Tag Archive 'Climate change'
Bookworm on Jan 16 2013 | Filed under: Science
Tweet Bear with me here, because I’m about to prove how simplistic and primitive my mind is. I need you all to help enlighten me. Some high school students I know got an assignment to set up and complete an experiment. Some of the experiments they came up with include looking at plant growth under [...]
Bookworm on Dec 12 2012 | Filed under: Climate change
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 [...]
Bookworm on Nov 24 2012 | Filed under: Uncategorized
Tweet (iPad wiped all my hyperlinks, so if you’re interested in the security programs I mention, you’ll have to search then yourself.) A friend’s email got hacked. This led to a discussion with a very knowledgeable person about the risks she now faces. Upon realizing she was hacked, she immediately changed her email password and [...]
Bookworm on Oct 12 2012 | Filed under: Climate change
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 [...]
Bookworm on Aug 15 2012 | Filed under: Climate change
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 [...]
Bookworm on Aug 09 2012 | Filed under: Climate change
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 [...]
Bookworm on Jul 16 2012 | Filed under: Climate change
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 [...]
Bookworm on Jul 03 2012 | Filed under: Climate change
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 [...]
Danny Lemieux on Jun 06 2012 | Filed under: Climate change, Environmentalism, Uncategorized
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 [...]
Bookworm on Apr 15 2012 | Filed under: Climate change
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; [...]
Bookworm on Mar 27 2012 | Filed under: Climate change, Media matters
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 [...]
Bookworm on Jan 05 2012 | Filed under: Religion
Tweet Today at lunch, Don Quixote and I ended up talking about predestination and free will. Along the way we touched upon whether prayers are necessary (if God is omniscient, doesn’t he already know what we want?) and funerals (definitely for the living, although one doesn’t want to disrespect the dead). We also talked about [...]
Bookworm on Dec 31 2011 | Filed under: Lefties on Parade
Tweet There’s nothing like a Progressive who’s not worrying about reelection. If you thought Barney Frank’s moobs were repellent, wait until you get a look inside Lynn Woolsey’s brain. The 10-term House Democrat from Marin County is retiring this year, so she finally feels that she can speak freely. It’s not pretty. For example, we [...]
Danny Lemieux on Dec 23 2011 | Filed under: Australia, Bush Doctrine, California
Tweet Bummer! It’s two days before Christmas and there will be no white Christmas in Chicagoland, this year and the temperature will be above freezing. There’s not much snow north of here all the way to the Canadian border, either. Global warmening? I called a good friend in Cali’s San Joaquin valley, today: turns out [...]
Bookworm on Dec 15 2011 | Filed under: Media matters
Tweet “Facts are stubborn things.” — John Adams. “Ideologues are even more stubborn than facts.” — Bookworm A few nights ago, Mr. Bookworm watched the movie Shattered Glass with the children. It’s a fairly good retelling of the way in which Stephen Glass, a young feature writer at The New Republic, wrote a series of [...]
Danny Lemieux on Aug 26 2011 | Filed under: Al Gore, Climate change, Democrats, Economics, Environmentalism, Socialism
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 [...]
Danny Lemieux on Jun 29 2011 | Filed under: Climate change, Conservative ideology, Economics, Leftist morality
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 [...]
Danny Lemieux on Apr 07 2011 | Filed under: Climate change
Tweet I know that we have been round and round on climate issues in our always edifying Bookworm Room discussions, so here is an interesting lecture that I found at our friends at Flopping Aces. The lecturer, Prof. Courtillot, professor of geophysics at the University of Paris, does an excellent job summarizing both historical data [...]
Bookworm on Mar 15 2011 | Filed under: Japan
Tweet Mr. Bookworm, New York Times reader, was telling the children that there was a total catastrophe in Japan, with the Japanese and the world exposed to the possibility of massive radiation poisoning. I calmed the children’s fears by telling them that the paper could be right, but it could be wrong. First, newspapers sell [...]
Danny Lemieux on Feb 07 2011 | Filed under: Climate change
Tweet Are we entering the next ice age? One of the foundations of scientific inquiry is skepticism. Contrary to what some believe, science is not about consensus but about leaving all doors of inquiry open to all possibilities. It takes only one point of evidence to disprove an entire theory. Progress in science has occurred [...]
Bookworm on Oct 02 2010 | Filed under: Climate change
Tweet Unless you’ve been on a camping trip in a remote wilderness for the past few days, you’ve heard about the video that a British climate change advocacy group prepared. The short video takes you through a variety of settings (classrooms, workplaces, sports fields), in which people are encouraged to diminish their carbon footprint and, [...]
Bookworm on May 18 2010 | Filed under: Al Gore, Climate change
Tweet I have to say that this video actually made me giggle, because having all of Al Gore’s doom-and-gloom compressed to less than 2 minutes, and then playing Pomp & Circumstance in the background, is more like a cartoon than anything else. Then again I didn’t have to listen to the whole blather, and I [...]
Bookworm on Feb 27 2010 | Filed under: Climate change
Tweet I truly intended to fisk algore’s op-ed at the New York Times, in which he explains why global warming is still so important that the world should continue its task of turning him into the first green-based billionaire. I was foiled, however, by the fact that I couldn’t step giggling as I read his [...]
Bookworm on Feb 24 2010 | Filed under: Climate change
Tweet I’ve been reading Fermat’s Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World’s Greatest Mathematical Problem, by Simon Singh. Normally, I’d shy away from a book like this — after all, it’s about math! — but it was required reading for my book club, and it’s proven to be delightful. To the extent there is [...]
Bookworm on Dec 19 2009 | Filed under: Climate change
Tweet This is one of Steyn’s best, and that’s saying a lot. Here are my two favorite parts from his column on Copenhagen: [T]he Prince of Wales is simultaneously heir to the thrones of Britain, Australian, Tuvalu, and a bunch of other countries. His Royal Highness was also in Copenhagen last week, telling delegates that [...]