Climate Hoax

What was published under IPCC’s auspicious is clearly falling under vigorous scrutiny and it turns out that there is plenty to work with.  Outright garbage work was packed into the full report and this is now coming back in full force to haunt them.  We can see from this article that the unraveling is well advanced and that calling global warming a hoax is well supported.

This is unfair of course, but considering how unfairly critics were handled over the past couple of years, it is perhaps rough justice.  There is still plenty of good science published in the IPCC reports, except they should no longer be deemed as peer reviewed.

Some of the claims that found their way into the IPCC reports were obviously silly gross exaggerations and recognized as such at the time by informed observers.  Except that IPCC cared little for informed observers, whom they had largely silenced.  They were advocates and not terribly polished ones either.  They made too many people angry.

As I have already posted, the past decade of temperature moderation and decline has now countered the preceding decade of warming and in the process neutralized the theory of CO2 linkage to global warming at least at present magnitudes. CO2 content has continued to climb in the meantime and that is still not likely a good thing.

It is still too early to refocus attention back to CO2 management but I think we have to go there.

The Hottest Hoax in the World

30 January 2010

It was presented as fact. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, led by India’s very own RK Pachauri, even announced a consensus on it. The world was heating up and humans were to blame. A pack of lies, it turns out.

 would be what it isn’t. And contrarywise, what is, it wouldn’t be. And what it wouldn’t be, it would. You see? —Alice in Wonderland

http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/international/the-hottest-hoax-in-the-world

BY Ninad D. Sheth 

The climate change fraud that is now unravelling is unprecedented in its deceit, unmatched in scope—and for the liberal elite, akin to 9 on the Richter scale. Never have so few fooled so many for so long, ever.

The entire world was being asked to change the way it lives on the basis of pure hyperbole. Propriety, probity and transparency were routinely sacrificed.

The truth is: the world is not heating up in any significant way. Neither are the Himalayan glaciers going to melt as claimed by 2035. Nor is there any link at all between natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and global warming. All that was pure nonsense, or if you like, ‘no-science’! 

The climate change mafia, led by Dr Rajendra K Pachauri, chairperson of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), almost pulled off the heist of the century through fraudulent data and suppression of procedure. All the while, they were cornering millions of dollars in research grants that heaped one convenient untruth upon another. And as if the money wasn’t enough, the Nobel Committee decided they should have the coveted Peace Prize.

But let’s begin at the beginning. Mr Pachauri has no training whatsoever in climate science. This was known all the time, yet he heads the pontification panel which proliferates the new gospel of a hotter world. How come? Why did the United Nations not choose someone who was competent? After all, this man is presumably incapable of differentiating between ocean sediments and coral terrestrial deposits, nor can he go about analysing tree ring records and so on. That’s not jargon; these are essential elements of a syllabus in any basic course on climatology.
You cannot blame him. His degree and training is in railroad engineering. You read it right. This man was educated to make railroads from point A to point B.

THE GATHERING STORM

There are many casualties in this sad story of greed and hubris. The big victim is the scientific method. This was pointed out in great detail by John P Costella of the Virginia-based Science and Public Policy Institute. Science is based on three fundamental pillars. The first is fallibility. The fact that you can be wrong, and if so proven by experimental input, any hypothesis can be—indeed, must be—corrected.

This was systematically stymied as early as 2004 by the scientific in-charge of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Change Unit. This university was at the epicentre of the ‘research’ on global warming. It is here that Professor Phil Jones kept inconvenient details that contradicted climate change claims out of reports.

The second pillar of science is that by its very nature, science is impersonal. There is no ‘us’, there is no ‘them’. There is only the quest. However, in the entire murky non-scientific global warming episode, if anyone was a sceptic he was labelled as one of ‘them’. At the very apex, before his humiliating retraction, Pachauri had dismissed a report by Indian scientists on glaciers as “voodoo science”.

The third pillar of science is peer group assessment. This allows for validation of your thesis by fellow scientists and is usually done in confidence. However, the entire process was set aside by the IPCC while preparing the report. Thus, it has zero scientific value.

