Category Archives: Mathematics

Culinary, Health, Mathematics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

Cholesterol

6 Comments

Matt Wridley has a brief history of how it’s not bad for you. And this is worth repeating in the context of climate “science”:

If challenged to show evidence for low-cholesterol advice, the medical and scientific profession has tended to argue from authority — by pointing to WHO guidelines or other such official compendia, and say “check the references in there”. But those references lead back to Keys and Framingham and other such dodgy dossiers. Thus does bad science get laundered into dogma. “One of the great commandments of science is ‘Mistrust arguments from authority’,” said Carl Sagan.

Similarly, mistrust people who talk about “consensus” and quote fake statistics on how many scientists believe something.

[Update a while later]

Sorry, link is fixed now.

Mathematics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

Bill Nye, Climate Guy

6 Comments

Yes, obviously the Texas flooding is caused by our SUVs:

For climate scientists like Brenda Ekwurzel of the Union of Concerned Scientists, the link to a warming planet was obvious.

“When you have a warmer atmosphere, then you have the capability to hold more water vapor,” Ekwurzel explained. “When storms organize, there’s much more water you can wring out of the atmosphere compared to the past.”

So I guess that would explain all the recent flooding in California, too.

Oh, wait.

Business, Mathematics, Technology and Society

A Question About Evolution

9 Comments

No, not the scientific theory, the email client.

It’s sending mail, but none of the sent mail for today is showing up in the “Sent” folder. Anyone know what’s going on, or how to trouble shoot?

[Saturday-afternoon update]

OK, mystery solved. The “Sent” folder I’ve been looking at is the one that mirrors the server, and I’m seeing older message there from this week that I was sending from the server, via Roundcube, because I was on my laptop on which I’ve not set up or synched Evolution. The new ones were sent from Evolution, and were stored in the generic “Sent” folder. So I haven’t lost them, but they’re in a different place.

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

Climate Jihadists

5 Comments

California is currently at their mercy:

Meeting the new target of an 80 percent cut by 2050 would require the use of even more speculative technologies, including those that the CCST reserachers considered to be “in development, not yet available” or merely “research concepts.”

Yet such problems do not seem to impinge much on Sacramento’s political class. Any group willing, as is most egregiously the case with the Latino caucus, to wage war on their own people, are not going to worry too much about such subtleties.

So then, who wins? It’s certainly not the environment, but some of the oligarchs in Silicon Valley may benefit as they have been feeding at the renewable-energy trough at the expense of less-well-off ratepayers. Then there’s the whole bureaucracy, and their academic allies, who can enjoy profitable employment by dreaming up new ways to make life in California more expensive and difficult for average citizens – envisioning schemes that the taxpayers have to finance. And, certainly, the climate change agenda could benefit multifamily housing builders, who will seek to force often-unwilling Californians into residences in which most would rather not spend their lives.

At some point, people are going to get fed up, but we don’t seem to be close yet.

Business, Economics, Mathematics, Media Criticism, Science And Society, Technology and Society

Climate Change “Consensus”

12 Comments

“When it’s a consensus among the uninformed, it’s not worth much“:

What can we take away from all this? First, lots of people get called “climate experts” and contribute to the appearance of consensus, without necessarily being knowledgeable about core issues. A consensus among the misinformed is not worth much.

Second, it is obvious that the “97 per cent” mantra is untrue. The underlying issues are so complex it is ludicrous to expect unanimity. The near 50/50 split among AMS members on the role of greenhouse gases is a much more accurate picture of the situation. The phony claim of 97 per cent consensus is mere political rhetoric aimed at stifling debate and intimidating people into silence.

Yes. Anyone who cites that number at this point is either a liar or appallingly ignorant.

[Update a while later]

Related, I was going to post about this interview with Jerry Taylor, formerly of Cato, who seems to aspire to be continually out of synch with reality:

I began to change, maybe five or six years ago, for several reasons.

One, the scientific evidence became stronger and stronger over time. A lot of conservatives think of climate change as similar to the population issue. You have to remember, in the ’60s and ’70s people were frantic about population growth. And it just peeled away as an issue, simply because it was wrong — or the projections were. And so I would say the same thing: [climate change] is just one in the endless parade of environmental apocalypse stories.

That’s simply not true. The scientific evidence has not become “stronger and stronger over time.” In fact, particularly with the pause, and the complete failure of the models, the uncertainty is growing.

Judith Curry addresses it:

…it is interesting to see Libertarian arguments about climate change policy they [sic] don’t seem overly caught up in the UNFCCC/IPCC ideology, or its antithesis ideology. The Climate Hawks (e.g. Dave Roberts) love this kind of libertarian ‘conversion’ story. But to my mind, Jerry Taylor’s argument for a carbon tax doesn’t really hold up.

Nope.