New Year's Open Thread

Happy New Years Fellow Jesters!!! 🙂

Well since the big man’s away, I shall simply bid you Charles a very happy New Year! 🙂

Watts up with Prince Charles and the Catlin crew three stooges this year ??
They got the baseline, but decided not to drill for follow-up data ?? Or did they stay closer to home and measure some ridiculously thin first year ice in Whitby Harbour ??
http://www.real-whitby.co.uk/whitby-harbour-frozen

What an amazing year of growth at WUWT!
To one and all — Happy New Year!
Now, excuse me but with six hours left to 2010, I’ve got piles of munchies and wine that need attending to. See y’all in 2011.

Happy New Year to all. Keep close watch upon the warmist alarmists and their political enablers.

To all my friends, and foes alike, I wish you nothing. But the best for the new year!
May the climate be with you.

Godt Nytt År

Talking with a friend working for Wash. State fisheries service I learned that for decades HOBO data loggers have been used to monitor temperatures in the water and on land. These devices make recordings every 20 seconds and past models have been used for some 40-50 years. My friend said they were originally used in railroad cars to record railcar temperatures during travel.
So I wonder if decades of HOBO records from outdoor locations around the country have been mined for temperature data to compare with official stations.
Here is webpage for a firm that sells these:
http://www.microdaq.com/occ/u12/u12-012.php

Happy New Year, everyone. Be careful not to put any rotten ice in your drinks tonight.
[I’ll watch for the yellow snow – enjoy ~ac]

Happy New Year to all
intrestingly the met office is talking about space weather in the run up to the next solar maximum! And they want a new computer! oh and another 10-20 million a year dollars or pounds they don’t mind!
Honestly read this interview;
http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101230/full/news.2010.685.html?s=news_rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+news/rss/most_recent+(NatureNews+-+Most+recent+articles)&utm_content=Google+Reader
seriously

Happy New Year to one and all and may the next one bring prosperity and good health. To Anthony in particular, let’s hope that this year is much better than the last one was for your family. Your resiliance deserves utmost respect. Enjoy what you can of the holiday, AND SPEND SOME TIME WITH THE FAMILY!!!!!!!
regards
john r

Just 15 mins past midnite here in the UK. I wish all a Happy and Prosperous New Year.
and to the warmist contingent, I hope you all can gain some wisdom in the coming year!
as to the likes of Jones, Schmidt, Hansen et al ………I suggest a correspondence course in openness, humility and honesty would be of great benefit! – nevertheless, I hope that may you find peace and contentment and the ability to sleep at night! LOL
cheers to all!

OK, here’s a shameless plug for my time lapse video of decorating the City Of Torrance Rose Float.

Have a Happy New Year everyone.
Bob Diaz

I’m sure everyone on here will be delighted that Robert Stewart Napier, Chairman of the MET Office and Thermageddonist Extraordinaire has been given a CBE in the New Years Honours List!
Pity the MET Office can’t be relied upon to correctly forecast whether it will be hot / cold / dry / wet / calm / windy more than a couple of days in advance, even with their £30 Million Supercomputer. Otherwise Napier might have got an even better gong.
Can our chum Phil Jones have much longer to wait?

I two can play at that game.
Too my to friends, happy new year two you. My wish is two make a turd friend this year.

We’re all going to die
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/dinosaurs/8234135/Man-could-create-new-mass-extinction.html

Happy New Year from Stanley Idaho….. -28C tonight brrrrrrr……

Looks like Slashdot is calling for a solar minimum or at least reporting that others are saying such things:
http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/12/31/2057218/Our-Lazy-Solar-Dynamo-mdash-Hello-Dalton-Minimum
In another few months, it will be mainstream and, then, we’ll have a hot summer somewhere on the planet and everyone will forget until next year.

I see that NOAA have posted the sunspot number for today (at 23), since it’s just past midnight UTC. That gives us a total of 682 for the month, or an average of 22.0 for the month, virtually unchanged from November’s 21.6.

“Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.
There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.”
–Michael Crichton, The Caltech Michelin Lecture, 17 January 2003

Thank you for a terrific resource. For one who loves to learn there is nothing better.
Happy New Year to all.
KD

happy new year folks. here’s one to make your blood boil!
30 Dec: SF Chronicle: Peter Gleick: The 2010 Climate B.S.* of the Year Award
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/gleick/detail?entry_id=80061

Happy New Year to all.
The days… they are longer than expected…
http://notrickszone.com/2010/12/31/german-public-television-1972-projections-for-2000/#comment-7984

Happy New Year everyone.
Best wishes for health, happiness and prosperity.
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap101231.html
An interesting photo/composition that’s inspiring for the moment.

This is good:
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/12/30/botched-environmental-forecasts/
Happy New Year

I’ll contribute a couple of bucks to that study.
Happy new year to Everyone interested in climate. And for 2011, fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

[we can’t all be perfect all the time ~ac]
More engine damage from excessive ethanol fuel in the mix?

I’m just wondering who is going to be first out of the traps with a 2010 hottest year on record news statement. On your marks get set….
Just in time for the second bit of cold hard reality (ie Winter) to hit us all.
And with that pondering, Happy New Year!

Anthony and all
A happy and interesting 2011

Richard North tells us that the Chairman of UK Met Office has been awarded CBE1. It’s “For public service.”
It’s a public service to squander taxpayer funds and to put millions of lives at risk.
How wrong does one have to be before one doesn’t get a civil service gong? How many people have to suffer from the consequences of ineptitude under a quasi-religious sect?
The Australian Climate Madness blog has more.
1.Commander of the Order of the British Empire

Happy New Year everyone. Here’s to 2011 being the “Goldilocks” uneventful weather year. Not too hot nor too cold but juuuust right. Not to wet nor too dry but juuuuust right. Not too much Arctic ice nor too little, bur juuuust right. All metrics right at the average value!

Don’t forget to eat black eyed peas and other lucky legumes. Cabbages, hog jowls or ham tomorrow. Drink socially and responsible. Watch where you point your fireworks, guns.

Fun on new years Eve…
Go to Google ngram viewer
Select time period from 1500 to 2000
Set smoothing to 30 years
Enter the phrase “hockey stick”
Hit search
Happy New Year!

Happy New Year! ~ctm and all. Best wishes for health and prosperity.
My current weather in eastern Washington state is single digit bitter cold plus a major power outage for approximately 25% of my town. We are living the dream of the Al Gore and the global coolers.

It is possible that C-Span and PBS will just use the new conserviative house and the hearings they plan as an excuse to shut down coverage of the hearings. They will do so I’m sure to save energy.
ps
Why pray tell do these CO2 on faith city goverments keep the flood lights on all their water towers/tanks/above ground storage? If they care all that about saving eletricity that needs to be shut down post haste. But, alas common sense .

It’s less than and hour before the new Year here in NE Alabama. 2010 sure went out with a bang. ice, snow, and a warm spring like day at the end for the last day of the month. Pray we that 2011 will be just as eventful and beautiful. The variability makes for such beautiful seasons on this blue/green planet.
Happy New Year to each and every one,
Bill Derryberry

Here’s a quote from The Good Society by Walter Lippmann than sums up the kind of people we are up against in the climate/environmental movement:
In their modes of thinking, the intellectuals who expound what passes for “liberalism,” “Progressivism,” or “Radicalism” are almost all collectivists in their conception of the economy, authoritarian in their conception of the state, totalitarian in their conception of society.
Happy new year everyone.

To Anthony, and everyone in WUWT, a Happy New Year.
Here’s a couple of quotes re climate & politics…
“A grain of truth has been embedded in a sea of nonsense.” (Nigel Lawson)
“Blue Planet in Green Shackles”. (Vaclav Klaus)
Thank you all for helping me seeing the whole picture, even if I understand only some of it.
From the Dutch sector of the North Sea,
Chris

I have learned a lot these past few months reading this site – best site discovery of the year for me. Thank you one and all for my ongoing education – the posts are as informative as the articles.
A happy and prosperous New Year to all 🙂

A Happy New Year to All, as Earth and Solar Systems tilt! Great thanks to Anth, the due mods and bloggers – wherever you are…..http://www.die.net/earth/
Best blog by far.

