Pervasive Warming Bias in CMIP6 Tropospheric Layers

 Here is a link to a paper by McKitrick and Christy that shows that the climate models continue to be wrong.  In particular, the IPCC climate sensitivity values are too high.

Here are some excerpts.

----------------------------------------------

PLAIN LANGUAGE SUMMARY

It has long been known that previous generations of climate models exhibit excessive warming rates in the tropical troposphere. With the release of the CMIP6 (Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Version 6) climate model archive we can now update the comparison. We examined historical (hindcast) runs from 38 CMIP6 models in which the models were run using historically observed forcings. We focus on the 1979–2014 interval, the maximum for which all models and observational data are available and for which the models were run with historical forcings. What was previously a tropical bias is now global. All model runs warmed faster than observations in the lower troposphere and midtroposphere, in the tropics, and globally. On average, and in most individual cases, the trend difference is significant. Warming trends in models tend to rise with the model Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS), and we present evidence that the distribution of ECS values across the model is unrealistically high.

INTRODUCTION

Numerous studies have pointed to a tendency across climate models to project too much contemporary warming in the tropical troposphere (Bengtsson & Hodges, 2009; Douglass et al., 2007; Fu et al., 2011; Karl et al., 2006; McKitrick et al., 2010; McKitrick & Vogelsang, 2014; Po‐Chedley & Fu, 2012; Thorne et al., 2011) with additional evidence pointing to a global tropospheric bias as well (Christy & McNider, 2017). Here we present an updated comparison using the first 38 models made available in the newly released sixth‐generation Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6) archive comparing model reconstructions of historical layer‐averaged lower‐troposphere (LT) and midtroposphere (MT) temperature series against observational analogs from satellites, balloon‐borne radiosondes, and reanalysis products. We compare trends over 1979–2014, the longest interval for which all three observational systems are available and for which models were run with historically observed forcings. None of our conclusions would be different if we extended the end date to 2018. We examine four atmospheric regions: the global LT and MT and the tropical LT and MT layers.

In previous studies, although a warm bias was typically present, over large atmospheric regions the model spread at least partly overlapped the observational analogs, especially at the global level. This is no longer the case. Every model overpredicts warming in both the LT and MT layers, in the tropics, and globally. On average the discrepancies are statistically very significant, and the majority of individual model discrepancies are statistically significant as well.

CONCLUSION

The literature drawing attention to an upward bias in climate model warming responses in the tropical troposphere extends back at least 15 years now (Karl et al., 2006). Rather than being resolved, the problem has become worse, since now every member of the CMIP6 generation of climate models exhibits an upward bias in the entire global troposphere as well as in the tropics. The models with lower ECS values have warming rates somewhat closer to observed but are still significantly biased upward and do not overlap observations. Models with higher ECS values also have higher tropospheric warming rates, and applying the emergent constraint concept implies that an ensemble of models with warming rates consistent with observations would likely have to have ECS values at or below the bottom of the CMIP6 range. Our findings mirror recent evidence from inspection of CMIP6 ECSs (Voosen, 2019) and paleoclimate simulations (Zhu et al., 2020), which also reveal a systematic warm bias in the latest generation of climate models.

My Life As A Climate Lukewarmer

 Here is Matt Ridley talking about his experience with climate change.

MR is on target.

----------------------------------------------------

I am a climate lukewarmer. That means I think recent global warming is real, mostly man-made and will continue but I no longer think it is likely to be dangerous and I think its slow and erratic progress so far is what we should expect in the future. That last year was the warmest yet, in some data sets, but only by a smidgen more than 2005, is precisely in line with such lukewarm thinking.

This view annoys some sceptics who think all climate change is natural or imaginary, but it is even more infuriating to most publicly funded scientists and politicians, who insist climate change is a big risk. My middle-of-the-road position is considered not just wrong, but disgraceful, shameful, verging on scandalous. I am subjected to torrents of online abuse for holding it, very little of it from sceptics.

I was even kept off the shortlist for a part-time, unpaid public-sector appointment in a field unrelated to climate because of having this view, or so the headhunter thought. In the climate debate, paying obeisance to climate scaremongering is about as mandatory for a public appointment, or public funding, as being a Protestant was in 18th-century England.

Kind friends send me news almost weekly of whole blog posts devoted to nothing but analysing my intellectual and personal inadequacies, always in relation to my views on climate. Writing about climate change is a small part of my life but, to judge by some of the stuff that gets written about me, writing about me is a large part of the life of some of the more obsessive climate commentators. It’s all a bit strange. Why is this debate so fractious?

Rather than attack my arguments, my critics like to attack my motives. I stand accused of “wanting” climate change to be mild because I support free markets or because I receive income indirectly from the mining of coal in Northumberland. Two surface coal mines (which I do not own), operating without subsidies, do indeed dig coal partly from land that I own. They pay me a fee, as I have repeatedly declared in speeches, books and articles.

I do think that coal, oil and gas have been a good thing so far, by giving us an alternative to cutting down forests and killing whales, by supplying fertiliser to feed the world, by giving the global poor affordable energy, and so on. But instead of defending the modern coal industry I write and speak extensively in favour of gas, the biggest competitive threat to coal’s share of the electricity market. If we can phase out coal without causing too much suffering, then I would not object.

Besides, I could probably earn even more from renewable energy. As a landowner, I am astonished by the generosity of the offers I keep receiving for green-energy subsidies. Wind farm developers in smart suits dangle the prospect of tens of thousands of pounds per turbine on my land — and tens of turbines. A solar developer wrote to me recently saying he could offer more than a million pounds of income over 25 years if I were to cover some particular fields with solar panels. Many big country houses have installed subsidised wood-fired heating to the point where you can hear their Canalettos cracking. I argue against such subsidies, so I don’t take them.

I was not always a lukewarmer. When I first started writing about the threat of global warming more than 26 years ago, as science editor ofThe Economist, I thought it was a genuinely dangerous threat. Like, for instance, Margaret Thatcher, I accepted the predictions being made at the time that we would see warming of a third or a half a degree (Centigrade) a decade, perhaps more, and that this would have devastating consequences.

Gradually, however, I changed my mind. The failure of the atmosphere to warm anywhere near as rapidly as predicted was a big reason: there has been less than half a degree of global warming in four decades — and it has slowed down, not speeded up. Increases in malaria, refugees, heatwaves, storms, droughts and floods have not materialised to anything like the predicted extent, if at all. Sea level has risen but at a very slow rate — about a foot per century.

Also, I soon realised that all the mathematical models predicting rapid warming assume big amplifying feedbacks in the atmosphere, mainly from water vapour; carbon dioxide is merely the primer, responsible for about a third of the predicted warming. When this penny dropped, so did my confidence in predictions of future alarm: the amplifiers are highly uncertain.

