We’re on break now until 10:50 AM PDT (actually, MST, but same thing), when Charles Miller will speak on what looks to be a proposal to actually resurrect a NASA-like entity. But meanwhile, Jonah Goldberg makes an interesting point about Al Gore and the Warm-mongers:

It’s funny, the same people who insist that dissent is the highest form of patriotism when it comes to the war, suddenly think you’re a moronic bastard or environmental traitor if you want to debate global warming a bit more, even when the solutions being discussed could cost

Louise Riofrio is having problems with academics. Check out the previous two posts as well for the whole story.

Al Gore is going to testify on global warming today, in about half an hour. Bjorn Lomborg will be on the second panel. Unfortunately, they won’t be debating each other, which is something I’d pay to watch. I think that Gore would get eviscerated.

[Going to check the schedule]

It’s going to be carried on CSPAN3, if you don’t have the bandwidth.

[Checking DirecTV schedule]

Dang. I only get CSPAN and CSPAN2.

Here’s an interesting article on precursors of morality in apes.

[Via Alan Boyle]

This post by Ron Bailey on whether or not parents might do things to help ensure that their offspring are straight reminds me of this post of mine from a while back:

Suppose we find that there is something different about the brains of gay men and women (a proposition for which there’s already abundant and growing evidence). If we can come up with an affordable, painless therapy that “fixes” this and converts them from “gay” to “straight,” should we a) allow them to take advantage of it, or b) forbid them from doing so, or c) require them to? And should “straight” (i.e., exclusively heterosexual) people be allowed to become gay, or bi?

These are the kinds of issues that separate me from conservatives.

Here’s a guy who wants to solve global warming by mimicking volcanoes:

For two years after Pinatubo erupted, the average temperature across the Earth decreased by 0.6C.

The volcano’s location close to the equator helped make Pinatubo the perfect model for explaining how sulphur in the stratosphere could reduce global warming.

Instead, controversially, he wants to duplicate the effects of volcanic eruptions and create a man-made sulphur screen in the sky.

His solution would see hundreds of rockets filled with sulphur launched into the stratosphere. He envisages one million tonnes of sulphur to create his cooling blanket.

A million tonnes. This would be a great market for suborbital vehicles.

If you can deliver a ton per flight, that would be a million flights. Let’s say that the marginal cost per flight is a hundred thousand or so (I think we can do a lot better than that). That would be a hundred billion dollar program. That seems like a bargain compared to many of the nostrums currently proposed. And boy would it give us a flight rate.

Of course, someone over at Free Republic pooh poohs it, because he doesn’t understand the concept. Even if one were to use a Titan (can’t be done–they’re out of production), the payload he quotes for it is to GEO. Just tossing stuff up in the atmosphere, you could probably get a hundred tons at a time. In fact, even if they were still in production, a Titan would be the worst conceivable choice for this mission. Deltas would make a lot more sense–clean propellants, and new vehicles with a high-rate production line, and their upper-stage performance issues would be irrelevant, since they wouldn’t need one. But it would be crazy to do it with expendables of any kind.

With suborbitals, I’d think you could do a hundred flights a day out of a given spaceport. If there are a ten spaceports scattered around the world, that’s a thousand flights per day. At that rate, you’d get the stuff up in three years.

Eric Scheie wonders why the global warming scolds don’t scold us about eating meat.

Razib asks.

One of the early proponents of anthropogenic global warming has changed his mind:

His break with what he now sees as environmental cant on climate change came in September, in an article entitled “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” in l’ Express, the French weekly. His article cited evidence that Antarctica is gaining ice and that Kilimanjaro’s retreating snow caps, among other global-warming concerns, come from natural causes. “The cause of this climate change is unknown,” he states matter of factly. There is no basis for saying, as most do, that the “science is settled.”

Let the inquisition begin.

I found this over at Free Republic. I also found it cute.

And Andrew Bolt talks about the problem with offsets, and the “do what we say, not what we do” hypocrisy:

…there’s a moral problem. Offsets are really best suited for people rich enough — like Gore — to afford them.

They let the rich pay someone else to use less so they can use more. And so the aristocrat can party on under the chandeliers, while the power-rationed peasants sit out in his dark.

Of course, one hypocrite like Gore shouldn’t discredit an entire cause. Yet it can’t be an accident that global warming attracts more hypocrites than most faiths.

There’s Tim Flannery, criss-crossing the world by jet to tell us to use less oil.

There’s British PM Tony Blair lecturing Britons to cut their emissions, but declaring it “unreasonable” to expect him therefore to stop flying off on his overseas holidays.

And there’s Prince Charles booking out all of a jet’s first and second class to fly to New York to accept a green award from Gore.

Ah, Gore again. Which reminds me of Laurie David, one of the producers of Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.

David, too, demands we save the world by cutting our gasses, yet turns out to be as addicted to private jets as her friend Al.

Asked recently to explain such inconvenient hypocrisy, David spluttered: “Yes, I take a private plane on holiday a couple of times a year.”

But — and here’s where she shows she’s nobler than you — “I feel horribly guilty about it.”

See? The global warming faith is more about how you feel than what you actually do. Even the makers of An Inconvenient Truth demonstrate that. What a circus.