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Readers! A November fund-raising drive!

 

It is unfortunately time for another November fund-raising campaign to support my work here at Behind the Black. I really dislike doing these, but 2025 is so far turning out to be a very poor year for donations and subscriptions, the worst since 2020. I very much need your support for this webpage to survive.

 

And I think I provide real value. Fifteen years ago I said SLS was garbage and should be cancelled. Almost a decade ago I said Orion was a lie and a bad idea. As early as 1998, long before almost anyone else, I predicted in my first book, Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8, that private enterprise and freedom would conquer the solar system, not government. Very early in the COVID panic and continuing throughout I noted that every policy put forth by the government (masks, social distancing, lockdowns, jab mandates) was wrong, misguided, and did more harm than good. In planetary science, while everyone else in the media still thinks Mars has no water, I have been reporting the real results from the orbiters now for more than five years, that Mars is in fact a planet largely covered with ice.

 

I could continue with numerous other examples. If you want to know what others will discover a decade hence, read what I write here at Behind the Black. And if you read my most recent book, Conscious Choice, you will find out what is going to happen in space in the next century.

 

 

This last claim might sound like hubris on my part, but I base it on my overall track record.

 

So please consider donating or subscribing to Behind the Black, either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. I could really use the support at this time. There are five ways of doing so:

 

1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.

 

2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation. Takes about a 10% cut.
 

3. A Paypal Donation or subscription, which takes about a 15% cut:

 

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Behind The Black
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You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.


“The timing couldn’t be worse.”

The next IPCC report: “The timing couldn’t be worse.”

The author describes how the new report, due out in just a couple of months, is probably already obsolete because of a slew of new papers documenting the long 10 to 15 year pause in global warming that was not predicted by any of the climate models used by the IPCC.

This quote I think sums things up nicely, however:

Due to a ‘combination of errors’, the models have overestimated warming by 100% over the past 20 years and by 400% over the past 15 years.

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 

The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

9 comments

  • Roger Pelton

    Where is Al Gore, et al with this NEW “Inconvenient Truth”. I guess the liberals will have to invent a new anti-capitalism myth to accomplish their Socialist/Marxist aims.

  • Phil Levu

    Recently read Nate Silver’s chapter on the global warming argument in his “The Signal and the Noise.” Silver found flaws in the effort to model climate, but said or implied that CO2 and its greenhouse effect is a fact. Any comment?

  • Gary Warburton

    Socialist/Marxist, any proof of that? A little strong don`t you think?

  • We have one fact that no one disputes: The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is increasing. Whether that can cause the atmosphere to warm significantly, however, remains a theory only.

    The problem is that CO2 in our atmosphere is a trace gas. Though the greenhouse effect is real, the major greenhouse gas is water, not CO2. The water in our atmosphere warms the Earth from 10 to 20 degrees, depending on what scientific papers you read. CO2 is not thought to do very much to warm the atmosphere. For example, in every past case where the Earth’s climate warmed, the warming occurred first, then the CO2 rose in the atmosphere, suggesting that the warming was caused by other factors and that this warming then caused the generation of more CO2 (probably from plant life that was prospering in the warmer temperatures).

    To get CO2 to cause global warming, it is required that the increase in CO2 reacts with other atmospheric components, such as water, to cause them to generate a bigger greenhouse effect. Climate scientists call this feedback. The CO2 causes a feedback with the important greenhouse gases, they trap the heat, and the climate warms. It is this theory on which all the global warming fear-mongering during the last twenty years has been based.

    The problem is that this only a theory. The climate models the IPCC uses all depend on it. None, however, have shown any ability to predict anything. See this link for a good summary. See also my comments here and here and here.

    Not only has the CO2 global warming theory not been proven, the facts we presently have are showing it to be a failed theory. The expectation had been that the climate would warm in lockstep with the increase in CO2. It has not. None of the models, written with this theory as their basis, has been able to predict the global temperature, at any time.

