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Mail 642 September 27 - October 3, 2010

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Monday  September 27, 2010

Yuan, Currency, Markets

Dr. Friedman gave the economically correct answer on currency valuation under conditions where a free market in them obtains. However, he didn't show that any such market truly exists in a situation where there is a government monopoly in the creation of money, and in this example where China uses government intervention to restrict the changes in the value of the Yuan relative to the Dollar.

We have a lot of economists who act as if we're effectively the only relevant Actor in the world, and others are just a bundle of responses to whatever stimuli we give them. Dr. Friedman mentions "mercantilism," alluding to America, but how would he describe China's system? Noting that recently China's government rotated all the top executives of its major banks - something that yes, we're probably coming close to here, but we haven't done that yet.

Dr. Friedman's argument is one of the things that got us where we're at, it treats the products of other country's government manipulations as market outcomes, and ours as...not. At best such economists will say we should accept the "gift," which it certainly is not. "Gifts" like these we'd be better off rejecting, as the Trojans would have been better off rejecting the one offered them.

I'm far from a Statist, and I abhor our evolution into a Corporatist political economy (with Corporatism properly understood). But I also think debates such as these should be conducted with accuracy when it comes to the facts. Dr. Friedman's reference to the Yuan-Dollar valuations as somehow the product of free market forces is simply incorrect. It has never been correct with respect to the Yuan's valuation.

Cordial Regards,

James H. Ruhland

-- "The past, while much studied, is little read." - M.M.

"In the first and in the final analysis, so-called multiculturalists are simply Western radicals, in the Western radical tradition, with the most imperial, dogmatic, and absolutist aspirations of all." - Alan Charles Kors

My position is somewhere in between. I think that when we had free trade with Mexico and the maquiladores were thriving we had far fewer border problems for obvious reasons. It was much in our interest; and a tariff that helped keep them open would have in my judgment been a Very Good Thing. Instead, Wal-Mart essentially forced its suppliers to abandon Mexico for China in order to cut prices more. That's what Wal-Mart does, and was expected; it was much in the interest of the Wal-Mart stockholders, and gave US consumers cheaper stuff at the cost of the maquiladores.

I am not an economist; but I do believe the country would be better off if Mexican border towns had economies that thrived on some goods other than drugs.

And I completely agree that China makes decisions for political rather than economic reasons, but I have no reason to suspect that David Friedman is not fully aware of this. His view is as an economist. [And see next message.]

I believe that political strategy sometimes trumps economics; but we also must understand that the results of political decisions have profound economic effects, many not foreseen.

==

'Other countries win or lose depending on how well they serve China's interests.'

<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/
content/article/2010/09/26/AR2010092603332.html

-- Roland Dobbins

==

'We are paying in blood and treasure to stabilize Afghanistan while China is building transport and pipeline networks throughout Central Asia that will ultimately reach Kabul and the trillion dollars' worth of minerals lying underground.'

<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/
content/article/2010/09/24/AR2010092404767.html>

-- Roland Dobbins

==============

Subj: The Envy-Inspired Life

I suppose we can look forward to becoming more like ... the Russians?

One day, God sent His Angel down to visit Pavel Ivanovich.

"Pasha!", said the Angel, "The Lord God has told me to give you whatever you ask for. The only catch is that I must give twice as much to your neighbor, Lavrenti Mikhailovich."

Pasha pondered for a moment, then stated his wish: "Please make me half dead."

Rod Montgomery==monty@starfief.com

I have heard this story with other ethnic groups as the foil. "I want to be blind in one eye..."

=========

'While it’s impossible to imagine the U.S. officer corps revolting in the manner of the French in Algeria — our national traditions are far too different, and we have none of France’s lengthy history of generals refounding the republic — it’s nonetheless worth pondering that we have set up the conditions for such a revolt.'

<http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/theirs-do-and-die?nopager=1>

--- Roland Dobbins

A sense of military honor. See Lartegy's novels for more. I point our that someone did imagine this. And of course the Left imagined it a lot at one time. Remember "Seven Days in May" and "Red Alert"?

=============

 

About that "Galileo was Wrong" site --

A bit of caution is in order when looking at that "Galileo was Wrong" site.

The store for the Galileo Was Wrong site catholicintl.co.cc. The CO.CC site has a service that lets people set up their own subdomains for free under the CO.CC domain. Apparently many phishing sites use the free service to set up scam sites, and there are reports of lots of infected servers running those subdomains.

I use Comodo's personal firewall. When I looked at the Galileo was Wrong site and then clicked on a link to the PDF products in their store (to see if they charge for those), Comodo intercepted my request and warned me that several of their users had reported the CO.CC site as a possible phishing site. They were blocking on the strength of it being in the CO.CC domain, not because of the specific subdomain, so these could be innocents who have fallen into the company of wolves. On the other hand, making outrageous claims is not a bad form of social engineering, because if you can get an emotional reaction out of the target, the target shifts from rational thought to emotional reaction and might be more amenable to cooperating with some form of malware.

--Gary Pavek

 

===============

Did vulcanism do in the Neanderthals?

<http://catastrophemonitor.com
/public_html/article.php?story=20100926072708498>

-- Roland Dobbins

I certainly would not reject the hypothesis out of hand. I do not think we have very good models of the effects of volcanism on climate.

=============

<http://dvice.com/archives/2010/03/video-f-35b-sup.php>

 You know, until I saw this video, the VTOL aspects of this craft escaped me.

VTOL, stealth and supersonic.

Very nice.

John Harlow, President BravePoint

===========

Letter from England

New brain drain. <http://tinyurl.com/2bqz36v> <http://tinyurl.com/2c2nsgb> (I've already visited America to line up a position, and the head of my research group left for Germany in the spring, so I can confirm it's very real.) UK Government cap on the hiring of elite scientists creates bemusement in the academy. <http://tinyurl.com/378bh6d> The UK Borders Agency (UKBA) is now requiring that external examiners for PhDs have the legal right to reside permanently in the UK. In the past, North American academics would be recruited as serve as external examiners when they were in the UK to attend conferences. This is no longer allowed, which suggests the UK Government is quite willing to cut off its nose and the rest of its facial muscles to spite its face.

 Graduate tax now regarded as unworkable. <http://tinyurl.com/358g9d8> That doesn't mean that they will do something economically sensible...

 The HMRC proposal to have salaries paid to the Government with any remaining funds then placed in one's bank account--it's coming unwound--HMRC is notorious for its errors, and nobody trusts the UK Government. My experience is the PAYE deductions are always calculated in the Government's favour--I get a thousand dollars or so in refunds each year. <http://tinyurl.com/2umpmj9> <http://tinyurl.com/2frtju4>.

