George Rebane

• Sweden’s drift to right
• Global Warming, more curiouser than ever
• ‘Counterfactuals’ among Cars for Clunkers

Sweden has long been the American progressive’s poster child for successful socialism.  Conservative libertarians like me have had limited success in pointing out the obvious to the leftwingers and ho-hummers that none of that form of governance is sustainable.  Now it looks like the Swedes are joining the other EU countries in their retreat from socialism by moving to a center-right government in their recent elections (here).  It was the only reasonable way out of the “economic gloom and joblessness” that has also gripped this perennial leader of collectivist thought.  It was a number of factors – economy, liberties, immigration, … – that brought Swedes to this enlightenment.  But the bottom line is that they finally started running out of other people’s money.  We, on the other hand, think that we’ve cracked the code to collectivism – we’re going to tax the ‘rich’ and redistribute.  The Swedes, among others, have been there and done that.

The manmade global warming argument has more holes than a sieve.  As a skeptic trained in the system sciences, I have tried to contribute a perspective not usually encountered in the arguments, and cited science to refute the ‘we’re all gonna fry and die’ hysteria that has been foisted on the know-nothings by the ruling class.  The complex systems argument advising prudence is undoubtedly the least accessible (take a look at my attempts here and here), but nevertheless the most compelling from where I stand.

One of the largest holes in the AGW (anthropogenic global warming) sieve is our profound ignorance of the earth’s carbon cycle – how and where all it gets made, and how and where all it gets absorbed.  CO2 is the hyped greenhouse gas that is now politically certified to be the agent that will do us all in unless we immediately destroy our economies and revert to command and control governance.  I have argued for years that we don’t know jack about the transfer function for earth’s atmosphere.  Transfer function? That’s the relationship between the gazintas and kamzatas – you know, it gazinta here and kamzata there.  It is that transfer function that is coded into those massive general circulation models (GCMs), those accretions of suspect software that can be tweaked to give you any kind of output that is politically desirable.  (The making, care, and feeding of GCMs is another story altogether that I’ve covered before.)

Now it turns out that some Chinese scientists have discovered a major component, perhaps THE major component, in the earth’s carbon cycle.  In ‘Invisible Carbon Pumps’ the 11sep10 Economist reports that “a group of oceanic micro-organisms just might prove a surprising ally in the fight against climate change.”  The article goes on to report that “a whole new ‘sink’ for carbon dioxide from the atmosphere has been discovered.”  The details should curl your toe nails as you consider what this means with respect to the collectivist crap that has been spreading around the world, and is now making its way into economy destroying public policies, ‘cap and tax’ and California’s AB32 here in the US.  Climate change has been going on for eons, AGW is of more recent and dubious manufacture.  Discoveries like these will keep coming, and this one adds to the reasons why the EU and China are not rushing into the insane policies that are so attractive to our leftwingers.

Speaking of economics, it turns out that another brick fell out of Obama’s stimulus façade.  The 20sep10 WSJ reports here that 'Cash for Clunkers' has turned out to be the boondoggle that it was identified to be from the gitgo.  All it did was to displace the timeframe in which new cars were sold, it created no new net aggregate demand.  The study by Drs A. Mian of UC Berkeley and A. Sufi of the Univ of Chicago concluded that the $2.85B stimulus “had no long run effect on auto purchases”.  And since this was heralded as the “best possible” stimulus program in the long litany of such programs from the Obama administration, the WSJ concludes that “the impact of the others must have been awful.”  Well yes, just take a look at the money down the drain, and the way we are floundering in this recovery from recession.

But most of all, I was very pleased by this report's glib use of “counterfactual” in communicating to broad audiences.  It's wonderful that the WSJ now deems its readership to be sufficiently elevated to understand words like that.  I have always deemed the RR readership to be at least as savvy as that of the WSJ, and therefore have not tried to water down the King’s (or is it now the Queen’s) English for my readers.  It’s much easier to write to a well-read audience, so I’m thinking that it may be time to crank things up a notch around here.  RR was never meant to serve as remedial high school, but instead as a forum for the efficient discussion of some pretty complex ideas among people who shared my interests in politics, economics, technology, and philosophy.  Bottom line – I get to keep writing unusual stuff using weird words and phrases even though, as one leftwing commenter complained, my scribblings are “not very easy to read”.   For all of you who have stuck with me, thanks for putting up with things not often found in the common denominator – you are the few among the few.