gregladen | April 13, 2017The New York Times has a history of supporting a certain degree of climate change science denial, while at the same time supporting some very good journalism in this area. Just now, the Times jumped over one big giant shark by adding Bret Stephens to its opinion page staff.
Stephens comes to the Times from the Wall Street Journal, a Murdoch anti-science rag you are all familiar with.
In 2011, he wrote,
Consider the case of global warming, another system of doomsaying prophecy and faith in things unseen.
As with religion, it is presided over by a caste of spectacularly unattractive people…
gregladen | April 12, 2017Why Hitler is Different
Hitler is not entirely different from Pol Pot, Stalin, and the other mass killers. He is not entirely different from other fascists. But there is a short list of people, with Hitler on that list, who have this characteristic: They were so bad that we can not and should not compare their badness to each other outside of certain limited academic contexts, and they were so bad that any comparison made between them and their works to anyone not on that list, or to their works, threatens to devalue their badness.
We can not devalue the evil of Hitler or his kind.…
gregladen | April 11, 2017Righting America at the Creation Museum (Medicine, Science, and Religion in Historical Context) is a strange book and I do not fully approve of it, even though I'm mentioned in it (not in a bad way).
Here is the write-up of the book provided by the publisher:
On May 28, 2007, the Creation Museum opened in Petersburg, Kentucky. Aimed at scientifically demonstrating that the universe was created less than ten thousand years ago by a Judeo-Christian god, the museum is hugely popular, attracting millions of visitors over the past eight years. Surrounded by themed topiary gardens and a petting…
gregladen | April 10, 2017About once a day, someone tells me that human caused climate change is not real because this or that thing in the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) contradicts something I, or some other scientists or science writer, has said.
I've noticed an uptick in references to the IPCC report by those intent on denying the reality of climate change. This even happened at recent congressional hearings, where "expert witnesses" made similar claims.
How can that be? How can the flagship scientific report on climate change, the objective source of information about the…
gregladen | April 10, 2017For example, consider the following truthful and accurate report. You won't see mainstream media doing this. Mainstream media would give a false "balanced" view, where the Republican attack on democracy is given the same positive spin as the Democratic attempt to save it. Why is this?
gregladen | April 10, 2017Here's a video from the Guardian on the current status of the reef:
This is going to take a while. If there is a major bleaching event every year for a few years, the reef could essentially die off right away, but most likely, there will still be a few years where coral can spread, and a few years that are not too bad. So one must adjust expectations.
Let me put this a different, perhaps cynical but probably realistic, view. In about four years from now, there will be some bone-headed global warming denier standing on a boat off shore in Australia, showing us a section of really nice, well…
gregladen | April 9, 2017Hi there, folks. This post should have been a tweet in response to Roger Pielke Jr (@RogerPielkeJr), professor of political science at the University of Colorado Boulder, the guy who got fired by Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight for, as I understand it, his anti-science positions on climate change. This is a response for a tweet by Junior designed to offend, nay, attack, both Professor Michael Mann and moi. But Roger blocks me (and everybody else) on twitter, so this has to be a blog post.
Roger is not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I suppose I can't blame him for getting every single…
gregladen | April 8, 2017The Friends of the Saint Paul Public Library, supported by Education Minnesota, ran the 29th annual Minnesota Book Awards ceremony tonight, and Amanda and I were graciously invited by author Shawn Otto and State Auditor and Gubernatorial Hopeful Rebecca Otto to join them at their table. Shawn's wildly popular, and extremely, increasingly relevant book The War on Science: Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It was up for the award in General Nonfiction.
There was a great deal of suspense, as Shawn's category was the very last one of several, and there were several other…
gregladen | April 8, 2017I was just thinking about Roger Pielke Jr. and Judith Curry, and the interesting situation they have found themselves in.
The hole they dug and climbed into. The corner they've painted themselves into. The metaphor that mightily mired them.
I'm talking about the situation they've created for themselves over the last few years as they've sunk into various states of denial of the reality or importance of global warming and its effects. Don't confuse the two of them, they are very different. If anything, Roger is a true believer warmist who has a particular ax to grind that blinds him to…
gregladen | April 7, 2017I just read an interesting piece on the widely influential VOX, by David Roberts, called “A beginner’s guide to the debate over 100% renewable energy.” It is worth a read, but I have some problems with it, and felt compelled to rant. No offense intended to David Roberts, but I run into certain malconstructed arguments so often that I feel compelled to promote a more careful thinking out of them, or at least, how they are presented. Roberts' argument is not malconstructed, but the assumptions leading up to his key points include falsehoods.
I’m not going to explicitly disagree with the…
gregladen | April 7, 2017Indivisible is a lot like #Occupy but instead of being in tents, we are intense in other ways.
