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Hey, Moon Landing Deniers… here’s an interesting tid-bit and an epic project. The historic engines that propelled Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on their trip to the moon (with Michael Collins orbiting above them) have not only been found but recovered. These F-1 engines fell back to Earth at 5,000 miles per hour and sank four kilometers underwater in the Atlantic. (The Apollo 11 crew splashed down later in the Pacific on July 24, 1969.)
It was not immediately clear when or where the objects might be displayed, but Mr Bezos said when he launched the project last year that he hoped they could be viewed at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington.
9.1 out of 10 based on 57 ratings […]
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Turn on your lights from 8.30pm-9.30!
Remember all the fuss? What happened to Earth Hour 2013?
It’s that time-of-year for the hour of Green Darkness. But how times have changed. On Their-ABC, the only mention I can find is this: “Is Earth Hour dead?” The Age and The SMH pay lip-service to Earth Hour with an article in today. But there is nothing like the hype of previous years. The Guardian puts on the best spin, but concede Lomborg might be right. Even the Huff Po is telling us it’s a waste of time.
It appears Lomborg took the fun out of it by pointing out that Earth Hour was a waste-of-time token that produced more emissions than it saved.
Earth Hour teaches us that tackling global warming is easy,” Lomborg writes at Slate. “Yet, by switching off the lights, all we are doing is making it harder to see.”
How so? Well, for starters, Lomborg argues that more than a billion impoverished people around the world have no switch to flip, lacking the electricity that we take for granted. Earth Hour, he implies, demonizes a technology that has lifted great swaths of humanity from lives […]
People across the UK are rolling in the aisles in laughter.
Lewandowsky’s latest paper, “Recursive Fury” (which has just reappeared), categorized a comment by Richard Betts under the heading “Excerpt Espousing Conspiracy Theory” (in the supplemental data). But instead of being a comment from a rabid tin-foil-hat skeptic, Betts turns out to be Head of Climate Impacts at the UK Met Office and an IPCC lead author.
When Betts was informed about this by Barry Woods, he tweeted “Lewandowsky et al clearly deluded!”
Here’s the comment by Betts that Lewandowsky et al think demonstrates conspiracist ideation. Betts is pointing out how easily the authors of the original paper (claiming that skeptics-believe-the-moon-landing-was-faked) could have posted their survey link in places where skeptics were actually likely to see it. The Moon landing paper — after all — claimed to analyze skeptics but ended up getting results only from sites that were virulently anti-skeptic.
Richard Betts: “The thing I don’t understand is, why didn’t they just make a post on sceptic blogs themselves, rather than approaching blog owners. They could have posted as a Discussion topic here at Bishop Hill without even asking the host, and I very much doubt that the Bish […]
UPDATE: Rudd refused to contend. Gillard and Swan “won” uncontested. (The ALP loses.) QLD State Liberal Premier Newman calls for a federal election. “‘The country cannot afford the waste of time; the paralysis we’ve seen.’” ——————————————— It’s on. Finally.
Leadership ballot called for Labor Party at 4.30pm today. 9.3 out of 10 based on 33 ratings […]
Andy Hoffman has flown from Michigan to deliver the pop science solution to our atmospheric catastrophe.
You may have thought it was about planetary radiation, or moist adiabatic lapse rates, but Hoffman is here to save you from the waste-of-time science debate. Discussing science with “climate deniers” is like “talking to a wall” he says. We agree — anyone who denies we have a climate is thick-as-a-brick. Have you ever met one? No, neither have I. The mythical climate denier seems to be causing global warming through their inaction, but no one as yet, can name a single person who denies the climate.
I’m sure Hoffman wouldn’t want to be loose and inaccurate with his words — so no doubt he will find an actual “climate denier” or start to speak English instead.
Perhaps the debate he says he wants, will start when we speak the same language?
It’s obvious the Great Global Warming Scare is unravelling when the losing team turn into sour-puss-psychologists — finding dark mental failings in those too stupid to understand their Gift with The Weather.