The fact that there was dissent within the climate science teams that some people objected to the very basis of the grand claims of global warming, did not come out through the due process. It came to light when emails at the Climate Research Centre at East Anglia were hacked in November 2009. It is from the hacked conversations that a pattern of conspiracy and deceit emerge. It is a peek into the world of global warming scaremongering—amplify the impact of CO2, stick to dramatic timelines on destruction of forests, and never ask for a referral or raise a contrary point. You were either a believer in a hotter world or not welcome in this ‘scientific fold’.

HOUSE OF CARDS AND COLOUR OF CASH

So we have the fact that a non-expert heads the IPCC. We have the fact that glaciers are not melting by 2035; this major scaremongering is now being defended as a minor error (it was originally meant to be 2350, some have clarified). The date was spouted first by Syed Hasnain, an Indian glacier expert, in an interview to a magazine. It had no scientific validity, and, as Hasnain has himself said, was speculative.

On the basis of that assertion, The Energy and Resources Institute (Teri) that Pachauri heads and where Hasnain works in the glaciology team, got two massive chunks of funding. The first was estimated to be a $300,000 grant from Carnegie Corporation and the second was a part of the $2 million funding from the European Union. So you write a report that is false on glaciers melting and get millions to study the impact of a meltdown which will not be happening in the first place. Now if this is not a neat one, what is?

The same goes for dire predictions on Amazon rain forests. The IPCC maintained that there would be a huge depletion in Amazon rain forests because of lack of precipitation. Needless to add, no Amazon rain forest expert could be trusted to back this claim. They depended on a report by a freelance journalist and activist, instead, and now it has blown up in their faces.

There’s plenty more in this sordid tale. For one thing, there is no scientific consensus at all that man-made CO2 emissions cause global warming, as claimed by the IPCC. In a recent paper, Lord Monckton of Brenchley, who has worked extensively on climate change models, argues: ‘There is no scientific consensus on how much the world has warmed or will warm; how much of the warming is natural; how much impact greenhouse gases have had or will have on temperature; how sea level, storms, droughts, floods, flora, and fauna will respond to warmer temperature; what mitigative steps—if any—we should take; whether (if at all) such steps would have sufficient (or any) climatic effect; or even whether we should take any steps at all.’

An investigation by Dr Benny Peiser, director, Global Warming Policy Foundation, has revealed that only 13 of the 1,117, or a mere 1 per cent of the scientific papers crosschecked by him, explicitly endorse the consensus as defined by the IPCC. Thus the very basis of the claim of consensus on global warming is false. And so deeply entrenched is the global warming lobby, the prestigious journal Science did not publish a letter that Dr Peiser wrote pointing out the lack of consensus.

Speaking to Open, says Dr Peiser, “The IPCC process by which it arrives at its conclusions lacks balance, transparency and due diligence. It is controlled by a tightly knit group of individuals who are completely convinced that they are right. As a result, conflicting data and evidence, even if published in peer-reviewed journals, are regularly ignored, while exaggerated claims, even if contentious or not peer-reviewed, are often highlighted in IPCC reports. Not surprisingly, the IPCC has lost a lot of credibility in recent years. It is also losing the trust of more and more governments who are no longer following its advice. Until it agrees to undergo a root and branch reform, it will continue to haemorrhage credibility and trust. The time has come for a complete overhaul of its structure and workings.”

Another fraud is in the very chart central to Pachauri’s speech at the Copenhagen summit. As Lord Monckton has pointed out, ‘The graph is bogus not only because it relies on made-up data from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, but also because it is overlain by four separate trendlines, each with a start-date carefully selected to give the entirely false impression that the rate of warming over the past 150 years has itself been accelerating, especially between 1975 and 1998. The truth, however—neatly obscured by an ingenious rescaling of the graph and the superimposition of the four bogus trend lines on it—is that from 1860 to 1880 and again from 1910 to 1940 the warming rate was exactly the same as the warming rate from 1975 to 1998.’

PACHAURI’S WRONG NUMBERS

 -- omitted chart

This chart, tracking mean global temperature over the past 150 years, was central to the presentation that IPCC Chairman Rajendra K. Pachauri made at the Copenhagen environment summit. Many scientists believe that the graph is fraudulent. First, there are strong allegations that the data, collected from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, is a tissue of lies. Plus, as British climate change expert Lord Christopher Monckton puts it: “(The main graph, in darker blue) is overlain by four separate lines, each carefully selected to give the entirely false im•pression that the rate of warming over the past 150 years has itself been accelerating, especially between 1975 and 1998. The truth, however... is that from 1860 to 1880 and again from 1910 to 1940, the warming rate was exactly the same as the warming rate from 1975 to 1998.” In other words, the graph has been drawn with a motive to prove one’s point, and not to show the truth.

