Good Stuff! Some Calm on the Climate

ByJohn Brown

Is the sky falling?

When we politicize science it sure seems that way.

For example, a while back I reviewed The Big Fat Surprise by Nina Teicholz. What she found in her research about fat and sugar was that we followed the exact wrong diet path over the last 40 years by (1) rushing to judgment on the science in a field that was tricky and (2) politicizing it. This, in turn, affected the science. And not in a good way. Here’s a quote from the book.

“Once ideas about fat and cholesterol became adopted by official institutions, even prominent experts in the field found it nearly impossible to challenge them. One of the twentieth century’s most revered nutrition scientists, the organic chemist David Krivtchesky, discovered this thirty years ago when on a panel of the National Academy of Sciences, he suggested loosening the restriction on dietary fat. “We were jumped on!” he told me. “People would spit on us!…they were so angry that we were going against the suggestions of the American Heart Association and the National Institutes of Health”

“This kind of reaction met all experts who criticized the prevailing view on dietary fat, effectively silencing any opposition. Researchers who persisted in their challenges found themselves cut off from grants, unable to rise in their professional societies, without invitations to serve on expert panels, and at a loss to find scientific journals that would publish their papers. As a result, for many years the public has been presented with the appearance of a uniform scientific consensus on the subject of fat, especially saturated fat, but this outward unanimity was only made possible because opposing views were pushed aside.”

For the rest of us, the result has been the highest obesity and diabetes rates we’ve ever seen. And it seems to me that we’ve been doing this same thing with climate science.

Instead of vigorous and spirited debate and research, we’re rushing to judgment and politicizing it. The media, non-climate scientists, activists, politicians, and others have turned it into a religious eco frenzy. And so we end up with people like Bill Nye the science guy (who was a mechanical engineer and then TV host for a children’s science program, not a climate scientist) suggesting that “climate deniers” go to prison.

Prison?

I think Bill had a bad dream about Nazi Germany, socialist Russia, or ISIS.

We all want clean air and water. We all want awesome rivers and lakes. We all want good science. Is it possible to remove the politics and frenzy so we don’t go off into the weeds again? I don’t know. But I did find these short videos helpful. If you’re interested in the climate, I think you’ll enjoy them.

In the first one, Richard Lindzen, an MIT atmospheric physicist, addresses the politicization.

In the one, Will Happer, emeritus professor of physics at Princeton University,  addresses whether we can actually accurately predict the climate.

This one by Patrick Moore, an ecologist and one of the founders of Greenpeace who subsequently left the organization because of its anti-science activism, explains why CO2 is actually awesome.

In this one Moore gives more details and argues that maybe we need more CO2.

In this one, Bjorn Lomborg argues against climate alarmism. Of course, Lomborg isn’t a climate scientist. However, if his facts are correct, then he asks an important question.

The other thing to ask is so what? So let’s say the seas rise a bit and it gets a bit warmer. We might lose some beach front properties over a number of years. That’s not new. It might accelerate and reach farther inland. Okay. But nobody is going to die. They’ll just rebuilt somewhere else.

So let’s avoid prison and climate pogroms and disastrous dashes off into public policy like we did with fat and sugar. Let’s simply support our scientists in doing what they do best. Let’s promote a vigorous search for more insight.

Notes

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  • Interview with Author Leah Cypess

    ByJohn Brown

    Leah Cypess says, “After selling my first story (Temple of Stone) while in high school, I gave in to my mother’s importuning to be practical and majored in biology at Brooklyn College. I then went to Columbia Law School and practiced law for almost two years at Debevoise & Plimpton LLP, a large law firm in New York City. I kept writing and submitting in my spare time, and finally, a mere 15 years after my first short story acceptance, I sold my first novel, Mistwood, to Greenwillow Books (HarperCollins).”

