In the week since I last wrote the NEG has been replaced by the leadership issue as the principal topic of political discussion in our country. The search for agreement that I wrote about has failed. There is none. What we have is a reversal of aspects of the Prime Minister’s proclaimed policy, and a challenge to Mr Turnbull’s leadership by Minister Peter Dutton, which failed by a few votes. Every day there is a new story. I said that sooner or later someone would have to face the reality of the energy problem. No one has said anything about…

Judith Curry has provided us with her take on an eight-year old paper by Carl Wunsch, a highly regarded oceanographer. I am sure I have read it before, but I certainly have not referred to it. I think her summary is excellent reading. I have made a few editorial changes. Introduction From one point of view, scientific communities without adequate data have a distinct advantage: one can construct interesting and exciting stories and rationalizations with little or no risk of observational refutation. Colorful, sometimes charismatic, characters come to dominate the field, constructing their interpretations of a few intriguing, but indefinite…

A little on Pain. Pain is the body’s way of telling you that something is wrong — avoid it, fix it up, and the pain will go away. We learn about it through toothaches, cuts, breaks and things like that. I have a spinal fracture, and fractures take six to eight weeks to fix up. I am in week seven, and it may take eight or nine or ten weeks to fix mine up because I am old. Old bodies don’t heal so well. Even then I may still have painful episodes. So I have chronic pain, and pain is…

As attentive readers will know, I am not well — specifically, a compression fracture of the spine at T8. These ailments will generally cure themselves  in time (six to eight weeks), but they are extraordinarily painful, and there are powerful painkiller to reduce the pain. Unfortunately, they have powerful side-effects, too, and one of them is a general dopeyness that is frightening. Moreover, they affect fine motor control too, and I can’t stand for long (I stand to use the computer). For all these reasons, I am finding it difficult to keep the website running. We’ll see how well I…

I have written about President Donald J. Trump before (here and here, for example). This essay was prompted by the Singapore meeting between him and the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. I may be wrong, but the media treatment of the whole meeting process seemed to begin with Trump’s refusal to meet’s being seen as provocative, risking a historic possibility. Then when the meeting occurred, he was being damned with the faintest of praise — previous North Korean leaders had given similar promises, where were the inspection guarantees, the statement was long on rhetoric and short on detail, and so…