So President George W wasn’t as dumb as the political left portrayed him

John Ray’s Dissecting Leftism blog posted an interesting assessment of former POTUS George W Bush by Keith Hennessey:

George W. Bush is smarter than you

 by Keith Hennessey

The new George W. Bush Presidential Center is being dedicated this week. This seems like a good time to bust a longstanding myth about our former President, my former boss.

I teach a class at Stanford Business School titled “Financial Crises in the U.S. and Europe.” During one class session while explaining the events of September 2008, I kept referring to the efforts of the threesome of Hank Paulson, Ben Bernanke, and Tim Geithner, who were joined at the hip in dealing with firm-specific problems as they arose.

One of my students asked “How involved was President Bush with what was going on?” I smiled and responded, “What you really mean is, `Was President Bush smart enough to understand what was going on,’ right?”

The class went dead silent. Everyone knew that this was the true meaning of the question. Kudos to that student for asking the hard question and for framing it so politely. I had stripped away that decorum and exposed the raw nerve.

I looked hard at the 60 MBA students and said “President Bush is smarter than almost every one of you.”

More silence.  I could tell they were waiting for me to break the tension, laugh, and admit I was joking.

I did not. A few shifted in their seats, then I launched into a longer answer. While it was a while ago, here is an amalgam of that answer and others I have given in similar contexts.

*    ”I am not kidding. You are quite an intelligent group. Don’t take it personally, but President Bush is smarter than almost every one of you. Were he a student here today, he would consistently get “HP” (High Pass) grades without having to work hard, and he’d get an “H” (High, the top grade) in any class where he wanted to put in the effort.

*    For more than six years it was my job to help educate President Bush about complex economic policy issues and to get decisions from him on impossibly hard policy choices. In meetings and in the briefing materials we gave him in advance we covered issues in far more depth than I have been discussing with you this quarter because we needed to do so for him to make decisions.

*    President Bush is extremely smart by any traditional standard. He’s highly analytical and was incredibly quick to be able to discern the core question he needed to answer. It was occasionally a little embarrassing when he would jump ahead of one of his Cabinet secretaries in a policy discussion and the advisor would struggle to catch up. He would sometimes force us to accelerate through policy presentations because he so quickly grasped what we were presenting.

*    I use words like briefing and presentation to describe our policy meetings with him, but those are inaccurate. Every meeting was a dialogue, and you had to be ready at all times to be grilled by him and to defend both your analysis and your recommendation. That was scary.

*    We treat Presidential speeches as if they are written by speechwriters, then handed to the President for delivery. If I could show you one experience from my time working for President Bush, it would be an editing session in the Oval with him and his speechwriters. You think that me cold-calling you is nerve-wracking? Try defending a sentence you inserted into a draft speech, with President Bush pouncing on the slightest weakness in your argument or your word choice.

*    In addition to his analytical speed, what most impressed me were his memory and his substantive breadth. We would sometimes have to brief him on an issue that we had last discussed with him weeks or even months before. He would remember small facts and arguments from the prior briefing and get impatient with us when we were rehashing things we had told him long ago.

*    And while my job involved juggling a lot of balls, I only had to worry about economic issues. In addition to all of those, at any given point in time he was making enormous decisions on Iraq and Afghanistan, on hunting al Qaeda and keeping America safe. He was making choices not just on taxes and spending and trade and energy and climate and health care and agriculture and Social Security and Medicare, but also on education and immigration, on crime and justice issues, on environmental policy and social policy and politics. Being able to handle such substantive breadth and depth, on such huge decisions, in parallel, requires not just enormous strength of character but tremendous intellectual power. President Bush has both.”

On one particularly thorny policy issue on which his advisors had strong and deep disagreements, over the course of two weeks we (his senior advisors) held a series of three 90-minute meetings with the President. Shortly after the third meeting we asked for his OK to do a fourth. He said, “How about rather than doing another meeting on this, I instead tell you now what each person will say.” He then ran through half a dozen of his advisors by name and precisely detailed each one’s arguments and pointed out their flaws. (Needless to say there was no fourth meeting.)

Every prominent politician has a public caricature, one drawn initially by late-night comedy joke writers and shaped heavily by the press and one’s political opponents. The caricature of President Bush is that of a good ol’ boy from Texas who is principled and tough, but just not that bright.

Who would you believe? The media and their surreal lexical painting, or the people who worked for him? And it’s interesting to read the comments made at JR’s original source.

