Category: Climate Change

Federal government weighs in on a 15-year-old pupusa dispute (Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia)

by philg

Our energetic government employees have been vilified for inefficiency (most recently by the notorious DOGE), but the example of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia shows that federal workers can be very energetic indeed.

CNN:

Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran national, entered the US illegally sometime around 2011, but an immigration judge in 2019, after reviewing evidence, withheld his removal. That meant he could not be deported to El Salvador but could be deported to another country. A gang in his native country, the immigration judge found, had been “targeting him and threatening him with death because of his family’s pupusa business.”

(“could be deported to another country” is inconsistent with what Democrats on X and Facebook are saying, i.e., that the noble Abrego Garcia had the right to permanent residence in the U.S.)

ChatGPT, regarding the value (in 2025 dollars) at stake in this deadly dispute:

​In El Salvador, pupusas are a beloved and affordable staple. Typically, a standard pupusa costs between $0.25 and $1.00 USD, depending on factors like ingredients, size, and location.

A federal employee, in other words, determined that a gang member who didn’t like a pupusa ten years earlier (maybe the gang prefers panes rellenos?) was lying in wait for Mr. Abrego Garcia to return to El Salvador so that he could be executed. Therefore, Mr. Abrego Garcia could stay safe in the U.S.

(It’s unclear to me why Mr. Abrego Garcia is safer in Maryland than in El Salvador. The murder rates in Baltimore and Washington, D.C. are more than 20X higher than in El Salvador. The border was fully open for four years and any Salvadoran, including cornmeal-hating gang members, could enter the U.S. and stay permanently temporarily (latest extension by the Biden-Harris administration, oddly in conflict with the fact that the State Department rates El Salvador as safer for American travelers than France or my beloved Sweden (see below).

Additionally, Mr. Abrego Garcia would be at risk in Maryland from his wife, with whom he apparently has a history of physical violence (ABC). Suppose that she has availed herself of her 2nd Amendment rights during Mr. Abrego Garcia’s sojourn in El Salvador? He returns to Maryland as a hero to all Democrats and is promptly filled with lead by the wife.

Surely the United States is now home to far more non-imprisoned violent Salvadorans than El Salvador itself (which successfully exported nearly all of its violent criminals to the U.S. and then imprisoned the rest).)

I’m at a loss to understand how Americans imagine that our English-speaking government workers are capable of sorting out what happened in a pupusa exchange 15 years ago.

Separately, here’s a hero of climate change alarmism:

According to Maryland Sen. Van Hollen, we’re in a “climate crisis” exacerbated by a “climate emergency.” What’s the right thing to do in that situation? Tap into a lake of Jet A and fly roundtrip to El Salvador without first making any appointments (nytimes):

It wasn’t possible to meet via Zoom or phone?

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If consumption taxes and carbon taxes are good, why are tariffs bad?

by philg

We’re informed by America’s expert class that Donald Trump’s tariffs, money paid to the government when an item from overseas is purchased for use here, are disastrous.

We’ve been informed for 30 years by America’s expert class that consumption taxes, such as sales taxes, airline ticket taxes, gasoline taxes, etc. are good. In fact, one way to make America better would be to have a European-style 20 percent value-added (consumption) tax, i.e., money paid to the government when an item from overseas is purchased for use domestically (and also when a domestically produced item is purchased). Trump’s 10 percent general tariff plus California’s 10 percent sales tax rate (varies a bit by city/county) comes pretty close to the European average of 22 percent consumption tax (VAT).

Our elites also say that what would really deliver us the paradise on Earth to which we are entitled is a carbon tax. We consume too much, especially of transportation, and the result is epic CO2 emission. A consumption tax, especially for things that have to be transported long distances, would go a long way to healing our beloved Spaceship Earth. A tariff, of course, isn’t a laser-targeted carbon tax, but it is most certainly better than no tax at all for plastic being made in China and then shipped across the wide Pacific Ocean.

Finally, we’ve been told by experts for at least 20 years that we are undertaxed (our structural annual budget deficits certainly lend some credence to this theory!). The government needs more revenue of all kinds so that it can do great things for us.

