As reported by Lawrence Solomon in the Financial Post, prominent climate scientist/alarmist Mike Hulme has now admitted that:

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change misled the press and public into believing that thousands of scientists backed its claims on manmade global warming, according to Mike Hulme, a prominent climate scientist and IPCC insider. The actual number of scientists who backed that claim was “only a few dozen experts,” he states in a paper for Progress in Physical Geography, co-authored with student Martin Mahony.

“Claims such as ‘2,500 of the world’s leading scientists have reached a consensus that human activities are having a significant influence on the climate’ are disingenuous,” the paper states unambiguously, adding that they rendered “the IPCC vulnerable to outside criticism.”

Hulme, Professor of Climate Change in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia—the university of Climategate fame—is the founding Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and one of the UK’s most prominent climate scientists. Among his many roles in the climate change establishment, Hulme was the IPCC’s co-ordinating Lead Author for its chapter on “Climate scenario development” for its Third Assessment Report and a contributing author of several other chapters.

The referenced paper by Hulme and Mahony is “Climate Change: what do we know about the IPCC?” Hulme, also author of the recent book, Why We Disagree About Climate Change, is a key proponent of what is called “post-normal science” (see here and here), a postmodern narrative that consists of a complete perversion of standard scientific practice that he supports in order to propagandize for his socialist agenda. As he explained in portions of his book and his article, “The appliance of science,” in the Guardian (March 17, 2007):

“Philosophers and practitioners of science have identified this particular mode of scientific activity as one that occurs…where values are embedded in the way science is done and spoken.”

“It has been labelled ‘post-normal’ science. Climate change seems to fall in this category. Disputes in post-normal science focus…on the process of science—who gets funded, who evaluates quality, who has the ear of policy…The IPCC is a classic example of a post-normal scientific activity.”

“Within a capitalist world order, climate change is actually a convenient phenomenon to come along.”

“The largest academic conference that has yet been devoted to the subject of climate change finished yesterday [March 12, 2009] in Copenhagen…I attended the Conference, chaired a session…[The] statement drafted by the conference’s Scientific Writing Team…contained…a set of messages drafted largely before the conference started by the organizing committee…interpreting it for a political audience…And the conference chair herself, Professor Katherine Richardson, has described the messages as politically-motivated. All well and good.”

“The danger of a ‘normal’ reading of science is that it assumes science can first find truth, then speak truth to power, and that truth-based policy will then follow…exchanges often reduce to ones about scientific truth rather than about values, perspectives and political preferences.”

“…’self-evidently’ dangerous climate change will not emerge from a normal scientific process of truth-seeking…scientists—and politicians—must trade truth for influence. What matters about climate change is not whether we can predict the future with some desired level of certainty and accuracy.”

“Climate change is telling the story of an idea and how that idea is changing the way in which our societies think, feel, interpret and act. And therefore climate change is extending itself well beyond simply the description of change in physical properties in our world…”

“The function of climate change I suggest, is not as a lower-case environmental phenomenon to be solved…It really is not about stopping climate chaos. Instead, we need to see how we can use the idea of climate change—the matrix of ecological functions, power relationships, cultural discourses and materials flows that climate change reveals—to rethink how we take forward our political, social, economic and personal projects over the decades to come.”

“There is something about this idea that makes it very powerful for lots of different interest groups to latch on to, whether for political reasons, for commercial interests, social interests in the case of NGOs, and a whole lot of new social movements looking for counter culture trends.”

“Climate change has moved from being a predominantly physical phenomenon to being a social one…It is circulating anxiously in the worlds of domestic politics and international diplomacy, and with mobilising force in business, law, academia, development, welfare, religion, ethics, art and celebrity.”

“Climate change also teaches us to rethink what we really want for ourselves…mythical ways of thinking about climate change reflect back to us truths about the human condition…”

“The idea of climate change should be seen as an intellectual resource around which our collective and personal identifies and projects can form and take shape. We need to ask not what we can do for climate change, but to ask what climate change can do for us…Because the idea of climate change is so plastic, it can be deployed across many of our human projects and can serve many of our psychological, ethical, and spiritual needs.”

