Things About A 75F Christmas

It's warm and raining in DC this week. I know half the world celebrates Christmas in warm weather, but for us it's unusual.

On the one hand, the geraniums on the porch, which have never needed changing out for Fall plants this year,  are blossoming, so that's kind of festive.

On the other hand, I cannot get in the spirit of the required bake-and-cook-a-thon for tomorrow's Christmas Eve gathering when the wind is not blowing through the drafty old house making the kitchen the place to be. I had to change into shorts and none of these cakes and pies and casseroles and such seem appetizing.

Think anyone would mind if I skipped the roast beast and roasted veggies and served nachos and cold beer tomorrow instead?

(Which reminds me: I never made the final tomato post of the year. I'll have you know I harvested the last tomatoes of the year the day before Thanksgiving.  That's weird, but quite gratifying, since I planted late this year and expected a piddly season).

Sigh.  Back to the oven.  

Francis, Solzhenitsyn & Churchill

If I were teaching a political philosophy class this month, I would assign students a compare and contrast essay between Laudato Si', the new encyclical on man's place in creation, and student's choice of: Solzhenitsyn's "Letter to the Soviet Leaders" or Churchill's "Mass effects in modern life."

Sage Dominican Advice for Catholics & Sensible Folk

Fr. Philip Powell, OP:

Remember, Catholics: never, never, and I mean NEVER trust the MSM when it comes to anything related to the Pope, the Church, the faith, etc. Check, check again, and then triple check their reporting.

Unfortunately, this includes many "orthodox" sources, who often try to play "whack-a-mole" with press absurdities before they've read carefully themselves. 

I think "Christian witness" ought to include modeling how to read and respond rationally to texts, particularly magisterial texts. Princeton's Robbie George had this to say on his FB page: 

"Catholic friends: If I may offer a word of advice, please receive the forthcoming papal encyclical in a spirit of willingness to listen and to be taught by the Holy Father. Do not approach it by simply looking for what one agrees with or disagrees with on matters of climate science or anything else. The gift of the papal magisterium to us, the faithful, is just that: a gift--a charism. We are to receive it as such. We can, and no doubt each of us will, appreciate the fact that different teachings or aspects of the teaching contained in the document will be proposed at different levels of authority. That is virtually always true of teaching instruments of this sort. But there will be plenty of time to sort all that out. It should NOT be our first priority. Our first priority should be to open ourselves to learning what is to be learned from the Holy Father's reflections on the physical and moral ecology in the context of the Church's witness to, and proclamation of, the Gospel. We are about to hear the voice of Peter. Our first and most important task is to listen attentively and with open-hearted willingness to be taught."

Many of his followers "shared" that post, and all of them, like the man himself, were met with vociferous protests of, "but not if the Pope says...." Or, "I can't stand it that he's saying....."  Well, it will hard to read with an open mind if you "can't stand" what you don't even know if he says! 

Happy New Year To Me

The feel-good stories of the turn of the year.

#3 Global warming activists go to Pole to prove ice is melting, get stuck in ice too thick for ice cutters.

#2 Justice Sotomayor issues a stay of Obamacare's abortifacient mandate. Just until tomorrow maybe, but it's hard to be the Justice who closes down the Little Sisters of the Poor.

#1 In the Grey Lady today, Michael Moore compelled to say:

Now that the individual mandate is officially here, let me begin with an admission: Obamacare is awful.

It's not really a good story in that he's just pushing for a single-payer system, which has been the purpose of this whole exercise all along, he tries to blame the debacle on Mitt Romney, and he insists that Obamacare is actually good in spite of being awful. But today I'm just going to savor the fact that a major story in the New York Times admits that Obamacare is awful and that the reason it's awful is that it has never had anything to do with helping the working poor, but has always been an exercise in Crony Capitalism -- the very thing Pope Francis denounces so harshly in Evangelii Gaudium, by the way-- of the first water. More on that later.

How I'm Observing Earth Day

...by mocking it.

First there is this headline I've been seeing all day, wrongly assuming it was from the Onion: Earth Day leader killed, composted girlfriend.

I was going to remark at least he was consistent and composted, but when I finally clicked through, I found to my horror:

Inside the closet, police found Maddux's beaten and partially mummified body stuffed into a trunk that had also been packed with Styrofoam, air fresheners and newspapers. 

 Styrofoam and air fresheners? Those take much longer to biodegrade than the poor girlfriend.

And treat yourself to 13 Worst Predictions Made on Earth Day, 1970, including these gems:

"It is already too late to avoid mass starvation" --Denis Hayes, Earth day organizer

The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age." — Kenneth Watt

I Wouldn't Change A Thing

"If I wanted America to Fail." Curtsy: CMR

Why Kyoto Would Never Work

Non-signers do stuff like this.

