The funny thing about climate denialism is that they basically break Karl Popper’s verification of science through falsifiability. No experiment, no matter how promising it may seem beforehand, can ever prove that the climate is actually warming. Paul Krugman writes:

So the joke begins like this: An economist, a lawyer and a professor of marketing walk into a room. What’s the punch line? They were three of the five “expert witnesses” Republicans called for last week’s Congressional hearing on climate science.

But the joke actually ended up being on the Republicans, when one of the two actual scientists they invited to testify went off script.

Prof. Richard Muller of Berkeley, a physicist who has gotten into the climate skeptic game, has been leading the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, an effort partially financed by none other than the Koch foundation. And climate deniers — who claim that researchers at NASA and other groups analyzing climate trends have massaged and distorted the data — had been hoping that the Berkeley project would conclude that global warming is a myth.

Instead, however, Professor Muller reported that his group’s preliminary results find a global warming trend “very similar to that reported by the prior groups.”

….

But back to Professor Muller. His climate-skeptic credentials are pretty strong: he has denounced both Al Gore and my colleague Tom Friedman as “exaggerators,” and he has participated in a number of attacks on climate research, including the witch hunt over innocuous e-mails from British climate researchers. Not surprisingly, then, climate deniers had high hopes that his new project would support their case.

You can guess what happened when those hopes were dashed.

Just a few weeks ago Anthony Watts, who runs a prominent climate denialist Web site, praised the Berkeley project and piously declared himself “prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong.” But never mind: once he knew that Professor Muller was going to present those preliminary results, Mr. Watts dismissed the hearing as “post normal science political theater.” And one of the regular contributors on his site dismissed Professor Muller as “a man driven by a very serious agenda.”

Of course, it’s actually the climate deniers who have the agenda, and nobody who’s been following this discussion believed for a moment that they would accept a result confirming global warming. But it’s worth stepping back for a moment and thinking not just about the science here, but about the morality.

For years now, large numbers of prominent scientists have been warning, with increasing urgency, that if we continue with business as usual, the results will be very bad, perhaps catastrophic. They could be wrong. But if you’re going to assert that they are in fact wrong, you have a moral responsibility to approach the topic with high seriousness and an open mind. After all, if the scientists are right, you’ll be doing a great deal of damage.

But what we had, instead of high seriousness, was a farce: a supposedly crucial hearing stacked with people who had no business being there and instant ostracism for a climate skeptic who was actually willing to change his mind in the face of evidence. As I said, no surprise: as Upton Sinclair pointed out long ago, it’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

But it’s terrifying to realize that this kind of cynical careerism — for that’s what it is — has probably ensured that we won’t do anything about climate change until catastrophe is already upon us.

So on second thought, I was wrong when I said that the joke was on the G.O.P.; actually, the joke is on the human race.?

Climatologist Ken Caldeira, who helped fund the study but did not particpate in it wrote:

I have seen a copy of the Berkeley group’s draft paper, which of course would be expected to be revised before submission.

Their preliminary results sit right within the results of NOAA, NASA, and HadCRU, confirming that prior analyses were correct in every way that matters. Their results confirm the reality of global warming and support in all essential respects the historical temperature analyses of the NOAA, NASA, and HadCRU.

Their analysis supports the view that there is no fire behind the smokescreen put up by climate science deniers.

This isn’t the only take-back from Republicans. Recently, Paul Ryan released a 10-year budget plan that will be cutting the top marginal rate to 25%, lower than it has been at any time in the past 80 years. The Heritage Foudnation then released a projection that tried to claim that the plan would bring the civilian unemployment rate under 3%, something that hasn’t been done since briefly during the Korean War. When economists caught wind of the ludicrous claim, they scrubbed the entire statistic.

According to Ryan’s own plan, it would not balance the budget until the 2060’s and presumes the Supply Side assumption that cutting taxes means higher revenue, arguing that large tax cuts will increase revenue by almost $600 billion over 10 years, while the CBO says the spending cuts would lead to bigger deficits and more debt than current law. One conservative estimate is that it would add $62 trillion to the debt before 2063.

Krugman writes:

“According to the budget office, which analyzed the plan using assumptions dictated by House Republicans, the proposal calls for spending on items other than Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — but including defense — to fall from 12 percent of G.D.P. last year to 6 percent of G.D.P. in 2022, and just 3.5 percent of G.D.P. in the long run.

That last number is less than we currently spend on defense alone; it’s not much bigger than federal spending when Calvin Coolidge was president, and the United States, among other things, had only a tiny military establishment. How could such a drastic shrinking of government take place without crippling essential public functions? The plan doesn’t say.”

And then there’s the much-ballyhooed proposal to abolish Medicare and replace it with vouchers that can be used to buy private health insurance.

The point here is that privatizing Medicare does nothing, in itself, to limit health-care costs. In fact, it almost surely raises them by adding a layer of middlemen. Yet the House plan assumes that we can cut health-care spending as a percentage of G.D.P. despite an aging population and rising health care costs.

The only way that can happen is if those vouchers are worth much less than the cost of health insurance. In fact, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that by 2030 the value of a voucher would cover only a third of the cost of a private insurance policy equivalent to Medicare as we know it. So the plan would deprive many and probably most seniors of adequate health care.

Remember when Republicans were screaming at Obama not to touch their Medicare? Well, jokes on you. The plan to replace Medicare fee-for-service with vouchers is one we have already tried with Medicare Advantage and it was a fiscal disaster.

According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, out of the $4 trillion in spending cuts Ryan proposes over the next decade, two-thirds cut programs that mainly serve low-income Americans. depriving some 34 million non-elderly Americans of health insurance.

