Letters to the Editor
ondelette
Published Letters: 1986 Editor's Choice: 19
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Now that we got that straightened out, here's something to see
[Read the article: Fred Hiatt and Iraq -- Together Forever]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Here is an example of a paper, peer-reviewed, from a Roger Pielke,Sr., who has a reputation of being anti-global warming. Not sure if all of that reputation is well deserved, but he does claim in non-peer-reviewed articles that the net glaciation change in recent years is zero, and he had a rather bad falling out with people at the IPCC.
He gets cited by people who at least think he is anti-global warming. In fact, there are those who charge his entire department of being against stopping climate change. If you were to only read the abstract and the final conclusion, it sounds pretty innocuous, but he is saying that without a more complex model, you can't predict the effect of doubling CO2 in the atmosphere.
Changes in soil moisture from drought or high soil moisture availability can enhance, or completely balance, or even reverse the biological effects associated with CO2 doubling by itself, and therefore need to be considered in any future assessment.
Just for reference, those biological effects, he claims, out-perform CO2 in the atmosphere to cause, or fail to cause, greenhouse effects (heat storage).
I'm just guessing, but I think his real disagreement with others started over how complex to make the climate model and over whether the predictions of gradual warming are accurate. He wrote one paper in which he argues that the climate system is chaotic, and talks about catastrophic rather than gradual climate change. But if he really is as his reputation seems to be, you can see why his abstract would have slipped through Oreskes' net.
http://blue.atmos.colostate.edu/publications/pdf/R-304.pdf
I found out about him last night by following this old blog:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=204
Who knew?
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Here's how is plays non-peer-reviewed
[Read the article: Fred Hiatt and Iraq -- Together Forever]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Should have included this with the other post. Weird.
http://cires.colorado.edu/science/groups/pielke/news/2007/ltt462%20feature.pdf
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Maybe oversight isn't enough
[Read the article: Congressional oversight is a linchpin of how our democracy works]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Max Frankle has a long piece in the Sunday Times magazine this morning about the cozy relationship between the press and the government when it comes to classified information. He works his way throught the Plame scandal, offering his thoughts from secrets he was privy to, back all the way to his army days in the fifties.
You get a picture of the government classifying everything and then leaking it out slowly as it suits their political or legitimate interests, which is what he says, and he wants to leave you with the impression that prosecutors like Fitzgerald should stay out of the relationship. "Attorneys general and others with subpoena power, back off, butt out." is the way he puts it.
But as he is filling you in with all these stories of information the press has had, and the decisions they have made on whether or not to tell the public, and then his version of the Libby trial, complete with sentences about information that wasn't known to Henry Waxman during the hearings last week, and...well, you kind of get the picture, which he perhaps wasn't intending, of the press sitting on a lot of secret information and then leaking it out slowly as it suits their political or legitimate interests. It's kind of a sickening feeling, and it ends with the kind of comments Glenn cited press pundits as making.
There's no such thing as a "Fourth Estate Freedom Of Information Act", or a "Media Sunshine Law".
Glenn's right, we absolutely need oversight to keep secrets from becoming corruption from becoming madness as has happened over the past six years. But there's no oversight on the press (and other corporate interests e.g. Blackwell) that are holding passes to all the secrets we think they'll tell us about, when it isn't in the presses interest to tell us. So who watches the watchers?
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Guess who is saying this?
[Read the article: Congressional oversight is a linchpin of how our democracy works]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"The president says, 'I don't care.' He's not accountable anymore," Hagel says, measuring his words by the syllable and his syllables almost by the letter. "He's not accountable anymore, which isn't totally true. You can impeach him, and before this is over, you might see calls for his impeachment. I don't know. It depends how this goes."
Chuck Hagel. It's in the April edition of Esquire.
Things are getting strange.
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Actually, Jeb, it probably does
[Read the article: Congressional oversight is a linchpin of how our democracy works]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]If we had single payer, socialized medicine, and didn't have to worry about being fired for our previously existing conditions or age, and didn't have to worry about whether or not we'd be covered, and had everyone go to the hospital without any stigma if they thought they'd been exposed?
The health care person working on you in the OR wouldn't need the Ryan White Act and 72 hours to find out if they'd been exposed. And that would probably lower the probability that the situation would occur.
Not exactly the answer nabalzbbfr was looking for, though.