Later On

Hendrik Hertzberg has another fine column, which concludes:

Frum is not the only Republican on the case. “If you want a quick answer to the question what would I do,” Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, said recently, “I’d have a payroll-tax holiday for a year or two. That would put taxes in the hands of everybody who has a job, whether they pay income taxes or not.” Other Republican politicians and conservative publicists have made similar noises. They haven’t made it a rallying point, though; it would, after all, shape the over-all tax system in a progressive direction. Anyhow, their sincerity may be doubted: when President Obama proposed a much more modest cut along similar lines—a refundable payroll-tax credit of four hundred dollars—they denounced it as a welfare giveaway.

Liberals have been reticent, too. The payroll tax now provides a third of federal revenues. And, because it nominally funds Social Security and Medicare, some liberals regard its continuance as essential to the survival of those programs. That’s almost certainly wrong. Public pensions and medical care for the aged have become fixed, integral parts of American life. Their political support no longer depends on analogizing them to private insurance. Besides, the aging of the population, the collapse of defined-benefit private pensions, the volatility of 401(k)s, and pricey advances in medical technology mean that, no matter what efficiencies may be achieved, Social Security and Medicare will—and should—grow. Holding them hostage to ever-rising, job-killing payroll taxes is perverse.

If the economic crisis necessitates a second stimulus—and it probably will—then a payroll-tax holiday deserves a look. But it’s only half a good idea. A whole good idea would be to make a payroll-tax holiday the first step in an orderly transition to scrapping the payroll tax altogether and replacing the lost revenue with a package of levies on things that, unlike jobs, we want less rather than more of—things like pollution, carbon emissions, oil imports, inefficient use of energy and natural resources, and excessive consumption. The net tax burden on the economy would be unchanged, but the shift in relative price signals would nudge investment from resource-intensive enterprises toward labor-intensive ones. This wouldn’t be just a tax adjustment. It would be an environmental program, an anti-global-warming program, a youth-employment (and anti-crime) program, and an energy program.

Impossible? A politically heterogeneous little group with the unfortunately punctuated name of Get America Working! has been quietly pushing this combination for twenty years. In one form or another, without much fanfare, it has earned the backing of such diverse characters as Al Gore and T. Boone Pickens, the liberal economist James Galbraith and the conservative economist Irwin Stelzer, Republican heavies like C. Boyden Gray and Democratic heavies like Robert Reich. It’s ambitious, it jumbles ideological and partisan preconceptions, and it represents the kind of change that great crises open political space for. Does that sound like anyone you know?

The GOP loves majority rule if and only if they are the majority. Steve Benen comments:

This week, there was increased speculation that the Obama administration might pursue major healthcare and energy reforms through the budget reconciliation process. The point would be to make passage far easier — Republicans can vote against reconciliation bills, but they can’t filibuster them.

Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) blasted the idea, calling it "the Chicago approach to governing." Gregg added, "You’re talking about running over the minority, putting them in cement and throwing them in the Chicago River."

A couple of Fox News personalities went even further yesterday.

During the March 20 edition of Fox News’ Hannity, host Sean Hannity falsely claimed that "a parliamentary procedure called reconciliation" would allow the Obama administration to pass legislation "without any Republicans even having an opportunity to vote." Guest and fellow Fox News host Mike Huckabee replied that this is "horribly dangerous because it really does bypass the entire system of the American government, where we’re supposed to have an honest debate."

Look, the budget reconciliation process isn’t complicated. Indeed, it’s called "majority rule." It doesn’t deny Republicans from "even having an opportunity to vote." Just the opposite is true — every member in both chambers gets to vote, up or down, after a floor debate. When Hannity talks about having an "opportunity" to vote, he means protecting a system in which 41 votes defeat 58 votes.

For that matter, Mike Huckabee believes it undermines the "entire system of the American government" if a piece of legislation passes with the support of congressional majorities. I have no idea what leads him to such a conclusion. Our "entire system of the American government" is not predicated on the notion that Senate super-majorities are necessary to pass any and all substantive pieces of legislation.

But this incredibly foolish rhetoric is nevertheless illustrative of policymaking gone awry. The administration is considering a process in which a bill receives majority support in the House, majority support in the Senate, and then becomes law with the president’s signature. We’ve reached the point at which this very idea is literally offensive — indeed, it’s un-American — to conservatives.

