Tariffs: Academic theory vs. reality and what the Academics, the media, and politicians leave out

Here is an adamsmith.org blog entry by Tim Worstall.  My comments are in italics following Worstall’s.

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Worstall

If other people make things cheaper for us then what is it we should do? The correct response being to then enjoy that greater wealth that those others have enabled us to have. It’s not actually necessary to write a note to Santa as well but perhaps politesse would indicate we should:

The Chinese telecoms company whose role in the construction of Britain’s 5G network has been questioned amid growing security fears has received as much as £57 billion of state aid from Beijing, helping it to expand and undercut its rivals, it is alleged.

A review by The Wall Street Journal of grants, credit facilities, tax breaks and other state assistance shows for the first time the extent to which Huawei has been helped — allegedly enabling it to offer generous financing terms and charge 30 per cent less for network equipment than competitors.

Assume that all of this is true and isn’t just competitors trying to justify their own higher prices - what should our reaction be?

Well, as a result of the Chinese taxpayer being rooked by the Chinese government’s pandering to special interests we can have a 5G telephone network cheaper. Or, presumably, for the same price as we would pay elsewhere we can have more 5G telephone network. Either way we are richer as a result of those taxes paid in China.

The correct response then, to this claim of subsidy of Huawei is to buy Huawei for we’re made richer by doing so. This is true of any such foreign subsidy to a producer as well. The appropriate reaction to such unfair competition is to say thank you, please may I have some more?

That is, foreign subsidy is the same as an advance in production technology, or our useful reaction to trade itself. If, for whatever reason, other people are making us richer then we should enjoy that greater wealth. After all, that is the very thing we’re trying to do, get richer.

Certainly, the Chinese taxpayer has reason to complain but why wouldn’t we appreciate network equipment that is 30% cheaper, wherever the £57 billion to produce it has come from?

Some will complain that this all makes China richer somehow but that can’t be true. It’s a straight transfer of £57 billion from them to us, from China’s state revenues - thus the Chinese populace - to us consumers. Our only difficulty here is to work out where to send that thank you letter. D’ye think they’d let us post it up on the Tiananmen Gate?

Me

Worstall’s argument is correct only in aggregate for the US and China, and only currently. For example:

• Not all US citizens are better off. Some US workers have lost good jobs and must take less attractive jobs. While it is theoretically possible to arrange for all US citizens to be better off if China subsidizes its exports, for example, through transfer payments, that does not happen in practice.

• If China enables Huawei to drive out its competition and then act as a monopolist, or close to one, then China wins and the US loses.

• According to Worstall and his ilk, the US should buy Chinese products whenever they are cheaper than others. So, China could subsidize critical products, e.g., required directly or indirectly for defense, drive out competition, and then be in a position to win a war – or at least to put the US at a bargaining disadvantage.

Worstall and his ilk push the advantages of free trade. They rightly point out that international competitive free markets maximize the potential wealth of all, because comparative advantage leads to worldwide efficient production (i.e., worldwide production is on the production possibility frontier (PPF). While this is correct, real markets mostly are not competitive – China’s subsidized exports being an example. Subsidies, such as China’s, can destroy the efficient production and pricing they so laud (i.e., worldwide production is interior to the PPF. To see this, suppose competitive free markets, hence maximally efficient production and pricing yielding the full benefit from comparative advantage. This world economy is on the PPF. Now add Chinese subsidies. Production of the subsidized products decline in other countries and increase in China. Efficient production and pricing suffer and the worldwide economy moves to the interior of the PPF.

It is clear that what you hear from many academics, politicians, and media talking heads is misleading.

Shaviv lecture showing the popular climate models are wrong - it's not all about CO2

Here is a link to a video of a 22 minute talk by Nir Shaviv on Climate Change.

NS shows conclusively that the popular climate change models are wrong, and shows why.

After watching the video, you will appreciate how much lying and incompetence is prevalent among Climate Alarmists.

Why the Democrats May Prove The Greatest Barrier To A Full (Impeachment) Trial

Here is an insightful column by Jonathan Turley, the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law for George Washington University.
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When William Shakespeare wrote that “all the world is a stage” and “one man in his time plays many parts,” he could have probably had in mind Senator Charles Schumer. In 1999, the Democrat from New York famously opposed witnesses in the trial of President Clinton as nothing more than “political theater.” Now Schumer has declared that witnesses and a full trial are essential for President Trump, and that a trial without witnesses would be deemed the “most unfair impeachment trial in modern history.”

That does not include the Clinton case where Schumer sought to proceed to a summary vote without a trial. As the Senate now gears up for the third presidential impeachment in history, the fight has begun over the rules and scope of a trial. The Framers were silent on the expected procedures and evidence for a trial, beyond the requirement of a two-thirds vote to convict a president. The only direct precedent on these issues is derived from two very different trials, those of President Johnson and Clinton.

By sending a thin record to the Senate, the House could not have made things easier for Trump. Since the House did not take time to subpoena critical witnesses, such as former national security adviser John Bolton, or to compel testimony of other witnesses, the Senate could simply declare that it will try the case on the record supplied by the House, a record that Democrats insist is already conclusive and overwhelming. Moreover, in reviewing the past trials of Johnson and Clinton, Democrats may have to struggle with precedents of their own making. Indeed, Republicans could argue that a trial without witnesses is impeachment in Democratic style.

THE BYRD MOTION

The first question for the trial could be whether there should even be a trial held at all. In early England, the House of Lords often refused to hold trials on impeachments, which often were raw political exercises. In the Clinton trial, Democrats moved to dismiss both impeachment articles as meritless. The motion by Senator Robert Byrd failed on a largely party line vote with Democrats, including Senator Joe Biden, Senator Dianne Feinstein, and Schumer, opposing having any impeachment trial at all.

Ironically, the obstruction of Congress article in the Trump impeachment would make a stronger case for such a threshold dismissal. The House adopted a brief investigation in order to impeach by Christmas. Trump has challenged the demands from Congress for testimony and documents in court. President Nixon and Clinton both took such appeals to the Supreme Court then lost. I disagree with the White House assertions of immunity and privilege. However, Democrats have taken the position that it can set an artificially short period of investigation and impeach a president who goes to court instead of simply yielding to the demands from Congress.

This would allow lawmakers to effectively manufacture the grounds for impeachment by setting abbreviated investigations then impeaching when presidents turn to the courts. In this case, the House burned more than three months without issuing subpoenas to key witnesses. It even pulled a subpoena for an impeachment witness rather than have the court rule on its merits. Meanwhile, other courts have ruled on these matters, such as the court order for former White House counsel Don McGahn to appear. An appellate court ruling could be expedited on that and other cases but not by Christmas. Worse yet, the Supreme Court has agreed to review decisions ordering Trump to turn over tax and financial records.

The greatest departure from tradition in the Clinton trial was the barring of live testimony and most witnesses in presenting evidence. The Johnson trial followed the tradition with 25 prosecution and 16 defense witnesses. In the Clinton trial, Democrats opposed having witnesses in the Senate trial. That was a surprise since the issue of witnesses came up during the House proceedings where I testified as a constitutional expert. While I favored calling witnesses in the House investigation, I noted that the Framers did not specify when, if ever, witnesses would be heard. But a Senate trial was viewed historically as an obvious forum for witnesses.

Two things prompted the House to not call many witnesses. First, the Clinton impeachment was the culmination of a long investigation by two independent counsels and a evidentiary record delivered by two vans to the House Judiciary Committee. With dozens of sources and statements, the House did not see the necessity of recalling all the same witnesses. Second, Democrats had accepted that Clinton committed felony perjury about an affair with a White House intern. They simply insisted that you could not impeach a president for that crime if the issue was personal.

THE DASCHLE MOTION

The Democrats outmaneuvered the Republicans and got an agreement not only to limit the witnesses to three but to bar public review of their depositions. They succeeded in barring any public testimony on the floor. After the depositions were finally completed, Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle moved to bar those depositions from being played on the floor and move forward to closing arguments. All Democrats except Senator Russ Feingold had once again voted to skip ahead to closing arguments.

Some precedent is a bit more recent. Representative Adam Schiff and the other House impeachment managers are expected to demand fair play and equal treatment in the presentation of witnesses and evidence, the very due process denied in the House investigation. Democratic leaders repeatedly denied witnesses and minority hearing days for Republicans. They allowed only one witness who was not on staff for the entire House Judiciary Committee proceedings, and I was that witness in the hearing.

As a general rule, I am inclined to oppose the threshold dismissals and to favor witnesses in Senate trials. But the House has now undermined those principles by advancing a dubious obstruction article and an incomplete record. Schumer has expressed shock at the very notion of a Senate trial without testimony, asking why Republicans are “so afraid of witnesses” and portraying a trial without witnesses as a mockery. A full trial, however, will require Republicans not only to ignore the precedent set by Schumer and other Democrats in the Clinton case but also the incomplete record.

In the Trump case, the House has rejected calls to take a little more time to secure additional testimony or court orders against the administration. Even during the final impeachment vote, House Democrats referred to still developing facts involving the conduct of associates of Trump counsel Rudy Giuliani in Ukraine. If House Democrats had simply taken more time, they could have locked such testimony and evidence into the record and not have to rely on Senate Republicans to complete their case for them.

After rejecting basic rights to Republicans during the House Judiciary Committee and House Intelligence Committee hearings, Democrats are now demanding the witness and adversarial rights that they denied the minority. They hope that Senate Republicans will resist the temptation to offer a trial that is as cursory and as contrived as the House investigation.

Government duplicity on Climate Change

From the Government Accountability Institute.

Here is a link to the paper.

The Executive Summary follows.