    That’s the theoretical and scientific arguments. Then there’s the question of scientific fraud, coming from scientists who believe in global warming. That fraud actually disturbs me more than anything else, especially in that the climate science community has done nothing to clean the mess up, and in fact has done what it could to protect these dishonest scientists. See also this long detailed post by me: The Fantasy of Extreme Weather.

    And finally, we have the bad influence of politicians, whose only real interest is to increase their power. They have helped distort this science more than anyone.

    I hope that answers your question.

  • D. K. Williams

    None of my liberal friends admit to communist leanings, but most of them are proud (and loud) about socialist goals. Wasn’t Pres. Obama’s appointee, Van Jones, now with CNN, an avowed communist?

  • wodun

    Na, not too strong. The Democrat party holds a lot of communist ideals dear and communists are a welcome and influential part of the party. Just look at the groups that help organize and fund Democrat protests.

    Democrats regularly bounce from, “We are not communists.” to, “So what if we are communists? There is nothing wrong with it.”

    What I have never seen is the party leadership or activists repudate communism or more importantly stop associating with communist activists.

  • Garry

    In my observation, the rank and file liberals/Democrats usually have no idea of the left’s Marxist/communist leanings; it’s one of the manifestations of their are guided primarily by feelings rather than by reasoning.

    When I point out to leftists that their arguments are Marxist/communist, they generally have one of two immediate reactions, either “You’re just name calling, there’s nothing Marxist here” or “If that’s what Marxism is them I’ll for it, this is just common sense!”

    As with many things, the root of the problem is education in the broader sense; not just what’s learned in school, but being able to think for oneself and seek knowledge.

    I like to point out that we run our (immediate) family on the Marxist tenet “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” In that arena, it is common sense, very practical, and very fair. I used to point out the same thing to my Marines; the basic tenet of Marxism is the best way to run a small unit who often spend all waking hours together and who may have to depend on each other for their very survival.

    The trouble is when we try to apply that and other principles to larger groups and to society as a whole; human nature prevents Marxism from working outside a small, tightknit group where there are strong bonds on multiple levels and an incentive to make nearly everyone self-sufficient.

    After all, when raising small children we have to cultivate their abilities and make them contribute to the family, while weaning them from dependency so that they can build lives of their own. Anytime you have a government program fulfilling the needs of the less fortunate/less industrious, the people running the program have no incentive to make the recipients more self-sufficient, and many of the recipients have no desire to be weaned off.

  • phil levy

    Thank you very much.

  • Tony Favero

    Global warming hysteria fuels the fears of all the Chicken Littlies while attacking a sizeable number of reputable climate scientists who fail to fall in-line with to what amounts to a modern day inquisition that denies nonconforming climate scientists tenure, research funds and employment; a fear driven by ideology, not science.

    Global warming, with many small warming and cooling cycles, has been around for about 18,000 years or since the last ice age with sea levels rising 400 feet from that time to present. As little as 9,000 years ago, one could walk from what is now England to France with trifling concern for wet feet.
    Some math, 400 foot sea level rise translates to 4800 inches total in 180 centuries for an average 26.7 inches of sea level rise per century…..a rise far greater than many estimates of the global warming hysteria crowd. Perhaps the sea level rise rate is decreasing?

    Consider Michael Crichton’s analogy in his book “State of Fear”
    (My Paraphrase)….
    Imagine the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere as a football field. Nitrogen, most of the atmosphere, takes you to the 78 yard line, adding oxygen advances you to the 99 yard line. Most of what remains is the inert gas argon that brings you within 3.5 inches of the goal line. The remaining amount that is CO2 is one inch with man’s contribution to CO2 in 50 years adding up to three-eights of that inch. Yet you are asked to believe that this tiny change has driven the entire planet into a dangerous warming pattern.

    Tony Favero
    Half Moon Bay, CA

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