The Real News Network has the interview Is Thomas Piketty Right About the Causes of Inequality?

HUDSON: Well, that’s why the neoliberal’s love Piketty. It’s why Krugman loves Picketty(sic) and others. You can’t implement it. So he’s produced a book without any solution, and the free enterprise boys like that. The 1 percent don’t mind being criticized as long as there’s no solution to their problem. And that’s what the critics have come out saying: wait a minute, there are a lot of solutions. For one thing, some kind of wealth is better than others. You don’t want to tax people building factories and improving living standards like the one percent pretend that they do, but what you do want to tax is unearned income, economic rent, capital gains.
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It’s the Wall Street bankers who’ve been doing the junk mortgages and engaging in the kind of fraud that we’ve been hearing about on Wall Street. This is not what Piketty discusses. He doesn’t say, throw the clerks in jail; he doesn’t say, have government regulatory agencies to prevent this kind of exploitation; he doesn’t say, reimpose anti-monopoly regulations to prevent monopoly profits from enriching the one percent; he doesn’t say, take all of these public utilities that Margaret Thatcher privatized in England and Ronald Reagan did in America and put them back in the public domain so that they can provide basic services to people at cost. All of this is a different topic from his book.

As with most books that I read that discuss the big problems in society, they are great in laying out the facts of what is wrong. This is usually the majority of the book. At the end they feel obligated to propose some solutions. Very rarely, if ever, have I read that part of the book and found it up to the standards of the first part of the book.

It appears that the Piketty book may be worse than the usual failure. He proposes non-solutions, and ignores the solutions that would work and have been proven to work.

The Real News Network is starting another series with Global Warming Theory Based on Evidence, Not Belief – Alan Robock on Reality Asserts Itself (1/5). This first part is a slow start if you are anxious to get into the nitty-gritty science.

Now, so that’s based on evidence. You asked me if I believe in global warming. It’s not a question of belief. It’s a question of looking at the evidence and weighing the evidence. And I’m really a skeptic. I try to be critical of anything that’s told to me, and want to ask questions, and then I make conclusions based on the evidence. My motivation in my career would be to find a flaw in global warming, not another paper that supports it.

The next part is No CO2 Eureka Moment, Just Years of Statistical Analysis — Alan Robock on Reality Asserts Itself (2/5).

ROBOCK: Well, my dissertation said that random variations, just the natural variability of weather, could have caused the climate change of the last hundred years. It turned out my model was too sensitive to these random variations and it was wrong. So, over time, I published papers on the impact of volcanic eruptions, which is what I specialize in, and other people worked on the carbon dioxide effect and trying to quantify it. And it wasn’t until more recently that it was clear that CO2 was the dominant cause.

But people don’t understand there’s multiple causes of climate change, and they’re all happening at the same time. And so it’s not just one thing; it’s the battle between these different things that ends up in the net climate change.

Paul Jay and other non-scientist always seem to expect a Eureka Moment. No matter how hard Paul tries, he cannot get this scientist to say there is one. At least the headline writer got the point.

As Robock tries to emphasize, there are a large number of competing forces in the climate that pull in different directions. What a scientist tries to do is to figure out what the net effect is and how sensitive the net effect is to changing over time. As time goes on, and we develop better measures, better simulations, and better accounting for more of the competing effects, the chances that we will find a large, heretofore unknown effect diminishes.

There is never a point in time when you can be absolutely certain that nothing can happen to upset the analysis. We could get hit by an asteroid large enough to kill us all off before we drown in the rising oceans. Normally, people get upset when the people who should know don’t take precautions against the obvious risks. They even get upset when the people who should know don’t guard against unimaginable risks. So why should we pay inordinate attention to the deniers who don’t want us to take any action against a likely and imaginable risk?

May 5, 2014.

The subsequent post Answering Counter Climate Claims – Alan Robock on Reality Asserts Itself (3/5) gets to the meat of the topic.