What part of “Congress shall make no law” do they not understand? The push by the FCC to regulate news reporting draws fire.
If this law was so great, why is this happening? Waivers to the Obama healthcare bill continue to pile up.
Then again, maybe this quote explains it: “The new legislation would have left our part-time workers without their medical coverage,” said Tom Schroder of Universal Orlando Public Relations.
The status of the Japanese probe Akatsuki in its attempt to go into orbit around Venus remains uncertain. The engines fired as scheduled, but radio signal was not regained at the scheduled time. Engineers are analyzing the spacecraft’s position now to see if it was successfully inserted into orbit.
The uncertainty of science! A microbiologist is slamming last week’s NASA discovery that claimed a microbe had incorporated arsenic instead of phosphorus as part of its DNA. Key quote:
In an interview Monday, Redfield said the methods used by the researchers were so crude that any arsenic they detected was likely from contamination. There is no indication that the researchers purified the DNA to remove arsenic that might have been sticking to the outside of the DNA or the gel the DNA was embedded in, she added. Normally, purifying the DNA is a standard step, Redfield said: “It’s a kit, it costs $2, it takes 10 minutes.” She also questioned why the researchers analyzed the DNA while it was still in the gel, making the results more difficult to interpret: “No molecular biologist would ever do that.”
The Falcon 9/Dragon test launch is likely delayed to at least Thursday. Key quote:
During reviews of vehicle closeout photos this morning, engineers found a possible crack in the second stage engine nozzle. If the nozzle needs to be replaced, the first launch opportunity would be Friday or Saturday. Officials called “remote” a possibility that the problem could be resolved in time to fly Wednesday.
Some educated speculations about the next manned mission in the Chinese space program.
What can we learn from 120 years of climate catastrophe reporting? We are all gonna die! Or to put it more clearly:
1: The mainstream media outlets are going to publish whatever sells. If someone publishes a story about the world getting colder and people buy it, you can be sure there will be many more stories touting the same headline.
2: There is a long lag between what nature is doing and what the media will report. The lag seems to be anywhere from 10 to 15 years after the climate changes. There is an inertia problem with the mainstream media even when the evidence is clear.
3: When all the stories are about warming or cooling, you can be sure they are all wrong.
When government agencies or United Nations Climate Change conferences warn you that the climate is changing you can be sure that is true — the climate is always changing. Determining the direction is the hard part. Based on the past reporting of these changes, be it from global cooling or warming, the trend will have reversed many years earlier than reported.
Incidentally there has been no global warming for a decade. Get a good grip on your long johns. Maybe a trip to Cancun is not such a bad idea after all, but I’ll wait until the delegates have gone home.
What does this tell us? Al Gore’s climate group has significantly scaled back its field operations.
Engineers say that the cause of the Russian rocket failure yesterday appears to have been a programming error.
This fish didn’t get away: The largest tuna, 405.2 pounds, was caught off of California today, breaking a 33 year old world record.
Feel the hate: Israeli fire and deaths delight many in the Arab world.
The Japanese spacecraft, Akatsuki, is set to enter orbit around Venus tomorrow.
Meanwhile, the political negotiations in Cancun continue: Britain and Brazil are going to try to break the deadlock between first and third world nations over extending the Kyoto climate protocol and thus prevent a collapse of the Cancun talks. Key quote:
Japan, Russia and Canada have been adamant that they will not sign an extension and want a new, broader treaty that will also bind emerging economies led by China and India to act.
Note that nothing going on in Cancun has anything to do with climate science. It is politics, pure and simple, rules and regulations created by a bunch of elite intellectuals and UN apparatchiks to be imposed on everyone else — while they play in the sun and fly on their jets to and from climate conferences.
They ain’t gonna like this in Cancun: For the past 15 years, global warming has stopped.
Bad news for the Russian space industry: A Proton rocket, carrying three Russian Glonass navigation satellites (their version of our GPS) failed at launch, crashing into the Pacific.
Wikileaks and the IPCC. Key quote:
What really strikes us is the fact that all this Copenhagen/Cancun stuff has nothing to do with the Climate, or saving the World. It’s about political positioning, money, and plain old fascism cult promotion.
