A feature, not a bug

Image via CardCow.com (click to enlarge)

Recently, as reported by AutoBlogGreen, the National automobile Dealers Association has claimed that the new 2025 fuel standards proposed by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration could price new cars out of the reach of up to 7 million consumers. As David Wagner, an analyst for the NADA Used Car Guide points out, "If the price of a vehicle goes up by the government estimate of almost $3,000, millions of people will no longer be able to finance a new vehicle."

This is of course causing some alarm. Naturally, regular Flares readers who know my capacity as a self-appointed muckity-muck in the Green movement are no doubt interested in my take on the matter.

I would like to point out that there is no real cause for alarm. While some peons may like to think they deserve a car to ride from their hovel home to their place of employment, they should remember that it is incumbent upon them that they lower their dreaded Carbon Footprint. For that reason, the little people are going to need to start considering alternate means of transportation to save the Planet from having its ocean's boiled away and/or another ice age.

Might I suggest donkey carts as a perfect alternative means of personal transportation?

As you can see in the picture above, a donkey cart need not be grim and depressing. You can decorate it in a festive manner and be proud to be seen riding it down the street. However, since I'm reasonably certain it would touch-off the animal rights people, I do not recommend painting your donkey to look like a zebra.    

Below is a video showing the ease at which you can parallel park a donkey cart. It leads to the question -- along with saving Gaia, is there anything that a donkey cart can't do that you can do in an automobile?

The Best Global Warming Thought of the Year

I'm not sure where I picked this up, so I apologize for the intellectual theft, but here's the gist of it:

If someone asks you whether you "believe in global warming" then you know they are talking about belief systems, not science.

Sunday Links

Global warming mongers embarrassingly debunked.

How much per second?

Is there a genius in all of us?

Chromosome division is different between women and men.

Putin: why do we need so many stinkin' elections?

North Korea gets tough.

Can ancient Chinese medicine yield a cure for AIDS?

Some transitions are more equal than others.

Is China its own worst enemy?

How to hide molecules.

Venezuela down the tubes.

How to bail out GM.

Why ant colonies don't have traffic jams.

Dictatorship in Nicaragua.

Time travel in Google Earth.

Wednesday Links

Drugs of the Stone Age.

Born in Columbia, made in the USA.

Putin's weak-kneed western defenders.

With only a billion years left, is it time to move the Earth?

100 more banks to fail?

Able to leap tall buildings with a single bound.

Sometimes you just have to stand on principle.

Global warming goes poof.

Russia to world: "death solves all problems".

Your Mexican drug dollars at work.

Not enough ads for all the startups?

Aid workers vs. the Taleban.

Good times breed bad times.

UFOs over England?

World Champion Anand wins a second game as black, and one as white.

Robotic surgery on a beating heart.

Sunday Links

Use the Internet 21 times, pay $19,370.

The windiest spot on the planet.

Fighting the real enemy.

Killing cancer with nanoboats.

65 mpg—but only in Europe.

The sustainable political narratives.

You are your walk.

A glimpse of the new Republican party.

Is "junk" DNA the secret of our success?

Let the crowd settle your disputes.

Stalking the central black hole.

Urban sprawl is not the problem.

No free speech if we don't like your speech.

Remembering is like reliving.

Sleep is the new sex.

Climate Hysteria and its Heretics

IT has been a tough year for the high priests of global warming in the US. First, NASA had to correct its earlier claim that the hottest year on record in the contiguous US had been 1998, which seemed to prove that global warming was on the march. It was actually 1934. Then it turned out the world's oceans have been growing steadily cooler, not hotter, since 2003. Meanwhile, the winter of 2007 was the coldest in the US in decades, after Al Gore warned us that we were about to see the end of winter as we know it.

In a May issue of Nature, evidence about falling global temperatures forced German climatologists to conclude that the transformation of our planet into a permanent sauna is taking a decade-long hiatus, at least. Then this month came former greenhouse gas alarmist David Evans's article in The Australian, stating that since 1999 evidence has been accumulating that man-made carbon emissions can't be the cause of global warming. By now that evidence, Evans said, has become pretty conclusive.

