Recently in Science Category

Here's the article, which is short and provided in full below the fold.

I remember just seventeen years ago being told by my town's school psychologist, who has an M.A. in the field and is still at the same job, that IQ was solely a reflection of environment and had no genetic component. My younger brother was dating his daughter at the time.

And this was what I ran into time and again at places of leftist indoctrination. Being on the left and finding out one is wrong means NEVER HAVING TO SAY YOU ARE SORRY.

As a teacher, it's now second nature for me to understand people can appear bright and engaging in everyday discourse, but not when it comes to the higher intellectual functions. Some very engaging students, I have regularly found, are just not smart. It's the idea Larry Auster discusses under the headline "The Optical Illusion," which requires a little scrolling down. It's instructive that groups of people can be nearly identical in being able to memorize a list of numbers, while simultaneously being very different at being able to recite them backwards.

And one of these days the ideas of the recently deceased J. Philippe Rushton, who I first heard on the David Brudnoy Program out of Boston in Nov. 1989, will not be treated as loony. He was a courageous, serious scientist who only fellow psychometricians took seriously. Pop culture treated him less so.

That memorable 1989 radio program was a plate tectonic shift moment in my thinking of human nature, IQ, IQ tests, and racial differences in same, which I haven't gone back from since. This means I take a contrary position to those who parrot the ideas of Gunnar Myrdal in his enormously influential _An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy_, which was published in 1944 and cited in the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown V. Board of Education.

Sitting here in front of my computer in The Manse's little office, looking out the window at the rain falling on this below normal temperature fall afternoon makes me yet again question the idea put forth by many of the AGW faithful that the sun has little effect on our climate.

There is plenty of evidence that our sun's activity cycles have quite a lot to do with our climate, with observations over the past 5,000 years seemingly backing up a number of theories that sunspot cycles can have a profound effect on our world's weather.

Even over the past 1,000 years it can be shown that the number of sunspots appearing on the sun's surface gives us a pretty good indication of activity, with more sunspots heralding warmer temperatures and less (or none) bringing cooler temperatures.

Work done by Dr. Henrik Svensmark has shown that the Roman and Medieval Warm Periods coincided with lengthy periods of high sunspot numbers and the Little Ice Ages (approximately 1300 to 1550 AD and 1650 to 1750AD) coincided with lengthy periods of minimal sunspot numbers, the so-called Maunder and Dalton Minimums. (I linked to Svensmark's Wikipedia page as most of his works, papers, and videos are linked from there.) Svensmark has managed to tie together solar activity and its effects on gamma radiation and cloud formation. (I won't go into all of it here, but I have covered it before.)

Now we find out our sun may be going into an extended quiet period - a minimum - like those seen during the Little Ice Ages. If Svensmark is right this may mean we're going to see extended periods of colder than normal weather that may last decades.

Waiting for solar fireworks to reach a grand finale next year? Um, sorry, looks like you already missed them. Structures in the sun's corona indicate that the peak in our star's latest cycle of activity has been and gone, at least in its northern hemisphere.

The southern hemisphere, meanwhile, is on a sluggish rise to solar maximum and may not hit its peak until 2014.

This bizarre asymmetry strengthens a theory that has been bubbling among sun watchers for the past few years: our star is headed for hibernation. Having the sun's outbursts turned off for a while would provide a better baseline for studying how they influence Earth's climate.

If such a thing does happen, it will give us a better idea of what effect the sun and CO2 has on our climate. I'm willing to bet that many of the AGW faithful are going to find out their favorite villain, anthropogenic CO2, has had little effect on climate and that the changes seen in our most recent history have been driven primarily by solar activity.

The next few decades are going to be interesting.

(H/T Synthstuff)

Instapundit has a wonderful link. This is a subject that needs to be proclaimed from the rooftops. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring has caused hundreds of thousands millions of people to die from malaria by being instrumental in having the amazingly safe & effective DDT banned.

Also, another villain is the EPA administrator William Ruckelshaus who in 1972 didn't bother reading his agency's own report recommending continuing DDT, and banned it except for emergencies.

The World Health Organization, an offshoot of the UN, in 2006 said DDT could be used indoors to combat malaria, with little noticeable effect in the West.

And when bedbugs become as prevalent as they were in this country in the late 1930s and early 1940s--a third to forty percent of homes were infested!--then the clamor will deafen the greenie-weenies.

What does it actually mean? I think I know.  Two full moons in a month's time.But I need to read this to make sure.

From the comments to the original WSJ opinion piece by Fred Krupp I posted about this past weekend comes this piece of wisdom from the late George Carlin. This was also linked by Instapundit. Warning: Strong Language.


While I haven't always agreed with Carlin's viewpoints, I agree with him about this topic, though maybe he didn't go quite far enough. A lot of the folks predicting the end of the world because of AGW are no different that those Carlin excoriates, except they may be even more clueless and self-serving.

After a week long hiatus I feel refreshed and ready to get back to blogging. I can see that Brent more than filled in while I was off doing other things.

One of those things was delving yet again into the morass that is AGW. A number of columns and blog posts have certainly been stirring the pot, bring even more debate about this issue to the forefront. One column in the Wall Street Journal certainly garnered a lot of comments. There are so many I still haven't finished reading through them all.

