Over at First Things, John Murdock has some thoughts (including a discussion of me, Mark and the Mann suit), but there is also a howler:
Big decisions, whether in the life of a person or a nation often boil down to trust. America has been hemming and hawing for a while now, trying to decide if the 97 percent or so of climate scientists who say we have a big manmade problem are looking out for our best interest or are self-serving quacks.
Sorry, but this number has been debunked multiple times. It is simply false that 97% of scientists say that we have a “big manmade problem.” You can only get to such a ridiculous number by watering down what the “consensus” is about. Most scientists (including me) believe that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. Period. Once you get beyond that, to whether or not we are causing a significant change in the climate with emissions, let alone whether or not the results will be catastrophic, and need to be addressed with immediate public policy, the “consensus” falls completely apart. Anyone who believes in that nonsensus needs to go read this.
…And after SpaceX unveils the manned version of its previously unmanned Dragon spacecraft this week, NASA should accelerate development of the project
Yes, though unlike me, they don’t actually propose how to do that.
Here’s the miss, and it’s a big one:
and revive the Space Launch System to put super heavy payloads into orbit.
What does “revive” the SLS mean? I thought it was ahead of schedule? That’s what its proponents keep telling me.
And what “super heavy payloads” are there that need to be put into orbit? What does this have to do with dependence on the Russians? This recommendation seems to be a complete non sequitur.
Since Snowden took vast quantities of information, and nobody can be quite sure what information he took, Russia has gained a fabulous smokescreen for all of its actual intelligence operations in America. Russian possession of American secrets is no longer actionable evidence of Russian spies in America; the secrets, especially anything touching on surveillance and the NSA, might have come with Snowden. The logic of American counter-intelligence is broken for a generation. It is like issuing a new life to every Russian spy in America, and nine new lives to any spy in the NSA.
The science of climate change on decadal to century timescales most definitely is not settled, in spite of the IPCC’s highly confident proclamations. There are so many interesting and unsolved issues in climate dynamics. At this point, climate science seems relatively irrelevant for energy policies – the goals of carbon mitigation are in place, and whether anything meaningful can be achieved in the near term is doubtful. However, climate scientists are (in the words of Pointman) in a hurry towards some finishing line only they could see, and acted accordingly. I suspect that the IPCC becoming less and less relevant to the UNFCCC agenda.
I’m hoping that at some point soon, climate scientists will get fed up with trying to play politics with their science and get back to researching and debating these fundamentally interesting and unsolved issues in climate science, rather than attacking their colleagues for suggesting that there are other ways of thinking about climate change.
I think he’s being a little too hard on himself. As he says, he was young.
The first (and last) year I was eligible for the draft, I had a high number. If I’d gotten a notice, I’d have likely joined the Air Force, though my vision would have prevented me from being a pilot.
It’s what they do, it’s who they are. And as usual, the perp turns out to be one of them. And as a bonus, there’s this:
Beyond that, some might argue that Rodger was a prototypical liberal male, only carried to a pathological extreme. Consider the profile: socially awkward, convinced of his own brilliance but not notably successful in life, hungry for revenge against those who have done better despite their obvious inferiority, eager to gain power over others, but through political influence rather than firearms–is this not a typical liberal on Twitter, or elsewhere on the internet? Or, for that matter, in the Obama administration? Isn’t state power the legal path to the long-awaited revenge of the liberal nerds? This strikes me as a plausible suggestion.
Me, too.
I have to say, though, that it might help if we didn’t give him so much notoriety. In this case, though, it might not have mattered.
I gave him a copy of the book last weekend at ISDC. I just got an email telling me that at his own book signing in Colorado yesterday, he mentioned it, and that he was reading it.