Climate Science

  

    

I have been a Climate Change skeptic but now, after reading M.J. Sangster’s, The Real Inconvenient Truth,  a 2018 book on all the factors that make up the Earth’s climate, I now accept the opprobrious label of Climate Change Denier (CCD). It is not that I deny that the Earth might be in a warming phase, or that the CO2 level in the atmosphere has been increasing over the last 100 years. 

But in Sangster’s extremely well-researched book, he demonstrates that human-caused CO2, is a tiny fraction of the CO2 produced by nature, and that it makes up an  even tinier fraction of Greenhouse gases (GHG) which are 95% water vapor. In other words, human caused CO2, is little more than a drop in the vast ocean that is our atmosphere. Despite the claims of Climate Change Alarmists (CCA), Carbon Dioxide (CO2), human-caused or natural, is not poisoning the planet. Here are some facts from Sangster’s book.

 

“Carbon dioxide  (CO2) is not a toxic gas; it plays a vital role in plant and animal processes, including photosynthesis [CO2+sunlight+Water produces Plant food (carbohydrates) + Oxygen). Obviously, we need the oxygen, and plants need the carbohydrates.” … [199]

“That CO2 is directly correlated with temperature is not the issue however, the issue is whether or not the relationship is the dominate climate driver in the presence of other natural events and feedbacks, and clearly it is not or, as CO2 increases linearly, so too would temperature… It is just one climate forcing event in a complex Earth system… “[198]

 

The major factors in the complex Earth climate system are the Sun, Tectonics, Wind and Ocean Circulation, Oceanic Oscillations, Clouds and Aerosols, and Greenhouse Gases.  Sangster devotes a chapter to each of these factors and they are must reads for anyone really interested in following the science. Actually, his book is a fascinating introduction to Earth science. Did you know, for example:

That the Sun revolves in a relatively circular orbit around the nucleus of our galaxy at a speed of over 500,000 miles per hour. It takes 11 Earth years to complete its immense orbit, and drags us along with it although we don’t feel a thing. On route, we pass through fields of cosmic rays that bombard us. Our atmosphere protects us, but these cosmic rays still effect our climate. 

That the plate tectonics that formed our continents is still going on and generating vast amounts of energy. They also create mountain ranges. Did you know that 85% of the Earth’s volcanos are below the surface of the oceans?

That wind and Ocean circulation is a major factor in our climate. Without the warm waters of the tropical Gulf Stream, Northern Europe would be uninhabitable.

That clouds play a key role in regulating our climate. Some let in needed heat from the Sun, while others reflect it back into space. As noted above, water vapor makes up 95% of the greenhouse gas that keeps heat in, and that prevents the entire planet from looking like Antarctica. Sangster quotes former President Obama’s Science Czar, Dr, John Holdren: “a 1% increase in cloud cover would decrease the surface temperature by .8 degree C., the entire warming amount attributed to CO2 since the start of the Industrial Age.” [196]

That water vapor makes up 99% of the greenhouse gases that help regulate our climate, and that it is entirely natural. There is nothing we can do about it this fact, or any of the other facts noted above. 

Finally, Sangster points out a basic truth: “Earth is the only planet in the solar system with an atmosphere that can sustain life. The blanket of atmospheric gases not only contains the air we breathe but also modulates the energy balance… “[197].

I have limited this post to Climate Science. The rest of “The Real Inconvenient Truth” deals with the politics of Climate Science. We will deal with that in subsequent posts, but for now I will just say that it appears to me that it is the height of hubris to think that humans can combat the vast and powerful natural forces that have shaped our Earth on its incredible journey through space and time. 

###              

Educational Bigotry

The Connecticut Mirror, an online newspaper recently published an article exposing the bias of a school administrator’s hiring practices in wealthy Greenwich. Caught on a hidden camera, the assistant principal admitted to an interviewer that he would never hire a conservative, a Catholic, or anyone over the age of 40. He claimed, with a kind of smug satisfaction, that such people were stuck in their ways and could never be changed into the kind of teacher he wanted for his school in wealthy Greenwich. 

What kind of teachers did he want? He preferred young left-leaning candidates who could be molded into what he wanted. In the elementary school classrooms they would not have to express a political or ideological bias, but just treat left wing positions as the norm, not even subject to debate or discussion. The goal would be to create young Democrats. 

He had developed a series of questions that he used in a 30-minute interview to weed out the undesirables. Of course, he could not ask them directly about their religion, or politics but there were ways to guess. If he suspected they were Conservative or Catholic, they would not be considered for the job. He would not even grant interviews with experienced applicants over the age of 40 because they also tended to be stuck in their ways.

The article in the Connecticut Mirror included the 12-minute video in which not once did the administrator indicate an awareness that he was violating a variety of State laws against such discrimination, laws largely drafted by liberals in blue state Connecticut. Neither did he indicate any awareness that he himself was rigid, bigoted, and stuck in his ways. 

