There’s a lot more to fat than we thought, and more of the right kind may actually be the key to losing weight.
Category Archives: Science And Society
More Exploding Watermelons
Here’s the latest from the fruit salad, over at The Independent:
The most progressive US president in a generation comes to the most important international meeting since the Second World War and delivers a speech so devoid of substance that he might as well have made it on speaker-phone from a beach in Hawaii. His aides argue in private that he had no choice, such is the opposition on Capitol Hill to any action that could challenge the dominance of fossil fuels in American life. And so the nation that put a man on the Moon can’t summon the collective will to protect men and women back here on Earth from the consequences of an economic model and lifestyle choice that has taken on the mantle of a religion.
I’m long on record of opposing the idiocy of inappropriate comparisons of the crisis du jour to Apollo. Is he really comparing a massive technological achievement of engineering to “summoning a collective will” (i.e., social engineering)? Apparently.
And when it comes to “taking on the mantle of a religion,” I can only suggest that he and his gaze long into a mirror.
Global Warming Models
…should be treated like horoscopes.
We now know that the models can’t even forecast the past (and they’re extremely shoddy work on inspection), and they want us to rely on them to make trillion-dollar decisions?
I Love The Sound
…of exploding watermelons in the morning:
Polly Toynbee is blaming the whole fiasco on false consciousness.
…Sometimes we’re inclined to dismiss Polly as a loveable comedy figure, what with her lovely house in Tuscany contrasting so amusingly with her prolier-than-thou politics, and the never ending japesomeness of her deft, lighter-than-air prose.
But you know what? When she reveals her true colours, as she does here, I think she’s really, really scary. Her whole article teeters on the brink of demanding an eco-fascist world government to save us all from ourselves.
Save us from people wanting to save us from ourselves.
Top Science Stories Of The Decade
Without getting into the issue of whether this year is the end of the decade, Alan Boyle has a list of science stories of the ten years of the double goose egg, of which this is definitely the last. I have a couple nits, though.
First, SpaceShipOne and the X-Prize had nothing to do with science really — they were engineering achievements. Spaceflight is not synonymous with science, and the notion that it is is one of the things that holds us back from doing more of it, and more cost effectively.
And if the 2007 Nobel prize to which he is referring was Al Gore’s, it had nothing to do with science either, unless it was bogus science, as his “documentary” was (for which the Oscar should also be revoked). It was a Peace Prize, not a science prize.
The Force Of The Gore Effect Is Strong In This One
Kyopenhagen abounded in irony, as all of these circuses do, but I found it quite delicious that Obama (and Pelosi, and many other DC denizens) had to rush home from a global warming conference to avoid getting shut out by an approaching blizzard* in the nation’s capital.
I would also note that, while I’m agnostic, I like the old phrase, “Men make plans, and God laughs.” This may put a dagger through the black heart of the health-care disaster, or at least its being passed by Christmas, which means that it may be dead for good (or at least this session, which will buy a lot of time after next year’s elections). But I won’t consider it over until it’s over.
* Yes, I do know the difference between climate and weather. When it’s warm, it’s climate; when it’s cold, it’s weather. Thanks for asking.
Pumping Air Back In The Balloon
Mann attempts to defend the manufactured consensus.
[Update a few minutes later]
Note, as usual, that he confines his defense to the emails, and never even attempts to address the much more damaging revelations from the models and data sets:
I cannot condone some things that colleagues of mine wrote or requested in the e-mails recently stolen from a climate research unit at a British university. But the messages do not undermine the scientific case that human-caused climate change is real.
Both true, and irrelevant. A straw man, in fact. The emails raise suspicion to tropospheric levels, but no, they don’t in themselves undermine the case. What does that is the clear cherry picking of station data and arbitrary “homogenization” that miraculously always results in a temperature increase.
[Mid-afternoon update]
Patrick Michaels isn’t impressed by the apologia:
Penn State and East Anglia have initiated “investigations” into Mann’s and Jones’s activities. Will Penn State request all of Mann’s e-mails from University of Virginia, where he was for the most of Climategate? Will the school comply? Will East Anglia clean out its massively politicized house?
Don’t hold your breath. Penn State gets over $750 million in federal-taxpayer dollars, and Jones alone received $22 million since the turn of the century. Because universities charge 50 to 125 percent “overhead” on research dollars, climate change is supporting a lot of humanities departments around the world.
So, the tragedy of Climategate is that we simply don’t know how many papers were rejected or simply not submitted because skeptics found it very difficult to publish in this climate. Does anyone seriously think Penn State and East Anglia are going to starve their English departments because of the activities of a few climate scientists?
Curiously, none of this — the attempts to rig the peer-reviewed literature, or the massive amounts of money that likely to influence any university investigations — were discussed in Mann’s Washington Post apologia.
Federal funding of higher education is one of the things that allows the academic bubble to stay inflated, and it’s a vast enabler of left-wing propaganda on campus, in addition to supporting fraud and corruption like this.
