Global warming, part 3

There continues to be a widespread impression, perpetuated by miscreants like Al Gore, that “all the scientists” believe we’re suffering from global warming caused by human-generated greenhouse gases.

Apparently famous physicist Freeman Dyson is not one of the “all”. Read this article by Lawrence Solomon of the Urban Renaissance Institute. (For some of the source material, you can read the text of Dyson’s 2005 commencement address at the University of Michigan.)

And Michael Crichton, author of The Andromeda Strain and Jurassic Park, gave a lecture at Caltech in 2003 in which he reminded the audience how “nuclear winter” was once going to destroy us all (are you old enough to remember that?). Until, among other things, Carl Sagan’s 1991 prediction of a nuclear winter effect resulting from Kuwaiti oil fires (caused by the Gulf War) failed to materialize. (Sagan may have passed away, but I’m still mad at him for putting onto the Voyager space probe a handy map showing any extraterrestrial beings who run across it exactly how to find us. Sagan was one of those people who believed that any extraterrestrials will “of course” be nice to us, e.g. not regard us as food even though we ourselves regard lots of animals as food. He was also once famous for his fondness for the phrase “billions and billions”, but somehow he didn’t care about the opinions of the other billions and billions of people whose location he was exposing.) I highly recommend reading the text of Crichton's lecture as it addresses the general question of non-science masquerading as science.

Thank heavens that a few scientists still believe in science.

Global warming, part 2

Most of the talk about global warming comes from politicians, not from scientists who actually know something about the subject. (Perhaps they’re afraid that people will learn that the real cause of global warming is “hot air”.) Apparently those scientists who do know something can be actively locked out by the politicians. See the article Bitten by the IPCC by Lawrence Solomon, which appeared in yesterday’s National Post.

Too much knowledge can be a bad thing

This isn’t a rant, but an account of something amusing that just happened to me.

While my computer was busy preparing a backup I was playing the game Text Twist (Palm OS version), where you are given 6 letters (e.g. USECED) and have to find words of 3 or more letters that can be formed from those 6 letters (e.g. USE, SEE, CEDE, CEDES, etc.). The more words you find, the more points you get. The critical thing is to find at least one 6-letter word (there’s guaranteed to be one), or you are tossed out of the game. (In the case of USECED, there are two such words, DEUCES and SEDUCE. But usually there’s only one word.) For assistance you can click “Twist”, which randomly reorders the letters.

This round I was presented with the letters EINSUX. It didn’t take me long to find UNIXES, a familiar name from my computer background, but not a valid word in Text Twist’s dictionary. Then I found USENIX; same problem. I couldn’t find anything other than those two before the clock ran out on me, and I wonder whether they blinded me from finding the valid word that was there. Which was UNISEX.

Billing vs. marketing vs. me

I was just about to pay my Rogers Cable TV bill when I noticed something amiss: the Digital Terminal and Digital Services fees added up to $7.48 (they were $4.49 and $2.99 respectively), but my “VIP Discount” was only $6.98. This bothered me because in the past my VIP Discount exactly cancelled out those two fees.

I called Rogers customer service, who did a pretty good job with my call: the first-tier agent gave me enough information to convince me that my total was correct and only the breakdown was wrong, but because I still was unhappy she passed me on to someone in the “management office” who explained the whole story. Apparently Marketing had decided to raise the digital terminal rental by 50 cents for everyone, so that non-VIP customers would pay $4.49 instead of $3.99 while VIP customers would pay 50 cents instead of zero.

I objected that the bill explicitly stated that my VIP Cable package included a free digital terminal: “Your VIP Cable package includes ... first digital terminal (from $4.49), Digital Services Fee, ...”. Guess what: it does, if you look at it just the right way. This price change was made at the same time as another price increase, that of VIP Cable. VIP Cable programming went up by $2.50 and digital terminal by $0.50, for a total increase of $3. (If I didn’t have a digital terminal I’d save 50 cents a month. Plus tax.) But if you look at it another way, the increase was $3, which includes a 50-cent credit toward the higher digital terminal fee. Multiple answers with no official contradictions: these people should start a religion.