Another thing that gave me pause was that I went back and looked at the history of past predictions of ecological apocalypse from my youth – population explosion, oil exhaustion, elephant extinction, rainforest loss, acid rain, the ozone layer, desertification, nuclear winter, the running out of resources, pandemics, falling sperm counts, cancerous pesticide pollution and so forth. There was a consistent pattern of exaggeration, followed by damp squibs: in not a single case was the problem as bad as had been widely predicted by leading scientists. That does not make every new prediction of apocalypse necessarily wrong, of course, but it should encourage scepticism.

What sealed my apostasy from climate alarm was the extraordinary history of the famous “hockey stick” graph, which purported to show that today’s temperatures were higher and changing faster than at any time in the past thousand years. That graph genuinely shocked me when I first saw it and, briefly in the early 2000s, it persuaded me to abandon my growing doubts about dangerous climate change and return to the “alarmed” camp.

Then I began to read the work of two Canadian researchers, Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick. They and others have shown, as confirmed by the National Academy of Sciences in the United States, that the hockey stick graph, and others like it, are heavily reliant on dubious sets of tree rings and use inappropriate statistical filters that exaggerate any 20th-century upturns.

What shocked me more was the scientific establishment’s reaction to this: it tried to pretend that nothing was wrong. And then a flood of emails was leaked in 2009 showing some climate scientists apparently scheming to withhold data, prevent papers being published, get journal editors sacked and evade freedom-of-information requests, much as sceptics had been alleging. That was when I began to re-examine everything I had been told about climate change and, the more I looked, the flakier the prediction of rapid warming seemed.

I am especially unimpressed by the claim that a prediction of rapid and dangerous warming is “settled science”, as firm as evolution or gravity. How could it be? It is a prediction! No prediction, let alone in a multi-causal, chaotic and poorly understood system like the global climate, should ever be treated as gospel. With the exception of eclipses, there is virtually nothing scientists can say with certainty about the future. It is absurd to argue that one cannot disagree with a forecast. Is the Bank of England’s inflation forecast infallible?

Incidentally, my current view is still consistent with the “consensus” among scientists, as represented by the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The consensus is that climate change is happening, not that it is going to be dangerous. The latest IPCC report gives a range of estimates of future warming, from harmless to terrifying. My best guess would be about one degree of warming during this century, which is well within the IPCC’s range of possible outcomes.

Yet most politicians go straight to the top of the IPCC’s range and call climate change things like “perhaps the world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction” (John Kerry), requiring the expenditure of trillions of dollars. I think that is verging on grotesque in a world full of war, hunger, disease and poverty. It also means that environmental efforts get diverted from more urgent priorities, like habitat loss and invasive species.

The policies being proposed to combat climate change, far from being a modest insurance policy, are proving ineffective, expensive, harmful to poor people and actually bad for the environment: we are tearing down rainforests to grow biofuels and ripping up peat bogs to install windmills that still need fossil-fuel back-up. These policies are failing to buy any comfort for our wealthy grandchildren and are doing so on the backs of today’s poor. Some insurance policy.

To begin with, after I came out as a lukewarmer, I would get genuine critiques from scientists who disagreed with me and wanted to exchange views. I had long and time-consuming email exchanges or conversations with several such scientists.

Yet I grew steadily more sceptical as, one by one, they failed to answer my doubts. They often resorted to meta-arguments, especially the argument from authority: if the Royal Society says it is alarmed, then you should be alarmed. If I want argument from authority, I replied, I will join the Catholic Church. “These are just standard denialist talking points” scoffed another prominent scientist, unpersuasively, when I raised objections — as if that answered them.

My experience with sceptical scientists, many of them distinguished climatologists at leading universities, was different. The more I probed, the better their data seemed. They did not resort to the argument from authority. Sometimes I disagreed with them or thought they went too far. I have yet to be convinced, for example, that changes in the output of the sun caused the warming of the 1980s and 1990s — an idea that some espouse. So for the most part, I found myself persuaded by the middle-of-the-road, “lukewarm” argument – that CO2-induced warming is likely but it won’t be large, fast or damaging.

Then a funny thing happened a few years ago. Those who disagreed with me stopped pointing out politely where or why they disagreed and started calling me names. One by one, many of the most prominent people in the climate debate began to throw vitriolic playground abuse at me. I was “paranoid”, “specious”, “risible”, “self-defaming”, “daft”, “lying”, “irrational”, an “idiot”. Their letters to the editor or their blog responses asserted that I was “error-riddled” or had seriously misrepresented something, but then they not only failed to substantiate the charge but often roughly confirmed what I had written.

I have seen bad-tempered polarisation of scientific debates before, for example during the nature-nurture debates of the 1970s and 1980s between those who thought genes affected behaviour and those who thought upbringing was overwhelmingly important. That debate grew vicious. What caused the polarisation, I realised then, was not just that people on one side read the articles they agreed with, reinforcing their prejudices, but something more. They relied on extreme distortions of their enemies’ arguments, written by self-appointed guardians of the flame on their own side, so they were constantly attacking straw men.

It’s the same here. Most of the people who attack me seem to think I am a “denier” of climate change because that’s what a few hyperventilating bloggers keep saying about me. It’s not, of course, true. It’s these flame guardians who polarise such debates.

The most prolific of them is a man named Bob Ward. Although employed at the London School of Economics, he is not a researcher or lecturer, but policy and communications director, somebody whose day job is to defend the climate orthodoxy in the media. Some might call him a spin doctor. It appears to me that he feels compelled to write something rude about me every time I publish on this topic and although his letters to editors are often published, he throws an online tantrum if they are not. He is hilariously obsessed with my peerage, lovingly reciting my title every time he attacks me, like a Bertie Woosterish snob.

As an example of playing the man and not the ball, Ward and Lord Deben, chairman of the government’s official committee on climate change, are both wont to mock the fact that my Oxford DPhil thesis in 1983 was on the behaviour of birds. Good luck to them but I notice they don’t mock the fact that the DPhil thesis of Lord Krebs was also on birds, earned in the very same research group as me: the Edward Grey Institute of Field Ornithology. Lord Krebs is the chairman of the adaptation subcommittee of the committee on climate change.

John Krebs, a fine scientist and superb lecturer, was the internal examiner of my thesis, which he praised at the time, after telling me to correct a couple of silly mistakes he had spotted in the calculation of a probability result. I did so. Imagine my surprise when he recently told several separate people (who reported it to me) that I should not be listened to on climate change because my DPhil thesis, all those years ago, contained mathematical errors. Lord May even used this argument against me in a debate in the House of Lords: that because I got a number wrong in a calculation 31 years ago, I cannot ever be right again. This is the kind of hilarious thing that happens to you if you come out as a lukewarmer.

