A translation guide:
It’s particularly useful for papers on catastrophic anthropogenic global warming.
This is nutty on multiple levels:
They argue that they have a constitutional right to a safe climate, that they have a right to receive from us a planet that supports all life, just as our forebears gave us.
Even ignoring that there is no such “right,” what the hell is a “safe” climate?
And I love this:
We know without a doubt that gases we are adding to the air have caused a planetary energy imbalance and global warming, already 0.8 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times. This warming is driving an increase in extreme weather, from heat waves and droughts to wildfires and stronger storms (though mistakenly expecting science to instantly document links to specific events misses the forest for the trees).
Got that? We know that carbon is causing extreme weather events, but don’t expect us to provide any scientific basis for it.
Hansen is a loon.
Jon Goff has another post up on utilizing the upper atmosphere of Venus.
This time, it’s personal:
How could any doctor in his/her right mind write such a prescription for an 86 year old, totally paralyzed man who has normal cholesterol? Even one who has elevated cholesterol? After about age 50, the higher the cholesterol, the greater the longevity. So, again, why would anyone write a prescription for a non-benign drug to an elderly patient? Plus, the chance for rhabdomyolysis is greater in the elderly who take statins as well as those who are taking a ton of other drugs, as is my dad. It’s a set up for disaster with no potential upside to balance the risk. It is blind stupidity to prescribe a statin under these circumstances.
And not just any old statin. The script was for a large dose of Lipitor, a fat-soluble statin. Fat soluble statins are much more likely to be involved in drug interactions, and they can induce insulin resistance and possibly cause diabetes. If you’re going to give an unnecessary drug, why wouldn’t you at least give one with the fewest side effects?
As I’ve noted in the past, I think that nutritional witch-doctory killed my own father a third of a century ago.
[Update a few minutes later]
A debate on the science of statins.
Some thoughts on their application to climate policy, in response to Judith Curry’s take.
As I noted on Twitter, two points. First, there really is no good physical case to be made that warmer global temperatures results in more extreme weather events. Storms are heat engines, driven by temperature differences, not total enthalpy. Also, I wrote about the fallacy of the precautionary principle as applied to climate policy four years ago.
…is crumbling:
I am a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society and a Certified Consulting Meteorologist. To the best of my memory I never had a chance to respond to this poll of the AMS membership.
That said, the fact that 70% of scientists say that humans affect the climate is utterly unsurprising. That has been known scientifically since Changnon’s METROMEX study in the early 70′s. The fact that 9 out of ten that publish on the subject of climate believe humans affect the climate is also utterly unsurprising.
For me, the money question was #6, “How worried are you about global warming?” Only 30% answered “very worried.” This would make 70% of the respondents “deniers” since that perjorative term seems to be applied to anyone who does not accept the “IPCC consensus” of catastrophic global warming. A statistically similar number (28%) is not worried or “not very worried” about global warming.
So, you can spin the results any way you want but this survey of a small number of AMS members doesn’t reveal any great concern about global warming.
Yup. All of this talk about consensus is just an attempt to bully people into their socialist “solutions” to a non-existent problem.
A new protein has been found that may be effective against them.
Faster, please.
Jon Goff has an interesting blog post. Also, scroll through recent entries for a lot of useful speculation about utilizing Venerian resources. In many ways, Venus is a more interesting candidate for colonization than Mars is.
…is unscientific:
It seems to make no difference that those challenging the doomsday narrative include some of the world’s most distinguished scientists, or that numerous experts in climatology and related earth sciences have repeatedly gone public with their critiques. To climate ideologues, they’re invisible. “Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous,” President Obama tweeted in May.
Really? That’s not what the American Meteorological Society learned from a recent survey of its professional members. Only a bare majority, 52 percent, said that climate change is largely being driven by human activity. Scientists with a “liberal political orientation” were much more likely to regard global warming as human-caused and harmful, the survey’s authors found — in fact, as a predictor of respondents’ views on global warming, ideology outweighed greater expertise. “This would be strong evidence against the idea that expert scientists’ views on politically controversial topics can be completely objective,” the authors observe.
In that light, consider the findings of a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change. Of 117 global warming predictions generated by climate-model simulations, all but three “significantly” overestimated the actual amount of warming that occurred during the past 20 years. The models typically forecast that global surface temperature would rise by more than twice as much as it did.
Why would so many scientists have relied on models that turned out to be so wrong? The authors propose several plausible explanations — volcanic eruptions? solar irradiation? — but their bottom line is that climate science still has a long way to go: “Ultimately the causes of this inconsistency will only be understood after . . . waiting to see how global temperature responds over the coming decades.”
That understanding won’t be advanced one millimeter by ideologues who thunder that the “science is settled.” Perhaps all those climate models wouldn’t have been programmed to overpredict global warming if the pressure to conform to the alarmists’ view weren’t so pervasive.
Ya think?
[Update a while later]
Global warming “proof” is evaporating:
Mind you, the term “pause” is misleading in the extreme: Unless and until it resumes again, it’s just a “stop.” You don’t say a bullet-ridden body “paused” breathing.
Remarkably, that stoppage has practically been a state secret. Just five years ago, the head of the International Panel on Climate Change, the group most associated with “proving” that global warming is man-made and has horrific potential consequences, told Congress that Earth is running a “fever” that’s “apt to get much worse.” Yet he and IPCC knew the warming had stopped a decade earlier.
Those who pointed this out, including yours truly, were labeled “denialists.” Yet the IPCC itself finally admitted the “pause” in its latest report.
The single most damning aspect of the “pause” is that, because it has occurred when “greenhouse gases” have been pouring into the atmosphere at record levels, it shows at the very least that something natural is at play here. The warmists suggest that natural factors have “suppressed” the warming temporarily, but that’s just a guess: The fact is, they have nothing like the understanding of the climate that they claimed (and their many models that all showed future warming mean nothing, since they all used essentially the same false information).
This is junk science. I would note to Mr. Fumento, though, that educated people knew the earth was round centuries before Columbus.
What headlines would look like there.
Obviously, I disagree with the one on global warming. “Consensus” is not a scientific term. And even if it were, it’s not close to 90%.