    Leah lives in Brookline, Massachusetts (right outside of Boston) with her husband Aaron, a researcher and doctor at the Joslin Diabetes Center, and their two daughters. She majored in biology, minored in journalism, went to law school, worked as a lawyer, and has just started to learn about hawking and hunting. She’s published a number of short stories, which are all available for free on her website.

    I just had the opportunity to interview Leah about her writing process and books. Enjoy!

    *

    JB: MISTWOOD, published by HarperCollins in April, 2010, is your debut novel. But is it the first you’ve written?

    LC: Most definitely not. I wrote, revised, and submitted four manuscripts before Mistwood. (Technically, five; but I don’t count the first one, because it wasn’t very good, and I didn’t know what I was doing with the submissions process either. I was fifteen years old.)  In fact, after getting the offer from HarperCollins, I acquired an agent, who asked me to send him a list of my previous manuscripts and their submission histories.  The list was sixteen pages long.

    JB: Holy cow, five novels and 16 pages of submission history. That’s a lot of dedication. And faith in the face of rejection. I’m intrigued. How did the sale of this novel come about? Was it just another submission to yet another editor or did you have some connection? What was different with this book?

    LC: Both the faith and the sale were helped by the fact that I could see incremental improvements. My first novel received mostly form rejection letters, a couple of letters inviting me to submit further, and one revision request. My second received a lot of personal rejection letters, many more requests from various editors to submit future works, and one two-page revision request. The third made it to the acquisition committee at two houses. So I could tell I was getting closer, though it was still pretty dispiriting to think I might never make that final leap into publication. (After Novel #3 was turned down by both acquisition committees, even though it was being championed by senior editors in both cases, I had a couple of bad days.)

     In the end, I think what was different about Mistwood was mostly luck.

    It wasn’t my most perfect manuscript – there was a lot of revising to do after it was accepted! – but it was the one that resonated with the right editor at the right time. This was an editor who had asked me to submit future books after rejecting the query for Book #3, then requested Book #4 and written me a detailed and regretful email about why she didn’t feel it was right for her. By the time I sent her the query for Mistwood, she was obviously confident enough in my abilities to request that I email her the full manuscript, and to read it right away. After all those years, the acceptance for Mistwood came just a few months after I started submitting it.

    JB: I’m betting your persistence and work made some of that luck. Work seems to be a little bit of magic all by itself and has been used by a lot of other authors I know. Hum (grin). So let’s talk about the book. You should know you made The Top 200 YA Authors list I just published on my site. It ranks YA authors by average number of readers per book. And while the list can’t purport to be anything but a reflection of the tastes of the area’s library patrons, I think it’s probably representative of what’s going on in my region. So congrats! The book starts right off with a bang. It’s about a shape shifter. I know shape shifters have been around forever, but most fantasy these days seems to be about vampires and werewolves. Tell us a little bit about the core idea of the novel and its genesis.

    LC:  That’s awesome that I’m on the Top 200 YA Authors list – thanks for letting me know!

    I’ve been reading fantasy/science-fiction “forever” (I cut my teeth on the Edgar Rice Burroughs books my father had stored in our garage), so shapeshifters are just as familiar to me as vampires and werewolves.

    The core idea of the novel is that of an inhuman creature grappling with the fact that she seems to be turning human — while trying to figure out why, exactly, this has happened to her, and who and what she truly is. (And, of course, fending off assassins and dealing with palace intrigue.) That idea developed over the course of writing the novel – I started out with a scene of men riding into a misty forest in search of the magical creature who lived there, with no clear idea of what that creature was or why they wanted her. Then I kind of made the rest up as I went along. (This writing process is one of the reasons the novel was revised nine times before being published!)

    JB: I really liked the beginning. No wonder you felt compelled to follow the idea. And nine revisions! It sounds like you use drafts, as opposed to outlines or other tools, to help you discover your stories. Were these big revisions, almost complete rewrites?

