Category Archives: Social Commentary

Science And Society, Social Commentary

Second Breakfast

14 Comments

…and second sleep? This is fascinating.

I often do wake up in the middle of the night and have trouble getting back to sleep. I generally do after an hour or two, but it means I don’t get enough sleep the second time, because I have to get up for work. Who knew that this was natural? The problem is that you really have to get to bed early in order to do it, because it means you need ten consecutive hours to get your sleep instead of eight. I found this interesting, too, and completely unsurprising:

…the majority of doctors still fail to acknowledge that a consolidated eight-hour sleep may be unnatural.

“Over 30% of the medical problems that doctors are faced with stem directly or indirectly from sleep. But sleep has been ignored in medical training and there are very few centres where sleep is studied,” he says.

So doctors are as ignorant about the science of sleep as they are about nutrition.

Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary

The Climate Fraud

8 Comments

Ross Kaminsky called it:

If those climate alarmists who went after me (for what I said explicitly in my note was “my speculation”) had any honor, they would not just apologize, but feel some guilt for being associated with the religion of climate change whose high priests could sink to identity theft because they feel “frustration” at not being able to get the rest of the country to join their rent-seeking, anti-human cult.

In the meantime, I take some satisfaction in believing, though I’ll never know for sure, that my article gave Mr. Gleick some incentive to confess, before the FBI agent came to his door. Or perhaps he just didn’t want to spend the money on a new (non-Epson) scanner.

Note also the comments from Judith Curry, who has been one of the few people in the climate community actually acting like a scientist.

[Update a few minutes later]

The Johann Hari of climate “science.”

Kind of funny the sort of people they’ll hand out “Genius Awards” to.

[Update a couple minutes later]

But it was only a first offense: Gleick has apparently been removed from the AGU Task Force on Scientific Ethics. Gee, I’d have thought he’d be a poster boy.

[Update a few minutes later]

Related: Don’t know much about science books.

[Update a while later]

In apologizing, Gleick blames his victims:

Once you begin to believe that the success of the Cause justifies deceit and theft, how long until you begin making excuses for other crimes committed on behalf of the Cause? I do not accuse Peter Gleick and his fellow fanatics of any Stalinist ambitions, but when we see them engaged in Stalinist methods — publishing forged documents to smear their critics – aren’t we justified in suspecting that they are not otherwise honest?

Actually, I suspect that some of them harbor Stalinist ambitions (e.g., Holdren). What a piece of work this guy is.