Utopia, you are standing in it!

by Judith Curry

Lindzen’s seminar last week that was presented at the House of Commons may be the most effective seminar he has given on Global Warming.

I cracked the spine of my copy of Ben Pimlott’s Harold Wilson (HarperCollins; 1992) in the somewhat incongruous setting of the Villa Magna hotel in Madrid on a lovely sunny day in 1993. A treat in itself, the Pimlott opus also marked, or coincided with at any rate, something of a revival in the former prime minister’s reputation.

Not, in truth, that there was any way but up for Baron Rievaulx. In the years since his 1976 resignation, his name was mud, and not the friendly brown mud of an English autumn but the oozing black swamp mud familiar from films of the Indiana Jones variety. From all sides, the four-time election winner was pelted with dirt. The fact that the various groups of detractors disagreed as to why they despised him in no way lessened the impact of their attacks.

On the left, he was, quite simply, a traitor…

Greenland ice sheet (east coast) [image credit: Hannes Grobe @ Wikipedia]
Of course the other question about the start of an ice age still remains.

New University of Melbourne research has revealed that ice ages over the last million years ended when the tilt angle of the Earth’s axis was approaching higher values, reports Phys.org.

During these times, longer and stronger summers melted the large Northern Hemisphere ice sheets, propelling the Earth’s climate into a warm ‘interglacial’ state, like the one we’ve experienced over the last 11,000 years.

The study by Ph.D. candidate, Petra Bajo, and colleagues also showed that summer energy levels at the time these ‘ice-age terminations’ were triggered controlled how long it took for the ice sheets to collapse, with higher energy levels producing fast collapse.

Researchers are still trying to understand how often these periods happen and how soon we can expect another one.

Nicholas II (May 18, 1868 – July 17, 1918), known in the Russian Orthodox Church as Saint Nicholas the Passion-Bearer, was the last Emperor of Russia, ruling from November 1, 1894 until his forced abdication on March 15, 1917. His reign saw the fall of the Russian Empire from one of the foremost great powers of the world to economic and military collapse.

By early 1917, Russia was on the verge of total collapse of morale. An estimated 1.7 million Russian soldiers were killed in World War I. The sense of failure and imminent disaster was everywhere. The army had taken 15 million men from the farms and food prices had soared. An egg cost four times what it had in 1914, butter five times as much. The severe winter dealt the railways, overburdened by emergency shipments of coal and supplies, a crippling blow.

Ideologically the Emperor’s greatest support came…

As  the global   Covid-19  toll  mounts,  with  6494 deaths so  far,   how close  are  new  drugs   to  treat   the disease?

Point of  Order  has been searching  international media for news of   the   work  of    much-criticised  Big  Pharma  and found  at   least  11  companies engaged in  developing  anti-viral drugs  to be used in treatment  against the  disease.

The  most advanced of   these  appears  to be  California-based Gilead Sciences, which for the past few years  has been developing Remdesivir, an anti-viral with promising results in lab and animal studies against SARS, MERS, Ebola and other infectious diseases, including Covid-19.

Remdesivir is already  being tested in Wuhan, the centre of the epidemic, and the US National Institute of Health  has indicated the drug would also be studied in some of the patients who contracted the illness overseas and are now being treated in  the US.

The notion that a nation can run on sunshine and breezes is worse than delusional, it’s flat out dangerous. Once resilient and reliable electricity generation and delivery systems designed around the certitude of coal, gas and hydro have been replaced by pure and utter, weather driven chaos.

Rapid and reactionary load shedding (“demand management”) and widespread blackouts (“demand mismanagement”) are now the order of the day, thanks to an obsession with the occasional, unreliable and unpredictable delivery of wind and solar.

In a world where hyperbole and hysteria have kidnapped, bound and gagged our good friends, logic and reason, it’s understandable that people might fall for the idea that we can merrily run on sunshine and breezes, alone; albeit with a few trillion dollars worth of mythical mega-batteries providing backup for a few minutes, when the sun sets and the wind stops blowing.

The mob panic and overreaction in response…

It has been a while since last post (on the Doctor’s analogy skeptic style). This post will be a bit different. It will be about energy, more specifically about (grid sized) energy storage. It all started with this tweet from Jean-Pascal van Ypersele. This is the text of the tweet:

Those who argue that fossil gas plants are needed to compensate the intermittency of renewable energy should read this @McMarghem @eliacorporate @EngieBelgium @LuminusEnergie @Gregoiredallema

An editorial (yes, an editorial, with the byline “BY THE EDITORS”) in the new online issue of Scientific American,”The new science of sex and gender“, is not only biologically misleading, but philosophically unsound. Its purpose appears to be that the “new picture” of sex and gender, which is no longer “simple” but supposedly confused by a variety of factors like social construction of gender, intersexuality, and so on, somehow means that women’s rights have suddenly become more important and more justifiable. But the science is right out of Everyday Feminism, and the social lesson commits a naturalistic fallacy, implying that women’s rights are somehow connected with recognizing that gender is “nonbinary”. In other words, they make a biological case for women’s equality, when the real case is a social and ethical one.

Here’s the totality of the science in the article:

Sex is supposed to be…

EXCELLENT article written by a ‘Vegan Democrat’ and former CAGW believer, highlighting the reasons why many remain sceptical of the “settled science” of climate change…

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What is your position on the climate-change debate? What would it take to change your mind?

If the answer is It would take a ton of evidence to change my mind, because my understanding is that the science is settled, and we need to get going on this important issue, that’s what I thought, too. This is my story.

More than thirty years ago, I became vegan because I believed it was healthier (it’s not), and I’ve stayed vegan because I believe it’s better for the environment (it is). I haven’t owned a car in ten years. I love animals; I’ll gladly fly halfway…

“Social distancing” – reducing the number of daily close contacts individuals have – is being encouraged by policymakers and epidemiologists. Why it works, and why now rather than for other diseases, is often left unstated. Economists have two important contributions here. First, game theoretic models of behavior are great for thinking through where government mandates are needed and where they aren’t. Second, economists are used to thinking through tradeoffs, such as the relative cost and benefit of shutting down schools versus the economic consequences of doing so. The most straightforward epidemiological model of infection – the SIR model dating back to the 1920s – is actually quite commonly used in economic models of innovation or information diffusion, so it is one we are often quite familiar with. Let’s walk through the simple economics of epidemic policy.

We’ll start with three assumptions. First, an infected person will infect B other people…

To begin our day-by-day retelling of the trial of Charles I over on twitter, Philip Baker, Research Fellow on the 1624 Parliamentary Diaries project, discusses the circumstances behind the trial and its later interpretation…

The trial of King Charles I – which began on this day in 1649 – remains arguably the most dramatic and famous trial in English history. Monarchs had been deposed, and even murdered, before, but Charles was the first to be placed on public trial for his life by his own subjects, charged with waging war against the English people in a bloody civil war. His court, which served as both judge and jury, was a specially commissioned high court of justice of 156 civilians and soldiers, of whom – no doubt due to the status of the accused – only 101 attended any sessions of the trial. The most conspicuous absentee was