Happy New Year everyone! Anthony, thank you for the unbelievably hard work over the past year (like those before it, and even moreso) and for the fascinating reading it has provided.
And to everyone out there–may your hens get very fat and may your sheep lay an abundance of eggs. Have a great 2011, one and all!
Geoff Alder

One thing i learned from this and other sites:
The quality of results given by a computer model are linearly inverse to the complexity of the data presented.

I have learned so much in the past couple of years.
Thank you Anthony; thank you contributors and posters.
A happy New Year to everyone. 2011 is going to be VERY interesting.
Kia ora, kia kaha.
Be well and be strong.

Discussion and opinion from WUWT commenters on this “Call for papers” on “Climate Determinism: Then and Now” should be fruitful and worthwhile. The alert to it was posted in Tips & Notes by vigilantfish on December 29, 2010 at 10:12 am.
It fits well on an “Open Thread” and I hope some of you will run with it. There is much to ponder and learn here. A short extract from vigilantfish follows; but it is well worth slipping back to Tips to read his whole posting before commenting:
Climatic determinism has a very long and checkered history. It has provided an enduring framework for thinking about the relationship between the human and natural environments by making the climate a demiurge of social universe. In doing so, climatic determinists have put forward a particular species of political ethics whose self-serving claims about the environmental distribution of virtue, value and privilege have long been subject of debate and criticism. Most problematically, the idea of climate as a key force in social development has naturalized existing forms of cultural domination, political hierarchy, economic dependency and racial inequity. While most of such thinking has been discredited, in recent years, the omnipresence of anthropogenic climate change has caused a resurgence of similar ideas, causing scholars and commentators to ask if these represent a revival of climatic determinism and, if so, with what consequences?

From the Antipodes I would like to thank Mr. Watts and all the moderators, contributors and posters for making this site such an enjoyable and delightful adventure.
To all, best wishes for a prosperous and enjoyable new year.

Happy new year to Anthony, his family & the mods.
Keep up the good work, good sense & good science will eventually prevail.
Cheers
Norman

“*Keep calm until we know how wind blows”
AGW PR Rebuttal:
Youse dirty denialist rats. We’re going to get youse.
“we risk emboldening the sceptics”.
>>> “To this I would add the fact that the story of climate change is a story that hasn’t happened yet.”
“For 22 years, climate change has been sold as an impending apocalypse. This tactic has not worked; indeed there are signs that it has backfired.”
“There is tremendous uncertainty, but we think it will be bad and that it would be a good idea to do something. And then sell climate change like you sell house insurance.”
…-
“*Keep calm until we know how wind blows
* Michael Hanlon
* From: Sunday Herald Sun
* January 01, 2011 4:02PM”
“THIS is a good time for sceptics, former sceptics, waverers and true believers to take stock on where they stand on climate change.
The harsh weather that has been battering Europe and the US, not to mention Queensland, has, of course, emboldened sceptical voices.
“It’s just weather, not climate!” shout the believers, perhaps a little nervously – well aware that they are all too often very willing to confuse weather and climate when it suits them.”
“Michael Hanlon is the science editor of Britain’s Daily Mail”
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/ipad-application/keep-calm-until-we-know-how-wind-blows/story-fn6bn88w-1225980023565
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/mt/mt-comments.cgi

Ric Werme says: December 31, 2010 at 10:28 pm
Thanks to everyone who hasn’t wished me a Happy New Year! 🙂
Lessee, what’s next? Ah yes, Perihelion Day!
2011 2011
Perihelion Jan 3 19 Equinoxes Mar 20 23 21 Sept 23 09 05
Aphelion July 4 15 Solstices June 21 17 16 Dec 22 05 30
Ric, you forgot to point out that CO2 has made the summer three days longer already, one in the spring, plus two in the fall! /sarc
A happy, healthy & prosperous New year to all!