 New Labour Party leader coming. Do you want to wait? <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11344445>

 The war between science and religion. <http://tinyurl.com/39kwa2z> The things fundamentalists think are evidence for intelligent design are the result of random variation and natural selection in a lawful universe, while the things they probably regard as purely random (like the distribution of the stars and galaxies) or misleading are actually evidence for the universe being in a highly unlikely state at the big bang.

--

 Why I use a Macintosh: Eccl 12:3 "those who look through the windows see dimly" (Crossan's translation).

Harry Erwin

===========

Madison wept.

<http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/
is-it-weird-for-congress-to-consider-
the-constitutionality-of-legislation-
before-voting-on-it/>

--- Roland Dobbins

When ought they to consider it? Perhaps we need a new ruling class.

==========

"The body is essentially in real-life suspended animation with no pulse, no blood pressure, no electrical waves in the brain. We didn't find any evidence of functional impairment after the surgery."

<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
health/healthnews/8024991/
Patients-to-be-frozen-into-state-of-
suspended-animation-for-surgery.html>

-- Roland Dobbins

What will they think of next...

=======================d

 

 

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Tuesday,  September 28, 2010

Alternative to a trade war,

Jerry

It occurs to me that a trade war would not be in our best interests, since the rest of the world would punish us via the WTO.

As an alternative to a trade ware, we should begin carefully to inspect trade goods coming in from China, and charge importers for the inspections. Inspections would look for toxins in items: lead in mugs, formaldehyde in sheetrock panels, poison in protein, etc. Hiring inspectors would put people to work. Charging for the inspections would effectively raise the price of goods. And it could be justified because the Chinese government does not and perhaps cannot properly police its manufacturers.

Better than a tariff, completely understandable, and would likely find great support in a populace that does not want children's toys with toxins. And we could apply the inspections to goods from any country where toxic goods are produced.

Ed

Of course inspections have been used by many as a way to prevent competition. It would be seen as such by China. I think a 10% across the board tariff on everything imported would work better. I hasten to add that many of my libertarian and Free Trade friends are appalled at the suggestion.

============

Discovery News - Is the Sun Running Out of Juice

Dear Sir,

I came across an article on DiscoveryNews today and thought your readers might be interested. The article “Is the Sun Running Out of Juice,” by Ian O’Neill, and suggests some small further evidence for a return of a Mauder Minimum due to a declining Solar magnetic field.

See - http://news.discovery.com/space/
is-the-sun-running-out-of-juice.html 

Art Russell

There are still fewer neutrinos than we expect. Our understanding of the Sun is better than was that of the Egyptian sun worshippers with their ankhs, but it is still pretty murky.

===========

a virus attempt - 

Dear Jerry,

I am getting a variety of email from Yahoo addresses. They have [no subject] as the subject and have a link in the body of the message. THEY ARE NOT FROM THE PERSON THEY SEEM TO BE FROM. Click on that link and you will get virused! The first time I got one from someone I know is not careful online. The second from someone I know is normally very careful. Anyway, I know your readers are generally much to aware to fall into this type of simple trap but it is the first time I have seen it in a Yahoo addresses.

R, Rose

I read mail only in Plain Text which strips out all links.

There are many clever attacks, new ones all the time. Be careful out there.

=============

Year without a summer? Only in California! 

We had more summer than we wanted here in Japan - it was reported as the hottest in over 100 years. California was unusually chilly (I was in the Bay Area for a couple of weeks in August). Didn't the East Coast have a big heat wave?

On the topic of planetary temperature, here's my geek thought solution - use a sensor in space far enough away to see an entire hemisphere and use that to take the temperature.

Regards,
Dave Smith
Tokyo

==============

After the Fall records 

Dear Doctor Pournelle,

If that solar flare does come and the grid goes away for good, don't forget that there is a reinforced concrete vault in Northern California, deep under a hillside, with a 100 per cent nitrogen atmosphere, zero humidity and inscribed on sheets of stainless steel are the complete works f L. Ron Hubbard.

The Mormons have similar vaults, not sure if they use stainless steel and nitrogen.

I'll bet the Vatican does something similar. Their archivists are Jesuits, after all!

There is also the "Crypt of Civilization at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, Georgia, home to the International Time Capsule Society

http://www.oglethorpe.edu/about_us/
crypt_of_civilization/international_
time_capsule_society.asp 

From the site:

-The encyclopedic inventory of items in the Crypt includes, in a swimming pool size chamber, over 640,000 pages of micro-filmed material, hundreds of newsreels and recordings, a set of Lincoln logs, a Donald Duck doll and thousands of other items, many from ordinary daily life. There also is a device designed to teach the English language to the Crypt's finder

The ITCS is currently setting up a registry of time capsules. The society estimates there are approximately 10,000 capsules worldwide, most of them lost (see Harper's Index, November 1990). This ambitious project will be a continuing process and is one of the most important ITCS functions.=

I also recall that UCLA has an enormous archive, underground )(arts of it run under Westwood Boulevard) filled with millions of feet of film. They hope to eventually have every motion picture still in existence in the archive on film. The same with thousands of kinescopes (television saved on film, made by pointing a synchronized (with the TV scan rate of 30 frames per second) camera at the TV screen, used in the days before videotape was invented in the 1950s),

There will be records. The closest we have to the monasteries are the churches, again, and the great universities.

It would be interesting to talk to the heads of some of the surviving monastic orders. I would not b e surprised if they are doing something along these lines. They cannot have forgotten their history, can they?

Especially the ones with large chapterhouses in Ireland?

Also, most large military bases (there is one of these at March Air Force Base in Riverside, near me) have archives of film that store most if not all of the tens of millions of feet of government films going back to the 1930s.

When the Long night comes, there will be losses. We ought act prudentially, now. to mitigate those inevitable losses.

When, not if!

Petronius

============

“Without the participation of Microsoft, these criminal cases against human rights defenders and journalists would simply not be able to occur."

<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/
world/europe/12raids.html?&pagewanted=all>

-- Roland Dobbins

================w

f

g

 

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Wednesday, September 29, 2010

The KUSC pledge drive week started today. This site operates on the "public radio" model: it's free, anyone can read without logging in, and if enough people subscribe I can keep it open. Without subscribers it will go away. Fortunately for the past several years enough have subscribed. Many have become Platinum subscribers, allowing me to work on projects of my own choosing rather than having to spend time looking for freelance work (potboilers, we used to call them). Again my thanks. For a week you're going to be bombarded with exhortations to subscribe or renew your subscriptions. My great thanks to those who are already currently subscribed and renewed. This pledge drive will last a week.

