Yes... Mr. Dyson DOES have some credibility on this issue. But not necessarily more credibility than the thousand of scientists for whom climatology is their life's work, not merely a sideline interest. His arguments are worthy of consideration, but not blind adoration.

It certainly is possible for someone who does not believe in global warming to be a useful adviser in this circumstance, but it would require them to put aside their beliefs and advise based on the data, not their ideology. If the Governor doesn't feel that he can trust the advice, it is both his right and his responsibility to find someone who's advice can be trusted.

But after doing some more reading this morning, the situation is even more simple. Mr. Taylor wasn't fired from the position of "state climatologist," because that position has not existed since the 1980's. The entire uproar is because Governor Kulongowski asked Mr. Taylor to stop using the fake title to lend credence to his work. Just like I can't just start calling myself 'Dr. Ibbey' without someone else bestowing that title on me, Mr. Taylor can't call himself "George Taylor, Oregon State Climatologist" just because he wants to.

It always amuses me when people make this argument. You obviously think academic scientists make a lot more money than they actually do.

But even ignoring the bad pay these guys who are only in it for the money are getting, here's another problem with your theory... You are arguing that something like 90% of scientists worldwide are only in it for the money, but the 10% who are quite often paid directly or indirectly by the oil companies are all the innocents? Are you really that naieve? Your theory just doesn't pass the laugh test.

Certainly there is money to be made off of the so called 'green' movement. Oddly, the majority of that money seems to be being made by the same corporations who would be making the money if there was no green movement. Global warming might be shifting a tiny sliver of the worlds wealth around, but certainly not enough to justify it's overwhelming support in the scientific community on the basis of greed alone.

Finally, you ignore the fact of the data. There is tons of data supporting man made global warming, and more is found everyday. Occasionally, evidence that support MMGW is found to be flawed, in which case that evidence is dropped and replaced with the new evidence. If that new evidence contradicts the theory, the theory is revised to take the new information into account. This is the scientific method at it's most basic.

The other side doesn't work that way. Instead of relying on the scientific method, they rely on doubt. They pick up on all those bits of evidence that on the surface seem to contradict MMGW and make press releases about them. They do this even if the discrepancy is already explained by a revision to the theory or even if there is no real discrepancy at all, only a perceived one. If they are ever faced with any evidence that truly does support the theory of MMGW, they just conveniently ignore it. These are exactly the same techniques that the ID crowd use when arguing against evolution, but either way it amounts to the same thing: a load of unscientific crap.

You should watch the movie Expelled, which covers exactly these topics, but dealing with Intelligent Design. It documents all the people who have lost their jobs or otherwise been punished for teaching ID... Except for one little detail: The movie lies throughout*. One of my favorite examples was when a was "forced" to remove his Intelligent design website from his university's web server. A shocking infringement of academic freedom! Except the professor taught electrical engineering, not evolutionary biology or anything remotely related. Oh, and he still has his job there, and continues to host the website, just on a different server. Maybe not so shocking after all.

Most of the Global Warming deniers have similar stories... They either didn't really suffer the fate that they claim, or the disciplinary act happened for other legitimate reasons but they use their belief to make a shitstorm for their being disciplined. Finally, in a few rare cases like that of George Taylor noted above, their beliefs truly do make them unable to adequately do the job that they were hired to do. You wouldn't hire someone who doesn't believe in evolution to teach a class on evolutionary theory, you wouldn't hire a communist to teach a class on stock trading, and you wouldn't hire someone who doesn't believe in abortion to teach a class on abortion procedures... Why would you hire someone who doesn't believe in global warming to educate the Governor on climate issues effecting his state?

* See Expelled Exposed for a full refutation of the topics covered in the movie. And to be honest, unless you want to study the techniques of how to (very badly) make a utterly dishonest documentary, I really can't recommend the movie... It doesn't even have much of Stein's normal wit.

But you need to understand what George Taylor's job was. His job was not a purely academic one. His job was to help advise the governor of Oregon on climate related issues effecting the state, and indirectly to help set climate policy in Oregon State. His disbelief in Global Warming made it impossible for him to act as a trusted advisor to the governor in that context.

From what I can find, Mr. Taylor seems to have retired, but he doesn't seem to be spending all his time fishing... He was a speaker at a anti-global-warming conference in New York this year. For some reason, I doubt that his appearance was pro bono. Also note (at the same link above) that the book that Taylor wrote arguing against global warming was funded by a publishing house funded in part by ExxonMobil.

If anyone, including noted scientists, say anything remotely the opposite of the climate change cabal, they are run out of town, belitted by their peers.

