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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (313591)	12/2/2006 8:07:47 PM
From: longnshort	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572501

Weathering Hurricane Hysteria Thursday, August 31, 2006 By Steven Milloy * E-MAIL STORY * PRINTER FRIENDLY VERSION It’s peak North Atlantic hurricane season again and much is being made of a supposedly increased hurricane threat due to man-made global warming. It’s a contentious issue, to say the least. JunkScience.com has tried to slice through a little of the overblown rhetoric to see what, if any, cold, hard facts are available. If you look at a graph from the Chronological List of All Hurricanes Which Affected the Continental United States: 1851-2005 compiled by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the years 2004-2005 represent the only time in this relatively short record that there have been two consecutive years with more than four hurricanes making U.S. landfall. This, however, does not constitute proof of global warming-enhanced, landfalling hurricane activity. Since 1928 -- the mid-point of the period 1851-2005 -- there have been 134 landfalling hurricanes as compared to 145 landfalling hurricanes prior to 1928. So there’s actually been a significant decrease in hurricane frequency though global temperatures likely have warmed somewhat since 1928. (Story continues below) Advertise Here Advertisements Related * Column Archive Full-page Junk Science Archive There also hasn’t been an increase in the number of stormy seasons. Pre-1928, there were nine years with three or more hurricanes compared to only five years with three or more hurricanes post-1928. There appear to have been more category four and category five storms post-1928 as compared to pre-1928 (12 vs. 9). But since that difference depends on measurements of maximum hurricane wind speeds, it could easily be questioned given dramatic technological improvements in modern hurricane data collection. Looking at the data by decade, it’s apparent that the anomalously quiet 1920s were followed by surging landfalling hurricane frequency in the 1930s and 1940s. But after the 1940s, the remainder of the 20th century was rather quiet. The statistics for 2004 and 2005 may look ominous at first blush, but we have no way of knowing how the remainder of the decade will ultimately pan out. With annual landfalling hurricane counts of 0, 1, 2, 6 and 6 for the period 2001-2005, it could be a big decade -- or not. The question originally posed, of course, was whether the increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide is associated with more or more-severe landfalling hurricanes. To answer this question, we plotted storms against atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. Curiously, the post-World War II period of increasing fossil fuel use and associated increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide is concurrent with the most sustained lull in landfalling hurricane activity throughout the record. While this doesn’t disprove any association between global warming and landfalling hurricane frequency or intensity, it lends no support to the contention either. It then strongly looks as though 2004-2005 was simply an unlucky anomaly since hurricane trends bear no similarity to the annual atmospheric carbon dioxide trend and, by extension, to global warming. The last time there were 15 landfalling hurricanes in a four-year period was back in the 1880s. Even so, the entire 1880s ended up having only one or two more landfalling hurricanes than the preceding and subsequent decades. History, therefore, cautions us against jumping to rash conclusions about whether the opening decade of the Third Millennium will likely become a record-breaker. We'll have to wait and see -- but history suggests it's somewhat unlikely. Finally, we’ve also plotted a new graph of global temperature data -- from the UK’s Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research -- against atmospheric carbon dioxide data -- from Mauna Loa, Hawaii, the longest continuous record of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations available in the world. The graph shows very little change in either global temperature or atmospheric carbon dioxide level since 1850. That’s because we plotted the ranges on scales that better suit planetary history as opposed to the global warming lobby’s fascination with dramatized illustrations of relatively small temperature change over short time periods. Temperatures are plotted in degrees Kelvin, the absolute temperature scale, and carbon dioxide levels are plotted in terms of their historical range, which has been more than an order of magnitude greater than current levels. Has the planet warmed over the last two centuries? Almost certainly it has. But we can say with equal certainty that, from a planetary perspective, it hasn’t warmed very much and, when viewed on a more appropriate scale, nowhere near the “dangerous” levels claimed by alarmists. And no one knows with any certainty why the warming has occurred. This is why the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) estimate of average global temperature change – 0.6 ± 0.2 degrees Centigrade during the 20th century – is really a trivial matter when viewed in the proper historical context. Simply put, a change in absolute planetary mean temperature of 0.2 percent is unlikely to have caused catastrophic climate change. Steven Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and CSRWatch.com. He is a junk science expert, an advocate of free enterprise and an adjunct scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

