Doctor Zero on Climategate

Over at Hot Air, there's an outstanding new post by Doctor Zero in the form of an open letter to the Warmist True Believers, A Memo To The Global Warming Cult. Here's how it begins:

Dear global warming fanatics,

Please. Stop. You’re embarrassing yourselves. Take a deep breath, and try to understand what has happened to you during the past month. You need to accept that your dreams of global domination are over. Increasingly shrill attempts to terrify the masses into ignoring Clima[te]gate are only making you look foolish. The con job you’ve been running for the last thirty years is busted forever.

I know this is difficult for you to accept. Things seemed to be going well. You’ve got the cap-and-trade bill lurking over the United States, ready to shatter an already weakened economy plagued with unemployment problems, and effectively end America’s role as a dominant industrial power. Your beliefs have been instituted in public schools as the official state religion, whose rituals and incantations are forced upon millions of school children. The wealthy royalty of popular culture is pleased to produce an endless string of movies, music, and television programming to market your beliefs. Your critics were marginalized to the point where the presidential candidate from the 2000 Democrat ticket felt comfortable referring to them as Nazis.

By all means read the whole thing.

Banning of Pre-1985 Children's Books

It seems that relatively few people are aware that as of February, 2009, it has become illegal to distribute children's books printed before 1985. The Washington Post wrote a comprehensive story about it last March 24th, Book Dealers Told to Get The Lead Out by Michael Birnbaum, but the rest of the mainstream media, even including the New York Times, ignored it.

Now, we're stuck in a classic, Kafka-esque example of the Law of Unintended Consequences. Unless they are willing to spend $300 to $600 per book to ascertain that its lead content is within safe limits, no one can legally do anything with a pre-1985 children's book except throw it away. The penalty has been set by law as a fine of up to $100,000 for each violation.

Meanwhile, no one has yet come up with a single case in which exposure to a pre-1985 book has ever caused any child to develop an elevated blood lead level, much less a case of lead toxicity.

Walter Olson, a senior fellow of the Manhattan Institute, has written an excellent discussion of the problem for The City Journal, The New Book Banning. He has also posted about it several times on his personal blog, Overlawyered, most notably here: CPSIA and Vintage Books. For all of his posts on the subject since February 24, 2009, including dozens of links to other useful resources, click here.

Among Walter Olson's many excellent links is this outstanding article in The New Atlantis magazine by Elizabeth Mullaney Nicol, Keeping Books Safe: A Bad Law Threatens Our Past. Here are Olson's comments on the article in Overlawyered, CPSIA and books: “A bad law threatens our past”.

More recently, Jonathan Adler, Professor of Law at Case Western Reserve University and one of the group responsible for The Volokh Conspiracy blog, posted The End of Vintage Kids' Books?

The CPSIA law itself is immensely complex, leaving its enforcement open to considerable bureaucratic discretion and arbitrary caprice. As you will learn, to date, no one has been able to get reliable information on exactly what the law means in given situations. In fact, the CPSC's Guide to the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA) for Small Businesses, Resellers, Crafters and Charities (PDF) is quite nebulous about precisely which measures are necessary to assure compliance in a given situation. Compliance would be difficult enough in a large organization with a separate Compliance Department. In a tiny one- or two-person business, it would be an impossibility.

At the time it was passed and signed into law, few realized the devastating effects of this new law. By November of 2008, though, the word had begun to circulate among libraries, dealers in used books, small manufacturers of children's toys, and thrift shops. Many of these people deluged the Consumer Products Safety Commission with thousands of justified, well-documented complaints. As a result, on January 30, the CPSC issued a stay postponing enforcement of the law for one year. However, there is far less to the stay than there seemed to be at first glance. It merely affects the enforcement of the law, not the requirements for compliance with its standards. In other words, its practical effect is more to agree to look the other way for a year – to relieve the CPSC of responsibility for policing violations of the law – than to excuse businesses from compliance.

For example, while the CPSC will not prosecute a used book seller until 2010, and that seller is not obligated to test his books for lead content, he is nevertheless obligated to insure that all of the books he sells after 10 February 2009 do not exceed the 600 ppm lead level which went into effect on that date. How he is supposed to be certain of compliance in the absence of testing, as well as what may happen to him in 2010, are left to his imagination.

