I met James Hansen several decades ago, and remember him all the back to  1988 when he first testified in Congress .  This was six years after I had left the U. S. Senate, a time period when global warming was an issue of importance only to a very few scientists.  I am on his mailing list, and this morning received his views on  The Venus Syndrome and Runaway Climate . Paper starts with: Mars, Venus and Earth   are the Goldilocks planets – too cold, too hot, and just right. These planets reveal how a planet’s surface temperature depends on atmospheric gases as well as the planet’s distance from the Sun. The physics is energy balance: a planet sends back to space, as (infrared) heat radiation, the energy in sunlight that it absorbs. Absorbed solar energy depends simply on the Sun’s irradiance, ⁱ   the planet’s distance from the Sun, and the fraction of incident sunlight that the planet absorbs (the remainder being reflected). The surface temperature is then ...

  From Stanford Medicine: For a long time, drinking in moderation was considered socially acceptable, and maybe even healthy.  You supposedly protected your heart with red wine, and even reduced diabetes. But what's the current truth about moderate drinking? The idea that moderate, occasional drinking is good for your health is outdated . Decades ago, large surveys of adults began showing an association between how much alcohol someone drank and their risk of death. People who said they drank heavily had an increased risk, but those who drank nothing at all also had an increased risk compared with those who drank one or two servings of alcohol per day . These findings were well promoted by the alcohol industry. Turns out that even at low levels, alcohol can have significant negative effects on your body. Recent research. A 2025 report from the American Association for Cancer concluded that  more than 5% of all cancers in the U.S. are attributable to alcohol use . A 2025 S...

During the past few weeks I have focused on the theme of War and Peace on this nostalgic Tuesday.  However, I previously only analyzed the War portion.  This all  began on August 5  with my first  Huffington Post  article:   Well, Barack, We have a Problem.. ., which was published on 29May2008.  That initial  HuffPo  was an article on peace. On 23March2009 my  HuffPo  was entitled  The 10% Solution .  This essay provided details to that first attempt:  an ultimate plan to attain World Peace. The timing was right, for the world had suffered through the  Great Recession  from December 2007, and would continue through the date of this article into June 2009. The U.S. stock market had dropped 35%, but Chinese and Russian stocks fell 70%. There was no serious enemy during this period, for Iran was losing money producing oil, there were ragtag bunches of terrorists in the Middle East and North Korea was ...

Dexter Resurrection  and  The Rainmaker  are two series I'm currently watching not from Netflix or Prime. Dexter Resurrection  ( Rotten Tomatoes , 94/86 ) is the latest continuation of  Dexter  ( RT  71/81 ) starring Michael C. Hall, which began on Showtime in 2006, and endured for seven seasons.   In that original series, Hall played Dexter Morgan, a forensic technician for the fictional Miami Metro Police Department. However, he led a secret parallel life as a vigilante serial killer of murderers Extremely bloody and gory, but nothing compared to  Squid Game  ( RT  86/66 ) from South Korea.  In a ranking by  IMDb  ten years ago,  Dexter  was #14 in a list of 18 most gory and bloody shows.  Earlier this year  Collider  had a top ten most violent shows of all time, and neither series was included.  Three were animated productions and most violent was  Warrior  (2019-present...