Yet believers in man-made global warming demand more and more money to combat climate change and still more drastic changes in our economic output and lifestyle.

The reason is that precisely that they are believers, not scientists. No amount of empirical evidence will overturn what has become not a scientific theory but a form of religion.

But what kind of religion? More than 200 years ago, Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume put his finger on the process. His essay, Of Superstition and Enthusiasm, describes how even in civilised societies the mind of man is subject to certain unaccountable terrors and apprehensions when real worries are missing.

As these enemies are entirely invisible and unknown, like today's greenhouse gases, people try to propitiate them by ceremonies, observations, mortifications, sacrifices such as Earth Day and banning plastic bags and petrol-driven lawnmowers.

Read the whole thing.

Sunday Links

Politics, policy, and polity (and politicking).

Stronger than cast iron.

What she's playing for now.

Some oil facts.

What billions can buy you.

Arbeit may not macht frei, but it often makes people glücklich instead.

The ultimate guide to motivation.

J.K. Rowling speaks.

Introducing Thinkbase.

A reflection of a reflection.

Show trials brought to the English-speaking world.

The Kyoto UN scam.

When principle beat pork.

Sunday Links

CIA: US gaining big on Al-Qaida.

Cracking the brain's code.

China's cyber-militia.

Redefining marriage as between one man and several women.

Advantage Crichton.

The Book of the Policeman.

Buy Ford.

The Book of Optics.

Bush is keeping America safe.

Avoid paying retail.

An economic reality check.

Sunday Links

The war we are in is the war we must win.

Logic puzzles.

Protecting the right to remove your right to breathe.

How to read a business book.

Requiring and demanding.

Could global warming be good for New Orleans?

A helping hand for Ahmadinejad.

From the stomachs of gators.

The coming Senate massacre.

The 25 best websites for travel.

Wednesday Links

The end of the End of History—the rise of the new autocracies.

Scanners that see through clothes.

Can he fix your soul?

Ho hum—dull jobs do dull the mind after all.

Benevolence in business?

The end of Russian space tourism.

"It's the spring-time, and the gators are jumpin'".

It will take a village to shake her off.

60% British Britain and half German?

Armchair warriors bravely battle carbon emissions.

The race margin.

Eating breakfast cereal instead of aborting your daughters.

"Three hundred thousand dead in Darfur-O."

Gas prices deconstructed.

Introducing flaptor.

Leaving Greenpeace.

Latent semantic analysis, in Python.

Are cheerleaders cricket?

Sunday Links

Is Windows collapsing?

Neanderthals speak once more.

Bamboo to the rescue.

Photoshop for music.

The amazing art of Wi Lei.

DatAmerica moves into the genetic data business.

The unknown Russia.

Cutting-edge IT.

Genocide in Canada?

Exploding water balloon.

The human rights of pirates.

Weekly Links

A profile of the Russian Business Network.

Operating systems explained in pictures.

9 scientific errors, legally speaking.

The database of free sounds.

The butt end of the equities bubble?

Human-hybrid genetic experiments might be coming in the UK soon.

Sneezing to avoid brain cancer.

8 simple ways to enjoy life each day.

Microscopic art.

Google's acquisitions sometimes go wrong.

Anti-hacker tools for XP.

Digitize your old tapes with Audacity.

The underground of EDU.

The cars of the future.

Tracking aliens directly.

7 energy sinks and how to avoid them.

Friday Links

It's time for search censorship.

Life without the FDIC.

20 amazing optical illusions.

Is honey the secret of youth?

The best single-book intros for laymen.

The 20 most popular sites for bargain hunters.

New hope for an AIDS vaccine.

6 rules to help learn a foreign language.

Man-made global cooling.

A real-life romantic tale.

Number theory for programmers.

The art of self-promotion.

The better gasoline engine.

Weekly Links

Personal jet-packs (finally!) for sale.

The BBC's Brain Story is available for free download.

"He has no idea what it's like out there!"-dot-mp3.

Overview of biodiesel and petroleum lifecycles.

Growing perfect crystals.

10 of the best natural phenomena.