Note that the failure of bond terms to differ between allegedly risk cities and safer cities implies that investors and investment firms do not believe the claims of coming sea level rise by these cities' politicians.
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Politicians in many American coastal cities pull no punches about the threats posed by rising sea levels due to climate change. At times they even seem to read from the same script, repeating the phrase “existential threat” to describe the rising sea levels that menace their ports and coastlines.

But when they authorize selling municipal bonds to pay for local development, do they mention any of these risks to investors? Bonds are rated and their coupon interest rates are determined by financial officials in these cities who must disclose all significant risks to the value of the bonds, by law. Do bonds floated by cities at the greatest risks from climate change pay higher interest than bonds from cities at no risk?

Often, the answer is no.

For example, the City of Oakland, the City of San Francisco, and San Mateo County, in filing individual lawsuits against ExxonMobil, Chevron, and other major oil companies, made specified claims of damages to their cities due to the impacts of climate change caused, they claim, by the knowing actions of these companies. The statements made by Oakland in its official lawsuit are so definitive as to claim that “global warming has caused and continues to cause accelerated sea level rise in San Francisco Bay and the adjacent ocean with severe, and potentially catastrophic, consequences for Oakland.” The city claimed the threats were so real that “by 2050, a ‘100-year flood’ in the Oakland vicinity is expected to occur… once every 2.3 years … and by 2100 … once per week.” Further, the lawsuit filing said, “Oakland is projected to have up to ‘66 inches of sea level rise by 2100,’ which, along with flooding, will imminently threaten Oakland’s sewer system and threaten property, costing the city as much as $38 billion.

However, language used to disclose risks to investors in a 2017 bonds document states, “The City is unable to predict when seismic events, fires or other natural events, such as sea rise or other impacts of climate change or flooding from a major storm, could occur, when they may occur, and, if any such events occur, whether they will have a material adverse effect on the business operations or financial condition of the City or the local economy.”

San Mateo County made similar claims of certain environmental destruction, including the likelihood of “a 93% chance that the County experiences a devastating three-foot flood before the year 2050, and a 50% chance that such a flood occurs before 2030.” Yet, a bond disclosure from 2016 issued in San Mateo County expressed almost identical sentiments as Oakland did. “The County is unable to predict whether sea-level rise or other impacts of climate change or flooding from a major storm will occur, when they may occur, and if any such events occur, whether they will have a material adverse effect on the business operations or financial condition of the County and the local economy.”

This disconnect between describing dire climate-related consequences to a city in great detail when a payout is on the table, versus downplaying the same issues when these cities’ own funding is on the line holds true for not just these two counties but for six other California cities or counties seeking legal payouts. San Francisco, the County and City of Santa Cruz, Marin County, and the City of Imperial Beach all used very similar language in their own statements.

The disconnect applies to bond rates as well.

Bonds are rated and their interest rates are determined by financial officials in these cities who must, by law, disclose all significant risks the bonds entail. Are the bonds floated by cities with the greatest risks from climate change paying a better interest rate than bonds from cities on higher ground?

To answer these questions, the Government Accountability Institute (GAI) reviewed bond disclosures from 40 cities. Twenty of these were cities in areas at high risk from rising sea levels or flooding, while the other 20 were mostly inland and freshwater cities not considered at such risk. We wanted to explore whether these threats affected the investment offerings of the cities claiming the highest risks.

GAI also reviewed official statements and policy actions in several of the cities we reviewed. We found:

There was no statistical difference between the interest rates and bond maturity terms for high-risk cities versus low-risk cities overall. 

▪ New York City and its own Port Authority barely mentioned climate change or rising sea levels in any of their bond disclosures, despite Mayor Bill de Blasio’s dire warnings that it is an “existential threat” and a “dagger aimed straight at the heart” of the city.

▪ Boston Mayor Marty Walsh has repeatedly railed against the dangers of climate change, yet has presided over the permitting of multiple buildings that would flood if his own predictions about climate change were correct, while the City of Boston mentioned “climate change” just once in its disclosure statements.

▪ Three California coastal cities— San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego—failed to mention “climate change” or “sea level rise” even once in the disclosure statements for their bonds.

▪ The city of Oakland said in its 2017 bond disclosure statement that it could not predict when (or even whether) sea level rise or other natural events “will have a material adverse effect on the business operations or financial condition of the City or the local economy.” At the same time, Oakland joined a lawsuit against several major oil companies in which it claimed a projection of up to “66 inches of sea level rise by 2100” that “will imminently threaten” the city’s sewer system and property with a “total replacement cost of between $22 and $38 billion.”

Low-lying Miami and Miami Beach paid lip service to sea level rise, but did not let it get in the way of lucrative building in flood-prone areas, especially where the mayor owns property. Miami Beach Mayor Philip Levine specifically built his campaign for Florida’s governor on fighting sea level rise, yet has presided over recent permitting of numerous buildings that would be threatened by it.

▪ Miami and Boston invoke the threat of “climate change” to their cities when they seek “climate change” grant funds from the federal government that can be used for other purposes.

▪ New Orleans continues to face nature’s severest hurricanes with flood prevention technology that is obsolete and woefully inadequate. Yet the city fails to budget sufficiently to fix its problems. 

▪ The City of Honolulu and King County (Seattle) provided the most complete statements disclosing the risk of rising sea levels or climate change to their bond issues. But it did not affect their bond coupon rates in any way.

How predictions of climate change disasters have fared

A blog entry by Francis Menton at Manhattan Contrarian.

FM is on target.
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On Monday the UN IPCC came out with its latest Special Report, this one supposedly addressed specifically to the allegedly dire consequences of allowing world temperatures to increase by more than an arbitrarily-selected threshold. Here is a copy of the “Summary for Policymakers,” and here is a copy of the accompanying press release. But I urge you not to peek at those until you have taken today’s very important Manhattan Contrarian Climate Tipping Points Quiz.

Many have noted that this latest Report seems to step up the level of hysteria and shrieking about the threat of climate change to a whole new level. The gist is, we are doomed, doomed, doomed unless mankind takes immediate drastic action to reduce and then eliminate carbon emissions, because otherwise we will shortly cross the dreaded climate “tipping point.” Crossing the tipping point means that climate change will thereafter accelerate out of control, there will be no further chance of saving the planet, and all hope must be abandoned. You can see that this is very serious, at least if you give any credence to this stuff. And yet, despite the hyperbole, this report seems to be getting much less attention than prior similar predictions of the impending climate apocalypse, even if no one in the mainstream press will apply the slightest amount of critical thinking as to whether any of this makes any sense at all. As an example, the big New York Times article on the Report did not appear until Tuesday, and in the print edition ran on page A8. I guess there were plenty of things more important than the approaching end of the world to fill up the front page.

So it’s time to take the Manhattan Contrarian Climate Tipping Points Quiz. The quiz consists of nine predictions of the impending climate “tipping point,” made at various points over the past few decades. For each prediction, I have deleted the name of the predictor, the year made and the year or years that were identified as the dreaded tipping point, but have included in brackets the number of years in the future that the tipping point was said to be at the time of the prediction in question. Your task is to identify which of the predictions is the one found in the current UN materials. For extra credit, see if you can identify any of the other predictions as to the person or organization uttering the prediction, the year made, and the year said to be the date of the tipping point.

Prediction Number 1:

[Predictor] said that without "coherent financial incentives and disincentives" we have just 96 months to avert "irretrievable climate and ecosystem collapse, and all that goes with it." . . . He confided last night: "We face the dual challenges of a world view and an economic system that seem to have enormous shortcomings, together with an environmental crisis – including that of climate change – which threatens to engulf us all."

Prediction Number 2:

[U]nless drastic measures to reduce greenhouse gases are taken within the next 10 years, the world will reach a point of no return, [predictor] said. He sees the situation as “a true planetary emergency.” “If you accept the truth of that, then nothing else really matters that much,” [predictor] said in an interview with The Associated Press. “We have to organize quickly to come up with a coherent and really strong response, and that’s what I’m devoting myself to.”

Prediction Number 3:

[Predictor] . . . told author Bob Reiss in [year of prediction] that New York City would be underwater in 20 years. "The West Side Highway [which runs along the Hudson River] will be under water," [predictor] said. "And there will be tape across the windows across the street because of high winds. And the same birds won't be there. The trees in the median strip will change."

Prediction Number 4:

The year: [46 years after prediction]. Massive dikes around New Orleans, Miami, and New York are holding back rising sea water. Phoenix is baking in its third straight week of temperatures above 115 degrees. Decades of drought have laid waste to the once-fertile Midwestern farm belt. Hurricanes batter the Gulf Coast, and forest fires continue to black thousands of acres across the country. Science fiction? Hardly. These are the sobering global warming or “greenhouse effect” scenarios that many scientists believe may happen if we continue to pollute our environment. . . . [N]othing short of an immediate worldwide effort by governments, corporations and especially individual citizens will be needed to reverse the environmental crisis that now threatens the entire planet.

Prediction Number 5:

In [year of prediction], [predictor] told [publication] that [4 years after prediction] was “the last window of opportunity” to impose policies to restrict fossil fuel use. [Predictor] said it’s “the last chance we have to get anything approaching [numeric] degrees Centigrade,” adding that if “we don’t do it now, we are committing the world to a drastically different place.”

Prediction Number 6:

[W]arming of [numeric] deg C or higher increases the risk associated with long-lasting or irreversible changes, such as the loss of some ecosystems,” said [predictor]. . . . [L]imiting global warming to [numeric]°C would require “rapid and far-reaching” transitions in land, energy, industry, buildings, transport, and cities. Global net human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) would need to fall by about 45 percent from [year] levels by [12 years from prediction], reaching ‘net zero’ around [32 years from prediction].

Prediction Number 7:

[Predictor] said in [year of prediction] that if “there’s no action before [5 years after prediction], that’s too late.” “What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment,” he said.

