I’ll be offline anywhere from 48-72 hours. The reason?
My lovely wife has another GA surgery scheduled for tomorrow at Stanford, hopefully the last one, and while I’ll have some sporadic Internet access, I don’t plan on focusing on anything but her. We are leaving today and I’m in transit while you read this as this is an automatically scheduled posting.
Guest authors and moderators may fill the void if you wish. If not, no worries.
Please, keep it civil.
Might I just add my best wishes for Mrs Watts’ speedy recovery to the list. Dave.
Anthony
Our thoughts and prayers are with your wife, yourself and your family and our hopes for a successful outcome and prognosis.
In all the tumult of recent days, we seem to have missed the passage of a significant anniversary. Three years ago Algore announced his intention to spend $300 million to create an army of 10 million “volunteers” to force the government to act on solving global warming.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/apr/01/climatechange.usa
I guess we would have to say he was somewhat successful, although calling folks who are collecting the overly generous pay and benefits of government employment “volunteers” seems to be a bit of a stretch.
Best wishes to Mrs W for a speedy recovery.
Hope all goes well. Take care, both of you. The weather will still be here when you get back.
Dave G
Trenberth’s new excuse for falling temperatures”
From New Scientist:
“The pervasive increase in water vapour changes the intensity of precipitation events with no doubt whatsoever,” Kevin Trenberth of the US National Center for Atmospheric Research told a meeting in January. “Yes, all events. Even if temperatures or sea surface temperatures are below normal, they are still higher than they would have been, and so too is the atmospheric water vapour amount and thus the moisture available for storms.”
In other words warming is still happening even if its colder.
So as if we go into a new ice age as Trenberth stands on the Mississippi glacier watching it calve off into the freezing water of the Gulf of Mexico 50 miles South of what was New Orleans – he will be saying “Yes CAGW is real – instead of minus 37 it would have been minus 45 if it hadn’t been for all the CO2”.
My very best wishes for your wife and yourself.
Best wishes from Texas for a successful surgery and speedy recovery. I had to look up “GA” surgery and now have a bit more medical knowledge rattling around in my brain. GA surgery sounds like quite an ordeal. You have my sincere wish that this is the last surgery required.
New app exploits piezo electric effect to allow users to smell and taste preprogrammed scents.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1374533/News-anchor-Shally-Zomorodi-licks-smells-iPad-April-Fools-Prank.html
Trusting everything goes well.
Don’t worry about us, we’re big kids now, we hope.
Our thoughts are with you, Anthony.
Without belittling that in any way, I thought it might be interesting to see the split between religious and non-religious ways of expressing the same thing in this thread.
Count of the word ‘wish’: 49 (not counting the one in the article)
Count of the word ‘pray’: 22
It’s made more complicated than that, though, because quite a few of the ‘pray’ers use ”best wishes’ as well.
If I was a climate scientist, could I call this a proxy reconstruction? 🙂
Still yearning for news, and praying that it is good.
Regarding the “New “scientist”” quote above….
I have published the answer to the AGW problem at http://lwolt.wordpress.com/2011/01/31/i-have-the-answer-the-global-warming-problem/ and I have been getting all of the credit that it deserves.
At the risk of stepping out of bounds:
“If I was a climate scientist, could I call this a proxy reconstruction? :)”
You could call it what you want. What it is is not governed by what you call it.
Regarding “wish” v. “prayer”–I think I have said something thrice, using the word prayer in one, I think (I have not checked). Sometimes, I find, I make people uncomfortable using “religious” words, and since I don’t (in this thread) want to make anybody uncomfortable…..
For me, personally, the words are pretty much interchangeable.
We Pray everything goes well.
Best wishes to your missus and all your family.
Best wishes.
Now for a serious question which I hopefully frame correctly.
Science fact: Air is transparent to sunlight.
Why does heat when rising from surfaces cast a shadow? I have obsserved this recently and have no idea why a shadow should arise.
…..gonna get me into an argument yet.
On prayer–one could argue that we have all been praying for the well-being of the Watts–the only questions have to do with to whom or what the prayers are are directed.
The other: “Science fact: Air is transparent to sunlight.”
