Our cities are in trouble. Most have huge unfunded pension and health-care obligations. Their infrastructure is old and so poorly maintained that it can’t power a football stadium for the full length of a game. Their schools have significantly lower high-school graduation rates than the suburbs, even after accounting for differences in incomes. Housing in many cities is unaffordable, roads are congested, and jobs are fleeing, even in supposedly urban industries such as high tech and finance.

Urban planner Richard Florida has a solution: President Obama should create a new federal Department of Cities. That’s right up there with rearranging the benches at Battery Park before Superstorm Sandy hits.

Like many planners, Florida believes problems can be solved from the top down. He is famous for urging cities to adopt policies that make housing unaffordable, forcing poor and moderate-income people out, thus increasing average incomes and making it look like the cities have attracted high-income “creative” people.

Now, relying on pre-recession data, Florida argues that “cities and metros are the engines of our economy,” and thus deserve their own cabinet-level department. By the same logic, maybe we should create a Department of Texas and North Dakota, as those two states seem to have been the engines of our economy since 2008. I am sure a federal DoT&ND could do much to muck up the growth of those states that is partly taking place because the state legislatures have so far kept their hands off.

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Here is an interesting essay/blog post from James Annan, a scientist with the Global Change Projection Research Programme of the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, and a leading researcher into constraints on estimates of climate sensitivity. Annan has long-held the opinion, borne from his own investigations, that the bounds of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates of the earth’s climate sensitivity are too wide, especially at the high end.

The IPCC’s “fat right-hand tail” of their distribution of possible climate sensitivity values means that the IPCC maintains that there is a non-negligible probability that the earth’s actual climate sensitivity—the global average temperature rise from a doubling of the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration—is upwards of 6°C (11°F) and perhaps has high a 10°C (18°F).  If the climate sensitivity were indeed this high, we’d be in a bunch of trouble. And so long as the IPCC concedes that this possibility exists, it allows folks to gin up truly alarming scare stories for what lies in ahead if we don’t immediately and drastically curtail carbon dioxide emissions.

But Annan has been arguing for years that the IPCC’s stance is scientifically unjustified.  And a host of recent scientific studies, including several of his own, seem to have made this point abundantly clear.

But apparently the IPCC is slow to let go of its alarmist notions.

In his recent post, Annan points out that the now-under-construction Fifth Assessment Report from the IPCC (which is due out later this year), continues to hang onto the fat right-hand tail of the distribution, even in the face of a large and growing body of research to the contrary.

But what I find most interesting in Annan’s post is his opinion and insight as to why the IPCC is behaving this way. Annan suggests that the IPCC is more tied to the results of “a small private opinion poll” than it is to the broader literature when it comes to the climate sensitivity estimates. 

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Just 12 hours ago I expressed disappointment that Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood had expressed his intent of “sticking around for a while” as a cabinet member in President Obama’s second term. Now – I suppose it’s just coincidence – LaHood says he’s departing after all. Promoted as the Republican in the Obama cabinet (at least the one left after the departure of Defense Secretary Robert Gates), the former Illinois Congressman has been a veritable fount of anti-libertarian proposals and regrettable policy decisions over the past four years: 

• LaHood’s best-known crusade, against “distracted driving,” enthusiastically built on earlier Washington initiatives muscling into traffic laws formerly decided at the state and local level. While he did back off earlier press reports that had him favoring a national ban on cellphone use in cars, even handsfree, he promoted such wacky ideas as having cops peer down into cars from overpasses to see whether drivers are paying enough attention to the road, and mandating technologies that would automatically disconnect phones in moving cars (what could go wrong?).
• Known while in Congress as friendly toward pork-barrel projects, LaHood provided a bipartisan gloss for his free-spending department: the Post recounts his efforts “helping implement billions of dollars in transportation projects from the 2009 economic stimulus bill and promoting the plan to wary Republicans.” Combining his two enthusiasms, LaHood pushed a program of local “nanny grants” that drew resistance from House Republicans.
• After trial lawyers and feckless reporters ginned up an “unintended acceleration” scare against Toyota, LaHood wasn’t in a position to reverse the engineering judgment of the career technical staff at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), who concluded the scare (like earlier ones against Audi and other makes) was bogus. But he seems to have done what he could to make life hard for the foreign-owned automaker, levying heavy fines over disclosure issues and delaying the release of the technical findings exculpating the company. Some felt that as a high officer of a government that had taken over and was running competitors GM and Chrysler, LaHood was in a bit of a conflicted position as judge-and-sentencer of Detroit’s envied Japanese rival.
• Early speculation on a replacement includes the name of Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. He’d probably leave me nostalgic for LaHood.