ADAMANT

Juggernaut Bites Metaphysician

Sick and tired of peer reviewed  journals that say things Anne Coulter disagrees with, and Human Events knows are not so?  Strike a blow against  the fact-based-- try:
    Answers Research Journal
 Cutting-edge creation research. Free.

"Answers Research Journal (ARJ) is a professional, peer-reviewed technical journal for the publication of interdisciplinary scientific and other relevant research from the perspective of the recent Creation and the global Flood within a biblical framework."

Wherein you can savor the wonders of

• An Apology and Unification Theory for the Reconciliation of Physical Matter and Metaphysical Cognizance

  by Desmond P. Allen   February 22, 2008

  Because one is tangible and the other intangible, the physical and metaphysical are generally treated separately. But this dichotomy is illogical.

• Catastrophic Granite Formation

  by Andrew A. Snelling  February 6, 2008

  The timescale for the generation of granitic magmas and their subsequent intrusion, crystallization, and cooling as plutons is no longer incompatible with the biblical time frames.

I wouldn't try the instant  granite recipe at home,  but the first paper may have been engendered in this blog's archive, bu last years modest proposal for the automated Sokalization of formulaic Crank Climate screeds of the sort currently ground out by human toil in  Steve Milloy's  SUNKJunkScience boiler works.

Las February,  I featured   UNDER DECONSTRUCTION,  which began with the observation that

Of all the Weapons of Mass Derision deployed in the Culture Wars, few  have proven more lethal than the PoMo Jargon Generator,

It seems entirely possible that the fearsome engine has been embodied in the metal software of the  author of the Unification Apology at the top of the list .I would not be  at all surprised to see him at next week's Heartland  conference.

"Soon As Buckley Arrived

..........................          ,,,He told the left wing to go to Hell."

With apologies to cartoonist Henry Payne

Sustainable Sloth

Sustainability Begins At Home. Hut

A Greenhouse implosion is a fearful thing. With fuel prices spiraling upward, Madison Avenue's most luxuriant  Greens must fear for their  livelihood. What if people can't afford to buy enough carbon to maintain  a decent standard  of CO2 growth?  Those with carbon permits in their 10K portfolios realize that even a measly one part per million annual increase in the greenhouse gas requires  everyone on Earth to  burn fuel enough to provide  ~782 kilograms, or 1,745 pounds per capita of CO2 each year. Many nations exceed this  ¾ metric tonne criterion-- Americans with  over 20 tonnes of CO2   each,  Kazakhstanis with 13 and  Israelis with over 10. Despite the  handicap of Gaullist  nuclear electricity  , even the French manage a respectable 6.

But heaven help the heavily carbon-leveraged  if more  nations start emulating the few, the proud, that took Earth Day 1970 seriously, and  are showing the world the way forward with this  exemplary spectrum of  low carbon footprint  lifestyles.

No wonder some American politicians have embraced the energy efficient and Eco-conscious national costume of that most advanced of Ultra-Green nations, the sovereign republic of  Somalia, whose citizens exhale far more carbon than statistics suggest they combust-

Wow! What a small camp fire !

CO2 per capita  KG      Life Expectancy   Lifetime Footprint:Tonnes CO2 

• USA                20,000             80.1                   1602.0

• Paraguay        742                 78.0                         57.8   

• Angola            505                  38.6                         19.5

• Sudan              287                 50.3                         14.4

• Zambia           204                 38.5                           7.9

• Ethiopia         103                  50.4                          5.2

• Rwanda           63                   50.1                          3.2

• Cambodia        39                  63.4                          2.5

• Afghanistan   29                 43.9                           1.3

• Chad                  13                  48.3                           0.6
  

• Somalia             3                   50.7                          0.15

I find the UN 's contention  that Somali's get by on  six ounces of fuel a month pretty unsustainable, but  their data base is not my problem. Then again, a lot of the time it's too hot in Somalia to risk working up a sweat carrying firewood.

DARK LIGHT

Dark-field X-rays Dissipate Structural Fog

It used to take an ultra brilliant synchotron x-ray source about as portable as a Swiss  bank vault to provide the high contrast high-quality dark-field scatter images using reflective optics .

Now they have been obtained using conventional X-ray tubes, an advance that could pave the way to revealing micro-cracks in aircraft or boat hulls, bone splinters  and on the analytical side , identifying explosives Pfeiffer et al., Nature Materials.          