“…climate change has become an idea that now travels well beyond its origins in the natural sciences…climate change takes on new meanings and serves new purposes…climate change has become ‘the mother of all issues’, the key narrative within which all environmental politics—from global to local—is now framed…Rather than asking ‘how do we solve climate change?’ we need to turn the question around and ask: ‘how does the idea of climate change alter the way we arrive at and achieve our personal aspirations…?'”

“We need to reveal the creative psychological, spiritual and ethical work that climate change can do and is doing for us…we open up a way of resituating culture and the human spirit…As a resource of the imagination, the idea of climate change can be deployed around our geographical, social and virtual worlds in creative ways…it can inspire new artistic creations in visual, written and dramatised media. The idea of climate change can provoke new ethical and theological thinking about our relationship with the future….We will continue to create and tell new stories about climate change and mobilise these stories in support of our projects. Whereas a modernist reading of climate may once have regarded it as merely a physical condition for human action, we must now come to terms with climate change operating simultaneously as an overlying, but more fluid, imaginative condition of human existence.”

Such a deception could only have gone on as long and far as it has because of the cultural cover provided by contemporary Western elites who have embraced environmentalism as the new secular religion. This development and its implications are examined in detail in the Independent Institute’s award-winning, new book:

The New Holy Wars: Economic Religion vs. Environmental Religion in Contemporary America, by Robert H. Nelson

I was talking with a new college graduate recently who told me of his plan to buy a BMW.  He doesn’t have the money to do it now, but said that after he had a job for a few years and had some income saved up, getting a BMW was something he aspired to.

Am I stretching too much to see a parallel between this and the support for President Obama’s “hope and change” agenda?  Like the new college graduate who aspires to own a BMW, President Obama hoped for the day when people could be secure in the idea that future health care costs wouldn’t bankrupt them, and the day when our economy could run on high-tech non-polluting domestically-produced energy.

The recent graduate who was talking with me about his aspirations for a BMW had the good sense to see that at the moment the car was unaffordable to him.  He would wait to buy it until he had the financial means to do so.  Indeed, if he’d concocted plans to get a dozen credit cards and max them out so he could get the car now, we would frown upon his behavior rather than admiring the fact that he has dreams and aspirations.  Borrowing as much as possible now to get the car immediately would be a recipe for bankruptcy.

The reality is that the aspirations President Obama has are unaffordable.  Sure, it would be nice to have everything he hopes for, but we can’t pay for all those dreams, and as he has pushed those dreams toward programs and promises, those promises can’t all be kept.

We can talk about all the reasons President Obama’s policies might be flawed; the problems with cap and trade, the perverse incentives in health care reform, and so forth, but that’s not what I’m talking about here.  I’m talking about the irresponsibility of promising a nation more than its government can afford to deliver.

Alan Greenspan has a sobering essay on the topic in the Wall Street Journal, where he says, “For generations there had been a large buffer between the borrowing capacity of the U.S. government and the level of its debt to the public. But in the aftermath of the Lehman Brothers collapse, that gap began to narrow rapidly…”  Greenspan notes, “In the 1950s, as I remember them, U.S. federal budget deficits were no more politically acceptable than households spending beyond their means. Regrettably, that now quaint notion gave way over the decades, such that today it is the rare politician who doesn’t run on seemingly costless spending increases or tax cuts with borrowed money.”  That’s what happens when aspirations turn into promises and are legislated as government programs.

Now, Greenspan says, “The federal government is currently saddled with commitments for the next three decades that it will be unable to meet…”

President Obama campaigned on a set of aspirations many Americans share.  We know that because he easily won the election.  The campaign was like saying to the recent graduate, I hope that some day you can get the BMW, and if I’m elected I’ll do what I can to make your aspiration become a reality.  Post-election, the administration has been like saying, I’ve taken out a huge loan that you’ll have to repay, and here’s your BMW.  Actually, it’s not even that good, because looking at health care, we’re starting the payments now, but the benefits don’t start for years.

