Author: Alex

Categories
movie NERD review tom hiddleston

Thor Loki Makes Me Go Squee

I liked the hell out of Thor; it’s a fun movie, and I hope I’ll get to see it again while it’s still in theaters. Watch out, mateys, THAR BE SPOILERS AHEAD!

SPOILERS

I liked Thor as a character well enough, and I appreciated that his major arc was realizing that he was kind of a dick and getting over himself. But it actually surprised me a lot that my favorite character out of that movie was Loki. I’m used to feeling fairly meh about comic book villains, but Loki felt like he had a lot of complexity to him.

And I swear, it’s not just because I’ve got a cat named Loki too.

Tom Hiddleston does an amazing job with the character. Loki’s constantly broody and thinky and plotty, and is obviously the smartest guy around, but at the same time just gets screwed again and again by his own issues. I’ve now read a couple of interviews with Mr. Hiddleston where he says Loki just really needs a lot of prozac and a lot of therapy. I’d definitely add a lot of hugs in there too, because damn I ended up feeling really bad for the guy for most of the movie. Yes, a lot of the bad stuff is his own fault for being all plotty and wanting to cause trouble, but the whole bit where he finds out he’s actually just a runty frost giant that Odin adopted… yeah, man needed a hug right then. It’s really not the sort of thing that you want to discover on your own.

I really see his major head-explodey moment there as the reason Loki just goes off the rails and crosses from being a crafty trouble-maker to an actual bad guy. I’ve read a bit of summary from the comics now, but the way it was really presented in the movie was:

a) Odin really does seem earnest that he loves both Thor and Loki equally.

b) Loki seems just as genuinely convinced that Odin can’t possibly love him that much. And there’s a certain logic too it even if you just look at the movie and nothing else… considering how everyone in Asgard seems to feel about the frost giants, it’s probably hard to imagine daddy genuinely loving you at all if you’re actually one of them.

c) Thor is the default good son, even though he starts off as kind of a douchebag.

d) And Loki is actually right when he points out that Douchebag!Thor would be a horrible king that Asgard needed “saving” from. Though at that point, you can’t quite be sure if he says that because he really means it, because he’s trying to convince himself that he’s got a noble reason for doing what he’s doing, or if he’s once again just really trying to fuck with people.

So of course it’s all wonderfully angsty, and that rolls into a lot of anger and that weird sort of love/hate that only siblings can manage to have for each other in these sorts of stories. The final epic fight that Loki has with Thor was definitely Loki trying to prove something to someone, but there are just so many ways that it could be read. If nothing else, I really wonder about Loki deciding to destroy the frost giants, as if that sort of over the top gesture would somehow make him not one of them by showing that damnit, he hated frost giants more than any other Asgardian possibly could.

Now, from the comic summaries I’ve read, it sounds like Thor really was the golden boy that daddy loved best, and that even if no one necessarily knew what Loki was, he also lacked the sheer physical presence in the form of enormous muscles that residents of Asgard seem to prize. But to be honest, I actually prefer the movie take from the standpoint of character complexity; it’s more interesting if dad really does love his sons equally, I think.

I am definitely, definitely, DEFINITELY looking forward to seeing Loki in the Avengers movie. If nothing else, I cannot wait to see what Joss Whedon does with him in the script, since Joss is the absolute king of the the complex and interesting evil-but-not-really-just-needs-a-hug villain. And from the little stinger that comes after the credits on Thor, Loki seems set to be prominent in the next film. Though considering that Thor also left the title character stranded in Asgard, I’ll be interested to see how the Avengers actually all manage to get together to begin with.

/SPOILERS

Wonderful stuff. Makes me wish I still wrote fanfic, to be honest.

Off the topic of my new fan obsession, Heimdall was amazing as well. Even without taking in to account that casting Idris Elba pissed off the white supremacists to no end (WIN!) he did a really good performance as an immensely intimidating and exceptionally patient god. I loved it.

Categories
Uncategorized

The Epic of Honda Buying

I will not be melodramatic about this. I’m not going to claim that I’d rather go to the dentist and have a cavity filled than buy a car, because we all know that would be an enormous lie. But it’s a close thing.

