Another awesome video from the volcano. (video from ITN)
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From the category archives:
Science
In this video of the Icelandic volcano, Eyjafjallajokull, shock waves can be seen emanating with each explosive pulse of lava, clearly causing displacement of the cloud of smoke, ash, and steam.
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A report in Newsweek, Iceberg Ahead, looks at the current state of climate science and politics… and how things got to this point.
What went wrong? Part of the blame lies, of course, with those who obstructed the efforts of the IPCC and the individual scientists, including bloggers who tried to sandbag scientists with spurious FOIA requests, and the perpetrators (as yet unknown) of the hack at the Climatic Research Unit. Part of the blame also falls on the climate scientists themselves. Many of them—including perhaps Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC head—may have stepped too far over the line from science to advocacy, undermining their own credibility. Some scientists, as a result, are now calling for a change in tone from antagonism to reconciliation. Climate science, they say, needs to open its books and be more tolerant of scrutiny from the outside. Its institutions—notably the IPCC—need to go about their business with greater transparency. "The circle-the-wagons mentality has backfired," says Judith Curry, head of Georgia Tech’s School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences.
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… more than a tad unusual lately, here in Arkansas, as I’m sure it seems to people in a lot of other places.
But, the weather for the next week is…, well…, ah…, it’s Winter!
It’s winter like winter was when I was a kid growing up in Nebraska. It’s cold – and it’s staying cold.
And it’s doing it in a lot of places other than Arkansas.
Something called the Arctic Oscillation has gone into a deep negative phase, where atmospheric pressure in the Arctic is relatively high, while pressure is low in the middle latitudes. In the negative phase, frigid winter weather extends further into the middle of North America than usual.
Hopefully, this thing will moderate soon – but I’m not counting on it.
How’s the weather where you are?
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While I’m moving on – or back – to other things, climate issues will continue to be an interest. With 5 of my last 6 posts being on the subject, it’s time to look at other things. I’ll try to figure out a way to continue to share some of what I learn, though, without this becoming a climate change blog.
I’m still happy with Windows 7. My computer at work uses XP, though, and moving back and forth between Windows 7 and XP makes getting used to Windows 7 a little harder, I think.
Yes, I am still working. A contract extension has been approved and, assuming the VP signs the funding paperwork, I will be there until about the middle of March. After that, I plan not to work for at least the rest of 2010.
Regular visitors to Exit 78 may recognize that my theme has changed once again. I have moved to the Thesis theme, which allows a lot more control over the appearance. I’ve got the basic structure down pretty good now, but I’ll be tweaking on it, so there may be subtle changes day to day.
I still have a little bit of material to post from our September trip, photo galleries to develop and publish and images from the great depression to share.
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“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”
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Update: Britain’s University of East Anglia says the director of its prestigious Climatic Research Unit is stepping down pending an investigation into allegations that he overstated the case for man-made climate change.
The university says Phil Jones will relinquish his position until the completion of an independent review into allegations that he worked to alter the way in which global temperature data was presented.
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.
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Click on any of the images to go to the associated webpage.
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While I have spent a bit of time reading some of the emails that were leaked earlier the week, I simply do not have the time – or desire – to delve deeply into the files. There are many others around the world digging into this.
I think that there have been serious consequences that have resulted from the actions of some of the scientists whose correspondence has been leaked. In their zeal to “prove” — at all costs — CO2 as the cause of anthropogenic global warming, other potential causes have been marginalized. Evidence is mounting that changes in land use may have a significantly greater impact on climate change than rising CO2. If true, mitigation and adaptation to successfully address human impacts on climate could be done at a fraction of the cost of the drastic actions and expenses that are being called for today. It may be that efforts could have been started a decade ago, but for an obsession on CO2 as the global warming culprit.
On Examiner.com, Thomas Fuller is writing a series of articles regarding the actions and communications of a group of climate scientists and paleoclimatologists known as The Team. Click here to read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5 , Part 6, and Part 7.
My first post on this was Climategate.
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The Sun has Lost it’s Spots (continued)
Today, it reached a count of 700 days.
On average, a solar minimum has 485 days where the surface of the sun is blank, with no sunspots appearing. The solar minimum is the period in a sunspot cycle where the number of observed sunspots is at its lowest. Sunspot cycles average 11 years from beginning of minimum through maximum and back to the beginning of the next minimum.
The current solar minimum began in 2004 and was predicted to end late in 2007.
Since the minimum began, there have been 700 days with no sunspots.
The last observed sunspot disappeared 47 days ago. If there are no sunspots by this time next week, this will have been the longest period without any sunspots during this minimum.
Long solar minimums have been observed in the past. However, this is the first long minimum where we have had sensitive instruments that can monitor the sun.
The jury is still out on the meaning of this extended minimum.
Advocates of the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming discount any significant change in the energy received from the sun. Others, however, point to previous periods of low sunspot and solar activity, which, by chance, happened to roughly correspond to the cold times of the Little Ice Age and the Dark Ages.
(to be continued in about a month or so)
Note: Previous posts on the sun were The Sun Has Lost Its Spots (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3) and The Sun Has Found Some Spots. I will be posting a continuation update about monthly.)
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Scaling back a bit
December 9, 2009
I made a decision after my last post on Climategate that I would scale back on my interest in anthropogenic global warming.
Before the emails and documents surfaced, I already knew there were issues with the some of the scientists and their data at East Anglia. Unfortunately, it’s likely that similar issues related to climate change exist in other places.
I am now very satisfied that my doubt in anthropogenic global warming is justified and don’t feel the need to follow what’s happening with climate change quite so closely.
I’ve already stopped my Google alert on the phrase climate change, which has significantly reduced the amount of items that I see in my feed reader.
This is my final post on climate change for the foreseeable future and I’m sharing here just a few of the many things I’ve learned before I get back to my regular posting.
I’m not looking to try to change any one’s mind, just share what I’ve learned. I’ll still be learning as things show up in my feed reader – I just won’t be studying as aggressively .
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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.
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
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