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"I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned" Richard Feynman
"The penalty good people pay for not being interested in politics is to be governed by people worse than themselves."
- Plato, Greek philosopher.
Solar – creating 79 pointless jobs The New York Times tells us that Today’s Energy Jobs Are in Solar, Not Coal. But watch the pea - these jobs are “energy jobs”, not jobs that use energy. Apparently it takes 79 people to create the same energy through solar as one person does through coal. (And that would be cheaper, how? ) Washington Examiner. To start, despite a huge workforce of almost 400,000
All over the US media today – discussion over whether Trump will pull the US out of the Paris agreement. We all know the Paris agreement will not alter world temperature*, slow storms or stop floods but is potentially a trap for domestic legal action, it hurts the poor via high electricity bills, and reduces living standards (for those outside the $1.5 Trillion Green Industrial Complex). The free
Poor petals. The ABC is selling the sob story of scientists paid from the public pocket who feel suppressed because they aren’t allowed to voice their personal unresearched opinion on things like international treaties and energy policy. Leaked emails from 2015 reveal a bitter dispute within CSIRO, Australia’s leading science body, as management tried to prevent top scientists from breaking ranks
Nothing is more dangerous than a polite conversation. On April 28th Brett Stephens wrote his first NY Times column, but dropped a complete bomb, he made it seem respectable to not robotically accept every bit of wild hyperbole about climate science: “Let me put it another way. Claiming total certainty about the science traduces the spirit of science and creates openings for doubt whenever a climat
Thanks to the IPA we can see just how fast green tape multiplies. In 1971 the first environmental laws covered just 57 pages. But now there are 4669 pages of laws. The IPA estimates that costs the nation $176b a year in lost economic opportunity. That’s a lot of jobs, and a lot of trees. *Apologies $176b corrected to million. Dennis Shanahan, The Australian Green tape’s 80-fold explosion, costing
In 2016 67% of meteorologists said that humans have caused most or all climate change and The Guardian headlined that there was a Growing Consensus among Meteorologists. In 2017 that fell to only 49%. The Guardian said nothing. …. In 2017 29% of meteorologists who thought climate was largely or entirely man-made, but that fell to only 15% this year. Figure how this result fits with the idea of th
A trace gas in our atmosphere hit 410ppm for the millionth day on Earth says Grist and this turned the planet in to something different. Who knew 410 was that exciting? We just hit 410 ppm of CO2. Welcome to a whole new world. This is not normal: We’re on track to witness a climate unseen in 50 million years by mid-century. In pre-industrial times, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmos
The anti-carbon industry is in trouble — both Al Gore, and The World Bank are doing the hard-sell on “climate investments”. The Fin Review used to be able to spot a chain letter… Climate change offers huge investment opportunity, Al Gore tells World Bank How did the worlds bankers miss something this big? “It’s the biggest opportunity in the history of the world – it’s the biggest investment oppo
News just coming in suggests someone took some pot shots at the building the UAH satellite data is analyzed in. Shots Fired into the Christy/Spencer Building at UAH April 24th, 2017 by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D. A total of seven shots were fired into our National Space Science and Technology Center (NSSTC) building here at UAH over the weekend. All bullets hit the 4th floor, which is where John Chris
A survey of Dept of Agriculture (USDA) scientists by the agency’s inspector general suggests some very fishy things are going on in government science: [Darryl Fears, Washington Post] According to the survey’s findings, nearly 10 percent said their research has been tampered with or altered by superiors “for reasons other than technical merit,” possibly because of political considerations. Looks
Today, the misnomer “March for Science” is trying to take over the aging faded Earth Day. It’s an attempt to steal the good brand “Science” yet again for other causes. Once upon a time, Earth Day used to mean something. Back in 1970, 20 million people took part, 12,000 events were held: Congress took the day off, and two-thirds of its members — Democrat and Republican alike — spoke at Earth Day e
The March for Science is on Saturday. Will J Grant and Rod Lambert struggled with the message behind the “March for Science” at The Conversation. We should march, they said a month ago, because “science is a human process”, which will be news to people who thought science was about evidence and reason instead. On Saturday they will be marching for the kind of science that is “passion” and “belief
Overnight a river in Northern Canada disappeared. A glacier had retreated and allowed the water upstream to sneak out via a different path. The water now ends up in the Pacific 1300 km away from the Bering sea where it used to emerge. A close-up view of the ice-walled canyon at the terminus of the Kaskawulsh Glacier, with recently collapsed ice blocks. This canyon now carries almost all meltwater
CO2Science found a 1999 paper done in China that shows just how awful climate change is for cotton. It’s a major global crop for fibre and oil and when the researchers warmed daytime growing conditions from 27C to 34C the plants seemed pretty happy about it as they grew faster and bigger. But if CO2 levels doubled as well, in hot conditions plant growth was up 60%. (Panic now. It’s a internationa
