Disparity Doesn’t Necessarily Imply Racism

 Roland Fryer in the Wall Street Journal.

Mr. Fryer is a professor of economics at Harvard, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and founder of Equal Opportunity Ventures.

I suspect that Mr. Fryer is correct. I also fear that the current divisiveness in our society may lead to the kind of racism and similar bias among other groups that Mr. Fryer tested for.

Here is his article.

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I was raised, in part, by my paternal grandmother—a phenomenal black woman born in 1925 who came of age during Jim Crow, attended Bethune-Cookman University in the early 1940s, and experienced both the promise and limitations of the civil-rights era when integrating schools in Florida in 1969. She did her best to teach sixth-graders subject-verb agreement minutes after being spat on by their parents. Her life’s journey provided unlimited content as we sat together for nearly three decades, stuck to the plastic slipcovers on her sofa, playing cards, drinking sweet tea, and talking uninhibitedly about race in America.

The first discussion I can remember happened in 1988, when I was 11, after a visit to McDonald’s. After ordering, my grandmother paid with a crisp $20 bill from her pocketbook, and the cashier put the change directly on the counter. When we got to the parking lot, she was incensed. “You see that? White woman didn’t want to touch me.” I had noticed it too, but thought the cashier was being nice, trying to avoid passing on her own germs.

My grandmother—no doubt based in part on her experiences—saw racism everywhere, in every inequity, every statistic. Racial differences in wages? Racism. Racial differences in educational achievement? Racism. Racial differences in teen birth rates? Racism. This sort of casual empiricism—which has crept back into mainstream media and other institutions—was a competitive sport among my family and friends. Did you see the way that white woman tightened her grip on her purse, because I was behind her? Does this guy follow everyone around the store?

A decade after the McDonald’s incident, in graduate school, I read a 1995 paper titled “The Role of Premarket Factors in Black-White Wage Differences.” Using a nationally representative sample of more than 12,000 14- to 17-year-olds from 1979, Derek A. Neal and William R. Johnson estimated that blacks earned between 35% to 45% less than whites on average.

They examined how much of the wage gap could be attributed to present-day discrimination in the workplace versus differences in skill as measured by the Armed Forces Qualification Test, a cousin of the ACT and SAT. Importantly, they weren’t trying to measure the effect of America’s racist history running back to the early 17th century, when the first African slaves were brought to work the tobacco farms of Virginia, only the extent to which blacks earn lower incomes because employers today make racially discriminatory decisions. Nor did they focus on prejudice more broadly: They ignored that my grandmother was spat on in the parking lot at work and concentrated on whether she was treated fairly once she entered the building.

“We find,” they wrote in the abstract of their paper, “that this one test score explains all of the black-white wage gap for young women and much of the gap for young men.” With their approach, antiblack bias played no role in the divergent wages among women; a black woman with the same qualifications as a white woman made slightly more money. And it accounted for at most 29% of the racial difference among men, with 71% traceable to disparate performance on the AFQT. The AFQT itself was evaluated by the Pentagon, which found that black and white military recruits with similar AFQT scores performed similarly on the job—indicating no racial bias.

The paper felt like an attack on what I knew. An assault on all those conversations with my grandmother, which taught me that racism—present-tense racism—dictated black-white inequality. I told myself that Messrs. Neal and Johnson, both of whom were white, were probably bigots, and I set out on a mission to disprove their work.

I vented about my battle with Messrs. Neal and Johnson to a fellow graduate student at Penn State, a white guy from the cornfields of Southern Illinois. He was no more at home at a top-25 economics doctoral program than I was, and we spent a fair amount of time together during our first year, staring at Euler equations in our favorite textbook, “Recursive Methods in Economic Dynamics.”

I told him I was sure discrimination was a bigger factor than Messrs. Neal and Johnson were letting on, but “I just can’t get this data to cooperate.” He asked why I was so convinced, and I erupted in a rant about the prevalence of racism and recognizing bigots on sight. My grandmother would’ve nodded rhythmically along. My friend responded with a burst of loud, sharp laughter in my face.

He pointed out how far I was straying from our Euler equations. How on any subject other than race, I would have never given in to such sloppy thinking. The double identity—a classically trained economist taught to tease out causal relationships and a black Southern boy taught that discrimination is ubiquitous—had lived seamlessly inside me until that moment. Messrs. Neal and Johnson, as it turns out, aren’t bigots, and their conclusions have stood the test of time and my attempts to disprove them. I extended their analysis to unemployment, teen pregnancy, incarceration and other outcomes—all of which follow the same pattern. Moreover, the relationship between skills and wages has been confirmed by study after study, even when using different data and methods. Kevin Lang, an economist at Boston University, corrects important issues in Messrs. Neal and Johnson’s work but finds the same relationship between AFQT scores and wages. Taken together, an honest review of the evidence suggests that current racial inequities are more a result of differences in skill than differences in treatment of those with the same skill.

I write this with some degree of trepidation, in part because I still have my grandmother in my ear and in part because I am keenly aware of the harm in underestimating bias. But there is also a cost to overemphasizing its impact. A black kid who believes he will face daunting societal obstacles is likely to underinvest in trying to climb society’s rungs. Every black student in the country needs to know that his return on investment in education is, if anything, higher than for white students.

The solution is neither to stop fighting biased behavior nor to curb honest inquiry about race in America. We shouldn’t stop searching for and penalizing discriminatory employers, or trying to reduce racial differences in police brutality, or estimating whether the value of a home appraisal depends on the race of the homeowner, or reducing bias in bail decisions by using artificial intelligence. I could go on, like the conversations stuck to those slipcovers. The solution isn’t to look away from discrimination. It does exist. But we also can’t point at every gap in outcomes and instantly conclude it’s racism. Prejudice must be measured rigorously. Statistically. Disparity doesn’t necessarily imply racism. It may feel omnipresent, but it isn’t all-powerful. Skills matter most.

The Associated Press loses its credibility

 Jonathan Turley shows why the Associated Press has lost its credibility.

