John Sladek Had Ted Cruz’s Number

I think Cruz is wrong about Global Warming. But he is right about about the attitude of your average left wing environmentalist.

I am an alarmist. I think we should use the Prudence Principle. Sure we might be ok. We have an idea but it is P(x) not 2+2. The Gulf stream salinity issue was at least 80% likely and than disappeared and now it looks like it is roaring back. But the danger of being really off at the bad end is very real.

On this issue not enough people care. By the time you move the Overton Window and burn the heretics it could be to late.

If you win the big election trade the natural gas in the Outer Continental Shelf for a mostly Revenue neutral Carbon tax of 35 a ton, with some the money for R&D, and convert the Green loans/bribes to R&D.

No, “by all accounts” is a figure of speech. Cruz is by some accounts bright. By other accounts he is just aggressive and sure of himself.

“There is a Grand Canyon of difference between certainty and certitude, and remarkably few of us have BS meters tuned well enough to detect the presence of that magnificent logical chasm.”

One of the few things I ever said in a lecture that I’m proud of, though I doubt that qualifies me to run for high office.

Probably disqualifies me.

I for one am not going to join the general laughter at Ted Cruz’s presidential ambitions.

The contest for the R nomination was a diving contest the last two cycles. This is in contrast to their former pattern of early anointment of a chosen heir by insiders, with the rank and file falling dutifully in line. Dubya was the last beneficiary of that pattern. It is true that these last two cycles, the Rs did finally, after multiple temporary front runners flamed out, turn to more establishment choices. But that final turn to the center hardly seems inevitable. I don’t think it at all unlikely that a really committed diver like Cruz, someone willing to go all in pandering to the bundle of resentments that is the R party these days, would get and hold the front-runner position long enough to build enough momentum to get the nomination.

And if Cruz gets the R nomination, he’s got pretty near even odds of winning the general. I would not count, even a little, on the idea that his extremism will automatically do him in with the general electorate. He isn’t any more whacko than candidate Reagan in 1980, when a lot of us were ecstatic that the other side had nominated the 23 Mule Team spokesperson as their nominee. The mere fact of getting the nomination of one of the two major US parties will do a lot to immunize him against the idea that he’s extreme.

@9

Crytandra, your argument is rich in adjectives and mud-slinging, but weak in fact and scientific assessment. It is not just unconvincing, but your tone and mode of argument suggest that you are a crank, and I finished reading your comment more inclined to agree with the people you have such an issue with that when I began reading it.

And honestly now, serious people are not making the case “GM offends Gaia”, and this view is not ‘really impact(ing) government policies’, at the same level of influence as a sitting US senator .

I challenge you to prove otherwise.

not ‘really impact(ing) government policies’, at the same level of influence as a sitting US senator .

It is a well-known fact that newspaper columnists have much more impact on government policy than actual, real-life senators.

I’m sensing a burgeoning theme here…

Slightly OT, but is there any reason for the increase in rightwing trollery? There used to be just Andrew F., whose sincere middle-of-the-roadism never struck me as trollish, albeit a bit bland. Then it got worse with Brett “feminist men aren’t real men” Bellmore, but he at least pretends to try to make real arguments. Now we’ve got people who don’t even pretend they’re not trolling. What happened? Did CT get mentioned on the Daily Caller? Are we going to talk about dick fright next?

@15
Leading questions are not arguments. If you want to make a point, argue for it and defend it – don’t gesture at it with deniability later on like a coward.

” And many of the alarmists on global warming, they’ve got a problem cause the science doesn’t back them up.”

Hm, note the glacier-free Hymalayans. A mistaken prediction, out of a conversation, not even a scientific paper, makes it into an IPCC report. Isn’t that a case of the science not backing you up?

Or, how about the Gulf stream slowing down? Except the measurements say it isn’t. Seems the science isn’t backing Mr. Mann up.