    LC: Thanks! I’m glad you liked it

    I usually don’t rewrite scenes completely – most of my editing of already-written material consists more of snipping unnecessary parts and adding little bits and pieces. (Especially of description, which I tend to leave out entirely in the first draft.) But I do a lot of moving scenes around, deleting some scenes, and writing some new ones.

    Though I don’t use an outline when I first write, I usually create one during the revision process so I can keep track of the jigsaw-puzzle my manuscript has become.

    JB: That’s interesting. Well, I have just one more question for you. Tell us what’s coming next.

    LC: What’s next is NIGHTSPELL, a stand-alone companion novel to MISTWOOD, which will be published in May 2011. It’s about a country where an ancient spell allows murder victims to return as ghosts to seek vengeance on their killers… and if they don’t manage that, they remain ghosts forever. After a couple of hundreds of years of this, the kingdom – Ghostland – has evolved into a place where the living and the dead co-exist, albeit uneasily. My main character, Darri, is a foreigner to Ghostland; she is a barbarian princess who abhors the idea of ghosts and is only there to rescue her younger sister Callie, who was sent as a hostage four years ago. But Callie has changed in those four years, and now has secrets of her own.  In her quest to save her sister from herself, Darri will ultimately face a decision that will force her to reexamine beliefs she has never before questioned – and lead her into the heart of a conspiracy that threatens the balance of power between the living and the dead.

    JB: Oh my bleeping heck. That just gave me a case of massive author envy. I was thinking about writing a ghost story just yesterday and thought, “naw, ghosts are all played out.” Curse you, Cypess!

    Sheesh, talk about a parting shot. Well, I would ask about the next book, seeing NIGHTSPELL must be ready to go if it’s coming out in May, but I can only stand so much punishment. The good news, if I put my reader hat on, is that it looks like I get to put a tickler in my Outlook for this May. In the meantime, I going to suggest to my readers to give MISTWOOD a go. Thanks, Leah, for your time. I enjoyed the interview.

    LC: Thanks, John!

    *

    John sez: folks, I think I’m going to make interviews a regular feature. I just loved finding out more about Leah. It’s also interesting to see just how much work she’s put into this. I know that a good number of authors sell their first or second novel (see the Hines stats in the on writing section), but for a good number of others it’s later novels that sell. In either case, I think it’s clear that good old fashioned work makes up a big part of the secret sauce.

    Ah, that was fun. But, dang it, I should have asked her about her lawyer and biology background. Next time.

    LINKS

    Leah Cypess’s website

    The first three chapters of Mistwood

    Praise for Mistwood

    Codex Author Blog Tour 2011

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  • Good Stuff! Lindybeige Rocks!

    ByJohn Brown

    I’ve been watching Lindybeige videos for a few years now. Lindybeige is the online name for Nikolas Lloyd, a smart, funny geek of the re-enactement, fencing, and RPG line. He’s got a youtube channel that is chock full of videos in which he makes witty and insightful points about ancient and medieval warfare, archaeology, dance, and anything else that takes his fancy.

    For example, have you ever seen folks pushing each other about with swords? Is that realistic?

    Interesting, what about pushing in a shieldwall?

    Food for thought, isn’t it? It makes me want to go read up on shieldwalls. Were they really as he concludes they were? But enough about history and conjecture. What about the truth? What about science? For example, if you believe in science, must you also believe in a certain approved list of theories?

    But surely that doesn’t apply to Global Warming Theory, which is now called Man-made Climate Change because the warming bit never panned out. No?

    Wow, and he even accepts the data on the warming. Okay, enough about the truth. Back to fantasy geekiness and weapons in fantasy worlds that make sense.

    I love this guy. If you’re a fantasy geek and haven’t yet begun to watch Lindybeige, you’ve got a lot of enjoyment ahead of you.

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  • Good Stuff! 4 Delightful Movies

    ByJohn Brown

    If you’ve been looking for some good movies to watch, I have four here that I think you’ll enjoy.