A team from Switzerland and Denmark has incorporated a  nanostructured grating interferometer into an X-ray setup that allows brightness and bandwidth restrictions to be overcome.          
Nanostructured gratings permit the use of a broad energy spectrum, including the standard range of energies that are used in traditional X-ray equipment. Current imaging equipment can be adapted to include dark-field imaging data obtained from small-angle scattering, revealing information on the microporous or microcrystalline structure of the material. Another possibility is Lang topographs to fingerprint gemstones.

Potential applications include security screening as explosives with microcrystalline structures can be identified by their ability to scatter X-rays.The literally stark contrast between these  chicken wing images demonstrates the potential of dark-field imaging  in medical applications.

“In cases of complicated bone fractures, where small splinters can intrude into the surrounding tissue, dark-field contrast could provide the necessary specificity to visualize subtle details"

lead author Franz Pfeiffer of the Paul Scherrer Institut, Switzerland, told Nature          

Persian Counsels

Late last year, I took the Vice  President's Classicist, Victor Davis Hanson, since honored with the National Medal Of the Humanities along with such worthies as Louis Auchincloss,  to task for  an echt-Neocon National Review Online piece expressing the view that ,in my words

"the National Intelligence Estimate shows that Iran's inability to realize its nuclear ambitions is but one of the many fruits of our wise invasion of Mesopotamia. As presumably is Libya's failure to send a manned mission to Mars. The scholarly world awaits Hanson's magisterial essay demonstrating that Xerxes turned tail on learning of Athens threat to weaponize Democritus' atomic theory."

I am now reduced to cognitive dissonance by belatedly  reading his far more balanced, indeed Classical take on matters Oriental --

July 21, 2007
Bad Persians
Myth and reality in wars between East and West
by Victor Davis Hanson
Times Literary Supplement

The principal cause of my chagrin is his reminder that  the Ionian  seat of pre-Socratic thought , including the the physics of Anaxamiter  and Democritus  languished under Persian satrapy  even as the Parthenon was being erected. So I sincerely  hope  ( one can dream ) that  they read this issue of the TLS at the White House, because it  is way above NR's current pay grade.

The Stanley Greener ?

In Coal in your stock-car   former  City Journal editor Edward John Craig celebrates Planet Gore's New Math :

Anne Korin from the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security responds to a reader's question about coal:

One pound of coal is about the amount of energy required to light a 40 watt bulb for 24 hours. One pound of coal generates about one kilowatt-hour of power, which depending on the weight of a vehicle will provide 2-6 miles worth of driving in a plug in hybrid.

Since  a gallon of gas weighs about 7 pounds , this seems to be just a restatement of the heat of combustion- and hence the energy content of the fuel, without any attempt to reckon conversion losses.

Were it so simple, a $50 dollar ton of coal would deliver  4,000 to 12,000 miles of driving  equal to roughly $1,000 to $2,500 worth of  gasoline, depending on whether a compact or an SUV is at issue . Since that much gas- say 250 to 750 gallons, far outstrips the realistic yield of less energetic methanol a ton of coal produces-- according to Korin,

" about 121 gallons of methanol. Energy content wise, that's about equivalent to 60 gallons of gasoline. So for a car that gets X miles per gallon of gasoline, running on coal to methanol yields about X/33 miles per pound of coal. Less miles per pound than electricity"

Clearly her argument is confused-  if coal electricity could function as the equivalent of twenty cent a gallon gasoline,  America would get around in a mixed fleet of electrics and Stanley Steamers. If we had gigajoule batteries weighing under a ton, and a good five cent  gearbox for a turbofan.

Baptized In The Fountain Of Youth

PZ  Myers is finds it alarming that "Donna Callaway, a member of the Florida Board of Education" whose  recent  editorial he thinks delusional is alarmed at one of the recently passed  Florida eucational  standards: "Diversity and Evolution of Living Organisms. A. Evolution is the fundamental concept underlying all of biology.".

If he thinks she's trying to win  Ben Stein's koolaid  harder than her neighbors, then PZ  needs to spend more quality time wresting alligators - here is what her brethren, who  have strong opinions about Expelled,  have to say in The American Spectator :

MARS ATTACKS TAKI

And my new column fights back feebly

Potemkin Firewalls ?

Headed to Beijing ?
The  " Golden Shield Project" is being routed around visitors to the Olympics, according to James Fallows disturbing expose' in The Atlantic

" In reality, what the Olympic-era visitors will be discovering is not the absence of China’s electronic control but its new refinement—and a special Potemkin-style unfettered access that will be set up just for them, and just for the length of their stay.

