the crew at Scientific American. They combine elitist snark, far left politics, some science, and some pseudo science,(can you say consensus?)

They also are quite willing and capable of trying to drag hard science into social and economic areas where they have little training and even less understanding. All the while feeling quite superior to others.

Chu must have really gotten picked on in High School.

“Smart Grid” is a marketing term to get congress (i.e. taxpayers) to pay for communications upgrades energy companies were already going to do, to obtain functionality they already had.

I’ll probably get fired for saying that, but whatever. Our executives openly mock politicians who buy this “Smart Grid” drivel.

verifiable and repeatable? I have studied science to some extent and worked in engineering which is very concrete and practical. So, when did extrapolating 20-50 years ahead in predictions of weather become ok? The political impetus for climate change legislation is glaringly obvious as I look at our competitors around the world and their demands of the US. Of course they want us to hamstring ourselves economically. But when did this begin with scientists, this reliance and drawing conclusions from unverifiable predictions? Did this start with evolution? Carbon dating is seen a ‘truth’ even though it is unverifiable. So why not apply this to future predictions? Am I missing something here?

As someone who falls squarely on the science half of the fence 3 days a week and on the engineering half the other 2, I can’t help but agree that we are an incredibly cocky community. What is so disdainable about scientists to us engineers is, even at the highest levels, they rarely understand much more about areas outside their field of expertise than anyone else with minimal exposure to the field. They can’t apply what they do for the life of them. And the scientist in me admits, there is a lot of times a huge disconnect between understanding electrons & phonons (with an n) and understanding how the hell we get “heat” away from your cpu.

And I could equally criticize engineers for their stereotypical flaws in understanding, but that’s not the point. The point of this is that my cocky fields, (that I love so much) take an incredible amount of pride in our work, even though at times it is somewhat undeserving. In this pride a vanity towards ones own intelligence easily forms. Scientists consistently fail to recognize their isolation from their own applications in the same way they fail to understand the relationship between how society acts and … anything.

When I take sociology advise from the SoE, s/he’d better be an engineer.

when it stopped being science. So why does this guy have a superiority complex, when he isn’t even doing science? I guess they have to resort to this sort of behavior to get their way. I would LOVE for someone to pull the rug out from under the climate science with some real science. But how do you fight a future prediction? There’s the rub.

I once had an Economics professor at Rutgers say…. “The problem with Economics is that in order for the theory’s to work, all other variables must remain constant, and in real life, that will never happen”.
Much like the Global Warming hysteria that is being shoved down our throats by scientists that refuse to realize that statement applies to them as well. Sure.. It would be very easy to assume that global warming was caused by carbon emissions if that was in fact the only variable that changed. Unfortunatly, it is not now, and never will be the only variable.
Now if you want to call me the unruly teenager, that’s fine. But i’ll refur to you going forward as the 1960′s tobacco executive that is spewing the line of the company that writes his check, regardless of the science behind it.

Many people who have spent their adult lives in the Ivory Tower in this country look upon the people of the United States as mental defectives who need to be “corrected” — or actually, if you’re Cass Sunstein, “nudged” through a careful and well planned and orchestrated manipulation to alter their behavior so that it falls in line with what people who have Tenure believe is “mature.”

Of course, this requires two things in order to be actionable politically:

1) You have to designate a group of elites who know how things “should be done.”
2) You have to convince enough voters in our society that their elected leaders actually know more than they do, and should be given the power to regulate every aspect of their lives to “correct” them.

It’s a startling reversal of the principles this country was founded on, but it’s standard thinking in a lot of parts of academe. Stephen Chu wants your children to live worse so that his children can live better — in the world he imagines is the correct one. That’s really what it boils down to, and in the meantime he wants to remind you that you’re not mature or intelligent enough to decide these important matters yourself, or vote on them.

What a condescending snob!!! He wants us to live by the rules he wants to make for us, but he won’t live under those rules. He must have
been one of those kids who had a “kick me” sign on his back. Don’t tell us how to live. Go back to your college free speech zone.

Obama is not talking to the people of this country or the industry of this country for answers to his questions about global warming, either:

He’s talking to the United Nations.

He obviously doesn’t want any answers to his concerns coming from within the United States, he wants them handed down in Copenhagen by people nobody in the United States voted for.

Lawyers? How many stupid things do lawyers have to say before someone comments on their profession being over-represented in politics because they are commenting on matters they have absolutely no grasp of?

As long as the union run public education system continues to make excuses for the lack of science and math education we’ll have idiots pushing “global warming” and holes in the ozone.