Category Archives: Science And Society

Business, Economics, History, Political Commentary, Science And Society

Don’t Know Much About History

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In attacking his critics as “flat earthers,” Obama screws up.

Yes, people who, unlike him, actually understand the math and physics (and business prospects) of alternative and conventional energy are “flat earthers.”  Once again, the man is impervious to irony.  And how insufferable this kind of thing is.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Heh: “Obama in Tucson & today: “Make sure we talk with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds, you Flat-earthers.”

[Update a few minutes later]

Where Obama gets his history.

Doesn’t explain the Rutherford B. Hayes slander though. And against a man who was wounded four times freeing Obama’s ancestors. Wait, what?

[Update a while later]

Don’t know much about energy, either. The US has sixty times as much oil as Obama claims.

It’s almost as though he just makes stuff up.

[Update mid afternoon]

#BarackObamasPresidentialFacts:

“Purple Hayes” was the first Jim Hendrix song about a president.

They’re hilarious. I think I’ll steal MfK’s from comments and add it to the mix.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

Un-Manned

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The Journal takes on the Jerry Sandusky of climate science:

…for all his caviling about “smear campaigns,” “conspiracy theorists” and “character assassination,” Mr. Mann is happy to employ similar tactics against his opponents. Patrick Michaels, former president of the American Association of State Climatologists and a past program chair of the American Meteorological Society’s Committee on Applied Climatology, is introduced as “a prominent climate change contrarian at the University of Virginia primarily known for his advocacy for the fossil fuel industry.” (Nowhere does Mr. Mann explain why a scientist might be more easily corrupted by a check from, say, a coal company than by one from a politically controlled institution.)

Instead of molesting children, though, he molests the data and his critics.  But unlike Sandusky, Penn State continues to whitewash it.

Philosophy, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society, Weird

Adaptation

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Some have said that the cost-effective solution to climate change is to adapt (I’m in this camp). But I think this may be going overboard:

Some of the proposed modifications are simple and noninvasive. For instance, many people wish to give up meat for ecological reasons, but lack the willpower to do so on their own. The paper suggests that such individuals could take a pill that would trigger mild nausea upon the ingestion of meat, which would then lead to a lasting aversion to meat-eating. Other techniques are bound to be more controversial. For instance, the paper suggests that parents could make use of genetic engineering or hormone therapy in order to birth smaller, less resource-intensive children.

What could go wrong?

And of course, it’s all about the liberty:

It’s been suggested that, given the seriousness of climate change, we ought to adopt something like China’s one child policy. There was a group of doctors in Britain who recently advocated a two-child maximum. But at the end of the day those are crude prescriptions—what we really care about is some kind of fixed allocation of greenhouse gas emissions per family. If that’s the case, given certain fixed allocations of greenhouse gas emissions, human engineering could give families the choice between two medium sized children, or three small sized children. From our perspective that would be more liberty enhancing than a policy that says “you can only have one or two children.” A family might want a really good basketball player, and so they could use human engineering to have one really large child.

Yes, that’s what we really care about — a fixed allocation of greenhouse emissions per family.

More thoughts from Mark Wilson at Ricochet.