Ken Nelson

Been there, done that, see no need to go again.

I, too, see no need to rocket off to the moon:

President Barack Obama is essentially grounding efforts to return astronauts to the moon and instead is sending NASA in new directions with roughly $6 billion more, according to officials familiar with the plans.

Naturally he does something I don’t agree with in the same sentence.  I wouldn’t give NASA more money. I’d cut their budget and focus them mostly on propulsion. Until we figure out a way to break earth’s gravitational clutch easier, space isn’t going to happen like scifi buffs and other futurists want. 

I think it much more likely that commercial interests will figure out space faster, cheaper and better than NASA.  NASA’s goal is more budget next year. That is hardly conducive to technical innovation and speed.   Also, NASA’s scientists, like James Hansen, have become too politicized.

New Arctic weather station installation

Well.. we could move all the thermometers:

“NOAA . . . systematically eliminated 75% of the world’s stations with a clear bias towards removing higher latitude, high altitude and rural locations, all of which had a tendency to be cooler,” the authors say. “The thermometers in a sense, marched towards the tropics, the sea, and to airport tarmacs.”

“Scientifically” they say this is cool because they, say, take a thermometer from Toronto and “interpolate” it for what the Arctic would be.  In other words, “guess”.

Oh.. .interpolation can be useful. Most images you see, that look pretty real, have interpolated data. But… interpolation looks at past data sets and would not capture changes in the places that used to be measured but that are independent from places where stations remain.

Weather is big and complex, interpolation is guessing.

A U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) study projects that the eastern US could get 20% of its electricity from wind by 2024:

“Twenty percent wind is an ambitious goal, but this study shows that there are multiple scenarios through which it can be achieved,” said David Corbus, NREL project manager for the study. “Whether we’re talking about using land-based wind in the Midwest, offshore wind in the East or any combination of wind power resources, any plausible scenario requires transmission infrastructure upgrades and we need to start planning for that immediately.”

Do you believe them?  I don’t.   Look at their title “National Renewable Energy Lab”… would they advocate some other solution? Or are they voting for their team to win?

I don’t trust anything or anybody using “renewable” “green” “sustainable”. That means they already made their mind up.

Can wind help? Sure. But I’m very dubious it will make up 20% of eastern power unless subsidized extensively.

I’d rather have a report from the “Department of More Energy than we could ever Use”.

Using elementary statistics, Randall Hoven has found that voting Democratic and dying from cancer correlate very highly:

Harry Reid said, "On average, an American dies from lack of health insurance every ten minutes." If he can say that, then I can say, "On average, an American dies from voting Democrat every 3.5 minutes." Both statements are equally valid.

Hoven also limited his data to just Americans, when we all know that voting Democratic kills people in other countries too.

What he is really writing about is that causation and correlation do not go together.

Journalist students should be required to study relatively advanced statistics so they will know when Harry Reid lies to them. Or they could just assume he is.

 
Contour map of earths crust. In kilometers.

Source: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/research/structure/crust/index.php

Calculated using seismic refraction

A job saved?  Or millions of future jobs lost?

The “stimulus” bill, which paid off Democratic constituencies and donors all over the world, didn’t skip the little guy. Nope, it reached down and lifted up none other than ClimageGates own “hide the decline” Michael Mann:

Mann is also the creator of the “Hockey Stick” graph, which purported to show a sharp increase in recent temperatures. That work has been thoroughly discredited by researcher Stephen McIntyre. Yet, in June 2009, the National Science Foundation awarded Mann a three-year $500,000 to further study the climate’s response to human activity. According to the grant award:

      The broader impacts involve supporting postdoctoral scholars and 
      graduate students and contributing to the understanding of abrupt
      climate change.

So the science seems settled and now we have to study what will happen, not what might. Right.  

First off, this isn’t appropriate for “jobs stimulus”. Second, Mann’s science is so suspect he shouldn’t be given grants at all, and we should probably try to get money back from past grants.

The Democrats fight all out war on this country and leave no stone unturned. In the unlikely event we survive their crazy policies of today, they need a firewall of climate change based laws to ensure we stay down.

Can Key West outrun the sea?

Try doing it when the land is moving:

"Key West has the distinction of being the Western Hemisphere’s longest sea level record. It dates back to 1846, and although it has several multi-year gaps, it shows a long-term trend of rising sea level of about +2 mm per year."

"However these very preliminary data paint a general picture for Florida and that is sea level has been rising steadily for at least 160 years, and will most likely continue to do so into the future."

http://www.fsbpa.com/documents/Florida%20Sea%20Level_rev04042008.pdf

In fact, Florida is moving west-northwest 5x faster than it is "sinking".

I don’t envy climate scientists the difficulty of their science, I just wish they would approach it more humbly, with less preconceived bias, and with less of an eye on global politics.

The models hoping to predict weather 3 months in advance got it dead wrong. So, Anthony Watts wonders:

if the climate models can’t reliably predict the next three months, what basis do they have to claim their ability to forecast 100 years out?  It is well known in the weather modeling community that beyond about three days, the models tend to break down due to chaos.

I second the question.

If they had forecasted THIS weather 8 years ago, I’d have moved somewhere else!

