August 28, 2007 by Tom Armstrong.

This opinion in today’s WSJ begins:

The recent discovery by a retired businessman and climate kibitzer named Stephen McIntyre that 1934 — and not 1998 or 2006 — was the hottest year on record in the U.S. could not have been better timed. August is the month when temperatures are high and the news cycle is slow, leading, inevitably, to profound meditations on global warming. Newsweek performed its journalistic duty two weeks ago with an exposé on what it calls the global warming “denial machine.” I hereby perform mine with a denier’s confession.

I confess: I am prepared to acknowledge that Mr. McIntyre’s discovery amounts to what a New York Times reporter calls a “statistically meaningless” rearrangement of data.

But just how “meaningless” would this have seemed had it yielded the opposite result? Had Mr. McIntyre found that a collation error understated recent temperatures by 0.15 degrees Celsius (instead of overstating it by that amount, as he discovered), would the news coverage have differed in tone and approach? When it was reported in January that 2006 was one of the hottest years on record, NASA’s James Hansen used the occasion to warn grimly that “2007 is likely to be warmer than 2006.” Yet now he says, in connection to the data revision, that “in general I think we want to avoid going into more and more detail about ranking of individual years.”

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August 28, 2007 by Tom Armstrong.

Increasing the federal gas tax is not a good idea.

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August 28, 2007 by Tom Armstrong.

I tend to like teacher stories. Here’s one that has something to say about teacher turnover and pay. We have a severe problem recruiting math and science teachers in many school districts across the nation, while art, music and social studies teachers are in great abundance. Why? Public schools offer standardized salaries based on education level and experience, not teaching abilities, content area (important to consider because of differing opportunity costs for educators), etc. So, we have a school district offering the same salary to math and music teachers, yet one is in great demand and the other is begging for a job. The teacher unions typically will not permit a price (salary) adjustment to attract quality math teachers, so the jobs go to substitute teachers, which are typically low-quality. How does this help educate our kids?

For more on teacher pay, see this or this.

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