It’s great to dream big, as long as you don’t sabotage your future to try to make those dreams come true.  People see this.  I suspect that’s why President Obama was so popular when he was running for election, and why his popularity is suffering now.  We’ll get a better indication in the November election, which is shaping up to be a referendum on Obamanomics.

Today, the Court decided Ontario v. Quon.  At issue was the right of the City of Ontario to read text messages sent by its employee’s on City-issued pagers. In a nutshell, the City issued employees pagers, noticed that the number of messages sent exceeded the plan (although the employees personally paid for overages), and thus the City reviewed to messages sent by Quon and others to decide whether the plan should be expanded or whether employees were using the pagers for personal, and not work-related, matters. The City discovered that Quon was using the pager primarily for personal business and disciplined him. 

In adjudicating the 4th Amendment Claim, the High Court assumed without deciding that Quon had a reasonable expectation of privacy in his text messages and that there was a “search” of his messages.  The opinion focused on whether the search was reasonable under the circumstances.  This standard was used because under the Court’s jurisprudence not all warrantless searches are forbidden.  For example, the Court has held that the “special needs” of the work place is an exception.  (Don’t bother searching for this exception in the text of the Amendment—it ain’t there). 

The Court held that because the search was motivated by a legitimate work-related purpose (assessment of the plan and possible need to expand it) and because the search was not excessive in scope (the City looked at only two months of messages where Quon exceeded the plan), the search was reasonable under the case law. 

Bottom line: If you work for a government, remember that your e-mails and text messages on government-issued phones, computers, and pagers can be viewed by your bosses.  Even if you have not signed an acknowledgment that the employer can review these matters, Quon demonstrates that it is not hard to craft a reason for searching that is “reasonable” and will pass Court review.  Protect your privacy by using your personal phone or BlackBerry for personal matters and the government-issued device for work matters.  Your personal electronics are probably better than what the government issues anyway, so don’t take chances.

David, Stewart’s bit was indeed insightful and encouraging, one of the best he’s done in a while, and I found it very funny and compelling. All your points are well taken. But I must nitpick Stewart’s comparison of Obama to Frodo. It was hilarious, but it seems to be a bit too charitable. While Stewart is correct that taking the oath of office and assuming power was a defining moment in changing Obama from a left-liberal politician to the most powerful executive power holder on earth, I don’t think he ever intended to go to Washington to destroy the ring — he always wanted his precious power. Of course, Stewart can’t be faulted too much for making this type of joke, and considering his audience he is probably doing a service in educating the left on the follies of the “hope and change” of Obama, who did indeed promise some good-sounding things in the national-security arena before assuming the throne.

I would say, however, that the real Frodo in America is the liberal movement in general. Starting off as an essentially freedom-oriented movement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, American liberalism became the premier champion of state power in the twentieth. Initially a movement interested in breaking down government power structures to liberate the common man, liberalism was taken in by the lure of power and the promise that it could be exercised for the good of all. At first a movement interested in ridding of coercive redistribution of wealth, correctly seeing it as a bane on the poor and a blessing for the politically connected wealthy, liberalism eventually succumbed to the temptation of utilitarianism and socialism—the ghastly prospect that the same tyranny that for centuries enslaved man and empowered oligarchs could somehow be turned to the benefit of the masses and against the interests of those same oligarchs. Along the way the movement embraced war, militarism, corporatism, the police state, secular puritanism, mass imprisonment, social engineering, central planning and all the other great enemies of mass prosperity and freedom that we now suffer under, regardless of the man with the ring.

This story of liberalism is told in Ekirch’s masterful The Decline of American Liberalism, put back in print by the Independent Institute, and is an important and tragically neglected facet in American intellectual history. The liberals were corrupted by the ring a century before Obama ever went to Mordor.

On Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” host Jon Stewart powerfully attacks President Barack Obama as a hypocrite and power-mongering opportunist regarding the writ of habeas corpus and other legal standards as protected under the U.S. Constitution. As Stewart shows, Obama repeatedly claimed that he was going to reverse the unconstitutional assaults on civil liberties by the Bush Administration, but has instead deliberately continued and indeed worsened such intrusions.

