Indeed I am. That’s great, great news. And that he goes down in such flames of hypocrisy is all the more delicious. The Greeks had another H-word for this, ending in “ubris.”
And when he does, New York gets its first black governor. I wonder if he’d be able to win reelection? We may find out.
And you’d think that Wall Street (which hated him, with good reason) would be celebrating, but the Dow is down. I guess that higher oil prices overrode any “Ding Dong, the witch is dead” feelings.
Michael Totten has a report from an interesting area of Iraq, with some cautionary words:
Be wary of any “expert” who says they know what’s going on everywhere in Iraq. It’s impossible to have both a general and a granular understanding of that country in real time. You can know one area well, or you can know several areas superficially, but you cannot have an intimate understanding of the entire country while it’s in upheaval and flux. It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve been there or how how many articles and languages you read.
One of the reasons I don’t pay much attention to the trolls in the comments section.
Over at Jonah’s place:
“We must know our IMMIGRANT’s pedigrees. They are flooding our shores with actual and potential Insanity, Imbecility, Pauperism, Prostitution, Alcoholism and Crime”
“When the low immigrant is giving us three babes while the Daughter of the Revolution is giving us one it means the Gibson and Harrison Fisher Girl is vanishing. Her place is being taken by the low-browed, broad-faced, flat-chested woman of lower Europe. “
This guy must have known different European women than I do.
…about greenhouse theory?
Miskolczi’s story reads like a book. Looking at a series of differential equations for the greenhouse effect, he noticed the solution — originally done in 1922 by Arthur Milne, but still used by climate researchers today — ignored boundary conditions by assuming an “infinitely thick” atmosphere. Similar assumptions are common when solving differential equations; they simplify the calculations and often result in a result that still very closely matches reality. But not always.
So Miskolczi re-derived the solution, this time using the proper boundary conditions for an atmosphere that is not infinite. His result included a new term, which acts as a negative feedback to counter the positive forcing. At low levels, the new term means a small difference … but as greenhouse gases rise, the negative feedback predominates, forcing values back down.
And why is there resistance to his theory? Follow the money:
NASA refused to release the results. Miskolczi believes their motivation is simple. “Money”, he tells DailyTech. Research that contradicts the view of an impending crisis jeopardizes funding, not only for his own atmosphere-monitoring project, but all climate-change research. Currently, funding for climate research tops $5 billion per year.
Miskolczi resigned in protest, stating in his resignation letter, “Unfortunately my working relationship with my NASA supervisors eroded to a level that I am not able to tolerate. My idea of the freedom of science cannot coexist with the recent NASA practice of handling new climate change related scientific results.”
It’s always amusing, and frustrating, to hear people who attack skeptics ad hominem because they’re on the take from Big Oil or Big Coal, when places like the Competitive Enterprise Institute actually get very little of their funding from such sources. But climate researchers are always portrayed as objective, noble and selfless, unswayed by the need to maintain their grant funding stream from Big Climate Change. All I know is that I wish I was getting paid as much to be a skeptic as some apparently think I must be. Or getting paid at all, for that matter. But so far, not a single check has shown up in the mail from Exxon-Mobil or Peabody. It’s also an interesting story, in light of Hansen’s complaints that he was “muzzled” by the administration, all while he was going around giving speeches evangelizing to the faithful.
I also found this criticism underwhelming.
Dr. Stephen Garner, with the NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL), says such negative feedback effects are “not very plausible”. Reto Ruedy of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies says greenhouse theory is “200 year old science” and doubts the possibility of dramatic changes to the basic theory.
Yes, can’t be overturning two-hundred-year-old theories. That would be completely unprecedented in science.
[Update in the afternoon]
This cautionary essay about science journalism seems to be relevant: beware the underdog narrative.
Paul Eckart, of the Boeing Corporation, writes about the benefits of cooperation in entrepreneurial space. Paul has been dong a great job of bringing investors and entrepreneurs together for the past few years, and it’s great that Boeing is supporting this activity.
Arnold Kling has some thoughts on our near-term (in the next couple decades) energy future.
Michael Yon has a long but interesting post about helicopter combat in Iraq:
Sometimes I sit up on a hill and watch them in the air. The other day two Kiowas were screaming low right over the rooftops and doing hard turns. I couldn’t see the combat because they were too far away, but I knew they were toe to toe and there was plenty of shooting going on or they wouldn’t have been flying so violently. It’s scary watching them because I’ve met them and know they are mortals doing the work of immortals. At any second there could be a fireball. A “fallen angel.” I remember the call over the radio last year of a “fallen angel” down by Baghdad. All aboard had been lost.
Virginia Postrel had successful surgery, and is posting again, including one on John McCain, non-conservative:
McCain is an instinctive regulator who considers business a base pursuit. It doesn’t help that the senator’s personal connections with commerce are largely limited to a highly protected local industry (distributing beer) and outright corruption (the Charles Keating scandal). And he’s every bit as moralistic as Hillary Clinton, our would-be national nanny. His first response to something he doesn’t like–particularly something commercial he doesn’t like–is to ban it.
This year’s presidential options are the most depressing in my memory (and that’s saying something).
Anyway, here’s to a continued full recovery.
From Jon Goff (related to my previous post). I thought that this is a very key point, that demonstrates the absurdity of Mike’s (or at least, people like Mark Whittington’s) thinking:
There’s been talk from NASA and some of their less discerning fanboys of a “Lunar COTS”. Basically the idea is to waste $100-120B on using Constellation to setup a small ISS on the Moon, and then once its there start paying commercial entities to service said base. This creates an interesting situation. Since NASA won’t have done anything for over a decade to help make it easier for commercial entities to actually service the moon, they’ll either have to keep sustaining the base themselves while they spend the money to belatedly help develop that commercial capability. Or, if the commercial market has independently created that capability anyhow, that NASA base will likely be only a small niche market in the cislunar space.
Yes, there’s a huge logical disconnect here. Either NASA will have developed technology that makes it easy for the commercial folks to access the moon (which they currently are not) or they are counting on the commercial folks to have done that on their own, in which case, that means that there’s already a thriving lunar market, of which NASA will be a trivial part, because otherwise, it won’t have happened commercially. NASA’s current high-cost, low-activity plans really do have the effect of ensuring the worst of all worlds for them, and us.
Is that what Obama is?