Author: Robert Zimmerman

Voyager 1’s future.

9:08 am

Voyager 1’s future.

Voyager 1 has enough nuclear fuel to keep doing science through to 2025, and then it will be dead, adrift. On its current trajectory, the probe should eventually end up within 1.5 light years of a star in Camelopardalis, a northern constellation that looks like a cross between a giraffe and a camel. No one knows if there are any planets around that star, nor if aliens will be in residence by the time the probe arrives. “But if they are there, maybe they will capture Voyager 1,” says mission scientist Tom Krimigis of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.

In addition to the above silliness, the article gives a good summary of the real data that Voyager 1 is sending back about interstellar space.

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IRS officials specifically targeted conservatives for harassment because they thought that was what President Obama wanted.

9:00 am

Working for the Democratic Party: IRS officials specifically targeted conservatives for harassment because they thought that was what President Obama wanted, according to an interim House report.

In the report, the investigators do not find evidence that IRS employees received orders from politicians to target the tea party, and agency officials deny overt bias or political motives. But the report says the IRS was at least taking cues from political leaders and designed special policies to review tea party applications, including dispatching some of them to Washington to be vetted by headquarters. “As prominent politicians publicly urged the IRS to take action on tax-exempt groups engaged in legal campaign intervention activities, the IRS treated tea party applications differently,” the staff report concludes. “Applications filed by tea party groups were identified and grouped due to media attention surrounding the existence of the tea party in general.”

It was about this time that both Obama and Democrats in Congress were demanding the IRS go after conservative organizations.

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New documents show that more than 80% of the organizations targeted by the IRS in 2011 for harassment were conservative.

10:22 pm

Working for the Democratic Party: New documents show that more than 80% of the organizations targeted by the IRS in 2011 for harassment were conservative.

A handful of liberal organizations were definitely targeted for close inspection, but it appears to me that these were merely picked to give the IRS some cover while it mainly focused at harassing as many conservatives organizations as possible.

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Another look at the leaked IPCC draft report.

10:11 pm

Another look at the leaked IPCC draft report. Key quote:

To those of us who have been following the climate debate for decades, the next few years will be electrifying. There is a high probability we will witness the crackup of one of the most influential scientific paradigms of the 20th century, and the implications for policy and global politics could be staggering.

The article also takes a close look at the contradiction between the data and the IPCC models and says this:

[W]hat is commonly called the “mainstream” view of climate science is contained in the spread of results from computer models. What is commonly dismissed as the “skeptical” or “denier” view coincides with the real-world observations. Now you know how to interpret those terms when you hear them.

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An unmanned spacecraft designed to get rid of space junk is set to launch in 2018, and use a new European built reusable launch system.

8:52 am

The competition heats up: An unmanned spacecraft designed to get rid of space junk is set to launch in 2018, and use a new European built reusable launch system.

Both components of this story are significant. First, a company has gotten the necessary financing to build the spacecraft, proving that there is profit to be made in the removal of space junk. Second, the launch system is simple and reusable, and will lower the cost of getting small payloads into orbit significantly. And it appears it is being built.

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A newly leaked revised draft of the upcoming IPCC report suggests that the climate uncertainties have significantly grown since the last report in 2007.

1:14 am

A newly leaked revised draft of the upcoming IPCC report suggests that the climate uncertainties have significantly grown since the last report in 2007.

Most important of all, the new IPCC draft finally admits that the climate has not warmed as predicted and that the climate field does not know why.

They recognize the global warming ‘pause’ first reported by The Mail on Sunday last year is real – and concede that their computer models did not predict it. But they cannot explain why world average temperatures have not shown any statistically significant increase since 1997.

They admit large parts of the world were as warm as they are now for decades at a time between 950 and 1250 AD – centuries before the Industrial Revolution, and when the population and CO2 levels were both much lower.

The IPCC admits that while computer models forecast a decline in Antarctic sea ice, it has actually grown to a new record high. Again, the IPCC cannot say why.

A forecast in the 2007 report that hurricanes would become more intense has simply been dropped, without mention. This year has been one of the quietest hurricane seasons in history and the US is currently enjoying its longest-ever period – almost eight years – without a single hurricane of Category 3 or above making landfall.

The worst aspect of this new draft, however, is how its conclusions completely ignore these admitted uncertainties.

In the new report, the IPCC says it is ‘extremely likely’ – 95 per cent certain – that human influence caused more than half the temperature rises from 1951 to 2010, up from ‘very confident’ – 90 per cent certain – in 2007. [Climate scientists Judith] Curry said: ‘This is incomprehensible to me’ – adding that the IPCC projections are ‘overconfident’, especially given the report’s admitted areas of doubt.

As I’ve noted before, though Curry favors the theory that the climate is warming, she is also a good scientist willing to honestly discuss the uncertainties of the science.

One last point: Most of these newly admitted uncertainties in the upcoming IPCC report were originally discussed in detail in the first IPCC report back in 1990. That 1990 report was an excellent and fair assessment of the overall knowledge of the field, at the time. Since then, none of the science has really been able to reduce any of these uncertainties significantly. All that happened in the ensuing years is that too many climate scientists and in the IPCC decided to make believe the uncertainties didn’t exist any more. Thus, later IPCC reports were filled with false certainty and an unreasonable insistence that the climate field understood what was going on.

These false certainties have now come back to bite that climate field, in the ass.

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India space officials have decided to completely replace the second stage of the GSLV rocket that leaked during the rocket’s scrubbed launch last month.