Thus the earth has warmed at this rate at least twice in the last 100 years and no major catastrophe has occurred. What is more, the earth has cooled after that warming. Why is the IPCC not willing to explore this startling point?

Another total lie has been that the Sunderbans in Bangladesh are sinking on account of the rise in sea level. The IPCC claimed that one-fifth of Bangladesh will be under water by 2050. Well, it turns out this is an absurd, unscientific and outrageous claim. According to scientists at the Centre for Environmental and Geographical Information Services (Cegis) in Dhaka, its surface area appears to be growing by 20 sq km annually. Cegis has based its results on more than 30 years of satellite imagery. IPCC has not retracted this claim. As far as they are concerned, Bangladesh is a goner by 2050, submerged forever in the Bay of Bengal.

THE COOKIE CRUMBLES

The fallout of Climategate is slowly but surely unfolding right where it hurts a large number of special interests—in the field of business. Yes, the carbon trading business is now in the line of fire. Under a cap-and-trade system, a government authority first sets a limit on emissions, deciding how much pollution will be allowed in all. Next, companies are issued credits, essentially licences to pollute, based on how large they are, and what industries they work in. If a company comes in below its cap, it has extra credits which it may trade with other companies, globally.

Post Climategate, this worldwide trade, estimated at about $30 billion in 2006, is finding few takers. It is under attack following the renewed uncertainty over the role of human-generated CO2 in global warming. In the US, which never adopted any of this to begin with, there is a serious move now to finish off the cap-and-trade regime globally. It’s a revolt of sorts. Six leading Democrats in the US Congress have joined hands with many Republicans to urge the Obama Administration to back off from the regime.

The collapse of the international market for carbon credits, a direct fallout of Climategate, has already sent shudders down many spines in parts of the world that were looking forward to making gains from it. It was big business, after all, and Indian businesses were eyeing it as well. In fact, Indian firms were expected to trade some $1 billion worth of carbon credits this year, and with the market going poof, they stand to lose quite some money (notional or otherwise).

Besides the commercial aspect, there is also the issue of wider public credibility. There have been signs of scepticism all along. In a 2009 Gallup poll, a record number of people—41 per cent—elected to say that global warming was an exaggerated threat. This slackening of public support is in sync with a coordinated political movement that is seeking to re-examine the entire issue of global warming from scratch. The movement is led by increasingly vocal Republicans in the US Senate and packs considerable political power.

Pachauri’s position is also becoming increasingly untenable with demands for his resignation becoming louder by the day. In an interview to Open, Pat Michaels of the Cato Institute, a noted US think-tank, who has followed the debate for years, says, “Dr Pachauri should resign because he has a consistent record of mixing his political views with climate science, because of his intolerance of legitimate scientific views that he does not agree with, because of his disparagement of India’s glacier scientists as practising ‘voodoo science’, and because of his incomprehension of the serious nature of what was in the East Anglia emails.”

Richard North, the professor who brought to light the financial irregularities in a write-up co-authored with Christopher Booker, has also said in a TV interview that, “If Dr Pachauri does not resign voluntarily, he will be forced to do so.”

GLOBAL STORMING AHEAD

The world awaits answers, based not on writings of sundry freelance journalists and non-experts, but on actual verifiable data on whether the globe is warming at all, and if so by how much. Only then can policy options be calibrated. As things stand, there is little doubt that the IPCC will need to be reconstituted with a limited mandate. This mess needs investigation and questions need to be answered as to why absurd claims were taken as gospel truth. The future of everything we know as ‘normal’ depends on this. The real danger is that the general public is now weary of the whole thing, a little tired of the debate, and may not really care for the truth, convenient or otherwise.

Toxic Pirates

The only thing that should be surprising is that anyone should be surprised.  The last thing a shipper should do is release a hazardous cargo to a third party shipper with no questions both asked and properly confirmed and audited before and after.  And if that shipper fails to make an insurance claim, then who is going to investigate?