I spent the last day and a half trapped in a car dealership, trying to buy a new car. I have noticed that, of all the major purchases I’ve made in my adult life, cars are by far the ones that take the longest and are the most painful. Buying a fricking house didn’t cause this much drama in my life.

I hadn’t actually expected to buy a new car this week. We were planning to start shopping today, actually, and just take our time with it. Our old car was starting to have some serious transmission problems, but I figured we could nurse it along for another couple of weeks without too much difficulty. However, my dad started looking around for cars in advance (I think he was way more excited about shopping for a car than I was, which… well, that’s not hard to do, really) and discovered that right now, trying to find a used Honda in the northern metro area is no easy task. According to the dealer, it’s apparently a combination of the gas prices and a lack of new Hondas coming in from Japan, so the used cars are getting snapped up almost as fast as they’re coming in. So my dad did find two used cars at Go Honda, and I went to look at them on Wednesday. They were both good, so I figured I might as well get Mike to try them out since getting a car earlier than expected wasn’t going to hurt anything.

The drama started when I decided that I wanted to have my mechanic look at the car we wanted before I was willing to throw down the money. Our actual salesman, a guy named Brandon, didn’t seem to have a problem with it, and even joked about putting the car in a remote corner of the lot so no one would see it until I picked it up the next morning. I think he believed me when I said that I’d made an appointment with my mechanic and would be back for sure. But his boss was not so convinced, and the hard sell started.

Seriously, I could just buy the car and then have my mechanic look at it and return it if something was wrong. And it was a Honda certified used car so it was insulting that I didn’t trust that. And they take the three day return policy very seriously. And you know that Hondas are hard to find right now, so someone might just buy it out from under us. And they only had four new Hondas left so what did I think would happen if those got bought – the used ones wouldn’t last long after. (Seriously dude, how many fucking cars do you sell on a Wednesday night?)

It felt like most of the pressure focused right on me, maybe because he sensed that Mike was an impenetrable wall of Britishness that wasn’t going to take any crap. It got to the point that I literally said, “You both have to go. I want to talk to my husband. Leave.” And then as soon as they left, we ran for it.

If I hadn’t really wanted that car, I wouldn’t have come back. It pissed me off that much. I have no idea why this is acceptable behavior to anyone… all I can guess is that it works sometimes. But no wonder buying a car is one of the most horrific purchasing experiences ever.

Anyway, I did go back the next day, and took the car to my mechanic. After having it for several hours, Dale called me back up and asked, “Is this car supposed to be Honda certified used? Because if so, there are some problems…” He found three things on the 150-point checklist that shouldn’t have been checked off – the battery, the brake pads, and the air filters. But he said that if those things got fixed, the car was very worth buying and would last us for years and years.

So, armed with a yellow piece of paper that said the dealership was trying to pull a fast one on us, I went to the dealer, with my dad to watch my back. I plunked the piece of paper down and said I’d love to buy the car, but these things had to be addressed first or no deal.

Our salesman scurried to the back room with the paper, and chaos ensued. Another salesman came out with him and seemed pretty ticked off – he made some pretty unkind comments about our mechanic, then dragged us downstairs so we could look at the car and see for ourselves that Dale was totally lying. I let my dad take the lead, since when it comes to cars, someone could point at a random part and inform me that it’s actually alien technology from Area 51 and I’d be able to do nothing but nod wisely in agreement.

So their mechanic pulled the front wheel off and pointed out the brake pad, saying that it looked fine. My dad asked for a ruler, since he wasn’t just going to take someone’s word for it. Which meant that they had to disassemble the brake and actually pull the pads out so they could measure them with a caliper… and the caliper said that the brake pads were only 4mm thick, which is quite a difference from the 7mm they claimed.

At this point, the sales guy that dragged us down there looked like he’d pooped in his drawers a little. Another mechanic tested the battery and said it was fine, but then I asked him to check the air filter since he was in the engine anyway. The filter was black, and his response was, “Yeah… that’s kind of dirty.”

Score one for my mechanic. Two, actually.

They shooed us back to the showroom then, and made a copy of the paper. The supervisor of the mechanics apparently wanted it so that he could go have a chat with his guys. Possibly with a sock full of pennies in hand, though that’s only speculation.

After that, it was just waiting and paperwork and more waiting and more waiting and then I pointed out they had to give me two master keys and a valet key, since that was required if the car was Honda certified too. And then more waiting while that got taken care of.

