terça-feira, 30 de setembro de 2014

Argentina despreza o Capitalismo


No meu outro blog Thyself, O Lord, eu falo hoje que o Papa Francisco é um peronista ao pensar em economia. Um filósofo, amigo de João Paulo II, recomenda que o Papa leia Hayek.

E hoje vemos que a Argentina voltou a desafiar as leis do mercado ao tentar pagar seus credores desobedecendo as normas do contrato que fez com eles. Sem normas legais reconhecidas e respeitadas, não há desenvolvimento de mercado, vira barbárie.

Não é por acaso mesmo que Che Guevara é Argentino. E o povo de lá tem orgulho disso.

Vejamos dois textos da Bloomberg sobre a tentativa de burlar as leis da Argentina.

     Sept. 30 (Bloomberg) -- Argentina deposited $161 million in
a local bank for bond payments, seeking to get around a U.S.
court ruling that bans the country from servicing its overseas
debt.
     The payment was made in a new trustee account at Nacion
Fideicomisos SA, a unit of state-run Banco de la Nacion
Argentina, the economy Ministry said in an e-mailed statement.
Lawmakers in the South American country approved a bill earlier
this month to allow for the local payment of foreign debt.
     “Argentina ratifies once more its unbreaking compromise to
comply with its obligations to bondholders and contribute to
preserving the right to be paid what is owed to them under debt
contracts,” the ministry said in the statement.
     U.S. District Judge Thomas Griesa ruled yesterday that
Argentina is in contempt of court for shifting control over debt
payments to Buenos Aires from New York. The judge had previously
ruled the nation cannot make payments on foreign debt unless
holders of defaulted bonds from 2001 are paid in full. President
Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner has refused to comply with the
ruling, triggering a default in July.
     Argentina had asked Bank of New York Mellon Corp. to step
down as bond trustee after Griesa’s ruling prevented the New
York-based bank from passing along payments to bondholders. The
bank hasn’t stepped down.
     Today’s payment is the second due from Argentina since
June, when the U.S. Supreme Court left Griesa’s ruling intact.
While the ministry’s statement says that the funds are now
property of the new trustee, it doesn’t say if the bank has the
bondholders’ information or how investors can claim their money.

                           RUFO Clause

     The legal dispute stems from Argentina’s record $95 billion
default in 2001. While the nation renegotiated about 92 percent
of its debt by issuing new bonds at discounts of as much as 70
percent, some holders such as Elliott rejected the terms, sued
and were awarded full payment in court.
     Argentina would be willing to negotiate a solution in the
first quarter of 2015 if Griesa grants the nation a stay until
the Rights Upon Future Offers clause expires Dec. 31, Cabinet
Chief Jorge Capitanich said Sept. 26. The RUFO clause prohibits
the nation from extending better restructuring terms to
creditors that shunned the earlier offer.
     Bondholders may be overestimating the government’s intent
to resolve its debt dispute with holdout creditors, according to
Siobhan Morden, the head of Latin America fixed-income strategy
at Jefferies Group LLC.
     President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner “tells us every
day that she’s not paying the holdouts,” Morden said. “It is
hard to believe that President Fernandez will change her mind
and pay the holdouts after all the hard-effort campaigning with
international institutions like the United Nations.”

                        Payment Capacity

     Fernandez, who replaced her late husband in 2007, is
 scheduled to hand over the presidency in December 2015.
     Unable to raise funds in overseas capital markets,
Argentina is boosting controls on dollar purchases to retain
foreign-currency reserves it relies on to pay debt and imports.
The central bank’s funds fell $668 million this month to $27.9
billion, the lowest since April.
     The peso in the black market has tumbled to near a record
low 15.5 per dollar as investors dump the local currency to
protect against estimated 40 percent annual inflation and
further devaluation.
     While the post-default economy is hurting domestic demand,
it is also prompting a tightening of controls, safeguarding
funds to pay bondholders, according to Michael Roche, an
emerging-market strategist at Seaport Group LLC.
     “The mix of weak domestic demand, capital controls and
devalued currency is having a positive impact on the external
accounts and reserves,” Roche said in an e-mail. “The
consensus view by strategic holders is for an ultimate
resolution to the holdout case sometime between the first
quarter of 2015 and first quarter of 2016.”


segunda-feira, 29 de setembro de 2014

Venezuela: Governo compra o Exército com Benesses, que Povo não tem.


