Admire you for standing up to a particularly virulent strain of Trumpers at the various places
you've been (Richochet looks like Lucianne.com now-Imagine trying to make a living out of sane conservative punditry !) If pressed I will admit to a slight crush (wife is aware and understands.)
I've stood up to no one. I let people express what they believe. I say what I believe. I am open to being persuaded I'm wrong. I hope to persuade people when I'm right.
It was never within the realm of possibility that I'd be enthusiastic about Trump because I believed everything I said when I described myself as a creature of the traditional American center-right. No one has yet persuaded me I was wrong to believe what I did, and I still believe it. I do think Trump made it clear that the United States wasn't working as well as I thought, and thus that reform is necessary--but he's reformed nothing, as far as I can see.
Delighted to learn of your crush. I think the best way to express your devotion would be giving this newsletter to ten of your friends. Don't you?
"I am cold as ice—in the face of elaborate, expensive packaging."
So, you expect the packaging to be polite? It's gonna make you sore if it don't greet you right?
"...your skin truly doesn’t know or care whether the oil is skanky...."
Hmm...neither did the customers on 40Mark Strasse regarding the merchants there at curbside.
"longtime enemy of the nanny state and I am all about liberal democracy, emphasis on liberal, meaning I think you should be free to choose"
It's not the 18th century, anymore. 21st century --20th century, come to that--liberal democracy is not at all democratic; it's the epitome of nanny state Big Government. This is an example of why labels are foolish.
"she’s {Warren] had Botox and fillers, and as you can see, both are very effective, and come recommended by Claire Berlinski’s Invariably Interesting Newsletter, though I still haven’t figured out how to order them at a discount adequate to my frugality."
And here, I thought it was because American Indians just don't show their age.
But: why would any woman want such nonsense? Does the man love her, then, or the artificiality into which she's made herself? There are robot companions coming onto the market that even are able to converse, more or less--and have the advantage, for those insecure enough drop some dimes on such, of not talking back.
You've been watching too many Alex Trebek insurance ads.
---
I won't bother with the Doomsday clock; the long quote you provided demonstrates its own lack of credibility, rife with error and misconception as it it.
"I find it plausible that our carbon consumption is making the planet uninhabitable."
Based on what actual evidence? I'll skip past the Global Warming Disaster Government Funds Industry beginnings of cherry-picked Siberian tree-ring data; agencies threatening dire consequences to erstwhile serious science journals if they published articles disputing, much less refuting the global warming claims; agencies altering historical data in order to enhance the hockey stick; climate scientists refusing to make their data public or refusing to make public their climate models' code for serious review; the inability of those models to simultaneously predict the past and the present, together with their wildly exaggerated predictions of the future these last 20+ years compared with observational data; or the industry's decision to change its name from "global warming" to "climate change"--because the climate is changing, the planet is warming, because the sun has been heating up since it first lit off those 4.5+ billion years ago.
I'll skip ahead to ice core data, from both ends of the earth, reaching back 400k years that indicate atmospheric CO2 rises after planetary warming has occurred; to today, 11k years after the end of the last Ice Age, we're still a couple degrees cooler than Earth's geologic warming trend line, still cooler than during a major portion of the Roman Empire; to many of the islands supposedly being flooded by rising seas actually being flooded by sinking into the seas as increasing populations pump ground water, and the surface subsides; to other islands not sinking at all, just moving downstream as ocean currents erode the upstream shores and redeposit the silt on the downstream shores.
And there's the so what of increasing atmospheric CO2. At times when the concentration was 1,000ppm and more, compared with today's 400ppm (compared further with a minimum of 120ppm for plant life to survive, much less thrive), and Earth was warmer, plant life was lush on the planet, animals that ate plants thrived, and animals that ate animals that ate plants thrived. When Earth was warm enough to have no north polar ice cap, life was lush all around.
Back to those rising seas. Humans living on coasts will have to relocate to the new coasts--a serious disruption, to be sure, but hardly a serious threat to the planet; actually it's little more than an inconvenience to us on that scale.
There's more, but that's enough for an already overlong comment.
One last thing (I lied--sue me): if the science is so difficult (it really isn't), here's a site (one of several) that discusses the science in easy terms (although there is, occasionally, some arithmetic): https://wattsupwiththat.com/ .
Eric, if you think this science is easy, more power to you, but I know for a fact I couldn't pass the qualifying exams for a basic doctorate in the field (these are the some of the subjects I know I don't understand well enough, for example: http://www.ese.caltech.edu/academics). I have a good idea what's involved in "learning enough to have a genuinely informed opinion." It's more work than I'm willing to do.
It's true enough that getting the credential would take a fair amount of grunt work, but none of those courses are rocket science. (Rocket science isn't rocket science, come to that--it's at most a three-body problem, at least until we get to sailing among the stars when time becomes an added dimension, involving little more than an 8th grade algebra ballistics problem with some realtime navigation thrown in.)
Aside from that, a credential isn't what's necessary for a genuinely informed opinion; what's necessary for that is information and an objective mind.
