Category Archives: Science And Society
Music To My Ears
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]
Sometimes It’s Just Too Simple
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.
Does CO2 Cause Warming?
…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.
Count Me In
Rasmussen says that almost 70% of adults think that scientists have been falsifying data in climate change research. A bit of good news amidst the coming economic apocalypse.
Don’t Try This At Home, Kids
And now for something completely different — a man who is splitting atoms on his kitchen table. Bill Joy, call your office.
The Man Who Fights Death
I have more thoughts on Bob Ettinger’s deanimation over at Pajamas Media.
Who Are You Going To Believe?
The climate models, or the lying empirical evidence?
The new NASA Terra satellite data are consistent with long-term NOAA and NASA data indicating atmospheric humidity and cirrus clouds are not increasing in the manner predicted by alarmist computer models. The Terra satellite data also support data collected by NASA’s ERBS satellite showing far more longwave radiation (and thus, heat) escaped into space between 1985 and 1999 than alarmist computer models had predicted. Together, the NASA ERBS and Terra satellite data show that for 25 years and counting, carbon dioxide emissions have directly and indirectly trapped far less heat than alarmist computer models have predicted.
But let’s not let a little pesky science get in the way of social justice.
[Update a while later]
Gee, whaddaya know? A “climate researcher” who implied that our SUVs were drowning polar bears is being investigated for “integrity issues.”
It’s just the ninety percent of them who make the rest look bad.
[Update late afternoon]
Weep not for the polar bears: James Delingpole piles on.
The Shuttle Is Retired
…and the planet is saved. I’ll leave it to commenters to find all the errors. My favorite is making a fuel stop at Uranus.
The Father Of Transhumanism
…has deanimated:
In 1947 Ettinger wrote a short story elucidating the concept of human cryopreservation as a pathway to more sophisticated future medical technology: in effect, a form of “one-way medical time travel.” The story, “The Penultimate Trump”, was published in the March, 1948 issue of Startling Stories and definitively establishes Ettinger’s priority as the first person to have promulgated the cryonics paradigm: principally, that contemporary medico-legal definitions of death are relative, not absolute, and are critically dependent upon the sophistication of available medical technology. Thus, a person apparently dead of a heart attack in a tribal village in the Amazon Rainforest will soon become unequivocally so, whereas the same person, with the same condition, in the emergency department of large, industrialized city’s hospital, might well be resuscitated and continue a long and healthy life. Ettinger’s genius lay in realizing that criteria for death will vary not just from place-to-place, but from time-to-time. Today’s corpse may well be tomorrow’s patient.
Ettinger waited for prominent scientists or physicians to come to the same conclusion he had, and to take a position of public advocacy. By 1960, Ettinger realized that no one else seemed to have grasped an idea which, to him, had seemed obvious. Ettinger was 42 years old and undoubtedly increasingly aware of his own mortality. In what may be characterized as one of the most important midlife crisis in history, Ettinger reflected on his life and achievements, and decided it was time to take action. He summarized the idea of cryonics in a few pages, with the emphasis on life insurance as a mechanism of affordable funding for the procedure, and sent this to approximately 200 people whom he selected from Who’s Who In America. The response was meager, and it was clear that a much longer exposition was needed. Ettinger observed that people, even the intellectually, financially and socially distinguished, would have to be educated that dying is (usually) a gradual and reversible process, and that freezing damage is so limited (even though lethal by present criteria) that its reversibility demands relatively little in future progress. Ettinger soon made an even more problematic discovery, principally that, “…a great many people have to be coaxed into admitting that life is better than death, healthy is better than sick, smart is better than stupid, and immortality might be worth the trouble!”
I’ve never understood the resistance, either.
Rest in peace, but not in perpetuity.
[Update early afternoon]
Adam Keiper has a link roundup over at The New Atlantis, with a promise of more to come.
[Another update a few minutes later]
This is the first time I became aware that Mike Darwin (long-time cryonics pioneer) has a blog. I’ll have to add it to the blogroll.