Category Archives: Science (real)

The Real Global Weirding

Posted on by

It is 104° in Phoenix today. It is 84° in the Keys today. Heck, it could be 64° in North Puffin today.

Paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey’s comments in a much delayed podcast of NPR’s Science Friday just gave me an aha moment.

Mentioning NPR cost me the conservative vote. Rufus may never speak to me again.

Professor Leakey helped me realize exactly why Al Gore has led us down the wrong primrose path.

Mentioning Mr. Gore cost me the liberal vote. Paul “Buster” Door may never speak to me again.

We aren’t facing a question of Global Warming. We aren’t facing a question of Global Cooling. We aren’t even facing a question of Global Climate Change.

The problem isn’t Global Weirding.

Of course the globe is warming. Or cooling.

The problem is people. People who would leverage the fact that you don’t know the science to coerce you do something bad for you.

Hubris.

Hurricane AndrewSee, Mr. Gore and his cohort don’t care as much about Global Weirding as they care about what steps we take to control Global Weirding. They think the solution is the Big Government answer to control people because obviously people cause Global Weirding.

Horse Puckey.

Of course there is Global Warming. Of course there is Global Cooling. Of course there is Global Climate Change. Of course there is Global Weirding. Or Global transitioning. This little blue marble is always warming or cooling or in transition.

It’s the Sun, stupid!

Convincing new evidence demonstrates that Al Gore, the IPCC, and other global warming doomsayers screwed us while they were having on with the pooch. The landmark CLOUD findings at CERN show that cosmic rays and the sun (not human activities) are the dominant controller of climate on Earth.

Professor Leakey reminded me of the historical record. Forget who caused it, he said. Let’s look at the prehistoric record and recognize that climate change has happened before and because it’s happened before we know the scale of possibilities and the change we’re looking at is not unlike changes we’ve had before. The difference is we’re now eight billion people. Before there were less than a million. This is going to impact. Rising sea levels today will be very different than rising sea levels 500,000 years ago.

That brings us to three most important facets of this discussion:

  • Al Gore is a fraud. He may have created the political science of Global Warming but he apparently knows less about the fact-based science than my friend Scott, a cartoonist in Alaska.
  • Rush Limbaugh is a fraud. He is so caught up in his disbelief in science (because scientists push the evolution of Man) that he cannot accept any scientific statements about Global Climate Change.
  • NASA is a fraud. Between James Hansen driving Global Warming at Goddard and Charles F. Bolden, Jr, driving Global Warming at Congressional budget talks, NASA has shown they don’t care about the science. They care only about the money.

The lowest temps in the last dozen years occurred in 2007 and 2011. Last year was globally cool despite what it felt like here in North Puffin. On the other hand, 2004 and 2010 were the hottest. So what?

Hubris. Do you really trust a politician who can’t predict tomorrow’s weather can forecast the climate a decade from now? Or a century? Do you really believe a politician who can’t bring democracy to a few square miles of desert can terraform an entire planet?

Follow the money.

It doesn’t much matter what you think of which politician usurping the science. It doesn’t even matter whether you think the science says it’s going to get hotter or the science says it’s going to get colder. We know Earth will get hotter. We know Earth will get colder. Sooner or later.

The only question left to resolve is simple: If the seas are really going to rise 5′ in the next 50 years, Why the heck are you spending all my money assessing blame instead of building a bloody dike?

This editorial is the reason Al Gore invented the Internet.

Are Republicans Really Anti-Science?

Posted on by

In Mother Jones, Kevin Drum takes on Chris Mooney’s stance In The Republican Brain. The question both writers pose is “Who has been anti-science, and why?”

I know some people who are anti-science but they seem to come from all over the political spectrum. In fact, I know more liberals who support the false god of political science than conservatives who denounce the real thing. And that is the crux of the problem.

When Buster Door said to me, “You’re anti-science” he and his friends are mostly saying “You’re against what I oh-so-strongly believe.” They have no rigorous proof to back up either the claim or what they believe. NPR’s Ira Flatow who “barely grasped chemistry” is a good example of that.

“The science of climate change is fixed,” he says regularly on his weekly radio show, Science Friday. “Why can’t people just accept that [man causes it] and move on?”

I don’t think anyone would argue for a static climate. I don’t understand how anyone who has ever seen a 5-day weather forecast could argue that we know enough about climate to “fix the science” in Mr. Flatow’s favorite concrete.

Stephen Hawking wrote in A Brief History of Time, “A theory is a good theory if it satisfies two requirements: It must accurately describe a large class of observations on the basis of a model that contains only a few arbitrary elements, and it must make definite predictions about the results of future observations.

“Any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis; you can never prove it. No matter how many times the results of experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict the theory. On the other hand, you can disprove a theory by finding even a single observation that disagrees with the predictions of the theory.”

