After seven years * of punishing positive US economic data with negative headlines, signs that some in mainstream media are mending the error of their ways – “Rosy Headlines And Few Read the Data”
Take the chipper headline about durables Durable-Goods Orders in U.S. Increase More Than Forecast on Autos, Defense. The article appropriately points out that the decline is not even bottoming (i.e. private business investment is sure to keep slowing).
[…]
Let’s just hunt for green shoots in a different place. How about the weekly unemployment report? Nice headline there Initial U.S. Jobless Claims Fall in Signal Biggest Rounds of Firings Over. So what does that mean?
What it means is that they finally got what they wanted!
Are you referring to all those baseless negative headlines that presaged our current economic plight?
If the mainstream media is to be exposed because of its inconsistent treatment of economic data, how do you reconcile your behavior? I’m gonna go with insanity.
When the libs or Dems are not in power all is dark and foreboding. When they are in power, things have never looked better. Don’t believe it? Just ask the MSM.
I call it a slow motion depression. Wait until inflation starts kicking in thanks to the US money printing presses.
At least the US and Canada are leaders in food production so to keep some civility, I am anticipating our respective Governments will make sure feeding the population is a top priority…Now what really worries me is the NATURAL global cooling that is setting in much faster than anticipated. Already, farmers on both sides of the border are complaining planting/growing is already late this year and the days cloud covering the sun is at a majority of the time.
Many scientists are worried. The MSM is currently ignoring/burrying and trying to cover their conspicuous GW cheerleading. They will have no choice to report on it eventually:
“Dark spots, some as large as 50,000 miles in diameter, typically move across the surface of the sun, contracting and expanding as they go. These strange and powerful phenomena are known as sunspots, but now they are all gone. Not even solar physicists know why it’s happening and what this odd solar silence might be indicating for our future.
Although periods of inactivity are normal for the sun, this current period has gone on much longer than usual and scientists are starting to worry—at least a little bit. Recently 100 scientists from Europe, Asia, Latin America, Africa and North America gathered to discuss the issue at an international solar conference at Montana State University. Today’s sun is as inactive as it was two years ago, and solar physicists don’t have a clue as to why.
“It continues to be dead,” said Saku Tsuneta with the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, program manager for the Hinode solar mission, noting that it is at least a little bit worrisome for scientists.
Dana Longcope, a solar physicist at MSU, said the sun usually operates on an 11-year cycle with maximum activity occurring in the middle of the cycle. The last cycle reached its peak in 2001 and is believed to be just ending now, Longcope said. The next cycle is just beginning and is expected to reach its peak sometime around 2012. But so far nothing is happening.
“It’s a dead face,” Tsuneta said of the sun’s appearance.
Tsuneta said solar physicists aren’t weather forecasters and they can’t predict the future. They do have the ability to observe, however, and they have observed a longer-than-normal period of solar inactivity. In the past, they observed that the sun once went 50 years without producing sunspots. That period coincided with a little ice age on Earth that lasted from 1650 to 1700. Coincidence? Some scientists say it was, but many worry that it wasn’t.
Geophysicist Phil Chapman, the first Australian to become an astronaut with NASA, said pictures from the US Solar and Heliospheric Observatory also show that there are currently no spots on the sun. He also noted that the world cooled quickly between January last year and January this year, by about 0.7C.
“This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record, and it puts us back to where we were in 1930,” Dr Chapman noted in The Australian recently.
If the world does face another mini Ice Age, it could come without warning. Evidence for abrupt climate change is readily found in ice cores taken from Greenland and Antarctica. One of the best known examples of such an event is the Younger Dryas cooling, which occurred about 12,000 years ago, named after the arctic wildflower found in northern European sediments. This event began and ended rather abruptly, and for its entire 1000 year duration the North Atlantic region was about 5°C colder. Could something like this happen again? There’s no way to tell, and because the changes can happen all within one decade—we might not even see it coming.
The Younger Dryas occurred at a time when orbital forcing should have continued to drive climate to the present warm state. The unexplained phenomenon has been the topic of much intense scientific debate, as well as other millennial scale events.
Now this 11-year low in Sunspot activity has raised fears among a small but growing number of scientists that rather than getting warmer, the Earth could possibly be about to return to another cooling period. The idea is especially intriguing considering that most of the world is in preparation for global warming.
