…takes a detour to the moon.
Yup.
[Afternoon update]
Here’s another story. With an endorsement by Bill Gerstenmaier. Funny he never tells that to Congress.
Category Archives: Economics
Meth
It’s not an argument for drug prohibition; it’s a demonstration and consequence of the failure of drug prohibition.
Hoplophobic Professors
I think they should be shunned and punished for being the bigots that they are.
Global Warming Scare Tactics
…environmental groups have known since 2000 that efforts to link climate change to natural disasters could backfire, after researchers at the Frameworks Institute studied public attitudes for its report “How to Talk About Global Warming.” Messages focused on extreme weather events, they found, made many Americans more likely to view climate change as an act of God — something to be weathered, not prevented.
Some people, the report noted, “are likely to buy an SUV to help them through the erratic weather to come” for example, rather than support fuel-efficiency standards.
Since then, evidence that a fear-based approach backfires has grown stronger. A frequently cited 2009 study in the journal Science Communication summed up the scholarly consensus. “Although shocking, catastrophic, and large-scale representations of the impacts of climate change may well act as an initial hook for people’s attention and concern,” the researchers wrote, “they clearly do not motivate a sense of personal engagement with the issue and indeed may act to trigger barriers to engagement such as denial.” In a controlled laboratory experiment published in Psychological Science in 2010, researchers were able to use “dire messages” about global warming to increase skepticism about the problem.
Many climate advocates ignore these findings, arguing that they have an obligation to convey the alarming facts.
But claims linking the latest blizzard, drought or hurricane to global warming simply can’t be supported by the science. Our warming world is, according to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, increasing heat waves and intense precipitation in some places, and is likely to bring more extreme weather in the future. But the panel also said there is little evidence that this warming is increasing the loss of life or the economic costs of natural disasters. “Economic growth, including greater concentrations of people and wealth in periled areas and rising insurance penetration,” the climate panel noted, “is the most important driver of increasing losses.”
People like the Bills McKibben and Nye look like fools when they seize on every weather event to evangelize their religion.
Increase NASA’s Budget
aA
The Recycling Religion
Thoughts from John Tierney:
I realize that true believers don’t need rational reasons for their religion, but it would be nice to see a little soul-searching in regard to some stats in the article: To offset the greenhouse impact of one passenger’s round-trip flight between New York and London, you’d have to recycle roughly 40,000 plastic bottles, assuming you fly coach. If you sit in the front of the plane, it’s more like 100,000 bottles — and you have to make sure not to rinse any of them with hot water, because that little extra energy could more than cancel out any greenhouse benefit of your labors.
They were told there would be no math.
The Economic Chessmasters
Play a losing game.
These are the kinds of policies that made the Depression Great.
Moore’s Law
It seems to be slowing down. Is it coming to an end?
[Update a few minutes later]
On the other hand, carbon nanotubes!
Andy Weir And Commercial Spaceflight
He says it’s critical.
I think he’s falling into a common myth here, though (the one promulgated by Margaret Lazarus Dean):
…people like to see new things happen. We’ve had ISS [the International Space Station] up there for years. It feels like, to the layman, that NASA hasn’t done anything really new, or accomplished anything very significant in a long time. Now building a big-ass space station is actually really hard. There’s also kind of a bruised national pride that we don’t have a manned spaceflight program anymore. I think you’ll see interest in NASA get rekindled once the Orion program [NASA’s latest manned capsule] gets up and running, and we actually start sending our own astronauts back into space without hitching a ride with the Russians.
We do have a “manned spaceflight program.” It’s called ISS and Commercial Crew. If Orion ever flies, it’s not the way we’ll be getting our own astronauts into space without hitching rides. That’s what Commercial Crew will do, if Congress doesn’t succeed in sabotaging it. Orion will look like an also-ran with all of the commercial activity that will be taking place by then.
And speaking of commercial spaceflight and the need to reduce costs, Alan Boyle discussed that subject with Lori Garver:
What’s the big technological innovation to watch for in space in 2018?
“Getting the costs down to get to space. That’s key, that’s been a barrier, and that is happening. Certainly by 2018 you will have multiple launches for a lot less money.
Clearly, Congress and NASA don’t agree. They think we need a big, expensive, obsolete-before-it-first-flies expendable rocket.
[Update a few minutes later]
Lee Billings: Why the first mission to Mars probably won’t look anything like The Martian:
NASA has no plans for a large, spinning cycler spacecraft between Earth and Mars, probably because such a spacecraft is considered unaffordable. In fact, ongoing squabbles in Washington over how to divvy up NASA’s persistently flat budget means that essentially all the crucial components for the agency’s planned voyages—the heavy-lift rockets, the power sources, engines and spacecraft for deep space, the landers, surface habitats and ascent vehicles—are behind schedule and still in early stages of development, if they are being developed at all. And the agency’s Journey to Mars could all go away, very quickly, at the whim of some future President or Congressional majority. Mired in the muck of politics, NASA may not manage to land even one crew of astronauts on Mars by 2035—let alone three.
It seem quite unlikely, absent a dramatic change in approach by the agency and the Congress.
And the planetary-protection issue is potentially a show stopper. We have to decide what’s more important: science, or settlement.
[Update a couple minutes later]
And here‘s the New York Times review:
The movie gently thumps several issues: It’s unambiguously on the side of science and rationalism with glints of manifest destiny, American can-do-ism and a little flag-waving folded in.
Well, that will piss off the SJWs.
[Noon update]
Ed Lu says NASA isn’t dead, but it’s lost:
“The debate about humans versus robots is beyond stupid,” he said. “Moving people outward is the whole reason for going. Otherwise, what are we doing? What is the purpose of going if not to live, go places, do things, spread humanity?”
Unmanned missions are easier because you can do them one at a time and find success through scientific breakthroughs. Lu said manned missions, on the other hand, have to be planned with a broader strategy or you’re just “doing random stuff.” And that’s the piece NASA is missing.
Asked if he thinks we’ll get back to manned missions, Lu said he’s counting on the private sector to get us there.
That’s a safer bet.
[Afternoon update]
Paul Spudis says that NASA’s Mars plans are delusional.
Yes. Yes they are.
The Uncertainty Of Climate Sensitivity
…and its implications for the Paris “negotiations”:
In my previous post Climate sensitivity: lopping off the fat tail, I argued that it is becoming increasingly difficult to defend high values of ECS. However, the uncertainty is sufficiently large that we can’t really identify a meaningful ‘best value’ of sensitivity, or rule out really high values.
A key issue is that emerging estimates of aerosol forcing are considerably lower than what was used in the AR5 determinations of ECS, implying lower values of ECS than was determined by the AR5.
This uncertainty in ECS makes emission targets rather meaningless. It will be interesting to see how this uncertainty is factored into the Paris negotiations
Note, there are other papers on this general topic that are in the review process, I expect a spate of such papers to appear during the next month.
Paris is doomed to failure, thankfully.