Iraq and General Bel Riose 

Dear Dr. Pournelle,

I apologize for the gloom, but I'm sending this to you anyway in the hopes that you can show me how my theory is wrong.

First, here are two articles on the return to life of the insurgency in Iraq.

http://www.nytimes.com/
2010/09/28/world/middleeast/28
qaeda.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all 

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/
04/world/middleeast/04awakening.html 

And you know , of course, about the Taliban in Afghanistan. Who are invigorated precisely because they know we're not in for the long haul. They're simply waiting us out.

Do you remember General Bel Riose? He was a character in Isaac Asimov's Foundation and Empire. He won every battle, but the Empire lost the war because victory was no longer politically acceptable. Bel Riose was recalled on the very threshold of victory.

I fear we are in the same position. Because many university professionals from the sixties have staked their careers on the hypothesis that insurgencies are unwinnable. Because if they were to ever admit that this was not true, they would also have to admit that Vietnam was a war that could have been won, but was lost by choice. That they abandoned millions of people to death and enslavement.

I wouldn't expect such an admission to be forthcoming. Far easier to just tell oneself that it was unavoidable, and inevitable. Because counterinsurgencies can't be won.

And so there will be no more victories. Because those in power have staked their reputations on victories being impossible, on the theory that there are 'no military solutions' to conflicts.

And so General Petraeus is General Bel Riose. Like Hannibal, the greatest military mind in charge of the greatest military machine in history, invincible on the battlefield, who cannot win because victory is not politically feasible.

So I guess my question is: Is this avoidable? Can this sickness be cured? Or do we need to start thinking about founding Terminus? Can we prevent the Dark Ages, or should we start thinking about shortening them? And if so, how?

Respectfully,

Brian P.

=I had not seen that parallel. Interesting.

=========

Doomed Republicans

You may have seen this recently on Intellectual Conservative:

"Today the right thing is actual representation; the incoming class of Republican Party members must pull no punches for the good of the nation and their party. If the do anything less, their party will lose any support it now has and may doom the nation to one party rule in the future. This will spell the end of the Republican Party, and more importantly to American democracy and to popular sovereignty. This simple fact should be enough to motivate them to do the right thing for once. And while they are at it, they shouldn't forget to eliminate that ban on the good old fashioned incandescent light bulbs."

from: http://www.intellectualconservative.com/
2010/09/08/a-piece-of-advice-for-the-gop/ 

This is spot on. Unfortunately, the chance that the Republican party will "pull no punches" is exactly zero. The Republicans appear to be doomed. The future opposition to centralization of power in Washington will depend on whatever forms phoenix-like out of the ashes.

-Steve

==========

STRATFOR article

Dr. Pournelle, this is one of the best recent analysis of the "Afghanistan Problem" I've seen:

http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/
20100927_pakistan_and_us_exit_
afghanistan?utm_source=GWeekly&utm_
medium=email&utm_campaign=
100928&utm_content=readmore&elq=
561cc3884508479fb27ea002b51a0a50 

John F. Gothard, Ph.D.

==========

Why am I not surprised? 

See <http://allafrica.com/stories/201009210101.html

-- Why I use a Macintosh: Eccl 12:3 "those who look through the windows see dimly" (Crossan's translation).

Harry Erwin

==========

SUBJECT: Nova Scotia Vineyards boast bumper crop

Hi Jerry.

I remember your recent surprise at discovering that there are vineyards in Nova Scotia. Well, this year they're having their best season on record!

http://thechronicleherald.ca/NovaScotia/1204170.html 

Cheers,

Mike Casey Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

I find that there are many wineries in Nova Scotia. I do not know what was the case during the Little Ice Age; does anyone know if these vineyards are continuous from Viking times or "recent" (i.e. since 1875 or so)?

===========

: Re: Trade War

"Of course inspections have been used by many as a way to prevent competition. It would be seen as such by China. I think a 10% across the board tariff on everything imported would work better. I hasten to add that many of my libertarian and Free Trade friends are appalled at the suggestion."

Of course, Libertarians and Free Traders tend to confuse frenetic finance, insurance and real-estate froth as economic activity and 'services' as productive labor. Other than direct across the board tariffs, one could enact parity tariffs to imports that raise the price of imports to account for lower wage, safety, and environmental standards. Another idea is to create a system of 'sequestered accounts' where monies from sold imports is sequestered inside the destination borders, until spent on something going the other way. The greatest expansion of American (and world) productivity and wealth happened behind trade barriers, and also coincided with Victorian consensus morality, but that's another story.

J

==

RE: 100% Inspection

Emailer Ed writes: " As an alternative to a trade ware, we should begin carefully to inspect trade goods coming in from China, and charge importers for the inspections."

Already done. Read up on the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008. (Note that this Act was introduced and signed into law during the GWB administration, although the Consumer Product Safety Committee charged with enforcing it is entirely made up of Democrats.)

-- Mike T. Powers

==============

Galileo was wrong

Can the notion that the earth is fixed in the exact center of the universe be either proved or disproved? Doesn't Relativity suggest every location in the universe is equivalent to being in the center... with no way to choose between.

Seems to me, though, the idea that the earth is motionless in space is easily tossed. If the earth did not revolve, the sun would have to fly about the planet at a horrendous speed in order to yield night and day. The stars would have to be moving at vast multiples of the speed of light to complete their nightly circuit.

If the earth is not hard fixed but instead spins, it is but a small step to suggest it surely also flies through space.

Has anybody actually heard of all those Ph. D astronomers and physicists who are quoted in support of the book that makes the center / motionless claim?

Paul

If the Earth does not rotate, then the relative motion of the fixed stars exceeds the velocity of light by a very great amount. This has always seemed odd to me, and I have had relativity theorists explain the apparent motion to me many times. I thnk something is wrong with my head because I don't remember the explanation. I think Alpha Centauri doesn't travel in a circle with radius of 4 lightyears each 24 hour period. That's two lightyears an hour. Clearly it must be apparent motion, but if I chose the non-rotating Earth as my frame of reference, what does that mean?  Ah well. I have work to do.

==========

Las Vegas death ray roasts hotel guests, 

Jerry

Las Vegas death ray roasts hotel guests:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/29/las_vegas_death_ray/ 

That solar power is no joke. I remember when I had a 20-inch Newtonian, and I had it out in the sun. Just the 20-inch disk was dangerous to everyone around - especially me, trying to move it. I can just imagine what a whole building could do. Maybe they could generate power and sell it.

