I didn’t mention it last week, because I was having posting problems, but Leonard David has a good overview of the program, with some quotes from Yours Truly.
Category Archives: Economics
3-D Printing Of Lunar Bases
This is the kind of thing that NASA should be doing. Instead, Congress is forcing them to waste their scarce resources on a rocket that they don’t need and won’t be able to afford to fly.
The IPCC
…and its inconvenient truth:
Based upon early drafts of the AR5, the IPCC seemed prepared to dismiss the pause in warming as irrelevant ‘noise’ associated with natural variability. Under pressure, the IPCC now acknowledges the pause and admits that climate models failed to predict it. The IPCC has failed to convincingly explain the pause in terms of external radiative forcing from greenhouse gases, aerosols, solar or volcanic forcing; this leaves natural internal variability as the predominant candidate to explain the pause. If the IPCC attributes to the pause to natural internal variability, then this begs the question as to what extent the warming between 1975 and 2000 can also be explained by natural internal variability. Not to mention raising questions about the confidence that we should place in the IPCC’s projections of future climate change.
Nevertheless, the IPCC appears to be set to conclude that warming in the near future will resume in accord with climate model predictions.
Why is my own reasoning about the implications of the pause, in terms of attribution of the late 20th century warming and implications for future warming, so different from the conclusions drawn by the IPCC? The disagreement arises from different assessments of the value and importance of particular classes of evidence as well as disagreement about the appropriate logical framework for linking and assessing the evidence – my reasoning is weighted heavily in favor of observational evidence and understanding of natural internal variability of the climate system, whereas the IPCC’s reasoning is weighted heavily in favor of climate model simulations and external forcing of climate change.
The models are utterly useless, as a basis for public policy. In fact, to the degree that people don’t understand this, they’re worse than useless.
[Update a few minutes later]
Related: no ice-free Arctic this year. Mazlowski is falsified.
The Safety Culture
Some cogent thoughts from Mollie Hemingway:
Many parents just can’t accept the reality that we’re not in as much control of our children as we wish. Last week my nephew went to an outdoor camp in Colorado with the rest of his 5th-grade class. They were supposed to stay just one night. Floods hit the region, the roads washed out and filled with boulders. There was nothing anyone could do. After being stranded for three days, the parents heard about plans to airlift the kids out via Chinook helicopter. That plan was halted when some parents complained it was too dangerous. Who knew that helicopter parents would be threatened by actual helicopters?
Never mind that riding on a Chinook would be the adventure of a lifetime for a 10-year-old. Perhaps because there were no other reasonable options, the airlift commenced the next day. Every child survived and my nephew reported that “No one ever had so much fun in a natural disaster.”
Look, I’m a mother. I care deeply about my children’s safety. But safety is just one important thing to teach our children. And it’s not even anywhere near the most important thing. Keeping your kids from dying or getting hurt is of secondary importance to teaching them how to live. Safety isn’t even a virtue. If you’re teaching your kids more about safety than you are about honesty, kindness, respect for others, responsibility, gratitude, integrity, cooperation, determination, social skills, enthusiasm, compassion and manners, you’re doing it wrong.
That’s the kind of culture that breeds the hypersafe culture of spaceflight that my book is all about.
And then there’s this:
My neighborhood is in Northern Virginia, an area that has been rewarded for playing it safe and going after government cash. Many of my neighbors are government employees, lawyers and lobbyists. Many of them have found success regulating other people’s businesses out of existence, destructive acts all too frequently predicated on fears that somebody somewhere might get hurt. It’s not surprising, in that context, that my neighbors would call for regulation of the lemonade stand or lawn mowing business run by the kids next door.
The fact is that America is now run by people who profit from keeping everyone else from taking risks. It’s lucrative work if you can get it. Six of the ten richest counties in the country are next to Washington, D.C., for good reason. [“It’s where the money is.” — Willie Sutton] But this isn’t a recipe for prospering culturally or politically.
Yup.
A Denunciation Of President Obama
In remarks on the Senate Floor on March 16, 2006, Sen. Obama said the need to raise the Debt Limit was “a sign of leadership failure.”
Sen Obama said the need to raise the Debt Limit was another reflection of the “Government’s reckless fiscal policies.”
The[n], Sen Obama also denounced the rising National Debt as “a hidden domestic enemy” robbing cities & states of “critical investments.”
Denouncing the ever-increasing National Debt, then-Sen. Obama told the Senate he would oppose an increase in the Debt Limit.
Pwned.
It goes without saying, of course, that Mark Knoller is a racist.
The Economic Recovery
What economic recovery?
…why is the current recovery so weak? It is not because of the aftermath of the 2007-08 financial crisis. U.S. Financial markets began to recover in late 2008, more than four and a half years ago. Moreover, research by Michael Bordo of Rutgers University and Joseph Haubrich of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland show that US recoveries following financial crises are typically faster, not slower, than average.
Recent research by us and other scholars analyzes the chronically slow economic recovery from a very different perspective. Specifically, our view is that poorly designed and implemented government policies have impeded capital and technological investments and hiring, and that bad government policies – not underlying problems with the U.S. market economy – are the primary reason why the economy has not recovered.
And the low-info voters voted for four more years of it last fall.
Life On The ISS
Joel Achenbach has an interesting article about the station.
Xenon
At lunch at #AIAASpace2013, NASA is proposing ten tons of it for propellant for the asteroid mission. World production is about a ton per year.
The Pension Crisis
I think that most of the nation’s fiscal problems are. Something that can’t go on, won’t.
The Obama Economy
Five years on, he can’t blame it on the financial crisis any more. He owns it. As do the low-info underemployed fools who voted to re-elect him.
[Update a couple minutes later]
“This was a very bad jobs report.”