Posts Tagged ‘climate change’

Why is this man on TV?

Posted: March 14, 2011 by datechguy in media, opinion/news
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I have the strange Habit in the morning (for a conservative) of watching Morning Joe on weekdays as I get ready to start my day.

Morning Joe is interesting for several reasons. It is the least bombastic show on MSNBC, and the only one where a conservative positions are occasionally introduced. It’s a great measure if a conservative story is actually going to break into the MSM, even if it is to simply be attacked. It is also the most entertaining morning show out there.

One and a while they have a guest that is so outrageous that I tend to change the channel. One of them is Dr. Jeffrey Sachs from the Earth institute of Columbia University. His most egregious batch of nonsense was referring to the great scholar Victor Davis Hanson as an “extremist” and excoriating Joe Scarborough for quoting a piece of his.

This morning just after coming home from taking my kid to school they brought Sachs on. I was busy writing bills so I only briefly registered him, but my jaw dropped because he started talking sensibly about nuclear power in the US. It was such a change, he pointed out that the US does have nuclear power now and it has been generally safe that I started to pay closer attention…then he went and spoiled it by making an incredible claim.

Just after Ed Rendell made the great point that no US trial lawyer has even won a death suit over nuclear power. Sacks followed up stating AS A FACT that thousands of people are dying all over the world from climate change, and calling those do disagree propagandists. He claimed this was due to droughts, floods and famine.

The sheer absurdity of this claim is breathtaking; anyone who has studied history of the world knows that droughts, floods and famine have been with us since time immemorial. To try to make such a connection is so egregious, so nonsensical that you would wonder that an educated person could say it, then again how much funding does Columbia’s “earth institute” from the Global Warming crowd?

Morning Joe Today hit Michelle Bachmann for incorrectly placing Lexington and Concord in New Hampshire but nobody challenged Sacks completely unprovable statement, even more incredible is the idea of making such a statement while people are pulling actual dead bodies out of cars and homes in Japan.

If you want to know why academics have lost the respect of the public in general, look no further.

Update: That’s Jeffrey Sachs btw, corrected

Blog of the month yes its late

Posted: January 10, 2011 by datechguy in blogs
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Running late again this month so let me give a found farewell to are blogs of the month for last month. Holysmoke, DaScienceGuy and SISU.

This month we have Katy’s conservative corner. She Joins into the debate on the Giffords shooting thus:

The Associated Press reported on Sunday morning that, despite the fact that this person had been turned down by the US Army for enlistment, had dropped out of high school, and been kicked out of his community college, somehow Sarah Palin was to be blamed.

Katy wishes congresswoman Giffords a speedy recovery.

Our next pick is Tim Blair who is always a pleasure to read he has spoken on the Giffords shooting but you will enjoy this global warming post more:

Doomstruck US scientist James Hansen essentially launched the modern global warming movement with his 1988 testimony before Congress. Batting on a friendly pitch and facing only the softest of attacks, Hansen scored easy runs and has remained in the opening slot ever since.

Against more probing questions, Hansen is prone to wild slogging. In 2009 he was forcibly removed from the crease during an anti-coal demonstration outside the White House and later that year called for a carbon tax equivalent to one dollar per US gallon of petrol.

Hansen’s opening partner, US panic merchant Bill McKibben, wrote one of the earliest books on global warming and continues writing books on the same subject, hoping that one day they’ll be read. Currently campaigning to have Earth re-named as Eaarth. Seriously.

He is using Cricket imagery and the whole post is a ton of fun.

Finally we bring on Dr. Sanity who has a gem on an e-mail he received in reaction to the Giffords shooting:

It takes a truly ‘sick’ person, in every philosophical/moral/spiritual and ethical sense of the word to say that such an ill person’s motivations are the exact motivations of those with whom they happen to disagree.

I have been treating schizophrenic patients for almost 35 years now. The point is that their illness impairs their cognitive functioning. Schizophrenics have a biological cause for their dysfunction.

I wonder what my emailer’s excuse for his behavior is?

I suspect it derives from the voluntary suspension of his cognitive functioning in order to maintain a certain worldview or ideology that explains a disturbing reality he does not want to face.

I think we can take the word “suspect” out of it.

The surest sign that “Climate Change” has jumped the shark…

Posted: December 31, 2010 by datechguy in blogs, oddities
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…is Charles Johnson attacking those who don’t fall for this bunk.

Well tomorrow is another year and to my knowledge he still hasn’t changed sides on Israel so there is still a slight hope for him, but I wouldn’t want to make book on when that will change.

Predictions old and new

Posted: December 31, 2010 by datechguy in oddities
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Nope this isn’t a post about my predictions for 2011 this is instead about predictions in the past that have become busts:

It is always entertaining to look at predictions from the past, and see how far off they were. In the 1920s, the assumption was that by the 1950s, we would all be getting around in flying cars. Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward describes how by the year 2001, capitalism would have completely disappeared (at the instigation of the capitalists, who would see the advantages of socialism), replaced with a democratic socialism where everyone ate in common mess halls, owned everything in common, and there was almost no violence anymore.

Clayton then links to this list of predictions of environmental catastrophes that weren’t and concludes thus:

When scientists make apocalyptic predictions based on claims of science, I expect them to hit their marks, or have a darn good explanation for why not.

The problem being these days that huge amounts of cash ride on these predictions and the right way of looking at things can be the difference between a well-funded grant keeping you in champagne for decades to teaching chemistry at a community college. More importantly with the amounts of money involved any challenge to the orthodoxy becomes not so much a scientific debate as a threat to a person’s standard of living requiring a strong and sometimes devastating counter.

The whole Global Warming bit has become basically a giant 21st century version of The Sting with the taxpayers of the western world as the mark. I predict that when it fails there will be a new version with a new prediction and a new urgency that will drive media coverage and funds for NGO to keep them in caviar for another decade or two.

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