Causes and implications of it.
The biggest implication is that the models are worse than useless as a guide to policy on climate. And places like California are taking a wrecking ball to their economy for nothing.
Category Archives: Science And Society
Tomatoes
Climate Activists Behaving Badly
Roger Pielke on the warm-mongers Internet antics. I look forward to his book.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Related: The president’s (anti)Science Advisor.
The Holdren appointment was just one among an appalling many.
The New Climate Agenda
…is apparently personal score settling. Holman Jenkins discusses the Mann suit, and the “exonerations.”
Also, Jim Lindgren weighs in on them.
Climate Scientists
Some of them aren’t all that impressed with Professor Mann.
A Climate Skeptic
The thought experiment that made him one:
I think any physical scientist should be extremely skeptical that a long-term stable system is dominated by positive feedback. Systems dominated by positive feedback — and we are talking about incredibly high implied feedback percentages to get to these catastrophic forecasts — don’t tend to be very stable, but it is Michael Mann himself who has argued over and over with his hockey stick chart that past temperatures have only varied in very narrow ranges for thousands of years. Not the behavior one would expect of a system dominated by strong positive feedbacks.
To me, this thought experiment demonstrated that it was more likely that net climate feedbacks were zero or even negative (if only half of past warming was due to man, and half due to nature, it would imply a sensitivity around 0.7C). In either case, the resultant warming would be far from catastrophic. To believe the IPCC forecasts, one would have to believe there were either really long time delays, or natural and manmade cooling factors off-setting the warming. These have all been debated and I won’t go into them today, but I didn’t find the higher forecasts of 5-10C to be at all credible.
I don’t, either.
The Mann Apology
More from Charles W. Cooke.
The Fossil Record
…doesn’t have a daily box score.
This is something that creationists don’t understand.
What Is Life?
This is an interesting interview, but Beck seems to be confusing “life” and “consciousness.” The appropriate answer to his question is something that self replicates using local resources, but that has nothing to do with AI, or uploading.
Seven Unhealthy Foods
…that turn out to be good for you. It’s hard to reconcile this, though:
…he scientific consensus on whether saturated fats are bad for us is changing. Now researchers are stressing that saturated fats like coconut oil actually lower bad cholesterol in our bodies.
With this:
If you consider popcorn something to douse with “butter-flavored topping” and shovel in your mouth at the multiplex, then keep it on the “bad” list. A study by the Center for Science in the Public Interest has concluded that movie theater popcorn—a medium tub, mind you—has 1,200 calories and 60 grams of the worst kind of saturated fat.
So what is the “worst kind of saturated fat”? I see nothing wrong with butter on popcorn (and to the degree there is, it’s the popcorn, not the butter).
She also reinforces the myth that “low calories” = “healthy.”