The Anatomy of Corruption
A News Link Round-Up
Here is the latest weekly round-up of links, with items on the official abandonment of the most apocalyptic global warming projections, the permanent “vibecession,” the raid on the US Treasury, vindictive prosecutions and prosecutorial misconduct, the debacle in Iran, updates on the AI bubble—and an example of the stubborn persistence of progress.
A reminder about this News Link Round-Up format: The main headlines are there to provide context and perhaps a little commentary, the headlines with the links are the original headlines from the articles, and the quotations beneath are extracts from the articles.
“A Saner Climate Debate”
Last month, UN scientists announced publicly what climate researchers have known for years: the most extreme climate change pathway is now so implausible, it really shouldn’t be part of our climate debate. The culprit—known as the Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5, or RCP8.5 to habitués—suffered a peculiarly nasty case of context collapse: a tool developed by a bunch of nerds was set loose on the world only to be wildly misinterpreted, generating mass confusion and buckets of activist dollars on the way to thoroughly disfiguring our climate debate.
Now the UN is mothballing it. Good riddance.
The “8.5” in RCP8.5 refers to the amount of added solar energy the atmosphere will trap by 2100—specifically, 8.5 watts per square meter. That’s very high—likely to bring about a shocking 5 degrees of global warming above pre-industrial levels.
RCP8.5 was the kind of climate scenario lurking behind Greta Thunberg’s accusation, in her September 2019 speech at the UN Climate Action Summit, that “we are in the beginning of a mass extinction.” It’s the kind of pathway young people in England were thinking about when they decided they needed to launch “Extinction Rebellion.” It’s been a fundraising bonanza for climate activist groups from Adelaide to Zurich, the main player in every single alarmist climate critique you’ve read in the last 15 years….
Perhaps belatedly recognizing how badly off the rails the discourse has gone, the scientists preparing the IPCC’s next assessment report have decided to pull the plug on RCP8.5. The new “high emissions” scenario to be used in climate modeling going forward is considerably less pessimistic than RCP8.5, less pessimistic even than RCP6, the second-worst case scenario in the old IPCC reports.
It’s a significant step towards a saner climate debate.
The Mind Is Its Own Place, and in Itself Can Make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.
The “Vibecession” Is Over. The “Permacession” Is Here.
I have been covering the “vibecession” for a few years now, and I thought I mostly understood it. Headline economic statistics are failing to capture the fragility and strain that consumers are experiencing…. But seeing the latest consumer-sentiment figures and comparing them with hard economic data, I found that my usual explanations fell short.
Americans are expressing some of the deepest, broadest, and stubbornest economic pessimism ever recorded….
