David Gelernter Takes On Darwinism

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David Gelernter is one of a small number of people in the world whom I would characterize as a genuine independent thinker. But then, I would say that, given that he’s one of the few conservatives on the faculty of Yale, where he is a professor of computer science. He has written widely, often outside his primary field, including on things like culture and art criticism. He was famously severely injured in 1993 by a bomb sent by the Unabomber. As an example of the extent to which he truly doesn’t care what his academic peers think of him, he wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in October 2016 supporting Trump for President (or, perhaps more accurately, stating that the only way to protect the country from the disaster of Hillary was to vote for Trump).

In the Spring 2019 issue of the Claremont Review of Books, Gelernter steps on another super-high-voltage third rail — Darwinism. Moreover, he does it in the context of writing what is essentially a favorable review of a 2013 book titled “Darwin’s Doubt” by a guy named Stephen Meyer. Meyer is one of the leading promoters of the counter-theory to Darwinism called “intelligent design,” as can be seen in the subtitle of Meyer’s book: “The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design.” I doubt that there is any more reviled guy in the field of origin of species than Meyer. (First line of Meyer’s Wikipedia bio: “Stephen C. Meyer (born 1958) is an American advocate of the pseudoscientific principle of intelligent design.”) Nasty! So what has inspired Gelernter to take this one on? . . .

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Michael Mann "Hockey Stick" Update: Now Definitively Established To Be Fraud

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Michael Mann "Hockey Stick" Update: Now Definitively Established To Be Fraud

The Michael Mann “Hockey Stick” is suddenly back in the news. It’s been so long since we have heard from it, do you even remember what it is?

The “Hockey Stick” is the graph that took the world of climate science by storm back in 1998. That’s when Mann and co-authors Raymond Bradley and Malcolm Hughes published in Nature their seminal paper “Global-scale temperature patterns and climate forcing over the past six centuries.” A subsequent 1999 update by the same authors, also in Nature (“Northern Hemisphere Temperatures During the Past Millennium: Inferences, Uncertainties, and Limitations”) extended their reconstructions of “temperature patterns and climate forcing” back another 400 years to about the year 1000. The authors claimed (in the first paragraph of the 1998 article) to “take a new statistical approach to reconstructing global patterns of annual temperature . . . , based on the calibration of multiproxy data networks by the dominant patterns of temperature variability in the instrumental record.” The claimed “new statistical approach,” when applied to a group of temperature “proxies” that included tree ring samples and lake bed sediments, yielded a graph — quickly labeled the “Hockey Stick” — that was the perfect icon to sell global warming fear to the public. The graph showed world temperatures essentially flat or slightly declining for 900+ years (the shaft of the hockey stick), and then shooting up dramatically during the 20th century era of human carbon dioxide emissions (the blade of the stick).

In 2001 the UN’s IPCC came out with its Third Assessment Report on the state of the climate. . . .

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John Paul Stevens, Oxfordian

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When retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens died a few weeks ago at age 99, my principal memories of him were as someone who would go along with the pro-big-government orthodoxy and groupthink on pretty much any important issue. This was the man who had written opinions including Kelo v. City of New London (allowing use of a government’s eminent domain power to take property from one private owner only to turn it over to another), Arizona v. Cant (supporting an expansive view of police ability to search a vehicle after arresting the driver), and Massachusetts v. EPA (finding that EPA must determine under the Clean Air Act whether emissions of CO2 constitute a “danger” to human health and safety, and if so, must regulate those emissions). Was there anything actually interesting about this guy?

But then, on reading a few obituaries of Stevens, I learned that he was an “Oxfordian” — that is, someone who supported the position that the true author of the Shakespeare plays and other works was not the commoner from Stratford-on-Avon about whom we have all learned, but rather Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. And Stevens wasn’t just someone who had expressed at some point a vague sympathy with the Oxfordian thesis. Instead, he had conducted a moot court exercise on the authorship question, and then actually written a substantial article in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review in 1992 (well into his time as a Supreme Court justice) laying out the Oxfordian position in the form of presentation of evidence in a legal case. And in 2009 (shortly before his retirement from the Court) Stevens had been given an award called “Oxfordian of the Year” by something called the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship, a group of supporters of the Oxfordian thesis.

Have you ever gotten interested in the question of the “authorship” of the Shakespeare works? . . .

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The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time -- Part XXVI

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The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time -- Part XXVI

Before moving on from this business of July 2019 supposedly being the “hottest month ever,” I want to pause to take note of some follow-on propaganda fresh out of the Washington Post.

