Tag: science

Gore Announces New Campaign and Worldwide Event to Re-energize Global Warming Hysteria

12:57 pm

Al Gore has announced a new campaign “to broadcast the reality of the climate crisis and mobilize citizens to help solve it.”

And I ask: what the hell does a propaganda campaign tell us about the climate? The answer: nothing. Just because you say so, Al, does not make it so.

On another note, satellite data continues to show absolutely no warming for the past decade.

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Ethane lakes in a red haze: Titan’s uncanny moonscape

10:33 am

Titan’s ethane lakes in a red haze.

So far, there are no recognisable signs of organic life. That’s not surprising: by terrestrial standards, Titan is a deep freeze with surface temperatures at a chilly -180°C. Yet Titan is very much alive in the sense that its atmosphere and surface are changing before our eyes. Clouds drift through the haze and rain falls from them to erode stream-like channels draining into shallow lakes. Vast dune fields that look as if they were lifted from the Sahara sprawl along Titan’s equator, yet the dark grains resemble ground asphalt rather than sand. It is a bizarrely different world that looks eerily like home. Or as planetary scientist Ralph Lorenz puts it: “our prototype weird-world exoplanet”.

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Where to find life in the Milky Way galaxy

11:05 am

A paper published today on the Los Alamos astro-ph preprint website has attempted to model the habitable zones within the Milky Way galaxy. From the abstract:

We predict that ~1.2% of all stars host a planet that may have been capable of supporting complex life at some point in the history of the Galaxy. Of those stars with a habitable planet, ~75% of planets are predicted to be in a tidally locked configuration with their host star. The majority of these planets that may support complex life are found towards the inner Galaxy, distributed within, and significantly above and below, the Galactic midplane.[emphasis mine]

They took into consideration the hazard of supernovae for killing off planetary life, as well as other factors such as the where the necessary heavier elements would be available for producing planets.

You can download the paper here [pdf].

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Highest Water in a Decade Expected at Lake Powell

3:04 am

The highest water level in a decade is expected at Lake Powell by August.

Lake Powell’s rising water level is a result of the long and wet winter this year. An above-average snowpack, with late snows and unseasonably cold weather has lead to a slower melt than usual. As of May, the snowpack that feeds Lake Powell was 30 percent higher than average, with only 50 percent of the accumulated snowpack melted. [emphasis mine]

I thought Al Gore told us this wasn’t going to happen anymore.

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A new image of Vesta from Dawn

2:36 am

Dawn continues to approach the large asteroid Vesta. Below is an image taken July 1st from about 62,000 miles. The image has a resolution of 5.8 miles per pixel.

Despite Vesta’s large size, 330 miles in diameter, it is nonspherical. This fact, combined with data that says it is differentiated with a core and mantle, suggests that it is the remains of a larger object that subsequently broke up.

Vesta from 62,000 miles

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More stupidity from the Center for Biological Diversity

9:14 pm

The Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) today sued the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in Colorado for allowing caving to take place at the annual convention of the National Speleological Society.

The CBD claims that human activity can spread white nose syndrome, the mysterious ailment that has been killing millions of bats across the eastern United States. To quote:

It is well documented that the fungus believed to cause white-nose syndrome, aptly named Geomyces destructans, can be spread on the clothes and gear of people visiting caves. Scientists strongly suspect that the disease is a recent import from Europe, likely transported by someone who visited a cave there and then came to North America.

To be blunt, this statement is an outright lie.
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Another Iceland volcano appears about to erupt

4:41 pm

Another Iceland volcano, Hekla, is showing signs that it is about to erupt.

The volcano, dubbed by Icelanders in the Middle Ages as the “Gateway to Hell,” is one of Iceland’s most active, having erupted some 20 times over the past millennium, most recently on Feb. 26, 2000. It measures 4,891-feet (1,491-meters) and is located about 70 miles (110 kilometers) east of Reykjavik, not far from Eyjafjoell.

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House proposes to drop NASA’s budget to 2008 levels, eliminate Webb Telescope

4:25 pm

The House today proposed cutting NASA’s budget back to 2008 levels while eliminating all funds for the James Webb Space Telescope.

As much as I’d hate to see the Webb telescope die, it has cost far more than planned, is way behind schedule, and carries a gigantic risk of failure. However, if I had a choice, I’d rather they cut the $1.95 billion for Congress’s homemade heavy-lift rocket, the program-formerly-called-Constellation. There is a much better chance that Webb will get completed, launched, and work, than there is for this improvised and impossibly costly Congressionally conceived rocket.

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The wimpy maximum continues

6:46 pm

The monthly updated graph of the Sun’s solar cycle sunspot activity was released today by NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center. I have posted the June graph below.

For the third month in a row, there was a decline in sunspot activity. Though the sun is producing sunspots quite regularly and there hasn’t been a blank day since January 16, the numbers of sunspots continue to fall far below the predicted level of activity as indicated by the red line.

All this is no longer a surprise or unexpected. As the solar science community noted last month, they have now gathered enough data to convince them that the sun appears to be going quiet, and might even follow this very weak solar maximum — the weakest possibly in 200 years — with a decades-long period of no sunspots at all.

This graph, however, is very intriguing. Even with an expected weak solar minimum, the sun should be producing more sunspots each month, not less, as shown on the graph. This suggests that the most up-to-date predictions for the next solar maximum might still be too high.

The sunspot graph for June 2011

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Prime real estate

2:32 pm

The south pole of the moon

Since the 1990s, scientists have suspected that water-ice might be hidden in the forever-dark floors of the polar craters on the Moon. If so, these locations become valuable real estate, as they not only would provide future settlers water for drinking, the water itself can be processed to provide oxygen and fuel.

Moreover, the high points near these craters, including the crater rims, are hoped to be high enough so that the sun would never set or be blocked by other mountains as it made its circuit low along the horizon each day. If such a place existed, solar panels could be mounted there to generate electricity continuously, even during the long 14-day lunar night.

Below the fold is a six minute video, produced from images taken by Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) from February 6, 2010 to February 6, 2011, in an effort to find out if such a place actually exists. It shows how the sunlight hits the south pole across an entire year.
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Global warming scientists blame coal use increase in China for recent cooling

8:25 pm

Global warming scientists have come up with an explanation for the cooling seen in the past decade: The increase of coal burning in China.

In other words, fossil fuels can cause global warming and global cooling!

Or to put it another way, climate scientists really have no clear understanding yet of the climate, and are merely guessing when they try to predict what’s happening.

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