Editorial -- Barry MacDonald

Are Americans in the dark? Do we have a clue yet as to how badly we are being governed? It is hard to believe that the brazen behavior of Democrats will remain unnoticed for long.

At a recent news conference on health care reform House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) was asked whether he thought members should be required to read the bill before voting. CNCSNews reported that he laughed:

I'm laughing because . . . I don't know how long this bill is going to be, but it's going to be a very long bill. . . . If every member pledged to not vote for it if they hadn't read it in its entirety, I think we would have very few votes.

Bad trends have gotten worse. Republican failings were revealed in their lust for earmarks. Republican squandered their credibility as the party of fiscal restraint during President Bush's tenure, and now how will they regain lost trust when Americans need them most?

Republicans have set bad precedents, but the Democrats are something else.

It is becoming routine for Democrats to push though bills of immense consequence without lawmakers taking the time to read the contents. House members and Senators had no time the read the Stimulus Bill before it was rushed through in February.

So far we have spent $845 billion on the Iraq war, according to William Beach of the Heritage Foundation. The Stimulus bill passed in February allocated $878 billion. Two weeks into the Obama administration the President and Congress allocated more than was spent after eight years of fighting in Iraq.

Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) wrote "100 Stimulus Projects: A Second Opinion on the Stimulus." He writes:

In my estimation, Congress chose the wrong approach to stimulating the economy by spending money we don't have on things we don't need. Real stimulus includes lowering the tax and regulatory burden on hardworking families and businesses, which creates good jobs for the long term.

Senator Coburn asks, What kinds of jobs are being created? Are they seasonal and temporary? Are the projects real improvements or "pet projects of politicians and lobbyists"? The following are some of the projects he discovered in the bill:

* John Murtha Airport in Johnson/Cambria County will get $800,000 in funds, even though the airport sees only 20 passengers a day. The airport will get a new runway and a motorized carousel for baggage.

* A 13-foot tunnel, a wildlife crossing for turtles, alligators, otters, snakes, beavers, and lizards will be built under a highway in Lake Jackson, Florida, for $3.4 million. Fences guiding the animals to the tunnel will also be built.

* Optima Lake in Oklahoma, which loses 100 percent of its water to evaporation, will receive $1.15 million in stimulus money for a guardrail. The rail is intended to protect people who have no reason for being there.

* The Social Security Administration admitted to sending out $2.5 million in stimulus money to 10,000 dead people.

* The Town of Union, New York, will receive $580,000 in stimulus money to prevent homelessness, even though the city did not request the money and does not have a homelessness problem.

Though President Obama promised to bring accountability and transparency to government, he and the Democrats have produced the opposite. The details of each project were to be posted on-line, but that has not happened. Senator Coburn writes that it is "nearly impossible" for the average taxpayer to find out how stimulus money is being spent.

President Obama said in February that we were in a "full-blown crisis" and a failure to act could "turn a crisis into a catastrophe" from which the nation might not recover. He said "a new wave of innovation, activity and construction will be unleashed all across America" by the Stimulus Bill. He claimed that 3.5 million jobs would be created. His economic advisors predicted that unemployment would stay under 8 percent if the Stimulus bill was passed but would rise to 9 percent by 2010 if nothing were done.

As of June the unemployment rate was at 9.5 and the end of the recession is nowhere in sight. Now Obama advisors say the economy will get worse.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that the Obama administration will preside over a $1.85 trillion deficit in 2009, quadrupling President Bush's 2008 deficit of $482 billion, including Bush's bailouts to financial institutions and the auto industry.

The CBO estimates that within 10 years the nation's debt, including the growth of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, will double to 82 percent of GDP. By 2038 the debt will be 200 percent of GDP if government doesn't curtail spending.

On June 26 the House passed a massive climate-change bill called the American Clean Energy and Security Act, or the Waxman-Markey bill after Reps. Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Edward Markey, (D-MA). Once again no one was able to read the bill before voting on it. Members couldn't have read the bill even if they had wanted to. According to Jonathan Adler writing for National Review Online:

When Waxman-Markey finally hit the floor, there was no actual bill. Not one single copy of the full legislation that would, hours later, be subject to a final vote was available to members of the House. The text made available to some members of Congress still had "placeholders" -- blank provisions to be filled in by subsequent language.

At 3 a.m. on the Friday morning before the vote, a 310-page amendment was added to the bill. The purpose of the amendment was to win the vote of one veteran Democrat, Marcy Kaptur, who represents coal-producing Ohio, a state certain get hit hard by caps on the use of coal. The amendment commits $3.5 billion to the state of Ohio for a new federal power authority, similar to Washington state's Bonneville Power Administration. The money will be used for loans to renewable energy and economic development projects.

Reps. Waxman and Markey were willing to spend $3.5 billion to secure the vote of one wavering Congressperson. If the energy bill does eventually pass the Senate and become law Ohioans especially will lose jobs and see their energy bills rise as they lose coal-fired power plants.

There hasn't been much reporting on the contents of the Waxman-Markey bill, but there is one excellent article written by Stephen Spruiell and Kevin Williamson for National Review Online: "A Garden of Piggish Delights." They write:

Two main things to understand about Waxman-Markey: first, it will not reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, at least not at any point in the near future. The inclusion of carbon offsets, which can be manufactured out of thin air and political imagination, will eliminate most of the the demands that the legislation puts on industry, though in doing so it will manage to drive up the prices consumers pay for every product that requires energy for its manufacture -- which is to say, for everything. Second, it represents a worse abuse of the public trust and purse than the stimulus and the bailouts put together. Waxman-Markey creates a permanent new regime in which environmental romanticism and corporate welfare are mixed together to form political poison. From comic bureaucratic power grabs . . . to the creation of new welfare programs for Democratic constituencies to, above all, massive giveaways for every financial, industrial, and political lobby imaginable, this bill would permanently deform American politics and economic life.

Were we not led to believe by Pesident Obama that lobbyists would have little influence during his time in office? *

"A fondness for power is implanted, in most men, and it is natural to abuse it, when acquired." --Alexander Hamilton

The following is a summary of the June 2009 issue of the St. Croix Review:

In "Hard Measures," Barry MacDonald considers whether the harsh measures the Bush administration used to interrogate the captured, elite al Qaeda worked and concludes that the methods succeeded.

In "Journalistic Cupidity," Herbert London documents a "consistently worshipful tone" the press has taken to President Obama; in "Human Rights and Free Speech," he reports that the Human Rights Council of the UN has voted in favor of a resolution to protect Islam from criticism; in "What's Good for the Goose Isn't Good for the Gander," he writes that it is time for Westerners to expect the same tolerance from Muslims that they demand from us; in "Atlas Ready to Shrug," he shows two events in which Obama has taken unconstitutional and unprecedented powers over the private sector; in "Post-Racial America?" he asks: Why should we be so obsessed with the President's race?

In "Reflections on Visiting a U.S. Military Cemetery Abroad: The /Uniqueness of America and the Dangers of Going to War Precipitously," Allan Brownfeld draws on American history to make the case for a careful foreign policy; in "Are There Any Limits on Rewarding Bad Behavior?" he shows how our free enterprise system depends on the chastening and educational effects of failure.

Mark Hendrickson, in "FDR: Then and Now," details the similarities between FDR's disastrous New Deal policies and Barack Obama's; in "The Ghost of John Maynard Keynes," he shows how the "defunct" British economist's free-spending theories are harming our economy; in "Into the Fiscal Abyss," he writes that U.S. Government's financial liabilities are $65 trillion. Instead of facing reality Obama proposes a huge increase in spending -- with no credible plan to pay for it; in "Anger at AIG," he writes that while AIG deserves blame for causing much of the economic crisis, politicians are just as blameworthy, and they are using bonus recipients as scapegoats.

Dan Miller, in "2009 International Conference on Climate Change," provides an overview of the events that took place in March 2009 at the conference dedicated to countering global warming alarmism.

Joseph L. Bast, in "Opening Remarks: 2009 International Conference on Climate Change," uses an opinion poll of scientists to show that there is no consensus supporting the need for drastic measures.

John H. Sununu, in "The Politics of Global Warming," compares today's alarmists with those of 1960s and 1970s and finds them using the same methods, even though the focus was different: earlier it was a looming ice age, depletion of natural resources, and mass starvation that caused hysteria. John Sununu gives a concise statement of what present science can and cannot determine about the climate; and he plots a course of action for how we should deal with the alarmists.

In "Climate Alarm: What We Are Up Against, and What to Do," Richard Lindzen shows how global warming alarmism has always been a political movement (it is well organized and powerful), but he is confident that the alarmists will be defeated because they are wrong.

Kesten Green, Scott Armstrong, and Willie Soon look at the faulty climate forecasts that warming alarmists rely on in "Climate Change Forecasts Are Useless for Policymaking."

In "Country Writing," Jigs Gardner writes about his and his wife's many years experience writing essays for practical and realistic magazines devoted to life in the country. But presently writing on the countryside has become ideological and childish, a consequence of left-wing fantasies.

