Most are politically moderate or conservative – as are most of the population. The real contrast is with extreme green neo-socialist agendas. Politics matters little as long as parties are committed to classic liberal values of western enlightenment – most especially the rule of law and the commitment to democracy.
But then – we may as well pursue grown up strategies rather than the policy trash from the far left. .
And then the poor Phoenician…
“… saw the merry Grecian coaster come,
Freighted with amber grapes, and Chian wine,
Green, bursting figs, and tunnies steep’d in brine—
And knew the intruders on his ancient home,
The young light-hearted masters of the waves.”
Don’t know who’ll blow away my old ways and ideas. Someone will.
Most people understand that prices equilibriate depending on supply and demand and that at a high enough price – strong demand and weak supply – alternative sources will be substituted.
It is 2 of the fundamental principles of economics that are seemingly lost on the loony left. Their idea is to add to costs now sufficiently to drive a transition to a fuel that doesn’t yet exist. Told you it was bonkers.
Do you have a review essay or anything on this critique of behavioral econ? I remember at one point you said that Kahnemann and Tversky’s work, up at the headwaters, was not as good as that of others addressing the same anomalies.
You are “bonkers” for attacking the field of climate science based on general cluelessness about the nature of finite and non-renewable energy sources.
Jim D, I must use this blog’s characteristic admonition to read harder. The Duarte et al article specifically gave the example of studies of stereotype accuracy, where only a rare self-described conservative political psychology researcher thought to test whether nasty stereotypes about various groups were true. (Apparently, they largely were.),
Coauthor Jonathan Haidt says:
“I am not a conservative”. He says he’s a centrist and he dislikes the Republican party
(Go to his web page and follow the link to ‘partisanship in the social sciences’)
One of my colleagues used to say “If two academics agree then one is redundant.” In Hull’s Science as a Process he shows how researchers create a facade of consensus to advance their “school” against rival “schools” but in many cases members of the same “school” violently disagree about fundamental issues. In one example, two important long-time allies on one side of a debate never finished a planned co-authored textbook because they couldn’t find an acceptable compromise on its contents.
The National Review declared a war on nerds
http://www.salon.com/2014/07/30/national_review_declares_war_against_the_nerds/
This is the 94% opinion:
”
But you know what? It’s not the fault of liberal nerds that Ken Hamm’s Creation Museum, which claims that dinosaurs were wiped out in a flood 4300 years ago, is in the South. And for better or worse, it’s not the fault of liberal nerds that large swathes of Republican politicians in the South have lined up behind the breath-taking rejection of the scientific method that is symbolized by the Creation Museum.That’s why we like Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Because we believe that civilization is going somewhere, and that if the future isn’t better than the past, then we’re just wasting our time on this planet.
”
o mosomos-o …’ Merry Grecian coaster come …
green bursting figs and tunnies steep’d in brine,
young light-hearted mastery of the waves,’ …
this is worthy of commitment ter memery fer a serf
and I will. )
bts
An example of why I sympathise but can’t fully identify with libertarians and economic dries of the right.
I was caught late walking across the Spanish meseta a few winters back. It got to the point where I needed to look about for trees to give a little shelter if I did not make it to the next village. There were countless wind turbines – but no trees. I thought with dread of how this trash was on its way to Australia, and how in our case there will be massive deforestation to install and maintain the impotent monsters. (In Spain, at least, the trees were already long gone.) And after the trash has been dismantled and carted away those concrete bases will just have to stay, in their thousands, forever.
The next day I walked into a very wide region of bare hills which had been painstakingly terraced and planted perfectly with tough seedlings. They had already survived a few years and looked on their way to forming a new forest where forests have been stripped away centuries ago. In a few more years it will team will birds, animals and quite a few humans.It was a massive and inspiring project, and it shows what big government and public initiatives can achieve. It was likely done with the same kind of borrowing and euro-subsidies as the Spanish wind farce. No modest organisation or funding could have achieved what I saw.
Conservation will need to get big, just like the anti-conservation neurosis called Environmentalism. For me, the problem is not big government, welfare or spending generously from the common purse. It’s about the quality and discipline of the government and the spending.
And it’s about advancing conservation over fetishism.
The exceedingly odd non sequiturs of the logically challenged.
Climate is a multiply coupled nonlinear system that shifts every few decades as a result of an internal and emergent reorganization of sub-components. Nothing is certain – although staying in a cool mode for decades at least seems a good bet.
e.g. http://www.geomar.de/en/news/article/klimavorhersagen-ueber-mehrere-jahre-moeglich/
Now which bit of supply and demand – or economic substitution – didn’t he get? Rhetorical question. Neither.
But then again – 87% of Americans think Elvis was abducted by aliens. What can you do?