Texto da Bloomberg revela como o governo de Nicoas Maduro anda comprando os militares do país. Eles têm acesso a todos os bens, que vão de carne a carros, passando por carrinhos de bêbê, em supermercados apenas para militares. Enquanto o povo fica na fila para comprar uma porção destes bens.Os militares também têm seus próprios bancos e rede de tv.

Vejam parte do texto abaixo:

Venezuela’s national parade ground at the Fort Tiuna military base presents a scene that local civilians can only dream of -- stalls laden with goods and no waiting lines.
The market with everything from subsidized meat to baby strollers, along with loans, new cars and apartments, are perks provided to the armed forces as the economy contracts, poverty rises and President Nicolas Maduro’s popularity sinks to a record low.
The benefits help ensure the loyalty of the military, while siphoning reserves away from the poor who have seen wage growth fall behind inflation, according to analysts, citizen activists and academics.
Since Maduro came to power 17 months ago, the armed forces have created their own television channel, housing program and bank, the only military-owned one outside Iran and Vietnam. A third of Venezuela’s 28 ministers and half the state governors are now active or retired officers, mostly companions of former paratroop commander and late President Hugo Chavez.
“The military remains the only element guaranteeing political stability under Maduro’s weak government,” Diego Moya-Ocampos, an analyst at consulting firm IHS Country Risk, said by phone from London. “As an outsider, Maduro had to give the generals a bigger role in managing the country to keep them on-board. He has militarized politics.”
Maduro named a brigadier general as economy vice-president on Sept. 2, the second most important post in the cabinet. He now has eight active or retired officers in the cabinet, up from five in 2012, the year before Chavez died.

New Cars

Fifteen years after Chavez started his revolution in “21st century socialism,” South America’s largest oil producer is running out of money, the economy is contracting and companies and investors are deserting what was Latin America’s richest nation in 1980.
Inflation has more than doubled and the bolivar slumped 76 percent against the dollar on the black market since Maduro came to office in April 2013 describing himself as the “son of Chavez.” More importantly to his support, the poverty rate has started to rise, climbing to 32 percent at the end of last year from a record low 25 percent in 2012, according to the National Statistics Institute.
Military personnel don’t have to contend with the economic chaos in the rest of the country. The 43 trucks and tents at the market in the military base on Aug. 22 were loaded with subsidized milk, cooking oil and detergents -- goods that are out of stock in most shops.
People line up for hours outside state-owned supermarkets to buy regulated staple goods, or pay three times as much from street hawkers. One in four basic goods were unavailable at any given time in January, the last month for which figures are available.


TV Station

The army’s support for the government was on display when the protests started in February. A television station owned by the armed forces broadcast Chavez’s speeches accompanied by songs such as “Maduro From My Heart.”
“The TV station is born with a mission to fight for the ideology of our eternal commander, Hugo Chavez,” the broadcaster’s president, General Pedro Alvarez, said during the channel’s launch in December. The telecommunications regulator has ordered every cable provider to show the channel.
While anger mounts among ordinary citizens, the loyalty of the military is ensured, said Rocio San Miguel, director of Citizens’ Control.
The military has been given control of many sectors of the economy, while active or retired officers are in charge of the finance, food and industry ministries.

Election Cost

Retired officers now control the bulk of food imports, helped by colleagues still in the military or politics, according to retired captain William Biancucci, a former member of Chavez’s strategic planning team who imported as much as $110 million of livestock from Brazil between 2009 and 2011.
Congressional elections due in December of next year will show how much resentment the policy of buying off the military has created.
“There’s a political cost Maduro will pay for prioritizing the soldiers over the poor neighborhoods,” Hugo Perez Hernaiz, sociology professor at Central University of Venezuela in Caracas, said by telephone. “The size of this cost will be seen in the next elections.”

quinta-feira, 25 de setembro de 2014

Aniversário: 18 anos sem Aquecimento Global.


Patrick Michaels (foto), PhD em climatologia e professor durante 30 anos de ciências do meio ambiente da Universidade da Virgina, faz parte do chamado IPCC da ONU que cuida de questões relacionadas a mudança climática. E é diretor do Instituto Cato para questões relacionadas ao clima.