More here.
To me, this is good news: The Cancún climate summit is in danger of collapse. Key quote:
The UN climate talks in Cancún were in danger of collapse last night after many Latin American countries said that they would leave if a crucial negotiating document, due to be released tomorrow, did not continue to commit rich countries to emissions cuts under the Kyoto Protocol. . . . The potential crisis was provoked by Japan stating earlier this week that it would not sign up to a second period of the Kyoto Protocol. Other countries, including Russia, Canada and Australia are thought to agree but have yet to say publicly that they will not make further pledges.
An evening pause:
We came on a ship they called the Mayflower
We came on a ship that sailed the moon
We came in the age’s most uncertain hour
And sing an American tune.
It appears that yesterday SpaceShipTwo flew another successful test flight.
What could possibly go wrong? The environmental global warming activists at the Cancun climate summit appear increasingly eager to encourage governments to tinker with the atmosphere to prevent climate change. The most frightening quote:
Funding may not be far off.
In September, the U.S. Government Accountability Office recommended in a 70-page report that the White House “establish a clear strategy for geoengineering research” within its science office. A month later, a report from U.S. Rep. Bart Gordon, a Democrat from Georgia who chairs the House Science and Technology Committee, urged the government to consider climate-engineering research “as soon as possible in order to ensure scientific preparedness for future climate events.”
The U.S. panel had collaborated in its study with a British House of Commons committee. “We may need geoengineering as a `Plan B,'” the British report said, if nations fail to forge agreement on a binding treaty to rein in greenhouse gases.
Perhaps most significantly, the U.N.-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, the global authority on climate science, agreed in October to take on geoengineering in its next assessment report. Its hundreds of scientists will begin with a session next spring.
Freedom of speech alert! Threats of violence by anti-religion activists force a Spanish cardinal to cancel a lecture at a university.
From Clark Lindsey, with video: The static test firing of the Falcon 9 rocket today was a success. Actual launch is planned for Tuesday.
In a paper published today in Geophysical Research Letters of the American Geophysical Union, scientists note that the rise of giant volcanic caldara under Yellowstone National Park has slowed significantly since 2006 and since 2008 has actually subsided somewhat. Key quote from the paper:
Here we propose that as the caldera source continues inflating, the accumulated strain energy in the deformed crust could promote earthquakes with mechanisms such as hydrofracturing,, migration of magmatic fluids, and brittle fracturing of rocks. These events can subsequently depressurize the magmatic systems or release the accumulated strain energy, slowing the uplift or even influencing a change in motion to subsidence. In January 2010 the Yellowstone caldera experienced another large earthquake swarm at its northwestern boundary close to the location of the 1985 swarm. . . . In the following five months the caldera experienced the first overall subsidence since the inception of its uplift in 2004. This scenario is similar to that in 1985 where a reverse of caldera uplift to subsidence was temporally correlated with the largest observed Yellowstone earthquake swarm.
Global warming activists today released a report claiming there will be “a million climate change deaths each year” by 2030.
Wanna bet? This article from AFP is typical of what I call press release journalism. The unnamed author shows no skepticism, and simply regurgitates what these activists told him without question. I for one would love to see this so-called report, as I suspect it has more scientific holes than a hunk of swiss cheese.
Update: I just did a quick scan of this so-called “peer-reviewed” report, and it is a piece of junk. (You can see the report’s press release here. The report can be downloaded here [pdf]) Its data is compiled from UN political workshops, not scientific research. Moreover, it uses the 2007 IPCC report as its fundamental source, even quoting some of that report’s now discredited research, such as its claim that the glaciers in the Himalayas will be gone in mere decades.
The squealing continues! The Orlando Sentinel demands that NASA gets its funding over everyone else, even as they admit there really is no money for anything. Key quote:
We applaud the Republicans’ determination to cut federal spending. But surely there are riper targets than the space program. The federal government spends billions each year on farm subsidies, a program held over from the Great Depression.
Didn’t the Cold War demostrate that profits, private property, and free enterprise do it better? By order of Congress, however, NASA is planning to put a nonprofit organization in charge of ISS research.