    Wives And Daughters CoverThe first is for fans of Downtown Abbey and Pride and Prejudice. It’s a four-episode, BBC TV miniseries called Wives and Daughters, and is based on the novel by Elizabeth Gaskell, who was a popular English novelist in the mid-1800s. Gaskell is the one who also brought us the delightful Cranford and North and South, which all my daughters love.

    Wives and Daughters is about Molly Gibson, the daughter of a country doctor, who suddenly has to deal with a new stepmother and a stepsister who becomes Molly’s good friend but brings a lot of baggage with her, mostly concerning men. It’s also about a man whom Molly falls in love with, but who only thinks of her as a sister.

    But it’s about even more than that. It’s about the enjoyable relationship Molly has with her father and the local Squire and his family, and the issues the Squire has with his own sons. It’s also about how the women in the town and the local gentry deal with Molly.

    Gaskell has a knack for showing both the good and bad about people and still making you love them. She also writes a fabulous ending. I don’t want to spoil anything, but the ending, for me, was just brilliant in so many ways. If you enjoy period romances, you’re going to love this.

    *

    The-Hundred-Foot-JourneyThe next movie is called The Hundred Foot Journey and is a humorous story about a contemporary Indian family down on its luck. The father leads them to England, but things don’t work out. So he takes them on a trip through France looking for the place to set up their restaurant. Except it’s a bit of a hare-brained idea because France doesn’t do Indian food.

    The family’s vehicle breaks down outside a little town, and the father decides this is the place where they will try to build their life again. The problem is the spot he’s chosen is right across the street, the titular hundred feet, from a posh French restaurant. And the battle between the two restaurant owners begins.

    You’ll laugh and fall in love with the characters in this story. And when it’s over, you’ll immediately want to go out and get some Indian food. It’s a great film.

    *

    The_Good_Lie_posterAnother wonderful fish-out-of-water story is The Good Lie, which is about three of The Lost Boys of Sudan, refugees who are resettled in America.

    In 1983-2005 there was a civil war in Sudan, which lies on the southern border of Egypt. During the war, government troops and rebels of the south systematically attacked villages in southern Sudan, killing 2.5 million and displacing a million others. The Lost Boys and The Lost Girls were children who escaped the attacks and traveled by foot in search of safe refuge. For many that was over 1,000 miles across three countries to refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya. Over half died along their epic journey, due to starvation, dehydration, sickness and disease and attack by wild animals and enemy soldiers.

    In 2001, as part of a program established by the United States Government and the United Nations, approximately 3,800 Lost Boys were given the chance to leave the camps and resettle in the United States. This film is inspired by their experience. In fact, a few of the actors are actually some of those who were resettled.

    The beginning of the film is about their journey. The rest is about what happens when they come to America. There are many poignant moments in this film, but there is also a good dose of humor and goodness. It’s a wonderful film to watch with the family.

    *

    McFarland,_USA_posterMy last, but certainly not least, recommendation is McFarland, USA, made by Disney and starring Kevin Costner. My family and I simply loved this movie. We loved it so much some of us ended up watching it three times because we couldn’t coordinate our schedules and so watched it again with the family members who weren’t there the first time.

    It’s based, with a little literary license, on a true story about Jim White, a teacher who re-starts a cross country running program in 1980 in McFarland, a small agricultural town at the south end of California’s Central Valley. It’s another fish-out-of-water film with this White coach being introduced to Hispanic culture.

    Now I know what you’re thinking—oh, jeez, another sports film. And, yes, it has many of the same story beats that you find in many sports stories. But this one seemed to make them all fresh again. All I can say is that we loved it. In fact, immediately after the third viewing, two of my daughters were so juiced about running, they went out on a run of their own.

    If you like sports at all, you’ll like this one. But even if you don’t love sports, you’ll like it because it’s not really about sports. It’s about the human spirit and seeing value in the things everyone else overlooks.

