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2023 Climate Skeptics Conference: We’re Winning! No, They’re Not—But How they Could Win

  2023 Climate Skeptics Conference: We’re Winning!   No, They’re Not—But How they Could Win I recently attended the Heartland Institute 15th International Conference on Climate Change discussing the latest in global warming ideas and proposed fixes to stop it.   Most of the press and public consider global warming a dangerous threat.   Heartland is the foremost exception.   Heartland began in 1984, “… to discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems.”   They soon zeroed in on predictions of catastrophic global warming and have been fiercely skeptical of it ever since.   This year’s 2023 conference continued the tradition.   The conference included high caliber climate scientists, economists and energy experts who are retired or otherwise insulated from loss of government funding. At every Heartland conference, the presentations target fallacies in the theory of a massive global warming and the various proposals to replace fossil fuels wi
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Salute to Nellie Bly on January 25, 2023

  Last night, January 25, 2023 we in the JPL/Caltech Toastmasters Club celebrated the century-and-a-third anniversary of Nellie Bly’s most famous reporter’s feat.   It wasn’t the most important.   That might have been when she traveled thru Mexico in 1886–1887 and reported on conditions of the poor, which got her fleeing the country, one step ahead of the federales, out of the country—but those stories were compiled in the book Six Months in Mexico .   The stories brought important world support when the peasants eventually rose up against President Porfirio Diaz. The most important story might have come from Nellie acting strangely to herself committed to the asylum on Blackwell’s (now Roosevelt) Island by feigning insanity. Her exposés of conditions—later compiled as Ten Days in a Mad House (1887)—precipitated a grand-jury investigation of the asylum and helped bring about needed improvements in patient care.   The most important story might have been her stories as one of t
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