Trump’s tariffs may simply be a prod to negotiating lower tariffs and non-tariff barriers in other countries to U.S. exports. But even if they were to be applied long-term, based on everything that elites and progressives have previously said, shouldn’t they be a positive for both the U.S. and for the world? Why the hysteria from Democrats when higher tax rates, carbon taxes, and more government revenue are precisely the things that they’ve been asking for?

A neighbor’s house this morning, below. Why wouldn’t a progressive celebrate discouraging the importation of a gas guzzling Porsche 911 like the one in the photo (daily driver parked on the street because the homeowner’s garage is presumably full with the valuable cars). This homeowner could have used a nudge in the direction of a planet-healing domestically produced Chevrolet Bolt instead.

The whole situation is almost as confusing to me as climate change alarmist Senator Mark Kelly’s switch from Tesla to pavement-melting gasoline-powered Chevy Tahoe. Trump has seemingly delivered almost everything that elite progressives have asked for and yet they’re forecasting a doom spiral.

Related:

  • “Trade, Firms, and Wages: Theory and Evidence” (Amiti and Davis 2011), in which economists from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Queers for Palestine University (a.k.a. “Columbia”), and NBER, found that high tariffs boosted wages for workers “at import-competing firms”
  • “There’s a Method to Trump’s Tariff Madness” (New York Times! Guest essay by a young history professor): “They are the opening gambit in a more ambitious plan to smash the world’s economic and geopolitical order and replace it with something intended to better serve American interests. … it seeks to improve the United States’ global trading position by using tariffs and other strong-arm tactics to force the world to take a radical step: weakening the dollar via currency agreements. … some sort of reset of the economic order probably makes sense for the United States.” and then the more familiar NYT perspective… “But the slash-and-burn approach of the Mar-a-Lago Accord isn’t the answer. For one thing, it is hard to find an economist outside of Mr. Trump’s inner circle who thinks it is a good idea. But even if, despite all the chaos it will unleash, the United States eventually prospers as a result, we will have traded away the core economic and political values that make America truly great. … The most valuable asset of the United States is not the dollar but our trustworthiness — our integrity and our values. If the world envisioned by the Mar-a-Lago Accords comes to pass, it will be a sign that not only our currency but our nation has been devalue” (My rating for this last sentence: Completely FALSE! Our most valuable asset is the entire continent that we stole from the Native Americans! As a thought experiment, imagine if the roughly 350 million Americans lived on the territory of Sudan. How rich would we be?)
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Hurricane season reality vs. prediction

by philg

The Righteous say that we should substantially reduce our standard of living in response to climate models that show the Earth’s climate trajectory for the next 75-200 years. (This will be effective because there is no way that China and India, for example, will continue to output CO2 once they see us cutting back.) Let’s see how climatologists did with a three-month forecast of hurricane activity.

The climate/weather nerds at Colorado State University have a page at https://tropical.colostate.edu/forecasting.html where they issue and update forecasts for the hurricane season and then, remarkably, report on how accurate they were. Here’s an excerpt from the “verification”:

In August, they said that we’d have 120 days during which a Named Storm was in operation. In fact, we had 77 such days. The Net Tropical Cyclone Activity (NTC) was forecast to be 240% and it was instead 189%. NTC is defined as “Average seasonal percentage mean of NS, NSD, H, HD, MH, MHD. Gives overall indication of Atlantic basin seasonal hurricane activity. The 1991-2020 average value of this parameter is 135.” The definitions needed to make sense of NTC, from a forecast:

I’m not sure whether (so to speak) to be impressed by these weather soothsayers. They overpredicted hurricane activity, but they were correct that hurricane activity would be greater than the recent average. Their results don’t seem to be tainted by going back so far that recordkeeping and measurement techniques were radically different. (See “Changes in Atlantic major hurricane frequency since the late-19th century” (Nature) for the dangers of fooling oneself when using older historical data; the authors of the Nature paper concluded that we aren’t having more hurricanes and we aren’t having more intense hurricanes than we did in the 19th century.)

If the Colorado guys, who might never have seen a hurricane, got the big picture right in 2024 maybe we should have faith in the 100-year forecasts and go green by buying… Tesla Cybertrucks! There is no better way to save our beloved planet than with a 7,000 lb. eco-vehicle. I’ve seen a few without wraps here in South Florida lately and the stainless steel looks fine.

