La Terreur of Modern ‘Liberals’

Funding is only ever a bad thing when it can be used as a ‘Koch’ smear. Heaven forbid it is ever turned on you.

h/t BishopHill

Censorship is horrible and oppressive unless of course there happens to be an opinion you disagree with in which case you can heckle and campaign for that person’s voice to be silenced oppressing them instead. You can complain about threats and abuse (asking for money helps ease progressive pain at these threats) feigning and thereby belittling serious mental complications such as PTSD, whilst happily doxxing, ending careers, intimidating and sending your fellow social justice crusader monkeys to abuse the objects of your ire – which is perfectly legitimate and not hate because leftists are incapable of hate just as gender hatred is the sole preserve of males, racism whites and religious intolerance is of course just for right wing christians.

Watch “TRIGGER WARNING! Mister Metokur: Crazy Social Justice Warriors, Feminist, Rape Culture Hysteria” on YouTube

The Great Immensity aka The Great Stonewall

An insight into the bureaucratic hive mind.

Watts Up With That?

What does The Great Immensity, a play about Climate change have to do with the NSF and it stated mission? Not much apparently.

Guest essay by Dennis Kuzara

What does The Great Immensity, a play about Climate change have to do with the NSF and it stated mission? Not much apparently, and the self described “most transparent administration in history” isn’t as transparent as they would have you believe.

NSF AT A GLANCE  The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent federal agency created by Congress in 1950 “to promote the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare; to secure the national defense…” With an annual budget of $7.2 billion (FY 2014), we are the funding source for approximately 24 percent of all federally supported basic research conducted by America’s colleges and universities.  —We fulfill our mission chiefly by issuing limited-term grants — to fund specific…

View original post 4,139 more words

NASA – Is Pluto’s Atmosphere Collapsing?

Four images from New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) were combined with color data from the Ralph instrument to create this sharper global view of Pluto. (The lower right edge of Pluto in this view currently lacks high-resolution color coverage.) The images, taken when the spacecraft was 280,000 miles (450,000 kilometers) away from Pluto, show features as small as 1.4 miles (2.2 kilometers). That’s twice the resolution of the single-image view captured on July 13 and revealed at the approximate time of New Horizons’ July 14 closest approach. Image – NASA

Five years ago NASA were baffled with Earth’s shrinking atmosphere

Large changes in the sun’s energy output may drive unexpectedly dramatic fluctuations in Earth’s outer atmosphere.

Results of a study published today link a recent, temporary shrinking of a high atmospheric layer with a sharp drop in the sun’s ultraviolet radiation levels.

The research, led by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo., and the University of Colorado at Boulder (CU), indicates that the sun’s magnetic cycle, which produces differing numbers of sunspots over an approximately 11-year cycle, may vary more than previously thought.

New Horizons has only taken a snapshot in time so we are unlikely to know if the current low solar activity may be linked to Pluto’s shrunken atmosphere [my emphasis].

From previous observations, scientists assumed the pressure on Pluto’s surface would be about 15 microbars, but it turned out they were wrong, by quite a bit.

This REX occultation data says that the pressure on Pluto’s surface is just 7 microbars. It could be that the atmosphere is kind of collapsing, that the atmosphere, the gases that make up that atmosphere, are freezing and falling to the surface. If this is what’s happening, it’s possible that the collapse of Pluto’s atmosphere is imminent, or at least that most of the gas in the atmosphere will freeze and fall to the surface.

Charon

Not based in Reality – Hansen’s End Times

Hansen Camping

An interesting blog by Andrew Revkin discussing activist James Hansen’s latest Armageddon postponed direst ever warning/press release to stoke the fires of alarm ahead of Paris- because there may have been a slight gap in the wall-to-wall coverage the mainstream has missed. Of particular note is Kevin Trenberth’s comments on how much the computer models fail to model reality (my bold).

