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Miniposts 0.6.5

Methane Leak
Scientists have discovered the Arctic ocean seabed is leaking huge amounts of methane into the atmosphere.  The research published in the journal Science shows the permafrost under the East Siberian Arctic shelf, which was thought to be a barrier sealing methane, is perforated.  Read more here. (1)

NYT: Pachauri Faces Credibility Siege
The New York Times is reporting that: Dr. Pachauri and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are now under intense scrutiny, facing accusations of scientific sloppiness and potential financial conflicts of interest from climate skeptics, right-leaning politicians and even some mainstream scientists.  More here. (1)

Phil Jones Guilty, But
The university at the centre of the climate change row over stolen e-mails broke the law by refusing to hand over its raw data for public scrutiny.  B ut…  Read more here. (0)

Banks Leave Carbon Market
Banks and investors are pulling out of the carbon market after the failure to make progress at Copenhagen on reaching new emissions targets after 2012.  Read more here. (0)

UK Met Office Can't Forecast Weather
The UK Met Office is debating what to do with its long-term and seasonal forecasting after criticism for failing to predict extreme weather.   It was predicted that this winter would be warmer than average – yet it has been unusually cold.  Read more here. (2)

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US Democrats Poised to Embrace Offshore Oil Drilling

Since Sarah Palin, the Governor of Alaska, became a part of the US Presidential election campaign there has been a change in US Politics with the Democrats now joining what some are describing as a new oil rush. 

 

Writing for the New York Times in an article entitle ‘Demoncrats embrace offshore drilling’ Carl Hulse explains:

 

“For decades, opposition to new offshore oil drilling has been a core principle of Congressional Democrats, ranking in the party pantheon somewhere just below protecting Social Security and increasing the minimum wage. But a concerted Republican assault over domestic oil production and the threat of political backlash from financially pressed motorists have Democrats poised to embrace a fundamental shift in energy policy.”

 

————

Carl Hulse, The New York Times, 11 September 2008

DEMOCRATS EMBRACE OFFSHORE DRILLING

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/12/us/12cong.html?hp

 

Link from Benny Peiser  

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58 Responses to “US Democrats Poised to Embrace Offshore Oil Drilling”

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  1. Comment from: Gordon Robertson


    Louis Hissink said…”these sciences tend to stall in intellectual cul-de-sacs derived from a reliance of deductive reasoning, often forgetting that the fundamentals were never empirically verified”.

    good point, Louis. You might include quantum mechanics in that group. Richard Feynman claimed it worked but that no one knew why. My own naive take on QM is they stole the equations from Newtonian mechanics and applied math (statistics) to them. They appear to have fluked onto something but the advocates claim it as a miraculous science and a replacement for Newtonian mechanics.

    David Bohm was in the forefront of QM studies and he claimed both QM and NM had come to the end of the road. He felt the problem was a lack of understanding of how phenomena worked. In particular, he thought the inclusion of time as a parameter has mislead us and that we need to revisit the theories and find a better relationship between the phenomena we observe.

  2. Comment from: Louis Hissink


    CK

    Since you write mainly ad homs no further discussion is necessary.

  3. Comment from: Louis Hissink


    Gordon,

    QM is indeed a fable – but once you apply the theories of the plasma universe, where the laws of Maxell and Lorentz are applicable, things start becoming tractable.

    Incidentally I believe David Bohm did work in plasma as well, so he was probably thinking along the lines of the electric plasma scientists.

  4. Comment from: Graeme Bird


    “Thanks for that brain fart, Bird. What is that avatar exactly? Stalin?”

    I can tell you this story. What happened is I hatched a plot with Anna at Larvatus Prodeo to dress up as Chairman Mao on the logic that I’d get more posts through the itinerant central-scrutinizers on that forum.

    It worked like a charm until Mark finally got jack of me laying out too many home truthzs in his direction.

  5. Comment from: Graeme Bird


    “Oh Luke. It was only because the ignorant voting public, as part of a giant conspiracy run by marxist otherworldians, and in an act of collective suicide, chose to deprive itself of Birdy’s shimmering genius.”

    OK Steve. I know its you now. Only you can go from being so pointlessly nasty to being inspired in a split second like that.

    “Betcha Birdy has got the hots for Sarah.”

    Wow what a scandal that would be? Good-looking intelligent women just don’t do it for you hey Luke?

    Everything is so topsy-turvy with you guys I suspect its mandatory only to be attracted to really dumb ugly girls. With apologies for the fact that they are female in the first place.

