Quote of the Week #11

Sorry,
That’s not a banana plug…
THIS is a banana plug:
http://www.pomonaelectronics.com/pdf/d1325-5230-5406-6546_101.pdf
Yours looks more like a phone (not phono) plug.
REPLY: I know what a banana plug looks like – and that above looks like one to me – feel free to create new artwork, I have more important things to do. – Anthony

I’ve just read the Telegraph obituary of Dr Eddy. Usually I love reading Telegraph obit’s, especially those of the wonderful war heroes, (sadly diminishing in number if not in glory), and for the most part this was the usual mix of scholarly research and amusing anecdote. However, the two references to global warming stuck out like a tutu on a frog. Notwithstanding that Dr Eddy may have sucked back on his initial ideas vis-a-vis the sun and climate, there is no attempt to link these statements to anything he said or wrote (if indeed he did either). Should I be deemed worthy of a couple of half columns in the press when I pass the veil and some hack tacks stuff like this on to my record, I’ll come back and haunt the swine.

In Nature BLOGS there is an obituary notice for Dr. Jack A. Eddy:
Sunspot veteran dies at 78 – June 15, 2009
Posted for Quirin Schiermeier
http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/2009/06/sunspot_veteran_dies_at_78.html
At the end of the post is the following statement:
****
Irregular variations in the 11-year sunspot cycle are an endlessly appealing topic for all those who would rather believe that the sun – not fossil fuels – is driving current climate change.
Eddy distrusted wackiness in science, but he was well aware that his discoveries were alluring to obscurants.
“There is a hypnotism about cycles that seems to attract people. It draws all kinds of creatures out of the woodwork,” he once told science historian Spencer Weart.
****
The quotation which Quirin Schiermeier used was taken out of context in the hope that no one would check the source, so here is the source:
Interview with Jack Eddy, April 21, 1999
In Michigan by phone, conducted by Spencer Weart
http://www.agu.org/history/sv/solar/eddy_int.html
****
EDDY: I had been taught that while the Sun indeed affects the upper and outer atmosphere of the Earth, purported connections with the troposphere and weather and climate were uniformly wacky and to be distrusted. I still believe that to some extent, for there is a hypnotism about cycles that seems to attract people. It draws all kinds of creatures out of the woodwork. The claims that were made for associations between weather events and the Sun I thought were pretty preposterous. One of those that turned up was this notion that Gene told me about. About the work of Walter Maunder 100 years before, when he had thought that there was a prolonged period of time in the 1600s when the Sun wasn’t so active.
That really piqued my curiosity, and I began digging into it. The trail was, initially, purely historical, initiated by Gene Parker telling me about Maunder, and driven by my prejudice of trying to find examples from the past that would disprove, once and for all, the notion of strong sun-weather relations. A devout negativism on this subject was the gospel at the High Altitude Observatory anyway and the catechism that I had been taught and had taught to others. And although I was indeed an acolyte, I was trying to examine the early origins of Sun-weather claims, like unrolling and deciphering the Dead Sea scrolls of solar physics. But it was mostly a love of history that took me down the trail.
****
Yes, the AGW True Believers are very much aware of the work of Dr. Eddy and would like it to go away. In 2001 and again in 2002 I asked the question:
“If the evidence for global warming is that compelling, why is it necessary for those who believe in global warming, to misrepresent data in this manner to support their cause?”
I am still waiting for an answer!
Mike