Update 3/24/2012 — I’m reconsidering my concern over Pinterest. Pinterest has come out with revised terms and is working on making private pinboards available.

I’ve developed a Pinterest Policy page.  Most pages here will be open for pinning, though the front page, archives, and selected pages will have it blocked.

A Pinterest pinboard, to me, is an online, published compilation of images that someone has collected.   It’s sort of like a published scrapbook.  If ya publish it, ya need to have the rights to publish the individual items in the scrapbook (compilation).

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I don’t like it.

It’s a great concept – organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web.

There’s just two big sticky problems.

Copyright

The first is called copyright infringement.

Pinterest is primarily based around collecting pictures.  In collecting images and “pinning” them on their pinboards, the Pinterest user is publishing copies of other peoples’ work.

Copyright of a photograph or drawing starts as soon as an image is fixed in some sort of permanent form.  For electronic images, that occurs as soon as an image is saved as a file.

Making copies of this file, including publishing it somewhere other than where it is intended, violates the exclusive right of the creator of the image to make and/or approve copies.  The right to copy is why it’s called copyright.  If you didn’t create it and didn’t get permission, then you don’t have a right to copy, you don’t have a right to pin.

Terms of Use

The other big problem is the Pinterest terms of use.

Under the terms of  use, if you use Pinterest, then you  “represent and warrant that: (i) you either are the sole and exclusive owner of all Member Content that you make available through the Site, Application and Services or you have all rights, licenses, consents and releases that are necessary to grant to Cold Brew Labs the rights in such Member Content.”

The terms of use also says none of your Pinterest activities “will infringe, misappropriate or violate a third party’s patent, copyright, trademark, trade secret, moral rights or other proprietary or intellectual property rights, or rights of publicity or privacy, or result in the violation of any applicable law or regulation.”

In other words, by the terms of use that everyone agrees to before they can use Pinterest, every user is saying they have the right or permission to use every single thing that they are putting on their pinboard.

Somehow I rather doubt that many users really understand or that they even actually read the terms of use, let alone this part.

Wikipedia has an interesting statement concerning Pinterest and the issue of copyright.

Pinterest has a notification system which allows copyright holders to request that content be removed from the site. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) safe harbor status of Pinterest has been questioned given that it actively promotes its users to copy to Pinterest, for their perpetual use, any image on the internet. Pinterest users cannot claim safe harbor status and as such are exposed to possible legal action for pinning copyrighted material. (emphasis mine – MpG)

While it’s an interesting concept, given the present state of the internet and current copyright laws and treaties, the design of Pinterest by its very nature fosters unintended abuse of the intellectual property rights of others.

I’ve spent too much time researching and learning about copyright.  I ‘m going to have to take a pass on Pinterest.

Copy Right, Copy Sense

Yes, but no.

Napoleon is believed by many to have been a shorty.  Perhaps so by today’s standards, but he was above average height for the period in which he lived.

During the Napoleonic wars, the British Tory press depicted Napoleon as shorter than average.  This perception took hold and persists to this day.  Napoleon complex is a supposed inferiority complex where short people compensate for lack of height with over-aggressive behavior.  The clichéd image of Napoleon in popular culture is of a comically short petty tyrant.

The misunderstanding over Napoleon’s height arose over the differences between the English and French systems of measurement.  The French Revolutionary government established the first legal basis for the metric system in 1795.  Implementation was poorly managed and the system was widely unpopular.

By imperial decree, in 1812, Napoleon instituted a revised system.  Under it, the pied (foot) was 1/3 metre, with 12 pouce (inches) in each pied.

While the French system of metre, pied and pounce were similar in concept to the English Imperial yard, foot and inch, the French units were actually 9.3% larger.

Under the 1812 French units, if Napoleon was about 5 pied (feet), 2 pouce (inches) in height, he would be just under 5 feet, 8 inches by the English system.  The average height of European men at the time was about 5 feet, 3 inches.

Perception misconception.

This is one of those (secretive  s-h-h-h-h ) benchmarks that lots of folks seem to want to keep hush-hush, no more than whispered about, when they get there.

Not me.  I’d rather just face it (and get it over with) and embrace it (what more can you do?) fully.  Today, I turned sixty.