When it comes to pop-psychology anyone can play…
Hoffman thinks skeptics aren’t convinced because they are afraid:
MANY climate sceptics […]
Here’s a benefit FOIA probably didn’t imagine. Skeptical networks. For anyone who doesn’t know, Jennifer Marohasy has published one of the longest-running skeptical blogs in the world, and she’s one of the few other women on the front lines. I don’t know why we hadn’t spent a long time on the phone before. I’m delighted that we are in much better contact…
— Jo
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Guest Post By Jennifer Marohasy
FOIA is a recognised shorthand for Freedom of Information Act. Legislation by this name has existed in the USA since 1966, Australia since 1982 and the UK legislation was introduced in 2000. It was climate scientists at the Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia, conspiring to evade the UK FOIA that probably inspired Climategate, with Mr FOIA, as the “hacker” calls himself, releasing over 220,000 documents and emails beginning in November 2009. In a recent email he explained: “The circus was about to arrive in Copenhagen. Later on it could be too late.”
By providing public access to emails and documents from leading climate scientists, Mr FOIA exposed how tricks, adjustments, and corrections, were routinely applied to climate data to […]
UPDATE: Cash is being flown to British Troops in Cyprus. The banks will stay shut til Thursday. The finance minister has resigned. [SkyNews]
Remember how the EU was supposed to promote stability?
Sooner or later a central fund managed by central bureaucrats is going to fail in a “central” way. This isn’t it, but we are getting closer to the center.
Without competition between states on currency, Europe left itself open to be a case study in centralized stupidity. The bureaucrats needed to stop the waste of public spending, they needed to halt the corruption, increase competition. And their answer? Steal 10% of depositor’s funds from everyone in Cyprus. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
We are now in new territory. In previous bank bailouts, if anyone took any losses it was the shareholders and the bond holders, and the depositors did not lose any money. In the Cyprus bail out, the bondholders and shareholders lose nothing but the depositors lose about 10%. (Any chance the bondholders of the Cyprus banks include the ECB or IMF?)
Where is the natural law that makes sense in this decision? Don’t punish the shareholders, or the bondholders, […]
Hyperia | Credit Wikimedia
Despite the fuss about CO2 emissions, on a global scale no one is quite sure where a lot of it ends up. Those mystery “sinks” draw in a large proportion of CO2. Here’s a big sink that just got twice as big.
Science Daily Mar. 17, 2013 — Models of carbon dioxide in the world’s oceans need to be revised, according to new work by UC Irvine and other scientists published online Sunday in Nature Geoscience. Trillions of plankton near the surface of warm waters are far more carbon-rich than has long been thought, they found. Global marine temperature fluctuations could mean that tiny Prochlorococcus and other microbes digest double the carbon previously calculated.
The trouble started when someone made an assumption.
8.8 out of 10 based on 55 ratings […]
File this under: What don’t we know?
We just discovered slice “2” is alive. |1 – Continental crust | 2 -Oceanic crust | 3 – Upper Mantle | 4 – Lower Mantle | 5 – Outer Core | 6 – Inner Core | Image Credit: Dake
You might have thought that photosynthetic life forms had the Earth covered, but according to some researchers the largest ecosystem on Earth was just discovered and announced last Thursday, and it’s powered by hydrogen, not photosynthesis.
The Oceanic Crust is the rocky hard part under the mud that lies under the ocean. It covers 60% of the planet and it’s 10km thick. (The oceans themselves are a paltry 4km deep on average.) We’ve known for years that the isolated hot springs in trenches held life. But who thought that all the hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of basalt rock in between had its own life cycle? Last week a group from the Center for Geomicrobiology at Aarhus University, Denmark announced that they had drilled through crust that was 2.5km underwater and 55 km away from anything that mattered. They found life in the basalt.
“We’re providing the first direct evidence of life […]
There are probably only ten people in Australia who haven’t heard it was the Hottest Ever, Record Summer Downunder. And they were probably born yesterday.