In "The Political Economy of the Obama Administration," Murray Weidenbaum considers whether the huge stimulus bill passed in February will stimulate the economy, whether the Bush and Obama administrations have been effective in fixing the financial markets, and whether congressional regulators have fallen down on the job.

In "China's Calculated Currency," an installment of the "Geopolitical Diary," published by Stratfor Global Intelligence, the writer believes that the U.S. is in no danger of a massive sale by China of its holdings of U.S. T-bills, and that the dollar cannot be replaced as the global reserve currency.

Geopolitical Diary

The Geopolitical Diary is frequently published by Stratfor Global Intelligence. This article is republished with the permission of Stratfor, (http://www.stratfor.com).

One of the more popular conventional wisdoms is that the United States is in decline and that it is a simple matter to select options that will edge the United States out of its dominant position in the world. In an editorial published Tuesday [March 24], Chinese central bank governor Zhou Xiaochuan spoke to one of the more popular financial conspiracy theories in this vein when he wrote that the time had come to establish a new scrip to replace the U.S. dollar as the global reserve currency. The issue is close to Beijing's heart: The Chinese reserve fund is a significant holder of U.S. debt, with some $750 billion in U.S. T-bills.

China does not purchase U.S. debt out of choice, but out of a lack of choice. China is a state with serious social stability issues that are mitigated only by state intervention in the economic structure to maintain mass employment. Since there isn't much internal demand for the goods these employed masses produce -- due in part to a high savings rate and low incomes -- China must peddle its goods abroad. The U.S. consumer market, with annual sales of approximately $10 trillion, is roughly equivalent in bulk to the next six consumer markets combined. Sales to the United States and other countries hardwired into the American supply chain -- which includes the bulk of East Asia -- are the only reasonable option. And so the Chinese yuan has a de facto peg to the U.S. dollar.

That is hardly the extent to which the Chinese are bound to the dollar, however. Because China lacks the financial and industrial infrastructure needed to metabolize the massive revenues generated by exports, the income must be stored in some sort of non-Chinese asset. Outstanding U.S. T-bills currently total $11 trillion, which -- with the notable exception of Japanese government debt, which very few foreigners even touch -- is greater than the next five government debt issues combined, by a ratio of two to one. U.S. debt outsizes combined euro-denominated government debt by more than three to one.

Corporate debt isn't much of an option either, even though the combined global corporate debt market is sufficiently large to absorb China's currency reserves. Whenever an investor holds a substantial portion of any company's debt, market liquidity is constrained and trading dynamics are altered. The solution is a highly diversified -- and therefore actively managed -- portfolio. But the administrative cost of a trillion-dollar portfolio so diversified that it does not affect the value of any particular asset would be staggering. In contrast, U.S. government debt is a one-stop shop that requires -- at most -- minimal management.

That China's income is primarily in either dollars or dollar-linked currencies only strengthens the rationale for pouring surplus income into American assets in general, and U.S. government debt in particular. Plainly put, China cannot put its income anywhere else because there is no other option available. There have been some mild attempts to diversify, but a dearth of options means that "mild" is about as dynamic as a diversification program for China can get.

As to a world beyond the dollar, the issue is that a reserve currency is not decided upon; it creates itself. Two things are needed to create a reserve currency. First, there must be sufficient liquidity to support a global system. That requires a central bank with an enormous amount of autonomy from a state government, and the U.S. Federal Reserve is unparalleled on this count. Not even the European Central Bank can compete. Second, the economy upon which the currency is based must be large enough to withstand fluctuations caused by other economies buying and selling its assets in massive amounts. Again, the United States is the only economy that potentially could qualify.

Part and parcel of any replacement of the U.S. dollar would be a large-scale abandonment of U.S. T-bills as the core of Chinese currency reserves, which -- as the conventional wisdom holds -- would force intractable economic problems upon the United States. But a closer look reveals that this is not the case. First, selling U.S. T-bills en masse simply is not possible. Every seller requires a buyer, and the volumes at hand cannot be exchanged quickly. Second, starting down that road would cause the value of the securities in question to plummet, destroying the savings the Chinese have been building up for years. The so-called "nuclear option" really is not an option at all.

So why are the Chinese bringing this up in the first place? Beijing clearly has done the math already and knows that this idea -- even if it had broad support -- is a nonstarter. There are two reasons. First, officials in Beijing know that any direct confrontation -- whether military or financial -- with the United States would end in disaster for Chinese national interests. Therefore, they want to foster anything they can that would create an international structure to restrain American power; failing that, something that just gets people thinking in that direction will have to do. Second, China is more severely affected by the ongoing financial crisis than it would like the world to register. The Chinese need sustained international demand to maintain their export industries and, consequently, their high employment levels. Espousing rhetoric that makes it appear that you have more options than you do, while redirecting attention toward a foreign power, always plays well at home. *

"I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend . . . if you have one." -George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchill . . . followed by Churchill's response: "Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second . . . if there is one." --Winston Churchill

Murray Weidenbaum

Murray Weidenbaum is the Mallinckrodt Distinguished University Professor at Washington University in St. Louis and also honorary chairman of the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy.

In this unusual period of deep economic decline, it is helpful to begin with the positive factors first. The Obama Administration's economic stimulus program will succeed in spending an unprecedented amount of money. The federal deficit will reach an all-time high as will the public debt. The federal government will become more involved in the business of the private sector -- and of state and local governments -- than at any time since World War II. This unusual flurry of public sector activity, on balance, is likely to have a positive effect on the over-all level of the American economy in the short run, although not in the long run.

If you have the tenacity to go through the detailed section-by-section analysis of HR1, the American Recovery and Investment Act of 2009, you will find many attractive-sounding items in it. Aids to education, health, science, and technology, infrastructure, and the unemployed are all included along with many other items. Far more striking, however, is what seems to have been lacking in the preparation of that massive document -- any attempt to establish priorities among the host of disparate spending categories.

Although the legislation is popularly referred to as an economic stimulus program, it is useful to note that the Congressional Budget Office expects more of the money to be spent in 2011 and 2012 than in 2009. That is not surprising to anyone who has attempted to analyze the contents of HR1. Everything seems to be equally important -- establishing new long-term disease prevention programs as well as expanding direct aid to the unemployed, fundamentally restructuring the domestic production of energy and alleviating the current cash drain on states and localities, responding to the long-term trend of global warming and moving ahead on "shovel ready" construction projects. Although manufacturing has been the hardest hit part of the real economy, far more money is devoted directly to fisheries.

In the accompanying verbiage, much is made of the need to rebuild the infrastructure of the nation. Yet the list starts off with repair and maintenance funds for the Washington, DC headquarters buildings of the Department of Agriculture. There is no need to pick on USDA, just because it is listed first in alphabetical order. Repair and maintenance projects for many other government buildings in the nation's capital are included in the stimulus bill, although the Washington, DC area is not a place of especially high unemployment.

I will spare the audience any further recital of the supposed high priority projects in the administration's stimulus bill, although the temptation is strong. For example, it takes approximately 55 pages to spell out the detailed conditions for spending the money assigned to medical information technology.

So much of the wasted opportunity to use the $787 billion of the new law in a constructive manner arises from an unnoticed but key administrative decision made by the Obama White House. For reasons that are not particularly compelling, in an unusual burst of professional modesty they delegated the task of developing the specifics of the massive stimulus bill to the Congress. The responsibility wound up with the Committee on Appropriations of the House of Representatives.

Those of us who have had the opportunity to meet with the members of the committee quickly learn that this is a powerful and very knowledgeable group. They and their staffs really know a great deal about the individual programs that they fund. Because of the huge magnitude of the task, the primary work is done at the subcommittee level under the leadership of the subcommittee chair. To my knowledge, there is limited effort on the part of the committee as a whole to change the decisions made by any subcommittee, much less to do battle with a powerful subcommittee leader.

The result of this procedure is that little if any effort seems to have been made through the appropriations process to establish any priorities across the array of government spending programs. After all, if any member of the Commerce subcommittee were to seriously question the recommendations of the Agriculture subcommittee on farm outlays he or she would be exposed to ridicule if not retaliation.

At this late stage, the damage cannot be undone. However, the naivete of the current White House senior people needs to be acknowledged. They did have an alternative, which is what we did at the outset of the Reagan Administration. The President set up a mechanism within the White House to review the spending plans of the various departments. Our job was to recommend substantial changes in priorities, including reductions in specific spending programs. After detailed presidential review, our spending and tax recommendations were submitted to the Congress, where they were of course subject to detailed and tough review. But the starting point on Capitol Hill consisted of the specific recommendations of the new administration. The continuing talent available at the Office of Management and Budget, the Council of Economic Advisers, and other specialized agencies in the White House can be of great help in translating general priorities into specifics.

Thus, the downside of HR1 is that far less will be accomplished than the public expects from the recently enacted massive stimulus bill. It seems that the stimulus bill violates the administration's own mantra of "timely, targeted, and temporary." To put the matter bluntly, the American economy is in a ditch and much of the "stimulus" money is going to the equivalent of repainting the car with a more attractive color. Until the economy can be pulled out of that ditch, it is wishful thinking to expect that the nation will make significant progress on a very wide array of attractive long-term objectives, be they developing new energy sources, responding to the concerns about global warming, improving health care, or reforming the elementary and secondary education system.