The column in question, written by Fred Krupp, claims that many skeptics about AGW have since come around to the AGW camp and that it's obvious the debate is over. But it must be noted that Krupp isn't exactly impartial as he is president of the Environmental Defense Fund, an organization not known for being impartial about the ongoing debate.

One of Krupp's biggest flaws with his opinion piece is that he's confusing agreement that climate change is occurring with agreement that climate change is caused almost exclusively by man. An example:

Respected Republican leaders like Govs. John Kasich of Ohio and Chris Christie of New Jersey have spoken out about the reality of climate change. Rupert Murdoch's recent tweet--"Climate change very slow but real. So far all cures worse than disease."--may reflect an emerging conservative view. Even Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson, during public comments in June, conceded the reality of climate change while offering assurances that "there will be an engineering solution" and "we'll adapt."

Not one of the people he cited agree with the It's-All-The-Fault-Of-The-Evil-Humans claim about climate change. Not one. But he implies that they've "come around" to that way of thinking. They haven't.

I certainly don't believe climate isn't changing. Of course it is, just as it has for almost all of Earth's existence. Do humans have an effect on climate change? I will agree with the statement that humans have a non-zero effect on climate, but so far no one has proven that it's anything but miniscule. Yes, humans can have a profound effect in very small areas. A perfect example of that is the urban heat island effect, where the concrete, pavement, and rooftops in an urban area can multiply the effect of the sun, making it much warmer during the day and, as the concrete and pavement radiates the heat it collected during the day, making for much warmer nights as well. Once you get out of the urban area, the day and nighttime temps fall back to 'normal'. It is this effect, along with the higher energy usage that goes along with it, that has boosted many of the surface temperatures, giving a false increase in average temperatures, something else addressed in the comments to Krupp's piece.

Krupp also mentions physicist Richard Muller's Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, where Muller and his team reviewed surface temperatures and the means for measuring them. This project was supposed to address the issue of poorly located measuring stations (next to AC exhausts, paved parking lots, or among encroaching buildings in urban areas). Muller published his non-peer reviewed findings which basically stated there were no errors in measurement and that surface temperatures are rising, satellite temperature measurements to the contrary notwithstanding. One of Muller's colleagues, Dr. Judith Curry, chair of the Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, disagreed with Muller's conclusions and believed he was premature in releasing the results.

When asked whether the rate had stopped over the last 10 years [Muller] said they had not. "We see no evidence of it having slowed down," he replied and a graph issued by the BEST project suggests a continuing and steep increase.

But this last point is one which Prof Curry has furiously rebuttted. In a serious clash of scientific experts Prof Curry has accused Prof Muller of trying to "hide the decline in rates of global warming".

She says that BEST's research actually shows that there has been no increase in world temperatures for 13 years."

So you have two scientists on the same research project who disagree with each other. Which one do you believe? Curry blogs about why she disagrees with Muller's conclusions and Muller's response.

One of the strongest voices criticising the study comes from the BEST team itself. Dr Judith Curry, head of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, declined to be a co-author on the latest BEST study, and says on her blog she does not "see any justification in [BEST's] argument for" the group's statement that its warming data fits with manmade carbon dioxide. Curry's not alone: former climate scientist William Connolley claims BEST has done "none of the attribution work you'd expect".

Muller says Curry distanced herself from the paper because she disagrees with the findings, and that she has an alternative theory - that the climate is random, so any correlation between increases in carbon dioxide and warming is an accident. His response: "'I've said to her that the unfortunate aspect of her theory is that it's untestable. Now a theory that's untestable is not something I consider to be a theory."

No one who frequents this blog has ever seen me refer to climate as 'random'.  I have an email discussion with Muller, who said he used the word 'random' in the interview since it is more easily understood by the public.  He has read my post Trends, Changepoints, and Hypotheses.  Re the climate shifts hypothesis, he is concerned that it is not testable.  I argued that it is just as testable as the other two hypotheses, and observations are not currently sufficient to distinguish between these three hypotheses.

She goes on to ask "So, is Muller's primary interest in the science, or in establishing himself in a position of power at the climate science/policy interface? The press releases and op-eds suggest the latter." So has Muller "sold his soul" to gain power as Curry suggests? It wouldn't be the first time a scientist has fallen under the sway of that particular vice.

Another skeptic voicing his dissent at the consensus is Dr. John Christy, the Alabama State Climatologist at the University of Alabama, Huntsville. In testimony he gave before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee earlier this month, Christy brings up new discoveries that explain part of the warming found it traditional surface temperature data and decouples some of the warming and the "extra" greenhouse gases. His testimony can be found here. It's well worth reading and brings up some question we should all be asking the AGW supporters.

So the debate continues, with some folks "switching sides" (Krupp doesn't mention the numerous former AGW proponents that have since changed their minds), and the the faithful still chanting the mantra that unless we "Do Something!" now, we're all gonna die.

I have to admit that when I read this, my first reaction was "It's about time!"

For quite some time now scientists studying lightning have been able to trigger strikes using pulses from medium power lasers aimed into the sky. (The lasers ionize the air, creating a low resistance path for lightning to follow.) This new means follows the old method of using rockets trailing wires to achieve the same effect.

Now Army engineers are using the concept to channel man-made lightning bolts to destroy targets.

