Byung Kyu Park's Personal Website

Prof. Muller puts it perfectly

Among the speakers was physics professor Richard Muller, who was arrested during the 1964 Sproul Hall sit-in. Ultimately, Muller said, the Free Speech Movement was a failure because of today’s intolerance on campus.

“We could not invite Condoleezza Rice here, as a prominent black woman, because of the fear she would be booed down,” he said. “We have less free speech today than on the day I was arrested.”

This is all very consistent with the typical “liberal” sentiments today: freedom for me but not for thee. Nowhere can we find any hint of Voltaire’s attitude “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”.

And how typically “liberal” of them to have such an elevated opinion of themselves:

Some Free Speech Movement veterans who watched Wednesday’s event said the current issues have yet to take on a life of their own, as they did in the 1960s. But many on the Berkeley campus at first ignored rallies 45 years ago, said Bob Roundy, an analyst in the academic personnel office who was a UC Berkeley student in the 1960s.

“The broader understanding (of the issues) grew with the Free Speech Movement,” he said. “It wasn’t instantaneous.”

One former leader of the movement told current students to keep up the fight.

“What you’re seeing here today is really a continuation of the fights we went through,” Gretchen Lipow told the group as many protesters chatted among themselves. “Do your research and stay out there.”

A free speech movement speaks to human nature itself. Freedom of expression is inalienable right given to us by Creator Himself (or, if you don’t believe in a Creator, the process of evolution which culminated in the human race). That’s why Free Speech Movement became what it became and carries the legacy it carries. Had it been described as the anti-Vietnam War movement we wouldn’t even consider it worth talking about it now—that war’s over now, right?

The fight that protesters today fight are not the same fight that was fought in the 60s. Free Speech Movement was everyone’s movement—no reasonable person is ever against reasonable (i.e. not violence-inciting) freedom of speech. The fight today—fight to keep UC public university, fight to stop raising student fees, fight to re-hire union workers who got laid off—is not everyone’s fight; it’s definitely not my fight: I believe the future of UC Berkeley as an academic institution and not a diploma factory lies in further privatization and enlargement of endowments; I see the economic reality and don’t really blame the administration for raising student fees (it was the best among the realistic options they had); and I’d rather that the administration fire custodians than lecturers and, god forbid, GSIs.

But now, on this campus, could I voice these sentiments (say, on Sproul plaza at one of those rallies) and not feel threat to my personal safety? Perhaps I could—I never tried it—but I do not risk it, not in person. And that is the failure of Free Speech Movement. We have less freedom of speech—if by speech you mean to include commonsense conservative opinions, and by freedom if you mean freedom from demonization and threats—on this campus today.

Max Schulz argues that global warming is a myth because computer simulations can’t be trusted:

At this point, there was every reason to think that running other problems through these increasingly powerful machines would yield useful results. That was the thinking that led Forrester to collaborate with the Club of Rome in the early 1970s. They devised a model of planetary resources that considered a variety of interconnected dynamic systems and global scenarios — death rates, birth rates, natural-resource depletion, population density, capital investment, crowding, pollution, etc. They fed the model into a large MIT mainframe and flipped the switch.

Forrester’s partners published the results in the 1972 bestseller Limits to Growth. They predicted a rapidly growing global population combining with rapid resource depletion to spark violent social upheaval. Limits to Growth suggested that disasters and die-offs were imminent, and that the survivors would live in a world of misery and scarcity.

Well, in fairness to climatologists (unlike Scientologists, I think they deserve some respect), their models are not completely wrong—and they are not trying to model something as complex as a human, only the amount of CO₂ generated by one and the effect of the released “toxin”.

In fact, Prof. Muller says that he trusts the latest computer models—at least as much as he trusts the back-of-the-envelope calculation performed about 100 years ago, which happens to agree with the latest computer models. (Colloquium webcast. It’s a good talk; abstract here.)

Of course, if the current calculation is only as accurate as what they could do without computers 100 years ago, then it goes without saying that we haven’t made much improvements in that area, i.e. the calculation is not complete garbage, but it ain’t gospel either.

In case you don’t want to listen through Prof. Muller’s talk at the colloquium two weeks ago, here’s the scientific consensus on global warming: (1) warming is real, there is overall rise in global temperature, at least up until 2000 or so; (2) the hypothesis that natural causes (solar activity, etc. anything but CO₂ levels) alone are responsible for the warming is excluded within 90% confidence level, i.e. outside that 10% chance, human activities probably contributed to, although is not solely responsible for, global warming seen in the 20th century.

Aside from these, I don’t know any other broad, data-backed scientific consensus on climate change. Anything more dire you hear is probably either a politician or a scientist (or both) trying to scare you into action.