I’ve really got to start paying more attention to this stuff, because my blood pressure has gotten ridiculously high to the point where I need to be pretty drastic about it.
Category Archives: Science And Society
The Climate-Change Gravy Train
How well paid are the warm-mongers? Looks like nice work to me, if you can get it, and all you have to do is go along with the politically correct status quo. I don’t know of anyone who’s done as well by scepticism. But then, the latter are being true to standards of science.
[Update a few minutes later]
The EPA person responsibility for regulating CO2 levels doesn’t know what the current level is. The country’s in the very best of hands.
Asking The Important Questions
Is it really possible to freeze your cojones off?
Well, over half of us are safe.
The USDA
…continues its wholesale manslaughter of innocent Americans. The food pyramid isn’t as bad as it used to be, but it remains disastrous. It was exactly this kind of dietary advice that killed my father, over three decades ago.
Good Question
In the midst of appropriately ridiculing Al Gore, Charles Krauthammer raises an interesting point:
Look, if Godzilla appeared on the Mall this afternoon, Al Gore would say it’s global warming…
[Laughter]
…because the spores in the South Atlantic Ocean, you know, were. Look, everything is, it’s a religion. In a religion, everything is explicable. In science, you can actually deny or falsify a proposition with evidence. You find me a single piece of evidence that Al Gore would ever admit would contradict global warming and I’ll be surprised.
OK, so how is the global warming religion falsifiable? What would it take?
Why I Eat Saturated Fats
Because they taste good, and they have essentially no relationship with coronary risk:
Overall, the literature does not offer much support for the idea that long term saturated fat intake has a significant effect on the concentration of blood cholesterol. If it’s a factor at all, it must be rather weak, which is consistent with what has been observed in multiple non-human species (13). I think it’s likely that the diet-heart hypothesis rests in part on an over-interpretation of short-term controlled feeding studies. I’d like to see a more open discussion of this in the scientific literature. In any case, these controlled studies have typically shown that saturated fat increases both LDL and HDL, so even if saturated fat did have a small long-term effect on blood cholesterol, as hinted at by some of the observational studies, its effect on heart attack risk would still be difficult to predict.
Actually, I have a simpler explanation — it’s simply an appealing theory, from a common-sense standpoint. You are what you eat, right?
Of course, it’s always dangerous to rely on “common sense” when it comes to complex topics like biochemistry. And yet the FDA builds such murderous concepts as the food pyramid on such shoddy research and thinking. Not to mention agri-industry lobbying, of course.
Educating The Ineducable
Before sending his critics off to the reeducation camps, John Holdren might want to learn a little himself.
Credentialed, not educated.
Faster, Please
Researchers at Scripps have converted skin cells directly to heart muscle:
“This work represents a new paradigm in stem cell reprogramming,” said Scripps Research Associate Professor Sheng Ding, Ph.D., who led the study. “We hope it helps overcome major safety and other technical hurdles currently associated with some types of stem cell therapies.”
I found this an interesting (and flawed) analogy, though:
“In 11 days, we went from skin cells to beating heart cells in a dish,” said Ding. “It was phenomenal to see.”
Ding points out the protocol is fundamentally different from what has been done by other scientists in the past and notes that giving the cells a different kind of signal could turn them into brain cells or pancreatic cells.
“It is like launching a rocket,” he said. “Until now, people thought you needed to first land the rocket on the moon and then from there you could go to other planets. But here we show that just after the launch you can redirect the rocket to another planet without having to first go to the moon. This is a totally new paradigm.”
Actually, I don’t know anyone who thought that except for people who were promulgating a straw-man argument against the Vision for Space Exploration. For instance, some claimed that Bush’s plan was foolish because it proposed “building a Kennedy Space Center on the moon.” But the plan was never to land on the moon, and then depart from there for other planets. It was to utilize the resources of the moon to provide propellants and other consumables to interplanetary ships already in orbit, and save the expense of launching them all from earth. It may well be that this is equally economically impractical in the near term, but it’s not what the critics (and the Scripps researcher) seem to think it is.
By the way, the article says that these researchers are scientists, but I think they’re engineers. Or perhaps some blend of both.
The Wrong Solution
We might be able to save the planet via artificial meat, but for some reason…
In a typical Malthusian-panic green response, one group recommends going vegan to save the planet. But Dr. Mironov has another approach: grow the stuff in labs without all the methane. I have no idea whether this will work at all or whether the meat produced that way will taste more like Kobe beef than like the anonymous gray ‘mystery meat’ they used to feed us when I was a promising young sprout back in pundit school. But if Dr. Mironov is even partly right, the dynamics of the world’s food supply, energy use and atmospheric composition are very, very different from what the greens say.
You would think that smart greens genuinely interested in saving the planet would be all over Dr. Mironov’s work like white on rice. You would think that the vast and well organized enviro-agricultural lobbies like the ones that brought us ethanol and the enviro-industrial lobbies like the ones bringing us bad electric cars and expensively subsidized alternative energy sources would be pumping billions or at least hundreds of millions into a relatively simple scientific concept that, if successful, would make the world cleaner while dramatically raising the living standards of much of the world’s population by making a high protein diet more accessible and sustainable.
It’s almost as though they had a different agenda than the one they claim.
The Narrative Continues To Collapse
Himalayan glaciers aren’t retreating, they’re advancing. But don’t worry, the usual suspects will be along shortly to assure us that it’s due to global warming.