“My district will be underwater in a few short years.”
Well, if by “a few short years” you mean perhaps centuries, maybe. On the other hand, it’s more likely that Chicago could be under a mile of ice.
Category Archives: Science And Society
Obama’s Five-Year Plan
…for the climate:
Speaking at Georgetown University on Tuesday, President Barack Obama outlined his “new national climate action plan,” which amounts to a federal top-down five-year plan—although he has only four years to implement it. Obama’s plan ambitiously seeks to control nearly every aspect of how Americans produce and consume energy. The goal is to cut the emissions of greenhouse gases and thus stop boosting the temperature of the earth. The actual result will be to infect the economy with the same sort of sclerosis seen in other centrally planned nations.
This is doubly hubristic: that he thinks he knows what’s happening with the climate, and that he thinks he know what best to do about and that it will work.
The Climate Models
On the verge of failure.
It’s an interesting exercise to attempt to model climate, but the notion that we should base public policy on these toys, particularly given the incompetence of many of those doing it, is insane.
[Update a while later]
It’s worth quoting the conclusions here:
It is impossible to present reliable future projections from a collection of climate models which generally cannot simulate observed change. As a consequence, we recommend that unless/until the collection of climate models can be demonstrated to accurately capture observed characteristics of known climate changes, policymakers should avoid basing any decisions upon projections made from them. Further, those policies which have already be established using projections from these climate models should be revisited.
Assessments which suffer from the inclusion of unreliable climate model projections include those produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the U.S. Global Climate Change Research Program (including the draft of their most recent National Climate Assessment). Policies which are based upon such assessments include those established by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency pertaining to the regulation of greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act.
In other words, all of the president’s latest job- and wealth-destroying power grab.
[Update a few minutes later[
Failure deniers– the problem with public-sector science:
Private companies which kill products or ideas administer the pain quickly and move on. If government ever tries to end a program or operation — “ever” is the operative word, as Ronald Reagan frequently noted: ”The nearest thing to eternal life we will ever see on this earth is a government program” — they go about it slowly, in hopes that outraged politicians or constituents will come to their rescue. If total termination ever occurs, they call it “a learning experience,” which of course was carried out with other people’s money, and rarely includes any learning.
Because they can do it with other peoples’ money. Time to take their (that is, our) money away.
Obama’s Climate Speech
I’m not sure that distinguishes it from any of his other speeches.
Environmental Groups
How they’re destroying the environment.
Limits To Growth
The authors of the report were wrong about everything:
The Limits of Growth got it so wrong because its authors overlooked the greatest resource of all: our own resourcefulness. Population growth has been slowing since the late 1960s. Food supply has not collapsed (1.5 billion hectares of arable land are being used, but another 2.7 billion hectares are in reserve). Malnourishment has dropped by more than half, from 35 percent of the world’s population to under 16 percent.
Nor are we choking on pollution. Whereas the Club of Rome imagined an idyllic past with no particulate air pollution and happy farmers, and a future strangled by belching smokestacks, reality is entirely the reverse.
In 1900, when the global human population was 1.5 billion, almost 3 million people – roughly one in 500 — died each year from air pollution, mostly from wretched indoor air. Today, the risk has receded to one death per 2,000 people. While pollution still kills more people than malaria does, the mortality rate is falling, not rising.
Nonetheless, the mindset nurtured by The Limits to Growth continues to shape popular and elite thinking.
Because it gives them an excuse to run our lives for us.
[Update a couple minutes later]
I agree with Glenn: “Personally, I’ll be more impressed if we’re ever warned of a pending doom whose aversion won’t require giving a lot of power to bureaucrats, technocrats, and other hangers-on while being left poorer and more constrained ourselves. Because no matter what the crisis being propounded, the remedy always seems to be the same…”
The President’s Energy-Efficiency Initiative
Four problems with it.
Only four?
And the other problem is that a lot of Republicans (like Rob Portman) go for this nuttiness.
HoustonDallas Space Hacker Workshop
The one up in Silicon Valley was apparently a success, and Citizens in Space is doing another one:
There is still time to sign up the Space Hacker Workshop takes place July 20-21 at the Frontiers of Flight Museum at Love Field. The workshop is sponsored by Citizens in Space, a project of the United States Rocket Academy, and SpaceGAMBIT, an international collaboration of citizen scientists operating through makerspaces, hackerspaces, and community groups.
At the two-day workshop, citizen scientists and hardware hackers will learn how to do “space on the cheap”. Participants at the workshop will learn how they can build and fly experiments in space, and even fly in space as citizen astronauts, through the Citizens in Space program.
Citizens in Space has purchased 10 flights on the XCOR Lynx spacecraft, now under construction at the Mojave Air and Space Port, which will be made available to the citizen-science community.
“We’re looking for 100 citizen-science experiments and 10 citizen astronauts to fly as payload operators,” Citizens in Space project manager Edward Wright said. “The Space Hacker Workshop will provide participants with information and skills needed to take advantage of our free flight opportunities.
“This is an opportunity for citizen scientists to develop and test new technologies in space, to collect microorganisms from the extreme upper atmosphere, to experiment with new processes for creating new materials; and do many more cool things.”
Andrew Nelson of XCOR Aerospace will be on hand to discuss the Lynx spacecraft. Experts from NASA and industry will discuss the research professional scientists have done in the past, prospects for new research on low-cost suborbital spacecraft such as Lynx, and opportunities for citizen scientists to build on the shoulders of NASA giants.
Three citizen-astronaut candidates will also be on hand, to discuss the Citizens in Space astronaut selection and training process.
Admission for the event is $129 at the door. Tickets are limited and the event may sell out. Online registration is available at spacehackerdfw.eventbrite.com.
The last one was oversubscribed, I think.
Obama’ Idiotic Energy Speech
He’ll only approve the pipeline if it won’t add to “carbon pollution.”
It’s a stupid question. Of course it won’t “add to carbon pollution.” Only in a fanciful, unicorn-fart world in which the oil that will be flowing through the pipeline will be left in the ground if it isn’t built is this an issue. We know that the Canadians are already cutting deals to sell the oil to China. In that case, moving it there in ships will generate even more carbon than moving it through a pipeline (not to mention increasing the chances of oil spills on the Pacific coast). So if you’re really worried about carbon, and you’re smart, you should be urging the construction of the pipeline. But we know that for opponents of the pipeline (possibly including the president) at least one, and possibly both of those conditions don’t apply.
Joe Bastardi
How dare he dispute that noted scientific journal, Rolling Stone?