Interesting column if you can stomach it.

Clay Shirky in his blog has an interesting post:

Back in 1993, the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain began investigating piracy of Dave Barry’s popular column, which was published by the Miami Herald and syndicated widely. In the course of tracking down the sources of unlicensed distribution, they found many things, including the copying of his column to alt.fan.dave_barry on usenet; a 2000-person strong mailing list also reading pirated versions; and a teenager in the Midwest who was doing some of the copying himself, because he loved Barry’s work so much he wanted everybody to be able to read it.

One of the people I was hanging around with online back then was Gordy Thompson, who managed internet services at the New York Times. I remember Thompson saying something to the effect of “When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.” I think about that conversation a lot these days.

The problem newspapers face isn’t that they didn’t see the internet coming. They not only saw it miles off, they figured out early on that they needed a plan to deal with it, and during the early 90s they came up with not just one plan but several. One was …

Continue reading. And I continue to recommend his book Here Comes Everybody.

Mike Lillis of the Washington Independent has the story:

For Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), it’s been a difficult week.

As the wrath over AIG bonuses has swept across the country and overtaken Washington, the Senate Banking Committee chairman has borne much of the blame for softening a law to allow those payments to be made. The episode has evoked questions about Dodd’s credibility, raised eyebrows about his industry ties, and left Republicans drooling over the possibility that his once-untouchable Senate seat might be up for grabs in 2010.

There’s just one problem: It wasn’t Dodd who engendered the AIG loophole.

Instead, White House economic officials swooped into congressional negotiations last month insisting that Dodd alter his own executive compensation proposal, passed by the Senate as part of the $787 billion stimulus package, so as not to restrict existing bonus contracts — the very type that ignited a firestorm this week when AIG began paying them out.

After implying earlier this week that he wasn’t behind the changes, Dodd clarified his statement Wednesday, saying that he agreed to the White House modifications out of fear that the entire provision would be stripped out otherwise. That he’s been blamed for empowering AIG’s bonuses when his original proposal would have prevented them is just one of the absurdities to arise from the country’s five-day obsession with AIG-gate.

Consider the events: In February, as Congress was debating the stimulus package, Dodd successfully attached language that would have prohibited all bonuses to the 25 highest paid employees of companies receiving any funding under the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. Under the provision, the Treasury, if it chose, could expand the number of employees targeted for the bonus ban. AIG’s bonuses would have been subject to the provision.

Yet the amendment, as Dodd wrote it, didn’t last long. In a series of negotiations that became public just this week, Treasury officials threatened to oppose the entire provision if it wasn’t changed to exempt the contractual bonuses. As a result, Dodd added a clause excepting “any bonus payment required to be paid pursuant to a written employment contract executed on or before Feb. 11, 2009.”

“I was being sought out and asked to modify this,” Dodd said in a CNN interview Wednesday, “with the alternative, quite candidly, being losing the amendment itself.”

In an interview with CNN Friday, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner conceded that it was the White House that insisted on the changes. “We expressed concern about this specific provision,” Geithner said, “because we wanted to make sure it was strong enough to survive a legal challenge.” (This week, TWI’s Daphne Eviatar examined the legal limitations surrounding the government’s vow to clawback the AIG bonuses.)

The practical implications of the changes were realized last weekend when the news broke that AIG had paid out $165 million in bonuses to the very branch of the insurance giant that had drowned the company with its toxic investments.

Speaking to reporters in Connecticut Friday, Dodd defended his actions, reiterating that he made the changes only upon the insistence of the White House. That request “seemed rather technical and innocuous at the time,” he said. “Had anyone suggested to me six weeks ago that this was on behalf of some bonuses for AIG employees who had received substantial taxpayer money to try and keep that organization alive, I would have rejected it out of hand.”…

Continue reading.

Good post:

Although the most recent outrage over the profligate behaviour of American financial institutions has been focused on AIG’s executive bonuses, Americans are equally outraged by the rate of foreclosures, by the credit crisis, by rising unemployment due to the bad economy. Bailout money, courtesy of American taxpayers, was given in good faith that the financial institutions were providing vital services to Americans–but it turns out these institutions were crushing the global economy to rubble, with absurd Ponzi schemes and dangerous "financial instruments."