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Hurricane Helene Holiday…

by philg

…. for the schoolteachers here in Palm Beach County. The forecast called for some rain, winds of about 20 knots, and for the storm to track off Florida’s west coast (i.e., “the other coast”) and then, in a move sure to delight Democrats, directly over Ron DeSantis’s house in Tallahassee (Greta Thunberg may have moved on to Queers for Palestine, but the Wrath of Climate Change God is still just).

With all of the spinning air there was a tornado watch, but that could be a reason to keep schools open. For many teachers and children, school is a far safer place to be during a tornado than home, especially if the home was built prior to the statewide Florida Building Code of 2002.

Every business was open, except for a few restaurants with primarily outdoor seating. We did not lose power even for one second (thanks to the grid hardening initiative approved by Governor DeSantis in 2019 and opposed by Democrats?).

A few palm trees shed fronds in our neighborhood, but this won’t damage even a parked car. It is nothing like being in the Northeast where an oak tree can destroy a house due to the weight being substantially near the top of the tree. (A friend’s house in the Boston suburbs was recently assaulted by an oak tree (fell down on a calm wind day). The removal of the tree via crane cost over $5,000 and only now is he beginning to contemplate roof, window, and siding repairs.)

The event was an interesting study in media-driven fear. A dozen friends and relatives called to see if we had survived the apocalypse. They knew that we lived on the east coast of Florida and that the hurricane had traveled off the west coast, but the media reports that they’d consumed made it sound as though most of Florida was threatened/trashed.

Related… if Americans vote correctly in November, Naples, Sanibel Island, Sarasota, and Palm Beach will be on track for extra federal taxpayer assistance. After Hurricane Ian trashed wealthy west coast barrier island beachfront property in 2022… “VP Harris slammed for saying Hurricane Ian aid will be ‘based on equity’” (New York Post):

Vice President Harris came in for a torrent of criticism after telling an audience that “communities of color” would be first in line for relief in the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Ian.

“We have to address this in a way that is about giving resources based on equity, understanding that we fight for equality, but we also need to fight for equity,” she said during a discussion with Priyanka Chopra at the Democratic National Committee’s Women’s Leadership Forum on Friday.

“If we want people to be in an equal place sometimes we need to take into account those disparities and do that work,” she added.

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NASA at Oshkosh (saving our planet with plastic bags)

by philg

From nasa.gov:

The NASA pavilion at EAA AirVenture (“Oshkosh”) 2024:

(These are the plastic bags that are good for the environment?)

What else was going on? NASA arranged to have a Boeing Starliner parked in front:

The NISAR mission was featured. This was supposed to be launched in January 2022 and will supposedly be able to measure displacements of parts of Earth’s surface as small as 3.5 mm. I’m not sure if this includes vertical displacement, e.g., to see whether sea levels are indeed rising to the point that owners of multi-$billion lower Manhattan and Boston real estate portfolios need to be bailed out by taxpayers in the Midwest. The satellite will supposedly be able to watch glaciers and ice sheets moving. I don’t think that it can measure sea level directly because the Science Users’ Handbook says “Provide observations of relative sea level rise from melting land ice and land subsidence.” How many migrants could have been housed for the cost of this mission? “NISAR launch slips to 2025” (July 29, 2024) says “with NASA alone spending more than $1 billion in formulation and development of the mission”. Taxpayers spend about $200,000 per year per migrant family welcomed in New York ($140k/year for food and housing and then let’s assume another $60,000/year for health care and other benefits). So if we hadn’t spent money on NISAR we could have supported 1,000 additional migrant families for five years.

NASA was also featuring the X-66, a collaboration with Boeing on an airliner that could possibly cut fuel burn by 30 percent, mostly via high aspect ratio wings (as you might see on a glider). We’re in a “climate crisis” according to our ablest minds, e.g., Kamala Harris, and “communities of color are often the hardest hit”. When will communities of color see some relief from the X-66? NASA says that if everything goes perfect the X-66 might get into the air as soon as 2028 and then, in the year 2050, we’ll be in a net-zero phase for aviation. The United Nations forecasts that world population will grow to approximately 10 billion by 2050. So we’ll have more people taking more trips, mostly in planes that were built to current designs, and the result will be much less environmental impact.

