This seems to be my experience, except that our current cat almost never talks. I think it may be a genetic defect (she also has a kink in her tail). Her communication is almost entirely non verbal.
Category Archives: Science And Society
An All-Beef Diet
Here’s a family that would drive the FDA and food nazis nuts. They’d probably call Child Protective Services. But the kids look pretty healthy to me.
Obesity
A cardiologist says that it’s not caused by lack of exercise, it’s caused by sugar and carbs.
I think the comparison with the tobacco industry is apt, but I disagree that it should be regulated. We just need to educate.
Climate “Denial”
It is clear from all this that Cook et al. are UNFCCC/IPCC ideologues. There is nothing wrong per se with ideology; it is the ideologues that are the problem – absence of doubt, intolerance of debate, appeal to authority, desire to convince others of the ideological “truth”, and a willingness to punish those that don’t concur. They need to look in the mirror and understand their own motivated reasoning.
Phil Plait is such a disappointment on this topic.
Climate Change And Extreme Weather
People like Seth Borenstein were excited to link to this paper yesterday.
Study: You can pretty much blame human-caused climate change for 3/4 of ultra hot days; http://t.co/LbkJg1Body pic.twitter.com/3pYaD5OXq0
— seth borenstein (@borenbears) April 27, 2015
“This new study helps get the actual probability or odds of human influence,” said University of Arizona climate scientist Jonathan Overpeck, who wasn’t part of the research. “This is key: If you don’t like hot temperature extremes that we’re getting, you now know how you can reduce the odds of such events by reducing greenhouse gas emissions.”
Lead author Erich Fischer, a climate scientist at ETH Zurich, a Swiss university, and colleague Reto Knutti examined just the hottest of hot days, the hottest one-tenth of one percent. Using 25 different computer models. Fischer and Knutti simulated a world without human-caused greenhouse gas emissions and found those hot days happened once every three years.
Then they calculated how many times they happen with the current level of heat-trapping gases and the number increases to four days. So three of the four are human caused, the team said.
This is crap science, because it’s based on crap models, that have been failing.
Interestingly, even Kevin Trenberth agrees with me:
“The paper is interesting and has some results that may be reasonably OK,” he said. “However, the paper is based almost entirely on models with little or no validation or relations to the real world. None of the models do precipitation realistically, and some are quite bad.”
You don’t say. Garbage in, garbage out.
The Tragedy Of Nepal
My thoughts on natural disasters, climate change, risk, and economics.
[Monday-morning update]
Related thoughts from David Hagen, over at Climate, Etc.
Global Warming Data
A new investigation into how much it’s been “adjusted.”
Treating Alzheimer’s
Faster, please.
Personhood For Non-Humans
Elizabeth Price Foley is appalled at some recent court decisions, and the trend.
I’ve got mixed feelings on this. I agree that they shouldn’t be given full human rights, but I do think we should make distinctions as a function of intelligence, and perhaps even recognize some degree of moral agency (e.g., dolphins). It also raises the issue of how we would treat extraterrestrials as a function of those things.
Dean Ornish
First, Nina Teichholz, and now Scientific American dismantles the quack.
[Early-afternoon update]
Should we eat meat? Thoughts from (of all people) Bill Gates.