this 2013 article by Megan McArdle summarizing the research):

• There was the big Oregon randomized study that ran for two years from 2008-10.  Oregon got some money to expand Medicaid, but only for about half the number of people they wanted; so they held a lottery to determine who got in.  And then they ran a randomized study on 6400 people who got in and 5800 who did not.  Results:  Not only was there no detectable difference in mortality, but "the study failed to find statistically significant improvement on the three targets associated with the most common chronic diseases.  This, mind you, is the stuff that we're very good at treating, and which we're pretty sure has a direct and beneficial effect on health."  
• Then there was the big observational study, conducted by Richard Kronick of UC San Diego, based on data from 672,000 insured and uninsured people as reported on the National Health Interview Survey from 1986 to 2000.  Results: "no mortality benefit from insurance."   
• Or, going back a ways, there was the big Rand randomized study of close to 8000 people, divided into five groups ranging from very to much less comprehensive health insurance, that ran from 1971 to 1982.  Results:  "[T]hey looked to see what differences emerged in health outcomes.  Shocker: none did."

So OK, Kristof just fails to mention that the big, real, serious studies completely contradict his contention.  We know that that is how they do business at Pravda.  But what is the supposed evidence that he relies on instead?  For example, what is that Urban Institute "study" that he links to?  Go to his link, and you find that this "study" is just an update of a much-criticized Institute of Medicine report from 2002.  Here is a 2009 comment on the IOM report (and related advocacy "studies" including the Urban Institute update) from John Goodman of Health Affairs:

Last year [2008], a report by Families USA made the astounding claim that 6 people die every day in Florida because they are uninsured. Seven die every day in Texas, 8 in California, and 25 in New York.  How was Families USA able to tally up all that carnage with such pinpoint precision? As Linda Gorman explains, these claims are based on a 15-year cascade of studies — each repeating the errors and misinterpreting or mischaracterizing the findings of the previous one and ultimately relying on data that is 37 years old.  It begins with a paper by Peter Franks et al. published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1993, estimating that being uninsured increased the probability of death by 25%. Although the subjects were interviewed only once, for the study’s inference to be meaningful, one is forced to make the unverified assumption that the uninsured stayed uninsured for a full 19 years!  Continuing the saga, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) uncritically used the Franks result to claim that 18,000 deaths a year in the U.S. are attributable to a lack of health insurance. The Urban Institute updated the IOM report, and Families USA updated the Urban Institute report.

That's how you do it:  Instead of studying two populations over a period of years, you just interview some people once.  From that you make up a preposterous "estimate" that being uninsured increases mortality by an astounding 25%.  Project that "excess mortality" out over the whole population, and voila! you claim "18,000 excess deaths per year" (IOM), or "22,000 excess deaths per year" (Urban Institute).  And then you sit back and watch as Pravda uncritically parrots these ridiculous numbers endlessly without ever describing how they were invented or mentioning that the real and serious studies show exactly the opposite.  By the way, there's an even more preposterous 2009 advocacy "study" from Harvard University and Physicians for a National Health Program that claimed that the annual number of "excess deaths" for the uninsured was 45,000.  The methodology is basically similar -- this time they just assumed 40% excess mortality for the uninsured.  This one and the Urban Institute "study" were part of the coordinated 2009 advocacy program for Obamacare, which was enacted shortly afterward in early 2010.  Suppose you want to claim 100,000 excess deaths per year?  Easy!  Just assume 100% excess mortality!

I actually believe that the people who produce these fake "studies," as well as the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof, et al., think that they are on the moral high ground when they do this.  Their thinking goes something like this:  We're just doing what we need to do, and saying what we need to say, to achieve the moral imperative of bringing the holy grail of universal health insurance to the poor and the vulnerable.  Sure it has been difficult to establish empirically that lack of health insurance causes excess mortality.  But it's just obvious that that has to be true!  So we are completely justified in fudging things and making up tales of thousands of deaths to scare people and thus get to the morally right end point.

