The new colonial movement continues: Brazil successfully launched and recovered a suborbital rocket this past weekend.
The Navy set a new world record with the firing of an electromagnetic railgun on December 10. Though intended as a military weapon Keith Cowing speculates about the railgun’s off-world applications.
The first report is back of the X-37B following the completion of its first flight.
Scientists have created a computer simulation describing the violent origin of Saturn’s rings, with moons being stripped of their ice as they death spiral into Saturn.
Note that this is only a theory, illustrated by a computer model. Though it is fascinating however!
Oink! Social Security advocates fear payroll tax cut.
American flag banned from condo complex. Key quote:
The 16 or so units are all alike. Beige with white trim and white mailboxes lined up ever so neatly along the main access road. And that, Coombs was told at a condo meeting, is how it shall stay.
With the obvious exceptions, of course.
A quick trip through the development this week showed that some of the condo owners like big wreaths. Some like small ones. Some like bows on their doors or garland on their banisters. Some like welcome signs on their porches and some don’t. Individuality is allowed for flowers in the summer, Coombs said. But there shall be no flags, and it says so right in the condo bylaws.
Defund them! Will GOP take the P out of NPR?
A nano-sized solar sail, built by NASA and launched in mid-November, appears to have been lost. Sadly, this has been the history of almost all solar sail efforts: failure before the sail can even deploy.
The rise and fall of Rocketplane.
In a paper published today in Geophysical Research Letters, scientists think they have detected evidence of volcanic activity on Venus that took place sometime in the past two decades.
A car that runs on air. Literally.
“Elections have consequences.” EPA suddenly delays new rules governing industry emissions.
Feel the love from Islam! Two car bombs go off in Stockholm, Sweden, killing one. Key quote from an email claiming credit for the attack:
“Our actions will speak for themselves. As long as you continue to wage your war against Islam and insulting the prophet and your stupid support of the pig Vilks. . . .” [The email continues by encouraging] all Muslims in Sweden to “stop sucking up and debasing yourselves,” then ends with another exhortation to “all the mujahideen in Europe and Sweden. . . . Now is the time to attack, do not wait any longer. Come forward with whatever you have, even if it’s just a knife and I know you have more than just knives. Do not fear anyone, do not fear jail, do not fear death.”
An evening pause: The central scene from the 1976 television production of George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra, starring Alec Guinness and Genevieve Bujold.
[The uproar in the streets again reaches them.]
Caesar: Do you hear? These knockers at your gate are also believers in vengence and in stabbing. You have slain their leader: it is right that they shall slay you. If you doubt it, ask your four counselors here. And then in the name of that right [he emphasizes the word with great scorn] shall I not slay them for murdering their Queen, and be slain in my turn by their countrymen as the invader of their fatherland? Can Rome do less then slay these slayers, too, to show the world how Rome avenges her sons and her honor. And so, to the end of history, murder shall breed murder, always in the name of right and honor and peace, until the gods are tired of blood and create a race than can understand.
It appears the climate meeting in Cancun has ended without much success. Unable to get an renewal of the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012, the diplomats instead agreed to create a $100 billion “Green Climate Fund” that is mostly funded by the First World nations but is mostly distributed by the Third World. See the notes at 10:45 am on this blog and at 12:20 am on this blog. Key quote:
[The fund] will have 25 members of developing countries on its board, compared to only 15 for developed countries. This gives developing countries a much stronger role. The World Bank is a trustee.
The real question is whether the new Congress in the U.S. will appropriate any money at all to this scam.
Court to rule on the constitutionality of ObamaCare on Monday. Key quote:
Normally, all comprehensive laws contain a boilerplate severance clause: it says that if any portion of the law is found to be unconstitutional, that portion is severed from the rest of the law — that is, the rest of the law stands. But ObamaCare contains no severance clause. Virginia is asserting that if it prevails on its substantive claims, the whole law is unconstitutional. (If Virginia does not prevail, any one of the twenty-plus legal challenges have the same severance argument available.)
This really isn’t the best way to get rid of this idiotic law, but we should also take any bone we can get.
More squealing, this time from Republicans: several GOP congressmen claim earmarks are necessary for budget negotiations.
The illegal imprisonment of Joel Rosenberg.
More TSA absurdity, with video: Indian ambassador given full patdown by TSA.
Those TSA patdowns sure are working, aren’t they? A unidentified man was arrested (not by the TSA) after bringing a boat — flying a foreign flag with Arabic lettering — into a restricted area of Cape Canaveral.
The Obama administration’s $30 billion cash pledge at last year’s climate summit is in doubt.
Not only do I think this is good, I continue to wonder how any administration (not just Obama’s) can make such a pledge in the first place, considering the fact that under our Constitution all such allocations must first be approved by Congress.
Venus has a Moon?
