Settled Science, Well Not So Fast

As we are all aware, team Obama is pushing hard to take over America’s healthcare. We also need to be vigilant towards his efforts to dominate many other aspects of American life especially, with his Cap and Trade scheme.

In the case of the former, team Obama says that CO₂ emissions will dramatically heat the earth.  His basis for this is science, especially the models developed by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Their most recent prediction (2007) is that climate sensitivity to a doubling of atmospheric greenhouse gas would be likely raise the earth’s temperature somewhere in the range of 2.0°C to 4.5°C.

Well hold on!  MIT climate scientists Richard Lindzen and Yong-Sang Choi have published a new study based on actual radiation measurements from satellites. They found earth's sensitivity to carbon impacts its temperatures only about 0.5°C.  This is significantly less than the IPCC’s estimate.  

What does this mean besides showing us that team Obama is trying to take over American Industry based on suspect science?  It means that the science of Global Warming is not settled. Keep this in mind when team Obama tries to ram the catastrophic Cap and Trade Bill down America’s throats.

Source

Lindzen, R. S., and Y.-S. Choi (2009), On the determination of climate feedbacks from ERBE data, Geophys. Res. Lett., 36, L16705, doi:10.1029/2009GL039628.

Let me clear the air

Liberals have been indoctrinted to believe that FDR's spending helped America during the depression.  

Let's not make the same mistake, tell team Obama to not follow Hoover's and FDR's failed strategy because the facts surrounding FDR and the Great Depression tell us something else. "Fully 17.2 percent of Americans, or 9,480,000, remained unemployed in 1939, up from 16.3 percent, or 8,020,000 in 1931". [1]

So rather than just showing FDR's failures based on statistics, let me use FDR's Secretary of The Treasury own words. 

"Here was Morgenthau, the secretary of the treasury, an expert on finance, a fount of statistics on the American economy during the 1930s; his best friend was the president of the United States and the author of the New Deal; key public policy decisions had to go through Morgenthau to get a hearing. And yet, with all this power, Morgenthau felt helpless.  After almost two full terms of Roosevelt and the New Deal, here are Morgenthau's startling words -- his confession -- spoken candidly before his fellow Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee":

We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. And I have just one interest, and if I am wrong...somebody else can have my job. I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises....I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started....And an enormous debt to boot![2]

 Works Cited

New Deal or Raw Deal?: How FDR's Economic Legacy Has Damaged America . New York: Threshold Editions: Simon and Schuster, 2008.

Ward 7 Election Results

One of the backstage (backroom?) stories of the election in Manchester is how the candidacy of a new, first-rate candidate, Lisa Gravel, was done in -- not by voters-not-insiders unaware of what was going on behind the scenes, but by a stab-in-the-back by the city’s newly elected Mayor, Ted Gatsas, without any significant countervailing influence of the current Mayor, now Congressional Candidate, Frank Guinta. 

Guinta and Gatsas are both Republicans. Gatsas endorsed a Democrat, Mr. Shea, for the Alderman’s seat in Ward 7. Guinta endorsed Gravel. Shea won.

The story plot thickened, however, when the Manchester Republican City Committee (MRCC) leafleted the city for Republican candidates. Yet, it neglected to include Ward 7 in its coverage under the (specious) pretexts that (1) the Committee ran out of material and (2) Ward 7 was too small to bother with. So, the Gravel campaign put out a red alert to myself and other grass-roots activists to help do a “lit drop” in Ward 7 on the Sunday just before election day. Only a select subset of voters, however, could be covered in so little time. 

There is no evidence that Guinta’s endorsement carried any weight.  There is even less indication that he said or did anything to try to dissuade Gatsas from endorsing Shea, or to urge the MRCC to do a lit drop in support of the Gravel candidacy in Ward 7.

Since the Mayor has been playing the same-old/same-old political game in his campaign for Congress -- of dialing for dollars, seeking endorsements from the GOP establishment and talking a conventional Republican line -- it should be no surprise that he would not go out of his way to support a bottom-up, grass-roots, outspoken, people-based, “shake up City Hall” candidacy of a fine candidate like Lisa Gravel.

Nice campaign, Lisa! Try again!