The political left are really quite an unsavoury mob when all is said and done. From the fabrication of Australian Aboriginal history or the Tony Abbott wall punching fiction, one wonders what else the left fabricated? The Holocaust?

Sprites and Lightning not in clouds, or Back to Front Science

It is generally believed that terrestrial lightning is formed by the collision of water and/or ice molecules in clouds. This belief is based on the logical fallacy of arguing the consequent, apart from the absence of any experience that colliding water molecules, such as when standing under your morning shower, or at the bottom of a water fall, or observed during a snow avalanche, generate charge separation and hence electricity.

Gigantic Lightning Above the Usual Suspects

 

The point is that with the discovery of Sprites, etc, we now know that electric charge accumulation is already present and quite unrelated to the commonly held belief that it is formed inside thunder clouds by water and ice collisions.

No, thunder clouds and water and ice precipitation is the result of electric charge accumulation. Have a look at the linked video to gain extra insights.

EU scientists were discussing aspects of this 0ver 10 years ago

In terms of the previous post concerning the enormous contraction of the thermosphere, that contraction would have been due to the ionosphere rather than some novel behaviour of CO2 or other “greenhouse”gases affecting the Thermosphere.

As Wal Thornhill pointed out in the video, mainstream science still does not understand what causes terrestrial lightning, let alone the causation of sprites, elves etc.

They have it precisely back to front.

Watts up with PSI

Seems there is a little spat between Anthony Watts and the people behind the Slaying the Skydragon book, now operating under the label Principia Scientific, or PSI. My attention was initially alerted by a cryptic comment on the Catallaxy Files website about some Lysenko related comment doing the round at climate blogs.  A quick scan produced little of note until I came across Watt’s post A-misinterpreted-claim-about-a-nasa-press-release-co2-solar-flares-and-the-thermosphere-is-making-the-rounds

Oh dear, I thought, what have the PSI lads done now, and lo, behold, the email flag noted an alarum and it started to become clear that another assault was made on the CO2 is a greenhouse gas issue. I’m not going into either side of this spat but I was rather intrigued that the NASA press release noted that the Earth’s thermosphere underwent a significant drop in bulk density during the last solar minimum over the period 2008-2009. NASA described it as “the biggest contraction of the thermosphere in at least 43 years”.

You could say that again. Their problem is that even taking in account EUV and CO2 coolling effects, they still could not explain 60% of the anomaly.

But as the NASA press release pointed out,

According to Emmert and colleagues, low solar EUV accounts for about 30% of the collapse. Extra CO₂ accounts for at least another 10%. That leaves as much as 60% unaccounted for.

In their GRL paper, the authors acknowledge that the situation is complicated. There’s more to it than just solar EUV and terrestrial CO₂. For instance, trends in global climate could alter the composition of the thermosphere, changing its thermal properties and the way it responds to external stimuli. The overall sensitivity of the thermosphere to solar radiation could actually be increasing.

“The density anomalies,” they wrote, “may signify that an as-yet-unidentified climatological tipping point involving energy balance and chemistry feedbacks has been reached.”

Or not.

That’s when I noticed the graphic they used.

Errrh, What’s up Doc, Wheres da Iyonosphere?

Source

Comment: Notice that the Thermosphere and Ionosphere cover the same domain.

In terms of the physics of the plasma universe, the Sun is considered the Anode (focus of positive charge) and the Earth a cathode (negative charge), so there is an electric field between them. Additionally and electrically conductive object immersed in a cell of plasma will form a plasma double layer between itself and the surrounding plasma.

A solar minimum in terms of this model means that the electric potential between the Sun and the Earth would decrease, which could mean a reduction in protons at the Sun end and decrease in electrons at the Earth End. A decrease in electrons at the Earth end could be interpreted as a reduction in electrons and hence density.  But as the Emmert et al seem not to have included the ionosphere in their modelling, it’s fairly obvious what the missing 60% could represent – a decrease in the electron density within the thermosphere.

But what a greenhouse effects has to do with this is somewhat puzzling.

In any case the collapse of the thermosphere during 2008-2009 should also have been accompanied by a corresponding collapse in the electron density at the time and could be assumed a reasonable test for this hypothesis.

Update: Just noticed a red coloured plot line on the right-hand side of the Emmert et al graphic labelled e^- which I assume means electron density?

