NASA Breakthroughs

Here’s an amazing demonstration of the cluelessness and credulity of reporters, particularly when it comes to NASA and space:

With the cost of gas hovering between $2 and $3 a gallon and the oil supply declining, scientists at NASA have discovered a potential new energy source — helium-3.

When combined with water, the element creates energy.

Just add water? What a breakthrough! Guess we don’t have to figure out how to do that complicated fusion thing.

Grigsby said he also plans to discuss NASA’s other creations, including the ion motor. It’s an engine that accelerates so quickly in space, picking up speed as it moves, that it creates artificial gravity.

A high-acceleration ion drive? Another breakthrough!

And of course, we get the usual spinoff argument.

Grigsby said most Americans don’t understand the importance of NASA. It’s more than space travel, he said.

“The problems we solve in space have a direct spinoff on people,” he said.

Well, actually, maybe not that usual:

Even tennis shoes, with their rubber soles, are partly a NASA creation. Before the 1960s, shoes were all leather and, often, not comfortable.

Wow. Tang, teflon and tennis shoes! Who knew?

Guess those old Converses I wore before we got to the moon were a figment of my imagination. Or maybe I just forgot about the leather soles–it’s been so long, after all.

More Stern Criticism

Christopher Monckton excoriates the Stern Report and the “science” behind the global warming policy pushes:

First, the UN implies that carbon dioxide ended the last four ice ages. It displays two 450,000-year graphs: a sawtooth curve of temperature and a sawtooth of airborne CO2 that’s scaled to look similar. Usually, similar curves are superimposed for comparison. The UN didn’t do that. If it had, the truth would have shown: the changes in temperature preceded the changes in CO2 levels.

Next, the UN abolished the medieval warm period (the global warming at the end of the First Millennium AD). In 1995, David Deming, a geoscientist at the University of Oklahoma, had written an article reconstructing 150 years of North American temperatures from borehole data. He later wrote: “With the publication of the article in Science, I gained significant credibility in the community of scientists working on climate change. They thought I was one of them, someone who would pervert science in the service of social and political causes. One of them let his guard down. A major person working in the area of climate change and global warming sent me an astonishing email that said: ‘We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.’ “

And Chris Mooney thinks that there’s a Republican war on science?

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