The Laser-Induced Plasma Channel, or LIPC, is designed to take out targets that conduct electricity better than the air or ground that surrounds them. How did the scientists harness the seemingly random path made by lightning bolts, and how does a laser help? To understand how the technology works, it helps to get a brief background on physics.

--snip--

"If a laser beam is intense enough, its electro-magnetic field is strong enough to rip electrons off of air molecules, creating plasma," says [George]Fischer, [lead scientist on the project]. "This plasma is located along the path of the laser beam, so we can direct it wherever we want by moving a mirror."

"The plasma channel conducts electricity way better than un-ionized air, so if we set up the laser so that the filament comes near a high-voltage source, the electrical energy will travel down the filament," Fischer says.

A target, an enemy vehicle, or even some types of unexploded ordnance would be a better conductor than the ground it sits on. Since the voltage drop across the target would be the same as the voltage drop across the same distance of ground, current flows through the target. In the case of unexploded ordnance, it would detonate, explains Fischer.

Considering the efficiency of lasers converting electrical energy to light energy isn't all that great, using lasers to direct an electrical charge to a distant target would likely be far more efficient. The laser itself doesn't need to be large or powerful. It only needs enough power to generate a brief high-power pulse in order for the "lightning bolt" to hit its target.

One step closer to Star Trek.

It seems that all of the weather we've been experiencing over the past few months is all our fault. So says a report from US and UK researchers. (No link available at the moment.) So says a news report on ABC's World News this evening.

Supposedly the report says all of the extreme weather we've been experiencing the past year is due directly to human generated greenhouse gases and that no other explanation is probable. Despite reams of data to the contrary, they're sticking to the predictions of disastrous sea level rise, massive killer hurricanes by the hundreds, and a whole host of other calamities that will be brought on by AGW. They have presented no further data, projections, or evidence that what they're claiming is true.

Really? It looks like these folks have fallen under sway of the Correlation Fallacy, ignoring the myriad of forces that affect weather (even the most rabid climate scientist admits they can't possibly know a majority of the factors that affect climate). So how is it that these scientists can state with absolute certainty that the only possible cause is human activity?

It's simple: they're nuts. What's worse is that they're lying to themselves.

At this point I am highly skeptical of anyone who says they know "without a shadow of doubt" that we are the end-all and be-all in climate change. Our atmosphere is such a chaotic system that anyone who says they can predict with high accuracy what the climate will be like next year, let alone 30 or 100 years from now, is a quack. Unless they have a climate model whose algorithm takes into account every factor that affects climate then all they're doing is gazing into a crystal ball, and a cracked one at that.

This isn't science. This is politics, period.

One of the best rebuttals I've ever read in regards to the use of the word "deniers" in scientific literature to label those of us who are skeptical about Anthropogenic Global Warming comes from Dr. Robert G . Brown of Duke University. Dr. Brown is a theoretical physicist and has a full understanding of the scientific method and the pitfalls scientists must avoid in order to make sure the science is sound.

One of the biggest problems with the use of "denier" is that it is too often applied to skeptics, which are not the same thing. One of Dr. Brown's complaints is the use of that term in scientific literature to describe those who are skeptical of questionable claims about AGW. As he states more than once, all scientists should be skeptical about claims of any kind, even their own, as a means of maintaining scientific honesty. It is too easy for scientists to be caught up in what they want to be true versus what is true, hence the need for healthy skepticism. Unfortunately when it comes to climate science it seems that skepticism is not tolerated, something that makes any claims made by those same climate scientists automatically suspect.

Being a skeptic does not mean that one does not believe in climate change. Quite the contrary. But health skepticism at the cause of climate change must be maintained in order to delve into the true causes, particularly when the the only acceptable answer is that its main cause is human activity.

I won't quote from Dr. Brown's response to Dr. Paul Bain's use of "denier" in scientific literature, but I will use one of his comments in response to the post linked above. I think he does a pretty good job describing why he finds the label so disturbing as he sees it as an indicator of closed minds in a field of endeavor that requires minds to be open to all possible causes of climate change, otherwise any results will be tainted and will smack of Lysenkoism, where politics decides scientific 'truth' rather than facts, evidence, experimentation, and theories.

Writes Dr. Brown in response to this comment:

On the contrary, I don't think there is any good reason to call people who don't believe in the "Anthropogenic" part of global warming deniers either, as I don't think the term has any place in science (as I think I made clear). However, bear in mind that I'm posting as a physicist -- not ex cathedra in any sense, but to explain why I find it difficult to escape from my own strongly held beliefs concerning the laws of nature. That the globe has warmed, on average, since the LIA (with some bobbles along the way) is -- in my opinion -- difficult to doubt because there is a rather lot of evidence supporting the assertion. That takes care of the GW part -- people who "deny" that global warming and cooling take place (with mostly warming since the mid-19th century) may not be "deniers" but they are IMO badly wrong, an opinion I will continue to hold until I am shown some fairly serious evidence to the contrary.

