Thursday, September 25, 2008

Mucking Up the Data...

Here's a wonderfully detailed and documented example of how NASA takes perfectly good data (which doesn't happen to support AGW) and “adjusts” it until it does. In a nutshell, here's what it says: NASA took data from a source that is provably very reliable and consistent, but which didn't show any global warming trends. Then NASA applied a series of adjustments to that data, and used the adjusted data as part of their global warming model. After all the adjustments, the data magically supports their global warming hypothesis.

It's as though you weighed yourself on the same scale every day of your life and kept meticulous records of that – but then your doctor didn't believe the results, and applied his own arbitrary set of adjustments to your data.

Your tax dollars, hard at work. But not for your benefit...

Solar Wind at a Minimum...

NASA held a news conference earlier this week, and this was the main topic:
The intensity of the sun's million-mile-per-hour solar wind has dropped to its lowest levels since accurate records began half a century ago...
The data they're talking about comes from the Ulysses spacecraft, which has long been in orbit around the sun.

There's much more to the story than just this carefully crafted statement from NASA, however. The solar wind they're referring to is “blown” outward from the sun by the pressure of the sun's radiation. The only reason why the solar wind would have diminished is because the sun's radiation output has diminished – which we already know from other measurments. So in that sense this new piece of data is completely unsurprising, but still useful as confirmation.

NASA gets a significant part of its funding as science grants, independently from the space program funding. The science grant gravy train has never been as magnificent as it has during these days of anthropomorphic global warming (AGW) fears. So NASA, for years now, has been very careful to craft its public presentations in such a way as to support AGW fears – they've got a lot of money riding on that. This week's press conference was a real problem for the message crafters, though, because you don't have to be particularly bright to figure out that if there's good evidence that the sun's radiation output is declining, then hey, that might just have something to do with the fact that the planet has been cooling for several years.

And if the planet is now cooling because the sun's radiation is lower, then perhaps the planet might have been warming earlier because the sun's radiation was increasing back then.

And maybe all this AGW talk is just a bunch of hooey.

But NASA doesn't like that answer very much, because then there's much less reason to fund all their AGW-related programs so lavishly.

Oops.

Morning, and Mo'i...

Mo'i is still doing fantastically well. It's just one week since his surgery, but he's rarin' to go – we have to actively control him in order to keep him as quiet as the doctor ordered. Basically these days he lives in his little crate or on a leash, poor guy. He's going to be one very happy fellow in a week or so, when we can first let him run free.

His surgical incision is healing very quickly. It already looks like a relatively minor, albeit big, cut. His hair is growing back on the shaved spot, and it's easy to see that within a few weeks he'll be looking practically normal. For Mo'i, that is...

It was a beautiful morning here again – crisp and clear, with a nice waning moon low in the northeastern sky, just down from Castor and Pollux. Ursa Major has wheeled just a bit higher in the sky; in a couple of weeks it will all be visible again at 4 am...