Voting fraud is not the only way to make an election dishonest. Media and Tech cooperation to bury relevant facts, including about candidates accomplishes the same thing. In my view, the latter has been far more serious than the former in distorting election results.

JT's example is only the tip of the iceberg.

The many members of the Educational Establishment, who have been largely responsible for the destruction of personal and professional standards in the media and elsewhere should be ashamed of themselves - but of course they are not - rather they are gloating about their success. Shame, shame, shame.

Here is JT's comment.

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For those of us who have written about the Hunter Biden scandal and the family’s influence-peddling operation for years, it is routine to read media stories denying the facts or dismissing calls to investigate the foreign dealings. However, this weekend, the Associated Press made a whopper of a claim that there is no evidence even suggesting that President Joe Biden ever spoke to his son about his foreign dealings. I previously discussed how the Bidens have succeeded in a Houdini-like trick in making this elephant of a scandal disappear from the public stage. They did so by enlisting the media in the illusion. However, this level of audience participation in the trick truly defies belief.

The statement of the Associated Press at this stage of the scandal is breathtaking but telling: “Joe Biden has said he’s never spoken to his son about his foreign business, and nothing the Republicans have put forth suggests otherwise.”

For years, the media has continued to report President Biden’s repeated claim that “I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.” At the outset, the media only had to suspend any disbelief that the president could fly to China as Vice President with his son on Air Force 2 without discussing his planned business dealings on the trip.

Of course, the emails on the laptop quickly refuted this claim. However, the media buried the laptop story before the election or pushed the false claim that it was fake Russian disinformation.

President Biden’s denials continued even after an audiotape surfaced showing President Biden leaving a message for Hunter specifically discussing coverage of those dealings. The call is specifically referring to these dealings:

“Hey pal, it’s Dad. It’s 8:15 on Wednesday night. If you get a chance just give me a call. Nothing urgent. I just wanted to talk to you. I thought the article released online, it’s going to be printed tomorrow in the Times, was good. I think you’re clear. And anyway if you get a chance give me a call, I love you.”

But who are you going to believe, the media or your own ears.

Some of us have written for two years that Biden’s denial of knowledge is patently false. It was equally evident that the Biden family was selling influence and access.

There are emails of Ukrainian and other foreign clients thanking Hunter Biden for arranging meetings with his father. There are photos from dinners and meetings that tie President Biden to these figures, including a 2015 dinner with a group of Hunter Biden’s Russian and Kazakh clients.

People apparently were told to avoid directly referring to President Biden. In one email, Tony Bobulinski, then a business partner of Hunter’s, was instructed by Biden associate James Gilliar not to speak of the former veep’s connection to any transactions: “Don’t mention Joe being involved, it’s only when u [sic] are face to face, I know u [sic] know that but they are paranoid.”

Instead, the emails apparently refer to President Biden with code names such as “Celtic” or “the big guy.” In one, “the big guy” is discussed as possibly receiving a 10 percent cut on a deal with a Chinese energy firm; other emails reportedly refer to Hunter Biden paying portions of his father’s expenses and taxes.

Bobulinski has given multiple interviews that he met twice with Joe Biden to discuss a business deal in China with CEFC China Energy Co. That would seem obvious evidence. In addition, the New York Post reported on a key email that discussed “the proposed percentage distribution of equity in a company created for a joint venture with CEFC China Energy Co.” That was the email on March 13, 2017 that included references of “10 held by H for the big guy.”

That brings us back to Houdini’s trick of making his 10,000 pound elephant Jennie disappear every night in New York’s Hippodrome. He succeeded night after night because the audience wanted the elephant to disappear even though it never left the stage.

I previously wrote about how the key to the trick was involving the media so that reporters are invested in the illusion like calling audience members to the stage. Reporters have to insist that there was nothing to see or they have to admit to being part of the original deception. The media cannot see the elephant without the public seeing something about the media in its past efforts to conceal it.

The media is now so heavily invested in the trick that they are sticking with the illusion even after “the reveal.” The Associated Press story shows that even pointing at the elephant — heck, even riding the elephant around the stage — will not dislodge these denials. This is no elephant because there cannot be an elephant. Poof!

Clinton-Linked Dark Money Group Targets Advertisers to Stop Musk From Re-storing Free Speech Protections

 Jonathan Turley discusses one of the latest efforts to control speech.

The real issue here is controlling speech as an aid to winning elections.

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In the shift of the left against free speech principles, there is no figure more actively or openly pushing for censorship than Hillary Clinton. Now, reports indicate that Clinton has unleashed her allies in the corporate world to coerce Musk to restore censorship policies or face bankruptcy. The effort of the Clinton-linked “Accountable Tech” reveals the level of panic in Democratic circles that free speech could be restored on one social media platform. The group was open about how losing control over Twitter could result in a loss of control over social media generally. For Clinton, it is an “all-hands on deck” call for censorship. She previously called upon foreign governments to crackdown on the free speech of Americans on Twitter.

We have been discussing how Clinton and others have called on foreign countries to pass censorship laws to prevent Elon Musk from restoring free speech protections on Twitter. It seems that, after years of using censorship-by-surrogates in social media companies, Democratic leaders seem to have rediscovered good old-fashioned state censorship.

Accountable Tech led an effort to send a letter to top Twitter advertisers to force Musk to accept “non-negotiable” requirements for censorship.

General Motors was one of the first to pull its advertising funds to stop free speech restoration on the site.

Of course, the company had no problem with supporting Twitter when it was running one of the largest censorship systems in history — or supporting TikTok (which is Chinese owned and has been denounced for state control and access to data). Twitter has been denounced for years for its bias against conservative and dissenting voices, including presumably many GM customers on the right. None of that was a concern for GM but the pledge to restore free speech to Twitter warrants a suspension.

The letter is open about the potential cascading effect if free speech is restored on one platform: “While the company is hardly a poster-child for healthy social media, it has taken welcome steps in recent years to mitigate systemic risks, ratcheting up pressure on the likes of Facebook and YouTube to follow suit.”

