The methodology of a recent study was preposterous on its face.
.. the now-infamous new study from Lund University’s child-averse climate scientists, advising people to save the planet by giving up their cars, avoiding air travel, becoming vegetarians, and having fewer kids.
.. ultimately concluding that childbearing does far more damage to the planet than all the other actions they measured. Actually, it’s worse than all the rest combined. Parents, how do you live with yourselves?
.. Parenthood, of course, isn’t the sort of thing you can step into and out of on a per annum basis. That’s the excuse for blaming parents for the projected carbon emissions of their child’s entire life, and then adding still more to that total based on projected grandchildren and great-grandchildren. They’re leaning on this cool concept that another team of climatologists dreamed up, called a “carbon legacy.”
.. Each parent gets credited (or demerited) with half of every child’s projected lifetime emissions, a quarter of each projected grandchild’s projected emissions, and so forth down the generations. The cumulative total becomes your “legacy,”
.. It’s about visiting the emissions of the children on the fathers, ultimately convicting parents of the crime of perpetuating human civilization.
.. Is there a chance that studies like this play some role in widespread skepticism about scientific claims? Perhaps what we have on our hands is a “crisis of scientific authority.”
.. My own personal memories may be representative. As a kid in science class I was bombarded with Malthusian lifeboat scenarios. I recall one project that required us to generate “creative solutions” for fitting 8 gazillion people into a square mile. We sat drawing pictures of people standing in pyramid formations, passing shrink-wrapped meals up from conveyor belts, while our science teacher thundered on about how this was not science fiction, people, this was math. We heard endless dirges about the dying rainforest, and when I take my kids to science museums today I feel like I’ve walked into a time warp, because the appeals don’t seem to have changed a bit
.. People mistrust politicized science for reasons that any principled empiricist ought to respect: Personal experience suggests to them that it’s unreliable.
.. Wisely noting that “adolescents poised to establish lifelong patterns are an important target group” for environmentalists, Wynes and Nicholas want schools to attack the real problem: children having children, or planning to have them at some future time
West Can Neither Live with nor Take Out North Korean Nukes Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/449404/north-korean-nukes-west-deterrent-insufficient?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Week%20in%20Review%202017-07-16&utm_term=VDHM
Kim Jong-un rightly assumes that wealthy Western nations would prefer to pay bribe money than suffer the loss of a city — and that they have plenty of cash for such concessions. He is right that the medicine of taking out Kim’s missiles is considered by Western strategists to be even worse than the disease of living with a lunatic regime that has nukes.
.. Apparently, Beijing found a rabid North Korean government useful in bothering rivals such as the Japanese and South Koreans while keeping the U.S. off balance in Asia and the Pacific. The dynamic economies and pacifism of Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan were taken for granted by China as easy targets for coercion and blackmail.
.. A preemptory strike might not get all of North Korea’s nuclear missiles and could prompt a conventional response that would wreck nearby Seoul — a scenario about which North Korea openly brags.
.. It may be tragic that a captive population suffers for the lunacy of its leader, but such misery is still preferable to an all-out war.
.. Nor should China be exempt from accompanying stiff trade restrictions. Almost every weapon component in the hands of North Korea either came directly from China or was purchased by cash earned through Chinese trade and remittances.
.. Australia, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the U.S. need to coordinate a massive missile-defense project aimed at ending North Korean assumptions that even one of its missiles has a chance to reach its intended target.
.. Such a Marshall Plan–like investment would also send a message to China that its own nuclear deterrent could be compromised and nullified by the defensive efforts of its immediate neighbors. China has made life difficult for the U.S. and its Asian allies, and it should learn that the allies could make things even more problematic for China.
.. Iran, a beneficiary of North Korean nuclear assistance, is watching how far Kim can go. It will certainly make the necessary strategic adjustments if he succeeds in shaking down the Western world.
.. We are nearing an existential showdown, as failed efforts at bribery and appeasement have run their course. Only a tough, messy confrontation now can prevent a disastrous war later on.
Why Is Nikki Haley Still Trump’s UN Ambassador?
It’s unclear whether she is speaking for herself or the White House.
But there are indeed some administration figures who clearly are fomenting endless conflict in the Middle East and elsewhere.
One might reasonably start with Generals James Mattis and H.R. McMaster, both of whom are hardliners on Afghanistan and Iran, but with a significant caveat. Generals are trained and indoctrinated to fight and win wars, not to figure out what comes next. General officers like George Marshall or even Dwight Eisenhower who had a broader vision are extremely rare, so much so that expecting a Mattis or McMaster to do what falls outside their purview is perhaps a bit too much.
.. My own little list of “society’s offenders” consists largely of the self-described gaggle of neoconservative foreign-policy “experts.” Unfortunately, the neocons have proven to be particularly resilient in spite of repeated claims that their end was nigh, most recently after the election of Donald Trump last November. Yet as most of the policies the neocons have historically espoused are indistinguishable from what the White House is currently trying to sell, one might well wake up one morning and imagine that it is 2003 and George W. Bush is still president.
.. Number one on my little list is Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley
.. Haley is firmly in the neocon camp, receiving praise from Senators like South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham and from the Murdoch media as well as in the opinion pages of National Review and The Weekly Standard. Her speechwriter is Jessica Gavora, who is the wife of the leading neoconservative journalist Jonah Goldberg.
.. As governor of South Carolina, Haley became identified as an unquestioning supporter of Israel. She signed into law a bill to restrict the activities of the nonviolent pro-Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, the first legislation of its kind on a state level.
.. In February, she blocked the appointment of former Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad to a diplomatic position at the United Nations because he is a Palestinian. In a congressional hearing this past week, she was asked about the decision: “Is it this administration’s position that support for Israel and support for the appointment of a well-qualified individual of Palestinian nationality to an appointment at the UN are mutually exclusive?” Haley responded yes, that the administration is “supporting Israel” by blocking any Palestinian from any senior UN position because Palestine is not recognized by Washington as an independent state
.. Regarding Ukraine, Haley has taken an extreme position that guarantees Russian hostility. In February, she addressed the UN Security Council regarding the Crimean conflict, which she appears not to understand very well. She warned that sanctions against Russia would not be lifted until Moscow returned control over the peninsula to Kiev.
.. So Haley very much comes across as the neoconservatives’ dream ambassador to the United Nations–full of aggression, a staunch supporter of Israel, and assertive of Washington’s preemptive right to set standards for the rest of the world.
.. Donald Trump really wants to drain the Washington swamp and reduce interference in other nations, he might well continue that program by firing Nikki Haley. He could then appoint someone as UN ambassador who actually believes that the United States has to deal with other countries respectfully, not by constant bullying and threats.
What to Think about Global Warming
Given the stakes in the global-warming debate — trillions of dollars in economic costs and/or climatic catastrophe — conservatives should not simply dismiss the Copenhagen talks, even though the revelations of Climategate may tempt us to do so. The debate is polarized, and it is natural to throw one’s lot in with one camp or another — The World Is Ending vs. Global Warming Is a Hoax — but there are more than two propositions to consider. And those propositions are not mostly scientific in character, but political. We should examine them in ascending order of unlikeliness:
.. The planet is getting warmer, human activity is a main factor, the consequences will be catastrophic, and some U.N.-style climate policeman is going to be able to manage a mitigating response.