Rearranging the Deckchairs

Testing from phone

Well it’s good to see the Libertarian Party nail their colors to the mast and it’s nice to see some different ideas for a change. Sadly it’s all spoilt by the usual ideological pontificating and transparently hypocritical nonsense that is the hallmark of libertarians everywhere. For example:

The UK Libertarian Party - Libertarian Party

Libertarians believe that coercive actions by individuals, or groups of individuals—for example, the State—against others can never be justified.

Well in that case how do you justify any of the sales or other taxes you propose? What if I do not agree to pay them? What if others do not agree to charge them?

You currently have no choice about whether to pay Income Tax,

Sure you do. You can leave. There’s always Somalia. Indeed you don’t have to earn more than your tax free allowance so you can stay and pay nothing at all.

so collecting this tax is clearly a coercive act on the part of the government.

Well OK. Of course thieves don’t want to pay for goods and services either, and also have to be coerced.

The Libertarian Party proposes moving, within the first term of a Libertarian government, purely to consumption based taxes,

Oh? Will collecting this tax be coercive?

and then only on non-essential goods.

Non-essential according to whom? Is my bike essential? My laptop? My other laptop? My DVD collection? A night out? A takeaway? Bottle of wine? Who decides?

How is this different from the choice I already have, about where and how much to earn? How is it morally different from the status quo, which I could easily argue only charges against non-essential income?

Not only is this far fairer

How? What’s fair about the poorer subsidising the wealthy by paying proportionally more for what you deem to be their luxuries? And what’s unfair about having the wealthy pay more tax? After all the wealthy use the police more, use the courts more, and generally benefit more from property rights, and enforcement of contracts. They also benefit more from defence, and arguably they also benefit more from a society with decent healthcare and education. So why shouldn’t they pay accordingly?

The UK Libertarian Party - Welcome

We don’t say government is too big in one area, but then in another area push for a law to force people to do what we want.

No? Are your laws optional?

We believe in individual liberty, personal responsibility, and freedom from government—on all issues at all times.

Sounds great…

We shall shift towards taxing spending, not income.

…what? I thought we were going to be free from government on all issues and at all times. And don’t libertarians claim that taxation coercive? Don’t they claim that taxation is theft? If so then why is it OK to steal in any manner or for any purposes? Aren’t some taxes like being a little bit pregnant?

the introduction of a Swedish-style voucher system.

Paid for with what? Taxes? Isn’t that coercive? What happened to freedom from government on all issues at all times?

This requires a well funded, trained and equipped professional Armed Forces (both full time and Territorial), geared for the defence of our nation and shipping

Well then we can’t have that. After all we were going to be free from government on all issues and at all times, and coercive actions against others are never justified. Indeed how are the Armed Forces going to be well funded if not by money coerced from pacifists? What if some people would rather see well funded education and healthcare? It’s their money, right?

In line with the Rule of Law, a transparent, consistent points based system is one of our key proposed measures to humanely manage migration.

I thought coercive actions by individuals or groups of individuals against others were never justified? I also thought we were going to be free from government on all issues and at all times?

As they scale it up, I predict these guys will be having fistfights over what is and is not ‘coercive’ and what is and is not ‘property’ before long. Anyway it is good to see Libertarians try to articulate their policies. Maybe after a while of attempting this they’ll learn to dial down the ideology and figure out that what they really are is Liberals. (ducks)

Technorati Tags: libertarian, uk

Anthony Watts:

So with all of this discussion, and with this newly collated data-set handed to me today, it gave me an idea. I had never seen a histogram comparison done on all four data-sets simultaneously.

Well, there is a reason for that. The data sets use different baselines to compute relative anomalies, so such a histogram comparison would be worthless.

Doing so would show how well the cool and warm anomalies are distributed within the data. If there is a good balance to the distribution, one would expect that the measurement system is doing a good job of capturing the natural variance. If the distribution of the histogram is skewed significantly in either the negative or positive, it would provide clues into what bias issues might remain in the data.

Well, no it would not. It would however provide a clue that whoever was attempting the comparison didn’t know the difference between an anomaly and a trend. If for example somebody computed anomalies relative to absolute zero, then all the anomalies would be in the red. The trend would remain unaltered and it would be no less correct.

Needless to say such a basic error won’t stop the usual denialists running with this and repeating it verbatim. Posts such as this one from Watts do however provide a useful function. They are wrong in such a uniquely clueless way that they are the equivalent of exploding dye packs in stacks of stolen money.

Look for a lot of global warming denialists running around colored bright red before they figure out what happened here.

Update: the original post seems to have been taken down. Meanwhile it is available here.

Technorati Tags: globalwarming, anthony watts, histogram, anomaly, trend, temperature, agw, denialists

Monday:

It’s the old argument about cost of ownership, you see. PCs are cheaper initially, but quite often the amount of time that you, or someone else, spend attempting to fix the problems actually adds a considerable amount of money “spent” on the machine. I have owned, since I bought my first computer in 1997, seven Apple Macs. The amount that I have spent on tech support amounts to £0.00p. Sure, I have spent some time tuning and fixing bits and pieces, but much of the time this was for my own pleasure as much as anything else.