Every day, about 330 or so boomers reach this point.  Born in the 50s, radical in the 60s (not me!) and early 70s, settled down in the 80s, splurged in the 90s, and lost our financial butts in the 2000s (not me ).

Supposedly sixty is the new 30 – or is that the new 40?  I don’t know about that.  I think it’s just rationalization for some people, to make them feel better when they get there here.

I took another tack on dealing with this benchmark and it really helps to lessen the impact.  Over the last year, as the time  grew closer and closer, I just more and more started thinking of my age as 60 instead of 59.  After all, since last summer sometime, I’ve actually been closer to 60 than 59. 

I don’t feel 60 – mentally or physically.

Retirement? Still doin’ it – part time.

Check out Exit78 on Facebook.

Scarlet fever is one of those illness that I thought modern medicine had virtually eradicated.

However, the truth is that scarlet fever, once a major cause of death, is still around, but is usually quite effectively treated with antibiotics.  Generally a childhood disease, scarlet fever is caused by toxins released by a bacteria called group A Streptococcus or “group A strep”, the same bacteria that causes strep throat.

Outbreak in Asia.

Over 400 cases of scarlet fever have been identified in Hong Kong in the last few weeks, with new cases being reported at about 25 a day.  Two deaths of young children have been attributed to the disease, a seven year old girl in May and a five year old boy in June.  Nearly all of the infections have been in children under the age of ten with most occurring in clusters in schools and child care centers.

Scarlet fever occurs every year in Hong Kong, but at much lower numbers.

A genetic mutation may be the cause of the outbreak. If so, it may be more difficult to control. Dr. Samson Wong Sai-yin, a University of Hong Kong assistant professor and medical microbiologist, told Hong Kong’s English daily, The Standard, “”It is the first time we have seen this kind of mutation in that particular type of Streptococcus.”

Besides Hong Kong, the disease is spreading through nearby regions of China and Macau.

Additional information:

• U. S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
• Wikipedia
• CBS News
• BBC
• Washington Post BlogPost

In the last couple of days, hundreds of news articles have been reporting on the strange behavior of the sun.

Three new scientific papers released simultaneously June 14th suggest that our sun’s magnetic activity and sunspot cycle may be going somewhat dormant for a while – possibly several decades – resulting in a period of global cooling. The results were announced at the annual meeting of the Solar Physics Division of the American Astronomical Society, which is being held this week at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces.

I’ve been following and writing about the unusual behavior of the sun for quite a while.  I check the status of solar activity and sunspots on a regular basis, sometimes daily.  It’s just a quick check, just to monitor the disparity between what’s been predicted and what is actually occurring.

On March 29, 2009 – a little over 2 years ago – I wrote, “A number of scientists are projecting that global warming is over, for now, and that global average temperatures will be dropping for the next 20 to 30 years.”   Last December, writing about what an extended lull in solar activity might mean, I said, “Bottom line – it’s going to get colder.”

I don’t want to be right on this.

During the Dalton Minimum, a period of low solar activity lasting from about 1790 to 1830, frigid winters and cold summers resulted in massive crop failures, famine and death.  The Maunder Minimum, from about 1645 to 1715, also corresponded to a period of low solar activity and coincided with the coldest part of the Little Ice Age.

I’d rather have global warming.

Other factors could mitigate or exacerbate the effect of this solar slumber.  It is already being suggested that anthropogenic global warming – warming caused by human carbon emissions – for example, could mitigate how cold it gets.  It is also being suggested by some that , rather cooling, this might merely temper the impact of global warming.

Unfortunately, I think that society will come to learn that anthropogenic global warming has already done all that it do.

A couple of things come to mind that could cause this to be worse – increased volcanic activity and the shifting of major ocean currents from their warm phase to the cold phase.  As we’ve seen in recent news reports, volcanic activity seems to be on the rise.  As well, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, a cyclic thermal phenomenon in the Pacific Ocean that lasts several decades, is shifting out of its warm phase into its cold phase.

I really do not want to be right on this.

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The image below is a composite of the solar sunspot predictions from 4 years ago and the actual results as of December 2010.  The red lines are smoothed high and low predicted values from 2007.  The blue lines are actual monthly results and smoothed monthly results from December 2010.

The tagline for this blog says that the blog is about sharing photos and images along with occasional commentary.