Prediction Number 8:

[Predictor] wrote in [publication] that within “as little as 10 years, the world will be faced with a choice: arable farming either continues to feed the world’s animals or it continues to feed the world’s people. It cannot do both.”

Prediction Number 9:

[Publication] reported in [year] that [predictor] says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if global warming is not reversed by the [year].”

Answer for Prediction Number 1: This famous prediction was made by the great climate scientist Prince Charles in July 2009. The 96 month (8 year) period of the prediction expired in July 2017. Does that mean that for a year plus we have already been in the state of “irretrievable climate and ecosystem collapse”?

Answer for Prediction Number 2: Again, this is a quite famous prediction, made by Al Gore at the January 2006 premier of his climate apocalypse movie “An Inconvenient Truth,” as reported at the time by CBS News. Thus, the period of the prediction expired in January 2016. I guess then that we have already reached the “point of no return” and the “true planetary emergency.” How does it feel?

Answer for Prediction Number 3: Another famous prediction, this one made in 1988 by James Hansen, then head of the branch of NASA known as GISS that collects (and fraudulently alters) world temperature data. This time the 20 year prediction period expired in 2008. Meanwhile, I went down the West Side Highway just a few days ago, and the water didn’t appear any closer to swamping it than it was back in 1988.

Answer for Prediction Number 4: This one comes from self-described all-around genius Jeremy Rifkin (“author of 20 bestselling books about the impact of scientific and technological changes on the economy, the workforce, society, and the environment.” and “advisor to the leadership of the European Union since 2000” — really, does that tell you all you need to know about what idiots the Europeans are?), and is found in an article in none other than the Poughkeepsie Journal (my hometown newspaper!) in 1989. OK, the date for the prediction (2035) hasn’t arrived yet. But, if we were going to need “massive dikes” to protect New York City by 2035, shouldn’t there be by now some evidence of the sea level going up?

Answer for Prediction Number 5: The predictor was then-head of the United Nations Foundation Timothy Wirth, and the year of prediction was 2012. That means that the date for the prediction was 2016 — or actually, in the phrasing of the prediction, the end of President Obama’s second term. The prediction appeared in ClimateWire. I guess we missed our “last chance” to save the world. Wirth is the same guy who, as a Congressman back in 1988, promoted the hearings featuring Hansen that many credit as the official launch of the global warming scare.

Answer for Prediction Number 6: Yes, this quote comes from the just-issued press release announcing the new UN Report. There were enough extraneous clues in there that probably many of you readers got it right. The number of degrees C that is said in this Report to be the brink of disaster is 1.5.

Answer for Prediction Number 7: The predictor is former UN IPCC head Rajendra Pachauri, and the year of prediction was 2007. That means that after 2012 it was “too late” to stop armageddon. Oh, well. Somehow we struggle on.

Answer for Prediction Number 8: This one comes from noted UK environmental writer George Monbiot, and appeared in the Guardian in 2002. So once again the year for the prediction was 2012. Do you recall the world making the choice somewhere 6 or so years ago between “feeding the world’s animals” and “feeding the world’s people.” I’m struggling to remember that. Perhaps I should go home and have a hamburger for dinner while I think it over.

Answer for Prediction Number 9: The prediction comes from 1989, and the year for the prediction (“entire nations . . . wiped off the face of the earth”) was 2000 — 18 years ago. The publication was the San Jose Mercury News, which attributed the prediction to UN “senior environmental official” Noel Brown. Somehow, even the Maldives seem to be doing fine here in 2018.

Here’s the incredible thing: Wouldn’t you think that making apocalyptic predictions like these that failed so completely would undermine the predictors’ reputations somehow — like maybe, they’d be considered laughingstocks? Not at all! All of these guys are still out there and going strong. OK, Pachauri was forced out of the IPCC, but over sexual harassment allegations, not failed climate predictions. He left the IPCC in 2015, which means that three years after his prediction above bombed, he was still there. Meanwhile, the IPCC had won the Nobel Peace Prize! Monbiot still writes climate doom articles for the Guardian. And you haven’t heard of Noel Brown? He retired from the UNDP, but has gone on to be President of the Friends of the United Nations.

Yes, ridiculous failed climate apocalypse predictions are the route to assured career success. The world is a funny place.

UPDATE, February 4, 2019: A reader points out that the IPCC press release announcing their Special Report seems to have disappeared from the web. I also cannot find it. However, a document called “Headline Statements From the Summary for Policy Makers” is still out there. The statements in this document are not identical to the ones quoted above under Prediction Number 6, but pretty close.

More evidence that the Climate Alarmists and the climate models they rely on are wrong

Here is a link to an insightful paper "On Climate Sensitivity" by Lindzen and Spencer.

The climate models that the Climate Alarmists rely on to support their "existential threat" claims produce projections of "alarming" global warming due to a particular parameter estimate.  That parameter is "climate sensitivity", which is the temperature change produced by a doubling of atmospheric CO2. The value the modelers use is chosen to make the models fit recent past data.  It is high enough to justify considerable concern about the future climate.  However, to the extent that the model is not complete, such a parameter estimate can be expected to be biased and measures of its uncertainty to be meaningless.  In fact, these models' forecasted warming has been much higher than the actual warming.

LS provide evidence that these climate models' estimates of climate sensitivity are inconsistent with the actual data.  They argue that the latter imply a climate sensitivity of about one third of the models' estimates.

Here are some excerpts from the LS paper.
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It is commonly accepted that increasing CO2 in the atmosphere should lead to some warming (e.g. Arrhenius, 1896; Callendar, 1938). This, per se, is not particularly worrisome. As has been recognized since antiquity, the dose makes the poison. The no on that any warming, however small, is evidence of coming disaster defies reason. Remember, in natural systems, fl uctua ons are the norm. For example, your body temperature always fluctuates a little. Skyscrapers always sway a li le. This is a characteris c of all stable systems. 

With respect to CO2, the dose is determined by what we call climate sensitivity. By convention, this is the eventual total increase in global mean temperature associated with a doubling of CO2. The reason we refer to a doubling is that the impact of each doubling is the same: i.e. a well-established equation based on empirical data shows that we get the same warming from an increase from 400 parts per million (ppm) to 800 ppm as we would from 200 ppm to 400 ppm (Pierrehumbert, 2011). That is to say, the impact of each added unit of CO2 is less than the impact of its predecessor. In addition, reasonably straight forward calculations suggest that, all other indirect factors (e.g. clouds) being held constant, a doubling of CO2 should produce about one degree Celsius (1°C) of direct warming—a value that is not generally held to be alarming (Wilson and Gea-Banacloche, 2012). The radiative forcing effect of CO2 is measured in units of Wa s per square meter. Each doubling of CO2 is expected to provide about 3.7 Watts per square meter (Pierrehumbert, 2011). This can be compared to the natural flows of radiant energy in and out of the climate system, es mated to be 235 to 245 Watts per square meter (Trenberth et al., 2009). 

Of course, CO2 is not the only anthropogenic greenhouse gas, and according to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2013) the increase in anthropogenic greenhouse forcing since the beginning of the industrial era (which happens to coincide with the end of the Little Ice Age) is already almost what one expects from a doubling of CO2, and we have seen a welcome warming of about 1°C. A er all, the Little Ice Age was hardly considered optimal. The IPCC does not claim all of this small warming is due to increased greenhouse gases, but even if it were, it does not, on the face of it, suggest a high sensitivity. However, most models employed by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change display higher sensitivities (currently ranging from 1.5° – 4.5°C). Moreover, the UN argues that higher values portend profound dangers (a dubious claim in its own right).

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Before turning to systematic approaches, we may ask whether there is, in fact, any evidence that at least suggests unusual warming. As we see in Figure 6 , warming since 1978 is considerably less than almost all models use d by the UN projected.

The UN acknowledges that anthropogenic contributions were only significant since the 1960s .  Yet, as we see in Figure 7, warming from 1920 until 1940 was indistinguishable from the recent warming.  

The contention of dangerous warming has always depended on special pleading rather than unusual behavior of the temperature record.  Arguments about changes of tenths of a degree have been relatively pointless since the data are far from reliable for such small changes.  Similarly, the use of demonstrably inadequate models to determine sensitivity is also inappropriate

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The situation with respect to climate sensitivity is that we basically see no reason to expect high sensitivity. The original basis for considering that high sensitivity is possible (namely, the hypothetical water vapor feedback of Manabe and Wetherald, 1975) is clearly contradicted by the measurements of TOA radiative fluxes which show that the total long-wave feedback, including cirrus cloud variations, may even be negative. Analysis of the temperature data leads to the conclusion that if anthropogenic contributions are the cause of warming since the end of the Little Ice Age, and if aerosols are limited to a contribution of 1 Watt  per square meter, then climate sensitivity in excess 1.5°C is precluded. 

Have we then proven that dangerous warming is truly impossible? Not quite. Although current estimates of short-wave feedbacks don’t even suggest positive feedback factors in excess of about 0.3 (with the possibility of negative values remaining), we can’t preclude that something may someday be discovered that raises this to a value that is significantly larger. Our simple calculation that suggested that sensitivities in excess of 1.5°C were precluded depends upon the assumption that models are correct in producing negligible natural internal variability. It is, however, remotely conceivable that there was in reality (as opposed to in models) natural internal variability that was exactly what was needed to cancel the effect of high sensitivity, but that this internal variability would eventually be overwhelmed, and allow the high sensitivity to reveal itself. 

This remote possibility is far from “settled science,” and the thought that multi -trillion dollar policies would be implemented to putatively prevent this, seems far from rational. This is especially so when one considers that for about 95 percent of the me since complex life systems appeared (about 600 million years ago), levels of CO2 were much higher than they are anticipated to become (as much as 10-20 mes today’s levels) without evidence of a relationship to global mean temperature.