It is also entirely possible to doubt the anthropogenic part and not be irrational. I've been in a debate with a very cogent arguer in other threads of WUWT who puts forth the proposition that global CO_2 levels are set by temperature only, with a roughly two year lag. His argument is evidence-based, associated with an observed, usually lagged, strong correlation between the temperature anomaly and the derivative of the atmospheric CO_2 concentration. It is quite plausible, and only fails to be completely convincing because it is not unique -- one can find a number of related models for the carbon cycle that make more or less of the CO_2 concentration responsible for the temperature anomaly and still retain the correlation in question, as well as models that may or may not retain the correlation but that fit the data within its error bars. There is also a problem of sorts with causal order in the data -- again, not something that proves the arguer or his assertion wrong, but still something to be thought about (as it implies that both the CO_2 and temperature change might have a common prior cause that is neither one of them). This approach doesn't "deny" that warming has occurred, or deny that atmospheric CO_2 concentration increases can cause temperature increases, it merely points out that it is not certain that the CO_2 levels in our atmosphere are primarily set by anthropogenic contributions, that there are plausible alternatives not as far as I know falsified by any argument or evidence, and that it may be GW that is causing the CO_2 increase and not the other way around. There are arguments against this, note well, but IMO they are not certain or settled science -- the carbon cycle is too open a question for that and a lot of science is still being done.

However, it is a lot more common for the doubt of AGW or the GHE itself to be expressed as terrible science -- propositions that openly violate the first or second law of thermodynamics or "There is no way that a trace gas in our atmosphere can be responsible for warming", for example. Well, yes there is, and the physics of it is relatively straightforward and well-known. Furthermore, one can simply look at the TOA IR spectra and see the CO_2 hole in radiation from the surface -- as close as one might hope to get to direct experimental of the GHE in action. So when skeptics assert "there is no such thing as the Greenhouse Effect", usually without anything like a well-founded theoretical argument or empirical support, they -- again in my opinion -- openly invite rebuttal, and I spend a fair bit of time on WUWT rebutting exactly that sort of claim. Obviously, they provide CAGW proponents with an opportunity to commit any number of logical fallacies and claim that because these skeptics have silly arguments, all skeptics are wrong. And even given my strong beliefs that the GHE is totally real and that it is not at all unreasonable that humans have contributed both to the total CO_2 concentration in the atmosphere (although quite possibly less than the AGW crowd asserts that they have contributed) and that the increased CO_2 has raised global temperatures by some amount (although quite possibly a lot less than the CAGW crowd asserts that they have raised them by), I do try to remain open to any specific argument to the contrary (such as the example given above that I could not falsify, although neither could I falsify alternatives that also worked).

The point is that one should not excuse the individuals on either side of the issue from their individual errors against reason. Some AGW opponents are quacks. I'm sorry, but there it is. Anthony is aware of this -- all of the scientists on this list are. The fact that some quacks try to invent unified field theory in physics (and somehow always seem to find my email address so that they can explain it to me) doesn't mean that physics in general or the search for a unified field theory in particular is quackery. Similarly some quacks opposing CAGW doesn't mean CAGW is either right or wrong, or that skepticism in general is quackery, it just means more "noise" in the discussion. In general, the list is pretty good at policing this sort of thing without resorting to censorship or (usually) name calling -- one reason I like to hang out here -- and the level of the science presented on both sides tends to be pretty good.

Note well, some AGW proponents are just as quackers! Ask Al Gore, for example, to present actual evidence defending half of the assertions he makes in the international news. A few other names come to mind as well, especially ones that have more or less "confessed" to at the very least abhorrent scientific practices in the Climategate emails -- gatekeeping, trying to get journal editors fired, concealing evidence that does not support a desired "cause", and the extraordinary steps of trying to get scientists actually fired from faculty positions at other institutions for the sin of disagreement with their published results and public position!

Shameful. One can indeed think of some nasty adjectives to describe the individuals who engage in such inappropriate activity as if it were science.

Science, however, does not benefit from throwing around pejorative terms (even in the specific cases where one might think they are justified). It's one thing that does bother me about this list -- certain members knee-jerk assume the worst about any scientist or politician that does -- in all honesty -- accept the conclusion of AGW, or CAGW. They not infrequently blow off steam with a bit of name-calling (and I'm probably not entirely free from blame here -- it is human nature and this is an informal venue). I obviously understand that -- but again it degrades the quality of the scientific debate, which should not automatically impugn the motives of someone that disagrees with you but rather should focus on the details of the disagreement, the arguments, and above all, the data and what can legitimately be inferred from it.

In any event, I hope this makes my position here clear. To summarize -- one should never use pejorative terms like "denier" in a scientific paper published in a reputable journal, not even to describe quacks who "deny" the laws of thermodynamics (whether or not they understand them). In general one should just ignore them. I would go one step further, and say that the term skeptic has no place in the debate, and is a purely political term that needlessly and incorrectly polarizes the scientific community and stifles the scientific process itself. All scientists worthy of the name are skeptics, and the best of them are the most skeptical of their own pet theories and beliefs, for it is here that we are most easily blinded the most by that bete noire of the scientific process, confirmation bias. We all see what we believe, and it is only by doubting our own beliefs that we can come to be reasonably sure of them, in time.

It is this that Feynman was attempting to convey in his wonderful speech -- one can always find evidence confirming any belief if one looks for it and fails to accurately report all of the evidence that didn't work out or confounds it. It is here that -- in my opinion -- climate science has horribly failed the people of the world. Whether or not the AGW hypothesis is correct -- with or without the "C" -- there has been a most unseemly rush to present only one side of the evidence, almost certainly to achieve certain political ends. Contrary evidence or arguments have been actively suppressed. Data and methods have been concealed as long as possible, and when finally revealed have proven to be at least -- questionable -- in many cases.