I have no credentials with which to purchase automatic credibility, but don’t think that is a fact.
I thing there are two problems with it–one is that “air” is poorly defined.
The other is that depending on what “air” means” it is transparent (or nearly so) at some frequencies and quite opaque at others.
And maybe a third–are those really shadows (what ever THAT means)? Or are we seeing interference patterns from differing refraction indices in the air currents?
Biofuels article, in the NYT no less!
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/07/science/earth/07cassava.html?_r=2&hp
Comforting thoughts to you and your family.
Your spirit for truth makes it easy to care.
Strength to you and yours.
kbray.
Our local Democrat congressman Schrader voted for funding to keep government open and to strip EPA’s power to regulate greenhouse gases
http://www.oregonlive.com/politics/index.ssf/2011/04/schrader_votes_for_gop_budget.html
The local lunatics are lambasting him.
civiletti April 07, 2011 at 5:12PM
“He just thinks the government should do nothing about it until Congress approves. this from Paul Krugman:
So the joke begins like this: An economist, a lawyer and a professor of marketing walk into a room. What’s the punch line? They were three of the five “expert witnesses” Republicans called for last week’s Congressional hearing on climate science.
But the joke actually ended up being on the Republicans, when one of the two actual scientists they invited to testify went off script.
Prof. Richard Muller of Berkeley, a physicist who has gotten into the climate skeptic game, has been leading the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, an effort partially financed by none other than the Koch foundation. And climate deniers — who claim that researchers at NASA and other groups analyzing climate trends have massaged and distorted the data — had been hoping that the Berkeley project would conclude that global warming is a myth.
Instead, however, Professor Muller reported that his group’s preliminary results find a global warming trend “very similar to that reported by the prior groups.”
The Republicans and those Democrats paid-off by the energy industry will do nothing to stop climate change before the planet is reduced to a cinder. And Congressman Schrader will stand on principle and go along.”
From mkelly on April 8, 2011 at 9:25 am:
You have likely seen mirages caused by heat such as with a paved road. Layers of colder and warmer air are involved, with colder air being denser thus having a higher optical index of refraction. The differences lead one to see “waves” of heat emanating upwards from sources of heat like fires and BBQ grills.
You are seeing a shadow because the light rays are being refracted from the straight path you’d otherwise expect thus they strike a surface elsewhere. I’ve noticed those rippling shadows myself. That’s what causes them.
From the BBC no right of reply story
“New York set to be big loser as sea levels rise”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13011073
Sometimes this happens – Picked up on 24 March 2011
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12530439
But remembered this earlier story
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2011/2010GL046474.shtml
Just like to point out he does have this
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/richardblack/
An again
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13002706
“Scientists who predicted a few years ago that Arctic summers could be ice-free by 2013 now say summer sea ice will probably be gone in this decade.”
All the best to you and your wife!
May I tell you a (true) story:
I used to work at a nuclear power plant. A long term colleague at our technical support laboratory (off site) was seriously ill and in a coma. An individual went round with a giant card and collected the signatures of well over half the staff members (several hundred). The “selling point” was:
You may not know this guy but he is a long term friend and supporter of the Station. We want his wife to know there are hundreds of people who care and we want one of the first things he sees when he wakes up to be a card full of the signatures of people, most of whom he may not know but are supporting him.
You can guess the impact on both of them. (Incidentally, he made a complete recovery.)
For anyone who reads this, why not put a simple one-liner on this thread, even if you feel you don’t know Mrs Watts. I doubt if either Anthony of his Mrs will object to knowing there are hundreds who care …
Found in Steve Oregon’s comment from April 8, 2011 at 10:27 am:
“The Republicans and those Democrats paid-off by the energy industry will do nothing to stop climate change before the planet is reduced to a cinder.”
The eco-loons want Republicans and Democrats to stop the Sun from exploding?
I can understand the political appeal. As opposed to the “carbon” taxes that won’t be stopped if “global warming” goes away, if the Sun explodes then all collections of the “Sunshine Tax” will cease immediately.
Good Luck and speedy recovery to Mrs Watts, Anthony and family.
God bless you all
Adrian