The truth is that hazardous waste is best stored in the bottom of the sea, so in the end little harm is usually done.  In fact most indirect nuclear waste is likely best dumped to start with.  That is not true for actual fuels, but those are also subject to profitable reprocessing.

At the moment it is unregulated and regulation as exists on land has created the need for pirate disposal.  Thus we have pirates.

I personally have a lot of respect for the sea’s ability to reduce whatever man chooses to throw into the drink.  Of course, I would also like to have a book of scientific work describing what we know so that the dumping can be signed off on in good faith.

Poisoned Shipments: Are Strange, Illicit Sinkings Making the Mediterranean Toxic?

Accusations fly over criminal dumping and scuttling of cargo ships carrying industrial and radioactive waste

By Madhusree Mukerjee   

 http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=poisoned-shipments-criminal-waste-disposal&sc=DD_20100129

http://www.scientificamerican.com/media/inline/poisoned-shipments_1.jpg

BEACHED; The cargo ship Rosso, which ran aground near Amantea, Italy, in December 1990, may have contained radioactive waste that was dumped at sea. The bright red hull is the result of a repainting job after stranding, perhaps done to hide markings.
COURTESY OF LEGAMBIENTE

In October 2009 the government of Italy announced that a wreck discovered off the southwestern tip of the country is theCatania, a passenger vessel sunk during World War I—and not the Cunski, a cargo ship loaded with radioactive waste, as alleged by district authorities from nearby Calabria. Few locals are reassured, says Michael Leonardi of the University of Calabria. He and others maintain that the putative Cunski is still out there and is just one of numerous ships full of poisonous garbage that a crime syndicate has scuttled in the Mediterranean Sea. Such a startling allegation, if true, would not only damage the tourism and fishing industries along this idyllic coast but also compromise the health of Mediterranean residents.

Processing and safely storing waste from the chemical, pharmaceutical and other industries can cost hundreds, even thousands, of dollars per ton—which makes illegal disposal highly profitable. According to the Italian environmental organization Legambiente, some waste shippers that have operational bases in southern Italy have been using the Mediterranean as a dump. While acknowledging that “no wreck has yet been found that contains toxic or radioactive waste,” physicist Massimo Scalia of the University of Rome, La Sapienza, who has chaired two parliamentary commissions on illegal waste disposal, argues that other vidence makes their existence “beyond reasonable doubt.”

Scalia contends that 39 ships were wrecked under questionable circumstances between 1979 and 1995 alone; in every case, he adds, the crew abandoned the ship long before it sank. An average of two ships per year suspiciously disappeared in the Mediterranean during the 1980s and early 1990s, according to Legambiente—and the number has increased to nine wrecks per year since 1995. Paolo Gerbaudo of the Italian daily il Manifesto, who is assisting investigations, has identified 74 suspect wrecks of which he regards 20 as being extremely suspicious. (The record extends until 2001.)

One notable example of a dubious wrecking is the Jolly Rosso, which washed up in December 1990 near the town of Amantea, after what investigators believe was a botched attempt to scuttle it. The cargo was offloaded and allegedly buried on land. In October 2009 an environmental ministry report noted that district authorities detected dangerous substances in a nearby river valley, including a buried concrete block containing mercury, cobalt, selenium and thallium at very high concentrations—and displaying substantial radioactivity indicative of synthetic radionuclides. Authorities also found marble granules mixed in with thousands of cubic meters of earth, which was contaminated with heavy metals and cesium 137, typically a waste product of nuclear reactors. The assemblage suggests that the Jolly Rosso’s cargo included radioactive waste, sealed in concrete and shielded from detection by marble dust (which absorbs radioactivity).

Significantly, the increase in the frequency of wrecking correlates with the progressive tightening of international dumping regulations. The first suspect sinking, in 1979, occurred the year after the Barcelona Convention, which restricts the disposal of pollutants in the Mediterranean Sea, came into force. Over the following decades other treaties expanded the regulations, culminating in a 1993 amendment to the London Dumping Convention that halted the ocean disposal of all radioactive waste and in a 1995 amendment to the Basel Convention that banned the deposition of the industrial world’s lethal excreta in developing countries. The laws ruined the ambitious plans of one firm, Oceanic Disposal Management, incorporated in the British Virgin Islands, to drop tens of thousands of cubic meters of radioactive waste into the seabed off the African coast. Andreas Bernstorff, who formerly headed a Greenpeace campaign against the trade in toxic waste, reports that the number of schemes to ship such garbage to Africa fell steeply at this time, to at most one attempt per year. The drop coincides with a sudden and ominous rise in the frequency with which ships in the Mediterranean perished.

