I have some other things to attend to this weekend, posting will be light from me. But I’ve arranged for some entertainment.
Willis will be posting some of his tales of the sea, which will appear below this posting.
Other WUWT authors are welcome to make submissions also.
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The only Saturn 5’s are in museums.My bet is we are more likely to be hit by somethjing big before NASA ever again has a booster of that capability. Im not imagining they ever will, in spite of their grandiose projects being cyclically announced and cancelled these past thirty years. Thats leaving out the Dragon boosters.
The Space Age died with the Cold War.
Some comic relief from Harry and Paul. What really goes on at the G20 summit.
I don’t think Italy builds aircraft carriers but it is still funny.
Science, Politics and Global Warming
by Wal Thornhill
“In the end, science offers us the only way out of politics. And if we allow science to become politicized, then we are lost. We will enter the Internet version of the dark ages, an era of shifting fears and wild prejudices, transmitted to people who don’t know any better. That’s not a good future for the human race. That’s our past.”
—Michael Crichton, “Environmentalism as Religion,” (A lecture at the Commonwealth Club, San Francisco, CA, September 15, 2003).
Global warming
The Global Warming circus in Copenhagen was politics driven by a consensus that, by definition, has nothing to do with science. The apocalyptic nonsense that opened the meeting highlighted that fact. How many who attended or demonstrated at the meeting actually understand the (disputed) scientific grounds for the hysteria? Meanwhile, leading science journals allow skeptics of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) to be labelled “deniers” and refuse them the right of reply. It is doctrinaire denouncement, not science. It is the journal editors who are denying the scientific method by censoring debate. It is they who are peddling ideology.
Despite the glossy media image, modern science is a mess. When the fundamental concepts are false, technological progress merely provides science with a more efficient means for going backwards. At the same time, government and corporate funding promotes the rampant disease of specialism and fosters politicization of science with the inevitable warring factions and religious fervor.
“Science has become religion! ..although religion may have borrowed some of the jargon of science, science, more importantly, has adopted the methods of religion. This is the worst of both worlds.”
—Halton Arp
There have been several warm climatic periods documented in history that had nothing to do with human activity. There seems to be evidence that the Earth has actually been cooling since 2001, in line with reduced solar activity. So it would be more realistic to consider climate change as a normal phenomenon and to plan accordingly because despite all of the hoopla in the media, modern science is founded on surprising ignorance.
Whether the squares are the same color or not wasn’t my point. I was showing that our perceptions are often quite different from reality.
The squares appear to be very different colors, when in reality they are the same, or almost the same. [Folks can’t even agree on whether they are the same color. Some say yes, some say no.] But by simply looking at the squares, everyone immediately ‘sees’ that they are different colors.
but but but…..the consensus says we’re right
Drugs developed using mice models can kill you by making it worse…..
“The drug failures became clear. For example, often in mice, a gene would be used, while in humans, the comparable gene would be suppressed. A drug that worked in mice by disabling that gene could make the response even more deadly in humans. ”
..and the usual suspects Science and Nature…would not publish
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/12/science/testing-of-some-deadly-diseases-on-mice-mislead-report-says.html?_r=0
It appeared I was being argumentative. that was not my intent. i was engaging in a spot of harmless leg-pulling.
In the last six years, the surfacetemperature of the North Sea (53,5-58°N/ 1-8°E) has dropped by one degree Celsius.
Winters in Holland are colder than normal, summers are wet and cool.
Does anyone know why?
hi all thought you would all like to see this keeps spamming my u tube http://www.savethearctic.org/
leon said on February 17, 2013 at 11:59 am:
WHOIS info:
Got that? Greenpeace owned, Greenpeace administered, “webmaster” contact is fronting for Greenpeace. Fund for the Public Interest runs fundraising for a bunch of groups like Sierra Club, etc.
Save The Arctic dot-org. Has that nice touchy-feely “we’re here to help” vibe. Are they spamming you to ask for financial help with their scruffy start-up grassroots effort?
Nope just generally spamming me, thought it would be fun for a giggle!
Either way still funny!
And on a lighter note a good band from the 80`s all powered by co2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwV3LrUDqyg. Peace out!!!
I edited that League of Women Voters letter a little:
Frederick Michael says:
February 16, 2013 at 4:08 pm
ZootCadillac says:
February 17, 2013 at 4:18 am
Pedantic is the operative word.
