Another in my series of articles worth pondering. From Paul Krugman, in the NYTimes: Hating Good Government
Recovery Diva
Long-Term Recovery from Disasters
Another in my series of articles worth pondering. From Paul Krugman, in the NYTimes: Hating Good Government
Recovery Diva 
Ms. Campbell:-
Nice partisan rant. I offered the NOAA data as evidence; you offered a diatribe. Nuff said.
John, I have a lot of pretty severe criticisms for democrats, and certainly Obama. Being increasingly disconnected from reality and alternately utterly unconcerned about it just doesn’t happen to be any of them – and that was the focus of the article. And what you offered was highly selective, minutia-like slivers of of very partial “data” that by itself is of no consequence whatsoever in the face of the massively larger data collection, analysis and modeling project that actual climate science and research is founded on and represents, period. It in no way begins to reflect or address it accurately, much less counters it in any direction. In fact, and although I obviously have no way of knowing, the impression I’ve been left with in reading your surprisingly climate-denying comments over the span of a couple of years now on this blog is that you’re basically just paraphrasing several specific meteorologists’, who as a group are notoriously poor at comprehending the fundamental differences between weather and climate science, research, modeling and prediction, etc. – with the latter involving far larger, more long-term, more ongoing and much, much more complex collections of data, analysis and model generation. I’m sorry but they really aren’t fundamentally the same thing at all – they really just aren’t – and they don’t produce fundamentally the same level of reliability or quality or type of information at all either.
Hi John: I knew I would hear from you on this. Not sure of the scientific data, but I do agree with your last paragraph.
This is a very poorly written article.
First, while some datasets have 2014 as the hottest year, others do not. If it is the hottest year, it’s not so by much. Look at the NOAA time series for global temperatures. For most of the US, 2014’s temperatures were around the average of last century’s.
Second, from the time series, it is clear that the rate of increase of temperature has either slowed or stopped. Certainly calls into question a strong tie with CO2 whose concentration in the atmosphere has been inexorably rising.
Most importantly, what does much of anything Krugman talks about have to do with “hating good government.” Where is his evidence of “good government?” Health care “reform?” Not sure I buy that – boondoggle to benefit the insurance companies is more like it. Krugman is a master of building strawmen that he can use as evidence to damn Republicans. He has become in many ways a shill for Democrats. And where is his evidence of “hate?”
Frankly, both parties have worked to make Big Government more complex and less responsive to our nation’s real problems. Both parties tinker around the edges of our real problems, primarily from a lack of courage. Both parties have become so beholden to Big Interests (corporations, unions, … take your pick) that the Little Guy’s real problems rarely get heard. Both parties are so bent on demonizing the other that finding effective solutions becomes more and more difficult (and perhaps a secondary consideration).
John, your comments do nothing but reinforce exactly what Krugman is saying, especially given how ungrounded they are in any relevant aspect of actual climate science or research, much less the sum total of it. And I’m sorry but you honestly don’t seem to have really read much beyond the article’s headline, which is fairly misleading actually (and probably not unintentionally).
Krugman says nothing about “good government” one way or another in the article. The article is about how much Republicans seem to almost wholly reject history, science, research, facts, statistics, or pretty much any known notion of evidence-based issue analysis or public policy formulation in their political functioning at this point – except when it suits their preconceived ideas and opinions – and he couldn’t possibly be more right or on point about that. There is also not the slightest equivalency on the Democratic side about any of it. It is only at the end of the article that Krugman postulates an explanation for Republicans behaving so irrationally and destructively, and just generally in such bad faith while in public office, and the reason he proposed was not that they hated “good government” but rather that they hated government “in the public interest.”
I also think he couldn’t be on more solid ground in using the term “hate,” for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the abject, truly mindbogglingly mindless and historically unprecedented degree of wholesale obstructionism Republicans have offered up in response to absolutely everything brought to them for 6 tortuous years now, with no end in sight. I personally don’t agree with his conclusion and suggested reason for why Republicans have deteriorated so badly into such infantile functioning. I not only don’t think its very insightful, but that it also gives Republicans too much credit for functioning consciously and intentionally. And although I certainly agree with you and Claire about the extent to which both parties have prostituted themselves to Big Money (who wouldn’t), I think this similarity pales dramatically in the face of the massive differences between the 2 parties generally at this point that no amount of false equivalency framing can fix – hence the unparalleled polarization. Finally, with reference to your comments about what constitutes “good government,” while I certainly think that reasonable minds could disagree about what that might be or how to go about or do it – I’m pretty sure that the sweeping exclusion of “history, science, research, facts, statistics, relevant expert input or pretty much any known notion of evidence-based issue analysis or public policy formulation” that Republicans now regularly practice would not primarily be involved.