House passes $700B "bailout bill" – CO2 Tax issues included –

Great… not only did we, the voters, get screwed with a $700 billion tax bill but now we’re gonna get a carbon tax on top. Time to start a third political party and kick the donkeys and elephants out of Washington, DC.

Counters
It’s clear you know nothing at all about financial models. You should really find out about them before you sound off. Yes they are also a series of differential equations, often exceedingly more complex, with proper optimisation techniques, than most climate models – many of which are simplistic junk by comparison. Also they are written by programmers who are streets ahead of most academics in ability, using modern problem-solving languages like Ocaml rather than Fortran. What they both utterly fail on though isn’t the maths or physics, it is the total reliance on ad-hoc assumptions about the underlying mechanisms combined with exceedingly poor validation.

I’ve had it with this nitwit President in particular and the republicans in general. The ‘pubs had six years in which they could get things done and they blew it. In the process, they showed the Nation they cannot be trusted and that they are the “spendthrift party” more so than the dumbos.
We know the dumbocrats are losers, but many had some faith in the ‘pubs. No longer, I’d rather vote communistic that republican ever again!
Jack Koenig
Independent Voter

First, they don’t permit drilling for oil here, even though its presence is known, thus driving up the cost of oil.
Then they require the issuance of lousy mortgage loans in pursuit of some feel-good social agenda.
Now that the chickens have come home to roost, they posture as our ‘saviors” by passing a pork-laden, something-for-everyone ‘rescue’ package that our kids and their kids will be paying throughout the century, at least until the rest of the house of cards collapses.
Just when you think things can’t get any worse, it gets worse.
From Marc Morano, a member of Senator Inhofe’s staff:
“During a week where Americans were focused on perhaps the greatest economic challenges this country has faced in over a generation, House Democrats released a set of principles on October 2nd that outline an aggressive plan to cap greenhouse gas emissions. The plan could be even more economically restrictive than the failed Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act, which would have cost $6.7 trillion dollars, according to the bill’s own sponsors.”
See the rest of that post:
http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Blogs&ContentRecord_id=c4584465-802a-23ad-46a7-cf9cfff3d7b9

Will (12:04:44) :
I am making a bumper sticker: Save the Planet, Sequester Al Gore.
That’s a great one, Will. I have made my own also:
SAVE THE PLANET
MORE CO2 = MORE GREEN
Think I’ll make one of yours too
http://www.makestickers.com/ (not my company:)

AE General says:

Didn’t the National Academy of Sciences already discredit the hockey-stick graph?

In a word, no. Here is the report: http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=11676 . They did not have as much confidence as Mann et al. in the pre-1600 results but still concluded

The basic conclusion of Mann et al. (1998, 1999) was that the late 20th century warmth in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the last 1,000 years. This conclusion has subsequently been supported by an array of evidence that includes both additional large-scale surface temperature reconstructions and pronounced changes in a variety of local proxy indicators, such as melting on ice caps and the retreat of glaciers around the world, which in many cases appear to be unprecedented during at least the last 2,000 years. Not all individual proxy records indicate that the recent warmth is unprecedented, although a larger fraction of geographically diverse sites experienced exceptional warmth during the late 20th century than during any other extended period from A.D. 900 onward.
Based on the analyses presented in the original papers by Mann et al. and this newer supporting evidence, the committee finds it plausible that the Northern Hemisphere was warmer during the last few decades of the 20th century than during any comparable period over the preceding millennium. The substantial uncertainties currently present in the quantitative assessment of large-scale surface temperature changes prior to about A.D. 1600 lower our confidence in this conclusion compared to the high level of confidence we place in the Little Ice Age cooling and 20th century warming.

Mann et al.’s latest (2008) paper is an attempt to address some of the uncertainties identified in this NAS report.

Senator Byrd would would say that there is a, “certain amount of over-reacting going on around here.”
Attaching this particular “stuff” to this particular bill at this particular time is a particularly good thing.
Particular illogical ranting on this particular blog at any particular time is a particularly bad thing. It accomplish nothing and provides AGW’ers opportunity to misdirect the debate.
Speaking of accomplishing — I am able to up my contribution to WUWT to $20.00 / month. Here is one real line in the sand, and all of us who can afford to — should stand with Anthony in moving the debate forward via this blog’s particularly positive outreach and impact..

Do you remember Black Monday? It was caused by a bunch of computer models getting a sell signal. The smart money knew it was a glich and bought stock at or near the bottom.

We need an economic assessment of the positive benefits of increased atmospheric CO2. Goodness knows we are spending a great deal looking for negatives. For instance what is the world wide savings on increased food production and reduced water usage due to the increase in CO2?
Do the positive environmental and economic effects of global warming increase in a linear fashion as CO-2 increases, while the warming from additional CO2 decreases logarithmically?

I fear Bad Science and politicians have won more than just the day.
If I could afford to contribute, I would, but I can not.
We need this site, it’s insight, and the science it covers so well,
we should all contribute what we can.
I try to..
(I’ll never, ever vote for a politician that spouts AGW either.)
So, I will not leave this planet with a guilty conscience,
I have tried my best, and will continue to,
(which ain’t that good, but every little helps)
however much the “greens” try to indoctrinate me otherwise.

I have an Excel spreadsheet that’s better than the link you gave in that it lists who voted ‘YES’ by state and whether they are up for election this year. Can I upload it?

Ya know, maybe blaming the Demicans or the Republicrats is not correct. Maybe we need to look past party affiliation to the training and background of those people who are elected to govern. The vast majority of them are lawyers. For many years we’ve elected people whose training is in legal and political matters, figuring these were the people who would write and pass good legislation.
Yet it is becoming clear these people have created laws that have great sounds to them, but dire consequences. The act that created the sub-prime lending fiasco is just one such example albeit a large one. A smaller, every day example of their work is those idiotic safety messages in instruction manuals (most of the pages in fact) for things that have motors, whirling blades, loud noises or sharp stuff.
OK, where do we go from here? Seems to me most of our small towns and municipalities are reasonably well run. That’s where the people elected to mayor, councilman, or what have you are folks like the rest of us. They are housewives, (yea, it’s still a word!) janitors, mechanics, small business people, garbage men and you name it. Regular common sense folk who want to do something for their community. They are not insulated from their constituents, but immersed with them in a common environment. They don’t have layers of staffers feeding them what the staffer wants. The city attorney will give them legal advice, but overall, they have to listen to their neighbors.
You get my drift. Maybe it’s time to elect some of these folks (liberal, center, conservative) to do our business.
“Nuff said!
Mike

Les Johnson says:

Joel: the NAS report I have, is subtly different than what you have

Same report…Just a different part of the summary than what I quoted. (Note that I linked to an online version of the entire report.)