The two squares range minutely but are both so similar in HSV that they could be switched and the illusion would appear the same. Essentially the hex number/triplet represented by 6b6b6b. The chances are that if you use a graphic program color picker and you get something other than H=0, S=0, V=42% then you are picking pixels that are part of a chromatic aberration from the text or the edges within the squares. Zoom in to about 1000% on either of the squares and you’ll see what I mean.
jim2 says:
February 17, 2013 at 8:07 am
….I got this from the League of Women voters. They have been hijacked by the socialists. Climate has nothing to do with voting…..
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
My Mother called them the League of Women Vipers and that was back in the 1960’s.
Julian Braggins says:
February 17, 2013 at 4:28 am
“If you are not familiar with the work of Louis Kervran they would interest you. Over a period of 40 years or so of meticulous observation and experiment he ‘proved’ that transmutation was occurring in animals and plants, i.e. residuals of certain elements were greater than inputs over time under very tightly controlled conditions, backing up observations going back two centuries or more by others. Without a mechanism to explain this, he and his work was ridiculed or ignored. Quantum tunnelling theory would have been a godsend to him !”
It’s a bit different
Most LENR researchers favor this theory at the moment. Widom-Larsen Theory
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/Widom-Larsen.php
Radio interview with Lewis Larsen
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVRLcC21F14
It’s not fusion, it’s weak interactions, already described by Fermi in the 40ies.
Surface-plasmons
I have to call bullshit on this one. The actual interview can be listened to at
this location . Having listened through the entire thing I did not hear anything like the exchange above. I suppose this short moment might have been edited out of the web version which would actually be most interesting if true. However at minimum the supposed quote as presented by Charles Gerard Nelson misrepresents the overall nature of the interview. Professor Church was clearly not at a loss for words. He was generally quite professional in the way he spun together his mixture of facts, half-truths, misleading implications and omissions to tell his story of ongoing sea level rise caused by warming.
I blame DB for starting the perception thing 🙂
Now, try this and think about it again {°~° }
Does it work with one eye?
http://beauproductions.com/golfswingsws/links/An%20amazing%20illusion.htm
CO2 causes milder storms.
First of all a storm is a heat engine and the amount of energy it uses to move air etc is proportional to the temperature DIFFERENCE between the input and the output not their absolute temperature .
Here is a simple explanation of the thermodynamics involved.
Notice that if the temperature out = the temperature in the heat engine STOPS !
CO2 makes the difference less so it slows down.
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/thermo/heaeng.html
By spreading the heat more evenly CO2 tends to make storms milder.
Despite one extreme storm recently the TREND seems to b e FLAT without any more or less storms floods or droughts and here is the proof.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/reference-pages/climatic-phenomena-pages/extreme-weather-page/.
OssQss,
Good one. Really excellent. When we perceive reality… is it, really?
[And don’t even get me started on consciousness!]
Well it is still the weekend so:- “””””…..Stephen Rasey says:
February 15, 2013 at 3:19 pm
@Jeff Wood
I think there is little doubt that the flickering you see is refraction from the movement of air at slightly different temperatures and longer distances, coupled with the fact that the standard lights are visibly smaller from the more distant towns. Jupiter and Saturn don’t flicker nearly as much as stars simply because they subtend a bigger angle, even if still measured in arc seconds.
Seeing as how this is an Open Thread, I want to recount a story I read in elementary school that made an impact on me to this day. Some kid chose a science experiment to measure the curvature of the Earth. …..”””””
The refractive index of the atmosphere is anything but unity, and because of its variable density, it is a graded index material. Graded index materials are quite commonly used in specialized optics.By far the most prevalent use of graded index materials, is in the fibers of fiber optic cables.
Self focussing lenses are made from radially index graded materials. In graded fiber cables, there are effectively billions of graded index lenses in series. The optical path from one focus to the next is constant, regardless of the angle the ray makes with the fiber axis (when you do it properly).
As a result, the propagation delay through the fiber is more constant, than if you had a uniform index across the fiber, which would give a cos theta propagation delay. This gives a wider bandwidth to the fiber, so it can carry more data.
In the atmosphere the refraction of light due to the atmosphere graded index, is very significant.
When you are sitting on the beach at Waikiki drinking a Mai-tai and watching the sunset, when the magic moment arrives, and the sun’s lower limb just touches the ocean horizon, the sun itself is already completely set below the geometrical horizon. The effect increases the closer you get to the horizon, which is why the setting sun gets vertically squished.
