Report Card

 “If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it’s free.” O'Rourke


Went to the Osher welcome last night. Back at school. Funny. The students are the same.

Republicans lost in Ky and Va. Lot of angles but one is that Trump is wearing on people. 
Another is the national relentless lying in D.C. and in the Press. It may be working. When did anyone in America think that secret hearings would be ok?



Our wants and desires keep growing, evidently without end, and therefore so do our economies. But our use of the earth’s resources does not. With the help of innovation and new technologies, economic growth in America and other rich countries — growth in all of the wants and needs that we spend money on — has become decoupled from resource consumption. This is a recent development and a profound one.--McAffee


Another affront to social justice: A person whose looks are one standard deviation above average attains 0.4 years more schooling than an otherwise identical average-looking individual. Enter the Bureau of Scarring.

Ideology has become all-encompassing. We are interested only in concepts. Practical economic problems, like how to structure the electric utilities in California to maximum efficiency, are never discussed. Maybe there's not enough outrage potential in them.

Paul Krugman has written, “All that matters for the gains from trade are the prices at which you trade — it makes absolutely no difference what forces lie behind those prices.” Is that true?

Roberts on Talleyrand: 'Talleyrand flees the Reign of Terror, goes to England and then to America, returns to France in 1796 and manages to become foreign minister within a year.

And stays foreign minister or in the diplomatic sphere in some way or another for the rest of his life. He thereby met almost all the important people in Europe and was at the table when all the great decisions were made. He was born an aristocrat and was later an unfrocked bishop. He had a lame foot rather like Byron and Goebbels which apparently turns you into a sex maniac; he turned his niece into his mistress which I think today would have him defenestrated but, nonetheless, no one seemed to hold that against him either.'

“There is no greater threat to humankind,” Liz Plank announces on the first page of her book For the Love of Men, “Than our current definitions of masculinity.” A bold claim. “Toxic masculinity,” Plank claims, underpins vast amounts of suffering across the globe.

U.S. charges that Saudi Arabia used Twitter Inc. employees to spy on social-media users are the latest allegations that authorities in the kingdom have used the platform’s popularity to crack down on critics. (wsj)

From Brian:



                               Report Card

This week, the Department of Education released the 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) assessment results, often called the Nation’s Report Card. For a nation obsessed with education, willing to pay almost anything for it and committed to the teachers and the union that control it, it should be a startling, worrisome document. It won't be.

Some points:
Scores were up a fraction in 4th-grade math but dropped in 4th-grade reading, 8th-grade reading, and 8th-grade math. Indeed, the drop in 8th-grade reading was very big — more than 3 scale points. It was the largest change in scores ever seen for that test.
While there were some test score gains (particularly in math) between 2000 and 2010, NAEP performance has stagnated since that time, with the 2015 results showing the first widespread declines in NAEP. The bulk of the declines are coming from the lowest-scoring students. In 4th-grade reading and in 8th-grade reading and math, declines are larger for lower-performing students.

The South’s Over-Representation in the Army

The difference between an enemy and adversary is an adversary plays by established and mutually agreed upon rules.--anon

Another meal out, this one a Tessarro.

In the postseason, there were 252 pitches called strikes outside the zone and 195 called balls that were in the strike zone. That’s 447 missed calls out of 5,459 called balls and strikes, a missed-call rate of 8.2 percent. That’s better than the regular-season miss rate of 9.1 percent, but those are still hundreds of errant calls influencing game outcomes.

On a recent episode of bi'l waraqa wa'l qalam ("With Paper and Pen"), an Egyptian news program that airs on TenTV, its host, Nasha't al-Deyhi, said:

"Leaked information confirms that Turkey is a terrorist state; it supports terrorists — including with weapons. It supports terrorists with weapons. This time, however, not in Syria ... Today's leak confirms without doubt that Erdogan, his state, his government, and his party are transferring weapons from Turkey to — this is a shock, to where you may ask — to Nigeria; and to whom? — to the Boko Haram organization."

(From Don)

A history professor from Rutgers on the real root of our problems:  “the invention of agriculture.” Agriculture, she writes, led to longer work weeks, poor health, “environmental degradation,” and “income inequality. Hunter-gatherer life isn’t sounding so bad.” Think about that mindset for a minute.