Lately, there’s not been much of any of any of that.

I’ve selected and randomly sorted a large number of my photos and collected images – and I’m going to start posting them on a fairly regular basis, starting tomorrow.  Some of the pictures will have appeared here before; most, though, will be posted for the first time.

Two and half men,
Now, it’s a sin,
Old Charlie Sheen,
Screwin’ up a’gin!
(…and a’gin …and a’gin.)

I can honestly say that I’ve never watched a single episode of Sheen’s show.  I also don’t watch much TV at all, but, lately I’ve seen far more of the pompous and erratic Mr. Sheen than I really ever wanted to.

However, I’m not really interested in writing about Sheen’s “situation.”  To me, the real story is elsewhere.

The recent media and public attention has enabled his high profile professional self-destruction.

We’ve seen it over and over again where the problems and  faults of a public personality have been more newsworthy than real world events –  Tiger Woods, Linsay Lohan, Mel Gibson, Britney Spears, etc., etc., etc.  Some stories flame out quickly and you don’t hear about them again until the celebrity screws up again.  Others go on and on because of who the person is more than what the person has done.  Then there are those like Sheen, who jumps on the media whoopla train and rides it to destruction.

The reason these things make it on air, online, and in print, of course, is because people pay attention when someone who has it made fails spectacularly – and, advertisers pay for what people tune in, go online, and read about.

Sheen has crashed, stories about it are are being watched and read everywhere – and his co-stars and all the support personnel for what was the most popular sitcom are now out of work.

I’ve seen more of it than I wanted to and I’m done paying much attention to it.

What about you?

How many times have you seen it? How many times have you done it?
I see it a lot and it’s starting to get scary.

I know —it’s hard not to do it.

Everyone else does it.

I used to do it all the time and, last week, I did it, even though I’ve tried very hard to resist the impulse.

Read the rest of this January 4, 2006 post (recovered February 25, 2011).

A few years back, when moving the blog location, I lost many of my older blog posts and images. Recently, while exploring the Internet Archive WayBackMachine, I discovered much of what I had lost.  I’ll be restoring the lost material and will share some of the better “recovered blog posts.”

Today, I found and recovered my very first blog post – and have posted it here on the date it was originally published, September 14, 2004.  It was recovered from the Internet Archive’s WayBackMachine.

As best as I can tell, I abandoned Skedaddle’s Log after only a very few blog posts.  During the next month, I established 3 niche  blogs and North Farnham Freeholder, with all but that very first post moved to it.

I had been trying to make some income online for a while. At the time there was no way to place ads on blogspot  (which was also known as blogger).  After looking at several different blogging platforms, I decided to self-host and use WordPress, moving North Farnham Freeholder to the web host I had been using for a while.

A couple of years later, Exit78 was established, with many of the old posts being moved to exit78.com/weblog.  Then, in early 2009, my blogging at Exit78 was moved to the root directory, exit78.com.  Unfortunately, I made a change that wouldn’t let me access the original Exit78 location and, when I tried to fix that, I ended up losing many of the older posts.

I’ve been able to recover quite a few over time and, yesterday, found that many that hadn’t been recovered were available on the Internet Archive WayBack Machine.  I’ll be recovering those, republishing them here on Exit78 at their original publish date.

Do remember when you first started blogging?

Do you still have or can you find your very first blog post?

Well Christmas has come, and soon will be gone.

It’s cold here and, while we had some flurries this morning, it’s not a white Christmas.  The winter storm that hit the southeast US missed us.

Our youngest daughter, her hubby and kids are traveling from the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee on their way home.  Part of their travel was to be through some areas with snow, but, hopefully, it wasn’t too bad.  Living in the north, they are familiar with winter weather.

We had an abbreviated visit with our older daughter – shorter than planned.  Her husband had a bad cold and stayed home.  She had a short visit with her mother-in-law and then came up the hill for a middle of the day meal with us and a few hours with us before leaving with enough time to get home before dark.

I hope that the rest of the holiday season – and next year – is great for everyone.

while we hike over to that next thing over there.”

or words to that effect.

We were on top of Inferno Cone when I heard one of the moms in that group say that.

I couldn’t believe guess nothing should surprise me out in the nation’s parks and this probably wasn’t that big a deal.