In the end it is this dishonesty that corrupts the scientific process, and we are paying for that corruption every day not just in climate science but in medical research, social science research, and many other scientific venues in which confirmation bias and cherrypicking of results runs rampant. In the case of climate science, the worst case bill -- either way -- could be in the trillions. Perhaps instead of throwing around terms like "denier" intended to shut down debate, we could open up the debate and get the science right.

Indeed.

Too many of the AGW and CAGW faithful have their blinders on and are incapable of seeing evidence, data, or theories that contradict their deeply held beliefs. Call it an ideological not-seeing-the-forest-for-the-trees problem. Their minds are made up and no amount of debate, discussion, or failure of their pet theories to predict actual climate behavior will change their minds. On the other hand, if the climate scientists who espouse much of this not-to-be-questioned theories were to take a closer look at their work, their data, and their assumptions, they might do one of two things: open up all of their data, algorithms, experimental processes, and any other relevant information for everyone to see, or; decide their theories and predictions are wrong and start over, this time without falling into the Feynman trap.

I came across this rather cool NASA publication dealing with aerospace accidents and incidents, a 244 page (in PDF format) report on all kinds of aerospace accidents and their causes, covering everything from crashes of X-planes, rough landings of the Space Shuttle, and problems with "almost" loss-of-consciousness incidents with F22 Raptor, amongst a number of aircraft/spacecraft covered in the report.

The report shows that quite often it is not a single factor that causes these incidents, but a chain of errors that leads up to problems encountered.

The free download from NASA can be found here with three different formats available, E-Pub, Mobi, or PDF.

It's quite fascinating reading for those of you out there who are aviation and spaceflight fans.

A co-worker sent this to me. It has to be one of the more interesting attempts (and a successful one) for beating a traffic ticket. This is something right out of the old TV show Numbers.

I can attest to the fact that math can help you beat a ticket.

On one occasion in the distant past I received a speeding ticket in the town of Braintree, Massachusetts. The police officer who cited me said I was doing 65mph in a 40mph zone. There was only one problem: the car I was driving at the time would have had to been able to accelerate from 0 to 65 mph in under 4 seconds. (I had just pulled out of a side street and onto the road in question a couple of hundred of feet from the officer's cruiser. But since I was driving a 1979 Dodge Omni with a 1.7 liter 4-banger, that feat of acceleration was impossible.

As the officer was writing up the ticket I noticed his radar was still on and more than once in a 1 minute period registered speeds well in excess of 40mph along the road in question. I found that interesting considering there was not one single vehicle on the road when the radar displayed the speeds. Looking closer at where the officer was set up I realized what was happening.

After getting permission to leave my vehicle for a moment, I pulled out my ever present 100' tape measure and started taking some measurements, specifically the distance of his cruiser from the side of the road (he'd flagged me down), the distance from the side of the building he'd used to shield his presence from cars coming down the road, and the distance of that building from the elevated highway behind and to one side of where he'd parked his cruiser. I also asked the officer for the make, model, and serial number of the radar system he was using to measure speeds. (Fortunately he didn't seem to mind. I guess he thought I was just wasting my time.)

To make an already long story short, I decided to fight the ticket.

The day of my court appearance arrived and I showed up with my ammunition: two poster boards- one with a diagram of the 'scene of the crime', showing the distances of all of the pertinent objects including the side street I'd pulled out of, the location of the cruiser, the building he'd been next to, and the distance to the highway; and the other with the same diagrams now overlaid with lines of sight and some equations. I also had a copy of the data sheet for the radar unit the officer used, some other literature from the manufacturer, and a textbook, in this case Skolnick's Radar Systems Handbook.

When my case was called, I made my presentation to the judge after the prosecuting officer made his case. After explaining my diagrams, the measurements I made, and asking the police officer if he thought the diagram was reasonably accurate (he admitted it was), I brought out the second poster board with the second set of diagrams and equations and showed how the officer's radar wasn't measuring speeds along the road I'd been traveling, but the highway behind him. The diagram showed the width of the beam emitted by the radar, how more than half of the radar energy was being reflected back to the elevated highway, and that the speeds the officer was measuring was that of the traffic on the highway.

At this point the judge asked me my profession.

"I'm a radar systems technician for [Really Big Defense Contractor]."

I was found not guilty.

You know it's coming apart for James Hansen when forty-nine of his fellow NASA colleagues questioned the validity of catastrophic climate change predictions based entirely on flawed climate models and not upon objective assessment of all available scientific data on climate change.

After all, isn't (or wasn't) NASA's job to approach science with an open mind, to look at the data retrieved during its research, collected by instruments both earthbound, airborne, and in space? Yet Hansen has turned all of that on its head, using his standing at NASA as a bully pulpit to put forward his views and just enough of the science to make his claims credible. How much has he tarnished NASA's reputation? (Not that it hasn't been tarnished by others, turning away from actual science and towards "Muslim outreach", something that has absolutely nothing to do with NASA's charter.)