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Climate Change: the Science is settled and also was “completely overturned” in mid-2024

by philg

We’ve been informed that, when it comes to climate change, “the Science [was] settled” as of no later than 2007 when Professor Dr. Al Gore, Ph.D. talked to fellow Scientists in the U.S. Congress (state-sponsored NPR). Science’s climate models generate accurate predictions of Earth’s future temperatures, storm patterns, hurricane frequency and track, etc. These models depend critically on submodels of ocean behavior. According to Scientists at the World Bank in 2022:

Oceans are the largest heat sink on the planet. They absorb 90% of the excess heat caused by climate change. Oceans are also a very efficient carbon sink, absorbing 23% of human-caused CO2 emissions.

Here’s some July 2024 news from MIT:

“By isolating the impact of this feedback, we see a fundamentally different relationship between ocean circulation and atmospheric carbon levels, with implications for the climate,” says study author Jonathan Lauderdale, a research scientist in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences. “What we thought is going on in the ocean is completely overturned.”

As it happens, “complete overturning” of what had been settled Science requires a higher level of panic:

Lauderdale says the findings show that “we can’t count on the ocean to store carbon in the deep ocean in response to future changes in circulation. We must be proactive in cutting emissions now, rather than relying on these natural processes to buy us time to mitigate climate change.”

“My work shows that we need to look more carefully at how ocean biology can affect the climate,” Lauderdale points out. “Some climate models predict a 30 percent slowdown in the ocean circulation due to melting ice sheets, particularly around Antarctica. This huge slowdown in overturning circulation could actually be a big problem: In addition to a host of other climate issues, not only would the ocean take up less anthropogenic CO2 from the atmosphere, but that could be amplified by a net outgassing of deep ocean carbon, leading to an unanticipated increase in atmospheric CO2 and unexpected further climate warming.”

Expected the unexpected, in other words, even when Science is settled. (Separately, with the Science having been settled prior to this “complete overturning”, why does the overturner refer to “some climate models” making a prediction and not others? With settled Science, shouldn’t all climate models agree on the major points, just as all models of orbital mechanics agree on when Halley’s Comet will return to our charred planet?)

From Nature Magazine:

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We’re suffering a “climate crisis”, but it isn’t so critical that we’d want to discourage driving and spewing CO2 while stuck in traffic

by philg

Today was the day that New York City was supposed to be decongested (with about $700 million in tax dollars spent in prep, according to the Wall Street Journal).

From New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s web site:

As Governor, Kathy is committed to ensuring that New York leads the transition to a clean energy future and advances climate justice. Since taking office, she has led efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions … She has also invested millions in climate justice fellowships for historically disadvantaged communities. Governor Hochul is working tirelessly to ensure that New York is a global leader in the fight against climate change, and she will continue enacting policies to protect our communities and the next generation of New Yorkers from the growing threats of the climate crisis.

From her official governor’s site:

“We have a moral obligation to leave this extraordinary planet better than we found it,” Governor Hochul said. … These issues, if not addressed collectively with great urgency, pose existential threats to humans and other living beings, as well as the ecosystems they depend upon.

CNN, June 5… “NY Gov Hochul delays controversial NYC congestion pricing plan ‘indefinitely’”:

New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced Wednesday she is indefinitely delaying the implementation of congestion pricing in New York City’s borough of Manhattan just weeks before the plan was set to take effect, … New York’s congestion pricing would have been the first of its kind in the United States. Similar programs have been implemented in London and Stockholm. The New York City version has been years in the making and was scheduled to begin June 30th. As part of the plan, drivers would have paid $15 to enter Manhattan south of 60th street, with commercial vehicles and trucks paying steeper tolls.

So humanity is doomed if we don’t stop spewing out CO2 while sitting in massive traffic jams and also we shouldn’t do anything to discourage people from spewing out CO2 while sitting in massive traffic jams. We’re in a “climate crisis” that isn’t one of those critical crises in which we might want to take action.

Related:

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Could climate change trash the States of Righteousness before it destroys Florida?

by philg

Democrats love contemplating the destruction of Florida almost as much as they love reflecting on Donald Trump’s crimes and convictions.

