Accuracy of the IPCC's forecasts? Not so much

A number of scientists who question the accuracy of the models and assumptions used to project future disasters due to global warming have discussed various experimental approaches that could be used to measure the accuracy of the models used. Here's one; the results aren't favorable to the global warming alarmists.

I find your lack of faith disturbing

Space Daily reports the discovery of a "death star galaxy" that is ripping up another galaxy nearby with a powerful jet of gamma rays and X-rays. More details along with a picture of the jet in action are contained in the report.

According to the article, the "...death star galaxy was discovered through the combined efforts of both space and ground-based telescopes. NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, Hubble Space Telescope, and Spitzer Space Telescope were part of the effort. The Very Large Array telescope, Socorro, N.M., and the Multi-Element Radio Linked Interferometer Network (MERLIN) telescopes in the United Kingdom also were needed for the finding."

It's about time

As reported in The New York Times, the F.T.C. Asks if Carbon-Offset Money Is Well Spent

The great Instapundit offers a story about the promise of another type of heavenly light that may bring hope to mankind:

In September, American entrepreneur Kevin Reed proposed at the 58th International Astronautical Congress in Hyderabad, India, that Palau's uninhabited Helen Island would be an ideal spot for a small demonstration project, a 260-foot-diameter "rectifying antenna," or rectenna, to take in 1 megawatt of power transmitted earthward by a satellite orbiting 300 miles above Earth.

That's enough electricity to power 1,000 homes, but on that empty island the project would "be intended to show its safety for everywhere else," Reed said in a telephone interview from California.

"The climate change implications are pretty clear. You can get basically unlimited carbon-free power from this," said Mark Hopkins, senior vice president of the National Space Society in Washington. . . . Some seem to hear the call. The European Space Agency has scheduled a conference on space-based solar power for next Feb. 29. Space Island Group, another entrepreneurial U.S. endeavor, reports "very positive" discussions with a European utility and the Indian government about buying future power from satellite systems.

I'm sure that Jerry Pournelle will be pleased. He's been an advocate of solar power from stationary satellites for years.

In Chill Out, Bjorn Lomborg repeats his eminently logical argument that the prudent course to take in addressing global warming is not to attempt to reverse a process that may or may not be the cause of climate change. Instead, he writes
"We must accept that climate change is real and that we've helped cause it. There is no hoax. But neither is there a looming apocalypse.
To some people, cutting carbon emissions has become the answer, regardless of the question. Cutting emissions is said to be our "generational mission." But don't we want to implement the most efficient policies first?
Combating the real climate challenges facing the planet -- malaria, more heat deaths, declining polar bear populations -- often requires simpler, less glamorous policies than carbon cuts. We also need to remember that the 21st century will hold many other challenges, for which we need low-cost, durable solutions.
I formed the Copenhagen Consensus in 2004 so that some of the world's top economists could come together to ask not only where we can do good, but at what cost, and to rank the best things for the world to do first. The top priorities they've come up with are dealing with infectious diseases, malnutrition, agricultural research and first-world access to third-world agriculture. For less than a fifth of Kyoto's price tag, we could tackle all these issues.
Obviously we should also work on a long-term solution to climate change. Solving it will take the better part of a century and will require a political will spanning political parties, continents and generations. If we invest in research and development, we'll do some real good in the long run, rather than just making ourselves feel good today.
But embracing the best response to global warming is difficult in the midst of bitter fighting that shuts out sensible dialogue. So first, we really need to cool our debate."

Well said.

The Belmont Club discusses signs that the environmental movement is becoming more and more of a religion in Terraforming on Terra.

Wizbang points to a rare admission by scientists that climate change isn't only about global warming and cooling, but large scale effects of wind and current are at work as well.
An Overdue Dose of Humility in the Global Warming Debate?

In ADAMANT: Another Day, Another Cosmology, Russell Seitz writes "Astrophysicists Liang Gao and Tom Theuns have floated an alternative to the theory of primordial matter condensing into star-forming clouds withing clumps of cold dark matter that does not interact with radiation. In their computer model, dark matter can emit radiation,and radiation pressure would resist clumping forces and cause elongation of dark matter concentrations instead."

"Their paper in Science suggests such warm dark matter would stretch out into million solar mass filaments kiloparsecs long , attracting primordial hydrogen and helium gas to form the first stars and nucleate supermassive black holes in galactic centers."

Very interesting, and worth a read.

James Lewis writes in American Thinker: NASA's Hansen Reaches Escape Velocity

Here's an excerpt from the article:

"Prof. Hansen and his colleagues argue that rapidly melting ice caps in Antarctica and Greenland could cause oceans to swell several metres by 2100 - or maybe even as much as 25 metres, which is how much higher the oceans sat about three million years ago."
In an email to the Globe and Mail, Hansen writes
"If we follow 'business-as-usual' growth of greenhouse gas emissions... I think that we will lock in a guaranteed sea-level rise of several meters, which, frankly, means that all hell is going to break loose."For all you non-metric folks, 25 meters equals 82 feet, or about as high as an eight-story building. "Several meters" is only about 9-15 feet. That's the wall of water that is going to drown all the coastal plains of the world if Hansen's predictions come to pass.