Congresswoman Maxine Waters said: "Impeachment is about whatever the Congress says it is. There is no law."

Interviews with opioid dealers in Philadelphia yielded these surprising results.  Most of the dealers didn’t know the ultimate origins of the products they sold, or were not informing on local wholesalers who might know. One dealer was more forthcoming and said he bought in bulk online from business to business websites based in China, which perhaps is where many of the dealers source their products.


                    The South’s Over-Representation in the Army

A study of an interesting phenomenon.

Free trade has gradually shifted the burden of military service onto the American South. While trade shocks generally lead to local increases in US Army enlistment, there are two different regional dynamics that concentrate this effect in the South. First, trade-related job losses are disproportionately concentrated in this region, where manufacturing jobs gradually migrated during the second half of the twentieth century. Second, the South’s “military tradition,” a relatively youthful population, and weak labor unions, combine to translate trade shocks into larger spikes in Army enlistment than the rest of the country. This paper uses county-level data from 1996–2010 to demonstrate the importance of meso-level, regional factors for understanding the location of trade shocks, as well as how communities adjust to such economic dislocations. We find that trade-related job losses account for roughly 7% of the South’s over-representation in the Army during our period of study.

This is from a study somewhere and I think is very shallow. You tend to measure what you are able to.

Trump, Clinton and Dershowitz

The failure of socialism in countries around the world can be traced to one critical defect: it is a system that ignores incentives."--Perry

Dinner with Kelly Meade at Casbah. She was in China for three weeks.

The abuse of power, making everyone suffer for a "good idea," is personified by Daylight Savings. I am stumbling through its effects now, trying to retrain my brain so that we can revere the sainted Benjamin Franklin.

In May 2014, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius declared during a joint appearance with Secretary of State John Kerry that "we have 500 days to avoid climate chaos."

It is astonishing that an economic system that has enslaved and impoverished nation after nation and was responsible for more than 100 million murders in the 20th century is portrayed as utopian, and that capitalism, which has liberated hundreds of millions from poverty, is depicted as evil.--David Limbaugh

An article on the S.A. rugby for David:
https://www.microsoft.com/inculture/sports/springboks-rugby/?ocid=AID2453188_QSG_357846

Uber still managed to lose more than $1 billion despite increased earnings in the most recent quarter.

A new National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) estimates that in the wake of the tsunami-induced Fukushima meltdown, shutting down all of Japan’s nuclear power plants actually killed far more people than it saved. Radiation from Fukushima resulted in a grand total of zero deaths. The overly cautious evacuation of the surrounding areas, on the other hand, resulted in 2,202 deaths, according to a 2018 report by Japan’s Reconstruction Agency.

On November 5, 2009, 13 people were killed and more than 30 others wounded, nearly all of them unarmed soldiers, when a U.S. Army officer goes on a shooting rampage at Fort Hood in central Texas. The deadly assault, carried out by Major Nidal Malik Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, was the worst mass murder at a U.S. military installation.

                             Trump, Clinton and Dershowitz

Impeachment is a quite specific process and the Clinton impeachment is a good example of its limits. Here is Dershowitz:

"Clinton did not commit an impeachable offense, even if he feloniously lied under oath about his sex life. Such perjury, if it occurred, would satisfy the definition of a "crime," but not meet the required Constitutional criteria of a "high crime and misdemeanor." If President Clinton committed a crime, it would be a low crime related to his sex life and comparable to the low felonies — adultery and paying off an extortionist — committed by Alexander Hamilton when he was Secretary of the Treasury. Had Hamilton paid the extortionist from Treasury funds, as he was falsely accused of doing, he would have been guilty of an impeachable high crime.

To be impeached, a president must commit a crime (misdemeanor is a species of crime) and the commission of that crime must also constitute an abuse of office. An abuse of office without an underlying crime is a political sin, but not an impeachable offense.

This very issue was debated at the Constitutional Convention, where one delegate proposed "maladministration" as the criteria for impeachment and removal of a president. James Madison, the Father of our Constitution, strongly objected on the ground that so vague and open-ended a criterion would have the president serve at the will of Congress and turn us from a Republic with a strong president into a parliamentary democracy in which the chief executive can be removed by a simple vote of no confidence. Instead, the Convention adopted strict prerequisites for impeachment: treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors. The House is no more empowered to substitute its own criteria for those enumerated in the Constitution.