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  • Good Stuff: For All Eternity

    ByJohn Brown

    This year I was introduced to a little gem of a book that has had a significant and pleasant impact on Nellie’s and my marriage.

    We heard about it from my newlywed daughter and her husband. Now you’d think that two people who, in just a few months, will have been married for twenty-nine years would know all the ropes of this marriage thing. You’d think they wouldn’t come across any real new ideas. But this little book proved that idea wrong.

    This book is For All Eternity by Dr. John L. Lund. At the time of its writing Lund had over forty years of experience as a counselor, college professor, and marriage educator. His focus is in interpersonal communication, and part of his background was working with John Gottman, one of the best marriage researchers of the last few decades.

    In this book, Lund shares what he’s learned with lots of humor and stories. Some of it will be familiar to you, but some of it will be refreshing and new. For example, one belief we frequently cherish is the idea that if someone really loves us, they will know our wants and needs. Their love will somehow endow them with superpowers so that we will never have to communicate our wants. Our loving spouses, if they have any love in them, will be able to discern our wants from the most subtle signs. A nod, a sigh, the wiggle of a nose. And if that doesn’t do it, then surely we will never need to drop more than the merest hint.

    Yeah, wrong.

    Lund explains why the whole notion of “If you have to ask, it doesn’t count” is not only unrealistic, it’s damaging. And that’s just one insight. There are many more. I will let you discover them. But I can tell you that I have found this book so useful and delightful that it will now be one of the two standard books I buy and give as gifts to those who are newly married. I wish I’d had these insights right from the beginning, but better late than never. I’m so happy to have them now.

    A little note. For those who are not members of the Mormon church, Lund is directing his teaching at that crowd. So you will find a sprinkling of quotes in here from church leaders that support what he’s learned in his practice and research. Don’t let that stop you. Mormon or non-Mormon, if you want to improve your marriage, you don’t want to miss this book.

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  • Gladwell, Dish Cloths, and Higher Technology for Tuna

    ByJohn Brown

    The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell

    After reading Made to Stick, I decided to read the book that inspired it—The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell. I’d read Blink and Outliers by the same author and found both fascinating.  I’m happy to report The Tipping Point is just as good. In it, Gladwell examines what conditions cause ideas, behaviors, messages, and products to spread like outbreaks of infectious disease. 

    In the book he shares a number of situations and studies, including the sudden drop in crime in New York city in the 1990’s (which started by attacking graffiti in the subway), the dramatic popularity of the Blue’s Clues TV program with pre-schoolers, Paul Revere’s success in rousing the citizens along his route (versus the almost total failure of the other guy who rode that night), the resurgence of Hush Puppies shoes, syphilis in Baltimore, Columbia Record’s amazingly effective golden box ad campaign, and a dozen other outbreaks.  From all of these, he extrapolates three rules of social epidemics—The Law of the Few, The Stickiness Factor, and The Power of Context.  

    The arguments Gladwell presents are thought-provoking and powerful, but what makes him such a treat to read is how he writes.  Like the best science writers (in fact, I think he IS one of the best), he tells great stories with interesting characters.  He puts the reader on the edge of the seat with mystery, insight, and humor. He makes things that could be incredibly complex seem like first grade math. It’s as if he’s standing right there with you chatting about the subject. Moreover, he does all this from page one.

    Here’s what I mean. I left the book out on the kitchen table one night after reading a few chapters.  The next morning Super Wife came down to quickly eat breakfast and get herself to a meeting.  She made the mistake of opening the book to glance at the first page. Twenty-five minutes later she came up for air and realized she was going to be late and dashed out the door. The writing is pure mind control.  And I loved every minute of it.

    If you’re at all interested in advertising or how fads and movements start, if you want to affect the behavior of customers or local teens, if you just like to read how things work, I think you’ll love this book.