The new colonial movement, in space! South Africa joins the race, launching its own space agency.
Want to follow the Cancun climate summit come to an end, for good or ill, on this its final day? Check out this blog.
NASA satellite sees an early meteorological winter in the American midwest.
I know this is weather, not climate, but according to the repeated claims of global warming scientists for the past decade, cold winters like this should no longer be happening. But they are, which means there must be holes in their science!
Two seemingly conflicting research papers, both focusing on how the formation of clouds might affect, or be affected by, global temperatures, actually end up combining to show that the world’s climate models can’t be trusted. In other words the basic science of predicting climate change remains seriously flawed.
At issue in both papers is how much and under what circumstances clouds help to warm or cool the planet. Do they reflect solar energy back into space or hold it within the atmosphere like a blanket – and by how much? The answer is crucial to determining where global temperatures will be heading in this century – and what if any policies the world’s governments should be adopting to deal with the situation.
The latest research, appearing this week in the journal Science, is the work of Andrew Dessler of Texas A&M University. In it he examines the weather-satellite databases covering atmospheric conditions over the past 10 years, looking for discernible patterns where changes in temperature have resulted in changes in cloud cover, or vice versa.
In particular, Dessler chooses El Niño and La Niña events in the Pacific Ocean. El Niño, which occurs every three to seven years, is accompanied by an enormous finger of warm water extending eastward along the tropical Pacific, all the way to South America and first appearing around year end. La Niña, which also erupts periodically, produces the opposite effect – a large zone of colder-than-normal water stretching across the Pacific. Both events tend to attract attention, because they usually generate severe weather affecting large areas of North and South America and elsewhere.
El Niño and La Niña are ideal subjects for climate researchers. They both develop quickly and produce, respectively, recognizable spikes and troughs in temperatures. For example, scientists studying the relationship of clouds to temperature can observe changes in cloud cover over the Pacific that precede, coincide with, and follow El Niño and La Niña and then use those changes to estimate how cloud cover affects or is affected by air temperature.
As Dessler describes in the Science paper, he did find evidence of what he calls a small positive feedback, meaning that clouds may prevent some solar heat from radiating into space, thereby warming the planet. He also doesn’t rule out the possibility of a small negative feedback, but says it probably isn’t large enough to overcome other factors contributing to warming.
But Dessler includes several assertions in his text that completely debunk the idea that climate science is “settled,” as asserted by former Vice President Al Gore and a host of others. For example, early on in the paper, Dessler acknowledges that “the most complex and least understood” of climate-feedback mechanisms is cloud feedback. And later on, he admits that “what we really want to determine is the cloud feedback in response to long-term climate change. Unfortunately, it may be decades before a direct measurement is possible.”
The earlier paper, published in the summer of 2010 in the Journal of Geophysical Research, by Roy Spencer and William Braswell of the University of Alabama at Huntsville, goes much farther in challenging the cloud-temperature link. The global warming community has tried for years to discredit Spencer’s work and to brand him as a “denier,” partly because for more than a decade he has produced findings that call into question the reliability of the host of earthbound instruments used to collect global temperature data.
Such accusations have been entirely unfair, because even Spencer, in his eminently readable and informative blog, has asserted from time to time that he isn’t sure whether the climate is changing and human activity is responsible. What gets him into trouble with the conventional wisdom is his emphasis on what’s wrong with current climate science and what remains unknown – and though it’s a short list, it’s formidable:
[Ed. Concerning the second and third quotes: Since water vapor in the atmosphere is by far the most powerful greenhouse gas, far more important than carbon dioxide, not understanding its detailed relationship with temperature means no model can do a reliable job of predicting the climate.]
In their paper Spencer and Braswell likewise look at the relationship between clouds and temperature. In an extremely detailed and – even to climate researchers – dense examination of the same satellite database, the two authors present an argument that separates the phenomenon of cloud formation from anything relating to temperature changes. As Spencer comments in his blog, regarding the feedback data, “even the experts in the field apparently did not understand them.”
But even interested lay readers can glean the gist of Spencer and Braswell’s findings simply by looking at the graphs they present, which contain jumbles of data points suggesting a complete disconnect between cloud formation and temperatures. This is a strong indication that we don’t know which is the cause and which is the effect, though most climate researchers assume temperature is the cause and clouds are the effect. At best, the researchers conclude, there’s evidence for a slight negative feedback – clouds causing cooling when temperatures rise – but overall there appears to be no link between the two phenomena over long periods.
“I cannot remember a climate issue of which I have ever been so certain,” as Spencer wrote about this finding on his blog.
The debate over the cloud-temperature link is bound to go on, but these two papers should make one thing clear: Until the connection between cloud formation and temperature is established or debunked once and for all, the models being used to predict future climate cannot be trusted. So perhaps when the new Congress looks at climate-related issues its members might want to consider them in this context.
