REVISED I’ve been asked to comment on William Happer’s “The Truth about Greenhouse Gases“, and finding no competent discussion of it anywhere on the first three pages of hits have agreed to take it on. To give you an idea of the tenor of the document, it starts off modestly, like this: “The object of…
Much, much, much more… All tolled, (and not yet all told) this is the first major league blogstorm emerging from the non-denialist climo-blogosphere and is thus a historical event regardless of your position on it. If there’s one thing you should understand about this event it is this one: Jonathan Schwarz tells an old Noam…
My opinions aren’t necessarily those of my employer, and the opinions of my employer aren’t necessarily mine, either. My employer, the Jackson School of Geosciences at the University of Texas, has invited Fred Singer to give a talk this Thursday to a public lecture series that has required student attendance. The lecture is entitled “Nature…
American Thinker has a particularly compelling and polished version of the usual vile garbage, put together in what starts to look like a coherent argument. Of course it is built on the usual foundation of overvalued nitpicking: “We can’t even believe in “official” measurements, as data sets relied upon to track global temperatures have again…
Back when Irene’s Mom used to live in Mississippi and we were in Wisconsin, we’d find ourselves driving through the deep south on occasion. A couple of times I heard some pretty extravagantly strange preachers on the radio. One I’ll always remember said something like “We have nothing against freedom of religion. Everybody should be…
I saw the following in comments on Steinn Sigurðsson’s blog in his article on the new sunspot minimum: Water vapour is the most important green house gas followed by methane. The third most important greenhouse gas is CO2, and it does not correlate well with global warming or cooling either; in fact, CO2 in the…
You might have thought our problems originated at least to some extent in the fact that the USA had been run by a tribe of drunken lemurs for eight years, but you would be wrong. No, the cause of our problems, all of them, the wars, the economic collapse, the budgetary problems, the international hostility,…
The disastrous trend that got me started blogging is not abating. According to Craig Miller’s Climate Watch blog at KQED Across much of the country (California being a notable exception), recent public polling would seem to indicate an eroding public acceptance of climate science, increasingly divided along party lines. A survey by the Pew Research…
The Darwinist hegemony over our culture has definitely peaked, according to a recent claim. Unfortunately, similar claims have been ongoing for well over a century. This does not bode well for the not-the-IPCC denial crowd going away anytime soon. I guess we were getting that picture already, but it’s grimly interesting to see how long…
In looking through all 203 responses to Tierney’s anti-Holdren screed to date I came up with some interesting nuggets. Alas, the idea that “global warming” is some sort of conspiracy is not going away. Witness, then, a grab bag of comments from John Tierney’s recent anti-Holdren screed in the NYTimes blogs that I think are sadly representative:…
With friends like this… Fisher said, “We actually have more evidence for evolution occurring than we do for the law of gravity. … Something doesn’t become a theory if it’s got weaknesses. There may be some questions that may yet to be answered, but nothing that’s to the level of a weakness.” Uh, right… Meanwhile…
It looks like Lubos Motl gets credit for the first notice in the blogosphere of Lindzen’s astonishing new rant about the state of climate science. As is often the case with people who are too sure of themselves, he turns out guilty of some of the things he accuses his opponents of. He politicizes and…
Everybody’s favorite river seems to flow in every corner of the world. For instance, consider how quickly Floridians stop worrying about hurricanes. Meanwhile, Dot Earth reports that US science agencies shy away from the question of how to deal with the fractured communications between science and the public. I have to say that when I…
Dot Earth has a follow-up to the John Holdren op-ed which I referenced a few days ago. Especially salient in my opinion: As my original reference to “the venerable tradition of skepticism” indicates, I am in fact well aware of its valuable and indeed fundamental role in the practice of science. Skeptical views, clearly stated…
Andy Revkin is taking bait set by Ron Rosenbaum in a ludicrous article on Slate. Here is my response. Well, I’ve been advocating you cover dissent too, but from a sociological perspective. You should report on Naomi Oreskes’ work uncovering the roots of the pseudoscientific footdragging that bypasses the scientific community entirely and goes directly…
John Mashey sends along the following. (Note that I am not the farmboy in question. I never roped a steer ’cause I don’t know how, and I sure ain’t fixin’ to start in now…) –mt Synopsis of Naomi Oreskes: You CAN argue with the Facts Full Talk, April 17,2008 – Stanford U ( 40 minutes…
Once in a while, I suppose, even lies are necessary. If a person in your surroundings is insane and behaving dangerously it may occasionally make sense to play into their delusion. In my opinion, such cases are extremely rare, although it appears to me that lying to young children about Santa Claus is somehow considered…
John P. Holdren, professor at the Kennedy School of Government and the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard and the director of the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts, summarizes effectively in an op-ed that appears in the International Herald Tribune. First, they have not come up with any plausible alternative culprit for…
It’s time the conspiracy of engineers promoting their “thermodynamics” stopped getting a free ride. It happens I believe in Phlogiston Theory. But so did all the Nobel winners, not just in physics and chemistry but also economics and peace. Without exception. Also Winston Churchill and Mahatma Gandhi not to mention Babe Ruth and Bobby Orr…