Talking of the committee on climate change, last year Lord Deben commissioned an entire report to criticise something I had said. Among other howlers, it included a quotation from the IPCC but the quote had a large chunk cut from the middle. When this cut was restored the line supported me, not Lord Deben. When I pointed this out politely to Lord Deben, he refused to restore the excision and left the document unchanged on the committee’s website. Presenting quotations so they appear to mean something different from what they do is quite a sin in journalism. Apparently not in Whitehall committees.

I suppose all this fury means my arguments are hitting home. If they were easily demolished they would demolish them rather than try to demolish me. Many of the things that I was abused for saying have since proved to be right. I was one of the first to write an article in the mainstream media (in The Wall Street Journal in 2012) arguing that the latest data supported much lower estimates of climate sensitivity (the amount of warming induced by a doubling of carbon dioxide levels) than those being assumed by the models used by the IPCC.

This produced the usual vituperation online from about a dozen high-profile science commentators with nothing better to do. Since then four papers (the latest being this one) have appeared in the scientific literature, authored by very prominent climate scientists, giving low estimates of climate sensitivity, some even lower than I had said. I am waiting for my critics to acknowledge that my story was sound.

I have never met a climate sceptic, let alone a lukewarmer, who wants his opponents silenced. I wish I could say the same of those who think climate change is an alarming prospect.

Judith Curry’s evolution on climate change

 Judith Curry backed the IPCC for a long time - until she found out it was more political than science.  Here is her story.

As for the political fallout, take a look at Wikipedia's entry for JC - an impressive hatchet-job by an unprincipled writer for whom agenda dominates fact.

------------------------------------------

I’m having another “Alice down the rabbit hole” moment, in response to the Scientific American article, the explication of the article by its author Michael Lemonick, Scientific American’s survey on whether I am a dupe or a peacemaker, and the numerous discussions in blogosphere.

My first such moment was in 2005 in response to the media attention associated with the hurricane wars, which was described in a Q&A with Keith Kloor at collide-a-scape. While I really want to make this blog about the science and not about personalities (and especially not about me), this article deserves a response.

The title of the article itself is rather astonishing. The Wikipedia defines heresy as: “Heresy is a controversial or novel change to a system of beliefs, especially a religion, that conflicts with established dogma.” The definition of dogma is “Dogma is the established belief or doctrine held by a religion, ideology or any kind of organization: it is authoritative and not to be disputed, doubted, or diverged from.” Use of the word “heretic” by Lemonick implies general acceptance by the “insiders” of the IPCC as dogma. If the IPCC is dogma, then count me in as a heretic. The story should not be about me, but about how and why the IPCC became dogma.

And what exactly is the nature of my challenges to the dogma? Lemonick made the following statement: ““What I found out is that when [Curry] does raise valid points, they’re often points the climate-science community already agrees with — and many climate scientists are scratching their heads at the implication that she’s uncovered some dark secret.” This statement implies that I am saying nothing new, nothing that climate scientists don’t already know. Well that is mostly true (an exception being my recent blog series on uncertainty); I am mostly saying things that are blindingly obvious to everyone. Sort of like in the story “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” A colleague of mine at Georgia Tech, a Chair from a different department, said something like this: “I’ve been reading the media stories on the Georgia Tech Daily News Buzz that mention your statements. Your statements seem really sensible. But what I don’t understand is why such statements are regarded as news?”

Well that is a question that deserves an answer. I lack the hubris to think that my statements should have any public importance. The fact that they seem to be of some importance says a lot more about the culture of climate science and its perception by the public, than it says about me.

The narrative

Why am I being singled out here? Richard Lindzen and Roger Pielke Sr. have been making far more critical statements about the IPCC and climate science for a longer period than I have. And both score higher than me in the academic pecking order (in terms of number of publications and citations and external peer recognition).

The answer must be in the narrative of my transition from a “high priestess of global warming” to engagement with skeptics and a critic of the IPCC. The “high priestess of global warming” narrative (I used to see this term fairly frequently in the blogosphere, can’t spot it now) arose from my association with the hurricane and global warming issue, which at the time was the most alarming issue associated with global warming.

The overall evolution of my thinking on global warming is described in the Q&A at collide-a-scape (the relevant statements are appended at the end of this post.) My thinking and evolution on this issue since 11/19/09 deserves further clarification. When I first started reading the CRU emails, my reaction was a visceral one. While my colleagues seemed focused on protecting the reputations of the scientists involved and assuring people that the “science hadn’t changed,” I immediately realized that this could bring down the IPCC. I became concerned about the integrity of our entire field: both the actual integrity and its public perception. When I saw how the IPCC was responding and began investigating the broader allegations against the IPCC, I became critical of the IPCC and tried to make suggestions for improving the IPCC. As glaring errors were uncovered (especially the Himalayan glaciers) and the IPCC failed to respond, I started to question whether it was possible to salvage the IPCC and whether it should be salvaged. In the meantime, the establishment institutions in the U.S. and elsewhere were mostly silent on the topic.

In Autumn 2005, I had decided that the responsible thing to do in making public statements on the subject of global warming was to adopt the position of the IPCC. My decision was based on two reasons: 1) the subject was very complex and I had personally investigated a relatively small subset of the topic; 2) I bought into the meme of “don’t trust what one scientists says, trust what thousands of IPCC scientists say.” A big part of my visceral reaction to events unfolding after 11/19 was concern that I had been duped into supporting the IPCC, and substituting their judgment for my own in my public statements on the subject. So that is the “dupe” part of all this, perhaps not what Lemonick had in mind.

If, how, and why I had been duped by the IPCC became an issue of overwhelming personal and professional concern. I decided that there were two things that I could do: 1) speak out publicly and try to restore integrity to climate science by increasing transparency and engaging with skeptics; and 2) dig deeply into the broader aspects of the science and the IPCC’s arguments and try to assess the uncertainty. The Royal Society Workshop on Handling Uncertainty in Science last March motivated me to take on #2 in a serious way. I spent all summer working on a paper entitled “Climate Science and the Uncertainty Monster,” which was submitted to a journal in August. I have no idea what the eventual fate of this paper will be, but it has seeded the uncertainty series on Climate Etc. and its fate seems almost irrelevant at this point.

Monster creation

There are some parallels between the “McIntyre monster” and the “Curry monster.” The monster status derives from our challenges to the IPCC science and the issue of uncertainty. While the McIntyre monster is far more prominent in the public debate, the Curry monster seems far more irksome to community insiders. The CRU emails provide ample evidence of the McIntyre monster, and in the wake of the CRU emails I saw a discussion at RealClimate about the unbridled power of Steve McIntyre. Evidence of the Curry monster is provided by this statement in Lemonick’s article: “What scientists worry is that such exposure means Curry has the power to do damage to a consensus on climate change that has been building for the past 20 years.” This sense of McIntyre and myself as having “power” seems absurd to me (and probably to Steve), but it seems real to some people.

