Posted on April 26, 2024 by Steven Hayward in The Daily Chart

The Daily Chart: College Regrets

This survey of the most regretted college majors will come as no surprise to most of our readers, and I’m tempted to make the suggestion that student loan forgiveness should be granted in inverse proportion to this ranking. That is, if you majored in journalism, you’d be eligible for no more than 13 percent of your loan being forgiven. This would provide a strong incentive not to major in sociology, etc.

It will be interesting to see trend survey data the next few years about the number of people who regret attending college at all. I suspect these numbers will be on the rise soon, if they aren’t already.

Posted on by John Hinderaker in Climate

Will More CO2 Warm the Atmosphere?

There is no doubt about the fact that various gases have a “greenhouse” effect. They trap radiation leaving the Earth’s surface, thus warming the atmosphere. The chief greenhouse gas, by a wide margin, is water vapor. Carbon dioxide and methane are two more minor greenhouse gases. We owe these substances everything: without the greenhouse effect, there would be no life on Earth. The fact that some gases absorb radiation that bounces back from the Earth, having begun at the Sun, makes the planet that we know possible.

Liberals claim hysterically, but without empirical evidence, that because CO2 is a greenhouse gas, increasing amounts of it in the atmosphere must inevitably make our planet warmer. That is a debatable claim for many reasons, including the fact that any greenhouse gas will reach a point of saturation, beyond which adding more of that gas will not have any perceptible effect on the climate.

Have we already reached the saturation point with regard to CO2? A recently published paper by Jan Kubicki, Krzysztof Kopczyński and Jarosław Młyńczak argues that we have already reached that point, and adding more CO2 to the atmosphere will have no, or virtually no, warming effect.

This is by no means a new concept (see original for links):

The phenomenon of saturation was already noted by Ångström (1900), who, based on experiments and analysis, challenged Svante Arrhenius’ hypothesis that continued use of fossil fuels would warm the planet (Arrhenius 1896). In 1972, Schack (1972), based on his considerations, demonstrated that for a concentration of 0.03% of carbon dioxide in the air, the absorption process in the troposphere is saturated.

Taking into account the saturation process, Dieter Schildknecht also proved in his work (Schildknecht 2020) that, contrary to the IPCC reports, the impact of anthropogenic CO2 increase on the Earth’s climate is very small.

The paper describes efforts that have been made to determine the saturation point of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere. Those experiments supply strong evidence that CO2’s saturation point has already been reached:

The determined saturation mass ms based on the plotted graph is 0.57kg/m2 for a temperature of 78.6°C, and 0.66kg/m2 for a temperature of 109.5°C. It should be noted that in the Earth’s atmosphere, for the currently assumed concentration of CO2 – 400ppm, the amount of carbon dioxide per 1 m2 of horizontal surface is mz > 6kg/m2. Extending the horizontal axis of the graph from Fig. 7 to this value, we obtain the image shown in Fig. 9, which suggests that there is currently a multiple exceedance of the saturation mass for carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere.

Which means that we can burn all of the Earth’s coal, oil and natural gas without impacting global temperatures.

The authors conducted an experiment of their own devising that involved radiation from the Moon:

This time, the radiation used, before passing through the inserted cuvettes, first passed through the Earth’s atmosphere. It turned out that the absorption of this radiation in carbon dioxide in the cuvette (the same cuvette as in the first part of the experiment) was practically negligible. It can be clearly concluded that additional carbon dioxide does not absorb thermal radiation that has been emitted from the heated surface of the Moon and has passed through the Earth’s atmosphere. This raises the question of whether, in the case of thermal radiation from the Earth’s surface, passing through the atmosphere in the opposite direction, a saturation process will also occur and whether this radiation will be absorbed by carbon dioxide in the cuvette.

It has long been noted that in ice core data, there is a relationship between carbon dioxide and temperature. The problem, from the warmists’ point of view, is that the warming comes first, and the additional CO2 later:

In the study (Humlum et al., 2013), the authors demonstrated that peaks of cyclic changes in air and water temperature globally precede peaks of cyclic changes in atmospheric CO2 concentration (Fig. 12). This finding supports the hypothesis that, as a result of saturation processes, emitted CO2 does not directly cause an increase in global temperature. Instead, it suggests that an increase in temperature likely leads to the release of carbon dioxide from the oceans.