The theory of anthropogenic climate change describes a smaller-and-smaller class of observations on the basis of a model that contains an increasing number of arbitrary elements. Many proponents ignore historically larger climate swings that do not fit the theory. Many proponents ignore solar influence that does not fit the theory. Many proponents ignore the inconvenient truth that new temperature data shows the planet has not warmed for the past 15 years which does not fit the theory.

Mr. Drum makes some good points but he overlooks the most obvious when he writes, “Doubt about climate change is obviously motivated by a dislike of the business regulation that would be necessary if we took climate change seriously…”

I just can’t see that.

I see that doubting anthropogenic climate change means we understand how science works.

And I see the political scientists of anthropogenic global weirding as worshipers of Ptolemy.

Pretty bright guy, our Ptolemy. His Harmonics defined music theory and the mathematics of music. His Geographia not only compiled world geography in the Roman Empire, but also used coordinates and established latitudes and longitudes. But he also believed the Earth was the center of the Universe. It took 1500 years before Copernicus could dispel that.

I know these pieces are always All About Me, but I also know I am not the center of the Universe.

If it takes us another 1500 years to understand that bankrupting ourselves on political science so we have nothing left to adapt to the looming colder or hotter lands and seas, we have indeed met the enemy.

He is us.

11.11.11

Posted on by

End times?

The New Tork Times reported today that scientists have begun to take concerns about an anthropogenically-caused Andromeda-Milky Way collision more seriously.

The Andromeda-Milky Way collision is a predicted galaxy collision that could take place in the measurable future between the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy. The Milky Way is a smallish, barred, spiral galaxy that contains the Solar System along with about 400 billion stars. Andromeda is a “nearby” galactic neighbor with about twice as many stars. The Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy are approaching each other at a speed of 300,000 miles per hour.

These simulations of the impeding Milky Way and Andromeda Galaxy collision, one a simulation of the University of Toronto, have scientists wondering if mankind will survive this collision.

“Just as greenhouse gases are the steroids of weather, the wobble in the Earth’s rotation caused by the increasing heat is having an effect on the systems around us,” Dr. William Hogarth, a senior Fluidics Professor of Biological Oceanography, said at a briefing held by the National Center for Deep Space Research. “We need to start not only reducing the spin, but the data is showing that perhaps we’ll even need to change our orbit.”

The discipline called geoengineering was originally dismissed as science fiction or even fantasy but geoengineers have shown that they can defeat global climate change by cooling the planet with sun-blocking particles or shades, by adding reflectivity to clouds to make them return more solar radiation to space, and by constructing a 26-mile diameter carbon nanotube to remove vast quantities of carbon from the atmosphere and “duct” it into space.

“We now have definitive computer models that show just how rapidly the collision is approaching,” Dr. Hogarth said.

Still, skeptics are still concerned about the possible unintended consequences of tinkering on a large scale with planetary and galactic orbits.

“We do need to act now,” Dr. Hogarth said.

“Without intervention, today, by the time that the two galaxies collide, the surface of the Earth may have become far too hot for liquid water to exist. That would end all terrestrial life as we know it even as the luminosity of the Sun increases.”

Remember, you heard it here first, 11/11/11.

Breezy

Posted on by

My great grandfather, Enos Barnard, kept a diary. Many people in that age did; some have become a great resource of sociological, marketing, and real-time observations.

“The meeting was stirred by A.D.’s announcement more than by the Indian Mutiny.”
“Shipped 30 pounds of butter to NY on PRR for $31.”
“Patchy fog this morning but Sunny for the day. One little shower this afternoon. Breezy.”

Right. “Breezy” is showing up in modern weather reports but my great grandfather never used the word in his life.

Probably because he liked words and used them with precision.

Friday morning started pretty grim looking. 80° and 69% humidity which is better than it has been but the sky full of heavy-bottomed black clouds. It was supposed to be mostly sunny with just the slightest 10% chance of showers so the clouds confused us. And “becoming breezy.” Heh. East winds about 15 in the morning increased to 20 – 25 mph by my afternoon beach time. I guess breezy meant about 20 mph on Friday. Better than “fresh,” I guess.

Saturday was mostly sunny, and “breezy” again. Local television meteorologist Trent Aric called it “blustery” Friday night.

I see it will be “sunny and breezy” in Southwest Puffin with wind gusts up to 30 mph this afternoon.

The Urban Dictionary calls the word breezy “a combination of the two words which describe a woman that is easy. The word ‘broad’ is combined with the word easy creating the derogatory word ‘breezy’.”

That was a lot of help.

Breezy could an adjective meaning “pleasantly windy.” Yourdictionary.com comes closest to my own idea by calling breezy, “slightly windy.” And the American Heritage dictionary calls it “a light current of air; a gentle wind.” Now we’re talking.

The second American Heritage quantifies the breeze as “any of five winds with speeds of from 4 to 27 knots, according to the Beaufort scale.”

