Roundup 1/28/08

The Hulk-out list. A compilation of the events that caused David Banner to get angry and Hulk-out.

38. Placed in a small room with a ravenous black panther

44. Kicking over a beehive and then being surprised when the bees are mad at
him

47. Being stuck in a cab in New York rush hour traffic - "You don't understand, I
have to be there by 4:00!" - "Hey, mac, it's rush hour, we ain't gettin' there til five,
so relax." - "BUT I HAVE TO BE THERE BY FOUR!!!"

84. Being placed in a room that is filled with carbon monoxide gas

Oddly, after writing about former Sen. Chaffee yesterday, I saw an environmental talk today by the guy who beat him, Sheldon Whitehouse. He seemed very direct. At one point someone asked him a hopeful question that most people would probably try to give a fuzzy, indirect answer to. Whitehouse just said, "No, I don't know anything about that" and moved on. So that was cool. Not as cool was his saying that he doesn't support nuclear power (though he admitted he might be mistaken). If climate change is the global catastrophe it is supposed to be, windmills and florescent lightbulbs aren't going to do it. Making cars as efficient as they already are in most other western nations by "2025" or whatever isn't going to do it either. And people aren't going to change their lifestyles. Wind, wave, hydroelectric, and solar, even at maximum capacity will not be enough. That calculation you do in intro modern physics about how much power you get out a pound of uranium (~4.7 gazillion volts, if I remember correctly) must be designed to brainwash young scientists into liking nuclear energy.

New Material Pushes the Limits of Blackness.

Made from tiny tubes of carbon standing on end, this material is almost 30 times darker than a carbon substance used by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology as the current benchmark of blackness.

What we need to do here, is take this material, slap in on the outside of some animal-human hybrids, and have them terrorize ordinary, hardworking Americans. People don't want to fund science unless they are panicked.

Update: As Jere pointed out in the comments, Bill Lee beat me to the punch on the carbon nanotube story, as he usually does.

Do Not Walk

Run!

Well actually, the people in this newspaper article don't want you to do either. Apparently, they've studied the energy efficiency of food production and shown that there is more carbon emitted in creating the food your body needs to walk down the block than there is when you drive there. From what I've already heard about it, this seems right, especially when it comes to meat. I think that there is something like a 10 to 1 ratio of energy in to energy out when you are talking about beef. Plus there are all sorts of extras like shipping and refrigeration. So according to these folks, the best thing to do for the environment is simply to eat little and do nothing.

Food production is now so energy-intensive that more carbon is emitted providing a person with enough calories to walk to the shops than a car would emit over the same distance. The climate could benefit if people avoided exercise, ate less and became couch potatoes. Provided, of course, they remembered to switch off the TV rather than leaving it on standby.

The sums were done by Chris Goodall, campaigning author of How to Live a Low-Carbon Life, based on the greenhouse gases created by intensive beef production. “Driving a typical UK car for 3 miles [4.8km] adds about 0.9 kg [2lb] of CO2 to the atmosphere,” he said, a calculation based on the Government’s official fuel emission figures. “If you walked instead, it would use about 180 calories. You’d need about 100g of beef to replace those calories, resulting in 3.6kg of emissions, or four times as much as driving.

“The troubling fact is that taking a lot of exercise and then eating a bit more food is not good for the global atmosphere. Eating less and driving to save energy would be better.”

This is stupid for several reasons. First of all, it assumes that people eat based on how much energy they are planning on using up in that day. Clearly this is not so. Most people eat too much as is, and getting slightly more exercise would not immediately alter how much they have for lunch that day.

Secondly, and more importantly, although food production is a huge carbon emitter, there is nothing significant that individuals can do about it. Changes of the magnitude required to have any impact have to come from the top down, not the bottom up. Getting everyone in your commune to use their NPR tote bags at the co-op won't do a thing. And unless there is some type of omnipresent emergency, people will not be inspired to miraculously start behaving in a better, but more inconvenient fashion.

But even if you did set out to personally reduce worldwide carbon emissions by a billionth of a fraction of one percent through lifestyle changes, you wouldn't accomplish anything by not consuming food that has already been made. It's like vegetarians -- it is fine if you just don't like meat or don't want to be personally involved in devouring animals, but if you think that the reduction in demand that you yourself create will save a single pig, you're wrong. The doritos are already on the shelf. At least, when it comes to gas, you can control how much carbon gets released over a certain period of time. After all, there is an amount of CO₂ that may be reabsorbed every year. You can ration your own gasoline burning, but you can't stop supermarkets from cooking up those delicious space chickens. In short, you can't make a difference. If you want a clean conscience you can certainly follow all the wildly impractical suggestions in that article about avoiding supermarkets and only eating cereal, but don't expect it to matter, and don't expect other people to suddenly start subsisting entirely on beans and lentils that they grow in their backyard.