The letter insists that free speech will only invite “disinformation, hate, and harassment” and that “[u]nder the guise of ‘free speech,’ [Musk’s] vision will silence and endanger marginalized communities, and tear at the fraying fabric of democracy.”

Among other things, the letter demands “algorithmic accountability,” a notable inclusion in light of Democratic politicians demanding enlightened algorithms to protect citizens from their own bad choices or thoughts.

In addition to Accountable Tech, twenty-five other groups signed the letter to demand the restoration of censorship policies, including Media Matters and the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation. Accountable Tech has partnered in the past with Hillary Clinton’s Onward Together nonprofit group.

I have no objection to boycotts, which are an important form of free speech. However, this boycott action is directed at restoring censorship and preventing others from being able to post or to read opposing viewpoints.

If consistent with their past records, these companies will likely cave to these demands. While the public has clearly shown that they want more (not less) free speech, these executives are likely to yield to the pressure of Clinton and other powerful figures to coerce Musk into limiting the speech of others on his platform.

These campaigns only add support to Musk’s push for alternative revenue sources, including verification fees. As I previously wrote, we can show that there is a market for free speech by supporting Twitter in trying to reduce the dependence on corporate sponsors. If Musk remains faithful to free speech, many customers are likely to join his platform and support his effort to reduce censorship on social media.

More evidence that freedom in the West is in a decline

 Jonathan Turley gets it right on freedom of speech and thought - or - as things seem to be heading - the lack thereof.

The issue is broader than Ireland - It is a scourge throughout the "civilized" world - and growing.

 Yee shall reap what yee sow.

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We recently discussed a troubling conviction in Great Britain of a man for his “toxic ideology.” Now Ireland appears ready to replicate that case a thousand fold. The proposed Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill 2022 would criminalize the possession of material deemed hateful. It is a full frontal assault on speech and associational rights. The law would allow for sweeping authoritarian measures in defining opposing viewpoints hateful. Ireland appears to be picking up the cudgel of speech criminalization from Britain, an abusive power once used against the Irish.

The law is a free speech nightmare. Even before addressing the crime of possession of harmful material, the law would “provide for an offence of condoning, denying or grossly trivialising genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and crimes against peace.” The crime of condoning, denying or grossly trivialising” criminal conduct would make most autocrats blush. The lack of any meaningful definition invites arbitrary enforcement. The law expressly states the intent to combat “forms and expressions of racism and xenophobia by means of criminal law.”

What is so striking about the law is how utterly unapologetic it is in the use of criminal law to curtail not just free speech but free thought. It allows for the prosecution of citizens for “preparing or possessing material likely to incite violence or hatred against persons on account of their protected characteristics.” That could sweep deeply into not just political but literary expression.

The interest of the Irish in assuming such authoritarian measures is chilling given their own history under British rule, including violent crackdowns on nonviolent protests like “Bloody Sunday.” Free speech is now in a free fall in Great Britain and Ireland appears eager to follow suit.

The decline of free speech in the United Kingdom has long been a concern for free speech advocates (here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here). Once you start as a government to criminalize speech, you end up on a slippery slope of censorship. What constitutes hate speech or “malicious communications” remains a highly subjective matter and we have seen a steady expansion of prohibited terms and words and gestures. That now includes criminalizing “toxic ideologies.”

Under this pernicious law, a judge can order the search of a home based solely on a police officer’s sworn statement that he or she has “reasonable” grounds to believe illegal material may be present in a person’s home.

Again, the embrace of such laws by the Irish is crushingly ironic. Frank Ryan, who fought against the treaty, spoke for many radicals in declaring “as long as we have fists and boots, there will be no free speech for traitors.” Those anti-Treaty forces rejected the views of free speech that long defined Western nations. Now, Ireland is declaring “no free speech for haters” and assumes the authority to define who are haters and who are not.

The Irish people struggled for generations for equality and freedom. To now pick up the mantle of suppressing viewpoints is to make of mockery of the long struggle.

Climate alarmists wrong again: Glacier National Park glaciers

 Judith Curry takes down Reilly Neill, a Montana politician - along with a few other unmentioned climate alarmists.

Here is the link.

Here are a few excerpts.

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The loss of glaciers from Glacier National Park is one of the most visible manifestations of climate change in the U.S. Signs were posted all around the park, proclaiming that the glaciers would be gone by 2020. In 2017, the Park started taking these signs down. What happened, beyond the obvious fact that the glaciers hadn’t disappeared by 2020?

Not only are Montana’s glaciers an important icon for global warming (e.g. Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth), it also seems that the glaciers are an important political icon for progressive politicians in Montana. Earlier this week, Reilly Neill, a (sort of) politician in Montana, went after me on Twitter:

"Yes, We understand. Anything you say about climate is driven by potential profit for you and your company. Come check out the glaciers in Montana and talk to some real scientists if you ever get over yourself and your greed."

Well, it just so happens that I have some analyses of Montana glaciers and climate in my archives; maybe I can help Reilly (and the “real scientists of Montana”) understand what is going on.
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Variability of glaciers in Glacier National Park

The total area of Glacier National Park covered by glaciers shrank 70% from the1850s to 2015, according to US Geological Survey. Melting began at the end of the Little Ice Age (circa 1850) when scientists believe 146 glaciers covered the region, as opposed to 26 in 2019.

The first surveys of glaciers in Glacier National Park began in the 1880s, with most of the focus on the two largest glaciers – Grinnell and Sperry. A 2017 publication issued by the U.S. Geological Survey entitled Status of Glaciers in Glacier National Park [link] includes a table of the areal extent of named glaciers in the Glacier National Park since the Little Ice Age (LIA) with markers at LIA, 1966, 1998, 2005 and 2015. Analysis of these data show:A ~50% loss from LIA to 1966 (~115 years), averaging a loss of ~4.5% per decade.
Additional ~12% loss from 1966-98 (32 years), averaging a loss of ~3.7% per decade.
Additional ~4.75% loss from 1998-2015 (27 years), averaging a loss of ~1.75% per decade.