The problem is that something like Obamacare is not free.  Far from it.  It comes with hundreds of billions of dollars of extra government spending to fund Medicaid expansion and private insurance subsidies -- all of which is taken away from things the people would rather do with the money if they were free to spend it themselves.  It also comes with forcing millions of the relatively young and healthy to wildly overpay for health insurance that is uneconomic for them and that they would not buy unless forced to do so by government coercion.  Loss of freedom and loss of wealth (much of that for relatively low income people) count for nothing in the progressive/New York Times world view.

But, making up tall tales about tens and hundreds of thousands of deaths to scare people into accepting loss of freedom and loss of wealth and increasing government control over their lives?  Is that really OK?  I'd call it really evil fake news. 

The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time -- Part XI

If you have been following my series on The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time, you know that I am referring to the world temperature data tampering fraud, by which the guardians of world surface thermometer records (in the U.S., NASA and NOAA) "adjust" old temperatures down and new temperatures up in order to provide fake support for the official "global warming" narrative.

My last post in this series (Part X) was back in July.  Meanwhile, 2016 has proved to be a rather suspenseful year for those following this issue.  The start of the year was a time of a massive El Nino.  El Ninos (warm surface conditions in the equatorial Pacific Ocean) are known to be highly correlated with somewhat lagged spikes in atmospheric near-surface temperatures, as the oceans give up some heat into the air.  Unsurprisingly, the years of the strongest El Ninos have also been the years of highest recorded lower tropospheric temperatures in the now 38-year (back to 1979) satellite temperature record -- most notably the year 1998, until now the record-holder for the warmest year in the satellite record.  But with a comparably massive El Nino extending well into 2016, would 2016 now end the 18-year global warming "pause," break the prior record, and give new support to the cause of climate alarmism?

Throughout the year, the temperature "adjusters" at NASA have been working to prepare the ground for the big end-of-year announcement that temperatures have finally broken the old record.  In the first several months, as the effects of the El Nino lingered, they put out breathless monthly press releases announcing that month to be the "hottest [March, April, May, whatever] since records began," or something like that.  Here is NASA's release from July 20.  Excerpt:

Each of the first six months of 2016 set a record as the warmest respective month globally in the modern temperature record, which dates to 1880, according to scientists at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York. The six-month period from January to June was also the planet's warmest half-year on record, with an average temperature 1.3 degrees Celsius (2.4 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than the late nineteenth century.

But then a few months after the break-up of the El Nino, the atmospheric temperatures started their inevitable sharp decline.  By October, NASA had suspended the breathless press releases; but its director of GISS, Gavin Schmidt, put out a tweet in that month that made it into the Guardian:

Dr Gavin Schmidt, director of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, tweeted:  "With data now available through September, 2016 annual record (~1.25ºC above late 19th C) seems locked in."  Last month was only just over the previous record, coming in at a razor-thin 0.004C above the previous high for the time of year, reached in September 2014. That tiny margin may be revised in future, as monthly temperature data can be nudged up or down retrospectively as later reports come in. For instance, June 2016 was initially reported as the warmest on record but was subsequently revised downward slightly to the third warmest.

June 2016 was revised down and no longer a record?  Funny, I missed any press reports on that one.

Anyway, yesterday Roy Spencer of UAH (provider of satellite-based data) put out the results for December and full-year 2016.  The UAH global lower troposphere anomaly declined a full .21 deg C in December, going from + 0.45 deg C to + 0.24 deg C.  And with that sharp drop, 2016 ended in what Spencer calls a "statistical tie" with 1998:

The resulting 2016 annual average global temperature anomaly is +0.50 deg. C, which is (a statistically insignificant) 0.02 deg. C warmer than 1998 at +0.48 deg. C. We estimate that 2016 would have had to be 0.10 C warmer than 1998 to be significantly different at the 95% confidence level. Both 2016 and 1998 were strong El Nino years.