Stewart presents Obama as a supporter of a police state and then compares him to Frodo Baggins in J.R.R. Tolkien’s masterly legendarium, The Lord of the Rings, in which the commoner Frodo succumbs to the lust for the power of the Ring in order to own, dominate and destroy others and reveals that he is no different from the stalking, self-absorbed, twisted, deformed, and depraved character of Gollum. In so doing, Stewart is saying that Obama’s power mongering is fully in keeping with the profound warning of Lord Acton when he noted that:

“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”

. . . is led by people like this volunteer fire chief, who spearheaded an “illegal” collective action to protect their territory from possible ruination from the oil spill. One of many great bits in the article:

When he first began gathering resources, county officials told him he was blowing things out of proportion, that it was just sweet crude. I don’t care if it’s sweet, sour, light, or black,” he says. “I don’t want it in my river.” Others told him the government would handle it. He scoffed. He remembered the Exxon Valdez, hurricane Katrina, hurricane Ivan. If anyone was going to save Magnolia Springs, it wouldn’t be the feds, BP, or environmental activists. It would be the thousand-odd people who live here. After all, the locals knew the water—knew every twist and turn of Magnolia River, Fish River, and Weeks Bay. They would handle things the way they always did—together.

These days, just about everything in the news makes me think (mostly sadly) of Etienne de la Boetie [also see his book, The Politics of Obedience]. This little story shows how real people and real knowledge tend to expose authorities in government and big corporation suits for what they inevitably are—wholly dependent on our fear of them and our faith in them. The story might have been titled “Government Control/Expertise Found to be Figment of Imagination!”
(crossposted at LRC)

In a recent debate, scholars fiercely debated whether or not Texas was really a “small-government” state when compared to California (or any other state). The BP spill, some argued, showed that places like Texas and Alabama were gimme states with their hands out to the federal government.

No doubt there is some truth to all states being “gimme” states but the argument was really about the relative status of state government spending and “intergovernmental transfer” (federal money to the states).

In days of old, I would hustle over to my university’s Government Documents Repository and tediously construct the numbers from U.S. and state budgets. In addition, there are useful print volumes of Statistical Abstracts, Historical Statistics of the United States, and a new edition focused on state data.

Fortunately, many of these debates-in-a-vacuum no longer require such tedium. Instead, all of this data can be found at

http://www.usgovernmentspending.com

So, back to the question: is Texas a “small-government” state versus California?

The data show that local and state government spend 18% of  Texas GDP. Add the 25% GDP that the feds spend and the total is 43%

California spends a whopping 28% of state GDP plus the same 25% spent by the feds. Total: 53% of GDP.

This site (http://www.usgovernmentspending.com) allows anyone to quickly find data based on per capita, % of GDP, inflation adjusted, etc. Even better, it is historical and gives a sense of change over time. For example, I constructed the following chart based on nominal dollars:

In my mind, 43% or 53% both exceed “limited government.” Bob Higgs would point out the additional factor of busybodiness  (and cost) imposed by unfunded mandates, regulations, and living in a world made more uncertain by arbitrary government.

Left-liberals counter that we can outgrow future obligations. If the economy grows, they argue, then we can afford Social Security, Medicare, military spending, and Roads to Nowhere. (Remember Keynes on the stimulus effect of digging holes as “better than [doing] nothing”).

The problem with this left-liberal argument is that it presupposes that the government has a lien on all our present and future labor. However, since we are far more wealthy today, we live longer, eat better, etc. the government ought to shrink. One hundred years ago, Progressives attacked problems of poverty, sanitation, disease that don’t exist today. For a look at how much we have progressed on all social indicators, I recommend the short, delightful book by economist Stanley Lebergott, Pursuing Happiness: American Consumers in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, 1993).

At any rate, if 43% of GDP is “small government,” then we freedom fighters have our work cut out. Even adjusted for inflation, we would have to cut total government spending by up to 50% to get back to where the Reagan Revolution began (and then fizzled) in 1980!

Enough to make me as pessimistic as Bob Higgs about the fiscal end times!