Ed

============

Sebelius Article

Hi Jerry,

Two thoughts on the article in the WSJ:

First, she wrote: "In the mid-1960s, for example, some claimed Medicare would put our country on the path to socialism." At least she got that part of the article right. It did.

Second, you wrote: "Insurance companies are raising premiums. If they don't they will be out of business. If they do, Kathleen Sebelius will investigate them."

I'm currently listening to the Atlas Shrugged audiobook (well done by the way). What she is defending could have come directly out of it - she implies that insurance companies will comply with the new laws, not raise premiums, and remain in business (for the public good). She's either totally ignorant of how the real world works, or is deliberately attempting to run them out of business so the government has to step in (again for the public good) and provide single-payer healthcare. I'm not sure if I'm more afraid of naivety or conspiracy.

Rand was sadly prescient.

Cheers,

doug

==

Jerry,

Ran across this the other day:

http://www.johntreed.com/Sebelius.html 

I thought it did a good job rebutting her.

Thanks, David

=============

Military role in renewable energy - 

http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/
rea/news/article/2010/09/the-us-militarys-
two-pronged-renewable-energy-initiative   

The US Military's Two-pronged Renewable Energy Initiative The US military is one of the biggest supporters of renewable energy in the country.

Energy independence means we are free of the need to go to war over oil interests. It makes us less vulnerable to energy blackmail and just makes sense. That it also may reduce pollutants generated along with electrical power is a very big plus but secondary.

I just found this a little interesting and hope you do as well.

R, Rose

I said much the same thing  about solar power satellites twenty five years ago. I still believe it.

============

The KUSC pledge drive week started today. This site operates on the "public radio" model: it's free, anyone can read without logging in, and if enough people subscribe I can keep it open. Without subscribers it will go away. Fortunately for the past several years enough have subscribed. Many have become Platinum subscribers, allowing me to work on projects of my own choosing rather than having to spend time looking for freelance work (potboilers, we used to call them). Again my thanks. For a week you're going to be bombarded with exhortations to subscribe or renew your subscriptions. My great thanks to those who are already currently subscribed and renewed. This pledge drive will last a week.

 

 

 

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Thursday, September 30, 2010

The pledge drive continues. This place operates on the Public Radio model: like KUSC, the classical music station in Los Angeles (there used to be several classical music stations; most are gone now) it's all free, but it can only continue if we get enough subscriptions and renewals. We have a fairly high renewal rate here -- I am told by others that ours is enviable -- and I thank all my long time subscribers who renew every year. =

============

Subject: Stupid architects

You'd think they'd have realized what they were doing sooner:
 http://www.theregister.co.uk/
2010/09/29/las_vegas_death_ray/ 

One look at the building as built, and it's obvious what's going to happen. At the very least, they should have oriented it differently. Now, of course, it's too late, and I doubt that the special coating will do any good

Joe

I have never met an architect who understood heat flow. Frank Lloyd Wright understood earthquake stresses, but his houses are notoriously hard to heat (and  cool for that matter, but most of them were before the wide use of home air conditioning) and often hard to live in. One local architect notoriously had to hang wet sheets in his living room to keep it livable in summer even though in theory the house had central air conditioning.

===========

Gliese 581g in the Goldilocks Zone?

<http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/
20100929/sc_afp/usastronomy
planet_20100929210707>

--- Roland Dobbins

At least in the twilight zone. (The planet is tidally locked, or apparently so)

==

Could 'Goldilocks' planet be just right for life? -

Dear Doctor Pournelle,

We have a probe about a third of the way to Pluto-

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/
newhorizons/main/index.html 

and now we know of a planet in another stellar system that is in the Habitable Zone for Life As We Know It ( I must say I find Greatly Amusing all the not so hidden assumptions in that brace of concepts) -

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/
20100929/ap_on_sc/us_sci_new_earths 

"Astronomers say they have for the first time spotted a planet beyond our own in what is sometimes called the Goldilocks zone <http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/
20100929/ap_on_sc/us_sci_new_earths#>  for life: Not too hot, not too cold. Juuuust right.

Not too far from its star, not too close. So it could contain liquid water. The planet itself is neither too big nor too small for the proper surface, gravity and atmosphere.

It's just right. Just like Earth."

II suspect that about the time (2015) that New Horizons beams images of Pluto and Charon, the first interstellar probe will be funded.

It might even be with American dollars.

That is, if the Chinese are still accepting them!

Petronius

I used to say that for what we spent after Apollo, NASA could be halfway to Alpha Centauri by now. Ah. Well. Prizes and X projects will get us there. If we choose to do it.

=============

China II

While I have Hayekian leanings, I would tend to agree with you because I don't think we should have granted Most Favored Nation Status to China. I understand MFN just means normal trading relations, but for all its significant progress, China is still not a normal nation and trade with them isn't really market based when the government can instruct their main companies who to import from and who not to, thus managing their trade in non-market ways.

I agree with you on Mexico and thought that's what NAFTA was all about, but it didn't work out the way either proponents (such as myself) or opponents thought. The "giant sucking sound" has been imports coming from China, and thus jobs going to China.

There's probably a good mostly-market.low-government intervention way of improving this, but right now we're going in the opposite direction, towards our own Corporatism. Moving away from an income tax and to a national consumption-based tax would probably be the least intrusive method, but it would be regressive by itself, and if combined with an income tax would lead to further gigantism in government, ultimately concentrating power.

In a country where people are, or should be, both consumers and producers, I don't believe in unilateral libertarianism as Dr. Friedman seemingly does, where we give not only little green slips of paper (of declining value) *and* productive industries to trading partners whose political economy is even less the product of market forces than our own. But how to fix that without getting drawn into managed economics ourselves is hard. Heck it's hard enough when our leadership basically ignores that aspect of things, and wants to manage what's left of the economy just for it's own sake, because Hayek to the contrary notwithstanding, they were never really convinced they didn't know better.

I believe if we solved that problem, we could probably solve the trade problem. But first catch the rabbit: uprooting the entire Extended Civil Service and replacing it will take more than an election or two and precinct work. Those are certainly necessary, but they're not sufficient. It'll take a lot more and I'm not sure how many people realize the difficulty of the situation we're in.

Cordial Regards,

James H. Ruhland

I long ago participated in some strategy study sessions on "hostile trade", a concept that has been around in Sino-Japanese relations since Shogun times and may have some implications for us. Political considerations often trump economic. Economic models do not often take account of political effects. So it goes.

As to the difficulty of our present situation, yes: we have been sowing the wind since before I began this site. I have been saying so ever since I started, not that if gives me any great satisfaction to be Cassandra. We continue to sow the wind, and we will continue to reap the whirlwind.

