Orwell was right.

I don’t expect that the casual reader may have heard much about all the absolute ridiculousness going on in the UK, the author only has out of habit of reading El Reg for IT news.

But this is a fine example.  A great grandmother is arrested and forced to wear a tracking anklet because she sold a goldfish to a 14 year old.  A 14 year old sent into the pet store by the police after a complaint that a bird had a broken leg.  No evidence was given that the great grandmother had anything to do with the bird’s broken leg, only that a vet wasn’t called in appropriate time.

I’m fairly certain broken legs wouldn’t hurt a bird, as a lack of nerves in the leg is why they can roost on frozen surfaces.  I’m also fairly certain broken bird’s legs aren’t routinely cast, instead the leg is either amputated or the bird is destroyed.

Still, I used to be a pet store manager, and I feel that the proprieter of a pet store is responsible for the proper care of the animals under their domain, but I still think this article hints at the ridiculous powers the greenies have obtained in the UK.

It wasn’t uncommon for us to open the parakeets’ cage door to add food and water and have a parakeet launch out at seemingly 90 mph and slam into the store’s front windows and die.  I would hate to imagine that I had committed an offence by trying to feed and water the birds.

Still though, a happy ending.  The goldfish was adopted by one of the coppers behind sending the 14 year old stoolie in.  Wonder if the copper/bobbie was feeding an oscar?

I would invite the reader to consider this article.

So, can toad behavior really predict earthquakes?

The following is my critique of the findings of the scientists:

1. What controls were in place to ensure the detectability of the presence of the two person scientific team remained as consistent as possible to the toads during the 29 days?
2. You state quite clearly this has not been observed before, so this is simply one observation.
3. The behavior of only 90 male toads is considered from only one location.
4. The males fled but supposedly not the females, so what attribute distinct to male toads is suggested here?
5. The scientist notes that the male toads usually never leave the mating site early.  So, was this a case of a normal “usual” leaving coinciding with an earthquake days later?

I suggest this is not an indication that male toads have an insight into pending earthquakes.  Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.

The body representing 36,000 UK physicists has called for a wider enquiry into the Climategate affair, saying it raises issues of scientific corruption.  El Reg has it here.

“Scientific corruption”, those are harsh words from the polite British.

Shamelessly plagiarized from the article:

The IOP says the enquiry should be broadened to examine possible “departure from objective scientific practice, for example, manipulation of the publication and peer review system or allowing pre-formed conclusions to override scientific objectivity.”

It deplores the climate scientists’ “intolerance to challenge” and the “suppression of proxy results for recent decades that do not agree with contemporary instrumental temperature measurements.”

The physics institute observes that “unless the disclosed emails are proved to be forgeries or adaptations, worrying implications arise for the integrity of scientific research in this field and for the credibility of the scientific method as practised in this context”.

This is serious business in light of the all clear the Parlimentarians ended up gaving to the CRU.  (gaving? Let’s make a new word: gaving; definition: giving; as in Gavin from the Real Climate blog glosses over facts and gives the green light to the popularist point of view.  You read it hear first all thanks to the WordPress spell checker.)

I’m very interested in watching the spread of knowledge, and the fascination people seem to have with the trivialities of popular people’s lives.  I just don’t get it, most people really seem to not care about anything that is real, choosing instead a preference for the ephemeral.

Variations in the right temporal parietal lobe, I expect.

From the user content generated sites I read daily (Fark, Digg, BoingBoing) the popular opinion is on the side of the CRU.  Few individuals understand the implications of “hiding the decline” (substituting temperature measurements for tree ring proxy estimations when the proxy estimations differ from the actual measured temperature, and therefore opening up the question of “were the tree ring proxies ever valid”?).  Few individuals understand that the Hockey Stick alarmist graphic was based on only 12 selected tree rings from a much larger sample size.  Few individuals understand that ice extent is increasing on both of the poles.

It’s curious to me the mental effort the popularists put into defending the indefensible, in the face of fact, they argue.  Strange.

El Reg is reporting that German and Russian scientists have found that fluctuations during interglacials might be normal based on studies of the last interglacial 115,000 years ago.

This really is very bad news, as we’re likely at the end (in geologic terms) of the Holocene interglacial, and it is therefore likely that the ice will return in the coming hundreds of years.

