More very cool photos here.

Busted – scroll down for the continuing updates….

Today’s good news story comes to us from beyond the Arctic circle. Our friends from the Catlin Expedition haven’t fallen through the ice yet;

When the three (Pen Hadow, Ann Daniels and Martin Hartley) leave messages on the TVM – a machine that records the messages they phone into London HQ – their voices often sound slurred and they occasionally muddle their words.

Sounds like heatstroke.
Update Catlin data hanky-panky? From the comments –

Anthony Watts checks the “live from the ice” data here (thanks for the heads up in the comments).

Something else bothers me: trailing zero deletion. Notice this data sequence:
Martin Core Temp
37.29
37.25
37.24
37.25
37.23
37.21
37.2
37.21
37.22
37.2
37.21
37.2
37.19
37.2
37.21
37.2
37.19
37.2
37.19
37.18
37.19
Notice how the zero is dropped from 37.2? Most data loggers don’t behave that way when logging data, but anyone familiar with a Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet knows of this behavior.
More – this appears to be the root data. I’ve loaded the http://dev.indigopapa.tv/clients/arctic/statsXML.php file and it appears to indeed be hard coded.

UPDATE2: “It gets even stranger. Why would anyone strap a “hand warmer” to a device designed to measure temperature?”
Heh. The Catlin site is edited to read – “Please note, we are disabling the biotelemetry data section of the website for several days. The units themselves are still functioning perfectly, but we need to address an issue with the above display. We hope to have resolved this problem in a matter of days.”
Then, edited again – (exerpt) “The first thing to note is that the data above is a representation of what the team have gone through on a particular day; it is not a live feed. As a project team, we explored the option of live transmissions, and this is certainly possible, using a combination of Bluetooth and Iridium technology. However, such a set-up is particularly power hungry, and given the power limitations imposed on the team (they have to carry all power supplies with them in their sledges), we opted instead to prioritise our power supply elsewhere. As such, biotelemetry data is still captured every five seconds, but it is not transmitted back to the UK in real time.”
And that’s not all that isn’t working.. read the whole thing, including the comments.

Or, how to send a man to the moon using nothing more than a plastic bag and an Electrolux.
h/t Shaken

h/t Kathryn C.
Environment Canada

In memory of Michael Crichton.
Update: Not even in his grave, and already turning!

Via Anthony Watts, who explains – “This is unusual. A live media teleconference on the sun.”

NASA To Discuss Conditions On And Surrounding The Sun
WASHINGTON — NASA will hold a media teleconference Tuesday, Sept. 23, at 12:30 p.m. EDT, to discuss data from the joint NASA and European Space Agency Ulysses mission that reveals the sun’s solar wind is at a 50-year low. The sun’s current state could result in changing conditions in the solar system.

Bookmark this Nasa page for the briefing on the 23rd.

“we now have 3 functioning laboratories on Mars”
Update – the first photos are starting to come in.

They shoot them just to keep the poor buggers from freezing to death.

A Nobel Peace Prize denier;

Two detailed investigations by Committees of the House confirm that the IPCC has deliberately, persistently and prodigiously exaggerated not only the effect of greenhouse gases on temperature but also the environmental consequences of warmer weather.
My contribution to the 2007 report illustrates the scientific problem. The report’s first table of figures – inserted by the IPCC’s bureaucrats after the scientists had finalized the draft, and without their consent – listed four contributions to sea-level rise. The bureaucrats had multiplied the effect of melting ice from the Greenland and West Antarctic Ice Sheets by 10.
The result of this dishonest political tampering with the science was that the sum of the four items in the offending table was more than twice the IPCC’s published total. Until I wrote to point out the error, no one had noticed. The IPCC, on receiving my letter, quietly corrected, moved and relabeled the erroneous table, posting the new version on the internet and earning me my Nobel prize.
[…]
At the very heart of the IPCC’s calculations lurks an error more serious than any of these. The IPCC says: “The CO2 radiative forcing increased by 20 percent during the last 10 years (1995-2005).” Radiative forcing quantifies increases in radiant energy in the atmosphere, and hence in temperature. The atmospheric concentration of CO2 in 1995 was 360 parts per million. In 2005 it was just 5percent higher, at 378 ppm. But each additional molecule of CO2 in the air causes a smaller radiant-energy increase than its predecessor. So the true increase in radiative forcing was 1 percent, not 20 percent. The IPCC has exaggerated the CO2 effect 20-fold.
Why so large and crucial an exaggeration? Answer: the IPCC has repealed the fundamental physicalthe Stefan-Boltzmann equation – that converts radiant energy to temperature. Without this equation, no meaningful calculation of the effect of radiance on temperature can be done. Yet the 1,600 pages of the IPCC’s 2007 report do not mention it once.

h/t reader Peter G.

While it’s the damage to Endeavour’s tiles that dominates the news this morning (hard to know whether it’s as serious as it sounds, given the media’s insistance on sensationalizing any event that brings with it a degree of risk), reader “L’il Walter” passed along a series of photos taken on launch day.

(I’ve been remiss in mentioning that Dave Williams, who is charged with making the repairs, is Saskatoon born.)
Click here for more.

