Don’t seem to be disappearing by the hand of man.
I’d almost feel sorry for that idiot Al Gore, if he wasn’t such a sanctimonious hypocritical carbon-belching schmuck.
[Early afternoon update]
As noted in comments, the former vice president has suddenly decided that he had better places to be than Copenhagen.
India won’t sign any binding carbon reductions. They’d be crazy to, just when they’ve finally thrown off much of the socialism that has held them back for decades, and are finally bringing their people out of poverty, particularly when it’s based on flimsy science, and economic ignorance. The Warm-monger religion demands that they remain in poverty for the good of Gaia, but they’ll stick with their traditional beliefs, and fully bellies.
[Update a couple minutes later]
More from Shikha Dalmia:
The resulting emission cuts won’t even make a dent in global temperatures. India’s per capita energy consumption is 15 times less than America’s and half of China’s—the two biggest polluters. To be sure, President Obama is poised to pledge to cut U.S. carbon emissions 80% below 2005 by 2050 at Copenhagen. But it’s an empty promise because there is little to zero chance that he will be able to get Congress to go along. China too announced plans—modest by all accounts—to curb its emissions. So India will certainly face pressure at the conference to act, despite the fact that bigger polluters won’t.
But as a developing country, India can least afford to give up its right to consume as much energy as is necessary to deliver all Indians a living standard comparable to the one that rich countries take for granted. There is every reason to believe that the new License Raj will damage India’s economy every bit as much as the old one in the preliberalization days, when India’s growth rate remained stuck at around 2%. This would be unfortunate at any time, but especially now, when the West itself is in the middle of a huge rethinking on this issue.
Yup.
The Huffington Post is desperately trying to fend off Climaquiddick, but Newbusters isn’t having any of it.
Now the headline “10 Tips Obama Can Take From Tiger” is probably making editors at the mag cringe.
I have to confess that I don’t give a damn about Tiger Woods or this story, not being a golfer or fan, but this computer simulation of the event from China is pretty funny.
…of the virtual newsroom:
Here you have two young conservative journalists, O’Keefe and Giles, possessed of a keen philosophical eye, a knowledge of technology (cameras, microphones videotape, the Internet) and a fat and inviting liberal fish in a barrel known as ACORN. Imagination conjured as to how they will approach their story — they go out and conduct their very-old style journalism investigation. Story in hand, Andrew Breitbart of Breitbart.tv in the Internet division takes the handoff. He sends a virtual memo to talk radio row’s Beck and Hannity. Who in turn are both Fox News stars. Five…four…three…two…one. Bang! Within a virtual instant, the Virtual Newsroom has just blown in the hull of the good ship ACORN, its stunned survivors racing around the deck of a political Titanic as Breitbart, O’Keefe and Giles are powered by the engines of the Virtual Newsroom. The full power of the Virtual Newsroom kicks in. Talk radio shows light up the call screeners screens. The newspaper and magazines kick in, in print and online. The lights are on in the Fox studios as the surging Fox audience gapes at a federally funded organization strategizing on prostitution. And…lights out for ACORN. Or more accurately, considerably damaged and suddenly congressionally unfunded. And the coverage from what’s left of the liberal mainstream media in all this? Next to zero.
… The problem for American progressives today — be they the activists of ACORN, Van Jones, the So We Might See group or others — is that they are unaccustomed to finding themselves on the receiving end of this kind of attention from the journalists, commentators, investigators, talk radio hosts, television stars and authors of the Virtual Newsroom. It is safe to say that whatever else went on in the three stories listed here, the scoundrels at ACORN, Mr. Jones, and the So We Might See-ers were taken aback at the fact they — they! — were suddenly under the Virtual Newsroom microscope for their public activities. Accustomed to velvet-gloved treatment from their progressive buddies in the Old Media, they simply never factored the existence of the Virtual Newsroom into the equation.
Newsflash to progressives. The Virtual News room is here to stay. Not only is it not going away — in spite of whatever shenanigans may be going on behind the closed doors of the FCC — it is gaining in both size and strength.
It may be saving us from the “progressive” drumbeat that has come from the media for decades. You can see why the administration wants to tighten control.
Jeff Foust has some good questions in preparation for today’s hearing:
* What would be the safety implications of terminating the government crew transportation system currently under development in favor of relying on as-yet-to-be-developed commercially provided crew transportation services? What would the government be able to do, if anything, to ensure that no reduction in planned safety levels occurred as a result?
* What do potential commercial crew transportation services providers consider to be an acceptable safety standard to which potential commercial providers must conform if their space transportation systems were to be chosen by NASA to carry its astronauts to low Earth orbit and the ISS? Would the same safety standard be used for non-NASA commercial human transportation missions?
* If a policy decision were made to require NASA to rely solely on commercial crew transfer services, which would have to meet NASA’s safety requirements to be considered for use by NASA astronauts, what impact would that have on the ability of emerging space companies to pursue innovation and design improvements made possible [as the industry has argued] by the accumulation of flight experience gained from commencing revenue operations unconstrained by a prior safety certification regime? Would it be in the interest of the emerging commercial orbital crew transportation industry to have to be reliant on the government as its primary/sole customer at this stage in its development?