Terrible job, NPR

Yes, I'm one of those goofy tote-bag toting public radio listeners. I love their obsession with pronouncing foreign names correctly, and playing ambient noise about things that they are reporting. Nobody does a better job incorporating jungle sounds into their coverage of the South American economy. Nonetheless, nobody is perfect and I have heard a few atrocious things in the past few days that went uncontested. Ordinarily, I wouldn't think much of it, but I suppose I hold them to a higher standard, so it annoyed me. Here is the first:

Newt Gingrich spouting, unchallenged in any way, a bunch of patent falsehoods about global warming. Though he purported to express nominal support for the scientifically-supported position, he almost immediately lapsed back into the usual coterie of pseudo-scientific talking points about how global temperatures have varied over time (a fact, of course, that no one disputes). Repeated a bizarre claim that some climatologists of the 70's were worried about a coming ice age (claims made by a few stray researchers before we started to seriously study climate are not equal to a universal consensus made after decades of extensive research by people who actually know what they are talking about), and utterly embarrassed himself by parroting a rumor started by Erik the Red, that Greenland "is called 'Greenland' because it used to be green." Um, no. Every 2nd-grader knows that the Vikings named 'Greenland' to draw settlers away from the more attractive 'Iceland,' which is actually much greener. The Greenland thing is a retarded lie, spread by global warming deniers. Did other people not learn this stuff in elementary school geography?

Am I naïve to be outraged by the presumption by politicians that they get to make up their own minds about issues with which they have no expertise? If you asked one of these goons how to replace their water heater they would laugh at you and say that their plumber worries about that kind of thing. Yet when it comes to matters far more complicated and important, they mouth off with the kind of solemnity you would expect from somebody who peer-reviews evolutionary biology articles for Nature in their free time. (Except that they are probably spouting opinions that no sane person (or reviewer) would be caught dead with.) Even the assumption that it matters what politicians think about things with which they have no expertise whatsoever is laughable, it is hard to understand why the news media, which (in some imaginary utopia) serves the purpose of fact-checking these propositions, reports on counter-factual views with undue reverence. You don't get to decide what you think about issues that are a matter of scientific judgment. The only aspect of scientific issues that politicians get to have any involvement with is in deciding what to do about things. And then, only a little. Scientists tell you how the world works, and you manage the suggestions of what to do about it. That's how it works.

This is something I think about almost every day, but I don't think I've blogged about practically at all. The old aphorism that 'we are entitled to our own opinions, but not our own facts' is never more relevant than now, with public distortion of science that now seems to be frequent than ever. And if crunchy NPR is letting people get away with it, it doesn't look good for anyone else.

Left-wingers now regulating Earth's rotation

From the "I hope this is satire" category, a letter to the editors of the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, on the far-ranging effects of extending daylight by an hour each day. Regulating foreign and interstate commerce, levying taxation, declaring war, ratifying treaties, approving judicial nominees, and now apparently, specifying the rate of the Earth's rotation...are among the roles of the U.S. Congress.

You may have noticed that March of this year was particularly hot. As a matter of fact, I understand that it was the hottest March since the beginning of the last century. All of the trees were fully leafed out and legions of bugs and snakes were crawling around during a time in Arkansas when, on a normal year, we might see a snowflake or two.

This should come as no surprise to any reasonable person. As you know, Daylight Saving Time started almost a month early this year. You would think that members of Congress would have considered the warming effect that an extra hour of daylight would have on our climate. Or did they?

Perhaps this is another plot by a liberal Congress to make us believe that global warming is a real threat. Perhaps next time there should be serious studies performed before Congress passes laws with such far-reaching effects.

Curse these big-government liberals meddling in the amount of sunlight to callously increase Al Gore's dvd sales! Today, more daylight, tomorrow they'll blot out the sun over the red states!

When the revolution comes, I want to be in the Politburo

As reprehensible and willfully misinformed ordinary global warming "deniers" are, they can't hold a deluded candle to the people who think the whole issue is some kind of conspiracy. I could see where someone who is deeply mistaken or scientifically illiterate would consider his pro-science opponents to be alarmists, or naïve and overcautious. I could imagine simply thinking that they were wrong, and that they were willing to believe anything pessimistic that their crunchy friends told them. But when it comes to the sorting out why every scientist who knows actually knows something about it disagrees, I can't imagine anyone settling on "conspiracy." Conspiracies are an inherently silly concept, but when you apply it to a situation involving a bunch of professors who don't know each other or get anything out of it, it makes even less sense. If that is possible.