A few days ago, I posted about this issue on the forum at Distributed Proofreaders. One respondent, who does not seem to comprehend the seriousness of the problem or the lack of any scientific justification for this book ban, wrote:

According to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the agency charged with enforcing the act, lead in the books' inks could make its way into the mouths of little kids.

My reply to her was as follows:

Let's apply a modicum of common sense here, please.

First, we do not need an agency of the U.S. Government to tell us that anything that will fit can make its way into the mouths of little kids, as well as into their nostrils, ears, and other body orifices. Just ask any pediatrician. But does that mean, for instance, that just because dried beans can make their way up children's nostrils and require surgical extraction, we should outlaw dried beans?

Second, even in the unlikely event that a child were to ingest several entire pages from an old book at once, the dose of lead he would absorb even under a worst-case scenario is orders of magnitude below that which would cause toxicity.

Modern testing methods have become so exquisitely sensitive that we can now detect a minuscule trace amount of nearly anything anywhere. However, it's important to maintain one's perspective in evaluating those test results. We should not jump to the unwarranted conclusion that barely detectable trace amounts of toxic substances ought to be of just as much concern as physiologically significant amounts which are orders of magnitude greater. Indeed, certain minerals -- not lead, but, for example, selenium, are essential nutrients in trace amounts, but deadly poisons in higher doses. "The dose makes the poison."

CDC considers a blood lead level of 10 µg/dL or greater to be significant in children. Its recent data indicates that since the late 1970s, average blood lead levels in children have dropped approximately 80%, essentially to the background level of between 2 and 3 µg/dL. The remaining pockets of high blood lead levels in children occur in those living in poor urban areas, in old housing, and in conditions of rank poverty.

Bottom line: While there are still a few areas of the U.S. in which children may have unacceptably high blood lead levels, there has never been any association ever demonstrated between high blood levels in children and exposure to books printed before 1985. Destroying those books will not help those unfortunate children at all. On the other hand, though, destroying them will most assuredly deprive future generations of children of the cultural enrichment they might have absorbed by reading those books.

While it's true that SOME of the old books have been reprinted in new, guaranteed lead (and phthalate)-free editions, for economic reasons, most have not and are not likely to be. In addition, most of these newly reprinted books have not been reproduced in their original form. Instead, they have been re-edited – bowdlerized, rendered politically correct, and thoroughly disinfected of any language that might possibly cause offense to one of the many professional offense-taking groups out there. In many cases, even the original illustrations are replaced by balanced, politically correct substitutes. Therefore, these reprinted versions cannot possibly convey the same experience as the originals did when we read them as children.

I thought it was interesting that in a post on the topic of the CPSIA and its effect on children's books and toys, ShopFloor blogger Carter Wood linked to the Project Gutenberg text of the classic 1922 Margery Williams Bianco story The Velveteen Rabbit. He considers it an allegory to the CPSIA situation:

The Velveteen Rabbit captures so well the horrible, even cruel effects of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, which has led to destroyed toys and children’s books. Excerpt:

And so the little Rabbit was put into a sack with the old picture-books and a lot of rubbish, and carried out to the end of the garden behind the fowl-house. That was a fine place to make a bonfire, only the gardener was too busy just then to attend to it. He had the potatoes to dig and the green peas to gather, but next morning he promised to come quite early and burn the whole lot.

As he so often does, Mark Steyn came up with one of the most succinct explanations of why this book banning is so wrong that I have yet seen:

A nation’s collective memory is the unseen seven-eighths of the iceberg. When you sever that, what’s left just bobs around on the surface, unmoored in every sense.

Last March, James Lileks, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune's great columnist and blogger, wrote Whoa! Lock up those kids' books chock full o' lead, including this great line:

The law seems to presume that children, having read and enjoyed a beloved story, will eat it.

It's hard to believe that something like this could happen under the radar in this once-free country, but nevertheless, it has. Now, we must do what we can to cope with this new reality.