This same outrage should be turned on the American Ag sector. If we’re so appalled by the foolhardy way our financial institutions have behaved, why aren’t we equally outraged at the foolhardy way Big Agribusiness has behaved with taxpayer money–and taxpayer health and well being? Big Ag routinely gets federal farm subsidy monies, courtesy of the taxpayers, but many of their farming practices are immediately dangerous to human health. We don’t call farm "subsidies" bailouts–rather they’re referred to as "a safety net" for farmers. But subsidies are legislated government cash payments, voted on by our elected officials, in the same way that the bailout money for automakers and financial institutions were. In 2007 alone, which was a record year for crop prices, the feds gave $5 Billion of your hard-earned cash in direct payments to farmers. And since the year 2000, according to a Washington Post report, the government has paid at least $1.3 billion in "farming" subsidies for rice and other crops to individuals who do no farming at all. Where’s the outage over this?

Polluting the environment and fostering a dangerous resistance to antibiotics through the rampant use of confined animal feeding operations is the Ag equivalent of a sub-prime mortgage. It looks good on paper, but eventually it could kill you…

Continue reading.

Good column in Salon:

The popular urge to claw back the bogus bonuses paid by American International Group is irresistible and fully justified, but should the Treasury someday retrieve every single bonus dollar, that total of $165 million will make no difference to anyone except a few disgruntled traders. From the jaded perspective of the financiers, the uproar over the AIG bonuses may provide a welcome distraction from far more important (and lucrative) abuses in the world’s offshore tax havens.

So rather than continue arguing over chump change, it is long past time for the United States, with its international friends and allies, to demand accountability from the long list of tiny countries and principalities, from Andorra and the Cayman Islands to Singapore and Switzerland, where corporations, wealthy clients and unrepentant evildoers hide their assets.

The big claw-back will reach into quaint islands and mountainous principalities, because the same banks, hedge funds and private equity firms responsible for the world financial meltdown keep their profits in those "secrecy spaces" — alongside the ill-gotten gains of numerous drug dealers, dictators and delinquents of every description.

According to the Government Accountability Office, nearly all of America’s top 100 corporations maintain subsidiaries in countries identified as tax havens. As the GAO notes, there could be reasons other than avoiding the IRS to set up branches in places such as Singapore, Luxembourg and Switzerland, where taxes are light or nonexistent and keeping clients’ illicit secrets is considered a matter of national pride.

But what reason other than evasion could there be for Goldman Sachs Group to set up three subsidiaries in Bermuda, five in Mauritius, and 15 in the Cayman Islands? Why did Countrywide Financial need two subsidiaries in Guernsey? Why did Wachovia need 18 subsidiaries in Bermuda, three in the British Virgin Islands, and 16 in the Caymans? Why did Lehman Brothers need 31 subsidiaries in the Caymans? What do Bank of America’s 59 subsidiaries in the Caymans actually do? Why does Citigroup need 427 separate subsidiaries in tax havens, including 12 in the Channel Islands, 21 in Jersey, 91 in Luxembourg, 19 in Bermuda and 90 in the Caymans? What exactly is going on at Morgan Stanley’s 19 subs in Jersey, 29 subs in Luxembourg, 14 subs in the Marshall Islands, and its amazing 158 subs in the Caymans? And speaking of AIG, why does it have 18 subs in tax-haven countries? (Don’t expect to find out from Fox News Channel or the New York Post, because News Corp. has its own constellation of strange subsidiaries, including 33 in the Caymans alone.)

When the cost of these shenanigans was last estimated two years ago, the U.S. government’s annual loss in revenue due to tax avoidance by major corporations and super-rich individuals was pegged at about $100 billion — considerably more than a rounding error, even today. But of course that is only a rough assessment, as is the estimate of $12 trillion in untaxed assets hidden around the world. Nobody will know for certain until the books are opened and transparency is established…

Continue reading.

UPDATE: More here, and interesting.