An amazing PDF timeline of “ClimateGate”. Click the image to see the PDF.

Via http://joannenova.com.au/global-warming/climategate-30-year-timeline/

This section jumped out at me:

Hardly seems like “science”…

Apparently, spaghetti of the Counter Insurgency inter-relations in Afghanistan:

means you can’t win a war.

But spaghetti like this, of the Model E GISS climate modeling simulation source file interdependencies, should be trusted implicitly:

I know war can be complex. And I’m quite familiar with how thorny software complexity can be.

But if you have concerns about the one, shouldn’t you about the other?

I know… I ask too much!

BTW: This is not to impugn the folks at NASA who expose themselves by posting their source code on the net.  I don’t know any specific issue about the quality of the NASA software. I can, however, measure its complexity. And I can guarantee you, at the level of complexity measured, it probably has hundreds of significant bugs. As does virtually ALL software of similar complexity and size.

Software graph done by “Understand” from Scitools.

A professor at University of Waterloo (Canada) reports that cosmic rays and chlorofluorocarbons not CO2 cause climate change.

How?  He observef actual data. No funky tweaked data and buggy computer models needed.  Both warming and cooling can be accounted for using satellite observed data:

His conclusions are based on observations that from 1950 up to now, the climate in the Arctic and Antarctic atmospheres has been completely controlled by CFCs and cosmic rays, with no CO2 impact.

“Most remarkably, the total amount of CFCs, ozone-depleting molecules that are well-known greenhouse gases, has decreased around 2000,” Lu said. “Correspondingly, the global surface temperature has also dropped. In striking contrast, the CO2 level has kept rising since 1850 and now is at its largest growth rate.”

Man can and will act to stop damage. We did with CFC’s when science we could believe in showed they were putting us at risk.

Maybe someday climate science can regain a position of trust. It will likely require an entire generation of scientists to retire.

Just one variant of data problems. The others are even harder 

Reading through this article on how climate researchers modified and adjusted actual data from the Darwin, New Zealand station confirms my belief that historical surface measurements provide little guidance as to global temperatures.

As I mentioned in my original article, the hard part is not to find five neighboring stations, particularly if you consider a station 1,500 km away as “neighboring”. The hard part is to find similar stations within that distance. We need those stations whose first difference has an 0.80 correlation with the Darwin station first difference.
(A “first difference” is a list of the changes from year to year of the data. For example, if the data is “31, 32, 33, 35, 34″, the first differences are “1, 1, 2, -1″. It is often useful to examine first differences rather than the actual data. See Peterson (PDF) for a discussion of the use of the “first-difference method” in climate science.)

Read the whole thing if climate science and statistics interests you.   Basically, even if their motives were pure, climatologists face an intractable problem of bad instruments, faulty recording, bad locations and a variety of other data oddities when trying to look at past surface temperatures.

This makes sense right?  Take Saturday morning… I walked out of the house, which was brisk but comfortable, drove 4 miles, and was miserably cold.

Surface weather varies widely  for surface reasons. Attempts to homogenize it to create some global record just don’t make any sense.

Going forward I’m more interested in the satellite data – which by the way – shows things getting cooler.

Randal Hoven over at American Thinker thinks about the “just in case” argument supporting expensive action on C02 and finds it “flawed”:

The average annual temperature in Memphis, Tennessee is 62.3^o F.  The temperature of Lexington, Kentucky is 54.9^o F.  That is a bigger difference than the IPCC’s worst-case scenario.

Could mankind handle that kind of adaptation – moving from Memphis to Lexington in the next 100 years?

Thomas Friedman thinks it’s worth $2 trillion a year to avoid even the slightest probability of that.

He also notes that:

• We are now in what is called an interglacial period, or the time between ice ages.  Previous interglacial peaks were three degrees warmer than now.  In Antarctica, these previous peaks were actually six degrees warmer.
• Since the last ice age, the oceans rose about 400 feet.  Most of that occurred before the pyramids were built (and well before modern use of fossil fuels), but the trend for hundreds of years up to the present has been rising sea levels.

Basically, we aren’t causing whatever “it” is and even if we were $2 trillion / year would require a catastrophe eliminating 2/3rds of the planet GOP to be cost effective.

In other words… doing something about global warming is stupid in two ways… first it isn’t real, second it will hurt more than it helps.

So we are going to waste $100 billion dollars A YEAR to help countries that will squander it?

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has promised the United States will help raise $100 billion annually by 2020 to assist poor countries in coping with climate change as long as America’s demands for a global warming pledge are met.

All tied to a fake crisis?

Could we have any worse leaders?

It is the big black dot on the right

This is cool. A planet, twice the size of earth, but loaded with water, was found by a 16x telescope.  It could have been found a long time ago, if they knew where to look!

While the planet probably has too thick of an atmosphere and is too hot to support life similar to that found on Earth, the discovery is being heralded as a major breakthrough in humanity’s search for life on other planets.

But don’t expect life there, if any, to be similar to ours. The atmostphere is too thick and the planet too hot. But it is loaded with water, so perhaps this is similar to the Mon Calamari planet where Star Wars Admiral Ackbar is from?

Or not…