Ken Nelson

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…

From Britain comes encouraging news that scientists have fully decoded the cancer genome. This means:

Not only will the cancer maps pave the way for blood tests to spot tumours far earlier, they will also yield new drug targets, says the Wellcome Trust team.

That is terrific news – and keep it coming please!

But congratulations aren’t the purpose of this post. Scolding and reality check is.

Currently there are NO solutions to our healthcare cost dilemma.

Democrats try to play sleight of hand by sticking young people with more of the bill, and trying to hide cost cuts imposed on seniors, while using the huge bills to hide payoffs to constituency groups like the SEIU.

Republicans do a little better. Their market based proposals actually would defer health care “judgment day”  a bit.

But even sound proposals, like tort reform, and moving away from third party payment systems, can only push back, not defeat the aging population soon to swamp our healthcare delivery and finance systems.

The ONLY way forward is to fund science, reform drug and medical procedure approval systems with an eye towards SPEED, and hope it works.

Where to focus?  Diabetes currently takes up something like 40% of our healthcare system costs. Amazing isn’t it…. a War on Diabetes might be the best war we ever fought.

Right now, only science can save us, and the best thing we can do is give it the time it may need. The Democratic proposals hasten the end.  Republican plans help, moderately, and should be enacted.

Via surfacestations.org, a site devoted to investigating the quality of our weather reporting stations, comes this chart:

The vast majority have an error of greater than 2 degrees Celsius.  Given the error rates of the stations, how can we put any stock in a warming claim (.7 degrees Celsius) much smaller than the error for the sites providing most of the data?  Put another way, how many blue or green dots can you find?

And look around… see any dots on the oceans that cover 71% of the earth?

So we only have data for land, no data for 71% of the earth, add in data cherry picking and outright erroneous or fraudulent data adjustment and it becomes clear that we have no idea what the temperature has done over the last century.

Menhaden Herring 

Commenter Carl sent this article on the over fishing of a herring crucial as a food source for virtually all other fish off our eastern coast. It turns out this fish is also useful for making Omega 3 fish oil that many claim benefits human health:

The book’s author, H. Bruce Franklin, compares menhaden to the passenger pigeon and related to me recently how his research uncovered that populations were once so large that “the vanguard of the fish’s annual migration would reach Cape Cod while the rearguard was still in Maine.” Menhaden filter-feed nearly exclusively on algae, the most abundant forage in the world, and are prolifically good at converting that algae into omega-3 fatty acids and other important proteins and oils. They also form the basis of the Atlantic Coast’s marine food chain.

But they are in danger now due to one company:

For the last decade, one company, Omega Protein of Houston, has been catching 90 percent of the nation’s menhaden. The perniciousness of menhaden removals has been widely enough recognized that 13 of the 15 Atlantic states have banned Omega Protein’s boats from their waters. But the company’s toehold in North Carolina and Virginia (where it has its largest processing plant), and its continued right to fish in federal waters, means a half-billion menhaden are still taken from the ecosystem every year.

Science and common sense suggests we should ban further menhaden herring fishing. Immediately. But will we? Guess who protects Omega Protein?

Democrats when they are in charge:

and Republicans when they are in charge:

What can you say?  The country is clearly not in the best of hands.

Al Gore lied again. He said “increasing tree mortality” in Copenhagen. Turns out he is wrong:

Plants eat C02. Remember that coal & oil used to be a plant when  young and had 10 times the C02 to eat.  Now is a GREAT time to be a plant!

I’m sure that CO2 and Climate models have included a “tree sink” for the carbon we emit.

This goes back to the “can we trust them” question. If they share all their data, all their models, and get back to “science” as it used to be done, then maybe. But that will still leave the question of if it is warming, is it bad, and if bad, is it worse to try and stop it.

Who pays for the sign?

Economists call costs that fall outside the buyer seller relationship “externalities”.  So, for example, if you hire a cheap illegal alien landscaper, you get landscaping, he gets money, and I get the externalities of his healthcare bill, lower wages if I’m a landscaper, school trouble, cultural impacts and gang crime.

