Bookworm Room

Tweet I think Al Gore must have been behind this eco-friendly housing subdivision, because it’s making money for the rich and screwing every one else: Residents promised cheaper bills to live in a multi-million pound eco-friendly ‘homes of the future’ complex say they will have to move out after being hit with sky-high electricity charges. [...]

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Tweet Approximately every ten years, Marin County floods.  Thinking back, the last big flood year in our neighborhood was around 2002 or 2003.  I remember taking the kids down from the hill on which we live to the marshy flat-lands nearby.  We waded through water that came up past our knees.  This high water was [...]

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Quite clearly, our own environmentally sensitive natives believed that all one needed to do was to build bricks, mortar and steel into modern-looking structures, pick an environmentally friendly “technology” with a cool sounding name and, voila! Magic benefits would come out of thin air – endless BTUs of cheap, pollution-free, guilt-free, Gaia-approved energy that defied the laws of physics, engineering and economics.

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Tweet “Find a need and fill it.”  That’s great advice in a capitalist society and it’s how many people have gotten rich while improving other’s lives. Al Gore has a different twist on that adage:  Use false data to create an artificial need, and then fill that need using pork: The man who was within [...]

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Tweet Food prices in America are going up and up.  We’re not starving, thank goodness, but we are seeing more and more of our money go to groceries.  Many see a direct connection with ethanol (i.e., using food to power cars) and rising food prices.  Thus, despite the challenging drought, the administration is pursuing ethanol-based [...]

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Basically, these volcanic events have to do with the puzzling appearance and disappearance of hot water masses in the Pacific Ocean that affect the flow of currents and, consequently, air masses that affect our global climate.

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Tweet The scientists were wrong, so they blame it on climate change.  Maybe they’re right this time that their wrongness is because of climate change.  Or maybe the scientists simply don’t know as much as they think they do, whether because of poor data, poor predictions, or the fact that Mother Nature always has surprises [...]

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Tweet The news tells me that the US is suffering the biggest drought since 1956.  Does that mean that anthropogenic global warming was as bad in 1956 as it is today?  And if the Dust Bowl drought of the 1920s was even worse (and the news article doesn’t mention it), does that mean AGW was [...]

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Tweet A couple of weeks ago, I asked you all to link to a General Knowledge Quiz that DK publishing hosts.   I disclosed at the time that this was not a purely altruistic act, even though I thought the quizzes were fun and I think the world of DK books.  In exchange for promoting [...]

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Tweet A few weeks ago, I asked just how energy efficient electric cars really are because it seemed to me that, as is the case with pre-packaged meat at the supermarket, all the dirty stuff is happening behind the scenes: People hostile to American consumerism (that would be the AGW/Green crowd), as well as vegetarians [...]

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Tweet Years ago, the Bookworm Room took a leadership position in challenging man-made global warming dogma and I would comfortably assert that we have been winning the arguments. However, the battle is far from over. Today’s Chicago Tribune posted a column published by two credentialed climate scientists from the U. of Illinois, attributing this winter’s [...]

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Tweet People hostile to American consumerism (that would be the AGW/Green crowd), as well as vegetarians and PETA people (often the same people as the AGW/Green crowd), like to point out that Americans, by buying their meat neatly packaged at the grocery store can ignore the living, breathing animal behind that ready-to-cook slab of meat.  [...]

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Tweet I’ve been skeptical of climate change because (a) I think Al Gore’s an idiot; (b) the climate changers see everything in terms of climate change, which is nonsensical; (c) the Climate Gate emails indicated fraud and information suppression to advance the climate change narrative, suggesting that the actual facts do not advance that narrative; [...]

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Tweet The Science Channel’s Alien Encounters is a two-part pseudo-documentary that interweaves footage of real scientists and novelists talking about possible alien encounters, with faux footage of the world dealing with an actual alien encounter.  Alien Encounters has gotten decent press from the usual suspects. I disagree.  As a science show, it’s not impressive.  The [...]

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Tweet I’m not the most observant person in the world.  It was probably in around 1976 when I suddenly realized that the CBS nightly news, which my parents watched religiously, was no longer giving daily updates about the number of dead and wounded in Vietnam.  That information had provided a backdrop to my childhood dinners, [...]

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Tweet Here’s a Robert Samuelson article, “bye bye Keynes” that should give us all pause: the arguments he uses to write Keynes’ obituary are arguments that we all posited in our own excoriation of Keynes in years past, in response to a string of commentators, ranging from A to Z. I’ve been reviewing our last [...]

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Tweet For those of you interested in the fact that several thousand more East Anglia climate change emails are now available for public consumption, many of which indicate that the climate change proponents were aggressively pushing a theory in advance of actual data, here are four good links: Watts Up With That Yid With Lid [...]

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Tweet Paul Krugman, aided by more than 500 commenters, launched a hysterical rant about the Republican war on science, all of which is embodied in Perry’s skepticism about anthropogenic global warming.  Krugman and his acolytes are unanimous in their opinion:  Republicans are anti-scientific, book burning, people burning, Galileo hating, troglodytes.  (Neither he nor his groupies [...]

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Tweet On the heels of Bookworm’s excellent, hard-hitting essay on narcissism comes a nice coda on man-made global warming that is emblematic of Bookworm’s theme. Because of major discoveries involving the interaction of atmospheric aerosols and cosmic radiation, “climate models will have to be revised,” stated a communication from CERN that promises to completely overhaul [...]

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Tweet Jim Lacey explains clearly the problem with global warming science:  it’s so hopelessly corrupt that it’s no longer possible to tell what the truth is any more. Incidentally, this corruption is not a new problem.  In 1934, the now-forgotten author C.P. Snow, was a trained physicist, examined scientific dishonesty in his book The Search.  [...]

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Tweet Fourth of July, the national celebration of combustion, presents an opportunity for atonement. Are you thinking? Have you figured it out yet? Do you know why you should atone on America’s Independence Day? You may have a hard time believing this one, from the NYT: FOOD is responsible for 10 to 30 percent of [...]

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Tweet Amazing video.  The narrative is clear, and the images are brilliant:

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Tweet We have an odd family friend. Fundamentally, she is a nice person and sports a very unconventional view of the world that occasionally emotes great insights into the human condition. She has a major flaw, however, one that she admits as a character flaw: she is an unabashed hater. Despite her husband, kids and [...]

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Tweet I thought Evan Sayet’s column on being a climate change skeptic was a good rebuttal to abc’s claim that I am an intellectual troglodyte, corrupting my child.

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Tweet My 13.5 year old glanced at this article and then walked away.  I asked, “Aren’t you going to read it?”  She shrugged.  “It just says that global warming’s basically a fraud.  I already knew that.  We need to care for our environment, but the world isn’t coming to an end.”  That’s my girl!

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