EPA Smackdown Time

The story of what EPA is doing to the Sacketts is outrageous, as you can see here. But they just won the right to sue the EPA at SCOTUS.

It's The Sun, Stupid

So says my spy in New York, in sending along this bit of news from Lawrence Solomon (who's written a book on scientists who've stood firm against the global warming juggernaut) on the warmening front.

new findings point to cosmic rays and the sun — not human activities — as the dominant controller of climate on Earth.
The research, published with little fanfare this week in the prestigious journal Nature, comes from über-prestigious CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, one of the world’s largest centres for scientific research involving 60 countries and 8,000 scientists at more than 600 universities and national laboratories. CERN is the organization that invented the World Wide Web, that built the multi-billion dollar Large Hadron Collider, and that has now built a pristinely clean stainless steel chamber that precisely recreated the Earth’s atmosphere.

Apparently numerous experiments have definitively demonstrated the validity of the "cosmic ray" explanation of global warming. The article chronicles the intense opposition the theory's received since it was first proposed by two Danes years ago, but also how dogged determination -- and actual Science-- has gradually persuaded people in the field. Not that the propagandists are going to let you know:

this spectacular success will be largely unrecognized by the general public for years — this column will be the first that most readers have heard of it — because CERN remains too afraid of offending its government masters to admit its success. Weeks ago, CERN formerly decided to muzzle Mr. Kirby and other members of his team to avoid “the highly political arena of the climate change debate,” telling them “to present the results clearly but not interpret them” and to downplay the results by “mak[ing] clear that cosmic radiation is only one of many parameters.” The CERN study and press release is written in bureaucratese and the version of Mr. Kirkby’s study that appears in the print edition of Nature censored the most eye-popping graph — only those who know where to look in an online supplement will see the striking potency of cosmic rays in creating the conditions for seeding clouds.

Conclusion:

CERN, and the Danes, have in all likelihood found the path to the Holy Grail of climate science. But the religion of climate science won’t yet permit a celebration of the find.

Who Is Ronnie Bryant?

Life imitates Ayn Rand: "I'm Just Quitting."

The Force of Greenpeace

Cute Greenpeace ad, I'll give them that. Now let them tell us which and how many of those children they wish weren't here because they're endangering the planet.

Curtsy:Hot Air

A Global Warming Achievement

It has caused Peter Singer to renounce his own philosophy. Sort of.

Climate change is a challenge to utilitarianism on at least two accounts. First, the problem of reducing the carbon output of humanity is tied to the problem of rising human populations. The more people there are, the greater becomes the difficulty of tackling climate change. This fact sits uneasily for a preference utilitarian, who would be inclined to argue that the existence of more and more sentient beings enjoying their lives – realising their preferences – is a good thing. As Singer puts it in the new edition of his book, Practical Ethics: "I have found myself unable to maintain with any confidence that the position I took in the previous edition – based solely on preference utilitarianism – offers a satisfactory answer to these quandaries."

Whew! At least he still hates people!

Sometimes A Disaster Is Just A Disaster

When did we lose sight of the fact that hasty decisions are rarely wise? W/ respect to Japan's earthquake/tsunami/volcano/nuclear plant crisis, ninme puts it succintly:

Sometimes something horrible happens and it’s horrible because of the horrible things that have happened, and there really aren’t any lessons to be learned.

and in her twitter feed, humorously:

Due to threat of tidal wave? "Switzerland suspends approval process for 3 nuke power plants to review safety measures after Japan crisis"

Jonah Goldberg explores the theme.

In Europe, where nuclear power is vastly more common than it is here, the Japanese earthquake is being exploited to the hilt. "If the Japanese," editorializes the British newspaper the Independent, "with all their understandable inhibitions about anything nuclear and all their world-leading technology, cannot build reactors that are invulnerable to disaster, who can?"

Well, that's just it. Who said anything, anywhere is invulnerable to disaster? At magnitude 9.0, this was Japan's biggest earthquake and could be the fourth largest ever recorded (it was even detected in Pennsylvania). Perhaps the standard shouldn't be whether Japan's reactor was "invulnerable" but whether it succeeded by taking such a beating without threatening much human life?

I can't decide if the anti-nuke reaction is more stupid (you really thought you were invulnerable?) or obscene (is this really going to be our reaction to broad-scale tragedy from now on? Exploit the dead for our stupid causes? For what kind of person do causes not drop away for a few days at least while the dead are buried?)

Rather than worry about letting this crisis go to waste, this strikes me as a great moment to simply cope.

