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The Week in Review

My week that is.  Busier than usual, topped with a quick and productive visit to the Ashbrook Center on Thursday!  More fun news about that in due course.  In the meantime, in the latest issue of the Weekly Standard out last night, I have a short meditation on what is likely to be aftermath of Japan's nuclear crisis.  (Short answer: more fossil fuels in the short run, but perhaps better new nukes in the long run.)

I also had an extra helping of Cranky Flakes for breakfast yesterday, and decided to deliver a long overdue beatdown on Michael Gerson, one of the media's favorite house-trained "conservatives."  And finally, don't miss Berkeley physicist Richard Muller's five-minute beatdown on the famous global warming "hockey stick" that I discuss here.

Discussions - 4 Comments

Gerson writes: “The ethics of lying, of course, are complex.” Whoa! Aristotle better take notes.

lol. Gerson is not altogether wrong of course. I wonder if he has ever read two briefs and been persuaded by both only to realize that they arose from the same factual record. Troubling that, especially if you aren't sure the extent to which your technical knowledge isn't a lie.
I would say there is a rather huge interest commited to the proposition that Rhetoric is not lying. That starting with a thesis and cherry picking facts is distinct from simply fabricating the facts. There are many ways to rewrite this more charitably, but alas the rewrite does not itself alter the underlying facts. But what is the supply demand relationship of bluffs in the dialectic of lies?

Better Nukes in the long run sounds about right, more fossil fuels in the short run will make T-Boone Pickens happy. Did Germany really close down its Nuclear plants, out of this fear, or was this a pretext for some sort of deal with Russia.(I can think of a nat gas one) That is supposing Germany is tied to the BRIC, by thick veins of commerce (which it kind of is)

Now Italy is out on its ass with Kadafi, and we can debate that dialectic of lies at another point. But if Nuclear goes down short term what do the French do? How pissed at the Germans are the French, and how much do they want to score some of that Lybian fossil fuel?

Hey, guess who funds that Muller project?

https://berkeleyearth.org/donors

May the circle be unbroken:
https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/en/campaigns/global-warming-and-energy/polluterwatch/koch-industries/american-enterprise-institute/

Muller's writings have been shredded before, too:

climateprogress dot org/2008/09/13/confusing-future-presidents-part-1/

Looks like Muller might prove to be a disappointment to the denialist / drill-baby-drill crowd:

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/04/opinion/04krugman.html?_r=2&ref=columnists

Even more on Muller and his very last job ever for the Koch Bros.:

https://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-climate-berkeley-20110404,0,772697.story

"The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project was launched by physics professor Richard Muller, a longtime critic of government-led climate studies, to address what he called "the legitimate concerns" of skeptics who believe that global warming is exaggerated.

But Muller unexpectedly told a congressional hearing last week that the work of the three principal groups that have analyzed the temperature trends underlying climate science is "excellent.... We see a global warming trend that is very similar to that previously reported by the other groups.""

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