Everybody wants prosthetic tails on their real heads. (Apologies to They Might Be Giants.)

Why open source works.


Heretical thoughts about science and society.

Biodiesel vs. renewable diesel.

10 tips for keeping the peace.

The beginner's guide to lock-picking.

Flexible, biodegradable batteries from carbon nanotubes.

The idea generator.

More than 60 resource sites for college students.

Europe's cheap hotels reviewed.

The world oil supply is still lagging demand in a "worrisome way".

The world's largest, most sophisticated people-tracking network.

Crowd farming.

How to solve the traveling salesman problem—use optics.

Renewable gasoline.

Update: Crystals link fixed. Thanks, Luther!

The Physical Science behind Climate Change

Article abstract from : August 2007;Scientific American Magazine; by William Collins, Robert Colman, James Haywood, Martin R. Manning and Philip Mote; 10 Page(s)

For a scientist studying climate change, "eureka" moments are unusually rare. Instead progress is generally made by a painstaking piecing together of evidence from every new temperature measurement, satellite sounding or climate-model experiment. Data get checked and rechecked, ideas tested over and over again. Do the observations fit the predicted changes? Could there be some alternative explanation? Good climate scientists, like all good scientists, want to ensure that the highest standards of proof apply to everything they discover.

And the evidence of change has mounted as climate records have grown longer, as our understanding of the climate system has improved and as climate models have become ever more reliable. Over the past 20 years, evidence that humans are affecting the climate has accumulated inexorably, and with it has come ever greater certainty across the scientific community in the reality of recent climate change and the potential for much greater change in the future. This increased certainty is starkly reflected in the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the fourth in a series of assessments of the state of knowledge on the topic, written and reviewed by hundreds of scientists worldwide.

From Climate Audit:
Pictures have been coming in to Surface Stations from many places. This one is from Fort Morgan, Colorado’s USHCN climate station of record. Fort Morgan is in the eastern plains of Colorado, about 100 miles northeast of Denver.

The good news is that more than 85% of the data collection points are better than Fort Morgan. There isn't much question that that humans are affecting the climate at this data collection point. The bad news is that climate scientists don't appear to be terribly concerned about which ones are which.

Sunday Links

I can't promise this as a regular feature, but from time to time when I have already collected more than sufficient links for the Weekly Links feature, I am going to bleed off some of the excess on Sunday.



Perpetual motion machine de la semaine.

The plight of legal immigrants.

Cramer vs. Cramer.

The propeller trike.

Ten politically incorrect truths about human nature.

Biodiesel beats ethanol.

Chinese slaves discovered in Las Vegas.

A's for Google.

When Greenland was green.

Politics as Fashion Ware

What lies beyond hypocrisy? Fashion!

"Caring isn't something you do," my wife informs me, "it is something you are." How else to explain the following?

• Most Florida boaters assert that they care about manatees, even as they speed recklessly through manatee protection zones.


• Al Gore's house guzzles more than twice the electricity in one month than an average American family uses in an entire year.


• John Edwards publicly claims to be the champion of the little guy while surreptitiously signing up to work for an extremely wealthy investment group from New York.


• Hillary Clinton is in favor of the war except when she's against it.


• Cameron Diaz carries fashion accessories extolling the very Maoist sayings used by communist terrorists insurgents.


• Barry Ritholz demands that the government do something about the oil situation, while personally continuing to drive around his gas guzzlers.


• The "Concerts for a Climate in Crisis" will involve a projected 2 billion people tuning into their computers to watch 150 bands flying to various venues all over the world, with untold thousands or hundreds of thousands burning fossil fuels to go see these concerts in order to save the planet. How much excess energy will this whole process burn up? How much impact will this grand extravaganza have on global warming? Don't ask; that's not the point! Tim Blair calls it "Live Earth – this weekend's festival of carbon destruction in the name of carbon conservation." Seems to capture it pretty well. [Actually somebody did the numbers: "The total carbon footprint of the event, taking into account the artists’ and spectators’ travel to the concert, and the energy consumption on the day, is likely to be at least 31,500 tonnes of carbon emissions ...
  
