Warming to Climate Claims

As Washington D.C. gets record snowfall, climate denialists cackle with glee. It was a cool summer, and now a cold winter. So, they wonder, where is this global warming? "People," I want to condescendingly say, "look at the sun." Weather girls of all genders and persuasions are mentioning that this is the coldest winter in 11 years. Notice that? Are they unaware that there is an 11 year cycle of solar warming and cooling that corresponds to -- and can be measured by -- sunspots? So it's like saying with implied importance that this is the coldest month since 12 months ago. The spots are just starting up, much like the days getting longer at the end of December. Here is a nice look at the sunspot phenomenon. It is intuitively confusing that dark spots mean more heat. But the pair of images here shows visible and ultraviolet views of the same scene. Those dark spots are tunnels into the gamma-hot regions of the sun. Our eyes can only see one octave on the spectrum. Both hotter than blue and cooler than red ranges are invisible. Dark. Red hot is the coldest temperature that gives off light. (Read about Black Body Radiation if you want to know how this is known.) Another detail that climate denialists get wrong is the meaning of heavy snowfall. If you get heavy precipitation, it implies much moisture aloft. That is, many more megatons of water are evaporated. By heat. So before you point to a low local current temperature as evidence against global warming, please look at the time scale that climatologists use, like the Temperature record of the past 1000 years, or even for the last century and a half:

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Eisenhower warns of the military industrial complex

In this video from 1961, President Dwight Eisenhower explained the grave implications of the existence of the military industrial complex. In my opinion, he was spot on in this speech (which was his exit speech from the presidency), and this phenomenon of the MEC explains the horrifically warped U.S. national budget and our equally warped sense of national priorities for decades:

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Hypocrisy on parade

Perhaps you've heard about the American hikers being held in an Iranian prison? A couple of Belgian bicyclists who were detained at the same prison have some updates on their situation:

"We're deeply concerned for their well-being," Van den Bosch and Falleur wrote in a news release. "The psychological stresses of detention were very great, especially during interrogation and solitary confinement." As of early December, when Van den Bosch and Falleur were released, the American hikers were being held in solitary confinement, a harrowing experience the Belgian men describe in detail. "We were in cells with no outside contact and a ceiling light on day and night," they wrote. "No communication was possible with other prisoners or with our families. Everything was designed to make us feel very lonely." Van den Bosch and Falleur added, "From our own experience, we can only imagine that the psychological pressure put on the hikers to confess to crimes they are innocent of is extremely intense. Their feeling of loneliness must be extreme."
Yes, no doubt the psychological pressures one must face in those sorts of situations must be intense. Not as intense as the pressures innocent Muslims face in America's torture prisons and secret black-ops sites, but extreme in any case!

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Cost of our new high-speed trains is dwarfed by the tax dollars we waste in our Afghanistan and Iraq “wars.”

President Obama has recently announced that he will allocate $8 billion ($4 billion each year, over two years) to develop a new system of high-speed passenger rail service. This is an excellent idea. The new rail lines will be created within 10 geographical corridors ranging from 100 to 600 miles long. Note, however, that the high-speed rail line system will be an extremely expensive project, and that the $8 billion bill will need to be paid by 138 million tax-paying Americans. Dividing the $8 billion cost by the number of taxpayers, we can see that, on average, each taxpayer will pay almost $60 ($30 per year, for two years) to support this massive new high-speed rail service. Again, this high-speed rail project will cost an immense amount of money. Consider, though, how small this pile of rail money looks when compared to the amount of money we are wasting in the "wars" in Iraq and Afghanistan. For 2009, the United States spent approximately $87 billion for Iraq and $47 billion for Afghanistan. The fiscal 2010 budget requests $65 billion for Afghanistan operations and $61 billion for Iraq. the cost of these two "wars" together is $126 billion for 2010. Compare these expenditures on a bar chart: Graph by Erich Vieth

Continue ReadingCost of our new high-speed trains is dwarfed by the tax dollars we waste in our Afghanistan and Iraq “wars.”

Temple of Disinformation

In America's heartland there is a modern temple to the denial of five nines (99.999%) of what we've learned about the universe in the last couple of centuries. The Creation Museum is a sleek, elegant, well presented indoor theme park almost entirely lacking in actual knowledge. It is derided worldwide, and is a source of shame for our once forward thinking nation. It is also, I grant, an edifice to the principle of free speech. The ham, showman and charlatan who created this institution in Kentucky after he was laughed out of his Australian homeland seems to be quite sincere about the project. Ken Ham is actually his name. And he has been raking in major profits for nearly three years from this place, well beyond even his early hopes. Apparently there is more than one born again every minute. Busloads of young Christians long to go on pilgrimages to shore up their Young Earth ideology. The younger ones (under 12) can even get their picture taken on the back of a dinosaur, just like those that people rode. That is, before the old west cowboys killed the last of them off. That's why all those T-Rexes are found out on the great plains. You don't have to take this from me on faith, follow the links from the Wikipedia article on the Creation Museum. See actual video tours. So, why am I venting my bile right now? Wasn't this already adequately covered on this site? I just learned that a young collateral relative, a bright young man, is looking forward to his trip there this weekend! Half a dozen years ago, he was in public schools, in every advanced program they offered. Advanced science and math and lead cello in the district orchestra. Then his parents removed him from all that intellectual wealth to put him in a small Christian school. He still excelled, eventually garnering college board scores that got him invitations to Harvard and Yale and such. But he wants to go to a small school with an influential chapter of the Campus Crusade. Sigh. Most of this is re-posted from this FaceBook note.

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