About the little guys

Bensblurb # 601 4/3/11 I’m hoping Butler can win it all when they play UConn for the NCAA basketball championship. Sorry it wasn’t my favorite, Richmond’s Virginia Commonwealth U. But VCU’s enrollment, like most of the others, is huge. In contrast, Butler’s, at 4,800 in Indianapolis, is more like my home town’s Abilene Christian U. Cheer for the little guys. Speaking of a little guy, here’s an independent fed: 　 Bureaucrat strikes back: Alan Carlin, the federal scientist who was rebuked last spring by his EPA bosses when he publicly disagreed with its finding that CO2 is a bad gas, has now published his peer-reviewed research (WUWT, 4/3/11) on climate-change science and economics. He writes, “The paper is unusual from a number of different perspectives. From a policy perspective, the paper’s conclusions include the following:· · The economic benefits of reducing CO2 emissions may be about two orders of magnitude less than those estimated by most economists because the climate sensitivity factor is much lower than assumed by the United Nations because feedback is negative rather than positive and the effects of CO2 emissions reductions on atmospheric CO2 appear to be short rather than long lasting. · The costs of CO2 emissions reductions are perhaps an order of magnitude higher than usually estimated because of technological and implementation problems recently identified. CO2 emissions reductions are economically unattractive since the few benefits remaining after the corrections for the above effects are quite unlikely to economically justify the much higher costs unless much lower cost geoengineering is used. The risk of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming appears to be so low that it is not currently worth doing anything to try to control it, including geoengineering.” 　 Me, too: My letter to Free Lance-Star, published 4/3/11: “At a time when we have too many problems facing us--many of great consequence like high unemployment, an overwhelming national debt and endless war entanglements sapping our military--here comes another impassioned plea, oh yeah, to spend more money to adjust our climate. Forget about the folly of worrying about that instead of our mortgage mess and the mountain of foreclosed homes. Yet, authors love to sell their books and the long inflammatory op-ed piece by Mark Hertsgaard is the latest example in the Free Lance-Star. He attacks Republicans in Congress for keeping the nation from blowing more money on studies of global warming. Doesn’t that seem old-hat nowadays? That was the last decade’s hot topic. Now if anyone wants to worry about nature’s impacts on us, I would suggest more study of consequential impacts, like earthquakes. Ode to April 15 Mark Steyn (in Daily Caller): “We need to throw this stuff out. There shouldn’t be a 1099. Small business shouldn’t know the name of stupid government forms like that. It’s embarrassing that in a republic of free citizens there are millions of us marching around with all this meaningless government mumbo-jumbo numbers stuck in our head because we know that tax season – tax season, and that’s another problem right there by the way. Baseball should have a season......Tax should be a day.” 　 Reduce Wetback Arrests, Border Patrol tells Arizona Sheriff: Cochise County Sheriff Larry Dever told FoxNews.com that a supervisor with the U.S. Border Patrol told him as recently as this month that the federal agency’s office on Arizona's southern border was under orders to keep apprehension numbers down during specific reporting time periods. “The senior supervisor agent is telling me about how their mission is now to scare people back,” Dever said in an interview with FoxNews.com. “He said, ‘I had to go back to my guys and tell them not to catch anybody, that their job is to chase people away.” Ben Blankenship #############