Hamilton did characterize the criteria for impeachment as "political," but only in the sense that they relate to "injuries done immediately to the society itself." He then immediately rejected the view that the process should be partisan, based on "the comparative strength of parties," rather than on "the real demonstrations of innocence or guilt." He called that the "greatest danger" and demanded "neutrality toward those whose conduct may be the subject of scrutiny." Those who misquote and misunderstand Hamilton wrongly conflate the words "political," by which he meant governmental, and "partisan, " by which he meant related to the comparative strength of parties and factions.

It is difficult to imagine a greater breach of Hamilton's principles than the recent House vote along party lines (with two exceptions, both opposing impeachment) to open a formal impeachment investigation against President Trump. The vote was determined exclusively by the "comparative strength of parties," as was the vote to impeach President Bill Clinton two decades ago."

(Published in Gatestone, by Alan M. Dershowitz, the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law Emeritus at Harvard Law School and author of The Case Against the Democratic House Impeaching Trump, Skyhorse Publishing, 2019.

Turkish vs. Kurds

Self-interest isn’t greed.--many

Baltimore surprised New England and me last night. Chris and I watched the first half at Mineo's. A lot of fun.
The Steelers are exciting in a goofy way. But there is a lot of bad football out there.

After the Houston Astros fell 6-2 in game seven of the World Series to the Washington Nationals, impending free-agent pitcher Gerrit Cole gave a strange interview when reporters approached him in the locker room. “I’m not an employee of the team,” he said to an Astros spokesperson. “I guess as a representative of myself...” Cole then spoke to the media. “Obviously l learned a lot about pitching from my teammates. From the pitching coaches and pitching staff. I learned a lot more about the game from [manager] A.J. [Hinch]. And it was just a pleasure to play in the city of Houston," he said. Cole also put on a Boras Corp cap, the company of his prominent agent Scott Boras.

The Breeders’ Cup ended in a disaster on Saturday at Santa Anita Park after Mongolian Groom suffered a catastrophic injury to his left hind leg in the stretch of the $6 million Classic.

Last year there was a curious attendee at Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' annual writer's retreat, Campfire; Jeffrey Epstein's alleged 'madam,' Ghislaine Maxwell. The daughter of an accused Mossad agent who died under mysterious circumstances, Maxwell was accused of participating in Jeffrey Epstein's sexual grooming and abuse of underage girls. She was confirmed to have attended at least one (and possibly three) of the secretive Bezos get-togethers

What is Campfire? According to the report, it's an "all-expenses-paid retreat courtesy of Bezos and Amazon that is completely off the record for attendees, who often bring their spouses and partners on the free trip." It was started in 2009. The secretive conclaves have had virtually no press coverage (aside from a 2014 New York Times article), and has "largely remained under the radar," reports VICE - which notes that Maxwell's attendance "further illustrates the connections that Epstein and Maxwell maintained to the wealthy elite."

The streaming wars are starting with reruns being bought for fortunes. South Park, Seinfeld, Big Bang, The Office, Friends. There will be countless streaming services, all in the range of $15 a month. We were wondering if this might result in closer communities--an HBO house, a Disney house, a Netflix house--each house sharing their streaming service one day or several assigned hours a week with other different stream service homes.

A birth coach has been ‘ostracised’ by her professional organization after transgender activists branded as offensive a Facebook post in which she said that only women can have babies.

On this day in 1922, British archaeologist Howard Carter and his workmen discovered a step leading to the tomb of King Tutankhamen in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt.

                     Turkish vs. Kurds

Government advocates believe that intelligent managers can exert pressure in the present to effect a predictable change in the future. Hayek argued that the government never has enough information, that only the free market can provide the information to make good decisions. This is a summary of a recent Turkish vs. Kurds event--with the appropriate U.S. political posturing--that appeared in something called "TheGrayZone."