Members of the public who have learned about CPSIA and its many (presumably) unintended consequences have been deluging the CPSC with angry complaints. In truth, though, their complaints are misdirected; the Commission's hands are tied. The language of the law is so specific and so strict that it leaves the Commission very little room to exercise any degree of discretion, to say nothing of common sense. The only way that we will ever get relief from this onerous, nightmarish new law is to insist to our Senators and Representatives that they act to amend it as soon as Congress reconvenes. Time is truly of the essence. 10 February 2010, when the one-year stay (itself of questionable legality) expires and the CPSC begins full enforcement, will be here before we know it.

8/9/09 19:30 CDT UPDATE and BUMP:
Commenter Wacky Hermit was kind enough to inform me about this useful site, What is the CPSIA?, which deals with the broader effects of the CPSIA, and doesn't concentrate solely on books.

Thought for Today

This one's for the Global Warmists among us:

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."

~~~~~ Richard Feynman

Climate Money

Joanne "Jo" Nova, a science writer from Perth, Australia, has been driving the Global Warmists totally bonkers. For 17 years, she was a True Believer. Then, in 2007, she became aware of a couple of pieces of key evidence that disprove the entire theory of AGW – that is, Anthropogenic Global Warming caused by the accumulation of CO₂ in the atmosphere.

As a trained scientist (molecular biology) and a person of unquestioned integrity, once Jo realized that the theory in which she had believed was false, she changed her opinion. She began speaking and writing as a global warming skeptic, pointing out how the recent evidence had poked some pretty sizable holes in the hypothesis that humans are causing the earth to warm as a result of our CO₂ production.

At first, Jo's former colleagues tried their best to ignore her. However, she's not easy to ignore. After all, she's a professional science communicator, and is very good at what she does. Not surprisingly, within a very short time, she began to experience the same sort of vicious personal attacks as all of the other scientists who dare to question the Global Warmists' cherished orthodoxy. To them, she was now an apostate, and they made it plain that if it were within their power to do so, they would gladly burn her at the stake, then bury her ashes in the nearest environmentally friendly landfill.

Last year, Jo started a blog, JoNova, in which she kept her readers abreast of the latest developments in the field of climate science. In September, 2008, she issued an invaluable book, The Skeptic's Handbook. Here is what she wrote about it at the time:

I want to lift the debate above the mud-slinging, pathetic ad hominem attacks, and specious argument by authority. The basic rules of logic and reasoning have been known since the Greeks. Educated adults ought to do better. Maybe one day, national curriculums will too.

The attacks grew more vicious and strident, but Jo was not dissuaded. Quite the contrary. She came to realize, as some of us have for a number of years now, that the believers in AGW theory were acting not like scientists, but like religious acolytes hanging on every word emanating from Prophet Al Gore and High Priest James Hansen. By the end of October, 2008, Jo realized that AGW is a religion, and had the temerity to say so in a blog post.

Reading the comments following that one post is a real education. Jo enforces certain standards of civility in her comment section, so you won't find the most depraved and vicious of the ad hominem attacks there (to see them, hang out in the left-wing blogs for a while and search on her name), but I was in turn amused, amazed, and disappointed to read some of the comments obviously intended as logical, reasoned discourse.

This month, Jo has just come out with another informative booklet, this time in cooperation with the Science and Public Policy Institute. It's called Climate Money, and you can download it as a PDF file from this page. Here's a summary of what you'll find within its 19 pages:

• The US government has provided over $79 billion since 1989 on policies related to climate change, including science and technology research, foreign aid, and tax breaks.


• Despite the billions: “audits” of the science are left to unpaid volunteers. A dedicated but largely uncoordinated grassroots movement of scientists has sprung up around the globe to test the integrity of the theory and compete with a well funded highly organized climate monopoly. They have exposed major errors.


• Carbon trading worldwide reached $126 billion in 2008. Banks are calling for more carbon-trading. And experts are predicting the carbon market will reach $2 - $10 trillion making carbon the largest single commodity traded.


• Meanwhile in a distracting sideshow, Exxon-Mobil Corp is repeatedly attacked for paying a grand total of $23 million to skeptics—less than a thousandth of what the US government has put in, and less than one five-thousandth of the value of carbon trading in just the single year of 2008.


• The large expenditure in search of a connection between carbon and climate creates enormous momentum and a powerful set of vested interests. By pouring so much money into one theory, have we inadvertently created a self-fulfilling prophesy instead of an unbiased investigation?

Jo is also a talented artist and cartoonist. She illustrated both The Skeptic's Handbook and Climate Money herself with clear, easy-to-follow charts, graphs, and occasional cartoons, such as this one from the cover of Climate Money:



By all means, download a copy of Climate Money and, if you don't already have one, The Skeptic's Handbook, too. By the time you finish reading them, you'll have a pretty good understanding of why the theory of AGW is wrong, and why we are nevertheless spending billions of dollars in an attempt to prove its validity.

As is, sadly, so often the case – follow the money.

Tolerance and Inclusiveness at Work

Over at Diversity Lane, Zack Rawsthorne skewers the Liberals again:

Col. Peters Is Furious ...

… and as a fellow military veteran, I can appreciate why. In response to the calculated and deliberate smear of veterans by our esteemed (NOT!) Director of Homeland Security, he wrote The Vet 'Threat': Gov't ID's Public Enemy No. 1. He begins like this:

HOLLYWOOD and countless professors warned us: Military vets are drooling trailer-trash who beat their wives and, at best, wind up as homeless street people -- at worst, as homicidal psychos deformed by war.