The Congressional Budget Office has prepared some preliminary estimates of the spend-out rates of major items in the stimulus package. The results are clearly disappointing. For example, only one-fifth of the $4.7 billion appropriated for broadband technology will be spent in the first two years. The remaining four-fifths will be spent over the next five years. Likewise, less than one-fifth of the $12.5 billion allocated to distance learning, telemedicine, and related programs is expected to be expended by the end of fiscal 2010, it will take another five years to spend the remaining four-fifths of the money. Similarly, less than one-fifth of the $16.8 billion for energy efficiency and renewable energy is estimated to be spent in the first two years. It will take seven more years to spend the remaining four-fifths of the money. Somehow this reminds us of President Lincoln's description of one of his generals as having a bad case of "the slows."

The Congressional Budget Office reminded the Congress of some relevant fundamentals in its testimony to the House Budget Committee earlier this year: the economic effects of fiscal stimulus should occur during the period of economic weakness; programs that rely on new technologies will result in slower spending. CBO also warned that some of the most effective policies for providing short-term stimulus provide little aid to long-term economic growth, and vice versa. Unfortunately, the authors of the stimulus bill ignored this obvious advice.

However, we can forecast confidently that the stimulus bill will stimulate one specific industry -- the production of paperwork. The new law requires the federal departments and agencies receiving the money to send Congress detailed reports on their plans and specific expenditures. Supposedly, that will make up for the lack of public hearings on the details of the law or, alas more accurately, on the lack of detail on how the money will be spent. The mandated paperwork includes a breathtaking variety of monthly, quarterly, semi-annual, and annual reports -- plus a host of one-shot reports on the use of the funds.

Most of those reports are designated to be sent to the Appropriations Committees of the Senate and House of Representatives. What will the committees do with all that detail and trivia? Will the members or their staffs have the time to read the hundreds of boring financial reports scheduled to be sent to them each year that the money is available? Even if they only read a few of the agency reports, how and where will they store the information? Will the data and analysis be retrievable by private researchers or other parts of the government? Sadly, like so much of the substance of the stimulus bill, there is little indication of any effort to analyze the bits and pieces to see if they form a meaningful whole.

There is no need to be partisan on this score. The congressional Republicans should not escape serious criticism. After eight years of constantly achieving new record highs for pork barrel earmarks and other wasteful spending, they have limited credibility when they now belatedly raise concerns over economy and efficiency in government. That negative public attitude was also fostered by the unwillingness of the Republican president to veto any spending bill. In any event, the current minority in the Congress showed no more interest in the need to set priorities and make real choices in the stimulus bill than did the majority. Both parties unfortunately tended to support protectionist "Buy American" provisions which were watered down by White House intervention.

It is also disheartening to recall that, despite the campaign promises to eliminate the wasteful practice of budgetary earmarks, the first appropriation bill to be considered by the Congress-shortly after the enactment of the stimulus bill-contains almost 9,000 new earmarks costing in excess of $3.8 billion.

The necessary changes in financial policy have been erratic in both the Bush and Obama Administrations. In good measure, the limited remaining capacity to respond to a rapidly changing situation in financial markets is a legacy of the inadequacies of the previous administration. It was sad to learn that the initial bank bailout efforts were not used effectively. Apparently much of the funds went to bank holding companies rather than to operating banks. Thus, a large portion of the funds that Congress authorized were not available to encourage bank credit because they were used for different purposes at the holding company level, including acquiring other banks.

Recent experience reminds us that part of the difficulty in trying to develop new economic policies in an incoming administration is the increasing amount of time it takes for prospective new political appointees to pass all the hurdles that have been established to avoid the scandals of the past. Many of the requirements are quite sensible, but some are needlessly bureaucratic. For example, the White House asks for a complete list of the organizations the new appointee has spoken to over, say, the past 10 years, complete with the location and amount of honorarium received. But, subsequently, the Senate asks for the same information, except that the White House wants the date that each speech was given and the Senate the date the appointee got paid for the speech.

In the midst of working almost around the clock to help put together the incoming president's program, often the new appointees have to fly home, at their own expense, to meet the Senate's request. Of course, the two groups should agree on a single reporting requirement. And that's just one example!

Let us turn briefly to a topic that is likely to receive more attention later this year: increased regulation of financial institutions. A few caveats may be useful. Without begging the question, I would like to suggest that the initial response to learning of egregious and illegal financial practice is not to amend the law but to strengthen its enforcement. This point may seem too obvious to warrant repetition. Yet, the sad fact is that those who made this point after the Enron fiasco were ignored by the writers of the Sarbanes-Oxley accounting and financial reporting reforms.

Likewise, reformers should check carefully what is supposedly common knowledge. For example, it turns out that there was limited financial deregulation during the administration of George W. Bush. The most significant new law along these lines was signed by President William Clinton. Even that set of regulatory changes did not figure significantly in the financial debacle that has occurred. Existing regulators did fall down on the job as did the boards of directors of major financial institutions. To add insult to injury, some of the folks who are highly vocal in pushing for more regulation were responsible for some of the most serious shortcomings that occurred.

For example, the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the leadership of the Banking Committees urged Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to provide more mortgage credit to low-income homebuyers. ACORN, that supposed friend of the poor, was in the vanguard of those urging financial institutions to be more generous in providing credit to people of modest incomes -- who subsequently suffered when they defaulted on the mortgages they were unable to handle. As someone who grew up in rented housing, I can attest to the fact that there is nothing inherently sinful when people of limited financial means rent the homes they live in. Rather, they have more flexibility in responding to changing economic circumstances.

Hopefully, reform efforts to improve financial regulation will place high on the agenda the ultimate phase-out of the giant supposedly "privatized" government-sponsored enterprises. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac incurred huge liabilities that the federal government had to assume.

New regulatory requirements should focus on, or at least begin with, an emphasis on enhancing the reporting of information by the various institutions that participate in financial markets. This is especially relevant in the case of the "shadow" banks, notably hedge funds and pools of private equity. Better informed private decision-making can obviate the need for more intrusive and burdensome regulatory requirements. Surely, combining or at least coordinating the multiplicity of financial regulators would also be a constructive move.

Outlook

Without making any direct comparisons with the New Deal of the 1930s, it seems clear that the Obama economic program shifts the public/private balance toward the public side and, within the private sector, to the nonprofit portion. Surely, that balance has shifted repeatedly over the years both between and within administrations.

To cite one recent example, Ronald Reagan's presidency represented a shift to the private side of the relationship. Specific steps taken to achieve this result ranged from substantial tax cuts to establishing a regulatory review process that reduced the array of federal regulatory agencies. The policy pendulum is now swinging again.

The Obama Administration is starting off with a rapid expansion of the role of the public sector and the federal government specifically. Aside from the obvious expansion in government spending and credit programs, several individual actions help to set the tone. For example, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 specifically states that no funds can be used to provide assistance to students attending private elementary or secondary schools. The Rural Community Facilities Program is limited to governments, non-profit corporations, and federally-recognized Indian tribes. Although the Rural Business Program is geared to private business, the money will be available through "public bodies, not-for-profit organizations, and recognized Indian Tribal groups."

Grants to "Institutional Entities" for energy sustainability cover institutions of higher education, public school districts, local governments, and municipal utilities. Similarly, the Department of Energy's Institutional Loan Guarantee Program covers the same set of non-business organizations. Despite protestations to the contrary, these are not the actions of an administration friendly to the private enterprise system.

To sum up very quickly, conservatives have a special reason for wishing that the Obama economic stimulus program succeeds. If it does not, the likelihood of another and even larger public expenditure effort would become more likely. *

"He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends." --Oscar Wilde

Kesten C. Green, J. Scott Armstrong, and Willie Soon

Dr. Kesten Green is a Senior Research Fellow with the Business and Economic Forecasting Unit of Monash University in Australia. Dr. Scott Armstrong is a Professor at The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Willie Soon is a scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Even as we struggle with serious global financial and economic difficulties, some people believe man-made global warming is a real problem of urgent concern. Perhaps this is because, almost every day, media outlets quote "experts" who predict that soaring temperatures, rising sea levels, increasing storms, prolonged droughts, and other disasters, will result from human activity.

NASA scientist James Hansen claims "death trains" carrying coal are putting our planet "in peril." If we continue using hydrocarbon energy, he predicts, ". . . one ecological collapse will lead to another, in amplifying feedbacks." He further forecasts that only by eliminating coal-fired power plants and other sources of carbon dioxide can we prevent the collapse.

The situation recalls a 1974 CIA report that concluded there was "growing consensus among leading climatologists that the world is undergoing a cooling trend," one likely to cause a food production crisis. Dr. Hansen would probably appreciate the frustration those CIA experts must have felt when Congress ignored their forecasts and recommendations.

If it makes sense to enact measures to reduce CO2 emissions when experts forecast warming, then surely it also makes sense to emit extra CO2 when experts forecast cooling. Or perhaps not.