Despair is a sin,

==========

CREEPS anyway

http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/09/29/okeefe.cnn.prank/index.html?iref=NS1\

James

There seems to be no shortage of creeps. Some are on our side. One of Niven's Laws is that "There is no cause so noble that it will not attract fuggheads."

=============

Bel Riose, Belisarius and the decline of Empire 

Dearest Doctor P,

Your correspondent "Brian P" wrote for Wednesday, September 29 on perceived parallels between the fictional general Bel Riose of Isaac Asimovs FOUNDATION AND EMPIRE and General Petraeus, in regard to the Iraqi insurgencies resurgence.

Aside from the conflation of Iraqi insurgency and Vietnam, the latter not having been an insurgency after mid 1968, there is a more direct and apt historical comparison.

Asimov based Bel Riose on the Byzantine general Belisarius. whose legions, spearheaded by the heavy cavalry known as "cataphract" reconquered most of North Africa, Italy and Sicily for the Emperor Justinian. Belisarius was. for Justinian, that most dangerous of men: an overly successful general. Belisarius crowned his Italian campaign with the capture of Ravenna by ruse, feigning acceptance of a barbarian offer of the title "Western Emperor" to gain entrance to the city. Justinian found this rather interesting, and decided it was time to have Flavius Belisarius transferred to Syria, there to fight the Persians, on a much shorter leash. , Whether Bel Riose, or Belisarius, the comparison with Iraq and the failure of the cognoscenti of the moment to "believe" that an insurgency can be defeated is hardly apt or even pertinent.. It is not in our interest, once we withdraw from Iraq, that the Sunni insurgency end, or succeed.

If we use a Cold Eye to determine our interests (and we should), then an independent Iraq that is a federation of nearly independent Kurds, Shia Arabs and Sunni insurgents is that most unstable of political structures, a tripod )at least, according to Frank Herbert in DUNE, since we seem to be drawing our analogies from science Fiction). That tripod will keep Iraq from becoming a threat to its neighbors, to our regional interest's. It will also wonderfully concentrate the minds of the Iranian overlords, as having an anarchic mess just across a porous border is never a good prospect for an embattled autocracy.

Just ask Obama about that one!.

Petronius

==========

Vineyards in NS

Dear Dr. Pournelle,

According to this website: http://www.novascotialife.com/
chartermembers/winery-association-nova-scotia , grapes have been grown in Nova Scotia since 1611, when a French settler planted grapes. However, seeing that there was a war between the French and English which culminated in the casting out of the Acadians, I doubt production has been constant. The modern winery program dates back only to 1980. So, no continuous plantings dating from the Vikings, and the Nova Scotia Winery is still in its infancy.

Stay well!

Bill Grigg

Kelowna BC

===============

 

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Friday,  October 1, 2010

Climate Change: A Summary of the Science - Publications - The Royal Society

http://royalsociety.org/climate-change-summary-of-science/ 

The Royal Society in Britain has published a new document, which is interesting in that it contains little science. It reads to me as a political document, published to counter many of the claims of the "deniers".

The paper focuses on the more recent times, since 1850. The claim is made:

Measurements show that averaged over the globe, the surface has warmed by about 0.8oC (with an uncertainty of about ±0.2oC) since 1850.

Which make me interested in how accurate the thermometers were in 1850, and how many stations recorded temperature around the globe. I also did not see where this temperature rise was compared to what could be expected from causes other than man, which I would assume to be less than 0.6 degrees.

Maybe I expected too much.

Is there a single paper which contains the actual documented science behind the theory?

Randy Lea

According to Believers there are plenty of actual documented science papers including the IPCC reports; Deniers say they are much harder to find than that. I have not found any.

===========

: Orwell's 1984 and recent political statements by Salazar, Bayh, Sebelius

Note-- didn't mean to write again so soon but the following popped up. Please don't hesitate to discard if it is not of interest. ---------------------------

Jerry:

Orwell: "...imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever."

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar: The Obama administration will "keep the boot on the neck of British Petroleum." (The New York Times: "The step-on-the-neck image had the White House seal of approval.")

Orwell: ""There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party."

In today's USA Today, Sen. Evan Bayh, Democrat from Indiana, blaming his decision to retire on extremists of both parties, but Democrats most: "(they) are demanding total fealty to whatever the party agenda happens to be... the tolerance for any deviation from party orthodoxy is at an all-time low... it's 100% or nothing."

Orwell: "There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. .... always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless."

HHS's Kathleen Sebelius: Americans who dislike the new intrusion of government into health care need to be "re-educated." There will be "zero tolerance" for insurance companies who dare report the costs imposed by ObamaCare and they may be banned from the future marketplace -- and there's nothing anyone can do about it.

May be time to reread the whole book.

Paul

==========

: Planetary Systems

Dr Pournelle:

I read the news items on Gliese 581g being in the liquid water zone... in a 37 day orbit around a red dwarf. I recall that the other extrasolar planets detected are mostly if not entirely in close orbits. I understand how the tracking methods tend to pick up such planets.

My question is, how far could Sol system be spotted by our present approach?

There seems to be no shortage of close hot planets, I wonder how many homelike systems there might be that we cannot pick out.

Jim Watson

==

Habitable Planet Twenty Light Years Away

Jerry,

Astronomers at the Lick-Carnegie observatory have found a possibly habitable planet twenty light years from Earth orbiting the star Gliese. For more details go to:-

http://arxiv.org/abs/1009.5733 

Even more striking is the last sentence in the abstract which I quote in full:-

This detection, coupled with statistics of the incompleteness of present-day precision RV surveys for volume-limited samples of stars in the immediate solar neighborhood suggests that eta_Earth could well be on the order of a few tens of percent. If the local stellar neighborhood is a representative sample of the galaxy as a whole, our Milky Way could be teeming with potentially habitable planets.

John Edwards.

In a hundred years we will know all.

============

: Study finds first evidence that ADHD is genetic - Yahoo! News

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100930/hl_nm/us_adhd_genes

Hardly astonishing. We're learning a lot about heredity.

But why is there so much MORE ADHD now?

==========

Shifting Money, etc.

Jerry,

Two interesting shifts are happening -- businesses are putting the President and his party in an interesting position and so are his donors. McDonalds is asking for a waiver or it will no longer offer health insurance to its employees: http://online.wsj.com/article
/SB1000142405274870343
1604575522413101063070.html?
mod=WSJ_hpp_LEFT
WhatsNewsCollection 

I like this line, "The move is one of the clearest indications that new rules may disrupt workers' health plans as the law ripples through the real world." As an aside, this creates an interesting conundrum. If McDonalds gets a waiver and another company does not, that opens a debate about the Federal Government having de facto power to regulate business through its waiver policies on health care. Whatever the Obama Administration does with this, it seems to me that -- eventually -- they are going to wonder how they painted themselves into another corner.