Yup. Same thing that happens to all the poor innocent teachers who try to teach Intelligent Design! I mean, Ben Stein said it was true, so it must be, right?!? I'd love it if you could point out a few examples of these scientists who lost their jobs, and who didn't almost immediately get new jobs at petroleum industry funded think-tanks at several times their original salaries.

I'd also believe you guys more if you could come up with a rational explanation for the massive hoax being perpetrated on the innocent public by the 90% or so of scientist who claim that Global Warming is happening and is caused by man. I've yet to hear anyone come up with a reasonable theory as to why these evil scientists would be doing such a thing. I hear can think of plenty of simple, logical reasons why the oil & coal companies would deny it, though...

There is nothing wrong with questioning the mainstream, but there is a difference between questioning something and having a knee-jerk reaction against it. You seem to be doing the latter. Before you can question something, you need to understand it, and it sounds like you fail pretty badly on that front.

I don't disagree with your basic point here, but you are confusing two very different goals. The goal of economic stimulus is not to create positive wealth, but to create economic activity. If the goal was to create wealth than savings would be a good thing, but that is exactly what we do not want in the case of a stimulus program. Buying a pallet of toilet paper may not seem like the best way to use your stimulus check, but it is perfectly valid economic activity (in fact I believe that most toilet paper is still made in the US, so it would actually be a better than average way to stimulate the economy).

When politicians were referring to 'freeing up credit' last fall, the goal was never to increase consumer debt, especially in the form of credit card debt. Certainly mortgages and car loans were encouraged, but the main purpose of freeing up the credit was so companies would have the operating funds needed to stay afloat. It is a pretty standard practice for even large, successful businesses to use credit for much of their short-term operating funds. When the credit markets dried up many otherwise healthy businesses had real trouble simply meeting payroll, so it was vital to the economy that we freed up those funds. You may disagree with this way of running a business (and many people would now agree with you), but that was absolutely the normal way of doing things until about 9 months ago. That credit has little to do with our advertising-driven economy.

I guess I don't see the problem... I'm a lousy programmer, and I could work up a proof-of-concept for this in about 10 minutes in PHP. Put your internal information in one frame and the Wikipedia information in another. Simply load the data from Wikipedia, either using the Wikipedia API, or just put the wikipedia page in a frame. This is not really any different than about a million other websites that aggregate information from multiple sources. This doesn't actually integrate the data (for example inserting internal links in the Wikipedia content), but that could be done easily enough in the PHP script (or whatever) if you really wanted to.

So, what if the grocer puts the $600 in food stamps under his mattress? Or, more reasonably, what if that $600 simply pads the wallet of the likes of Mike Duke, Lee Scott, and Robson Walton (key principles of Wal Mart)?

That's always a risk with any money in the economy. The trick is putting the money on the places where putting it aside is the least likely to happen. From a stimulus perspective, the nice thing about grocery stores is that they operate on very narrow margins, so for every dollar that comes in, probably $.90 or more immediately goes back out in the form of paying suppliers. Walmart is highly profitable, but they are so because of volume, not because of their high margins. So even stimulus money spent there almost immediately goes back out again (though unfortunately in the case of Walmart, most of it goes to China).

The velocity of the first step is admittedly higher, but that first step is not a productive one.

Of course the first step is a productive one. I certainly consider putting food on someone's table productive. But even ignoring that obvious bit of productivity, giving someone food stamps means that the cash that they have which would otherwise need to be spent on food will now be spent on something else. That is exactly why giving stimulus to the poor is so much better than giving it to the wealthy or even the middle class-- you can be assured that all the money will be spent at least once in the short term. The entire point of the Velocity of money is counting the total number of times the money changes hands. Ignoring the first one is a big fallacy.

I agree with most of the rest of what you say. I'm in exactly the same boat about Obama. I'm certainly farther left than you, but I'm definitely not a partisan Democrat, so I have no problem pointing out when the Dems are wrong. Obama was the best hope the Dems have had in decades, and you're absolutely right that he has so far been a terrible disappointment. Every once in a while he starts making noises that make me think he might be growing a spine, but then he goes right back to appeasing the right or appeasing his corporate overlords.

He's doing it again this week, with David Axelrod reminding the republicans that they are no longer needed to pass a new healthcare reform bill, but I can tell you right now what will happen. The bill will pass, but in spite of the 160 or so Republican amendments watering down the bill, not a single Republican will vote for it. They could do the smart thing and put a clean bill forward-- they still won't get any Republicans to vote for it, but at least the plan will be a good plan that actually accomplishes something-- but, no. They will pass the contaminated bill that is designed to fail. Of course much of the blame there goes to Congress, but Obama could certainly pressure them to pass a clean bill if he really wanted to.

