27 thoughts on “Mann: Summary Judgement for CEI.”

  1. Lucia,
    That thread was pretty entertaining, but sort of sobering too. I’m glad the Court rejected the ‘expert in disinformation’ and classified him according to what he probably actually is (‘a passionate advocate who’s expertise was developed specifically to testify on behalf of climate scientists’) regarding Dr. Mashey.
    There were lots of gems in there, thanks for pointing it out.

  4. I was interested in this 9 years ago….
    Is it really 9 years?
    Good to see it is finally heating up….
    –
    Must be 10 years since you did an Arctic Ice max or min, Lucia.
    Is it really 10 years?

  5. The sorry part is that the entire case was (and is) nothing but a SLAPP, and despite legislation prohibiting such suits, it has gone on for a decade…. which shows how the appointment of incompetent judges can void even good legislation.

  6. This silly article https://www.salon.com/2021/07/27/artificial-intelligence-wants-you-and-your-job_partner/ helps explain why liberals believe nonsense and pass nonsensical legislation. Oh yes, what may actually save the world from global warming is the arrival of “the singularity”, when artificial intelligence (finally!) does away with evil humans and their desire for material wealth. After all, many ‘experts’ see the singularity arriving as soon as 2050, and humans are then doomed to rapid extinction. However, if we are all good little boys and girls, and accept a subsistence life with virtually no energy use, then maybe we can control the robots, or at least they may spare us.
    .
    The author runs a liberal policy think tank….. why does this not surprise me? He is a child-like idiot, who apparently knows nothing.

  7. SteveF,

    An AI singularity like in The Terminator series is not the only possible outcome investigated by different science fiction authors. Enhanced human intelligence by direct mental access to computing and data resources is another possibility. IMO, the gray goo problem is physically impossible like many of the things advocates of nanotechnology have proposed. Nanomachines that repair DNA, for example, simply aren’t going to happen. There are multiple impossibilities involved.

    Then there’s this:

    In my new novel Songlands, humanity faces a terrible set of choices in 2052. Having failed to control carbon emissions for several decades, the world is at the point of no return, too late for conventional policy fixes.

    Oh, puhleeze. That’s a book I have no interest in reading.

  8. DeWitt,
    ” Nanomachines that repair DNA, for example, simply aren’t going to happen.”
    Of course not; such machines would need functional structure smaller than the molecules they are going to fix…. an impossibility. Some DNA repair schemes are possible, but they are based on enzymatic repair, not nanomachines. These folks need to read “plenty of room at the bottom”.
    .
    It is the child-like belief in wacky pronouncements of ‘experts’ in fields like AI and climate ‘science’ which I find most shocking. Really, people who have not the slightest clue about science and technology seem unable to dismiss ‘scientific’ cranks…. and so embrace nutty pronouncements/projections/predictions as if they were actually plausible. They are ~100% not plausible.

  9. Yes, they call those books “Cli-Fi” now, ha ha. Climate science fiction. Many of them are in fact lectures in environmentalism, but many others are just using this as a hand wave for their apocalypse world building scenarios. Science fiction has never been short on political ideology lectures, I tend to avoid the most blatant ones, but the genre comes with this almost by default.

  10. It is certainly not beyond the realm of thought that computers will one day evolve to be beyond our pile of biogel in our cranium. Obviously they already exceed us in many measurable ways. The rate of evolution between humans and computers is not even close. However I have been hearing AI is “only 5 years away” since the 1970’s. The internet can be thought of as a giant self evolving brain in an abstract way.
    .
    Could a monkey eventually build something as smart as a human? Or are there fundamental limitations here? First the monkey has to evolve to a certain level. Are humans far enough along to build a super human? I have my doubts.

  11. Tom Scharf,
    “Are humans far enough along to build a super human? I have my doubts.”
    .
    I too have been hearing that artificial intelligence, far superior to humans, is only 5 years away for most of my life. It is rubbish. True intelligence is ’embodied’ and is self-aware…. it derives from and is connected to a complex world of sensory inputs….. which can’t be divorced from self awareness. Fish, while dumb compared to humans, are way more intelligent in the way they interact with their environment than computers. They are self aware. They have fear. They have hunger, they have motivations of all types. AI is not even close.
    .
    When people succeed in producing ’embodied’ computers, capable of learning most anything via sensory experience (French, Mandarin, or how to splice a rope), that is when we should consider artificial intelligence has been created. As far as I can tell, we are nowhere near it. World beating chess or go is not artificial intelligence; those are too narrow and limited to even be though of as any kind of intelligence.

