Climate change

A thought re Barry Arrington’s thread, MIT Atmospheric Physicist Explains What Everyone Should Know about Climate Alarmism: Maybe we are missing the real problem: In itself, global warming is just the latest a-crock-alypse by which green daycare moms compete in the middle class virtue stakes. And swindlers get rich. But what’s new there? We can be glad when the swindlers are not also murderers. They sometimes are. But readers, do consider the readiness with which Heat Doom morphs into a state religion, giving proponents the right to persecute dissenters. With so much money and power at stake, too. Cf Bill Nye open to jail time for climate change skeptics It’s most likely that the problem will be exported to other Read More ›

Richard Lindzen, an MIT atmospheric physicist and one of the world’s leading climatologists, summarizes the science behind climate change. Here.  

Readers will remember the “science guy”: From Reason: As a taxpayer and voter, the introduction of this extreme doubt about climate change is affecting my quality of life as a public citizen… So I can see where people are very concerned about this, and they’re pursuing criminal investigations as well as engaging in discussions like this….That there is a chilling effect on scientists who are in extreme doubt about climate change, I think that is good. Via Washington Times More. That sort of thing is big in Big Government now. For example, Breitbart London notes the lawfare approach: Now the Attorney General of the US Virgin Islands — some utter nonentity called Claude Earl Walker — has gone a step Read More ›

From Glenn Harlan Reynolds (Instapundit) at USA Today: This [government goes to Muscle Beach] all takes place in the context of an unprecedented meeting by 20 state attorneys general aimed, environmental news site EcoWatch reports, at targeting entities that have “stymied attempts to combat global warming.” You don’t have to be paranoid to see a conspiracy here. Not everyone believes that the planet is warming; not everyone who thinks that it is warming agrees on how much; not everyone who thinks that it is warming even believes that laws or regulation can make a difference. Yet the goal of these state attorneys general seems to be to treat disagreement as something more or less criminal. That’s wrong. As the Supreme Read More ›

From Breitbart: US Attorney General: We’ve ‘Discussed’ Prosecuting Climate Change Deniers “This matter has been discussed. We have received information about it and have referred it to the FBI to consider whether or not it meets the criteria for which we could take action on,” said Attorney General Loretta Lynch, responding to a question from green activist Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI)4% at a Senate Judiciary Hearing.… Perhaps the kind of RICO action Whitehouse has in mind is similar to the one proposed to President Obama a few months ago by a number of key climate scientists, led by one Jagadish Shukla of George Mason University. However this campaign appears to have gone mysteriously quiet of late. Could it perhaps be Read More ›

Bradshaw: What I’ve seen in a shockingly large slice of the Australian palaeo-science literature is not just sloppy, it’s downright disingenuous. It’s probably also funded, so … it’s kind of like a failing public school system where true causes can never be acknowledged in such a way as leads to positive change. From climatologist and conservationist CJA Bradshaw at Conservation Bytes, (offering outcome analysis for biodiversity policies), At risk of sounding a bit like a broken record (I wonder if the Millennials understand the meaning of that expression), the complex interplay of changing climatic conditions and the sudden appearance of an extremely efficient predator (humans) is likely to have operated rather differently around the world. This is because the variation Read More ›

Climatologist Judith Curry, mainly controversial for letting research findings determine her views rather than the needs of Big Climate, draws attention to a recent article in Nature, Don’t let transparency damage science, Stephan Lewandowsky & Dorothy Bishop, essentially arguing for censorship in science in order to protect Big Agendas. We can all think of a few besides the GlobalWarming Apocalypse, apparent successor to The Population Bomb. She quotes from it, with responses: Many organized attacks call for more data, often with the aim of finding an analysis method that makes undesirable results go away [JC note: most would call that ‘skepticism’]. Even when data availability is described in papers, tension may still arise if researchers do not trust the good Read More ›

The way it jump starts the government-tab business at good hotels. Your climate or mine may or may not be changing, but the hotel’s guests climate will improve a notch. 😉 Anyway, from New Scientist: The specific role of the climate shift in these events is unclear, but it would have changed what foods were available. Carbon isotope data from fossil hominid tooth enamel show that Paranthropus‘s diet was mostly derived from grasses, while the doomed Australopithecus almost exclusively ate plants that weren’t so well adapted to hot temperatures. Early Homo species seem to have eaten a mixture of grasses and non-grasses. Whenever one hears that the “specific role of [insert item] is unclear” and that it “would have” this Read More ›