Michaels lembrou ontem que no próximo dia 1 de outubro se completará 18 anos que não se registra aquecimento global na superfície da terra.

Há dois atrás, eu lembrei do aniversário de 16 anos sem aquecimento, no meu outro blog.

Michaels também destacou que o tamanho da crosta polar na Antártica está maior desde 1978 e o o Ártico parou o derretimento em 2005/2006. Os ambientalista costumam olhar para os polos para dizer que o gelo está derretendo.

Vejamos parte o texto da CNS News:

Upcoming Anniversary: October 1st Will Mark 18 Years of No Global Warming


According to the datasets used last year, October 1st will mark the 18th year of “no significant warming trend in surface average temperature," says Patrick Michaels, director of the Cato Institute’s Center for the Study of Science.
And even if the current 18-year trend were to end, it would still take nearly 25 years for average global temperature figures to reflect the change, said Michaels, who has a Ph.D. in ecological climatology and spent three decades as a research professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia.
Sooner or later, even Al Gore and the numerous scientists, academics and politicians who agree with him that “Earth has a fever” will have to admit that their climate models predicting catastrophic global warming were off by a long shot, said Michaels, who was also a contributing editor to the United Nations’ second Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report.
“It has to be admitted eventually that too much warming was forecast too fast. That just has to happen. You can’t go on and on and on,” he told CNSNews.com.
“If the surface temperature resumed the warming rate that we observed from, say 1977 through 1998, we would still go close to a quarter of a century without significant net warming because there’s such a long flat period built into the record now. “
ut there’s no indication that after 18 years, global warming will resume anytime soon.
Michaels pointed to record Antarctic ice, which “is at its highest extent measured by the current microwave satellite sounding system” since 1978, according to data from the University of Illinois’  Polar Ice Research Center.
“And if you take a close look at the Arctic data, it appears the decline stopped somewhere around 2005/2006, which means we’ve almost had ten years without any net loss in Arctic ice,” he told CNSNews.com.
Nor does it look likely that the next El Nino, which Michaels says is “really weak,” will have much of an effect on global temperatures.
“The much vaunted and predicted El Nino, which would [ordinarily] spike global temperature, is not going according to plan,” Michaels pointed out. “That’s the major known oscillation in global temperature, and we can’t even get that one right in the near term.”
--
“I would say that his order of needs is a little bit out of whack,” Michaels told CNSNews.com.
“Given that a cogent political analysis indicates that the loss of control of the House of Representatives by the Democratic Party was the result of their passing the unpopular cap-and-trade bill in 2009 - in the 2010 election they lost 64 seats- you would think that this is kind of a political hot potato," he continued.
“And in fact, our friends in Europe, who are certainly leftier and greenier than we tend to be as a country, are trying to back away from this issue,” he noted, adding that the major heads of state of China, India, Australia, Canada and Germany all declined to join President Obama at the United Nations’ Climate Summit held in New York this week.
“Angela Merkel, the German prime minister, wrote the Framework Convention on Climate Change when she was an East German," Michaels pointed out, but “Germany has resumed building coal-fired power plants because they can’t get enough electricity out of solar energy and windmills.
“We told you so,” he said with a laugh.

terça-feira, 23 de setembro de 2014

Presidentes Estúpidos.





Não, eu não vou falar da Dilma. Não preciso falar sobre o que se pode ler em tantos comentaristas políticos. Costumo dizer que os problemas brasileiros podem ser vistos em outros lugares do mundo (às vezes em menor e às vezes em maior grau) e a estupidez de quem lidera um país é uma variável presente em inúmeros países. Mas por vezes o nível da estupidez assusta, como é o caso de Obama, o presidente do país mais rico do planeta. Será que a estupidez da Dilma é de maior grau que a do Obama?


Bret Stephens escreveu um excelente artigo no Wall Street Journal sobre a estupidez de Obama. O artigo não é aberto ao público, vou colocar aqui apenas partes do texto.

What Obama Knows

Every president gets things wrong. What sets Obama apart is his ideological rigidity and fathomless ignorance.