The Electric Earth

Bill Nichols of the US National Weather Service presented an interesting talk at the recent EU conference at Albuquerque over 3-6 January, 2013 (ignore his date on his first slide).

Nichol’s conclusion from his work as an atmosphere scientist working for the USAF and the National Weather Service is that the data point to an electric earth in an electric universe.

Bill Nichols Presentation–Personal Strategic Experienes: Electric Universe–Are we Limiting Ourselves

Some points Bill Nichols made:

• The Pacific Decadal Oscillation seems to be based on an underlying electro-dynamic process.
• The Earth’s weather and climate is dominated by the oceans
• Volcanic eruptions like Pinatubo comprised of 85% water derived from the mantle and not recycled oceanic water.
• The basis of the mainstream solar cycles, 21,22,23,24, etc are based on flawed concepts.

Back-to-front climate science

Seems the Lord Monckton of Brenchley has added another scalp to his belt – Tony Press, the CEO of the University of Tasmania’s Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Co-operative Research Centre (H/T Jo Nova). The issue was published in the Sunday Tasmanian. The interesting part was Press’ firm statement, part of which was:

The argument of ‘no recent warming’ is wrong and has been debunked time and again,” Dr Press said.

“The cherry-picking of dates or selected time periods to cast an argument in support of a pre-conceived idea is not scientific method.

“Climate is variable we here in Australia are very familiar with El Nino and La Nina.

“To understand the path and trajectory of climate change it is important to understand the long-term trends and their causes. You have to look longer than 10 or 15 years. It is only by looking at multiple decades that climate signals become obvious.”

Dr Press said it was irrefutable that temperatures had increased steadily in the past 200 years.

Scientists working all over the world, independently and in many institutions, had concluded that this steady increase could be explained only by higher levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

“You cannot explain it without having an increase in greenhouse gases,” he said.

Now here we have really confused thinking for Press has decided to totally ignore the cause of the LIA that preceded the 200 years of warming, tacitly assuming that things were globally normal at the time of the LIA.

Well no. The LIA was an abnormality of climate, in that it terminated the much warmer, so we know, Medieval Warm Period, MWP, which should be considered the normal climate state since things grow and life proliferates in a warm climate.

The LIA, on the other hand, was marked by famine, extreme cold and climate catastrophes of a global nature associated with increased meteoric activity. Circum-pacific civilisations were terminated, the Moas became extinct in New Zealand (and according to the Maoris from a fire in the sky), Easter Island people died out, and according to Gavin Menzies, the destruction of many of the Chinese Ming Dynasty ocean-going fleets.

The steady rise of global temperature during the last 200 years isn’t due to CO2 but due to the removal of the cause of the LIA and the slow and steady return of the earth-system back to its MWP climate state. The increase in CO2 associated with that return to climate normality, if there is such a thing, is an effect of numerically increasing, recovering biosphere of which humans are an intrinsic part. It’s the thermal tracking back to normality that is causing the increase in atmospheric CO2, not vice versa.

I’ve made the analogy before to that of someone accidentally falling into a near freezing lake, being rescued and watching the person’s temperature starting to rise back to normal. The increased metabolism of the person would indeed cause the increased production of CO2 but that CO2 isn’t causing the person’s temperature to rise, though it seems obvious from Mr. Press’ comments that this is what climate science believes.

What Press hasn’t taken on board intellectually is the cause of the LIA which preceded the current warming trend, which caused the sudden drop in global temperature, and that cause, now absent, has allowed the earth-system to return to its pre-LIA thermal state.

Personally I don’t think it will because we have ignored one other mechanism affecting climate – the earth-system’s ability to careen around its axis of spin under the influence of external forces. But this mechanism involves questioning the absolute ascendancy of gravity as the primary and only force operating in the cosmos and the earth-system, and that is a scientific no-no. Well, it is if you have a religious mind, one which is subservient to argument from authority, whether that authority is theological or scientific.

But the primary issue of ignorance of what caused the earth-system’s drop in global temperature after the MWP remains, and while that remains ignored climate science will continue to have things back-to-front. It’s not that the earth-system is warming, it’s understanding what caused it to cool in the first place that is more important.

BOM FOLLIES

Last week the Fairfax press, specifically the Sydney Morning Herald, published an interesting map showing the temperature forecast for the following Monday 14th of January 2013. Note the date and the link to the graph.