At the zenith, the effect of atmospheric refraction is quite significant. The rays bend away from the zenith point, so that stars appear to be closer to the zenith, than they really are. And for small angles near the zenith, the refraction error is almost linear with the zenith angle. As a result, the speed at which the stars appear to move near the zenith is slowed down.
I haven’t done the calculation in many years, but when telescope clock drives were simply constant frequency driven, amateur astronomers, had their clock run slightly slower than the real clock time to enable them to track stars for long periods across the zenith, without manual correction. As I recall, the apparent speed is about 16 seconds per day slower than real earth rotation speed.
I had a very special GT cut crystal cut for me, to divide down digitally with a binary divider, to run a clock 26 seconds per day slower than true. This let me track for about three hours across the zenith with a constant frequency and never get the telescope more than one second of arc away from a star position, which was about the resolution limit of my telescope.
So atmospheric refraction does significantly displace the apparent position of things.
“””””…..D.B. Stealey says:
February 16, 2013 at 2:01 pm
Open Thread? OK, check this out. Squares A and B are the same color…
How does that affect your perception of reality?…..”””””
Well colors seem to have become highly inflated in this computer age. RGB screens often claim to have 24 bit color, and I think some systems claim 32 bits. So 24 bit RGB is easier to misunderstand, since it is presumably one 8 bit byte for R, G, B. which gives you about 16 million different colors doesn’t it ?
Well no; actually it doesn’t give you anywhere near 16 million colors. Maybe if, you are lucky, you will get 64,000 colors !
You see eight of those bits are “Brightness” bits, and don’t really affect the color at all.
Arguably the G bits set the brightness level with 256 different brightness levels, and the 16 RB bits set one of 64,000 colors.
Well I personally don’t believe that anywhere near 64,000 different colors actually exist.
I would say that two colors are different, if I can see a single pixel of one, in a screen full of the other. Some might argue for half a screen of one, and half a screen of the other. I might be persuaded to agree with them.
I don’t believe there are any more than 4096 colors; but that is just me.
My local paint store, has dozens of different paint chips, each supposedly a different color.
If you paint one room in one color and a non ajoining room in another, and they look different to an observer walking from one room to the other, then maybe they are different.
My paint store doesn’t have anything like 4096 paint chips, and many of those look the same to me.
The other scam in your expensive TV or computer monitor is the claimed contrast. The fancy monitor I bought a couple of weeks ago, has an 8,000,000 comtrast ratio (they claim)
Now the brightest level on most of these screens, is about 300 Lux; maybe some get to 400.
So if the white level is 400 lux, then the black level is 50 micro lux. So my screen doesn’t get that black even when I turn the power off to it. Just the room lights reflecting off the screen make it many times brighter than 50 microlux.
If you are unfortunate enough to own an HP monitor, then you actually have a very expensive mirror, and it won’t meet its own contrast specs unless you watch it in a completely darkened room with no lights to reflect offf the screen. In fact you will have to have non reflective walls in the room so the screen doesn’t light up your room.
Well in fairness to HP, lots of other monitor makers, also make expensive mirrors.
I already own a mirror, which is why I didn’t buy an HP monitor.
George,
I defer to you as the resident expert in colors, optics, wavelengths and photons. You are the man!
But I was only trying to show the disconnect between reality and perception — the same disconnect that appears when true believers in ‘catastrophic AGW’ assume that ‘climate disruption’ is occurring.
I’ve had my fill of hedonist talk story and am ready to get back to climate science. Hurry back, Anthony.
Parahandy, (feb. 17, 2:25am)
Read it. Made sense to me, too. I just happen to think it is not conveniently popular at this time.
Got another “general” question:
a) If Co2 in 1850 was 280 ppm and now is 395 ppm, then the difference is ( 395 – 280 ) = 115 .
b) If the anthropogenic part of all the Co2 increase is about 25% and the rest is natural, then
.25 x 115 = 28.75 ppm.
c) If “a” and “b” above are correct, is it not logical to assume that the whole debate is about 28 ppm, more or less?
Would we make the same calculation with water vapor?
crosspatch says:
February 17, 2013 at 1:15 pm
I edited that League of Women Voters letter a little:
Subject: Take The Lead on Climate Change Hysteria….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Sounds like a good letter/fax to send to a;; your congress critters too, state and federal. Heck, send it to all the politicians.