From the Center on American Progress:

The Wall Street Journal reported over the weekend that a coalition led by Costco Wholesale Corp., Starbucks Corp., and Whole Foods Market Inc. were seeking to compromise with union groups to support a modified version of the Employee Free Choice Act. The compromise was reported to have allowed a union to be formed if 70 percent — instead of the current bill’s 50 percent proposal — sign a card favoring unionization. The president of the National Right to Work Committee, an anti-union group, responded forcefully, saying in a statement, “These huge companies are apparently willing to sell out hundreds of thousands of small ones under the guise of making some phony and misguided compromise with Big Labor.” Today, however, news reports indicate that rumors of a compromise on the majority sign-up provision were inaccurate. Indeed, The Hill reports that the compromise offered in the coalition’s “declaration of principles” drops “two of EFCA’s main provisions,” including the ability to form a union through signing a card. The “measure that would allow workers to bypass secret ballot elections to form a union if a majority of them sign authorization cards stating their intention to organize…is not in the coalition’s statement of principles.” Instead, “there is a guarantee for a secret ballot in a union election but voting would have to happen in a fixed period of time once workers wanted to certify their union.” Additionally, “the provision for the government to appoint an arbitrator if workers and management cannot negotiate a contract within 120 days is removed.” Reps. George Miller (D-CA) and Tom Harkin (D-IA) said in a joint statement, “This proposal is unacceptable. It was written by CEOs for CEOs.”

The corruption embodied in Congressman John Murtha (D-PA) has reached his mind. Now he’s screwing up the armed services to get contracts to those who pay him. The story:

Despite opposition from the Pentagon, one of the most powerful members of the House Appropriations Committee is considering including a provision in an upcoming supplemental defense bill that would split the $35 billion contract for Air Force refueling tankers between Boeing and a European competitor.

Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., the chairman of the House defense appropriations subcommittee, says that with the U.S. fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, additional delays in replacing the current fleet of aerial refueling tankers, some of which date to the Eisenhower era, are unacceptable.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates, however, said a split contract between Boeing and a Northrop Grumman-European Aeronautic Defense and Space Co. team would be a mistake that could end up costing taxpayers billions of additional dollars.

“I think it’s bad public policy and I think it’s bad acquisition policy,” Gates said at a Pentagon news conference last week.

Continue reading.

The epicenter of the financial earthquake: its history in one brief column.

Hilzoy lacks the cachet of a Nobel prize, but she’s damned smart. She has two posts on the Geithner plan, both worth reading in their entirety:

Post the first

Post the second

And, if you do want what a Nobel prize-winning economist thinks, here’s Krugman’s column today: he doesn’t like the Geithner plan either.

They both see their constituency as the financial community and they seem to be doing everything they can to protect and reward the financial executives and companies that produced the crisis. I think they should be fired and Obama turn to others who will put the public and the country first.

Dean Baker asks:

Will Tim Geithner Help You Find a Buyer for Your House?

He’s apparently working as a sales agent for the junk at Citigroup and other zombie banks. It would be nice if he were doing this on his spare time, but according to the NYT he sees trying to help the bond holders and shareholders and multimillion dollar executives at these institutions as his main responsibility.

It would be reasonable to ask why the Treasury secretary feels a need to work as a sales agent for the major banks, in addition to subsidizing the sale of their junk assets.

At the link you’ll find more posts by Baker. He pretty much exposes the rotten rescue plan for what it is.

I got a query about a shaving brush recommendation, so I thought I’d post my thoughts. One question frequently raised by novice shavers is which brushes are good for soaps, and which for shaving creams? That’s not really the right question, since any decent brush can create a fine lather from either a shaving cream or soap. The question is: which sort of brush feels best to you?

I like a resilient brush, whose bristles seem to have a bit of spring to them. I also prefer that it not be too dense: an ultra-dense brush has little capacity for holding lather. Some people like a “scrubby” brush feel, such as you get with something like the Simpsons Chubby series. I prefer a somewhat softer feel, but still with resilience.

Also, since I build the lather on my face, I want a brush that’s in proportion to the job: an enormous brush is hard to work with on the face and also requires quite a bit of shaving cream or soap to get the lather—and leaves a lot of lather unused.

Thus I like the Rooney Style 2 Super—and the Finest is indeed somewhat better. It’s not too large, the bristles are springy and resilient, and the loft means it has good “give”. It creates a good lather readily, from soap or shaving cream, and it holds enough lather for a 20-pass shave. But: YMMV.

Lassie, barking and pointing to say that Timmy has fallen into the well and broken his left arm, is nothing to Megs, who was meowing urgently this morning about something terrifically exciting in the apartment. She was twisting around and meowing and making little dashes down the hall, looking back. I followed, somewhat dully, to the kitchen. The big excitement, apparently, was that her kibble bowl was almost empty. I took care of that, and all was well.