Now, thanks to our ever-vigilant Department of Homeland Security, the full extent of the danger has been revealed: Our so-called "war heroes" are rushing back to join right-wing-extremist hate groups to overthrow our government.

Let's not quibble about little things like evidence. The Obama administration just knows that vets are all racist, Jew-hating crazies waiting to explode. Thank God, DHS has a fearless leader, Janet-from-another-planet Napolitano, who isn't afraid to call white trash "white trash."

He then proceeds to let everyone know what he REALLY thinks.

I wonder how much Col. Peters' column had to do with Secretary Napolitano's subsequent lame, half-hearted attempts to extinguish the raging inferno of public outrage she had ignited.

Come to think of it, I also wonder if Janet Napolitano has any idea how utterly ridiculous she looks.

Hat tip: Lisa Benson and Townhall.com

Hat tip: Jerry Holbert and Townhall.com

Why They Hate Sarah Palin So Much

This new post at House of Eratosthenes on the subject of Why They Hate Sarah Palin So Much is absolutely brilliant, and spot on. Go read it – you won't be sorry. Be sure to check out the comments, too. The early ones, anyway, are most promising. Let's hope the left-wing vultures don't find it for a while, but that's probably a forlorn hope.

BIG hat tip to Gerard Van der Leun at American Digest for calling attention to Morgan Freeberg's outstanding post.

"A Charismatic Demagogue"

Mark Levin, the brilliant attorney and talk show host, just uploaded a very important post to NRO's The Corner. It's obvious that he dashed it off in the heat of passion, so to speak, because while it's tightly reasoned and eloquently written, it's not neatly arranged in paragraphs. He named it "The Obama Temptation." Here's how he begins:

I've been thinking this for a while so I might as well air it here. I honestly never thought we'd see such a thing in our country - not yet anyway - but I sense what's occurring in this election is a recklessness and abandonment of rationality that has preceded the voluntary surrender of liberty and security in other places.

Here's another pull quote:

But beyond the elites and the media, my greatest concern is whether this election will show a majority of the voters susceptible to the appeal of a charismatic demagogue. This may seem a harsh term to some, and no doubt will to Obama supporters, but it is a perfectly appropriate characterization. Obama's entire campaign is built on class warfare and human envy. The "change" he peddles is not new. We've seen it before. It is change that diminishes individual liberty for the soft authoritarianism of socialism. It is a populist appeal that disguises government mandated wealth redistribution as tax cuts for the middle class, falsely blames capitalism for the social policies and government corruption (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) that led to the current turmoil in our financial markets, fuels contempt for commerce and trade by stigmatizing those who run successful small and large businesses, and exploits human imperfection as a justification for a massive expansion of centralized government.

This one is a must-read.

Why I'm Voting Democrat

Ben Shapiro tells us "Why I'm Voting Democrat" – and I agree with him 100%.

"In the spirit of evenhandedness and fair play, ... I feel it my duty to explain why I'm going to vote Democrat."

No, I haven't gone nuts. Before you jump to conclusions, read what Ben has to say. Chances are, you'll agree with him, too.

"Carbon Chastity" and The Church of Global Warming

For some time now, I've been among those who consider global warming, as promoted by Saint Al Gore and his acolytes, to be a religious cult. Although it masquerades as science, its tenets are matters of faith, and as such are immune to the influences of factual evidence and logical thought.

As is true of any religion, the True Believers of the Church of Global Warming refuse to debate the fundamental doctrines of their faith. "The science is settled," quoth Saint Al and his High Priest, James Hansen.

Charles Krauthammer, unquestionably one of our most brilliant commentators, has just come out with a column expanding upon the idea of Global Warmism as religion, "Environmentalists Pick Up Where Communists Left Off." He begins by clarifying his own position: he is neither a Believer nor a Skeptic, but considers himself to be a Global Warming Agnostic. Then, in his inimitable wry manner, he introduces the concept of Carbon Chastity:

Environmentalists are Gaia's priests, instructing us in her proper service and casting out those who refuse to genuflect... And having proclaimed the ultimate commandment – carbon chastity – they are preparing the supporting canonical legislation that will tell you how much you can travel, what kind of light you will read by, and at what temperature you may set your bedroom thermostat.

Priceless!

Fortunately, it appears that just about the time most of our self-anointed leaders have decided to jump aboard the Global Warming train, it has begun to run out of steam. The large and growing number of eminently qualified climate scientists who have joined the ranks of the skeptics are attracting increasing public attention. Most significantly, the public is beginning to get some inkling of the astronomical cost burden they will be forced to carry if the various global warming mitigation nostrums should be enacted into law.

Yes, we are most assuredly in great peril – but not from global warming. Instead, we must do all within our power to dissuade our gullible and scientifically illiterate politicians from being suckered into this gigantic scam. We must stop them from enacting ruinously expensive anti-global warming measures to combat this nonexistent threat. Calm, well-reasoned opinion pieces by highly regarded pundits, such as this masterpiece by Charles Krauthammer, will be enormously helpful in the effort.

Not Evil, Just Wrong

There's a new documentary coming out. Here's the leader.



There's a website here, but it's still under construction. Stay tuned.

"The Boy Who Cried Wolf" Redux

Here are some quotes of famous people from a few years ago. For some reason, when I read these, I was reminded of that old story "The Boy Who Cried Wolf." See what you think.

'In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines. Hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. Population control is the only answer.'