The CBO found that in addition to acknowledging that seniors, disabled and elderly people would be hit with much higher out-of-pocket health care costs, in the 10-year budget window, public debt will actually be higher than it would be if the GOP just did nothing.

Ezra Klein writes:

Just over a year ago, I wrote a column praising Rep. Paul Ryan’s Roadmap. I called its ambition “welcome, and all too rare.” I said its dismissal of the status quo was “a point in its favor.” When the inevitable backlash came, I defended Ryan against accusations that he was a fraud, and that technical mistakes in his tax projections should be taken as evidence of dishonesty. I also, for the record, like Ryan personally, and appreciate his policy-oriented approach to politics. So I believe I have some credibility when I say that the budget Ryan released last week is not courageous or serious or significant. It’s a joke, and a bad one.

Ryan’s numbers are so fantastic that Alice Rivlin, who originally had her name on this proposal, now opposes it.

The Affordable Care Act, in contrast, actually includes reforms and new processes for future reforms that would help Medicare save money rather than shift it. Ezra Klein writes:

The Affordable Care Act’s central hope is that Medicare can lead the health-care system to pay for value, cut down on overtreatment, and cut out treatments that simply don’t work. The law develops Accountable Care Organizations, in which Medicare pays one provider to coordinate all of your care successfully, rather than paying many doctors and providers to add to your care no matter the cost or outcome, as is the current practice. It also begins experimenting with bundled payments, in which Medicare pays one lump-sum for all care related to the successful treatment of a condition rather than paying for every piece of care separately. To help these reforms succeed, and to help all doctors make more cost-effective treatment decisions, the law accelerates research on which drugs and treatments are most effective, and creates and funds the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute to disseminate the data.

If those initiatives work, they head over to the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), which can implement cost-controlling reforms across Medicare without congressional approval — an effort to make continuous reform the default for Medicare, even if Congress is gridlocked or focused on other matters. And if they don’t work, then it’s up to the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, a funded body that will be continually testing payment and practice reforms, to keep searching and experimenting, and when it hits on successful ideas, handing them to the IPAB to implement throughout the system.

The law also goes after bad and wasted care: It cuts payments to hospitals with high rates of re-admission, as that tends to signal care isn’t being delivered well, or isn’t being follow up on effectively. It cuts payments to hospitals for care related to infections caught in the hospitals. It develops new plans to help Medicare base its purchasing decisions on value, and new programs to help Medicaid move patients with chronic illnesses into systems that rely on the sort of maintenance-based care that’s been shown to successfully lower costs and improve outcomes.

I could go on, but instead, I’ll just link to the Kaiser Family Foundation’s excellent primer (pdf) on everything the law does. The bottom line is this: The Affordable Care Act is actually doing the hard work of reforming the health-care system that’s needed to make cost control possible. Ryan’s budget just makes seniors pay more for their Medicare and choose their own plans — worthy ideas, you can argue, but ideas that have been tried many times before, and that have never cut costs in the way Ryan’s budget suggests they will.

That’s why, when the Congressional Budget Office looked at Ryan’s plan, they said it would make Medicare more expensive for seniors, not less. The reason the deficit goes down is because seniors are paying 70 percent of the cost of their insurance out-of-pocket rather than 30 percent. But that’s not sustainable: We’ve just taken the government’s medical-costs problem and pushed it onto families.

No one who knows health-care policy will tell you that the Affordable Care Act does everything we need to do in exactly the way we need it done. That’s why Resichauer gave it a five, not a 10. But it does a lot of what we need to do and it sets up systems to help us continue doing what’s needed in the future.

Ryan’s proposal, by contrast, does almost none of what we need to do. It appeals to people who have an ideological take on health-care reform and believe we can make Medicare cheaper by handing it over to private insurers and telling seniors to act like consumers. It’s a plan that suggests health-care costs are about insurance, as opposed to about health care. There’s precious little evidence of that, and when added to the fact that Ryan’s targets are so low that even his allies can’t defend them, the reality is that his savings are largely an illusion.

Republicans have also been constantly taking back the amount they want to cut. First it was $31 billion, then $32, then $38, now it’s $39, all of which are really peanuts in the long run for the debt but critical for today’s services. It’s like cutting off your pinky finger to lose weight.

The last time Clinton and Gingrich’s showdown caused a government shut down, the Republicans took most of the heat and Newt went from House Speaker to Senate outcast. Yet a NBC/WDJ poll shows Democrats and Independents would rather compromise on the budget while Republicans would rather the government shut down.

The relationship between Republicans and Democrats often reminds me of a marriage between a redneck gun nut and his wife, where they both work and no raises their child, while most of the money goes to buying the guy’s gas-guzzling camouflage truck complete with wind-dragging American flags attached to it, his impressive gun collection, and the hospital bills for fights the guy gets in with foreigners. The wife typically wants to spend money on their home’s infrastructure and education for their children, and hates it when her husband goes off gambling, but the guy thinking he will become a billionaire one day, gambles all the money away. But the redneck blames his economic problems on his wife wasting money on school, the house, or to charity, because it’s always the dregs of society below him that are the real problem, not anything in the way he lives his life (“How dare she say I’m addicted to oil!”).

When the redneck and his wife are held up to gun point by the gambler’s kingpin, he tries to convince his wife not to hand over what they have because there really aren’t any bullets in the gun. The wife of course doesn’t believe him and tells him she knows exactly what caliber bullet that’s being pointed at them and so forces them to hand over what they have. The husband then tries to convince her that since the caliber bullet was actually larger than what she said it was, she didn’t know what she was talking about. When the cops come, the redneck refuses to identify his cohorts and tries to blame it on the fact that the cops are anti-gambling, but he tries to maintain that none of this was his fault because he didn’t want to hand over the money in the first place.