The Swamp’s and Media’s guilt in the Carter Page fiasco

Here is Jonathan Turley's blog entry "An Apology To Carter Page".

JT is on target.

Government and the media are not to be trusted.

Note that McCabe directed his underlings to the Steele Dossier, knowing it was false. Underlings usually want to keep their Bosses happy. Which way would you bet, if you had to, that the FBI fiasco reflects political bias or not?
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After he was acquitted in a major fraud trial, former Labor Secretary Ray Donovan asked, “Which office do I go to to get my reputation back?” The trial was ruinous for Donovan, personally and financially, and the question was a fair one. Donovan, however, at least received a trial. Former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page has never been given a fair hearing, let alone a trial, to clear his name. As the two political parties spin the results of a report by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, one matter remains unaddressed. Someone needs to apologize to Page.

I do not know Page and have had only one conversation with him that I can recall. Indeed, my only impression of him was shaped by the image, repeated in endless media segments, of a shady character who was at worst a Russian spy and at best a Russian stooge. Page became the face and focus for the justification of the Russia collusion investigation. His manifest guilt and sinister work in Moscow had to be accepted in order to combat those questioning the allegations of Trump campaign collusion with the Russians. In other words, his guilt had to be indisputable in order for the Russia collusion investigation to be, so to speak, unimpeachable.

Ultimately, special counsel Robert Mueller found no evidence of collusion or conspiracy by Trump associates or the campaign with those Russians intervening in the election. However, Horowitz found that the FBI never had any real evidence against Page before beginning its investigation, codenamed Operation Crossfire Hurricane. Soon after the investigation was opened, it became clear that Page had been wrongly accused and was, in fact, working for the CIA, not the Russians. Page himself later said he was working with the CIA, yet the media not only dismissed his claim but was very openly dismissive while portraying him as a bumbling fool.

Horowitz found that FBI investigators and lawyers had determined that the allegations involving Page fell short of a case for probable cause to open a secret warrant under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Those investigators were then told by the eventually fired FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe to look at the Steele dossier, which was actually funded by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. The Clinton campaign denied repeatedly that it funded the dossier but finally admitted doing so after being confronted by media with new information.

Despite warnings about the credibility of Steele and red flags over the unreliability of the dossier, Horowitz found that “FBI leadership” used the dossier to justify its application for a FISA warrant. Democratic members of Congress and a wide array of media outlets have long told the public that the dossier was just one part of the FISA application. That is false. Horowitz states that the dossier played the “central and essential role” in securing the secret surveillance of the Trump campaign, including four investigations with both electronic surveillance and undercover assets.

Early on, Horowitz found that an unnamed government agency, widely acknowledged to be the CIA, told the FBI that it was making a mistake about Page and that he was working for the agency as an “operational contact” in Moscow. Indeed, he was working as an asset for the CIA for years. While it was falsely reported that Page met with three suspicious individuals there, he had no contact with two of those individuals. More importantly, Page did the right thing and told American officials about being contacted by the third person, because he felt they should know.

It gets even worse. Throughout Operation Crossfire Hurricane, evidence continued to flow into the FBI that Christopher Steele, the former British spy who wrote the infamous dossier, was unreliable and working against the election of Trump. Not only was he known to be trying to get this false information to the press, but evidence mounted that he misrepresented sources and stated false information. While it took long, someone at the Justice Department finally decided to act on the FISA matter regarding Page. The official in charge of FISA applications, Kevin Clinesmith, was told to ask the CIA again about whether Page had been working for the agency. He was again told that Page in fact was, yet Clinesmith allegedly changed the CIA response to describe Page as not working for it. He is now being criminally referred by Horowitz for falsifying that information.

Investigators also found an array of messages against Trump on the social media accounts of Clinesmith, including one declaring “vive le resistance” after Trump won. Meanwhile, throughout this period, the FBI was leaking aplenty but no one leaked the Page was actually a CIA asset. Instead, he was left to twist slowly in the wind. Media reports all but convicted Page of being a Russian spy. Evan Hurst wrote about him last year asking, “Why the hell are Republicans dying on this hill to defend Carter Page,” whom Hurst described, in all caps, as “a literal actual Russian intelligence asset.”

Natasha Bertand later wondered why anyone would question the case against Page. After all, she wrote, Senator Mark Warner, who is ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, had warned reporters to “be careful what you wish for” and one of his aides told her that is is “simply impossible to review the documents” on Page and conclude anything other than that the FBI “had ample reason” to investigate him. Her article was published long after the FBI had been told that Page was working with the CIA, but many other stories ran with similar comments from senators suggesting that anyone defending Page would be ridiculed after the release of some damning evidence. Mueller and Horowitz have now confirmed that there was never such evidence showing Page was a Russian asset. Indeed, the evidence showed he was an American asset.

As Horowitz has now stressed, there is a difference between starting an investigation based on mere allegations and continuing the investigation based on known falsehoods. His report documents how direct exculpatory information was quickly shared with the FBI. I do not know anything about Page other than what I have read in these reports. All I know is that he is an American citizen put under a secret surveillance operation based on a dossier shown to be both unfounded and unreliable. He then remained under surveillance with three renewals of secret warrants, even though the FBI was told repeatedly that Page was working with the CIA and that the dossier used to obtain those warrants was considered unsupported. Finally, Page was the subject of an alleged falsification of a document presented to the FISA court to obscure that exculpatory information.

At what point does someone apologize to Page? He is, in fact, the victim of this criminal referral. He is the victim of what Horowitz describes as a “misleading” basis presented to the FISA court. He is a victim of media “groupthink” that portrayed him as the sinister link proving collusion with Russia, an allegation rejected by the FBI, by the inspector general, and by the special counsel. Of course, Washington does not work this way. Page served his purpose and the trashing of his reputation was a cost of doing business with the federal government for many members of Congress and the media. In recalling the question by Donovan, there is no such office. Page is simply supposed to disappear and leave his reputation behind.

The climate change hockey stick - the inside story - bad data, misuse of data, flawed statistics and deceit

Here is a link to a paper by McIntyre and McKitrick, "Climategate - Untangling Myth and Reality Ten Years Later".

This paper is a must read for anyone who wants the truth about the dishonesty surrounding some of the original claims of climate change and the supposed "proofs" that it is an "existential threat".

Suffice it to say that there are a lot of Climate Alarmist Scientists who are not credible and their message of alarm is unjustified.

Here is an excerpt, which is only the tip of the iceberg.
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INTRODUCTION: MAKING THE MYTHS

It is now 10 years since the Climategate emails were released. The issues they raised continue to reverberate; even figuring in a decision last week of the United States Supreme Court to allow Michael Mann’s (US) defamation suits to proceed (see the dissent by Justice Alito), and in an August 2019 decision of the BC Superior court dismissing a similar suit (on which see more below). The immediate reaction at the time to the emails was visceral, even among “green” reporters, including George Monbiot as follows:

Pretending that this isn't a real crisis isn't going to make it go away. Nor is an attempt to justify the emails with technicalities. We'll be able to get past this only by grasping reality, apologising where appropriate and demonstrating that it cannot happen again
UK reporter Fred Pearce, who covered the story for the Guardian and who, unlike Oxburgh or Muir Russell, had actually read the emails, wrote in The Climate Files:

The evidence of scientists cutting corners, playing down uncertainties in their calculations and then covering their tracks by being secretive with data and suppressing dissent suggests a systemic problem of scientific sloppiness, collusion and endemic conflicts of interest, but not of outright fraud. (p. 241)

Given the importance of climate science in today’s society, all of us expect more of climate scientists than merely that they not commit “outright fraud.” Exoneration at such a low threshold would be small exoneration indeed.

However, rather than confronting the corruption and misconduct apparent throughout the Climategate emails, the climate academic community shut their eyes to the affair, eventually even persuading itself that the offending scientists were victims, rather than offenders.

This re-framing was made possible by numerous myths propagated about the affair, of which the following were especially important:

Myth #1: The Climategate scandal arose because “cherrypicked” emails were taken “out of context”.

Myth #2: The Climategate correspondents were “exonerated” following “thorough” and impartial investigations.

Myth #3: Scientific studies subsequent to Climategate have “confirmed” and “verified” the original Mann hockey stick.

These are only the major myths from a veritable tsunami of disinformation from the academic community. The myths are untrue and, in this article, we will explain why.

Yamal: Climategate in a Nutshell

A good illustration of the three myths is provided by the Yamal story. In many ways it was at the heart of Climategate, yet very few commentators picked up on its centrality. Most tree ring temperature proxies do not have a hockey stick shape. A few do: some bristlecone pine records from the US (on which Mann’s hockey stick depended) and a few larch records from the Yamal peninsula of northwest Russia. The Yamal record was the key ingredient for virtually all the supposedly independent confirmations of the Mann hockey stick. 

 
The first email in the Climategate archive, dated March 6 1996, was from a Russian scientist (Shiyatov) to Briffa requesting money to support their efforts to collect more tree ring data from the Yamal peninsula. One of the last Climategate emails (dated October 5, 2009, just a month before the Climategate release) was from scientist Rashit Hantemirov to a UEA colleague asking for advice on how to respond to a Finnish journalist who was investigating Briffa’s use of the Yamal data, based on findings Steve had published at Climate Audit. Yamal was, in fact, the mostrepeated theme in the emails, even though it never captured public attention. The emails provided extensive context for a controversy that had long been raging. 

Since 2005, Steve had regularly criticized Briffa and the CRU for concealing an updated version of a proxy record from the Polar Urals which, unlike the original published in 1995, showed a strong Medieval Warm Period. The cold medieval segment of the Polar Urals series was critical to a few early hockey stick-like reconstructions, so much so that using the revised series would have overturned the original conclusions.

