Nicholas Kristof wrote an editorial in the New York Times illustrating the need for Obamacare.  John, from Oregon, faced a devastating illness, lost his job, lost his health coverage, and couldn’t find a doctor who would treat him.  Michelle Malkin and various readers of the Times have taken the story apart.  It turns out that John could have been covered under his wife’s health insurance plan; there’s a law preventing insurers from imposing “pre-existing conditions” limitations on spousal coverage.  John was already covered under Oregon’s Medicaid plan, something Kristof pointed out in the original article, indicating that any problem here, if there is one, is a problem with a government health insurance program.  Doctors have pointed out that public hospitals are required to see patients regardless of their ability to pay.  Finally, it turns out that John has in fact been a patient seeing top surgeons at Oregon State for three weeks– well before the article was published!

This reminds me of the Democrats’ case study on expansion of the SCHIP program—a family where both parents worked, the children went to a private school whose tuition was $20,000 for each child, the father owned his own architectural firm, the family lived in a house worth more than $400,000, and the boy taken as the example was already covered anyway!

If there’s an urgent need for health care reform, why is it that the Democrats can’t come up with even one convincing example that makes their case?

I’ve talked about this phenomenon before.  The elites in Washington, New York, and elsewhere who craft policies, write editorials, write laws, propose regulations, etc., don’t know any people who are actually in the conditions they talk about.  They don’t know anyone who lacks health insurance.  They don’t know anyone who knows anyone who lacks health insurance.  (Except, maybe, their maids—but they never talk to them anyway.) They have no idea that you can go to a public hospital and get treatment, even if you don’t have insurance.

Worse, in this case, they appear not to talk to anyone in the health care industry—doctors, nurses, hospital administrators, specialists, etc.—unless they happen to be political activists as well.  Doctors I know talk a lot about the problems of the health care industry.  The problems they worry about and the fixes they recommend, however, bear almost no relation to the Democrats’ proposed reform.  There are real problems about insurance companies dropping people from coverage, for example, when they are diagnosed with a serious illness.  There are real problems about reimbursement rates, about malpractice lawsuits, about the burdens placed on hospitals, about the inefficiencies of the present system, and about prescription drugs.  But Obamacare addresses none of them in a constructive way; indeed, it would make many of them worse.

Advice to Nicholas Kristol: Hop a train to the unfashionable parts of New York City and talk to some people who don’t have health insurance.  Talk to some doctors, nurses, administrators of clinics.  Don’t tell them your ideas; listen to theirs.  Then, write about that.  Talk about health care as it actually exists in this country, not as you imagine that it must be.

UPDATE: The more I think about this, the more I think that we’ve all been missing the real story.  Where do these examples come from?  Where did Kristof hear about John, anyway?  I’d love to know the genesis of this, the SCHIP story, and other similar bad examples.

So much has been happening on Climategate that I haven’t been able to keep up and blog too.  Meanwhile, my Handel concert tomorrow may be snowed out!  The high being predicted for tomorrow is thirty degrees below normal.  Global warming, my ***!

Here are a few highlights: Phil Jones has stepped down as Director of the East Anglia Climate Research Unit, pending an investigation.  The CRU has announced that it discarded the original, unadjusted climate data.  Penn State has opened an investigation into Michael Mann.  Attempts to run the programs downloaded by the “hacker” have failed; they just generate reams of error messages.  The EPA has apparently relied heavily on East Anglia results in reaching its absurd decision to classify carbon dioxide as a pollutant.  NASA has been resisting Freedom of Information Act requests for its underlying data for the past two years.  Temperature records for New Zealand, finally released, show nothing like the upward swing that official, published graphs have shown.  Australia has voted down a cap-and-trade law.  India, China, and Brazil have announced their firm opposition to any climate accord.  And now we can see the decline the researchers were trying to hide:

And the ABC, CBS, and NBC nightly news shows still have not reported on Climategate.  Last night they were scooped by Comedy Central!  Meanwhile Nancy Pelosi thinks the only issue is how to prosecute the whistle-blower.  The Travis Monitor reprints a useful chart showing threat levels to the politically correct consensus:

I couldn’t help being struck this morning by the juxtaposition of these two stories.