Perhaps any link between climate change and carbon dioxide is not so strong or important. Consider the historical record.

The tiny fraction of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increased through the 20th century. And yet, during that time, global average temperatures rose till about 1940, fell till about 1975, rose again till 1998, and then dropped away again. It is not surprising, then, that despite claims "the science is settled," thousands of scientists disagree with forecasts of dangerous manmade global warming.

History again provides useful guidance.

Back in 1860, scientists used observations and mathematical modeling to predict the existence of planet Vulcan in an orbit 13 million miles from the sun. More observations of the planet and extensive debate followed. Finally, the science was settled. The model was wrong. Planet Vulcan does not exist.

Climate change is a complex problem that has generated a similarly heated debate. Reliable data exist only for the last three decades, whereas climate changes occur over decades and centuries. Not surprisingly, there are rival theories.

What is the status of experts' forecasts in such a situation? Scientific forecasting research has shown that experts aren't able to provide accurate predictions in this kind of complex and uncertain situation. It doesn't matter whether experts present their forecasts as certain outcomes, detailed scenarios, expectations, likelihoods, or probabilities. Or that the forecasts are the product of hard thinking by many highly qualified experts, or even of mathematics or computer simulations. The expert forecasts are nonetheless worthless.

This lack of credible climate forecasts matters, because proposed policies -- including taxing carbon emissions and cap-and-trade regimes -- will increase energy prices, cause major wealth transfers, and cost jobs. It would be immoral to impose such punishing policies on the basis of dodgy forecasts.

Fortunately, proper forecasters know how to do better.

Global average temperatures vary up and down over short and long periods, without apparent pattern -- and our current knowledge about what causes temperature and other climate changes is speculative and incomplete. Thus, the first question a bona fide forecaster would ask is: Can we do better than assume future temperatures will be the same as current temperatures?

The forecasting model based on this assumption is called the "no-change" model, and studies have shown it is often difficult to beat. The model predicts that global average temperatures in each of the next 100 years will be the same as the previous year's temperature.

When this model is applied, starting in the year 1850, the differences between the forecasts and global temperature measurements turn out to be quite small. For example, for temperature forecasts for 20 years in the future, the average difference turns out to be 0.18C (0.32¡F). For forecasts for 50 years into the future, the average error was 0.24¡C (0.43¡F).

These are temperature differences that a normal human being would have trouble detecting and are well within the range of natural variation. The evidence clearly suggests that the no-change model is the obvious one for public policy makers to use.

Policymakers, however, have tended to defer to the projections of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Perhaps it isn't surprising that they should prefer projections that governments have paid billions for, over forecasts from a free and simple model. But how do the IPCC projections perform?

The IPCC first projected a global warming rate of 0.03¡C per year in 1992. The errors of the IPCC projection over the years 1992 to 2008 were little different from the errors from the no-change model, when compared to actual measured temperature changes. When the IPCC's warming rate is applied to a historical period of exponential CO2 growth, from 1851 to 1975, the errors are more than seven times greater than errors from the no-change model.

The models employed by James Hansen and the IPCC are not based on scientific forecasting principles. There is no empirical evidence that they provide long-term forecasts that are as accurate as forecasting that global average temperatures won't change. Hansen's, and the IPCC's, forecasts, and the recommendations based on them, should be ignored.

It would be irresponsible and immoral of policymakers to impose the heavy burden of costly anti-carbon-based energy policies in the absence of any credible evidence that those burdens will result in net benefits to man, beast, or tree. *

"He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary." --William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway)

Richard Lindzen

Richard Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, gave one of the keynote addresses Sunday, March 8, 2009, at the International Conference on Climate Change.

Global warming alarm has always been a political movement, and opposing it has always been an uphill battle.

In this talk I wish to point out some simple truths that are often forgotten by our side of this issue.

First, being skeptical about global warming does not, by itself, make one a good scientist; nor does endorsing global warming make one, per se, a poor scientist. Most of the atmospheric scientists whom I respect do endorse global warming. The important point, however, is that the science that they do that I respect is not about global warming. Endorsing global warming just makes their lives easier.

For example, my colleague, Kerry Emanuel, received relatively little recognition until he suggested that hurricanes might become stronger in a warmer world (a position that I think he has since backed away from somewhat). He then was inundated with professional recognition.

Another colleague, Carl Wunsch, professionally calls into question virtually all alarmist claims concerning sea level, ocean temperature, and ocean modeling, but assiduously avoids association with skeptics; if nothing else, he has several major oceanographic programs to worry about. Moreover, his politics are clearly liberal.

Perhaps the most interesting example is Wally Broecker, whose work clearly shows that sudden climate change occurs without anthropogenic influence! and is a property of cold rather than warm climates. However, he staunchly beats the drums for alarm and is richly rewarded for doing so.

For a much larger group of scientists, the fact that they can make ambiguous or even meaningless statements that can be spun by alarmists, and that the alarming spin leads politicians to increase funding, provides little incentive to complain about the spin.

Second, most arguments about global warming boil down to science versus authority. For much of the public, authority will generally win since they do not wish to deal with science. For a basically political movement, as the global warming issue most certainly is, an important task is to co-opt the sources of authority. This, the global warming movement has done with great success.

Thus, for over 20 years, the National Academy had a temporary nominating group designed to facilitate the election of environmental activists. The current president of the academy is one of these. The American Association for the Advancement of Science has been headed by James McCarthy and John Holdren in recent years, and these have been public advocates for global warming alarm. Holdren is now President Barack Obama's science advisor.

There are numerous further examples. How often have we heard a legitimate scientific argument answered by the claim that the alarmist scenario is endorsed by, for example, the American Physical Society (regardless of their lack of expertise in the issue)? How often have you heard innocuous claims by some society or another taken as endorsements of alarm? How often have you heard that any particular argument has been dealt with by realclimate.org (a clear advocacy Web site designed to assure warming alarmists that the basis for alarm still exists)?

Third, the success with respect to the second item also gives the climate alarm movement control over carrots and sticks -- which, in turn, is what makes it convenient for most scientists to go along. Note that the carrots are as important as the sticks.

Thus, for example, John Holdren was long on the board of the MacArthur Foundation, which has awarded "genius" grants to numerous environmental activists. Ironically, an award allegedly honoring the late Bill Nierenberg, a very perceptive and active skeptic of climate alarm, is now given annually to an alarmist.

One could go on at great length.

The process of co-opting science on behalf of a political movement has had an extraordinarily corrupting influence on science -- especially since the issue has been a major motivation for funding. Most funding for climate would not be there without this issue. And, it should be added, most science funded under the rubric of climate does not actually deal with climate, but rather with the alleged impact of arbitrarily assumed climate change.

All impacts depend on regional forecasts, and quoting the leading scientist at the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (widely regarded as the foremost atmospheric modeling center), Tim Palmer, such forecasts are no better than guesses. Nonetheless, regional forecasts are at the heart of numerous state initiatives to "fight" climate change. These initiatives are usually prepared by the Center for Climate Strategies (CCS), a Pennsylvania-based environmental advocacy group that purports to help states determine for themselves how to develop climate change policies.

In reality, according to Paul Chesser of the John Locke Foundation, CCS tightly controls these commissions, who consider proposals mostly from a menu of options presented by CCS themselves. Nearly all the choices represent new taxes or higher prices on energy, increased costs of government, new regulations for businesses, and reduced energy-producing options for utilities, and therefore consumers. CCS is funded largely by a multi-million-dollar global warming alarmist foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

What can be done?

The most obvious point is to persevere, to better understand the science, and to emphasize logic, which ultimately has to trump alleged authority. Generally, there is a deep disconnect between consensus statements that commonly only repeat the trivial points that there has been some warming and that man's emissions have caused some part of this, and the claims of catastrophe made by advocates; stress these differences.

With respect to better understanding the science, it is my view that the observations of almost a decade ago that outgoing long-wave radiation associated with warmer surface temperatures was much greater than models predicted; this was as good evidence that model sensitivities were much too high as one could hope for. However, without an adequate understanding of the physics, the point is largely missed. How can one communicate this to the public? Actually, the science isn't all that hard.

John Sununu offered an easily appreciated example of positive and negative feedback. In your car, the gas and brake pedals act as negative feedbacks to reduce speed when you are going too fast and increase it when you are going too slow. If someone were to reverse the position of the pedals without informing you, then they would act as positive feedbacks: increasing your speed when you are going too fast, and slowing you down when you are going too slow.

Stress that alarming predictions depend critically on the fact that models have large positive feedbacks. The crucial question is whether nature actually behaves this way? The answer is unambiguously no.

In the common (though admittedly somewhat inaccurate) picture of the greenhouse effect, greenhouse substances (mainly thin high clouds and water vapor, but also CO2, methane, freons, etc.) act as a blanket, inhibiting the emission of infrared (heat) radiation. We know that in the absence of feedbacks (in which water vapor and clouds allegedly act to amplify the effect of added CO2), an increase in temperature will lead to a certain increase in this heat radiation (also known as outgoing long-wave radiation, OLR). With positive feedbacks, this amount of radiation will be reduced (in terms of the "blanket" imagery, the blanket has gotten thicker). Current models do, indeed, predict this. We also know that the 1990s temperature was warmer than in the 1980s.