No mention is made of ENSO or Pacific decadal variations that dominate interannual and decadal variability in the real world, and which are a key to understanding the recent hiatus, and recent trends that are not representative of longer-term trends, although frequently interpreted as such. In section 4.5, the authors point out the need to simulate a number of features realistically and the model does not really do them very well, especially basic things like sea surface salinity. So the relevance of the model is not established. They use the model for a number of highly artificial experiments that are supposed to depict melting of ice at high latitudes: ”freshwater injection.” These experiments introduce a lot of very cold fresh water in various places, and then they see what happens. The question is how relevant these are to the real world and what is happening as global warming progresses? They do not seem at all realistic to me.

A key to a lot of this is how clouds change, and one needs to get clouds right in the first place to have confidence in the results. Unfortunately, this is an area where major problems exist. Huge problems occur over the southern oceans for instance and ***all models have far too much sunshine penetrating to the surface compared with observations***. No doubt the southern ocean, featured strongly by Hansen et al, plays an important role, but data there are poor, and change is not well known; in particular the recent hiatus in global warming greatly influences any observations, which can therefore be quite misleading wrt trends. I certainly do not believe the result claimed with regard to less snow over Antarctica with a warming climate. Although Hansen argues that the real world is responding even faster than in the model scenarios, this is not at all clear owing to the natural variability.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/dotearth/2015/07/23/whiplash-warning-when-climate-science-is-publicized-before-peer-review-and-publication

Watch “3 Body Hacks For Stargazers” on YouTube

Follow the Water–Arctic Ocean Flywheels

Science Matters

The motto of oceanography should be: “It’s not that simple.”

Dallas Murphy wrote that in a book containing his reflections from numerous voyages with ocean scientists, entitled Follow the Water: Exploring the Sea to Discover Climate. The author goes on to say:

“One reason why the ocean has been left out of the climate-change discussion is that its internal mechanisms and its interactions with the atmosphere are stunningly complex. That the ocean has been left out has helped pitch the discussion toward unproductive, distracting extremes–either global warming is bunk or sea levels are about to rise twenty feet–and to frame the issue as a matter of opinion, like the place of prayer in public schools.”

He also quotes respected Oceanographer Carl Wunsch: “One of the reasons oceanography has a flavor all it’s own lies in the brute difficulty of observing the Ocean.”

A previous post on the Climate Water…

View original post 1,008 more words

Starry, Starry Night

MalagaBay

The orbital altitude of the International Space Station varies between 310 and 410 kilometres.

The ISS is maintained in a nearly circular orbit with a minimum mean altitude of 330 km (205 mi) and a maximum of 410 km (255 mi), in the centre of the thermosphere, at an inclination of 51.6 degrees to Earth’s equator, necessary to ensure that Russian Soyuz and Progress spacecraft launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome may be safely launched to reach the station.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station#Orbit

Epoch (UTC):         10 July 2015 12:48:03
Perigee height:      401 km
Apogee height:       403 km
Revolutions per day: 15.54928627

ISS – Orbit Developed and maintained by Chris Peat, Heavens-Above GmbH.
http://www.heavens-above.com/orbit.aspx?satid=25544

At these altitudes it’s possible to take some really hot daytime photographs of the Earth and plenty of really cool night time exposures of the RGB [Red-Green-Blue] fluorescing oxygen in the upper atmosphere at altitudes between 100 and 300 kilometres.

Without…

View original post 621 more words

Zero Room For Climate Debate: Greg Laden Plays With Himself

The Lukewarmer's Way

On June 25, Greg Laden posted an update to his post slamming NY Times journalist/blogger Andrew Revkin for sleeping with the enemy–giving aid and comfort to the enemy–being a Klimate Kwisling, a traitor to the cause. Yeah, Laden’s nuttier than  a fruitcake.

Laden had opined that there was zero room for debate on climate science.

His update was a riposte to Revkin’s reply to him. Revkin had written: ““Zero room.” That’s scientific.”

To which Laden replied

“Yes, it is. There is zero room for debate when an issue has been pretty much settled. In science debate can come up anywhere, you never know, but for all practical purposes we do not debate if the Earth is hollow or solid or flat or round, or that germs cause many diseases, or that frogs reproduce as most other tetrapods do rather then spontaneously emerging from mud.”  He later continued, “So to repeat…

View original post 164 more words

The forgotten summer of 1955