Why they (that is to say, we) are winning.
[Update a while later]
Peter Gleick and America’s [other] dumbest criminals.
Category Archives: Science And Society
Catastrophic Global Warming
…is it like the Millennium Bug?
As he says, it’s pseudoscience in the service of politics. Of course, the nice thing about the Millennium Bug was that we knew to the second when it would occur.
Second Breakfast
…and second sleep? This is fascinating.
I often do wake up in the middle of the night and have trouble getting back to sleep. I generally do after an hour or two, but it means I don’t get enough sleep the second time, because I have to get up for work. Who knew that this was natural? The problem is that you really have to get to bed early in order to do it, because it means you need ten consecutive hours to get your sleep instead of eight. I found this interesting, too, and completely unsurprising:
…the majority of doctors still fail to acknowledge that a consolidated eight-hour sleep may be unnatural.
“Over 30% of the medical problems that doctors are faced with stem directly or indirectly from sleep. But sleep has been ignored in medical training and there are very few centres where sleep is studied,” he says.
So doctors are as ignorant about the science of sleep as they are about nutrition.
The President’s Energy Speech
The five biggest whoppers. And those are just the biggest ones.
[Update a couple minutes later]
“We’re focused on production.”
Fact: While production is up under Obama, this has nothing to do with his policies, but is the result of permits and private industry efforts that began long before Obama occupied the White House.
Obama has chosen almost always to limit production. He canceled leases on federal lands in Utah, suspended them in Montana, delayed them in Colorado and Utah, and canceled lease sales off the Virginia coast.
His administration also has been slow-walking permits in the Gulf of Mexico, approving far fewer while stretching out review times, according to the Greater New Orleans Gulf Permit Index. The Energy Dept. says Gulf oil output will be down 17% by the end of 2013, compared with the start of 2011. Swift Energy President Bruce Vincent is right to say Obama has “done nothing but restrict access and delay permitting.”
And this is worthy of comment:
Obama said in his speech that Americans aren’t stupid. He’s right about that, which is why most are giving his energy policy a thumbs down.
Actually, it’s not clear that he’s right about that. The fact that he was elected president would seem to be evidence against the proposition.
[Update a few minutes later]
Rising gas prices: all part of Obama’s plan? All you had to do was to listen to what he was saying in the 2008 campaign.
While this position may be slightly unfair to the President (Mr. Chu was not yet in the Administration at the time he made the remarks, so any link between it and administration policy is tenuous), the quote devastatingly reveals just how tone-deaf and myopic white-collar, progressive intellectualism can be. The delusion that jacking up energy prices is part of a “good government” agenda is one of the pieces of insanity that keeps the blue intelligentsia from consolidating its position as a natural governing class.
More surprising here is that Politico is jumping on the bandwagon—although it notes that Chu’s remarks have been detrimental to Obama, the piece laments that the goal of raising gas prices doesn’t get the sympathetic attention it obviously deserves, given the support of numerous “experts.” With thinking like this dominating media and intellectual circles, it’s little wonder that the mainstream media is perceived as elitist and out of touch.
I disagree that the link between Chu’s remark and policy is “tenuous” at all. He was appointed precisely because he believes such nonsense. And in this case at least, the perception is the reality.
You Know Who Are The Real “Deniers”?
Two Sets Of Ethos
An interesting example of how climate skeptics treat private documents versus the settled-science types:
…no skeptic I know of, including me, has yet “outed” the early drafts and author notes contained in Phil Jones JGR account. It would have been easy to do so, to publish Dr. Jones first submitted draft for the broadest peer review possible on the Internet. But no skeptic (that I know of as of this writing) did.
That’s a distinction of difference compared to the actions of people who created Fakegate via potentially criminal actions.
There’s a world of ethical difference between an Anthony Watts and a Peter Gleick. But we’re the ones they want to shut up, or herd off to the reeducation camps.
Teaching The Controversy
Some useful thoughts on science education and climate from Judith Curry.
Climatologists Don’t Know Clouds
…at all.
As I wrote a couple days ago:
I deny that we understand the complex and chaotic interactions of the atmosphere, oceans and solar and other inputs sufficiently to model them with any confidence into the future, and I deny that it is unreasonable and unscientific to think that those who [believe they] do suffer from hubris.
There may be some time in the future that we understand climate as well as they think they do, but I don’t think it will be soon, and I wouldn’t bet that it will ever happen.
The Green Movement Jumps The Shark
Between Rajenda Pachauri and Peter Gleick, the international green movement has displayed a penchant for colorful personalities. But the root cause of the green meltdown is not the flawed personalities and eccentric ethical standards some greens display. The problem has been that the greens tried to stick the world with a monstrous and unworkable climate control system through the flawed medium of a global treaty. This project is so expensive, so poorly conceived and, in fact, so naive and unthinking, that greens increasingly felt their only hope to get their agenda adopted involved scare tactics.
Like Dean Acheson addressing the communist menace, they were “clearer than truth.” They stretched evidence, invented catastrophes — vanishing glaciers, disappearing polar bears, waves of force five hurricanes sweeping up the coast, the end of snow — to sell their unsalable dream. Not all greens were this irresponsible, but many prominent spokespersons and journalists working with the movement were; ultimately the mix of an unworkable policy agenda and a climate of hype and hysteria holed the green ship below the waterline.
Of contemporary mass movements, the green movement has been consistently the most alarmist, the least constructive, the most emotional, the least rational, the most intolerant and the most self righteous. What makes it all sad rather than funny is that underneath the hype, the misstatements, the vicious character attacks on anyone who dissented from the orthodoxy of the day, and the dumbest policy ideas since the Kellogg-Briand Pact that aimed to outlaw war, there really are some issues here that require thoughtful study and response.
Unfortunately, we’re not going to get it from people who are reflexively anti-human socialists, such as John Holdren.
The Climate Insanity
[Wednesday-morning update]
I have a piece up a PJMedia about the latest climate fraud.
[Below was posted yesterday]
“…has just jumped upward a big notch.”
Also, Peter Gleick’s remarkable confession. Remarkable in the sense that it’s probably continued lying.
[Bumped]