A week ago today, on August 13, the Post published a lengthy “climate” piece with the scary headline “2°C: BEYOND THE LIMIT: Extreme climate change has arrived in America.” The piece is several thousand words long and carries the by-lines of the entire Post climate propaganda team: Steven Mufson, Chris Mooney, Juliet Eilperin and John Muyskens. The gist is that “extreme” climate change — defined here as increase in annual mean temperature exceeding 2 deg C over some year in the past — has now been observed in certain areas of the United States. Not the whole U.S., mind you, but only certain areas — and not very large areas at that. Excerpt:

“These winters do not exist anymore," says Marty Kane, a lawyer and head of the Lake Hopatcong Foundation. . . . [A] century of climbing temperatures has changed the character of the Garden State. The massive ice industry and skate sailing association are but black-and-white photographs at the local museum. . . . New Jersey may seem an unlikely place to measure climate change, but it is one of the fastest-warming states in the nation. Its average temperature has climbed by close to 2 degrees Celsius since 1895 — double the average for the Lower 48 states.

Before getting into more details of this article, let me first turn to how the Post chose to use the article in its editorial section. On Sunday, August 18, the Post had an unsigned editorial with the headline “Global warming is already here. Denying it is unforgivable.” The basic idea here is to use the definitive reporting of the Post’s crack team to scare the readers and to bash President Trump: . . .

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The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time -- Part XXV

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I posted Part XXIV of this series just three days ago, on Wednesday August 14. The subject of that post was the “homogenization” of official historical temperature data, by which the keepers of our official temperature records from ground-based thermometers use the excuses of station moves and instrumentation changes to adjust earlier temperatures downward in order to create an artificial warming trend and make recent temperatures appear to be the warmest ever.

But why would anyone engage in such a stupid game? After all, it’s been a good 50 years since the network of ground-based thermometers was recognized as completely inadequate to the task of keeping track of the earth’s changing climate. This network just had too many unfixable issues that meant that its measurement accuracy was not nearly sufficient for the task at hand. The issues include things like poor coverage of most of the earth’s surface (e.g., the whole southern hemisphere), essentially no coverage of the poles or the oceans, urban heat island issues affecting many of the most important stations, poorly tracked station moves and instrumentation changes, and so forth. These many issues are reasons why the decision was made back in the 1970s to spend some serious money to create a far superior methodology to track not just temperature readings at randomly sited ground stations, but instead to track the bulk heat content of the entire lower troposphere. Since 1979 the U.S. government has spent several billion dollars to build, launch and operate a group of satellites with instrumentation called “microwave sounding units,” designed to measure true average worldwide temperatures of the lower troposphere. Thus, since 1979, the network of ground-based thermometers has been made obsolete. We now have the far more accurate satellite temperature record to guide us. . . .

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New York City Housing Authority Update

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New York City Housing Authority Update

I keep returning to the case of the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) because it is such a perfect illustration of the socialist economic model in practice. There about 170,000 NYCHA apartments, housing around 400,000 people. Most of the apartments were built from about the late 1940s to the 1970s, to be technically “owned” by the City of New York, although nobody expects any return on the investment. Maintenance and upkeep are in the hands of a unionized bureaucracy, headed by a Commissioner reporting to the Mayor. The unionized staff gets paid for going through the motions, rather than for assuring that the residents are receiving a good-quality housing product. Nobody ever gets an extra dollar of pay for getting the buildings ready to go for the next ten years, or for the next generation.

Actually, it’s far worse than that. The commissioners turn over every few years, and their only interest is in not having the buildings fall apart on their watch. The employees have union contracts that perversely reward inefficiency. For example, NYCHA’s plumbers have negotiated themselves a deal where all shifts are Monday through Friday, 8 AM to 4:30 PM, and any work outside those hours gets paid at “overtime” rates. Clearly, the plumbers maximize their income when the plumbing is old and prone to regular breaks, requiring emergency calls during the nights and weekends when the pay is time-and-a-half or even double. Fortunately for them, the genius economic planners who put this NYCHA thing together some 40 to 70 years ago never considered the possibility that after such a period of time the buildings would need major capital upgrades. No plan was ever put in place to provide for such upgrades. As the buildings get older, the breakdowns become more frequent and worse. The living conditions get worse and worse, while the employees make more and more money.

Mostly, NYCHA has been out of the news lately. But thank the Lord for the New York Post, which will not let go. . . .

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