So, too bad for those hoping for a big new full-year record in the satellite data.  The "pause" resumes.  But still no word from NASA as to their year-end figures.  Not to worry.  NASA has a different data source from the satellites, namely the network of surface weather stations whose data can be "adjusted" and "homogenized" to get essentially whatever answer NASA wants in support of its favored political narrative.  The excellent Tony Heller, in a post titled "Why Temperature Fraud Matters," is already on top of the stream of NASA data, and provides this graph as of yesterday to compare recent NASA ("adjusted" surface station) data to UAH (satellite) data:

Yes, NASA has baked in a good 0.2 deg C or so of "adjustments" just since 1995 to give it a comfortable margin to claim a "record" for 2016.  Expect that breathless announcement from NASA within the next couple of weeks.  (Prior experience indicates that NASA press releases come out around the 18th to 20th of the month.)  

If you want to make a prediction of the future about as safe as predicting the time of tomorrow's sunrise, you can predict that every mainstream news source in the country will parrot the upcoming NASA press release without mentioning that the new supposed "record" is not supported by the far-more-accurate satellite data.  Nor will any mainstream news source ask the obvious question of how it is that global warming is supposed to be caused by CO2 emissions, yet temperature records always and only seem to be associated with El Ninos, and there is no plausible mechanism to explain how CO2 emissions into the air have any causative effect on the El Nino ocean current phenomenon.  Hey, that would ruin our good sin-and-redemption story!  We can't have that!

In related news, famed climate scientist Judith Curry, long head of the department at Georgia Tech, has announced her early retirement and an intended move into the private sector.  Here is her post at her own blog.  She began her transition to skepticism all the way back in 2005, and the years since have only seen a growing disgust:

A deciding factor was that I no longer know what to say to students and postdocs regarding how to navigate the CRAZINESS in the field of climate science. Research and other professional activities are professionally rewarded only if they are channeled in certain directions approved by a politicized academic establishment — funding, ease of getting your papers published, getting hired in prestigious positions, appointments to prestigious committees and boards, professional recognition, etc.  How young scientists are to navigate all this is beyond me, and it often becomes a battle of scientific integrity versus career suicide.

Well, that's the legacy of the Obama-era bureaucracy and its lackeys in academia.  The funding situation may be about to change by 180 degrees.  We'll see.

It's A Good Thing That Our Geopolitical Rivals Are So Incompetent

Many on the right have been getting mileage lately from bashing the incompetent foreign policy of outgoing President Obama.  The guiding theme of Obama's worldview has long seemed to be that we just need to be nice to our geopolitical rivals, and then of course they will be nice back.  Next thing you know, Russia is invading Ukraine and sending bombers to aid Assad in Syria; Iran is controlling Iraq behind the scenes and backing Hamas in its attacks on Israel; and China is building new islands to claim jurisdiction over the South China Sea.

But before you conclude that incoming President Trump needs to take drastic steps to rein in these three world bad guys, it is useful to look at their situations with a somewhat broader perspective.  The fact is that none of Russia, Iran or China is currently in a very good position to be more than a marginal player on the world stage, and the only one of the three that might become a much bigger player any time soon is China.  

Let's consider them one at a time.

Russia.  When I was a kid going to high school in the 1960s, it was the Soviet Union.  In the mid-60s the Soviet Union had around 230 million people, compared to about 190 million for the United States.   And that was before including the population of all the satellite countries in Eastern Europe, like East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania and so forth -- not to mention then-comrade-in-arms Communist China.  The economy of the Soviet Union at that time was said to be about 60% the size of the economy of the United States, and they were putting out fake statistics claiming that their economy was growing at a rate about double ours.  If you believed it, that meant that their economy would overtake ours in as little as 10 years, 20 at most.  Their military was about double the size of ours, with thousands of nuclear missiles, and equal thousands of tanks lined up at the East/West barrier then known as the "Iron Curtain."  Now that was a geopolitical rival to reckon with!

Compare that to Russia today.  About half of the population went away in the breakup of the Soviet Union, and even the population of the remaining Russian state has shrunk from about 148 million in the mid-90s to about 143 million today.  That's because their birthrate is so low, and also because nobody immigrates into Russia.  (Population of the U.S. today is more than 320 million.)  