(I know, now I’m making a prediction regarding a 100+ year time frame as I harped about here.)

If the gentle reader would care to launch their search engine of choice and query: “snowball+earth” – “hansen is wrong” the most extreme possible concern will present itself.

“The observed instability with the proven occurrence of short warming events during the transition from the last interglacial to the last glacial epoch could be, when viewed carefully, a general, naturally occurring characteristic of such transition phases,” concludes UFZ boffin Dr Tatjana Boettger.

Boffin = scientist in England’s english for some reason.

Idiocracy is not really a very good movie but does engage in an interesting thought experiment of what will happen to the human race given that the foolish are out breeding the intelligent.

Don’t pay to watch it, but maybe read a summary somewhere, or throw it in your Netflix queue for popcorn night.

The short term effects of Idiocracy are happening right now in our schools and institutions of higher learning.  We are churning out emotionally guided tree huggers far faster than reasoned young minds.

The religion that is the Cult of the Carbon Cow gains adherents daily.

I stumbled across two very interesting articles regarding the principles behind pH, calcium and carbon dioxide today while reading on Watts Up With That.

Having been a salt water fish tank enthusiast for years, I understood the mechanics of pH in my tanks, but never really bothered to learn the exact chemical processes that occur between calcium, carbon dioxide, the water, calcium carbonate, and the limestone substrate and coral skeletons.  Shame on me, but my Purple Up and infrequent kalkwasser drippings work so well, I never really bothered with the chemical formulae.  I learned them today, and they are linked below.

The data mining excursion of today was to understand exactly what threat may be faced by a slight lowering of the pH in the oceans.  This is erroneously referred to by alarmists, such as head of NOAA Dr Jane Lubchenco whom we’ve discussed before, as “ocean acidification”.

Sounds scary, huh?  “Acid”, that’s bad, right?  You don’t want acids in sea water, and fortunately they will never be there.  This “acidification” is alarmingly referred to as a drop in the pH of the oceans from an average of 8.2 to perhaps 8.1 by the end of the century.  But neutral pH is 7.0, everything above 7.0 is “basic” not “acidic”, everything below 7.0 is acidic.  So, lowering the pH 0.1 unit is not “becoming acidic”, it is “becoming slightly less basic”.

I like how dire predictions are always made 100 years out, that way everyone who profited from the doom and gloom is long dead before it becomes obvious they were playing the public for fools.  “The End is Nigh!” and always has been for some since we crawled out of the bushes a few millions of years ago.

The pH in my tanks often varies between 8.1 and 8.4, and all my corals are fine, one has even grown perhaps two inches over the last year, thank you very much!  That’s why I stopped measuring the pH regularly, it obviously trended and therefore was subject to the specifc time and conditions under which the measurement was taken.  For instance, when did I last add supplements, how long have the lights been on, how much water has been lost to evaporation in the sump, is the venturi slightly clogged on the skimmer (reducing oxygen to the tank), etc.  Now I only measure it when I’m bored or the animals seemed stressed, and it’s always 8.1 to 8.4.

pH is a logarithmic scale, every whole number increase is a 100 fold increase in hydrogen ions (pH/acidity/alkalinity all just measure hydrogen ions), so a change from 8.1 to 8.4 in one day is significant percentage wise, but insignificant to my corals.

Why?  Because the corals are alive.  They have metabolic processes that contend with changing water chemistry and cellular processes that repair damaged tissue.  When Dr Jane Lubchenco performed her third grade science exhibit before Congress she certainly understood and failed to mention the difference between chalk and a living coral.  A lie by omission is still a lie, Dr Jane, and a rigged experiment meant to elicit an emotional reaction from Congress is unbecoming of a scientist, but I did like the purple starfish pin you wore – nice touch.

So, a slight change in pH isn’t that big of a deal to a living organism evolved to live in the changing conditions of the ocean.

But what if we cross some sort of threshold where anthropogenic carbon dioxide upsets a delicate balance in the seas and runaway something-or-other happens?  It can’t.  The seas are far too large, and have far too massive a buffer in limestone to be affected by all the unburned fossil fuels in existence.  The seas already have far, far more carbon dioxide in them than would be contributed by burning everything we could set alight.

In short, ocean acidification is science fantasy.