In other news, George Soros -- a wealthy social idealist who stands against almost everything I stand for -- ended his financial support of the Democratic Party. This seems significant to me. Soros no longer sees the Democratic Party as a useful tool to further his personal agenda. Peter Lewis -- another billionaire -- is joining Soros in this matter, but I am not as familiar with Lewis as I am with Soros. http://www.contracostatimes.com/
rss/ci_16210180?source=rss&nclick_check=1  Perhaps this will be a lesson for the political left in what happens when the money stops flowing and policies break down -- and not necessarily in that order?

<http://www.contracostatimes.com/
rss/ci_16210180?source=rss&nclick_check=1>  The headline on Drudge may have something to do with Soros decision, "They [Congress] Couldn't Even Pass a Budget!". The headline linked to this story: http://apnews.myway.com/article/20100930/D9II12900.html  So...they think that they can just not do their jobs and then tell their electorate that they should re-elect them so that they can not do their jobs for another term? I don't think so. I think John Kerry sums up the sentiment: "We have an electorate that doesn't always pay that much attention to what's going on so people are influenced by a simple slogan rather than the facts or the truth or what's happening." http://online.wsj.com/article/
SB10001424052748703882
404575520044037709702.html?
mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop=  So, perhaps the Democrats are betting their constituents will continue to sling slogans and use glandular reasoning? Perhaps their electorate will, but I do not think those reactions will favor the democrats. The old Animal Farm technique of not wanting the farmers to come back will only play out for so long, in my humble opinion.

----

BDAB, Joshua Jordan, KSC

Come now, no one is more equal than anyone else, except of course for...

============

"West of Honor" & Bayonet Training

Dr. Pournelle,

Just started re-reading West of Honor--great book! The part where Captain Falkenberg discusses having troops fix bayonets to escort the convicts off the ship after they land was still a fresh memory when this appeared: One less skill for soldiers to master at boot camp: bayonet training <http://www.csmonitor.com/
USA/Military/2010/0928/
One-less-skill-for-soldiers-to-master-
at-boot-camp-bayonet-training>  .

The article notes this wonderful bit:

In 2004, with ammunition running low, a British unit launched a bayonet charge toward a trench outside of Basra, Iraq, where some 100 members of the Mahdi Army militia were staging an attack. The British soldiers later said that though some of the insurgents were wounded in the bayonet charge itself, others were simply terrified into surrender.

As they say in Minnesota: Oof-da!

Speaking of books with the word “Honor” in the title, I’d love to see you do a story or twelve set in David Weber’s “Honorverse!”

Robin Juhl

I hardly have time to write in my own universe, much less someone else's.

=============

 

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Saturday, October 2, 2010

: Chinese Power Grab

Most interesting... This looks like the kind of investments in production of national power the United States should be making.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/
fears-of-chinese-land-grab-as-beijings-
billions-buy-up-resources-2095451.html 

--------

BDAB, <http://lh3.ggpht.com/_tYl4r7oh9Nk/TJ
YpvE60WsI/AAAAAAAAADg/j7MVFTS
YRPM/67513C11EE2B21388647CDB5
97A11E33.png

Joshua Jordan, KSC Percussa Resurgo 

“The opinion of ten thousand men is of no value if none of them know anything about the subject.” —Marcus Aurelius

“You have have no interest in politics, but that emphatically does not insure that politics has no interest in you; you ignore it at your peril.” —Jerry Pournelle

==========

Interesting Nut Strategy

Jerry,

I found this article interesting, it says a lot that you might read in a lot of separate articles: http://thehill.com/opinion/columnists/dick-morris/121487-obliterating-a-generation

<http://thehill.com/opinion/columnists
/dick-morris/121487-obliterating-a-generation>  Put simply, the Democrats have put nothing on the table. Once again, their reforms led to consequences that they did not expect, and they do not know how to deal with these. Now that Democratic candidates face a failure of their policies -- or lack thereof in some cases -- and the same candidates have no fresh ideas, popular alternatives, etc they will use negative campaign adds. Many of these adds are moralistic in nature, and seem designed to garner emotional outbursts from other social idealists.

When I traveled, I came to understand this mentality. It seems prevalent among people who exist on the lower socioeconomic strata and it seems pervasive -- I noted this mentality in every country I've ever lived in among the aforementioned strata. I do not seem to note this mentality in other strata, save for the devices usefulness in condescending to speak to certain sections of people where this device works. The device, quite simply put, equates to "if you ain't so good, then I ain't so bad".

But, it's still too soon to pull out the violin -- in my humble opinion. Maybe we will -- as a Republic -- come to our senses? It seems that we may do so. Once we get through this election, successfully, we will need to get through the next congressional election. These two elections seem crucial to me if we are going to take back what we lost -- our Republic.

--------

BDAB,

  Joshua Jordan, KSC Percussa Resurgo

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Sunday, October 3, 2010      

: Heinlein comments from the grave

Dr. Pournelle:

RAH's prescience is amazing in light of Steven Colbert's "testimony" before Congress:

In To Sail Beyond the Sunset, Chapter 24, "Decline and Fall," copyright 1987, Heinlein writes

But there seems to have been an actual decline in rational thinking. The United States had become a place where entertainers and professional athletes were mistaken for people of importance. They were idolized and treated as leaders; their opinions were sought on everything and they took themselves just as seriously -- after all if an athlete is paid a million or more per year, he knows he is important . . . so his opinions of foreign affairs and domestic policies must be important, too, even though he proves himself to be both ignorant and subliterate every time he opens his mouth. (Most of his fans were just as ignorant and unlettered; the disease was spreading.)

Heinlein wrote that 23 years ago and things have not improves since.

--

"Newspapers are unable, seemingly, to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilization." - George Bernard Shaw

Pete Nofel Pete@CNCReport.com

==========

: Madam Sebelius, the grand inquisitor

Saw the same article you did. The second paragraph shows she has absolutely no idea of what she is talking about:

" In the mid-1960s, for example, some claimed Medicare would put our country on the path to socialism. "

When congress decided they knew how to price medical treatment, the system started to go off the rails and got us where we are today. Who in their right mind, thinks congress has clue what an xray should cost?

