The zombie theory.
Category Archives: Science And Society
Earth-Like Exoplanets
Right next door?
Maybe it’s more motivation to develop interstellar propulsion, but we’re still a long way from it, and thirteen light years is still a long way away.
More On Toxic Greenery
Really, someone should use this data to get rid of the idiotic bans on plastic bags.
Warning of disease may seem like an over-the-top scare tactic, but research suggests there’s more than anecdote behind this industry talking point. In a 2011 study, four researchers examined reusable bags in California and Arizona and found that 51 percent of them contained coliform bacteria. The problem appears to be the habits of the reusers. Seventy-five percent said they keep meat and vegetables in the same bag. When bags were stored in hot car trunks for two hours, the bacteria grew tenfold.
That study also found, happily, that washing the bags eliminated 99.9 percent of the bacteria. It undercut even that good news, though, by finding that 97 percent of people reported that they never wash their bags.
They’ll take my plastic bags away from my cold, dead fingers.
[Update late morning]
The San Francisco bag ban kills five people a year.
If we could save just one child’s life…
Silent Running
The stupid movie is appropriately dissed by Lileks:
The entire movie is nonsense, a green paen to the inevitable dystopia and the spiritual purity of those who shove seeds in loam. I remember thinking it was incredibly Deep at the time, because it summed up everything we expected from our future: a planet without trees, choked by pollution, ruled by brand names (AMF was stamped on the futuristic pool table, if I recall) but still cool because it had spaceships. This fleet held the last few trees and plants, which had been parked in orbit around Saturn – makes sense – and when the order came to destroy the last trees and return the ships to commercial use, because well you know tin soldiers and Nixon coming. Bruce Dern kills the guys he works with because they don’t have sufficient social consciousness, and saves the trees while Joan Baez sings in the background.
A YouTube comment:
I often cry when I hear this. I used to cry because of how beautiful it was and my fears of what might be. Now I cry because I see, despite it’s warning, what has become.
How true. The planet has no more trees, but we have fleets of manned spacecraft capable of reaching Saturn.
It is amazing that people take such nonsense seriously.
Anyway, read the whole thing for some evocative high-school nostalgia.
Brown Versus Green
Will the California coastal elites continue to destroy the state’s economy?
They’ll certainly try to. And as he notes, this would be a great opportunity for the state GOP, if it wasn’t brain dead.
Fear
There’s a lot more to it than the amygdala.
And there’s a lot more to the human mind than we can even now imagine.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Speaking of which, is our sense of smell driven by vibrational modes? If they can figure this one out, smellovision can’t be far behind.
SLAPPing The Mann Again
We filed our final response to Michael Mann’s ridiculous lawsuit on Friday. It’s the last filing prior to a hearing on the motions to dismiss, which will likely occur in April. CEI General Counsel notes:
As our reply demonstrates, while Mann paints himself as a reluctant warrior in the global warming debate, he’s quick to fling epithets at his critics. Mann characterizes his opponents and their positions, variously, as “pure scientific fraud,” “bogus,” “hired assassin,” “shills,” “crimes against humanity,” and the ever-useful smear of “denier.” The professor claims that he’s been exonerated by numerous investigations, but those reports raise more questions than they answer. And his view of First Amendment freedoms is so incorrect that, in addition to the Nobel Prize he wrongly thinks he won, he may now end up with a Pulitzer — but it won’t be for nonfiction.
From the filing itself:
Poisonous Greenery
More unintended consequences:
Recently, many jurisdictions have implemented bans or imposed taxes upon plastic grocery bags on environmental grounds. San Francisco County was the first major US jurisdiction to enact such a regulation, implementing a ban in 2007. There is evidence, however, that reusable grocery bags, a common substitute for plastic bags, contain potentially harmful bacteria. We examine emergency room admissions related to these bacteria in the wake of the San Francisco ban. We find that ER visits spiked when the ban went into effect. Relative to other counties, ER admissions increase by at least one fourth, and deaths exhibit a similar increase.
I’m never surprised when environmentalist policies kill people, because many of them hate people, but in this case, it probably is an unintended consequence. Because they never think these things through. Manhattan Beach passed one of these idiot bans recently, but at least they can still use paper bags. Of course, it didn’t affect Trader Joe’s at all. And I usually shop in Redondo, where Albertson’s still offers plastic.
And yes, I know that the problem is mitigated by washing the canvas bags each time. How many people want to do that (plus having to remember to take them)?
Global Warming
Though you wouldn’t know it from the antagonistic nature of public discussions about global warming, a large measure of scientific agreement and shared interpretation exists amongst nearly all scientists who consider the issue. The common ground, much of which was traversed by Dr. Hayhoe in her article, includes:
· that climate has always changed and always will,
· that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and warms the lower atmosphere,
· that human emissions are accumulating in the atmosphere,
· that a global warming of around 0.5OC occurred in the 20th century, but
· that global warming has ceased over the last 15 years.
The scientific argument over DAGW is therefore about none of these things. Rather, it is almost entirely about three other, albeit related, issues. They are:
· the amount of net warming that is, or will be, produced by human-related emissions,
· whether any actual evidence exists for dangerous warming of human causation over the last 50 years, and
· whether the IPCC’s computer models can provide accurate climate predictions 100 years into the future.
Dr. Hayhoe’s answers to those questions would probably be along the line of: substantial, lots and yes. My answers would be: insignificant, none and no.
What can possibly explain such disparate responses to a largely agreed set of factual climate data?
I tend to the latter view. As I’ve noted in the past, I have zero confidence in the predictive power of existing climate models, for very good reason.
Al Gore’s New Book
A review:
Techno-enthusiast Al’s discussion is interesting, if occasionally heavy-handed in its erudition. With so many facts on display, errors inevitably creep in: Bronze wasn’t chosen over copper in ancient times because copper is too brittle (it isn’t brittle at all) but because bronze tools could hold an edge under hard use, as copper tools couldn’t. Even so, Mr. Gore’s fans will find the book a useful introduction to the future, if not to the past. Yes, he does go on about climate change at some length, but that is hardly news. There is much, much more to the book than a rehash of the global-warming debate.
But then Savonarola Al intervenes, his fondness for high-toned scolding coloring every topic. It’s a pretty monochromatic color. After reading Savonarola Al’s sermons, one might be excused for thinking that all of the evils in the world come from corporations. There is a lot about what Mr. Gore calls “the domineering crimes of the robber barons” and the evils of capitalism, but the actual “crimes” that Mr. Gore mentions, chiefly lobbying efforts that thwart regulation, don’t seem all that bad in comparison with the things that governments are capable of doing. In much of the Third World—think Zimbabwe or Iran—people have far more to fear from the despotic regimes that misrule them than they do from private enterprise. And even in the free world, governments have a coercive power that no corporation can rival. Hence the need for lobbyists as a check on wealth-destroying intrusions into markets and abridgments of commercial freedom.
Want to get money out of politics? Get politics out of money.