Wednesday:

Apologies for the lack of posting, I had some severe computer issues yesterday. The new Apple 10.5.2 upgrade broke my computer. Or, rather, it caused a conflict that meant that a large number of my most vital applications simply crashed on start up.

Technorati Tags: vista, mac, linux, all as bad as each other

From climateprediction.net:

Climateprediction.net is the largest experiment to try and produce a forecast of the climate in the 21st century. To do this, we need people around the world to give us time on their computers - time when they have their computers switched on, but are not using them to their full capacity.

Whatever about globalwarming, this is certainly making my Macbook get hotter and louder:

Before:

After:

Read the rest of this entry »

As mentioned before, in May I’m cycling with a group from Amsterdam to London. It’s going to be over two days, with distances of 80km on day one and 130km on day 2.

Although I cycle a fair bit through the week when commuting (about 16 miles a day), I haven’t cycled these distances in a long time so I’ve been doing a bit of training:
Read the rest of this entry »

This is a great lively presentation from Naomi Oreskes on global warming denialism in America (not that it’s restricted to America). It’s also a good backgrounder on the science.

(And if the name seems familiar, she’s the author of this paper on the scientific consensus on global warming - and yes, Virginia, there is one)

HT Deltoid

Technorati Tags: globalwarming consensus denialism science

Stephen Fry has a blog.

DK: close-minded, pusillanimous, ill-informed moron. demonstrably incorrect about global warming

Over at Devil’s Kitchen, DK demonstrates projection, and gets every point of substance wrong while calling someone else an ill-informed idiot. First we have:

The entirety of the global warming theory is predicated on (fudged) computer modelling and inaccurate data.

Well, for the sake of argument let’s suppose for the moment that there really is a global conspiracy among climate scientists to fudge computer models and to fake data. As conspiracy theories go this is slightly, but only slightly, more plausible than the notions that hollywood faked the moon landings, Israel brought down the WTC, and space aliens stole New York City overnight and replaced it with an exact replica. But let’s go with it. Even then DK appears to be skipping lightly over a number of items such as the observed warming, the many independent lines of evidence for it (including not only melting icecaps and glaciers, but the valiant attempts of denialists including DK himself to explain it without invoking CO2). Then there are the observations of elevated CO2 in the atmosphere, the isotope evidence that it is man-made, the observations of CO2 infrared absorption in the lab and from space, and the droughts which are explained only by warming. Oh, and  the little matter of the physics of greenhouse gases which has been known and uncontroversial for over 100 years - that is, until it all added up to a problem that wingnuts couldn’t solve by cutting taxes, raising prison sentences, prayer, or bombing the middle east. And boy, all those birds and butterflies are going to be mad as hell when they realise they left their previous habitats all because they were fooled by fudged computer models and inaccurate data! Given all that, the only explanation for DK’s strange outburst is that he is exceptionally ill-informed or lying.

Next up is a graph of CO2 over the past 500 million years:

It’s worth reading the whole of that post in order to understand how those warm periods relate to CO2 (or, rather, don’t particularly).

Actually it’s worth reading the cited paper so that you realise that it is about long term climate change, i.e. change on tectonic timescales and thus has sweet FA to do with global warming on shorter timescales…such as for example the last century or the last 30 years. To put that in perspective, if you were to plot the emergence of modern man (homo sapiens, c. 130,000 years ago) on the graph DK cites, it would look a little like this:

But it gets worse. No fact-free denialist rant would be complete without at least one canard that has been rebutted countless times already, so DK doesn’t disappoint and takes “global warming stopped in 1998″ for yet another whirl around the dancefloor. In fact, global warming did not stop in 1998. Even leaving aside the blatant cherry picking of 1998 (a record year) as starting point, that claim is garbage. However as Tamino points out: garbage is forever.

Technorati Tags: globalwarming projection climate

What is it about the global warming topic that makes otherwise sensible people lose all semblance of reason?

For example, according to Bishop Hill oil might not be a fossil fuel after all, and there is…

an article in Science which seems to support the theory. Our findings illustrate that the abiotic synthesis of hydrocarbons in nature may occur in the presence of ultramafic rocks, water, and moderate amounts of heat.

…so far, so good. But then he goes on to say that:

If this is right, then oil is not a fossil fuel at all, and another prop has been kicked out from under the global warmers’ feet.

Huh? While it is true that ‘global warmers’ (like most everyone else) tend to refer to oil as a fossil fuel, AGW theory doesn’t depend at all on whether oil is a fossil fuel or not. The issue is whether combustion of, among other things, oil, leads to increased GHGs which in turn leads to increased T. Why do denialists pretend that every silly quibble somehow spells doom for the AGW theory?

Elsewhere the good bishop thinks that invoking the magical concept of ‘the price‘ will somehow make a market take into account costs that people can simply externalise. This is a case of believing in the free market fairy.