I want to slightly clarify something in my last post... I said "It is absolutely false to say that the velocity of money is uniform regardless of where you spend it", which is slightly mischaracterizing what you said, but not by much. Velocity of money is entirely dependent on which sector of the economy possesses the majority of the money. The higher the percentage of money in the hands of the poor, the higher the velocity of money will be since those people cannot afford to save money. In the examples you cite (Artists, BART employees, etc.) the velocity of money will be the same only if those people save and spend money at the same ratio as food stamp recipients. That may be true in some cases, but it is certainly not true in all cases.

First off, I never said I thought you were a right winger. I said it sounds like you are listening to them. You are clearly a smart person and you clearly do think for yourself, but you keep repeating fairly easily refuted right-wing talking points such as the one here.

It is absolutely false to say that the velocity of money is uniform regardless of where you spend it. The simplest example is what happens if I put the $600 from my stimulus check under my mattress for a few years? Obviously that money has a very low velocity. On the other hand, if I take that same $600 and spend it on groceries, the money would have a higher velocity, and spending the money on locally produced goods and services would give it an even higher velocity.

If on the other hand you give the money to the rich, there is very little motivation for them to spend the money at all. What's another $600 when you already make half a million a year? An even better example of this was the TARP program, particularly the first half that was administered under Bush. We gave the banks 350 billion dollars with absolutely no strings attached, in an effort to free up the credit market. But instead of increasing lending, the banks mostly took the money and either hoarded it or they spent it to buy up other banks at a huge discount. Neither of these has a beneficial effect on the velocity of money. The latter is certainly spending, but at firesale prices, so I suspect that the investors are not terribly happy with the situation (I know that many Washington Mutual shareholders are furious about the way the WaMu/Chase merger was forced down their throats, and it was pretty devastating to the Seattle economy, where something like 8,000 people lost jobs and the downtown real estate market lost its single biggest customer).

You are right that there is no 'perfect' stimulus plan, but there are 'good' ones. For example one of the best parts of the original proposed stimulus plan was weatherzation of public schools and other buildings. Not only would this have the short-term effect of creating thousands of jobs across the country, but it would have two additional secondary benefits: it would have lowered the ongoing energy costs of operating these buildings (therefore lowering our taxes) and it would have lowered the nations long-term energy demands. This is an obvious win/win scenario, and should have been the focal point of the entire plan, but the Republicans shot that part of the stimulus plam down. Now only a small part of the stimulus goes to these programs.

The right-wing quite literally did everything in their power to sabotage the plan that we ended up by putting their own long-term political good in front of that of the nation. They know that all that they need to do to win in 2010 is to make sure that the economy doesn't recover. So they did everything they could to water down the bill and fill it with wasteful programs. Nearly 50% of the entire stimulus package was devoted to tax cuts that the GAO and even groups like Moody's Investor Services say will have virtually no short-term benefit to the economy. Then, when the economy is still bad in 2010, they will blame the problem entirely on Obama and they assume most Americans will be to stupid to know that they are being sold a line of bullshit. Unfortunately, they are probably right, and I suspect that the Dems will continue to be too spineless to do anything about it, even with their filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.

For example, they were the ones who insisted on business tax cuts that will have almost no short term economic benefit (something like $1.03 return on every $1.00 spent), but forced the removal of increases to the food stamp programs when those are shown to have just about the largest return on investment of all possible stimulus methods (something like $1.83 per $1).

Screw the short run, screw the business tax cuts, and please provide support for the food stamps hypothesis. Please note: If it hangs on the velocity of money, don't bother or remove that part. Velocity arguments are complete bullshit. All transactions result in follow-on transactions. If velocity arguments held, it would imply that infinite deficit spending would pay for itself, and it would support the "we're at war, go shopping" line. If the real goal is to give $0.83 to grocers then just give $0.83 to grocers and save $0.17.

I don't have time right now to respond in full, but with this reasoning, I don't see a lot of point in even trying to. I suspect that you listen to too much right-wing talk radio or get your news from some right wing source, since your points all have their fingerprints all over tham, and they are pretty easily refuted.

I'll respond in full this evening, but in the meantime, can you provide a link to something that backs up your refutation of the concept a 'velocity of money'. From your statement, it seems like you seriously misunderstand the whole point.