That is reflected in this chart:

From the authors Conclusions:

The presented material shows that despite the fact that the majority of publications attempt to depict a catastrophic future for our planet due to the anthropogenic increase in CO2 and its impact on Earth’s climate, the shown facts raise serious doubts about this influence. …

This unequivocally suggests that the officially presented impact of anthropogenic CO2 increase on Earth’s climate is merely a hypothesis rather than a substantiated fact. Resolving these dilemmas requires further experimental work to verify the results of theoretical studies at every possible stage. To answer the question of whether the additionally emitted CO2 in the atmosphere is indeed a greenhouse gas, it would be necessary, among other things, to conduct additional research for a radiation source with a temperature similar to Earth’s surface temperature and measure the absorption of thermal radiation in a mixture of CO2 and air at different temperatures and pressures, as is the case in Earth’s atmosphere at various altitudes. It would also be beneficial to conduct field studies using an appropriate balloon, as suggested in (Kubicki et al., 2020b). By measuring the absorption of Earth’s thermal radiation in atmospheric CO2 under atmospheric pressure in a cuvette placed in the basket of a balloon in the upper layers of the troposphere, we could obtain results that would decisively settle many controversial issues.

But the global warming grifters don’t want to carry out experiments that could decisively refute their theory. Rather, they want to shift trillions of dollars from one set of industries to another set of industries, based not on scientific fact but rather on a tenuous hypothesis that pretty clearly seems to be wrong.

The authors conclude with an observation that should not be controversial:

In science, especially in the natural sciences, we should strive to present a true picture of reality, primarily through empirical knowledge.

Posted on by Steven Hayward in Podcasts

Podcast: The 3WHH With Sober Thoughts on Immunity

We’re going up a day earlier than usual with this week’s (ad-free!) episode, partly because our constantly irregular travel schedules complicated things again, but more importantly to be timely, as John, Lucretia, and I have LOTS of thoughts on the Supreme Court argument yesterday about whether ex-presidents should enjoy broad immunity for any or all acts they took while in office. Lucretia and I think the president does, while John thinks textual support for the proposition is lacking. Lucretia and I respond with an appeal to first principles, and enlist as an expert witness Harvey Mansfield, because of his unique book on the inherent ambivalence of executive power even in a constitutional republic, Taming the Prince. As usual, we fought to a draw.

Our second subject is the ongoing Kristalnacht on campus. There’s not much new to say except to calibrate how cowardly university administrators continue to be, and note that even some liberals, like George Packer in The Atlantic (who provides our article of the week, “The Campus-Left Occupation That Broke Higher Education“) are starting to figure out what conservatives have known about higher education for two generations now. It’s as if no one ever bothered to notice Closing of the American Mind.

As usual, listen here, or through our hosts at Ricochet, or wherever you source your podcasts.

Posted on by Lloyd Billingsley in 2024 Election, Biden Administration, Donald Trump

Raising the Barr?

I’ve said all along given two bad choices, I think it’s my duty to pick the person I think would do the least harm to the country. And in my mind, I will vote the Republican ticket. I think the real danger to the country — the real danger to democracy, as I say — is the progressive agenda. Trump may be playing Russian roulette, but a continuation of the Biden administration is national suicide in my opinion.

That was former Attorney General William Barr on Wednesday. If Barr leaves people puzzled, they might recall what he has said and done “all along.” For example, he supported the FBI raid on Trump’s Mar-A-Lago residence.

“I think a lot of the attacks on the FBI are over the top because a decision like this is not made by the FBI,” Barr explained. The DOJ and AG would make the call and “the FBI would be told to go and execute it.” Barr also supported the indictment of Trump for mishandling classified documents. Trump was “not a victim,” and “if even half of it is true, then he’s toast,” and so on.

In May of 2023, Barr predicted “a horror show” if Trump was again elected president. “You may want his policies,” Barr told reporters, “but Trump will not deliver Trump policies. He will deliver chaos, and if anything lead to a backlash that will set his policies much further back than they otherwise would be.” Consider also Barr’s One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General, published in 2022.

