Matt Ridley decries the BBC’s insistence on co-opting bad weather into a climate crusade. Two slices:
America has also failed to break records. On Monday, Death Valley got close to its (and the world’s) all-time high of 56.6C. But that record was set in 1913, 110 years ago. Remarkably, more than 30 of the 50 American states recorded their highest temperatures in the 1930s or earlier.
A big reason for the failure to beat more records is that greenhouse warming is felt most strongly at night, in winter, near the poles. Milder winter nights are indeed the biggest effect we see in Britain. Given that roughly ten times as many people die of cold as die of heat globally, and that this is true even of countries like India and Italy, warming has meant fewer people dying.
Incidentally, the heat today is nothing to what our recent ancestors probably experienced after the invention of agriculture. There is evidence that, during the so-called Holocene Optimum around 8,000 years ago, British summers were 2C warmer than today, the treeline in Siberia was far further north, Alpine glaciers were smaller, the Arctic ocean was regularly ice-free in late summer and the Sahara was wetter than today.
But yes, of course, heatwaves are getting more intense and longer and some extreme-precipitation events have increased in frequency. However, that is not true of most other forms of extreme weather. The data on this are very clear. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has consistently confirmed that there is insufficient evidence to prove a long-term increase in the frequency of floods, cyclones, tornadoes, hailstorms, lightning, or strong winds.
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The economist Paul Krugman says that it’s time to “politicise the weather”. Where has he been the past ten years? It’s already happened. Every weather event is now recruited to the cause of net zero in a shameless way. Bizarrely, we are reverting, after a brief century of sanity, to the old habit of blaming somebody for every weather event. In Peru during an El Nino in the 1400s, the Chimu civilisation sacrificed children to appease the weather gods.
Steve Dewey applauds Matt Taibbi’s courageous stance against censorship. A slice:
Musk released a total of 19 batches of the Twitter Files from December 2, 2022 to March 17, 2023 to several independent journalists. Matt Taibbi reported on 12 of the 19 batches, including the first, third, sixth, and ninth batches during the month of December alone. His reporting exposed an astounding level of involvement by multiple federal agencies, especially the intelligence agencies, in colluding with Twitter to manipulate and block conservative political content. Perhaps the most eye-opening was Taibbi’s December 16th report on the sixth batch of released files, which he entitled, “Twitter, The FBI Subsidiary.” To the Democratic Party establishment and its allies in the mainstream media, Taibbi was committing traitorous sins that made him a major target for retaliation.
The retaliation in the mainstream news media came quickly, especially from Democrats’ favorite news network, MSNBC. This prompted a response from Taibbi in his January 9th Racket News article “On MSNBC and ‘Authoritarianism’” where Taibbi lists no less than 16 MSNBC talking heads that had conducted on-air and online hit pieces on him. Taibbi followed this article with a more detailed and colorful rebuttal of MSNBC’s personal attacks in his April 6th Racket News piece, “Eat Me, MSNBC.”
To be attacked in the news media is one thing, but to also face an unexpected investigation by the IRS is another. On December 24th, the IRS opened a case into Taibbi’s 2018 tax return (without Taibbi’s knowledge at the time) and made an unannounced visit to his home on March 9th, which, coincidentally, was the same date that Taibbi testified before the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government about the Twitter Files and the new threat of a state-sponsored Censorship-Industrial Complex.
David Henderson shares highlights of some of his recent reading.
And here’s David Henderson on the late James Buckley.
Eric Boehm has a new, limited-run podcast titled “Why We Can’t Have Nice Things.”
Alvaro Vargas Llosa writes about Javier Milei.
Steven Greenhut reports on the the damage done to California’s economy by public-sector unions.
