This week in science: who knew carbon dioxide is good and good for you?
Thankfully, Phil knocked this crap down, so I can link him and not the New York Post that published the usual, dreary litany of anti-science zombie lies:
With 2015 a record-setting hot year, and 2016 already off to a roaring start, you have to be in a special kind of denial to try to convince people that more carbon dioxide in the air is a good thing. In a crowded field of outrageous climate change denial claims, this is the one that is so ridiculous, so in-your-face wrong that it still stands out.
Yet this is where the New York Post finds itself, publishing just such an opinion piece by William Happer and Rod Nichols. Not surprisingly, to make such a claim you have to make a series of other howlers leading up to it. … Using that as a jumping off point, the op-ed then goes into a series of zombie global warming denial claims that, if you know anything at all about the science, are demonstrably (and laughably) wrong.
Laughably is saying it nicely. The last time we had a huge, geologically sudden spike in greenhouse gases like CO2, oxygen levels crashed to fatal levels, the temperature rose by ten degree globally, and almost 90 percent of all then extant species went gently in that sweet goodnight.
- Virgin Galactic plans to be back in the air treading the sanctity of space testing their suborbital tourism and research vehicle on the heels of a redesign following a tragic loss in 2014. If all goes well, the first private astronauts could be strapping in for the ride of a lifetime well before the end of this decade.
- The mystery of vanishing Near-Earth asteroids may have been solved:
The team produced the best-ever model of the NEO population by combining this information with the CSS data and theoretical models of the orbit distributions of NEOs that originate in different parts of the main belt. But they noticed that their model had a problem — it predicted that there should be almost 10 times more objects on orbits that approach the Sun to within 10 solar diameters.
- This just in, Antonin Scalia is still dead. And dogs fly planes? I’m skeptical on the latter, but I’ll have a nice evo-science-y background article on Man’s Best Friend tomorrow on Sunday Kos.