I think it would be foolish of warmists to claim that they are always right, that the science always backs them up, that all their predictions always prove out. It makes it just too easy to call you out on things.

But, that’s what comes of dismissing anyone who disagrees with you, or challenges you, as a “denier”, instead of engaging them.

Yes, but how long did they take to correct it? Quite a while, it was already known to be wrong when they originally included it in the report.

As for the Gulf stream, you demonstrate the problem. The actual *measurements* say it hasn’t slowed. That report you linked to was based on the outcome of a model, not the actual measurements.

See? Haven’t quite worked yourself up to the point of executing people who don’t fall in line, but you have reached the point of refusing to engage criticism. Which I take to be in direct contradiction to the principles of science.

You’re not as scientific as you enjoy thinking yourselves. Taking on the characteristics of a cult, actually.

@14 Slightly OT, but is there any reason for the increase in rightwing trollery?

I thought you were headed somewhere else with that, namely that the trolling — an integral part of his political strategy — is Ted Cruz (R-Alberta) himself. He really has perfected it.

“Thus, you conceded that the market system leads to more inequality and less opportunity. ”

More inequality, because more opportunity. A market system generates inequality by INCREASING opportunities, which some people take advantage of, and some do not, causing inequality.

There’s nothing more equal than a society where everyone is poor. Create a society where people *can* become wealthy, some will, some will not, and the result is inequality. But it’s upward inequality.

“So I will ask again, What is your evidence (not opinion, not theory) for your statement, “I just don’t think our market is all that free any more”?”

Increased barriers to entry, essentially. For instance, only a small minority of the population, legally, are permitted to invest in startups. You have to be an “accredited investor”. Crowdfunding is an effort to circumvent this, but only partially accomplishes that.

Then there are high levels of regulation. You understand that regulatory compliance is a bigger burden on small firms, because it doesn’t scale with the size of the firm. So the higher the level of regulation, the worse the barriers to entry are.

I might also cite “Operation Chokepoint”, as a particularly egregious example of economic liberty being infringed, given it’s illegal nature.

Brett Bellmore,

1. “Yes, but how long did they take to correct it? Quite a while, it was already known to be wrong when they originally included it in the report.”

I’m not sure exactly how long it took to correct. The error was in the IPCC 4th Assessment Report and then the articles I read online about the IPCC admitting the error date from about 2010. Skeptical Science says it took more than a month to respond which they say is tardy but I think is quite quick:

“Did the IPCC respond to this error quickly and diligently? The answer here is unfortunately no. According to a review by the InterAcademy Council on the IPCC processes and procedures, the IPCC took more than a month to respond to the Himalayan Glacier error, and even then did not explicitly acknowledge the error or issue a retraction. To make matters worse, it has been documented that the IPCC had responded more quickly to other supposed errors in the report (Leake, 2010; Reuters, 2010). Though the IPCC has been recognized for its scientific contributions, there is certainly room for improvement in terms of communications.”

2. “As for the Gulf stream, you demonstrate the problem. The actual *measurements* say it hasn’t slowed. That report you linked to was based on the outcome of a model, not the actual measurements.”

My link was to a newspaper article based on a report in Nature Climate Change by the Potsdam Institute. The newspaper article was easier to read but I had to read the other since you claim it is refers to a model that didn’t use real measurements.

There is something called AMOC — Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation — the researchers think there is a connection with AMOC reducing/weakening/slowing in the 20th C especially from 1970-1990/1975-1995 (it recovered a bit from 1990/95-2004 but measurements indicate a slowing since 2004) and a strange phenomena of a particular region experiencing cooling in the North Atlantic despite an overall global trend of warming.

The slowing of AMOC may have a connection to the melting Greenland ice sheet.

The researchers did a temperature reconstruction and they found the weakening of AMOC from 1975 is unprecedented in the past millennium.

