I think this is the future of space science.
Category Archives: Science And Society
Trump, And Climate
Thoughts from Judith Curry. tl;dr He’s not crazy:
In my post Trumping the elites, I stated that Trump’s election provided an opportunity for a more rational energy and climate policy. Many in the blog comments and the twitosphere found this to be an incomprehensible statement.
Here is what I think needs to be done, and I do see opportunities for these in a Trump administration:
- a review of climate science that includes a faithful and transparent representation of uncertainties in 21st century projections of global and regional climate change
- reopening of the ‘endangerment’ issue, as to whether warming is ‘dangerous’
- a do-over on assessing the social cost of carbon, that accounts for full uncertainty in the climate model simulations, the integrated assessment models and their inputs.
- support funding for Earth observing systems (satellite, surface, ocean) and research on natural climate variability.
Even if politics are to ‘trump’ the conclusions of these analyses, it would be clear that the Trump administration has done its due diligence on this issue in terms of gathering and assessing information. If the Trump administration were to accomplish the first 3 items, they might have a scientifically and economically defensible basis for pulling out of the Paris agreement and canceling Obama’s Clean Power Plan.
I noted the other day on Twitter that if Myron is the new EPA administrator, we’ll finally have one who is not a rabid environmentalist, and will follow the law, doing actual cost/benefit analyses. As a bonus, many EPA employees may quit (though it’s unclear if they have any marketable skills outside of government).
A Trump Space Program
I don’t understand where this talk about a return of Mike Griffin is coming from. I’d be very surprised if either Bob Walker or Mark Albrecht would recommend that.
[Update a few minutes later]
Not space related, but here is a report on potential cabinet members. Needless to say, I’m not as hair on fire as Jerry Coyne is. Bolton would be a good choice for Secretary of State. I think that Corker would be a disaster. Not sure about Newt.
I think, from a space perspective, the worst thing about the Trump win is that Jeff Sessions has been such a close supporter. If he becomes head of OMB, killing off SLS will be impossible, unless we can come up with something more useful for Marshall to do.
Arrival
This looks like an interesting movie.
Men And Women’s Brains
You’ll be as shocked as me to learn that they’re different.
The War On Sat Fat
More and more people are starting to spread the word on how scientifically insane it is, including a physician who is a former vegan. Not that I care about Bill Clinton’s health, but it’s nice to see that he’s gotten off that idiotic low-fat diet. It was probably killing him and he didn’t even know it.
Whole-Fat Dairy
Five reasons you should be eating it. No one should be eating low-fat dairy, or low-fat food in general. It’s all an abomination based completely on junk nutritional science over decades.
I should note that Costco only sells zero-fat Fage yogurt (last I checked). They make a 2%, but not a whole-fat version. But Trader Joe’s has started to make a whole-milk version, and it tastes great, and is only two bucks, compared to $2.67 for lower-fat versions, and more than that for Fage.
Climate McCarthyism
Wikileaks exposed it, from Podesta and Steyer:
Since the fivethirtyeight.com uproar, Pielke has quit publishing about climate change. He’s gone on to become a world-leading expert on sports and doping. He now heads the Sports Governance Center at the University of Colorado, which is housed within the university’s athletics department. He has more than 8,000 followers on Twitter and is an active, maybe rabid, tweeter. “I’m having a blast,” he told me. Working on climate change, he said, “you wake up, it’s the same people arguing about the same stuff. In sports, you have no idea what idea you will be writing about. . . . There’s so much going on. There’s so much upheaval.” What lessons did he learn from his stint in the climate-change discussion? He replied that the debate is “almost religious in its intensity.” Instead of having a rational discussion about the best ways to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, the debate has become solely “about power, about who gets to speak and whose voices are deemed legitimate.” The smear campaign against him by Romm and ThinkProgress was designed “to make public speech costly.”
The lawsuit against me and others is mentioned as well. What fascists these people are.
Steven DenBeste
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.
Paleolithic Art
Take a break from this absurd depressing election with a tour of a 35,000-year old French cave. Check out the slide show.