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I Lose a Bet, Start an Argument
Back on November 17, 2011 I penned a piece in response to Fed Governor Bullard's assertions regarding the collapse of MF Global. Bullard thought there was no lasting consequences to that blow-out: .
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At the time, I thought that Bullard was full of crap, and that there would be significant consequences to the collapse of MFG. My words:
Okay, Mr. Bullard I'll make you a wager. A six pack of your favorite beer. Give the MFG story another month and it will be a problem. It will undermine markets. It will impact confidence in our financial system. It will impact liquidity. As those things will occur it will force both the Treasury and the Fed to take actions.
I was wrong, Mr. B was right. There were no consequences to the MFG disaster. No heads rolled. No one went to jail. There were no lasting economic consequences. There were were no regulatory changes. The MFG affair was buried. Bullard never accepted my bet, but I still feel I owe him. If he reads this and sends me a note I will forward his beer. He deserves it. He won. Unfortunately, we all "lost" as a result. Today we have yet another MFG in our laps. Perigrine Financial has followed the exact same path as MFG. The PFG bankers looted customer accounts.
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I lost a bet for $12 worth of beer. Customers at Peregrine have lost $220m (so far). I can’t help wondering what would have happened had won the bet. If there had been hell to pay regarding the MFG affair, things might have turned out differently for Peregrine’s customer. But there was no market reaction, the CFTC ignored the signs, the SEC never lifted a finger. Nothing changed, so history has repeated itself.
Perigrine customers, looking at a loss today, might be warming up lawsuits against Bart Chilton and the CFTC. He clearly fell down on the job. I think he should be fired on the spot. Fed Governor Bullard is not responsible for the failure of Peregrine (or MFG), but his dismissing attitude is:
This is no big deal, it will blow over”
To that extent, he shares in the blame.
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The markets are boring, so let's talk about global warming
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I have absolutely no credentials or expertise to discuss matters related to climate change. I’ll do it anyway. I follow this topic and read what I can. In my opinion:
I) - Climate change is happening on a global scale. The evidence that this occurring is conclusive.
II) - I don’t know if humans are contributing to the rapid change, but I suspect they are.
III) - Even if there were conclusive evidence that human activity was contributing to global warming, I’m not at all sure that there is anything that can be done about it.
Consider these before and after pictures from NASA. These are images of the Beaufort Sea, north of Alaska.
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May 13, 2012
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One month later
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Okay, so some ice melted. Is that a big deal? The folks at NASA and the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) think it is:
Sea ice retreat in June is typical, but the first half of June 2012 brought unusually rapid ice loss.
How unusual?
On June 19, 2012, NSIDC reported: “Recent ice loss rates have been 100,000 to 150,000 square kilometers per day, which is more than double the climatological rate.”
Double the rate? How much ice is melting every day in the Beauford Sea? About the size of the state of Illinois – big!
As of June 18, temperatures were above freezing over much of the sea ice in the Arctic, and snow had melted earlier than normal, leading to warming on land.
June 18? It has been hot as hell over the globe since then. This year’s arctic ice melt will set a record.
The rapid melt north of Alaska was part of a larger phenomenon. Sea ice across the entire Arctic reached record-low levels for this time of year. It was also lower than the extent in June 2007; Arctic sea ice reached its lowest extent ever recorded by satellite in September 2007.
This is not a record that we want to set. Now consider this number:
20,900,000,000,000
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20.9 Trillion is the number of pounds of CO2 that humans sent into the atmosphere in the last 12 months. It’s hard to relate to a number as big as that. Think seven billion Hondas. But even that is a number that is hard to fathom, as there are only a billion cars in the world today. How could we be producing 7Xs the weight of all the cars, every year?
Is there a connection to the incredible output of CO2 and the rapid ice melt that is happening all over the world? I wish I knew the answer to this question. I do know that CO2 emissions are directly tied to population growth/economic activity. The question is how rapidly CO2 output will rise:
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Any thoughts?
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Would you like to play?
What kind of dernier are you?
Libtard?
DK Effect?
Buckling from Peer Pressure?
The Manly Type (how can an Alpha male be wrong?)
What part of the science do you find unsettling?
And if we are not careful the future is going to look exactly like... the past?
Send me the $12 for the "beer of choice" and I will pick up 3 - 6 packs of PBR @ 3.99 each. Recycling the cans for 40 cents to be green and have a good "buzz" for the weekend!
Screw Global Warming, unless I pass out and get burned!
i wonder if the global currency wars have something to do with this. I fsay the chinese were major customers of MFG trying to take delivery of Phys then i could see how 4 would vaporize days before options expiry. there must be some interesting thinkg going on behind the secenes with these bankrupcies. possibly the farmers had envelopes of cash show up on their doorsteps after. Only certian entities who lost money with questionable financeers.