Much of the glacier loss occurred prior to 1966, when fossil-fueled warming was minimal. The percentage rate of glacier loss during this early period substantially exceeded the percentage rate of loss observed in the 21st century. I suspect that much of this melting occurred in the 1930’s (see next section).

Looking much further back, Glacier National Park was virtually ice free 11,000 years ago. Glaciers have been present within the boundaries of present-day Glacier National Park since about 6,500 years ago. [link] These glaciers have varied in size, tracking climatic variations, but did not grow to their recent maximum size until the end of the Little Ice Age, around 1850. An 80-year period (~1770-1840) of cool, wet summers and above-average winter snowfall led to a rapid growth of glaciers just prior to the end of the Little Ice Age. So, the recent loss of glacier mass must be understood in light of the fact the glaciers reached their largest mass for the past 11,000 years during the 19th century. [link]

The USGS hasn’t updated its glacial survey since 2015 (gotta wonder why, with the huge losses they were expecting). While the loss between 1998 and 2015 has decreased relative to prior decades, it appears that the ice loss has actually stalled or slightly reversed since 2008 [link] This stall caused the Glacier National Park in 2017 to start taking down the signs that expected the glaciers to disappear by 2020.
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Montana’s cold winters

The “greed” part of Reilly Neill’s twitter rant seems to have something to do with fossil fuels. If there is ever a place you might want to be kept warm by fossil fuels (or nuclear), Montana during winter is it. Montana is one of the coldest states in the U.S. Of particular concern are wintertime “Arctic outbreaks,” which occur multiple times each winter with varying magnitudes and durations. “Arctic outbreaks” periodically bring exceptionally cold temperatures to large regions of the continental U.S., even in this era of global warming.

A little known JC biographical fact is that Arctic cold air outbreaks and the formation of cold-core anticyclones was the topic of my PhD thesis). [link] [link]

An exceptionally cold outbreak occurred in Montana during February and March 2019, with similar outbreaks in 2014 and 2017. In February 2019, average temperature departures from normal in Montana were as much as 27 to 28 oF below normal, with Great Falls at the heart of the cold. Temperatures did not rise above 0 oF on 11 days and dropped to 0 oF or below on 24 nights. While the cold in February was remarkable for its persistence, the subsequent Arctic blast in early March 2019 delivered the coldest temperatures. Almost two dozen official stations in Montana broke monthly records, with an all-time record state low temperature for March of -46F. [link]

I can’t even imagine what it would be like to be without electric power and household heating under such cold conditions. Apart from freezing and figuring out how to keep warm, water pipes would be frozen; not just a lack of potable water, but massive property damage once the pipes thaw.

Fortunately, Montana has a reliable power system with about 50% renewables (mostly hydro) with most of the rest produced by coal. There is a nontrivial contingent in Montana that is seeking 100% renewable power (hydro, wind, solar).

In addition to exceptional power demand for residential heating during such Arctic outbreaks, any power generation from renewables is at a minimum during such periods. Montana’s solar and hydropower capacity are at their lowest during winter. While winter winds are generally strong, the Arctic cold air outbreaks are accompanied by large regions of high pressure that are called cold-core anticyclones The nature of these circulations is that wind speeds are very low within the high pressure system, resulting in very low amounts of wind power production.

While Arctic outbreaks generally impact the northern Great Plains states the worst, the spatial extent of these outbreaks can be very large. The cold outbreak during February 2021 that impacted Montana also covered half of the U.S. and extended down to Texas, where massive power outages ensued that resulted in considerable loss of life. The large horizontal scale of these high pressure systems indicates that remote transmission of excess energy from someplace else is not going to be of much help if much of the continent is also suffering from cold temperatures and low winds. The long duration of these events makes battery storage hugely infeasible. The options are nuclear, gas and coal.

Conclusion

Nothing is simple when it comes to understanding the causes of climate change impacts. The key to understanding is to look at the longest data records available, and try to interpret the causes of the historical and paleo variability. Once you understand the natural variability, you aren’t so prone to attributing everything to fossil-fueled warming and making naïve predictions of the future. And once you understand weather variability and extremes, you won’t be so enthusiastic about renewable energy.

I hope that this little exposition helps Reilly Neill and the real scientists of Montana understand the causes of the recent variations in Montana’s glaciers.

Victims of the faux climate “crisis”: Part I: Children

 Here is a link to Judith Curry's blog article "Victims of the faux climate “crisis”: Part I: Children".

Here are some excerpts.

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The apocalyptic rhetoric surrounding the climate “crisis” has numerous victims. Children and young adults rank among the victims of greatest concern.

Numerous academic studies have highlighted the psychological health effects of climate change on children and young adults, including elevated levels of anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, increased incidences of suicide, substance abuse, social disruptions including increased violence, and a distressing sense of loss.
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I have personally received emails from children and young adults suffering from such effects, which were featured in previous blog posts [link] [link] . I have received numerous additional emails from teens and young adults that are very sincere and communicating with me because they are grasping for reasons not to be so depressed about this issue. These psychological injuries, at least in some individuals, seem real to me.

There is little basis in the IPCC assessments for a level of alarm that would induce such psychological effects — even in context of the IPCC’s numerous erroneous assumptions and dubious judgment calls that were outlined in my previous blog post The climate crisis isn’t what it used to be . The apocalyptic and misleading rhetoric in the media and political discourse about climate change is arguably the driving impetus of these adverse psychological health effects.
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The presentation of climate change to children is far more alarming and less nuanced than what adults are exposed to. Stories of the coming climate apocalypse have become commonplace in schools, textbooks, churches, movies and even children’s books. A prominent example is the book “Our House Is on Fire: Greta Thunberg’s Call to Save the Planet,” a picture book aimed at ages 3-8. The book’s overarching message is summed by this statement in the book: “There might not be a world to live in when she grows up. What use is school without a future?”

