Bookworm Room

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 the [...]

47 Comments »

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 learn [...]

11 Comments »

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 that [...]

8 Comments »

“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 fraudulent [...]

21 Comments »

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 scientific [...]

12 Comments »

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 friends [...]

40 Comments »

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 and [...]

5 Comments »

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 well [...]

24 Comments »

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 largely [...]

79 Comments »

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, importantly, [...]

7 Comments »

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 wasn’t [...]

9 Comments »

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 hysterical [...]

21 Comments »

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 math [...]

10 Comments »

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 there [...]

3 Comments »

Some things go out with a whimper.  Global warming may well be going out with a bang.  The latest news from Russia is the claim that the global warming scientists didn’t just have faulty code and highly massaged numbers.  It turns out that they also messed with the underlying data, falsifying it or ignoring data [...]

5 Comments »

There is something deeply, deeply wrong with the Obami and the Congressional Democrats.  Or maybe not.  Maybe they are just all too human and are living out that saying that “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”  In this case, the corruption isn’t necessarily monetary (although that’s there too).  Instead, it’s a rot of the [...]

6 Comments »

My daughter is a very reluctant Girl Scout, only because her best friend, an equally reluctant Girl Scout, is in there due to parental pressure.  In Spring, we sell cookies, and I buy the minty kind.  Might have to stop selling and buying, though, because it turns out that, not only have the Girl Scouts [...]

9 Comments »

My post title is a bit of an exaggeration.  It’s not clear that the science is fraudulent.  It’s just clear that the scientist is fraudulent: A sweeping California regulation aimed at cutting hazardous pollution from diesel engine exhaust could be derailed after a key state researcher on the project was caught in a lie about [...]

7 Comments »

I can’t do better than to quote from the Wall Street Journal on the EPA ruling, which constitutes nothing more than an undemocratic takeover of all business activity and most government activity in this country: EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said yesterday that her ruling that greenhouses gases are dangerous pollutants would “cement 2009′s place in [...]

1 Comment »

In the wake of the emails that an anonymous whistleblower published, those of us who aren’t scientists have been able to figure out that something is very, very wrong with the AGW data.  Still, all the science stuff is confusing, especially the bit about “hide the decline.”  Thankfully, at American Thinker, Marc Sheppard takes the [...]

1 Comment »

I don’t find Stewart at all amusing — but I love the fact that, through his leaden efforts, a generation that relies on him for the news is being told that they’ve been force-fed Kool-Aid.

1 Comment »

The whole sordid story of the corruption of science at one of the world’s premier institutions that has been pushing the man-made global warming theory sounded vaguely familiar to me, but I couldn’t figure out why.  It was only last night that I finally realized that the debate perfectly parallels a major plot point in, [...]

9 Comments »

I realize that, with readers all over the world, speaking about “morning” is a bit silly, but I can only function according to the rules of my own time zone.  I’m up, but so are the kids, and the “getting ready for school” drill is in full swing.  It’s definitely morning for me, and will [...]

2 Comments »

I think we’re all agreed that global warming alarmists have used fraud, blackmail, and blackballing to advance their global warming agenda.  The liberal media, if it acknowledges these tactics, is saying that they were simply over aggressive, but that the underlying facts remain true.  AJ Strata, however, begs to differ.  In a heavily scientific post [...]

27 Comments »

From The Weekly Standard: With the release of hundreds of emails by scientists advocates of global warming showing obvious and entirely inappropriate collusion by the authors — including attempts to suppress dissent, to punish journals that publish peer-reviewed studies casting doubt on global warming, and to manipulate data to bolster their own arguments — even [...]

8 Comments »