When I bitch about illegal alien costs, economists say “just put the externals in the price”.  Okay… how?  I don’t have access to the off the books transaction between the sleazy homeowner (you) and the illegal alien landscaper.  And if I did make it harder, say for instance, by building a fence, might that hurt our economy?

So we have three things we need to know when dealing with externalities:

• where to collect the cost
• what is the cost
• what are the costs/side effects of collecting the cost

Now lets flip the situation… Imagine you have the perfect place to charge for externalities, but gosh darn it, no externals in sight. But you want money… what to do?

You invent an externality!

I just described global warming.  Different groups invented the global warming externality for various money centered reasons.  Scientists found that the threat of global warming yielded research funding. Politicians like that global warming can be used to regulate, control and tax. And socialists find it useful to distribute wealth or prevent wealth creation.  There was no “grand conspiracy” – just recognition of a useful tool.

But what of the three requirements to properly use externalities do we know about the proposed global warming externality?  Only one of three.  We know where externalities costs could be collected (Cap & Trade, Carbon Taxes).  We do not know if the externality cost really exists (google “climategate”).  And if it does we don’t know what the impact would be of collecting the externality cost (high energy costs, bad economy, etc..) .

Why prematurely collect externality costs on CO2?  Come back when you know more than how you will charge me.

The Daily Express offers 100 reasons why climate change is natural but just the first 10 should convince you:

1) There is “no real scientific proof” that the current warming is caused by the rise of greenhouse gases from man’s activity.

2) Man-made carbon dioxide emissions throughout human history constitute less than 0.00022 percent of the total naturally emitted from the mantle of the earth during geological history.

3) Warmer periods of the Earth’s history came around 800 years before rises in CO2 levels.

4) After World War II, there was a huge surge in recorded CO2 emissions but global temperatures fell for four decades after 1940.

5) Throughout the Earth’s history, temperatures have often been warmer than now and CO2 levels have often been higher – more than ten times as high.

6) Significant changes in climate have continually occurred throughout geologic time.

7) The 0.7C increase in the average global temperature over the last hundred years is entirely consistent with well-established, long-term, natural climate trends. 

8 The IPCC theory is driven by just 60 scientists and favourable reviewers not the 4,000 usually cited.

9) Leaked e-mails from British climate scientists – in a scandal known as “Climate-gate” – suggest that that has been manipulated to exaggerate global warming

10) A large body of scientific research suggests that the sun is responsible for the greater share of climate change during the past hundred years.

The first 10 convinced me, but read the other 90 too…

Electric companies burn coal to make energy and release CO2. Trees breath CO2 and produce oxygen.  And cyanobacteriumSynechoccus elongatus, a genetically modified bacteria, eats C02 and makes isobutanol (like gasoline).

 
Yum

The engineered bacteria can produce isobutanol directly, but researchers say it is currently easier to use an existing and relatively inexpensive chemical catalysis process to convert isobutyraldehyde gas to isobutanol, as well as other useful petroleum-based products.

Can this bacteria make gas cheap enough to succeed in the market without global warming scare subsidies?  I don’t know.  The article doesn’t say, but the word “relatively” above makes me think it may be tough.

Start with 27 stations:
 

Use just one to estimate temperature for all of Antarctica:

Guess which one they chose? 

The one showing temperature increase.  The others… ignored.

The other interesting item about that station?  It is amidst a heat island of development of the largest station on Antarctica.

We can’t trust climate science right now.

Funky data, charts, & peer reviews – is anything trust worthy from climate science?

Global Warming faithful spent the weekend lying about what the e-mails said, what the professors did, and about how this doesn’t put at question the entire basis of global warming theory…. but if you want a nice summary of what they REALLY mean, read this DailyMail special report:

Yet some of the scientists who helped to draft it, The Mail on Sunday can reveal, harboured uncomfortable doubts.

In the words of one, David Rind from the US space agency Nasa, it ‘looks like there were years around 1000AD that could have been just as warm’.

Read the whole thing.