Despite the fact that I did little but sit in the showroom and feel intensely bored, I was stressed and exhausted by the end. It was like I put in eight hours of work at the damn dealership and then paid them a giant wad of cash at the end of it.

I hate shopping for cars. But look, it’s so shiny!

I think the moral of this story is, though, make sure your mechanic looks over a used car before you buy it. And don’t let them push you.

Categories
cats grad school

School’s Out All Summer!!!!

DONE WITH GRADING DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!

So, other than the grading, I had way more fun teaching this semester than I did last semester. Probably because I like sed/strat WAY more than I ever liked mineralogy. Hopefully everyone had a reasonable amount of fun with it. Though the one problem with teaching a class that I really enjoyed when I was an undergrad is that I wanted all of my students to just love it as much as I did… and of course, that’s not going to happen. Some geologists are sedimentary people, some just aren’t.

I’m already working to improve the assignments and materials for next semester, since no matter what I’ll be teaching this lab at least once more. One of the harder things I’m trying to do is develop a grading rubric for one of the major projects, since I think that’ll help me grade, and also help the students figure out exactly what I’ll be expecting from them. I ended up using the rubric for grading this semester, but only as a very fuzzy guideline where I erred on the side of being nice. It seemed to work out mostly, but I’ve got to do some fine-tuning before next spring. Which really means doing it some time this week, before all the motivation gets sucked out of me.

One thing that’s really starting to drive me nuts is just how many points get lost over students just not reading the directions, or not answering the actual question that’s asked, or things like that. And I always feel just a little guilty, taking points off if something is done in pencil instead of pen, but then again, damnit, I said on multiple occasions that it needed to be done on pen.

Though I feel less guilty for deducting points for the assignment being handwritten instead of typed. My eye strain on all the terrible handwriting makes me feel much, much less charitable.

But anyway. That’s pretty much done with teacher stuff for the semester. Grades have been sent off to my advisor, and all that’s left is a bit of cleanup. I think I did pretty well for my first semester on this class – next spring ought to be even better!

And many thanks to Loki, who helped me in this time of great stress by laying on top of the papers and refusing to be moved.

Also, my friend David seems to have a blog now: Unintelligently Designed, which wins for its name if nothing else.

Categories
writing

I Will Be Installing a Turbo on My Fountain Pen

From June 26 through August 6 this summer, I will be attempting to complete the rough draft of my current novel-in-progress. I can’t tell you how many words that will end up being, but my guess is I’ll be putting in at least 80,000 words in that six week period. A good portion of this writing will be done while I’m in the middle of the Bighorn Basin in Wyoming, with only other geologists and inquisitive snakes for company. Why?

Because I’m fucking insane!

No, I mean because I’m participating in the Clarion Write-a-Thon. Clarion is a Big Deal, intensive writing bootcamp for writers who want to improve their scifi/fantasy short story skills. It also needs money, so that it can keep training the budding authors in our favorite geek genres. And I can always use motivation to write, so it’s like a match made in heaven.

(And if you all love me enough to pledge dirty wads of cash, I might win an iPad. But that’s beside the point, I promise.)

Here’s my writer page, complete with an en-hatted picture. Because I am nothing without my hat. It’s for a good cause, and it’s getting me to do things with my summer other than throwing rocks at rattlesnakes, so please consider donating!

Categories
Uncategorized

I Have No Words

Photos of Pictures and Documents found after the April 27, 2011 Tornadoes

Words fail me. Tears don’t.

* * *

After a breather and several kleenex, I think I’ve got a few words in me. It’s scary as hell, how much of these things are ending up 60, 80, even close to 100 miles away from their point of origin. Which really shows the terrifying force that nature is capable of – as if we needed another reminder this year after the Sendai earthquake.

It’s scaring me that there have been this many tornadoes, and this strong, and this early in the year already. Makes me wonder what the rest of the summer has in store for us. Makes me wonder what hurricane season is going to bring. And makes me wonder if we may be lining up for more years like this, considering one of the predicted effects of the current climate shifts is storms of greater severity. You know, the climate change that a horrifying percentage of Congress isn’t even willing to admit exists.

