If everything seems under control, you're not going fast enough. - Mario Andretti

Monday, February 22, 2010

So now it looks like the drastically rising oceans, the apocalyptic end game the AGW church has warned us would happen if we refused to accept the collectivist government takeover of our freedoms and cash, was also, erm, exaggerated?

Scientists have been forced to withdraw a study on projected sea level rise due to global warming after finding mistakes that undermined the findings. The study, published in 2009 in Nature Geoscience, one of the top journals in its field, confirmed the conclusions of the 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It used data over the last 22,000 years to predict that sea level would rise by between 7cm and 82cm by the end of the century.

At the time, Mark Siddall, from the Earth Sciences Department at the University of Bristol, said the study ”strengthens the confidence with which one may interpret the IPCC results”. The IPCC said that sea level would probably rise by 18cm-59cm by 2100, though stressed this was based on incomplete information about ice sheet melting and that the true rise could be higher.

Many scientists criticised the IPCC approach as too conservative, and several papers since have suggested that sea level could rise more. Martin Vermeer of the Helsinki University of Technology, Finland and Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany published a study in Decemberthat projected a rise of 0.75m to 1.9m by 2100.

OK, so now we are told that they are unsure of the rise. That’s bull of course because what was likely found is that they have no science to prove this idiotic claim. So now even the threat of Waterworld is gone? No melting glaciers, no disappearing North Pole or ice in the Himalayas, no oceans rising… WTF? What’s left? What’s the impending catstrophe that should scare us all into letting them take away our freedoms and cash in return for, well nothing but an overarching government that has control of every aspects of our lives by limiting our access to energy and controlling our purchase power?

All the fear mongering we used to say was bunk and based on bunk science, is now proven as bunk. That’s why it was retracted. Asked to prove with science their claims, one by one, they are being retracted, or drastically revised, to a point that the end result is a statistical insignificance. And yet, the defenders of the AGW cult are still hard at work trying to make not only like they still have the science behind them, but that the onus is on the “deniers” to disprove the AGW claims, even though now it is a given that the underlying data, methodology, and the projected damage all are outright falsehoods or exaggerations. Even worse, people are starting to see that the real big money influences were not from the people that the AGW cultists demonized, but by the very priests of the AGW cult, which have all made millions, and stood to make billions more, scamming us all.

If the AGW watermelon cultists had any sense, they would drop this lost cause and go invent the next big lie they are going to glom on to try and convince us to let them create their global wealth redistributing collectivist government for the elites by. Of course they will not. They will continue to try and lie & bluff their way through this – after all, they have a complacent and willing media that has so far ignored the scandalous behavior by them – and in the process make sure we all know this is a fanatical cult based more on faith than any kind of science.

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

While I do not want to belittle the fact that Obama is pushing for nuclear energy, I find the much touted news that he is pushing for 2 new nuke plants is just a token - one that they can easily take away later when they have gotten what they want: more massive and horribly destructive taxes on all of us - and meaningless in the grand scheme of things. It’s a joke. And insult. The Chinese are building over 120 new reactors in the next decade. That’s commitment to nuclear energy. 2 Plants are not going to add any significant power to the already desperate energy situation we face. Especially since my bet is that they will pull the plug on them anyway later, just like they did with Yucca Mountain. I hope the republicans see through this slight of hand and do not buck on their stance to kill that “Cap and Tax” bill. Remember that when government controls energy through prices they can control the peasants…

Friday, February 12, 2010

But it looks like science, the real kind that is not immune to peer review and also isn’t based on concensus, has now allowed an airborn laser to shoot down a ballistic missile. It is quite funny to me that we achieve this technology feat when we have a president in the WH whose party called the idea crazy when introduced and still believes the best thing to do is to not have the capability to avoid being seen as antagonistic. Let’s hope we get this stuff out in the field for real sooner than later.

Thursday, February 11, 2010

No, I don’t mean our budget situation, I literally mean a black hole simulator that shows what it would look like if you passed near a black hole or, God forbid, fell into one.  Enjoy.