These forty-nine scientists, all of which have credentials that are equal to or better than Hansen's, are saying "Hey, wait a minute! This climate change stuff isn't based on hard science, but conjecture, incomplete data, and faulty computer prognostications! That's not science!"

Maybe this is just the nudge needed to move the debate about climate change to the actual science, the "un-adjusted" raw data, and away from the politically attractive predetermined results bought and paid for by those who see CAGW as a means to an end.

But I'm not holding my breath that it will happen any time soon.

Renewable fuels have been in the news for years now, with much of the emphasis on ethanol and so-called bio-diesel. Both of these fuels come directly or indirectly from food crops. Some bio-diesel is derived from vegetable oils and some from algae based conversion systems. The one big problem with any of these sources is that all of them take up considerable land to grow and the conversion process is neither cheap or easy.

But that may be changing.

A new process developed by UCLA may take the crops out of bio-fuels and allow for large scale production an alternative fuel called isobutanol, a "higher alcohol" with an energy density approaching that of gasoline. Its feedstock? Carbon dioxide.

Using a modified bacteria for the conversion and electricity as the sole energy source, the system has the potential to be "more efficient than the biological system."

Photosynthesis is the process of converting light energy to chemical energy and storing it in the bonds of sugar. There are two parts to photosynthesis -- a light reaction and a dark reaction. The light reaction converts light energy to chemical energy and must take place in the light. The dark reaction, which converts CO2 to sugar, doesn't directly need light to occur.

--snip--

[James] Liao explained that with biological systems, the plants used require large areas of agricultural land. However, because Liao's method does not require the light and dark reactions to take place together, solar panels, for example, can be built in the desert or on rooftops.

As nice as electric cars may be, their batteries still can't store enough energy or be recharged fast enough to make them practical except for local travel. Liquid fuels have a much higher energy density and it takes little time to refill a fuel tank. If the process created by Liao and his team at UCLA can be scaled up, the need for growing food crops for use as bio-fuel feedstock will disappear. That means agricultural operations can go back to growing crops for food rather than to turn into fuel.

According to Liao this process can also be used to generate a variety of other chemicals as well.

If this pans out, I can see it as a far better and less expensive means of generating bio-fuels than the present system.

It seems I get drawn back to the subject of AGW again and again. Over the past couple of years there hasn't been anything new from the "We're-All-Gonna-DIE-And-It's-All-The-Fault-Of-The-Evil-Humans" warmists. On the other hand, between ClimateGate 1.0 and 2.0, more scientists questioning the "settled science", and gross failures of climate models to even come close to predicting the actual temperatures over the past 10 years or so, AGW has been losing its luster, except for the few diehards who still choose to keep pushing their agendas.

One of the most recent setbacks is the more recent failure of climate models to predict the present decade long halt to warming, and particularly their lack of correlation between predicted effects of increased CO₂ concentrations and their effect on climate.

Some may point to the recent warm spell we enjoyed in the US over the past week or so as proof of AGW. But I recall more than a few really mild winters (and equally bitter cold winters) since I've trodden this earth. It's called weather and it happens all the time.

But back to the main point.

During a fundraiser in Atlanta earlier this month, President Obama is reported to have said: "It gets you a little nervous about what is happening to global temperatures. When it is 75 degrees in Chicago in the beginning of March, you start thinking. On the other hand, I really have enjoyed nice weather."

What is happening to global temperatures in reality? The answer is: almost nothing for more than 10 years. Monthly values of the global temperature anomaly of the lower atmosphere, compiled at the University of Alabama from NASA satellite data, can be found at the website http://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/. The latest (February 2012) monthly global temperature anomaly for the lower atmosphere was minus 0.12 degrees Celsius, slightly less than the average since the satellite record of temperatures began in 1979.

The lack of any statistically significant warming for over a decade has made it more difficult for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and its supporters to demonize the atmospheric gas CO2 which is released when fossil fuels are burned.

Many of the warmists point to the increase in global temps and their correlation with increased levels of CO₂ as the only proof they need. But they choose to ignore that global temperatures started increasing well before the CO₂ levels stared rising. So unless CO₂ has some kind of temporal effect, meaning that its effects somehow travel through time to cause warming before the levels rise, then we have to look at the possibility that CO₂ levels rose because of rising temperatures. Antarctic ice cores showing 400,000 years of climate data suggest just that scenario.

Perhaps my biggest gripe about the ongoing AGW doomsaying is that all they predict is calamity, yet they have no way of telling us exactly how they came to that conclusion. It's like they assume that any change is a bad change and that there's no way that conditions on Earth might actually get better rather than worse. Paleoclimatology suggests things will be better with a warmer climate. Better that than trying to usher in a another Ice Age.

Probably one of the best proponents of the "skeptics" view on AGW, Lord Monckton, gave his "Climate of Freedom" lecture at Union College in Schenectady, New York. Monckton, being no fool, was well prepared to parry the claims and fallacies put forth by the indoctrinated "watermelon" environmentalists (green on the outside, red on the inside) either attending the lecture or protesting outside the lecture hall.

One of his better encounters was with Erin Delman, president of the Environmental Club at the college and one of the unthinking indoctrinated.