On so called global warming.....
Me and Ivar Giaever know whats up!!!!
Is there any evidence ice core bubble gas is pristine ?
No.
It's all a house of cards based upon an the unverifiable assumption that bubbles on glaciers represent global air content.
The way science works is you must have proof of contamination to invalidate the glacial core gas measurements. Multiple, independent analyses have been done of multiple ice cores and the evidence consistent.
Furthermore, sea floor/lake bed cores and tree ring evidence is combined to make a whole picture. While there certainly is some local variation, especially for tree rings, there is plenty of agreement between the various mechanisms to make a strong case.
The house of cards is on fire. It's going to stay on fire while you lose your mind from crushing remorse.
Don't forget the antarctic, which warmists conviently neglect:
http://www.iup.uni-bremen.de:8084/amsr/ice_ext_s.png
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.anomaly.antarctic.png
Oh, it's increasing, what do you know. How did that happen?
Only looking at the antarctic would be cherry picking. From the same site:
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/global.daily.ice.area.withtrend.jpg
shows a distinct trend over the decades toward less ice globally.
Just another inconvenient truth I'm afraid...
Solar activity has fried the earth in the past and can do so again at any time. Earth's climate has been declining for the last 12 years. The weather patterns are changing which bring warmer weather to different parts of the globe. Obama gave more speeches this year so there is more hot air in the atmosphere. The raping of the environment fueled by bankster globalists and corporate globalist interests leads to more pollution such as the Gulf oil disaster, the burning of coal to meet China's electrical demand and the Nuclear disaster in Japan. All due to the greed that accompanies Globalist's need to control corporate profits. My dog ate the baked beans off my plate when I went to see who was knocking at the door. Mass extinctions of oceanic life and Amazonian life and forests are absorbing less CO2. Chemical treatment of the atmosphere by the Government is causing adverse side effects. The elite have employed temporary disasterous ecological methodologies to induce an environmental disaster as a means to reduce world population. And, so on.
I wear a sweater in the winter because Jimmy Carter told me to so many years ago. Doya think I saved a few years for Gaia?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2171973/Tree-ring-study-p...
Three skeptical books on climate change I recommend are:
The Deniers
The Climate Caper (especially chapters 4-6)
The Delinquent Teenager ...
The first two are cheap used on Amazon, and the third has a Kindle version for only $5.
Or one could just read up on the science a little. Plenty to work from there. The rest is sort of a lot of noise.
I tried, but I nodded off so much that I've become resigned to being reliant upon others to stay awake, to digest and regurgitate it back in a more grandiose, distilled and passably consciousness-supportive format (I particularly liked the movies ... learning heaps that way!).
Unfortunately 'science', the literature and even the pertinent 'facts' vary from person to person, and scientist to scientist.
Yet dissent is strangely stamped out and strangled wherever possible, to the extent that falling-sleep is the only sure-fire remedy to a close encounter of that sort of science.
The one sure-fire thing about science though, is that the majority and the consensus are invariably more or less completely wrong.
Yep.... every scientist has their own version of Thermodynamics and what not...
I can understand your confusion, after all your boy Plimer flip-flops on basic science every few pages in his books....
I've not read his book, I'm waiting for the movie to come out.
Hey you might know this, is Al Gore making a sequel?
Re: Gore, No idea....
Glad you gave up using Plimer as an advocate of AGW denial.... Was it his cozy relationship with Coal interests down under that clued you in?
It's called sarcasm.
BK - love your stuff on the markets. I learn from you - thanks.
Please consider this via today's Drudge Report:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2171973/Tree-ring-study-p...
No one actually knows the whole story. No one knows what the real impact of cosmic rays are on cloud formation. No one even knows if increasing CO2 is bad, it may expand the rain forest.
What we do know is weather changes, ice melts in some places and water freezes in others. It's not static and we don't have a good model. That's no argument against getting off of fossil fuels. What I do find tedious is the constant barrage of pseudo-science touted out as "fact". In the 70's the facts were we were on the verge of a new mini ice age. Scientists are people who want prestige and funding, just like everyone else. They see what they want to see. They see that makes them feel like they're important. A climate scientist who says "It's the weather, it changes" does not get invited to international conferences or have 15 grad students working for him. Let's just get honest about the debate.
What in the world ever gave you that idea?
The number of people who know the whole story from having made a professional career studying the topic numbers in the thousands. They are the scientific backbone of the field of climate studies.
They find statements like yours really frustrating.
Please everyone, see global warming for what it really is, a bullshit scam to impose a global tax on everyone. CO 2 is needed for our environment if you think their is too much than go plant a fucking tree.