According to engineers I have spoken with... the government bodies in charge of censoring the Internet have told them to get ready to unblock access from ...certain Internet cafés, access jacks in hotel rooms and conference centers where foreigners are expected to work or stay during the Olympic Games... the very existence of Internet controls is almost never discussed in public here...

When American technologists write about the control system, they tend to emphasize its limits. When Chinese citizens discuss it—at least with me—they tend to emphasize its strength. All of them are right, which makes the government’s approach to the Internet a nice proxy for its larger attempt to control people’s daily lives.

In America, the Internet was originally designed to be free of choke points... In China, the Internet came with choke points built in...virtually all Internet contact between China and the rest of the world is routed through a very small number of fiber-optic cables that enter the country at one of three points..."

Chicken Fried Hydrogen

Beware The Bushwhackers Of Gallium Gulch !

indigestible energy ideas are in abundant supply, but Milk Of Alumina affords no relief, and it takes a tough chicken to cluck at the half-baked state of this bit of technofluff from Perdue  ballyhooing the  Hydrogen-Gallium Gospel 

"New aluminum-rich alloy produces hydrogen on-demand for large-scale uses
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - Purdue University engineers have developed a new aluminum-rich alloy that produces hydrogen by splitting water and is economically competitive with conventional fuels for transportation and power generation.

    "We now have an economically viable process for producing hydrogen on-demand for vehicles, electrical generating stations and other applications," said Jerry Woodall, a distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue who invented the process.

    The new alloy contains 95 percent aluminum and 5 percent of an alloy that is made of the metals gallium, indium and tin. Because the new alloy contains significantly less of the more expensive gallium than previous forms of the alloy, hydrogen can be produced less expensively, he said.

    When immersed in water, the alloy splits water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen, which immediately reacts with the aluminum to produce aluminum oxide, also called alumina, which can be recycled back into aluminum. Recycling aluminum from nearly pure alumina is less expensive than mining the aluminum-containing ore bauxite, making the technology more competitive with other forms of energy production, Woodall said.

    "After recycling both the aluminum oxide back to aluminum and the inert gallium-indium-tin alloy only 60 times, the cost of producing energy both as hydrogen and heat using the technology would be reduced to 10 cents per kilowatt hour, making it competitive with other energy technologies," Woodall said.'

What he didn't say was that  the H2 yield from the 2 Al + 6 H2O = 2 Al( OH)3 + 3 H2 reaction  is about 1 ltier of gas per gram of aluminum alloy.

A 3 liter engine operating on a lean ( 10% H2) mixture  buzzes though 6,000 liters of air and fuel vapor  in a minute, running at 2,000 RPM.

It will therefore require   hundreds of grams  per minute , or a multiple of  5  KG of aluminum alloy per hour . Call it 100 pounds  a week. That means you will be carrying five pounds of gallium worth several thousand dollars in your 'gas' and milk of Alumina tanks ., the aluminum hydrodide slurry being about as far removed from what electrolytic  aluminum plants consume  as rusty bilge water is from iron ore.

Anybody for  cars with calcium carbide / water  acetylene generators ?  The non-energy inputs are cheap, and the lime water can capture half the CO2 in the exhaust- but that makes it  no more economic than the prospect of recycling galliumas an alternative to solving the hydrogen fuel storage problem per se.

X-Rated Astrophysics

Last year,the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) spacecraft  was aimed at a pulsar named PSR J1846-0258 some 20,000 light-years away in the constellation Aquila when the star suddenly erupted in a blast of x-rays.

The display, which propagated as stripes across the stellar disc,is reported online in Science, by  Fotis Gavriil of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. He suggests  PSR J1846-0258 may  be a magnetar in the making---a neutron star with an enormously powerful magnetic field. Only a dozen or so have been discovered, routinely emitting  energetic x and gamma rays.

"The bursts were completely unexpected," Fotis told Science,  Because the young-- roughly  millennium old--  pulsar's magnetic field strength is  low his colleagues suspect it is still evolving. He says the discovery raises important questions-- Do pulsars behave like magnetars only periodically and then revert? Did all magnetars originate as pulsars?

