Shaky NASA astrophysics too

An email from Oliver Manuel [omatumr@yahoo.com], Emeritus Professor, Nuclear Chemistry, University of Missouri-Rolla

Steve McIntyre at Climate Audit seems to be witnessing a meltdown at NASA as he continues to find evidence of changes in the experimental temperature database which Dr. James E. Hansen used as evidence for global warming.

I suspect that NASA has used some of the same tricks to peddle AGW (anthropologic global warming) that it used to promote the myth that planet Earth is heated by a steady, H-fusion reactor in the core of a Hydrogen-filled Sun.

Since the 1969 Apollo Mission returned the first lunar soils loaded with solar-wind-implanted material, NASA has successfully manipulated the press and access to funds, samples, and Lunar Science Conferences to hide experimental evidence that planet Earth is heated by a neutron star at the core of an iron-rich Sun - the remains of an object that exploded five (5) billion years ago and ejected the material that now orbits it.

More from Prof. Manuel here. Believers in the sanctity of pronouncements from physics might like to consider just two recent headlines from PhysOrg: Research overturns accepted notion of neutron's electrical properties and Magellanic clouds: Single measurement throws out everything we thought we knew




Judge tosses global warming lawsuit

A federal judge on Monday tossed out a lawsuit filed by California that sought to hold the world's six largest automakers accountable for their contribution to global warming. In its lawsuit filed last year, California blamed the auto industry for millions of dollars it expects to spend on repairing damage from global-warming induced floods and other natural disasters.

But District Judge Martin Jenkins in San Francisco handed California Attorney General Jerry Brown's environmental crusade a stinging rebuke when he ruled it was impossible to determine to what extent automakers are responsible for global-warming damages in California. The judge also ruled that keeping the lawsuit alive would threaten the country's foreign policy position. Jenkins said it's up to lawmakers, rather than judges, to determine how responsible automakers are for global warming problems.

The state sued Chrysler Motor Corp., Ford Motor Co., General Motors Corp. and the U.S. subsidiaries of Japan's biggest manufacturers, Honda North America, Nissan North America and Toyota Motor North America.

Separately, the automakers are challenging a California law in federal court that requires them to reduce vehicle carbon emissions by 2009.

A federal judge in Vermont recently rejected the industry's position that only the federal government can make such demands in upholding that state's nearly identical law.

Source







MARS, LIKE EARTH, HAS CYCLICAL COLD AND WARM AGES, STUDY SAYS

Mars has gone through 40 ice ages during the past five million years that regularly send the planet's permanent ice sheets cascading toward the equator, then melting backward, a new theory suggests.

The climate changes are likely driven by cyclical fluctuations in the planet's orbit that alter the amount of sunlight that falls on the planet's surface, says astronomer Norbert Schoerghofer of the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Understanding the sun's exact role in the Martian ice ages could help solve longstanding puzzles about the red planet. It could also help scientists better understand Earth's complex climatic systems, which are also affected by orbital variations. The new theory appears in this week's issue of the journal Nature.

Mystery of the Ice

In recent years extensive amounts of ice have been discovered below the surface of Mars. Much of the ice mysteriously survives far from the planet's poles. Schoerghofer suggests that this ice is newer than previously believed.

"Earlier theories have tried to explain this ice with snowfall that would have happened some five million years ago [but struggle] to explain how that ice could have stayed there," Schoerghofer said. "I'm saying it didn't stay. It went away and then came back many, many times."

According to Schoerghofer, much of Mars's ice is formed by vapor diffusion-the seeping of gas directly into underground pockets during cold periods. "The water cycle on Mars is very different than what we see on Earth," said Joshua Bandfield, a research specialist at Arizona State University's School of Earth and Space Exploration who was not involved in the study.

FULL STORY here




Cap-and-Trade Could Cost Average Family $10,800 in Lost Income

Proposed Global Warming Policy Likened to 1970s-Era Energy Crunch

A cap-and-trade scheme for controlling greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) would impose significant economic costs on the U.S. economy and is not a sound policy response to current concerns about global warming, says renowned economist Arthur Laffer in a new study released today.

"Dr. Laffer's analysis is another death knell for the cap-and-trade approach to addressing concerns over carbon dioxide emissions," said Steven Milloy, executive director of the Free Enterprise Education Institute (FEEI), the nonprofit group sponsoring the study. "The Department of Energy, Congressional Budget Office and, now, Dr. Laffer have all concluded that cap- and-trade would be disastrous for the U.S. economy," added Milloy.