For its economy, Russia has gone the route of crony capitalism on steroids, with the head guy passing out the plum economic prizes to his friends.  The economy is completely dominated by the oil and gas sector.  The best that can be said for this form of economic management is that it is better than Stalinist totalitarianism.  Without much diversification or entrepreneurialism, Russia is at the mercy of swings in the international oil and gas market.  As of 2013, as oil prices were riding high, the economy of Russia seemed to be doing OK, with GDP about $2.2 trillion, or about $15,000 per capita.  (By comparison, U.S. GDP today is about $18.5 trillion, or about $57,000 per capita.)  Then came international sanctions in early 2014, followed by the bottom dropping out from under oil prices in the second half of that year.  The Trading Economics web site estimates that by 2015 the GDP of Russia had declined to $1.326 trillion, an astonishing decline of about 40% from the 2013 peak; and TE's estimate for 2016 is for only a small increase from that.  That's less than $10,000 per capita.

Meanwhile, Russia has lost most of its former friends.  Almost all of the former Eastern European satellites have joined NATO.  So have Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, which were part of the Soviet Union proper, albeit with only about 6 million people among the three of them. Then a few years ago, the very largest non-Russian member state of the former Soviet Union -- Ukraine, with about 50 million people -- was threatening to join NATO.  Russia headed that off with the invasion of Crimea and some incursions into Eastern Ukraine.  Ukraine today has not joined NATO, but it's certainly no friend of Russia.  And elsewhere among the former Soviet states, there are plenty that are also none too friendly.  Georgia comes to mind.

Russia does have an unusually large military for a country with such a small GDP, including a substantial nuclear arsenal; but the small economy really limits its abilities.  The U.S. Defense Department budget, at around $600 billion per year, is almost half the size of Russia's entire economy!

Russian President Vladimir Putin likes to get his kicks by throwing around such military weight as he has, and by tweaking Western leaders in his speeches.  But fundamentally, based on the size of his population and his economy, he is playing a very weak hand.  If Russia wanted to grow its geopolitical power and status, it would need to open up its economy to private capital and entrepreneurs.  But that doesn't seem to be Putin's way.

Iran.  Iran is a much poorer country than even Russia, with GDP per capita at around $6000.  (And fewer than 80 million people.)  And their economic policy in recent years seems to have been designed to keep the economy small.  At least in Russia the oil and gas sector is mostly in the hands of nominally private entities like Rosneft, Gazprom and Lukoil.  Iran has instead gone for full-socialist public ownership of its national company, the National Iranian Oil Company.  And here is a 2015 description of some other Iranian economic policies in recent years from a website called Al Monitor ("The Pulse of the Middle East"):

[T]he nominal exchange rate was fixed at around 10,000 rials for every dollar during 2006-2011. During this same period, Iran’s annual inflation rate was on average 16% above the global average, and as a result, Iranian goods gradually lost competitiveness with foreign goods. Thus, there was a flow of imported goods into the Iranian market. Because of the aforementioned policies, many of Iran’s industries were closed down; during  2011-2016 more than 2,500 industrial firms were shuttered and there was a reduction of more than 500,000 workers in the industrial sector. Most important, during this period, the net total of created jobs in Iran was equal to zero. The only main exports, besides crude oil, were condensate as well as oil and gas derivatives, including oil and petrochemical products.  On the other hand, the growth of the monetary base (with an annual average of more than 26%) — a major cause of which was the Central Bank’s purchase of oil revenues — led to macroeconomic instability and persistently high inflation rates of above 20%.

According to Trading Economics, Iran's GDP reached a peak of $592 billion in 2011, and began a steady decline after that, despite high oil prices into 2014.  And of course, when your only significant export product is completely government-controlled and is the government's main source of revenue, you are setting yourself up for disaster when the price of that product declines -- as the price of oil did in mid-2014.  By the time 2014 was over, Iran's GDP was down to $425 billion, where it remains today according to the TE estimate.  That's down more than 25% from the peak five years ago.  And the U.S. frackers look set to keep a lid on the price of oil at around $50 - 60 per barrel for the foreseeable future. 