Right out of law school, Barr launched his career with the CIA, and aside from Stansfield Turner, CIA bosses come off well. Barr is a big fan of Robert Mueller and deputy attorney general Rob Rosenstein, who appointed Mueller to investigate President Trump. “Few can appreciate the complexities Rod faced during that tumultuous time,” writes the former AG, “and even fewer will know the important contributions he made to the administration and the country.” The former AG and CIA man is also friendly with James Comey and an admirer of Christopher Wray, who denied the FBI spied on Trump.

Barr tasked U.S. Attorney John Durham to look into the Russia hoax, but as the memoir explains, “I made it clear that neither President Obama nor Vice President Biden were in Durham’s crosshairs.” So for Attorney General Barr some people and agencies are above the law.

The FBI is now openly deployed against Trump supporters, smeared as violent extremists, domestic terrorists and so forth. According to former CIA man John Gentry, the politicization of intelligence was “aimed at Trump” and the IC agencies are “available for reactivation in the event of another serious candidacy by Trump or the election of another Republican president.”

William Barr now supports the election of Donald Trump as the person who would “do the least harm to the country.” Did Barr clear it with Christopher Wray and Biden’s CIA boss William Burns? Where, exactly, does the deep state stand on this election? As Trump says, we’ll have to see what happens.

Posted on by Scott Johnson in Anti-Semitism, Higher education, Israel

Take Columbia’s Khymani James — please

Well, they may be ignorant or stupid, they may be evil, but they may also need help. Take, for example, Columbia undergrad Khymani James — please. James may be in need of help, but he appears to be busy negotiating with the authorities at Columbia to stand down.

Mr. James had more to say — in a symptomatic way.

The NewsNation story cited below can be found online here.

Who are these people? (James’s preferred pronouns are he/she/they.) The New York Post characterizes James as a “ringleader.” He is a spokesman for Columbia’s anti-Israel student group Apartheid Divest.

The Post credits the Daily Wire with digging up the ramblings on James’s mind: “James made the sickening comments as they [i.e., James, I think] were being grilled by officials from Columbia’s Center for Student Success and Intervention over a past Instagram post, according to the video, which was first reported on by the Daily Wire.” I found James’s ramblings via Bonchie/RedState.

Posted on by Scott Johnson in Anti-Semitism, Hamas, Higher education, Israel

Don’t mess with Texas, “protest” edition

Texas Governor Greg Abbott has expressed his support for the removal of the pro-Hamas kill the Jews crowd from their nascent “occupation” of the University of Texas at Austin. In the tweet below Governor Abbott reported: “Arrests being made right now and will continue until the crowd disperses. These protesters belong in jail.” Shut up, he explained: “Antisemitism will not be tolerated in Texas. Period.”

University President Jay Hartzell posted this related message:

Dear UT community,

This has been a challenging day for many. We have witnessed much activity we normally do not experience on our campus, and there is understandably a lot of emotion surrounding these events.

Today, our University held firm, enforcing our rules while protecting the Constitutional right to free speech. Peaceful protests within our rules are acceptable. Breaking our rules and policies and disrupting others’ ability to learn are not allowed. The group that led this protest stated it was going to violate Institutional Rules. Our rules matter, and they will be enforced. Our University will not be occupied.

The protesters tried to deliver on their stated intent to occupy campus. People not affiliated with UT joined them, and many ignored University officials’ continual pleas for restraint and to immediately disperse. The University did as we said we would do in the face of prohibited actions. We were prepared, with the necessary support to maintain campus operations and ensure the safety, well-being and learning environment for our more than 50,000 students.

We are grateful for the countless staff members and state and University law enforcement officers, as well as support personnel who exercised extraordinary restraint in the face of a difficult situation that is playing out at universities across the country. There is a way to exercise freedom of speech and civil discourse, and our Office of the Dean of Students has continued to offer ways to ensure protests can happen within the rules. The University of Texas will continue to take necessary steps so that all our University functions proceed without interruption.
Sincerely yours,

/s/ Jay Hartzell
Jay Hartzell
President

Governor Abbott and President Hartzell have set an example of leadership that is conspicuous by its absence in the White House.

