Speaking of Science!

1. I’m not even linking to this click bait from National Geographic: Are Mites Having Sex on My Face? But I got give ’em credit for trying.

2. The “we are so doomed” news of the day, again from International People’s Geographic, with my comments in Lysenko Red:

A movement to fight climate change has real people power.

The most surprising development of the summit didn’t unfold in the halls of the UN. It happened two days before the summit, when an upstart environmental group, 350.org, organized a march through Manhattan that attracted thousands of people (official crowd estimates for such marches are notoriously unreliable). Hundreds of smaller demonstrations were staged around the globe. The turnout, especially for the New York march, was far greater than anyone, even organizers, expected. (but how many of us expected the turnout to be far greater than the organizers expected? Did we expect a ‘far fewer people showed up that we hoped’ announcement? In this space-time continuum?)

“Our citizens keep marching,” U.S. President Barack Obama said in his Tuesday address, acknowledging the protest. “We cannot pretend we do not hear them. (I dunno. Pretending to not hear people seems right in the President’s wheelhouse. Fore!) We have to answer the call.” (but you don’t have to buy what they’re selling. Just a friendly tip.)

Asked this week how the summit would impact ongoing negotiations, the U.S. Department of State’s special envoy for climate change (When the history of all this is written by a saner age, this title will go down with The Committee for Public Safety as one of the great verbal triumph of statism), Todd Stern, started talking about the impact of the march instead, calling it the biggest climate demonstration ever. (Can’t one consider a million Californians hitting the beach on a summer weekend a ‘climate demonstration’? No?)

“You had 400,000 people on the streets of Manhattan,” Stern told reporters at the summit’s conclusion. “You have to say that that matters.” (Not really. You have at least twice that insanely inflated number marching in Washington every year for Life – and, no, the special envoy for Life (there’s one of those, too, right? based on the logic here?) hasn’t issued a statement that I know of.)

The UN’s Ban marched in the demonstration, gushing about the experience in his Tuesday speech. “Two days ago I was part of a massive people’s climate march in New York,” Ban said. “I was overwhelmed by the energy of the tens of thousands of people.” (that ‘energy’ was probably just hemp.)

This is just like how, when a trial doesn’t go their way, the mob decides justice. This mob is deciding both science and government policy. Probably helps that the UN and our government just about wets their collective pants at the thought of the level of power needed to do anything about the climate. Woohee, that’s some power! And, since they themselves aren’t likely to have to eschew planes and imported delicacies and vacation homes and chauffeurs, it’s a win-win! The real risk is that people will notice things aren’t so bad the way they are, or, more sophisticated, will notice that nothing we can do will have any meaningful effect on the climate any time soon, if ever.

The only real solution? Mass slaughter. Get the human population down to about 500 million or less, and we can live on organic greens, huddle for warmth, and walk anywhere we need to go, without a carbon footprint any bigger than the world’s cetaceans, who should be our standard since who doesn’t love the whales?

Not enough. Old Scratch wants us all gone. A nice big world war would be more to his liking.

3. This is so cool! Indian spacecraft set to enter Mars orbit Having just read the Wreck of the River of Stars, I was feeling pretty melancholy – Flynn has all these solar sails traveling between the permanent settlements from low earth orbit out to Saturn – and has them doing this starting in about another 20 years. Ain’t gonna happen, I said to myself, we ain’t done nothing much in space for 40 years. What makes anybody think that’ll change?

India getting a satellite to Mars for $74 million, that’s what. Hell, NASA can’t remodel the men’s rooms at Ames for that kind of money. So, let’s get a bunch of cheap Edisons hacking away at this – maybe it will work.

Of course, nobody has yet demonstrated that the self-contained greenhouses proposed as space settlements even work, let alone that human beings could live in them indefinitely. But let’s not bicker about ‘o killed ‘o! This is a happy occasion!