The exposure of the Greenwich school administrator was the work of an organization called Project Veritas that tries to expose those in public office who engage in such misbehavior. The CT Mirror tried to criticize the organization but there was the video which could not be denied. The cat was out of the bag. The administrator was subsequently suspended pending the inevitable investigations, and even Democratic politicians had to complain about such unfair and bigoted hiring practices.

Nevertheless, I believe that the assistant principal in Greenwich was just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. I suspect that there are thousands like him all over the country whose goal is not education but indoctrination. It is no secret that more than 90% of college professors are left-leaning Democrats. Faculties at colleges of education, that turn out the teachers, must be even more liberal. 

I wonder if the assistant principal actually knows any Catholics or conservatives? Is he unaware of the many outstanding Catholic teachers that have served in Greenwich and other Connecticut public schools for as long as I can remember? Many of them were clients of mine when I worked as a financial advisor. Just like their non-Catholic colleagues, there was the good, the bad, and the ordinary among them. 

I recall one Catholic client who was stuck in her ways. She taught in an elementary school in nearby Bridgeport, where her students were mainly minority children. She was generally regarded as the best teacher of reading in the school. For years, she taught under-privileged and disadvantaged children how to read.  Reading is the foundation of all learning. When I asked her how she did it, she said she used phonics despite the official method recommend by school administrators. When an administrator planned to visit the classroom, she had the children hide the phonics materials in their desks. When the visitor left, they could get back to the work of learning how to read. It was not a matter of faith with her. Phonics just worked. Her children learned how to read. She was interested in education, not indoctrination. If anything, she was a great teacher because she was Catholic. 

A few years ago when an inner-city Catholic parochial school teacher was asked why she taught in a school where most of the students were not Catholic, she replied, “We teach them not because they are Catholic, but because we are Catholic.”

###

The Unjust Steward

  

President Joe Biden has been a public servant for practically all of his adult life. He served the people of Delaware as a senator for more than 40 years. Now, as President of the USA he is the servant of all the people.  Even though he is our chief executive, he is our servant, and we the people are his employer or master. 

So, when he issues an executive order to forgive student loans, it  may seem magnanimous and merciful to some, but he is not forgiving payments due to him but to us. He is giving away our money, not his own. It is very easy to spend or give away someone else’s money. Moreover, he is not even consulting with our representatives in Congress on this matter despite the fact that his Democratic party has majorities in both houses. This is just a clandestine form of taxation without representation.

President Biden admits to being a practicing Catholic so he must have heard the parable of the Unjust Steward many times while in attendance at Mass. Actually, he will hear it again on September 18 when it is the gospel for the 25^thSunday in Ordinary Time. 

The parable is about a servant or steward who is a crook. He was cheating his own master or employer to feather his own nest. Realizing that his fraud is about to be disclosed, and that he will be out of a job, it never occurs to him to ask for forgiveness or repent.  Instead, he goes to his master’s debtors and reduces what they owe. He hopes that they will reward him when he is out of a job. What else could he do in the face of impending doom? As he says, "to dig, I am not able, to beg, I am ashamed.” 

 

Commentators have wondered why the master seems to “commend” the unjust steward for his criminal behavior. “And the master commended that dishonest steward for acting prudently.” Personally, I detect sarcasm here. Why would any of those debtors ever trust the steward when they know that he has cheated on his own master? Interestingly, the gospel relates that the wealthy Pharisees listening to the parable laughed at Jesus.

 

Even today, it is funny to hear people like Joe Biden called public servants. It appears that in all those years that he “served” the people of Delaware, he mainly served the interests of himself and the Biden family. Somehow, on a congressman’s salary, he became one of the richest, if not the richest man, in the tiny state of Delaware, where, by the way, most of the largest companies in America are domiciled because of favorable corporate laws. Years from now, when the FBI concludes its investigation of the Hunter Biden laptop, we may finally learn the identity of the “big guy” who would get 10% of the profits of Hunter’s business dealings in China.

 

As far as college loan debt forgiveness is concerned, it is just not fair to shift the burden to others. During the Obama/Biden administration, the government took over the whole student loan operation, and promised that by taking it out of the hands of private banks, billions would be saved. Ten years later, the program is a disaster. The Biden administration plan appears to be not only a cover-up of another progressive failure, but also, a ploy to revive the sagging reputation of the Biden administration as the mid-term elections draw near. 

 

###

Income Inequality: 1950-2022

                                           

William F. Buckley, Jr.

Last year marked the seventieth anniversary of the publication of William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale, a book which some believe to have launched the conservative movement in America. Below find a brief review. 