Except it’s not a town or city kind of park.  It’s not a playground.  There isn’t any slides or swings.  And – that “next thing over there” was down off the Inferno cone and over at least a half a mile.

I could just imagine those little guys getting tired of playing up there and heading off to find the rest of the group.

Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve is a wild place.  Oh sure, there probably aren’t any bears and there certainly aren’t any dangerous buffalo or moose.

But there are snakes… and holes little boys can fall into… and other places where people can get lost – and, then, there’s the heat. 

Though it wasn’t terribly hot that morning, you can see the heat waves shimmering  above the cinder rocks in a photo taken not long after those above. 

In that whole group of adults and kids, there might have been two water bottles, maybe three – though at least one lady was carrying a good sized purse.

I guess it could be that these folks were from the area, that they were familiar with it and that there was nothing to worry about.

But then again, we used to live in the area and would never have dreamed of just letting our kids “play” in a place like this, wonderful as it was, while we went on down to the “next thing.” 

They didn’t have to be right there with us, but our rule always was that they had to be in sight, even if they were going ahead of us on a trail – never, ever, out of sight.  And that was in the 70s and early 80s.

Perhaps I’m just being paranoid and it was perfectly fine to leave those boys up there to play.

Perhaps.

What  Do you think?

Have you ever stood next to a modern wind turbine when it’s generating power?  It’s louder than you’d think.  I wouldn’t want to have one of the big ones in my backyard – or neighborhood – let alone a bunch of them.

1940s artist concept drawing of what a new “windmill” in Vermont would look like in July 1941 issue of Popular Science – it actually looked very different (see below).

Of course modern wind turbines look much different than the 1.25 megawatt Grandpa’s Knob wind turbine that operated near Rutland, Vermont in 1941.  In February, 1943, a main bearing failed and, due to the war, a replacement part took more than two years to manufacture and install.  The wind turbine was restarted on March 3, 1945, but, later that month, a connector failure resulted in one of the 8 ton blades being tossed over 700 feet, where it landed on it’s tip. Tip replacement was not feasible because of the war effort.  With the cost of coal generated electricity substantially the cost of electricity produced by the wind turbine, the project was dismantled.

The United States has added significant amounts of wind power generation in recent years, producing about 2.4% of the total electrical power generated.  The phenomenal growth has been largely due to government subsidies and tax breaks, without which, I’ve read, continued growth cannot be sustained as various studies estimate new wind energy production is more expensive than other sources such as new nuclear, clean coal, and carbon capture and storage.

And, as I’ve already stated, not in my backyard or neighborhood – it’s not windy enough here to make it feasible.

Have you been near any of the large modern wind turbines?

Other perspectives on not tweeting:

Why I Don’t Tweet… :

First of all, I don’t believe Twitter is evil, wrong, or in any way immoral. And I’m not condemning my many friends who love to Tweet. But it’s not for me. Here are the top 10 reasons why I don’t use Twitter (not that there’s anything wrong with it)….

Why I Don’t Tweet

Because I don’t think my random thoughts are of interest to anyone, especially those thoughts that can fit into Twitter’s 140-character limit.

And I truly don’t understand people who think their 140-character random thoughts should be of interest to others, even if—as apparently is the case with Ashton Kutcher—they are.

Twitter’s payoff simply seems too low and its risks too high….

Why Teens Don’t Tweet

Why aren’t teens using Twitter? The answer to this question is essential to not only understanding why Generation Y has not embraced microblogging, but to the very future of the medium. Let’s take a look at the statistics and the thoughts of my fellow under 25-ers to understand just why there’s a shortage of teen tweeters…

Why CEOs Don’t Tweet | BNET

America’s business leaders are largely absent from social media platforms.  A study of the web 2.0 footprints of the CEOs from the Fortune 100 found that only two had Twitter accounts, 81 percent did not have a personal Facebook page, just 13 used LinkedIn and none had a blog….

Real men don’t tweet

OK. That headline is a huge exaggeration. But a new study from comScore Inc. finds that there is a gender gap of sorts on social networking sites….