 
Briffa resisted disclosing the updated Polar Urals data and Steve only obtained it after a lengthy dispute with Science magazine. When it finally became available, the CRU scientists promptly dropped it from their studies and substituted one from the nearby Yamal peninsula instead. Whatever the stated reasons for doing so (and at the time none were given), the effect was to remove a proxy that now had a medieval warm period and replace it with one with a very strong hockey stick shape, especially due to a big jump after 1990.

 
The two series (Yamal and updated Polar Urals) gave contradictory information about the climate of the region in the medieval era, something not disclosed to readers of the very studies and reports that placed great emphasis on the importance of being able to make precise claims about the relative warmth of the medieval era. Over an 8-year period Briffa used the Yamal series repeatedly in his papers, but never published the data. Steve’s various requests for the data were ignored, but in 2008 Briffa published a study based on Yamal in a journal (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society) that had adopted strict data disclosure rules. After Steve asked the journal for the data the editor demanded Briffa provide it to Steve. 

 
What immediately became apparent was that the post-1990 jump was based on a sampling flaw: the sample size collapsed at that point to fewer than the minimum number of trees required and the series should have been terminated prior to 1990. Also, Briffa had not used a large set of nearby tree cores that would have allowed the full interval to be covered, but doing so would have yielded a different overall profile, one with no hockey stick shape. Although numerous postMann hockey stick studies relied on the Briffa Yamal series to provide a supposedly independent confirmation of the Mann result, in 2013 the CRU quietly abandoned the Briffa Yamal series and substituted one based on a larger sample that looked a lot like the one Steve had computed back in 2009 by combining Briffa’s data with the larger nearby data set.

 
None of this misconduct was dealt with by the various inquiries. The Oxburgh panel ignored it entirely (see below). In Steve’s evidence to the Muir Russell panel (on which also see below) he showed the published version of Briffa’s Polar Urals series, with its cold Medieval series, and the updated resampling in which the medieval era was now very warm by comparison to the present. He also discussed Briffa’s secrecy and refusal to publish his data, which thwarted discovery of the weaknesses of his temperature reconstructions. The Muir Russell panel dismissed all these concerns on the basis that they were not published in academic journals. This was ridiculous reasoning since, first, much of the battle involved getting the journals to enforce their own data disclosure policies but this typically does not lead to an article in the journal, and second, by refusing to disclose the data Briffa was making it impossible for papers critical of his analysis from being published.

MYTH #1: THE EMAILS WERE TAKEN OUT OF CONTEXT 

Climate academics repeatedly assert that the emails were taken “out of context” to create controversy, yet the reality is the exact opposite: the controversies already existed; the emails provided the disquieting context that exposed the depth of malfeasance. The most notorious emails (e.g. “hide the decline”, “dirty laundry”) concerned issues and controversies which had already been raised at “skeptic” blogs (especially Climate Audit). The emails provided background detail which was then analysed extensively in contemporary blog posts at Climate Audit. Rather than coming to terms with the revelations, the climate community has simply chanted “out of context!”, but never demonstrated that there exists an alternative context in which the emails were less damning.

 
We will show this for several of the most prominent and controversial emails, but the potential list is far more extensive.

Example 1: “Dirty Laundry” 

In a remarkable 2003 email, which was discussed in detail at Climate Audit within the first two weeks of Climategate, Mann sent some undisclosed calculations from the Mann et al 1998 temperature reconstruction to Tim Osborn, a “trusted colleague”, telling Osborn that the series were his “dirty laundry” and needed to be kept strictly confidential so that they didn’t fall into the wrong “hands”.

The email sounds bad enough on its face, but, in context, it is even worse. Nor was Mann’s withholding of data an issue that originated with the Climategate emails: it was a longstanding controversy to which the Climategate email added additional and disquieting context. It also touches issues which, due to Mann’s libel lawsuits, linger on to this day.

Reconstruction Residuals

The “dirty laundry” data series are called residuals. They are the differences between the proxy reconstruction estimates of past temperature and observed temperature records during the model estimation (“calibration”) and testing (“verification”) periods. Since the residuals measure the goodness-of-fit of the model, they are essential for computing verification test scores. In this email Mann was supplying residuals for reconstructions (which he grandiosely calls “experiments”) based on the post-1000, post-1400 and post-1600 intervals. The first two were critical since they determine whether it is legitimate to do the reconstruction back that far.

 
Numerous statistical authorities, including those1 cited in Mann et al 1998, recommend testing reconstruction validity using several different scores based on the residuals. Mann stated in his 1998 paper that he had computed two such scores, the Reduction of Error (RE) statistic and the r2 score. But in his paper and in the accompanying archive he only listed the RE values. He had not (and has never) released the r2 scores. Nor could they readily be computed from information disclosed with the original publication because, contrary to widespread belief among climate scientists, Mann’s archive omitted the complete reconstructions for each time step. For the signature Northern Hemisphere (NH) reconstruction, Mann only archived the spliced reconstruction segments in which, at each time step, the results of a later step were printed over results from earlier steps. Without the residual series no one could compute the unreported r2 scores. 

What Was Being Hidden

In late 2003, only a few months after the “dirty laundry” email, we asked Mann to provide the residual series for the AD1400 step of his reconstruction. He refused. We filed a Materials Complaint to Nature, which had published the 1998 study, under their disclosure policies for either the residual series or the reconstruction steps. To their shame and discredit, Nature refused. We also requested the US National Science Foundation to require Mann to provide this data. To their discredit, they also refused. 

 
Despite disinformation to the contrary, the results of Mann’s individual steps remain unarchived to this day.

 
We discovered the reason why Mann was so adamant about withholding his “dirty laundry” in 2004 – long before Climategate. By early 2004, despite many obstacles, we had been able to replicate Mann’s peculiar and poorly documented methodology well enough to calculate the residual series (and verification statistics) for the AD1400 step.
We discovered, to our considerable surprise, that the verification r2 statistic for the AD1400 step was disastrously low (0.018). The verification r2 is a commonplace statistic, which ought to be easily passed by any reconstruction purporting to have statistical “skill”. It is not a guarantee of model validity, but failure is more or less a guarantee of model invalidity. We reported our discoveries in two widely-discussed 2005 articles.2 At the time, we didn’t know for sure whether Mann had overlooked calculation of verification r2 values (implausible but possible) or whether he had calculated the values, discovered that they were disastrous and withheld them. Both alternatives were disquieting.

 
The dispute was prominently reported on in 2005, including a frontpage article in the Wall St Journal which attracted the attention of the US House Energy and Commerce Committee. They sent a set of questions to Mann including ones about source code and verification r2 statistics. These provoked vigorous protests from AAAS, AGU and other science institutions. Ralph Cicerone, then chair of the National Academy of Sciences, wrote to the House Energy and Commerce Committee offering their services, including, specifically, examination of the verification r2. Two studies were commissioned by congressional committees: the 2006 National Academy of Science and Wegman reports.

 
In partial response to the Committee questions, Mann archived some (but not all) source code for Mann et al 1998. While incomplete, it confirmed our surmise that Mann had calculated verification r2 statistics for each step of the signature NH reconstruction and had withheld them. 

 
Subsequently, in 2006, Wahl and Ammann, both Mann allies and associates, did their own replication of the various steps: we were quickly able to reconcile their calculations to ours. They replicated the poor verification r2 for the AD1400 step and discovered that the score for the AD1600 step was even worse – perhaps the worst verification r2 in any scientific study ever published. Despite reconciling exactly to and confirming our results, their abstract misleadingly asserted that they had verified Mann’s results, when, in fact, they replicated ours – a point made at the time by Professor Wegman. 

To this day, Mann has never archived the NH reconstructions for individual steps, the equivalent residual series (the “dirty laundry”) or even the verification r2 results.  

The Toxic Rhetoric of Climate Change – How Wrong It Is

Judith Curry provides much needed perspective for those worried about the alleged "existential threat of Climate Change".
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Letter from a worried young adult in the UK

I received this letter last nite, via email:

“I have no idea if this is an accurate email of your but I just found it and thought I’d take a chance. My name is Elan I’m 20 years old from the UK. I have been well the only word to describe it is suffering as I genuinely have the fear that climate change is going to kill me and all my family, I’m not even kidding it’s all I have thought about for the last 9 months every second of the day. It’s making my sick to my stomach, I’m not eating or sleeping and I’m getting panic attacks daily. It’s currently 1am and I can’t sleep as I’m petrified. I’ve tried to do my own research, I’ve tried everything. I’m not stupid, I’m a pretty rational thinker but at this point sometimes I literally wish I wasn’t born, I’m just so miserable and Petrified. I’ve recently made myself familiar with your work and would be so appreciative of any findings you can give me or hope or advice over email. I’m already vegetarian and I recycle everything so I’m really trying. Please help me. In anyway you can. I’m at my wits end here.”

JC’s response
We have been hearing increasingly shrill rhetoric from Extinction Rebellion and other activists about the ‘existential threat’ of the ‘climate crisis’, ‘runaway climate chaos’, etc. In a recent op-ed, Greta Thunberg stated: “Around 2030 we will be in a position to set off an irreversible chain reaction beyond human control that will lead to the end of our civilization as we know it.” From the Extinction Rebellion: “It is understood that we are facing an unprecedented global emergency. We are in a life or death situation of our own making.”

It is more difficult tune out similar statements from responsible individuals representing the United Nations. In his opening remarks for the UN Climate Change Conference this week in Madrid (COP25), UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said that “the point of no-return is no longer over the horizon.” Hoesung Lee, the Chair for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said “if we stay on our current path, [we] threaten our existence on this planet.”