"Footage showing members of Turkey’s mercenary “national army” executing Kurdish captives as they led the Turkish invasion of northern Syria touched off a national outrage, provoking US government officials, pundits and major politicians to rage against their brutality.

In the Washington Post, a US official condemned the militias as a “crazy and unreliable.” Another official called them “thugs and bandits and pirates that should be wiped off the face of the earth.” Meanwhile, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton described the scene as a “sickening horror,” blaming President Donald Trump exclusively for the atrocities.

But the fighters involved in the atrocities in northern Syria were not just random tribesmen assembled into an ad hoc army. In fact, many were former members of the Free Syrian Army, the force once armed by the CIA and Pentagon and branded as “moderate rebels.” This disturbing context was conveniently omitted from the breathless denunciations of US officials and Western pundits.

According to a research paper published this October by the pro-government Turkish think tank SETA, “Out of the 28 factions [in the Turkish mercenary force], 21 were previously supported by the United States, three of them via the Pentagon’s program to combat DAESH. Eighteen of these factions were supplied by the CIA via the MOM Operations Room in Turkey, a joint intelligence operation room of the ‘Friends of Syria’ to support the armed opposition. Fourteen factions of the 28 were also recipients of the U.S.-supplied TOW anti-tank guided missiles.”

Sunday/ Zacchaeus

Most government transfers are not from the rich to the poor. Instead, government takes from the relatively unorganized (e.g., consumers and general taxpayers) and gives to the relatively organized (groups politically organized around common interests, such as the elderly, sugar farmers, and steel producers). The most important factor in determining the pattern of redistribution appears to be political influence, not poverty.--Lee



One way of telling the distance one has from his culture is when a person does not know of basic social agreements, like time. Today is Daylight Savings and I did not know that. So I was an hour early for Mass.
Dunkin is starting Beyond Meat this week.
On my way for coffee, a delivery robot crossed the street in front of me.
PGC members dinner last night. Very small and old. I had a surprisingly good meal with a caesar salad and some good steak.


According to data released this week by the Energy Information Administration, there were 12 new production records set in August for natural gas and oil production at the national and state levels, as America’s emergence as a world energy superpower just became even more established.


Does smoking lots of pot make you dumb or do dumb people smoke lots of pot? Mostly, the latter. Twin studies do not show the loss of cognition in pot smokers.

Itzchak Tzachi Raz has a paper coming out. The concept looks very soft to me but this is from its abstract:

This study examines the historical origins of American individualism. I test the hypothesis that local heterogeneity of the physical environment limited the ability of farmers on the American frontier to learn from their successful neighbors, turning them into self-reliant and individualistic people. Consistent with this hypothesis, I find that current residents of counties with higher agrarian heterogeneity are more culturally individualistic, less religious, and have weaker family ties. They are also more likely to support economically progressive policies, to have positive attitudes toward immigrants, and to identify with the Democratic Party. Similarly, counties with higher environmental heterogeneity had higher taxes and a higher provision of public institutions during the 19th century. This pattern is consistent with the substitutability of formal and informal institutions as means to solve collective action problems, and with the association between “communal” values and conservative policies. These findings also suggest that, while understudied, social learning is an important determinant of individualism.

 There’s a tactic spreading across the Web named after treatment usually reserved for criminals: fingerprinting. At least a third of the 500 sites Americans visit most often use hidden code to run an identity check on your computer or phone. Websites from CNN and Best Buy to porn site Xvideos and WebMD are dusting your digital fingerprints by collecting details about your device you can’t easily hide. It doesn’t matter whether you turn on “private browsing” mode, clear tracker cookies or use a virtual private network. Some even use the fact you’ve flagged “do not track” in your browser as a way to fingerprint you. (from the WashPo)


                         Zacchaeus

Today's gospel has Zacchaeus, the small tax collector, climb a tree to see Jesus in Jerico. There all sorts of storylines here: Jerico below sea level and Jerusalem on the hill, Jerico being one of the world's oldest cities (at least 8ooo years before Christ), the value of a man determined by his works, the specificity of the man's size. But here is a popular children's song:

"Zacchaeus was a wee little man,
And a wee little man was he.
He climbed up in a sycamore tree
For the Lord he wanted to see.