Ring in the New Year by Committing to Read Something which You May Not Already Agree With.
If anybody had any doubts at this point that the problem of the Information Age is in parsing and validating the information, then those people apparently lack Internet connections.
Everywhere you go online, the community is divided on issues. But, the dominant philosophy which tends to guide *both* sides is to criticize the other, and ignore their responses.
Rarely, in this current Information age, do people go out of their way to read what their critics are saying. But, for those who do, and come to develop an understanding of both sides of a debate, they learn that the extra effort to spend time within the company of those who they normally find distasteful is well worth the hassle.
Right now, you are probably imagining that *you* are not one of *those* guys. You’re imagining that you are different. You are open-minded to good ideas. You listen to your critics. You know both sides of the issues.
But, I would propose that this problem is not a problem of the Internet or the Information Age. This is a problem of humans. We desire certainty. And we want to believe that man has conquered his surroundings. It is not just romantic; it makes us feel secure and safe.
Being people, the people of WUWT are just as susceptible to these socio-psychological forces as anybody else. The people here are not some special breed. This is merely a collection of people who, for whatever reason, started listening to both sides of the conversation, on the specific issue of climate change.
But, is this enough? Have you guys gone far enough? Ultimately, somebody somewhere is going to have to create another climate model which actually works. How many of you guys have taken the next step, and started to wonder what this climate model would actually look like?
What would you change? What errors within the underlying physics would you propose that the models eliminate?
I’ve spent around five years of my time studying the subject of plasmas and plasma cosmology. I’ve heard both sides out, and to the best of my abilities, even run the arguments by both sides. I’ve read countless books by the EU Theorists and I’ve read published papers on the subject in IEEE. I’ve held countless conversations with the theorists, usually to clarify some confusion here or there.
In the process, I’ve learned the meaning of philosophy of science without ever even picking up a book on the subject. As a journalist, I’ve come to understand how scientists speak, and how to incorporate doubt into my language, where appropriate. I’ve learned how important it is to not confuse inferences with observations, as well as the inherent danger of the inferential step.
To many of you here, my views are pseudo-scientific. You guys should realize that I’m very used to that response. It is typical. It’s fine as a starting point, but only that. My expectations, over time, is that logical people do indeed listen to evidence and arguments worth hearing out.
In my experience, the large majority of the electric universe skeptics remain skeptical for the sole reason that they are not reading both sides. Nobody will ever convince you of a cosmology on a forum. But, somebody can convince you to read about another cosmology, and to cultivate sufficient interest to keep an open mind on the subject when you see others discussing it. When I discuss EU theory online, I never imagine that I’m going to sway somebody. I am merely trying to convince people that there are these other ideas which warrant their attention.
Okay, so here’s what’s going to happen:
Where Silicon Valley startups were once dominated by titans like IBM, Microsoft and Apple, today it’s ventures like Zynga and Facebook. We are going through a social networking phase, which has not yet fully run its course. Facebook will eventually peak and be chipped away by lots of smaller, more focused clones. Why? Because social networking is a powerful mechanism for formulating web content with minimal effort by the developers. A developer need only create the content management system — the framework itself — and the users will create the content if the idea is good enough to draw people.
At some point, the electric universe crowd (as well as, perhaps, other against-the-mainstream movements) is going to wake up to this. And, if they are right, somebody is going to create a social networking site dedicated to the creation of these models.
There is a big picture here. One of these fringe movements — whether it be EU or not — is going to set the precedent by coming together online and collaborating on models which are superior in their predictive capabilities to the conventional models. And from that instant forward, everything that we’ve come to imagine about how science is done in this world will be over.
It will be at this instant in time when the people of the world will realize that science for mankind can be created by the public, and can even be *funded* by the public. Investors will flock to this social networking site, and flood it with money for validating its predictions with additional observations and experimentation.
Whether or not the people of WUWT realize that this is the future of science, it’s going to eventually happen. If it does not happen in our generation, our children or grandchildren will do it.
It is inevitable.
Get over it right now.
Big Science will eventually become Old Science.
And there will eventually be a solar model which electric universe advocates can point to. And, based upon my five years reading about it, I strongly suspect that — given the power to observe the interstellar filaments which radio astronomers already follow, but in a more systematic manner — this new electric sun model will make accurate predictions. And these predictions will be sold to the US government in order to predict energetic solar events.
And all of this will really just be the beginning, because after that, these same people will move on to creating additional electric universe models. A climate model would be a natural second goal.
The third model would likely be a quantum model, with a special focus on how to properly model gravity on the quantum level.
So, at the end of the day, advocates of against-the-mainstream ideas who speak to frequently disinterested forums will win the day. They need not worry that their idea will not eventually be given its day. In the end, all good ideas will be tried. And those which work will make money. And those who refused to read about the good ideas will ultimately watch others make that money.
I’m sure it’s a story which has repeated itself in the history of men many times.

