Category Archives: Science And Society

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Science And Society

The Latest Warm-Monger Tactic

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Scaring us with bad science fiction isn’t going to work, either:

Science fiction writers used to focus on the horrors of nuclear war and frightened the willies out of readers for many decades. Public worry much more intense than anything the greens can gin up never got the nuclear disarmament movement over the hump — not because nuclear war isn’t bad, or because people weren’t scared, but because the nuclear disarmament movement’s policy ideas emanated from the same cloud-cuckoo-land that the green fantasies do.

Panic doesn’t turn an unworkable policy agenda into something that people can actually do. It can waste a lot of energy and time and cause otherwise capable people to sink months or years of their lives into leprechaun chases, and it can cause pandering politicians to gesture in the direction of your agenda without ever actually doing anything significant — but that is all. And it is not much.

It is, after all, fiction. Sort of like Al Gore’s book, but more entertaining.

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

Music To My Ears

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Al Gore is ranting in frustration that no one buys his climate BS any more.

[Mid-morning update]

Climate skepticism isn’t a fringe phenomenon:

CC. To what extent did you feel like you were standing alone in resisting the man-made climate change theory back in the 1990s?

“It was difficult. I knew that many of my colleagues at the Association of State Climatologists agreed with me. But many of them wouldn’t say anything because they were worried about losing their jobs or just plain having their professional lives made difficult. Frankly there’s a lot more money supporting the other side. Things would be easier if you just go along with them.”

CC. “You’d say that now there’s a lot more money supporting the man-made climate change side of the issue than there is on the side of the skeptics?

“Oh yes, it’s been that way for a long time.”

Yes, though you’d never hear it above the din of the screams about oil money.

[Update late morning]

Climate Depot responds to Gore’s rant.

[Bumped]

Humor, Political Commentary, Satire, Science And Society

Sometimes It’s Just Too Simple

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Scientists discover possible cause of the current heat wave:

“Our measurements indicate the massive amount of energy this thing gives off is able to travel 93 million miles and reach our planet is as little as eight and a half minutes,” said Professor Mitch Kivens, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology. “While we can’t see them, we’re fairly certain these infrared rays strike Earth’s surface, become trapped by the atmosphere, and just heat everything up like a great big oven.”

“We originally thought that if this star was producing temperatures of 100-plus in the South and Midwest, it must be at least 100 degrees itself,” Kivens added. “But it turns out it’s far, far hotter than that, with a surface temperature of nearly 10,900 degrees Fahrenheit.”

Kivens and his CalTech colleagues said this intense radiation, which results from constant nuclear reactions converting hydrogen to helium in the star’s core, could also account for why the orb in the sky is extremely bright and difficult to stare at directly.

Remember, correlation is not causation.

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

Does CO2 Cause Warming?

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…or does warming cause CO2?

Darn that pesky “correlation is not causation” thingie.

[Update a few minutes later]

This seems sort of related — does iron-rich dust cause ice ages?

The thinking goes that, during warm periods, much of the Southern Ocean is an oceanic desert because it lacks the iron crucial for plankton growth. That changes at the start of ice ages, when a wobble in the planet’s orbit causes an initial cooling that dries the continents, generates dust storms – particularly in central Asia – and sends dust onto the surface of the Southern Ocean.

The plankton that then bloom take the carbon they need from the water, causing the oceans to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to compensate. This cools the atmosphere further, creating yet more dust-producing regions, and the cycle continues, sinking Earth into an ice age.

When the planetary wobbles, known as Milankovitch cycles, eventually choke off the cooling, the feedback goes into reverse: continents warm, dust storms subside, the Southern Ocean is starved of iron, and CO2 levels in the atmosphere rise again.

Emphasis mine.