As they filed in, Lord Monckton was chatting contentedly to a quaveringly bossy woman with messy blonde hair who was head of the college environmental faction. Her group had set up a table at the door of the auditorium, covered in slogans scribbled on messy bits of recycled burger boxes held together with duct tape (Re-Use Cardboard Now And Save The Planet). "There's a CONSENSUS!" she shrieked.

"That, Madame, is intellectual baby-talk," replied Lord Monckton. Had she not heard of Aristotle's codification of the commonest logical fallacies in human discourse, including that which the medieval schoolmen would later describe as the argumentum ad populum, the headcount fallacy?  From her reddening face and baffled expression, it was possible to deduce that she had not. Nor had she heard of the argumentum ad verecundiam, the fallacy of appealing to the reputation of those in authority.

Ah, yes. The ever popular appeal to authority, the usual device of those who know their argument is a losing one. It's certainly one of the more used tactics of the warmist camp - if the facts don't support your beliefs, then make the appeal to authority as if that's all one needs to do to prove the unsubstantiated claims.

But for the moment let us return to to Erin Delman's refrain - "There's a CONSENSUS!" Monckton blew the consensus argument out of the water with a few examples of consensus that were anything but proof.

[Monckton] said that, unlike the IPCC, he was going to speak in plain English. Yet he proposed to begin, in silence, by displaying some slides demonstrating the unhappy consequences of several instances of consensus in the 20th century.

The Versailles consensus of 1918 imposed reparations on the defeated Germany, so that the conference that ended the First World War (15 million dead) sowed the seeds of the Second. The eugenics consensus of the 1920s that led directly to the dismal rail-yards of Oswiecim and Treblinka (6 million dead). The appeasement consensus of the 1930s that provoked Hitler to start World War II (60 million dead). The Lysenko consensus of the 1940s that wrecked 20 successive harvests in the then Soviet Union (20 million dead). The ban-DDT consensus of the 1960s that led to a fatal resurgence of malaria worldwide (40 million children dead and counting, 1.25 million of them last year alone).

You could have heard a pin drop. For the first time, the largely hostile audience (for most of those who attended were environmentalists) realized that the mere fact of a consensus does not in any way inform us of whether the assertion about which there is said to be a consensus is true.

And there is the crux of the argument. Consensus, particularly when the term is applied to science, means absolutely nothing. It is merely a tool used to push unsubstantiated and, in some cases, wholly unprovable "scientific" gobbledygook. Consensus means nothing in regards to the validity of a scientific hypothesis. All it takes is one person outside the consensus to prove it wrong.

What made Monckton's lecture even more eye opening was using the IPCC's own data and conclusions to prove them as nonsense. As Monckton stated, the IPCC's reports were not peer reviewed, something the warmists claim ad nauseum is the only thing that is the measure of whether something is true or not. (Never mind that the only peers the AGW folks want reviewing anything are those who are firmly in the warmist camp. The open-minded need not apply.)

In the comments to the post linked above, Lord Monckton replies personally to some of the warmist trolls who tried to discredit his claims by making strawman arguments, misrepresenting what he stated, or trying to attack his data. Ironically, much of the data he used came from the IPCC itself, which he goes to great lengths to explain in his reply. Using their data he shows a number of faulty or unsubstantiated assumptions made by the IPCC to make their grossly overestimated projections about AGW. He shreds every one of the trolls' accusations and shows them for the indoctrinated and unthinking drones they are.

As more than one commenter opined, they'd love to see Lord Monckton debate Al Gore about AGW. Too bad we'll never see that happen. Monckton would bury him.

As the furor has started to die down over Peter Gleick's use of identity theft in order further support of his cause, that being Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming, I have to admit to thinking about both the immorality of the act and the casting aside the ethics that someone like Gleick should have strove to uphold.

Some have tried to rationalize his act, proclaiming his intentions were good. But that's an old excuse that has been overused and does not excuse his actions. We also know where that road leads: Hell.

The debate rages on about whether "lying for the cause" excuses the lies or is merely an excuse for something that an unethical or immoral person would have done anyways.

We've seen so much in the way of lies and deceit in regards to AGW that it's becoming hard to discriminate between facts, wishful thinking, and outright fabrications. And in that regard I have to say the award for the most deceitful actions must go to the supporters of AGW. As the ClimateGate e-mails have revealed, those who should have been pursuing the truth instead put their efforts towards burying it. (Please notice that I use the lower case 't' in truth, as science is supposed to search for the truth. Use of the upper case "T" in Truth tends to signify that whatever is designated using that word tends to be anything but.) Dissenting viewpoints were quashed. The word 'peer' in "Peer review" was redefined to mean "only those who agree with us", which destroyed the credibility once attached to that phrase. Publications which dared to publish dissenting views were targeted for trivialization or forced to fire editors who refused to toe the line if they wished to survive.

Such is the power of lying for the cause.

In this case the lies are allegedly to force courses of action that are supposedly necessary to save the planet. Never mind that there is tenuous evidence at best that any such actions are required. The true believers know they are right and are willing to put forward any story, use any lie, any fabricated evidence to advance their cause. The thought that they might actually be wrong has never crossed their minds. And should there be any facts that contradict their belief system then it must be suppressed and those presenting them discredited.

When these kinds of actions are applied to science, then it ceases being science. It becomes dogma and requires no proof. We saw that in Nazi Germany (racial science) and the Soviet Union (Lysenkoism), where political beliefs overrode the truths provided by science. And because of it millions died.