Plan Stein From Outer Space

The Report Of Ben Stein's Evolution Has Been Somewhat  Exaggerated
Move over,  An Inconvenient Truth. To paraphrase its American Spectator review by Tom Bethell, "The real question about" Ben Stein's gonzo opus Expelled " is not whether it is brutish or cruel or chilling or helpful to conservatism or harmful to it, but whether " the anti-Darwinian tract will roll the eyeballs of  voters with IQ's above body temperature heavenward faster than reruns of Teletubbies or out-takes from Gigli

Having labored a lifetime in science journalism's vinyards without squeezing a sour grapes worth of intellectual nourishment into his flock,the venerable Bethell reports

SCIENCE EXPELLED FROM EDEN   The Visinegoth Psalter circa MMVII

"  it brought tears of joy to my eyes. I have written about this controversy for over 30 years and by the movie's end I felt that those of us who have insisted that Darwinism is a sorry mess and that life surely was designed are going to prevail.

It would be uncharitable to  suggest  Ben has been putting Visine in the popcorn again, for  Bethell recovered his clarity of vision to observe :

  "I had not expected was that the film would take the war to the enemy...Oxford's Richard Dawkins... P.Z. Myers of the University of Minnesota... evolutionists who unflinchingly accept the logic of their own position and reject... the Rodney King mantra: "Can't we all just get along?"

WHAT DOES THE science show? The vast majority of species that once lived are now extinct. ..The real action today is within the microscopic study of living organisms..we are only beginning to discover the amazing complexity found at the molecular level.

... Now the cell is seen to resemble a high-tech factory.The growing allusions in the scientific literature to "molecular machines" have inspired one biologist..., to publish The Design Matrix. I don't know his real identity, which he conceals for obvious reasons...new research ... carried out under the auspices of the Discovery Institute ...is uncovering a miracle of complexity.

...Expelled makes use of Cold War imagery, and we are now in the Samizdat period ... when the most interesting Soviet authors used pen names to avoid being "expelled" -- to the Gulag...My only complaint about Expelled... is that its ending came all too soon. "

Those who can't wait for the final cut-- the pseudocumentary's directors are still weaving illusory  interviews from out- of- context sound bites and  shots of Stein talking at empty chairs-- can save $8 by watching this free and equally edifying ecumenical prequel.

I'm scripting a sequel, in which Ben Stein journeys to the Red Planet by cab, eschewing rocket science in solidarity with Tom's agnostic view of Einstein's  theory of general relativity. Once there, he'll interview an old friend of Tom and ID maven Michael Behe, the Face On Mars.   Besides figuring in their inspirational writings, the face has authored as many papers on molecular and synthetic biology as all the Discovery Institute  fellows combined. I hope Ben gets his autograph. And Bethell's too, on a copy of his classic article on the shape of scientific history to come :

" Darwin's theory, I believe, is on the verge of collapse...natural selection was quietly abandoned, even by his most ardent supporters, some years ago. Darwin, I suggest, is in the process of being discarded, but... it is being done as discreetly and gently as possible, with a minimum of publicity."

Discreetly to be sure.  Some who knew Darwin were yet alive when Bethell's  report of evolution's immanent extinction appeared in Harper's in 1976.  With luck, Stein's comic reputation will be resuscitated next year, as gales of laughter greet  clips of this cult classic in the making   at Darwin bicentennial  celebrations around the world.

Illustration by the author, Copyright 2008

The Few, The Green, The Proud

AHEAD OF THE CURVE IN MAKING C02 HISTORY

The New York Times'  Andy Revkin complains :

'Some libertarian critics have implied I’m supporting a Draconian push back to sweaters and bicycles (see Ron Bailey’s recent critique of my “Unnecessary Things” post). [UPDATE: Draconian by some of their standards, not mine.] Some environmentalists say I’m too gloomy about the chances that humanity will resolve to share responsibility for limiting climate risks.'

Like politics, all gloom is local. To keep Carbon Dioxide levels rising by a  part per million per year, everyone on Earth must burn fuel enough to provide  ~782 kilograms, or 1,745 pounds per capita. The citizens of many nations easily exceed this  ~ ¾ metric tonne criterion-- Americans generate over 20 tonnes of CO2   each,  Kazakhstanis over 13 , Israelis over 10. Even the French, sorely handicapped by their nuclear electric system, manage a respectable 6.

 Still, there are laggards, nations so backward that they are not pulling their weight in the race to keep up with nature as a source of climate change. Despite India's burgeoning economy, its billion citizens only managed to add a feeble 1.5 parts per million  of CO2 to their share of the world’s air last year, while Pakistan barely made the cut  with 1.02 parts per million.