    Sunflower Dish Cloths

    I used to suffer along with subpar dish cloths.  There were the dish cloths with mesh on one side that were so small you had to rinse them after every wiping stroke.  There were the hand cloths made of terri that belonged in a bathroom but were repurposed and were far too big. Then were the cloths that had some slippery crap in the thread that refused to soak up water.  And there were the crocheted things that I think we should have put out of their misery when we first got them. Folks suggested we go to sponges. So we did sponges and had similar results.

    Oh, woe, woe, woe.

    Then a kind and loving friend gave us a set of mystery cloths that were incredible.  They were large enough that we didn’t need to rinse with every wipe.  They had this fantastic weave that was open, yet absorbent, and dried quickly.  And the weave had enough of a texture that you could use it to scrub.  We received those back in 1999.  They lasted us for years and gave us much kitchen cleaning joy.  But, alas, like all of mortality, those brave cloths finally began to give up the ghost. 

    My problem was that I didn’t know who had made those cloths and where I could get more.  We looked all over and couldn’t find them.  And then, at this year’s Garden City Raspberry Days craft fair, we saw them nestled amidst all the kitsch!  We bought as many as we could afford, and went our way rejoicing, fully expecting these to last us until we have grandchildren.  Maybe we’ll pass them down as priceless heirlooms.  Maybe some day they’ll be featured on Antique Roadshow.  Maybe they’ll be resurrected with us and become the official dish cloth of the Millennium when the world is renewed (it could happen).

    If you’re sick and tired of sponges and crappy dish cloths, let me suggest you pick up some Sunflower Dish Cloths made by Sangamon Mill. You can order them in bulk at http://www.sangamonmill.com/ , or in smaller quantities online from places like Amazon.

    Everiholder’s Veggie & Tuna Press & Strainer

    Do you eat tuna? If so, you know the biggest pain is draining the can. But you don’t have to suffer along any longer using the lid, which doesn’t do a good job at all anyway.  There’s a better solution, which Super Wife discovered. It’s called the Tuna and Veggies Press and Strainer by Evriholder: http://www.evriholder.com/Tuna-Veggie-Press.asp.  With this little blue piece of higher technology you easily and quickly press all the juices away, and nothing slips out the sides. We love our.  You can order it online, although Super Wife found it at our local evil empire Wal-Mart store.

    That’s it for now.  In the next review, I’m going to reveal two killer recipes over which all who partake will salivate and drool—Chocolate Éclair Cake and Dill Potato Salad.

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  • Black Hawk Down, Pete Blaber, Not Waving But Drowning

    ByJohn Brown

    A Ferocious Battle

     I just finished reading Black Hawk Down by Mark Bowden. It is the most gripping account of any battle I have ever read.

    In 1992 a Somali warlord attacked and killed U.N. peacekeeping forces. As a result, the US put a $25,000 bounty on his head and attempted to arrest and try him for war crimes. On October 3, 1993, by the order of President Bill Clinton, a force of United States Army Rangers and Delta Force operators, the Army’s most elite warriors, set out to capture several lieutenants of the warlord’s militia in an area of the Somali capital city of Mogadishu that was controlled by the warlord.

    The force of about a hundred U.S. soldiers helicoptered in during broad daylight. They roped down to the streets surrounding the target building. It was supposed to take them no more than an hour. They would bag the warlord’s lieutenants, put them on a convoy of Army trucks that had barreled into the city and were waiting right around the corner, and get out.

    But the citizenry, loyal to the warlord, weren’t going to take it lying down. They began to swarm with guns and rocket propelled grenades. They attacked, almost heedless of the danger. One Somali with an AK-47 rode a cow out in a strange charge, a number of other Somali’s taking cover behind (yeah, he and the cow died). But the Americans were overconfident of their Black Hawk helicopters. They didn’t think the types of weapons the Somalis had could bring them down.

    One chopper was hit and crashed. Then another. A third and then a fourth were damaged and barely made it back to safety before they crash landed. As for the Rangers and D-boys, they were in for the fight of their life.