Bureau Of Meteorology Weather Chart | Deep Purple

http://www.smh.com.au/environment/weather/temperatures-off-the-charts-as-australia-turns-deep-purple-20130108-2ce33.html

Screen clipping taken: 8/01/2013 1:50 PM

Now have a look at the ACTUAL measured temperature for the 14th of January 2013.

Climate Maps – Temperature Latest

http://www.bom.gov.au/jsp/awap/temp/index.jsp

Screen clipping taken: 15/01/2013 6:05 PM

Comments:

1. Think of the two maps representing a mineral drilling target with the conspicuous bulls-eye in the forecast being the basis for an optimistic stock exchange announcement that you, the mining entrepreneur will be hitting a whopper of a mine.

   However if you actually went and drilled that bulls-eye, you would have intersected nothing, nada, zip as shown by the second diagram! And you certainly would not have publicised the second map showing your results either; the embarrassment would have been more than acute.

2. Much ado was made over the BOM’s necessity to add another colour level to its map legend to allow the plotting of temperatures up to 54 degrees Celsius. The actual maximum seems to have been about 10 degrees Celsius lower than the forecasted temperature, 45 versus 54. This forecasting error is somewhat larger than the maximum forecasted temperature for distant future, 2050, 6 degrees Celsius.
3. There is only one scientific reason why this particular forecast is so laughably wrong, even after the billions of taxpayers money thrown at the problem, and that it is most likely the basics physics describing the weather and hence climate, is wrong.

There is only one description for this forecasting folly – intellectual and scientific incompetence. You would never be allowed to get away with this is in the mining industry.

Wierd atmospheric effects

Note for the record.

The last couple of days have been interesting because I have a Tivoli FM radio which has an alarm and I have set it to wake me up at 0530 hours. These last few days FM reception has been lousy, noisy, signal down, and the only physical explanation is that something is interfering with the transmission of the EM waves from the station transmission tower.  After all radio waves are essentially EM radiation.

The only external sources that might affect EM radiowave propagation in the atmosphere are solar plasma ejections, CME’s.

It’s also been humid, rain has been forecast and it’s experienced as a weak drizzle, on occasions.

And we are also experiencing extremely hot weather and bush fires in Australia at the same time as well.

I wonder if there is a connection. More research is needed on this, particularly what the space weather is doing, and the planetary positions.

Further comments later after some information gathering.

Update 1: Extremely cold weather being experienced elsewhere – Russia, etc. Here’s a thought – if the average temperature of the earth remains more or less constant, but some parts suddenly become extremely colder, then other parts need to get hotter to maintain the overall temperature average. That’s what being observed, isn’t it? So what plausible mechanism could possibly explain that?

Update 2: I’ve noticed that the radio interference diminishes as the sun rises higher into the sky. This is, of course, related to the position of the ionosphere above the earth’s surface during day and night and one explanation is here. In the case being described here, this interference has only been noticed the last couple of days, radio interference being inaudible the rest of the time.

Update 3: And there is a tropical cyclone occurring in Australia’s north-west – linked?

Update 4: And the solar wind has gusted, producing auroras around the arctic circle as well, according to NASA’s space weather site.

Update 5: And once again a solar coronal hole has been observed facing the earth, expected 9-10 January, which will a strong gust of the solar wind to the earth, and increased surface effects like tropical cyclones powering up, and more extreme temperature swings but the connection of temperature to solar wind is, at this stage, mere conjecture. All we can note is the coincidences of these phenomena.

Update 6: 10th Jan – Continued noisy radio interference in the FM band but temperatures have dropped to 16 degrees Celsius here in Perth. No rain occurred during the last day despite BOM advice to expect it.

Update 7: 7AM News, ABC Classic, WST: Report on the ES fires – worry about lightning starting fires in the afternoon. So intense heat and lightning is noted. Lightning is a short circuit between the earth and its plasma environment and as rain clouds are not being reported (it’s a heat wave of course) then what is producing the lightning? Remember that lightning is believed to be created when ice molecules bump against each other in clouds. The satellite imagery shows no cloud over most of the fire areas in eastern Australia. So how is the lightning produced, and has it any physical connection with the higher than normal temperatures in Eastern Australia? Possibly we might be dealing with an increase in atmospheric electricity as the earth tries to re-equilibrate with its plasma environment after the last coronal hole spawing the latest surge of solar wind (proton rich plasma).