Oh this is funny. There’s not even any Gore involved.
"Haunted house" in Amsterdam - from About.com
We’ve seen that man-made global warming has taken some hits in the opinion polls lately, and that its 10 minutes of fame may be over, but sharp eyed blogger Dave R. at Care2 spotted this zinger. I’ve posted the graphs and tables from the polls with highlights below.
Dave R writes: Read the rest of this entry »
Some days I find things by accident. Today, researching for something else online, serendipity paid me a visit.
Fans of the hit sitcom “Seinfeld” may recognize this logo.
Image: Tshirtbordello.com (with some help from the Gimp)
Fans of the show may also recognize this restaurant:
Photo: Wikipedia entry on Seinfeld - Tom's Restaurant - click for details
Fans of Real Climate might recognize this man: Read the rest of this entry »
WUWT readers may recall the story I did last week:
Live in Ontario Canada? – help find this meteorite
Warmists thrilled about the SUV impact? Well I can only imagine but the meteorite did hit an SUV, according to CBC. No major damage though.
From a University of Western Ontario Press release.
By Communications Staff
Friday, October 16, 2009
GRIMSBY, ONT. – When Tony Garchinski heard a loud crash just after 9 p.m. on Friday, September 25 he didn’t think much of it. That is, until he awoke the next morning to find the windshield of his mom’s Nissan Pathfinder with a huge crack in it. Making note of the ‘unusual’ rocks he later found on the car’s hood, Garchinski chalked the incident up to vandalism and filed a police report. Read the rest of this entry »
My lovely wife pointed this out to me tonight while I was writing the post on the DMSP/SSMI sea ice sensor issue. It spoke to me, not only because it was hilarious, but because I immediately saw a comparison in it to how I feel (as well as many others) about the “rush” to save the planet. We keep hearing these pronouncements that we only have “X number of years left” to act, that we’ll reach “tipping points”, or “points of no return” if we don’t pass the Copenhagen Treaty.
But while the warmers are driving in the fast lane to Copenhagen, us annoying old skeptics (which is how many warmers view us) keep plodding along with facts (they are stubborn things you know) with occasional whacks to the climate science fast track like McIntyre’s recent revelations about the majority of the hockey stick being based on a few tree cores in Yamal and the use of Wikipedia graphs in United Nations official climate reports.
But warmers don’t like it when we do this, they simply want us to “get out of the way”: Read the rest of this entry »
NSIDC’s Mark Serreze must be thrilled, as he’ll now be able to justify some of his press releases. Gore must be ecstatic that his 2013 “Entire north polar ice cap will be gone in 5 years” prediction has come in way ahead of schedule.
Click for the current Arctic Ice image.
Notice the contrast between Arctic and Antarctic. I can hear the Angelic choruses of “we told you so” taking flight now. Oh, wait.
Electrical circuit runs entirely off power in trees
From the University of Washington by Hannah Hickey hickeyh@u.washington.edu
 |
| University of Washington |
| Electrical engineers Babak Parviz and Brian Otis and undergraduate student Carlton Himes (right to left) demonstrate a circuit that runs entirely off tree power. |
You’ve heard about flower power. What about tree power? It turns out that it’s there, in small but measurable quantities. There’s enough power in trees for University of Washington researchers to run an electronic circuit, according to results to be published in an upcoming issue of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ Transactions on Nanotechnology.”As far as we know this is the first peer-reviewed paper of someone powering something entirely by sticking electrodes into a tree,” said co-author Babak Parviz, a UW associate professor of electrical engineering.
A study last year from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that plants generate a voltage of up to 200 millivolts when one electrode is placed in a plant and the other in the surrounding soil. Those researchers have since started a company developing forest sensors that exploit this new power source. Read the rest of this entry »
Click for a larger image
I might add that the likelihood of a hurricane strength storm striking Southern California is low. Since 1900, only four tropical cyclones have brought gale-force winds to the Southwestern United States. They are an unnamed tropical storm that made landfall near San Pedro in 1939, the remnants of Hurricane Joanne in 1972, the remnants of Hurricane Kathleen in 1976, and Hurricane Nora in 1997 which entered California as a tropical storm.
The storms that do make it close enough to be a threat are often weakened by two facts: cold sea surface temperatures and upper level steering winds that tend to take them away for SoCal. But it’s a fun exercise to discuss the possibility. – Anthony
Guest post by Roger Sowell
A hurricane hitting Los Angeles. No, it hasn’t happened yet, but it could. I am using the same reasoning as the Carbon Is Going to Kill Us crowd, where it is deemed prudent and even mandatory that we take action now to prevent a future catastrophe. AGW believers insist that all mankind (well, except for developing countries, of course!) curtail or stop altogether emitting carbon dioxide, as that may cause ice caps to melt and oceans to rise and population disruption. Read the rest of this entry »
Hmmm, maybe there’s something to that “Wines grown in England during the Medieval Warm Period” after all. I think maybe the French are upset that Scottish wine might be served with kippers rather than truffles. Oh the horror!