Admire you for standing up to a particularly virulent strain of Trumpers at the various places
you've been (Richochet looks like Lucianne.com now-Imagine trying to make a living out of sane conservative punditry !) If pressed I will admit to a slight crush (wife is aware and understands.)
I've stood up to no one. I let people express what they believe. I say what I believe. I am open to being persuaded I'm wrong. I hope to persuade people when I'm right.
It was never within the realm of possibility that I'd be enthusiastic about Trump because I believed everything I said when I described myself as a creature of the traditional American center-right. No one has yet persuaded me I was wrong to believe what I did, and I still believe it. I do think Trump made it clear that the United States wasn't working as well as I thought, and thus that reform is necessary--but he's reformed nothing, as far as I can see.
Delighted to learn of your crush. I think the best way to express your devotion would be giving this newsletter to ten of your friends. Don't you?
"I am cold as ice—in the face of elaborate, expensive packaging."
So, you expect the packaging to be polite? It's gonna make you sore if it don't greet you right?
"...your skin truly doesn’t know or care whether the oil is skanky...."
Hmm...neither did the customers on 40Mark Strasse regarding the merchants there at curbside.
"longtime enemy of the nanny state and I am all about liberal democracy, emphasis on liberal, meaning I think you should be free to choose"
It's not the 18th century, anymore. 21st century --20th century, come to that--liberal democracy is not at all democratic; it's the epitome of nanny state Big Government. This is an example of why labels are foolish.
"she’s {Warren] had Botox and fillers, and as you can see, both are very effective, and come recommended by Claire Berlinski’s Invariably Interesting Newsletter, though I still haven’t figured out how to order them at a discount adequate to my frugality."
And here, I thought it was because American Indians just don't show their age.
But: why would any woman want such nonsense? Does the man love her, then, or the artificiality into which she's made herself? There are robot companions coming onto the market that even are able to converse, more or less--and have the advantage, for those insecure enough drop some dimes on such, of not talking back.
You've been watching too many Alex Trebek insurance ads.
---
I won't bother with the Doomsday clock; the long quote you provided demonstrates its own lack of credibility, rife with error and misconception as it it.
"I find it plausible that our carbon consumption is making the planet uninhabitable."
Based on what actual evidence? I'll skip past the Global Warming Disaster Government Funds Industry beginnings of cherry-picked Siberian tree-ring data; agencies threatening dire consequences to erstwhile serious science journals if they published articles disputing, much less refuting the global warming claims; agencies altering historical data in order to enhance the hockey stick; climate scientists refusing to make their data public or refusing to make public their climate models' code for serious review; the inability of those models to simultaneously predict the past and the present, together with their wildly exaggerated predictions of the future these last 20+ years compared with observational data; or the industry's decision to change its name from "global warming" to "climate change"--because the climate is changing, the planet is warming, because the sun has been heating up since it first lit off those 4.5+ billion years ago.
I'll skip ahead to ice core data, from both ends of the earth, reaching back 400k years that indicate atmospheric CO2 rises after planetary warming has occurred; to today, 11k years after the end of the last Ice Age, we're still a couple degrees cooler than Earth's geologic warming trend line, still cooler than during a major portion of the Roman Empire; to many of the islands supposedly being flooded by rising seas actually being flooded by sinking into the seas as increasing populations pump ground water, and the surface subsides; to other islands not sinking at all, just moving downstream as ocean currents erode the upstream shores and redeposit the silt on the downstream shores.
And there's the so what of increasing atmospheric CO2. At times when the concentration was 1,000ppm and more, compared with today's 400ppm (compared further with a minimum of 120ppm for plant life to survive, much less thrive), and Earth was warmer, plant life was lush on the planet, animals that ate plants thrived, and animals that ate animals that ate plants thrived. When Earth was warm enough to have no north polar ice cap, life was lush all around.
Back to those rising seas. Humans living on coasts will have to relocate to the new coasts--a serious disruption, to be sure, but hardly a serious threat to the planet; actually it's little more than an inconvenience to us on that scale.
There's more, but that's enough for an already overlong comment.
One last thing (I lied--sue me): if the science is so difficult (it really isn't), here's a site (one of several) that discusses the science in easy terms (although there is, occasionally, some arithmetic): https://wattsupwiththat.com/ .
Eric Hines
Eric, if you think this science is easy, more power to you, but I know for a fact I couldn't pass the qualifying exams for a basic doctorate in the field (these are the some of the subjects I know I don't understand well enough, for example: http://www.ese.caltech.edu/academics). I have a good idea what's involved in "learning enough to have a genuinely informed opinion." It's more work than I'm willing to do.
It's true enough that getting the credential would take a fair amount of grunt work, but none of those courses are rocket science. (Rocket science isn't rocket science, come to that--it's at most a three-body problem, at least until we get to sailing among the stars when time becomes an added dimension, involving little more than an 8th grade algebra ballistics problem with some realtime navigation thrown in.)
Aside from that, a credential isn't what's necessary for a genuinely informed opinion; what's necessary for that is information and an objective mind.
Eric Hines
The credential itself is unnecessary. Knowing the stuff that results in the credential? Necessary.