As you can see, Iran was not exactly negotiating from a position of strength when it did its deal with President Obama in 2015.  Yes, they are getting back some of the assets frozen back in the 70s and 80s.  How long will that one-time bounty last?  

China.  By comparison to Russia and Iran, China's economic management looks almost competent.  After a couple of decades of rapid growth, China now has the second largest GDP in the world! -- it's around $11 trillion, if you believe their numbers.  But let's not get ahead of ourselves.  They have about 1.36 billion people, which makes their per capita GDP only about $8,000.  That's well less than Russia.  For that matter, it's behind places like Mexico, Kazakhstan, and Panama -- and, indeed, behind the world average per capita GDP of about $10,000 according to the tabulations of all of the IMF, World Bank and CIA as presented here.   

Sure China has not made the same fundamental mistake as Russia and Iran, going all in on one industry that is subject to wild cyclical swings.  But don't kid yourself by thinking that its economy represents real capitalism -- a system where everybody gets to participate on equal terms in a grand game of trial-and-error to see who can come up with the next big thing.  Instead, China's economy is directed by state-owned banks who invest in state- and crony-owned companies that have privileged status to expand endlessly and cannot fail.  Look around for reports on the state of China's economy, and the word that you see again and again is "overcapacity."  For example, this from the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business in June 2016, "Solving the Prickly Issue of Overcapacity in China":  

Having delayed serious structural reforms, China faces eye-watering overcapacity in heavy industries.  Steel production volume is more than double that of the next four leading producers combined: Japan, India, the United States and Russia.  Aluminum production capacity reached 40 million tons last year, exceeding global consumption by 9 million tons, according to Chinese think tank Antaike.  Most remarkably, between 2011 and 2013 China produced more cement than the US did during the entire 20th century -- 6.6 gigatons, compared to the US's 4.5 -- according to data from China's National Bureau of Statistics and the US Geological Survey.       

Without doubt, China just counts all of this (and other) excess production as a full addition to GDP, as if nothing was wrong.  Its economic statistics are completely phony -- and all of that just to pretend that its per capita GDP is only a little below the world average.  In any real economy, there would have been a massive shake-out long ago, with a good half or two-thirds of the heavy-industry producers forced out of business so that the resources could be put to other uses.  What is China's real per capita GDP, honestly measured?  $5000?  $4000?  And do they think that enough free government credit can postpone the inevitable shake-out forever?  Good luck with that!

In its favor, China does have those 1.36 million people, many of whom are highly intelligent, creative and entrepreneurial.  If it just opened up its credit system and turned its people free, it could shortly have a world-beating economy.  But that would require having the current oligarchy open itself up to rivals for its power.  Also, it would require going through a severe recession, the likes of which the world has probably never seen, and then restarting from a new much lower base.  Oh, the loss of face!  

I don't foresee this any time soon.  Indeed, I think that China will do everything in its power to keep the economic charade going, potentially for decades.  Its economy will languish.

Meanwhile, the United States, even with completely incompetent foreign policy (not to mention almost equally incompetent domestic policy), continues to race further ahead of its geopolitical rivals.  Imagine what we could do with competent foreign policy!  

California: Good Luck With Your "Climate Leadership"

In the phrase of one-time U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, the states are "laboratories of democracy."  With the age of Trump now upon us, and several progressive-leaning states vowing resistance to his agenda, we are about to find out a lot more about how that works.

Consider the arena of carbon emissions and climate change.  All indications are that the incoming Trump administration will be backing off from efforts at the federal level to achieve emissions reductions as a means of affecting the earth's climate.  But there's nothing to stop one or more states from trying their hand at this game.  And, over at the New York Times, they are all excited that the state of California appears ready to carry on the climate fight on its own.  The headline of the December 26 article is "California, at Forefront of Climate Fight, Won't Back Down to Trump."   

California — a state that has for 50 years been a leader in environmental advocacy — is about to step unto the breach. In a show of defiance, Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, and legislative leaders said they would work directly with other nations and states to defend and strengthen what were already far and away the most aggressive policies to fight climate change in the nation. That includes a legislatively mandated target of reducing carbon emissions in California to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030.

