The US is undergoing a once in 30 year outbreak of cold temperatures, and as this graph from Roger Pielke Sr.'s web site shows, snowfall is tied as the third greatest in extent in the last 43 years:
Europe is dealing with an unusually cold and snowy winter with the UK having major highways closed due to snow.
Northern China is dealing with record cold temperatures and snow. There was a news story tonight about a train in inner Mongolia being brought to a halt by 10 feet of snow and rescuers being sent in to dig the train out.
There are stories of unusually cold weather sneaking over the Himalayas killing unprepared people in India.
Yep... as the global warming crowd will tell you, these are all signs that we are well into the "runaway warming" that their climate models have pictured for us.
The global warming crowd reminds me of the hangers on, the "true believers" in Communism who -- even after the Khrushchev revelations kept their faith in the doctrines. The never-ending cant of "global warming" reminds me of this "truth" pushed in the US during the Cold War:
In the 1961 edition of his famous textbook of economic principles, Paul Samuelson wrote that GNP in the Soviet Union was about half that in the United States but the Soviet Union was growing faster. As a result, one could comfortably forecast that Soviet GNP would exceed that of the United States by as early as 1984 or perhaps by as late as 1997 and in any event Soviet GNP would greatly catch-up to U.S. GNP. A poor forecast--but it gets worse because in subsequent editions Samuelson presented the same analysis again and again except the overtaking time was always pushed further into the future so by 1980 the dates were 2002 to 2012. In subsequent editions, Samuelson provided no acknowledgment of his past failure to predict and little commentary beyond remarks about "bad weather" in the Soviet Union (see Levy and Peart for more details).It is really hard to climb down from a doctrinaire tree in the face of mere facts. So, enjoy the cold and the snow. This is just "more proof" that we are deep into those dangerously hot days of global warming!
... an even more off-course analysis can also be found in another mega-selling textbook, McConnell's Economics (still a huge seller today). Like Samuelson, McConnell estimated Soviet GNP as half that of the United States in 1963 but he showed that the Soviets were investing a much larger share of GNP and thus growing at rates "two to three times" higher than the U.S. Indeed, through at least ten (!) editions, the Soviets continued to grow faster than the U.S. and yet in McConnell's 1990 edition Soviet GNP was still half that of the United States!
A second case of being blinded by "liberal" ideology? If so, Levy and Peart throw another curve-ball because the very liberal even "leftist" texts of the time, notably those by Lorie Tarshis and Robert Heilbroner did not make the Samuelson-McConnell mistake.
Text from the Marginal Revolution website.
No comments:
Post a Comment