[Bumped]
Negative Cloud Feedback
Roy Spencer was allowed to give an interesting presentation at the AGU meeting in San Franscisco. I liked this comment:
I can’t help feeling that you might as well have stood before a flock of Archbishops, who were discussing the 7 days of creation, stating that there is evidence that the earth is actually several billion years old – and giving evidence to support your idea. The religious elite smile and nod, and say encouraging words.. “interesting way of seeing things, young man…” before moving on to discuss whether The Almighty drank coffee or iced tea during work breaks.
But this is an interesting point as well:
There seems to be great reluctance to consider the possibility that these computerized prophets of doom, which have required so many scientists and so much money and so many years to develop, could be wrong. I come along with an extremely simple climate model that explains the behavior of the satellite data in details that are beyond even what has been done with the complex climate models…and then the more complex models are STILL believed because…well…they’re more complex.
Besides, since my simple model would predict very little manmade global warming, it must be wrong. After all, we know that manmade global warming is a huge problem. All of the experts agree on that. Just ask Al Gore and the mainstream news media.
Let us stipulate that a valid model of climate prediction is going to be complex, or at least, the more complexity, the more likely it is that it is taking the necessary factors into account. That does not, in itself, render complexity a virtue, and it’s quite possible that a simple model will do a better job than a more complex, but flawed one. This sort of reminds me of Shuttle huggers who will say, with pride, that it is the most complex machine ever built, as though that were a feature and not a bug.
The Socialists’ Victory
Let’s ignore McKibben’s barmy notion that man has it in his power to control global climate by tinkering with CO2 output, and concentrate on that part of his tearful outburst that does make sense. Copenhagen never really had anything to do with “Climate Change”. Rather it was a trough-fest at which all the world’s greediest pigs gathered to gobble up as much of your money and my money as they possibly could, under the righteous-sounding pretence that they were saving the planet.
This nauseating piggery took two forms. First were the Third World kleptocracies – led by the likes of Hugo Chavez and Robert Mugabe – using “Global Warming” as an excuse to extort guilt-money from the Western nations.
Second, and much more dangerous, were the First World Corporatists who stand to make trillions of dollars using the Enron economics of carbon trading. Never mind all the talk of President Obama’s trifling $100 billion pledge. This is very small beer compared with the truly eye-watering sums that will be ransacked from our economies and our wallets over the next decades in the name of “carbon emissions reduction.”
Richard North has spotted this, even if virtually nobody else has. The key point, he notes, is the Copenhagen negotiators’ little-publicised decision to save the Kyoto Protocol. This matters because it was at Kyoto that the mechanisms for establishing a global carbon market were established. Carbon trading could not possibly exist without some form of agreement between all the world’s governments on emissions: the market would simply collapse. By keeping Kyoto alive, the sinister troughers of global corporatism have also kept their cash cow alive.
Fortunately, cap’n’tax remains DOA in the Senate.
Is The Dam Breaking?
Via a commenter, I see that James Randi, who has sort of a history of spotting scientific fraud, has apparently lost his mind and become a “denier”:
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — a group of thousands of scientists in 194 countries around the world, and recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize — has issued several comprehensive reports in which they indicate that they have become convinced that “global warming” is and will be seriously destructive to life as we know it, and that Man is the chief cause of it. They say that there is a consensus of scientists who believe we are headed for disaster if we do not stop burning fossil fuels, but a growing number of prominent scientists disagree. Meanwhile, some 32,000 scientists, 9,000 of them PhDs, have signed The Petition Project statement proclaiming that Man is not necessarily the chief cause of warming, that the phenomenon may not exist at all, and that, in any case, warming would not be disastrous.
Happily, science does not depend on consensus. Conclusions are either reached or not, but only after an analysis of evidence as found in nature. It’s often been said that once a conclusion is reached, proper scientists set about trying to prove themselves wrong. Failing in that, they arrive at a statement that appears — based on all available data — to describe a limited aspect about how the world appears to work. And not all scientists are willing to follow this path. My most excellent friend Martin Gardner once asked a parapsychologist just what sort of evidence would convince him he had erred in coming to a certain conclusion. The parascientist replied that he could not imagine any such situation, thus — in my opinion — removing him from the ranks of the scientific discipline rather decidedly.
History supplies us with many examples where scientists were just plain wrong about certain matters, but ultimately discovered the truth through continued research. Science recovers from such situations quite well, though sometimes with minor wounds.
I strongly suspect that The Petition Project may be valid.
Emphasis mine. I think that claiming that there is a “consensus” and that “the science is settled” are semantically equivalent to “I can’t imagine any such situation.” Such people are many things, but they are not people who truly respect, or even understand, science. They are politicians, encouraging political acts.
[Update a while later]
I’ve deleted my reference to Little Green Footballs, pending the outcome of an ongoing civil email conversation with Charles.