Change your opinions, keep to your principles; change your leaves, keep intact your roots.
Victor Hugo, “Thoughts,” Postscriptum de ma vie, in Victor Hugo’s Intellectual Autobiography, Funk and Wagnalls (1907) as translated by Lorenzo O’Rourke.
February 26 marks the Dominican Republic’s Independence Day.
Every now and then Paul Jacob covers “the climate.” This would fall outside of the scope of his commentary if politicians and activists would not step outside the scope of their expertise. In the real world, alas, “climate change” and “anthropogenic global warming” are huge political issues, driving trillions of dollars in “research” and, increasingly, in mitigation policies. Costly, sometimes horrendously destructive and dangerous policies.
So “Fixation on CO2 Ignores Real Driver of Temperature, Experts Say,” a recent article by Katie Spence in The Epoch Times is worth consulting for a contrarian take.
The current pseudo-consensus driven by massive coordinated propaganda holds that increases in atmospheric carbon is the main destabilizer to past low temperatures, which are almost unaccountably regarded as ideal. Ms. Spence notes that the cold temperatures of pre-industrial Europe were not pleasant. But then gets to a major point:
“If emissions of CO2 stopped altogether, it would take many thousands of years for atmospheric CO2 to return to ‘pre-industrial’ levels,” the Royal Society states in a report on its website. The organization describes itself as a “fellowship of many of the world’s most eminent scientists.”
“Surface temperatures would stay elevated for at least a thousand years, implying a long-term commitment to a warmer planet due to past and current emissions,” the report states. “The current CO2-induced warming of Earth is therefore essentially irreversible on human timescales.”
If this be true, then a lot follows. But would politics actually follow the consequences of this and other arguments? There is a social addiction, at present, to the AGW claims about CO2.
The article relies heavily on the work of Ian Clark, emeritus professor at the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Ottawa, who argues that CO2’s driving of climate is only apparent; in actuality is follows temperature changes “It lags by about 800 years.”
“If we completely cut out emissions, CO2 would stop rising at its current rate,” Mr. Clark said. “But it would probably continue to rise to a certain point, and then it could come down. But that would be driven by temperature.”
Mr. Clark said that in different parts of the world and at different times of the year, CO2 fluctuates “between 15 and 20 percent,” and that’s driven by the temperature of the seasons.
“If we start having cooler summers and colder winters, those fluctuations would start driving CO2 further down. But overall, climate is going to do whatever the sun dictates,” he said.
Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, “Control or Economic Law,” Zeitschrift für Volkswirtshaft, Sozialpolitik und Verwaltung, Volume XXIII (1914): 205–71; John Richard Mez, Ph.D., translator.
The monopolist . . . never has unlimited control; he merely has the choice within the laws of price of different ‘economically possible’ price levels. He can select that price at which the combination of profit for each article, and the number of articles to be sold at that price, are likely to promise the greatest total profit, but he cannot exert his ‘power’ in any other way than in conformity with the laws of price, for it is his behavior that establishes the ‘price law,’ namely the conditions of the amount offered at a given price level, but never can he counteract the laws of price.
February 25, 1805, saw the birth of Angelina Emily Grimké Weld, American abolitionist and feminist. She was the younger sister of the equally famed Sarah Moore Grimké.
On February 25, 1870, the first African-American entered Congress to serve in the U. S. Senate.
Hiram Rhodes Revels (Sep 27, 1827 – Jan 16, 1901) was a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, a Republican politician, and college administrator. Born free in North Carolina, he later lived and worked in Ohio, where he voted before the Civil War. Revels (pictured above) was elected as the first African American to serve in the United States Senate, and was the first African American to serve in the U.S. Congress. He represented Mississippi in the Senate in 1870 and 1871 during the Reconstruction era.
In Law #46 of February 25, 1947, the Allied Control Council formally proclaimed the dissolution of Prussia.
Our imagination is struck only by what is great; but the lover of natural philosophy should reflect equally on little things.
Alexander von Humboldt, Equinoctial Regions of America (1814-1829).
On February 24, 1917, United States ambassador to the United Kingdom, Walter Hines Page, was shown the intercepted Zimmermann Telegram, in which Germany offered to give the American Southwest back to Mexico were Mexico to declare war on the United States.
On February 24, 1803, the Supreme Court, in Marbury v. Madison, established the principle of judicial review.
One Big Challenge, more like: the contempt university policymakers routinely show for the speech of members of disfavored groups, if and when they say things that members of favored groups dislike.
Lat points to a decision, last month, by the Law School State Senate of Columbia Law School. The organization denied official recognition to a group formed to combat antisemitism, Law Students Against Antisemitism.
Reason: some pro-Palestinian students objected to LSAA’s definition of “antisemitism.”
The objection is cause for debate, sure, but not for preventing an organization from formally operating. Fortunately, after much attention was paid to the Senate’s decision by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and others, the Senate reversed itself.
In addition to bad publicity, one thing that may help improve prospects for free speech on campus is a new rule issued by the American Bar Association,
Standard 208 requires law schools that want to be accredited by the ABA to “protect the rights of faculty, students, and staff to communicate ideas that may be controversial or unpopular.” This requirement is more encompassing than existing (if often ignored) protections of academic freedom for faculty members.
The ABA’s action is a big step, but not sufficient, Lat says. The cultures of our schools must change too.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, “Control or Economic Law,” Zeitschrift für Volkswirtshaft, Sozialpolitik und Verwaltung, Volume XXIII (1914): 205–71; John Richard Mez, Ph.D., translator.
[T]here is one . . . thing that not even the most imposing dictate of power will accomplish: It can never effect anything in contradiction to the economic laws of value, price, and distribution; it must always be in conformity with these; it cannot invalidate them; it can merely confirm and fulfill them.
On February 23, 1898, Émile Zola was imprisoned in France after writing J’accuse, a letter accusing the French government of anti-Semitism and wrongfully imprisoning Captain Alfred Dreyfus. Zola was a leading force in extending realism to the novel.
Fifty-eight years earlier, Austrian economist Carl Menger was born.
Menger [shown above] would go on to contribute to the development of the theory of marginal utility, which supplanted cost-of-production theories of value in economics, in his first book, translated into English as Principles of Economics. Though expert in mathematics (he served as tutor in economics and statistics to Archduke Rudolf von Habsburg, the Crown Prince of Austria, starting not long after the publication of the Principles), his approach to marginal theory was the least mathematical of his famous “co-discovers” of the principle, William Stanley Jevons and Leon Walras. Rooted in a subjective theory of value, it was the most realistic and least model-based of the marginalist revolutionaries, and he was most interested in price formation, not “price determination,” which focused almost exclusively on equilibrium conditions. He developed an evolutionary theory of money, as well. In his second book, he expanded upon invisible hand processes in society — made most famous in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) and contributed the opening salvo in what came to be known as the Methodenstreit, in which he attacked the misuse of historical method in economics by the technocratic “socialists of the chair” in the German-speaking world. Menger’s approach could be considered a kind of theoretical realism, as opposed the operationalism that was made famous a century later by Milton Friedman.
Zola died in 1902; Menger died in 1921.