He was one of the greats of early blogging, and a brilliant man in many fields. I have to confess that I feel partially responsible (though I’m sure I was far from alone) in chasing him away from blogging with an ill-thought email. I think I later apologized, but if I didn’t, Steven, if you can read this, please accept my deepest apologies.
[Tuesday-morning update]
More thoughts from Jim Geraghty.
Take a break from this absurd depressing election with a tour of a 35,000-year old French cave. Check out the slide show.
…and other joint cartilage, from noses.
Faster please. Though I do have to say it sort of reminds me of the end of Sleeper.
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has seen the impact site. Burn was ten times too short, fell from 2-4 kilometers, almost-full tanks probably exploded on “landing.”
But they think it was a software error, which is good news.
…to global greening. Thoughts from Matt Ridley:
Suppose I am right and our grandchildren find that we were greatly exaggerating the risks, and underestimating the benefits of CO2.
Suppose they do indeed experience carbon dioxide levels of 600 parts per million or more, but do not experience dangerous global warming, or more extreme weather, just a mild and decelerating increase in global average temperatures, especially at high latitudes, at night and in winter, accompanied by spectacular global greening and less water stress for both people and crops.
Does it matter that our politicians panicked in the early 2000s? Surely better safe than sorry?
Here’s why it matters. Our current policy carries not just huge economic costs, which hit the poorest people hardest, but huge environmental costs too.
We are encouraging forest destruction by burning wood, ethanol and biodiesel.
We are denying poor people the cheapest forms of electricity, which forces them to continue relying on wood for fuel, at great cost to their health.
We are using the landscape, the rivers, the estuaries, the hills, the fields for making energy, when we could be handing land back to nature, and relying on forms of energy that nature does not compete for – fossil and nuclear.
But there is a further reason why it matters. Real environmental problems are being neglected. The emphasis on climate change as the pre-eminent environmental threat means that we pay too little attention to the genuine environmental problems in the world.
We bang on about ocean acidification when it is overfishing and run-off that is most hurting coral reefs.
We misdiagnose climate change as the cause of floods when it is land drainage and urban development that is the cause.
We claim climate change as the cause of extinctions, when it is invasive species that disrupt and damage ecosystems and drive out rare species.
We say climate change is a threat to air quality, when it is climate policy that has hindered progress in improving air quality.
We talk about losing seabird colonies to warming seas and then build wind farms that slaughter the birds while turning a blind eye to overfishing.
Here’s why I really mind about the exaggeration: it has downgraded, displaced and discredited real environmentalism, of the kind I have devoted part of my life to working on.
I have worked on wildlife conservation projects in India, Pakistan and elsewhere. Climate change is the least of the problems facing birds like the western tragopan, the lesser florican, the cheer pheasant and the grey phalarope, rare species that I once studied and published peer-reviewed papers about.
The climate obsession has used up money and energy and political will that could have been used for getting rid of grey squirrels, for protecting coral reefs, for preventing deforestation and overfishing, for weaning the rural poor in Africa off bushmeat and wood fuel.
Yes.
I wrote earlier today that I don’t worry about increased concentrations of plant food in the atmosphere. This is part of the reason why.
I hadn’t realized the degree to which CRISPR has revolutionized disease treatment. And the possibility of treating sickle cell would be a huge medical boon to the black community.
Researchers have figured out how to get mice to do it. Seems like the same thing should work in humans. Between this sort of thing, stem cells, and brain-controlled exoskeletons and prosthetics, it’s a much better world for those paralyzed. Faster, please.
The climate debate has an epistemological problem that proponents of policy to deal with it want to pretend doesn’t exist. I wrote about the flawed precautionary principle years ago.
Is Elon religious enough to do it?
I don’t know, but I think there will be room for plenty of religions off planet, including new ones.
[Update a while later]
A new paper from the White House called “Making Human Settlement of Space a Reality” that contains almost nothing that would actually enable human settlement of space.
[Afternoon update]
Adam Routh wants to do Apollo again.
What is the import of Lorenz? Literally ALL of our collective data on historic “global atmospheric temperature” are known to be inaccurate to at least +/- 0.1 degrees C. No matter what initial value the dedicated people at NCAR/UCAR enter into the CESM for global atmospheric temperature, it will differ from reality (from actuality – the number that would be correct if it were possible to produce such a number) by many, many orders of magnitude greater than the one/one-trillionth of a degree difference used to initialize these 30 runs in the CESM-Large Ensemble. Does this really matter? In my opinion, it does not matter. It is easy to see that the tiniest of differences, even in a just one single initial value, produce 50-year projections that are as different from one another as is possible(see endnote 1). I do not know how many initial conditions values have to be entered to initialize the CESM – but certainly it is more than one. How much more different would the projections be if each of the initial values were altered, even just slightly?
This has always been pretty obvious to me. What does it mean? That we cannot model it into the future with any confidence whatsoever.