And as the Savior passed that way
He looked up in the tree and he said,
'Zacchaeus you come down, For I'm going to your house today!'
For I'm going to your house today!

Zacchaeus was a wee little man,
But a happy man was he,
For he had seen the Lord that day
And a happy man was he;
And a very happy man was he.”

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Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue. -- Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld

Happy Birthday, Chris!

Went to Eddie V's for birthday dinner with Max, Abby, Alissa, and Thomas.
Mom was up really early and drove down for one last try in organizing the guys from Wheeling. There is a competitor. "Almost seven, West Virginia..."
Stancey is the lead author of an article accepted for publication in Injury, the journal of the British Trauma Society.

The Agriculture Department projects that farm incomes will reach $88 billion in 2019 but nearly 40% of that — $33 billion — will come from trade aid, disaster assistance, the farm bill and insurance indemnities, according to a new report by the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF).

The evidence ... overwhelmingly supports the case for easier migration and falsifies the arguments against it, particularly what we might call the popular ones. It is not true that immigrants take jobs away from the indigenous population; in fact, immigration leads to higher levels of economic activity and more employment opportunities. Immigrants do not disproportionately live off welfare benefits — the exact opposite is true, and they make a net contribution to the national treasury.--Davies

Re: the quote above. When vice no longer cares, it reverts to simple mendacity.

Calavera, n.

‘A representation of a human skull or skeleton made for or associated with the Mexican celebration, Día de Muertos (Day of the Dead); esp. (in earlier use) a caricature or satirical drawing in the style of Mexican printmaker José Guadalupe Posada (1852–1913); (in recent use also) a three-dimensional decorative skull or skeleton figure.’        

About 200 inmates are among the thousands of firefighters still doing battle with the massive wildfire that has destroyed the town of Paradise, California, and killed at least 31 people. Once they are released from prison, however, most of them will be prohibited from joining the fire crews that they currently work alongside. The society has done more than judged their bad deeds, it has judged them bad people.

In mid-February in 2016, an armed militia called Fursan al Haq, or Knights of Righteousness, was run out of the town of Marea, about 20 miles north of Aleppo, by Pentagon-backed Syrian Democratic Forces moving in from Kurdish-controlled areas to the east.
Knights of Righteousness!

                                      More Charts

The Impact of Anti-Warming

Reparations: To have a child born with the hereditary right to expropriate another's goods or efforts is a virtual definition of royalty. --me

Went for an engagement anniversary drink at Casbah. 
The street had a Halloween event across the street.
Two Teslas on the street.

Landsburg:
"If you get accepted to college because you faked being a sports star, pretty much everyone is outraged. I get that.
If you get accepted at college because you are a sports star, almost nobody seems to mind. That’s what I don’t get.
Either way, you’ve climbed the ladder by prevailing in a largely meaningless zero-sum (and hence socially useless) game, thereby signaling a dollop of narcissism together with a few mostly irrelevant talents or advantages. What’s the difference?"

Find a child with a penny.  Have her double it every day.  After 47 days, she will have a trillion dollars

The FBI lists murder victims by weapon from 2014 to 2018 in their 2018 report on Crime in the United States. It turns out that slightly over 2% (297) out of a total of 14,123 homicides were committed with rifles. A total of 1,515 or 11% of homicides were committed by knives. Four hundred and forty-three people were murdered with a hammer, club or some other bludgeoning instrument. Six hundred seventy-two people were murdered by a hand, foot or fist. Handguns accounted for the most murders -- 6,603.

Here's an interesting little thing:
Commentary. The rural West Midlands area that Tolkien patterned the Shire after had become more urban by the time of Tolkien’s writing, and the idea of something even remotely like it being preserved in America might well have charmed him. To a European classicist, rural America had much the same remoteness that Professor T was trying to capture about the Shire. Americans would immediately associate Kentucky with Appalachia, which was settled by rambunctious Scots-Irish and English Borderers, and discount the idea of any connection. But Tolkien may not have had that association, and in this case it is not accurate anyway. That section of KY between Frankfort and Louisville was actually settled by a higher percentage of West Midlanders, more like Ohio was.
I looked up all those Hobbit-names, comparing that part of KY with the rest of KY, and with other places across the US. There weren’t any Bagginses,* Gamgees, or Bracegirdles, but there were Tookes, Grubbs, Barefoots and Proudfoots, Burrowes, and Pippins. There were no Butterburs, but there were Butterbaughs. BOOderbaw my second son pronounced immediately after I’d told him. “We had a Butterbaugh in my class” (at Asbury College in Kentucky, 2005). There was indeed a greater concentration of all these names around Shelbyville and Louisville. These names occurred elsewhere in the country, but were much less common – only a few in huge California, New York, and Texas, for example.--from a NYT article in 1979 by Davenport