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Just after one year of “Hope and Change” it looks like people are wising up that they got sold the same bill of loser collectivist goods of the Carter years, and pining for those bad days they told us we had when republicans were in charge. As reality clashes with fantasy and things like this, this, this, this, this, this, and this keep happening, the democrats continue to pretend that what people want is bigger government, a complete takeover of healthcare - 1/5th of the economy - by that big government, and a massive migration from jobs in the private sector to a fraction of the number of jobs lost there in the public sector. And that doesn’t tackle the complete collapse of the AGW scam which wanted to expand the government take over globally and other such stupid ideas. At least Clinton was smart enough to be saved by a republican takeover of congress in 2004. I doubt Obama, a true believer, will be able to make the same connections. After all, he was told he was the messiah and could walk on water.

As I said before, a few years of the democrats in power would be enough to make many see the light. I just didn’t think it could take but one year for that to happen. I could not believe that the democrats were really this inept and stupid, but they are hard at work proving me both right and wrong. Democrats are good at manipulating the news, with help of the complicit MSM, to attack their opponents when they are in power. Unfortunately now that they are in power, even with massive help covering up for them by the MSM, they can’t hide how inept they are. Reality has a way of destroying most collectivist fantasies, and what is happening isn’t anything new. The fun thing is that I get to bring out my latest find, a poster on some highway in the Mid West that tells the story better than anything else:

Give it time. The numbers are getting bigger and bigger, and all but the most hard core leftists are agreeing that for all his faults, and he had them believe me, Bush was heads and shoulders a better president than the current community organizer in chief….

Saturday, February 06, 2010

This is interesting:

The head of the UN’s climate change body is under pressure to resign after one of his strongest allies in the environmental movement said his judgment was flawed and called for a new leader to restore confidence in climatic science.

Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has insisted that he will remain in post for another four years despite having failed to act on a serious error in the body’s 2007 report.

John Sauven, director of Greenpeace UK , said that Dr Pachauri should have acted as soon as he had been informed of the error, even though issuing a correction would have embarrassed the IPCC on the eve of the Copenhagen climate summit.

It may surprise you—in more ways than one—but I agree with Greenpeace here.  It’s becoming increasingly clear that the IPCC report was sloppy, poorly referenced and pitifully supervised.  The flaws uncovered in the IPCC report do not disprove the idea of global warming nor prove a Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy.  Uninformed speculation about Himalayas glacier melt thirty years in the future and strange references to half of the Netherlands being below sea level don’t alter temperature records or basic science.  They do, however, show, once again, that the doomsday scenarios being flogged by the Left are even less likely.  They do show the extreme lack of skepticism many on the Left have toward wild claims of global disaster.  It’s yet another reason to get their hands of the wheel of environmental policy.

I once assisted an advisor in writing a review article on an astronomy topic.  One of my assignments was to go through all the references and make sure they said what we thought they said.  It was mind-numbing work but I did find a few flawed references.  That’s actually not that unusual because references tend to be passed on from article to article with few investigators going to the original source to be sure of the claim.  But when you’re talking climate science, with trillions of dollars and, supposedly, the fate of the planet at stake, I think it behooves you to aim for a higher standard than that used in the East Yachupitsville Geology Bulletin.  Pachuri didn’t.  And he need to take responsibility for that.  No one will trust the science if such sloppy work is not only ignored but rewarded.

Pachauri’s defense is hilarious:

Dr Pachauri did not return calls yesterday but he told Indian television at the weekend that he believed attacks on him were being orchestrated by companies facing lower profits because of actions against climate change recommended by the IPCC.He added: “My credibility has been established because I was re-elected chairman in 2008 by all the countries of the world. They must have been satisfied with what I did in terms of the fourth assessment report [published in 2007] because they have given me the mandate of completing the fifth assessment report [[to be released over 2013 and 2014] which I intend doing.

In other words, they liked him before the knew that he was more interested in glad-handing and grand-standing than in doing rigorous science.  This is the equivalent of Clinton’s defenders saying he shouldn’t have been impeached because he was elected.

This will never happen, but the IPCC would be very wise to replace Pachauri with a climate skeptic.  Someone like Bjorn Lonborg or Pat Michaels.  I guarantee you they would make sure every part of the next report was scrutinized.  And it would have a lot more credibility with a skeptic at the helm.

Sunday, January 31, 2010

While the last decade has been the warmest on record (and 2009 one of the warmest years), the temperature of the planet has not risen as quickly as expected by climate models.  A new paper may indicate why:

A 10 percent drop in water vapor ten miles above Earth’s surface has had a big impact on global warming, say researchers in a study published online January 28 in the journal Science. The findings might help explain why global surface temperatures have not risen as fast in the last ten years as they did in the 1980s and 1990s.