From the UK Telegraph:
Best wines will come from Scotland if climate change is not stopped, French chefs say
Prominent French chefs have given warning that the country’s wines will lose their complexity and the best produce will come from Scotland if the effects of climate change are not tackled.
excerpts:
President Nicolas Sarkozy was posed a stark choice: save French wine by clinching a deal at the international climate conference in Copenhagen in December, or see generations of viticulture slowly die out as vineyards cross the Channel and head north.
“As flagships of our common cultural heritage, elegant and refined, French wines are today in danger,” 50 leading names from the world of French wine and food wrote in an open letter. “Marked by higher alcohol levels, over-sunned aromatic ranges and denser textures, our wines could lose their unique soul.”
Burt Rutan - aviation pioneer, engineer, test pilot, climate skeptic. Note the car.
Recently after some conversations with a former chemical engineer who provided me with some insight, I’ve come to the conclusion that many engineers have difficulty with many of the premises of AGW theory because in their “this has to work or people die” world of exacting standards, the AGW argument doesn’t hold up well by their standards of performance.
Today I was surprised to learn that one of the foremost and world famous engineers on the planet, Burt Rutan, has become an active climate skeptic. You may be familiar with some of Rutan’s work through his company, Scaled Composites:
Thanks to WUWT reader Dale Knutsen, I was provided a PowerPoint file recently by email presented by Mr. Rutan at the Oshkosh fly-in convention on July 29th, 2009 and again on August 1st, 2009. It has also now been posted online by an associate of Mr. Rutan’s. Read the rest of this entry »
Like Waxman-Markey, where 300+ pages get added at 3:09AM that nobody has time to read or fully evaluate, Real Climate gets on the “hurry up bandwagon” in regards to climate change perception. Dr. Pielke takes them to task again. I ask “What’s the rush?” – Anthony
With sincere apologies to "Big Daddy" Roth
Response By Roger A. Pielke Sr. To The Real Climate Weblog “More Bubkes”
Real Climate has posted a response titled “More bubkes” to my weblog of July 30 2009 titled Real Climate’s Misinformation. First, it is clear they are (deliberately?) misinterpreting what I wrote on the weblog. Embedded in the personal attack comments that Real Climate permits be posted, there are several that recognize that the error in the original Real Climate post was their statement
”Some aspects of climate change are progressing faster than was expected a few years ago”.
As I documented in my weblog of June 30 2009, their statement is clearly and documentably false (and is not a “wild allegation”).
They present a set of observational evidence regarding the longer term trends, and I have no disagreement with them on this. Indeed, in the past I posted a weblog that supported the retrospective skill of the GISS model in simulating upper ocean heat content increases at least until the last few years;
Comparison of Model and Observations Of Upper Ocean Heat Content.
I wrote in that weblog Read the rest of this entry »
Our QOTW comes from the newly minted Wikipedia page of the late, great Dr. Jack Eddy. Jack had a way with words, he liked them immensely and wielded them in ways that were not only profound but entertaining.
As a person who has worked on all sorts of meteorological and TV broadcast electronics systems in my career, this one quote from Dr. Eddy really hit home for me, and I think many of our readers will get the same great laugh and flash of understanding that I did from it. Then, you’ll understand the image I rendered above. Read the rest of this entry »
“He’ll stop the globe from getting warm; fuel your car with nuts and corn”
(h/t to Tom Nelson)
The link for the YouTube video is below. It is very well done. Read the rest of this entry »
Gavin should watch this show - he might find his missing weather station
A couple of days ago, I located the “long lost” Honolulu Observatory GISS weather station on the Island of Oahu with just a couple of hours of digging. That one apparently got “lost” because the station name changed, and the inter-agency communications seemed to be the cause, and nobody at GISS bothered to look to see if there was still current data coming from the station.
Today I found one in under 5 minutes. I wasn’t even planning on looking for one, it happened by accident. I was watching the Discovery Channel TV show this afternoon “Deadliest Catch” where crab fishermen brave the worst imaginable weather to keep crab shacks running nationwide. They are based out of Dutch Harbor, Alaska.