Ready for the links?  Put on your chemistry 101 hat and read here and here.

Bill Gates and Toshiba are working on developing smaller nuclear power stations with the idea of each meeting a city sized electrical demand.

These reactors would use depleted uranium and would only need to be refuelled every 100 years or so.  This would make these reactors much less of a terrorist target, and therefore much safer.

To quote from the article:

CO2 only absorbs and emits specific spectral wavelengths (14.77 microns) that constitute a tiny fraction of solar radiation energy in Earth’s atmosphere. The first 50 ppm of CO2 absorbs about half of this tiny energy, each additional 50 ppm absorbs half of the remaining tiny fraction, so at the current 380 ppm there are almost no absorbable photons left. CO2 could triple to 1000 ppm with no additional discernable absorption-emission.

We’ve discussed before  carbon dioxide’s lack of ability to warm the world.

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution recently reported that water as warm as 39 F was contributing to the melting of glaciers around Greenland.  This water was not warmed by global climate change in the Northern latitude, but rather was a current coming from the tropics.

So, I think the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution has just verified the gulf stream has random attributes.  Who, who has ever held a hose, would have thought?

Where might some of the warmer water come from?  How about superheated vents in the Caribbean.

The researchers expect the vents to be warmer than 403 C!  How long might this good Earth have been belching forth this scorching stew upon itself?  How much longer will it continue?

So here we have the Huffington Post faithfully reproducing an AP article regarding climate alarmism.

The recent winter was supposedly the “fifth warmest on record worldwide”.

What record?  The record that ignores the 1940′s and 1880′s?  The record that ignores the reconstructed temperatures going back 100′s of 1000′s of years?  What record that is incomplete needs to be consulted?  Is the record simply that period of time during which Hansen has reigned supreme?

Ah, in the story (note: it is a story not an article), is mention of the fact that parts of Russia are excluded.

Okay, so parts of Russia are excluded, but those parts must have been relatively warm, right?, because this is being reported as a global phenomenon?

Oops.  Not so much. 

If Siberia had the coldest winter on record, as well as the other land masses mentioned in the AP article being relatively chilly this past year, how can the claim be made that world-wide temperatures were the fifth warmest ever?

I just reactivated the ice maker in my freezer, it’s the coldest it has ever been in there, and just cooked hamburger on my stove at 350 F, the fifth warmest temperature my stove has reached (I cook fish around 425 F).  Is the temperature in my kitchen normal?

Picking and choosing data does not a global mean make.

As has been stated by meteorologist Anthony Watts on his blog “Watts Up With That” for years, the Guardian is now reporting  that wind driven icebergs into warmer waters, where the icebergs subsequently melt, contributes up to a third of the sea ice extent loss since the late 1970′s.

The late 1970′s, that is when the climatic curve had reached its coolest point (lowest amplitude) since the last period in the curve, and when we have since been lamenting the loss of sea ice observed by satellite.

Why was the recent coldest period chosen to represent the norm, and therefore the amount of sea ice we should expect in the Arctic?  Who knows?  Only those who ignore the fact that the Arctic was largely free of ice in the 1940′s can answer.

Our man, who might have been seen at Stonehenge, appears below calm and collected, coolly contemplating his fate as he apparently faces down a green lightsaber wielding Jedi Knight.

The Jedi Knight has exacted a confession from the bold Darth Pachauri, and a promise not to engage in galactic politics ever again, no doubt on pain of death.

The sly Darth Pachauri has used his coercive powers to instill the belief in the feeble minds of the Times reporters Ben Webster and Hannah Devlin that he does not personally benefit from monies contributed to TERI, The Environmental Research Institute, and the lair of Darth Pachauri.

So, a sprawling complex with no less than two cricket pitches, manservants, and a golf course that requires 0.05% of the local water supply is of no personal benefit to the master of the house?

Well played, sir, well played.

The National Center for Atmospheric Research is reporting that pollution from Asia’s booming economies rises into the stratosphere during the monsoon season then circles the world for years.

This would be good news for the global warming alarmists, not because they can use it as more evidence that our outsourced production economy is exacerbating the problem, but as it is particulates in the stratosphere that reduce the amount of sunlight reaching the planet.

These particles in the stratosphere will help cool the planet.  No surprise then that this fact was not mentioned.