Deep Greens of course esteem the Pakistani life style shockingly profligate in terms of greenhouse gas emission. They seek to stop and reverse increases in gases that tend to warm the planet, and applaud  Al Gore’s demand  for a 90% cut in US CO2 emissions by 2050.  This means surpassing the fuel economy of  sunny  Iraq  at ~ 3 tonnes per capita , or Cuba at ~2, and emulating the few, the proud nations that took Earth Day 1970 seriously, and  are showing the world the way things ought to be, providing  so-called ‘developed’ nations with an exemplary spectrum of  low carbon footprint  lifestyles.

 Which one the next president of the United States will elect to aim for is for democracy to determine, so before you vote, or emigrate, take your pick from this list of ten nations whose cool example America can follow into a Greenhouse gas and central heating free future :

Less Than 1 PPM Global CO2 Growth Per Year

      CO2 per capita  KG                     LIFE EXPECTANCY
 

• Paraguay        742                              78.0 

• Angola           505                               38.6

• Sudan              287                              50.3

• Zambia           204                              38.5

• Ethiopia        103                               50.4

>>1 PPM Global CO2 Growth Per Decade!

• Rwanda             63                 50.1

• Cambodia         39                 63.4

• Afghanistan     29                43.9

• Chad                  13                  48.3   

• Somalia               3                 50.7

It might broaden the horizons of those who take passive solar tea  with Amory Lovins, if  the Aspen Institute and Guggenheim Foundations were to cycle their annual meeting venues through the above list, in ascending order.   

Source: United Nations statistics last updated August 2007

 

Satellite Temperature Data For Dummies

How to look at the RSS satellite-derived temperature data

Rare is the statistician who can write- don't miss William Briggs lucid and disinterested introduction to whence the data underlying the policy debate come, and what happened to their error bars along the way.

Annals of Anthraxophobia

Good King Coal
Editorial
National Review
Dec 13, 1993
  by Russell Seitz

IN JUST over two centuries coal has descended from being the lifeblood of the Industrial Revolution to the environmental movement's foremost bugbear. But the world's cheapest and most abundant fossil fuel should not be allowed to come under the guns of carbon taxation without a little representation beforehand.

The glittering anthracite prized by the railways until recent decades was and remains a villain of the darkest hue smokeless and therefore apparently clean, but actually carbon dioxide incarnate, the harbinger of global warming. Anthracite is distinguished by a dearth of hydrogen, the abundance of which in natural gas is what commends the latter mightily to the environmentalists. For the heat from burning hydrogen is accompanied not by carbon dioxide, but by innocuous water vapor.

Yet curiously, almost no one advocating carbon taxes has noted that there is more hydrogen locked up in the hydrocarbon content of bituminous coals than in all the world's oil and gas combined. The best of these high-hydrogen coals contain in excess of three hydrogen atoms for every four of carbon--a distinction important enough to make possible a roughly 5 per cent reduction in global [CO.sub.2] emissions without any reduction in the amount of thermal energy derived from the coal. Such high-volatile bituminous and sub-bituminous coals are as abundant as anthracite is rare their reserves are reckoned in trillions of tons.

But the anthraxophobes have three other arrows in their quiver--sulphur, ash, and toxic metals. Some coals are burdened with all three, while others are all but free of them. Sulphur, the previous enemy number one, was laid low a decade ago by the mandated retrofitting of scrubbers to every powerplant smokestack. Most environmentalists were too busy celebrating that victory to note that the retrofit was typically accompanied by a reduction in thermodynamic efficiency that added 10 per cent to the [CO.sub.2] emitted per kilowatt hour.

Today, enjoined to reduce sulphur emissions by 90 per cent, regardless of their starting point, power plants are being denied the opportunity to reduce both their [CO.sub.2] and sulphur emissions by burning a newly discovered class of coals so clean that they do not need sulphur control. Billion-ton reserves of a new benchmark coal very high in hydrogen and startlingly low in sulphur, metals, and ash have recently been found in Indonesia. Its analysis reads like a wish-list from the Green Party. Similar deposits are avidly sought elsewhere in the tropics.

We hold no brief for strip-mining Central Europe or subsidizing the antique collieries of Wales and the Ruhr. But international free trade, by moving the best coals globally, can contribute to reducing not just environmental burdens, but the crippling effect on economic development suffered by those nations hard pressed to pay for oil. To thoughtful conservationists the worst of all possible worlds is the one in which underdeveloped nations, denied access to coal by carbon taxes, can afford only enough petroleum to run their chain saws. In a more enlightened regulatory environment, the pursuit of environmental quality via the carrot of a hydrogen-promoting rebate rather than the big stick of punitive carbon taxes could do much to help the good coals drive the bad out of circulation.