Power corrupts, and the power of political activism to thwart the lawful use of private property continues to corrupt our once-free market of competitive enterprises. It turns out that those “spontaneous” demonstrations against Wall-Mart in community after community are in fact well-funded and professionally orchestrated political activist campaigns bought and paid for by Wal-Mart’s highly unionized supermarket rivals, as well as by the unions themselves.

This profile shows how the Saint Consulting Group has succeeded through using

political-campaign tactics—petition drives, phone banks, websites—to build support for or against controversial projects, from oil refineries and shopping centers to quarries and landfills. Over the years, it has conducted about 1,500 campaigns in 44 states. Mr. Saint says about 500 have involved trying to block a development, and most of those have been clandestine.

Among the firm’s clients,

Safeway, a national chain based in Pleasanton, Calif., retained Saint to thwart Wal-Mart Supercenters in more than 30 towns in California, Oregon, Washington and Hawaii in recent years …. Former Saint employees say much of the work consisted of training Safeway’s unionized workers to fight land-use battles, including how to speak at public hearings.

Proudly calling themselves the “Wal-Mart killers,” Saint’s operatives might more accurately be dubbed the “consumer and community killers,” as their tactics deprive consumers—and especially, the lower income shoppers comprising Wal-Mart’s base—access to the benefits of the wide selection and lower prices the presence of a Wal-Mart brings (including lowering the prices competitors offer), as well as its jobs. And even ultimately unsuccessful campaigns can more than double the time it takes to open a new Wal-Mart, producing in the process huge additional costs for consumers and communities. With the delays of one Wal-Mart alone estimated to have cost the developer over $3 million in legal fees, and the local government an estimated $6 million per year in sales and property-tax revenue, these legal and opportunity costs are ultimately borne by taxpayers and consumers.

It’s well past time to expose “community activists” asserting the evils of development—even those not explicitly manufactured by tactics such as these—as furthering the interests of the rich and the politically savvy at the expense of the poor and powerless, and end the ability to use politics to trump property rights.

———
For more on this issue, see the Institute’s newest book, Property Rights: Eminent Domain and Regulatory Takings Re-Examined

Before the USSR collapsed, “smart” observers bet that the regime had broad support and the people only wanted reform. This was a theme of writers like Stephen Cohen and required reading during my graduate school education.

Similarly, outside observers assumed that nominally democratic Iran maintained broad support for the Islamic Republic. Sure, sure, college students and urban elites would demonstrate but the people outside the capitol were loyal to the regime. Then the disputed election, massive protests and yet . . . still observers wondered if the demonstrators—matched by counter-demonstrators—represented only the educated stratum.

As Michael Ledeen shows in a recent Wall Street Journal column, we now know the answer:

The regime sent 50,000 buses across the country, offered free food and drink for the anniversary of Ayatollah Khomeini, and the turn out was abysmal (imagine one person per bus!). This “demonstration of silence” is more powerful than the clashes we witnessed a year ago.

This boycott demonstrates the importance of civil society: that sphere buffering between individual and State. In communist nations (think Cuba), the buses would be full because the State controls everything—including your food rations. In authoritarian nation States where civil society exists, there is room for protest, even if it is refusing to show up for state-sponsored propaganda plays.

Libertarians loath neoconservatives but perhaps there was something to their distinction between authoritarian (civil society) and totalitarian states (no civil society). What remains to be seen is whether the government trends toward the totalitarian.

Meanwhile, don’t look for President Barack Obama to speak out. The people of Iran showed courage by remaining silent and staying home. President Obama demonstrates cowardice by doing the same. One is an act of defiance (the Iranian no shows), the other a “sin of omission.”

Some people have always occupied themselves in crying out that the end is near. This sort of thing has been going on for millennia. But lately, it seems to me, the volume of such doom-saying has risen markedly. Websites that feature apocalyptic forecasts have grown like weeds on the Web, and at least one well-known libertarian site has shifted from more analytical material to heavy doses of gloom-and-doom. An odd aspect of this increasing tendency toward Chicken-Little-ism is that it now comes for the most part in two completely different versions. Let’s call them the Left Version and the Right Version.

