The New Hockey Stick?

Powerline ^ | October 6, 2011 | Steven Hayward

[7MMmag]

Everyone who follows the climate change controversy even casually will know about the “hockey stick” controversy. Well, Nature magazine this week offers a new graph of interest: the rising trend of retractions of scientific research papers...

Lo and behold, it looks like a hockey stick! (Heh.)

The Nature story notes:

[B]ehind at least half of them lies some shocking tale of scientific misconduct — plagiarism, altered images or faked data — and the other half are admissions of embarrassing mistakes. But retraction notices are increasing rapidly. In the early 2000s, only about 30 retraction notices appeared annually. This year, the Web of Science is on track to index more than 400 — even though the total number of papers published has risen by only 44% over the past decade.

[mamelukesabre]

you don’t think alberta+Ndakota+alaska crude is enough to warrant refineries plus hydrocracker in Ndak? Seems to me if we don’t put one in Ndak, then the canucks will eventually put one in their own country

[thackney]

How are you going to get Alaska oil to North Dakota and why would you?

And you are ignoring my point. The refining is just one step. You still need to get the product to the market and that isn’t in North Dakota. You would actually build more pipeline plus build new refineries with your proposal.

You are suggesting spending more money for the same result.

[mamelukesabre]

I just want more jobs.

I’d rather see guys building a refinery and requisite auxillaries in north dakota than put up 50,000 windmills in kansas...and waste half a billion dollars on a damn solar cell factory that goes broke.

Also, I’d like to see the refineries NOT at a sea port so I know our petro-chemical products aren’t being exported to china!

[thackney]

I would rather those companies spend money building additional facilities, rather than idling facilities in one area of the country while building another.

Every dollar you spend building a refinery that already exists in another area, was dollars that could have been spent developing even more production facilities.

The capital is not unlimited, they have to choose between projects. We have the existing refinery capacity, only those refineries refine too much oil imported from oversea, particularly OPEC.

The markets for the products don’t change, just because the refineries are now in North Dakota. You still have to take the products to the existing market where the demand is.