We can’t fight nature. In the end, nature wins. Nature always wins; it has more time, more power. We’ve got each other, though, and that shouldn’t be downplayed. And I was crying because there’s something indescribably sad about pictures torn and cast into the world by a storm, when you don’t know what happened to the people in those pictures – you just know that the person, the moment, was important to someone. But I was also crying because humans are amazing, though I wish it didn’t require tragedy to remind us of that fact.

Red Cross

Categories
geology oil and gas

Hydrocarbon Formation at Depth

I think this got mentioned on this week’s Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe in the science or fiction. I thought it might be the fiction, but wasn’t all that surprised when it turned out to be science:

Hydrocarbons in the deep earth (press release…?)
Stability of hydrocarbons at deep Earth pressures and temperatures (PNAS article)

And this of course ties back in to my previous linking and random ruminations about abiotic oil.

Mostly, I think this article is interesting, but not something explosive in terms of what we know about the formation of petroleum. I actually found this PNAS article via a post with the faceplam-worthy title “Oil and Gas Forever?“1 on the website of The Global Warming Policy Foundation – which is apparently supposed to be “devoted to challenging conventional wisdom about climate change.” I do think that if you just check the front page of the site (The GWPF’s, not the Daily Mail’s), the axe they’re grinding is evident. Though maybe it is with the Daily Mail’s too, I wouldn’t know.

But I digress.

Despite the murky chain of links I followed to find the little PNAS article, I think it’s interesting. And will probably be horribly misused by excited people who think “Oil and Gas Forever” sounds like a lovely concept in general. The article itself is about computer simulations run to see if methane could form in to longer hydrocarbon chains at deep pressures and temperatures, and according to the simulations, the answer is yes. Which can be considered a point in the camp of abiogenic oil, but I would add the following cautions:

1) Whether long hydrocarbons can form abiogenically or not, that doesn’t in any way mean that all hydrocarbons – or even the majority – form in that way. Please see the bit about kerogens in my previous post.

2) This doesn’t really address any of the other questions important to developing hydrocarbons, such as: What’s the migration path, and how long does it take to get there? (And many more…)

3) It’s also not necessarily a realistic simulation. Quoting the first article:

“Our simulation study shows that methane molecules fuse to form larger hydrocarbon molecules when exposed to the very high temperatures and pressures of the Earth’s upper mantle,” Galli said. “We don’t say that higher hydrocarbons actually occur under the realistic ‘dirty’ Earth mantle conditions, but we say that the pressures and temperatures alone are right for it to happen.“

Emphasis mine. So, like much science that gets slapped with melodramatic headlines, this is more of a, “Huh, that’s interesting,” than anything else.

1 – Actually, it’s not what you’d imagine out of an article with that title… it’s just the LLNL press release, and a C&P from a blog post that also pretty much emphasizes that there’s not really evidence for this being a major source of hydrocarbons, but that this is just sort of interesting.

Categories
grad school

One Down, One and a Bit Left…

Today was officially my last Petroleum Reservoir Characterization class and the final project is out of my hands, so that’s that. It’s been an interesting class, but between wrestling with Petrel and wanting to stick my head under a pillow and scream every time I have to read about geostatistics, I’m pretty sure I don’t want to go into reservoir modeling when I grow up. But it’s certainly given me an appreciation of just what it takes to do that sort of job.

What I have left now is my last Facies Analysis project, which is ticking along quite nicely. Today I did a rough description of the last core, though I’m going to give it a pretty strict second pass through. This core and I are not getting along well, which I find strange since it’s from the Almond formation, which is the same formation as the Stagecoach Draw cores. I loved those cores to bits when I looked at them as an undergrad, and have still found them quite loveable while inflicting them on the current class of sed/strat undergrads. They’ve got the same lovely black lagoon shell that’s laced with oyster shells, even.

As weird as it is, I think I just don’t like the Almond core because:
a) It’s in a different sort of box, which makes it harder to look at the cores without pulling them out.
b) There’s a ton of swelling in clays in the upper part of the formation, which means all of the mudstone is covered with a crackly gray skin of clay. And if you want to look at those core sections, you have to clean them off thoroughly (in the process covering your hands with deep gray mud) and then look fast, since they get their clay skin back as soon as they dry off.