By BRET STEPHENS


Serious people feel an obligation to listen whenever Barack Obama speaks. They furrow their brow and hold their chin and parse every word. They assume that most everything a president says is significant, which is true. They assume that what's significant must also be well-informed. Not necessarily.

I've been thinking about this as it becomes clear that, even at an elementary level, Mr. Obama often doesn't know what he's talking about. It isn't so much his analysis of global events that's wrong, though it is. The deeper problem is the foundation of knowledge on which that analysis is built.
Here, for instance, is Mr. Obama answering a question posed in August by New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, who wanted the president's thoughts on the new global disorder.

"You can't generalize across the globe," the president replied. "Because there are a bunch of places where good news keeps on coming. Asia continues to grow . . . and not only is it growing but you're starting to see democracies in places like Indonesia solidifying."
"The trend lines in Latin America are good," he added. "Overall, there's still cause for optimism."
Here, now, is reality: In Japan, the economy is contracting. China's real-estate market is a bubble waiting to burst. Indonesia's democracy may be solidifying, but so is Islamism and the persecution of religious minorities. Democracy has been overthrown in Thailand. The march toward freedom in Burma—supposedly one of Mr. Obama's (and Hillary Clinton's ) signature diplomatic victories—has stalled. India may do better than before under its new prime minister, Narendra Modi, but gone are the days when serious people think of India as a future superpower. The government of Pakistan is, as ever, on the verge of collapse.

As for Latin America, Argentina just defaulted for the second time in 13 years. Brazil is in recession. Venezuela is a brutal dictatorship. Ecuador is well on its way to becoming one.
I begin with these examples not because there aren't bright spots in Asia (South Korea is one) or Latin America (Colombia is another) but because it's so typically Obama. Warn against generalization—and then generalize. Cite an example—but one that isn't representative. Talk about a trend line—but get the direction of the trend wrong.
---
Keep going around the world. He declared victory over al Qaeda and dismissed groups such as ISIS as "the jayvee team" at the very moment that al Qaeda was roaring back. He mocked the notion of Russia being our enemy—remember the line about the 1980s wanting "its foreign policy back"?—just as Russia was again becoming our enemy.
He predicted in 2012 that "Assad's days are numbered" just as the Syrian dictator was turning the tide of war in his favor. He defended last November's nuclear deal with Tehran, saying "it's not going to be hard for us to turn the dials back or strengthen sanctions even further" in the event that diplomacy failed. In reality, as the Foundation for Defense of Democracies notes, "burgeoning trade ties with Turkey, increased oil sales to China, and reports of multibillion-dollar Russian-Iranian trade deals, not yet consummated but in the offing, are giving [Iran] a 'Plan B' escape hatch."
Every administration tries to spin events its way; every president gets things wrong. Mr. Obama is not exceptional in those respects. Where he stands apart is in his combination of ideological rigidity and fathomless ignorance. What does the president know? The simple answer, and maybe the truest, is: not a lot.

segunda-feira, 22 de setembro de 2014

Cientista diz que Eu Estava Certo (desde 2008) - A Ciência da Mudança Climática Não está Definida


Eu já publiquei dois textos no exterior sobre meio ambiente e um no Brasil. Para ler os publicados no exterior,  clique aqui (para paper Immoderate Complexities to Model Environment), aqui (para o paper A Least Human Restrictive Approach to Gatt Environmental Model at G20) . E acesse a página da revista Contexto Internacional da PUC-RJ para ler meu artigo Mudança Climática e Gasto Público no volume 30, nº1, ano 2008.

Quando tentei escrever um pequeno texto mostrando simplesmente as dúvidas e críticas dos céticos em mudança climática, meu paper foi engavetado, eu nunca obtive resposta da editora do journal brasileiro, e não tive saco para reescrever e enviar para outra revista científica.

É sempre bom ver que eu estava certo desde que comecei a lidar com o tema em 2008. Mudança climática é pura bobagem travestida de apoio científico, que na verdade não possui.

Leio hoje, que um cientista renomado dos Estados Unidos, que assessorou Obama, escreveu no Wall Street Journal, afirmando que os cientistas estão longe de conhecer o processo climático para que se possa determina uma política do clima.