It's Not Chernobyl In Japan

William Tucker points out that focusing on Japan's nuclear plants at a time when there's a race against time to rescue missing people is close to obscene.

while thousands of people are reported dead or missing, whole neighborhoods lie in ruins, and gas and oil fires rage out of control, press coverage of the Japanese earthquake has quickly settled on the troubles at two nuclear reactors as the center of the catastrophe.

The problem at the Japanese reactors has been solved by the "generation III" nuke plants that some now propose to put on hold. Fearing a problem and therefore passing a law to refuse to let the problem be solved doesn't strike me as the right policy somehow....you?

The core of a nuclear reactor operates at about 550 degrees Fahrenheit, well below the temperature of a coal furnace and only slightly hotter than a kitchen oven. If anything unusual occurs, the control rods immediately drop, shutting off the nuclear reaction. You can't have a "runaway reactor," nor can a reactor explode like a nuclear bomb. A commercial reactor is to a bomb what Vaseline is to napalm. Although both are made from petroleum jelly, only one of them has potentially explosive material.
Once the reactor has shut down, there remains "decay heat" from traces of other radioactive isotopes. This can take more than a week to cool down, and the rods must be continually bathed in cooling waters to keep them from overheating.
On all Generation II reactors—the ones currently in operation—the cooling water is circulated by electric pumps. The new Generation III reactors such as the AP1000 have a simplified "passive" cooling system where the water circulates by natural convection with no pumping required.
If the pumps are knocked out in a Generation II reactor—as they were at Fukushima Daiichi by the tsunami—the water in the cooling system can overheat and evaporate. The resulting steam increases internal pressure that must be vented. There was a small release of radioactive steam at Three Mile Island in 1979, and there have also been a few releases at Fukushima Daiichi. These produce radiation at about the level of one dental X-ray in the immediate vicinity and quickly dissipate. 

Read on. "Melt-down" doesn't mean what you think it means, and the only disaster is to the power companies of Japan. We should focus our energies elsewhere.

Update: Shamelessly pinched from Kaching!

There's Not Too Many Of Us

"This Is Not Science; Other Forces Are At Work"

From The Telegraph, top Physicist resigns from the American Physical Society. Here's his letter in its entirety.

Sent: Friday, 08 October 2010 17:19 Hal Lewis
From: Hal Lewis, University of California, Santa Barbara
To: Curtis G. Callan, Jr., Princeton University, President of the American Physical Society
6 October 2010
Dear Curt:
When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago).

Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence—it was World War II that changed all that. The prospect of worldly gain drove few physicists. As recently as thirty-five years ago, when I chaired the first APS study of a contentious social/scientific issue, The Reactor Safety Study, though there were zealots aplenty on the outside there was no hint of inordinate pressure on us as physicists. We were therefore able to produce what I believe was and is an honest appraisal of the situation at that time. We were further enabled by the presence of an oversight committee consisting of Pief Panofsky, Vicki Weisskopf, and Hans Bethe, all towering physicists beyond reproach. I was proud of what we did in a charged atmosphere. In the end the oversight committee, in its report to the APS President, noted the complete independence in which we did the job, and predicted that the report would be attacked from both sides. What greater tribute could there be?

How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d’être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.


It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.

So what has the APS, as an organization, done in the face of this challenge? It has accepted the corruption as the norm, and gone along with it. For example:


1. About a year ago a few of us sent an e-mail on the subject to a fraction of the membership. APS ignored the issues, but the then President immediately launched a hostile investigation of where we got the e-mail addresses. In its better days, APS used to encourage discussion of important issues, and indeed the Constitution cites that as its principal purpose. No more. Everything that has been done in the last year has been designed to silence debate

2. The appallingly tendentious APS statement on Climate Change was apparently written in a hurry by a few people over lunch, and is certainly not representative of the talents of APS members as I have long known them. So a few of us petitioned the Council to reconsider it. One of the outstanding marks of (in)distinction in the Statement was the poison word incontrovertible, which describes few items in physics, certainly not this one. In response APS appointed a secret committee that never met, never troubled to speak to any skeptics, yet endorsed the Statement in its entirety. (They did admit that the tone was a bit strong, but amazingly kept the poison word incontrovertible to describe the evidence, a position supported by no one.) In the end, the Council kept the original statement, word for word, but approved a far longer “explanatory” screed, admitting that there were uncertainties, but brushing them aside to give blanket approval to the original. The original Statement, which still stands as the APS position, also contains what I consider pompous and asinine advice to all world governments, as if the APS were master of the universe. It is not, and I am embarrassed that our leaders seem to think it is. This is not fun and games, these are serious matters involving vast fractions of our national substance, and the reputation of the Society as a scientific society is at stake.