Direct ocean circulation measurements for the past century and the past millennium are not very plentiful since no-one was taking regular measurements (which is hardly the researchers’ faults) — but because AMOC is related to temperature they used a variety of things to reconstruct temperatures and work out what was happening with AMOC in the past that way. If you look at figure 5 they show the things that were used to gauge Atlantic Ocean circulation in the 20th C.

So it is a mix of measurements and modelling — which is the best they can do since no-one was measuring the circulation enough in the past. If you think that is a problem you should support higher taxes for extra data collection that may possibly be needed in the future sometime.

Does anyone think that if Ted Cruz lived in 17th-century Italy he would have sided with Galileo as opposed to the Church?

I loved The New Apocrypha until my crappy paperback copy fell apart. Sladek’s 1974 book predates Carl Sagan in Broca’s Brain in 1979:

The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

For older examples of cranks deploying Galileo, see Martin Gardner’s “Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science”.

And, I wish commenters here would stop responding to Brett; they waste their and everyone else’s time. Though perhaps this is just sock puppets arguing amongst themselves?

The perverse allure of candidates like Mr. Cruz (and years ago that fella from Chicago – Barrack something)…is that regardless of their actual intelligence, they are absolute genius about saying exactly the sort of things their base wants to hear and the quite talented at obscuring the specifics of that message in seeking to appeal to the middle.

Long after they are elected (when they are) these transgressions come across as flip-flops to whomever is doing the measuring – but of couse by then its too late.

Such candidates get elected when their related base is sufficiently energized to come out en masse – whether the Rs have such fervent energy or a sufficient base is a fair debate and one that will no doubt be had. But don’t underestimate how determined some will be to get “their guy” into the race….its only when the responsible middle-shows up (since the left would never follow anyway) that the weaknesses of the platform and the person can be exposed. We’re the better part of a year away from that happening.

Crytandra 03.26.15 at 3:09 am:

…all four corners of the globe.

Geometry denial, too?

MCA Victoria: The hypothesis is not controversial, but controverted by the available evidence: to wit, none of the commenters here (including and especially YOU) has ever shown evidence of the sharp wit that BW regularly displays!

/knocks off tinfoil hat!

The critical fact is not just that Belle Waring is arguing with herself, but that she’s actually winning! Certainly not found anywhere else on the Internet.

Belle @43

Well played but you won’t fool me.

MPAVictoria, surely you’re aware of the MIT study on the effectiveness of aluminum foil helmets. Evidently they’re more likely to amplify than attenuate ambient mind-control beams.

Anyone thus impressed is unlikely to comprehend a book put out by MIT Press – and the odds are they’ll never even pick it up.

The other thing about “its from models, not data” is that models are only one part of the climate change story. Paleoclimate research is a good half or more of the basis for the conclusions of the IPCC and forms much of the supporting evidence for the models. It also is the basis for some of the more alarming projections on climate change – looking at the data, asking “how high was the sea level last time we had 450 ppm CO2? Oh @#$%…”

The “it’s from models, not from data” complaint was from the guy collecting the data.

Again, On the long-term stability of Gulf Stream transport based on 20 years of direct measurements

“In contrast to recent claims of a Gulf Stream slowdown, two decades of directly measured velocity across the current show no evidence of a decrease. Using a well-constrained definition of Gulf Stream width, the linear least square fit yields a mean surface layer transport of 1.35 × 105 m2 s−1 with a 0.13% negative trend per year. Assuming geostrophy, this corresponds to a mean cross-stream sea level difference of 1.17 m, with sea level decreasing 0.03 m over the 20 year period. This is not significant at the 95% confidence level, and it is a factor of 2–4 less than that alleged from accelerated sea level rise along the U.S. Coast north of Cape Hatteras. Part of the disparity can be traced to the spatial complexity of altimetric sea level trends over the same period.”

That’s the guy who’s actually measuring flow rates. He’s complaining about all these people infering from this or that, that the flow has dropped, when his direct measurements of the flow say it hasn’t.