Media targeted at teens and young adults portrays relentless doom. The 2018 U.N. warning that governments need to take action on climate change within 12 years led Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to incorrectly conclude that millennials fear “the world is gonna end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.” The website of the U.K.-based group Extinction Rebellion warns that “societal collapse and mass death are seen as inevitable by scientists and other credible voices.”

The world’s teens and young adults seem to have gotten the message: A 2021 study polled 10,000 people between the ages of 16 and 25 from numerous different countries, and found that over half thought that humanity was “doomed” because of climate change [link]. Further, there is an explicitly political message being fed to teens and young adults as evidenced by this finding from the study: “Climate anxiety and distress were correlated with perceived inadequate government response and associated feelings of betrayal.”
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Public school districts in the U.S. are adopting curricula on climate change that portrays climate change only in context of human causes and as a peril beyond dispute, emphasizing worst case scenarios — actual climate science seems to be ignored in the curricula. Further, there is an explicit objective that students should respond through activism. The materials used in these curricula include those from UNESCO Office for Climate Education and the North American Association for Environmental Education, as well as materials provided by advocacy groups such as the Sierra Club.Kristen Hargis of the North American Association for Environmental Education states : “There are a lot of resources out there that are … helping students draft policies as well, and getting them involved from the beginning. And this is what we want to see, this whole-institutionapproach where we’re creating this culture of climate action.”

The Director-General of UNESCO, Audrey Azoulay, states : “Climate change, which results from our own behaviour, is the greatest threat to our common existence. Education is an essential tool to empower young people to take action for a more sustainable future.” The website for the UNESCO Office for Climate Education states: “These resources aim at promoting action”

The “K12 Climate Action Plan” was published by the Aspen Institute. The Commission that prepared this report includes: Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers; Becky Pringle, President of the National Educational Association; John King, U.S. Secretary of Education (Obama Administration); Christine Todd Whitman, EPA Administrator (Bush Administration) and former NJ Governor; Linda Darling-Hammond, President of the California State Board of Education; Pedro Martinez, Superintendent of the San Antonio Independent School District. Their stated mission and beliefs :

• “MISSION: Our mission is to unlock the power of the public K-12 education sector to be a force for climate action, solutions, and environmental justice to help prepare children and youth to advance a more sustainable, resilient, and equitable society.”

• “BELIEFS: We believe today’s children and youth will be essential in the fight against climate change, and we must empower children and youth with the knowledge and skills to build a more sustainable, resilient, and equitable world.”

Additional statements of note:“Advocacy and the media will help build the narrative for supporting our schools in moving toward climate action, solutions, and environmental justice.”
“In fact, education has been identified as an underutilized social tipping point needed for decarbonization — the process of phasing out reliance on carbon across all parts of the economy.”

Efforts to insert climate-related activism into all aspects of the curricula are squeezing out science, economics, political science, history, critical thinking, etc. in the curricula.
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It is difficult to avoid concluding that children are being used as tools in adults’ political agenda surrounding climate change. This tooldom is having adverse impacts on the mental health of children and young adults.

I find the K-12 educational brainwashing by establishment educators to be particularly reprehensible. Wouldn’t it be much better for the children to learn about geology and meteorology, mass media influences on politics and society, and critical thinking about big societal issues? Wouldn’t it be great to motivate students to want to contribute to solving society’s problems and give them the academic tools to take advantage of opportunities?

But a more fundamental issue is how children are being raised, so that they are lacking in resilience and hardiness.

And finally, there are near- and long-term political implications. Does anyone think that throwing tomato soup at paintings in museums is helping the “cause”? In the longer term, all of this propaganda and brainwashing will backfire when it becomes apparent in a decade or two that there is no climate catastrophe, and young adults are rebelling against the ‘establishment’.

Climate Change and the Lancet’s ‘Heat Death’ Deception

Bjorn Lomborg at the Wall Street Journal.

Mr. Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus and a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. His latest book is “False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet.”

Even supposedly objective science journals have succumbed to our woke and cancel culture and no longer can be taken at face value.

The climate alarmists lose again.

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As the United Nations’ annual global climate summit, COP27, nears, it’s important to look with skepticism at the academic reports many news outlets cite as evidence supporting radical climate policies. Too often, they use highly skewed data that seem to have been carefully selected to support aggressive environmental regulations. One recent and much-cited Lancet report appears deliberately deceptive.

The study offers a frightening statistic: Rapidly rising temperatures have increased annual global heat deaths among older people by 68% in less than two decades. That stark figure has been cited all over, from the BBC and Time to the Washington Post and the Times of India, the world’s largest-selling English-language daily. U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres publicized the report, tweeting a link with a grave statement of his own, “The climate crisis is killing us. #COP27 must deliver a down-payment on climate solutions that match the scale of the problem.”

But while their model for heat deaths is based on solid academic research, the report commits an amateur statistical fallacy by blaming the increase in heat deaths on “rapidly increasing temperatures.”

Annual heat deaths have increased significantly among people 65 and older world-wide. The average deaths per year increased 68% from the early 2000s to the late 2010s. But that is almost entirely because there are so many more older people today than there were 20 years ago, in no small part thanks to medical innovations that keep us alive longer. Measured across the same time span the Lancet maps heat deaths, the number of people 65 and older has risen by 60%, or almost as much as heat deaths. When the increase in heat mortality is adjusted for this population growth, the actual rise that can be attributed to rising temperatures is only 5%.

It is hard not to see the Lancet study’s failure to adjust this figure as a deliberate act of deception. Any academic who works with statistics would know to adjust the deaths to account for population growth. I’ve actually raised this issue to the Lancet before. Last September the journal published a study with the same fallacious argument, and I sent the editor a detailed letter explaining the problem. The Lancet never corrected it and here it is, over a year later, committing the same error.