Government has never made anything better or cheaper, more effective or more efficient. And nowhere is that more true than in education. --DeVos

All models require assumptions. The recommendations of the Society of Actuaries Blue Ribbon Panel on Public Pension Plan Funding (SOA BRP) make a great starting point for policymakers who wish to tackle the challenge of public employee pension reform. The SOA BRP’s most important recommendations involve investment-return assumptions and pension-debt amortization. The assumption plays a critical role in calculating the current value of promised benefit payments, and thus the adequacy of annual contributions to cover the cost of those benefits. The amortization schedule determines how quickly pension debt is paid off. Together with mortality estimates, the investment-return assumption and amortization policy are the most important elements of pension funding policy.
All models require assumptions.

On November 1, 1950, Griselio Torresola and Oscar Collazo attempted to assassinate President Harry S. Truman at the Blair House in Washington, D.C.

          The Impact of Anti-Warming

Climatology is hard and the idea that it is both straightforward and decisive is scandalous.
Here us Epstein, with more practical Lonborg-like concerns. He's from the Hoover Institute. Sowell lives there.

"Without a doubt, it is a major challenge to accurately model and predict the course of climate change. Climate systems are highly chaotic, which makes it difficult to figure out the effect of any particular natural or human event on future climate changes. We should therefore proceed with caution before making bold claims that the main, or even sole, driver of climate change is the human generated increase in the carbon dioxide level, which now is approaching 415 parts per million.

But today’s activists are in crisis mode. The 16-year old Swedish student Greta Thunberg’s recent calls for action sparked thousands of students to skip classes last month in order to fight a global climate “emergency.” These students are long on indignation, but short on solutions. They are content to implore today’s business, political, and social elites to come up with a solution before it is all too late—after all, these activists claim, in ten years we could all be dead.

The youth movement and its adult supporters assume that the fate of the world hangs in the balance unless some prompt and decisive action is taken. The proposed cures for addressing the climate crisis, such as the uncompromising demand that there be no more new fossil fuel projects, are highly intrusive. If implemented , even in part,  they will necessarily affect how  ordinary people eat, work, travel, and vacation­—and even how they bear children. The common desire “to set a pathway for 100 percent renewable power” will force excessive reliance on alternative energy forms, such as wind and solar, that are too unreliable to offer a dependable energy source on land, and useless for such activities as air transportation.             

But what if the green crusaders have overstated the risk, or what if they are just plain wrong? Then massive social resources will be squandered without obtaining any advantage in return.

Before we join the crusade, we should listen to the independent professionals decrying the current crisis mentality. Five hundred professional climate scientists have flatly stated to the Secretary-General of the United Nations that “There is no climate emergency,” stressing the dangers of relying on today’s “immature models.” Petteri Taalas, who is the secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organization, has decried the “extremism” that has made it impossible to hold a more rational debate about the overall subject. Susan Crockford, an oft-cited polar bear expert, has recently rejected the claim of a climate emergency for polar bears, noting that ice fluctuations are common in the arctic, and that polar bears have for thousands of years adapted to rapid changes in conditions.

Beyond these sober assessments, it’s important to consider two other relevant issues: what “chaos” really means in a weather system and how plant life has fared in recent years.

