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Daynotes
Journal
Week of 14 December 2009
Latest
Update: Saturday, 19 December 2009 10:31 -0500 |
11:04
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It's crunch week for all retailers, brick-and-mortar and on-line. Maker
Shed has done well this year. In fact, it's done superbly, showing
significant month-on-month and year-on-year gains in an economic
climate where most retailers are delighted to match last year's
numbers. But we're still in crunch week, so don't expect much here
until next week.
To add to the excitement, I got email from my editor. The good news is that they're going to reprint Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments: All Lab, No Lecture.
The bad news is that my editor needs corrections/edits from me as soon
as possible. So, yet one more thing on my to-do list for this week.
Tuesday, 15 December 2009
00:00
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Wednesday, 16 December 2009
00:00
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Thursday, 17 December 2009
09:04
- The now thoroughly discredited Hadley/CRU datasets are further called into question.
The Russians are accusing Hadley/CRU of the worst kind of
cherry-picking of data. If this article and the linked site can be
believed, which I strongly suspect they can, Hadley/CRU ignored half
the Russian temperature data, using only the half that supported their
preconception that warming is occuring. Furthermore, the data that
Hadley/CRU chose to include in their databases is, almost without
exception, the lower-quality data, originating from sites that are
subject to the urban heat-island effect and sites that had been
relocated. In other words, Hadley/CRU chose to incorporate the less
reliable half of the data in their datasets and discard the more
reliable half.
There's an old saying in computer programming,
garbage-in-garbage-out, and it applies no less to science. The global
warming alarmists spend a lot of time ridiculing the idea that a giant
conspiracy exists to push AGW, but the simple truth is that no such
widespread conspiracy is necessary if the data are corrupted at the
source by a small group of true believers. And because Hadley/CRU is
one of only two or three primary sources for historical climate data,
every paper and every climate model that is based in whole or in part
on those data--which is to say nearly all of them--is now worthless.
The 90% or 95% of climate scientists who are honest, who are real
scientists, have been betrayed.
AGW alarmists are now reduced to
arguing from authority, claiming that only climate scientists
understand the subject well enough to have valid opinions. Bullshit.
One doesn't have to be a chemist to recognize scientific misconduct by
a chemist who's demonstrably faked his data, nor does one need to be a
climatologist to recognize scientific misconduct by climatologists. Any
biologist will have deep reservations about the claims of a physicist
who refuses to release his data, and vice versa. Any real scientist
from any discipline will deeply suspect any supposed scientist who's
behaving more like a politician with an agenda than a scientist. To any
real scientist, the "trust me, I'm a scientist" argument is anathema.
In
short, any real scientist understands scientific misconduct, and that's
what we have here. I've spoken privately with a number of scientists,
none climatologists, but all qualified in the hard sciences. Every one
of them, including those who were formerly convinced of the reality of
AGW, has expressed, at a minimum, deep reservations about the conduct
of Hadley/CRU, the reliability of their data, and the predictions of
the AGW alarmists. Most believe that the current datasets have been
corrupted entirely, and that the only solution now is to discard those
datasets, along with any papers and models that used them, and to start
fresh from the raw data. I agree with them.
08:50
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Totally unrelated to my AGW comments yesterday, the forecast here for
this afternoon through tomorrow is blizzard conditions, at least by the
European definition of that word and certainly by the North Carolina
definition. We're to have heavy snow, possibly accumulating to
12" overnight, with sustained winds up to 30 MPH.
Oddly
enough, the schools are open today, which was to be their last day
before Christmas vacation. Ordinarily, they close on just the forecast
of frozen precipitation. The precipitation is to start sometime this
afternoon, initially as rain and turning to snow and sleet this
evening and snow with sleet and freezing rain overnight. Barbara is
going to work through lunch and head home about 4:00 this afternoon.
The
real threat is that they've gotten the forecast wrong and we'll end up
with mostly freezing rain instead of snow. If that happens, there'll
likely be widespread power outages as tree limbs and whole trees are
overweighted by the ice and blown over, taking power lines with them.
We'll be fine even if that happens. We have a wood-burning fireplace in
the downstairs guest area, gas logs in the den upstairs, and a gas
water heater. We also have a 6 KW generator.
Of course, it may
all come to nothing. We've had similar forecasts in the past and ended
up getting nothing. But I also remember the time the forecast was for a
light sprinkling of snow and we ended up getting 16".
Saturday, 19 December
2009
10:31
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The blizzard dumped maybe 5" (12.5 cm) of snow on us. Areas just 20 or
30 miles (32 to 48 km) to the north and west of us got more, as much as
15". Areas just 20 or 30 miles to the south and east of us got as
little as nothing. Still, this is the biggest snow we've had in four or
five years. The kids are out on sleds, having a great time. So are the
neighborhood dogs, minus the sleds.
In unrelated but generally
good news, the Copenhagen climate talks utterly collapsed, at least in
the sense that they accomplished absolutely none of their stated goals
going in. Of course, these talks had almost nothing to do with climate
and everything to do with a UN power grab and money grab. In that
respect, I was disappointed in the outcome, with Obama kind of
promising that "rich" countries, primarily the US, would contribute $30
billion over the next three years and eventually $100 billion per year
to "poor" countries to mitigate supposed climate change. Of course,
little of that money will actually benefit those in poor countries.
Most of it will go to the UN kleptocracy, with most of the remainder
going to third-world dictators.
So now we have a year of
breathing space until the next such event, scheduled for December 2010.
Fortunately, that year will almost certainly see the AGW alarmists even
more thoroughly debunked. It'll also see a mid-term election, in which
I expect Obama and the democrats will be handed their heads. At least I
profoundly hope this is what happens. I hope the Republicans take
control of both houses of congress. Not that I care for republicans any
more than I care for democrats, but at least having the republicans in
control of congress would keep either party from advancing its agenda
too much.
I hope that by the time the December 2010 climate
talks convene, the US will take the rational position: we should accept
absolutely no limitations on our own output of carbon dioxide, and we
should contribute absolutely nothing in foreign aid of any sort, most
especially including welfare to poor countries to cope with the effects
of so-called climate change, and doubly most especially including any
funds to the UN. In fact, it's long past time for the US to withdraw
entirely from the UN, throw them out of the US, and tear down their New
York City headquarters building.
00:00
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Bruce
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