Cause and Effect and Global Warming Hysteria

When scientists confuse cause and effect aka "that's my story and I'm sticking to it."
H/T to Secondhand Smoke for picking up on the article from the WSJ

For  years we have heard that we humans have caused CO2 to rise–and hence it is “physics,” to  use Al Gore’s terminology–that we are causing warming.  Proof was in the ice core pudding.  But then, we found that the earth warmed before the CO2 level rose in the past.  But why let that interfere with an easy to sell government/GWH complex story line? More here

Rare winter solstice lunar eclipse visible tonight. Next chance- 2094

Hasn't occurred in 372 years...
From Reuters 
U.S. skywatchers who stay up late enough and have clear skies can see a total lunar eclipse, a rare event for the winter solstice. More

something in her eyes- tiny numbers and letters in the eyes of the Mona Lisa

Intrigue is usually focused on her enigmatic smile.

But the Mona Lisa was at the centre of a new mystery yesterday after art detectives took a fresh look at the masterpiece – and noticed something in her eyes.

Hidden in the dark paint of her pupils are tiny letters and numbers, placed there by the artist Leonardo da Vinci and revealed only now thanks to high-­magnification techniques.

Read more: here

a 33-megajoule firing -The Railgun Becomes Reality

...the Navy produced a 33-megajoule firing ....

A single megajoule is roughly equivalent to a 1-ton car traveling at 100 mph. Multiple that by

33 and you get a picture of what would happen when such a weapon hits a target....

A theoretical dream for decades, the railgun is unlike any other weapon used in warfare. And it's quite realtoo, as the U.S. Navy has proven in a record-setting test today in Dahlgren, VA.

Rather than relying on a explosion to fire a projectile, the technology uses an electomagnetic current to accelerate a non-explosive bullet at several times the speed of sound. The conductive projectile zips along a set of electrically charged parallel rails and out of the barrel at speeds up to Mach 7. 

The result: a weapon that can hit a target 100 miles or more away within minutes.....

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/12/10/navy-railgun-shoots-bullets-electromagnet/#ixzz17m7bWcKI

mobile phones a risk to foetuses

Ok- I'm not taking it too seriously but its kinda funny these first couple of paragraphs:

From the Sydney Morning Herald

PREGNANT women who regularly use mobile phones may be more likely to have children with behavioural problems, particularly if their children start using mobile phones in their first seven years, new research suggests.

American scientists reported that foetuses regularly exposed to mobile phones in the womb had a 30 per cent greater chance of behavioural difficulties at the age of seven.

Unfortunately its an American study

fatal flaws in the NASA study of arsenic-based life

"This Paper Should Not Have Been Published"

 "I was outraged at how bad the science was," she told me.

Redfield blogged a scathing attack on Saturday. Over the weekend, a few other scientists took to the Internet as well. Was this merely a case of a few isolated cranks? To find out, I reached out to a dozen experts on Monday. Almost unanimously, they think the NASA scientists have failed to make their case. More from Slate

405-Pound Chicken (of the sea)

SAN DIEGO -- A Central California man caught what is considered a world record-breaking tuna while fishing in Mexican waters. More here

Second record set by the man who caught the Tuna. He now has the world's longest arms. Man that's a lot of sandwiches....

MRI scans live birth

A team comprised of obstetricians, radiologists and engineers have built an “open” MRI scanner that allows a mother-to-be to fit fully into the machine and give birth there, the hospital announced on Tuesday....more here


I think the baby's expression kinda sums up all the feelings one might have whilst one's head is being put through a vice...

New York to Sydney in just 2hrs 30mins

NASA is planning to build hypersonic jets that will fly through the Earth’s atmosphere and slash flight times around the world to a few hours at most.

The US space agency wants to manufacture a craft that would travel at five times the speed of sound and bring in a new age of aircraft akin to a turbo-charged Concorde.

Travelling at such speed would reduce the flight time from New York to Sydney to around two-and-a-half hours, from the 21 hours it is now.

The project is thought to be aimed at making a reusable aircraft that could fly to Mars but, as with previous space technology, it could have a huge impact upon passenger transport too.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1326618/Nasa-develop-hypersonic-jets-travel-5-times-speed-sound.html#ixzz14jRlVXWo

Here's A Story You Won't See On This Side of the Pond

Global warming science implodes overseas: American media silent

Remember when our press was the best in the world? Vanguards of the truth? If there was any lingering doubt in your mind about how far journalism has fallen in this country then this matter should finally put it to rest:( From American Thinker)

The revelations have been nothing short of jaw dropping. Dozens - yes dozens - of claims made in the IPCC 2007 report on climate change that was supposed to represent the "consensus" of 2500 of the world's climate scientists have been shown to be bogus, or faulty, or not properly vetted, or simply pulled out of thin air.