This year’s study also cherry-picks data by discussing only heat deaths. Around the world, far more people die each year from cold than heat. In the U.S. and Canada between 2000 and 2019, an average of 20,000 people died from heat annually and more than 170,000 from cold. This omission matters even more because cold deaths are decreasing with rising temperatures. Modeling from the Global Burden of Disease replicates the relatively small increase in heat deaths shown by the Lancet, but shows a much larger decline in cold deaths from rising temperatures. Based on today’s population size, the current temperatures cause about 17,000 more heat deaths in older people, but also result in more than half a million fewer cold deaths. Reporting one finding without the other is misleading about the true effect of climate change.

This dishonesty leads to worse policy outcomes. While activists push for extreme and expensive climate policies that threaten economic growth, those aren’t the only or even the best ways to help. Temperatures rose throughout the 20th century, but the U.S. nonetheless saw a decrease in heat deaths, largely thanks to air-conditioning. Policies that focus on lifting people out of poverty and providing affordable, reliable sources of energy would allow the rest of the world to reduce heat deaths and live more comfortable lives. They would also help stave off the much greater threat of cold deaths.

Climate change is a real problem, but academics do themselves and their readers a gross disservice when they put activism above honest scientific inquiry.

More racism and other inappropriate behavior from academia and the woke and cancel crowd

 Jonathan Turley is on target - yet again - with the following blog entry.

We must all speak out if we wish to reduce such inappropriate behavior. We must let those who exhibit it know that it is unacceptable.

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Crickets: Illinois Professor Publishes Racist Attacks Against Herschel Walker With No Outcry from the Faculty or Media

Professor Sundiata Cha-Jua, a prominent history and African-American studies professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, is under fire after using racist slurs to describe Georgia Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker. While the racist attack has drawn criticism on conservative sites, there has been no opposing statement or protest at the university. The media has also been largely quiet. The contrast to past controversies involving conservative faculty members again raises the concern over a double standard applied by colleges and universities as well as the media. Thus far, the response to the use of racist slurs or tropes against Republicans has been the familiar sound of crickets.Cha-Jua wrote in The News-Gazette Walker is “incompetent, subliterate and coonish.”

Recently, Walker was subjected to a racist attack on MSNBC by regular guest (and writer for Above the Law and the Nation) Elie Mystal. MSNBC never apologized to Walker or affirmed its opposition to such racist commentary.

The column was an attack on Black Republicans who Cha-Jua refers to as “MAGA Black White supremacists.”The column seems to follow a pattern among Democratic politicians in attacking Black and Hispanic voters who are shifting over to the GOP. President Biden was ridiculed for declaring “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.”Likewise, minority members have been opposed by minority caucuses or campaign funds controlled by Democrats. For example, Republican Jennifer-Ruth Green has attracted national attention in a surprisingly competitive race against an incumbent Democratic Rep. Frank Mrvan. The race has Democrats so worried that the Congressional Black Caucus took the controversial step of backing her white opponent despite a stated purpose of being “a non-partisan body made up of African American members of Congress” committed to achieving “access to Black Americans and other marginalized communities.”GOP Rep. Mayra Flores was barred from the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.The media has also shown the same open hostility or bias. Notably, the Huffington Post recently wrote a column celebrating the surge of Muslim Americans in the midterms as a candidates but omitted the Muslim American running to be the next senator from Pennsylvania (arguably the highest of these races): Dr. Mehmet Oz. The column titled “American Muslims In The Midterms Aren’t Long-Shot Candidates Anymore,” simply does not include the Republican among the notable Muslims seeking public office.

In his highly offensive column, Chu-Jua compares a Black Republican candidate Terence Stuber to a slave serving white masters: “And like the incompetent, subliterate and coonish Herschel Walker, Stuber reiterates ‘massa’ Trump’s talking points.” Stuber is running for Champaign County Clerk.

The lack of any protest or statement at the university is another example of how such controversies are handled when they involve faculty on the left as opposed to right. There are relatively few conservative or Republican faculty at most universities today, but the response to any such controversial statements is often immediate and overwhelming.

I have defended faculty who have made similarly disturbing comments “detonating white people,” abolish white people, denouncing police, calling for Republicans to suffer, strangling police officers, celebrating the death of conservatives, calling for the killing of Trump supporters, supporting the murder of conservative protesters and other outrageous statements. I also defended the free speech rights of University of Rhode Island professor Erik Loomis, who defended the murder of a conservative protester and said that he saw “nothing wrong” with such acts of violence. (Loomis was later made Director of Graduate Studies of History at Rhode Island).

Even when faculty engage in hateful acts on campus, however, there is a notable difference in how universities respond depending on the viewpoint. At the University of California campus, professors actually rallied around a professor who physically assaulted pro-life advocates and tore down their display.

When these controversies arose, faculty rallied behind the free speech rights of the professors. That support was far more muted or absent when conservative faculty have found themselves at the center of controversies. The recent suspension of Ilya Shapiro is a good example. Other faculty have had to go to court to defend their free speech rights. One professor was suspended for being seen at a controversial protest.

I would defend Cha-Jua’s right to speak despite his offensive rhetoric in any effort to fire him. Yet, such language should be condemned. A professor used openly racist slurs to attack African Americans running for office and the silence from the university and the faculty at Illinois is perfectly deafening. The contrast in these cases is glaring and chilling. The professors and pundits who have written hair-triggered columns or tweets are notably silent when the racist attack is directed against Black Republicans or conservatives.

The response explains the sense of fear and intimidation for some faculty in speaking out on campuses. There is a general view that a conservative or dissenting faculty member will be given little quarter or protection in any controversy. Given the relatively small number of openly conservative or Republican professors left on many faculties, the chilling effect is perfectly glacial.

A growing recognition that the Climate Alarmists are wrong

 Here is a link to Judith Curry's blog article "The climate 'crisis' isn't what it used to be. JC is a top climate scientist.

It has been clear for a long time that the Climate Alarmists were wrong and that the climate models they relied on were mostly an exquisite example of curve fitting, not science.