The amazing Aerogel: insulator, filter, armor enhancer.
Scientists hail ‘frozen smoke’ as material that will change world - Times Online

Steve McIntyre of Toronto operates http://www.climateaudit.org/ as a hobby, essentially. I discovered the site accidentally a few years ago. Steve has waged an often lonely campaign to examine the accuracy of the data and methods behind the "consensus" view of climate change.

Steve has uncovered a whopper of an error, one that calls the "consensus" into question and the diligence of all those so-called scientists who shared the consensus. True scientific progress relies upon open sharing of experimental data--the inputs, the data, the environment, etc.--and the scientist's proposed theory is only considered proven if the experiment can be repeated successfully by any other scientist acting independently. Steve has fought to obtain the data and methods used by "the team", the scientists who Crazy Al relies on most to bolster his claim that we only have 10 years left to act. "The team" admitted an error that invalidated their claim for a hockey stick in Congressional testimony this year. Now NASA and their famed muzzled scientist (who's been muzzled into giving perhaps hundreds of tiresome interviews) admit a key error that calls more of the "consensus" view into question.

Al Gore's Global Warming Hysteria the Result of a NASA Programming Error (Wizbang)

More inconvenient research reported in ScienceDaily: Synchronized Chaos: Mechanisms For Major Climate Shifts

Excerpt:

"In the mid-1970s, a climate shift cooled sea surface temperatures in the central Pacific Ocean and warmed the coast of western North America, bringing long-range changes to the northern hemisphere.

After this climate shift waned, an era of frequent El Ninos and rising global temperatures began.
Understanding the mechanisms driving such climate variability is difficult because unraveling causal connections that lead to chaotic climate behavior is complicated.

To simplify this, Tsonis et al. investigate the collective behavior of known climate cycles such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the North Atlantic Oscillation, the El Nino/Southern Oscillation, and the North Pacific Oscillation.

By studying the last 100 years of these cycles' patterns, they find that the systems synchronized several times.

Further, in cases where the synchronous state was followed by an increase in the coupling strength among the cycles, the synchronous state was destroyed. Then. a new climate state emerged, associated with global temperature changes and El Nino/Southern Oscillation variability.

The authors show that this mechanism explains all global temperature tendency changes and El Nino variability in the 20th century. "

In "Against the grain: Some scientists deny global warming exists," Astrophysicist Nir Shariv describes his passage from man-made climate change believer to his present opinion. He has recanted: "Like many others, I was personally sure that CO2 is the bad culprit in the story of global warming. But after carefully digging into the evidence, I realized that things are far more complicated than the story sold to us by many climate scientists or the stories regurgitated by the media. "In fact, there is much more than meets the eye."

The article continues: Even doubling the amount of CO2 by 2100, for example, "will not dramatically increase the global temperature," Dr. Shaviv states. Put another way: "Even if we halved the CO2 output, and the CO2 increase by 2100 would be, say, a 50% increase relative to today instead of a doubled amount, the expected reduction in the rise of global temperature would be less than 0.5C. This is not significant."

Two takes on the politicization of science here and here.

American Thinker asks, "What Islamic Science and Philosophy?"

Jason Miks is lucky enough to have had A Conversation with Bjorn Lomborg. He's still correct; I hope he's right that more climate scientists are becoming global warming catastrophe skeptics, at least for the next half century. I also applaud his efforts to attempt to get mankind focused on real problems like indoor air pollution caused by burning the wrong fuels to heat homes, lack of drinking water and encouraging responsible use of pesticides in developing countries to control disease.

Move along, nothing to see here: "Hurricane predictions off track as tranquil season wafts away."

With the sadness that comes with the passing of Milton Friedman comes pleasure at reading tributes to him from those who knew him and from reading articles written by the great man himself.

It's unfair to excerpt from the second article since it is already an abridgment of longer works by Friedman. Still, this excerpt is among my favorites:

"The company town has been revived in one major area: medical care. It is taken for granted that workers should receive their pay partly in kind, in the form of medical care provided by the employer. How come? Why single out medical care? Surely food is no less essential to life than medical care. Why is it not at least as logical for workers to be required to buy their food at the company store as to be required to buy their medical care at the company store?"

--from "Pricing Health Care: The Folly of Buying Health Care at the Company Store," Feb. 13, 1993

Wow! The Israelis may have a process to convert oil shale into refinable oil at the equivalent of $17 per barrel.

The reaction of the environmentalists:

Amid various presentations on the nature of the fuel resource, problems unique to processing this fuel, emerging technologies, economic issues, etc. was a presentation by an attorney representing the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance that could be summed up in one sentence: "It is really bad - don't do it."

And of the wildlife advocates:

the observation of a Mexican Spotted Owl in a canyon nearby one of the reserves, which therefore qualified the area as a habitat for an endangered species.

The Israelis appear to be a couple of years ahead of the US in this field. Hopefully we will learn enough from their experience to alleviate these concerns by those who want alternatives to foreign oil as long as they're alternatives that are ineffective and don't address the actual need.

Global Warming: it's worse than we thought--even other planets are affected.

H/T: Jerry Pournelle