But I’m almost done. There will not be pictures of this core, though, since it’s not very pretty and I’m not getting along with it. I do have pictures of the Williams Fork core I just finished looking at. I’m hoping to post those for anyone who might be interested, but I think I want to check with my teacher first to make sure it’s okay to do so. I don’t see why it shouldn’t be, but my grad bff is doing her thesis on that core (and a few others) and I don’t want to risk stepping on toes or messing anything up.

But anyway, that ought to all be done by the end of the week, if all goes well. Though I unfortunately won’t actually be done then – I still need to finish grading! The Stagecoach Draw core projects are stacked in the plastic crate next to my desk, glaring at me accusingly because I’ve been too chicken to even look at them thus far. Once I get this last project done, though, I’ll be out of excuses and I’ll need to get started on them. Particularly since I need to have grades turned in as soon as possible next week.

And then I’ll be done with my second semester. This one’s gone better than the first semester… and has been a lot less stressful. But I’m definitely looking forward to the summer!

Also, from the department of It’s The Little Things: When you e-mail someone and specifically mention that your advisor is female, it’s pretty sad when the reply steadfastly refers to said advisor as male.

Categories
writing

I Wrote a Story!

A story of mine (The Falling Star) got picked up for an anthology that’s now available! The New Fairy Tales Anthology can be bought from Createspace, and because I love you all so very much (or rather, Mike Pennington, the head honcho of Aurora Wolf loves you all so very much), there’s a discount code that you can use for $2 off the cover price, which makes the book an even $10: 9RWWE4QP

This code ought to work for all Aurora Wolf offerings if you buy them off of Createspace, if there are any other books of theirs that you’d like to pick up.

And you can get the book on Amazon, if you’d rather, though no discount then.

I think the story’s a little different from my usual stuff, in that it’s a bit cute and sweet, and I don’t generally do cute and sweet. But I’m quite pleased with how it turned out, and I hope that you’ll like it whenever you get to read it.

In less happy news, I got a rejection note (it wasn’t big enough to be called a letter) that came on a square of paper barely bigger than a business card. I’m not sure how I feel about this, but I guess if nothing else, it’s certainly appropriate for Earth Day – it’s a reduction of paper use. Though I admit that I won’t be recycling it, since it’s now decorating my wall. But that counts as reuse, right?

Happy Earth Day!

Categories
rants sarcasm science fiction

Boy Fiction Versus Girl Fiction

A quote:

The true perversion, though, is the sense you get that all of this illicitness has been tossed in as a little something for the ladies, out of a justifiable fear, perhaps, that no woman alive would watch otherwise. While I do not doubt that there are women in the world who read books like Mr. Martin’s, I can honestly say that I have never met a single woman who has stood up in indignation at her book club and refused to read the latest from Lorrie Moore unless everyone agreed to “The Hobbit” first. “Game of Thrones” is boy fiction patronizingly turned out to reach the population’s other half.

(Emphasis added by me.)

Okay, so let me first admit that I should probably get my nerd card taken away, since I don’t give much of a crap about Game of Thrones, having not read the books yet since I’ve heard so many people whining about the series being unfinished and I don’t like to be left hanging. And at this point, so many people have been going on and on and on about it that I’m just kind of tired of hearing about it and the contrary little gremlin that lives somewhere around my pituitary gland is whispering, “Well if it’s that popular you don’t want anything to do with it anyway.”

So this has really nothing to do with Game of Thrones per se, but rather the mind-boggling stupidity that it’s brought out in some people. Namely the person that penned the above quote, in a NYT review.

Seriously, can we please dispense with this absolutely stupid notion of boy fiction and girl fiction already? Can we please let go of the tired, ridiculous notion that women don’t like things unless there’s like, sex and romance or some shit, because apparently we just don’t enjoy politics or watching people getting blown up or whatever?

I’m actually not even sure if Ms. Bellafante is saying that she thinks women couldn’t possibly like Game of Thrones if it weren’t for all the sexy-sexy time, or if she’s just saying that studio execs must believe that, or what. Though after reading the paragraph over and over, through the red haze of sheer annoyance I feel pretty sure that it’s a ridiculous statement any way you read it. And by the way, if we’re being stereotypical and sexist, isn’t lots of sex a boy thing? Because chicks just want relationships and romance and shit, and then all the subsequent sex is candle-lit and arty and there’s a mushy soundtrack with piano and lots of strings.