Well, who created these “monsters?” Big oil and the right-wing ideologues? Wrong. It was the media, climate activists, and the RealClimate wing of the blogosphere (note, the relative importance of each is different for McIntyre versus myself). I wonder if the climate activists will ever learn, or if they will follow the pied piper of the merchants of doubt meme into oblivion.

A note to my critics in the climate science community

Let me preface my statement by saying that at this point, I am pretty much immune to criticisms from my peers regarding my behavior and public outreach on this topic (I respond to any and all criticisms of my arguments that are specifically addressed to me.) If you think that I am a big part of the cause of the problems you are facing, I suggest that you think about this more carefully. I am doing my best to return some sanity to this situation and restore science to a higher position than the dogma of consensus. You may not like it, and my actions may turn out to be ineffective, futile, or counterproductive in the short or long run, by whatever standards this whole episode ends up getting judged. But this is my carefully considered choice on what it means to be a scientist and to behave with personal and professional integrity.

Let me ask you this. So how are things going for you lately? A year ago, the climate establishment was on top of the world, masters of the universe. Now we have a situation where there have been major challenges to the reputations of a number of a number of scientists, the IPCC, professional societies, and other institutions of science. The spillover has been a loss of public trust in climate science and some have argued, even more broadly in science. The IPCC and the UNFCCC are regarded by many as impediments to sane and politically viable energy policies. The enviro advocacy groups are abandoning the climate change issue for more promising narratives. In the U.S., the prospect of the Republicans winning the House of Representatives raises the specter of hearings on the integrity of climate science and reductions in federal funding for climate research.

What happened? Did the skeptics and the oil companies and the libertarian think tanks win? No, you lost. All in the name of supporting policies that I don’t think many of you fully understand. What I want is for the climate science community to shift gears and get back to doing science, and return to an environment where debate over the science is the spice of academic life. And because of the high relevance of our field, we need to figure out how to provide the best possible scientific information and assessment of uncertainties. This means abandoning this religious adherence to consensus dogma.

Addendum: reproduced from my Q&A at collide-a-scape

” Circa 2003, I was concerned about the way climate research was treating uncertainty (see my little essay presented to the NRC Climate Research Committee).

I was considered somewhat quixotic but not really outside of the mainstream (p.s. the CRC didn’t pay any attention to my essay, they went off in a different direction that focused on communicating uncertainty and decisionmaking under uncertainty). During this period, I was comfortably ensconced in the ivory tower of academia, writing research papers, going to conferences, submitting grant proposals. I was 80% oblivious to what was going on in terms of the public debate surrounding climate change.

This all changed on September 14, 2005, when I participated in a press conference on our forthcoming paper that described a substantial increase in the global number of category 4 and 5 hurricanes. The unplanned and uncanny timing of publication of this paper was three weeks after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. While global warming was mentioned only obliquely in the paper, the press focused on the global warming angle and a media furor followed. We were targeted as global warming alarmists, capitalizing on this tragedy to increase research funding and for personal publicity, a threat to capitalism and the American way of life, etc.

At the same time, we were treated like rock stars by the environmental movement. Our 15 minutes stretched into days, weeks and months. Hurricane Katrina became a national focusing event for the global warming debate. We were particularly stung by criticisms from fellow research scientists who claimed that we were doing this “for the money” and attacked our personal and scientific integrity. We felt that one scientist in particular had crossed the line and committed a series of fouls, and this turned the scientific debate into academic guerrilla warfare between our team and the skeptics that was played out in the glare of the media. This “war” culminated in an article published on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, “Debate shatters the civility of weather science” on Feb 2, 2006 . . . This article became a catharsis for the hurricane research community, that engendered extensive email discussion among scientists on both sides of the public debate. We did an email version of a “group hug” and vowed to stop the guerilla warfare.

I had lost my bearings in all of this, and the Wall Street Journal article had the effect of a bucket of cold water being poured over my head. I learned several important lessons from this experience: just because the other guy commits the first “foul” doesn’t give you the moral high ground in protracted academic guerilla warfare. Nothing in this crazy environment is worth sacrificing your personal or professional integrity. After all, no one remembers who fired the first shot, all they see is unprofessional behavior.

I took a step back and tried to understand all this craziness and learn from it. I even wrote a journal article on this, “Mixing Politics and Science in Testing the Hypothesis that Greenhouse Warming is Causing a Global Increase in Hurricane Intensity.” This paper got quite a bit of play in the blogosphere upon its publication in Aug 2006, and at this time I made my first major foray into the blogosphere, checking in at all the blogs where the paper was being discussed. See esp realclimate and climateaudit (but I can no longer find the original thread on climateaudit).

At climateaudit, the posters had some questions about statistics and wanted to see the raw data. I was pretty impressed by the level of discussion, and wondered why I had not come across this blog before over at the realclimate blogroll. Then I realized that I was on Steve McIntyre’s blog (I had sort of heard of his tiff with Mann, but wasn’t really up on all this at the time). I was actually having much more fun over at climateaudit than at realclimate, and I thought it made much more sense to spend time at climateaudit rather than to preach to the converted at realclimate. Back in 2006 spending time at climateaudit was pretty rough sport (it wasn’t really moderated at the time). When I first started spending time over there, the warmist blogs thought it was really funny, and encouraged me to give ‘em hell.

I was continuing my overall thinking on how to better deal with skeptics and increase the credibility and integrity of science. I gave an invited talk at Fall 2006 AGU meeting, entitled “Falling out of the ivory tower: Reflections on mixing politics and climate science.” This is where I first started talking about circling the wagons, etc. I don’t think this was quite what the convenors had in mind when they invited me to give this talk, but at the time I still had pretty solid status as a survivor of vicious political attacks during the hurricane wars and was a heroine for taking down Bill Gray.

When the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report was published in 2007, I joined the consensus in supporting this document as authoritative; I was convinced by the rigors of the process, etc etc. While I didn’t personally agree with everything in the document (still nagging concerns about the treatment of uncertainty), I bought into the meme of “don’t trust what one scientist says, listen to the IPCC.” During 2008 and 2009, I became increasingly concerned by the lack of “policy neutrality” by people involved in the IPCC and policies that didn’t make sense to me. But after all, “don’t trust what one scientist says”, and I continued to substitute the IPCC assessment for my own personal judgment [in my public statements].

November 19, 2009: bucket of cold water #2. When I first saw the climategate emails, I knew these were real, they confirmed concerns and suspicions that I already had. After my first essay “On the credibility . . .” posted at climateaudit, I got some emails that asked me to be sensitive to the feelings of the scientists involved. I said I was a whole lot more worried about the IPCC, in terms of whether it could be saved and whether it should be saved. I had been willing to substitute the IPCC for my own personal judgment [in public statements], but after reading those emails, the IPCC lost the moral high ground in my opinion. Not to say that the IPCC science was wrong, but I no longer felt obligated in substituting the IPCC for my own personal judgment.

