Rand’s fictional progressives don’t want Reardon Metal to succeed any more than their modern, real-life equivalents want shale gas to succeed.
Why not? For the same rag-bag of made-up, disingenuous reasons which progressives have used to justify their war on progress since time immemorial: it’s unfair, it uses up scarce resources, it might be dangerous. Rand doesn’t actually use the phrase “the precautionary principle.” But this is exactly what she is describing in the book when various vested interests – the corporatists in bed with big government, the politicised junk-scientists at the Institute of Science (aka, in our world, the National Academy of Sciences or the Royal Society), the unions – try to close down the nascent technology using the flimsiest of excuses.
It was supposed to be a cautionary tale, not an instruction manual.
…here we see a major problem with IAM-based climate policy analysis: The modeler has a great deal of freedom in choosing functional forms, parameter values, and other inputs, and different choices can give wildly different estimates of the SCC and the optimal amount of abatement. You might think that some input choices are more reasonable or defensible than others, but no, “reasonable” is very much in the eye of the modeler. Thus these models can be used to obtain almost any result one desires.
How (politically) convenient.
As I retweeted, they’re worse than useless to the degree that people trust them for policy decisions.
So why, pray tell, do we spend so much time talking about suburban sprawl and sport utilities, and so little time talking about FedEx and European vacations?
The question answers itself, doesn’t it? Giving up air travel and overnight delivery is much more personally costly for the public intellectuals who write about this stuff than giving up a big SUV. If you live in one of the five or six major cities that contain virtually everyone who writes about climate change, having a small car (or no car), is a pretty easy adjustment to imagine. On the other hand, try to imagine giving up far-flung vacations, conferences, etc. — especially since travel to interesting locales is one of the hidden perks of not-very-well remunerated positions at universities, public policy groups, nongovernmental organizations, and yes, news organizations.
One interesting aspect of this new survey is the unmistakably alarmist bent of the survey takers. They frequently use terms such as “denier” to describe scientists who are skeptical of an asserted global warming crisis, and they refer to skeptical scientists as “speaking against climate science” rather than “speaking against asserted climate projections.” Accordingly, alarmists will have a hard time arguing the survey is biased or somehow connected to the ‘vast right-wing climate denial machine.’
Another interesting aspect of this new survey is that it reports on the beliefs of scientists themselves rather than bureaucrats who often publish alarmist statements without polling their member scientists. We now have meteorologists, geoscientists and engineers all reporting that they are skeptics of an asserted global warming crisis, yet the bureaucrats of these organizations frequently suck up to the media and suck up to government grant providers by trying to tell us the opposite of what their scientist members actually believe.
I have added James Taylor to my list of people that I can’t trust a word they say. That article is a travesty, as are the ones he links to about meteorologist. How dare he say “only 36% of scientists” when the study studied geoscientists who work at Alberta petroleum? Pathetic. Or claim in the other links that “only a minority 30% is very worried about global warming”, ignoring that the study said an additional 42% are _somewhat_ worried. I’m not a big believer in AGW, but the man is obviously in the business of fooling people. You shouldn’t link him either.
Noted for future reference. But the point remains that a) the 97% number is bogus and b) the models are broken.
I started drinking coffee a few weeks ago, primarily for medicinal purposes (a couple cups in the morning). I don’t really enjoy it, and I’ve never noticed any mental effect from doing so. If I didn’t make a pot for her every morning, I probably wouldn’t bother. When I skip a day, I don’t notice anything, either. So maybe I’m sort of impervious to its effects. Of course, that could also mean that I’m not getting any of the hoped-for health benefits of drinking it.
I’m not surprised. They don’t know WTF they’re doing. As I’ve said before, climate modeling is an interesting exercise, but it’s insane to base policy on it.
“At the heart of it, introverts and extroverts respond really differently to stimulation,” Susan Cain, author of Quiet: The Power Of Introverts In A World That Can’t Stop Talking, tells The Huffington Post. “Introverts feel most alive and energized when they’re in environments that are less stimulating — not less intellectually stimulating, but less stuff going on.”
Many workplace set ups undermine introverted employees by failing to accommodate their personalities and productivity styles — over-stimulation and excessive meetings can easily stunt their full brain power. One study showed that when introverts and extroverts are given math problems to solve with various levels of background noise playing, introverts do best when the noise is lower, while extroverts perform better with louder noise, Cain told Harvard Business Review.
Ignoring the business implications, this might explain why some people like loud restaurants, while others (e.g., me) detest them. I can be social when I need to, but my default setting is introversion, and if I’m with a group that wants to go to the Hard Rock Cafe, I have no qualms whatsoever about saying “No way.” There’s not going to be any useful social interaction when I can’t hear myself think, let alone someone else talk. I can’t imagine why anyone would ever want to do that, but EPID.