Enjoy the weekend. It might be the last nice one for the American economy for quite some time.

by ryen123

Washington: American political dysfunction runs amok
[Via BusinessInsider]

So some version of the Reid plan it will be. The Boehner plan isn’t just dead, it’s inconceivable. The notion that Congress might “debate” a second tranche of deficit reduction six months from now — as the Boehner plan requires –isn’t ever going to fly. There is only so much that people can take.

If some version of the Reid plan it is, then it will have to pass the House with Democratic and Republican votes.

Democrats who vote for it will not be punished in their primaries next year.  Some, maybe many Republicans who vote in favor of the Reid plan will be punished in primaries next year. The Tea Parties will see to that

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I hope that something note worthy happens over the weekend. But I expect there is not enough time to produce something that will prevent our debt from being rated lower.

Who wants to loan money to anyone with such a dysfunctional system of government? And the House wants to do this all over again in a few months?

I think we are  about to see the end of the dollar as the reserve currency. The BRIC countries will probably like that. As it hits the bottom line of every American.

That could have huge impacts on our economy and on the cost of things. All because we have a government that can not govern.

The last words of the article are, unfortunately, both scary and realistic:

It’s no longer clear that the “August 2nd deadline” and “technical default” really matter any more.  The truth is the political system has, by its behavior, already declared its bankruptcy. And since it is the political system that has stewardship of fiscal matters, it follows that the United States government is bankrupt, politically and as a fiduciary.

Jim Cramer was on television today, saying that he thought it was possible that the Congress might authorize the sale of all the gold in Fort Knox to cover expenses for the week of August 2-August 9.  If you had heard such a thing 30 years ago, you would have said: “that’s insane.”  When I heard it this afternoon, I thought: “we could do that. We might have to do that.”

What happens to the social fabric of a nation that is bankrupt?  Does anyone know?  Care to hazard a guess? My guess is that the United States of America begins to untie, unravel. Truth is, the unraveling is already well along. The question is whether it accelerates or reverses itself with renewal.

All the political signs point to acceleration.

 

 

Rebutting the sensationalist hype of a recent Climate Change paper

by Double–M (formerly DoubleM2)

“Misdiagnosis of Surface Temperature Feedback”
[Via RealClimate]

Guest commentary by Kevin Trenberth and John Fasullo

The hype surrounding a new paper by Roy Spencer and Danny Braswell is impressive (see for instance Fox News); unfortunately the paper itself is not. News releases and blogs on climate denier web sites have publicized the claim from the paper’s news release that “Climate models get energy balance wrong, make too hot forecasts of global warming”. The paper has been published in a journal called Remote sensing which is a fine journal for geographers, but it does not deal with atmospheric and climate science, and it is evident that this paper did not get an adequate peer review. It should not have been published.

The paper’s title “On the Misdiagnosis of Surface Temperature Feedbacks from Variations in Earth’s Radiant Energy Balance” is provocative and should have raised red flags with the editors. The basic material in the paper has very basic shortcomings because no statistical significance of results, error bars or uncertainties are given either in the figures or discussed in the text. Moreover the description of methods of what was done is not sufficient to be able to replicate results. As a first step, some quick checks have been made to see whether results can be replicated and we find some points of contention.

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There has been a lot of hype from the denialist camp on this paper as though one paper could completely upend all the previous work. Not too likely.

Getting a paper published in an inappropriate journal is one thing to worry about with a new paper. If this was so important, why not a higher profile place (remember Nature published a naturopathic paper why back when, just for the controversy).

For another thing, for this groups model to work, clouds have to cause weather, not weather causing clouds. So I guess a hurricane is caused by the clouds that form rather than the weather system driving it? That is what is meant by a forcing. Carbon dioxide is a forcing because it causes the temperatures to go up.To call clouds a forcing seems to completely at odds with what we expect that it requires greater proof than assertion or model building.

Denialists hate models, Except this paper is all based on models,ones that have apparently been cherry-picked to give the results desired by the researchers. As RealClimate states:

To help interpret the results, Spencer uses a simple model. But the simple model used by Spencer is too simple (Einstein says that things should be made as simple as possible but not simpler): well this has gone way beyond being too simple (see for instance this post by Barry Bickmore). The model has no realistic ocean, no El Niño, and no hydrological cycle, and it was tuned to give the result it gave. Most of what goes on in the real world of significance that causes the relationship in the paper is ENSO. We have already rebutted Lindzen’s work on exactly this point. The clouds respond to ENSO, not the other way round [see: Trenberth, K. E., J. T. Fasullo, C. O'Dell, and T. Wong, 2010: Relationships between tropical sea surface temperatures and top-of-atmosphere radiation.Geophys. Res. Lett., 37, L03702, doi:10.1029/2009GL042314.]

No error bars or statistical significance are other weaknesses. The fact that others are stating that there is not enough information to replicate their work really makes this a worthless paper, even if it was demonstrating something extra-ordinary.

And finally, rising carbon dioxide levels have much greater impact than just raising temperatures. We must do what we can to lower our production.

Al Gore is exactly right

by simone.brunozzi

Mr. Gore Finds the Link
[Via Only in it for the gold]

There’s a fairly obvious link between the impending economic train wreck in the US and the disastrous response to climate change. Al Gore spells it out.

We haven’t gone nuts — but the “conversation of democracy” has become so deeply dysfunctional that our ability to make intelligent collective decisions has been seriously impaired. Throughout American history, we relied on the vibrancy of our public square — and the quality of our democratic discourse — to make better decisions than most nations in the history of the world. But we are now routinely making really bad decisions that completely ignore the best available evidence of what is true and what is false. When the distinction between truth and falsehood is systematically attacked without shame or consequence — when a great nation makes crucially important decisions on the basis of completely false information that is no longer adequately filtered through the fact-checking function of a healthy and honest public discussion — the public interest is severely damaged.

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Al Gore may not always be right. he is human, after all. But I feel he nails it here.

America is at its best when it brings the full diversity of thought to the table, solving complex problems that require many different viewpoints.

When America is lead by people who think only they know the right way, whose view of the other side is that they are traitors or idiots or corrupt or some other ‘other’, whose positions are hardened into concrete, then we all lose.

America is not at its best right now. It has not been for quite some time. Falsehoods, craven lies and bullying are the common tools of the modern ‘conversation of democracy’.

The West Wing explains the debt ceiling

[youtube=hthttp://youtu.be/v5igKuNF1rII

Or as Lincoln described a similar process:

A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, “Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!”