So . . . exactly what should we be worried about? Consider the following statistics:

• Over the past century, there has been a 99% decline in the death toll from natural disasters, during the same period that the global population quadrupled.

• While global economic losses from weather and climate disasters have been increasing, this is caused by increasing population and property in vulnerable locations. Global weather losses as a percent of global GDP have declined about 30% since 1990.

• While the IPCC has estimated that sea level could rise by 0.6 meters by 2100, recall that the Netherlands adapted to living below sea level 400 years ago.

• Crop yields continue to increase globally, surpassing what is needed to feed the world. Agricultural technology matters more than climate.

• The proportion of world population living in extreme poverty declined from 36% in 1990 to 10% in 2015.

While many people may be unaware of this good news, they do react to each weather or climate disaster in the news. Activist scientists and the media quickly seize upon each extreme weather event as having the fingerprints of manmade climate change — ignoring the analyses of more sober scientists showing periods of even more extreme weather in the first half of the 20th century, when fossil fuel emissions were much smaller.

So . . . why are we so worried about climate change? The concern over climate change is not so much about the warming that has occurred over the past century. Rather, the concern is about what might happen in the 21st century as a result of increasing fossil fuel emissions. Emphasis on ‘might.’

Alarming press releases are issued about each new climate model projection that predicts future catastrophes from famine, mass migrations, catastrophic fires, etc. However these alarming scenarios of the 21st century climate change require that, like the White Queen in Alice and Wonderland, we believe ‘six impossible things before breakfast’.

The most alarming scenarios of 21st century climate change are associated with the RCP8.5 greenhouse gas concentration scenario. Often erroneously described as a ‘business as usual’ scenario, RCP8.5 assumes unrealistic trends long-term trends for population and a slowing of technological innovation. Even more unlikely is the assumption that the world will largely be powered by coal.

In spite of the implausibility of this scenario, RCP8.5 is the favored scenario for publications based on climate model simulations. In short, RCP8.5 is a very useful recipe for cooking up scenarios alarming impacts from manmade climate change. Which are of course highlighted and then exaggerated by press releases and media reports.

Apart from the issue of how much greenhouse gases might increase, there is a great deal of uncertainty about much the planet will warm in response to a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide – referred to as ‘equilibrium climate sensitivity’ (ECS). The IPCC 5th Assessment Report (2013) provided a range between 1 and 6oC, with a ‘likely’ range between 1.5 and 4.5oC.

In the years since the 5th Assessment Report, the uncertainty has grown. The latest climate model results – prepared for the forthcoming IPCC 6th Assessment Report – shows that a majority of the climate models are producing values of ECS exceeding 5oC. The addition of poorly understood additional processes into the models has increased confusion and uncertainty. At the same time, refined efforts to determine values of the equilibrium climate sensitivity from the historical data record obtain values of ECS about 1.6oC, with a range from 1.05 to 2.7oC.

With this massive range of uncertainty in the values of equilibrium climate sensitivity, the lowest value among the climate models is 2.3oC, with few models having values below 3oC. Hence the lower end of the range of ECS is not covered by the climate models, resulting in temperature projections for the 21st century that are biased high, with a smaller range relative to the range of uncertainty in ECS.

With regards to sea level rise, recent U.S. national assessment reports have included a worst-case sea level rise scenario for the 21st century of 2.5 m. Extreme estimates of sea level rise rely on RCP8.5 and climate model simulations that are on average running too hot relative to the uncertainty range of ECS. The most extreme scenarios of 21st century sea level rise are based on speculative and poorly understood physical processes that are hypothesized to accelerate the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. However, recent research indicates that these processes are very unlikely to influence sea level rise in the 21st century. To date, in most of the locations that are most vulnerable to sea level rise, local sinking from geological processes and land use has dominated over sea level rise from global warming.

To further complicate climate model projections for the 21st century, the climate models focus only on manmade climate change – they make no attempt to predict natural climate variations from the sun’s output, volcanic eruptions and long-term variations in ocean circulation patterns. We have no idea how natural climate variability will play out in the 21st century, and whether or not natural variability will dominate over manmade warming.

We still don’t have a realistic assessment of how a warmer climate will impact us and whether it is ‘dangerous.’ We don’t have a good understanding of how warming will influence future extreme weather events. Land use and exploitation by humans is a far bigger issue than climate change for species extinction and ecosystem health.

We have been told that the science of climate change is ‘settled’. However, in climate science there has been a tension between the drive towards a scientific ‘consensus’ to support policy making, versus exploratory research that pushes forward the knowledge frontier. Climate science is characterized by a rapidly evolving knowledge base and disagreement among experts. Predictions of 21st century climate change are characterized by deep uncertainty.

As noted in a recent paper co-authored by Dr. Tim Palmer of Oxford University, https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/2019/11/26/1906691116.full.pdf, there is “deep dissatisfaction with the ability of our models to inform society about the pace of warming, how this warming plays out regionally, and what it implies for the likelihood of surprises.” “Unfortunately, [climate scientists] circling the wagons leads to false impressions about the source of our confidence and about our ability to meet the scientific challenges posed by a world that we know is warming globally.”

We have not only oversimplified the problem of climate change, but we have also oversimplified its ‘solution’. Even if you accept the climate model projections and that warming is dangerous, there is disagreement among experts regarding whether a rapid acceleration away from fossil fuels is the appropriate policy response. In any event, rapidly reducing emissions from fossil fuels to ameliorate the adverse impacts of extreme weather events in the near term increasingly looks like magical thinking.

Climate change – both manmade and natural – is a chronic problem that will require continued management over the coming centuries.

We have been told that climate change is an ‘existential crisis.’ However, based upon our current assessment of the science, the climate threat is not an existential one, even in its most alarming hypothetical incarnations. However, the perception of manmade climate change as a near-term apocalypse and has narrowed the policy options that we’re willing to consider. The perceived ‘urgency’ of drastically reducing fossil fuel emissions is forcing us to make near term decisions that may be suboptimal for the longer term. Further, the monomaniacal focus on elimination of fossil fuel emissions distracts our attention from the primary causes of many of our problems that we might have more success in addressing in the near term.

Common sense strategies to reduce vulnerability to extreme weather events, improve environmental quality, develop better energy technologies and increase access to grid electricity, improve agricultural and land use practices, and better manage water resources can pave the way for a more prosperous and secure future. Each of these solutions is ‘no regrets’ – supporting climate change mitigation while improving human well being. These strategies avoid the political gridlock surrounding the current policies and avoid costly policies that will have minimal near-term impacts on the climate. And finally, these strategies don’t require agreement about the risks of uncontrolled greenhouse gas emissions.

We don’t know how the climate of the 21st century will evolve, and we will undoubtedly be surprised. Given this uncertainty, precise emissions targets and deadlines are scientifically meaningless. We can avoid much of the political gridlock by implementing common sense, no-regrets strategies that improve energy technologies, lift people out of poverty and make them more resilient to extreme weather events.

The extreme rhetoric of the Extinction Rebellion and other activists is making political agreement on climate change policies more difficult. Exaggerating the dangers beyond credibility makes it difficult to take climate change seriously. On the other hand, the extremely alarmist rhetoric has frightened the bejesus out of children and young adults.

JC message to children and young adults: Don’t believe the hype that you are hearing from Extinction Rebellion and the like. Rather than going on strike or just worrying, take the time to learn something about the science of climate change. The IPCC reports are a good place to start; for a critical perspective on the IPCC, Climate Etc. is a good resource.

Climate change — manmade and/or natural — along with extreme weather events, provide reasons for concern. However, the rhetoric and politics of climate change have become absolutely toxic and nonsensical.

In the mean time, live your best life. Trying where you can to lessen your impact on the planet is a worthwhile thing to do. Societal prosperity is the best insurance policy that we have for reducing our vulnerability to the vagaries of weather and climate.

JC message to Extinction Rebellion and other doomsters: Not only do you know nothing about climate change, you also appear to know nothing of history. You are your own worst enemy — you are triggering a global backlash against doing anything sensible about protecting our environment or reducing our vulnerability to extreme weather. You are making young people miserable, who haven’t yet experienced enough of life to place this nonsense in context.

The facts concerning Schiff's "views" (lies?) about the impeachment

Here is Jonathan Turley on Shiff's "need" to impeach by Christmas.

My view is that Schiff's and Nadler's behavior reflects concern only with their and their Party's power.  I also believe that their behavior is harming the "State".  This could be viewed as treason.
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The House Judiciary Committee is about to approve two articles of impeachment as member after member last night declared that time is of the essence. The House is now set to fulfill its pledge to impeach President Donald Trump by Christmas. For some us, the mad rush toward impeachment by the Democrats has been utterly incomprehensible. It is difficult enough to go to the Senate in a presidential impeachment without an accepted crime and on the narrowest basis in history. However, the Democrats know that they have combined those liabilities with the thinnest record of any modern impeachment – a record filled with gaps and conflicts. The Democrats know that this record is guaranteed to fail and could easily justify the Senate holding a trial as cursory as its hearings. Yet, they would prefer guaranteed failure rather than build a credible case for removal. Why? The reasons put forward by House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and others are not credible and, given the paucity of examination given these claims, it is worth closer scrutiny.

So, to use Stephen Hawkings’ famous construct, here is a brief history of time for impeachment.

So why? The answer to that question will likely occupy historians for decades after this slipshod impeachment is summarily rejected. In the impeachment hearing, I testified that President Donald Trump could be impeached for abuse of power but that the record was facially inadequate and incomplete. I encouraged the Committee to just take a few more months to subpoena roughly ten witnesses with direct evidence and secure judicial orders that I believe would support the Committee on its obstruction article. While I was relieved to see the Committee drop the allegations of bribery, extortion, and other crimes that I testified against, it refused to simply take a little more time to develop a more complete case.