Will, at some point, those who were and are furious with "climate deniers" acknowledge their inability to read the tea leaves? If not, should they be taken seriously in the future about anything? And what about those in power who used climate alarmist pseudoscience as a reason to reduce our freedom? Should they remain in power?

Will the Greta Thornbergs of the world go down in history as the twits they are?

Here are some excerpts from JC's blog entry.

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Summary: The climate “catastrophe” isn’t what it used to be. Circa 2013 with publication of the IPCC AR5 Report, RCP8.5 was regarded as the business-as-usual emissions scenario, with expected warming of 4 to 5 oC by 2100. Now there is growing acceptance that RCP8.5 is implausible, and RCP4.5 is arguably the current business-as-usual emissions scenario. Only a few years ago, an emissions trajectory that followed RCP4.5 with 2 to 3 oC warming was regarded as climate policy success. As limiting warming to 2 oC seems to be in reach (now deemed to be the “threshold of catastrophe”),[i] the goal posts were moved in 2018 to reduce the warming target to 1.5 oC. Climate catastrophe rhetoric now seems linked to extreme weather events, most of which are difficult to identify any role for human-caused climate change in increasing either their intensity or frequency.

The main stream media is currently awash with articles from prominent journalists on how the global warming threat less than we thought. Here are some prominent articles:

• NYTimes David Wallace-Wells: Beyond catastrophe: A new climate reality is coming into view.

• WSJ: Good climate change news is fit to print. Slowly its percolating into the journalistic mind that recent research is upbeat

• NYT Bret Stephens: Yes Greenland’s melting but . . .

David Wallace-Wells is one of the most interesting journalists writing in the climate space. In 2017, he wrote a 2017 New York Magazine article titled “The Uninhabitable Earth”, with subtitle: “Famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us: What climate change could wreak—sooner than you think.” Not long after publication of his book in 2019 entitled The Uninhabitable Earth, David Wallace-Wells made this statement: “Anyone, including me, who has built their understanding on what level of warming is likely this century on that RCP8.5 scenario should probably revise that understanding in a less alarmist direction.” DWW scores HUGE number of points with me for quickly adjusting his priors with the growing amount evidence that RCP8.5 is implausible.

Well, the “messaging” around DWW’s latest article is that we are succeeding with reducing emissions (no we are not). The second message is to acknowledge that that warming will be less than we thought, but the impacts of the warming will be worse than we thought (nope). The third message is that advances in science have brought us to this (relatively) happy place (nope)

At the heart of this good news is abandonment of RCP8.5 from UNFCCC policy making. The hero of science behind this abandonment is Justin Ritchie, a recent Ph.D. graduate (whose work has been cited in previous RCP8.5 posts at Climate Etc).

The COP26 and now the COP27 have quietly dropped RCP8.5 (and SSP5-8.5) from their considerations, focusing on the envelope between RCP4.5 and RCP2.6. The grand poohbahs of the IPCC apparently didn’t see this coming (or preferred to keep spinning the alarm), since they instructed climate modelers for CMIP6 to continue a focus on SSP5-8.5, and climate researchers continue to focus on this scenario in their impacts publications. The IPCC AR6 prominently featured SSP5-8.5, although WGI did make this lukewarm statement

“In the scenario literature, the plausibility of the high emissions levels underlying scenarios such as RCP8.5 or SSP5–8.5 has been debated in light of recent developments in the energy sector.”

The second so-called scientific advance is lower values of climate sensitivity. The so-called advance is associated with the IPCC AR6 decision NOT to include values derived from climate models (which have dominated previous IPCC reports). They implicitly acknowledge that climate models are running too hot and that you can pretty much get whatever value of climate sensitivity that you want from a climate model (this has been blindingly obvious to me and many others for over a decade). The IPCC AR6 lowered the upper likely bound of ECS to 4.0oC (from 4.5oC previously); this further acts to reduce the amount of projected warming. The IPCC AR6 also raised the lower likely bound of ECS to 2.5oC (from 1.5oC). Raising the lower bound of ECS is on very shaky ground, as per the recent publication by Nic Lewis

The COP27 is working from a value of expected warming of 2.5oC by 2100. This is arguably still too high for several reasons. IPCC expert judgment dismissed values of climate sensitivity that are on the lower end (that should not have been dismissed as per Nic Lewis’ paper). Further, the IPCC projections do not adequately account for scenarios of future natural climate variability. See these recent posts:

X https://judithcurry.com/2022/01/23/crossing-or-not-the-1-5-and-2-0oc-thresholds/

X https://judithcurry.com/2021/11/21/solar-variations-controversy/

In addition to an insufficient number of solar and volcanic scenarios, the climate models ignore most solar indirect effects, and the climate model treatment of multidecadal and longer internal variability associated with ocean circulations are inadequate. While in principle these factors could go either way in terms of warmer vs cooler, there are several reasons to think these natural factors are skewed towards cooler during the remainder of the 21st century:

• Baseline volcanic activity since 1850 has been unusually low

• Most solar researchers expect some sort of solar minimum in the mid to late 21st century

• Solar indirect effects are inadequately treated by climate models, which would act to amplify solar cooling

• A shift to the cold phase of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation is expected in the next decade, which influences not only global temperatures but also Greenland mass balance and Arctic sea ice.

Once you include alternative scenarios of natural variability, temperature change by 2100 could easily be below 2oC and even 1.5oC. Recall that this warming is with reference to a baseline of 1850-1900; 1.1oC warming has already occurred.

Impacts

David Wallace-Wells provides some “hope” for the climate alarmists with this sentence:

“It’s sadly apparent by now that scientists have underestimated, not overestimated, the impact of warming.”

I just don’t know what further to say here. The IPCC AR6 provides very meager fodder to support DWW’s statement. Apart from sea level rise, which is unambiguously associated with global warming, there is no prima facie reason that extreme weather events would worsen in a warming climate. Observational evidence, provided that you go back at least to 1900, shows that nearly all horrible, recent weather and climate disasters have precedents in the 20th century and hence “detection” is very challenging. Climate models are not fit-for-purpose to simulate extreme weather events, let alone to attribute them to human caused warming. We are then left with back-of-the-envelope simple thermodynamic calculations to infer worsening of extreme weather events, which ignores the overwhelmingly dominant role of atmospheric and oceanic circulations.