Just what makes a system chaotic? The common misconception is that chaos is defined by a lack of control and predictability, such that excessive carbon dioxide could set the planet on an inexorable doomsday cycle. But the technical definition of chaotic carries with it no such implication. A system can be chaotic even when the set possible of outcomes can be confined within a limited space. A simple illustration of this point is the double pendulum with a break in the middle and a point weight on the end. The two segments of the pendulum form a circle with a radius equal to their sum. The break in the pendulum leads to a set of wild swings, the exact course of which will vary widely with even minute changes in the initial position. This apparently simple system is deterministic in that if the same initial settings are used on different occasions, they will always yield the same outcome. But it is also chaotic because no available computational method can come close to predicting the often large differences in final outcome as a function of small variations in the initial conditions. But there is a key structural limit on the set of possible outcomes: the double pendulum can never go outside a circle whose radius is the sum of its two segments.

This point has important implications for understanding the complex dynamics of climate change. No one disputes that carbon dioxide levels have been climbing steadily since 1900. There are some claims that 350 parts per million is the ideal concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, a figure that was reached during the 1980s. So why is a rise of 20 percent over that supposedly ideal number fatal? That has never been explained.

Nor, taken alone, can the consistent increases in carbon dioxide levels explain the observed ups and downs in temperature since 1900. Interestingly, these temperature oscillations gave rise to dire predictions of a new ice age in the 1970s. If CO₂ were the dominant driver, we would expect to see steady temperature increases over the entire period. But the data shows constant fluctuation. Constantly rising carbon dioxide levels cannot explain the record number of high temperatures in the 1930s when overall carbon dioxide levels were far lower than they are today: only two such highs have been set in the continental U.S.  after 2010—South  Carolina (2012) and Death Valley California (2013).

Moreover, any viable model must explain not only the dramatic temperature peaks in 1998 and 2016 but also the sharp declines that followed. The small increases in year-over-year levels of carbon dioxide are not the likely culprit. One reasonable explanation for these changes could be the rapid shifts from El Nino (which sent cold airs from the west across the Atlantic) and the temporary rise of La Nina, which did not. These results should be expected. The temperature spikes generate “negative feedback loops” which tend to reverse temperature directions in ways that stabilize the overall system. This pattern has held for billions of years.

The second relevant factor in this discussion is the change in plant coverage. Predictions of climate emergency entail the view that plant life will fall into a rapid rate of decline owing to the occurrence of extreme temperature conditions across the globe. But the exact opposite is true. The evidence is overwhelming that the greening of the earth continues apace. NASA reports that “the greening of the planet over the last two decades represents an increase in leaf area on plants and trees equivalent to the area covered by all the Amazon rainforests. There are now more than two million square miles of extra green leaf area per year, compared to the early 2000s – a 5% increase.” And ironically, much of that growth has taken place in China and India, where carbon dioxide emissions are highest.

Taken altogether, these are not unexpected results. The influence of carbon dioxide levels on temperature depends on a multitude of factors. Greenhouse gases tend to have multiple effects on global temperatures, and it should never be forgotten that water vapor is both a more powerful and more abundant greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. But it is also the case that these two gases are critical for  photosynthesis, a process that increases plant coverage, which in turn reduces temperature extremes.

A common practice for greenhouses is to pump in large quantities of carbon dioxide, up to 1000 to 1500 parts per million, to stimulate plant growth, even if temperatures remain constant. This pattern helps explains why most of the record highs (and lows) in the United States took place in the 1930s. There are those who claim that this cycle will not hold outside the laboratory, where conditions are more complex, leading to more “drought and heat stress.” Think of Wired’s 2016 prediction that “California’s Drought Is Probably Forever.” But there is no evidence of that today. Indeed, a recent report asserts that California is now drought-free for the first time in nearly a decade, notwithstanding higher carbon dioxide levels.

It is common for many concerned scientists to develop a metric that speaks of the social cost of carbon. The Environmental Defense Fund, for example, estimates the cost to be around $50 per ton for the 37.1 gigatons of carbon dioxide emissions released in 2018 (for a total cost of $1.86 trillion). But it is critical to be aware that all of these gloomy predictions posit a world in which, according to the EDF, climate change “causes devastating impacts: extreme weather events like flooding and deadly storms; the spread of disease; sea-level rise; increased food insecurity; and other disasters.”

But these are predictions of bad times to come. They are not descriptions of the current situation in which the incidence of extreme weather events like drought is falling, sea-level rise is slowing, agricultural prices are low, and food is abundant, not scarce. The professional skeptics are right: there is today no compelling evidence of an impending climate emergency."