Archive for the 'Environment' Category

Senate Committee Issues Climate-Consensus Busting Report

According to the press release (my emphasis):
Over 400 prominent scientists from more than two dozen countries recently voiced significant objections to major aspects of the so-called “consensus” on man-made global warming. These scientists, many of whom are current and former participants in the UN IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), criticized the climate claims made […]

“I don’t like other people telling me what to do.”

Amen.
One of the reasons I abhor communitarianism (and tend to see my political philosophy as the opposite of that) is because it vests communitarian thinkers with the self appointed power to tell me (and others) what to do. Provided, of course, that they come up with a claim to do so in the name of […]

Now, it is time to save marriage

Why? Because it is good for the environment:
Divorce can be bad for the environment. In countries around the world divorce rates have been rising, and each time a family dissolves the result is two new households.
“A married household actually uses resources more efficiently than a divorced household,” said Jianguo Liu, an ecologist at Michigan State […]

Hugo Chavez and the path to mass murder II

Part I is here, but in The Ruin of Venezuela I wrote:
As we have seen with Mugabe and many others, once you go down this road it is very difficult to turn things around. As the situation gets worse, in order to keep socialism in place, more force is needed. A Revolutionary ideology cannot allow […]

The City Car

Very Cool:
The City Car, a design project under way at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is envisioned as a two-seater electric vehicle powered by lithium-ion batteries. It would weigh between 1,000 and 1,200 pounds and could collapse, then stack like a shopping cart with six to eight fitting into a typical parking space. It isn’t […]

Global Warming = California Wildfires

So says Harry Reid and other environmentalists, so it must be true. No doubt they have checked with everyone who agrees with them and they have a consensus about it.
So, what caused them way back when…
If there was a “worst fire season” in the last century or so, Berlant said, it would probably be […]

The Subtle Oil Shock

It hasn’t been all that shocking. Why not? Greg Mankiw supplies a few possibilities. My favorites? Well let us start here:

In contrast to much rhetoric to the contrary, capitalism is the most powerful weapon to achieve energy efficiency we have.
He provides us with some things I am fond of, conjectures. So I will call this […]

Speaking of Common Sense

While over at Megan’s I noticed a discussion she has about Bjorn Lomborg and her main criticism of him. That is that he doesn’t give enough weight to low probability, but catastrophic events. That is in fact a weakness (and she notes in his defense that it is a very contentious and difficult issue) and […]

Bjorn Lomborg on Al Gore and the IPCC

Bjorn looks at this in much the same way I do:
This year’s Nobel peace prize justly rewards the thousands of scientists of the United Nations climate change panel (the IPCC). These scientists are engaged in excellent, painstaking work that establishes exactly what the world should expect from climate change.
The other award winner, former US vice-president […]

Another award for the Goracle-Updated with even more reactions

This just confirms what a bogus award the Nobel Peace Prize has become. Past winners have often been inappropriate, such as when murderous thugs such as Yasser Arafat were awarded for claims and intentions rather than their murderous actions. At least in past cases, as deluded as they often were, the claim is it had […]

News Brief, Chesme siah daree Edition

Cross-posted at The Conjecturer
Defense & The War

Mountain Runner makes the case for why mercenaries aren’t all bad, and that the real sunk costs of their use should be handled. It’s similar to David Dryer’s case for their usefulness, which is framed as a counter to P.W. Singer’s point that their use obscures political costs. I […]

News Brief, Truncated For Life Purposes Edition

Cross-posted on The Conjecturer.
Defense & the War

Reading the Instapundit and his minions, you’d think the one reason Bush wasn’t more popular is because he’s not bombing the shit out of Iran. Luckily, most people don’t think as they do.
How will the bombing-murder of Sattar Abu Risha, the Sunni Sheikh most visibly associated with the progress […]

Some Consensus - II

The sky is falling, the sky is falling…
Oh wait, no it’s not.
http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/news_press_release,176495.shtml
A new analysis of peer-reviewed literature reveals that more than 500 scientists have published evidence refuting at least one element of current man-made global warming scares. More than 300 of the scientists found evidence that 1) a natural moderate 1,500-year climate cycle has produced […]

News Brief, Kometenmelodie 1 Edition

Stewing in his own juices over at The Conjecturer.
Defense & The War

The Republicans are refusing to ponder any troop withdrawals. Does that now make General Petraeus a Defeatocrat? Maybe not, as he still wants troop levels to remain high—the progress, after all, isn’t yet permanent.
A face-wasted Just For Men’d Osama Bin Laden is set […]

Some Consensus

The “reality based” ideologues often decry when politics get in the way of science, but that certainly seems what they are doing with regards to global warming. But then, hey, making overblown claims based on the scantiest of evidence, real or anecdotal, gets them in the press, and makes them seem caring.
http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Blogs&ContentRecord_id=b35c36a3-802a-23ad-46ec-6880767e7966
Of 528 total […]

The “Bull Moose of Climate Change” reminds me of “A Modest Proposal”