    The book tells the story of their courage, but it also brings in the point of view of a number of actual Somalis who fought and were injured. In the process, we get a view of the battle that is both thrilling and poignant.

    Bowden did an excellent job researching and writing this. I could not put it down. It does include some military grade profanity, but it wasn’t there to titillate or shock. I’ve talked to those who saw the movie based on this book, and I could tell the book is, per usual, better than the movie. If you’re at all interested in the military and the military operations we conduct overseas, let me recommend that you read this book. 

    Delta Force Commander Shares Insights

    Delta Force is the world’s most elite counterterrorist fighting force. Pete Blaber was a Delta Force operator that worked his way up to become a Delta Force commander and took part in some of the most dangerous, controversial, and significant military and political events of our time.

    During his time in uniform, he learned a number of lessons about life, about how we make decisions and act on them. In The Mission, The Men, and Me, Blaber writes about a number of the missions he conducted and the lessons he learned from them.

    The missions were conducted in Montana, Iraq, Bosnia, and Afghanistan. One featured a commander stupidly ordering Blaber to take his men into sure destruction. Another featured some of the first plans to capture Osama Bin Laden, before 9/11. Another included a man in a gorilla suit.

    The lessons Blaber draws from these experiences are fascinating and apply to more than military operations. For example, the lesson he drew from the operation featuring the gorilla suit is something I use every day with my writing. Anyone who leads or manages or works in groups will find other critical lessons. This was another book I couldn’t put down. Anyone interested in special forces will love this book.

    Not Waving But Drowning

    “Not Waving but Drowning” is a poem by female British poet Stevie Smith. It was published in 1957 as part of a collection with the same title. The work is her most famous poem and describes a man whose distressed thrashing in the sea causes onlookers to believe that he is waving to them, not drowning

    I hadn’t thought about this poem since I was a student at BYU. Then a local poet read it as part of his remarks at a conference I recently attended. The image and message lingered with me for hours. I thought about it off and on over the following weeks. This is, for me, an incredibly powerful poem. It needs to be read aloud, I think, to be appreciated. Not in some silly way, but with the appropriate feeling. I’m going to record a reading for my website, but you can read it aloud for yourself. Or have someone else do it for you. Then read it again.

    Nobody heard him, the dead man,
    But still he lay moaning:
    I was much further out than you thought
    And not waving but drowning.

    Poor chap, he always loved larking
    And now he’s dead
    It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
    They said.

    Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
    (Still the dead one lay moaning)
    I was much too far out all my life
    And not waving but drowning.

    How often does this happen? Those onlookers, caring only superficially, thinking it was too cold, thinking he was funning. But it wasn’t too cold. And his heart didn’t give out. He was struggling for his life, and they were too preoccupied to see it.

    Too preoccupied to really see. 

    I wonder. Is there someone around me, that if I just looked, just paused from my rush, I’d see they were much too far out, and not waving, but drowning.

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2 Comments

  1. Richard Lindzen is wrong. On the quotes page as well as the myths page you will find over 30 times he is wrong.

    https://www.skepticalscience.com/skeptic_Richard_Lindzen.htm

    Here is a summary from 2012 of climate scientists taking on Lindzen.

    https://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-scientists-take-on-Richard-Lindzen.html

    And here is a dozen errors from 2017.

    https://blog.ucsusa.org/brenda-ekwurzel/a-dozen-doozies-setting-the-record-straight-on-richard-lindzens-letter-to-president-trump

    Will Harper – His 23 errors.

    https://www.skepticalscience.com/William_Happer_arg.htm

    A response to a 2018 lecture by Harper, on of many he gives.