Don’t panic now, but all the coal burnt in China has been cooling the Antarctic Peninsula. For the last twenty years, The Antarctic Peninsula was the poster-peninsula for the Global Worriers as they calculate how many meters the oceans will rise when it melts, but all across it, temperatures are going down, not up. We can knock half to one degree off: This cooling has amounted to a 0.5 to 0.9 °C
Crazy World Quiz #2349: Let’s close the cheapest generators of electricity. Will electricity bills: a/ go down, b/ go up, or c/ be paid by The Tooth Fairy? A quarter of Australians don’t know. A half think the answer is “b” or “c”. It’s that bad. A new survey came out this week which fans of renewables are using to argue we need more renewables, but hidden in the data is the big misinformation th
Spot the effect of man-made CO2 in this graph. Terror, terror I tell you — as the accumulated energy of cyclones in the southern half of the planet reaches a new low, far below anything seen in records that go back to 1971. From the Daily Caller, and @Ryan Maue Meteorologist Ryan Maue of Weatherbell Analytics noted tropical cyclone activity in the Southern Hemisphere for the 2016-2017 season is t
Check out the book for yourself :- ) The Heartland Institute sent a round of 25,000 books to science teachers across the US. Knowing Heartland, the book Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming is loaded with dangerous material — peer reviewed references, graphs with both axes, stuff like that. Because it will have been checked, cross checked and subjected to twenty years of non-stop criticis
I nearly headlined this: Climate grief group meets at someone’s house, Grist covers it. That’s pretty much all this program is. No one even counts to nine in this story. Depressed about climate change? There’s a 9-step program for that. Imagine Alcoholics Anonymous mixed with an environmental humanities course, and you’ll begin to get a sense of the “good grief” group started by Schmidt. Its goal
The Arctic is the most sensitive place to man-made emissions on Earth, which is why it has barely warmed since 1944? Well, it makes sense if CO2 is largely irrelevant. Humans have made 90% of all their CO2 in the last 70 years and nothing much happened in the place where it was supposed to hurt the most. The WMO apparently missed the first 30 years of data. But Dr. Sebastian Lüning and Prof. Frit
First an announcement: Wednesday, May 10th I'll speak at the “ Digital Revolution ,” a free public forum that the Union-Tribune will hold at the University of San Diego’s Kroc Theater. It starts at 6:30 p.m. All you have to do is register online at uniontribune.com/future ." == More than we are? == Elon Musk is backing a brain-computer interface venture that was founded to allow humans to keep up
In Edinburgh I just posed for pictures next to one statue of Hume and then in front of Adam Smith, the founder of liberal economics. (Oh the handsome scotsman posing with me? Edinburgh science fiction legend Ken MacLeod. Look up his fine novels, such as The Corporation Wars .) Back to Adam Smith; it’s clear where he would be writing, were he alive today -- at the website that mentions his name mo
I've suggested this before. Donald Trump is about personality disorders, not ideology! Indeed, the "worst American" George F. Will has reached the same conclusion about the man occupying the Oval Office. This overlap of diagnosis does not persuade me to cozy up to Will the Traitor. Still, by all means read the man's dissection . Viewing the problem as psychological, instead of fundamentally ideol
We’ll go all “good news, bad news” on you, today, contrasting one of the globe’s astonishing bright spots with the decline of the erstwhile Leader of the West/ But first: Have you been floundering to get a handle on this weird time we are in? Lately there’s been a surge of interest in my “ Horizons Model ” to explain why our divides - especially in America, where market enterprise does better, un
Having recently participated in the worldwide March for Science , I can only repeat my assertion that the "War on Science" is about a lot more than nerds and EPA grants. You cannot name a fact-centered profession -- from teaching and medicine, to accounting and economics, to the U.S. military officer corps -- that's not under direct assault. Given that these professions created the vast profusion
Girding yourself for Saturday's Science March ? This article - Donald Trump Should Not Appoint a Science Advisor - will steam you, offering much more detail on the White House Science Adviser office -- which Donald Trump has refused to fill -- first officially established by President Eisenhower. A partial list of responsibilities: "Manage NASA strategy and budget. Work with the Office of Managem
Back from travels and giving speeches about our risk-filled future world. And so, feeling a need to share some optimism, I'll post some cool s pace and science news ... ...only first a reminder: do find a way to get involved in the Earth Day (April 22) Marches for Science, somewhere near you. This shouldn't be about left or right. It's about our children's survival in a civilization that pays att
Oy! Now the news suggests he is being eased out, to make way for Jared. I had better talk about Steve Bannon while I can. Unless... he's still the Dark Lord and I had better say it, while there's still free speech... and electricity. Before he got to the White House, Steve Bannon was first a Goldman-Sachs mogul, then a filmmaker. His polemical movies say a lot about what’s on his mind, and how he
At a time when public confidence is (ironically) plummeting, we see example after example of our society's competence and reasons for confidence. But first: does anyone k now of some public event or resort along the path of the August
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I've been 'around' for a few years now, pursuing the shifting goal of a sharable home-made surfers resource site focused on ease of use and variety of mostly adult ( whoa : I didn't say prurient ) content.
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