CAGW is no different. And while it's not likely to lead to extermination camps and gulags, millions (if not a couple of billion) will pay the price for the lies put forward "for the good of the people." Scientific truth need not apply.

With the ongoing debate about CAGW (Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming) heating up again, a commenter on one of the many blogs linked to this comic on the PHD Comics site.

This comic pretty well explains the scientific method as it should be and how it seems to be today (at least in regards to AGW).

Click on image to embiggen

All too true...and sad.

Call it yet another blow against the AGW faithful.

In this case, Dr. Richard Lindzen of MIT, whose specialty is atmospheric physics, testified in front of the British House of Commons about the overblown hysteria that is anthropogenic global warming and the dire predictions of catastrophe.

For those of you out there who will try to claim that Dr. Lindzen isn't a climate scientist, I must remind you that climate is atmospheric physics, and Lindzen is an expert.

Lindzen's presentation to the House of Commons can be found here. (PDF)

I got into a discussion about AGW with my rather liberal brother-in-law last night. Unlike many other debates I've had with AGW believers, this one was unemotional and, quite frankly, enjoyable. While neither of us convinced the other our particular point of view was the correct one, we both agreed there are still too many unanswered questions that need to be addressed before considering any of the proposed corrective "actions" are taken. (Both of us agreed that some of the proposals are too draconian and, in the end, foolish.)

This brings me to tonight's post.

I linked to the follow-up opinion piece from the "Sixteen Concerned Scientists", and much like the first there were a considerable number of comments. Unlike the first, many of those commenting were far less emotional (though no less indoctrinated).

One of the best comments I've come across so far came from Mike Koban, a scientist in the fields of geochemistry and dendroclimatology. Apparently he is a professor at the University of West Florida, teaching Basic Hydrology, Physical Geology, Environmental Geology, and Geomorphology.

Writes Mike:

I have a points to make about GW and Environmentalism --

First, it's not even politically correct to say "Global Warming" anymore -- we call it "Global Climate Change." This, I think, reflects the point that most of us naysayers are trying to highlight. And that is that the science is far too uncertain to make any economic, political or social projections, especially those as sweeping as redirecting all energy production towards "green" types.

Second, if the GW movement is about preserving our planet the way it is...that's just silly. No natural system is ever about the status quo. They are ever changing and anyone who tells you that they want to preserve the planet and save all the creatures in it clearly doesn't understand the concepts of geomorphology or evolution.

Third, it is inherently misleading to compare all changes in weather to the time right before the industrial revolution. If you only study the time during which Earth's atmosphere has been receiving anthropogenic CO₂, then, chances are, your going to find effects driven by anthropogenic CO₂...There is, however a problem with doing this -- it's almost impossible to interpret accurate climate cycles at high resolutions. This is exactly my point -- we cannot focus on 2 centuries worth of data out of 10 million centuries worth of data. Would you invest your life savings in the stock market based on one minute's worth of data?

The point is that we cant possibly know that it is CO₂ so why are we saying that there is no possible alternative.

(I have edited the above, primarily to correct some formatting and a couple of spelling errors, and removed some parts that did not add to Mr. Koban's points. However, if you believe I did so to change his meaning or quoted him out of context, feel free to read his full comment linked above. - dce)

Much like my discussion with my brother-in-law, Mike brings up points that should not be ignored by the AGW faithful or the skeptics. There are still too many unanswered questions to say "the science is settled" or that "the evidence is incontrovertible". There are still too many unanswered questions that cannot be ignored. Until the answers are found we must not take action that will impoverish the developed nations and trap the developing nations into economic stasis and perpetual poverty, all in the name of "saving the planet."

After the excoriation they received after publishing their letter questioning the validity of the conclusions by some climate scientists as a WSJ op-ed, the "Sixteen Concerned Scientists" have answered their critics with a second piece, asking even more poignant questions about the science, climate models, and what they see as an unreasonable push for draconian measures to combat something that may not even exist.

One of their biggest concerns is the reliance on climate models that have not lived up to their hype, failing to predict the actual global temperatures, including those in the past.

I've mentioned this before. It's called hindcasting and it uses climate data from 70 or 80 years - generally from 1900 onward, for instance - to predict the temperatures for the following 20 or 30 years. To date, every climate model has failed miserably, overestimating the actual temperatures by a wide margin. This means the models don't work and shouldn't be used to predict temperatures over the next 10 years, let alone the next 100 years. Nor should we base any corrective actions based on these seriously defective models. But of course that hasn't stopped the AGW faithful from claiming that we have to "Do Something!" right now or we're all doomed because the climate models say so.

One of the best comments to this second piece came down to a phrase in Latin that is the basis for all scientific inquiries - Nullius In Verba - which means "Take no one's word for it" and is the motto of the Royal Society. And when it comes to the claims that human activity is the major cause of global warming, nullius in verba should be kept in mind until all the work, data, and experimentation has produced repeatable results. So far we haven't reached that point. And until we do I'll maintain my skepticism.

And to quote another non-climate scientist, John Maynard Keynes, whose words should also be kept in mind - "When the facts change I change my mind. What do you do?" That is a question we should be asking all of the AGW faithful. Their answers would be illuminating.