Summer here was so scorchingly awful it was Angry. But a funny thing happened on the orbit overhead. Check out the UAH satellite data on summers since the UAH records began. The graph below (thanks to Ken) is the temperature data from the NASA satellites, processed by UAH (University of Alabama in Huntsville). Strangely there is a disparity between what the satellites recorded and the BOM.
The satellite data shows that the summer of 2012-2013 was close to ordinary, compared with the entire satellite record going back to 1979. Not a record. Not even extreme?
According to UAH satellite measurements summer in early 2013 was not a record. Not even close.
The graph data comes thanks to John Christy, Director, Earth System Science Center, Distinguished Professor, Atmospheric Science University of Alabama in Huntsville, Alabama State Climatologist and Roy Spencer. It was graphed by Ken Stewart at KensKingdom, and inspired by Tom Quirk at Quadrant. I was very happy to connect them this weekend. The data cover “average lower troposphere temperature anomalies for land grids […]
Who knows what might have turned up…
7.8 out of 10 based on 25 ratings
The message to the world is unequivocal:
“We are heading for somewhere that is far off from anything we have seen in the past 10,000 years – it’s through the roof. In my mind, we are heading for a different planet to the one that we have been used to,” said Jeremy Shakun of Harvard University, a co-author of the study.
Source: The-world-is-hottest-it-has-been-since-the-end-of-the-ice-age–and-the-temperatures-still-rising.
There are two factors in the new Marcott paper that are major red flags. For one, there is hardly any data in the modern end of the graph. Ponder how researchers can find 5,000 year old Foraminifera deposits, but not ones from 1940? Two: they’ve smoothed the heck out of longer periods. Marcott et al clearly say there is “…essentially no variability preserved at periods shorter than 300 years…” So if there were, say, occurrences of a warming rise exactly like the last century, this graph won’t show them.
Some of the data has a resolution as poor as “500 years” and the median is 120 years. If current temperatures were averaged over 120 years (that would be 1890 to now), the last alarming spike would blend right in with the other data. Where would the average […]
FOIA has been in touch with skeptics today. Here is the email below, sorry, without that password. There are 220,000 emails in the file. There may be private information which could cause grief that is not related to taxpayer funded work. Obviously that large file is not in a form that can be released publicly yet. I do hope people are very very careful with the password.
This is your chance to understand why FOIA did what they did, and your chance to say thanks to the person who quite possibly saved us from a bureaucratic coup in Copenhagen in 2009. The draft treaty promised to take up to $140 billion from some and redistribute it to others. As Christopher Monckton revealed, sovereign nations would be ceding powers to a group of foreign officials, but the document did not have the words “election” or “democracy” or “vote” or “ballot”.
To all those who think, post hoc, that Copenhagen was never going to succeed anyway, I say that in November 2009, when I asked the carbon traders which outcome the money was betting on. The answer was: we don’t know. The players are out of this market.
You can leave your […]
I’m not keen on short term trends at all, they have a habit of flicking in and out of statistical significance with each month’s new data, or even switching from cooling to warming. But for what it’s worth, and only time will tell, perhaps the world entered the downswing of the PDO cycle in temperatures circa 2005.
If the world was entering a gently cooling phase, this is what it would look like
Syun Akasofu pointed out that there was a simple 60 year oscillation of global temperatures (about 30 years of warming, about 30 years of mild cooling) on top of a long slow rise that started more than 200 years ago. He predicted that we were at the top of one of the cycles, and were about to see the beginning of a cooler cycle. This early data suggests he may be right.
See the little red dot with the green arrow at about the 2010 mark. Dr Syun Akasofu
The cooling for the last eight years is statistically significant in 4 of the 5 major air temperature datasets. One, UAH, shows a small (statistically insignificant) rise since 2005.
And here’s the political point: how many of […]
Oh the irony?