Dare we be so impolite as to ask, what can they hope to achieve, and at what cost?

On the subject of "what they might achieve," the Cato Institute has put out a handy "Carbon Temperature Savings Calculator" to enable us to determine the avoided rise in world temperature resulting from any given reduction in carbon emissions.  Now, you might say, this Calculator can't be anything but hocus-pocus, because there does not exist any validated empirical relationship between CO2 emissions and world temperature.  You would be right about that.  But Cato didn't just make this thing up.  The Calculator is based on a model for the relationship between CO2 emissions and world temperature called MAGICC, which has been cooked up by a government bureaucracy called the National Center for Atmospheric Research, with funding from EPA (of course).  Here is a link to the government website describing the MAGICC model.  In other words, these are the government's worst-case numbers, created in the effort to scare the bejeezus out of us over how much temperatures will rise as a result of carbon emissions.  Surely, the same model that can tell us how much temperatures will rise as a result of increased carbon emissions can also be used to tell us how much temperature rise will be avoided from reduced carbon emissions.

To apply the Calculator, you need to select what percent of CO2 emissions you would like to eliminate, as well as your preferred "climate sensitivity" (in other words, by how many degrees will world temperatures increase for a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere?).  For percent of CO2 emissions eliminated, you can select 20%, 40%, 60%, 80%, or 100%.  Let's go for 100% -- send them back to the stone age!  For "sensitivity," you can choose among 1.5 deg C, 3 deg C, or 4.5 deg C.  Let's go all the way to 4.5 deg C.  The Calculator will not break this down by state, but only gives an answer for the full U.S.  And the answer is, with those extreme assumptions, 0.062 deg C of temperature rise avoided by 2050, and 0.173 deg C of temperature rise avoided by 2100.

But how much can California achieve on its own?  Given that California is about a tenth of the U.S. in population and energy usage, we can get an estimate of what California alone can achieve by elimination of its carbon emissions by dividing the full-U.S. numbers by 10.  (Math geeks among the readers will recognize that this linear assumption will in fact considerably overstate the effect that California alone can have, since the relationship between atmospheric CO2 and temperature is thought to be logarithmic rather than linear.)  Anyway, divide by 10 and you find that, assuming that California eliminated all of its carbon emissions, and with "climate sensitivity" of 4.5 deg C, California will save the world from about 0.0062 deg C of temperature increase by 2050, and 0.0173 deg C by 2100.

Now suppose you think that California will never really be able to achieve more than about 60% reduction in carbon emissions, and that climate sensitivity is more like 1.5 deg C.  (I would say that 1.5 deg C is still way too high.  After all, there is no actual empirical proof that climate sensitivity to atmospheric CO2 is anything other than zero.  But whatever.)  On those assumptions you have California affecting world temperature through its climate policies by 0.0021 deg C by 2050, and 0.0045 deg C by 2100.  Whoopee!

Now let's look at the cost.

California is already a leader in the U.S. in getting a high percentage of its electricity from the big so-called "renewables," wind and solar.  According to this chart from the California Energy Commission, in 2015 California got 6% of its electricity from solar, and 8.2% from wind.  Oh, and its average electricity rate in 2015 was 15.62 cents per kwh, versus a U.S. average of 10.31 cents per kwh, according to the U.S. Energy Information Agency here.  Cause and effect?  That's hard to know.  

But we can look to places that have driven the percentage of electricity generation from wind and solar up to much higher levels.  For example, there's Germany.  Germany began its so-called Energiewende ("energy transformation") in 2010, and by 2015 had gotten the portion of its electricity generated from the big renewables up to a whopping 31%, according to a chart here from the EIA.  A chart here from Clean Energy Wire puts the average residential German electricity rate at 28.8 cents per kwh.  Cause and effect?