Vou colocar aqui o texto do Dr. Steven Koonin:

Climate Science Is Not Settled

By 

The idea that "Climate science is settled" runs through today's popular and policy discussions. Unfortunately, that claim is misguided. It has not only distorted our public and policy debates on issues related to energy, greenhouse-gas emissions and the environment. But it also has inhibited the scientific and policy discussions that we need to have about our climate future.
My training as a computational physicist—together with a 40-year career of scientific research, advising and management in academia, government and the private sector—has afforded me an extended, up-close perspective on climate science. Detailed technical discussions during the past year with leading climate scientists have given me an even better sense of what we know, and don't know, about climate. I have come to appreciate the daunting scientific challenge of answering the questions that policy makers and the public are asking.
The crucial scientific question for policy isn't whether the climate is changing. That is a settled matter: The climate has always changed and always will. Geological and historical records show the occurrence of major climate shifts, sometimes over only a few decades. We know, for instance, that during the 20th century the Earth's global average surface temperature rose 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit.
Nor is the crucial question whether humans are influencing the climate. That is no hoax: There is little doubt in the scientific community that continually growing amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, due largely to carbon-dioxide emissions from the conventional use of fossil fuels, are influencing the climate. There is also little doubt that the carbon dioxide will persist in the atmosphere for several centuries. The impact today of human activity appears to be comparable to the intrinsic, natural variability of the climate system itself.
Rather, the crucial, unsettled scientific question for policy is, "How will the climate change over the next century under both natural and human influences?" Answers to that question at the global and regional levels, as well as to equally complex questions of how ecosystems and human activities will be affected, should inform our choices about energy and infrastructure.
But—here's the catch—those questions are the hardest ones to answer. They challenge, in a fundamental way, what science can tell us about future climates.
Even though human influences could have serious consequences for the climate, they are physically small in relation to the climate system as a whole. For example, human additions to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by the middle of the 21st century are expected to directly shift the atmosphere's natural greenhouse effect by only 1% to 2%. Since the climate system is highly variable on its own, that smallness sets a very high bar for confidently projecting the consequences of human influences.
A second challenge to "knowing" future climate is today's poor understanding of the oceans. The oceans, which change over decades and centuries, hold most of the climate's heat and strongly influence the atmosphere. Unfortunately, precise, comprehensive observations of the oceans are available only for the past few decades; the reliable record is still far too short to adequately understand how the oceans will change and how that will affect climate.
A third fundamental challenge arises from feedbacks that can dramatically amplify or mute the climate's response to human and natural influences. One important feedback, which is thought to approximately double the direct heating effect of carbon dioxide, involves water vapor, clouds and temperature.
But feedbacks are uncertain. They depend on the details of processes such as evaporation and the flow of radiation through clouds. They cannot be determined confidently from the basic laws of physics and chemistry, so they must be verified by precise, detailed observations that are, in many cases, not yet available.
Beyond these observational challenges are those posed by the complex computer models used to project future climate. These massive programs attempt to describe the dynamics and interactions of the various components of the Earth system—the atmosphere, the oceans, the land, the ice and the biosphere of living things. While some parts of the models rely on well-tested physical laws, other parts involve technically informed estimation. Computer modeling of complex systems is as much an art as a science.
For instance, global climate models describe the Earth on a grid that is currently limited by computer capabilities to a resolution of no finer than 60 miles. (The distance from New York City to Washington, D.C., is thus covered by only four grid cells.) But processes such as cloud formation, turbulence and rain all happen on much smaller scales. These critical processes then appear in the model only through adjustable assumptions that specify, for example, how the average cloud cover depends on a grid box's average temperature and humidity. In a given model, dozens of such assumptions must be adjusted ("tuned," in the jargon of modelers) to reproduce both current observations and imperfectly known historical records.
We often hear that there is a "scientific consensus" about climate change. But as far as the computer models go, there isn't a useful consensus at the level of detail relevant to assessing human influences. Since 1990, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, has periodically surveyed the state of climate science. Each successive report from that endeavor, with contributions from thousands of scientists around the world, has come to be seen as the definitive assessment of climate science at the time of its issue.
For the latest IPCC report (September 2013), its Working Group I, which focuses on physical science, uses an ensemble of some 55 different models. Although most of these models are tuned to reproduce the gross features of the Earth's climate, the marked differences in their details and projections reflect all of the limitations that I have described. For example:
• The models differ in their descriptions of the past century's global average surface temperature by more than three times the entire warming recorded during that time. Such mismatches are also present in many other basic climate factors, including rainfall, which is fundamental to the atmosphere's energy balance. As a result, the models give widely varying descriptions of the climate's inner workings. Since they disagree so markedly, no more than one of them can be right.
