‘Clunkers,’ a classic government folly - Jeff Jacoby, Boston Globe

...the supply of used cars is artificially low, because your Uncle Sam decided last year to destroy hundreds of thousands of perfectly good automobiles as part of its hare-brained Car Allowance Rebate System — or, as most of us called it, Cash for Clunkers. That was the program under which the government paid consumers up to $4,500 when they traded in an old car and bought a new one with better gas mileage. The traded-in cars — which had to be in drivable condition to qualify for the rebate — were then demolished: Dealers were required to chemically wreck each car’s engine, and send the car to be crushed or shredded.

Congress and the Obama administration trumpeted Cash for Clunkers as a triumph — the president pronounced it “successful beyond anybody’s imagination.’’ Which it was, if you define success as getting people to take “free’’ money to make a purchase most of them are going to make anyway, while simultaneously wiping out productive assets that could provide value to many other consumers for years to come. By any rational standard, however, this program was sheer folly.
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When all is said and done, Cash for Clunkers was a deplorable exercise in budgetary wastefulness, asset destruction, environmental irrelevance, and economic idiocy. Other than that, it was a screaming success.

Is a Sweltering Summer Proof of Global Warming? | Audubon Magazine Blog

Yet the five hottest years ever recorded since record keeping began in 1880 happened in the last decade, NASA reports, indicating that the earth is heating up.
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On the Pew Center on Global Climate Change’s blog, Jay Gulledge, senior scientist and director of the science and impacts program there also offers some interesting comments when writing about extreme weather events in recent years.

“As every dutiful scientist does, I stopped short of blaming those individual weather events on global warming, but I am also careful to point out that it is scientifically unsound to claim that the confluence of extreme weather events in recent years is not associated with global warming,” he says.

Flashback: A New Leaderboard at the U.S. Open « Climate Audit

Four of the top 10 are now from the 1930s: 1934, 1931, 1938 and 1939, while only 3 of the top 10 are from the last 10 years (1998, 2006, 1999). Several years (2000, 2002, 2003, 2004) fell well down the leaderboard, behind even 1900.

Another Item for Climate Panel's To-Do List - NYTimes.com

So there’s a circular issue here. All media queries for the hundreds of scientists participating in the panel’s next assessment are supposed to funnel through a media office with almost no resources (see the InterAcademy review), and direct access (through, say, a user-friendly country-by-country directory with links to scientists’ home pages) won’t be forthcoming until the authors get media training (with what resources?).

I have an idea. Why don’t scientists and other experts contributing to the fifth assessment by the climate panel self organize and create a public Web portal? They can stick to the panel guidelines, but still interact with reporters and — better yet — the public.