There is a revolution coming in geothermal energy. How big it will be and how fast it can grow remains to be seen, but the revolutionary technology is here now. We already know about the new technology by name — fracking. But that is fracking for oil and gas, the...
During the cantankerous September 29 presidential “debate,” candidate Joe Biden proclaimed “I am the Democratic Party.” He is in charge, he insisted, and his views will be Democrat policy. Others aren’t so sure – about that, about what his views actually are, or about...
In what has become an annual summer tragedy, wildfires are again destroying western US forests. Millions of acres and millions of animals have been incinerated, hundreds of homes reduced to ash and rubble, dozens of parents and children killed, and many more people...
A scientific scandal of epic proportions has led to costly, overly restrictive regulations and harmed patients by greatly precluding the use of radiation in curative medicine. Dr. Edward J. Calabrese, Professor of Toxicology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst...
The United Nations (UN) was born out of an idea for creating a society of nations, a global community, a brotherhood of nations built on a set of higher ideals. These ideals would give rise to a global village with accountability to each other, including social...
The Alberta premier’s plan to treat the coronavirus as endemic was the way out of the COVID crisis. That he is once again adopting restrictions for the province, for the fourth time, does not negate the endemic approach. But his declaration, paraphrasing President...
NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg blames climate change for Hurricane Sandy as a means to deflect attention from the fact that he didn’t do nearly enough to prepare for and deal with the storm.
Tim Ball argues that alarmists exaggerate the severity of global species extinction.
Climate change should be an issue in the U.S. election, all right. But we shouldn’t be discussing greenhouse gases reduction in a futile attempt to stop climate from changing or extreme weather events from happening. Instead we should be discussing how best to prepare our growing societies for extreme weather like Tropical Storm Sandy, events that will continue to occur no matter what we do.
PowerPoint slides which accompanied Donna Laframboise’s speech The UN’s Climate Change Panel: Activist and Untrustworthy that she gave in Calgary, October 17, 2012.
Calling on people to stop asking questions leads to ignorance. Dissuading people from asking questions about scientific issues leads directly to scientific ignorance.
The purpose of scientific knowledge never has been to reach certainty and to stop questioning. While science and technology mitigate some of the uncertainty in which we live, they do not get rid of it.
No science is possible without doubts. Questions are to science what oxygen is to fire: without doubt, science is extinguished.
This is a basic lesson that an Italian court could use, having recently convicted seven earthquake scientists for their failure to predict and warn the population about the 2009 earthquake that sadly injured thousands and killed more than 300 people in the Italian town of L’Aquila.
The sentences handed out by judge Marco Billi were higher than those demanded by the prosecution, which had asked for the accused to be given four years each. The judge also imposed lifetime bans from holding public office and ordered the defendants to pay compensation of €7.8m (£6.4m).
The verdict has been called chilling and shocking. It may be easy to blame the judge for his supposed ignorance, but such blatant scientific ignorance does not exist in isolation. It has a context.
Besides the obvious bias we have come to expect from most main stream media coverage of climate change, “Climate of Doubt“, aired Tuesday night on PBS’s Frontline, committed one serious mistake that can not be left unaddressed.
Frontline repeatedly implied that there is an overwhelming consensus among climate scientists that our CO2 emissions are driving us to a global climate catastrophe. They cited 97% as the fraction of the climate science community who agreed with climate alarmism.
That number is easily dismissed. It comes from a 2009 online survey of 10,257 earth scientists, conducted by two researchers at the University of Illinois. Strangely, the researchers chose to eliminate almost all the scientists from the survey and so ended up with only 77 people, 75 of whom, or 97%, thought humans contributed to climate change.
Besides the fact that, with tens of thousands of climate scientists in the world, 77 is a trivial sample size, the survey coordinators did not ask respondents how much humans had contributed to climate change. The poll is therefore meaningless.
Developing countries must insist that adaptation negotiations, and the agreements that eventually ensue, be totally separated from the so far fruitless mitigation wars. Not only will this greatly simplify discussions, but the chances of significant climate adaptation agreements will be much enhanced.
New public opinion survey “intellectual baby talk”
On Thursday, October 18, 2012 a new report was released entitled “Climate Change in the American mind – Americans’ Global Warming Beliefs and Attitudes in September 2012”. The report and the public opinion survey it discussed were produced by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication. These are the same people who produced the bias-riddled October 9, 2012 Climate Change in the American Mind report about another of their recent polls, that one concerning U.S. public opinion about the connection between extreme weather and global warming. I wrote about the problems with that survey for PJMedia out of Los Angeles here.
As was the case with the October 9th survey, climate change campaigners and their allies in mainstream media quickly reported uncritically on the October 18th report:
“Poll: Growing Majority Of Americans Understand The Earth Is Warming And Humans Are The Cause” proclaimed the alarmist site “Think Progress”.
“Americans increasingly believe in global warming, Yale report says”, blared the Los Angeles Times.
“70% of Americans say global warming is real” exclaimed the Detroit Free Press.
But the new Yale/George Mason study is a seriously flawed report describing yet another biased and meaningless public opinion survey. Like practically all other polls on the subject, they failed to ask respondents the only questions that actually matter from a public policy perspective, questions like the following (which must be asked in this order):
This week saw the release of Climate Change in the American Mind, a report interpreting an important poll concerning American public opinion about extreme weather and climate change. Media across the world immediately gave this survey from the Yale Project on Climate...