Gerald E. Marsh

General Interest

Truth, Faith and Reason: Pope Benedict XVI’s Lecture at the University of Regensburg

Posted on Posted in General Interest, Politics

Essays in the Philosophy of Humanism Volume 16(1) Spring-Summer 2008.

Pope Benedict XVI interleaved two themes in his talk at the University of Regensburg on September 12, 2006. These are discussed here in two separate parts: Truth, Faith, and Reason and The Dialogue of Cultures. The first addresses the Pope’s proposal to expand scientific reasoning to include the “rationality of faith”; and the second with the threat of radical Islam, and whether a “dialogue of cultures” is possible if the West persists in its belief in what the Pope calls a “reason which is deaf to the divine”.

Truth, Faith & Reason

Goracle Gushings on Faith-Based Science

Posted on Posted in General Interest, Global Warming, Politics, USA Today Magazine

USA Today Magazine (January 2008) Goracle PDF

“We are about to waste an enormous amount of money and effort on carbon mitigation without lowering CO2 emissions one whit. The Goracle and his fellow travelers will carry the day.”

AL GORE won an Academy Award for his skillfully done film, An Inconvenient Truth. It was well-deserved. Had he given as good a performance during his campaign for president, he would have won in a landslide. As environmental drama, it only can be compared with Michael Crichton’s novel, State of Fear. Both have elements of scientific and political fact, and both are excellent fiction.

America’s Left Has Taken a Wrong Turn

Posted on Posted in General Interest, Politics, USA Today Magazine

USA Today Magazine (May 2007) (PDF)
Socialism, the Left, and its future in the United States.

The Left in the US is in crisis. It has lost the broad support it once enjoyed in the working class and finds itself captive to the past—or, worse yet, to an impotent radicalism. It no longer offers working people a political outlet for their interests, but only a means of protest about issues that are not central to their lives.


Recycling Nuclear Waste

Posted on Posted in General Interest, Nuclear Policy, Politics

American Physical Society Special Session on Nuclear Reprocessing, Nuclear Proliferation, and Terrorism (15 April 2007)
Coauthors: William H. Hannum and George S. Stanford

In the public mind, the foremost reservation about nuclear power is, “What can we do with the waste?” Fortunately there is an answer: We can use the worrisome, very long-lived components as fuel in the right kind of reactors, and then the rest becomes manageable. Will this lead to proliferation of nuclear weapons or to an increase in the threat of nuclear terrorism? Not necessarily. Prudent recycle of nuclear waste will actually reduce these threats while also reducing the time that nuclear waste must be sequestered to a few hundred years instead of thousands.

(PDF)

Smarter Use of Nuclear Waste

Posted on Posted in General Interest, Global Warming, Nuclear Policy

Scientific American (December 2005)
Coauthors: William H. Hannum and George S. Stanford

Reprinted in Oil and the Future of Energy by The Editors of Scientific American Magazine (The Lyons Press, 2007), p. 98.
Fast-neutron reactors could extract much more energy from recycled nuclear fuel, minimize the risks of weapons proliferation and markedly reduce the time nuclear waste must be isolated. (PDF)

Climate Change 2001: A Critique

Posted on Posted in General Interest, Global Warming

This Critique builds on A Global Warming Primer. Like the Primer, its purpose is to help the reader determine whether our understanding of the earth’s climate is adequate to predict the long-term effects of carbon dioxide emissions from the continued burning of fossil fuels, to permit informed public policy decisions. This is a limited critique, looking only at a few topics covered in the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

(PDF)

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