During this period, satellites were measuring the emitted heat radiation. What at least four groups all confirmed was that emitted heat radiation during the 1990s was not only much greater than what models predicted, but also greater than what would have been expected if there were no feedback at all.

This implies that nature is, as any reasonable person might suppose, dominated by stabilizing negative feedbacks rather than destabilizing positive feedbacks. It has been noted that the climate in models is an example of unintelligent design -- something modelers are far more capable of than is nature.

Getting people (including many scientists) to understand this is crucial. Once it is understood, the silliness of the whole issue becomes evident -- though those who are committed to warming alarm as the vehicle for a postmodern coup d'etat will obviously try to obfuscate matters.

As important as the above is, it does not eliminate the possible need for more institutional approaches. These are limited by the minimal resources available to rectify the present situation. Indeed, given the minimal resources available to those who are truly interested in how climate actually works, and the immense resources and power of the environmental movement, it is astounding that resistance has been as effective as it has been. That said, one should not underestimate the impressive degree of organization behind the climate alarm movement.

Notable, in this regard, has been the Climate Action Network that has coordinated the activities of hundreds of environmental NGOs (non-governmental organizations) since 1989.

However, should some benefactor create a climate institute that could recruit outstanding scientists, regardless of their position on global warming, and provide the resources for truly independent research protected from political manipulation, then it is possible that the corrupt state of the science could, in time, be rectified. So far, however, this would appear to be a pipe dream.

A possibly more practical undertaking would be to undermine the authority of scientific organizations wherein a few activist members have managed to speak for the entire membership.

A major campaign is needed to get thousands of scientists to resign from professional societies that have taken unrepresentative stands on the warming issue, while making the reason for the resignation unambiguous and public. This would, in my opinion, be far more effective than simply collecting thousands of signatures for petitions.

The global warming issue has done much to set back climate science. In particular, the notion that climate is one-dimensional -- which is to say, that it is totally described by some fictitious global mean temperature and some single gross forcing a la increased CO2 -- is grotesque in its oversimplification. I must reluctantly add that this error is perpetuated by those attempting to "explain" climate with solar variability. Unlike greenhouse forcing, solar forcing is so vague that one can't reject it.

However, acting as though this is the alternative to greenhouse forcing is asking for trouble.

Remember, we are dealing with a small amount of warming (concentrated in two relatively brief episodes) in an inadequately observed system. The proper null hypothesis is that there was no need whatsoever for external forcing in order to produce such behavior. The unsteady and even turbulent motions of the ocean and atmosphere are forever moving heat from one place to another on time scales from days to centuries and, in doing so, they leave the system out of equilibrium with the sun leading to fluctuations in temperature.

The thought that these turbulent fluctuations demand specific causes is absurd -- almost as absurd as calling for specific causes for each whirl in a bubbling brook.

Finally, I would suggest that however grim things may appear, we will eventually win against anthropogenic global warming alarm simply because we are right and they are wrong.

There are many reasons for being confident of this. However, we have just gone over one of the most important scientific reasons. The satellite records of outgoing heat radiation show that the climate is dominated by negative feedbacks and that the response to doubled and even quadrupled CO2 would be minimal. In a field as primitive as climate science, most of the alleged climate scientists are not even aware of this basic relation. And these days, one can be confident that once they are, many will, in fact, try to alter the data. Under the circumstances, it is not surprising that the public is not likely to understand this as well.

On the other hand, the fact that the global mean temperature anomaly has not increased statistically significantly since at least 1995, does not actually disprove anthropogenic global warming, but for the public this fact is likely to be crucial.

For some of us, this is an occasional source of frustration, but one must always remember that this is a political rather than a scientific issue, and in a political issue, public perception is important.

Moreover, the temperature record does demonstrate at least one crucial point, namely, that natural climate variability remains sufficiently large to preclude the identification of climate change with anthropogenic forcing. As the IPCC AR4 (the Working Group I Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) noted, the attribution claim, however questionable, was contingent on the assumption that models had adequately handled this natural internal variability.

The temperature record of the past 14 years clearly shows that this assumption was wrong. To be sure, this period constitutes a warm period in the instrumental record, and, as a result, many of the years will be among the warmest in the record, but this does nothing to mitigate the model failure to show continued warming. To claim otherwise betrays either gross ignorance or grosser dishonesty.

When it comes to global warming hysteria, neither has been in short supply. *

"I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure." --Clarence Darrow

We would like to thank the following people for their generous support for this journal (from 3/13/09 -- 5/4/09): Michael A. Alaimo, John D. Alt, George E. Andrews, Ariel, Lee R. Ashmun, Gordon S. Auchincloss, A. D. Baggerley, David D. Barbee, Paul A. Barber, Lillian Barbey, Nephi Barlow, Bud & Carol Belz, Charles Benscheidt, Veronica A. Binzley, Thomas A. Blair, Charles L. Blilie, Peter H. Block, C. W. Borklund, Robert E. Boyar, Linda Boyles, Mitzi A. Brown, Patrick J. Buchanan, Priscilla L. Buckley, Price B. Burgess, Terry Cahill, William C. Campion, Dino Casali, Mark T. Cenac, Cliff Chambers, Jim Cruit, John D'Aloia, Dianne C. DeBoest, Michael D. Detmer, Joseph R. Devitto, Jeanne L. Dipaola, Robert M. Ducey, Granville Dutton, Don Dyslin, Ronald E. Everett, Nicholas Falco, Reuben M. Freitas, John B. Gardner, Robert W. Garhwait, Robert Gates, Jane F. Gelderman, Gillis W. Gerleman, Gary D. Gillespie, Lee E. Goewey, Bob & Nancy Goodman, Hollis J. Griffin, Joyce Griffin, James E. Hartman, Winchell T. Hayward, Norman G. P. Helgeson, William & Barbara Hilgedick, John A. Howard, David Ihle, Joseph M. Irvin, O Walter Johnson, Louise H. Jones, Edgar Jordan, Fredric R. Joseph, Ken E. Kampfe, Margaret Kearney, Martin Kellogg, William H. Kelly, Robert L. Kemper, Frank G. Kenski, Gloria Knoblauch, Charles B. Koehler, Mary S. Kohler, Thomas F. Kordonowy, Melvin Kriesel, Bryon J. Kuntz, Reuben A. Larson, Herbert London, William H. Lupton, Francis P. Markoe, Howard S. Martin, Arthur J. May, Eugene F. Meenagh, Woodbridge C. Metcalf, Henry M. Mitchell, John Nickolaus, David Norris, King Odell, Michas M. Ohnstad, Harold Olson, Harold B. Owens, Clark Palmer, Nancy J. Parise, Gary Phillips, Bernard L. Poppert, Melvin J. Ptacek, David Renkert, Shirley W. Roe, Steven B. Roorda, Kathie Ross, Herbert C. Schneider, Richard P. Schonland, Harry Richard Schumache, Alvin I. Shane, Gordon A. Shearer, L. Sideris, Joseph M. Simonet, Ben T. Slade, Thomas W. Smoot, John R. Stevens, Carl G. Stevenson, Norman Stewart, Clifford W. Stone, Dennis Sullivan, Kenneth R. Thelen, Paul B. Thompson, Robert M. Thornton, Elizabeth E. Torrance, Jack E. Turner, Alan Rufus Waters, Eugene & Diane Watson, Gaylord T. Willett, Max L. Williamson, Eric B. Wilson, Lee Wishing, Piers Woodriff, W. Worman, William. P. Wortman, James P. Zaluba.

John H. Sununu

John H. Sununu is president of JHS Associates, Ltd. He was chief of staff to the President George H. W. Bush. In 2004 he co-chaired the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board, Nuclear Energy Task Force.

We have gathered here to bring some reality and sound science into the ongoing global debate on climate change and global warming. I certainly am pleased to join this very distinguished assembly of experts who have come here to confirm that the "debate on the science is not over."

Another Rush to Judgment

This is a very significant event because it will give focus to the false underpinnings of the current international "rush to judgment" and the calls for implementation of drastic policies to deal with this rashly proclaimed "crisis." My message today is to make sure we recognize that no matter how effectively we deal with exposing the errors and games behind that agenda, we need to know the battle will never end, because it's not really about global warming.

The global warming crisis is just the latest surrogate for an over-arching agenda of anti-growth and anti-development. This agenda grew and gathered support in the years following World War II.

One of the first issues to be celebrated as a crisis by these reformers was over-population. That fad peaked in the 1960s and early 1970s. The bible of that cult, The Population Bomb, argued that ". . . the battle to feed all of humanity is over" and claimed we had lost the battle, claiming ". . . in the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death."

This clearly phony crisis was followed by warnings about global climate change: Global cooling was going to lead to a new ice age.