I have been at a few Indivisible meetings over the last few weeks. One of the questions I have about the movement is this: How many people in Indivisible now had voted for Trump, or in my case, our local Republican house representative, Erik Paulsen, or the like, elsewhere? Also, how many people in Indivisible had not voted at all in the last election, or at least, were not reliable voters? And, how many people in Indivisible had voted, and generally voted Democratic/Progressive/Whatever but had…
gregladen | April 7, 2017For my friends who are thinking that military action like we just saw in Syria is OK.
No it isn't, even if it is.
Gather together the three smartest people you know. Then recruit the top five experts on Middle Eastern diplomacy, and the top five experts on military solutions in the region. Call in the joint chiefs. Make a military plan, the best plan ever.
Now put 100% of the responsibility for final decisions, go-orders, choice making between alternatives, etc, in the hands of an ignorant clownish six year old who is allowed to make up his own alt-plans at any time, and who, as a habitual…
gregladen | April 6, 2017Have a look at the list of books, below.
Would you like a subset, or all, of these books, in electronic format, for very cheap? There is a way to do that. Note: This is time sensitive, the offer running for just about two weeks and it started yesterday.
I've reviewed several of these books on this blog, and have recommended them. I'm going through Python Crash Course right now, and we've found the various kids programming books to be helpful, for instance. I've not looked at the grey hat or black hat books, but I'm sure they are fine.
The publisher, No Starch Press, has created one of…
gregladen | April 6, 2017As we pass through Spring on the way to summer, the sea ice in the Arctic is starting to melt. The ice usually peaks by the end of the first week in March or so, then slowly declines for a few weeks, then by about mid-May is heading rapidly towards its likely September minimum.
With global warming the ice has been reaching a lower winter maximum, and a much lower summer maximum. This is caused by warm air and water, and it contributes to global warming. The more ice on the sea for longer, during the northern Summer, reflects away a certain amount of sunlight. With less ice, less sunlight is…
gregladen | April 5, 2017This bill was so unpopular that only 11% of Americans thought he should sign it. It was so unpopular that 74% of Americans thought he should veto it.
This bill was not one of Trump's campaign promises, and it wasn't part of the Republican Party platform. I can only assume it was a bought and paid for deal.
I'm speaking, of course, of the bill that allows your Internet service provider to collect pretty much any information it wants, including quite possibly the contents of what goes into and out of your house on the Internet, and the physical locations of you and your family members, and…
gregladen | April 5, 2017There are about four hundred species of birds we call "raptors" of which most are falcons, hawks, eagles, owls, and so forth. I believe there are about 40 in what is considered the United States (from a person, not a bird, perspective) and many of them are found across much of the US, with the usual breaks across the Rockies, and a certain amount of north-south geography, and varying degrees of migration.
A typical page
There are 69 species of raptors, many overlapping with those in the US, in Mexico (which is part of North America, from a human perspective) and Central America.…
gregladen | April 5, 2017In case you were wondering, Trump is telling you lies.
Syria is run by a horrible dictator. He is the kind of dictator that makes you want to bring back assassination of foreign leaders. The idea of putting him down is hardly an extreme one, once you know what he does and has done.
There was a moment in time, in 2013, when Obama tried to stand up to Assad, but failed to push back when Assad pushed him. Assad read the US system better than most foreign dictators do, it seems. You see, in the United States, a president can't just go to war. Congress authorizes war. Once that authorization…
gregladen | April 5, 2017Last week, House Representative Lamar Smith held yet another masturbatory hearing to promote climate science denial. Smith is bought and paid for by Big Oil, so that is the most obvious reason he and his Republican colleagues would put on such a dog and pony show, complete with a chorus of three science deniers (Judith Curry, Roger Pielke Jr, and John Cristy). I don't know why they invited actual and respected climate scientist Mike Mann, because all he did was ruin everything by stating facts, dispelling alt-facts, and making well timed Princess Bride references.
The hearings were called "…
gregladen | March 31, 2017A well known anti-science "think" tank has sent around, to teachers, a mailing including an antiscience book, a movie, and nice letter and, oddly, a pamphlet exposing the fact that the mailing is entirely politically motivated.
Most science teachers will ignore this. A few science teachers are science deniers, and they already had the material in the mailings. So, I think this was a huge waste of money and effort. But it happened and you should know about it, and you should warn anyone you know that is a teacher.
The real concern, in my opinion, is not this falling into the hands of science…
gregladen | March 29, 2017It is hard to get very far into a discussion of non-fossil fuel energy, and the energy transition, without someone coming along and yammering about nuclear energy.
Now, don't get me wrong. I'm all for inexpensive and safe nuclear power and for building nuclear power plants that promise to eat up all the waste, do not create any more waste, are totally safe, are affordable, are efficient, don't require the equivalent of slave labor to mine the uranium, and are cost effective. Bring it on!
But the nuclear industry is generally troubled by the fact that this list of promises is not possible…