Strange Attractors, Political Division

“You can now buy Indulgences to offset your carbon guilt”

Spiked Jan. 2008

 Beat the heat selling CO2 Indulgences from the
 InterPapal Climate Concordat

........................ADAMANT Aug. 2007

 

A Black Hole In The WSJ

Conspicuously absent from next week's  American  Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Boston will be Jerry E. Bishop, the last science editor of  The Wall Street Journal, and past president of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing. Bishop, who died of  lung cancer last fall. He joined the WSJ in 1955, and the intrepid Texan reporter covered  Antarctic exploration and the rise of the Space Age.

I first met him at the Apollo 11 moon launch,  and in 1989 we were on opposite sides of the Cold Fusion controversy, he  having scooped the startling claim of  two University of Utah chemists, one a Nobelist, to  have created a bench top experiment  apparatus that generated nuclear fusion reactions without benefit of a giant Tokomak or a hydrogen bomb.  The  newsletter of the National Association of Science Writers notes :

The claim of so-called "cold fusion" seemed so implausible that many media outlets at first refused to print the story. But Bishop was less inhibited...in the weeks immediately following that announcement he reported frequently on the claims emanating from Utah and from other laboratories. His reports came more often and were generally longer than those of most major newspapers, and he did not always write as a skeptic as did other science reporters covering the story.

Bishop was accused by skeptics in the physics community of compounding the cold fusion hype. "But the job of reporters is to report news," he would later say in an interview. "If some authority, like a scientist in the case of cold fusion, says it's not true, you don't kill the story you report the controversy."

Bishop was selected by the American Institute of Physics (AIP) as the winner of its annual science writing award for the year 1989. The announcement by the AIP... that its annual award for excellence in science writing would be given to Bishop raised more hackles. "Whatever one thinks of this particular series, one must recognize Jerry Bishop as one of the finest science writers in America," said Kenneth W. Ford, AIP executive director...

Bishop's memory for detail and penetrating questions at the briefings were inspiring. He was a role model to generations of reporters.

During his editorial tenure, weekly science coverage by the WSJ grew into a separate eight-page section, Science Journal . After his 1996  retirement, it imploded into a once a week column , as the WSJ dispensed with the office of Science Editor. This dismal example is reflected in The Washington  Times, Human Events and virtually the entire constellation of conservative journals of fact and opinion upon which the Republican Beltway depends for its scientific intelligence.

If nowadays the think tank faithful feed less on science than Intelligent Design,  and other dark and dogmatic matter, it is because nature abhors a news vacuum. A dim constellation of cranks in the orbit of the Discovery Institute has been sucked into the one left in Bishop's wake.

The result is one of the scientific wonders of the age- obedient to Murphy's Law, a spin polarized vortex of talking heads , all facing backwards and to the right, has filled the No Spin Zone.

HELL FREEZES OVER

And My Latest Climate Wars  Essay Is Linked On:

---

' If we're on the road to climate hell, then it's sure in the slow lane. Warming of 1/10 degree per decade makes isotherms move poleward less than half a mile per year...continue »'

Should you find yourself in Hell,
and wish to send souvenirs home,
" Gods Expedition " is Down East 
Norwegian for " Cargo Dispatch "

View Larger Map

Parting The Veil

Who's behind the dastardly Danish depictions ?
The NYTimes reports the Wikipedia 's posting of  representations of Muhammad The Prophet , taken from medieval manuscripts has become the subject of an online protest.

"A Frequently Asked Questions page explains the site’s polite but firm refusal to remove the images: “Since Wikipedia is an encyclopedia with the goal of representing all topics from a neutral point of view, Wikipedia is not censored for the benefit of any particular group.”

Surveilance  reveals that far from being the handwork of an innocent Dane, darker forces are behind the cartoons that have set heads rolling and seen presses smashed- To reveal the Marxist Islamofascist  very short villain behind this attack on ecumenical comity just :

"Science in presidential debates? "

      ' Absolutely.  A science debate?  Not so sure. '
         Commences Nature 's  lead editorial  this week, but it goes on to observe :

Many of the great and good in US science... have joined an initiative calling for the American election campaigns to feature a science debate. Such is the groundswell of support that their call is starting to feel like an idea whose time has come, and indeed it may prove to be so...But in true scientific spirit, the proposal itself requires critical scrutiny....the campaign's website goes too far in saying that science and technology "may be the most important social issue of our time".