Save the planet – get your dirty feet off it;

Food production is now so energy-intensive that more carbon is emitted providing a person with enough calories to walk to the shops than a car would emit over the same distance. The climate could benefit if people avoided exercise, ate less and became couch potatoes. Provided, of course, they remembered to switch off the TV rather than leaving it on standby.
The sums were done by Chris Goodall, campaigning author of How to Live a Low-Carbon Life, based on the greenhouse gases created by intensive beef production. “Driving a typical UK car for 3 miles [4.8km] adds about 0.9 kg [2lb] of CO2 to the atmosphere,” he said, a calculation based on the Government’s official fuel emission figures. “If you walked instead, it would use about 180 calories. You’d need about 100g of beef to replace those calories, resulting in 3.6kg of emissions, or four times as much as driving.
“The troubling fact is that taking a lot of exercise and then eating a bit more food is not good for the global atmosphere. Eating less and driving to save energy would be better.”

It’s official. The only way to meet the one tonne challenge is to kill somebody.
(h/t Tenebris)

As word of the revised GISS temperature rankings (1998 no longer the hottest year on record in USA) spreads, reaction is predictable. Steve McIntyre’s Climate Audit is under DOS attack.
How pathetic.

Go, Dave!

* spelling corrected. (Though I share the honour with a gazillion news outlets.)

New energy technology that doesn’t have us filling our tanks with zebra dung distillate or paving Nebraska with solar collecters;

In basic ways, Alex Fassbender’s breakthrough in clean-coal technology retains James Watt’s methodology from the 18th century. You pulverize coal into particles as fine as talcum powder, then burn it in a furnace surrounded by pipes filled with water. You direct the steam into turbines that spin to produce electricity. In other basic ways, though, it is very different. For one thing, there’s no smokestack.
Mr. Fassbender is the American engineer whose invention – as tested last year in the federal government’s energy labs in Ottawa – delivered clean electricity at a lower cost than the inventor himself had expected. Code-named TIPS (Thermo-energy Integrated Power System), the technology strips coal of its pollutants and captures its carbon emissions in power plants a 10th the size of conventional plants.

More – a little red meat for the engineering types: PRESSURIZED OXY-FUEL COMBUSTION FOR MULTI-POLLUTANT CAPTURE.

*

NASA is holding a news conference shortly to “announce significant find on Mars”.
Update: Here’s the transcript

NARRATOR: First of all, in 25 words or less, what is the news about water?
MALIN: The news about water is that we have found two gullies out of the 10,000 that we have observed that have fresh deposits that we believe were formed by water flowing out recently.
NARRATOR: How recently?
MALIN: Within the last five years.

Woohoo!

This is definitely progress:

The latest part of the Conservatives’ long-awaited strategy focuses more on smog than on global warming…

Excellent. Naturally, the Conservatives will get nothing but criticism from environmentalists and the left-lib media, but this is exactly what they should be doing.
Whether you believe CO2 emissions are a threat to the Earth or not, surely Kyoto supporters in Canada should be embarassed about spending billions, making lofty speeches, and then having a worse record on CO2 emissions than the U.S.
So, let the critics seethe and wail. I’ll take effective measures to limit smog over useless sanctimoniousness any day.
But for those who are interested in following the science of Global Warming, I notice stories like this still get systematically underreported:

A team at the Danish National Space Center has discovered how cosmic rays from exploding stars can help to make clouds in the atmosphere. The results support the theory that cosmic rays influence Earth’s climate.
(snip)
Interestingly, during the 20th Century, the Sun’s magnetic field which shields Earth from cosmic rays more than doubled, thereby reducing the average influx of cosmic rays.
The resulting reduction in cloudiness, especially of low-altitude clouds, may be a significant factor in the global warming Earth has undergone during the last century. However, until now, there has been no experimental evidence of how the causal mechanism linking cosmic rays and cloud formation may work.
(snip)
“Some said there was no conceivable way in which cosmic rays could influence cloud cover. The SKY experiment now shows how they do so, and should help to put the cosmic-ray connection firmly onto the agenda of international climate research.”

Well, yes, it should, but almost certainly won’t. You can’t usefully demonize anyone by better understanding natural effects on the climate.

We have the technology;

Silica provides structural support to diatoms (single-celled organisms known for their remarkable nanostructural details) while silk proteins from spiders and silkworms are more flexible, stronger and able to self-assemble into readily defined structures. The Tufts researchers were able to design and clone genetic fusions of the encoding genes for these two proteins, and then generate these genetically engineered proteins into nanocomposites at ambient temperatures using only water. In contrast, high temperatures and harsh conditions are typically required by geochemical and industrial synthesis of silica in the laboratory.
Another remarkable detail about the spider silk-silica composite is its size. While past tests using silica have formed silica particles with a diameter between 0.5 and 10 nanometers, the silk-glass composite has a diameter size distribution between 0.5 and 2 nanometers. The smaller, more uniform size will provide better control and more options for processing, which would be “important benefits for biomedical and specialty materials,” according to the research.

BBC – “Geologists in Iceland are drilling directly into the heart of a hot volcano”.

Omar Friedleifsson of the Iceland Geosurvey is leading the consortium of energy companies in the Iceland Deep Drilling Project.
Last year, they drilled down to a depth of 3,082m and since then have been conducting flow tests.
Later this year, they will put a pressure lining into their borehole and drill on down to more than 4km deep.
At that depth, they hope to encounter what is called supercritical water: water that is not simply a mixture of steam and hot water but a single phase which can carry much more energy.
Engineers on the project have calculated that increasing the temperature by 200 degrees and the pressure by 200 Bar will mean that, for the same flow rate, the energy extracted from such a borehole will go up from 5MW to 50MW.
Power station manager Albert Albertsson predicts that, by the end of the century, “Iceland could become the Kuwait of the North”. The vision is to use this cheap and carbon-free energy to split water, to yield hydrogen that could be despatched around the world in tankers.

h/t The Corner.