• Although the Earth's average surface temperature rose sharply by 0.9 degree Fahrenheit during the last quarter of the 20th century, it has increased much more slowly for the past 16 years, even as the human contribution to atmospheric carbon dioxide has risen by some 25%. This surprising fact demonstrates directly that natural influences and variability are powerful enough to counteract the present warming influence exerted by human activity.
Yet the models famously fail to capture this slowing in the temperature rise. Several dozen different explanations for this failure have been offered, with ocean variability most likely playing a major role. But the whole episode continues to highlight the limits of our modeling.
• The models roughly describe the shrinking extent of Arctic sea ice observed over the past two decades, but they fail to describe the comparable growth of Antarctic sea ice, which is now at a record high.
• The models predict that the lower atmosphere in the tropics will absorb much of the heat of the warming atmosphere. But that "hot spot" has not been confidently observed, casting doubt on our understanding of the crucial feedback of water vapor on temperature.
• Even though the human influence on climate was much smaller in the past, the models do not account for the fact that the rate of global sea-level rise 70 years ago was as large as what we observe today—about one foot per century.
• A crucial measure of our knowledge of feedbacks is climate sensitivity—that is, the warming induced by a hypothetical doubling of carbon-dioxide concentration. Today's best estimate of the sensitivity (between 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit and 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit) is no different, and no more certain, than it was 30 years ago. And this is despite an heroic research effort costing billions of dollars.
These and many other open questions are in fact described in the IPCC research reports, although a detailed and knowledgeable reading is sometimes required to discern them. They are not "minor" issues to be "cleaned up" by further research. Rather, they are deficiencies that erode confidence in the computer projections. Work to resolve these shortcomings in climate models should be among the top priorities for climate research.
Yet a public official reading only the IPCC's "Summary for Policy Makers" would gain little sense of the extent or implications of these deficiencies. These are fundamental challenges to our understanding of human impacts on the climate, and they should not be dismissed with the mantra that "climate science is settled."
While the past two decades have seen progress in climate science, the field is not yet mature enough to usefully answer the difficult and important questions being asked of it. This decidedly unsettled state highlights what should be obvious: Understanding climate, at the level of detail relevant to human influences, is a very, very difficult problem.
We can and should take steps to make climate projections more useful over time. An international commitment to a sustained global climate observation system would generate an ever-lengthening record of more precise observations. And increasingly powerful computers can allow a better understanding of the uncertainties in our models, finer model grids and more sophisticated descriptions of the processes that occur within them. The science is urgent, since we could be caught flat-footed if our understanding does not improve more rapidly than the climate itself changes.
A transparent rigor would also be a welcome development, especially given the momentous political and policy decisions at stake. That could be supported by regular, independent, "red team" reviews to stress-test and challenge the projections by focusing on their deficiencies and uncertainties; that would certainly be the best practice of the scientific method. But because the natural climate changes over decades, it will take many years to get the data needed to confidently isolate and quantify the effects of human influences.
Policy makers and the public may wish for the comfort of certainty in their climate science. But I fear that rigidly promulgating the idea that climate science is "settled" (or is a "hoax") demeans and chills the scientific enterprise, retarding its progress in these important matters. Uncertainty is a prime mover and motivator of science and must be faced head-on. It should not be confined to hushed sidebar conversations at academic conferences.
Society's choices in the years ahead will necessarily be based on uncertain knowledge of future climates. That uncertainty need not be an excuse for inaction. There is well-justified prudence in accelerating the development of low-emissions technologies and in cost-effective energy-efficiency measures.
But climate strategies beyond such "no regrets" efforts carry costs, risks and questions of effectiveness, so nonscientific factors inevitably enter the decision. These include our tolerance for risk and the priorities that we assign to economic development, poverty reduction, environmental quality, and intergenerational and geographical equity.
Individuals and countries can legitimately disagree about these matters, so the discussion should not be about "believing" or "denying" the science. Despite the statements of numerous scientific societies, the scientific community cannot claim any special expertise in addressing issues related to humanity's deepest goals and values. The political and diplomatic spheres are best suited to debating and resolving such questions, and misrepresenting the current state of climate science does nothing to advance that effort.
Any serious discussion of the changing climate must begin by acknowledging not only the scientific certainties but also the uncertainties, especially in projecting the future. Recognizing those limits, rather than ignoring them, will lead to a more sober and ultimately more productive discussion of climate change and climate policies. To do otherwise is a great disservice to climate science itself.
Dr. Koonin was undersecretary for science in the Energy Department during President Barack Obama's first term and is currently director of the Center for Urban Science and Progress at New York University. His previous positions include professor of theoretical physics and provost at Caltech, as well as chief scientist of BP, where his work focused on renewable and low-carbon energy technologies.

