Category Archives: Science/Engineering

The “Greenhouse Effect” Scam

New research says the so-called Greenhouse Effect, the basis of the IPCC’s report and the EPA’s new regs on carbon dioxide emissions, not only cannot be verified but violates the laws of physics:

"Thus, scientific support for the man-made global warming hoax slowly collapses while politicians rush to lock in massive international wealth-redistribution in its name. Those pesky ‘greenhouse gases’ just don’t behave in a politically correct manner."

Not that this or anything else is likely to slow down the Democrats mad rush for higher taxes for a "solution."

Via The Seablogger.

There is no law of averages

As Barry prepares to jet off to Copenhagen to promise to continue our descent to the poorhouse by cutting our carbon emissions to make the dictator’s club (i.e. the UN) happy, the climate naysaying is mounting.

Statistician, AMS member and blogger William M. Briggs shows the illogic in Barry’s logic:

"Diminishing glaciers did not prove AGW; they were instead a verification that ice melts when it gets hot. Fewer polar bears did not count in favor of AGW; it instead perhaps meant that maybe adult bears prefer a chill to get in the mood. People sidling up to microphones and trumpeting ‘It’s bad out there, worse than we thought!’ was not evidence of AGW; it was evidence of how easily certain people could work themselves into a lather."

Briggs is the self-published author of an amusing book on the law of averages that isn’t.

Meanwhile, Canadian businessman Stephen McIntyre, the famous blogger debunker of the infamous hockey stick "proof" for AGW gets a timely writeup in the WSJ.

Even (gasp) cBS is weighing in objectively (what will they think of next) on the hacked emails.

And blogger Megan McArdle, who (cough, spit) actually believes in AGW, notes the real problem with those emails: the major climate model predicting doom ahead could be rubbish. A little item financed in part by (you guessed it) the American taxpayer.

Oops, now there’s more climate science faking in New Zealand.

So will Barry notice any of this stuff and unbutton if not completely remove his climate hairshirt and spend more time trying to get our economy back on track? Naw. That’s above his pay grade. Apparently.

Cold As Ice

ColdAsIce.jpg

 

I enjoyed this 1992 scifi novel of physicist Charles Sheffield’s, though it seemed unnecessarily complicated in the beginning. A little more action before establishing the seven main characters would have prevented me from putting it down so often. Sheffield died of brain cancer in 2002, which resonates because a good friend of Mrs. Charm’s is struggling with it. Seems to have it licked for the moment, though the odds of that lasting are very low.

I bring up Sheffield to point out how easy it is to fall into these stories of ordinary life in the solar system, as if we had gotten off the engineering dime and were actually living in/on Luna, Mars, and the Asteroid Belt. A lot of Cold As Ice occurs on (actually, under the surface of) Ganymede, which recalls Heinlein’s impossible young adult novel, Farmer In The Sky, which Mr. B. and I started as a bedtime story but never finished.

We had the space probe pictures and details of Jupiter’s radiation to consult, as Heinlein did not. Also life on (under, actually) Europa, which seems plausible, despite Sheffield’s scientific realism of the dangers of Jovian radiation. I hope all this verisimilitude means humanity really will do these things and not just wallow forever in political corruption and the threat of war. But a posed result of the latter is limned chillingly in Cold As Ice as one of the spurs for continued colonization.

Dusty Island Universe

NGC253_Dusty_Island.jpg

Also called the Silver Dollar and the Sculptor. A mere ten million light years away, and about seventy thousand light years in diameter. No weekend trip, alas.

Science fraud

The anthropogenic global warming guys have been whacked again and again and, now, again. But these scientific fraudsters (in it to keep their research funding and salaries healthy) keep rolling on. Barry may be sliding on Cap & Trade, but the EPA still is penalizing emitters of carbon dioxide and trying to put the coal industry out of business. So even if Copenhagen now deserves to be stopped in its tracks, the "climate-change" circus likely will keep traveling on for a while longer.

Via the Seablogger and Power Line.

Biggest cruise ship’s bow thrusters

oots-1-lg

Whoa. The Oasis of the Seas is a biggie. Got to be impressed with the engineering.

Large Hadron Collider goof

Nevermind the worrisome threat of a black hole. A baquette dropped by a bird will work just fine.