So the Judith Curry ca 2010 is the same scientist as she was in 2003, but sadder and wiser as a result of the hurricane wars, a public spokesperson on the global warming issue owing to the media attention from the hurricane wars, more broadly knowledgeable about the global warming issue, much more concerned about the integrity of climate science, listening to skeptics, and a blogger (for better or for worse). . . People really find it hard to believe that I don’t have a policy agenda about climate change/energy (believe me, Roger Pielke Jr has tried very hard to smoke me out as a “stealth advocate”). Yes, I want clean green energy, economic development and “world peace”. I have no idea how much climate change should be weighted in these kinds of policy decisions. I lack the knowledge, wisdom and hubris to think that anything I say or do should be of any consequence to climate/carbon/energy policy.”

Assault on the Capitol Has Let Loose the Electronic Octopus to strangle free speech

 From Victor Davis Hanson.

On target.

The United States is no longer free.

--------------------------------------------

Two days after the 2020 election, a defiant Kathy Griffin retweeted the notorious picture of her holding a prop that looked like the bloody head of a decapitated Donald Trump. Earlier last year, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, tweeted out a call to his followers to destroy Israel. Both tweets passed the censorship rules of Twitter’s 20-something judges in San Francisco.

In contrast, Trump has been banned for life from Twitter and barred indefinitely from Facebook. Twitter said in a statement it excluded Trump “due to the risk of further incitement of violence.”

The president had called for thousands of his followers to assemble at a massive Washington, D.C., rally protesting the results of the election. Splinter groups broke off from the massed protesters. Some stormed into the halls of Congress. Social media platforms canceled Trump after he urged his followers, albeit “peacefully and patriotically,” to go protest at the U.S. Capitol, where the mayhem followed.

After the assault — and after Democrats won the presidency, kept the House, took the Senate and threatened to pack the Supreme Court — furor broke out against Trump. The outrage included the banning of Trump and some of his supporters from social media.

Thousands of scared social media users then retreated to the more conservative site Parler. But in near-unison, Google, Apple and Amazon removed Parler from their platforms.

Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri had his upcoming book — a call to clamp down on Big Tech monopolies — abruptly canceled by publisher Simon & Schuster. Hawley’s crime was apparently his quixotic persistence in questioning the authenticity of the 2020 election.

What are the new standards that now get a book or a social media account canceled?

After all, the Vicki Osterweil book “In Defense of Looting,” a justification for theft and property destruction, came out last summer amidst the antifa and Black Lives Matter unrest. The author was even featured on National Public Radio in a largely sympathetic interview.

Is Madonna banned from social media? Shortly after the 2017 inauguration, she voiced a desire to blow up the White House with the Trump family in it.

Is AK-47-toting rapper Raz Simone banned from social media? He took over a swath of downtown Seattle last June and declared it an autonomous zone. For weeks, his armed guards reigned supreme without worry of police. There were at least four shootings and two deaths in or around Simone’s kingdom. He was neither prosecuted nor deplatformed from social media. The lyrics of his song “Shoot at Everyone” are full of allusions to violence, racial slurs and stereotypes. The song is posted on YouTube, and Simone still enjoys a large social media presence.

So, why did Big Tech, the media, the publishing industry, a host of corporations and a growing number of campuses double down on censoring some free speech? Why now blacklist, censor and cancel thousands of people?

True, Trump gave them an opening when some rogue supporters vandalized the Capitol. But the real reason is that the left has long been eager to curtail the speech of those it opposes. Last week simply offered members of the left the sort of perfect crisis that they determined should never go to waste.

With an unpopular Trump on the way out, and with control over the levers of government, members of the left abruptly settled all their old scores. Their aim was not just to humiliate opponents but to curtail opponents’ ability to organize against them.

Democrats applauded the censorship. And why not? In a few weeks they will likely seek to end the Senate filibuster. In revolutionary fashion, they may try to admit new states, pack the Supreme Court and end the Electoral College — moves designed to emasculate their conservative opposition.

Over a century ago, the oil, railroad, telegraph and power industries created huge monopolies. They set up vertically integrated cartels. And they used their enormous profits to lavish gifts on politicians, control information and destroy competition.

Some people likened these huge trusts to octopuses whose tentacles strangled freedom. In reaction, angry workers and farmers, muckraking journalists and novelists, and crusading populist and progressive politicians passed antitrust laws.

And so they broke up the monopolies.

Today, however, progressive politicians, Wall Street, the media, academia, Hollywood and professional sports are all on the side of the mega-rich tech cartels. Partnering with Big Tech is both politically useful and financially lucrative.

So the values of the 19th-century rail and oil monopolies are back. But now they are married to the 20th-century leftist totalitarianism of George Orwell’s “1984.” And they are further powered by the 21st-century instant reach of the internet.

This time around there will be no progressive trustbusters or muckrakers. They are in league with, or bought off by, the new electronic octopus.

And its tentacles are strangling the thoughts and speech of an increasingly unfree America.

Big Tech’s fight against freedom of speech continues

 Jonathan Turley gets it right, yet again.

I think that Big Tech's control over information and our speech is a bigger threat to our Country than the violence everyone is upset about.  For example, while it is unlikely that outright voting fraud swung the election, the same cannot be said about the censoring by Big Tech of news in favor of Trump and the censoring of news disadvantageous to Biden.  Silencing "Climate Deniers" and others concerning important debates is just as bad.  Such censorship is destroys debate that could lead to a better understanding of the issues and better solutions. 

My initial reaction to Big Tech's censorship was that private companies have the right to do whatever they want.  However, I now think that a case can be made to apply the same reasoning that leads to the regulation of utilities to Big Tech's social platforms.  They are monopolies in a sphere where size conveys an advantage that prevents effective competition.  Moreover, their actions strike me as demonstrating intentional efforts to destroy possible competition.

Perhaps Big Tech's social platforms should be available to everyone, by law.

My view is that censorship is more damaging than upsetting social posts.  History shows that it is never objective and leads to loss of freedoms.

Some will say that planning of violence done on social platforms is bad enough to justify censoring it.  This is a legitimate concern, but  I think that argument is short-sighted.  Such planning is easily accomplished in other ways.  Moreover, if it is out in the open, it is easier to discover and stop.

Consider the German submarine Wolf Packs during WWII.  Which would you have preferred - the continued use of an almost impossible to break code to communicate their attack plans or Twitter in ordinary German?

-------------------------------------------------------

We have been discussing the chilling crackdown on free speech that has been building for years in the United States. This effort has accelerated in the aftermath of the Capitol riot including the shutdown sites like Parler. Now former Texas congressman Ron Paul, 85, has been blocked from using his Facebook page for unspecified violations of “community standards.” Paul’s last posting was linked to an article on the “shocking” increase of censorship on social media. Facebook then proceeded to block him under the same undefined “community standards” policy.