We know this because newspapers in Great Britain are doing their job; vetting the 2007 report item by item, coming up with shocking news about global warming claims that formed the basis of argument by climate change advocates who were pressuring the US and western industrialized democracies to transfer trillions of dollars in wealth to the third world and cede sovereignty to the UN.
Glaciergate, tempgate, icegate, and now, disappearing Amazon forests not the result of warming, but of logging. And the report the IPCC based their bogus "science" on was written by a food safety advocate according to this Christopher Booker piece in the Telegraph :

Dr North next uncovered "Amazongate". The IPCC made a prominent claim in its 2007 report, again citing the WWF as its authority, that climate change could endanger "up to 40 per cent" of the Amazon rainforest - as iconic to warmists as those Himalayan glaciers and polar bears. This WWF report, it turned out, was co-authored by Andy Rowell, an anti-smoking and food safety campaigner who has worked for WWF and Greenpeace, and contributed pieces to Britain's two most committed environmentalist newspapers. Rowell and his co-author claimed their findings were based on an article in Nature. But the focus of that piece, it emerges, was not global warming at all but the effects of logging.

A Canadian analyst has identified more than 20 passages in the IPCC's report which cite similarly non-peer-reviewed WWF or Greenpeace reports as their authority, and other researchers have been uncovering a host of similarly dubious claims and attributions all through the report. These range from groundless allegations about the increased frequency of "extreme weather events" such as hurricanes, droughts and heatwaves, to a headline claim that global warming would put billions of people at the mercy of water shortages - when the study cited as its authority indicated exactly the opposite, that rising temperatures could increase the supply of water. (more)

ClimateGate- The conspiracy to hide information against global warming

***Updated*** added link to referenced NASA temp error
***UPDATE*** searchable database here
***UPDATE*** University spokesman confirms hack


If you have visited this site for any length of time you know I am no fan of the view that man is responsible for global climate change. My view has been and continues to be, that global warming is a currently a fiction and that the more recent declarations of climate "change" are cyclical rather than man-made. Views to the contrary are either driven by blameless ignorance or by political agendas which have hijacked science to make their point. I've been in the weather forecasting business for too long (25years) to believe otherwise.

Attached articles seem to indicate that someone hacked e-mails that prove the position to greater links than even I could have imagined. If this turns out to be as damning as it seems then it is clear that no conspiracy theory is too great to account for the climate change alarmists data.
Which is certainly nothing new since NASA was caught fudging temperature data some time ago. (whether it was deliberate fudging or simply an inherant problem with computer models, the result is about the same. Remember, computer models do not reflect El Nino/Nina or account for blocking highs ) Still...
For discussion of the NASA temp correction see Am Spectator GeoTimes for example. Go here for a pretty good summary of problems computer models have and are providing and some of the other errors that have had to be corrected.

Here's a sample:

Well I have my own article on where the heck is global warming ? We are asking that here in Boulder where we have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record. We had 4 inches of snow. The high the last 2 days was below 30F and the normal is 69F, and it smashed the previous records for these days by 10F. The low was about 18F and also a record low, well below the previous record low.
This is January weather (see the Rockies baseball playoff game was canceled on saturday and then played last night in below freezing weather)....
....The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.***

comment from Hot Air: Do scientists use data to test theories, or do they use theories to test data? Scientists will claim the former, but here we have scientists who cling to the theory so tightly that they reject the data. That’s not science; it’s religious belief.

more:
Here are some speculations on correcting SSTs to partly explain the 1940s warming blip. If you look at the attached plot you will see that theland also shows the 1940s blip (as I’m sure you know).So, if we could reduce the ocean blip by, say, 0.15 degC, then this would be significant for the global mean – but we’d still have to explain the land blip.

H/T Hot Air and Watts Up With That

New Site for Adult Stem Cell Resources

www.stemcellresearchfacts.org is part of a campaign to educate and spread awareness about the potentials and successes of adult stem cell therapies. H/T Zenit

Silence Galileo Again

"Galileo Silenced Again" is the name of a post over at the Heartland Institute.
In the introduction paragraphs the authors have this to say about Galileo's run in with the Church:

Four centuries ago, “heretics” who disagreed with Church orthodoxy were burned at the stake. Many were the dissenting views that could send offenders to a fiery end.
In 1633, the astronomer Galileo Galilei came within a singed whisker of the same fate, for arguing that the sun (and not the Earth) was at the center of the solar system. He was saved only because he was already famous, had good friends in high government places, and agreed to recant his “heresy” (at least publicly) and submit to living under house arrest until the end of his days.