I could go on and on about just how many women I know who utterly love the book series and are excited about the TV series. I could also go on and on about how I got hooked on fantasy in general because my mom read The Hobbit to my brother and I when we were little kids. But I’m not.

My gripe is actually a lot more general. You know, from high school on I’ve been exposed to a lot of sneering comments about how, of the available nerd genres, fantasy is girl fiction and scifi is boy fiction because our pitiful ladybrains can’t handle all the science and guns and whatever in scifi. And now apparently fantasy isn’t girl fiction any more either, not unless it includes a sufficient quantity of mushy stuff to go with the violence, because our ladybrains just can’t enjoy anything if people aren’t frantically humping each other.

FFS, could you assholes make up your minds about what women are allowed to like? At this rate, I’m going to have to give up reading all together, and then I’ll apparently only be allowed to watch Jersey Shore or something similarly vacuous. At which point I intend to put a hole through my skull with my dad’s cordless power drill.

Or maybe we could just dispense with all the stupidly sexist generalization and – I admit this is a radical notion, but hang with me here – just let people like whatever the hell it is they like without linking it to their gender?

You’ll get my copy of Old Man’s War when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.

Categories
climate change geology skepticism

Climate Change and Plate Tectonics

My awesome mom found the following article on Alternet and sent it to me, with the question “Plausible or wingnutty?” : Scientists Find Link Between Global Warming and Earthquakes

At this point, I know better than to accept at face value what an article claims that a scientific paper says, so I set out to find the paper – particularly since for once I have a chance of understanding at least some of the paper since it’s about geology! I had to comb through the RawStory article that the Alternet article links to in order to actually find the paper in question. Which is:

Giampiero Iaffaldano, Laurent Husson, Hans-Peter Bunge, Monsoon speeds up Indian plate motion, Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Volume 304, Issues 3-4, 15 April 2011, Pages 503-510, ISSN 0012-821X, DOI: 10.1016/j.epsl.2011.02.026.

The article is available on ScienceDirect, though you may not be able to read the whole thing for yourself if you don’t have a subscription to the service. You should be able to at least read the abstract, which should give you the gist of it.

So what does Alternet take out of this paper? “Climate change can affect plate tectonics, oh shit, that’s why we’ve got all the huge earthquakes OH MY GOD.”

I will point out that there’s one VERY salient quote from Giampiero Iaffaldano (the lead scientist) that’s in the RawStory article that Alternet leaves completely out:

Iaffaldano stressed that his study did not mean that global warming would translate to stronger earthquakes happening more often, with the relevant patterns developing over “the order of millions of years.”

“Of course earthquakes do occur at the boundaries between plates because of plate motions, but our work doesn’t imply at all that we will see an increase in these types of events,” he told AFP.

Emphasis added by me. This little omission really leaves me wondering about the motivations of the Alternet author.

As for the paper itself, what does it actually say, and is it interesting? The paper does make a reasonable case for linking climate change with an effect on plate motion and speed. However, the important part that also gets left out of the Alternet article is that this link is explored on a million year scale. It’s an examination of how the change in climate over the last 10 million years or so – the climate change in question being a strengthened Indian monsoon – has affected the erosion of the Himalayas, which ultimately lead to decreased resistance in the convergence between the Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates.

Now, personally, I find this fascinating, since it links relatively “fast” surface processes (eg weathering and erosion) to much slower tectonic processes. I think that opens up a lot of very interesting research questions – Iaffaldano points out that he’s curious to see if there’s a climate signature to be found in other fairly recently uplifted areas.

But I think for general interest, it’s VERY important to note that when we’re talking a scale of millions of years – which is what plate tectonics operates on – the current climate change we are inflicting on the planet is NOTHING in terms of duration. It’s not even a blip. Now, if we keep pumping carbon into the atmosphere and manage to really fuck things up in the long, long, long, long term, maybe in ten million years future humans or aliens will be using simulations to wind the tectonic clock back and say, “DAMN, look at those plates move!” But this will have no measurable effect on our short little human lives.

It really bothers me that an interesting study is being misrepresented in this way. While I appreciate wanting to add some urgency to the issue of climate change – trust me, I do, BIG TIME – this is not the way to do it. It smells like a scare tactic, and it plays into the hands of the climate change deniers.