If you haven’t followed all this, that’s ok: the point is that the total is correct but the breakdown is misleading. (What they really need is to tell their billing system that there are now two VIP Cable programming products, one analog and one digital, with slightly different prices. But perhaps their billing system can’t handle it.) I suggested to the “management office” person that he pass this complaint on so that clarifying the bill could be looked into. He obviously didn't want to so I badgered him and he said that he would run it by his management, but I’m not holding my breath. He knows, as I know, that hardly anybody actually reads their bills and insists on understanding them. But as I pointed out to him, most people who think something may be wrong won’t call Rogers; they’ll just hate Rogers, unfairly in this case.

Global warming

The Earth’s certainly been warmer than usual lately, enough so that I believe all the worry about consequences to be entirely justified. But it’s not at all clear to me that the global warming is caused by human activities. Yes, there are such things as greenhouse gases and we’ve been generating them, but there are lots of forces that affect climate, and I’m concerned that we’re just picking one to the exclusion of all others.

We humans unfortunately like to do that kind of thing, because it lets us believe that we can control things more than we actually can. For instance, when Ronald Reagan ran for U.S. president, he seized on the doctrine of supply-side economics because it would allow him to cut taxes, reduce the deficit, and increase spending — simultaneously. It didn’t work. The economic forces quoted by supply-siders do exist, but so do others.

If we want to put the brakes on global warming it is crucial that we understand what’s causing it. If we assume that the problem is greenhouse gases and we’re wrong, we may expend enormous efforts to reduce greenhouse gases only to have global warming gallop on unchecked — while we avoid dealing with the consequences because we believe we’re solving the problem at the source.

Some people have remarked that it’s not just the Earth that’s experiencing global warming, that other planets in our solar system that have atmospheres are experiencing the same thing. If that’s accurate, then global warming is almost certainly caused by conditions external to the Earth. For one person’s writing on this, with links to various sources, see this. I can’t vouch for any of it, but then nobody should vouch for the simplistic assumption that global warming is being caused by human-generated greenhouse gases. Climate is a very complex thing, just like economics, but certain people, like politicians (not just the publicly elected ones, but also those who maneuver their way into heading up non-governmental organizations), find it convenient to pretend that they have all the answers. Reaganomics didn’t work, and now one of the loudest voices in the greenhouse-gases-are-evil establishment is someone else who’s had a run at the U.S. presidency, Al Gore. Mr. Gore likes to act as though he’s a scientist, but he’s no more a scientist than Mr. Reagan was an economist, and he falsely claims that all the scientists agree on what’s behind global warming.

The US media

When the USA and its allies invaded Afghanistan in October 2001, I watched CNN for a few hours. CNN spent much of its time showing how US forces were being humanitarian above all, dropping ration kits to fleeing refugees. Lots of airtime was devoted to showing how these kits were being dropped at low altitudes in such a way that they would land safely without needing parachutes. 37,000 kits were being dropped, an impressive-sounding number. (I’m glad I remembered the number correctly: a Google search for "afghanistan ration 37,000" found this U.S. Defense Department press release confirming details of the ration program.)

Well, the number 37,000 was meant to be impressive. It was mentioned that one kit would feed one refugee for one day. CNN was also saying that there were at least a million refugees. Am I the only person who can do arithmetic? One million refugees (minimum), trekking for multiple days, would need millions of meals. Of course they had brought some food themselves, but compared to a requirement of millions, 37,000 is almost nothing; it’s in the neighbourhood of one percent. Yet CNN, toady of the Bush administration that it is, was trumpeting it as an important indicator of how much the USA cared about the people whose country it was invading.

The uniformity of the US media has become much more complete since the days of the Cold War. During the 1990s, the US government permitted an unconscionable concentration of print and broadcast media that terminated the independence of the media. Today the US media is owned by 5 giant companies in which pro-Zionist Jews have disproportionate influence. More importantly, the values of the conglomerates reside in the broadcast licenses, which are granted by the government, and the corporations are run by corporate executives—not by journalists—whose eyes are on advertising revenues and the avoidance of controversy that might produce boycotts or upset advertisers and subscribers. Americans who rely on the totally corrupt corporate media have no idea what is happening anywhere on earth, much less at home.