Laffer's analysis, entitled "The Adverse Economic Impacts of Cap-and- Trade" concludes that:

-- Cap-and-trade may reduce U.S. economic growth by 4.2 percent -- even to achieve the comparatively modest GHG reductions of the Kyoto Protocol i.e., GHG emissions 7 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-2012). The cost to reach the ultimate goal of some GHG control proponents (e.g., reducing GHG emissions to 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050) would be significantly greater. Moreover, these estimates may underestimate the actual cost as they assume the government would auction the rights to emit greenhouse gases -- as opposed to simply giving them away, which is the approach often discussed in the Congress.

-- Because fossil fuels (oil, coal and natural gas) provide 86 percent of current U.S. energy needs and it is not currently feasible to substitute contribution of alternative energy sources in the near-term, a GHG cap could effectively become an energy production cap -- or an energy supply shock.

-- During the previous energy supply shocks of 1974-75, 1979-81 and 1990- 91, the economy declined, unemployment rose, and the stock market declined in value.

-- Based on the energy efficiency responses to the energy supply shocks of the 1970s, the U.S. economy could be 5.2 percent smaller in 2020 compared to what would otherwise be expected if cap-and-trade regulations are imposed. This equates to a potential income loss of about $10,800 for a family of four for the initial Kyoto GHG reduction target.

"Cap-and-trade is a simply dreadful policy option that is being pushed by Alcoa, BP, Caterpillar, Conoco Phillips, Dow Chemical, Duke Energy, Dupont, General Electric, PepsiCo and the other big business interests that belong to the U.S. Climate Action Partnership (USCAP)," said the FEEI's Tom Borelli. "Global warming pork-barrel spending and corporate welfare are what they're after," Borelli added.

"USCAP members hope that, through a cap-and-trade scheme, Congress will simply give them and other special interests what amounts to essentially 'free money' -- as much as $1.3 trillion dollars over the next 10 years under legislation recently introduced by Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) and Arlen Specter (R-PA) -- as well as other competitive business advantages," explained Milloy. "Not only is cap-and-trade likely to misdirect taxpayer monies and rob hard-working Americans of income, it's not at all clear that it will produce any environmental benefits whatsoever," he added.

"The Laffer paper confirms that cap-and-trade is a lose-lose proposition," said Borelli. Given the well-established relationship between economic prosperity and a clean environment, it's hard to see how harming the economy won't also harm the environment," Borelli concluded.

Source





Pesky Humberto

Hurricane Humberto hit the Texas Gulf Coast with little warning. In the wake of the storm even the experts are wondering just how it happened.

"While this was forecast to become Tropical Storm Humberto, I don't think any forecaster or any model for that matter brought it to a tropical hurricane with winds at 85 miles an hour," said CBS 42 Meteorologist Susan Vessell. "That was a big surprise."

Storm warnings first went out at 10 a.m. Wednesday, leaving less than 18 hours until a hurricane hit land.

Joe Arellano with the National Weather Service has been predicting hurricanes for 30 years -- but he didn't predict this. "Our forecasts are getting better," Arellano said. "We have better technology, satellite, radar, computer models that we use. But there's always the thing about Mother Nature. It doesn't always agree with the models. It does its own thing."

He says the warm, shallow water near the coast fueled Humberto, and he credits a cold front for helping the Category 1 hurricane blow quickly across the coast.

"That was one good thing about the storm," Arellano said. "It didn't spend enough time over open waters. It could have been a Category 2 or 3 if it had more time over the Gulf of Mexico."

The state of Texas had plans in place, even before Humberto was upgraded to a hurricane. The governor deployed 200 military soldiers, a half dozen helicopters, search and rescue crews, and swift water rescue teams to the area.

Source

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The Lockwood paper was designed to rebut Durkin's "Great Global Warming Swindle" film. It is a rather confused paper -- acknowledging yet failing to account fully for the damping effect of the oceans, for instance -- but it is nonetheless valuable to climate atheists. The concession from a Greenie source that fluctuations in the output of the sun have driven climate change for all but the last 20 years (See the first sentence of the paper) really is invaluable. And the basic fact presented in the paper -- that solar output has in general been on the downturn in recent years -- is also amusing to see. Surely even a crazed Greenie mind must see that the sun's influence has not stopped and that reduced solar output will soon start COOLING the earth! Unprecedented July 2007 cold weather throughout the Southern hemisphere might even be the first sign that the cooling is happening. And the fact that warming plateaued in 1998 is also a good sign that we are moving into a cooling phase. As is so often the case, the Greenies have got the danger exactly backwards. See my post of 7.14.07 and a very detailed critique here for more on the Lockwood paper

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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