TheMillerCircle.org

If the Republicans had introduced their current agenda to the American public in the 1960s, it almost certainly would have evoked a move to outlaw the party perhaps by promoting a constitutional amendment banning the organization as subversive to our Democracy and cultural values. While the banning and amendment option may have been viewed as unconstitutional (after all, we didn’t even ban the Communist party, we just persecuted its members), the party could not have maintained access to American voters with the agenda that they have today. An organization that commits itself to destroying government, privatizing its functions to promote excessive corporate profits, eliminating labor unions, destroying the economies of friendly countries, denying services, destroying our public school system, risking public safety for corporate profit, allowing bridges to fall and promoting a continuous state of war to keep its militaristic agenda alive—that party would have shocked our nation of the 1960s. And oh yes, we don’t hear about the “Republican War on Science” disguised as the elimination of “junk science,” but that too is part of their agenda, it’s just hidden from the vast majority of Americans. The Republican party agenda of today has all of these attributes that seem stunningly un-American and yet the perpetrators have a happy home in America, with a large constituency, frightened about war and possessing deep pockets.

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No subject in the history of science has depended more on models and computer simulations than the science of global climate change. If you look back into our history, our knowledge of the distant past has been derived from studies of the the geological and fossil record that have been going on for more than two hundred years. And increasingly the view we get from these studies is that cataclysmic climate change can occur. But all of the past events have not been created by humans, but from other causes. If you try to look forward, by predicting our future climate conditions, it all comes from computer models and simulations that are extremely limited in their capacity to incorporate all the variables, primarily because the variables themselves are insufficiently understood. Events in the last few years have made it very clear: we don’t understand the variables that we need to know about in order to generate global climate change models that can tell us something which will give us confidence about our future. In the past year, we have witnessed the utter collapse of models that have proven the conservative nature of science and the scientists who study global climate change. There may not be enough time left to fix the problem. Climate models are being scrapped or rapidly revised to see if better predictions can be achieved by exploding the models to include as much as possible. I tend to think that this mass hysteria is going to fall short, simply because of the scale of the problem. I have spent a good part of my scientific career developing models of nerve cells, so I know something about how long it takes to get models that have good accuracy and I think the planet is probably more complicated than the single nerve cells I study and model. It is possible that we are at the beginning of a global emergency on climate change, but don’t know it yet because the computer models haven’t predicted it. But those models are now completely discredited and not because of a bad strategy, but because they aren’t sophisticated enough to be useful and helpfully predictive. They confirm that we may have a future problem, but they haven’t been able to predict the events of the last few years, particularly with respect to the melting of the polar ice caps and what this might do to sea levels and global temperatures.

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Golden Toad

A beautiful little amphibian called the Golden Toad was first described in the Monteverde mountain region of Costa Rica in 1966, but has not been seen anywhere in the world since 1989 and is presumed to be extinct. This biological tragedy is made more alarming by the fact that this region of the Costa Rica mountains is protected as a national reserve and was presumed to be a site for species preservation, not extinction! Costa Rica has some of the most delicate and unusual ecological systems of the world. Placed at the isthmus of the junction between North and South America, Costa Rica has both a Pacific and a Caribbean coast, with a prominent North-South mountain range that serves as a continental divide, which, like that in North America, determines whether rivers flow to the Pacific or Caribbean oceans. Monteverde is near a unique regional preserve in the mountainous region North of San Jose, the main city of Costa Rica (To get there you have to drive up a 30 km road that is unpaved, very rocky and dangerous. We did it in a small four-wheel drive car, during an intense rain storm, but most others we met hired tour guides to take them up and bring them back: they looked at us like we were a little nuts).

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