We’ve come a long way since then. The Church eventually adopted Galileo’s view of science as its own: Nature is the criterion of the truth about nature. ....

Which of course is not true but it is one of the more famous of the Politically Correct truths of the day. The Politically Incorrect truth is that Galileo found himself in the predicament he was in, not because he said the earth was not the center of the universe but because he said it without sufficiently arguing the scientific case against geocentrism. Among the problems with the theory as presented by Galileo was he said the tides were responsible for the earth's motion and he never answered the geocentrist argument involving stellar parallax. Tycho Brahe, who could hardly be called an enemy of science was unconvinced by Galileo. So it really wasn't, as is the popular myth, that the Church was/is against science. But rather the "sin" Galileo was guilty of was bad science and his insistence that the Church take seriously a theory still in its infancy. A theory if you will, that had not yet learned to walk.

There is a delicious irony to the the title, "Galileo Silenced Again." The posting describes the attempts of the authors, to host a scientific session entitled, "Diverse Views from Galileo’s Window: Researching Factors and Processes of Climate Change in the Age of Anthropogenic CO2." The session was to be hosted at the upcoming Fall 2009 Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco.

As the American Spectator puts it, "It was a "go" until it wasn't. The AGU put a stop to the session due to highly suspect causes which seem to toddle about with all the directness of a very young child. Speculation rests on the idea that perhaps the AGU preferred silence to any questioning of the official party line choosing to ignore research that contradicts it.

The Church in Galileo's day was the seat or at least the springboard and ally of many great scientific discoveries. Galileo's case was an exceptional one. The Church acted as a gate-keeper for bad science among others. No gate-keeper and we are overrun by bad science. The theory of man-made climate change has no legs. Would that we could silence Galileo again.

"one million times smaller than a grain of sand"

Simply amazing. A photograph of a molecule.

Wow.

The story can be found here

The researchers focused on a single molecule of pentacene, which is commonly used in solar cells. The rectangular-shaped organic molecule is made up of 22 carbon atoms and 14 hydrogen atoms.
In the image above the hexagonal shapes of the five carbon rings are clear and even the positions of the hydrogen atoms around the carbon rings can be seen.
To give some perspective, the space between the carbon rings is only 0.14 nanometers across, which is roughly one million times smaller than the diameter of a grain of sand.

"...the LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being. "

New Zealand just got a little bit bigger

I figure neither the Australians nor the New Zealanders are very happy about this but it is striking news:

WELLINGTON (AFP) – A massive 7.8 magnitude earthquake last week has moved the south of New Zealand closer to Australia, scientists said Wednesday. (more)

Wow even if it is only a foot, that's pretty amazing. Next thing you know they'll be sharing a beer.

Casual Sex is Unhealthy

Doctors, Joe McIlhaney and Freda McKissic Bush, explain what we now know about sex and the human brain in their book, Hooked: New Science on How Casual Sex Is Affecting Our Children

From OneWoldNews:

...Males have their own neurochemical related to bonding: vasopressin. It floods the male brain during sexual intercourse, causing him to feel at least partially bonded to every woman with whom he's been intimate. If men begin a pattern of having sex with partner after partner, they risk not developing the ability to form long-term emotional attachment. As McIlhaney and Bush put it: "Their inability to bond after multiple liaisons is almost like tape that loses its stickiness after being applied and removed multiple times." ...

...Now let's add to that new information that neuroscience teaches us about the brain chemistry of sex and bonding some cold, hard facts about how effective birth control really is when it comes to teenagers. The authors of Hooked have compiled the following statistics from various sources:

- 20 percent of 12- to 18-year-olds using the Pill will become pregnant within six months

- 20 percent of teens under 18 using condoms will become pregnant within a year

- 50 percent of female teenagers who live with a boyfriend and use contraception will become pregnant within a year...

...For those of us unconvinced by moral or religious arguments, it's time to re-order our priorities. Now that we have science behind us, it's time for society to change its collective mind when it comes to sex, just as it did with smoking. Maybe in one generation, we can undergo a transformation when it comes to sex outside of marriage. Maybe TV shows and movies will stop implying that casual sex is no big deal. Maybe we'll begin to teach young people that waiting till marriage is best. Then the dopamine and the oxytocin and the vasopressin can do their jobs of helping to make two people one.