The Democrat dream begins with a rejection of Science, i.e., saying that climate change has already resulted in more frequent and more intense hurricanes. “Changes in Atlantic major hurricane frequency since the late-19th century” (Nature magazine, 2021; by geoscientists from NOAA and Princeton) looks at data from 1851-2019 and concludes the opposite:

To evaluate past changes in frequency, we have here developed a homogenization method for Atlantic hurricane and major hurricane frequency over 1851–2019. We find that recorded century-scale increases in Atlantic hurricane and major hurricane frequency, and associated decrease in USA hurricanes strike fraction, are consistent with changes in observing practices and not likely a true climate trend. After homogenization, increases in basin-wide hurricane and major hurricane activity since the 1970s are not part of a century-scale increase, but a recovery from a deep minimum in the 1960s–1980s.

One of the most consistent expectations from projected future global warming is that there should be an increase in TC intensity, such that the fraction of [major hurricanes] MH to [Atlantic hurricanes] HU increases … there are no significant increases in either basin-wide HU or MH frequency, or in the MH/HU ratio for the Atlantic basin between 1878 and 2019 (when the U.S. Signal Corps started tracking NA HUs … The homogenized basin-wide HU and MH record does not show strong evidence of a century-scale increase in either MH frequency or MH/HU ratio associated with the century-scale, greenhouse-gas-induced warming of the planet. …Caution should be taken in connecting recent changes in Atlantic hurricane activity to the century-scale warming of our planet.

Suppose that progressives are correct and the NOAA/Princeton geoscience nerds are wrong. Let’s assume that there will be more hurricanes and that each hurricane will be more intense than in the past. Is it guaranteed that these intensified and more frequent hurricanes will hit the Deplorables in Florida? Let’s go back to Nature magazine. “Poleward expansion of tropical cyclone latitudes in warming climates” (2021):

Tropical cyclones (TCs, also known as hurricanes and typhoons) generally form at low latitudes with access to the warm waters of the tropical oceans, but far enough off the equator to allow planetary rotation to cause aggregating convection to spin up into coherent vortices. Yet, current prognostic frameworks for TC latitudes make contradictory predictions for climate change. Simulations of past warm climates, such as the Eocene and Pliocene, show that TCs can form and intensify at higher latitudes than of those during pre-industrial conditions. Observations and model projections for the twenty-first century indicate that TCs may again migrate poleward in response to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, which poses profound risks to the planet’s most populous regions. Previous studies largely neglected the complex processes that occur at temporal and spatial scales of individual storms as these are poorly resolved in numerical models. Here we review this mesoscale physics in the context of responses to climate warming of the Hadley circulation, jet streams and Intertropical Convergence Zone. We conclude that twenty-first century TCs will most probably occupy a broader range of latitudes than those of the past 3 million years as low-latitude genesis will be supplemented with increasing mid-latitude TC favourability, although precise estimates for future migration remain beyond current methodologies.

As decoded for the public in an AP News article, “Climate change could bring more storms like Hurricane Lee to New England”:

One recent study found climate change could result in hurricanes expanding their reach more often into mid-latitude regions, which includes New York, Boston and even Beijing. Factors in this, the study found, are the warmer sea surface temperatures in these regions and the shifting and weakening of the jet streams — strong bands of air currents that encircle the planet in both hemispheres.

“These jet stream changes combined with the warmer ocean temperatures are making the mid latitude more favorable to hurricanes,” Joshua Studholme, a Yale University physicist and lead author on the study. “Ultimately meaning that these regions are likely to see more storm formation, intensification and persistence.”

Another study simulated tropical cyclone tracks from pre-industrial times, modern times and a future with higher emissions. It found that hurricanes will move north and east in the Atlantic. It also found hurricanes would track closer to the coasts including Boston, New York and Norfolk, Virginia and more likely to form along the Southeast coast, giving New Englanders less time to prepare.

In other words, if the dire predictions of the climate alarmists come true the result could be hurricanes redirected from the 20-year-old concrete houses of South Florida to the 150-year-old wooden houses of New England.

Perhaps some of this punishment of the virtuous has already happened. Scientific American, which endorsed climate warrior Joe Biden, says “Extreme Heat Threatens Student Health in Schools without Air-Conditioning”:

Yet as extreme heat affects more students and disrupts more school days, government spending to keep kids cool remains woefully inadequate, experts say, allowing an underreported health crisis to fester in school districts across the country.