Phil

===========

Navy Connects Buoy to Power Grid at Hawaii Marine Corps Base - 

Jerry,

http://www.navy.mil/search/display.asp?story_id=56229 

Navy Connects Buoy to Power Grid at Hawaii Marine Corps Base

This sounds like one of your books. Hopefully this is another little step in the right direction.

R, Rose

I preen.

============

hyperthermia in babies

Jerry,

A friend is a neo-natial doc at the level 4 trauma center in silicon valley. They routinely cool down newborns to allow their systems to fight off birth problems. Apparently, the low temperature slows down the chemical reactions and allows the baby time to fight invaders etc.

Phil

I think you mean hypothermia, but that's very interesting.

============

'Then it dawned on me. My iPad had just flown off the back of my car at 70 MPH and crash-landed on the Interstate.'

<http://comicsansrelief.com/2010/09/the-flying-ipad/>

- Roland Dobbins

Rugged little beast...

==========

Designing an [Even More] Insecure Internet.

<http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/designing-an-insecure-internet/>

---- Roland Dobbins

============

"Moon Shots"

Did you see this by Thomas L. Friedman from the NY Times Op-Ed section:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/26/
opinion/26friedman.html?src=me&ref=general 

China is doing moon shots. Yes, that’s plural. When I say “moon shots” I mean big, multibillion-dollar, 25-year-horizon, game-changing investments. China has at least four going now: one is building a network of ultramodern airports; another is building a web of high-speed trains connecting major cities; a third is in bioscience, where the Beijing Genomics Institute this year ordered 128 DNA sequencers — from America — giving China the largest number in the world in one institute to launch its own stem cell/genetic engineering industry; and, finally, Beijing just announced that it was providing $15 billion in seed money for the country’s leading auto and battery companies to create an electric car industry, starting in 20 pilot cities. In essence, China Inc. just named its dream team of 16-state-owned enterprises to move China off oil and into the next industrial growth engine: electric cars.

As Mr. Heinlein said, mankind will go to the planets and the stars. There is no guarantee that the language spoken there will be English.

==

China 

Regarding the China threat to our economy, there was a similar fear during the 1976-1990 time period, that Japan was buying up the USA (Rockefeller center), that Japanese economic policy was superior to US policy, that Japan was going to surpass the USA. James Fallows became famous for writing a book about the superiority of the Japanese economy and business culture, he even moved his family to Japan in order to study the place up close. We all know how that turned out, 20 years of economic problems from 1991 to 2010, a declining birthrate, and the abandonment of Japan as the economic model for the USA to emulate. A big part of the praise for Japan back in the 1980s was that Japan was full of engineers and devoid of lawyers, and it was the oppposite in the USA. Ironically, it was the lack of lawyers in Japan that has prevented them from protecting stockholder rights, modernizing the consumer economy, securing more economic rights for working women, attacking government corruption, and from functioning as more than a Hi-Tec feudal economy. The China threat today is like the Japan threat of the 1980s. China’s internal problems: its corruption, lack of infrastructure, lack of transparency, lack of modern criminal justice systems, lack of a civil legal system protecting property and intellecual rights, lack of freedom, and 800 million people living in third world conditions, will prevent China from surpasssing the USA, even as Japan failed back in the 1980s. The only way China will surpass the USA is if we elect governments that continue to transform the US into a French European style Socialist state that kills GDP growth and causes long term 10% unemployment.

===========

IQ 

Jerry,

The discussion on the future belonging to the high IQ folks is interesting. I’ve taken three IQ tests over my lifetime, and the average of them is also the middle test score of 143, so I’m assuming it’s fairly accurate. Anyway, although I’m probably on the low end of the folks who frequent Chaos Manor what I have found over the years of working with Scientists, Really Smart Programmers and Really Smart Engineers is that I serve a really great purpose. Most of the really smart people I work with, have trouble communicating with the average person. I’ve found a niche in that I’m able to bridge that gap, taking the high level discussions of the really smart folks and putting it in terms the rest of us can understand and put to use.

Strange talent…but I’ve gotten to be pretty decent at it. And the funny thing is many folks have decided that I am the smart guy, because of that talent…which clearly isn’t the case.

Tracy Walters, CISSP

IQ is the best single predictor we have for performance in tasks that use symbol manipulation and complex abstract tasks. Best single predictor doesn't mean it's all that good, and a combination of data such as was used in the University of Washington Grade Prediction Program is considerably better. Alas the court forbade use of the Grade Prediction Program because it predicted lower grades for certain racial groups although there were no racial questions on the test. Since the program was largely used to predict grades in different majors and thus guide students in their choices its loss was seen as unfortunate by many.

I have made much of my living for most of my life explaining complex ideas to relatively smart people. Actually that's pretty well what science fiction writers do, and of course I do science fact as well. I've also been an advisor to political leaders, which is pretty much the same job.

==========

Subject: Stephen Colbert testifies before Congress

Jerry,

If Congress had any respect for itself, they would not have invited a comedian to testify, if Colbert had any respect for himself, he would not have come. If I believed in conspiracy theories, I might think Pelosi and the other clowns were trying to turn Congress into Ringling Bros., Barnum and Bailey North. Maybe the simple answer is really that they ARE that stupid…after all, Al Franken is one of their own.

"He comes before the committee, he has a point of view, he can bring attention to an important issue like immigration," the House Speaker [Nancy Pelosi] said. "I think it's great." [NYDN <http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/2010/09/26/2010-09-26_house_majority_leader_steny_hoyer_stephen_colbert_was_an_embarrassment.html#ixzz10fmijTL5>  ]

Tracy Walters, CISSP

===============

Gun Dealer Gets Prison for Selling to Illegal Immigrant; Illegal 'Middle Man' Not Charged

Dr Pournelle,

In case you haven't found anything about which be disgusted today, take a look at this.

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/09/09/
texas-gun-dealer-gets-prison-sentence-
selling-gun-illegal-immigrant-id-illegal/ 

"Gun rights advocates are up in arms that a Texas gun dealer was sentenced to six months in prison for selling a firearm to an illegal immigrant, but a "middle-man" who bought the gun for the immigrant -- and who was in the U.S. illegally himself, but had a valid driver's license -- was never arrested, charged or deported in the case.

Paul Copeland, 56, a Vietnam veteran, was sentenced to prison time and two years probation in federal court last week for selling a gun to an undocumented alien, Hipolito Aviles, at the Texas Gun Show in Austin in January.

But Aviles wasn't the man who handed Copeland the money for the gun. That man was Leonel Huerta Sr., who presented as identification the valid Texas driver's license he had obtained before his visa expired in 2007."

