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Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 

The print edition can be purchased at Amazon. from any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News


The science remains uncertain

Two papers published this week by the American Geophysical Union once again indicate that the science of climate change remains exceedingly uncertain. More significantly, the models that try to predict the future of the Earth’s climate continue to appear unreliable, with such large margins of error that it is at this time foolish to make any policy based on their predictions.

diagram of Atlantic currents

The first paper took a close look at the deep water currents in the Atlantic to see if it could track changes to what the authors’ call the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC), more generally referred to as the Atlantic conveyor belt. This conveyor belt begins with the sinking of salty dense water in the northeast Atlantic off of Europe and Africa. The deep water current then travels south and into the Indian and Pacific Oceans where it comes to the surface only to flow back to the Atlantic, traveling north along the coast of North America as the Gulf Stream, bringing with it the warm temperatures that make Europe’s climate much warmer than its latitude would normally suggest.

According to most global warming models, higher temperatures should cause the glaciers in the Arctic and Greenland to melt, thereby pouring an increased amount of fresh water into the North Atlantic. This infusion of fresh water is then expected to lower the salinity and density of the Atlantic water, thus preventing it from sinking and thus acting to slow the conveyor belt, and possibly even causing it to shut down. The consequence would be no more Gulf Stream to warm the climate of Europe.

In other words: Disaster! Death! Destruction! All caused by global warming!

Unfortunately for these global warming models, the paper above found no trend at all. The conveyor belt is not slowing, as predicted. To quote the paper’s abstract:

Concerning the debate about whether a slowdown of Atlantic meredional overturning circulation has already occurred under global warming, the observed North Brazil Current transport time series suggests strong multidecadal variability but no significant trend.

And from the paper’s conclusion:

A slowdown of the AMOC has been reported from analysis of 5 hydrographic sections over the past 50 years and, while those results are controversial because of the limited data on which they are based, almost all state‐of‐the‐art climate models project significant slowdown of the AMOC during this century in response to the increased greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. Our results on the other hand suggest that such an anticipated slowdown has not occurred yet even though global temperatures have been significantly higher since the 1970s. While the AMOC might have been weakened from the 1960s to the early 1970s, it has been strengthening since then to the end of last century as shown in our transport time series. [emphasis mine]

Obviously, the science here is not “settled,” no matter how many times Al Gore says it.

Murray-Darling Basin

The second paper took a look at 20 different IPCC climate models that tried to predict the long term precipitation changes for the Murray-Darling Basin of southeast Australia. Sadly, they also found that none of the models were very good a predicting those changes. To quote the paper:

Of those, the IPSL‐CM4 model was ranked the best for precipitation. We used the difference‐variance framework to investigate the P annual time series in the (single) IPSL‐CM4 model run in considerable detail. We found that this particular time series was not very convincing. . . . We believe that there is, at least at the moment, some reason to be cautious about overinterpreting the results from single runs of a climate model. [emphasis mine]

These results do not reject the possibility of global warming. All they show is that the Earth’s climate is an extremely complicated thing, and that at present the data available does not yet explain fully that climate’s behavior. More importantly, the computer models that scientists have created to try to simulate this climate still do a very poor job of predicting what that climate will do.

We must therefore treat their pronouncements of doom with great skepticism.

The support of my readers through the years has given me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Four years ago, just before the 2020 election I wrote that Joe Biden's mental health was suspect. Only in this year has the propaganda mainstream media decided to recognize that basic fact.

 

Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Even today NASA and Congress refuse to recognize this reality.

 

In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.

 

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One comment

  • Blair Ivey

    In order to ensure accuracy, computer models must be calibrated with real-world data. As the climate data becomes available, we’re seeing a definite de-escalation of consequences: “Sea levels will rise 100m! Or 20m, or 5m, um, 1 meter?”
    Unique among holy writ, the tenents of the faddish religion of global warmism have been tested, and found wanting.

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