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December 1, 2009
The wonderful, magical, make believe world of Paul Krugman
Bill Weckesser
No one should be surprised by the ClimateGate emails about suppressing critics and inventing data because that's just how academics talk to one another.
That's the take from Nobel Prize winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. On ABC's "This Week " he denied the existence of a "smoking gun." All those e-mails -- people have never seen what academic discussion looks like. There's not a single smoking gun in there. There's nothing in there. And the travesty is that people are not able to explain why the fact that 1998 was a very warm year doesn't actually mean that global warming has stopped. I mean, that's loose wording. Right? Everything is about -- we're really in the same situation as if there was one extremely warm day in April. And then people are saying, well, you see, May is cooler than April, there's no trend here. And that's what -- the travesty is how hard it has been to explain why that's bad reasoning. What's actually hard to explain is Mr. Krugman's inventiveness. In a devastating column a few weeks ago in Barron's (Debunking Krugmania), economist Gene Epstein, points out that Mr. Krugman has never let the facts get in the way of a good column. HE SEEMS TO SPEND 10 MINUTES writing his columns," observes Columbia Business School Professor Charles Calomiris, "and he makes up his facts as he goes along." The object of the professor's low opinion is Nobel laureate economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. Three years ago, I published a book called Econospinning, with several chapters devoted to Krugman's gaffes. I guess that prompted the Nobel committee to give him the prize, thereby magnifying his enormous influence. So perhaps a brief update on Krugmania is in order.
No, his coverage isn't always misleading or misinformed. But let's say an expert in science were to tell me that the articles in some science magazine I subscribe to were wrong half the time. I'd have to cancel my subscription, since I wouldn't know which half. Similarly, Krugman's legions of fans don't have the time or background to tell which half from which.
And so, like Don Quixote, Professor Klugman and the rest of the global warming crowd continue fighting the windmills of imminent doom. The facts be dammed.
This speaks so well for the fine folks on the Nobel committee and their lemmings at the Copenhagen Climate Conference.
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