The global-warming industry has declared that July 3 and 4 were the two hottest days on Earth on record. The reported average global temperature on those days was 62.6 degrees Fahrenheit, supposedly the hottest in 125,000 years. The claimed temperature was derived from the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer, which relies on a mix of satellite temperature data and computer-model guesstimation to calculate estimates of temperature.
One obvious problem with the updated narrative is that there are no satellite data from 125,000 years ago. Calculated estimates of current temperatures can’t be fairly compared with guesses of global temperature from thousands of years ago.
A more likely alternative to the 62.6-degree estimate is something around 57.5 degrees. The latter is an average of actual surface temperature measurements taken around the world and processed on a minute-by-minute basis by a website called temperature.global. The numbers have been steady this year, with no spike in July.
Moreover, the notion of “average global temperature” is meaningless. Average global temperature is a concept invented by and for the global-warming hypothesis. It is more a political concept than a scientific one. The Earth and its atmosphere is large and diverse, and no place is meaningfully average.
J.D. Tuccille reports on the U.S. government’s on-going trade war with the Chinese government. A slice:
Economic warfare is damaging enough. “Since it began in earnest just over a year ago, the trade war with China has cost an estimated 0.3 percentage point in U.S. real GDP and almost 300,000 jobs,” Moody’s Analytics reported in 2019. A United States International Trade Commission report issued in May of this year found that tariff costs “passed through fully into U.S. importer prices.” That is, they are ultimately picked up by American consumers.
China’s people have also suffered from the trade war between the two governments.
“US consumers of imported goods have borne the brunt of the tariffs through higher prices,” found a 2021 paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research. “The trade war has lowered aggregate real income in both the US and China.”
Joe Lancaster weighs in on New York State’s $1 billion boondoggle subsidy of Tesla.
Cases like Smith’s raise some nonlegal, moral questions about living in America’s current climate of contentiousness, beginning with: Would not American life be more congenial if people who believe that some behaviors, although legal, are reprehensible would accept that some people are going to do those things, and that providing a publicly advertised commercial service that facilitates those things does not express the provider’s moral endorsement?
Another question concerning congeniality: Why would a same-sex couple choose to compel the involvement in their joyous day of a vendor who is hostile to what they are celebrating, when there are alternative vendors offering similar services? The gay rights movement’s original live-and-let-live spirit has become curdled by a bullying impulse that reflects the truculence of many moralists nowadays.
Erec Smith explains the promise of individualism.
Politicians are also masters of making complex societal problems appear as if they can be solved easily with a single piece of legislation. For instance, voters should beware of politicians promising to improve social media and online retailing by hammering Big Tech with antitrust lawsuits, as if these companies represent true monopolies. Google, Amazon, and today’s other large tech firms grew so successfully only because consumers chose to buy their services, and they will remain successful and large only as long as consumers continue to do so.
Every allegedly “dominant” tech firm has competitors just waiting for it to get lazy or fail. In such a fast-changing industry, these competitors will swoop in and quickly take market share. Or a firm that makes too many mistakes will be bought out by investors who aim to improve its performance. Think here of Elon Musk purchasing Twitter.
To use antitrust against successful firms is to obstruct the operation of very complex patterns of commercial organization that no politician or government lawyer can hope to understand. The kind of antitrust interventions now demanded by populists on the left and right would be like angry bulls in a china shop. They’ll be able to destroy, but all that they’ll create is rubble.