Paul, a libertarian leader and former presidential candidate, has been an outspoken critics of foreign wars and an advocate for civil liberties for decades. He wrote:

“With no explanation other than ‘repeatedly going against our community standards,’ @Facebook has blocked me from managing my page. Never have we received notice of violating community standards in the past and nowhere is the offending post identified.”

His son is Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) tweeted, “Facebook now considers advocating for liberty to be sedition. Where will it end?”

Even before the riot, Democrats were calling for blacklists and retaliation against anyone deemed to be “complicit” with the Trump Administration. We have been discussing the rising threats against Trump supporters, lawyers, and officials in recent weeks from Democratic members are calling for blacklists to the Lincoln Project leading a a national effort to harass and abuse any lawyers representing the Republican party or President Trump. Others are calling for banning those “complicit” from college campuses while still others are demanding a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” to “hold Trump and his enablers accountable for the crimes they have committed.” Daily Beast editor-at-large Rick Wilson has added his own call for “humiliation,” “incarceration” and even ritualistic suicides for Trump supporters in an unhinged, vulgar column.

After the riots, the big tech companies moved to ban and block sites and individuals, including Parler which is the primary alternative to Twitter. Also, a top Forbes editor Randall Lane warned any company that they will be investigated if they hire any former Trump officials.

The riots are being used as a license to rollback on free speech and retaliate against conservatives. In the meantime, the silence of academics and many in the media is deafening. Many of those who have spoken for years about the dark period of McCarthyism and blacklisting are either supporting this censorship or remaining silent in the face of it. Now that conservatives are the targets, speech controls and blacklists appear understandable or even commendable.

The move against Paul, a long champion of free speech, shows how raw and comprehensive this crackdown has become. It shows how the threat to free speech has changed. It is like having a state media without state control. These companies are moving in unison but not necessarily with direct collusion. The riot was immediately taken as a green light to move against a huge variety of sites and individuals. As we have seen in Europe, such censorship becomes an insatiable appetite for greater and greater speech control. Even Germany’s Angela Merkel (who has a long history of anti-free speech actions) has criticized Twitter’s actions as inimical to free speech. Yet, most law professors and media figures in the United States remain silent.

Pelosi names Swalwell as House Impeachment Manager

 Jonathan Turley comments on Pelosi's choosing Swalwell as House Impeachment Manager.

Pelosi's choice shows that she is not interested in credibility or healing.

--------------------------------------------

Speaker Nancy Pelosi shocked many in Washington by appointing Eric Swalwell as a house managers in the impeachment of President Donald Trump as he continues to face calls for his removal from the House Intelligence Committee due to his alleged intimate relationship with a Chinese spy. Swalwell has been bunkered down to avoid questions from the media and the public, but he will now be one of those prosecuting the case against the President.

He allegedly first met the spy, Fang Fang or Christine Fang, in 2011. She not only raised money for Swalwell but reportedly had a personal relationship with him. She also pushed successfully for his office to accept an intern. He cut ties with her in 2015 after the FBI contacted him. Pelosi made no mention of the scandal in heralding Swalwell’s credentials:

“Congressman Swalwell serves on House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, where he chairs the Intelligence Modernization and Readiness Subcommittee, and on the Judiciary Committee,” Pelosi’s office said in a statement. “He is a former prosecutor and is the son and brother of law enforcement officers. He is serving his fifth term in Congress.”

Usually a speaker selects House managers to reinforce the credibility and integrity of the case against a president. Even before the current scandal, Swalwell was viewed as a member who was a raw partisan. Last year, it was revealed that (despite long denials) the FBI did send an agent to report on his observations within the Trump campaign. As I discussed in a column, Democratic members spent years mocking allegations that there was any spying or surveillance of Trump or his campaign by the FBI. That was just a conspiracy theory. Now however there is proof that the FBI used a briefing in August 2016 of then candidate Trump to gather information for “Crossfire Hurricane,” the Russia investigation. It turns out that it did not really matter after all and Rep. Eric Swalwell did not miss a step. Swalwell declared that such targeting of the opposing party and its leading presidential candidate was “the right thing to do.” That’s it. A conspiracy theory suddenly becomes a commendable act.

Previously, Swalwell also declared that if President Donald Trump refused to give Congress the documents and witnesses that it has demanded, he is clearly guilty of all charged offenses. Swalwell declared “We can only conclude that you’re guilty.”

The Swalwell selection is clearly part of a rehabilitation campaign. Swalwell remained secluded as the many in the media refused to carry the story, let alone investigate it. A member of the House Intelligence Committee carried on an intimate relationship with a Chinese spy but major media largely blacked out coverage as they did on the Hunter Biden story. Now Pelosi will use the impeachment as a way for Swalwell to reemerge from seclusion . . . as the accuser and prosecutor of President Donald Trump.

While there are good faith reasons for calling for impeachment, there remain serious questions over the speed and basis for the impeachment. My concern is primarily over the use of a snap impeachment without even a hearing to discuss the implications of this action. That makes the House managers even more important in bringing credibility to this effort. This is putting politics ahead of the institution in my view.

Lies Tearing America Apart

 BEn Shapiro gets it right at Jewish World Review.

-----------------------------------------

Last week, the Capitol was breached by a group of fringe Trump supporters who had bought into a series of lies: the lie that President Donald Trump lost the election due to proven voter fraud and irregularity; the lie that the Electoral College results, legally certified state by state, could be overturned by Congress or the vice president; the lie that Trump would remain in office if only some sort of armed rebellion were to prevent the election certification by Congress.

Those were lies. And those lies had deadly consequences.

Thankfully, the vast majority of Americans don't believe those lies. Which means we should be able to unify around certain basic truths: that Joe Biden is legally president-elect of the United States; that violence in pursuit of political ends is a deep wrong and those who participate in it should be punished to the full extent of the law; that broad claims regarding invasion of rights ought to be backed by compelling evidence.

But we won't.

That's because while the Democratic Party and the political left agree that Joe Biden is president-elect, they absolutely disagree with both the fundamental precept that violence in pursuit of political ends is a deep wrong and the even more fundamental precept that claims require evidence. We saw that this summer when Democratic Party officials made light of riots spreading across the nation in the name of yet another lie — the lie that America is systemically racist, rooted in slavery and Jim Crow, and replete with bigoted police dedicated to endangering black lives.

Democrats demanded no evidence to support those claims; in knee-jerk fashion, they simply repeated ad nauseam untruths about the existential threat to black Americans in the United States. Which means that for the Democrats and the political left, violence is fine so long as it supports their narrative, and un-evidenced claims are fine so long as they support an agenda.

In order to defend such violence, the political left has mobilized behind another convenient and advantageous lie: the lie that the Capitol riots represent all conservatives and Republicans. Paul Krugman of The New York Times suggested that the "putsch was decades in the making," chalking up the rioting to "Republican elites" since before Ronald Reagan. The Washington Post amplified a nutty post from the chairman of the Nye County Republican Party in Nevada into a referendum on a "long-festering struggle within the Republican Party over conspiracy theories, purity tests and fealty to the rule of law."