8:36 am

India’s space agency has decided to completely replace the second stage of the GSLV rocket that leaked during the rocket’s scrubbed launch last month.

“Although the exact reasons for the leakage in the second stage of the engine, which prevented the launch on August 19, are being probed by the team headed by K Narayanan, it has been decided that a new liquid second stage (GS-2) will be assembled to replace the leaked stage,” said the official. He added that the process of assembling has begun, and that besides the GS-2, all the four liquid strap-on stages are being replaced with new ones.

That leak must have been quite significant for them to make this decision.

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A good scientist, who also believes in global warming, explains the irrelevance of “extreme weather” to the climate change debate.

12:27 am

A good scientist, who also believes in global warming, explains the irrelevance of “extreme weather” to the climate change debate.

Yet [an increase in extreme weather] is not supported by science. “General statements about extremes are almost nowhere to be found in the literature but seem to abound in the popular media,” climate scientist Gavin Smith of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies said last month. “It’s this popular perception that global warming means all extremes have to increase all the time, even though if anyone thinks about that for 10 seconds they realize that’s nonsense.”

The scientist writing this op-ed is Bjorn Lomborg. He gives a lot of details. Here’s just one:

Global warming, in general, will mean higher temperatures. This causes more heat waves — more extreme weather. But it also causes fewer cold waves — less extreme weather. Many more people die from excessive cold than excessive heat, so fewer people will die from cold and heat in the future. By mid-century, researchers estimated in 2006, that means about 1.4 million fewer deaths per year. In the continental United States, heat waves in the past decade exceeded the norm by 10 percent, but the number of cold waves fell 75 percent.

Moreover, global warming will mostly increase temperatures during winter, at night and in cold places, making temperature differences less extreme.

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The astronauts who returned to Earth from ISS on September 10 were flying blind.

5:30 pm

Another Russian space glitch: The astronauts who returned to Earth from ISS on September 10 were flying blind.

The altitude sensors apparently failed soon after undocking. Since the Soyuz craft is not piloted but returns to Earth automatically, this failure was not crucial. That it happened, however, sends another worrisome signal about declining Russian quality control standards. If this system failed, why couldn’t another more crucial one fail as well?

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The Obama administration has decided to actually follow the law and not give its Democratic union buddies a waiver on Obamacare.

3:58 pm

Finding out what’s in it: The Obama administration has decided to actually follow the law and not give its Democratic union buddies a waiver on Obamacare.

It shows us how far we have fallen that we are surprised that the Obama administration is going to follow the law, as written and passed by Congress, rather than arbitrarily rewrite that law illegally into order to help its political allies. Nowadays we are increasingly expecting this administration to treat the law as a plaything that it can ignore willy-nilly, without any opposition from anyone.

This story also illustrates the danger of blindly supporting the actions of one political party. Union leaders have for decades allied themselves with the Democratic Party, without ever really questioning the wisdom of anything those Democrats were doing. Obamacare was only one example of this foolishness. Now they are going to suffer badly for their blind partisanship.

It would have been much smarter for those unions to have done what conservatives and tea party advocates demanded back in 2009 and 2010: Read the damn law before you pass it!

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The increasing harassment of their members by Homeland Security has caused the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA) to begin a political campaign against the agency.

11:54 am

Gotta have your KGB: The increasing harassment of their members by Homeland Security has caused the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA) to begin a political campaign against the agency.

The link above takes you what looks like a fundraising letter sent about by the AOPA to its membership. The significance is that they are centering their campaign around the harassment by Homeland Security, which suggests that this harassment has become a very big issue within this community.

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When will SpaceX launch the upgraded Falcon 9? We have competing news stories:

9:57 am

When will SpaceX launch the upgraded Falcon 9? We have competing news stories:

  • The Canadian Space Agency sent out a press release today saying Cassiope will launch on September 15 on its Falcon 9 rocket.
  • Elon Musk sent out a twitter report of yesterday’s static fire test, noting there were anomalies and that the launch date is still to be determined.

This is very puzzling. That the Canadian release was sent out today suggests that they have information we don’t have about the static fire test and thus knew they could announce the launch date. That Musk is more circumspect however suggests that the information the Canadians have is not correct.

Update: Stephen Clark at Spaceflight Now has more information. It appears the launch will not happen on Sunday, as SpaceX plans a second launchpad static test tomorrow to iron out the unexplained “anomalies” in yesterday’s static test.

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Before the Minnesota Obamacare health exchange has even officially opened there has been a security breach of the private health records of more than 2,400 individuals.

9:27 am

That didn’t take long: Before the Minnesota Obamacare health exchange has even officially opened there has been a security breach of the private health records of more than 2,400 individuals.

Stay tuned for more screw-ups and the misuse of private health records for political purposes. The Obamacare health exchanges are inherently insecure.

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Fifteen so-called journalists have made their political preferences official by joining the Obama administration.

9:23 am

Working for the Democratic Party: Fifteen so-called journalists have made their political preferences official by joining the Obama administration.

That almost all of these media types have ended up working for a Democratic administration illustrates the one-sided culture in the mainstream media. If you aren’t for the Democratic Party, you won’t survive as a journalist at these news outlets. In fact, it is likely that you won’t even get a job there.

More here. This second article is absolutely worth reading because it dissects the leftwing and partisan culture of the mainstream press by looking at the employment history of these mainstream media journalists as well their history of bad and biased reporting.

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