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Italian Elections: The Great Five-Star Surprise

Italian Elections: The Great Five-Star Surprise Nearly definitive results of the Italian national elections of March 4, 2018. the “five-star movement” (M5s) got the most votes, although the center-right wing coalition (CDX) has the largest number of seats in the Italian parliament. For the center-left (CSX), it was total disaster. In several senses, it is […]

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Where is the proof that CO2 warms the Earth?

February 27, 2018

Where is the proof that CO2 warms the Earth? A persistent element of the climate debate is the claim that “there is no proof” that CO2 and other greenhouse gases warm the atmosphere. This has generated a number of amateurish demonstrations of how the greenhouse effect works A good example of how NOT to carry […]

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Our only hope for long term survival

February 23, 2018

Our only hope for long term survival Language warning: Many may find the following article offensive, such as: Technocornucopians – eg geoengineering and carbon drawdown fantasists, blinkered university academics and engineers, TZM, Elon Musk etc People who think reducing population and/or consumption are sacred cows which should never be mentioned People who are shocked […]

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Islands Not sinking: Climate Change Demonstrated to Be a Hoax

February 20, 2018

Islands Not sinking: Climate Change Demonstrated to Be a Hoax Have you ever wondered how it is possible that coral islands lie flat just a little above the sea level? It is not a coincidence, the coral reef that forms the islands is alive and it can adapt to variations of the sea level. According to […]

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The Life and Death of Memes: Vegan Vs. Macrobiotic

February 15, 2018

The Life and Death of Memes: Vegan Vs. Macrobiotic This 2009 book by Lierre Keith is a fascinating reflection on how ideology permeates people’s eating habits. Ideology, then, is based on memes and that’s a new and developing field of science. John Michael Greer (the Archdruid) tells the whole story of the great cycle of […]

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Keep on trucking? No, Keep on Platooning!

February 12, 2018

Keep on trucking? No, Keep on Platooning! The concept of “platooning” involves electronically connected trucks running close to each other. It is a much more innovative idea than that of self-driven private cars and it has the potential of revolutionizing road transport by drastically reducing costs. (image from scania.com). Self-driving cars (or “automated vehicles,” AVs) […]

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What if we could REALLY convince the public that climate change is a threat?

February 6, 2018

What if we could REALLY convince the public that climate change is a threat? Maybe one day some really gigantic-awful-horrible-monstrous-humungous climate related disaster will hit us. And that, at that moment, people will stop playing the boiling frog and will be forced to admit that climate change is real and we have to do […]

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How Big a Disaster Can Climate Change Be?

February 3, 2018

How Big a Disaster Can Climate Change Be? Above, you can see an image from the paper by Marsicek et al., just appeared on Nature. It shows a reconstruction from pollen records of the temperatures of the past 10,000 year or so, the “Holocene,” for North America and Europe. Note the black squares, showing […]

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Donald Trump: Wise Emperor or Condemned to Damnatio Memoriae?

January 28, 2018

Donald Trump: Wise Emperor or Condemned to Damnatio Memoriae? About one year ago, shortly before the US elections, I published a post on Cassandra’s Legacy where I wondered what Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton would look like if they were Roman Emperors. I reasoned that the Roman Empire of the 1st and 2nd Century AD […]

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Delusions of Grandeur in Building a Low-Carbon Future

January 27, 2018

Delusions of Grandeur in Building a Low-Carbon Future Some excerpts from Carey King’s excellent paper titled “Delusion of Grandeur in building a low-carbon future” (2016). By all means worth reading: it identifies the delusionary approach of some policy proposals. Image Credit: K. Cantner, AGI. …. the outcomes of economic models used to inform policymakers and […]

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How long will the rich be willing to share the roads with the poor?

January 24, 2018

How long will the rich be willing to share the roads with the poor? In Ray Bradbury novel “Fahrenheit 451” we are told of a world with no private cars (above, a still from the 1966 movie by François Truffaut). Bradbury had correctly understood that dictatorships not only tend to burn books but also don’t like […]

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Trump and Berlusconi: harbinger of the coming Seneca Cliff

January 20, 2018

Trump and Berlusconi: harbinger of the coming Seneca Cliff Donald Trump and Silvio Berlusconi have many similarities as country leaders. I argue here that they are the symptom of a giant political transition which is reversing the trends that started more than two centuries ago with the French revolution. Human rights have a cost and […]

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How to convince the public of the danger of anthropogenic global warming

January 19, 2018

How to convince the public of the danger of anthropogenic global warming Last year, the vagaries of life led me to chair a commission charged with examining the candidates for the admission to the Italian Chemists Association. It was a rather formal exam that was supposed to provide the successful applicants with the legal status […]

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The Romans and Us. Why State Violence is on the Rise

January 9, 2018

The Romans and Us. Why State Violence is on the Rise The Spanish police injured hundreds of people, including women and the elderly, during the referendum for the independence of Catalunya, in 2017 (image source). It was not the worst that states can do – and have have been doing – to their citizens, but […]

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The Impending Curtailment of Conventional Oil and the Total Resource Curtailment

January 5, 2018

The Impending Curtailment of Conventional Oil and the Total Resource Curtailment In a previous post titled “The Soft Belly of the Oil Industry“, I mentioning the impending unlocking of numerous negative feedbacks affecting the oil industry. I argued that the gradual increase of production costs, the need of reducing emissions, the weakened demand created by […]

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