In much of the rolling plains of West Texas, a blizzard has never been recorded.
Until now.
h/t (and stay warm!) Ed S.
Hopenchangen!
Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose!
June 2008 – “…this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal…”
December 2009 – “…at least we kind of held ground and there wasn’t too much backsliding from where we were.”
Who Forgot The Sundial Batteries?
… who braved freezing temperatures to celebrate the winter solstice at Stonehenge were dismayed to discover that they had turned up on the wrong day.
About 300 people dressed in robes met at the stone circle on Monday to greet the rising of the sun on the shortest day of the year. Unfortunately, their calculations were slightly out. They had arrived 24 hours early.
h/t Charles MacDonald
The Sound Of All Hell Breaking Loose: A Lump Of Code In Your Stocking
Steve McIntyre finds something under his tree;
The UK Met Office has released a large tranche of station data, together with code.
Only last summer, the Met Office had turned down my FOI request for station data, saying that the provision of station data to me would threaten the course of UK international relations. Apparently, these excuses have somehow ceased to apply.
Early reviews at Bishop Hill;
Meanwhile, even this extremely limited attempt at openness is not all it seems to be. John G-C has been looking at the code and running it against the data he has. What he has found is that prior to 1855 there was no southern hemisphere data and that when you run the Met Office’s newly released code, this shows up as a gap in the graph of the average. But there is no such gap in the actual CRUTEM index. John’s conclusion is that what we’re looking at is not the actual code used in CRUTEM, but something written especially for public consumption. In light of the scorn that many programmers have been pouring on the quality of the coding standards at CRU, this might suggest that the original code was just too awful to make available for public inspection.
Via Anthony Watts
Update: Reading the comments at the sites linked above, most are in agreement about the nature of the data released.
Heathens Greetings
“Aren’t we forgetting the true meaning of Christmas?” Homer Simpson once asked. “You know, the birth of Santa.”
Like Homer, I enjoy the birthday of Jesus — or Santa. So it pains me to witness fellow atheists acting like a bunch of irritating ’80s
televangelists and defeating the entire purpose of unbelief by
organizing, grousing, wagging their fingers and, worst of all,
proselytizing.
Take the billboards popping up in Las Vegas this year that read
“Reason’s Greetings” and “Heathen’s Greetings.”
The man behind the billboards claims to only want to make people think — because only atheists can really think, after all.
Reader Tips
Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to our 2009 SDA Late Nite Radio Christmas Extravaganza. Tonight, for your delectation, here are:
I should also like to note that a selection of Christmas Carols, formatted for printing, is available from the Sagacious Iconoclast main page and from the SDA Late Nite Radio archives page linked here every night. |
Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.
Y2Kyoto: Build-A-Boycott
Our goal is to entertain and engage the imagination of children with our stuffed animals, our store environment, and online. Our intention with the Polar Bear story was to inspire children, through the voices of our animal characters, to make a difference in their own individual ways. We did not intend to politicize the topic of global climate change or offend anyone in any way. The webisodes concluded this week with Santa successfully leaving on his journey to deliver gifts around the world. The webisodes will no longer be available on the site.
I get the sense that, for as important as it is to yell at elected representatives who endorse policies that damage our interests, it’s the negative feedback directed towards AGW promoting corporations that may produce the most results per complaint over the long run.
Unlike their counterparts in mass media, most sensible retailers understand that the consumer can, and will, reject a product tainted by political agenda. A few angry letters can alert an executive that the global warming “consensus” ain’t what she used to be.
An update from Ed Driscoll, in the comments. “For what it’s worth, the three Build-A-Bear videos that Hot Air linked to are all still up on YouTube, where any kid can, and will stumble across them.”
“Amending Executive Order 12425”
One week ago, President Obama quietly signed an executive order that makes [INTERPOL] immune from the restraints of American law.
