HFO-1234yf, a climate-friendly alternative refrigerant for car air conditioning systems touted by environmental activists, may instead be a greater problem than the products they insisted was causing pollution.
Ray tracing has been a hot topic since...well, at least 350 B.C. in the western world, when Aristotle described his camera obscura and wrote that the eye is 'a darkened chamber awaiting light.' Da Vinci was fascinated by it, as was Descartes. And of course Einstein wanted to understand light quanta.In the 1990s, software and hardware companies began to tout it, but like Atari Jaguar's claim it was a 64-bit machine because it had two 32-bit processors, it was a lot of marketing.
Urban poor people live in areas where there is more population density and higher pollution and more crime, that is no surprise. But pollution is relative in 2018, American air is so incredibly clean(1) that epidemiologists and activists have tried to define harmful smog all the way down to 2.5 μm (microns) in diameter in hopes of showing air quality is still a worry. Particles to small you need an electron microscope to know they exist. Yet they try to same it is th same as real smog, an actual carcinogen.
DDT was banned by a politician in the US in 1972 and was banned a few years later in Finland, so how can it be causing autism now?The answer is statistics. The same curve that can show autism is linked to organic food can link autism to anything and if you are at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health you are very much against corporations and in need of a way to get in the New York Times, so a recent paper links DDE, a metabolite of DDT, in the blood of pregnant women to autism.
On Sunday evening, John Oliver of HBO's "Last Week Tonight" took a break from talking about Paul Manafort's clothing to talk about public trust in science. Well, sort of. Really, he claimed he wanted to expose "astroturf" groups - fake organizations that look like real "grassroots" ones. You can imagine how I surprised I was on Saturday when I found out he was going to be talking about me.
Environmental trial lawyers are thrilled that the politically friendly 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in California
California has banned plastic bags in grocery stores, a giant subsidy and mandate for the cloth bag industry.When government isn't manufacturing problems to solve, corporations often do it themselves. Some companies ban plastic straws now, when it is only a matter of time before environmental groups pushing paper straws claim the chemicals in those cause birth defects, and after the homeopaths behind the 'endocrine disruption' craze got corporate media to scare people about BPA - which only binds to estrogen 1/20,000th as well as actual estrogen - I was not surprised ConAgra took it out of Manwich cans.Nor was I surprised the company responded to higher costs by laying off 1,500 people. It turns out activists were not going to ever buy it anyway.
Paracelsus famously noted Sola dosis facit venenum - "Only the dose makes the poison."
I've never been much for the word "tribe." It sounds too insular in 2018, the kind of term (see also "zeitgeist", "heteronormative", and "schadenfreude") thrown around by postmodernists with their heads in the clouds believing what they tell each other as the real world passes by.That's not to say it isn't an accurate description of science media.
Science 2.0 began 11 years ago, the year that the James Webb Space Telescope was supposed to be completed, but there was no real cause for alarm about the delays until 2010, when it was three years late and $1.5 billion over budget. Not many in science communication really cared, though that is easy to dismiss as modern journalists being cheerleaders rather than critical thinkers. Instead, the science community has continued to gush how great it will be as JWST missed milestone after milestone after milestone. Even last month, people were still continuing to write sentences like "JWST will be able to..." about 2020.
It can't have been easy for former environmental activist Mark Lynas to change sides. His friends were on the anti-science side, he was a dutiful reader of The Guardian, where activists and environmental trade groups reign supreme, and he was adored there.But he had an ethical dilemma. How could he talk about the science consensus on climate change, despite generous potential funding by corporations to say otherwise (no, really, anti-science people think that happens), while continuing to deny the science consensus in agriculture. Exxon's revenue was 20X that of Monsanto and yet even with far fewer scientists in climate studies they were not "bought off" as his side claimed about farming.
On Saturday, June 2nd, 2018, I gave the commencement speech for the North Penn-Liberty class of 2018, 35 years after I graduated. While much has changed, the basic challenges young people will face have not. A number of attendees asked me for a copy and I didn't have a clean one, mine was half-typed, half hand notes, so it is presented below. At least as it was written. I went off book in a few spots, including at the end. So even at my age I have new things to learn: Like always listen to the experienced speechwriters.###Home
The days when environmental litigation groups like Earthjustice and Farmworker Justice had friendly voices in EPA and the White House seem like two years in the past. Because they are two years in the past. Where once environmental groups could write entire documents for the White House to repost in the name of the U.S., now they cry foul if organizations like Heartland even have email exchanges with EPA.
