Update: How Do You Tell If The Earth's Climate System "Is Warming"?

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Back in August I had a post by the title of “How Do You Tell If The Earth’s Climate System “Is Warming”? The post took note of the fact that, with a time series (like for temperature) that fluctuates up and down, you can always give a presentation that makes the trend look to be whatever you want it to be, so long as you get to pick the start date. If you want to make it look like the trend is up, you pick a start date where the value of the series is low; and if you want to make it look like the trend is down, you pick a start date where the value of the series is high. Nothing to it! With the earth’s climate system, you have nearly infinite numbers of years that you can go back to get the result you want. Those who want to convince you that the earth’s climate system “is warming” typically pick as their start date either the 1880s or the 1970s, both of which were notable low points in the temperature times series. The trick is so obvious that you would think that nobody could be fooled. But, among others, they seem to have bamboozled Google, which as that August post noted, had taken to including on YouTube videos involving climate skeptics a legend stating “Multiple lines of scientific evidence show that the climate system is warming.”

“Multiple lines of evidence”? Really Google, is there any “line of evidence” that matters as to whether something “is warming” or “is cooling” other than the temperature time series? They don’t enlighten us as to what that other “line of evidence” might be.

Anyway, enough months have now passed for another year to end, so we now have three full years since the most recent temperature peak, which occurred in January 2016. . . .

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Will Somebody Actually Start A Serious "Climate" Emissions-Reduction Program In 2019?

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OK, I know that back in August (and repeated as recently as December 29) I said that “the whole idea of reducing carbon emissions as a supposed ‘solution’ to ‘climate change’ is over.” In those two posts and others, I have pointed to one country (or continent) after another giving up on so-called “renewables” and carbon taxes and even the whole idea of emissions reductions, and going instead for some good old reliable coal: China, India, Africa, Japan, Australia, even Canada and Germany. Now we have the gilets jaunes in France, still protesting after two months over a lousy 17 cents per gallon gasoline tax increase that definitely would never make enough of a difference in world “climate” that it could be measured, let alone noticed. And I haven’t even previously mentioned the new Energy Plan from Poland, presented at the close of 2018, which promises to scrap all wind turbines by 2035.

Does anybody other than a UN bureaucrat even care about this issue any more? Yes, at least if you go by what they say, plenty of people do. And we’re not talking about nobodies here.

For example, there is the new Democratic majority in the U.S. Congress. . . .

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On Being In With The In Crowd

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Do you have a burning desire to be in with the in crowd? I do not. Maybe that’s what makes me a contrarian.

But the desire to be in with the in crowd is certainly a very common and powerful human instinct. You might even think that this desire is universal. If so, then you probably suspect that I must be lying when I say that I have no desire to be in with the in crowd. It must be that I have always been so nerdy and awkward that I was never going to be in with the cool people, so I had to develop this contrarian schtick in order to preserve some pitiful semblance of self-worth.

OK, you can go right ahead and think that. At least I don’t go around regularly making a fool of myself in a desperate quest for approval from the cool people. And our current in crowd is rather achingly dumb, which means that anyone pursuing their approval is regularly going to make a fool of him or herself.

Yes, I am talking about Mitt Romney. . . .

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Is Ruth Bader Ginsburg A Good Supreme Court Justice?

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Several months ago, it was "RBG," a documentary heaping praise on progressive icon Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.  Now in the past week we have seen released a new Hollywood bio-pic, “On the Basis of Sex,” with actors playing the Notorious RBG, her family, and other characters.  The reviews overall are pretty bad, but there's no question that the idea of the film is to heap praise and make an enduring heroine out of the great justice who stands up to Republican appointees like Brett Kavanaugh.  Here is a roundup of reviews from the left-wing British newspaper The Independent.  Example:

The Hollywood Reporter . . .:  "The dramatic approach here is clear, efficient and entirely on-the-nose, with little time for anything that might distract from the hagiographic effort in play. Its sole purpose is to ennoble and proclaim a hero, which its subject almost certainly is. But it makes for notably simplified drama."  

So is RBG a heroine worthy of great praise and adulation? . . .

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How Could The Times Not Realize That It Is A Laughingstock?

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At the New York Times yesterday, they devote the entire space for unsigned editorials to one piece.  You could guess the headline without my having to tell you.  It’s “Trump Imperils the Planet.”   From the sub-headline:  “[T]he administration is taking the country, and the world, backward.”   Yes, it’s not only that nobody is doing as we say on reducing emissions to “save the planet,” but IT’S ALL DONALD TRUMP’S FAULT!!!!!!.

[The recent UN climate conference in Poland] was a hugely dispiriting event and a fitting coda to one of the most discouraging years in recent memory for anyone who cares about the health of the planet — a year marked by President Trump’s destructive, retrograde policies, . . .  

But hadn’t Pravda assured us that the rest of the world would never be tricked into following Trump’s lead, but rather was going to put this retrograde idiot in his place? . . .

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Three Generations In Greenwich Village

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Three Generations In Greenwich Village

My kids seem to get a laugh out of watching some of the cheesy Hallmark Christmas movies during the holiday season. And then last week I got talking to a guy on the city bus, and he turned out to be working as one of the producers of the series. So I thought I should read up on the phenomenon. Next thing you know, I find out that these movies have a standard plot, one of the elements of which is young woman “leaving the soulless big City” to go to a small town and find love.

Soulless?? . . .

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