The blog of Hilton Ratcliffe

 
Dear Malcolm,
Thank you most sincerely for your response last month to my April 2009 Breaking News column in Ndaba. I wish more of our readers would express their views and exchange ideas. I fear though that objectivity may be on thin ice here (pun unintended) because we both, by our own admission, engage for ethical [...]

Well, I have after trial and tribulation managed to watch all of “The Age of Stupid”. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a free download site that offered the entire movie in one chunk, so ultimately I resorted to YouTube and watched it in 9 episodes. Given the emotional style of the production, which requires uninterrupted flow [...]

And a very good morning to you. It’s 4:30am, and I was awakened by a cat and this oppressive, sweltering Durban heat. I do have aircon in my home, but don’t like to use it continuously. I suppose that subliminally, I’m embracing the warmth as we start an irreversible slide into the headwaters of a [...]

My argument is that terrestrial climate is dynamic, and has been changing cyclically for the Earth’s entire lifetime. Climate change exists and is natural. Climate and energy on Earth are products of the Sun by such an overwhelming margin as to make human influence vanishingly trivial. Al Gore lied about that and has formulated [...]

Global Schwarming! Anthropogenic Global Warming debunked
I consider myself an environmentalist. I would like to see human beings become better citizens and treat their planet with greater respect. However, as a scientist, I am really deeply despondent about the whole paradigm that has arisen around Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth road show. The reason is simply this: [...]

Is Cosmology fact or fiction, science or fairy tale? Do we need it? is it good for us? Does it have any useful purpose? Should we be confined to a Standard Model?