Three years after the scandal that was ClimateGate, the University of East Anglia has a campus wide poster program to teach staff and students how to protect themselves from pfishing. (Thanks to reader pickabelief). Could this be a plan to protect the university from more embarrassing hacks and leaks too?
(Given other standards at UEA*, we have to ask if this is the rapid-response-squad?)
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*With apologies to good scientists and workers at UEA. You didn’t ask for this test, but if you want to protect your reputation, you need to speak up. You could start with explaining why you do things differently to the people who use tricks to hide declines, avoid FOIs, and consort to delete taxpayer funded email records.
Some at UEA applaud work where random numbers produce the same “result” as a poor-censored-and-truncated-proxy does, and you might think, rightly, this is not science. But as long as sloppy, inept activist-scientists use the UEA brand to bolster their credibility, everyone who tacitly supports them gets tarred with the same brush.
The hoax that matters is the one that billions of dollars depend upon ($257 billion are invested in renewables per annum and $176 […]
I’ll be back at the desk later today… 🙂
8.7 out of 10 based on 20 ratings
The animated Christopher Monckton
Apologies for the lack of posting, Christopher Monckton is staying with us, he’s in the kitchen right now, and we’ve had an event on, or radio interviews, or high level log-graph must-do calculations every day. It’s been marvelous, and as it happens, very productive (though not conducive to writing posts).
Christopher was in absolutely fine form on Wednesday night in Perth, as he tackles the teetering health of Western Civilization. The crowd was filled with many new faces — people who missed Monckton on previous tours, and were delighted to finally get the chance to see him. There were “undecideds” bought in by skeptical friends, as well as some believers-of-man-made-global warming (good on them for turning up).
What was also especially obvious at the Dalkeith-community-Hilton was the generous support of the Oil Moguls (not). We arrived half an hour ahead to find that there was no stand for the enormous projector screen. Dr David Evans sorted that out with great improvisation under pressure. (What he didn’t do was phone an emergency support contractor at great expense to turn up and save the day and send the bill to some Australian Government agency. )
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TIM FLANNERY, CHIEF CLIMATE COMMISSIONER 7-30 Report ABC: “…everything we’re seeing is consistent with what the climate scientists have been telling us now for decades…”
Leigh Sales, ABC PRESENTER : “… … …(no comment)…”
Steve Hunter Cartoonist:
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Thanks to Steve Hunter (political cartoons). See also Andys rant. 😀
What are the odds?
Tim Flannery makes out that they have used maths to arrive at their conclusion. Let’s be clear, if you have a 499 in 500 chance of winning at poker, that’s not the same as the odds of us being able to predict a normal climate, and be able to spot an “artificial” one. Yet Tim would like you to think that’s the same bet.
7:30 Report excerpts
LEIGH SALES: How do you know that the new climatic conditions are responsible for the extreme whether events? How do you know that it’s just not some combination of meteorological circumstances?
TIM FLANNERY: Sure. Look, the studies suggest it’s a 1/500 chance that this sorta stuff is just normal. This is way outside the range of anything we’ve experienced before. It is really an extraordinary summer….
What studies Tim? Name […]
There were not many long term sites (in black dots) in the centre of Australia in 1930.
This summer the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) invented a whole new metric to measure average national heat, which might be all very well except no-one (other than the BOM) seems to know what it is.
On January 7th the BOM claimed Australia set a new “average maximum daily temperature record”. Now the headlines are about the “hottest” Australian summer.
With both records, no one outside the BOM team has access to the methods or data. This post is about the new “daily” temperature of Australia used to declare Jan 7th was a record, but the same point applies to the “hottest summer” records, even though they may be a different data set. Where is the data? Where are the methods?
Is the BOM a science agency or a PR bureau?
The January 7th heatwave supposedly broke all previous “daily” records in this category — a dubious honor since no-one can remember any records like it.
It’s a bit like winning the Side-Jump. It’s not an event anyone knew was on until the medal ceremony. Worse, no one knows how the […]
For all the non-hottest-summer in Australia talk.
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7 out of 10 based on 16 ratings
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