1. Navy SEALs who captured a most-wanted terrorist are being court-martialed for allegedly giving him a bloody lip in the process.  Isn’t assault what the military is, you know, for?
2. Saudi Arabia has sentenced a TV host to death for witchcraft. He was visiting from Lebanon and sometimes makes predictions on his show.

I can think of one thing we have in common with the Saudis: we’re both completely insane.

That’s how Charlie Martin puts it.  He reviews an East Anglia programmer’s notes in detail (in HARRY_READ_ME.txt) as he tries to make sense of the climate models.  The upshot: He finds complete confusion, and can’t replicate the research team’s results!

I think there’s a good reason the CRU didn’t want to give their data to people trying to replicate their work.

It’s in such a mess that they can’t replicate their own results.

Now, it’s worth looking at this in some detail.  It’s not unusual that, in dealing with very large databases, one has to make corrections to the data.  Stations stop transmitting data for a time, and then resume; mechanical problems lead to ridiculous outliers; things break and have to be replaced; and so on.  Sometimes, problems are severe enough that stations have to be thrown out of the sample altogether.  But often problems seem relatively minor, and missing or bizarre data is extrapolated.  There are ways of doing this that are entirely respectable, and improve the quality of the results. (You really don’t want to work from data sets that show that the temperature in Norwich was zero for two weeks in August, or that the temperature in St. Andrews was 938° C one day in March.) Of course, such changes should be documented, and the method for extrapolating should be specified.

The manipulation and confusion in the East Anglia data, however, goes far beyond anything like this.  There are significant errors in the program; a sum of squares ends up negative!  A commenter has a nice joke:

[why does the sum-of-squares parameter OpTotSq go negative?!!]

Because, obviously, the climate data are imaginary.

In the end, the programmer simply plugs in the published 1901-1995 results, because he can’t recreate any of them using the data!  Near the end he comments,

I am seriously close to giving up, again. The history of this is so complex that I can’t get far enough into it before by head hurts and I have to stop. Each parameter has a tortuous history of manual and semi-automated interventions that I simply cannot just go back to early versions and run the update prog. I could be throwing away all kinds of corrections – to lat/lons, to WMOs (yes!), and more.

WMO is the World Meteorological Organization, whose data might reasonably be thought to be trustworthy.  But no; it was “corrected” for unspecified reasons in unspecified ways.

Here are some other excerpts (from Declan McCullogh):

I am seriously worried that our flagship gridded data product is produced by Delaunay triangulation – apparently linear as well. As far as I can see, this renders the station counts totally meaningless.

There are hundreds if not thousands of pairs of dummy stations, one with no WMO and one with, usually overlapping and with the same station name and very similar coordinates. I know it could be old and new stations, but why such large overlaps if that’s the case? Aarrggghhh! There truly is no end in sight… So, we can have a proper result, but only by including a load of garbage!

Knowing how long it takes to debug this suite – the experiment endeth here. The option (like all the anomdtb options) is totally undocumented so we’ll never know what we lost.

There are other problems:

Programmer-written comments inserted into CRU’s Fortran code have drawn fire as well. The file briffa_sep98_d.pro says: “Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!” and “APPLY ARTIFICIAL CORRECTION.” Another, quantify_tsdcal.pro, says: “Low pass filtering at century and longer time scales never gets rid of the trend – so eventually I start to scale down the 120-yr low pass time series to mimic the effect of removing/adding longer time scales!”

I like Bob Bleck’s summary: “The emails prove that Mann made global warming is real…we’ve just been spelling it wrong.”

Robert Tracinski and Iain Murray have excellent pieces today on Climategate, the emails from East Anglia University that give us a look behind the curtain at the “scientific” background underlying global warming hysteria. Tracinski, after giving an excellent summary of the issues, says,

This is an enormous case of organized scientific fraud, but it is not just scientific fraud. It is also a criminal act. Suborned by billions of taxpayer dollars devoted to climate research, dozens of prominent scientists have established a criminal racket in which they seek government money-Phil Jones has raked in a total of £13.7 million in grants from the British government-which they then use to falsify data and defraud the taxpayers. It’s the most insidious kind of fraud: a fraud in which the culprits are lauded as public heroes. Judging from this cache of e-mails, they even manage to tell themselves that their manipulation of the data is intended to protect a bigger truth and prevent it from being “confused” by inconvenient facts and uncontrolled criticism.