    “Happer argues that the current concern over human-caused greenhouse gases is overblown. Although he clearly understands basic climate science, his presentation includes claims that are exaggerated, misleading, or incorrect regarding human-caused climate change. His presentation is entertaining, but he argues in many places against claims that climate scientists do not make. He acknowledges that CO2 has an influence on climate, but emphasizes that the influence is small. Yet he gives no physical reason to conclude that the current scientific understanding on the response of climate system to CO2 (the “climate sensitivity”) is wrong, other than to say that he does not trust climate models. His claims that climate models do not work are exaggerated and misleading. He also claims that increased CO2 will be beneficial by increasing plant growth – it is true that plant growth will increase by the CO2 increase alone, but he does not show that it will be beneficial, especially when climate is changing at the same time as CO2. His presentation ignores the large number of studies available that show that through climate change, CO2 will be detrimental to agricultural productivity as well as to human well-being generally.”

    and more:

    https://www.unc.edu/~jjwest/climatechange.html

    Patrick Moore is policy advisor to the Heartland Institute, the leading source of climate change disinformation which has spent many millions provided by energy companies and conservative foundations and billionaires with energy company ties to stop government regulations against climate change.
    Greenpeace accuses him of leaving when he saw opposing Greenpeace was much more financially lucrative and his career now is speaking out against climate change.

    https://www.desmogblog.com/patrick-moore

    Bjorn Lomberg is pretty famous for being fully funded by energy companies to deny the severity of climate change.

    https://www.desmogblog.com/2014/06/25/millions-behind-bjorn-lomborg-copenhagen-consensus-center

    https://www.desmogblog.com/bjorn-lomborg

    He got major funding and wrote a book called ‘The Skeptical Environmentalist’ he was mostly known for along with his later book ‘Cool It’. Another writer decided to write a book examining that books claims. He found every reference cited was wrong or misleading in two chapters. The book ‘The Longborg Deception’ was going to handle the entire book and every citation but it would take years so he skimmed checking the cites in the other chapters. It concludes Lomborg is ‘a performance artist disguised as an academic,’ ‘misrepresenting academic research, misquoting data, relying on irrelevant studies, (omitting important citations and sources), (using the lowest estimates of likely climate changes), and citing sources that seem not to exist.’ Many of the cites appear to be simply cited to build up the number of cites with multiple entries to simply show where a person worked for example.

    https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1nq1hv

    http://www.newsweek.com/debunking-lomborg-climate-change-skeptic-75173

    A short critical analysis of recent articles.

    https://climatefeedback.org/authors/bjorn-lomborg/

    http://www.lomborg-errors.dk/

    There is a reason climate change skeptics rely on lies and misrepresentations. The science and evidence of human-caused global climate change is overwhelming and the warming is accelerating.

  2. Gary, thanks for the links.

    At the same time, I can’t see that any of them address the claims made in the videos posted.

    They’re a general attack on the reliability and motives of all of these individuals. I think potential conflicts of interest are important to raise, but they do nothing to address the specific claims in the videos.

    You say Lindzen is wrong. That out of the 200 papers he’s written, people have challenged him on various points. That seems par for the course. How many scientific papers are written that aren’t challenged on various points? More importantly, is he wrong on what he claims in the video? I can’t find any evidence of that. It doesn’t seem any of the links refer to anything in the video.

    Same with Harper.

    On Moore, you repeat a claim about him leaving Greenpeace that sounds like rumor. He left in 1986. From what I can tell that was well before global warming became any type of issue. Al Gore wasn’t until 2002. Heck, in the 70s, it was global cooling that was all over the news.

    More importantly, what about the specific claims made in the videos?

    The fact that he advises Heartland doesn’t mean any of the claims he made in the videos are wrong. Heartland seems to be like all other think tanks–favoring one political view.

    With Lomborg, I made a mistake. Somehow I thought he was an actual climate scientist. He’s not. At the same time, the question is whether his facts are correct in the video.

    Finally, the purpose of this post is not to refute any current theory or model. It’s a call to get the politics out of climate science so we avoid exactly what happened with nutrition science.

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