I guess we shouldn't be surprised by this. It wouldn't happen in most parts of Texas, but Austin is heavily Democratic and left-leaning. Is this a "Sow the winds" moment?

I also find it curious that this hasn't received much press.

Matt Kirchner Houston, TX

==============

The Regulation Tax Keeps Growing (in wsj)

"One out of every three dollars earned in the U.S. goes to pay for or comply with federal laws and regulations, and new policies enacted in 2010 for health care and financial services will increase this burden."

Do our morons in DC remember why the revolution started?

Phil

Taxed Enough Already

===========

: A view of the solar system by Aliens

This is interesting. A simulation of what an alien civilisation might see from our solar system.

http://physicsbuzz.physicscentral.com/
2010/09/aliens-eye-view-of-solar-system.html 

It may be possible that ET already know about Earth just by looking at the solar system.

sd.

=============

Border Patrol/TSA

Jerry,

This year my wife and I have been lucky enough to do some traveling. We have gone through TSA security 8 times and US Customs/Border Patrol checkpoints twice. Someone wrote you complaining about being questioned by the Border Patrol. The questions they asked my wife and me were: “How long were you gone?” and “Did you enjoy your trip?” I don’t consider those to be intrusive questions.

The TSA agents may be curt at times, but I can’t blame them. If I had to deal with never ending lines of idiots all day, every day, I’d be curt too.

Three incidents:

In Atlanta, the TSA agent was saying: “Open your passport to the picture page” over and over, interspersed with “The picture page is the page with your picture”. Yet I saw three people hand him passports either not open or opened in the middle.

There are signs up about the amount of liquid that can be carried on a plane and you would have to have lived under a rock for the last three years to not know the rules. Yet, I saw a man with a pint sized bottle of shampoo arguing that it was only partially full and that the TSA agent should get a measuring cup and check to see if it was over three ounces.

The person in front of me went thru the metal detector which buzzed. When the TSA agent asked him about any metal, he pulled up his shirt tail to show a belt with a large metal buckle. He was sent back through the detector and told to place all metal items in the basket going through the x-ray. He removed the belt, but when he went back through the detector it buzzed again. The TSA agent asked him about any metal and he pulled up his shirt sleeve to reveal a large metal watch with a metal band. The TSA agent sent him back telling him to place all metal items in a basket going through the X-ray. He went through a third time and it buzzed again! At that point I snapped at him saying that if he was too stupid to remove all metal items, he was too stupid to fly. The TSA agent told me to come on though the metal detector and sent him back so I don’t know what set it off the third time.

Full disclaimer, I am a Federal Employee, but the Border Patrol/Customs/TSA Agents did not know that. Luckily I only deal with other Federal employees and not with the public.

Mike

Then there is the Burbank case where the TSA was afraid of the yogurt. When your job is to convince citizens they are subjects, there will be controversy. How much safety we buy with this is questionable. As for instance the attempt to confiscate the Medal of Honor from a retired general on the grounds that it was a potential weapon. Now there's a TSA agent who deserves an exciting new career in  concrete breaking...

============

Global Average surface temperature - the answer is...

The first overarching question, of course, is what is meant by the ‘‘global average surface temperature’’? The National Research Council (NRC) [2005, pp. 19 and 21] report provides a definition as

‘‘According to the radiative-convective equilibrium concept, the equation for determining global average surface temperature of the planet is

dH/dt = f - T'/lamda

where H. . .. . .is the heat content of the land-ocean-atmosphere system. . ... Equation (1) describes the change in the heat content where f is the radiative forcing at the tropopause, T' is the change in surface temperature in response to a change in heat content, and lamda is the climate feedback parameter [Schneider and Dickinson, 1974], also known as the climate sensitivity parameter, which denotes the rate at which the climate system returns the added forcing to space as infrared radiation or as reflected solar radiation (by changes in clouds, ice and snow, etc.).’’ [5] Thus T is the ‘‘global average surface temperature,’’ and T' is a departure from that temperature in response to a radiative forcing f. It appears in equation (1) above as a thermodynamic proxy for the thermodynamic state of the Earth system. As such, it must be tightly coupled to that thermodynamic state. Specifically, changes in T must be proportional to changes in the radiation emitted at the top of the atmosphere. However, where is this temperature and its change with time, T', diagnosed, and is it closely coupled? [6] At its most tightly coupled, T is the radiative temperature of the Earth, in the sense that a portion of the radiation emitted at the top of the atmosphere originates at the Earth’s surface. However, the outgoing longwave radiation is proportional to T to the 4th power. A 1 degree C increase in the polar latitudes in the winter, for example, would have much less of an effect on the change of longwave emission than a 1degree C increase in the tropics. The spatial distribution matters, whereas equation (1) ignores the consequences of this assumption. A more appropriate measure of radiatively significant surface changes would be to evaluate the change of the global average of T to the 4th power. [7] In most applications of (1), T is not a radiative temperature, but rather the temperature at a single level of the atmosphere, usually close to the ground. The CCSP report (2006) presents three separate analyses of the global surface temperature trend that use land- and ocean-based observations to evaluate T'.

Etc.

http://pielkeclimatesci.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/r-321.pdf 

(And the paper concludes.)

This paper presents reasons why the surface temperature is inadequate to determine changes in the heat content of the Earth’s climate system.

---------

-Joe

I am still looking for where the temperature balance between the very hot interior and the cooler biosphere takes place. How much heat flow is there from the hot interior? Is it heating or cooling? We know that heat goes in. Is the interior temperatue constant? Is that a dynamic constancy? I don't believe in perfect adiabatic systems. Yet I find little about any of that in the climate models. Perhaps it is trivial, but I would not assume so off hand. The interior of the Earth is HOT compared to the surface.  Why?

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IF YOU SEND MAIL it may be published; if you want it private SAY SO AT THE TOP of the mail. I try to respect confidences, but there is only me, and this is Chaos Manor. If you want a mail address other than the one from which you sent the mail to appear, PUT THAT AT THE END OF THE LETTER as a signature. In general, put the name you want at the end of the letter: if you put no address there none will be posted, but I do want some kind of name, or explicitly to say (name withheld).

Note that if you don't put a name in the bottom of the letter I have to get one from the header. This takes time I don't have, and may end up with a name and address you didn't want on the letter. Do us both a favor: sign your letters to me with the name and address (or no address) as you want them posted. Also, repeat the subject as the first line of the mail. That also saves me time.

I try to answer mail, but mostly I can't get to all of it. I read it all, although not always the instant it comes in. I do have books to write too...  I am reminded of H. P. Lovecraft who slowly starved to death while answering fan mail. 

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