Last night I had a good-looking celery root—well, "good-looking" really doesn’t apply to celery roots, but it was large, round, and sound. I peeled it and used the Swissmar to make small julienne strips, add a thinly sliced fennel bulb with some of the fronds, olive oil, Meyer lemon juice, salt, pepper, and shredded Parmesan. Quite a nice salad, and I do love my Swissmar. (I used the hand guard thing: no cuts.)

Sunny morning on the bay, coffee at and, what could be better? I have a lovely big batch of red kale for lunch and dinner, and the cereals cooking away.

Sometimes the planets align and the stars smile and you get such a shave as you can only imagine. Of course, I did have a two-day stubble to work with, but after the first pass most of my face was already smooth. The tools: D.R. Harris Almond shave stick made the usual fine lather, especially with my Rooney Style 2 Finest. Then the Merkur NOS Slant Bar with a new Feather blade slid smoothly through the stubble: light pressure, good angle, not a single nick and no irritation. Finally, Booster June Clover provided the leap into the day.

Peter Beaumont in the Guardian:

An investigation by a group of former Israeli soldiers has uncovered new evidence of the military’s conduct during the assault on Gaza two months ago. According to the group Breaking the Silence, the witness statements of the 15 soldiers who have come forward to describe their concerns over Operation Cast Lead appear to corroborate claims of random killings and vandalism carried out during the operation made by a separate group of anonymous servicemen during a seminar at a military college.

Although Breaking the Silence’s report is not due to be published for several months, the testimony it has received already suggests widespread abuses stemming from orders originating with the Israeli military chain of command.

"This is not a military that we recognise," said Mikhael Manekin, one of the former soldiers involved with the group. "This is in a different category to things we have seen before. We have spoken to a lot of different people who served in different places in Gaza, including officers. We are not talking about some units being more aggressive than others, but underlying policy. So much so that we are talking to soldiers who said that they were having to restrain the orders given."

Read the rest of this entry »

Preface to Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes, by Charles Hartshorne:

The occasion which led to the writing of this book was somewhat sudden and quite concrete. It was the near coincidence of two conversations, each with an intelligent, educated lady, different in the two cases, who was troubled by she felt were absurdities in the idea of God with which she was familiar. In this way I was made more aware than ever before of a large number of people (represented by these two) who, not trained but seriously interested philosophically and theologically, know little or nothing about some important but relatively recent changes in the philosophy of religion. The objections that the two, and many others like them, make to a traditional and still widely accepted form of theology (which I call “classical theism”) have been felt also by a number of penetrating, technically trained philosophers and theologians, especially in the present century, and these writers—not all of them as famous as they should be—have been working out, with increasing clarity and competence, a revised form of theism which some call “process theology” and I call “neoclassical theism,” applying this term especially to my own version of the doctrine. This book is an attempt present and defend the revised idea of God as simply and forcefully as I can. It is not written primarily for trained philosophers or theologians, although, to be candid, I should be surprised and disappointed if they could not learn from it, especially if they want to be able to meet a widespread need in contemporary society.

Read the rest of this entry »

Krugman:

The Geithner plan has now been leaked in detail. It’s exactly the plan that was widely analyzed — and found wanting — a couple of weeks ago. The zombie ideas have won.

The Obama administration is now completely wedded to the idea that there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the financial system — that what we’re facing is the equivalent of a run on an essentially sound bank. As Tim Duy put it, there are no bad assets, only misunderstood assets. And if we get investors to understand that toxic waste is really, truly worth much more than anyone is willing to pay for it, all our problems will be solved.

To this end the plan proposes to create funds in which private investors put in a small amount of their own money, and in return get large, non-recourse loans from the taxpayer, with which to buy bad — I mean misunderstood — assets. This is supposed to lead to fair prices because the funds will engage in competitive bidding.

But it’s immediately obvious, if you think about it, that these funds will have skewed incentives. In effect, Treasury will be creating — deliberately! — the functional equivalent of Texas S&Ls in the 1980s: financial operations with very little capital but lots of government-guaranteed liabilities. For the private investors, this is an open invitation to play heads I win, tails the taxpayers lose. So sure, these investors will be ready to pay high prices for toxic waste. After all, the stuff might be worth something; and if it isn’t, that’s someone else’s problem.

Or to put it another way, Treasury has decided that what we have is nothing but a confidence problem, which it proposes to cure by creating massive moral hazard.