The damage here goes far beyond the loss of a few billions of taxpayer dollars on bogus scientific research. The real cost of this fraud is the trillions of dollars of wealth that will be destroyed if a fraudulent theory is used to justify legislation that starves the global economy of its cheapest and most abundant sources of energy.

This is the scandal of the century. It needs to be thoroughly investigated-and the culprits need to be brought to justice.

Most of the posts and articles I have read on climategate say, judiciously, that while this casts doubt on some evidence, and is itself evidence of misconduct, we shouldn’t rush to judgment about global warming itself.  Nonsense.  There are many disturbing things in the emails—the use of tricks to hide temperature declines, for example; the pressure on journals not to publish articles critical of global warming; the channeling of papers to reviewers who will rubber-stamp papers showing warming and reject critical papers; the manipulation of the IPCC and the papers referred to in it—but the response to ordinary scientific requests for data and then Freedom of Information Act requests for data is, I think, most telling.  It contravenes scientific practice and violates the law.

But it does more than that.  It tells us that the data do not support the conclusions these scientists have been drawing. If they did, why not release them?  I have done statistical analyses of data sets in a variety of contexts.  There’s no reason not to give other researchers access to the data—unless you’ve been engaged in monkey business. The only sensible explanation is that the scientists involved have analyzed the data, reached conclusions they didn’t want, and then employed “tricks” to get the conclusions they wanted at the outset.

We’ve recently seen a shocking example of this in the case of the Yamal samples.  The famed hockey stick graph of global temperatures depended on picking 12 trees out of 252. The sample as a whole shows no evidence of global warming.

I don’t know what a fair analysis of the East Anglia data would indicate, or even whether there’s enough uncorrupted data left to analyze, but I’m sure of one thing: a fair analysis of the actual data didn’t show global warming.  If it had, there would have been no reason to hide anything.

Right, and hold the inconvenient facts, the objectivity of peer review, and the respect for scientific method.  The astounding revelation of thousands of emails among global warming scientists casts a shocking light on the use of science as politics.  War, von Clausewitz said, is politics by other means.  Apparently, the same can be true of science.  Or perhaps we should say “science.”  Finding “tricks” for hiding data that appears to be incompatible with one’s favored view is not science.

PowerLine has been all over the case, here and here. Gateway Pundit sees South Park parallels. Michelle Malkin calls it “the global warming scandal of the century.” The Washington Post notices the hostility and manipulation of the peer-review process. Charlie Martin explores what it all means.  His conclusion:

But, at least on this first look, it appears that the three scandals are:

• First, a real attempt by a small group of scientists to subvert the peer-review process and suppress dissenting voices. (For another look at this, by a respected climate scientist who was one of the targets, see these posts on Roger Pielke Sr.’s blog.)  This is at best massively unethical.
• Second, a willingness to manipulate the data to make a political case. This is certainly misconduct and possibly scientific fraud. This, if it proves true, should make these scientists subject to strong disciplinary action, even termination of their tenured positions.
• Third, what gives every appearance of an actual conspiracy to prevent data from being released as required by the Freedom of Information Acts in the US and UK. If this is proven true, that is a federal crime.

These emails and the data associated, taken together, raise really important questions about the whole scientific structure of AGW. Is the data really valid? Has the data been effectively peer reviewed and have attempts to falsify been fairly treated? Is CO₂-forced AGW really the best hypothesis?

UPDATE: Look at the summary of some key emails at Bishop Hill. (HT: Instapundit, via Volokh.) Good grief.  No matter how skeptical you may have been about global warming—and I’ve been plenty skeptical—the level of duplicity and thuggery these emails evidence is appalling.

UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds: “I’m thinking “Hide The Decline” could be a slogan for a lot of folks, right about now.”

