California voters have just rejected Proposition 19, the ballot initiative that would have legalized marijuana under state law. Where did Prop 19 go wrong?

Prop 19 failed in part because many proponents emphasized the wrong arguments for legalization. Many advocates promised major benefits to California's budget because of reduced expenditure on marijuana prohibition and increased revenue from marijuana taxation. Other supporters claimed that Mexican drug violence would fall substantially.

Both claims were overblown. The budgetary benefits, while not insignificant, would have been small compared with California's fiscal mess. Mexican drug violence is mainly associated with the cocaine and methamphetamine trades, as well as from marijuana traffic to other states.

Many voters sensed that Prop 19 supporters were overreaching, and this made them suspicious of all the arguments in its favor. Common sense should have recognized that since marijuana was close to legal already, Prop 19 would not have had dramatic effects.

Prop 19 failed also because it overreached. One feature attempted to protect the "rights" of employees who get fired or disciplined for using marijuana, including a provision that employers could only discipline marijuana use that "actually impairs job performance." That is a much higher bar than required by current policy.

This provision allowed Prop 19 opponents to claim that workplaces would become infested with impaired pot users. That assertion is not well-founded, but that is not the point. Prop 19 did not need to address employee marijuana-testing in the first place.

A more effective position for Prop 19 supporters would have been that employee marijuana-testing should be unencumbered by state or federal law. That would allow employers to protect themselves and their employees against perceived risks from marijuana, thereby promoting support for legalization.

A final problem with Prop 19 is that it would only have legalized marijuana under state law, since federal law also bans marijuana. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, moreover, announced just weeks before Tuesday's election that the administration would enforce the federal law fully even if Prop 19 passed.

This legal limbo would have kept the marijuana market underground, limiting tax revenue and continuing the ills of black market. This ambiguity also dimmed support by making state-level legalization feel like an empty gesture.

So what is the path to legalizing marijuana in the United States?

First and foremost, advocates must emphasize that in a free society, the burden of proof should be on prohibitionists to justify the interference with liberty that results from outlawing marijuana, a burden the prohibitionists have never met. Any calm assessment of marijuana versus alcohol, for example, shows that alcohol is the substance with the greater potential for harm.

Ancillary benefits of legalization are naturally important: by eliminating the black market, legalization promises reduced crime and corruption, fewer infringements on civil liberties, better quality control for marijuana users, along with budgetary benefits. But these considerations are unlikely to convince the majority until more people agree that government should not interfere in the private decision to consume marijuana.

Marijuana advocates should also focus on federal law, in addition to or even instead of state law. Legalization proponents have long despaired of affecting change at the federal level and assumed that state-by-state change would someday bring down federal prohibition. That position is understandable, and it has achieved some success, such as the decriminalization of medicalization of marijuana in many states.

Yet it's hard to see the federal apparatus yielding ground without direct elimination of its authorization; the stakes for those who hold this power are too high. Legalizers can also argue compellingly that no reasonable interpretation of the Constitution justifies federal imposition of a marijuana ban.

A final key to legalizing marijuana is to get conservatives, not just liberals, more involved. A number of well-known conservatives have advocated legalization, such as Milton Friedman, George Schultz, and William Buckley, but the general perception is that legalizers are "stoners, " acting mainly out of self-interest.

Yet legalization can appeal to conservatives, especially if the arguments emphasize freedom, personal responsibility, and the Constitution, along with up-front clarity about the goal: legal production and use of marijuana for adults, whatever their motivations. Past liberal efforts, such as medical marijuana, invite charges of hypocrisy and weaken support.

Marijuana can and should be legal, Prop 19's failure notwithstanding. But the strategy for achieving that end must change.

One of the many crimes that climate scientists have been accused of lately is that they claim absolute certainty in a field of research fraught with uncertainty. Sure, the planet is warming, say skeptics, but that's happened throughout Earth's history, long before humans were burning fossil fuels. So, how can we be sure this isn't just a natural phenomenon?

Yet a search through the much vilified Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports shows that absolute certainty is notably absent. In the most recent document, for example, published in 2007, the authors write: "Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic GHG [that is, human-generated greenhouse gas] concentrations."

If that doesn't sound definitive, it's because, as the authors freely admit, it isn't: climate science continues to evolve as new evidence comes in. Indeed, back in 2006, even before the latest IPCC report was complete, researchers in Britain were already planning to launch an update. Helmed by the U.K.'s Met Office (formerly known as the Meteorological Office), the update, published March 5 in the journal Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, is based on more than 100 peer-reviewed post-IPCC studies. The new data may shift the evidence for climate change, but none of it weakens what the IPCC said three years ago.

By looking at a wide range of observations from all over the world, the Met Office study concludes that the fingerprint of human influence on climate is stronger than ever. "We can say with a very high significance level that the effects we see in the climate cannot be attributed to any other forcings [factors that push the climate in one direction or another]," says study co-author Gabriele Hegerl of the University of Edinburgh.

Plenty of these climate effects had already been observed at the time of the 2007 IPCC report, including warming temperatures, shifts in rainfall (wet regions getting wetter, dry regions getting drier) and the increase in summer meltback of Arctic sea ice. Those patterns have continued, and in some cases gotten worse.

Some entirely new observations have been recorded as well. In its 2007 report, the IPCC did not include the impact of Greenland's or Antarctica's melting glaciers in its estimate of future sea-level rise, saying it lacked sufficient data. But now the speed-up of flow from these glaciers has been documented. And while the IPCC noted in 2007 that every continent had warmed throughout the 20th century except Antarctica, that continent has now been shown to be warming as well — very likely due to man-made influences, says Hegerl. 

