Climate and Health Care

View 793 Saturday, October 12, 2013

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

Christians to Beirut. Alawites to the grave.

Syrian Freedom Fighters

What we have now is all we will ever have.

Conservationist motto

I have been much under the weather to the extent that I will have to miss an old friend’s birthday party tonight and have had little energy. Apologies, particularly since this is Pledge Week when I traditionally annoy you about subscribing or renewing. This place operates on the Public Radio model, free to all but it stays open only if enough subscribe to keep it open. It has always been that way and we have always had enough subscriptions and renewals. I run my subscription drives in the weeks when KUSC the Los Angeles good music station runs its public radio pledge drive, and they have started their pledge week.

I do things this way so you won’t be continuously annoyed with commercials for the site and of course I don’t take advertisements here.

So if you have not renewed your subscription for a while, this would be a good time to do that. And I hasten to add, if the economic times are getting to you, I am not after eating money. Just some of your beer and wine money. Paying for this place…

I will try to get more up tonight, but Mike Flynn has sent me an excellent essay summarizing discussion on the Climate Debates.

It tends to be a bit wordy, but this comes as close to my view as anything I have seen:

A physicist on climate science

Readers may find this interesting:

http://judithcurry.com/2013/10/12/a-physicist-reflects-on-the-climate-debate/

MikeF

Here is an extract. There is a great deal more.

The climate science debate is something that matters, it cannot be simply neglected or ignored. Whether or not there are reasons to be alarmed is beyond the point. The point is that many people are getting emotionally alarmed with economical and geopolitical consequences that are enormous. Under such panicking pressure, and the stronger pressure of financial interests, gigantic sums are invested in wind-mill farms and electric cars, just to quote two very controversial initiatives. Decisions are taken on nuclear energy, on fracking, on deep-sea drilling, etc. Not to mention crazy geo-engineering projects that are being contemplated.

I naturally should like to be well informed of the bases on which such decisions are taken. I am prepared to adhere to some precaution principle and accept that we should be careful with injecting CO₂ in the atmosphere at the scale of what it already contains when we do not know enough to be sure that it is reasonably harmless; I understand that answering many of the open questions in climate science may require more time than we can afford to wait. But I find it difficult to find a good summary document where I can read what I need. The IPCC report was not written with this in mind and it makes statements on the probability, or level of confidence, of model predictions that are not scientifically acceptable. The way they quantify their ignorance of many parameters and phenomena of relevance, as if they were arguments governed by statistics, or worse by voting, makes no sense to me.

 

Re: A Disturbing Thought

Jerry,

I note that since I wrote last, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew has testified to the Senate about missing his October 17th debt limit deadline.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/running-transcript-jack-lews-testimony-on-debt-ceiling/2013/10/10/3edc0122-31b0-11e3-9c68-1cf643210300_story.html

Among the obligatory parroting of White House talking points (the sky will fall, it’s already starting to, the President is a paragon of reasonableness who’s always been willing to negotiate, we’ve always been at war with EastAsia – oh, and broadly hinting that if you think they’ve made the shutdown gratuitously painful, just wait until they’re deciding whether to cut checks for veterans or retirees) he did make one seriously convincing point:

The Treasury Department may simply not be competent to handle what any struggling business routinely does, dealing with limited cash flow by prioritizing bills. They may simply not have the IT expertise to tell the massive computer systems involved to cut only selected fractions of the usual torrent of checks without causing things to collapse into chaos.

Given the IT magnificence that is Obamacare, I find this argument far too plausible.

A further thought: On top of my previous reasons why he might be willing to steer straight into a head-on collision, there’s the President’s recent negotiating record – getting snookered on the Sequester domestically, inspiring a fake(?)-but-accurate Putin "playing chess with a pigeon" quote internationally. He may well see that his best chance of coming out of this still wearing his pants is to stonewall all the way.

Assuming nobody has meanwhile provided a convincing argument that I’m

(excessively) paranoid about all this, I conclude that the Tea Party Republicans need to back down fast, save what face they can, then set about the serious business of taking the car keys away from Harry Reid next fall and away from the White House two years later.

Anger and pride may make it hard to swallow this, but what’s more important – short-term pride, or saving the country from short-term and long-term disaster?

It won’t be easy regardless. We’ll have to do this despite the worst the (by then desperate) Dems and their partisan Federal apparat can do.

And despite the usual ongoing can’t-beat-’em-lets’-join-’em lemming urge of the country-club set…

But consider, by next fall, Obamacare in all its magnificence will have hit tens of millions of voters, and I don’t expect most will like it any more than I do so far. Long after the current shutdown is forgotten, the fact that it was the Tea Party that stood up and tried to stop this disaster will be remembered. Build on that.

courage to us all – we’re gonna need it

Porkypine

Peggy Noonan has something of the same sort to say in today’s Wall Street Journal. She points out that good or bad, Obamacare was not ready for prime time although they had three years to prepare for its opening; it needs to be delayed long enough to fix the obvious flaws so that people can get in on it before it is brought out.  We will see.

 

I now have to go do grocery shopping. We have interesting mail and a short dialogue of value. And of course the shut down continues. Later. And thanks to those who subscribe.

Dr. Pournelle

You’re gonna get your DCX and SSTO. http://www.newspacejournal.com/2013/10/12/grasshopper-flies-again-sets-new-altitude-record/

Live long and prosper

h lynn keith

It is sort of marvelous. I discussed VTOL vs. wings and horizontal with Elon Musk when I spoke at a fund raiser in the Space X headquarters a couple of years ago, and he didn’t like the idea;  I wonder if I had anything to do with persuading him.  I’ll have to ask when next I see him.

Progress. Slow, but progress.

http://www.nbcnews.com/science/must-see-video-spacex-grasshopper-rocket-makes-half-mile-hop-8C11380772