  Throw in the television audience and it comes to a staggering 74,500 tonnes. In comparison, the average Briton produces ten tonnes in a year."]

This is the world we live in. Hollywood Democratic gazillionaires exhort the rest of us to use less energy just before boarding their private jets to Acapulco and Aspen. People put on and take off political opinions with the vagaries of current political fashion. None of it means a thing. This isn't hypocrisy because it has nothing to do, in their minds, with their own lives or actions. What difference does it make whether you wear a green sweater or a green opinion? What matters is having tasteful right-thinking opinions, not boorish Republican ones.

Hockey in The Park

McIntyre is at it again. This time everything is simple enough so that even I can understand it. If you would like to understand the basics of hockey stick manufaturing, this is an excellent primer with easy to follow graphics.

While I understand the need to establish a coherent mythos in support of Gaia worship I sometimes wonder if government support of research into the behavior of this fellow:



might be suffering due to all the focus on hockey stick manufacturing techniques.

UPDATE: Here is a National Geographic piece that poses a bit of a conundrum (barring my lack of understanding as to what it's saying). As we enter this weekend of Gaia worship we are reminded that the upper bound increase at +100 years of 6.0 degrees Celsius will result in the icecaps melting and Manhattan being submerged (a silver lining?). The article states that ice core data over the past 800,000 years show that

"... the warmest period was during the last interglacial period, which is an interval of warmer global average temperature that separates ice ages. At that time, around 130,000 years ago, it was a balmy 4.5 degrees Celsius (8.1 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than today."

If +4.5 degrees didn't melt the ice caps (ice core, remember) that last 1.5 degrees must have a real doozy of an effect. Oddly, the article doesn't mention the thinning that must have occured due to less ice being made in the warmer times....

UPDATE: More from National Geographic - "Based on computer models, some researchers had thought that most of southern Greenland was ice-free about 125,000 years ago, during the last interglacial period—a gap in time between ice ages when Earth was warmer." Maybe the models only work for predicting the future?

Consensual Pruning

Steve McIntyre at Climate Audit continues to point out the state of the Emperor's Clothes concerning the "science" underlying the IPCC's claim of consensus:

As an IPCC reviewer, I

Show the Briffa et al reconstruction through to its end; don’t stop in 1960. Then comment and deal with the “divergence problem” if you need to. Don’t cover up the divergence by truncating this graphic. This was done in IPCC TAR; this was misleading. (Reviewer’s comment ID #: 309-18)]

In response, IPCC section authors said:

Rejected – though note ‘divergence’ issue will be discussed, still considered inappropriate to show recent section of Briffa et al. series.

What an odd choice of words. "Inappropriate" - not "incorrect", not "inaccurate", not "unsupported", just "inappropriate".

Perhaps it's a "scientific" faux pas to display incongruent data?

Lysenko had it so much easier.

Weekly Links

Nerd tatoos.

There's no absolute freedom of speech in Sweden.

Google is building a lobbying powerhouse in Washington.

This doomed star is approximately 150 times the size of the Sun.

Cheap ethanol from glycerin, from biodiesel, care of bioengineering.

France bans Canadian Blackberries on fear of US spying.

11 cures for procrastination.

New study shows Vista more secure than Linux or Macintosh OSX.

The world's best business sites. (hat tip: Buddy Larsen)

A binary adder made from marbles. (hat tip: Seneca the Younger)

Top cities for young professionals.

Sun delivers its first Blackbox data center to Stanford.

Social trip finder.

We actually belong to the Sagittarius Dwarf galaxy, not to the Milky Way. Who knew?

How to cool your house.

If fire were made of water.

The essential 1,000 films.

Aurora Borealis from space.

Philosophy of History.

Quantum dots might be the key to teleportation.

Giant penguins roaming the tropics.

The UK is the worst for social mobility.

The coming global cooling.

7 secrets of the super-organized.

Chimps can be altruistic.

World's first robot construction worker.

1 in 10 Brits born overseas.

Inside China's factories.

Iranian forces cross into Iraq.

Hot rocks keep North America afloat.

Facebook vs. MySpace.