Author: Mark Tokarski

Just a man who likes to read, argue, and occasionally be surprised.

Climate alarmism = Lysenkoism?

I was just reviewing a book I read some time ago, The Pseudoscience Wars, by Michael D. Gordin, and from there (apart from the overall thrust of the book) came across the following quote from Julian Huxley*, a British evolutionary biologist, eugenicist, and internationalist:

“… Lysenko and his followers are not scientific in any proper sense of the word – they do not adhere to recognized scientific method, or employee normal scientific precautions, or publish the results in a way which renders their scientific evaluation possible. They move in a different world of ideas from that of professional scientists, and do not carry on discussion in a scientific way.”

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Proxies and reality

hadcet

The graph above is known as “HadCET,” or the Central England temperature record, from 1659 to present, monthly in the beginning, daily from the late 1700s forward. When I last put up graphs using Greenland ice cores (link), it was pointed out to me that those ice cores are mere “proxies,” that is, we cannot know the actual temperatures of previous times and thus have to search for other indicators. I think that the implication was that the ice cores, which measure a shift of oxygen isotopes, for that reason are trash.

(Note on HadCET the rise of temperature from 1900-1950, before we began putting large quantities of CO2 in the atmosphere. What caused that? The warmest decade in the lower 48 during the 20th century was the 1930s, easily. What caused that? (No one knows.))*

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Dancers and prancers

See PS below

We were watching West Side Story, the 1961 movie, a couple of nights ago, and it had such an other-world feel to it. I had never sat through it before (we only made it to an old-time blockbuster movie concept, “intermission”). What was it like to be alive in 1961 when this soft, homoerotic movie (music by Leonard Bernstein) garnered ten Oscars?

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More on Freddie/Dr. Phil

I just spent half an hour with a left profile of Freddie Mercury and one of Dr. Phil. I think the work is intriguing but not convincing. Freddie had an imposing face that jives nicely with Phil’s, but I could not make the ears work. Also, Phil has developed both a long nose and chin in the intervening years. All of this creates doubt.

I refer you back to earlier work, and accept that people are not convinced. I am agnostic on the subject. I just can’t stick the landing.

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Obama: The poor gotta stay poor

Warm periods

Above is a nice reconstruction of historical temperatures, and in it I see two things: One, obvious to all, is that it is good to be alive during a warm period. Two, if you look closely, there is a downward trend with the peaks. I’ve sent away for a book on this and will address it later when I understand it better, but as explained to me in a way I did not quite comprehend, our planet enters and leaves the spirals of the galaxy at regular intervals of 350 years or so, and when that happens, we cool off. You can see by the bottom of the Little Ice Age that we might soon be entering a cool period, the prediction given as 2030. How severe – no one can say. We have a great tool, however, if it happens: Hundreds of years of fossil fuels available to us.

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Hicks/Jones: How can you not see it?

(See PS)

I am about to enter into no-man’s land, an area I visited years ago. This post has to do with a comedian who faked his death, Bill Hicks, and a controlled opposition broadcaster, Alex Jones. I have maintained for years that the former became the latter, knowing full well that most people do not believe it. I am going to go through the matter in depth, and deal with all of the evidence that I have gathered along with a link to work by others.

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Dead South, Deer Ticks, and Turtles

Red Rocks

Anybody’s bet on a place not to find me would be at Red Rocks Amphitheater, just down the hill from where we live, during a rock concert. We have been there three times before, but never for a packed house performance as we saw the other night. Our friends came upon some free tickets, and offered us two, and because they are really nice people and fun to be with, we accepted.

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Impenetrable barriers, us and them

It does not hurt, on our little isolated island here at this blog, to try to walk in the shoes of regular people.

I recently became reacquainted with a man I knew years ago, a newscaster, and became Facebook friends. He knows everyone who is anyone, and his list of friends includes people whose names I recognize as important in the Montana sense. They were or are in news, politics, business. They are each in a cloud, as we all are, a dense smokescreen difficult to penetrate called “me.”

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Please pass the thistle …

Everts Thistle The plant to the left is commonly known as “Everts Thistle,”named after Truman Everts, a low-level bureaucrat who used its roots to survive during a 37-day ordeal that lasted from September 9 to October 15, 1870. The plant was and is abundant in Yellowstone National Park.

This post is not part of the normal fare of this blog. I have long known the survival tale of Truman Everts, but never the details. I have long known that cirsium scariosum, or Elk Thistle, was renamed in honor of this man.  On our way to Yellowstone last month, my wife read the Everts tale to our grandson and me from the book by Dave Walter, Montana Campfire Tales, and I was enraptured. It is an heroic tale, but Everts did not go on to become a governor or senator, to write a book or to even become famous. He was just a man who in the face of 37 days of insults to his body and mind, survived.

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