The Left Version, of course, has been bombarding us for the past forty or fifty years mainly as a warning of imminent environmental catastrophe ― of near-term exhaustion of natural resources, terminal ruin of a hyper-polluted physical environment and, most recently, overheating of the earth’s atmosphere with countless attendant climatic disasters. Leftists who peddle this terrifying prospect seek to allay the threat by ceding totalitarian powers to government officials who in their copious wisdom will save the day, if only narrowly and at the cost of our liberties and our modern standard of living.

The Right Version has resided for decades more in the shadows cast by millenarians, goldbugs, and self-anointed financial gurus than in the bright media glow that has illuminated the leftists’ prophecies. Recently, however, many more people seem to have concluded that the only sane course is to forsake all hope for the continuation of socio-economic life as we have known it, and hence that preparation for a complete social and economic meltdown ― Greater-than-Great Depression, hyperinflation, dollar collapse ― obliges us to stock up on guns, ammo, gold, and a larder full of dried beans and other survivalist goodies.

It is interesting that although many people take an ominous forecast more or less seriously, they have embraced dramatically different conceptions of the nature of the impending doom. Are those who foresee the future so differently living in the same world? If so, how can they have come to such clashing conclusions about the events to come?

The answer, I believe, has to do with ideology, which I have long defined as a somewhat coherent, rather comprehensive belief system about social relations, noting that each such system has four distinct aspects: cognitive, moral, programmatic, and solidary. Ideologies permit people to understand, evaluate, and cope with a social world otherwise too vast and complicated to comprehend. If two persons embrace starkly different ideologies, they can easily arrive at starkly different visions of future developments, even when presented with the same information.

Can objective facts and established scientific theories cut through all of this ideological noise, substituting the pure, harmonious tones of truth for the cacophony of wild-eyed, mutually inconsistent ideologies? No, they cannot. In the determination of human beliefs, ideological outlooks and propensities have the power to override virtually any kind of inconsistent information or knowledge. Decades may pass, yet the Club of Rome remains as convinced as ever that environmental and natural-resource disasters are imminent. Stock markets may soar by multiples while confirmed “bears” never lose their faith that selling short is the road to financial paradise ― hedge-fund manager Michael Berger defrauded a multitude of trusting investors, not to mention tricking the government regulators, and drove his firm Manhattan Capital into bankruptcy because he could not surrender his bearish convictions even during a prolonged run-up in stock prices in the late 1990s.

So, the answer to my previous question is, yes, different sets of people in effect do live in different worlds, notwithstanding their physical coexistence on planet earth during extended time spans. And therefore you’ll have a devil of a time disabusing any of them of their cherished visions. Strange to say, many people fall in love even with their preferred brand of apocalypse. Doomster Paul Erlich might have lost his famous bet with Julian Simon, but he never “cried uncle.” As Ed Regis wrote in Wired:

 A more perfect resolution of the Ehrlich-Simon debate could not be imagined. All of the former’s grim predictions had been decisively overturned by events. Ehrlich was wrong about higher natural resource prices, about “famines of unbelievable proportions” occurring by 1975, about “hundreds of millions of people starving to death” in the 1970s and ’80s, about the world “entering a genuine age of scarcity.”

In 1990, for his having promoted “greater public understanding of environmental problems,” Ehrlich received a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award.

And so it goes.

If you want to load up on gold, who am I to tell you that you’re making a bad bet? I don’t know what the price of gold, or anything else, will be in the future. (I also happen to believe that nobody else knows, or can know. Someone who knew the course of future prices could easily and quickly acquire the wealth of Croesus simply by making appropriate transactions in the futures markets.)

What I do know is that for thousands of years, some people have been telling their fellows that the end is near, and although some terrible things did happen from time to time, hardly ever did they prove to be as catastrophic as the prophets’ most foreboding warnings had foretold. The sky never rained blood, the oceans never boiled, the ground never rose up to crush squealing humanity between heaven and earth. Of course, as David Hume has taught us, this history is no guarantee that such an apocalypse won’t happen.  Nevertheless, I am inclined to make my bets on the basis of a somewhat more temperate outlook.