Via Update Desk/JNS.

Posted on by Scott Johnson in Laughter is the Best Medicine

Thoughts from the ammo line

Ammo Grrrll reports: DOOM-SCROLLING TAKES A HOLIDAY! Commenter-Con3 in the Rearview Mirror (things are closer than they appear). She writes:

Well, Commenter-Con3 (April 14-16) has come and gone and, as my hometown newspaper used to report on all social gatherings, “a good time was had by all!” I TRIED asking attendees to hold off a week on discussing CC3 because I had an earlier – now defunct — version of this column in the pipeline. But it appears to have had a lot of the cachet of a Geezer Woodstock! And people want to signify that THEY were there! Fair dinkum!

So I hope to discuss it again by drawing some conclusions after a week’s distance. Don’t worry, kids, if YOU weren’t there personally (despite months of my begging…ahem), you can still weigh in on the lessons drawn in the last half of the column.

First of all, I LOVE hotels. Joe and I checked in on the Friday before the wingding officially started. We had two nights just to chill and relax. Many “regulars” arrived on Saturday to do the same. When I was on the road for some 30 years doing standup, other comics complained about the loneliness and ennui of hotel living, but I loved it! I don’t want to say I spent a lot of nights on the road, but I didn’t BUY a bar of soap for about 15 years. I don’t think my boys knew that soap came in any larger sizes.

Of course, as you rise in your comedic status, you get put in better and better hotels. It’s not as fun to be in a motel in which everything that could possibly be stolen is bolted down. “Who,” you ask yourself, “would steal an IRONING BOARD??” Sure, a couple of Holiday Inn towels, but do the people who would steal an ironing board even have a use for one?

In one particularly wretched motel in Nebraska, three of us comics shared two rooms for 3 nights in a place where I swear nobody had ever spent a WHOLE night, if you catch my drift. One measly “bath towel” you could see through, no washcloth, a seat on the toilet, praise God, but no cover, and a black and white television bolted to the floor. No self-respecting junkie would even bother to steal that.

But, eventually, I was regularly quartered in luxury properties where the amenities were such that once when my dear, thrifty late Mama stayed with me in Naples, Florida, she had already put her fancy shampoo, soap, and face cream in her luggage before the maid had even changed the bed and of course, the maid laid out all new amenities – which Mama also nicked. I think Mama just DISPLAYED them at home on her vanity rather than using them.

It’s weird when something you have worked on for 10 months is suddenly over. Remember in the great Tom Hanks movie Castaway one of the worst parts of his character’s terrible isolation and omnipresent danger was having no meaningful work to do, apart from survival to another day. He even saved one of the UPS packages to be delivered when HE was delivered to have some task to look forward to.

I think men in particular struggle with retirement unless they make new friends and seek out new hobbies. Bear Bryant, who was not in the best of health, soldiered on from duty and his love of Bama football right up until he retired. Then, sadly, he was gone just four weeks and one day later. The brother of the firefighter next door to us in Minnesota also passed away just weeks after he was no longer called upon to do one of the most dangerous jobs in the world.

Watch little toddlers – what we call “toys” are their jobs. They are “busy” all day. I believe we are hard-wired for USEFULNESS and being paid to do nothing is one of the worst disasters that can happen to a person’s character, no matter how sweet it appears in the abstract.

Now, I realize that several of our male commenters do a lot of cooking, perhaps even the majority of it, but in our home, we have an extremely stereotypical, gender-specific division of labor: Joe writes novels, keeps an eagle eye on his Fantasy Baseball, practices piano, does his own laundry and virtually anything related to finances or technology.

I do household laundry and my own, write columns, cook two meals a day almost every day, and everything connected with that, such as shopping, dishes, and cleanup. In that sense, I see no “retirement” down the road. Which suits me fine. I love to cook and feed people and entertain. We pay other indispensable people to clean and do landscaping. No sense in overdoing this whole “usefulness” thing. But let us now circle back to Commenter Con and see what we can take away from the experience.

1. People came from 21 of the 57 states (Hat Tip: Obama), many bluer than a Buddy Guy guitar riff, and attendees were relieved not to have to self-censor all the time.

