The Real News Network has the interview Nuclear Winter – Alan Robock on Reality Asserts Itself (4/5)

ROBOCK: Nuclear bomb dropped on a city would be horrible. It would kill hundreds of thousands, millions of people, the blast, the fires, and the radioactivity. There would be a plume of radioactivity going downwind for a couple of hundred miles, and people would be affected by that in the decades to come. But it wouldn’t be a global catastrophe in terms of radioactivity. The people that were targeted would die, but the rest of the world, these direct effects would leave them alone. There are no nuclear weapons in the southern hemisphere, so half of the world really wouldn’t have that much of an effect of the direct use.

Yet it turns out that fires started by the bombs would produce so much smoke that it would go up into the atmosphere, block out the sun, and make it cold and dark at the Earth’s surface, killing the crops, and famine would threaten the entire planet. The amount of cooling depends on how much smoke goes into the atmosphere.

If you are a winter sports enthusiast, maybe you would prefer a nuclear winter to counteract global warming.

If you are a global climate change denier, then the parts of this interview involving Fidel Castro ought to send a sensation of thrill up your spine.

If you are just a normal person, I don’t know what you might think about this interview.

Elizabeth Warren posted a link to the Politico story Holder: No banks ‘too big to jail‘.

You’re not holdering your breath waiting for a prosecution are you?

The Rachel Maddow Show blog has the article Divided Court backs town-meeting prayers.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority in the 5-to-4 decision, said “ceremonial prayer is but a recognition that, since this nation was founded and until the present day, many Americans deem that their own existence must be understood by precepts far beyond that authority of government to alter or define.”

In dissent, Justice Elena Kagan said the town’s practices could not be reconciled “with the First Amendment’s promise that every citizen, irrespective of her religion, owns an equal share of her government.”

The Real News Network has published the third part in the series – Answering Counter Climate Claims – Alan Robock on Reality Asserts Itself (3/5). My previous post Global Warming Theory Based on Evidence, Not Belief – Alan Robock on Reality Asserts Itself (1/5) actually covered the first two parts.

The part of the interview introduced here gets more to the point of explaining why the counter claims are easily disproved.

ROBOCK: There are over 150 claims that claim that people are not causing global warming, and they are all misrepresentations and cherry picking of the data. So it’s not challenging to answer them; you just have to tell the truth and tell what we actually know.
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ROBOCK: … By the way, I’m a skeptic. To be a good scientist, you have to be skeptical of all the evidence, of all the model results of your own work, and always ask questions and challenge it. A good scientist is a skeptic

This segment could only touch on a few of the counter claims, but Paul Jay explains how The Real News Network will give its readers the opportunity to send in their counterclaims and get responses from Alan Robock.  On the few issues that this interview does cover, Robock gives very good explanations of how scientists can compare the size of various effects and determine which ones are major at any specific time and which are minor.

Naked Capitalism has the article How Milton Friedman Fomented the Barmy “Corporations Exist to Maximize Shareholder Value” Myth  by Yves Smith.

One of my pet peeves is the degree to which the notion that corporations exist only to serve the interests of shareholders is accepted as dogma and recited uncritically by the business press. I’m old enough to remember when that was idea would have been considered extreme and reckless. Corporations are a legal structure and are subject to a number of government and contractual obligations and financial claims. Equity holders are the lowest level of financial claim. It’s one thing to make sure they are not cheated, misled, or abused, but quite another to take the position that the last should be first.

I am a sucker for any article that would call Milton Friedman or any of his ideas “barmy”. Later the article quotes a Friedman article that said the following:

In a free-enterprise, private-property sys­tem, a corporate executive is an employee of the owners of the business. He has direct re­sponsibility to his employers. That responsi­bility is to conduct the business in accordance with their desires, which generally will be to make as much money as possible while con­forming to the basic rules of the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical custom.

Yves Smith then goes on to see how ill founded these thoughts are.

You can see how incoherent this is. Shareholder are not bosses of corporate executives. They are diffuse and large in number, and if you got them all in a room to tell the corporate executive what to do, you’d be more likely to see fisticuffs than agreement.

The trick that is being pulled on us here is the usual sophistry that gets the listeners into trouble.  The concept of boss and owner implies many characteristics.  The shareholder has some of the characteristics of a boss and some of the characteristics of an owner, but not all the characteristics of either one.  The sophist’s trick is  to get you to agree with the similarity of the shareholder with a boss or owner without specifying in what way they are alike and in what ways they are not alike.  The sophist makes an absurd point by  using aspects where they are not alike before you can realize how you are being duped.

It might be worth imagining why the citizens in a democracy would want their government to create the legal concept of a corporation.  Would the citizens of that democracy really want the government to set up a corporation for the sole purpose of making a few people wealthy, or would they want it done for some larger social purpose?