Global Nitrogen Problem

This month’s scientific American is carrying an article on nitrogen fertilizer.  It describes the well known problems associated with our present methodology.

We sow our soils with soluble salts that provide a sufficiency of the necessary nutrient but also flood the same soil with an unutilized surplus beyond the reach of the crop.  We try to minimize the wastage but the article makes clear just how poorly we are doing.

Once again, I emphasize the oncoming importance of biochar in remediating this whole problem.  The authors make no mention of this, suggesting that as usual it is continuing to be poorly understood.

Recall elemental carbon will grab free ions in the soil and prevent their removal until plants arrive to extract the ions.  This simple trick appears to largely eliminate the excessive use of fertilizer.

Interest in the method has gotten plenty of mention but still is a long way from been main stream.  The present situation is restrained by a lack of methodology for industrial farmers who most need the fix.  I will be addressing that shortly.

Fixing the Global Nitrogen Problem( Preview )

From the February 2010 Scientific American Magazine 

Humanity depends on nitrogen to fertilize croplands, but growing global use is damaging the environment and threatening human health. How can we chart a more sustainable path?

By Alan R. Townsend and Robert W. Howarth   

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=fixing-the-global-nitrogen-problem&sc=CAT_ENGYSUS_20100128

Key Concepts

Nitrogen pollution from smokestacks, tailpipes and heavily fertilized croplands creates a  host of challenges for the environment and human health.

Such ills are mounting as some countries burn more fossil fuels and pursue fertilizer-intensive endeavors, such as bio fuels production.

Synthetic fertilizer remains indispensable for meeting global food demands, but the world can—and should—do more with less.

Billions of people today owe their lives to a single discovery now a century old. In 1909 German chemist Fritz Haber of the University of Karlsruhe figured out a way to transform nitrogen gas—which is abundant in the atmosphere but nonreactive and thus unavailable to most living organisms—into ammonia, the active ingredient in synthetic fertilizer. The world’s ability to grow food exploded 20 years later, when fellow German scientist Carl Bosch developed a scheme for implementing Haber’s idea on an industrial scale.

Over the ensuing decades new factories transformed ton after ton of industrial ammonia into fertilizer, and today the Haber-Bosch invention commands wide respect as one of the most significant boons to public health in human history. As a pillar of the green revolution, synthetic fertilizer enabled farmers to transform infertile lands into fertile fields and to grow crop after crop in the same soil without waiting for nutrients to regenerate naturally. As a result, global population skyrocketed from 1.6 billion to six billion in the 20th century.

New Theory of Primate Origins

It is noteworthy that Head is opening the possibility of primates emerging as early as 185 millions of years ago.   Considering that it has been a common perception that primates as a group are much more recent, it throws the whole subject of such dating wide open.

My first comment is that we have been asked to rely on the fossil record.  I have already shown that this is a mistake.  The fossil record is hugely incomplete to start with and must surely show when a given type is most broadly and commonly distributed.  An animal restricted for a range of reasons to a single island will be naturally invisible elsewhere and even then say little regarding its emergence.

A primate family residing only in forests might be never fossilized unless abruptly overcome by a volcano.  Yet a primate is also most likely able to escape.  Thus interpretation based solely on fossil evidence is fraught with risk regarding time frames.

Scientists are quite right to reject speculations lacking fossil support as unproven.  That still places them as possible and even probable hypothesis.  After all with as little fossil record we interpolate an evolution for mankind that suggests ‘missing links’  My point is that extrapolation has a place in informing us of what we are looking for.

The age set for the breakup of Pangaea is speculative in its own right and is hardly precise physically itself.  A rift valley may separate over tens of millions of years yet be incomplete in areas yet blocking easy traffic.  This is not hard to imagine.

We have a good grasp of the eons involved in our history. We lack trustworthy resolution and data yet presume to interpret.  We need to presume less and look harder. 

