Saturday roundup

 I won't deny it, people. This has been an ordeal. 

A layman such as myself is not equipped to parse how many of my symptoms are due to the infection itself and how many due to the antibiotic. I just know my bursts of energy and clarity have to be acted on; they're brief and only come along about twice daily. Otherwise it's sleep, eat a little something (my appetite, customarily voracious, is about one-tenth its normal level) do my physical therapy, read, get sick. 

But the world has not ceased to be a place that merits our attention. 

Forthwith some nuggets on various aspects of that world, for your reading pleasure:

Climate scientist Judith Curry asks a question that merits examination:

How would you explain the complexity and uncertainty surrounding climate change plus how we should respond (particularly with regards to CO2 emissions) in five minutes?

You might go about it like this:

Let me start with a quick summary of what is referred to as the ‘climate crisis:’

Its warming.  The warming is caused by us.  Warming is dangerous.  We need to urgently transition to renewable energy to stop the warming.  Once we do that, sea level rise will stop and the weather won’t be so extreme.

So what’s wrong with this narrative?  In a nutshell, we’ve vastly oversimplified both the problem and its solutions.  The complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity of the existing knowledge about climate change is being kept away from the policy and public debate. The solutions that have been proposed are technologically and politically infeasible on a global scale.

Specifically with regards to climate science. The sensitivity of the climate to a doubling of carbon dioxide has a factor of three uncertainty.  Climate model predictions of alarming impacts for the 21st century are driven by an emissions scenario, RCP8.5, that is highly implausible. Climate model predictions neglect scenarios of natural climate variability, which dominate regional climate variability on interannual to multidecadal time scales.  And finally, emissions reductions will do little to improve the climate of the 21st century; if you believe the climate models, most of the impacts of emissions reductions will be felt in the 22nd century and beyond.

Whether or not warming is ‘dangerous‘ is an issue of values, about which science has nothing to say.  According to the IPCC, there is not yet evidence of changes in the global frequency or intensity of hurricanes, droughts, floods or wildfires.  In the U.S., the states with by far the largest population growth are Florida and Texas, which are warm, southern states.  Property along the coast is skyrocketing in value.  Personal preference and market value do not yet regard global warming as ‘dangerous.’ 

AEI fellow Max Eden has a bracing piece at Newsweek on why the teaching of critical race theory in public schools should indeed be banned:

In January 2021, OCR determined that the Evanston/Skokie school district violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act when it separated students and staff by race, publicly shamed students based on their race and told teachers to take student race into account in discipline.

But after President Biden issued his executive order on "racial equity," OCR took the nearly unprecedented step of suspending its own decision. No one should believe the decision would have been suspended if minority students were the ones being targeted. The simplest explanation: The federal government does not intend to enforce civil rights laws when white students or teachers are victimized.

This is what makes these "CRT bans" so necessary. In the 1960s, it became undeniable that some states wouldn't apply 14th Amendment protections to all citizens, so Congress passed the Civil Rights Act. Today, it has become apparent that the federal government is not equally and consistently enforcing the Civil Rights Act. It is, therefore, up to the states to step up to protect students from discrimination and racially hostile environments.

A stark assessment of the current state of affairs in Afghanistan:

"The important thing is how quickly [the U.S. withdrawal] has accelerated the disintegration of Afghanistan," D'Agata told CBS News chief Washington correspondent Major Garrett in this week's episode of "The Takeout" podcast. "There is a two-minute offense that the Taliban were starting to implement… it has stunned everybody — the Afghans, Americans, the White House — how quickly the Taliban advance in the offensive has gone on in the past six weeks or so." 

This one goes back a little, but I just ran across it. Sharon James, social policy analyst for the Christian Institute in the United Kingdom, writes at Tabletalk on how there is no basis for morality without God. 

Ted Campbell, a professor at Southern Methodist University's Perkins School of Theology, writing at Firebrand, on some context for the looming fissure of the United Methodist Church. 

Laura K. Field at The Bulwark on the sad descent of the Claremont Institute from highly esteemed think tank to Trumpist dumpster fire.