[…]
Interpol’s property and assets are no longer subject to search and confiscation, and its archives are now considered inviolable. This international police force (whose U.S. headquarters is in the Justice Department in Washington) will be unrestrained by the U.S. Constitution and American law while it operates in the United States and affects both Americans and American interests outside the United States.
Interpol works closely with international tribunals (such as the International Criminal Court — which the United States has refused to join because of its sovereignty surrendering provisions, though top Obama officials want us in it). It also works closely with foreign courts and law-enforcement authorities (such as those in Europe that are investigating former Bush administration officials for purported war crimes — i.e., for actions taken in America’s defense).
Why would we elevate an international police force above American law? Why would we immunize an international police force from the limitations that constrain the FBI and other American law-enforcement agencies? Why is it suddenly necessary to have, within the Justice Department, a repository for stashing government files which, therefore, will be beyond the ability of Congress, American law-enforcement, the media, and the American people to scrutinize?
More at Threatswatch;
For an added and disturbing wrinkle, INTERPOL’s central operations office in the United States is within our own Justice Department offices. They are American law enforcement officers working under the aegis of INTERPOL within our own Justice Department. That they now operate with full diplomatic immunity and with “inviolable archives” from within our own buildings should send red flags soaring into the clouds.
[…]
Ultimately, a detailed verbal explanation is due the American public from the President of the United States detailing why an international law enforcement arm assisting a court we are not a signatory to has been elevated above our Constitution upon our soil.
Is there nothing that Obama can’t do?
In Conversation With Tom Friedman’s House, A Continuing Series ….
The Sound Of Settled Science
What would we do without peer review?
Fraud rocks protein community
The finding by a university misconduct investigation that a crystallographer “more likely than not” faked almost a dozen protein structures has left the field in shock. The fraud is the largest ever in protein crystallography. The disputed structures had important implications for discovering drugs against dengue virus and for understanding the human immune system.
“It’s massive,” protein crystallographer Wayne Hendrickson of Columbia University in New York says of the investigation’s conclusion. “It’s the worst possible thing.”
In a report released earlier this month, the University of Alabama at Birmingham concluded that H. M. Krishna Murthy acted alone in fabricating and falsifying results that appeared in ten papers published during the past decade. The disputed papers have been cited more than 450 times.
I know what you’re thinking.
There’s a protein community?
h/t John E.
Reader Tips
Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to our 2009 SDA Late Nite Radio Christmas Extravaganza. Tonight, for your delectation, here are:
|
Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.
The Sound Of Settled Science
Hey Phil – you missed a paper;
In his paper, Qing-Bin Lu, a professor of physics and astronomy, shows how CFCs – compounds once widely used as refrigerants – and cosmic rays – energy particles originating in outer space – are mostly to blame for climate change, rather than carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. His paper, derived from observations of satellite, ground-based and balloon measurements as well as an innovative use of an established mechanism, was published online in the prestigious journal Physics Reports.
“My findings do not agree with the climate models that conventionally thought that greenhouse gases, mainly CO2, are the major culprits for the global warming seen in the late 20th century,” Lu said. “Instead, the observed data show that CFCs conspiring with cosmic rays most likely caused both the Antarctic ozone hole and global warming. These findings are totally unexpected and striking, as I was focused on studying the mechanism for the formation of the ozone hole, rather than global warming.”
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.
The rest is at WUWT, (along with lots of discussion/skepticism in the comments).
Y2Kyoto: Build-A-Boycott
[T]he Build-A-Bear empire sweeps across nearly every state and into 17 other countries. You’ll find their outlets in shopping malls everywhere and even some ballparks. The company also has a website called Build-A-Bearville.com where children can play an interactive video game that, on it’s surface, is unlikely to raise suspicion or sound alarms.
But when your unsuspecting tot logs on and hops a virtual train to the North Pole…you should know that he or she will be informed — by Santa Claus — that Christmas may be canceled this year due to Global Warming.
Or flood their order desk with complaints.
h/t Paul S.