New Theory of Primate Origins Sparks Controversy

By Charles Q. Choi, LiveScience Contributor

posted: 27 January 2010 08:33 am ET

 http://www.livescience.com/history/primate-origins-100127.html

The evolution of the distant ancestors of humans and other primates may have been driven by dramatic volcanic eruptions and the parting of continents, according to a controversial new theory.

Scientists remain skeptical about the idea, however.

According to prevailing theories, primates originated in a small area. From this center of origin, they dispersed to other regions and continents.

The problem with this idea is that it has "resulted in all sorts of contradictory centers of origin," from Africa to Asia to the Americas, said researcher Michael Heads at the Buffalo Museum of Science in New York. It has also led to perhaps improbable suggestions that primates rafted across the Mozambique Channel to reach Madagascar or even across the Atlantic to reach South  America,  "imaginary migrations" that are "incompatible with ecological evidence," Heads noted.

Instead, Heads suggests the ancestors of primates and their nearest relatives were actually widespread across different parts of the supercontinent Pangaea some 185 million years ago, back when the lands that make up our continents nowadays were fused together. These ancestors could have evolved into the primates in central-South America, Africa, India and southeast Asia, the flying lemurs and tree shrews in southeast Asia, and extinct creatures known as plesiadapiformes in North America and Eurasia.

The big split

Dramatic geological events on Pangaea — major volcanic eruptions and the splitting up of the continent — might have then helped split the primates into different lineages.

For instance, Heads suggested that at roughly the same time as intense volcanic activity in Africa about 180 million years ago, the group that includes humans, other simians, and tarsiers — altogether known as the haplorhines, or dry-nosed primates — split from the strepsirrhines or curly-nosed primates, which include the lemurs and lorises.

There are more examples he poses as well. He speculated the lemurs of Madagascar diverged from their African relatives at roughly the same time as the opening of the Mozambique Channel some 160 million years ago, while New and Old World monkeys diverged with the opening of the Atlantic about 130 million years ago.

Heads detailed his concept in the journal Zoologica Scripta.

Behind the theory

Heads reached these conclusions by incorporating spatial patterns of primate diversity and distribution as historical evidence for how they might have evolved. Prior research looked solely at the fossil record and genetic data, he said.

Still, doubts remain. Evolutionary biologist Anne Yoder at Duke University in Durham, N.C., bluntly stated, "I believe that Heads' theory is absurd."

While Heads conjectures that primates were widespread across Pangaea some 185 million years ago, the ages of the oldest primate fossils known to date suggest they emerged some 56 million years ago, while genetic data suggested they originated some 80 to 116 million years ago. Primatologist John Fleagle at Stony Brook University in New York added that Heads' findings "are inconsistent with all other evidence we have about the timing of major events in primate evolution."

Heads notes that fossils often serve as an incomplete record for what and when animals actually existed. He added that genetic data might also potentially lead scientists to underestimate ages by tens of millions of years.

Another possibility

Although Fleagle noted it was reasonable to assume that the fossil record is imprecise when it comes to what species emerged when, "the question is how far off is the fossil is record likely to be." For instance, "Why don't we find even a hint of a primate in the very rich fossil record of South America between 180 million years ago and 26 million years ago, if they there were actually there?"

Indeed, new research suggests primates could have rafted from Africa to Madagascar. Computer simulations detailed online Jan. 20 in the journal Nature suggest powerful ocean surface currents flowed eastward for a few million years from northeast Mozambique and Tanzania to the island about 50 million years ago.

These could have rapidly carried the ancestors of Madagascar's mammals outward, following storms that washed them out on natural rafts of trees or large vegetation mats.

"I was very excited to see this paper," Yoder said. This kind of dispersal had been an idea without actual data backing it up. "This takes it out of the realm of storytelling and makes it science," she added.

Barney Frank's Fantasy World

This item spells out clearly how we got were we are with the US housing market.  Without question the Clinton administration embraced and promoted the use of Freddie and Fannie as a mechanism to support marginal lending with the implicit support of government as lender of last resort.  He also unleashed the deregulated securities industry. 

 

Bush embraced the policies in place and over time tweaked them higher.  There is no reason to think either Clinton or Bush truly understood the danger created by these new policies.  Those wanting to blame Bush cannot have it both ways.  The policies were created by a democrat regime and sustained as a sop to secure support for other initiatives.