In reality, science and technology are a factor in many issues, sometimes a defining one, but most often not. They can and must inform political debate, but will rarely be at its centre. Take the key issue of climate change, which is at the top of the science debate list. The Bush administration's self-interested denialism and subsequent heel-dragging have infuriated informed opinion at home and abroad. But this anger, widely felt by scientists and others, should not lead us to raise science above other concerns out of a sense of slight.

The science of the Earth system is crucial to understanding climate change; that does not mean that climate is best debated as a science issue. Climate change should indeed be debated by the ultimate contenders for the presidency... with expert interlocutors able to challenge claims and highlight both common ground and inconsistencies.

Scientific issues — how to deal with the uncertainties of climate sensitivity when deciding goals for emissions, or how far to shift federal research priorities towards near-to-medium-term innovation in alternative-energy systems — would play a key role in such a debate. But they would not be the whole story: tax policy, international trade, treaty law and foreign policy are just as crucial.

These doubts clearly reflect the debut in Nature of David Goldston s 'Party Of One ' column.  He was  chief of staff on the House Science Committee under its Republican chairman, Representative Sherwood Boehlert of New YorK. Asked by Andrew Revkin of the Times : "Couldn’t an argument be made that simply by having candidates in this forum it’d send message that science is important in many realms of policy?"  Golston replied

" Who needs that message, and at what cost? Do either the public or the candidates not think science is important? I don’t think so... Scientists feel slighted that they’re not mentioned all the time. But actually, scientists are treated with a unique kind of deference... And a debate may not help in that regard. There are lots more reasons a debate could be problematic... putting science in an inherently divisive political context — exactly what scientists usually say they want to avoid...the questions that have been offered for a debate tend to be either
1) questions that aren’t really about science,
2) questions on which one would not want to encourage snap judgments by candidates,
3) questions that while important, are so in the weeds that Presidents usually don’t get involved with them even when they’re in office, or
4) questions likely to elicit platitudes.
.... badgering lawmakers can be a more organized and effective activity than that choice of words might imply. But I’d list a number of things...educating students and the public; writing editorials, op-eds, blogs; advising political figures; participating... as individual citizens as opposed  scientists..how...NASA supporters have used e-mail campaigns to affect Obama’s position on space is interesting.

The Zombie Curve And 'Six Degrees'

Dead Parameters Walking

" Climate sensitivity" , notes Barton Paul Levenson ,

" Is an estimate of how much some factor in a regional or global climate would change with a specific change in some factor affecting it. That's pretty vague, of course. In practice, the term has recently come to mean the change in Earth's surface temperature that could be expected if the ambient level of carbon dioxide were doubled (usually from the preindustrial level of 280 parts per million by volume to 560 ppmv, but sometimes from 300 to 600).

Below are all the estimates I could find in the literature. Not all estimates are equal. Most of these, though not all, include the effects of climate feedbacks such as water vapor. And these estimates include ones which were later shown to be based on flawed models, erroneous reasoning or outright mistakes"

Estimate of its value vary  with scientific sophistication and taste , the peer-reviewed values spanning nearly two orders of magnitude , since the first was put forth by Arrhenius in 1896. While  reasonably complete treatments of the physics have converged into an idealized mathematical consensus, the choice of variables needed to connect the physics to a real planetary system remain , empirically, well controversial- witness Levenson's cautionary graph of how the published ones look over time.

Arrhenius  first result testifies to the force of his  physical intuition- he got the order of magnitude right  with no computers and crude spectrometers -Victorian infrared prisms were carved out of rock salt. But modern instruments , billion dollar  R&D funding , and exploding computer power have not made the data scatter go away. The policy debate can't die until the data flatline, and the last decade's estimates of climate sensitivity  values  still span an order of magnitude.

It would be statistically perverse to point out that the  trend of the four most modern values ( five counting Schneider's 2007 estimate, published shortly after this graph appeared) is not going up.

Lord knows which way the four year trend will point in 2020. Science aside,  funding can be directed just as data are cherry-picked,  and the cynically directed support of groups that deliver high or low end results can bend it either way.Yet there remains  a big difference in the physics pecking order between the merely ornery and often wrong , and those few who prove their contraries -- I'm biased towards Schneider's conclusion because the last time he dared to be contrary, he proved to be right.

It is curious that the two values most closely approximating the production values of the latest  National Geographic Special were respectively published in 1963 and 1896 !

Isn't modern climate science wonderful ?