One school in Rhode Island “had components of their operating HVAC systems that were nearly 100 years old,” the GAO stated. Yet few local school boards in financially strapped districts can afford to upgrade old mechanical systems.

The same is true for a school in Natick, Mass., a 36,000-person city 22 miles west of Boston, where “staff and students have suffered heat stroke and other heat-related illness due to the lack of centralized air-conditioning during high degree days,” according to a summary of the $2 million grant.

Guess where schools already have A/C… Florida! In fact, some Florida schools have fully air conditioned field houses (WPTV) to support athletic training in mid-August, the beginning of the school year here:

Circling back to hurricanes… if the NOAA and Princeton eggheads cited above are wrong, it is possible that Floridians accustomed to a hurricane every 30 years might have to endure one every 20 years and that their impact windows, impact garage doors, and 160 mph-rated roofs would therefore get tested more frequently. But if the Yale egghead cited above is correct, the folks who have been gleefully contemplating Florida’s suffering will fare worse given that their communities were never designed to withstand hurricanes.

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Climate change is an existential threat, but China is a bigger threat

by philg

Joe Biden, 2023 (whitehouse.gov):

You know, I’ve seen firsthand what the reports made clear: the devastating toll of climate change and its existential threat to all of us. And it is the ultimate threat to humanity: climate change.

“Biden to Quadruple Tariffs on Chinese EVs” (Wall Street Journal, May 10, 2024):

The Biden administration is preparing to raise tariffs on clean-energy goods from China in the coming days, with the levy on Chinese electric vehicles set to roughly quadruple, according to people familiar with the matter. … signs that China was ramping up exports of clean-energy goods prompted concern in Washington, where officials are trying to protect a nascent American clean-energy industry from China.

Officials are particularly focused on electric vehicles, and they are expected to raise the tariff rate to roughly 100% from 25%, according to the people. An additional 2.5% duty applies to all automobiles imported into the U.S. The existing 25% tariff on Chinese electric vehicles has so far effectively barred those models, often cheaper than Western-made cars, from the U.S. market. Biden administration officials, automakers and some lawmakers worry that wouldn’t be enough given the scale of Chinese manufacturing.

In other words, it is better for all humans to be killed by climate change (the “existential threat” turning out to be real) than it is to drive a Chinese car or use any other “clean-energy good” from China.

One might think that the cognitive dissonance would start to become apparent even to climate change alarmists themselves. Greta Thunberg has switched to pro-Hamas activism (e.g., protesting against the 20-year-old Eden Golan singing in the Eurovision contest; this reminds me to wonder if there will be a sequel to the Will Ferrell movie). Even if we accept that Palestinians are the world’s most noble people, how is the status of their war against the Israelis more important than the impending death of all humans that she previously warned us about? Of course, there are the climate change alarmists who use private jets. And we have the Biden administration, which says that climate change is on track to kill all humans and also keeps the border open so that millions of migrants from low-carbon societies can become high-carbon-output residents of the U.S. (the quickest method of accelerating CO2 emissions imaginable). Finally, we now have these huge tariffs to discourage Americans from adopting what we’ve been informed are planet-saving/humanity-saving technologies.

Separately… the YANGWANG U9 from BYD, with the 1 horsepower that is required for moving at Miami Beach traffic speed and 1,299 hp in reserve.

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United Nations climate change alarmist steps out of a Gulfstream

by philg

The UN proudly displays a picture of its top executive getting out of a Gulfstream in Egypt (note the oval windows)

A first class lie-flat nonstop commercial flight from NY to Cairo was not an option, apparently. Why is it interesting that an elite spews a few trucks worth of Jet A into the atmosphere? Six days earlier, the same person characterized climate change as #1 among the “crises assaulting our planet”:

In 2023, he highlighted climate change as “killing people and devastating communities” and called for “phasing out” oil (peasants would stop using it so that elites would enjoy lower prices when topping off their Gulfstreams?):

In the comments below a reader points out that the specific Gulfstream in the photo might not have carried the Hero of Climate Change all the way from New York. I did a little digging and found that the United Nations operates its own fleet of private jets, apparently, in “UN” livery:

In case the original is memory-holed:

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