I sauntered over to Instapundit today and noticed this story:
Norway is concerned that its national animal, the moose, is harming the climate by emitting an estimated 2,100 kilos of carbon dioxide a year through its belching and farting.Norwegian newspapers, citing research from Norway’s technical university, said a motorist would have to drive 13,000 kilometers in […]

News Brief, Pizazz We’re Gonna Give It To You* Edition

Would much rather be back at The Original Conjecturer.
Defense

How to make an EFP.
The difficulty of sea mines.
These two takes on the SCO exercises (covered in sometimes much greater depth here, at Registan.net, and Bonnie Boyd’s Central Asia blog) have some interesting tidbits: the PLA has never performed a distance deployment before, and it’s a […]

News Brief, My News Brief Beat Up Your Honor Student Edition

Defense

Phillip Carter has some choice things to say of the Scott Thomas Beauchamp affair: “Anyone who finds Beauchamp’s story incredible merely because it’s upsetting has no idea what war can do… How, then, should journalists tell the story of what happens in wartime? At best, the American public is getting a filtered picture of the […]

Global Warming: The Early Years

As an ideal follow up to my most recent post on Anthropogenic Global WarmingTM, Keith forwarded me an interesting tidbit from the Washington Times’ “Inside the Beltway” round-up:
D.C. resident John Lockwood was conducting research at the Library of Congress and came across an intriguing Page 2 headline in the Nov. 2, 1922 edition of The […]

On The Wings Of Butterflies

My favorite class of all time was a course on chaos theory that I took my senior year in college. I think it was listed as part of the Chemistry Department’s curriculum (hey, whaddya know, it still is!), but it also involved physics and statistics (and thankfully, little math). My fondness for […]

News Brief, This Is My Sundown Edition

Cross-posted on The Conjecturer.
Defense

DARPA wants many outrageous things—an oil-free Air Force, invisibility cloaks, piezoelectric bodysuits, kill-proof animal-esque soldiers, and so on. For the latter, my quite serious question is: at what point do these enhanced soldiers cease being human, and are reduced to machines? It’s all very Ghost in the Shell.
Calling Kevin Drum: Legacy of […]

News Brief, Much Much Better Off Edition

Defense

As usual, Cathy Young chimes in on the Beauchamp debate with several highly cogent points: “I think there are good reasons to question Beauchamp’s accuracy, and neither TNR nor liberal bloggers are doing themselves any favors by coming uncritically to his defense. But conservative bloggers aren’t covering themselves in glory either when they stridenly insist […]

Bio-Fuel Increases Price of Ice Cream

The increase in the amount of bio-fuel production, specifically ethanol, is driving up the costs of anything that feeds or is produced with grain. This is leading to higher prices for milk, ice cream, cereal, and a host of other staples. The UN is also having a harder time buying grain to feed […]

Supporting carbon creds means no street cred

Since the entire concept of carbon credits emerged a few years ago, I’ve constantly found myself questioning not only the actual effectiveness, but also the underlying motivation behind them. Donating or purchasing carbon credits basically seemed, to me at least, to be the designer way for rich (or wealthier than average) people to buy […]

Trading Dependencies

Instapundit links to an article in Reason about how the increased production of ethanol is leading to higher prices for food.
I also think it could lead to increasing reliance by America on foreign grain. Which, as we saw with the pet food recall, could mean a riskier supply. You can poison grain, but […]

News Brief, I Worked Late Then Went to the Wilco Show Edition

Cross-posted on The Conjecturer.
Defense

Follow up to the story on the pathetic number of fluents in Arabic currently stationed at the Baghdad Vatican-Embassy (and shame on me for not noticing this): the 3/3 proficiency level is virtually useless—both because it is not advanced enough for technical or legal matters, and it of a sort not actually […]

All Your Weather Base Are Belong To Us

“Kyoto, we have a problem.”
Few things annoy me more than the modern Lysenkoism of Anthropogenic Global WarmingTM and its rapturous congregation who viciously condemn any who dare challenge their scriptures. Each day it seems that we are bombarded with yet more bald-faced propaganda designed to scare us (and especially our children) into submission to […]

Garbage In, Garbage Out

I’ve often commented that I don’t really trust computer climate models because they’ve seemed to me to be missing a lot of variables. So, it’s a little satisfying to see this article, which shows that MIT researchers are enhancing the model to more accurately account for a significant variable.
Global climate models are missing a […]

Sunny Times for Chinese Solar Power?

To get rich is glorious in China nowadays. Scientists are no exception.
A top home-grown inventor, 41-year-old Ma Xin, is currently engineering a reverse takeover of a small Singapore-listed investment company, Rowsley, in a deal worth 2.7 billion Singapore dollars ($1.6 billion) that would bring a small part of his high-tech corporate empire, Sinocome Group, to […]

News Brief, Planet Unicorn Heyyy Edition

Cross-posted at The Conjecturer, where you’ll find an explanation for the edition name. I’m sorry.
The Pentagon

I think Lance should have highlighted Blackfive’s major point about the stupid restrictions on war blogs: the Pentagon has already lost the information war in the public arena. The supreme importance of competing narratives was chillingly highlighted in the […]

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