None of the excuses for the pledge to impeach by Christmas are even remotely plausible. They can be divided into two basic groupings: court challenges would take too much time and there is a crime in progress that must be stopped.

No Time To Wait

First, there is the argument by Chairman Schiff in response to the criticism over the short investigation (which even the New York Times has challenged). Schiff insisted that waiting will mean a guarantee of that there will be no impeachment while also guaranteeing that there will be foreign meddling in the 2020 election: “People should understand what that argument really means. It has taken us eight months to get a lower court ruling that Don McGahn has no absolute right to defy Congress. Eight months for one court decision.” As has consistently been the case, no major media outfit seemed interested to fact check that statement. It happens to be untrue.

The House waited until August 7th to go to court to compel McGahn’s appearance. That was roughly four months ago, not eight. It was also filed before the House voted to start the impeachment inquiry on October 31st. Back in January, I testified in the House Judiciary Committee and pushed the Committee to hold such a vote to allow for expedited cases over testimony like McGahn’s. At the time, I warned that the House was running out of runway to get an impeachment off the ground. With such a vote, these cases could have moved at the accelerated pace of an impeachment.

So not only has the House gone two years without opening an impeachment inquiry, it burned over three months without going to court to enforce a subpoena in the Ukrainian controversy. Indeed, a court was close to ruling on such a subpoena in the case of Charles Kupperman, a former deputy national security adviser. Kupperman was ready to testify but simply wanted judicial guidance. The House withdrew the subpoena before the court could rule and this week Kupperman is still trying to keep the case in court to get a ruling against the determined efforts of the House.

In the Nixon case, the White House moved to quash a subpoena for the Watergate tapes on May 1st. Judge John Sirica denied St. Clair’s motion on 19 days later. On May 24th, an appeal was taken to the D.C. Circuit but the case was taken directly to the Supreme Court. Oral arguments were heard on July 8th and a ruling issued only three weeks later. That is three months. That is what can happen when you expedite a matter as an impeachment matter.

The question is why would the House not only refuse to try to secure these witnesses but actually withdraw a subpoena before a ruling in the Kupperman. The December deadline is more logically tied to the Iowa caucuses than any litigation schedule. It is not the judicial but political calendar that appears the pressing concern in this schedule.

This Is An Ongoing Crime Spree

The second argument is that there must be action now because President Trump is actively seeking to undermine the 2020 elections. Chairman Schiff declared “The argument, ‘why don’t you just wait’ amounts to this: ‘why don’t you just let him cheat in one more election? Why not let him cheat just one more time?'”

Rep. Eric Swalwell further declared that the House must act because this is a “crime spree in progress.” Rep. David Cicilline similarly declared that time was of the essence because this is a “crime in progress.” Likewise, Rep. Cedric Richmond (D, La) explained that they cannot wait because “this is a crime in process” and this is a 911 moment. It makes for riveting rhetoric but it is detached from any objective view of the facts, even if you object to to the call and request for an investigation. What is the ongoing crime in Ukraine? The aid has been paid. Moreover, how does rushing an incomplete impeachment case to certain failure stop an ongoing crime? These members are pushing forward a half-formed case that will be easily to dismiss – and calling it “tough on crime.” Finally, the Johnson, Clinton, and Nixon cases all had recognized crimes, not metaphorical crimes. Yet, those cases were based on long investigative periods that produced massive and comprehensive records.

What is equally concerning is that this claim of a “crime spree” is based not just on the request for investigations in Ukraine, but earlier public statements made by President Trump, including during the campaign. Chairman Jerry Nadler last night said the pattern includes then candidate Donald Trump calling for the Russians to hand over the Clinton emails. That was before Trump took office and it is now being somehow used as part of an impeachment. It is also a comment that Trump and his supporters maintained was a joke. It did seem like a public statement on a campaign trail that was mockery. Now it has been cited as part of this pattern of a conspiracy to invite foreign interference with our elections — a conspiracy that was expressly rejected by the FBI, the Inspector General, and the Special Counsel. This is an example of how this incomplete record quickly breaks down under scrutiny and why the House needs to build an actual not aspirational case for impeachment.

Let’s be clear. Many of us have criticized the references to the Bidens. However, there was no invitation to intervene in the election. It certainly was not akin to the Russian hacking operation in 2016. Many presidents ask for actions that would benefit them politically in an election year. Any request that might benefit a president is not an invitation for intervention or rigging of an election. To portray that as rigging the 2020 election (and to suggest that it is an ongoing crime) is not just hyperbolic but highly misleading. Moreover, this line of argument does not address why a delay of two months would somehow magnify this danger. As noted, the Democrats allowed months to pass without seeking subpoenas for witnesses like John Bolton and withdrew other subpoenas. How would sending an impeachment guaranteed to fail help in any way to stop such intervention? Indeed, what the Democrats are doing would seem to encourage such alleged misconduct by all but forcing an acquittal in the Senate. If you really want to combat such misconduct, you would build this case and seek a vote in the early Spring with a full record.

There is no question that impeachment by Christmas is the ultimate stocking stuffer for many voters. However, this is marketing a known defective product that will not last long outside of the box.

More lies about the Horowitz Report from the media and the Democrats

Here is Jonathan Turley on the media's lies about the Horowitz Report.

Jonathan Turley is the chair of public interest law at George Washington University and served as the last lead counsel in a Senate impeachment trial.---------------------------------------
The analysis of the report by Justice Department inspector general Michael Horowitz greatly depends, as is often the case, on which cable news channel you watch. Indeed, many people might be excused for concluding that Horowitz spent 476 pages to primarily conclude one thing, which is that the Justice Department acted within its guidelines in starting its investigation into the 2016 campaign of President Trump.

Horowitz did say that the original decision to investigate was within the discretionary standard of the Justice Department. That standard for the predication of an investigation is low, simply requiring “articulable facts.” He said that, since this is a low discretionary standard, he cannot say it was inappropriate to start. United States Attorney John Durham, who is heading the parallel investigation at the Justice Department, took the unusual step to issue a statement that he did not believe the evidence supported that conclusion at the very beginning of the investigation.

Attorney General William Barr also issued a statement disagreeing with the threshold statement. In fact, the Justice Department has a standard that requires the least intrusive means of investigating such entities as presidential campaigns, particularly when it comes to campaigns of the opposing party. That threshold finding is then followed by the remainder of the report, which is highly damaging and unsettling. Horowitz finds a litany of false and even falsified representations used to continue the secret investigation targeting the Trump campaign and its associates.

This is akin to reviewing the Titanic and saying that the captain was not unreasonable in starting the voyage. The question is what occurred when the icebergs began appearing. Horowitz says that investigative icebergs appeared rather early on, and the Justice Department not only failed to report that to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court but removed evidence that its investigation was on a collision course with the facts.

The investigation was largely based on a May 2016 conversation between Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos and Australian diplomat Alexander Downer in London. Papadopolous reportedly said he heard that Russia had thousands of emails from Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. That was viewed as revealing possible prior knowledge of the WikiLeaks release two months later, which was then used to open four investigations targeting the campaign and Trump associates.

Notably, Democrats and the media lambasted Trump for saying the Justice Department had been “spying” on his campaign, and many said it was just an investigation into figures like Carter Page. Horowitz describes poorly founded investigations that included undercover FBI agents and a variety of different sources. What they really discovered is the main point of the Horowitz report.

From the outset, the Justice Department failed to interview several key individuals or vet critical information and sources in the Steele dossier. Justice Department officials insisted to Horowitz that they choose not to interview campaign officials because they were unsure if the campaign was compromised and did not want to tip off the Russians. However, the inspector general report says the Russians were directly told about the allegations repeatedly by then CIA Director John Brennan and, ultimately, President Obama. So the Russians were informed, but no one contacted the Trump campaign so as not to inform the Russians?

Meanwhile, the allegations quickly fell apart. Horowitz details how all of the evidence proved exculpatory of any collusion or conspiracy with the Russians. Even worse, another agency that appears to be the CIA told the FBI that Page was actually working for the agency in Russia as an “operational contact” gathering intelligence. The FBI was told this repeatedly, yet it never reported it to the FISA court approving the secret investigation of Page. His claim to have worked with the federal government was widely dismissed.

Worse yet, Horowitz found that investigators and the Justice Department concluded there was no probable cause on Page to support its FISA investigation. That is when there was an intervention from the top of the FBI, ordering investigators to look at the Steele dossier funded by the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign instead.

Who told investigators to turn to the dossier? Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. He was fired over his conduct in the investigation after earlier internal investigations. Horowitz contradicts the media claim that the dossier was just a small part of the case presented to the FISA court. He finds that it was essential to seeking FISA warrants. Horowitz also finds no sharing of information with FISA judges that undermined the credibility of the dossier or Christopher Steele himself. Surprisingly little effort was made to fully investigate the dossier when McCabe directed investigators to it, yet investigators soon learned that critical facts reported to the FISA court were false. FISA judges were told that a Yahoo News article was an independent corroboration of the Steele dossier, but Horowitz confirms that Steele was the source of that article. Therefore, Steele was used to corroborate Steele on allegations that were later deemed unfounded.

The report also said that Steele was viewed as reliable and was used as a source in prior cases, yet Horowitz found no support for that and, in fact, found that the past representations of Steele were flagged as unreliable. His veracity was not the only questionable thing unveiled in the report. Steele relied on a character who, Horowitz determined, had a dubious reputation and may have been under investigation as a possible double agent for Russia. Other instances were also clearly misrepresented.

