Category Archives: Science And Society

Culinary, Health, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Obesity, Diet And Calories

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Another blow to the mindless thermodynamic theory, and hope for a breakthrough:

Slimming bacteria work their magic in either of two ways, studies of gut microbiota show. They seem to raise metabolism, allowing people to burn off a 630-calorie chocolate chip muffin more easily.

They also extract fewer calories from the muffin in the first place. In contrast, fattening bacteria wrest every last calorie from food.

Transferring slimming bacteria into obese people might be one way to give them the benefits of weight-loss surgery without an operation. It might also be possible to devise a menu that encourages the proliferation of slimming bacteria and reduces the population of fattening bacteria.

I’ve always been thin, regardless of what I ate (though as I got older, I did put on a few pounds, which came back off when I went paleo), and have never felt particularly virtuous about it. I don’t have much patience for thin people who lecture fat ones about their caloric intake. People do have different metabolisms, and what you eat can affect it, but the “diet and exercise” nazis don’t want to believe it.

Business, Economics, Humor, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary

Poor Poor Pitiful Mann

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The involuntary public figure. And Monckton is piling on:

I, too, can name-drop sanctimoniously, just like Michael E. Mann.

Meanwhile, I’ve also been subject to a constant onslaught of character attacks and smears on websites, in op-eds, by a politicized and now-discredited clerk in the House of Lords acting without the authority of the House, in Michael E. Mann’s Climategate emails, and on left-leaning news outlets, usually by front groups or individuals tied to global-warming profiteers of the traffic-light tendency (the Greens too yellow to admit they’re really Reds): groups like Greenpeace, Deutsche Bank, the Environmental Defense Fund, Munich Re, and the World Wide Fund for Nature.

As the website WattsUpWithThat has frequently pointed out, climate researchers are in a street fight with those who seek to discredit the data that now comprehensively disprove the once-accepted scientific “evidence” simply because it is inconvenient for many who are profiting from attacking fossil fuel use.

Being the focus of such attacks has a lead lining: I’ve become an accidental public figure in the debate over human-caused climate change. Reluctant at first, I remain reluctant embrace this role, but nevertheless I choose to use my position in the public eye to inform the discourse surrounding the issue of climate change.

Despite continued albeit diminishing skepticism in official quarters, in reality the evidence against dangerous human-caused climate change is now very strong. By digging up and burning fossil fuels, humans are releasing carbon that had been buried in the Earth into the atmosphere, helping to stave off the mass extinctions that would follow from the next – and long overdue – Ice Age. And storms like extra-tropical system Sandy and hurricane Irene, and the oft-precedented heat, drought, and wild-fires of last summer cannot in logic, reason, or science be attributed to “global warming” that has become conspicuous chiefly by its near-total absence over the past two decades and perhaps more. In a deterministic climate object operating on a rational world, that which has not happened cannot have caused that which has.

If we continue down this path of lavishly-funded nonsense, we will be leaving our children and grandchildren a different planet—one with more extreme Socialism, more pronounced and widespread scientific illiteracy, worse episodes of cant even than those of Michael E. Mann (if that were possible), and greater competition for diminishing taxpayer subsidies. It will be worse than we ever thought.

My emphasis. As a commenter at JunkScience noted, that’s bumper sticker material, there.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

A Change On Climate Change

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The Economist comes to its senses:

The mismatch between rising greenhouse-gas emissions and not-rising temperatures is among the biggest puzzles in climate science just now. It does not mean global warming is a delusion. Flat though they are, temperatures in the first decade of the 21st century remain almost 1°C above their level in the first decade of the 20th. But the puzzle does need explaining.

The mismatch might mean that—for some unexplained reason—there has been a temporary lag between more carbon dioxide and higher temperatures in 2000-10. Or it might be that the 1990s, when temperatures were rising fast, was the anomalous period. Or, as an increasing body of research is suggesting, it may be that the climate is responding to higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in ways that had not been properly understood before. This possibility, if true, could have profound significance both for climate science and for environmental and social policy.

No kidding.

The models are, and always have been, junk science, and it is insane to make costly public policy decisions based on them.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary

The Socialist Paradise

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…of Venezuela:

Apologists for Chavez mentor Fidel Castro blame Cuba’s sixty years of economic problems on the US embargo. If it weren’t for Uncle Sam, they say, Castro would have built a socialist paradise by now.

Venezuela is the test for this talking point. Not only is there no US embargo in Venezuela, but the country also has huge oil reserves. And what does it have? Food and medicine and foreign currency shortages.

There are very real theoretical reasons, based on fundamental human nature, why socialism doesn’t work, and empirically fails everywhere it’s tried. But it’s also human nature to wish it would work, so those ignorant or in denial of those reasons continue to try it. Or to try to defeat human nature by creating the New Soviet Man, at the point of a gun.

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

A Whistle-Blowing Scientist

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…sues UCLA for his job:

The lawsuit filing provides a troubling description of how fraud was used to impose draconian environmental regulations on California enterprises, which is one of the many reasons why California is deemed by CEOs nationwide as the “worst place to do business”.

As he notes, “liberals” only like whistleblowers when they blow the whistle on conservatives.