Archive for category politics

Date: February 16th, 2010
Cate: politics

Drawing a line for the denialists

With the unending avalanche of embarrassments in climate science recently, global warming “deniers” are becoming ever more strident in their triumphalism over defeat of the “warmists.” I must admit that I have not familiarized myself with the science behind the IPCC report.  But there is a simple, irrefutable fact that those committed to rational inquiry must not lose track of, and that is that we have been pumping a hell of a lot of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

This can be corroborated with CO2 measurements from around the world and is really not contested.

However, some people seem to still believe that this change could not be caused by human activity.  Here I present a simple, back-of-the-envelope computation to measure the total weight of CO2 in the atmosphere, compared to the total weight of CO2 released by burning fossil fuels. more))

Date: July 2nd, 2009
Cate: politics
1 msg

Spouting off…

So many opinions.. so much discussion.. so much controversy..

Every now and then (and today, at 12:40 PM I still haven’t headed in to work yet) I like to pass an hour of time by going to the New York Times opinion page and clicking on everything with a remotely interesting headline.  Lately this habit has become more fun because of schadenfreude–

Well, really, it’s not schadenfreude– I was unemployed myself just months ago– as it is a sort of Vonnegut-like glee at catastrophe.  The whole world seems to be going to hell, and you see it in the unemployment numbers as well as the torturous debate about new media, which is really a debate about the future of knowledge.  What inspired me to post today (and here begins the eponymous spouting off) is the symmetry among the various themes of culture, economy, and ecology, the latter vis-a-vis the weak but still transformational climate change bill which, weakened as it is, will never make it past the (appallingly timid) US senate.

more))