And at 31% of electricity production, the intermittent renewables are pushing up against the limits of what they can contribute without resorting to a series of far most costly additions to the electricity system -- additions like massive excess capacity, backup, storage and additional transmission.  Consider this piece from The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, "Germany's  Energiewende : the intermittency problem remains," by Christine Sturm in May 2016:

Given that Germany’s electricity grid did not collapse [as production from intermittent renewables increased to 31%], one might declare the intermittency problem as solved. Unfortunately, this ignores two essential aspects of the Energiewende that explain how Germany solved the intermittency problem until now. First, the problem of generating electricity on cloudy and windless days could only be managed because utilities were obliged to cover these intermittencies by maintaining and running fossil power plants as backup source, in an uneconomic mode. Second, Germany’s electricity generation on windy and sunny days often exceeds by far the grid’s balancing abilities, forcing the power surplus into the adjacent grids of neighboring countries, and obliging other countries to compensate for German intermittencies. These solutions are neither sustainable nor possible in a carbon-free economy. Moreover, whether bold Energiewende-like concepts will be successful or not essentially depends on our ability to really solve the intermittency problem.

So even to get to its 31%, Germany has had to rely on the indulgence of its neighbors to take power off its hands on days when too much sun and wind would otherwise overload its grid.  How do you get to 50%, or 60%, and with a reliable system that works 24/7/365?  As I detailed in this post back in August, a demonstration project by a utility in Korea attemted to get a majority of electricity production from wind, and found it needed about four times excess capacity, plus full fossil fuel backup, plus massive amounts of battery storage.  And they still only got to 42% of electricity production from wind over a full month-long period.  And the system cost about 10 times as much as a conventional system.

So, good luck California!  Unless you can come up with some kind of technological innovations in electricity delivery that no one has thought of yet, if you really want to get to 60% reductions in carbon emissions you are likely to face electricity bills at least three to five times what others in the U.S. face.  And maybe ten times!  But you can console yourselves that you have made world temperatures 0.0045 deg C cooler than they would have been by 2100.

Something tells me that in the real world California will never actually go through with this.  Or are they really that dumb?    

Venezuela: Useful Idiots Roundup

For those who enjoyed my Fidel Castro roundup from last month, I thought it might be fun to do a similar roundup of what the useful idiots have said over the years about Venezuela during the dictatorships of Chavez and Maduro.

Unless you have been living in a cave for the last couple of years, you undoubtedly already know that after almost 18 years of "Bolivarian socialism" the economic situation in Venezuela has become desperate.  For news just in the past few months, you might consider:  The New York Times from Christmas day ("No Food, No Medicine, No Respite: A Starving Boy's Death in Venezuela");  The Independent from December 16 ("We're living in the end of times: Starving Venezuelans giving away children to survive"); Legal Insurrection from November 26 ("Starving Venezuelans Flee Socialist Nightmare By Boat"); The Hill from October 24 ("My Native Country of Venezuela Is Starving").  There are plenty more such stories if you can stand it.

So, how about a few quotes from the idiots:

Linda Poon in Wired, April 25, 2016 (!) ("Venezuela's Economic Success Fueled Its Electricity Crisis"):

Earlier this April, . . . president [Maduro] called on women to stop using hairdryers, and to save them only for “special occasions.” He also asked citizens to hang their clothes instead of using dryers and to embrace the heat. . . .  The current crisis is essentially what [Professor Victor] Silverman [of Pomona College] calls a problem of the country’s own economic success. . . .  “The Venezuelan economy reduced poverty at one of the most rapid rates in the world, and certainly one of the most rapid rates in Latin America over the past 20 years,” he says. “That meant people had the money to buy refrigerators, air conditioners, and … hairdryers.”

Ben Norton in Salon, December 7, 2015 (!) ("13 years after failed U.S.-backed coup, right-wing opposition wins Venezuela election"):

For 17 years, the PSUV has enjoyed enormous popularity in Venezuela. Its economic and social programs drastically reduced poverty, created universal healthcare, and promoted widespread literacy and education. Compared to its Latin American neighbors, Venezuela has consistently led the region in reducing poverty.