There's plenty more evidence in the Met Office report to support global warming. But the question from critics remains: how can we be sure this isn't just a natural phenomenon? Scientists haven't done a good enough job of communicating how they distinguish human versus natural influences, says Hegerl. The answer lies in climate models — massive computer simulations that allow the scientists to project climate effects in various scenarios, including those in which humans do not emit any greenhouses at all. "We go out of our way to check out other explanations — by assuming it's all explained by solar activity, or by solar activity plus volcanoes, or by combinations of any of the other natural forcings known to affect climate," says Hegerl.

According to the models, none of those combinations can produce the climate patterns currently being observed in the real world. Add the greenhouse gases that we know humans are generating (and which we've known since the 1800s tend to warm the Earth, all other things being equal), and the simulations finally come close to matching the real world. Its possible, albeit far-fetched, that the simulations are defective. It is even less possible that all of them (and there are many) are defective in the direction of overstating humanity's contribution to warming.

Again, none of the evidence adds up to absolute certainty, a rare commodity in any field of science. On Wednesday, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon announced that an independent panel of scientists, representing national science academies from around the world, would review the IPCC's research procedures — an effort to account for the 2007 report's mistakes, for which the IPCC has come under hard criticism. But while the U.N. group may benefit publicly from more transparency, it won't change the fact that more than 99% of the scientific details in the 2007 report have already withstood the most intense scrutiny. The fact that climate change evidence that was "very likely" a few years ago has now been declared likelier still by the comprehensive Met Office report suggests that the evidence for human-caused climate change is getting better all the time.

Newspapers and traditional media have seen their world and their business models crumble before their very eyes. Newspaper revenues have plummeted by nearly 30% in the last year alone, while newspaper circulation numbers are in the toilet. The web is destroying outdated business models and replacing them with more efficient ones.

These newspaper and media companies aren’t just letting themselves get destroyed, though. Some have gone web-only, some are embracing social media, and then some are blaming Google.

When we first heard that Rupert Murdoch intended to remove News Corp websites from Google, we weren’t impressed. We didn’t understand his plan, but we did believe that it wouldn’t work.

Then This Google Thing Got Out of Hand

That was, until we learned that Microsoft and News Corp are in discussions to remove content from Google and that most recently, other newspapers and media companies are considering joining Murdoch’s insanity.

Let’s think about this: in a few months, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and most of the 56 daily newspapers of MediaNews Group could be de-indexed from Google and Google News(and in News Corp’s case, displayed prominently on Bing.

Experian Hitwise explored yesterday what would happen if this plan comes to fruition. As the following graph demonstrates, Google alone accounts for 20+ percent of newspaper traffic:

Some of that traffic would remain intact (we really doubt Murdoch would remove the homepage of the Wall Street Journal from Google, thus searches for the WSJ in general would remain unaffected), but overall it’d be a devastating traffic blow. Google is still the main method of information discovery online, and that trend will only grow as more kids turn to Google instead of the $0.75 daily.

In short: Rupert’s plan will gut his company and doesn’t set News Corp up for the future.

Rupert, We Understand Your Dilemma

Let’s give News Corp some leeway and a little credit though: they know that the old business models are dying and that they have to do something. Even back in August, we stated that good journalism isn’t cheap and that we have to find a better way to compensate media organizations for their work. Here is what we said about his plan to put his websites behind a paywall, with key points bolded:

“Murdoch has essentially declared that the free-for-all in online news has ended. Specifically, he states that good journalism isn’t cheap (that’s true) and that, while the web has made distribution cheap, it has not made it free. He also hopes to gain more revenue from major celebrity scoops from his tabloid papers (i.e. the Sun). His bet is that people will indeed pay for news content.:

The next paragraph explains our arguments, though:

“We’re not so sure. While we don’t disagree with the need to find additional revenue streams for newspapers and quality journalism, we think there are plenty of alternative news resources to turn to. Murdoch must see something encouraging at the WSJ, because he wouldn’t be going with this plan if he didn’t think they could replicate that model without losing significant readership.”

Sorry Rupert, but newspapers aren’t going to increase anytime soon and up-and-coming blogs and media companies aren’t going away. Maybe we were wrong about you seeing something in the WSJ model. Maybe you just don’t understand how media has been fundamentally altered by the web.

This Isn’t the Future of Media, Murdoch

We’ve had enough. Murdoch’s plan to de-index from Google is getting out of control, and it threatens to speed up the destruction of all traditional media. If other newspapers decide to join this insanity, here’s what will happen: more efficient organizations will step in to fill the gaps. There is no shortage of lean and socially savvy media organizations built in the last five years.

The future of media isn’t in The Wall Street Journal, no matter how much value it provides society. No, the future is in the web, fast-paced blogs, and social media. The future is in companies that realize that news a day old is, well, a day old. The future is in information discovery, not in hiding content.

We know your empire is not doing so well, Murdoch, but that doesn’t excuse you from taking your company down a path that will take you into oblivion. No Microsoft deal will fix the inherent problems with the newspaper business model.

What News Corp should be doing instead: Finding more efficient means of distribution, leveraging its revenue-generating assets, exploring new methods of payments, and encouraging innovation. We’re not psychics or high-profile consultants, but we know which models are winning and which ones are not.

In short, Murdoch, take your ball and go home. Your plan can only hurt News Corp.