Category Archives: Science/Engineering

Al Bore, call your publisher, producer, etc.

The World Federation of Scientists has a message for the Gorebot and his climate crazies: “Climate change in itself is not a planetary emergency.”

The Federation, composed of more than 10,000 scientists from 110 countries, had this to further say about that:

“Our greatest concern at present is that the intellectual climate for scientific investigation of these matters has become so hostile and politicized that the necessary research and debate cannot freely take place. Political constraints take the form of declaring the underlying science to be settled when it clearly is not; defunding or denigrating research that is perceived to threaten the case for renewable energy; or the use of odious pejoratives like “denialist” to describe dissent from officially-sanctioned views on climate science.”

Golly gosh-a-rooty, does this mean Obongo’s EPA will now stop its war on coal? Can miners in West Virginia and Pennsylvania get back to work? We’ll see, when we learn how much they really respect science that doesn’t support their politics.

Via Instapundit and Fabius Maximus.

UPDATE:  So far, Obumbles is deaf to other conclusions. Gee, what a surprise.

A $22 billion Democrat boondoggle in the Panhandle

Since these five turbines can’t pay their own way without government subsidies—which also have to pay for the continual, imperative maintenance often neglected by private owners—plans for building them at Pantex, the federal nuke weapons factory and storage outside Amarillo, makes more sense than the ones on private land supposedly intended to, ahem, turn a profit.

Pantex’s federal land presumably will have the further advantage of the EPA turning a blind bureaucratic eye away from all the eagles and other birds these monsters are projected to start killing next summer. While producing supposedly enough electricity to run only sixty percent of the plant. And all for just $4.5 billion each. Each.

One of the contractors is Bechtel, a little firm that was accused of war-profiteering in Iraq in 2006. Can you say Democrat boondoggle with under-the-table payoffs all around? I knew you could.

Via Knoxblogs.

Where are all the hurricanes?

Al Bore, Obongo and their tax-the-rich (but not them and their waivered few) warmist pals have told us over and over that we can expect more and more deadly hurricanes thanks to global warming, er, climate change, uh, climate disruption, ah, carbon pollution. Yes, that’s it, carbon pollution.

So where are they? This has been the slowest start to a hurricane season on record, i.e. since 1886. Among other inhibiting factors, too much dust is blowing west out of Africa, according to meteorologist Joe D’Aleo. His WeatherBell pal, Joe Bastardi, says we should get ready: “I think this is getting ready to crank up and we should have 2-3 weeks with 5-6 storms and probably a couple of them being major.”

Or not. Obongo did promise to calm the seas, after all, and, since he’s failed at pretty much everything else, he deserves one. And Al, well, as everyone knows, Al could talk anyone or anything to sleep—including hurricanes.

UPDATE: In addition, it’s been the mildest summer across the U.S. in a hundred years. We’ve had a few hundred degree days here but not near as many as usual.

What if Earth orbited Saturn?

At the same distance we are from Luna (our moon), that is, which is 384,000 kilometers away. A cool video animation, with disinterested drivers in the foreground, gives you an idea of what it would look like.

Of course, the drivers could not be blase about the earthquakes and tidal waves such a thing would cause every minute of every day. Stuff that would make the lying Gorebot (James Taranto: “The guy has more whoppers than a Burger King”) and his climatechange pals look reasonable by comparison.

Via Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub.

Viagra is a scam

Public exposure, so to speak, is always delicate (I’m not talking about Weiner and his magic tallywhacker here) but, face it, someone has to do it. And J.D. over at the Mouth of the Brazos has come mighty close:

“If these products are so great, I will buy any or all of them, on the condition that they show on screen a wore-out, obese, old fart with diabetes and high blood pressure and heart disease with a rock-hard phallus ramming it into one of those chicks.”

Allow me to, as it were, go all the way there: In my experience, having reached the Psalmist’s three score and ten, Viagra and its clones are a scam. All I got from the big V was a headache and dizziness. Much more likely to work are 1) going on a low-to-zero carb diet, 2) quitting smoking and 3) exercising daily. Not that I really care to try two or three.

The coming ice age

Folks at The Weather Channel keep shrieking about global warming making our temps higher than at any time in human history, blah, blah, blah, and their critics keep replying that the temp trend is down, the record is being manipulated and the Earth has been cooling since 2002. Meanwhile word is trickling out of a possible coming ice age.

This 1683 painting The Great Frost by Jan Grifier shows the Thames River in London frozen over with ice three-feet thick. Nobody’s saying that’s going to happen again, but who knows. Don’t look for it in your forecast. Meteorologists are awfully poor at predicting the weather beyond three days and the honest ones admit it.

Dad’s weekend date

My career Air Force father was still flying tail-draggers like this World War II C-45H every other weekend in 1958 to earn his flight pay, according to his official pilot logs which I inherited.