All posts by Rand Simberg

Business, Economics, Education, General Science, Mathematics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Climate Skeptics

15 Comments

How and when did you become one?

A lot of interesting responses.

As some note there, to me the biggest deal with the release of the CRU data five years ago wasn’t (just) the duplicity and unscientific behavior revealed in the emails, but the utter crap that was the source code of the computer models. It was clear that it was not done by anyone familiar with computer science, numerical methods, or modeling, and the notion that we should have any confidence whatsoever in their output was societally insane. In terms of Matthews’ paper, I’d put myself somewhere between “lukewarmer” and “moderate skeptic.”

[Update a couple minutes later]

Starting to read through the comments. Here’s just one horror story:

Most of the claims being made by climate change advocates appear to run contrary to basic meteorology. As I’ve been attacked personally and professionally for offering contrary views, I decided to leave the field. I will defend my Atmospheric Science PhD thesis and walk away. It’s become clear to me that it is not possible to undertake independent research in any area that touches upon climate change if you have to make your living as a professional scientist on government grant money or have to rely on getting tenure at a university. The massive group think that I have encountered on this topic has cost me my career, many colleagues and has damaged my reputation among the few people I know in the field. I’m leaving to work in the financial industry. It’s a sad day when you feel that you have to leave a field that you are passionately interested in because you fear that you won’t be able to find a job once your views become widely known. Until free thought is allowed in the climate sciences, I will consider myself a skeptic of catastrophic human induced global warming.

Yup. Totally, totally politicized. It’s not a science any more. Unless you think that Lysenko was a scientist.

Business, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

Jon Stewart

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Kyle Smith isn’t as impressed with him as we’re supposed to be:

Though Stewart has often claimed he does a “fake news show,” “The Daily Show” isn’t that. It’s a real news show punctuated with puns, jokes, asides and the occasional moment of staged sanctimony.

It contains real, unstaged sound bites about the days’ events and interviews about important policy matters.
Stewart is a journalist: an irresponsible and unprofessional one.

Yes, as Jim Treacher put it, the “clown nose off, clown nose on” schtick got pretty tiresome. The tears of all those bewailing his departure are delicious.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

ISIS Beheading Christians

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…in Libya.

Probably caused by an Internet video. Hillary and Susan Rice were unavailable for comment.

[Update a while later]

Denmark’s turn, and looking back at the Rushdie fatwa:

It’s not at all difficult to see the roots of now in what happened then. It’s not that Westerners weren’t already alarmed back then, though; they were. They just didn’t see the depth and breadth of what this phenomenon represented, and they didn’t quite know what to do. Nor do they now. And although political correctness was much weaker back then it already very much existed, and probably helped to hamper recognition of the dangers of this strain of Islam to the West itself. Those dangers are still not fully recognized by the governments of the West, in part for the very same reason.

Yes, Glenn is right. We should have nipped this in the bud in 1979, but we had the wrong president.

But it’s not in fact too late. We shouldn’t be droning Al Qaeda/ISIS leaders, we should be capturing and interrogating them. The people we should be droning are mullahs who issue fatwas (like the ones who stirred up all the rage over the cartoons). It would probably discourage them, at least somewhat. And dead mullahs don’t issue fatwas.