The source relied on by Steele was presented as conveying damaging information on Trump. When this source was interviewed, he said he had no direct information and was conveying bar talk. He denied telling other details to Steele. This was all known to the Justice Department, but it still asked for warrant renewals from the FISA court without correcting the record or revealing exculpatory information discovered by investigators. That included the failure to tell the court that Page was working with the CIA. Finally, Horowitz found that an FBI lawyer doctored a critical email to hide the fact that Page was really working for us and not the Russians.

Despite this shockingly damning report, much of the media is reporting only that Horowitz did not find it unreasonable to start the investigation, and ignoring a litany of false representations and falsifications of evidence to keep the secret investigation going. Nothing was found to support any of those allegations, and special counsel Robert Mueller also confirmed there was no support for collusion and conspiracy allegations repeated continuously for two years by many experts and members of Congress.

In other words, when the Titanic set sail, there was no reason for it not to. Then there was that fateful iceberg. Like the crew of the Titanic, the FBI knew investigative icebergs floated around its Russia investigation, but not only did it not reduce speed, it actively suppressed the countervailing reports. Despite the many conflicts to its FISA application and renewals, the FBI leadership, including McCabe, plowed ahead into the darkness.

Memories - another time the FBI and media screwed up

A column by Henry Schuster in The Jewish World Review.

Always doubt the Government (the FBI in this case) and the media.
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"Dear Richard," the letter began, "I owe you an apology."

Writing an apology is not something journalists are used to doing. It took me years just to open a document and type those few words. But with the release of "Richard Jewell," Clint Eastwood's new movie about the aftermath of the 1996 bombing in Atlanta's Centennial Olympic Park, those of us who reported the story are doing a fresh round of soul-searching. No one emerged from the coverage with glory, although Jewell certainly deserved to.

I am one of the reasons he didn't.

Jewell might have been the first victim of the 24-hour cable news cycle. He went from hero to villain in less than three days. Jewell was working security in Centennial Olympic Park when he discovered a backpack containing a bomb and alerted law enforcement. The bomb exploded, and soon, so did his life, after the FBI decided he was the suspect and the media piled on.

If Jewell was the first, it would only get worse. Cable news accelerated the pace, but social media made the rush to judgment instantaneous - as quick as machine trading on Wall Street, but without any circuit-breakers.

I had barely gone to sleep around 1:30 a.m. on the night of Saturday, July 27, 1996, when the phone rang.

Our assignment desk said there had been an explosion during a concert in Centennial Olympic Park, across the street from our offices at CNN Center. By the time I made it downtown, it was clear from sources and witnesses that this had been a bomb. The streets nearby were filled with panic, ambulances and carnage.

The blast killed one woman and injured 111; a cameraman died of a heart attack as he rushed to cover the explosion. These days, we would call it an IED. In those more innocent times, the murder weapon was called a pipe bomb, and it had been carried into the park in a military-style backpack, then left by a bench.

During a news conference in those early hours, someone from the Georgia State Patrol mentioned that a security guard named Richard had spotted the backpack and alerted law enforcement. He seemed to be the hero of the story. I turned to a guest booker and asked her to track him down.

By that evening, we had our man. Less than 24 hours after the bombing, Jewell and his mother arrived at CNN. He was flustered. Traffic in the area had been heavy, and they had to rush the last several blocks. Rep. Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., then House speaker, and Sen. Sam Nunn, D-Ga., were in our newsroom. Both wanted to shake his hand and thank the hero. Even before he sat down on the set, Jewell was distracted by the attention.

The interview I had pushed for set off the chain of events that led to what Jewell later described as "88 days of hell."

A former employer of Jewell's, the president of a college in north Georgia, was watching and called the FBI. He wanted the bureau to know that Jewell had worked for him and that he had been forced to resign.

Agents in the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit in Quantico, Virginia, were also paying attention. They wondered why Jewell looked uncomfortable and his eyes shifted around - he seemed suspicious. They may not have considered that this was Jewell's first TV interview and that it was being done remotely; he was hearing questions from an anchor in Washington through an earpiece.

They were too busy thinking about Jimmy Wade Pearson. During the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984, Pearson was a police officer who claimed to have found a bomb on a bus carrying luggage for Turkish athletes. Pearson later admitted planting the device so he could be the hero of his own story.

Jewell had been a sheriff's deputy before working security at the college, and he'd moved to Atlanta hoping to boost his career. His stint in law enforcement had not been without controversy. If you were an FBI profiler, you could make it all seem sinister.

A colleague and I interviewed him again the next night for a special report. After we turned off the cameras, Jewell casually mentioned that he would not be surprised, based on his training, if he was considered a suspect. That's just the way it worked, he implied: Until you found the culprit, everyone in proximity, especially the guy who discovered the bomb, was in the frame.

With the world's media already gathered in Atlanta - 20,000 of us, by some counts - the FBI was under intense pressure to solve the case quickly. FBI Director Louis Freeh became personally involved. Agents were chasing down dozens of leads, trying to figure out who had been near the bench and who had made a 911 call from a public phone several blocks away a few minutes earlier. "There is a bomb in Centennial Park. You have 30 minutes," said the caller, who didn't realize that the warning would never be relayed.

The FBI called Jewell to the Atlanta field office on Tuesday afternoon,pretending they were making a training tape. He was the hero, so they wanted his help. No need to bring a lawyer. They were going to lead him in, lead him on and then spring their trap. As they were trying to trick him into a confession, Freeh called Atlanta and told the agents in the room to read Jewell his rights. The agents made the situation worse by pretending that giving him his Miranda rights was part of the training tape.

Law enforcement sources were already telling journalists that Jewell was under investigation. Even before he made it to the FBI for his interview, several of us were meeting in the office of CNN's president, Tom Johnson, to discuss how we would report the news. Should we call him a "suspect" or use the more cautious term "person of interest"? That's when Johnson got a call from an editor of the Atlanta Journal saying the paper was about to put out a special edition naming Jewell as the bombing suspect.

Then things went off the rails.

Instead of going with the more neutral language we favored, Johnson had the anchors on set hold up the front page of the Journal and read the headlines. By the time Jewell's lawyer heard the news reports and managed to get through the FBI switchboard to his client, telling him to get out of the field office, the collective weight of law enforcement and the media had begun turning Jewell from a hero to a villain. Our wall-to-wall coverage was underway: We became the FBI's megaphone. There was no nuance in those first 48 hours.

This was 1996, the dawn of the internet age, so the process took some time. The Atlanta paper reported it, we ran it over and over as breaking news, and those thousands of reporters covering the Olympics had their lead. By the next day, Jewell was notorious worldwide. (Now, with social media, it's even worse: A reputation can be destroyed in nanoseconds.)

I'm still a journalist, and I still love to break news, but I get queasy anytime I see a "breaking news" banner on screen. It used to be reserved for events like 9/11. Now, it's often less than a morsel of news, chewed over by endless panels of underqualified and over-opinionated pundits who replace reporting with pontification. Time gets filled, reputations get ruined - and no one bothers to check if the story is true.

Think how much worse it would have been for Jewell in 2019.

We later did a story that same week showing that under the FBI's timeline of the bombing, Jewell couldn't have made the warning call to 911. By then, though, it didn't matter. The media was camped out in front of the Jewells' apartment. Every time he went somewhere, he was followed by an absurd caravan of FBI agents and cameras. It was relentless, and it was wrong.

Richard Jewell was not the Olympic Park bomber.

Despite the innuendo and FBI leaks that he was their man, Jewell was never charged. The U.S. attorney even took the unusual step of writing a letter that fall saying Jewell wasn't a suspect.

Eventually, there were more bombings using similar devices, outside a gay nightclub and at abortion clinics in Atlanta and Birmingham, Alabama. A police officer was killed, a nurse maimed. The real culprit was finally identified more than a year later; he was a Christian terrorist who hated the "New World Order," abortion and the Olympics. But as soon as Eric Robert Rudolph was named, he disappeared into the mountains of North Carolina. He was caught dumpster-diving five years later.

The happiest I saw Jewell was April 13, 2005, the day Rudolph pleaded guilty in federal court in Atlanta to the Olympics bombing. Jewell was smiling before the hearing, looking fit in the company of his wife. He'd never gotten proper recognition for his heroism after those first few days. But his lawyers negotiated settlements from NBC, CNN, the New York Post and Piedmont College, whose president had called the FBI. He got nothing from the Journal-Constitution, which argued that its reporting, like ours, had been correct at the time - and that Jewell was a public figure, thanks to the interviews he had done for us at CNN, and therefore faced a tougher standard in suing for defamation.

I didn't say "sorry" when I saw Jewell that April day. We simply exchanged greetings. I saw him again a year later, at a training exercise for local law officers. He was back on the job as a sheriff's deputy and friendly, although he went cold when he saw an FBI agent in attendance.

A couple of days later, I sat at the computer and started my letter of apology, got frustrated and hit save. A year after that, Jewell died at 44, after months of failing health; my letter remained unfinished and unsent.

So how do I make sense of it all these years later, when I have an Emmy on my shelf for CNN's coverage from those first 24 hours?

We in the media got it wrong, even though our reporting was right. There's the paradox: Jewell really was the FBI's main suspect. Yes, the FBI has a lot to answer for, but this is about our responsibility. Suppose that CNN had been more nuanced and called Jewell a person of interest; our repetitive and relentless coverage would still have made it look like the authorities thought he was the culprit.

In my own reporting, I've learned to be more skeptical of sources, especially when they claim to speak for government - especially at its highest levels. My stories these days don't go to air without relentless fact-checking, and my scripts have more footnotes than any term paper I did in college.

But the lesson is, that isn't always enough. It's also how you report it and how everyone else is reporting it, too. Someone else's guilty plea and several court settlements didn't give Jewell his good name back. Maybe the film finally will.

And next time? I will own up to my responsibility. I will finish that letter. It's never too late to apologize.