—Paul Craig Roberts, columnist and formerly U.S. Assistant Secretary of the Treasury

This may not be my Web 2.0 blog, but Web 2.0 is what gives me hope. In future Americans will get less of their news from giant corporations and more from smaller entities that have fewer sacred cows. They may end up going backward, in a good way. The American Revolution was partly inspired by a pamphlet called Common Sense. It was written and published by just one person, Thomas Paine, yet was very widely read, with hundreds of thousands of copies printed, a massive number for that time and place.

Since the age of 14 I have looked to the USA as my inspiration for freedom for all the people of the world. Lately, not so much — but Americans, I have not given up on you. The centre of the Web 2.0 revolution is in the USA.

"Best Global Airport" - to whom?

On Tuesday, the Globe and Mail newspaper included an advertising supplement, oh, excuse me, “a special information supplement”, promoting Toronto’s Pearson International Airport. A collection of self-laudatory “articles” is supported by ads from companies that had little choice but to say yes when approached by the Greater Toronto Airports Authority (GTAA), since the GTAA is their only possible customer in the airport business in Toronto, and not a good idea to alienate.

The supplement is clearly not intended to drive revenues or reduce costs, so self-congratulation appears to be the only goal.

Apparently the Institute of Transport Management named Pearson the Best Global Airport in 2006. Unfortunately this award came from an industry organization concerned with management, not from, say, an organization representing passengers.

I am occasionally one of those passengers, and I can tell you that the newest and greatest terminal, Terminal 1, is in some crucial ways much worse than its predecessors. It may be “reconfigurable” and have other qualities that delight the airport management, but I curse the GTAA every time I go through it.

The trouble starts right after I park my car in the parking building attached to the terminal. I have no idea where the terminal is, so my only clue as where to park in order to be reasonably close to the terminal is to go to the popular areas (the veterans having figured out over time where to go). Oh, and on some levels, like the one that you drive right into when you arrive, there are barricades in place to prevent you from getting close. How friendly. Other levels are better, but of course I had to learn that through experience without any help from the GTAA.

Once parked, there is the interesting question of how to walk to the terminal, since I may have no idea in which direction it is. Signs exist only once I’m close enough that I don’t need them any more. How about a big green flashing light suspended from the ceiling, visible from a fair distance?

Once I’ve arrived where there are corridors and elevators and stairs, I have no idea what to do. What I’ve since learned is that I have to go to a different level in order to access a bridge to the terminal building. Again, it would be nice if there were signs!

OK, so I’m at the elevator. But do I press the Up button or the Down button? No idea! I have to guess and press (say) Down. After I’m in the elevator I see that the floor marked Terminal is actually Up. Only if I’m lucky and there are no other passengers going down, and the elevator isn’t on its way down to pick up someone else, can I change the elevator’s direction at this point.

In case you think that I just have trouble finding my way around (which I generally don’t), let me illustrate that it’s not just me. On my last visit to the parking lot I had to flounder around with two fellow travellers, one of whom was married to a pilot and was a frequent visitor. I felt bad the one time I led our group in the wrong direction, but not so bad when the pilot’s wife later did the same thing.

Upon arrival in the terminal building (what a relief!) I take the escalator to Departures. But which one? — there’s one going off to the left and one to the right. I know now that it’s always the one to the right, at least for domestic departures (the international area having opened only three days ago), but it would have been nice if the signs said so. The first time I made the wrong choice and had to walk a lot further quite unnecessarily.

I suppose it wasn’t that much further; it just seemed that way. This is because one has to walk an awful lot more in this new and “improved” terminal. I’m surprised that the advertising supplement doesn’t include an article extolling the health benefits of light exercise.

So who cares about the passengers? Not the GTAA. It’s too busy pleasing itself and its fellow airport operators. Aren’t monopolies wonderful?