Nuremberg-style trials for global warming skeptics?

Next time they call people fascists, some of these folks need to look in the mirror.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Jonah Goldberg (with whom I had the pleasure of chatting for a few minutes last night) has related thoughts.

So much of the demonization of conservatives from liberals in the last fifty years has worked on a formula which goes something like this: “I want use the state to impose my dreamy good intentions. Conservatives are evil. So, if they get ahold of government they will use government to do evil in the same way that we would do good.”

Several health reasons why s3x is good for you. Particularly as you get on in years.

This isn’t surprising, given human nature, and the evolutionary process that developed it. It’s in our genes to distrust “the other.”

But one of the features of the Anglosphere is its ability to build trust institutions, even in the face of physical diversity. I’d like to see some cultural cross comparisons. Any takers on further thoughts?

Speaking of hurricanes, while the Atlantic remains quiet, the biggest storm of the season so far is pounding the Phillippines, and due to hit Manila directly. It unexpectedly went from a tropical storm to a Category 4 typhoon in twenty-four hours. It just shows that we have a long way to go to be able to predict these things. It also shows that we don’t pay much attention to tropical cyclones unless they affect the US, because I haven’t seen anyone reporting it.

Anyway, the lack of predictability brings up our immediate dilemma. We’re about to go out of town for ten days. Should we shutter up before we leave (which would be a royal pain, amidst the other packing)? It seems unlikely that there will be a storm that hits south Florida during the first week of October, but you never know.

Read Professor Pielke.

I was amused at the unintended irony of this story at the BBC:

President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, John Holdren told the BBC that the climate was changing much faster than predicted.

What does that say about their ability to make predictions?

This may be a breakthrough for obesity:

After the volunteers had eaten, Dr Batterham took blood samples from them every 30 minutes for an hour and a half, and measured the concentration of peptide YY. As she suspected, it was the high-protein meal that coaxed the greatest production of the peptide.

Having proved the point in people, she then turned to a more reliable laboratory animal

This is interesting. Many human social rules carry over into cyberspace.

I just got review copies of Chris Mooney’s book, The Republican War On Science, and James Lovelock’s most recent work, The Revenge Of Gaia. Both titles seem a little overwraught to me, and I’ve already expressed skepticism on Chris Mooney’s thesis. But I’ll report anon, after reading them.

I’m puzzled by this post by Clayton Cramer, who thinks:

I am prepared to believe (at least for sake of argument) that all of these complex mechanisms could have developed as a result of blind, random chance. But what are the chances that all of these complex mechanisms managed to develop in less than 700 million years? More importantly, what are the chances that cells that blindly, randomly developed one of these structures or enzymes were the ancestors of cells that blindly, randomly developed all the rest of these useful mutations?

On my planet, 700 million years is a really long time. Is there some kind of mathematical analysis that he’s done to indicate that it’s for some reason insufficient?

I think that part of the problem is his continued use of variations of the phrase “blind, random chance.” This is a common misperception among evolution skeptics (who have apparently never read “The Blind Watchmaker” or other books that describe how evolution actually works). They seem to think that it stumbles around blindly, as though it were like the million monkeys randomly typing Shakespeare attempts. In fact it is directed–it simply isn’t directed by intelligence. It’s directed by what works. If a mutation occurs that has an advantage in the environment, it is preserved, and the next generation builds on it.

Imagine the monkeys, except when one of them accidentally gets a letter of the sonnet right, they don’t have to type that part any more–it’s preserved in their next attempt, and they just bang on the keys to fill in the spaces around it. Each time they get one right, it becomes more sonnet like. If the sonnet has, say a couple thousand characters, then the monkey might get each one right within a few dozen keystrokes (assuming that he’s really typing randomly, and not skipping some keys entirely–which is an interesting analog to the concept of future development paths limited by existing morphology, described in Gould’s book The Panda’s Thumb). Even with thousands of characters, a rapidly typing simian would pound out the poem in a couple days, while having no knowledge of what he’s doing.

I’m puzzled by this post by Clayton Cramer, who thinks:

I am prepared to believe (at least for sake of argument) that all of these complex mechanisms could have developed as a result of blind, random chance. But what are the chances that all of these complex mechanisms managed to develop in less than 700 million years? More importantly, what are the chances that cells that blindly, randomly developed one of these structures or enzymes were the ancestors of cells that blindly, randomly developed all the rest of these useful mutations?

On my planet, 700 million years is a really long time. Is there some kind of mathematical analysis that he’s done to indicate that it’s for some reason insufficient?

I think that part of the problem is his continued use of variations of the phrase “blind, random chance.” This is a common misperception among evolution skeptics (who have apparently never read “The Blind Watchmaker” or other books that describe how evolution actually works). They seem to think that it stumbles around blindly, as though it were like the million monkeys randomly typing Shakespeare attempts. In fact it is directed–it simply isn’t directed by intelligence. It’s directed by what works. If a mutation occurs that has an advantage in the environment, it is preserved, and the next generation builds on it.

Imagine the monkeys, except when one of them accidentally gets a letter of the sonnet right, they don’t have to type that part any more–it’s preserved in their next attempt, and they just bang on the keys to fill in the spaces around it. Each time they get one right, it becomes more sonnet like. If the sonnet has, say a couple thousand characters, then the monkey might get each one right within a few dozen keystrokes (assuming that he’s really typing randomly, and not skipping some keys entirely–which is an interesting analog to the concept of future development paths limited by existing morphology, described in Gould’s book The Panda’s Thumb). Even with thousands of characters, a rapidly typing simian would pound out the poem in a couple days, while having no knowledge of what he’s doing.