 

We are in the process of getting affordable housing by destroying the mortgage market.  This was done once before during the great depression.  The problem is that there will be less takers because the middle class market is been shrunken

 

The take home lesson for all my readers is that once a credit bubble is underway, no one can stop it except the Federal Reserve through increasing bank reserves.  This was never done in a timely manner.  Instead we went the other direction in an idiotic attempt to keep the party going.

 

Credit bubbles in an isolated stock floatation is great fun and surprisingly common and harmful only to the players.  The housing market is the mainstay of the economy and needs to have a functioning credit system.  It continues to go unrepaired.

 

 

Barney Frank’s Fantasy World

by RUSS ROBERTS on JANUARY 29, 2010

http://cafehayek.com/2010/01/barney-franks-fantasy-world.html

in GOVERNMENT INTERVENTION IN HOUSING

At Big Think, they used one of my questions in their interview with Barney

Frank:

Question: How can Fannie and Freddie be structured to avoid the moral hazard problem and a too-cozy relationship with regulators? (Russ Roberts, Café Hayek)

Barney Frank: Yes, in 2004 the Bush Administration significantly increased those housing goals and particularly ordered Freddie and Fannie to start buying up a lot of low income individual mortgages, and I opposed it at the time.

Interesting answer. Here is the relevant data on the housing goals from my soon (really) to be finished essay:

Starting in 1993, Fannie and Freddie have affordable housing goals—30% of Fannie and Freddie’s purchases of loans have to be loans made to borrowers whose income was below the median income in their area. These are interim goals. In 1996, the interim goal becomes firm at 40%. In 1997, the number rose to 42%. In 2001 it rose to 50%. The Bush Administration increased this number to 52% in 2005, 53% in 2006, and 55% in 2007.

So it turns out there was no increase in 2004 and a minimal increase in 2005. The big increase was in 2001, the legacy of Clinton and Andrew Cuomo his HUD chief. Of course Bush embraced the housing goals and did increase them. But “Bush in 2004″ is a red herring.

I’d love to see the evidence that Frank “opposed it at the time.”

And none of Frank’s answer addresses the moral hazard problem–that people kept lending to F and F as the quality of their portfolio deteriorated because they knew the government stood behind them.

Yuan Revaluation Pending

These monetary maneuvers by the Chinese government surely presage a revaluation of the Yuan dollar peg.  It will now obviously benefit China by somewhat cooling things off internally and allowing them more time to place their huge US dollar pool. This should actually happen very quickly.

The Chinese are also diversifying their currency holdings but there is only so much that can be done quickly.  Again the next two years will be used to perfect this new policy.

The USA is still getting its fiscal house in order in a process that if not accelerated by government action, promises to last a decade.

So we can expect a slow delinking of the Yuan into a basket of currencies and a step by step advance in the value of the Yuan for at least ten years.  We may be impatient with them but recall this is about 1.3 billion people transitioning into a middle class consumer society and they are trying to bring the whole country along.  So far they are doing fantastic and have avoided hillside slums that is common most other places.

January 28, 2010

China Yuan and US Dollar News

http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/01/china-yuan-and-us-dollar-news.html

Wall Street Journal coverage of the G7 meeting and currency discussions

Alan Ruskin, who heads foreign exchange strategy at RBS Securities, notes there is more evidence of a strengthening U.S. dollar than there is to indicating a weakening in the currency. "The dollar's rallied quite sharply. There's a sense that as the U.S. economy is recovering it's hard to conceive of a dollar collapse," he said. 

Ruskin said he sees China's recent moves to scale back bank lending as a sign the country could move toward using exchange policies as another tool to tighten monetary policy and fight inflation.

Vice-Minister for Commerce Zhong Shan said in a statement on the ministry's website -

International pressure for the yuan to rise is growing; there are strong expectations for yuan appreciation. Zhong said expectations for a stronger yuan were one of the factors that could weigh on China's exports in 2010, in addition to uncertainties about global economic recovery and trade disputes.

These semi-official comments from a Chinese Minister could indicate that China will move earlier than this summer to begin re-appreciating the yuan versus the US dollar. It could also signal an increased likelihood of something in the range of 10% one off appreciation.