A friend asks us to notice again science writer Matt Ridley’s complaint about the Climate Wars’ Damage to Science, quoting: The great thing about science is that it’s self-correcting. The good drives out the bad, because experiments get replicated and hypotheses tested — or so I used to think. Now, thanks largely to climate science, I see bad ideas can persist for decades, and surrounded by myrmidons of furious defenders they become intolerant dogmas. Previous notice here. To some of us, the biggest problem was the wholesale manipulation of data, as in Climategate and data fudging. We were used to this with Darwinism, etc., but then some people began doing it with stuff your nephew or your granny should care Read More ›

we should care much about climate change (paywalled!) One serious non-paywalled reason would have been enough. Non-paywalled excerpt: Most of us have taken some steps in the right direction. However, we continue to produce greenhouse gases. Sometimes, we truly cannot do better. Not everyone can afford to buy solar panels, rural residents cannot commute by subway, and people who live in cold climates cannot go without heating. These are structural barriers, beyond an individual’s control. The biggest problem is that we live and breath and want to, like, DO stuff. Maybe better our lives or something. Sorry, our bad. Follow UD News at Twitter!

(This begins and ends the formal religion news coverage for the day. Maybe the new atheists went to relationship counselling?) Closing off our religion coverage for the day, from Maureen Malarkey at The Federalist: A Short List of What’s Wrong with ‘Laudato Si’ … There is nothing to admire in its assault on market economies, technological progress, and—worse—on rationality itself. Bergolio, whom we know now as Pope Francis, is a limited man. His grasp of economics is straitjacketed by the Peronist culture in which he was raised. “Laudato Si” descends to garish, left-wing boilerplate. The pope is neither a public intellectual, theologian, nor a man of science. Yet he impersonates all three. At least he wasn’t lauding Darwinism, mindless evolution, Read More ›

Further to churches getting sucked into the politicized climate change controversy, chewed up, and spit out: English science journalist Matt Ridley assesses the damage done to science by the frankly political climate science wars here at Quadrant: For much of my life I have been a science writer. That means I eavesdrop on what’s going on in laboratories so I can tell interesting stories. It’s analogous to the way art critics write about art, but with a difference: we “science critics” rarely criticise. If we think a scientific paper is dumb, we just ignore it. There’s too much good stuff coming out of science to waste time knocking the bad stuff. Sure, we occasionally take a swipe at pseudoscience—homeopathy, astrology, claims Read More ›

Closing off our religion coverage for the week: Further to Pope Francis’ adviser is a science pantheist? (And this in an age when the human mind is widely regarded among the intelligentsia as an illusion, shaped for fitness, not for truth), The Guardian asks, Is science policy a theological matter? The Encyclical Letter Laudato Si’ released by Pope Francis last week has generated a wide range of reactions ranging from enthusiastic praise to uneasy criticism. For some, the Pope’s key message was about climate change, for others about the downsides of economic growth, and some saw in it a reconciliation of science and religion. But the Encyclical also lays bare a debate much larger than each of these perspectives, one Read More ›

Odd that: Strange, then, that a self-professed atheist and scientific advisor to the Vatican named Hans Schellnhuber appears to believe in a Mother Earth. … In the Gaia Principle, Mother Earth is alive, and even, some think, aware in some ill-defined, mystical way. The Earth knows man and his activities and, frankly, isn’t too happy with him. This is what we might call “scientific pantheism,” a kind that appeals to atheistic scientists. It is an updated version of the pagan belief that the universe itself is God, that the Earth is at least semi-divine — a real Brother Sun and Sister Water! Mother Earth is immanent in creation and not transcendent, like the Christian God. What’s this have to do Read More ›

In “Hard Truth Against Soft Theory,” Canadian columnist David Warren says, I have been around for some time now, so that the name Paul Ehrlich is familiar to me. I spotted it in media accounts of the latest imposture, in which a “global extinction event” is said to be unfolding, on a scale with the extinction of the dinosaurs. Imagine my non-surprise upon discovering that Ehrlich was among the co-authors. One might actually read the predictions he made in The Population Bomb (1968), or any of his subsequent works, for that matter. Catastrophes he predicted by 1975 have not occurred. The world’s population has doubled, but food production has significantly outstripped this growth, with only modest increases in land under Read More ›