NO genius, its a man made disaster that some fuckers will look to make a profit from. That is what you dont get. Its basically war profiteering, just because assholes look to make money off the suffering of a war, doesnt mean the war wasnt or isnt real.
Don't believe everything you are told - the past few years should have taught you that. Wait, you're not a Keynesian are you?
We couldn't keep a dozen people in biosphere going even with massive external inputs so we are not going to know how the climate works conclusively for thousands of years if ever. Gotta make your best guess before it's too late to optimize survival chances though.
Donutboy...
quit with the weaselword bullshit...
Yes, lets be honest about the debate starting with
http://www.skepticalscience.com/foster-and-rahmstorf-measure-global-warming-signal.html
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Be sure to read this
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2012/07/tree-rings-and-climate-some-recent-developments/
if you are going to take the DailyMail at facevalue,,,,
I'm not taking the DailyMail at face value. The Daily Mail didn't do the research. My point is the science is not "closed". People with equally good academic credentials disagree. Who's got it right? You don't know and neither do I.
Do you realize that the paper was about a minor effect that does not change the conclusions?
The SCIENCE is closed, each month more and more DATA shows up to support the conclusion that is pointed to by the SCIENCE and the existing DATA,,,,
Name 5 Climate Scientists that disagree with the concensus that have not recieved Fossil Fuel funding or payments of some kind in their career....
I defy you to....
Yes - my point exactly. Once you define yourself as a "climate scientist" your place in the world depends on how big the climate emergency is.
Do you also play a fool in real life and not just on the Hedge?
Pretty much everywhere - but I enjoy it. The really intelligent people like you have a lot to worry about.
As a counterpoint to the Skeptical Science article above, see this:
Tisdale on Foster and Rahmstorf – take 2
And this:
Tisdale takes on Tamino’s Foster & Rahmstorf 2011
So, what do you think is a better way to do such an analysis, simulataneous muitiple regression or regressing individually? Tisdale also committed the following error
Here is the data, you can reproduce the result using Excel:
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2011/12/15/data-and-code-for-foster-rahmstorf-2011/
thanks for bringing some sanity to this debate, but you cant reason with people who think jesus rode a fucking dinosaur.
I'm an atheist and an AGW denier but I guess that doesn't fit into any of your models.
True, you cannot.
However if nobody had ever tried we would still be living on a flat earth. Not that the situation now is a whole lot improved; it's shocking how many people still think science is a belief system.
Okay, explain how a galaxy maintains it's shape without reverting to a belief in magical dark matter.
Let me guess, anything you don't understand is magical...
A scalar boson was predicted 48 years ago to be the mechanism that breaks the SU(2) x U(1) symmetry of the Standard Model, well, one was found last week... Did everything work by magic up to then?
Likewise Pauli predicted the neutrino to explain Beta decay... that took 25 years to find and detect....
The term "record" is being miscast and misused in every sense of the word. They are only records for the little time we have been recording. We can't possibly know what temps were doing, the amount of ice melting etc... in all the course of time thus we can't possibly know what a "record" would really be.
The only period of time we care about is the one we are living in. It is also the only period of time we've been able to influence. In the larger sense it is the period of time when we built civilization, and it is the period of time when we may see it un-built.
Not everything is relative. Not all time periods are equal to the living, nor to our own species. Our lives are important, I care what happens tomorrow.
I don't like what I see happening in the world. We could have changed that. We didn't. Now our own time and way of life is in peril.
That sucks. And not in a relative way, either. It sucks absolutely.
The fallacy is that although 20.9 trillion pounds sounds like a lot, the atmosphere weighs about 1.1 x 10^19 pounds.
No, the issue is that GHG have increased by about 35% since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution... And that increase is anthropogenic....It is the fraction of the atmosphere that is GHG that makes it a big deal...
"It is the fraction of the atmosphere that is GHG that makes it a big deal.."
CO2's fraction of the atmosphere is about 1 part in 2500.
A pellet of ricin toxin the size of a poppy seed can kill a man. Fact.
So what was your point again?
Yes, Roger, and what fraction of the atmosphere is GHG? What temperature would the Earth be if there were *no* GHG in the atmosphere?
Nice article Bill, what throws me for a loop is that most the "raw" data on climate change has been destroyed, and that which is left does not support "climate change." Then add that everyone conveniently ignores the medieval warm period.
Nonsense. Not only has the raw data not been destroyed, but it is publically-available, so that any researcher (or anyone at all, for that matter) can analyze it.
The abject stupidity and gullibility of the right is amazing.
Sure its nonsense...I only read the researchers own E-mails, in which the scientists seemed to manipulated climate data and attempted to suppress critics. Oh and they never denied the content of the e-mails their only defense was that they were out of context.