More Than Planet Gore Ever Wanted To Know

About  Climate  Modeling
And JunkScience Is Afraid To Ask:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/02/ipcc-archive/langswitch_lang/wp#more-520

What the world is doing is not always to to the modeler's liking though.  As the owlishly skeptical Roger Pielke Senior notes of Real Climate's own skepticism about  what the short term --less than a generation--implies about the still parlous state of the modeling art:

"Ironically, by suggesting that there might be some significance to recent climate trends, [ IPCC head] Dr. Pachauri has provided ammunition to those very same skeptics that he disparages. Perhaps Real Climate will explain how misguided he is, but somehow I doubt it.

For the record, I accept the conclusions of IPCC Working Group I. I don't know how to interpret climate observations of the early 21st century, but believe that there are currently multiple valid hypotheses. I also think that we can best avoid confirmation bias, and other cognitive traps, by making explicit predictions of the future and testing them against experience. The climate community, or at least its activist wing, studiously avoids forecast verification. It just goes to show, confirmation bias is more a more comfortable state than dissonance -- and that goes for people on all sides of the climate debate."

 

Ancient Of Days

Once Upon A Time In Arcadia

Pausing on his grand tour of Greece,  slightly winded after  climbing 4500 feet to the summit of Mount  Lykaion , the traditional birthplace of Zeus,  the original Lonely Planet Guide, Pausanias, wrote:

“Before the altar on the east stand two pillars, on which there were once gilded eagles. On this altar they sacrifice in secret to Lykaion Zeus. I was reluctant to pry into the details of the sacrifice; let them be as they are and were from the beginning.”

Pausanias did not have carbon dating at his disposal , but  ow archaeologists trenching deep into that altar's base have encountered an earlier foundation, and remains of burnt offerings made some 5,000 years ago, fully  1,500 years before the earliest mention of the god's name in Minoan linear B tablets, and a millennium before the arrival of indo-european speakers in mainland Greece. The new evidence make the nameless deity 's worship twice as old to Pausanias , as the more familiar pantheon assembled on Olympus some twenty miles away.

Image:University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology

And On The Third Day,

,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,IT LANDED

With the wingspan , but not the weight, of a pterodactyl on steroids, the carbon fiber Zephyr  ultra-lightweight  unmanned  aircraft  can be launched  like a paper airplane- if you can throw a  66 pound barbell overhand. Normally several men pick it up and  toss it into the air.

Once there it can stay up for quite a while.  By day  the QinetiQ  UAV  flies on solar power generated by  paper thin amorphous silicon photovoltaic arrays that cover the aircraft's wings. By night, or under cloud cover,  its rechargeable lithium-sulfur batteries keep it aloft- it can find sun when it must by flying over the weather and into the stratosphere.

Recent  trials validated modifications that have improved the efficiency of Zephyr's power system; new solar arrays supplied by United Solar Ovonic, a full flight-set of Sion Power batteries as well as a novel solar-charger and bespoke autopilot developed by QinetiQ allowed the aircraft to fly  twice carrying a surveillance payload , first for 54 hours to a maximum altitude of 58,355 feet, and then for 33 hours 43 minutes to a maximum altitude of 52,247 feet.  This is an unofficial un-fueled heavier than air endurance record, it being kind of hard to get the equivalent of the Guinness guys to hang around for that  long. If the UAV jocks keep this up, expect the Swiss to retaliate , and next year's Book Of World Records to include the first chronometer certified 100 hour stopwatch.

Hit Or Myth

Top 10 Historical Figures Britons regard as Myths

1. Richard the Lionheart  – 47%
2. Winston Churchill – 23%
3. Florence Nightingale – 23%
4. General  Montgomery – 6%
5. Queen Boudicca - 5%
6. Sir Walter Raleigh – 4%
7. The Duke of Wellington - 4%
8. Cleopatra - 4%
9. Mahatma Gandhi – 3%
10 Charles Dickens - 3%

Top 10 Fictional  Characters Britons consider Real

• 1) King Arthur – 65%
• 2) Sherlock Holmes – 58%
• 3) Robin Hood – 51%
• 4) Eleanor Rigby – 47%
• 5) Sir Edmund Blackadder 37%
• 6) Dick Turpin – 34%
• 7) Captain Biggles  – 33%
• 8) The Three Musketeers – 17%
• 9) Lady Godiva – 12%
• 10) Robinson Crusoe- 5%

In addition, a 2001 BBC  poll found some two million people in the UK believed  Adolf Hitler  to be the  British Prime Minister who led the nation to victory in World War II, while ten million thought Oliver Cromwell was defeated at The Battle Of Hastings