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Submission + - Sydney Uni to divest from fossil fuels, as global momentum builds (reneweconomy.com.au)

Submitted by mdsolar
mdsolar writes: The University of Sydney has revealed its plans to begin divesting from heavy-polluting and fossil fuel companies, in an effort to cut the carbon footprint of its investment portfolio by 20 per cent in three years.

The partial divestment plan, released by the University on Monday, brings it in line with a growing number of tertiary, religious and other organizations around the world that have divested over $50 billion in fossil fuel stocks for reasons both environmental and economic – that is, their business models are incompatible with the pledge by the world’s governments to tackle global warming.

Submission + - Climate Scientist Wins Defamation Suit Against National Post (huffingtonpost.ca)

Submitted by Layzej
Layzej writes: A leading Canadian climate scientist has been awarded $50,000 in a defamation suit against The National Post newspaper. Andrew Weaver sued the Post over four articles published between December 2009 and February 2010. The articles contain “grossly irresponsible falsehoods that have gone viral on the Internet,” and they “poison” the debate over climate change, Weaver asserted in a statement at the time the suit was filed.

The judge agreed, concluding “the defendants have been careless or indifferent to the accuracy of the facts. As evident from the testimony of the defendants, they were more interested in espousing a particular view than assessing the accuracy of the facts.”

This is the first of several law suits launched by climate scientists against journalists who have published alleged libels and falsehoods. Climate scientist Ben Santer suggests the following explanation for these types of defamations: "if you can’t attack the underlying science, you go after the scientist.”

Comment How bad is Forbes reporting? (Score 2) 481

by Layzej (#48985487) Attached to: DOT Warns of Dystopian Future For Transportation

Similarly, Forbes relies on the Heartland Institute's James Taylor (also not a scientist) to report on climate change. How bad is the Forbes reporting? Well, in an August 2012 interview, I correctly stated that in a warming world, hurricane intensity can increase and these increases are being observed. Also, rainfall, storm surge, and storm size can be affected.

In response, Mr. Taylor attacked me and discussed the frequency of landfalling U.S. hurricanes, as if the two were the same. Obviously, he either misunderstood my comments or does not have the knowledge to interpret them. When I asked for the right to rebut Mr. Taylor, what did I hear? Crickets. Did Forbes feel even a bit embarrassed when just over a month later, Superstorm Sandy hit the U.S. coast, causing approximately $65 billion in damage? Do they feel embarrassed now that the newly released IPCC report supports me, not their non-scientist Mr. Taylor? Perhaps we will never know. - http://www.theguardian.com/env...

Comment Re:Female-Run Companies Often do Better Than Male- (Score 2) 271

by Layzej (#48984205) Attached to: Female-Run Companies Often do Better Than Male-Run Ones (Video)
You are suggesting that female-run companies are more successful because the vagina bestows some management power that penis equipped CEOs lack? You could be right, but I would think that companies that promote based on merit would be more successful. Likely companies with woman as CEO are not promoting based on genitalia but rather based on merit.
Businesses

Video Female-Run Companies Often do Better Than Male-Run Ones (Video) 271

Posted by Roblimo from the sometimes-the-best-man-for-the-job-is-a-woman dept.
Today's interviewee, Viktoria Tsukanov, is one of the executives at predictive marketing company Mintigo who did a study in January, 2015 that seemed to show that large companies with female CEOs "achieve up to 18% higher revenue per employee than male CEOs." The study, titled "She’s the CEO and She’s Sensational," used financial data Mintigo collected on 20 million companies, and determined CEOs' genders by analyzing first names, so it was not subject to survey vagaries but was a straight data analysis job. Could this be a case of correlation and causation being unrelated? It's possible. It's also possible that the revenue per employee figures are affected by the fact that female CEOs are more common in healthcare and non-profit organizations, while men dominate manufacturing and construction -- and, as Viktoria pointed out in a blog post headlined "Women Just Raised the Bar. Big Time." there may be other factors at work as well.

The "18% higher revenue" figure specifically applies to companies with more than 1000 workers, while companies with fewer workers may average more revenue per employee if they have male CEOs. Besides discussing the study itself, in our interview Viktoria talks about how male employees might want to alter (or not alter) their behavior if they find themselves working for a female boss for the first time. She also discusses challenges a woman might face if she is suddenly put in charge of a heavily male IT or programming staff. Other thoughts she shares have to do with finding mentors and dealing with negative people, both of which apply to people of all genders. Interesting food for thought all around.

Comment Re:whose payroll is the scientist on? It matters (Score 1) 514

by Layzej (#48939275) Attached to: The Gap Between What The Public Thinks And What Scientists Know

Note that a lot of that money is involved in "clean" energy projects which have dual or triple use: reducing pollution, improving arable land, water management, emergency planning for coastal areas, and switching from unsustainable fuel resources to sustainable, less greenhouse gas producing fuels.

It also covered development and launching of satellites which also have dual/triple use.

Comment Re:Bias: but for them - not me! (Score 1) 497

by Layzej (#48930449) Attached to: Science By Democracy Doesn't Work

The recent trend is nearly half the 1970 trend

How do you know? Do you understand what statistical significance means. You use those words a lot but you don't seem to understand them... In fact, Tamino shows that there is no evidence that the 1970-2000 trend hasn't continued apace.

I spoke of GISS showing the greatest warming in the context of the last 15 years

But the GISS warming is not significantly different from HADCRU for ANY period. Cowtan+Way2014 shows that GISS has a cooling bias.

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