No, we don’t have to accept it to mine the moon.
The author ignores the other lunar-related entrepreneurial activities, focusing exclusively on the Google Lunar Prize. The people closest to getting to the moon in any serious way are private actors, not any government, because it’s only going to happen with a dramatic reduction in cost of access. Certainly China’s not doing anything significant.
This is nutty on multiple levels:
They argue that they have a constitutional right to a safe climate, that they have a right to receive from us a planet that supports all life, just as our forebears gave us.
Even ignoring that there is no such “right,” what the hell is a “safe” climate?
And I love this:
We know without a doubt that gases we are adding to the air have caused a planetary energy imbalance and global warming, already 0.8 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times. This warming is driving an increase in extreme weather, from heat waves and droughts to wildfires and stronger storms (though mistakenly expecting science to instantly document links to specific events misses the forest for the trees).
Got that? We know that carbon is causing extreme weather events, but don’t expect us to provide any scientific basis for it.
Hansen is a loon.
The book
Their world was just hit by an asteroid, whether they realize it or not.
…for most of the three years since Obamacare was passed, the majority of the population has disapproved of it (see the second chart here at Real Clear Politics), yet that didn’t really translate into significant public anger or political action, beyond the 2010 mid-term election results. In fact, Sen. Ted Cruz’s filibuster attempt and the House’s short-lived shutdown appeared to push public opinion against those actors rather than against Obamacare.
But that has changed, and dramatically, with the law actually going into effect — and Healthcare.gov going live — back on October 1st. For the first time, Obamacare got “close enough” to significant portions of the American electorate to trigger a sudden shift in actual emotional response from a generic disapproval to outright hostility. I believe that Obama and his Administration — lulled, perhaps, by the more passive dislike evinced by the public up until now — have been caught genuinely off-guard by the dramatic change in public opinion in a month’s time, not just towards Obamacare but towards Obama himself. I believe that shift in fact represents a ‘catastrophe’ — that is, an abrupt transition from one state to another– brought on by the realities of Obamacare hitting home.
I don’t think there’s any precedent for a second-term president recovering from something like this.
Can it continue to work?
…is crumbling:
I am a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society and a Certified Consulting Meteorologist. To the best of my memory I never had a chance to respond to this poll of the AMS membership.
That said, the fact that 70% of scientists say that humans affect the climate is utterly unsurprising. That has been known scientifically since Changnon’s METROMEX study in the early 70′s. The fact that 9 out of ten that publish on the subject of climate believe humans affect the climate is also utterly unsurprising.
For me, the money question was #6, “How worried are you about global warming?” Only 30% answered “very worried.” This would make 70% of the respondents “deniers” since that perjorative term seems to be applied to anyone who does not accept the “IPCC consensus” of catastrophic global warming. A statistically similar number (28%) is not worried or “not very worried” about global warming.
So, you can spin the results any way you want but this survey of a small number of AMS members doesn’t reveal any great concern about global warming.
Yup. All of this talk about consensus is just an attempt to bully people into their socialist “solutions” to a non-existent problem.
Note the implicit but not necessarily valid assumption — that in order to do space activities, you have to launch from your own soil. For instance, I’d bet that Kodiak would be happy to lease some real estate to them for high-inclination launches.
Lileks has a righteous rant on the subject. Buck-sucking fail boxes indeed.
Has anyone actually ordered and received a copy yet?
[Friday-morning update]
Well, as you can see in comments, we have disparate results. One person has received it, one is going to next week, and one got a message that it’s a month away. So huh.