Observations from satellites and balloons show that stratospheric water vapor has had its ups and downs lately, increasing in the 1980s and 1990s, and then dropping after 2000. The authors show that these changes occurred precisely in a narrow altitude region of the stratosphere where they would have the biggest effects on climate.

Water vapor is a highly variable gas and has long been recognized as an important player in the cocktail of greenhouse gases—carbon dioxide, methane, halocarbons, nitrous oxide, and others—that affect climate.

“Current climate models do a remarkable job on water vapor near the surface. But this is different — it’s a thin wedge of the upper atmosphere that packs a wallop from one decade to the next in a way we didn’t expect,” says Susan Solomon, NOAA senior scientist and first author of the study.

As Ronald Bailey points out, this is yet another reason to take long-term climate projections with a heap of salt.  We don’t even know what’s causing this, least of all how likely it is to be sustained.  It could keep up and help hold down global temperatures.  It could reverse, as it did during the 90’s, and amplify global warming.  The point is, we don’t know.  This doesn’t “disprove” global warming; but it muddies the waters considerably.

This is precisely the reason why I am against the radical action favored by most greens.  As much as we’ve invested in studying the climate, most of the climate scientists who have ever lived are alive and working today.  We’re still learning.  To take steps that benefit everyone—cutting down on industrial methane emissions—is a no-brainer.  Cautious steps—like investing in R&D and a small carbon tax—are OK.  But carbon rationing and overly complicated treaties are absurd.

Thursday, January 28, 2010

Last week, a British pseudo-scientist was found to have committed fraud in giving Iraqis bomb-detecting dowsing rods that did nothing.  Today, there’s another setback to medievalism—the General Medical Council has found that Andrew Wakefield, who initiated the “vaccines cause austim” scare (long since disproved) behaved unethically.

The verdict, read out by panel chairman Dr Surendra Kumar, criticised Dr Wakefield for the invasive tests, such as spinal taps, that were carried out on children and which were found to be against their best clinical interests.

The panel said Dr Wakefield, who was working at London’s Royal Free Hospital as a gastroenterologist at the time, did not have the ethical approval or relevant qualifications for such tests.

The GMC also took exception with the way he gathered blood samples. Dr Wakefield paid children £5 for the samples at his son’s birthday party.

Dr Kumar said he had acted with “callous disregard for the distress and pain the children might suffer”.

He also said Dr Wakefield should have disclosed the fact that he had been paid to advise solicitors acting for parents who believed their children had been harmed by the MMR.

Wakefield’s supporters were heckling the council when the verdict was read.

Just remember, neither of our Presidential candidates last year was willing to disown this claptrap.  You have to wonder when President Evidence-Based Medicine is going to speak out on this subject.

It has not been good for the cult of AGW this last couple of months. The defenders of the indefensible have been hard at work doing damage control. The usual apologists and crazies are trying hard to convince us that even if it was all fake, we should still let them do their thing - kind of like the fake but true TANG incident - because if they don’t get what we want we will be in big trouble. A step down from their previous claims we would all be living in a Waterworld, well those of us that survived the coming cataclysms would, but still much ado about nothing. Now they are being dealt another big bad blow.

The university at the centre of the climate change row over stolen e-mails broke the law by refusing to hand over its raw data for public scrutiny. The University of East Anglia breached the Freedom of Information Act by refusing to comply with requests for data concerning claims by its scientists that man-made emissions were causing global warming.

The Information Commissioner’s Office decided that UEA failed in its duties under the Act but said that it could not prosecute those involved because the complaint was made too late, The Times has learnt. The ICO is now seeking to change the law to allow prosecutions if a complaint is made more than six months after a breach. The stolen e-mails , revealed on the eve of the Copenhagen summit, showed how the university’s Climatic Research Unit attempted to thwart requests for scientific data and other information, and suggest that senior figures at the university were involved in decisions to refuse the requests. It is not known who stole the e-mails.

I mean, if the science was so clear cut and settled, why would you need to do stuff like this? Really? The AGW cult has done more damage to real scientific progress than anyone has yet understood. They are the ones that cried wolf. If the real wolf comes, most people will be too skeptical to even bother. I guess this is offset by the many and ever entertaining jokes we can tell at the expense of those that fell for this crap, and those that still continue to think there might be one once of truth to this bullshit. My fondest wish is that people can now actually do scientific research on warming. I am dying to be vindicated on the fact that the warming cycle is tied to solar activity.