Canadian scientist Kenneth Tapping of the National Research Council has also noted that solar activity has entered into an unusually inactive phase, but what that means—if anything—is still anyone’s guess. Another solar scientist, Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, however, is certain that it’s an indication of a coming cooling period.
Sorokhtin believes that a lack of sunspots does indicate a coming cooling period based on certain past trends and early records. In fact, he calls manmade climate change “a drop in the bucket” compared to the fierce and abrupt cold that can potentially be brought on by inactive solar phases.
Sorokhtin’s advice: “Stock up on fur coats”…just in case.”
From:
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2008/06/the-sunspot-mys.html
hypocritic,
Come back in a year and a half and if things are as rosy as you seem to think, you will be more than welcome to gloat and I will pull the lever straight Democrat the rest of my life. Right now, I think you are like the proverbial French rooster, always crowing too early while knee deep in shit. To coin a phrase, time will tell, but hypocrisy has nothing to do with it. You may be too stupid to understand that last sentence, if so, I can’t worry about it.
“French Rooster.” You’re killing me, Tim. And, RHTT, thanks for the info. I’d much rather fret silently over something backed by observed science than the manufactured hysteria of those looking for alternative revenue streams.
But, but, but.
Scientists are able to predict with 98% certainty when these sunspots cycles begin and end.
Scientists Issue Unprecedented Forecat of Next Sunspot Cycle
/read it all
I’m gonna go with insanity.
Posted by: hypocritic at June 1, 2009 11:47 AM
You have to dance with who brung ya.
everything old is new again. eevrything negative is positive sgain. only if you believe the liar obama and the msm. ah but there is a new discription of the msm. is it the offical party media, pravda, the peoples news, aww shit someone must have the answer.
Yeah, a 4% growth rate under Bush is a “jobless recovery”, but “only” 5.7% drop in GDP under Obama is “better than expected”. Why does anyone pay attention to the media losers anymore?
Honestly, Kate, there are times I don’t know what to think of you. So much of the “positive” economic data in the US from 2003-2008 was the result of a huge credit-based consumer spending boom, the result of skyrocketing house prices, absurdly low interest rates, enormous government deficits, and the astounding willingness of foreign governments to buy US paper. Those of us who can read the macro-economic entrails (e.g. “me”) were here three years ago, and predicting the collapse. Like Cassandra, we were right and we were ignored (and laughed at and vilified). I remember some guy named “Brian” slagging me for my “buy oil and gold” recommendations in early 2008, and boasting about how he was buying equities. I challenged him to get back to me in the fall, which, for some strange reason, he failed to do.
There’s an old saying: “Markets always do what they’re supposed to do; they just never do it when they’re supposed to do it”. And as Edwin Lefevre said in his classic “Reminiscences of a Stock Operator”, the way to make money in bull or bear markets, is in the “sitting”. Did I take a paper haircut in gold over the last 18 months? Sure – I watched it go from 1003 to 750. However, having bought at 250, it’s not that hard to sit back and wait out the correction. (And, I have to add, if I wasn’t so sure that gold is going to go much higher, I would have sold 1/4 of my positions at 1,000, which ensures I’m playing with “house money” from then on. But I sincerely believe gold is going significantly higher, and I’m holding on.)
And again, looking at the macro picture – the US adding almost 10% (or more depending on who you believe) in GDP in one year? to its debt. The ridiculous focus on “second derivatives” – for those who’ve forgot their high school calculus, the base is house prices, the first derivative is the rate at which house prices are falling, and the second derivative is the the rate at which the rate of house prices is falling. So if house prices fell 6% in March and 5% in April – hallelujah! – the second derivative has turned up! Never mind that housing prices could fall by 4%, 3%, 2%, and 1% over the next four months (i.e. more than a 10% cumulative fall in house prices), each month, the second derivative would get better! If this is a sign of recovery, please contact me for info on frozen Nigerian bank deposits I can help you recover.
I think the MSM’s desire to sound positive is rooted in their emotional need to (as well as all lefties) to speak positively of what their supposed saviour (Obama) is not really able to do, but more fundamentally, be in denial of the reality of the situation. That being they will have to make some hard choices on what non productive hypocritical silk stocking champagne activities they will have to curtail. Less sarcastically the left who has always pursued a revenue model (tax the rich) to rid them of their ills (pursuit of a perfect society) will have come to the realization there just isn’t going to be enough money to continue the “happy trip” and the expense model will have to used.