      PETER BEARSE, Ph.D., Danville and North Hampton, Candidate for Congress and volunteer in the Gravel campaign, 11/4/09

 

Advice to Obama

By Peter Bearse

As  someone on the campaign trail said to me recently: “Obama is trying to boil the  ocean;” -- trying to do too much all at once.  There’s too little priority setting in the Obama White House. Will he listen to advice from the outside? -- not likely, but let’s give some, anyway. The exercise might help to shape opposition into a force that can take back our government in two steps -- 2010 and 2012.

 The economy comes first. If the U.S. economy doesn’t start to grow again, all bets are off. Obama is in danger of becoming another LBJ -- brought down by hubris and/or a vainglorious assumption that we can have both guns and butter without asking sacrifice from the great American majority. 

The second priority is the “AfPak Theater” of war. The battle to spare Afghanistan and Pakistan from the tender mercies of the Taliban and their Al Queda allies is crucial to America‘s national security. This battle is intimately connected to the campaign to replace our dependence upon foreign oil and other carbon-based energy sources with renewable energy resources. The latter depends on an effective fight to steadily reduce our carbon “footprint”. These joint challenges call for a President who is capable of alerting the American people to the long-run consequences of failing to address them now, aggressively, and calling on a national spirit of sacrifice to win the battles.

Before turning to how the “national spirit” can be mobilized, one may well ask: What becomes of national health care reform in this picture of priorities? One answer is FUHGETABOUTIT. This would put the issue on the back burner until the AfPak Theater is secure. The other answer is heard from Republicans -- to focus upon and resolve a few key problems, such as a national market for health insurance, health savings accounts and tort reform. This answer has been declared DUA (Dead Upon Arrival) by the Democrats on Capitol Hill, but they and their ways of doing the public’s business are:

(1) Incapable of dealing with any complex issue like healthcare reform without vast increases in present and future costs to taxpayers and the generation of unanticipated (“unintended”) consequences, and

(2) Corrupted by Members‘ dependence on big money for reelection campaigns.

So, Obama should fund necessary research on what works to reduce health care costs and improve health services delivery. In the meantime, FUHGETABOUT forcing through a costly patchwork and calling it “reform.”

As for mobilizing the nation, only a President can call for national sacrifice, but how? Obama the speechifier could make a strong case for sacrifice to both secure the AfPak Theater and cut our dependence on foreign oil. After all, they are both national security issues. The means? In the past, Presidents have called for taxes, shifts in production, constraints on consumption and the sale of “War Bonds” to finance battles and shift resources into the production of war materiel.  Besides weapons for our fighting men and women, the latter now include goods and services to provide energy from renewable sources.

As for “taxes,” the best option to provide both needed [non-debt increasing] financing and spur the move from oil to renewable sources of energy would be what is called the “carbon tax.” This label is untruth in advertising because the so-called “tax” is not a tax; it would be a fee per ton of carbon pollution. Thus, the dollar cost would go down as less carbon is emitted into the atmosphere. This provides an efficient and fair way of dealing with environmental concerns, including global warming and climate change. So, then we could also say to Obama with respect to Cap’nTrade, another badly flawed bill before the Congress, FUHGETABOUTIT! A carbon emissions fee would also be more fair to American industry than Cap’nTrade. Import charges proportional to the carbon “footprints” of imports could be levied on the imports of countries that are not taking counterpart actions to reduce their industries’ carbon emissions.

A small portion of the tax revenues could be used to fund applied R&D on alternative energy sources.  The rest would go to finance the fight in the AfPak Theater and help to reduce our huge national deficit. Remember that Eisenhower’s massive plan to build a national highway system was sold to the American public as a National Defense Highway system, funded in part by a gas tax.

Let’s get some discussion going on these options before it’s too late. Comments are welcome via this website venue and/or to peterj@peterbearseforcongress.com or to the campaign website blog.

      PETER BEARSE, Ph.D., International Consulting Economist and Independent Republican Candidate    for Congress in NH CD 1

What did the people say yesterday?

• Team Obama’s socialism and accompanying massive government spending is not what people want

• Democrats must work with Republicans to improve healthcare. As Edmund Burke said, "All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue, and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter”.

• Not everyone is for gay marriage

• “It’s the economy stupid…”.

• Incumbents of all political persuasions beware of the voters in 2010