Most Twitter users never tweet, don’t follow anyone

A new report about how the majority of the population uses Twitter reveals that most people, well… don’t really use it. The microblogging service has grown exponentially over the last year, but a little more than half of its users have never sent a single tweet, according to the latest report from HubSpot (PDF). The report reminds us that, like many Web services, much of the content is produced by a small number of users while everyone else likes to look in and watch….

Michael Lewis: What I Read

I don’t tweet, I don’t Twitter, I couldn’t even tell you how to read or where to find a Twitter message. I don’t actually see the point of limiting communication to a haiku. I find the whole effusion of communications technology bewildering. All you have to do is overhear a certain number of cell phone conversations to see that the vast majority of what people say and write to each other is totally pointless. I have an email address and I’m thinking of shutting that down. It’s amazing how overly accessible people are. There’s a lot of communication in my life that’s not enriching, it’s impoverishing….

The sun isn’t as completely spotless as it was a year ago, but spotless days are still occurring – and, according to a new study discussed in Science, sunspots may soon disappear for decades.

Scientists studying sunspots for the past 2 decades have concluded that the magnetic field that triggers their formation has been steadily declining. If the current trend continues, by 2016 the sun’s face may become spotless and remain that way for decades—a phenomenon that in the 17th century coincided with a prolonged period of cooling on Earth. (Say Goodbye to Sunspots? by Phil Beradelli, September 14, 2010, ScienceNOW)

The study is also discussed in a Financial Post article by Lawrence Solomon:

And that would not be good – far more people suffer and die as a result of cold than of heat.  Extended periods of cold would have an adverse affect on crops. Frigid winters and cold summers during the Dalton Minimum, which lasted from about 1790 to 1830, resulted in massive crop failures, famine and death.  The Maunder Minimum, also known as the Little Ice Age, lasted for about 70 years, from about 1645 to 1715, and “was marked by bitter cold, widespread crop failures, and severe human privation.”¹ The Dalton and Maunder Minimum were periods of low solar activity and low sunspot count.

The sun has not fully escaped the solar minimum between solar cycles 23 and 24.  A typical solar minimum will see 486 days without sunspots.  Since 2004, there has been 809 blank days, 41 so far in 2010, and the most recent just in the past week.  If scientists were to use the telescopes of the Dalton or Maunder Minimum, the number of blank days would likely be quite a bit higher and many of the recent sunspots would not have been counted.

What do you think about the possibility of a colder future?

Of course, some may say that for long term forecasting, one would have just as much fortune depending upon the Old Farmer’s Almanac.  Ironically, though, sunspots are taken into consideration in the Old Farmer’s Almanac forecasts.

We employ three scientific disciplines to make our long-range predictions: solar science, the study of sunspots and other solar activity; climatology, the study of prevailing weather patterns; and meteorology, the study of the atmosphere. We predict weather trends and events by comparing solar patterns and historical weather conditions with current solar activity.

¹ from a 2008 Livingston and Penn paper

Yesterday, when I checked my phone as I was leaving the fitness center, I found a missed phone call from a number and area code that was not in my contact list and that I didn’t recognize. I didn’t try to call back, preferring, instead, to wait until after I got home and could find out where the area code is .

It turned out that the call was from Phoenix, Arizona.

Now, I do know some people who are living in the Phoenix area, but they were people from work who either quit and moved there to work or retired and moved there to work.  I wouldn’t expect to hear from any of them.

However, there was a contract coordinator on one of the contracts jobs I did who worked out of Phoenix, though all of the communication with the contract company when I’m not working comes from the home office in Florida.  Still, it was worth looking into a little bit more, but not enough to try calling back, yet.

I decided to try to do a reverse phone number look-up.  For a price, personal information is available for the name a phone is in for almost every land line as well as many cell phones.  There are varying amounts and varying plans that can be subscribed to.  However, I don’t often have the need to track down personal information and I wasn’t about to pay for information about a call that might have been a wrong number.  When I searched on the term “reverse look-up,” all I found were various websites trying to get my money when I tried to do a reverse phone number look-up.

Then I decided to do a search on the phone number in Google.

Sometimes ya just get lucky.

Some of the comments on one of the pages:

A credit card telemarketing scam! They are trying to get you to tell them your credit card number so they can charge your credit cards.

They keep calling me to my cell phone and I never give them my number,I don’t know how they got my number, they are violating my privacy calling to my cell phone I hope we can do something to stop this.