3. In the interim the ClimateGate scandal broke into the news, and the machinations of the principal alarmists were revealed to the world. It was a fraud on a scale I have never seen, and I lack the words to describe its enormity. Effect on the APS position: none. None at all. This is not science; other forces are at work.

4. So a few of us tried to bring science into the act (that is, after all, the alleged and historic purpose of APS), and collected the necessary 200+ signatures to bring to the Council a proposal for a Topical Group on Climate Science, thinking that open discussion of the scientific issues, in the best tradition of physics, would be beneficial to all, and also a contribution to the nation. I might note that it was not easy to collect the signatures, since you denied us the use of the APS membership list. We conformed in every way with the requirements of the APS Constitution, and described in great detail what we had in mind—simply to bring the subject into the open.

5. To our amazement, Constitution be damned, you declined to accept our petition, but instead used your own control of the mailing list to run a poll on the members’ interest in a TG on Climate and the Environment. You did ask the members if they would sign a petition to form a TG on your yet-to-be-defined subject, but provided no petition, and got lots of affirmative responses. (If you had asked about sex you would have gotten more expressions of interest.) There was of course no such petition or proposal, and you have now dropped the Environment part, so the whole matter is moot. (Any lawyer will tell you that you cannot collect signatures on a vague petition, and then fill in whatever you like.) The entire purpose of this exercise was to avoid your constitutional responsibility to take our petition to the Council.

6. As of now you have formed still another secret and stacked committee to organize your own TG, simply ignoring our lawful petition.

APS management has gamed the problem from the beginning, to suppress serious conversation about the merits of the climate change claims. Do you wonder that I have lost confidence in the organization?

I do feel the need to add one note, and this is conjecture, since it is always risky to discuss other people’s motives. This scheming at APS HQ is so bizarre that there cannot be a simple explanation for it. Some have held that the physicists of today are not as smart as they used to be, but I don’t think that is an issue. I think it is the money, exactly what Eisenhower warned about a half-century ago. There are indeed trillions of dollars involved, to say nothing of the fame and glory (and frequent trips to exotic islands) that go with being a member of the club. Your own Physics Department (of which you are chairman) would lose millions a year if the global warming bubble burst. When Penn State absolved Mike Mann of wrongdoing, and the University of East Anglia did the same for Phil Jones, they cannot have been unaware of the financial penalty for doing otherwise. As the old saying goes, you don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. Since I am no philosopher, I’m not going to explore at just which point enlightened self-interest crosses the line into corruption, but a careful reading of the ClimateGate releases makes it clear that this is not an academic question.

I want no part of it, so please accept my resignation. APS no longer represents me, but I hope we are still friends.
Hal

Harold Lewis is Emeritus Professor of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, former Chairman; Former member Defense Science Board, chmn of Technology panel; Chairman DSB study on Nuclear Winter; Former member Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards; Former member, President’s Nuclear Safety Oversight Committee; Chairman APS study on Nuclear Reactor Safety Chairman Risk Assessment Review Group; Co-founder and former Chairman of JASON; Former member USAF Scientific Advisory Board; Served in US Navy in WW II; books: Technological Risk (about, surprise, technological risk) and Why Flip a Coin (about decision making)

What Do You Mean By That?

Visitors at a different parish this morning. Treated to a homily on global warming, which had what to do with the rich man and Lazarus I'm not sure. Thank you, Father, for making my pre-teens cynical about the Church because they know the facts of the case better than you, and for making my weekly opportunity to refresh my soul tedious. I'm sure you meant well.

The priest, who seemed a perfectly nice fellow, avuncular in aspect and tone, said we could talk about the environment "leaving politics aside," and then proceeded to repeat a set of political talking points which might have been credible three years ago but are thoroughly discredited now. I suppose like many pastors he doesn't have time to keep up. Which suggests some things, but that's not my purpose here.

I have been pondering what that fellow thinks "politics" means if he thought he was leaving it aside.

Comeuppance

Oh, man, how did I miss this story?

When the Rev. Jesse Jackson led a rally for "green jobs" in Detroit, he arrived in the Motor City in a massive Cadillac SUV. But his exit from the Motor City was a lot more environmentally friendly -- thanks to some car thieves.

Police later found the car, stripped. In the story, nobody cares about the theft; Jackson just catches it for going to a green anything in an SUV.

First Confirmed Global Warming Death

Didn't come quite the way we expected. I know, I know, it's not right to blame Al Gore. Though if this had been a pro-lifer, you can bet we'd have been blamed.

Update: The discovery gunman confronting pro-lifers last year.

Hindenbuicks?

Fueling station for GM's hydrogen-powered cars blows up. Don't know if the cars have anything to do with it. I only bring this up because any time I hear about Hydrogen fuel cells, I think of this scene from Top Secret.

Curtsy: Steve Hayward