What the heck is that video? Updated with links to funny science songs

My son has an assignment in his science class to create a power point/music presentation on a science theme. They have to substitute science information in a song. Because of his interest in German he has chosen music from a German group that isn't available on ITunes. It is available on YouTube but he can't access YouTube from school. He can access my blog so he hopes to access in this way.

All of this begins to explain why I haven't posted much this week...

the link to Tom Lehrer's "The Element Song."

the link to The First and Second Law.

Thanks to Otepoti for both.

The Missing Link Goes Missing

It made front page news here in my hometown. Referred to by many as the "missing link" it has quickly gone the way of the "gay gene".

The fossil of a lemurlike creature that probably weighed no more than 2 pounds when it was fully grown is remarkable because it is the most complete primate specimen ever obtained from so long ago, experts say. (statesman)

Hmm, well that didn't seem so big a deal after all.

The discovery was presented with much fanfare at a press conference at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where researchers called the finding a "missing link" and a publisher from Little, Brown (which put out a related book called "The Link") called it "a scientific discovery that will undoubtedly revolutionize how we understand our own evolution." (FoxNews)

Oh well, there you have it, the precursor ahead of the book release. That explains the hoopla and the lack of science...

...David Attenborough announced with confidence that the missing link ‘is no longer missing,’ but the way the evidence has been presented and handled has raised questions about media manipulation, especially from the London Times science correspondent Mark Henderson; he seems quite miffed.

Mark Henderson reports that doubts have arisen now that others have finally been given access to the fossil and suggests that Ida is related to ‘nothing that exists today.’ Although Ida is an important fossil, he writes that ‘she isn’t all that’ and complains that the researchers haven’t provided sufficient evidence to justify their claims. He argues that this is…
‘…especially serious given the publicity blitz behind Ida…a popular book, a documentary, a website and an exhibition have been launched on the back of this find, before it has received full scientific scrutiny.’ (Uncommon Descent)

Even Time Magazine said the whole thing is overhyped:

...Most paleontologists will roll their eyes at that sort of overhyped nonsense, especially given that there's real science lurking underneath. After wading through the false advertising, though, most people might have a hard time finding it.


The sorry state of modern journalism, and science for profit make for an awkward coupling do they not?

The Oprah Winfrey Show – A Platform to Advocate the Use of Adult Stem Cells?

Nice to see the show being used for something good for a change...

From STR:
...Wouldn't it be great to use Oprah Winfrey's TV show to explain how adult stem cells are superior to embryonic stem cells for potentially treating Parkinson’s disease?
Ask and you shall receive.

Check out how Dr. Oz explains to Oprah, her audience, and Michael J. Fox (an ardent embryonic stem cell supporter) that "the stem cell debate is dead." The reason? He says embryonic stem cells aren't as desirable because they can become cancerous. Adult stem cells, on the other hand, can be induced to become as flexible as embryonic stem cells without the cancerous side effects. I think Dr. Oz even hints (although he doesn’t spell it out) that cloning won’t be necessary since adult stem cells have the same genes as the patient. (more)

"aborted fetuses offer 'at least a temporary solution' to the shortage of available organs for people in need of transplants."

It worked for Embryos so... A frighteningly accurate post by STR. Folks we need to wake up and fight...


Let's apply the same reasoning to unwanted fetuses. At least, that's what Oxford professor Richard Gardner is advocating, saying that "aborted fetuses offer 'at least a temporary solution' to the shortage of available organs for people in need of transplants."

From a Slate article:
Two arguments have persuaded the United States to fund stem-cell research using destroyed embryos. One is that the research will save lives. The other is that the embryos, left over from fertility treatments, will otherwise be wasted. Both arguments are now being applied to fetuses.

Apparently, "it is a shame to waste their organs," since they're going to die anyway.
We have reached a seemingly impassable great divide in Western culture--the divide at the root of conflict after conflict between the two sides. One side sees human life as intrinsically valuable, the other does not. One side has an unshakable grounding for human rights in a Creator, ensuring that no mere human or group of humans will be granted the authority to pick and choose which human beings are worthy or unworthy of rights based on whichever characteristics they happen to favor. The other pays lip service to the idea of human rights and dignity because the idea still feels good, but little by little lets those rights slip away when pressed by expediency. In the end, on their side, there is no real human value. Instead, the value lies in what a human can do, either alive or dead. And we get to decide in which of these two categories a human being will do the most good. This kind of value is not objective, but subjective, based on the preference of others. And since rights are granted by other humans, they can be taken away for a "good cause."

And that side will take away. I guarantee you this is only the beginning. (more)