Y2Kyoto: “Carbon Trade” And “Credibility”
Carbon prices plunged yesterday in the aftermath of the Copenhagen conference on climate change, dealing a blow to the credibility of the European Union’s carbon-trading scheme.
[…]
Carbon traders blamed the price fall on the Copenhagen conference, which produced an accord among the world’s biggest developed and developing countries to limit their greenhouse gas emissions, but omitted details on what those limits would be. Governments now have a month to submit formal pledges on how far they will reduce their carbon output.
“This [accord] is a very disappointing outcome,” said Trevor Sikorski, director at Barclays Capital. “I see nothing here that should drive investment in low-carbon technology.” He said that it was “bearish for the market and bearish for the world”.
SDA gets results!
Cooking Kirensk
Earlier today Steve McIntyre posted a paper drawing attention to a discrepancy in the CRU’s treatment of Siberian temperature series may have a tendency to overstate the warming trend.
It turns out this was one of those papers that Phil Jones went to town on to keep critical papers out of the published literature. In that paper it mentioned the rural station of Kirensk as one that should be looked at because it has a long record and isn’t subject to urban heat island effects. This is interesting because this station is one that the CRU released as part of their subset of recently released data and it is available in the GHCN records.
So I downloaded the data for both and compared them:
As you can see the GHCN and CRU versions agree fairly closely from about 1950 but CRU has a noticeable warming trend because it is significantly colder in the past. How they justify this sort of adjustment is interesting but unknown since they don’t release their methods. I assume this is some sort of homogeneity adjustment that aligns the trend of this station with neighbours (which may be increasing due to urban effects).
Also note that GHCN also has an “adjusted” series for this station, but those adjustments are minor – usually less than 1/10 of a degree.
That graph provides no less than three temperature series for one station, but it doesn’t tell us which one (if any) are actually right. There is actually one more series for that station, and that is the GHCN Daily measurements. The other series are already monthly averages, and have been processed somewhat. The daily observations, on the other hand, are supposedly completely raw, recording exactly what Ivan wrote down on his form as he trudged out into the Siberian winter to read the thermometer.
Unfortunately, that data is missing the records for the early part of the century, but plotting it is interesting nonetheless:
The station reliably reported from about 1935 to about 1999, after which it has a large number of missing values, which would explain the larger variance from the year 2000 on. Presumably CRU and GHCN estimate the missing days from neighbouring stations and calculate the monthly values from a mix of real observations and estimates.
But both CRU and GHCN show smaller variances from 1935 to 1999, too, even though there are essentially no missing values to estimate. So it appears that even the GHCN “raw” data isn’t really raw, but has been subjected to a degree of homogenization.
So what is the “real” temperature trend of Kirensk and, by extension, southern Siberia? It looks like it can be whatever you want it to be.
Is There Nothing That Obama Can’t Do?
Rasmussen.
Meanwhile, over at the CBC: Can Obama Save The Planet?
To “Salahi”
The president and Mrs. Obama are reportedly outraged…
Strangely enough, Theodore Roosevelt, who was shot while making a speech, and finished it, was not reported to have been outraged. When Puerto Rican nationalist terrorists attacked Blair House, with three wounded, two dead, and at one point only a machine-gun on the stairs between Harry Truman and assassination, the president was not reported to have been outraged. And when Ronald Reagan, bullet near his heart, was wheeled into the emergency room at George Washington University, he was most likely not outraged—because had he been he likely would not have had the wit to say to his surgeons before he was put under, “I hope you’re all Republicans.” Apparently, outrage, like attention span and a good deal else, has devolved with American history.
Nopenchangen
Y2Kyoto: Featured Comments
Posted by: PiperPaul at December 21, 2009 1:29 AM
I’ve always been gobsmacked hearing that one can get a degree in “Climate Science”. Sure, it’s worth studying, but in no way should it be given the respect of, say, mechanical or chemical engineering.
Posted by: Peter O’Donnell at December 21, 2009 2:07 AM
Don’t worry, it isn’t.