Members of the media gleefully hunted for Republicans to blame for the Capitol riots, calling for the deplatforming of brand-name conservatives and cheering on social media crackdowns.

Lies are dangerous. And double standards are perhaps the most dangerous form of lying: They grant the bravery of purity to those most willing to defy decency, prompting similar spasms of cruelty and malice from the other side. The solution to our national crisis of conscience isn't bad-faith political purges or repetition of tiresome falsehoods about the nature of the United States. It's truth.

But truth is more a shield than a sword. And we are now in the age of swords, wielded aggressively by those with little principle but an unending sense of their own moral superiority.

A voice of reason amidst the insanity

 Here is Matthew Nisbet with a helpful perspective.

Let's face it - today's version of debate is more like insanity.

---------------------------------------------------

Across a few weeks in mid-March 2020, American life was remade, whether temporarily or permanently no one can say for sure. To stem the spread of the Covid-19 virus, states and cities closed schools and non-essential businesses, ordering more than 280 million Americans to shelter at home. With much of the economy coming to a sudden halt, the U.S. jobless rate quickly climbed to its highest level since the Great Depression.

During the lockdown, I briefly went into a war-like mobilization mode, urgently thinking of ways that as an academic I could shift my research activities to contribute to a solution.

But I quickly ran up against the barriers of reality. Sheltering at home with my wife and our six-year old son, I found myself paralyzed by the radical uncertainty of the moment.

My situation was in sharp contrast to the heroes serving on the frontlines of the pandemic crisis who each faced a far greater risk of infection. My job was also secure, unlike the tens of millions who were soon out of work. And yet by noon on most days, my brain was completely scattered.

So, I decided to heed my inner voice, slowing down rather than speeding ahead. With a sabbatical scheduled for the fall, I knew that the best way I could quiet my mind was to focus on a few long planned projects that took me in new intellectual directions.

For months, I immersed myself in books, data, and articles, filling moleskine notebooks with thoughts, reflections, and observations. I discovered that only by looking back at history and by organizing my days around moments of contemplation, could I begin to understand the whirlwind of events.

Lost in thought

As I emerged from my sabbatical at the end of 2020, I announced via social media I would be launching a “Climate Politics” newsletter and podcast devoting my focus to research-driven analysis of climate politics, communication, and journalism. In a matter of days, more than a hundred subscribers had signed up.

But on January 6, the moment that Trump-inspired domestic terrorists stormed the U.S. Capitol building seeking to kill Vice President Mike Pence and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, the history of our nation changed. We are no longer the country we thought we were. If the event was the plot line to a movie, it would be considered so subversive there would be calls for its banning — the equivalent of a political snuff film.

In the days that followed, each time I sat down to write a first piece about climate politics, something tugged inside me. The sweet ping of words that fly off the keyboard — a sure sign that I am engaged in strong analysis — eluded me as I struggled to find perspective.

To unwind during the evening, I plunged down on the couch to read Lost in Thought, a recently published book by the philosopher Zena Hitz.

As a professor at an elite university, Hitz came to recognize — like almost every academic today — that the intellectual joy of her youth had been blotted out by years of hyper-competitiveness. She had grown up valuing learning for its own sake, but now focused almost exclusively on career ambition and achievement.

Working so busily on narrow research projects, she barely had time for the soul nourishing reading of a broad range of books and the forms of deep reflection that motivated her to become a professor in the first place.

After leaving academia for a few years, she returned in search of work that could rekindle intellectual joy in her and others. By chance, Hitz was able to land a faculty position at her alma mater St. Johns College, a liberal arts institution where teachers as mentors guide students on a journey through the wonders of a Great Books curriculum.

Reframing my focus

Reading Lost in Thought, I realized that at Substack I needed to focus on a broader range of topics and to let my intellectual passions shape my direction as a writer. As a scholar and teacher, I also have a special duty to live up to what this unprecedented moment in American history demands of us, and to harness my idiosyncratic gifts on behalf of the public good.

The process by which the public and decision-makers come to understand debates over science, technology, and the environment — and the influence of ideas, politics, expertise, and culture — is a subject I have studied and written about for two decades.

But I also believe it is a mistake to reduce the future to climate change, as some academics and activists tend to do. Committing to a totalizing cause blinds us to parallel threats like pandemics or the crisis in our democracy — and to the many other things about the world and life that are worth studying and writing about for their own sake.

I consider climate change a grave threat, but it doesn’t keep me up at night. Instead, I approach the problem as shining a light on ourselves. We tend to read into its wicked complexity our hopes and desires for the future; and our vision of a good society. In this sense, the intensely polarized debate over climate change is a vehicle for understanding our inconvenient minds and the broader sources of division in society.

My outlook on climate change reflects my intellectual disposition as a fox rather than a hedgehog, a distinction famously articulated by Isaiah Berlin.

A hedgehog tends to “relate everything to a single central vision, one system, less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel,” wrote Berlin. In contrast, a fox pursues “many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory,” and is skeptical of totalizing theories and causes. Plato and Nietzsche, for example, were hedgehogs. Aristotle and Montaigne were foxes.

So given what is at stake in society today, and the feelings of deep uncertainty that all of us are experiencing, I decided to expand my focus, organizing the re-named Wealth of Ideas newsletter and podcast around the following central themes:

The battle of ideas over today’s mega-problems

In a first main theme, I will be exploring the social and intellectual history behind today’s mega-problems and political divisions, tracing the sources of our disagreement from the 1960s forward, examining the events, trends, movements, and ideas that define the fault lines in our culture. This history is often told in a one-sided way by both progressives and conservatives, but how we arrived at this moment as a nation cannot be reduced to a single interpretation.

The deep complexity of the problems we face require critical analysis of our assumptions and beliefs, a goal best reached not through full throated advocacy, but via contemplative engagement with a diversity of voices and ideas. Instead of quickly choosing between clashing perspectives, a better approach is to spend time wrestling with their tensions and uncertainties, and to recognize what each offers that is of value.

Numerous social science studies, for example, demonstrate that in situations where consensus is closely guarded and defended to the exclusion of dissenting voices, individuals and groups tend to make poorer decisions and think less productively. In contrast, exposure to dissent, even when such arguments may prove to be wrong, tends to broaden thinking, leading individuals to think in more open ways, in multiple directions, and in consideration of a greater diversity of options, recognizing flaws and weaknesses in positions.

The moderate mind in an age of extremes

In a related main theme, I will be writing about the importance of moderation in politics and life. Drawing on philosophy and history, I will be making the case for why moderation, pragmatism, and institutional thinking are so desperately needed, and the essential role that these habits of mind must play today.