While watching a scene where they were coming into the docks, I saw an ever so brief flash of what looked like a Stevenson Screen off in the distance near the docks. I hadn’t expected to see one and I wasn’t 100% sure, but I thought I’d check NCDC’s metadatabase (MMS) for Dutch Harbor, AK. Sure enough, they have a COOP station there with a Stevenson Screen there that is “current”. Read the rest of this entry »
I busted out laughing when I saw this on Tom Nelson’s blog.
His title was “For climate hucksters, two inconvenient Google trends”.
I never think about this sort of stuff, but it was darn funny.
click for larger image
In the discussion thread about CO2 and Antarctic cold, some references to CO2 ice in the ice caps of Mars were part of that discussion.
WUWT reader Lou Mackenzie sends word that we can now watch Mars ice caps and many other things ongoing with the planet with a new NASA widget. You’ll find it now at the lower right on the WUWT widget panel.
Here are the details:
Mars Today, created by Howard Houben of the Mars Global Circulation Model Group, is a poster produced daily by the Center for Mars Exploration at NASA’s Ames Research Center. The updated poster depicts current conditions on Mars and its relationship to Earth in six panels. Read the rest of this entry »
Everyone see things in the clouds. People, animals, Christ on the cross, UFO’s, angels, and even schizophrenically imagined chemical attacks by contrails. You name it, somebody has seen it. So when I was prodded with a news item that said “new cloud type defined” I was thinking “uh oh, here we go again”. It is a lot like cyclomania, as humans tend to assign patterns to randomly ordered observations of nature. Looking for meanings in the clouds isn’t much different than looking for meanings in the alignments of the stars and planets.
From ChattahBox and The UK Telegraph:
Click for a larger image
(ChattahBox)—Meteorologists around the world have taken notice of a new storm cloud on the horizon, literally. And if they have their way the dark and choppy cloud will take its rightful place among its more famous cousins, cumulus, cumulus, cirrus and nimbus.
Cloud gazing Meteorologists first noticed the stormy and billowy formation floating over the Scottish Highlands and above Snowdonia, Wales. The unique gray storm cloud was also spotted over Australia, the cornfields of Iowa and high above the Arctic Sea off the coast of Greenland.
A group in England dedicated to cloud watching, the Cloud Appreciation Society, became quite excited when viewing numerous photos of the new storm cloud floating in the atmosphere.
The Cloud appreciators describe the cloud as “…a bit like looking at the surface of a choppy sea from below,” said Gavin Pretor-Pinney, founder of the Cloud Appreciation Society, and the first man to identify the new cloud. Read the rest of this entry »
You may have noticed that I have been absent from WUWT for a few days. The stories have been on scheduled automated posting, and the WUWT team of moderators has held down the fort (thank you).
The reason is that I have been traveling on business. While I was traveling I was invited to photograph the weather station at what I think is probably the most visually stunning and technologically advanced meteorology center in the world today:
Can you guess what city and country this is in?
Hints below.
Some of our younger readers may not get the title, and may never have seen a TV show in black and white. The answer is at the end of the article. Here’s an interesting weather phenomenon on the prairie – snow rollers!
From the NWS in Spokane, WA
(h/t to Mike D)
Snow Rollers on the Camas Prairie
March 31 2009
On the evening of March 31st, 2009, Tim Tevebaugh was driving home from work east of Craigmont in the southern Idaho Panhandle (see map below). Across the rolling hay fields, Tim saw a very unusual phenomenon. The snow rollers that he took pictures of are extremely rare because of the unique combination of snow, wind, temperature and moisture needed to create them. They form with light but sticky snow and strong (but not too strong) winds. Some snow rollers are formed by gravity (i.e. rolling down a hill), but in this case, the snow rollers were generated by the wind.
These snow rollers formed during the day as they weren’t present in the morning on Tim’s drive to work.
Based on estimations from Tim as well as the blades of grass in the picture, most of the snow rollers were about 18″ in height, while the largest rollers were about 2 feet tall.
Click on the thumbnails below for a full-size image.
Don’t get me wrong, I like new technology, and improved fuel economy too, but I just had to show this auto review excerpt from the Sunday Times because, well, it’s just so darn funny.
BTW to the potential hate mail senders, I drive an electric car myself to/from work most days. It costs me about five cents a mile to operate.
Sure, with any combo gas-electric technology, you likely won’t get the same performance, but I don’t have these sorts of problems alluded to in the article. – Anthony
(h/t to Kate at SDA)
Honda Insight 1.3 IMA SE Hybrid
WUWT reader David Summers sends this photo along taken a few days ago in 2007 in Australia from a colleague that “returned there for the summer”. I thought it might make a fun photo caption exercise.
Or if you like, fling funds
to help keep the www.surfacestations.org project going.
Sea Ice
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