Moreso for the politicians who make a big deal out of it; how would you think that they stand to gain by pointing out that there is going to be a world-wide catastrophe unless industry undergoes drastic changes? The polluter people obviously have a lot to gain by stopping you, but it isn't like Al Gore hates cars. A few nutty people might dislike technology for stupid whacked-out reasons, but the vast majority of environmentalists get absolutely nothing for holding this view, other than a deep feeling of unease. Anti-scientific charlatans get the support of these fantastically rich companies, the politicians who shill for those companies, and they also get to feel good about the fact that the world isn't going to end.

This is what I never get about climate change deniers, just what do they think is the point of the supposed conspiracy? Executed somehow by these scientists are so capable of coming to a secret but world-wide consensus to deceive everyone (because if academics are known for anything, it is agreeing), so that they can get...more funding? I don't know. Or what they thing Gore was up to in the 80's when he was the only person who was pointing this out. How is talking about complicated scientific issues cloaked in a message of gloom and despair supposed to make you popular? What is the demographic that is going to love hearing about that? "Vote Gore: Harbinger of inevitable disaster." Yes, that is an uplifting message.

I just don't understand what they think their opponents motives are. They cannot honestly say scientists hate the idea of car ownership or electricity. I figured the charlatans were just sort of in denial and that they assumed their opponents were misguided, or that the climate predictions would turn out to be wrong, even as that became increasingly unlikely. I have just never been able to see, from their point of view, how environmentalists could be perceived to have sinister motives. Even if they were wrong, they would have to be sincere--there is absolutely no reward.

But I finally saw something Friday that cleared up for me what some of these folks are thinking. They believe, at least the more obtuse ones, that global warming is being used as a cover to secretly establish a world-wide totalitarian communist government. Yes, you read that correctly. Of global warming this [successful right-wing blogger] says:

They want to use it to create a world government that subjugates individual nations and people to the irrefutable ideal of preserving the planet. In other, simpler words, their objective is communism -- the replacement of individual free choice and free markets with a collective that has the power to exterminate anyone and anything on behalf of a rational government model that justifies all actions without resort to bourgeois notions of morality.

Once the precedent has been set that there is a planetary cause which trumps human-centric morality, they will be free to rule everyone as they -- and their chosen experts -- see fit. It's important to recognize that modern liberalism has nothing whatever to do with traditional liberalism, which values the individual above all other principles. The real desire of contemporary "liberals" is to establish a ruling class with absolute power over all us ordinary slobs who don't share their peculiar perspectives on social justice.

A scientific cause is the perfect instrument for achieving this objective. The definition of science is that it consists of what has been proven factually true. It cannot therefore be rebutted by faith, values, esthetics, or aspiration. Its status as irrevocable truth empowers the enlightened (i.e., those in power) to censor, punish, obliterate, and overturn pre-existing values without any philosophical backchat. Science allows the substitution of facts for truth, however conceived. If he were alive today, the amoral keepers of the Global Warming faith could wring obedience from Jesus Christ on the subject of recycling and secondhand smoke -- without uttering a single word about divinity, faith, or sin. In the preferred "liberal" model, power belongs not to the good but to the smart. You will learn, despite three centuries of disrespect and rebellion, to genuflect to Yale.

That's why ducking the questions about Global Warming -- "I don't know," "I'm not sure," "I don't disagree in principle," "I don't see the harm in going along," -- is a suicide pact with totalitarianism.

These people are nuts. And they're also winning the battle over what the politics of the future will look like. Global Warming is not a sideshow. It's the incredibly ponderous first step of an assault that intends to remove all individual free will from life. That's why it's imperative that all of us quit making jokes about Global Warming and go to war for the purpose of debunking it.

...Study. And then spread the word. Not laughingly, but as seriously as if your life depended on it. Because it does.

Somehow I am having trouble picturing Commissar Gore delivering a vociferous invocation to the assembled multitudes of Red Square at the installment of his one-world Peoples' Government. The long-awaited fruition of decades of work, patiently making power point presentations and boring speeches, dreaming wistfully of the glorious Workers' Revolution. Climatologists of the world, Unite!

(I don't want to give this creep traffic, so email me [or roll your cursor over this text] if you are interested in the link.)

open letter

dear al gore,

you have placed a lot of emphasis on the 0th and 1st laws of thermodynamics.* now is the time to begin raising awareness about the 2nd: keeping entropy low. at least CO2 can be reabsorbed, entropy only goes up! what would our lives be like if the entropy became too high to find your car keys or pair socks correctly? do you really want to live in a world where our great-grandchildren have to eat the peas all mixed in with the mashed potatoes? (eww, gross). fortunately, there are steps we can take to keep entropy low. they range from avoiding temperature changes, to reducing the number of choices people are allowed, to rolling up the bottom of the toothpaste. every little bit helps. please spend several minutes talking about this in your slide lectures. i can make you a graph.

yours truly,
concerned citizen

* ice caps melting. conservation of energy.