‘My great fear,” Neil deGrasse Tyson told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes in early June, “is that we’ve in fact been visited by intelligent aliens but they chose not to make contact, on the conclusion that there’s no sign of intelligent life on Earth.” In response to this rather standard little saw, Hayes laughed as if he had been trying marijuana for the first time.
All told, one suspects that Tyson was not including either himself or a fellow traveler such as Hayes as inhabitants of Earth, but was instead referring to everybody who is not in their coterie. That, alas, is his way. An astrophysicist and evangelist for science, Tyson currently plays three roles in our society: He is the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the New York Science Museum; the presenter of the hip new show Cosmos; and, most important of all perhaps — albeit through no distinct fault of his own — he is the fetish and totem of the extraordinarily puffed-up “nerd” culture that has of late started to bloom across the United States.
One part insecure hipsterism, one part unwarranted condescension, the two defining characteristics of self-professed nerds are (a) the belief that one can discover all of the secrets of human experience through differential equations and (b) the unlovely tendency to presume themselves to be smarter than everybody else in the world. Prominent examples include MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry, Rachel Maddow, Steve Kornacki, and Chris Hayes; Vox’s Ezra Klein, Dylan Matthews, and Matt Yglesias; the sabermetrician Nate Silver; the economist Paul Krugman; the atheist Richard Dawkins; former vice president Al Gore; celebrity scientist Bill Nye; and, really, anybody who conforms to the Left’s social and moral precepts while wearing glasses and babbling about statistics. http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/3186875/posts
They are just not all that bright, literate, witty or cool. Is webby an example? QED.
That so-called extra energy is also a hypothesis and one that is impossible to tease out of the available satellite instruments as you should know. It is built on the founding hypothesis that CO2 is a driver of climate, which is now thoroughly disproven and was only ever a half-hypothesis in the first place.
If you are basing your bold assertion on the absurd notion of ocean warming below 700m then you need sufficient data, a theory that doesn’t defy physics and an explanation of why this imaginary heat will magically rise out from this massive heat sink, thereby further defying physics.
The amazing thing about climate scientivists is that a mere notion, regardless of how physically absurd and/or contradicted by reality seamlessly becomes an irrefutable fact in their closed minds and thence something to worry about. If skeptics used such physics-defying leaps of faith we’d be condemned as anti-science.
Mine was a reply to jim2 who said that “Only a very small percentage of people have ever heard of global warming“. And I responded that people are aware of signals that impact their pocketbook, such as the spiralling upward cost of energy.
Studying climate science is important as we start to rely more on renewable sources of energy to replace the non-renewable fossil fuels.
You really have to be wearing a dunce-hat (or from Oz) not to be aware of this transition.
I don’t know if Jose Duartes realizes but this by him:
That AGW is true has no inherent implications for policy. For one thing, severity or magnitude will matter. If the warming is only 1° C, that’s a very different scenario than a 6° C change. Global warming is not a dichotomous or binary thing – it’s a matter of degree, in every sense. You need to do some serious work to get from 1) AGW is true, to 2) Do something! We might value economic prosperity more than some increment of climate stasis. We’d also have to establish whether we owe the people of 2100 a very specific band of temperatures, and a very specific range of sea levels — that’s not obvious. We’d have to decide whether government should be an open-ended, unconstrained, intergenerational welfare-maximization engine, or a protector of individual rights on human lifespan timescales. There is a substantial body of evidence detailing the harms of giving government a coercive role in economic life — see public choice theory, rent-seeking, regulatory capture, the knowledge problem, general economics, Hayek, Buchanan, Easterly, Cowen, Mankiw, Caplan, Epstein, the history of the 20th century, etc. (and many economists disagree with them — I’m puzzled why economics isn’t more unified.) There will be deep philosophical and ethical differences on whether we have the right to coerce billions of people for an unclear likelihood of preventing a 2-4 C increase in global mean surface temperatures by 2100. None of this is self-evident — people will disagree. – See more at: http://www.joseduarte.com/#sthash.RQrDM6Cg.dpuf
is enough to get him labelled a climate denier, by the usual suspects. Additionally his position there is near identical to mine..
JimD, It works both ways. As a general rule left wing governments attempt to suppress skeptical points of view. Re: the United States, the UN, and the tool known as the IPPC. The bogus 97% paper is ample evidence of that. This forces scientists to go through government channels least they be chastised, marginalized, and ostrisized. See Bengtsson, Christy, Spencer, Pielke, Curry et al. This is also a real world case of suppression of diversity.
Professor Curry I admire your courage and personal integrity, but I doubt if Georgia Tech can protect you from the wrath of the consensus community.
“New research has found rapid warming of the Atlantic Ocean, likely caused by global warming,”
“likely caused by global warming”. Classic. Science at its most basic. “likely caused by global warming”. God help us.