WSJ discusses one off appreciation versus gradual

The 23% surge in China's foreign reserves last year to $2.4 trillion is a much clearer signal that its currency is undervalued. 

China rightly worries that a new program of gradual appreciation would only encourage more hot money inflows. 

So the alternative is to do it all in one bang. To be sure, a one-off sharp revaluation would strike a major blow at China's export base and induce a significant slowdown in the economy. But since China's competitors would enjoy an exchange rate windfall, contagion would be limited.

Either way, doing nothing and so indefinitely postponing a more violent, involuntary bursting of the bubble is the worst option.

Feathered Dinosaurs

I have posted extensively on what we call dawn age reptiles. These are critters that are at home in swamps and deep water and are mostly aquatic.  I avoided talking about the later reptiles for the nonce.

The niche occupied by dawn age reptiles immediately solved a huge problem of temperature control.  They lived almost exclusively in water and avoided the whole issue.  Even our old friend Nessie fitted nicely into the oceanic version of this niche.

However, the minute we allow these critters to stray away from water, it is necessary to think about temperature control.  Exposed skin does a poor job of controlling temperature.  We do not go out and work naked in either the mid day sun or the dead of winter without serious consequences.

Every critter exploiting a wider range of temperature using any vigor must be insulated.  Basking is not an activity.  This has meant hair or feathers.

Not surprisingly, these late reptiles are showing signs of using feathers.  This probably thinned out as they became large.  The internal mass by itself would then be largely sufficient.  Down and feathers would be necessary for the young in any case.  I think that the default mode for active advanced reptiles included down and feathers as a pre condition to leaving the swamps.

I think this story is only beginning to be told.

Dinosaur Sported Colorful Feathers

By Jeanna Bryner, LiveScience Managing Editor

posted: 27 January 2010 01:01 pm ET

http://www.livescience.com/animals/colorful-dinosaur-feathers.html#comments

http://i.livescience.com/images/feathered-dino-100127-01.jpg

A meat-eating dinosaur called Sinosauropteryx likely sported a rim of colored feathers on its head, down its back and tail when it lived some 120 million years ago. The tail probably had a striped pattern of orange and white. Credit: © Chuang Zhao and Lida Xing.

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Our image of what dinosaurs looked like has just been colorized, thanks to fossilized feather remains showing one meat-eating beast sported a striped tail of white and gingery bands.

Not only do the results paint a jazzier picture of the ancient giants, they also confirm the presence of real feathers, not just "feather-like" or bristly structures, in some meat-eating dinosaurs called theropods, the scientists say. The finding has implications for understanding the origin of feathers, since scientists think birds evolved from a group of theropods called maniraptors, some 150 million years ago during the Jurassic period.

"Our research provides extraordinary insights into the origin of feathers," said Mike Benton, a professor of paleontology at the University of Bristol. "In particular, it helps to resolve a long-standing debate about the original function of feathers — whether they were used for flight, insulation, or display. We now know that feathers came before wings, so feathers did not originate as flight structures."

Rather, feathers were likely used for color display at first, he added.

Specifically, Benton and his colleagues found remains of melanosomes, which are tiny structures enclosing pigments that are embedded within the structure of feathers. Melanosomes are responsible, in part, for the colors exhibited by the feathers of some modern-day birds, such as zebra finch feathers.

The team looked at melanosomes from remains of theropods and primitive birds using a scanning electron microscope, finding melanosomes for reddish-brown to yellow pigment and those for black-grey pigment. While the remains didn't include actual pigments, the researchers matched the shapes of these melanosomes with those found in the feathers of today's birds to figure out the color. 

The pattern of the melanosome structures suggested the theropod Sinosauropteryx had simple bristles with alternating white and ginger, or chestnut-colored rings down its tail. And the early bird Confuciusornis had patches of white, black and orange-brown coloring on parts of its body.

"There's a very clear rim of feathers running down the top of the head kind of like a Mohican [Native American headdress] all the way down the back and along the tail," Benton said, referring to feathers on Sinosauropteryx, which lived some 120 million years ago.

In the past, some have suggested that what scientists assumed were fossilized feathers were actually bits of tissue.

"These bristles really are feathers," Benton said during a press briefing yesterday on the discovery. "If they were bits of skin or connective tissue or something else they would not contain melanosomes."