PS correction; its not a new book it is 5 years old.

Here is a video by Ian Plimer introducing his new book at Paul Homewood's site.

https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/

The interesting fact is that when you click to see it on YouTube you find the page is blocked so i am unable to download it either on YouTube or RealPlayer. Censorship at work !

Spectator TV latest offering; food for thought (if you have got an hour or so to spare: I think it will be worth it; personal view)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvSs6amEa3c

Steve Sanghi, former CEO of Microchip, was a good guest on The Amp Hour podcast in spite of Dave Jones's mediocre interviewing style. One interesting point on the automotive chip shortage post-COVID was that JIT marufacturing, Just In Time, has been tweaked to JIC: Just In Case, i.e. keeping reasonable inventories of items where supply lines are not assured. Economic theory meets the real world.

There were other interesting points, and I liked his background to some of the (seemingly endless) buyouts amongst chip makers. Good enough for me to speculate a few dollars on an e-book of his memoirs.

DaveS,

I'm sure you're right to doubt. Representatives mght officially be policymakers, but that doesn't mean they make the policies. Rubber-stampers might be a better term.

A few days ago at Jo Nova's I raised Arnold Kling's Three Languages of Politics, trying to point out that the "enemy" isn't the Left, that the traditional left/right battle of those who favour Egalite and those who favour Fraternite has given way to a simple battle along the Liberte axis. That seems to have had good effect, at least on the person I pointed it out to. It has occurred to me that it also offers a reasonable view of why communist and fascist dictatorships seem so similar: that egalite and fraternite both become irrelevant in the absence of liberte.

Today I see Jo Nova features another article I learnt about at EconTalk: Adam Mastroianni on the utter failure of peer review. I recommended it here (and its companion papers) a while back.

Jo added one juicy example I'd not heard about before: that something like 20% of genetic data associated with scientific articles (in 2016) had been corrupted by Microsoft Excel trying to auto-correct gene sequences into dates and numbers!

Also liked the Richard Smith quote at the end of Jo's article on the irony that modern science leans on peer review as an item of deep faith.

Those who write the Summary for Policymaker know their audience. But I wonder if your average elected 'representative' even bothers to read it, relying instead on whatever interpretation of the Summary that the appropriate government department cares to provide them with.

Ross Lea,

It's been a pretty wide view in the sceptical world that the Summary for Policymakers has always been at odds with the main body of the report. It will be a welcome sign that the tide is turning on climate alarm if this Clintel report gets wide coverage. Then again, if that happens, the caravan will surely move on to the next hobgoblin.

tomo,

One day it might dawn on people that these "greenhouse gases" are steps in a cycle of life. Eliminate them, eliminate life.

As for heat pump theft, at least in my installation, there's not that much of value in the external unit -- a pump a 3-phase motor and condenser/evaporater. The "brains" of the operation is in the roofspace. Perhaps more modern single-phase systems have more brains outside, with an inverter to drive the pump. Difficult to justify the insurance companies' position on it. I suppose they're claiming that it was outside and free for anyone to steal, but you'd think having it bolted down would count for something. Here comes a new line of security gadgets.

Only made it part-way into the recent EconTalk. It was on the dangers of AI, and the fellow's thesis was that current AI work is putting all life on Earth in danger (talk about hobgoblins). I'd have been interested to hear his argument if it had been coherent, but... well, here's a sample:

So, I could maybe start by saying why I expect stochastic gradient descent as an optimization process, even if you try to take something that happens in the outside world and press the win/lose button any time that thing happens and the outside world doesn't create a mind that in general wants that thing to happen in the outside world, but maybe that's not even what you think the core issue is. What do you think the core issue here is? Why don't you already believe that? Let me say.

It's rare that I skip an EconTalk, but no compunction about this one.

This from the Daily Sceptic taking apart the IPCC sumary for policy makers as it ignores the findings of the body of the report.

https://dailysceptic.org/2023/05/13/ipcc-admits-many-of-its-gloomy-climate-forecasts-are-of-low-likelihood/