*********

 William F. Buckley Jr., the famed Conservative commentator, first came to nation’s attention with the publication of God and Man at Yale back in 1951. The book, a review of Buckley's years at Yale was subtitled, “The Superstitions of ‘Academic Freedom’”. 

Buckley must have had an outstanding college career before graduating in 1950. For example, one year he held the prestigious position of editor of the Yale Daily News.  He  loved his Alma Mater but found some disturbing trends. 

Here I would just like to concentrate on his lengthy chapter devoted to the teaching of economics at Yale, a chapter primarily analyzing the textbooks chosen for the basic introductory course that was taken by a large number of students. All four of the textbooks believed that the biggest problem facing America in 1950 was “income inequality”. That’s right! Income Inequality or, as he titled it, THE UNFAIR DISTRIBUTION OF INCOME. Why was income inequality such a big issue back in 1950?

I believe the answer can be found in the background of the economists who had written the textbooks. If Buckley was about 25 in 1950, then I would guess the authors of the textbooks were born before the First World War and grew up in the era marked by the subsequent Communist Revolution in Russia and the worldwide Great Depression of the 1930s. Paul Samuelson, for example, was born in 1915 and his textbook, Economics, an Introductory Analysis, was first published in 1948 and soon became one of the best-selling textbooks of all time. Samuelson’s book was one of the four reviewed by Buckley.

Samuelson and the others all believed that the experiment begun in Russia in 1917 was the wave of the future, and that the Great Depression in American had shown the inadequacies of the traditional system of free or private enterprise in dealing with modern economic issues. In the chapter on economics Buckley cited a comparison between the Soviet and American systems from one of these textbooks. The italics are Buckley’s.

compare “ the situation in our economy with that in a socialist economy, such as the Russian or Czechoslovakian. In the Russian economy the decision to produce, let us say 20 million tons of pig iron, is made by the Central Planning board, which presumably takes into account the needs and resources of the Russian economy before it comes to a decision. The same board determines how many automobiles to produce, how many pairs of socks to manufacture, and how many acres to put into wheat. In our economy, no such institution exists. No one group or person determines how much steel to produce, how many tractors to make, or how much land to plant in cotton…. In a socialist economy, important questions of output, price, employment, and so on are planned collectively. In a capitalistic economy, these decisions are made separately by individual firms…. How does the business firm determine how much it will produce? The answer to this question is to be found in the fact that the business firm in this country is privately owned…. The determination of how much to produce, or of the price to be charged for the product, is made with one interest in mind—that of the owner. The owner’s interest is to secure as large a profit as possible. [Pp. 65-66]

Just as today, it was believed that the profit motive that was the root of all evil. In the words of one text, “the state, being free from the profit motive and having the power of compulsion, is able to make its revenue fit its expenditures (within limits) rather than the reverse.” [p. 67] Of course, profit motive brings up the image of the greedy businessman as often portrayed in popular movies of the 1930s or in the figure of Mr. Monopoly from the very popular board game.

Samuelson’s text disclaimed the image but still used it.

In this connection, it is important to understand just what a monopolist is. He is not indeed,“…a fat, greedy man with a big moustache and cigar who goes around violating the law. If he were, we could put him in jail. He is anyone important enough to affect the prices of the things that he sells and buys. To some degree that means almost every businessman”… [75]

In 1950 all four textbook authors were convinced that the experiment going on in Russia was the wave of the future and that the private enterprises system was a thing of the past that had been forever discredited by the Great Depression. The textbooks, and the professors who chose them, were all advocates of central planning, a large central government, extremely high progressive income tax rates, and confiscatory inheritance tax rates. 

Writing in 1950 I don’t suppose that the young Buckley or the textbook authors could have foreseen the great economic boom that would take place in the USA in the next few decades, a boom that not only raised millions out of poverty, but also created the wealthiest country in the history of the world. Neither could they imagine that during the same period the Soviet economy would finally be exposed as a rotten failure. At the same time as we were beginning to learn about Stalin’s brutal oppression, we were learning of people lining up at Russian markets for hours to buy inferior or even non-existent necessities. 

The Soviet Union had eliminated income inequality by making everyone poor. Years later, we would learn that they had actually created a new aristocracy of Communist party members and their friends who lorded it over their subjects. As in most socialist countries members of the ruling party made up only about 10% of the population. So much for central planning and the elimination of the profit motive.

In one of history’s ironies Paul Samuelson made a fortune with his economics textbook, In true capitalist fashion he contrived to bring out a new edition every couple of years so that students could not buy older used texts. No central board or agency prevented him or his publisher from printing and selling as many copies as the market would bear. He lived a long life and received practically every award a scholar could get. In 1996, he was awarded the National Medal of Science by President Bill Clinton, another Yale graduate who now makes millions by giving speeches to fat cats all over the world while he, his wife, and "democratic socialists" or so-called progressives complain of income inequality.

###