quinta-feira, 18 de setembro de 2014

Mapa de Países que Declararam Independência do Reino Unido


Este mapa do Global Post diz muita coisa, tem muita história nestas datas de independência de um império, que, segundo o próprio britânico Nial Fergusson, nasceu roubando barcos espanhóis (pirataria contra a Espanha), e se tornou uma potência onde por um certo tempo o "sol nunca se punha".

Hoje, o Reino Unido é um estado relativamente fraco. Não tem o poder militar nem econômico de uma antiga colônia (Estados Unidos), nem o poder econômico de rivais históricos, como Alemanha e Japão, nem o poder militar de uma Rússia. Sozinho, o Reino Unido não é nada na cena internacional mais.

Hoje, se vota pela independência da Escócia, as pesquisa mostram que o "não" irá ganhar e a região vai se  manter dentro do Reino Unido.

Como eu já falei aqui no blog, em geral não tenho nada contra independências, mas que seja pelos melhores motivos, não me parece ser o caso da Escócia, nem da Catalunha, por exemplo. A Escócia é pobre e esquerdista e a Catalunha é endividada e esquerdista.

(Agradeço o mapa ao site Zero Hedge)

terça-feira, 16 de setembro de 2014

O Viés Esquerdista da Mídia


Pergunte por aí, no mundo, se as pessoas gostam ou admiram George Bush. A imensa maioria vai dizer que não. Então, pergunte as razões. Elas seguramente não vão saber responder ou suas respostas não fazem sentido ou não têm relação com os fatos.

Agora pergunte por aí se as pessoas gostam do Obama. A maioria vai dizer que sim. Então, pergunte as razões, elas certamente também não vão saber responder ou suas respostas não fazem sentido ou não têm relação com os fatos.

Por que que ocorre isso? Porque as pessoas têm opiniões baseadas no que lêem nos jornais e na televisão e não nos fatos.

E a mídia global, não apenas no Brasil, tem um viés fortemente esquerdista. No Brasil, as pessoas costumam achar que a revista Veja é de direita. Nada mais equivocado. A revista Veja é completamente de esquerda em matérias sociais, como aborto, casamento gay, etc. Eu deixei de assinar a revista quando percebi isso.

Ontem, eu vi um exemplo claro do viés esquerdista da mídia nos Estados Unidos. Uma pesquisa mostra que ocorreram 124 reportagens falando da queda de popularidade do governo Bush na época que Bush era presidente. Mas em relação a Obama só ocorreram 9 reportagens no mesmo sentido, como mostra a figura acima.

E não falta razão para falar do assunto.

Obama tem a mesma popularidade que tinha Bush no mesmo período de governo. Durante o mandato de Obama que começou em 2009, por várias vezes tinha mais gente rejeitando como Obama administra do que aprovando. Desde o início de 2013, a imensa maioria rejeita Obama.

Como mostra o gráfico abaixo da Real Clear Politics, que faz uma média de várias pesquisas.


quinta-feira, 11 de setembro de 2014

As Palavras Proféticas de Bush


Saddam Hussein matava centenas no Iraque e invadiu o Kuwait.  Os Estados Unidos invadiu e entregou Saddam Hussein ao povo iraquiano, que o enforcou. Bush tinha alertado antes de sair que os Estados Unidos só devem sair do Iraque depois que os comandantes militares disserem que sim.