Across history, moderates in the tradition of Aristotle, Montaigne, Ben Franklin, James Madison, Abraham Lincoln, and Barack Obama have been the strongest defenders of freedom, pluralism, civility, and self-restraint. Moderates do not think in black and white, but shades of gray, and are mindful of the limits to their knowledge. They are pragmatists who oppose fanatics of all stripes, skeptics who criticize grandiose visions, and skillful diplomats who strive to maintain common ground between competing factions.

Moderation is also an ancient virtue for living a better life, and a philosophical resource for standing firm against today’s accelerated culture. So in other essays, I will be investigating the many twisted messages about human happiness and flourishing that dominate our culture. In today’s world, almost every aspect of life continues to speed up, allowing little time for joy, connection, or contemplation. I will be tackling not just our relationship to work and its many forms but the excesses of the latest self-improvement and "life hacking" crazes. I will also be writing about traditional contemplative practices such as stoicism, yoga, Buddhist meditation, walking, and the reading of Great Books — exercises that cultivate a moderate mind.

Here is what to expect in terms of weekly content:

• Two longform, research-driven essays per week.

• Regular podcast interviews with compelling thinkers.

• Weekly discussion thread posts and access to comment section of articles.

• Access to expertly curated annotated bibliographies of related readings.

• Monthly Zoom chats to discuss selected topics and share ideas.

In the meantime, to help build a diverse community of readers, please share this article with others via e-mail and social media; follow me on Twitter @MCNisbet; and let me know your thoughts and ideas.

Mark Twain quotations

Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.- Mark Twain's Notebook, 1898

One cannot have everything the way he would like it. A man has no business to be depressed by a disappointment, anyway; he ought to make up his mind to get even.
- A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

What is it that confers the noblest delight? What is that which swells a man's breast with pride above that which any other experience can bring to him? Discovery! To know that you are walking where none others have walked; that you are beholding what human eye has not see before; that you are breathing a virgin atmosphere. To give birth to an idea -- an intellectual nugget, right under the dust of a field that many a brain-plow had gone over before. To be the first -- that is the idea. To do something, say something, see something, before anybody else -- these are the things that confer a pleasure compared with other pleasures are tame and commonplace, other ecstasies cheap and trivial. Lifetimes of ecstasy crowded into a single moment.
- Innocents Abroad

Yes, even I am dishonest. Not in many ways, but in some. Forty-one, I think it is.
- Letter to Joseph Twichell, 3/14/1905

If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.
- Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar

In those early days dueling suddenly became a fashion in the new territory of Nevada and by 1864 everybody was anxious too have a chance in the new sport, mainly for the reason that he was not able to thoroughly respect himself so long as he had not killed or crippled somebody in a duel or been killed or crippled in one himself....I was ambitious in several ways but I had entirely escaped the seductions of that particular craze. I had had no desire to fight a duel. I had no intention of provoking one. I did not feel respectable but I got a certain amount of satisfaction out of feeling safe. I was ashamed of myself...but I got along well enough. I had always been accustomed to feeling ashamed of myself, for one thing or another, so there was no novelty for me in the situation. I bore it very well.
- Autobiography of Mark Twain

I said I was so habituated to shirking my duty that I was able now to shirk it fifty times a day without a pang; that is, that I could shirk fifty duties a day without a pang if the opportunity to do it were furnished me; that I did not get fifty opportunities a day, but that I got an average of about that many a week, and that I had noticed a peculiarity, a quite interesting peculiarity, of these opportunities -- to wit, that the opportunity to do a duty was always furnished me by an outsider, it seldom originated with me; it was always furnished by some person who knew more about my duties toward the public than I did. I said I believed that if I should become the champion of every cause that was brought to my attention and shown by argument that it was my duty to take hold of it and champion it, I shouldn't ever have any time left to punch up the China missionaries or revel in any of the other duties that were of my own invention and that were occupying all the spare room in my heart.
- Autobiographical dictation, 13 January 1908. Published in Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 3 (University of California Press, 2015)

Is Truth Irrelevant?

 Thomas Sowell gets it right again.  The Double Standard is alive, well, and growing.

--------------------------------

It is amazing how many people seem to have discovered last Wednesday that riots are wrong — when many of those same people apparently had not noticed that when riots went on, for weeks or even months, in various cities across the country last year.

For too many people, especially in the media, what is right and wrong, true or false, depends on who it helps or hurts politically. Too many media people who are supposed to be reporters act as if they are combatants in political wars.

Someone once said that, in a war, truth is the first casualty. That has certainly been so in the media — and in much of academia as well.

One of the most grotesque distortions growing out of this carelessness with the facts has been a removal of Abraham Lincoln's name and statues from various places, on grounds that he saw black people only as property.

Such criticisms betray an incredible ignorance of history — or else a complete disregard of truth.

As a lawyer, Abraham Lincoln knew that there was nothing in the Constitution which authorized him or any other President to free slaves. But he also knew that a military commander in wartime can legally seize the property of an enemy nation. Defining slaves as property gave President Lincoln the only legal authority he had to seize them during the Civil War. And once they were seized as property, he could then free them as human beings.

But, if the Emancipation Proclamation had based its action on defining the slaves as human beings, with a right to be free, the Supreme Court of that era would undoubtedly have declared it unconstitutional.

Millions of human beings would have remained slaves. Would ringing rhetoric be worth that price?

As for the claim that Lincoln did not regard black people as human, he invited Frederick Douglass to the White House!

Gross distortions of history, in order to get Abraham Lincoln's name removed from schools tells us a lot about what is wrong with American education today.

Many schools are closed because of the corona virus and the teachers unions. And many schools in minority neighborhoods failed to teach children enough math and English, back when they were still open. So it is incredible that school authorities have time to spend on ideological crusades like removing names and statues from schools.

Unfortunately, too many American educational institutions — from elementary schools to universities — have become indoctrination centers. The riots that swept across the country last year are fruits of that indoctrination and the utter disregard for other people's rights that accompanied those riots.

At the heart of that indoctrination is a sense of grievance and victimhood when others have better outcomes — which are automatically called "privileges" and never called "achievements," regardless of what the actual facts are.

Facts don't matter in such issues, any more than facts mattered when smearing Lincoln.

Any "under-representation" of any group in any endeavor can be taken as evidence or proof of discriminatory bias. But those who argue this way cannot show us any society — anywhere in the world, or at any time during thousands of years of recorded history — that had all groups represented proportionally in all endeavors.

In America's National Hockey League, for example, there are more players from Canada than there are players from the United States. There are also more players from Sweden than from California, even though California's population is nearly four times the population of Sweden.

Californians are more "under-represented" in the NHL than women are in Silicon Valley. But no one can claim that this is due to discriminatory bias by the NHL. It is far more obviously due to people growing up in cold climates being more likely to have ice-skating experience.

This is one of many factors that produce skewed statistics in many endeavors. Discriminatory bias is among those factors. But it has no monopoly.

Yet who cares about facts any more, in this age of indoctrination?