Now it is the NSF using taxpayers' money to propagate Warmism
The National Science Foundation has awarded a $700,000 grant to the Civilians, a New York theater company, to finance the production of a show about climate change. “The Great Immensity,” with a book by Steven Cosson (“This Beautiful City”) and music and lyrics by Michael Friedman (“Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson”), tells the story of Polly, a photojournalist who disappears while working in the rain forests of Panama.
The grant is a rare gift to an arts organization from the foundation, a federal agency that pays for science, engineering and mathematics research and education. The company says it plans to spend the money on the development and evaluation of the show, as well as on a tour and educational programs, including post-show panel discussions with experts in related scientific fields. No performance dates have been announced.
SOURCE
“Climate variability” is the new “climate change”
During an Aspen Institute forum earlier this month Gore blamed oil, auto, steel and other industries for infusing pseudo-science into the climate science debate. In part, Gore said:
“When you go and talk to any audience about climate, you hear them washing back at you the same crap over and over and over again. There’s no longer a shared reality on an issue like climate even though the very existence of our civilization is threatened.
“It’s no longer acceptable in mixed company, meaning bipartisan company, to use the god—- word climate. It is not acceptable. They have polluted it to the point where we cannot possibly come to an agreement on it.”
You may hate Gore, but he’s right about this at least. One cannot speak or write about climate change today without immediately polarizing an audience (especially conservative white men).
I personally know climate scientists from Texas universities who no longer give talks to the public about “climate change,” but rather use the term “climate variability” in an effort to defuse some of this skepticism. Expect to hear the term more.
It’s not hard to understand why. A recent poll found that 69 percent of Americans believed it’s at least somewhat likely that some climate scientists have falsified research data in order to support their own theories and beliefs.
SOURCE
Only in Berkeley
Al Gore is a piker compared to this guy: Berkeley warmist Bob Brown fears that CO2 will cause oceans to rise over 245 feet and kill us all. And he calls others scientifically illiterate!
First of all, I admit the term “Deniers” for “them” might have a derogatory association with “Holocaust Deniers”. I liked GWD. But GWI works too. No, it doesn’t stand for what you think — I’m considering “GW Illiterates”. Just as the intellectual world can be put into “us & them” as “the scientifically aware and the scientifically illiterate”.
...There’s the rising of sea level, from warming oceans and melting land ice (It’s small so far, but if 1. small glaciers and marginal polar ice caps melt: a 1 ½ ft rise in sea level; 2. The Greenland ice sheet melts: a 24’ rise; 3. West Antarctic ice sheet melts: a 20’ rise; and 4. East Antarctic ice sheet melts: over 200’ rise. The last 3 are very unlikely, but possible.)
...
And to the GWI who say: “So what, there has always been GW in the history of the earth.” That is true, but our species wasn’t around with the dinosaurs, and although I clearly have minimum expectations from our species, I am one, and fond of many of them. A climate change that eliminates us would disturb me.
...
SOURCE
EU bans napthalene moth balls, clothes moth plague follows. Who saw that coming?
As reported by Britain's "Greenest" newspaper
They’re back – and this time we haven’t got the balls to stop them.
One of Britain’s grubbier little secrets is out of the closet. Clothes moths appear to be making an annoyingly widespread return – their numbers swollen by the insects’ love for our bulging, and not always impeccably laundered, wardrobes.
Reports of infestations have risen sharply in the past six months. Some have attributed this to the demise of the traditional mothball, others to global warming. But, it seems, the real problem is us and our over-heated bedrooms full of more clothes than ever before, not all of which are as clean as they could be.
SOURCE
A "smart" grid could be dangerously unstable
If everyone buys electricity when it's cheapest, could that cause blackouts in the same way as when everyone turns on their AC on hot days? The smart grid will have to be smart enough to overcome the desire to use it.
The fully networked smart grid offers plenty of benefits to both utilities and consumers, including dynamic energy pricing that can potentially keep the grid from, say, collapsing on ultra-hot days when demand is high. That's because after seeing that increased demand has made running the AC incredibly expensive, customers might choose to be a little hot in the name of saving a few bucks.
This also means, theoretically, that intermittent sources of power like solar and wind aren't wasted. But could dynamic energy pricing, instead of being a utopian dream of market efficiency, actually bring down the power grid?
A new report (PDF) from MIT says it's possible--if utilities aren't careful. Researchers at MIT’s Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems recently illustrated the problem: It's around midnight and demand is low, which means that electricity prices are also low. But if too many people try to take advantage of these low prices at the same time, a massive spike in demand could result, potentially causing the power grid to collapse.
Customers want to take advantage of low prices whenever they can--if they didn't, dynamic energy pricing wouldn't work. But if consumers respond to price fluctuations strongly (which they have to do in order to make any sort of difference in demand), the grid could grind to a halt.
"For the system to work, supply and demand must match almost perfectly at each instant of time," says Mardavij Roozbehani, an MIT research scientist, in a statement. "The generators have what are called ramp constraints: They cannot ramp up their production arbitrarily fast, and they cannot ramp it down arbitrarily fast. If these oscillations become very wild, they'll have a hard time keeping track of the demand. And that's bad for everyone."
There are ways around this. Power companies could potentially offer energy price updates hourly instead of every few minutes.
But while this protects the grid from dangerous oscillations, it also minimizes the usefulness of dynamic energy pricing--because sometimes, demand and energy availability do fluctuate quickly.
One potential solution that Roozbehani suggests: having customers give utilities information about how they would respond to price fluctuations at different times of day and, and then customizing pricing accordingly. This would, of course, require a lot of extra work on the part of utilities. But ultimately, it could protect them--and us--from an unstable grid.
SOURCE
Blatantly Closed minds among Warmist "scientists
An article in Sunday’s Arizona Daily Star illustrates why climate science is corrupt. The story concerns computer modeling of climate, and scientists’ yearning for bigger, better, faster computers. Within the story are these sentences:
Lawrence Buja, the director of the Climate Science and Application Program at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., said climate models had moved quickly from “Climate 1.0″ to “Climate 2.0.”
In Climate 1.0, the main issue was to prove that human-caused climate change was happening. “For that we needed models developed over 40 years,” he said.
“To prove human-caused climate change was happening.” That’s the problem. True scientists would investigate and assess ALL the causes of climate change. The focus of the IPCC and other researchers trying to prove one politically-correct cause to the exclusion of all others resulted in data manipulation, cherry-picking, and attempted exclusion and suppression of contrary data and research papers.
Theories can be supported by evidence, but, no matter how widely they are held, they can never be proven, only disproven by that lone minority voice who just happens to provide the critical piece of evidence. “Climate 1.0″ was not a search for truth, but rather an attempt to provide a defense of one particular tenet of carbon-cult orthodoxy.
According to the story, “Climate 2.0″ will begin with the false conclusion of version one, and with new, more powerful computers, these “scientists” can make their mistakes even faster. Both truth and science will suffer.
SOURCE
***************************************
For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here
*****************************************
Jim Hansen and his twin
No comments:
Post a Comment