Flawed Science Advice for Obama?

New York Times ^ | December 19, 2008 | John Tierney

[raisetheroof]

Does being spectacularly wrong about a major issue in your field of expertise hurt your chances of becoming the presidential science advisor? Apparently not, judging by reports from DotEarth and ScienceInsider that Barack Obama will name John P. Holdren as his science advisor on Saturday.

[raisetheroof]

Holdren has done for science what Ward Churchill has done for history.

[Army Air Corps]

The NYT is running this story? Did I jump into a parallel universe?

[Anti-Bubba182]

"What kind of White House science advisor you think Dr. Holdren would make?"

He is one who will follow the party line. Universities are loaded with people like this. The global warming cult is a mask for socialism.

[M. Dodge Thomas]

"Dr. Holdren, now a physicist at Harvard, was one of the experts in natural resources whom Paul Ehrlich enlisted in his famous bet against the economist Julian Simon during the “energy crisis” of the 1980s. Dr. Simon, who disagreed with environmentalists’ predictions of a new “age of scarcity” of natural resources, offered to bet that any natural resource would be cheaper at any date in the future..."

However it was Holdren, not Simon, who had it right; the only part of the prediction of increasing world consumption and rising prices that was incorrect was the time frame.

And even then, not by much, here's copper, for example:

[aShepard]

I don’t recall when I’ve ever read an article with such terrible writing.

Time for this guy to go back to kindergarten to learn sentence structure

[utahagen]

The global warming stuff has peaked, which is why even global warming scare-mongers now say, “climate change”. In 2006, Al Gore said, “Beijing will be under water in fifteen years.” It's pretty obvious this won't be the case, and the NYTimes et al have begun to hedge their bets on this issue. Paradoxically, now that Obama has won, we can expect less pressure to buy into global warming (because the liberals won't want Obama to make the political sacrifices to enact legislation to combat global warming).

[FrankR]

None of this is about climate change anyway...it's about power, control and money. That's it!

There was a reason behind the old saying, "Everyone talks about the weather, but no one does anything about it."...there is nothing to be done about it.

If the earth is warming - as they claim - it's from the sun...you know that big ball in the sky that has been warming this planet for centuries. You know, the thing that provides life as we know it.

The sun doesn't care if you drive an electric car, or if your name is gore, pelosi, or obama...it's going to do what it does. Hundreds of the planet Earth would fit inside the sun, and "carbon credits" is going to protect us from it?

If the gorebull warming pundits were serious, they'd all be over there in China tearing down their president's office door...as America is a "clean room" compared to China.

There is one thing of which you can all be assured...IF and WHEN we conquer "gorebull warming"...a new crisis will immediately pop up to take its place. A crisis is the best way to get people to give up their freedoms, and the liberal whackoes know it. We should rename the democrat party as the "Panic Party"...the only way their ideas can be pushed forward is to panic the populace.

[SAJ]

Nice cherry-picked chart.

Jan high-grade copper is $1.3360/lb as I write this.

The differential isn't supply or demand; it's government. Julian Simon was spot on.

[steelyourfaith]

 

John Holdren,
Climate Specialist Susperstitionist

[onedoug]

PC science

[Hans]

What is the price today?

[MindBender26]

>>>>Holdren has done for science what Ward Churchill has done for history.

.... and what Mr. Obama will do for America.

[The Electrician]

AFAIK it’s not precisely the NY Times running the story, rather it is an NY Times blog - Tierney has often stoked the ire of globull warmingists in his blog...

[ETL]

What is the price today?

Price of copper today:
http://biz.yahoo.com/ic/131.html

One month stock chart:
http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=^YHOh711#chart1:symbol=^yhoh711;range=5d;indicator=volume;charttype=line;crosshair=on;ohlcvalues=0;logscale=on;source=undefined

[ETL]

Oops. That was a 5-day chart, not 1 month. Charts longer than 5 days apparently aren’t available for copper on that Yahoo site I linked to.

[ETL]

You can access a 5-year chart on "African copper" here:
http://www.advfn.com/p.php?pid=qkchart&symbol=L^ACU

[freekitty]

Obambi is a big flaw.

Why isn’t he in Chicago, his home, celebrating Christmas? Oh, I forgot; He live in Crooksville, Chicago, IL.

[freekitty]

Good one. Scam Artist could be applied.

[Bob]

Nicely done piece of misinformation. I especially like the way that you cherry-picked the timeframe. Surely there's price data available since May. Why did you choose not to include it? Might it have undermined your bogus point?

Incidentally, the original bet was for a ten year period using inflation-adjusted dollars and Simon won the bet, quite handily.

[zek157]

Copper is now ~$1.30 lb off from $4.00. Your chart doesn’t show the entire drop back to where copper was in 2003.

http://www.kitcometals.com/charts/copper_historical_large.html#5years