Peter McLaren (of Chapman University) and Mike Cole (of University of East London) in Truth-Out.org, June 11, 2014 ("Austerity/Immiseration Capitalism: What Can We Learn From Venezuelan Socialism?"):

While democratic socialism may sound utopian in the European context, and positively unimaginable in the United States, there is [in Venezuela] a viable alternative to the neoliberal model in existence. It is incumbent on the left to think seriously about what can be learned from the Bolivarian revolution. That revolution can provoke us to imagine an alternative to capitalism, whether through forms of freely-associated producers planning and allocating the social wealth, syndicalist and Marxist forms of socialism, or self-governing popular assemblies or autonomous communities.

Mark Weisbrot in the Guardian, November 7, 2013, ("Sorry, Venezuela haters: his economy is not the Greece of Latin America"):

For more than a decade people opposed to the government of Venezuela have argued that its economy would implode. . . .  How frustrating it has been for them to witness only two recessions: one directly caused by the opposition's oil strike (December 2002-May 2003) and one brought on by the world recession (2009 and the first half of 2010). However, the government got control of the national oil company in 2003, and the whole decade's economic performance turned out quite well, with average annual growth of real income per person of 2.7% and poverty reduced by over half, and large gains for the majority in employment, access to health care, pensions and education.

David Sirota in Salon, May 6, 2013, "Hugo Chavez's Economic Miracle":

[A]ccording to data compiled by the UK Guardian, Chavez’s first decade in office saw Venezuelan GDP more than double and both infant mortality and unemployment almost halved. Then there is a remarkable graph from the World Bank that shows that under Chavez’s brand of socialism, poverty in Venezuela plummeted (the Guardian reports that its “extreme poverty” rate fell from 23.4 percent in 1999 to 8.5 percent just a decade later). . . .   Additionally, as Weisbrot points out, “college enrollment has more than doubled, millions of people have access to health care for the first time and the number of people eligible for public pensions has quadrupled.”

Richard Gott in the New Statesman, January 30, 2013 ("Hugo Chavez: Man against the world"):

[Chavez] brought hope to a continent. . . .  [H]e has not only helped to construct and project Venezuela as an interesting and important country for the first time, at ease with itself and its historical heritage, he has reimagined the continent of Latin America with a vision of what might be possible.

Sean Penn in the Huffington Post, August 5, 2011 ("A State Department That Can"):

The American people have grown accustomed to hearing the Venezuelan president referred to as a dictator, not only by media representatives but by members of the leadership in both parties. This is a defamation, not only to President Chavez, but also to the majority of Venezuelan people, poor people who have elected him president time and time again. This is not a dictator supported by the wealthy classes, but rather, a president elected by the impoverished and at the service of the Venezuelan constitution, a document not unlike our own. He is a flamboyant, passionate leader.

Bernie Sanders in Valley News (Vermont), August 5, 2011 ("Close The Gaps: Disparities That Threaten America"):

These days, the American dream is more apt to be realized in South America, in places such as Ecuador, Venezuela and Argentina, where incomes are actually more equal today than they are in the land of Horatio Alger. Who's the banana republic now?

Nobel Prize-winning economist (and economic advisor to Hillary Clinton campaign) Joseph Stiglitz, quoted in Venezuela Analysis, October 11, 2007 ("Joseph Stiglitz, in Caracas, Praises Venezuela's Economic Policies"):

Venezuela's economic growth has been very impressive in the last few years. . . .  Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez appears to have had success in bringing health and education to the people in the poor neighborhoods of Caracas, to those who previously saw few benefits of the countries oil wealth.

You could go on with this all day if you want.  The important thing to understand is that, as long as you claim to have improved "healthcare" and "education," and you utter the right platitudes about "social justice," you can put out completely fake economic statistics and these dopes will fall for it every time.  Meanwhile, on August 10, 2015 the Mail Online reported that the richest person in Venezuela was none other than Maria Gabriela Chavez, daughter of the recently-deceased dictator.  They reported her wealth as $4.2 billion, almost entirely held in foreign banks and non-Venezuelan currencies, of course.  Somehow, none of the linked articles above mentions the case of Ms. Chavez.