But the best parallel to the current crusade, the real precursor to the current "panic du jour," was the computer model-based alarmism of the "Club of Rome." The Club of Rome's claim that global economic collapse was imminent because the world would soon "run out" of some critical resources was a very appropriate precursor to the current dire warnings. It too based its alarms not on any scientific analysis of specific issues, but on a computer model. And like the current call to action, their model was predestined to give the result they wanted.

The criticism of the "Club of Rome" models by Resources For the Future clearly applies to the Global Climate Models' predictions of doom. RFF pointed out that parameters with a negative impact were programmed to grow nonlinearly (exponentially, in fact) and parameters that mitigated negative effects were programmed to grow, if at all, "only in discrete increments."

In each of these false alarms, nature and technology spiked their prophecies. The natural cooling period of the 1950s and 1960s turned into the warming period of the 1980s and 1990s, and with the help of increased CO2, a plant nutrient, instead of mass starvation, we had no problem growing enough food for the rapidly increasing world population, and we continue to find and make more efficient use of our other critical resources.

But the anti-growth, anti-development crowd is a hardy bunch. They won't give up. As nature switched from global cooling to global warming, so did they.

It is quite easy to link virtually all of the principal proponents of this overall agenda through a two- or three-generation mentor-apprentice-mentor professional family tree. I don't want to go through a specific list of names. That has all been well researched and reported by many of you here. But it is important to understand that without this process of resonating self-acclamation, such bad science and ludicrous predictions would long ago have relegated them all to obscurity.

Make no mistake, their cast of characters may have expanded a bit, but at the core, there is an unbroken lineage back to those unbelievably wrong, unscientific prognosticators.

Their basic method of attack may be the same, but they have certainly refilled their operations. They learned from the "Club of Rome" episode. Since basic hard science is more difficult to bias, they would resort again to modeling. And since critics will take the time to examine their assumptions, they make the models big, obscure, and full of complex feedback structures much too abstract to debate in a public forum.

That all brings us to what has happened in the last 20 years, and where we are today. It is worthwhile reviewing what has gone on over the past two decades to give perspective and context to what is taking place today.

Some Basic Facts

Let's begin by summarizing what we did know then and what we do know now. In fact, we don't know as much as the media and the public have been led to think we know.

Here is what we could include in an absolute fact base:

* Over long periods of time climate changes.

* Over short periods of time weather changes.

* There have been relatively long periods of time when the world has been colder than it is now.

* There have been relatively long periods of time when the world has been warmer than it is now.

* CO2 is a trace gas whose presence in the atmosphere can contribute to an increase in the absorption of thermal radiation.

* The increased use of carbon-based fuels has produced significant increases in the amount of CO2 released to the atmosphere, though still dwarfed by natural sources.

Also, there have been a number of identifiable periods of temperature variability over the past century:

Cooling in the 1920s; heating in the 1930s and 1940s; cooling in the 1950s and 1960s and 1970s; warming in the 1980s and 1990s; and cooling for the past decade.

It was the warming period of the late 1980s and 1990s that provided the context and the opportunity for the alarmists to argue that once again we faced a serious calamity.

Climate Change and Public Policy

My own involvement with global climate change began in 1989 when I was serving as Chief of Staff in the White House for the first President Bush. The year before had seen the staged testimony before the Congressional Committee that launched into the public consciousness a fear of global warming.

In 1989 the pressure for drastic policy changes to respond to the crisis began. Since some of those changes had a budget impact, Dick Darman, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, came to my office to discuss the issues. We both met with Allan Bromley, the President's Science Advisor, and we agreed to let some of the leading advocates come in and discuss the science and the models behind their concern.

In 1989/1990 the Global Climate Models were being run on computers very much less powerful than those now available. Models were relatively primitive. They had virtually no inclusion of ocean/atmospheric interactions. When the alarmists came to see Allan Bromley and me, I asked how they could believe results if they were modeling climate without including, in any effective way, the ocean/air heat and mass transfer. That shortcoming was required of the models because of time step limitations imposed by the model elements and characteristics.

They tried to argue the ocean wasn't that significant because the culprit was airborne CO2. I pointed out that the top couple of meters of the ocean had a thermal capacity greater than the entire atmosphere, and that the top 100 meters of ocean were generally well mixed and that the heat and mass transfer coupling at the interface was truly significant. All this meant the air/ocean interactions were a major driver of reality. When I suggested they could confirm the critical significance of the ocean in a one-dimensional model, they suggested we didn't understand how complex the issue was. They were still determined to use their faulty models to influence policy. Only in recent years have they been able to begin to model the significant ocean contributions within the models. But they are still far from being able to handle the reality of nature.

Our response to their call for policy change in 1989 was to point out that their models should be supported by good science, and that in order to get good science, we would provide a very substantial increase in funding for global climate research. I believe we raised it from a couple of hundred million dollars to what was then considered a huge level of funding: $1.5 billion. We believed that level would support some serious research to clarify all perspectives of climate change.

Over the years, the anti-growth lobby has used the global warming issue very effectively. They have received even more significant levels of funding. One estimate puts the U.S. contribution to climate research today at $10 billion per year and climbing. Unfortunately, the alarmists have effectively captured the funding allocation process.

An important question to ask now is: What have we gotten for that investment? In my opinion, surprisingly little. Of course, the computing capacity has been increased, and the models have become bigger and more complex, and they have been able to include better detail in some of the air-ocean interactions, but they still are a long way from modeling detailed phenomena very well. And of course, many of the most critical phenomena are still represented in the computer models by an assumed interaction or feedback process. And thus, the models are still susceptible to the same predestination of results as was the "Club of Rome" model.

Some Elements of the Science

This presentation is not intended to go into any of the technical details of modeling, or of the science of climate. However, there are a couple of aspects of those technical details which should, in broad general terms, be understood by those responsible for policy. These issues, in fact, are where we must be diligent in clarifying the science and separating fact from myth.

One of these issues is feedback. Feedback in climate systems is a regulating mechanism within the climate system that dampens or enhances fluctuations, most particularly fluctuations in temperature. If, for example, a climate change that is produced by a slight increase in temperature will itself further increase the temperature, that is positive feedback. But if that temperature increase-induced change will tend to reduce the increase, that is negative feedback.

One visualization of the difference between positive and negative feedback is to consider what happens to us when we take a shower. If the water temperature is exactly what we want and doesn't change, feedback has no impact. But suppose the temperature drifts up a bit, gets hotter. We reach over, and either turn the cold up a bit, or the hot down a bit until we return to our ideal temperature. That is how negative feedback stabilizes a system.

However, consider our shower with the faucets incorrectly marked, the cold faucet marked hot and the hot marked cold. When the temperature drifts hot, we may turn higher the faucet marked cold. But this is really the hot faucet, and so the flow gets ever hotter. If we try to correct temperature by turning down the faucet marked hot (when actually this is the cold line) the water again gets hotter. The more feedback response there is, the hotter and hotter the flow gets. This is positive feedback.

If computer models represent critical phenomena in such a way that the feedback is always positive, it is inevitable that with increasing CO2 the result will be excessive heating.

There is just now beginning to be some closer examination of a number of the feedback phenomena critical to the model results such as cloud-climate feedbacks. Furthermore, we are beginning to recognize that some possibly significant phenomena with strong stabilizing negative feedback have been left out of the models. One potentially extremely important such effect is the iris effect being studied by Dr. Richard Lindzen at MIT.

Another critical issue which deserves more serious, dispassionate study is the basic carbon exchange cycle, which determines how much CO2 remains in the atmosphere. We need better science to determine which phenomena actually establish CO2 concentration at any given time. It is virtually accepted as given that a fixed fraction of anthropogenic CO2 remains in the air, even though the initial emissions and remaining CO2 are both extremely small fractions of much larger natural CO2 fluxes. This basic assumption makes inevitable the conclusion that CO2 produced by man-made processes is responsible for the "great disaster of global warming."

Paradoxically, and very important to this concept of CO2 driving temperature, there is also a well-accepted data-set of global temperature and CO2 concentrations for the past 400,000 years which shows it is temperature driving an increase in CO2 and not CO2 driving temperature. It is interesting to note how this contrasting set of data is finessed in the alarmist rationalization of the world. In essence, they dismiss it with a self-serving phrase: While carbon dioxide may have acted as a feedback in the past, it is acting as a forcing in the current climate." No science, just rhetoric.

I have dwelt a bit on these two technical details because I feel that they are among the least effectively understood issues that deserve better scientific study and a better share of the climate research budget for real, unbiased scientific examination, analysis, and data collection. They are important because they are the critical assumptions that virtually predestine the doom and gloom.

Return to Policy

But let me get back to the policy debate. In one of the only times he has ever said anything that was right, Al Gore recently told the American Association for the Advancement of Science "We have a full-blown political struggle to communicate the truth." His only problem is that his version of science is more political than true.

As noted earlier, the alarmists have learned well from the past. They saw what motivates policy makers is not necessarily just hard science, but a well-orchestrated symphony of effort. Their approach is calculated and deliberate. Remember the quote from one of the most outspoken alarmists, "We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements, and make little mention of the doubts we have."

They have used that strategy to execute an orchestrated agenda over the last two decades:

* Announce a disaster.