Think about the implications of assuming extreme weather and horrible impacts are highly sensitive to a 0.5oC temperature change. If so, this leads to the conclusion that the dominant climate factor is natural climate variability, with year-to-year swings of several tenths of a degree from El Nino and La Nina, a substantial volcanic eruption, and/or multidecadal ocean oscillations. The rationale for ignoring natural climate variability is based on the assumption that large amounts of fossil-fueled warming from climate model simulations spiked by RCP8.5 and high values of ECS will swamp natural climate variability. Cut the warming in half (or reduce even further), and you lose the rationale for ignoring natural climate variability.

So is all this a “victory” for climate science? I don’t think so. But I told you so . . .

And finally Bret Stephen’s article includes this all important figure. Are we to infer that warming causes fewer deaths (well there is a STRIKING correlation)? Well maybe, but the real cause of this decline is increasing wealth, increased warnings, and adaptation to weather and climate extremes.

Extreme weather and climate events are something that needs to be dealt with independently of the AGW issue. The world has always suffered from weather and climate extremes, and it always will; this will not change with further warming or with emissions reductions.

COP27

The policy implications of all this is enormous. Unfortunately I suspect that the COP27 will focus too much on emissions reductions (which aren’t working and wont impact the climate in any event), and not enough on supporting development and adaptation for developing countries and most importantly supporting development in Africa by allowing them to benefit from their fossil fuels (other than by selling them to Europe). With regards to the later, a shout out to Rose Mustiso’s recent Nature publication; Rose is my favorite African activist and thinker on this topic.

ERCOT renewable energy: reality check

Here is a link to an interesting comment on renewable energy that puts in perspective the lack of insight of the climate change alarmists.

The contrast with nuclear energy is particularly striking.

Do gun buybacks "take guns off the street" and reduce violent crime?

 Here is a link to a note I wrote on gun buybacks.

Here are some excerpts.

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Introduction

This note addresses whether gun buybacks take guns off the street or reduce violent crime from several simple economic perspectives, including net present value (NPV) project evaluation, demand-supply curves, and the income effect. For the most part these perspectives suggest that it is unlikely that gun buybacks either take guns off the street or reduce violent crime. Rather, they suggest that gun buybacks are more likely than not to increase the number of street guns and increase violent crime.
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The cost of street guns is part of the initial outlays required for criminal projects involving guns. They are part of the initial outlays portion of a NPV analysis. These guns have a market value at each point in time that can be treated as an EPV if it makes sense to sell them. Both their initial cost and EPV reflect their quality, technical features, and suitability. For example, both are higher for high-end guns than low-end guns. “Clean” guns that have not been involved with serious crimes, such as shootings are particularly valuable. A street gun that becomes “dirty” may lose a large part of its market value (EPV) suddenly, early in a project.

A gun buyback provides the opportunity to convert a low EPV, e.g., from a gun going dirty, to a higher EPV. This provides a criminal with added “income”. In terms of a simple budget line – preference curve analysis, added income tends to increase consumer expenditures on all items, in this case including street guns. The income effect of a gun buyback more likely than not is to increase the number of street guns and increase violent crime.

A gun buyback program offers criminals the opportunity to sell any of their guns with a market value below a gun buyback price at a higher price than otherwise. In terms of a NPV analysis, it raises the EPV from what it would otherwise be. This increases the NPV of the criminal project. This implies that all criminal projects that have positive NPVs without a gun buyback remain a “go” and that some other criminal projects that were a ”no go” may change to a “go”. Projects that change from a “no go” to a “go” are likely to increase the number of street guns.

The increased EPV effect of a gun buyback does not reduce the demand for street guns and is likely to increases it. A corollary is that this gun buyback effect is, more likely than not to increase violent crime.

An interesting aspect of a EPV analysis of gun buybacks arises because criminals mostly obtain street guns illegally. Street guns usually have been stolen, e.g., during burglaries. There is a market for these stolen guns and the business of obtaining and selling them is a criminal project.

If a burglar finds guns, he will most likely steal them and sell them illegally. This corresponds to a short-term project similar to a merchant buying inventory for immediate sale at a markup. In this case, the gun’s EPV is realized almost immediately.

High-end stolen guns will not be proffered to a gun buyback because their street value is higher than a gun buyback price. Stolen high-end guns will end up as street guns. Stolen low-end guns may have a market value below a gun buyback price. It will pay for a criminal to submit these guns to a gun buyback. If these low-end guns would have ended up as street guns, then the gun buyback has taken them off the street and, it seems, reduced violent crime. However, things are not so simple.

Burglars are in business. More valuable loot is mostly found in the homes and businesses of people who can afford nice things. The great majority of stolen guns is likely to be high-end guns. These will be worth more as street guns because their street value exceeds a gun buyback price. While burglary may result in some low-end guns that would have become street guns being proffered to a gun buyback, it is likely that burglary will result in substantially more high-end guns becoming street guns. The latter effect of burglaries is likely to dominate the former one.

If a gun buyback raises the EPV of low-end guns, it increases the NPV of burglary. Stolen high-end guns increases the supply of street guns, which tends to reduce their market price, thereby lowering the initial outlay cost for all criminal projects requiring guns. Lowering the cost of the required initial cost of a project increases its NPV. Both these NPV effects can change a criminal project from a ‘no go” to a “go”.

A reasonable conclusion is that burglaries are likely to increase, the number of street guns (mostly high-end street guns) is likely to increase, and violent crime is likely to increase.

It appears that to the extent criminals act rationally in terms of a NPV perspective, gun buybacks are not likely to take guns off the street or reduce violent crime. More likely, gun buybacks will increase street guns and increase violent crime.