    “Thanks for that brain fart, Bird. What is that avatar exactly? Stalin?”

    Now I see this for what it is. Steve Munns bungled attempt at deep cover.

    >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

    “The PLas Universe theories are quite capable of explaining things in terms of known physics not made up stuff like black holes, neutron stars, dark matter, dark energy etc.”

    Right. When I’ve heard these guys talk nothing sets of the shit-detector. They were calling it all the electric-universe which sounded a bit simple. But once you got over that unfortunate phrasing, it was all pretty interesting.

    Whereas the mainstream view is just one series of pathetic excuses and maths-boy 101 silliness from start to finish.

    People don’t realise the arbitrariness of some of these developments. Like if Einstein had drowned at sea and someone had slipped steroids into Lorentz’s morning coffee then we could have locked in an entirely different set of premises.

    Or if Fred Hoyle and his coterie hadn’t gone head to head with the maths-boy fantasists before the Hoyle team having their own ideas worked out much better……. than the Big Bang eschatology might not be locked in like the Church locked in the trinity dogma.

    >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
    Nothing worthwhile is ever acheived by linear deduction that goes on too long without other tools being brought in. Always you put one tool down and pick another one up.

    You may formalise a system of understanding from the ground up but thats not how you discover it. Always it ought to come from small models, attacking a problem from convergent angles, and thought experiments as much as possible.

    People seem to want to argue that a tool is no good if you cannot do the whole job with it. Hence todays scientists put statistics up there as the real deal and simple thought experiments are looked askance at.

    You never throw any of the tools away but thought experiments are the tool of choice all the way through the process because THEY ARE COST EFFECTIVE.

    Thats not an insubstantial criteria. Though cost-effectiveness isn’t really held to be all that important these days. Look at that particle accelerator. What a waste of money that is. Criminal.

  6. Comment from: CK


    Geeze Graeme Budgerigar,

    I hate to disappoint, but I’m not Steve Munn, whoever s/he is.

    Thanks for the yarn about the avatar, all the same. Pretty funny really.

  7. Comment from: iridescent cuttlefish


    “Introspective individuals are not required in the liberal world view…”

    Louis,

    For a bright guy, a person able to think outside the orthodox cosmology box, for example, you display a stunning inability to think outside even less tenable containment fields. “Left” and Right” are meaningless labels; the flatland spectrum is only marginally improved by adding another axis between authoritarian and libertarian poles, as the folks at the Political Compass have attempted.

    It’s all spectacle, diversion and distraction. Hence the “hot-button” issues where fundamentalists harangue other fundamentalists (I particularly like the rightwing creationists “battling” the rightwing neo-Darwinists for the sound of fury signifying nothing.)

    Here’s the recipe for the future, folks:

    Autonomy → Synergy → Infinity

    Autonomy is not on the menu from either wing of the Party and never has been; the basis of the imperial hierarchy/strongman rule has always been submitting to the authority of the state because you just can’t make it on your own. Check out the history of energy scarcity and its manipulation in Edwin Black’s Internal Combustion for a nice example, but the same dynamic is true for all of our material needs throughout recorded history, whether we’re talking 21st century America or any of the totalitarian states of the previous century.

    (Those needs, btw, are simply food, water, energy & shelter.)

    Now, imagine the impact of a scalable, untethered, non-polluting and limitless energy source on our current socio-economic set up.

    I mean really think that through.

    And what if water could be produced in the same fashion, and food, and all the consumer goods a person could possibly need? And what if we discovered that certain synergies developed, just like in Nature, where symbiosis, all the way down to the microbial level, is far more the name of the game than the social Darwinist propaganda that modern hacks like Pinker & Dawkins are lifting their skirts to sell?

    It’s all true, folks, every bit of it. Why hasn’t this “good news” been trumpeted throughout the world?

    Well, some folks are trying to, but it’s still money–entropic, corrosive money–that makes the world go ’round, you see, and even if we let the 375 families who own 52% of the world outright keep their loot, they wouldn’t be happy seeing the rest of the world pursuing its happiness because power does funny things to people.

    As you all know.

    More clues for interested parties are available.

    (And Louis, keep thinking. Special clue for you: All is One)

  8. Comment from: Jennifer Marohasy » Bowhead Whale Could Slow US Plan for Energy Independence?


    [...] Tomorrow the residents of Barrow, Alaska, a town on the edge of the Arctic Ocean, will vote for a new mayor.    According to at least one report whoever wins will potentially impact the ability of the US to fast track its plans for energy independence through offshore oil drilling. [...]

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