The curious thing about people having laughed at Columbus and Galileo is that they were both spectacularly wrong.

Columbus was indeed spectacularly wrong.

But Galileo is another story altogether. Discovery and conceptualization of inertia, independence of the rate of acceleration from the mass, demonstration of the irregularity of celestial bodies by optical arguments, discovery of the phases of Venus and of the moons of Jupiter, elucidations of many confirmations of heliocentric theory and parallel demonstration of many problems of geocentric theories (for instance the computations of the differential speed of the stars if the Earth was motionless) etc… All these are spectacular, indeed breathtaking, achievements. Of course, he made many mistakes big and small, as we do all, but he deserves well his reputation as the father of modern physics.

Brett Bellmore,

“That’s the guy who’s actually measuring flow rates. He’s complaining about all these people infering from this or that, that the flow has dropped, when his direct measurements of the flow say it hasn’t.”

Well he has been doing the measuring only over a 20 year period – the claim is about the circulation slowing over one hundred years or a millennium. These are different longer time periods – so the climate scientists had to do temperature reconstructions to see what the circulation used to be like.

I’ll make an analogy .

If you posed the hypothesis that gender relations changed over the last century and it is also the greatest change for a millennium – and then I said I had conducted by myself a twenty year study and there is not really much change – you would have to reconstruct the longer durations through archival documents, archeological artifacts, antiquarian reliques, and so on.

So that’s what the climate scientists had to do to make a longer than 20 years comparison – except they reconstructed the temperature through natural artefacts like coral and so on.

Brett Bellmore #26: “More inequality, because more opportunity… Increased barriers to entry… high levels of regulation… Operation Chokepoint…”

No, see, this sort of answer was already discredited by you yourself in previous statements in the comments thread I linked to in #23 above.

First, your own demand was to stick to evidence, not opinion. I feel that if we are going to have a discussion based on the evidence, then we ought to stick to evaluating the evidence, without the intercession of our own wishes about it.

Second, you already conceded to the evidence that the market system, as it is, has led to BOTH more inequality and less opportunity.

Thus third and finally, in #26 above, you are simply restating your opinion about why you believe that it hasn’t been a “freer” economy over the same period.

In pursuance thereof, you now adduce the “barriers to entry”, without evidence.

Now there are two kinds. It’s pretty clear that governmental “barriers to entry” have been slowly reduced over the last 35 years or so. History of slow but steady progress both in trade deals and in the reduction of government regulations throughout most countries is voluminous on this point. Or are you now advocating for lesser time limits for intellectual property?

And on the other hand, what about reducing the other kind, the free-market-generated “barriers to entry”? Are you advocating for the breakups of big businesses, for example? This would be necessary to reduce “market power”. Yet it would be a rather curious stance for a libertarian, although market power is among the remaining large barriers to entry. Or are you denying that the free market could generate barriers to entry? What would be your evidence for such an opinion?

As to “high levels of regulation”, I already cited one new study that shows that government regulation has had little-to-no effect on the decline of entrepreneurship, co-authored by a prominent libertarian economist, and this same result has shown up in other recent studies as well.

And “Operation Chokepoint” was an initiative begun in 2013 and now reversed, thus it had nothing to do with the rising inequality and declining opportunity of the last 35 years.

So I will ask once again: Please state real evidence, not mere theory or opinion or just throwing more shit out there, for your observation that, “I just don’t think our market is all that free any more.”

By the way, in case anyone’s wondering why Brett is currently obsessing over the North Atlantic, look at the first picture in this article on the unique situation of the North Atlantic. It is, with the possible exception of one part of interior western Africa, the only part of the world not to show marked sustained warming over the period from 1900 to 2013. By trying to make the conversation/debate/showdown about that one particular spot, he and other climate change denialists get to avoid talking about what’s clearly going on across the whole world.

Which is to say, very typical for him.