Uh oh. That’s still a pretty informal approach to a definition.

Sir Francis Beaufort’s Wind Force Scale gives wind speeds in measurable velocities and describes those speeds in terms of empirical observations at sea or on land. A light breeze (3-6 knots) brings mall wavelets and leaves begin to rustle. In the gentle breeze (7-10 knots), brings some whitecaps to the Straits and the leaves and small twigs move constantly. Moderate breeze (11-15 knots) means small breaking waves, dust and paper in eddies in the air, and palm fronds dancing. The fresh breeze (16-20 knots) is getting serious with some spray coming aboard and small trees swaying. A strong breeze (21-26 knots) takes your garbage can.

I fell in lust with Kay Lenz when she played Kate Jordache in the TV series Rich Man, Poor Man but she made her bones as Breezy, a teen-aged hippy with heart. Clint Eastwood directed her in the film of the same name. It’s a schmaltzy story of a hitchhiker who escapes a man who wanted her for only sex.

So I’m thinking the weather peeps should use the appropriate qualifiers unless they want us to use these breezes only for sex.

Ban Bread!

Posted on by

The Earth is in trouble and our carbon dioxide output is obviously to blame. I know this because Al Gore told me so.

We can fix the Earth and lose weight at the same time.

One of the oldest prepared foods and long called the “staff of life,” bread has been baked around the world for at least 30,000 years. Starch residue on rocks used for pounding plants some 30 millennia ago in Europe shows that prehistoric man ate flatbreads with no worries about carbon dioxide output.

CO2?

Yeast devours sugar, then releases carbon dioxide bubbles and small amounts of ethyl alcohol. When the kneaded dough is baked, the heat from the oven forces the yeast into overdrive, which quintuples the rate at which carbon dioxide is produced.

The released carbon dioxide is responsible for bread rising.

Former Vice President Al Gore and Live Earth founder Kevin Wall have called for a 90% reduction in carbon dioxide emissions worldwide by mid-century. “Nations all over the world are making progress in tackling the climate crisis. But too many proposals fall short of the strong, decisive action that’s needed,” Mr. Gore said in 2007.

Victor Preedy, Ronald Ross Watson, Vinood Patel report in Flour and Breads and Their Fortification in Health and Disease Prevention that “Worldwide, bread is one of the most consumed foodstuffs.”

After extensive, even exhaustive 10 minutes of Internet research, I discovered very little statistical data on worldwide bread consumption where “very little” is actually a vanishingly small number approaching, well, zero. I did the next best thing. I asked answers.yahoo.com and found that eating “a TON of bread each day” is the best answer — chosen by voters!

That seemed an order of magnitude or two over the top so I did the next best thing. I asked former North Puffin car dealer and Democratic party official, Mr. Paul “Buster” Door for his take. As a card-carrying member of the Far Green, Buster is always willing to chase assumptions around and around in his head until he comes up with an answer that sounds right.

“Well you see, Dick, it’s like this,” Buster said. “Man can live by bread alone but only the strongest do so. It is well known that prehistoric man ate flatbreads but it wasn’t until Bastet — she was that famed Egyptian foodie — invented yeast that bread sales really puffed up. The market expansion of bread swelled pretty much unencumbered for centuries but it suddenly plummeted in 18th Century Europe, particularly in France. The good news is that worldwide growth of yeast breads has risen back to a high of more than a pound per person per day now world-wide. And that’s why Frenchmen are 2.4 inches taller than they were in 1789.”

“Don’t forget,” Rufus added, “a pounder of beer is the equivalent of a pound of bread!”

The total population of humans is currently estimated to be 6.92 billion. “That’s on planet Earth,” Buster confirmed.

Earthlings release some 25 billion tons of carbon dioxide annually. Plants like rice, wheat, and corn eat some of it but there is plenty left for free floating hyperbole in the atmosphere. That works out to about 6.9 million tons per day.

“A pound of bread is mostly hot air,” Al Gore who should know said. Fresh bread is baked daily in every nation, in every state, in every city, in every hamlet in the world. The production of that 3.46 million tons of daily bread releases something slightly less than 1 million tons of carbon dioxide each and every day.

And that doesn’t take into account the energy required for the great bakery ovens nor the fuel burned to truck the bread from bakery to store.

Mr. Gore and Mr. Wall have called for bakeries to buy carbon credits until engineers can develop commercial methods to eliminate the emission of this dangerous greenhouse gas from bread production.

“We’re looking at salt breads using salts recovered from water desalination plants in Qatar right now,” Mr. Wall said. “The technology is very promising.”

It is worth noting that each and every person in Qatar releases 44.8348 tons of carbon dioxide annually, more than twice the per capita output of Americans. We need to eat more bread to catch up!

Except we can’t.

The new Gore-Wall diet embraces a balanced intake from all the food groups but bans bread.

That’s it. Don’t eat bread. Save the planet. It’s only good science.