I have refrained from saying anything about the attack at Fort Hood until the facts became clear.  It is remarkable how much we have learned about the activities and beliefs of Major Hasan, and how clearly they indicate that his act was an act of terrorism.  It is even more remarkable how unwilling the Army, the media, and the President are to embrace that conclusion.  Fortunately, there are signs that the American people have not abandoned common sense.  A friend who has just returned from California told me that most people he talked to raised the issue of the Fort Hood shootings with him, scoffed at the ridiculous commentaries they had been hearing, and found it obvious that they were acts of Islamic terror.  Phyllis Chesler found the same even at CNN, after appearing on the Lou Dobbs show:

And last night, as I was leaving CNN’s very spiffy headquarters in NYC, a tall and handsome CNN man stopped me and said: “You spoke very well. Thank you.” The guest who followed me said, “I agree with you.”

Folks: I am talking about CNN, not FOX. I think, maybe, perhaps, possibly, my God, if not now when, that things might be beginning to change. (The realist in me is scoffing; the optimist has her fingers crossed).

What if the Ministry of Truth insists that war is peace, freedom is slavery, etc., and no one believes it?

There is another interesting angle.  How do we know so much so quickly about Major Hasan?  And why was nothing done?  A. J. Strata puts the pieces together, and conjectures that Hasan was under investigation in 2008, but that the investigation was later canceled.  Michael Isikoff notes:

But although an FBI-led task force undertook an “assessment” of the Army psychiatrist as a result of those contacts, counter-terror officials concluded earlier this year that Hasan’s communications with the terror suspect were “protected” by “free speech” and did not warrant opening up a criminal investigation of him, the investigators said.

Strata observes:

Bingo. The timeframe is perfect with the incoming administration (which we all now know is very liberal and willing to take all sorts of risks with American lives and fortunes). And the excuse is right out of MoveOn.org.  Free speech is protected, that is what the FIS Court is all about – the balance between free speech and protecting Americans from harm. It is why the information is gathered, held closely to protect the individual’s reputation.

There is no harm in monitoring someone who shows the signs of losing his mind and going violent. Whoever called of the surveillance was an Obama official with far left views. Isikoff’s article indicates his ‘government official source’ is trying to turn this into a gun control debate. Of course, he only has this person’s word (who may be trying to cover his ass) as to whether there was no notice of Hasan’s gun purchase.

This is starting to reek of a cover up.

Maybe that’s why the administration and their media groupies are so eager to think of other explanations.

None of this should actually be surprising.  Obama has consistently decried what he terms “false choices” such as that between liberty and security.  But they’re real choices, and tipping the balance away from security has real consequences—consequences we’ve only begun to see.

Hugh Fitzgerald over at Jihad Watch is amazed at the cluelessness of the people in charge of Middle East policy in Washington:

I’m amazed — aren’t you? — that more than eight years after the 9/11/2001 attacks we still have people in Washington who do not have a grasp of Islam, do not understand what Islam has to do with the Arab war on Israel, why any further perceived Arab or Muslim victories will whet, not sate, Arab and Muslim appetites, who do not understand the simple concept of divide et impera, and of how we can exploit to our advantage the sectarian, ethnic, and economic hostilities and resentments that could divide and demoralize the Camp of Islam.

I don’t fully agree with everything Fitzgerald says in the article, which is very much worth reading, but I do fully share his amazement.  What will it take for our elites to begin a serious study of Islam?  If not 9/11, what?  If Europe is any guide, they never will.

Another brilliant post from Richard Fernandez, with an outstanding bit in the comments about the importance of religion and the dangers of materialism:

Like Voltaire and perhaps Pascal, I think it is always in a man’s personal interest to claim he is something more than an animal or the equivalent of a barrel of chemicals. There are enough forces out there trying to enslave and kill you without volunteering the proposition that we’re all just jumped up monkeys. You must at least allow for the remote possibility that we truly are sacred; and that not a sparrow falls to earth without a heavenly Father taking note. If a man won’t argue his cause, if a man can’t at least hope that his “individual act of love” will last or try to last forever, then nobody else will. Because sure as heck the bearded prophets of Marxism would like nothing better than to assign, or better yet tattoo a serial number on you with an expiration date and a recycling destination. I would almost say that to believe in God, or at least to allow for the possibility of His existence is the most fundamental act of rebellion possible. You defy the universe and certainly the State to extinguish you….

The most subversive sentences of the Declaration are all to do with the legitimacy of the pursuit of happiness; and the celebration of our dangerously impertinent desire to look up at the skies and call each star by its name.