2. Youngsters, take heart! Unlike in many Asian and other cultures, in youth-worshiping America older adults are perhaps THE most “invisible” of all demographic groups and least respected. Do not despair if you are lucky enough to reach senior status! Most of our attendees ranged in age from late 50s to mid-80s. Please understand that every single attendee was still interesting, talented, fun, funny, and with it – even if occasionally our memories needed a teeny tiny jog. (“You know that actor – the one who has the charity for disabled vets?” “Gary Sinise” – yes! That’s it…anyway…”) There is no shame in being on “dial-up” instead of “high speed.”

3. And a great many of the ladies attending could definitely still turn heads. Nice-looking fellas, too, but then I am partial to older men. Or older man, in my case.

4. And, of course, dozens of our cohort have a knowledge base that could run circles around the smartest young person, some of whom know shockingly little without Google. Also much of what they DO “know” is wrong.

5. Among our famous Deplorables who smell and have bad teeth if we believe “journalists,” we have everything from an astronaut who docked to the Space Station five times (and also has a set of autographed drumsticks from Ringo!) to a retired cardiologist and a bone doctor; farmers from Minnesota with some of the most hilarious stories around; not one, but TWO women veterinarians; several novelists; a Dream Team of lawyers; at least a platoon of military vets; scientists, engineers; a guy with no home but four motorcycles; and a gunsmith married to an artist, Meme Queen, and world-class cook and gardener.

6. My forever bestie, Ladiehawke, caught my attention with her assertion that “EVERYBODY is a Ph.D in SOMETHING.” She should know – she legitimately could be called Dr. Dr. as she has a Ph.D. in some sciencey thing that always slips my mind – Biochemistry? Biology? Some bio thing – AND also a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine. But she told me a beautiful story about a mentally challenged neighbor long ago who was an absolute expert on pigeons.

7. My experience at all the Commenter-Cons is that ANY conversational “hive” you happen upon will contain people so much smarter and warmer and more interesting than any celebrity in either D.C. or Hollywood that it isn’t even a contest. I’d love to lock “intellectual” Katie Couric and any seven leftist friends of her choice in a cage match with all three Tonys, Deb, Aurora, Lucretia, Joe, and Capt Jim and see who emerges with a brain cell standing after half an hour! (Not so easy, is it, without the ability just to cut off someone’s mic when he/she is WINNING?) By the way, we could pick ANY seven attendees and still win – those were just the first smarties I thought of!

We had a guy from Utah who is an expert at drying fruit and also knows everything about the Civil War and, oh yeah, speaks fluent Korean; we had a famous novelist who also is an expert on old-timey baseball players. THESE names he knows, whereas he wishes that every current human had to wear a name tag at all times…including me.

We had a truck driver with a Law Degree who also knows pretty much everything there is to know about vintage automobiles. We had a Navy vet who teaches Line Dancing. We had a World Champion Quick Draw guy who had to learn to shoot with his non-dominant hand after a little dust-up with brain cancer who is also a fanatic grammarian, having been properly taught in a one-room Iowa schoolhouse; we had an Iraqi Jew from New Jersey whose relatives wrote the definitive book on life for Jews in Iraq before the wretched pogrom known as the “Farhoud.” (Look it up if you have the stomach for it. The lovely book is called Memories of Eden.)

8. And, of course, this doesn’t even scratch the surface. One of the most wrong-headed things F. Scott Fitzgerald ever said was “There are no second acts in American life.” Quoi? Let me – S. Marie Vass – tell you that almost every person I know who has retired from one or more jobs is busy contributing in some other way. Making baby hats for newborns; gardening; learning a new language or musical instrument; volunteering at the VA twice a week in Prescott; tutoring black kids in St. Paul; heck, even learning to shoot and becoming a columnist at 67!

9. The almighty arrogance and utter lack of self-awareness of our pathetic, degenerate ruling class boggles the mind. I love it when sometimes they say the quiet part aloud. To hear Katie Couric say that Trump voters are anti-intellectual and full of “class envy” at least lets me know that the spoiled near-talentless little twit ADMITS that she and her pals are in a different “class” and look down on the middle and working classes with total contempt. And back atcha, hon.