* Cherry pick some results.

* Back it up with computer modeling.

* Proclaim a consensus.

* Stifle the opposition.

* Take over the process and control the funding.

* Roll the policy makers.

In the past, when they tried some of this on population explosion and global starvation, or global cooling, or their Malthusian vision of a world running out of resources, they were thwarted by nature and technology. Over time, we are confident that nature will thwart them again. Their computer model generated output may give them the result they want for press releases, but nature is not impressed.

Nature will eventually do what nature has always done. It will respond in a self-stabilizing manner over the long term with moderate variability over multi-decade periods and with occasional significant variability over the short term.

But waiting for "eventually" to prove the alarmists wrong is not the wisest course of action. Unfullfillable ambitions to stifle growth will devastate a world trying to deal with the complexities of economics, stability, and the environment. Quality of life depends on access to energy. Noble intentions about "CO2-free" sources of energy are not sufficient, if their agenda of eliminating coal as a source, and turning their back on nuclear, are allowed to be part of our near-term policies.

The Challenge Ahead

So what is our challenge? What agenda do we define for ourselves if we are to avert a policy disaster?

We need to recognize that for at least most of the next decade the real battle will be to win over public opinion and influence the policy makers. Unfortunately, standing between us and the public most of the time is the media. And the press seems to have bought the alarmist line, hook and sinker. They thrive on reinforcing the alarms.

I am often asked about the press. The question is usually something like "Is the press biased or ignorant?" My answer is: Yes they are.

We have to try to deal with a long-term education process and a long-term lobbying process.

And we have to keep working to make the science right and restore integrity to the data-gathering process. This concern about data is very significant. It is critical that there be real consistency and validity in the observed data which define the state of climate, and changes in the state of climate.

We are all aware of the games played with the data producing the infamous "hockey stick" plot of temperatures. We also know how many of you here worked hard with good, persistent forensics and analysis to force the correction of the misrepresentation that had been a showpiece in the early IPCC reports. That kind of diligent effort and good science is a good example of how we must continue to deal with specific issues.

The world-wide data collection network is also far from world-class. There has been a lot written about the far-from-ideal locations here in the U.S., and how the large loss of stations in recent years makes comparisons across time questionable.

The best approach to assure honest consideration of reality in developing policy alternatives would be to establish standards for siting, and establish equipment and procedural standards for collection, processing, and dissemination. This is the only way to affirm data quality and reliability.

But most critically, in order for the science to be right, there has to be broader, less-restrictive distribution of research funds. In a sense there has to be a "Fairness Doctrine" applied to the funding of research and to the journal review and publishing of papers. We have all seen and heard of the success the alarmists have had in taking control of who gets funding, who gets published, who gets acclaimed, and who gets demonized. We have started to address this perversion of process, and have begun to overcome some of the obstacles. And with nature affirming our belief, and confirming our science, we will continue to make headway.

And, most important, we must work hard to communicate on these issues in terms that can be understood by non-technical individuals. We must remember we are trying to educate the public and policy makers.

It won't be easy. Nothing worthwhile is ever easy. But it is certainly worthwhile to restore honest science, valid science, and good data as the basis for good public policy. Climate changes, but good science can explain it. That is our mission. *

"I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it." --Groucho Marx

Joseph L. Bast

Joseph L. Bast is president of The Heartland Institute.

Good evening, and welcome to the 2009 International Conference on Climate Change. I am Joseph Bast, president of The Heartland Institute, and it is my pleasure to serve as your host tonight and for the next two days.

Approximately 700 people have registered for this event, nearly twice as many as attended last year's conference. We are delighted to demonstrate once again the breadth and high quality of support that the "skeptical" perspective on climate change enjoys.

Speakers at this conference will address questions that go to the very heart of the global warming debate:

* Does the plateau in global temperatures during the past eight years contradict computer model predictions?

* Do proxy records of ancient climates contradict how computer models characterize the role of carbon dioxide in climate change?

* Does the modern warming have the "fingerprint" of having been caused by greenhouse gases?

* Is there a case for governments to legislate reductions in greenhouse gas emissions?

Eight of the world's most distinguished economists certainly don't think so: They ranked emission reductions dead last among 30 ways to spend $75 billion to solve the world's most pressing problems.

The Copenhagen Consensus demonstrates how climate change is not only a scientific issue, but also an economic and political issue.

It is the enormous cost of reducing greenhouse gas emissions that compelled Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist George Will to write that global warming legislation "could cause in this century more preventable death and suffering than was caused in the last century by Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot combined."

Global warming legislation also poses a threat to our civil and economic liberties, leading Charles Krauthammer -- another Pulitzer Prize winner -- to warn that "other than rationing food, there is no greater instrument of social control than rationing energy."

Some of the left's leading spokespersons also have expressed concern over global warming. Alexander Cockburn wrote in The Nation:

. . . vast amounts of money will be uselessly spent on programs that won't work against an enemy that doesn't exist. Meanwhile, real and curable environmental perils are scanted or ignored. Hysteria rules the day, drowning really useful environmental initiatives.

If the scientific community were convinced that we could reliably forecast future climates, or that the consequences of some warming would be catastrophic, then perhaps no price would be too high to pay to save the Earth. But that is not what the scientific community is telling us. According to the most recent international poll of climate scientists:

* Most climate scientists believe global warming "is a process already underway."

* But that "consensus" drops to below 60 percent when climate scientists are asked if "climate change is mostly the result of anthropogenic causes."

* Sixty-five percent of climate scientists do not believe "climate models can accurately predict climate conditions in the future."

* Sixty-eight percent do not believe "the current state of scientific knowledge is able to provide reasonable predictions of climatic variability on time scales of ten years."

* Seventy-thee percent do not believe it is possible to predict climate "on time scales of 100 years."

* About 70 percent of climate scientists think "climate change might have some positive effects for some societies."

* Finally, on the question that might matter the most, climate scientists are perfectly split over the question of whether they know enough about global warming to turn it over to policymakers to take action, with 44 percent saying we do and 46 percent saying we do not.

This extensive disagreement within the scientific community is not reflected in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Why is that? Maybe because, to quote Alexander Cockburn again:

The IPCC has the usual army of functionaries and grant farmers, and the merest sprinkling of actual scientists with the prime qualification of being climatologists or atmospheric physicists.

Indeed, it was recently acknowledged that 80 percent of the contributors to the latest IPCC report are not climate scientists at all.

Dr. Fred Singer, one of the many distinguished scientists with us here tonight, asks in the preface to the upcoming report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change:

Why have the IPCC reports been marred by controversy and so frequently contradicted by subsequent research? Certainly its agenda to find evidence of a human role in climate change is a major reason; its organization as a government entity beholden to political agendas is another major reason; and the large professional and financial rewards that go to scientists and bureaucrats who are willing to bend scientific facts to match those agendas is yet a third major reason.

And what of scientists who dissent from the IPCC's claimed "consensus"? They are branded "deniers," accused of being tools of the fossil fuel industry, over-the-hill, or ideological extremists. This is in spite of evidence, reason, and common sense that all should tell us that it is the skeptics, not the true believers, who are more likely to discover and publicly discuss the true science and economics of climate change.

The 80 scientists, economists, and policy experts speaking at this conference have no shared agenda and no institutional interest in inflating the risks of climate change, and they bow to no government over-seers. They come from 14 countries and 28 universities. They speak out against what the IPCC and many in government and the media claim to be a consensus because their own independent research suggests otherwise.

We respectfully ask for the attention of the world's policymakers and opinion leaders to these distinguished and brave individuals, that they might consider the real science and economics of climate change before embracing costly and probably unnecessary legislation.

I would like to extend my thanks to the 59 other organizations that acted as cosponsors of this event. They are listed in your program and will be displayed on these screens during dinner. I also thank the individuals and foundations whose gifts made this year's conference possible. As was the case last year, no corporate funding was used to support this conference.

Following dinner we will be addressed by two truly remarkable individuals, President Vaclav Klaus of the Czech Republic, and Dr. Richard Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. *

"I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it." --Mark Twain

President Obama demonstrates ignorance of basic economics when he proposes spending billions of dollars to stimulate the economy. Although not an economist, Albert Jay Nock in less than three pages of his Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (1943) clears up the confusion about money in plain man's language.

Nock wrote that the only time he was a millionaire was when he spent a few weeks in Germany in 1923. When he crossed from Amsterdam to Berlin he had $1,250,000 in German money. Ten years earlier he could have bought out a town. But in 1923 his best hope was that it might cover a decent meal and a night's lodging. This, he wrote, should show that "money is worth only what it will buy."

Nock insisted that money "does not pay for anything, never has, never will." Goods and services can be paid for only with goods and services.

Another strange notion is that the state has money of its own. It does not. "Its existence is purely parasitic, maintained by taxation."

Increasing the supply of money -- by running the printing presses overtime or more sophisticated measures brings inflation that destroys the value of money and leads to chaos.