  12. DeWitt,
    “the world is at the point of no return, too late for conventional policy fixes”
    .
    Perhaps we have heard this terrible scenario before? Yes, maybe only 100 times. It is garbage. People are not going to let the world be destroyed by global warming. Good grief, spending 0.1% of the USA’s GDP we could put enough sulfate aerosols in the stratosphere to start an ice age. The crazies need to get past this ‘we are destroying nature and nothing is going to save us’ crap. Humanity is quite capable of navigating effectively through most any problem, just so long as the crazies are not allowed on the boat’s bridge. The crazies are a far bigger problem than anything else we face.

  13. SteveF,

    Good grief, spending 0.1% of the USA’s GDP we could put enough sulfate aerosols in the stratosphere to start an ice age.

    That’s the premise of the sci-fi (in the pejorative sense of the term) movie and TV series Snowpiercer, where the last living humans are on a huge train on a world spanning track. In spite of the fact that the oceans are frozen over and the global surface temperature is at or below the Antarctic Plateau winter level, -100F or so, somehow it still manages to snow enough to cause avalanches onto the tracks. There’s plenty of social justice narrative too. I watched a few episodes of the TV series, but have no real interest in it anymore.

  14. DeWitt,

    I never read sci-fi. I find it too phony and too boring. We are neither going to have a global warming catastrophe nor a new ice age catastrophe, at least not so long as humans are around. The only indisputable ‘crisis’ humanity faces is how to provide sufficient energy in the long term to support an advanced (materially wealthy) civilization. Solar panels are not the answer.
    .
    The short term crisis for humanity, one that never seems to subside, is the unhinged green influence on policy.

  15. SteveF,

    I could say you’re a victim of Sturgeon’s Law wrt science fiction, i.e. 90% of everything is crap and all you’ve read is the crap part. However, that would remind me of nearly everyone’s reply when I say I hate beets because they taste like dirt to me; which is that you’re just not fixing them correctly. But no matter how you fix them, they still taste like dirt to me. Hence the phrase from latin, de gustibus, non disputandem

    I have to admit that I mostly read fantasy now, although I quite like the books in The Expanse series.

  16. Speaking of green, I just saw some items that claimed that the offshore wind farms in the UK would be abandoned as uneconomic if there were no government subsidies.

    There also seems to something of a boomlet for hydrogen again. Apparently no one can do fairly simple economic analysis or they’re counting on the government to bail them out.

  17. DeWitt,

    i.e. 90% of everything is crap and all you’ve read is the crap part.

    I think one reason lots of people think things like “music used to be better” is they either forget or never heard some of the old crap.
    .
    Beets do taste like dirt. You should have to ‘fix’ food to make it not taste like dirt. I’ve read the ability to taste the dirt part of beets is genetic. Beets are horrible.

  19. DeWitt,
    “But no matter how you fix them, they still taste like dirt to me.”
    .
    You have described beets perfectly….. intensely distilled dirt flavor, along with intense color and a very unpleasant consistency.
    .
    Many years ago, I visited Cartagena, Colombia with a Brazilian business associate. At the hotel breakfast buffet they had boiled beets, which I was careful to avoid. My Brazilian associate thought they were baked apples, deeply colored. I warned him (in Potuguese “Luiz , eles sao beterrabas horrivies!”) He did not believe me until he took a bite.
    .
    Beets are indeed absolutely horrible, except for those few people who can’t perceive the taste of pure dirt.

  20. DeWitt,
    If you are wildly optimistic, the solar panel/windfarm/electrolysis/fuel cell efficiency loop is on the order of 50% efficiency. That means that dispatchable future solar/wind power delivered price has to be over $0.40 per KWH wholesale, with 5 times the capital investment of nuclear power stations.
    .
    It is crazy expensive, and it is not going to happen at any scale that is not wholly subsidized by government.

  21. The odd thing is, we can for certain be energy in dependent,it the and long term, but only if we stop listening to the unhinged green crazies.

  22. Lucia
    “So people sense that the nature of the stress is somewhat different from a football quarter back who, likely, at least has more or less “normal” treatment during his developmental years.”
    –
    This comment is rather appropriate to the substance of the Steyn/Mann case?
    Or am I not allowed to say that.

  25. OK. I may have gotten it wrong. I think it made the kid sick to where they thought it was ricin, but may not have been deadly on its own.

  26. MikeN,
    I, I should have been clearer. I do think it’s poisonous! But it smells sweet.

    https://www.gardeningknowhow.com/ornamental/bulbs/lily-of-the-valley/lily-of-the-valley-toxicity.htm

    Lily of the valley toxicity makes it unsafe to have around children and pets. The plant is so dangerous that ingestion could result in a trip to the emergency room, or in rare cases, death.

    The wonderful fragrance makes it especially dangerous since a kid might want a taste.

  27. It was a major plot point in Breaking Bad. Someone thinks a kid was poisoned with ricin, and the FBI comes in treating him as a terrorist. In the end it was lily of the valley and the kid was fine.

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