This plan will produce big gains for banks that didn’t actually need any help; it will, however, do little to reassure the public about banks that are seriously undercapitalized. And I fear that when the plan fails, as it almost surely will, the administration will have shot its bolt: it won’t be able to come back to Congress for a plan that might actually work.

What an awful mess.

Update: Calculated Risk and Yves Smith have similar reactions.

Omas Arco 1995

This is the pen I’m currently using, a favorite I bought in San Francisco. The lines of the celluloid line up correctly if you put the tip directly under the clip before screwing on the cap. (This is the usual trick. If the tip-under-clip trick doesn’t work, trying putting the tip upside down under the clip before screwing on the cap.)

The celluloid must be aged before it can be used in a pen. The pen is quite lightweight—one of the benefits of celluloid—and uses a piston fill. If you click the image, you might make out the year “1995″ on the grip to the right of the threads. Great little pen. This nib I ground myself to get an italic shape from a medium standard nib (see the “M” on the side of the nib).

George Will is a climate change denier (who also believes that FDR’s New Deal lengthened the Great Depression—see this post for a video of Paul Krugman trying to educate Will (it didn’t work)). He recently wrote a column about climate change in the Washington Post that was filled with errors, which the Post refused to correct. But now the Post has a column by Chris Mooney that does correct some of the errors. From Mooney’s column:

… Consider a few of Will’s claims from his Feb. 15 column, "Dark Green Doomsayers": In a long paragraph quoting press sources from the 1970s, Will suggested that widespread scientific agreement existed at the time that the world faced potentially catastrophic cooling. Today, most climate scientists and climate journalists consider this a timeworn myth. Just last year, the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society published a peer-reviewed study examining media coverage at the time and the contemporary scientific literature. While some media accounts did hype a cooling scare, others suggested more reasons to be concerned about warming. As for the published science? Reviewing studies between 1965 and 1979, the authors found that "emphasis on greenhouse warming dominated the scientific literature even then."

Yet there’s a bigger issue: It’s misleading to draw a parallel between "global cooling" concerns articulated in the 1970s and global warming concerns today. In the 1970s, the field of climate research was in a comparatively fledgling state, and scientific understanding of 20th-century temperature trends and their causes was far less settled. Today, in contrast, hundreds of scientists worldwide participate in assessments of the state of knowledge and have repeatedly ratified the conclusion that human activities are driving global warming — through the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the scientific academies of various nations (including our own), and leading scientific organizations such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society.

Will wrote that "according to the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979." It turns out to be a relatively meaningless comparison, though the Arctic Climate Research Center has clarified that global sea ice extent was "1.34 million sq. km less in February 2009 than in February 1979." Again, though, there’s a bigger issue: Will’s focus on "global" sea ice at two arbitrarily selected points of time is a distraction. Scientists pay heed to long-term trends in sea ice, not snapshots in a noisy system. And while they expect global warming to reduce summer Arctic sea ice, the global picture is a more complicated matter; it’s not as clear what ought to happen in the Southern Hemisphere. But summer Arctic sea ice is indeed trending downward, in line with climatologists’ expectations — according to the Arctic Climate Research Center.

Will also wrote that "according to the U.N. World Meteorological Organization, there has been no recorded global warming for more than a decade." The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) is one of many respected scientific institutions that support the consensus that humans are driving global warming. Will probably meant that since 1998 was the warmest year on record according to the WMO — NASA, in contrast, believes that that honor goes to 2005 — we haven’t had any global warming since. Yet such sleight of hand would lead to the conclusion that "global cooling" sets in immediately after every new record temperature year, no matter how frequently those hot years arrive or the hotness of the years surrounding them. Climate scientists, knowing that any single year may trend warmer or cooler for a variety of reasons — 1998, for instance, featured an extremely strong El Niño — study globally averaged temperatures over time. To them, it’s far more relevant that out of the 10 warmest years on record, at least seven have occurred in the 2000s — again, according to the WMO…

I continue to get comments from readers who believe that climate change is not happening or, if it is, it has nothing to do with human activity. I try to point out the flaws in their reasoning, but it’s hopeless. Their usual advice to me is to do my own research (that is, get a PhD in climatology and then find a research position to review the literature). I’m a little old for that. I’ll just read the reports from current climatologists and base my ideas on that.