Piers Corbyn gets support for his ice age theory.
Ice Age to start in five years.
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2011/01/01/ice-age-to-start-in-five-years/

Happy New Year to all WUWT contributors and readers, but especially Anthony the Moderators! Surfing around today I came to the happy realization that for virtually any posting on CAGW, where comments are free and open, the skeptics far outnumber the warmists.
WUWT and the Chiefio and Climate Audit have changed the world. I wonder if there is any university in the world that would have the guts to give Anthony – or Steve McIntyre, of E.M. Smith – the honourary doctorates they so richly deserve for their attempts to keep science honest?

…….that for virtually any posting on CAGW, where comments are free and open, the skeptics far outnumber the warmists……..
Thats because we are all in receipt of hidden $billions donated by Big Coal and Oil. I’m expecting my annual bonus imminently.

Well the sun is maximum South in its annual trek due to the tilt of the earth, the moon is today at its maximum South declination for this 27.32 day period, and there are reports of killer tornadoes in the South East USA.
I could have told you so but nobody listens to the unwashed masses. It is a cyclic pattern thing, not a CO2 thing, due to solar wind shifts and lunar declinational tides in the atmosphere. Ignoring the biggest drivers of the weather and climate will always result in surprising happenings to standard observers.
Have a Happy New Year! Here’s to progress being made toward the truth.
Blogs are actively pursuing truth in all directions, you just need to digest enough of the bulk to separate out the BS from the gold hidden within.

Food and fuel shortages imminent as new ice age dawns:
http://www.helium.com/items/2051424-food-and-fuel-shortages-imminent-as-new-ice-age-dawns
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2006/10may_longrange/
Links from Iceagenow

Chris Reeve said:

Where Silicon Valley startups were once dominated by titans like IBM, Microsoft and Apple, today it’s ventures like Zynga and Facebook.

Of the three you mentioned, Apple is the only Silicon Valley startup and IBM has been around for something like 100 years.
What was wrong with Cisco, Intel, Google, Veritas, …

Roger L.;
But … we liked you better hammered!
😉
Happy New Year, or, as the Chinese will say next month (3rd): Gung Ho Fat Choi!

To Brian H and Smokey — I like Jonah Lehrer’s last three sentences, sobering though they be:

“Just because an idea is true doesn’t mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn’t mean it’s true. When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe.”

Hello. I know that I’m very late on this thread, but there was something that I wanted to get off my chest.
On November 26th 2010 the BBC released the following:
Met Office says 2010 ‘among hottest on record’
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11841368
Here’s how the article begins:

“This year is heading to be the hottest or second hottest on record, according to the Met Office.
It says global temeratures [sic] for the past 12 months are the warmest recorded by Nasa, and second in the UK data set, HadCRUT3.
The Met Office says it is very confident that man-made global warming is forcing up temperatures.”

The question is, why was this article published? Why was this news? If a similar article had been published in January then I could understand how it might be considered to be a news story. Once all the data is in for the year then it would seem reasonable to write a story on how the year’s temperatures compared to previous years.
But to publish an article in November about the possibility that 2010 would be one of the hottest on record is odd, to say the least.
So why was it published? The answer is depressingly obvious. The article was published three days before the start of the Cancun United Nations Climate Change Conference.
I’m slightly puzzled as to why this has not met with greater uproar. We have here a crystal clear example of the BBC and the Met Office trying to influence politicians. The publicly funded BBC, and the publicly funded Met Office are seen here clearly trying to push forward a political agenda.
As a tax payer, and a TV licence fee payer, I’d like to know how this is legal.