Monday, January 25, 2010

It looks like our AGW cultists have been skewered yet again. It seems that they have been caught selectively skewing the data to make their case yet again.

Call it the mystery of the missing thermometers. Two months after “climategate” cast doubt on some of the science behind global warming, new questions are being raised about the reliability of a key temperature database, used by the United Nations and climate change scientists as proof of recent planetary warming. Two American researchers allege that U.S. government scientists have skewed global temperature trends by ignoring readings from thousands of local weather stations around the world, particularly those in colder altitudes and more northerly latitudes, such as Canada. In the 1970s, nearly 600 Canadian weather stations fed surface temperature readings into a global database assembled by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Today, NOAA only collects data from 35 stations across Canada. Worse, only one station—at Eureka on Ellesmere Island—is now used by NOAA as a temperature gauge for all Canadian territory above the Arctic Circle.

How are we to trust any of this data, especially the historical patern, when they are jury rigging the measurement locations to be in warmer places? Should it really surprise anyone that when you exlude those pesky locations that are colder and shift the measurements to places that are warmer, that you end up with data that shows warming? Remember that pharma companies that get caught doing this exact kind of things during their drug trails end up in court, and people go to jail. The same would happen to people rigging security trading information in order to push the stocks they wanted. Even the Cheerios manufacturer was smacked hard because they could not conclusively make the claim their product lowered colesterol.  Yet we have governments the world over, with an agenda that will cost us citizens trillions of dollars and result ins some real hurt for the non-elite that stand to profit obscenly from this scam, not just turning a blind eye to this, but actually pushing it.

Neither agency responded to a request for comment Wednesday from Canwest News Service. However Hanson did issue a public statement on the matter earlier this week. “NASA has not been involved in any manipulation of climate data used in the annual GISS global temperature analysis,” he said. “The agency is confident of the quality of this data and stands by previous scientifically-based conclusions regarding global temperatures.”

That’s good enough for me! Well not.

In addition to the allegations against NOAA and GISS, climate scientists are also dealing with the embarrassment this week of the false glacier-melt warning contained in the 2007 report of the UN Panel on Climate Change. That report said Himalayan glaciers are likely to disappear within three decades if current rates of melting continue. This week, however, the panel admitted there is no scientific evidence to support such a claim.

Their house of cards is being dimsantelled piecemeal, but it is falling apart. They continue to spin and lump this bull with real problems in the hopes of keeping the momentum, but the truth is coming out, and it looks like too many people were either just had or part of a massive conspiracy to convince us to hand over our freedoms to a world government intent on running a wealth redistribution scam that would make the seleted elite stinking rich.

Al Gore was not available for comments. He was to busy raking in as much money as he could before this thing went south and he was forced to look for a new scam to push for the same agenda.

Monday, January 11, 2010

Well, with the entire AGW ClimateGate scandal wrecking the collectivist’s global world government agenda, and the coldest winter in a real long time rearing it’s ugly head, killing people in Europe, and people, citrus, and tropical farmed fish in the Southern US, even the UN is now forced to switch gears, admit there now is cooling, and even point to the possibility of a coming mini ice age! Soon they will blame man for that problem (maybe even try to convince us that CO2 is behind it all), tell us we need to allow them to form a global government to redistribute wealth and restrict our freedoms, while they fly in private jets to special functions where they eat caviar, drink champagne, and discuss our impending doom, and threaten us with ice world otherwise. After all, the calamity is just the means to an end. In the mean time we are still being promised more of the same tripe from the same idiots with the same agenda. One would be inclined to believe we were spared at least one royal screwing by whatever divine entity chose to derail these collectivists and their plans. Maybe Gaia got tired of all the stupidty and evil done in her name? Heh!

Thursday, January 07, 2010

Since the dawn of time man has had it in his nature to want to know, “What is over there?”, “What is over the next hill?”. That spirit of exploration has carried man from his humble beginnings around the camp fire, to the the farthest reaches of the Earth, and Beyond.  In those wanderings man has many times come up on traces of civilizations that have past on. Many of these became the bedrock of our research on how we came to be what we are today, others, passed on into legend.

One of these legends, a city of great wealth lost in the green vastness of the Amazon jungle, know to the Conquistadors as El Dorado, or to the English adventurer and explorer, Percy Harrison Fawcett, as the city of Z.