Ok, a couple of points... First, to be nitpicky, 27% + 22% is not "more than half". :-)

Second, from briefly browsing their website, the Liberty Fund is either Conservative Republican or Libertarian (I'm guessing the latter), so take that into account when judging anything they say. That's not to say that they can't be trusted, but be sure to consider their biases.

But regardless of the groups biases, the survey still shows that 49% agreed at least partially with the statement "Taken as a whole, government policies of the New Deal served to lengthen and deepen the Great Depression," right? That's one way to look at it, another is that 73% of economists either completely disagreed with the statement, or disagreed "with provisos". A perfect example of how changing the words just a little bit can pretty dramatically change the apparent meaning of a statement.

So the next question... Can the survey itself even be trusted? If the survey wording or something else was wrong with it, than it's numbers are meaningless anyway. Unfortunately, the survey falls pretty flat on this point. As it is worded, anyone who has even the slightest disagreement with the opposite statement ("Taken as a whole, government policies of the New Deal served to shorten the Great Depression") would automatically be lumped in with the people who appear to think the New Deal lengthened it. There should have been a fourth option "disagree with provisos" to get a better understanding of where people lean.

Going in to debt during a budget crisis is never an ideal solution, but sometimes you have no choice. Have you ever been unemployed, and had your car break down? You have two choices, fix it by putting the repair on your credit card, or don't fix it, but not be able to make your job interview next week. Unfortunately, sometimes the axiom "desperate times call for desperate measures" is correct. The same is true for the national economy in this case.

You are correct that if we did nothing, the economy would most likely eventually recover on it's own. But if we did nothing, things would get FAR worse before they got better. You're right, much of what has been done has been bad, but remember, the Republicans get a big chunk of that blame. For example, they were the ones who insisted on business tax cuts that will have almost no short term economic benefit (something like $1.03 return on every $1.00 spent), but forced the removal of increases to the food stamp programs when those are shown to have just about the largest return on investment of all possible stimulus methods (something like $1.83 per $1). Had the Republicans put aside their ideology and actually allowed a real stimulus plan to pass instead of the watered down travesty that we have, we would almost certainly be in much better shape today.

Sorry if you feel I misrepresented your comment. That was not my intention. I understood what you were saying, and perhaps I phrased my reply badly. What I was trying to get across was more the point that if you asked 100 average people on the street which party was the more fiscally conservative, the majority of them would still sat the Republicans, in spite of the fact that our nation is now on the verge of a new great depression thanks to Republican financial mismanagement. Democrats may not be as fiscally conservative as many people would like, but at least Clinton was able to leave a budget surplus, something no Republican has done (especially no modern Republican). While I don't disagree with your last sentence (Though I usually vote Democratic,I'm more of a proud liberal than a party Democrat, and I'm happy to point out places where the Dems are wrong), I feel that it is important to make it very clear that the Republicans, when they talk about being the fiscally responsible party, are just plain lying.

To be clear, the second paragraph of my reply was not directed at you, but at any other readers who would post kneejerk anti-Obama rhetoric.

But I'm still waiting for a citation regarding your comment "More than half of economists think the New Deal didn't help". As I pointed out before, that sounds like a talking point. Even if there is a survey that says that, it doesn't necessarily mean much. I see two problems potential problems. First, who conducted the study, how large was the sample, what were the biases of the sample group, etc. Second, the University of Chicago school of Economics and the economic theories they promote have been the dominant economic worldview over the last 50 years, so presumably a sizable chunk of economists believe in that worldview. Those same theories have lead to things like the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act which pretty much directly lead to our current economic downturn. It would seem to me that those so called "experts" should maybe be ignored for a while. Remember, it wasn't all that long ago when 50% of doctors would have said leaches are a quite effective medical tool, so just because someone is an "expert" doesn't mean that they are right.

I think you definition of "Fiscal Conservative" is flat out wrong. That may be the -theoretical- definition, and that may have been the practical definition thirty years ago, but that definition no longer has any bearing on the policies of the Republican party. Since Reagan, and accelerating greatly under Bush, Republican policy has been to cut income while accelerating spending*. It is exactly the opposite of anything that could be called 'fiscally conservative'.

And before the Republicans all start screaming about Obama's rampant spending, don't blame him for the problem that your guy left us with. Unfortunately, Bush dug us deep into a hole, so now we have little choice but to spend some money to get out of it. Regardless, at least he isn't cutting taxes while accelerating spending. A true fiscal conservative understands that sometimes spending is unavoidable (such as during a time of war), but understands that in those circumstances you will have to raise taxes to pay for it.

I'd also be interested in a citation for you comment "More than half of economists think the New Deal didn't help". Sounds like a Republican talking point to me.