The sum of Nock's observations was that money has been largely diverted from its function as a mere convenience, a medium of exchange, a sort of claim-check on production, and has been skillfully changed into an instrument of political power. The inevitable consequences are easily foreseen but the jobholder dares not look beyond the moment. All the concern he dares have with the future is summed up in the saying, apres moi le deluge.

--Robert M. Thornton

Albert Jay Nock books are available from The Nockian Society, 42 Leathers Road, Fort Mitchell, KY 41017. Tel. No. 859-341-4841.

Dan Miller

Dan Miller is the publisher of the Heartland Institute. The Heartland Institute is a Chicago-based think tank promoting pubic policy on Individual Liberty. This article, and the following four articles, are republished with permission of the Heartland Institute. The International Conference on Climate Change was held in New York City, NY, in early March 2009.

Former Vice President Al Gore, the most prominent proponent of global warming alarmism, was the target of biting humor and ridicule Monday at the second International Conference on Climate Change.

U.S. Congressman Tom McClintock (R-CA) and scientist Arthur Robinson, who has assembled a list of more than 31,000 U.S. scientists skeptical of global warming alarmism, in separate speeches ripped what they saw as Gore's hypocrisy in urging energy conservation while expanding his own carbon footprint, and with inconsistencies in Gore's popular movie An Inconvenient Truth.

The conference, produced by The Heartland Institute and 60 co-sponsors, attracted about 700 scientists, economists, and policy experts to confront the issue, "Global Warming: Was it ever really a crisis?"

McClintock joked he was the first to discover global warming during a grade school trip to a natural history museum, where he deduced dinosaurs were destroyed by warming temperatures. Unfortunately, he said, Miss Conroy, his elementary school teacher, failed to nominate him for a Nobel Prize:

. . . so instead of jetting around the world in a fleet of Gulfstream Fives to tell people they need to feel guilty about driving to work, I have to take the subway. And I don't get paid $100,000 a speech for my original discovery. But then again, I don't have Al Gore's electricity bills either, so I guess it all balances out.

The congressman also noted that James Hansen, the notorious NASA astronomer who has urged that global warming skeptics face a Nuremberg-style trial for crimes against humanity, in 1971 warned of a coming deadly ice age, but lately has made front-page news by warning of a deadly global warming.

Robinson, who heads the independent Oregon Institute of Science & Medicine, dissected An Inconvenient Truth by noting contradictions, much to the delight of the audience.

For instance, he noted Gore produced a chart he said showed computer models that had predicted a sharp rise in global temperatures years before computers capable of such projections existed. Another Gore graphic warned of species becoming extinct, and illustrated the point with wooly mammoths and other species that disappeared eons ago. Robinson ridiculed Gore's contention that Pacific Ocean islanders evacuated their land for New Zealand as ocean levels rose 3 inches.

Robinson defended his oft-cited list of 31,478 scientists who have proclaimed their skepticism of dangerous global warming. The list has been criticized for containing the names of many non-climate scientists. But Robinson said the ranks of sound-science climatologists have been trimmed because some scientists "succumbed to fortune and glory" by spinning their research into global warming alarmism, and thus lost credibility with their peers.

Robinson said with the ranks of climatologists so weakened, the only scientists who can claim "there is no convincing scientific evidence" of dangerous global warming caused by human activity are scientists from fields beyond climatology, such as physics, chemistry, and mathematics -- more than 31,000 of whom signed his petition.

More than 50 presentations were made Monday, including:

* Tom Segalstad from Oslo University in Norway, who noted that the composition of ocean water -- including carbon dioxide, calcium, and water -- can act as a buffering agent in the acidification of the oceans, a relatively new alarm raised by global warming alarmists as data mounts that global temperatures pose little risk.

* Syun-Ichi Akasofu of the University of Alaska, who said Earth's climate is presently in a period of long, slow recovery from the Little Ice Age that ran for 300 or so years and ended in about 1850. The data suggest a large-scale trend of about 0.5 degrees Celsius per century of linear rise, punctuated by multi-decade-long oscillations. He said his data suggest the warming may end soon, because by historical standards it should not last for more than about another 100 years.

* David Evans, former researcher in the Australian Department of Climate Change, said computer models of human-caused global warming in models from the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change clearly predict the emergence of a "hotspot" in the upper troposphere over the tropics. However, radio temperature data for the upper troposphere clearly show there is no hotspot. The IPCC's assertion of man-made global warming rests on this fundamental prediction, but, said Evans, the hotspot just isn't there.

Evans suggested "the science behind (human-caused global warming) is weak" and consists largely of 45 people peer-reviewing each other's papers, which tends toward groupthink on science questions.

* Australian climatologist William Kininmonth said his data show that a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would produce a temperature change at the surface of about 0.6 Centigrade. By contrast, models favored by alarmists predict a much more shallow energy-loss curve, and hence give an average temperature increase nearly three times higher. He said the difference is significant because it influences predictions of worldwide sea levels. *

[Bloggers Daniel Foty and Thomas Sheahen contributed to this article.]

"He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire." --Winston Churchill

Editorial -- Barry MacDonald

Waterboarding is a harsh technique. It triggers a perception of suffocation, a sensation of drowning, and panic. Did the United States lose its moral bearing, as President Obama believes, when it used the waterboard on a handful of captured, elite al Qaeda?

I don't think so, and we should not be apologetic about what we did to safeguard the country from terrorists.

Reading the memo of August 1, 2002, (declassified by President Obama) detailing the interrogation techniques used by the Bush administration, makes it clear that great effort was made to determine what measure of physical and mental pressure could be applied before crossing the legal definition of torture. The goal was to wrest vital information about imminent terrorist attacks from captive al Qaeda without causing them lasting damage. The techniques were harsh, especially sleep deprivation, stress positions, and water boarding. Pain was inflicted for a purpose.

But the techniques were not senselessly savage: there was not the breaking of bones or the burning of flesh. The captive al Qaeda were not made spectacles before our enemies, and they were not left cripples. No one had his head hacked off by the CIA.

Waterboarding is a hard measure. It is reasonable to believe that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah thought they were going to die if they didn't cooperate. (Their lives were never in danger.) They did cooperate and American lives were saved.

According to the memo of May 30, 2005, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed resisted all the other interrogation techniques up to the waterboard. When he was asked about planned attacks on the U.S. he told the interrogators, "Soon you will know." According to the memo:

Both KSM and Zubaydah have expressed their belief that the general U.S. population was "weak," lacked resilience, and would be unable to "do what was necessary" to prevent the terrorists from succeeding in their goals.

Mohammed gave up information on the "second wave," an attack on the Library Tower in Los Angeles, by East Asian terrorists hijacking an airliner. Information obtained from Mohammed led to the capture of terrorist leader Hambali and his brother, and the Guraba Cell, a 17-member Jemmah Islamiyah cell assigned to carry out the "second wave."

Former Director of the CIA for Bill Clinton and George Bush, George Tenet, in his memoir, At the Center of the Storm, writes about the interrogation of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed:

I believe none of these successes would have happened if we had had to treat KSM like a white-collar criminal -- read him his Miranda rights and get him a lawyer who surely would have insisted his client simply shut up. In his initial interrogation by CIA officers, KSM was defiant. "I'll talk to you guys," he said, "after I get to New York and see my lawyer." Apparently he thought he would be immediately shipped to the United States and indicted in the Southern District of New York. Had that happened, I am confident that we would have obtained none of the information he had in his head about imminent threats to the American people.

. . . From our interrogation of KSM and other senior al Qaeda members . . . we learned many things -- not just tactical information leading to the next capture. For example, more than 20 plots had been put in motion by al Qaeda against U.S. infrastructure targets, including communications nodes, nuclear power plants, dams, bridges and tunnels.

Michael Hayden, one of President Bush's CIA directors, said: "as late as 2006 . . . fully half of the government's knowledge about the structure and activities of al-Qaeda came from those interrogations." According to Mike McConnell, President Bush's director of national intelligence, "We have people walking around in this country who are alive today because this process happened."

President Obama said in a visit to CIA headquarters that there is no way of knowing whether less severe techniques would have worked as well -- this is an easy statement to make once the palpable weight of terror has dissipated, after the magnificent job the U.S. military has done in killing or capturing most of the al Qaeda leadership, under the guidance of President Bush.

And President Obama's words -- there's no way of knowing whether other methods would have worked -- are empty. It's the sort of thing a person says when he has contributed nothing towards solving a problem, but he doesn't want others to get the proper credit they deserve. It reveals a parsimonious and petty character, a characteristic he shares with far too many elected Democrats and journalists. It reveals also a lack of honesty and a refusal to face reality.

Isn't it just common sense to note the fact the al Qaeda has failed to follow-up on the attacks of 9/11 and conclude that the interrogation techniques worked? Khalid Sheikh Mohammed seems to have suffered no lasting damage. At the end of 2008 before a military commission at Guantanamo Bay he took credit for the 9/11 attacks and expressed his intention to die a martyr for Islam.

President Obama should answer how many thousands of American lives are worth losing so that America can satisfy Democrat ideals of moral purity. *

Some of the quotes following each article have been gathered by The Federalist Patriot at: http://FederalistPatriot.US/services.asp.