This theory for many many years has been the subject of scorn and ridicule in the archaeological community and the subject of many adventure novels and movies.  Now it seems that Fawcett’s lost city, is more of a reality. In recent years clear cutting and more advanced orbital observations have found a network of of earthen mounds, roads, foot prints of large structures and a large canal system, all in the upper amazon basin, in the very area Fawcett, and the Conquistadors claimed.

I find it fascinating, that in our modern age, we are still discovering that mans civilization is far older and more complex than we once thought. The old Legends and Myths DO have a element of truth to them.

oh jsut so you all know Brad Pitt has already got a movie in production about the city of Z and Fawcett.

Monday, January 04, 2010

The American Astronomical Society is having their big conference this week.  So there’s going to be a lot of mind-blowing stuff announced.  Here’s the highlight of today:

Monday morning at an astronomy meeting here in Washington, the lead scientist for a new NASA space telescope announced the discovery of five more “exoplanets” far beyond our own solar system, and expressed optimism that his team is on a path to finding an Earth-sized planet in an Earth-like orbit in the near future.

But the new trove of data from the telescope named Kepler has also turned up space oddities that make astronomers wonder what exactly they’re looking at.

For example, Kepler found a star with a small orbiting object that is hotter than the star itself. The object is too hot to be a planet but is the wrong size and density to fit any known profile for a dwarf star.

One of the five planets announced by William J. Borucki, the top scientist for the telescope, is so fluffy that “it has the density of Styrofoam,” he said.

What’s going on with these planets?  That’s the coolest part of all.  We don’t fucking know.  But we’re going to have a lot of fun figuring it out.

We are in a Golden Age of Science.  Keep your monitors peeled for more announcements.  It’s going to be an exciting week.

Thursday, December 31, 2009

Fitting close for this year we get this article which basically, evn when they continue to push the same crap, destroys the CO2 fantasy of the watermelon cultists that demand we abandon our ways and allow them to form a tyrannical, all controlling, global government which will regulate the life of the peasants while letting the elite live like royalty.

ScienceDaily (Dec. 31, 2009) — Most of the carbon dioxide emitted by human activity does not remain in the atmosphere, but is instead absorbed by the oceans and terrestrial ecosystems. In fact, only about 45 percent of emitted carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere. However, some studies have suggested that the ability of oceans and plants to absorb carbon dioxide recently may have begun to decline and that the airborne fraction of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions is therefore beginning to increase. Many climate models also assume that the airborne fraction will increase. Because understanding of the airborne fraction of carbon dioxide is important for predicting future climate change, it is essential to have accurate knowledge of whether that fraction is changing or will change as emissions increase.

The first sentence is what counts. The other stuff is just more lies so they ca continue to leave the door open to push the agenda. And the fun thing is that they just discovered this now? Shows you how much they don’t really know, and how much of their science is plain and simple bullshit. We have been told that we are warming because of CO2. That’s obviously a big ass lie:

In contradiction to some recent studies, ,b>he finds that the airborne fraction of carbon dioxide has not increased either during the past 150 years or during the most recent five decades.

Money quote in bold. End this cult! What these people want will just usher in a new dark age for humanity.

Sunday, December 20, 2009

The anti-vaccination crowd can claim some more casualties:

Brooklyn, New York is suffering a large outbreak of mumps right now. There have been 600 cases either confirmed or suspected in the past few months. Compare that to the fewer than 300 cases total on average in the entire United States over the course of a whole year and you’ll see that this is clearly a major outbreak.

The community being hit hardest is the Orthodox Jewish Community. Despite rabbinical instruction to get kids vaccinated, many opted out.  And now their kids are paying the price of their panic.

The outbreak in NYC has been traced to an infected child who was visiting the area from the UK. Vaccination rates in the UK are lower, in large part due to the antivax scare started by Andrew Wakefield and his now-discredited study linking vaccines to other illnesses. There have been over 6000 cases of mumps in the UK this year so far (not even including the last quarter of 2009) — 6000, more than twenty times the cases we get in the US, and we have five times the population here.

All those thousands of kids suffering through mumps — and potential deafness, encephalitis, meningitis, orchitis in boys, and ovarian swelling in girls — because of the antivaxxers and their misinformation campaign.

Bullshit costs lives. There are a lot of kids out there who are going to have a miserable potentially crippling Christmas because shitwits like Jenny McCarthy insist on peddling their ignorance as though it were science and others refuse to bring the hammer down on them.