To: tejek who wrote (313591)	12/3/2006 8:01:23 AM
From: Road Walker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572501

Teaching the Elephant By DAVID BROOKS Human beings have divided selves. Some philosophers emphasize that people have a cool, rational side and an unruly, passionate side. Some theologians emphasize that people have a loving, virtuous side and a selfish, sinful side. Freudians used to emphasize the divisions between the ego, the superego and the id. But lately some brain researchers have another way to conceptualize the divided self. They distinguish between the conscious, intentional parts of the mind and the backstage automatic parts. The best metaphor for this last division comes from Jonathan Haidt’s wise book “The Happiness Hypothesis.” Imagine, he writes, a boy riding an elephant. The boy is the conscious mind, the prefrontal cortex and such. The boy can plan ahead. The elephant is the unconscious part of the brain, the amygdala and other regions. It produces emotions and visceral reactions. It processes information and forms intuitions. These days, scientists are spending a lot of time trying to understand the elephant, and journalists are popularizing their results. In “Blink,” Malcolm Gladwell describes how the elephant can pick up and process information, and even draw instant conclusions before the boy is aware of what he is seeing. In “Social Intelligence,” Daniel Goleman describes how elephants talk to each other while scarcely letting the boys in on the conversation. Fear, laughter and other emotions can sweep through crowds before the individuals in the crowds understand what’s going on. The elephant is the repository of tacit knowledge. As Robert Sternberg of Yale notes, tacit knowledge is procedural. It’s knowing how, not knowing what. It’s knowing how to listen, how to see and organize what you see. A child born into a home where people use a lot of words develops a sophisticated ability to use language, without even having to sit down and consciously develop this skill. A child born into a home where actions have predictable consequences learns to restrain impulses and practice self-control. The elephant doesn’t acquire its knowledge from self-conscious study. The elephant absorbs information from the environment. The neural architecture of the brain is shaped by experiences and habits, often during the sensitive periods early in life. This way of dividing the self is beginning to have a powerful influence on education policy and urban policy, and across a whole range of other practical spheres. For example, last Sunday Paul Tough had an outstanding article in The Times Magazine about how to improve urban schools. In one scene, Tough was standing in front of a music class at a KIPP Academy. The teacher was explaining Tough’s presence to the class, when he suddenly pointed to Tough and asked, “Do you notice what he’s doing right now?” The class called out, “Nodding!” The teacher was using Tough’s unconscious nodding to reinforce a lesson: that when you listen to a person you should look at the person, and you should actively listen. Later in the class the teacher told the students to adopt the “normal school” pose. The kids slouched low in their chairs and gazed off into space. Then the kids snapped back to the KIPP-approved posture: upright, every head swiveling toward whoever was speaking. In short, KIPP is taking skills that middle-class kids pick up unconsciously and it is rigorously drilling them into students from less fortunate backgrounds. KIPP Academies, like many of the best schools these days, don’t just cram information into brains. They educate the elephant. They surround students with a total environment, a holistic set of habits and messages, and they dominate students’ lives for many hours a day. A generation ago, the gods of education fashion ordained that children should be liberated from desks-in-a-row pedagogy to follow their “natural” inclinations. In those days, human beings were commonly divided between their natural selves, assumed to be free and wonderful, and their socially constructed selves, assumed to be inhibited and repressed. But now, thanks to bitter experience and scientific research, we know that the best environments don’t liberate students. We know, or have rediscovered, that the most nurturing environments are highly structured. Children flourish in homes that are organized, in families where attachments are stable, among people who plan for the future and within cultures that celebrate work. Many of today’s most effective antipoverty institutions are incredibly intrusive, even authoritarian. Up to a point, elephants seem to like it that way.