I get frequent "missed call" notices on my cell phone from this number ( ). The caller is always too cowardly to leave a message. As another complaint filer noted, it appears to be a telemarketer. How are telemarketers getting our cell numbers?

The second time they called – same message, and this time I played along.
This is a complete and utter scam
How do I know? because I’ve never applied or carried a credit card – not even a store credit card! I prefer to operate on a cash basis. They have nothing to do with any existing credit card company nor are they calling on behalf of any company from what I gathered from them on the phone they are either a complete scam or an intermediary that will buy your debt from your existing company although he was very hazy and evasive on the phone. So the alarm going off in my head says scam – and under no circumstances should you give these people any information about yourself

They won’t be calling me from that number for a while.

Verizon Wireless lets customers block calls from up to 5 numbers for 90 days.  It’s a temporary measure, but, hopefully, our numbers will have dropped off of their system by December 9.

Question:

Other than telemarketers, have you ever been contacted by a phone scam (or received phone spam)?

According to major news sources, including the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, major budget shortfalls in Arizona will result in the closure of 13 state parks by June.  Eight others have already been closed.

The Los Angeles Times:

The action represents the largest closure of state parks in the nation, although several other states are considering similar moves.

“It’s a dark day for the Arizona state parks system,” said Renee Bahl, the system’s executive director.

“We have 65,000 acres around the state and the majority of them are closing.”

The Arizona parks receive about 2.3 million visitors per year who bring about $266 million into the state, Bahl said.

The New York Times:

The Arizona State Parks Board has voted unanimously to close 13 parks in response to budget cuts.

The Washington Post:

The Arizona State Parks Board is closing some of the state’s iconic Old West landmarks, including the Tombstone Courthouse in one of the West’s most storied towns, and the Yuma Territorial Prison, which housed hundreds of Old West outlaws and was portrayed in the film “3:10 to Yuma.”

The decision also closes parks such as Red Rock State Park near Sedona that draw tens of thousands of tourists a year.

The Legislature has cut 61 percent of the state parks budget since July.

In a Huffington Post editorial, Chad Campbell, the House Democratic Whip in the Arizona State Legislature, describes the reappropriation of a quarter of a million dollars meant for state parks:

GOP legislators recently pilfered a nearly $250,000 gift left by an elderly woman – now deceased – for the Arizona State Parks system.

The severity of budget cuts in Arizona is quite disturbing, but the cuts to State Parks have touched an especially raw nerve. In 2003, 82-year-old Asta Forrest left nearly $250,000 to the Arizona State Parks Board. This Danish immigrant’s gift to Arizona was inspired by her love of its beautiful natural surroundings.

It’s ironic that, in today’s rough economic times, state parks are being closed.  During the Great Depression, construction of state parks provided need work for thousands of young men in the Civilian Conservation Corps.

.

Many scientists and others who are skeptical of anthropogenic global warming would like the answer to one question that, so far, has not been answered:

While there is laboratory evidence that carbon dioxide acts as a greenhouse gas and carbon dioxide and global temperature have both been rising, real world proof that CO2 has caused the rise in global temperature does NOT exist.

While, at times,  there appears to be a rough correlation between CO2 and global temperature, correlation does not prove causation.

Even though anthropogenic global warming is an unproven hypothesis, it is likely that some historical warming resulted from carbon dioxide released to the atmosphere by humans. However, because of the physical properties of CO2, it’s done all the warming it can do.

Predictions of rising temperatures and the dire consequences of anthropogenic global warming are based on computer climate models.  The climate models include the assumption that global temperatures will rise as CO2 continues to rise.

Over the last decade, global temperatures have leveled off while CO2 continued to rise.  Temperature is trending below all of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predictions.

Joanne Nova, an Australian freelance science presenter & writer: Professional speaker, author, and former TV host, has prepared and published two excellent — and free — booklets on global warming.  The first, The Skeptics Handbook, has been translated by volunteers into many other languages, including German, French, Norwegian, Finnish, Swedish, Turkish, Portuguese, Japanese, and Danish.

