“Imagine going to work and then sending your car home to pick up your kids and take them to school. Self-driving cars won’t require able-bodied drivers, extending the benefits of mobility to many more people…. Personally, I am looking forward to sending my dogs to the vet in a self-driving car so I don’t have to go myself.”
“Though technical challenges remain, the real challenges are legal and institutional. Even they are not insurmountable. Instead of individuals insuring their cars, automakers might buy insurance against liability suits and pass the cost onto auto buyers. Since self-driving cars can record every event leading up to an accident, it will be easy to determine who is at fault in any crash.”
There’s a self-driving car in your future. Most experts believe that cars capable of driving themselves in almost any situation will be on the market by 2020, and cars that don’t even have the option of being driven by humans will be on the market by 2030.…
Continue ReadingAbout a week ago, a strong winter storm, known as a nor’easter, was making its way, hit and miss, up the Northeastern seaboard. While forecasts of two feet or more in New York City were busts, forecasts of near three feet in the Boston environs were right on.
As almost goes without saying nowadays, speculation as to the influence of human-caused global warming on the behavior of the snowstorm are rife. Any by “speculation,” I mean blaming global warming for the storm’s ferocity.
And, as also goes without saying, the actual science behind such speculation is both slim and countered by a large body of confounding evidence.
But the number of stories in the mainstream media that hyped the former greatly outnumbered any that even bothered to mention the latter.
Below is reprinted a blog post that I co-authored with Patrick Michaels for the Cato Institute in the hours leading up to the storm trying to tamp down the global warming hype.…
Continue Reading“[A]n analysis of some of the calamities reported in doom and gloom media accounts shows some—at times, severe—disconnect with actual observations. For instance, there is no evidence that ocean acidification has killed jellyfish predators, nor that jellyfish are taking over the ocean, and predictions that the killer algae, Caulerpa taxifolia, was going to devastate the Mediterranean ecosystem have not been realized, despite claims to the contrary from the media.”
– Carlos Duarte et al., “Reconsidering Ocean Calamities,” BioScience, December 31, 2014.
“Ocean Life Faces Mass Extinction, Broad Study Says” stated a recent headline in the New York Times. Is it true? Has a “groundbreaking” analysis “from hundreds of sources” of the world’s oceans unearthed signs of human-caused global catastrophe, as claimed? Or is this just another alarmist narrative that’s all wet?…
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