~~~~~ Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (1968)

'I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.'

~~~~~ Paul Ehrlich (1969)

'In ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish.'

~~~~~ Paul Ehrlich, Earth Day (1970)

'Before 1985, mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity ... in which the accessible supplies of many key minerals will be facing depletion.'

~~~~~ Paul Ehrlich (1976)

'This [cooling] trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century.'

~~~~~ Peter Gwynne, Newsweek (1976)

'There are ominous signs that the earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production – with serious political implications for just about every nation on earth. The drop in food production could begin quite soon ... The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologist are hard-pressed to keep up with it.'

~~~~~ Newsweek, (April 28, 1975)

'This cooling has already killed hundreds of thousands of people. If it continues and no strong action is taken, it will cause world famine, world chaos and world war, and this could all come about before the year 2000.'

~~~~~ Lowell Ponte, "The Cooling" (1976)

'If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder by the year 2000 ... This is about twice what it would take to put us in an ice age.'

~~~~~ Kenneth E.F. Watt on air pollution and global cooling, Earth Day (1970)

'The continued rapid cooling of the earth since WWII is in accord with the increase in global air pollution associated with industrialization, mechanization, urbanization and exploding population.'

~~~~~ Reid Bryson, "Global Ecology; Readings towards a rational strategy for Man" (1971)

[Hat tip: David C. Kifer, who posted these to alt.quotations.]