You can never push a denier to water: only lead him gently with a dollar sign ...

    If solar cells had been introduced at 1950s era electric utility shareholders' AGMs by CEOs proclaiming, "They'll double our profits overnight !!", they be in mass use by now.
     Thomas Edison's light bulbs* were an instant world wide hit, despite being 100 times less efficient at converting electricity into light than current solar panels are at converting light into electricity.
   100 times more efficient !!! One hundred times !!!

    But you yawn and get into your SUV - "solar panels are unproven, much like those contested claims about 'carbon pollution in the atmosphere' ."
    Deny,deny,deny.
   In fact, the problem with solar panels is that they were actually introduced as something you would have to make do with, like it or not, when Mommy Nature refuses give you any more hydrocarbon Kool-aid.
   You don't like being told what to do (or even worse) being told you can't do everything.
    Who can blame you?  Your doting parents, teachers and politicians never told you anything like that, growing up .....

      * Readily available solar panels' efficiency - typical case - are currently about 15%. Edison's typical early light bulb was .15% efficient.
     Both have gotten a lot better from their earliest days - but marvel at how high the initial solar panel efficiency was - versus the hostility to it from the deniers,birthers, flat-earthers, tea partiers.
   The Sky Gods and Deny-Me-Nots and SF fans are not to be placated by mere Mammon, unless and until it also re-affirms their right to do whatever, whenever,however, wherever they want : they still are in denial , still claiming that human potential throughout our vast universe is essentially limitless.

  

Why are we STILL teaching kids "FLAT EARTH" geometry ?

   Parallel Lines of Longitude : what lines ? Aren't parallel lines supposed to never meet , but don't parallel longitudes actually meet - at our North and South Poles ?
    What in the name of all public school math is going on here?

    Forget public educational authorities bowing to political correctness pressure from those who deny human carbon pollution of the atmosphere and that species evolve over time.
    Most of us believe the world is not flat but a sphere - a blue sphere - we've seen the photos of it taken out in space.
   But the math we teach in school comes across like it was handed down on tablets of stone to Moses.
   (Along with Commandant 11: "Thou shall not claim that fossil fuels will ever run out, though you also deny that fossils ever did run about.")
  It is called Euclidean Geometry and it has the outstanding advantage of being simple to demonstrate on a classroom chalkboard and thus in making even ho-hum mathematicians seem god-like.
   Where it isn't at all simple to demonstrate, is out in the physical world.
  Out there it is not actually correct  or true - at least not true like a law carved out on stone and handed down to you by G.O.D. Himself should be.
  It is actually a 'quick and dirty', 'close enough for the P. Eng', type of rough and ready 'field math'.
  Fail to believe, oh Earthling ?
  Take your bog-ordinary orange -- it looks a lot like the Earth - which it should as both are spheres or balls.
   Score it around the equator and then from North Pole to South Pole and back again - then turn it horizontally 180 degrees and again score it from Pole to Pole and back.
  You now have divided the Earth-cum-orange's surface into 8 equal parts: triangles.
  Or are they ?
   A triangle, as your dimly remembered High School teacher was always quick to remind you, is such that all of its internal angles always add up to180 degrees.
  Measure those 1/8ths of an orange carefully and then reflect.
  Don't add up to 180 degrees do they ?
  Welcome to the incredibly useful world of non-Elucidean math : the math of measuring land for land sales on this sphere we call Earth.
   Well, actually, unless the piece of land is very big indeed we are unlikely to note the error in measurement if we don't use non-Elucidean geometry.
   But it is there and it matters , or should matter, to the two thousand years of mathematicians who failed to even notice the error let alone chose to ignore it.
  Yep, the would-be "Masters of the Universe" turned out to be "The Gang who Couldn't Measure Straight "!
   Elucidean math is incredibly useful --- and long may we ordinary joes and josephines continue to use it in our ordinary daily lives.
   But let us also hear from the world's collected mathematicians a big and sincere apology, a sort of scientific Truth and Reconciliation, over them foisting Euclid's Geometry upon us and upon themselves as the only,the only possible, presentation of  physical reality.
   Yeah - as if that is likely !
    As if highly educated mathematicians are going to admit to us that they didn't notice the math implications of the fact that the world was round, long after even uneducated peasants knew it was round.
   If stuff like this gets around, then where will their pensions and their prestige be ....

Global Referendum on CARBON TAX would give plurality to Deniers

Michael Marshall

I do not believe, in any way, that climate deniers (aka 'skeptics') are limited to a tiny minority of flat earth believers and cranks.

Whenever a seriously effective carbon tax is raised, at elections or in legislatures ,we see the wheels quickly come off the bus of the majority of us who do not deny that climate change will seriously damage society within our own lifetimes.

A plurality of us quickly forms up to oppose even weak carbon taxing and the idea of serious carbon taxing sufficient to halt and reverse global warming, finds no traction at all.

Since there still is a mania about the Titanic sinking in the air about my hometown of Halifax as I write this post, let me use a metaphor from past ocean liner disasters.

If we really truly believed that the lifebelt of a sharp tax on our extravagant lifestyle was the only hope for being alive 30 years from now, we would be rioting trying to get at the ship's stores of them.

But we are not - instead we are busy rioting in an attempt to avoid being made to put to them on.

Deep down ,most of us still believe Newtonian science's glossy promise that given enough time, money and mental effort, human science can solve any problem thrown at it.

None of us, not even WILD ROSE premier-elect Danielle Smith, denies that past human science has thrown up some serious environmental and social problems right now .

(I believe even Exxon executives would admit this ----- privately.)

What most of us deny is that it will take a global solidarity of will without precedent in history, to do something, in time, about our biggest current problem.

That is the fact that we are pumping way too much CO2 into the atmosphere.

We still believe that Newtonian science, two body science, linear, rational, mechanical science , can quickly and painlessly invent a technical solution.

It can't.

It won't.

Three body science, post modern science, commensalistic science, says only by accepting limits (in this case upon our burning of carbon-based fuels) can we pull out of this fatal Phaetonian dive.

The Deniers are not just MURDERERS AMONG US, they are a majority among us, a majority of us.....