Carbon dioxide acts as a greenhouse gas by absorbing infrared radiation in three narrow bands of frequencies, (2.7, 4.3 and 15 micrometers (µM)), meaning that most of the heat producing infrared radiation frequencies escapes absorption by CO2.  The main peak, 15 µM, is absorbed completely within about 10 meters of the ground meaning that there is no more to absorb.  Doubling the human contribution of CO2 would reduce this distance. Reducing the distance for absorption would not result in an increase in temperature.

The sun appears to have entered a less active period and is providing less warmth to the Earth.  The sun is in an extended solar minimum that was predicted to end in March 2008, nearly 20 months ago.  Since 2004 there have been 770 days without sunspots.  A typical solar minimum averages about 485 days.  Solar magnetic activity continues to drop.

A number of scientists are projecting that global warming is over, for now, and that global average temperatures will be dropping for the next 20 to 30 years.

“Tricks” apparently have been performed on more climate data than just the tree ring proxy information.  The figure below shows the adjustments made to the historical temperature record of Darwin, Australia.  The blue lines show the values for the original, “raw” temperature data. The red lines are the official NOAA/GHCN  ( National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — Global Historical Climate Network) data  after the values have been “homogenized” and averaged.  The black line are the values for the adjustment that was made (uses the scale on the right of the figure).

“Before getting homogenized, temperatures in Darwin were falling at 0.7 Celcius per century … but after the homogenization, they were warming at 1.2 Celcius per century. And the adjustment that they made was over two degrees per century …” – Willis Eschenbach, The Smoking Gun At Darwin Zero

American climate sceptics are now demanding a thorough investigation of NASA’s earth science programme, including the possibility that instruments on its satellites have been “tweaked” to give a “correct” result, and pointing out that the agency has repeatedly had to correct its data, going back to the 1930s. The common factor between CRU East Anglia and NASA is the destruction or withholding of research models and data which, if they are reliable, should be their pride and joy – documentation that would secure these institutions’ place in history, like Einstein’s equations. Telegraph.co.uk

“They’ve lost the raw data on which all the models, all the computer generated forecasts, the graphs and projections, are based.”

“Poor Al Gore”

Climate politics continue to be interesting.  Australia’s opposition Liberal Party has ousted its leader, Malcolm Turnbull, after the resignation last week of several senators from their “front-seat” positions.  The Aussie government’s climate change bill is now in jeopardy, raising the potential of an early general election in 2010.

The Climategate emails and documents are being investigated by a number of organizations, including an inquiry by Penn State University, where Michael Mann, creator of the discredited hockey stick graph – used by Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth – is a professor. Inquiries are also under way at the University of East Anglia, the source of the leaked material.  Government investigations are either ongoing or pending and there has been at least one civil lawsuit filed.

At a minimum, the emails document the violation of UK Freedom of Information laws.

Many believe that the leaker was not a hacker, but, rather, was an insider acting as a anonymous whistleblower by leaking the emails and documents, including information that had been unsuccessfully been sought under the UK FOI statutes.

The emails are not the only incriminating material.  Computer codes and their documentation show fudged numbers and “blatant data-cooking” that tell a story of twisting reality to a desired view.

Many of the fantastic claims in the media about climate change are likely predicated on the same sort of skewed science.

An article in the Wall Street Journal titled The Climate Science Isn’t Settled, by Richard S. Lindzen, professor of meteorology at MIT gives a more balanced view of the state of climate science.

Claims that climate change is accelerating are bizarre. There is general support for the assertion that GATA has increased about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since the middle of the 19th century. The quality of the data is poor, though, and because the changes are small, it is easy to nudge such data a few tenths of a degree in any direction. Several of the emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) that have caused such a public ruckus dealt with how to do this so as to maximize apparent changes.

While I have been skeptical of global warming claims for quite some time, this Climategate fiasco appears to show  a conspiracy to doctor the evidence.

In my interest in climate change, I wasn’t looking for a conspiracy, just the truth.

While I haven’t blogged about it for a while, I read material related to global warming climate change every day, so it was with great interest yesterday morning that I read of the release of allegedly stolen anthropogenic global warming climate change correspondence.

I had woken early for some reason and was unable to get back to sleep.  By 4:30, I was up and checking email, blogs and the news-feeds that I subscribe to.

A little over an hour later, I was downloading the files.

It’s going to be interesting to see where this is going to end up.  Articles are already appearing in the mainstream media.

See new article: Climategate update.