Thought for Today

"Fear cannot be banished, but it can be calm and without panic; it can be mitigated by reason and evaluation."

~~~~~ Vannevar Bush

Thought for Today

"An appeal to the reason of the people has never been known to fail in the long run."

~~~~~ James Russell Lowell

But James Russell Lowell never heard of Donald Trump.

Thought for Today

"Fraud is the homage that force pays to reason."

~~~~~ Charles Curtis

Thought for Today

"Conscience is our magnetic compass; reason our chart."

~~~~~ Joseph Cook

Thought for Today

"Reason is like an open secret that can become known to anyone at any time; it is the quiet space into which everyone can enter through his own thought."

~~~~~ Karl Jaspers

Thought for Today

"When I am getting ready to reason with a man, I spend one-third of my time thinking about myself and what I am going to say and two-thirds about him and what he is going to say."

~~~~~ Abraham Lincoln

Thought for Today

"If we cannot by reason, by influence, by example, by strenuous effort, and by personal sacrifice, mend the bad places of civilization, we certainly cannot do it by force."

~~~~~ Auberon Herbert

Thought for Today

[Ed.: I posted this last year on Phyllis McGinley's birthday, but it's so great -- and so apropos -- that I'm posting it again.]

"When blithe to argument I come,
Though armed with facts, and merry,
May Providence protect me from
The fool as adversary,
Whose mind to him a kingdom is
Where reason lacks dominion,
Who calls conviction prejudice
And prejudice opinion."

~~~~~ Phyllis McGinley

Thought for Today

"People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come in to the mind of others."

~~~~~ Blaise Pascal

Thought for Today

"A true history of human events would show that a far larger proportion of our acts are the result of sudden impulse and accident than of that reason of which we so much boast."

~~~~~ Peter Cooper

Thought for Today

"Where all is but dream, reasoning and arguments are of no use, truth and knowledge nothing."

~~~~~ John Locke

Thought for Today

"When blithe to argument I come,
Though armed with facts, and merry,
May Providence protect me from
The fool as adversary,
Whose mind to him a kingdom is
Where reason lacks dominion,
Who calls conviction prejudice
And prejudice opinion."

~~~~~ Phyllis McGinley

Thought for Today

"Right reason is stronger than force."

~~~~~ President James A. Garfield

Thought for Today

"It is not what a lawyer tells me I may do; but what humanity, reason, and justice, tell me I ought to do."

~~~~~ Edmund Burke

Thomas Jefferson on Global Warming

"Man, once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without rudder, is the spot of every wind. With such persons, gullibility, which they call faith, takes the helm from the hand of reason and the mind becomes a wreck."

~~~~~ Thomas Jefferson, letter to James Smith, December 8, 1822

Thought for Today

"He only employs his passion who can make no use of his reason."

~~~~~ Cicero

Climate Money

Joanne "Jo" Nova, a science writer from Perth, Australia, has been driving the Global Warmists totally bonkers. For 17 years, she was a True Believer. Then, in 2007, she became aware of a couple of pieces of key evidence that disprove the entire theory of AGW – that is, Anthropogenic Global Warming caused by the accumulation of CO₂ in the atmosphere.

As a trained scientist (molecular biology) and a person of unquestioned integrity, once Jo realized that the theory in which she had believed was false, she changed her opinion. She began speaking and writing as a global warming skeptic, pointing out how the recent evidence had poked some pretty sizable holes in the hypothesis that humans are causing the earth to warm as a result of our CO₂ production.

At first, Jo's former colleagues tried their best to ignore her. However, she's not easy to ignore. After all, she's a professional science communicator, and is very good at what she does. Not surprisingly, within a very short time, she began to experience the same sort of vicious personal attacks as all of the other scientists who dare to question the Global Warmists' cherished orthodoxy. To them, she was now an apostate, and they made it plain that if it were within their power to do so, they would gladly burn her at the stake, then bury her ashes in the nearest environmentally friendly landfill.

Last year, Jo started a blog, JoNova, in which she kept her readers abreast of the latest developments in the field of climate science. In September, 2008, she issued an invaluable book, The Skeptic's Handbook. Here is what she wrote about it at the time:

I want to lift the debate above the mud-slinging, pathetic ad hominem attacks, and specious argument by authority. The basic rules of logic and reasoning have been known since the Greeks. Educated adults ought to do better. Maybe one day, national curriculums will too.

The attacks grew more vicious and strident, but Jo was not dissuaded. Quite the contrary. She came to realize, as some of us have for a number of years now, that the believers in AGW theory were acting not like scientists, but like religious acolytes hanging on every word emanating from Prophet Al Gore and High Priest James Hansen. By the end of October, 2008, Jo realized that AGW is a religion, and had the temerity to say so in a blog post.

Reading the comments following that one post is a real education. Jo enforces certain standards of civility in her comment section, so you won't find the most depraved and vicious of the ad hominem attacks there (to see them, hang out in the left-wing blogs for a while and search on her name), but I was in turn amused, amazed, and disappointed to read some of the comments obviously intended as logical, reasoned discourse.

This month, Jo has just come out with another informative booklet, this time in cooperation with the Science and Public Policy Institute. It's called Climate Money, and you can download it as a PDF file from this page. Here's a summary of what you'll find within its 19 pages:

• The US government has provided over $79 billion since 1989 on policies related to climate change, including science and technology research, foreign aid, and tax breaks.


• Despite the billions: “audits” of the science are left to unpaid volunteers. A dedicated but largely uncoordinated grassroots movement of scientists has sprung up around the globe to test the integrity of the theory and compete with a well funded highly organized climate monopoly. They have exposed major errors.


• Carbon trading worldwide reached $126 billion in 2008. Banks are calling for more carbon-trading. And experts are predicting the carbon market will reach $2 - $10 trillion making carbon the largest single commodity traded.


• Meanwhile in a distracting sideshow, Exxon-Mobil Corp is repeatedly attacked for paying a grand total of $23 million to skeptics—less than a thousandth of what the US government has put in, and less than one five-thousandth of the value of carbon trading in just the single year of 2008.


• The large expenditure in search of a connection between carbon and climate creates enormous momentum and a powerful set of vested interests. By pouring so much money into one theory, have we inadvertently created a self-fulfilling prophesy instead of an unbiased investigation?

Jo is also a talented artist and cartoonist. She illustrated both The Skeptic's Handbook and Climate Money herself with clear, easy-to-follow charts, graphs, and occasional cartoons, such as this one from the cover of Climate Money:



By all means, download a copy of Climate Money and, if you don't already have one, The Skeptic's Handbook, too. By the time you finish reading them, you'll have a pretty good understanding of why the theory of AGW is wrong, and why we are nevertheless spending billions of dollars in an attempt to prove its validity.

As is, sadly, so often the case – follow the money.

Thought for Today

"It is as useless to argue with those that have renounced the use and authority of reason as to administer medication to the dead."

~~~~~ Thomas Paine