Obama, entrou no poder, e resolveu ignorar o que dizia os comandantes e tirou o exército americano  o mais rápido possível do país.

Desde o advento macabro do ISIS, o Obama teve que voltar atrás e agora anuncia a volta de contingentes militares americanos ao Iraque.

Cumpre-se o que previu George Bush (foto acima).

George Bush recebe muito pouco crédito pelo que o fez de bom. Enquanto Obama recebe crédito pelo que fez e faz de errado.

É o viés esquerdista do mundo.

(Agradeço a indicação do assunto ao site da Fox News)

terça-feira, 9 de setembro de 2014

Regiões na Europa que Podem Tentar Independência com apoio da Escócia.



O site Zero Hedge disponibilizou um mapa com as regiões da Europa que podem ser incentivadas pela possível independência da Escócia do Reino Unido (veja acima), que vai ser decidida no próximo dia 18. Pesquisas mostram que uma leve maioria da população apoia a independência.

São muitas regiões.

O que eu acho da independência dessas regiões? A princípio eu não tenho nada contra, compartilho da opinião que a Europa se desenvolveu mais quando mais regiões eram independentes do que na União Europeia. Mas observo que muitas dessas regiões têm um viés muito perigoso para o esquerdismo, como a Escócia e a Catalunha. E por isso são regiões muito pobres relativamente (como a Escócia) ou têm enormes dívidas (como a Catalunha).

Para se desenvolverem creio que elas deveriam primeiro abandonar o esquerdismo.


sexta-feira, 5 de setembro de 2014

Argentina acha que a economia da Venezuela está Ótima.


O jornal Wall Street Journal falou ontem da aprovação de uma lei na Argentina chamada "Lei da Oferta" (Supply Law, em inglês). Com esta lei, o governo irá controlar preços, lucros e produção das empresas.

Olha que legal!! Será que o mercado achou uma beleza esta lei que copia o modelo de faz tanto sucesso na Venezuela, onde falta até papel higiênico?

Vejamos parte do texto do Wall Street Journal:

Argentina's Government Is Considering Price Controls

A month after Argentina defaulted on its debt, big companies here say they fear that something else could do much more damage to the economy - legislation letting the government regulate private-sector prices, profit margins and production levels.

On Thursday, Argentina's senate passed a bill to do just that. The bill is expected to pass the lower house within weeks.

As written, the bill would allow the government to "establish, at any stage of the economic process, profit margins, reference prices, maximum and minimum prices, or all or any of these measures."

Critics say the bill, informally dubbed the supply law, would bring Argentine regulations in line with those of Venezuela, where inflation hovers around 60% and goods like sugar and toilet paper can be scarce.
...
"This is absolutely ridiculous. It's part of a very primitive ideology that says government officials should decide what people should make, how much they should make and how much they should charge," said Congressman Federico Pinedo of the opposition Pro party.
...
"We already know exactly what it is like to suffer from these kind of interventionist economic policies," said Luis Etchevehere, president of the Argentine Rural Society, the country's top farm group. "This will lead to divestment and possibly even supply shortages of some products like is now happening in Venezuela."

"If this kind of thing failed in Venezuela, why would you want to try it again here?" asked San Juan Province Senator Roberto Basualdo, himself a businessman. "Nobody will invest in this context."

Nicolás Maduro Jr., the 20-something son of Venezuela's president, met with Argentine legislators here last week, reportedly to discuss the bill and Venezuela's experience with its own version of a supply law.

Argentine officials say the criticism and comparisons to Venezuela are misguided.
"We can require companies to produce things only if they're essential and necessary for people, and could create scarcity problems without them," Mr. Costa said in an interview. "They have to be goods that meet basic and essential needs of the population or there has to be a situation that very clearly distorts the market.

"You won't find any logic in this if you're looking at the economy and the need to attract investment," said Nicolas Solari, a political analyst at Poliarquia. "The supply law is a weapon that lets the government keeps businessmen in line during a period of economic and political adversity."

"This bill constitutes a grave intrusion into the decisions made by private sector companies and is clearly unconstitutional," the Argentine Business Association said a recent statement.


(Agradeço a indicação do texto do WSJ ao site Zero Hedge)