March 22, 2015

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Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace and it’s director for 15 years writes on why he is a climate change skeptic. 

I am skeptical humans are the main cause of climate change and that it will be catastrophic in the near future. There is no scientific proof of this hypothesis, yet we are told “the debate is over” and “the science is settled.”

My skepticism begins with the believers’ certainty they can predict the global climate with a computer model. The entire basis for the doomsday climate change scenario is the hypothesis increased atmospheric carbon dioxide due to fossil fuel emissions will heat the Earth to unlivable temperatures.

In fact, the Earth has been warming very gradually for 300 years, since the Little Ice Age ended, long before heavy use of fossil fuels. Prior to the Little Ice Age, during the Medieval Warm Period, Vikings colonized Greenland and Newfoundland, when it was warmer there than today. And during Roman times, it was warmer, long before fossil fuels revolutionized civilization.

The idea it would be catastrophic if carbon dioxide were to increase and average global temperature were to rise a few degrees is preposterous. …

  

 

The Wall Street Journal reviews James McPherson’s new look at the Civil War. There is some new in this, and it is also worth being reminded of what an unmitigated disaster our country produced as it joined the world in abolishing slavery. The anti-slavery movement in Great Britain spread its gospel to all areas of the globe touched by British power. Even Russia freed the serfs peacefully. But not here. Not only were 750,000 killed, but the framework was created for the apparatus of the modern state. One form of slavery was abolished; to be replaced by another. 

The shooting will have been over for a century and a half this spring, but the casualties keep mounting. As recently as a decade ago the best estimates of the soldiers killed in the Civil War put the number at 600,000; today’s scholarship has increased the toll to three quarters of a million. That was 2.4% of the American population when the war began. As James M. McPherson observes in his brisk and engrossing book, “The War That Forged a Nation,” if the same percentage of Americans were killed in a war today, “the number of war dead would be almost 7.5 million.”

But the appalling mortality rate is hardly the only reason the war lives on in our culture. Mr. McPherson sees the war as lying at the heart—and the midpoint—of the American past, a terrible clarification of the ideals on which the country had been established in 1776. “Founded on a charter that had declared all men created equal with an equal title to liberty,” the author writes, America had by the 1850s “become the largest slaveholding country in the world,” an irony that vexes us even today, so long after Appomattox.

Mr. McPherson has been writing about this war for 50 years, and in “The War That Forged a Nation” he distills a lifetime of scrupulous scholarship into 12 essays—two new, the others extensively revised from previously published versions. Yet the book has none of the haphazard feel of an anthology, and readers will finish it with the sense that they have received a succinct history of the whole struggle, as well as numerous fresh and occasionally controversial observations. …

  

 

OK, we know the following post from Watts Up With That is almost unreadable. But the main thing is to report that no tornadoes have occurred so far in the month of March, That’s a notable event so the post is included. But, you don’t have to try to read it now that you know the one important fact.

The US tornado count for March 2015? Zero. That’s right, so far this month there have been no tornadoes reported in the U.S. — this is only the second time this has happened since 1950, according to Weather Channel meteorologist Greg Forbes.  “We are in uncharted territory with respect to lack of severe weather,” Greg Carbin, a meteorologist at NOAA, said in a statement. “This has never happened in the record of [Storm Prediction Center] watches dating back to 1970.” …

 

 

 

March Madness will be happening through the beginning of April. Slate provided a guide on how to fake your way thru.

So everyone in your office is talking about the NCAA Tournament, but you don’t know the difference between John Calipari and calamari? (One is a slimy bottom-feeder; the other is squid.) Fear not! Your friends at Slate are here with a cheat sheet to help you fake your way through the early stages of the tournament. 

Midwest Region

Talking points: College basketball purists hate Kentucky coach John Calipari for building his teams around so-called one-and-done players who leave school as soon as they become eligible for the NBA draft. These people are assuredly aghast at the chance that the top-ranked Wildcats, who went 34–0 this year, might end up running the tournament and posting a perfect season, thus validating Calipari’s tactics to those who claim he doesn’t do things “the right way.” Talk these people off the ledge by noting that this year’s Kentucky squad relies heavily on veteran players like junior forward Willie Cauley-Stein and sophomore guards—and identical twins—Aaron and Andrew Harrison. Then push them back up on that ledge by noting that collegiate amateurism is a farce and that in a system that’s already ethically bankrupt, “the right way” is any way that wins. …

East Region

Talking points: While the first-seeded Villanova Wildcats haven’t lost a game since Jan. 19, you know that the team to watch in the East is Virginia. The second-seeded Cavaliers don’t score a lot, but they play a smothering help defense that leaves opponents desperate. Coach Tony Bennett’s “pack line” scheme is designed to minimize paint scoring while forcing low-percentage jumpers, and it’s very effective. Feel free to yell “Defense wins championships” at the top of your lungs whenever the Cavaliers force their opponents to take an ugly outside shot. You can also feel free to croon a few bars of “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” whenever the coach is shown on TV. It’s not the same Tony Bennett, but that joke doesn’t wear thin until like the fifth or sixth time. …

  

 

More on the NCAA tournament as a Louisville fan faces up to the thuggery. Story from the WSJ.

This was supposed to be myannualcolumn for taunting the gimmick-riddled realm of Kentucky basketball.

Then three weeks ago, a shock came across my Twitter feed. The starting point guard for my hometown squad—Louisville—was charged with raping two women in one night.

The accusation rattled me to an extent I did not anticipate, forcing a difficult reckoning: Perhaps this team I held so dearly really was no different from the rest of college basketball, a sport of collapsing moral norms.

Energized by winning, I had grown desensitized to the sport’s rolling scandals, the billions of dollars, the towering coaches’ salaries. The Cardinals brought me pure joy, most recently in 2013 when they won the national championship. But something cumulative, something disgusted, emerged after those allegations.

What does it mean to be a fan in 2015? Does being loyal mean being unquestioning? In fact, does being a fan require willful ignorance? …

  

 

ZME Science posts on salt and how it is mined or extracted.

Salt is one of the most common and yet most controversial substances on Earth – you can’t really live without it, but too much of it might kill you. It used to be very expensive, now it’s really cheap, and most of it is used for industrial purposes. It’s in the foods we eat, in the planetary oceans, and in us… but where does it come from? …