Just in case you haven’t had enough bad news lately, the new H1N1 virus strongly resembles the 1918 flu.
Category Archives: Science And Society
In Defense Of Cats
John Tierney versus the National Academy of Sciences.
Sunspots
They may finally be starting up again, after a long drought.
The Bogosity Of The BMI
Here.
We got a Wii fit a few months ago, and it tells me that my BMI is high, though within the normal range (23.5), and it’s always encouraging me to set a goal to lose weight, but I don’t think that 170 lbs on a 5’11” frame is overweight, particularly when my waist size is only a couple inches more than it was when I was a kid. We ought to start debunking this.
Catastrophe Avoidance
…is not a one-sided threat. For those people who don’t understand discount rates, a graphical presentation.
This is a problem that just begs to have a regret analysis performed on it. Of course, we have a media that can’t even do simple division, so why would we expect them to understand net present value?
[Update on Tuesday morning]
It’s the economic growth, stupid:
Here are some other metrics. The percentage of the world’s population that is at risk for coastal flooding is well under 1% in the baseline, and is not projected to rise close to 1% in any scenario within the 95-year forecast. Malaria deaths have historically been in effect eliminated by societies that achieve several thousand dollars per year of per capita income — the key risk here is once again slower economic growth that keeps parts of the developing world poorer longer.
Again and again, we see the same pattern: At least for the next century, changes in human welfare, even on metrics that are not purely economic, are fundamentally driven by changes in economic development, not AGW damages. This is why it makes sense to be focused acutely on risks to economic growth when considering the overall effects of any emissions-mitigation program.
Most people who advocate nonsense like cap and trade are ignorant of the science, but even more are ignorant of economics, including the “scientists.”
The Democrats’ War On Science
The EPA has quashed a politically incorrect study. Meanwhile, Jim Hansen, non-climate scientist, goes around shouting from the rooftops that he’s being silenced.
More here:
Less than two weeks before the agency formally submitted its pro-regulation recommendation to the White House, an EPA center director quashed a 98-page report that warned against making hasty “decisions based on a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data.”
The EPA official, Al McGartland, said in an e-mail message (PDF) to a staff researcher on March 17: “The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward…and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision.”
After all the complaints about the Bush administration’s “war on science,” the self-righteous hypocrisy of these people is sickening.
Flint, Without Us
It is returning to nature. A nice little photo essay.
There’s a quote from a New Yorker review of the book, The World Without Us
After thousands of years, the Chunnel, rubber tires, and more than a billion tons of plastic might remain, but eventually a polymer-eating microbe could evolve, and, with the spectacular return of fish and bird populations, the earth might revert to Eden.
Why do I think that the reviewer would look forward to that? Except, of course, he or she wants an Eden without either Adam, or Eve.
Is Our Reporters Learning?
The Evolution Of Good And Evil
As Joe Katzman says, it’s hard to know whether this should be comforting, or frightening:
Within fifty generations of this electronic evolution, co-operative societies of robots had formed – helping each other to find food and avoid poison. Even more amazing is the emergence of cheats and martyrs. Transistorized traitors emerged which wrongly identified poison zone as food, luring their trusting brethren to their doom before scooting off to silently charge in a food zone – presumably while using a mechanical claw to twirl a silicon carving of a handlebar moustache.
You might be upset by this result, scientific proof that those who say “Evil is utterly fundamental to human nature” actually understates the scope of the problem, there were also silicon souls on the side of the angels. Some robots advanced fearlessly into poison zones, flashing warning lights to keep other robots out of harms way.
This seems to be congruent with Axelrod’s work. I wonder if the successful ones use Tit for Tat?
So, do they have free will?
More Waxman-Markey Thoughts
It’s funny how so many liberals have become “realists” of late, insisting that we can’t expect to cajole sovereign nations into doing what we think is right if it’s not in their interests, but the same liberals insist that if we hobble ourselves with the dull-rusty axe of cap-and-tax, our example will inspire other nations to do likewise. Yes, yes, liberals will likely say that fighting global warming is in these nations’ interest, but they just don’t realize it. Well, maybe. But who are we to tell these countries what their interests are? Isn’t that the sort of imperial hubris these folks usually denounce? Regardless, there’s zero evidence and sub-zero reason to believe that countries such as China and India will ever be inspired by our action on global warming.
As he says, W-M may not accomplish much, but at least it’s expensive.