The problem is, of course, that this will not be either an honest or informed discussion, because there are so many rent seekers involved. I was glad to see Patti stand up for commercial industry, though.
More hearing coverage and links over at Clark’s place.
[Update a few minutes later]
You’ll be as shocked as I am to learn that NASA (once again) lied to the Augustine panel and withheld information about Ares/Orion safety. Well, at least they’ve been honest about their costs. And schedule. Right?
I agree with Ray — this is Powerpoint engineering at its finest (which is to say, worst). I’ll be very interested to hear what Joe Fragola has to say about this at the hearing today.
[Mid-morning update]
Well, now we know what Fragola thinks:
Fragola says that Atlas 431 would likely not pass a safety review for crew missions since it uses solid strapon boosters.
OK, so strap-on solid boosters that have never had a failure, on a launcher with a clean record — unsafe. A giant solid first stage that has never served in that solitary role — safe. Got it.
[Update a few minutes later]
Another tweet from Jeff:
Gifford closing out hearing, thanks witnesses for “briliant” testimony. Says she sees no grounds for changing course based on safety.
Well, neither do I. The reasons for changing course is cost and schedule, not safety. In fact, I’d be happy with a system much less “safe” if it actually accomplishes useful things in space, which Ares never will, because it’s unaffordable.
[Update a few minutes later]
A lot more detail from Bobby Block over at the Orlando Sentinel:
Fragola said that the passage quoted by the Sentinel story from the Exploration Systems Architecture Study concluding that it would take at least seven flights (two test flights and five mission flights) before the Ares I and Orion crew capsule could to be deemed to be as safe as the shuttle referred to a more powerful configuration of Ares-Orion that used a liquid oxygen-methane engine and not the simpler lower performance configuration being designed today.
Of course, the very notion that one can know or even properly estimate the safety of a vehicle with so few flights under its belt remains absurd.
[Update late morning]
Clark Lindsey has what looks like a first-hand report.
[Late afternoon update]
NASA Watch has the prepared statements from the hearing.
APS has an explanation for the warm-mongers:
Science is the systematic enterprise of gathering knowledge about the universe and organizing and condensing that knowledge into testable laws and theories.
The success and credibility of science are anchored in the willingness of scientists to:
1. Expose their ideas and results to independent testing and replication by others. This requires the open exchange of data, procedures and materials.
2. Abandon or modify previously accepted conclusions when confronted with more complete or reliable experimental or observational evidence.Adherence to these principles provides a mechanism for self-correction that is the foundation of the credibility of science.
But, but…it’s settled! We have to save the planet!
I think I’ve found the pseudocode for Mann’s temperature charts:
input hockey_stick array
input year_data array
For each year (1000 - 2009) {
while (year_data_of_year less than hockey_stick_of_year) {
if (year_data_of_year less than hockey_stick_of_year) {
year_data_of_year += 0.1 degrees
}
}
plot year_data_of_year
}
See, nothing to it. Poor Harry wouldn’t have had so much frustration if he’d just stuck with the script.
If you want to follow the Climaquiddick events, in addition to Pajamas Media, the folks over at Planet Gore are all over the case on a pretty continual basis.
And via the latter, here is a list of hundreds of peer-reviewed (because we all know how important that is) papers outside the “consensus” of AGW.
Thoughts on Climaquiddick from Derek Lowe:
I have deep sympathy for the fellow who tried to reconcile the various poorly documented and conflicting data sets and buggy, unannotated code that the CRU has apparently depended on. And I can easily see how this happens. I’ve been on long-running projects, especially some years ago, where people start to lose track of which numbers came from where (and when), where the underlying raw data are stored, and the history of various assumptions and corrections that were made along the way. That much is normal human behavior. But this goes beyond that.
Those of us who work in the drug industry know that we have to keep track of such things, because we’re making decisions that could eventually run into the tens and hundreds of millions of dollars of our own money. And eventually we’re going to be reviewed by regulatory agencies that are not staffed with our friends, and who are perfectly capable of telling us that they don’t like our numbers and want us to go spend another couple of years (and another fifty or hundred million dollars) generating better ones for them. The regulatory-level lab and manufacturing protocols (GLP and GMP) generate a blizzard of paperwork for just these reasons.
But the stakes for climate research are even higher. The economic decisions involved make drug research programs look like roundoff errors. The data involved have to be very damned good and convincing, given the potential impact on the world economy, through both the possible effects of global warming itself and the effects of trying to ameliorate it. Looking inside the CRU does not make me confident that their data come anywhere close to that standard…
But why should we pay any attention to him? He is, after all, one of those Evil Scientists™ in the pay of Big Business, not a noble one trying to save the planet (with millions of dollars in government and left-wing grants).
As a commenter notes, the biggest casualty of this episode is the credibility of science itself. But if it saves us from those trying to save the planet from us, perhaps it’s worth the cost, if it can be regained.