However, it is of course alarming that these pollutants are in the atmosphere, and linger for years, or for several monsoons, the implication being that the density of pollutants will only increase.

And unlike carbon dioxide, the pollutants mentioned here are the baddies: black carbon (soot) which melts snow and kills miners in Virginia, and sulpher dioxide and nitrogen oxides which contribute to acid rain.

Hopefully Asia will filter its emissions before this becomes a self-correcting problem (the monsoons are driven by snow melt and rain down on the population centers of Asia).

BTW – I believe ‘Acid Rain Monsoon’ is now trademarked by the author, no doubt it’ll be Carbon Cow Heavy Industries’ punk rock band.

Given all the attention recently regarding the mysterious dark flow, I wanted to go on record with thoughts I’ve been pursuing for a number of years regarding the shape of the Universe.

I believe the shape I’ll propose will neatly deal with dark pull, as well as account for our estimation of the shape based on visual observations.

And so it is written:

And doth did His noodly appendages forceth two branes together…

Of course there was no light for hundreds of millions of years, until space cooled and the first stars coelesced from the gases and ignited under awesome gravitational compression producing nuclear fusion and the resulting quantas of electromagnetic emission we call light.

I’ve long wondered why our observations have suggested the Universe is flat, okay maybe “flatish”, it is still afterall three dimensional, but we see it as being very wide and not so tall.

In the above pic, imagine this unfashionable end of the Milky Way galaxy (props to Douglas Adams) as residing in the shock wave ring which can be seen white above with the inward surface lit orange by the rising gases and expanding mushroom cloud, yet unseen, as it is about to poke over the top of the shock wave ring.

What we have is essentially three parts to the expanding atmospheric forces in the above pic.

1. The ring
2. The rising mushroom cloud
3. The descending gases

Imagine now that the Big Bang concept of “inflation” is true.  Personally, I don’t quite buy it because there is no theoretical mechanism to begin the inflation, nor stop the inflation, but let’s accept it for the sake of this post.  Inflation tells us that all points in space were rapidly producing more space between them, pushing those on the edges out much faster than the speed of light, but not violating the laws of physics because the regions themselves were not actually traveling faster than the speed of light; instead all the points of the Universe were each expanding simultaneously and the sum of these localized successive expansions filled the Universe with space at a pace that greatly exceeded the speed of light.

So, over a brief period of time the ring would become a disk as the middle was filled by the inward edge of the ring expanding rapidly toward the center.  And that’s what we see with our telescopes, a flat disk of a Universe.

So, what about the dark pull?  Well, the reader is asked to once again consider the above photo and estimate the amount of energy that did not go into forming the ring.  The vast majority of energy went up and down, and I propose that the vast amount of matter in the Big Bang went up and down perpendicular to the ring that is the visible Universe we inhabit.

Dark pull then is not unexpected, as the ring is subjected to the gravitional pull of the vastly superior amount of matter that only exists in a perpendicular band at the center of the visible Universe, the Universe not being defined between the edge of the ring and the top and bottom of the matter in the middle, therefore we’re not pulled at an angle upwards or downwards, we’re dragged toward the middle.

So, this then is my predicted current shape of the Universe (what I don’t like about my theory is that, like the Big Bang, like string theory, m-theory (membrane ‘brane’ theory) is it is untestable):

Who knows?  It’s untestable and therefore unprovable and therefore unscientific, but I do believe it accounts nicely for dark pull, and like my idea of a Magnetic Plasma Differential I just wanted to get it committed to cyberspace before the Nobel selection committee awards the thought to the wrong individual.

I suggest a thought experiment for the gentle reader who may yet be on the fence regarding the relative importance of carbon dioxide versus water vapor in the contribution of greenhouse warming each gas may provide.

The reader is encouraged to take a hot shower with the bathroom door closed and continue to breathe, even sing if you like. 

After you are sufficiently clean, having contributed carbon dioxide and the various fragrances of your cleansing products to your constrained environment, step out onto the bath mat and stop to consider: what is keeping you warm?

Look at the water rivulets running down the wallpaper, tile, and shower door.  Feel the humidity on your skin, feel the sweat as it continues to exude from your pores.

Did the carbon dioxide from your singing contribute significantly to those warming effects, even under a heat lamp?