The Mayaguez Incident...

Long-time readers of this blog may remember that I was on board the USS Long Beach in May of 1975, during the Mayaguez incident.  The Cambodian Kmer Rouge forces captured the Mayaguez, a US Navy supply ship manned by a civilian crew.

At the time the Mayaguez was captured, the USS Long Beach was in the port of Sattahip, Thailand, and much of the crew (including me) was in Bankok.  The crew was recalled and the ship got underway on the second day of the four-day incident.  We sailed just over 200 miles to the southeast, to Koh Tang island, some 60 miles off the coast of Cambodia (modern satellite photo at right).  I remember seeing the island from the deck of the ship, watching the air support and ship-based bombardment in action.

Forty one Americans died in the Mayaguez incident, including eighteen who died in heavy fighting on Koh Tang.

Just recently it occurred to me that at this remove their might actually be a book about the incident, and in fact I found two, which I bought and read: The Last Battle, by Ralph Wetterhahn and The Four Days of Mayaguez by Roy Rowan.  Both were fascinating reads for me, the former for its rich content, the latter for the human story of the captured crew.

One thing about both books absolutely floored me: neither of them contains any mention of the USS Long Beach, or any other US Navy ships besides the USS Holt, the USS Wilson, and the USS Coral Sea (all of which were direct participants in the battle).  I don't know for certain how many other US Navy ships were present, as my memory of events almost 35 years ago is a bit shaky.  But my best estimate is that at least six US Navy ships were there (and I think one Australian ship as well). 

My role on the ship kept me in CIC (Combat Information Center) most of the time, and I had access to some information as the battle progressed.  On reading these books, I realize now that what I “knew” at the time was very sketchy and often inaccurate.  The USS Long Beach's primary role was air defense control, and that's the main involvement I remember us actually having in the incident.  However, there was discussion of our Marine detachment (roughly 60 men) participating in the rescue effort, and also there was the possibility that the 5 inch guns on board would be used in supporting the troops on Koh Tang.

It was quite a strange experience to read two books about an incident that I was a witness to...

ClimateGate: Excellent Observations and Discussions...

Armed and Dangerous is a new blog to me, written by Eric S. Raymond, who may be familiar to you as the author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar.  Based on reading the posts on the front page, I've added it to my daily reading list.  There are some excellent posts on ClimateGate up there now, with the comments being just as interesting as the posts themselves...

Two Adult Cats, Badly in Need of a Home...

The Steele Canyon Veterinary Clinic has two beautiful, fluffy adult Siamese cats (one flame-point, one lilac-point) available for adoption.  If one of these steals your heart, please call them at 619/659-7274.  Both are in need of a loving home, either together or separately...

  

ClimateGate: McIntyre Begins Digging into the Data...

I've been waiting eagerly for this: the well-informed AGW skeptic Steve McIntyre has started digging into the trove of ClimateGate data.  Of course he's finding interesting stuff.  This post is also interesting, for a completely different reason: McIntyre is attempting to get other scientists who were revealed by the ClimateGate emails to be critical of the IPCC data to comment (without success so far).

If you're at all interested in ClimateGate and the AGW debate, I highly recommend regularly visiting Climate Audit (Steve McIntyre's blog)...

ClimateGate: WSJ Weighs In...

The Wall Street Journal has an editorial on ClimateGate with this conclusion:

The response to this among the defenders of Mr. Mann and his circle has been that even if they did disparage doubters and exclude contrary points of view, theirs is still the best climate science we've got. The proof for this is circular. It's the best, we're told, because it's the most-published and most-cited—in that same peer-reviewed literature.

Even so, by rigging the rules, they've made it impossible to know how good it really is. And then, one is left to wonder why they felt the need to rig the game in the first place, if their science is as robust as they claim. If there's an innocent explanation for that, we'd love to hear it.

It's a good, short piece – read the whole thing here.

ClimateGate: Skewed Science...

Interesting piece from the Canadian newspaper, the National Post.  Since the ClimateGate story broke, such skeptical pieces are suddenly being published all over the place.  It's too bad that it takes a scandal to prod the lamestream media into more balanced reporting.  Now I'm actually a little worried that they're headed too far the other way!

Here's an excerpt:

Millions of measurements, global coverage, consistently rising temperatures, case closed: The Earth is warming. Except for one problem. CRU’s average temperature data doesn’t jive with that of Vincent Courtillot, a French geo-magneticist, director of the Institut de Physique du Globe in Paris, and a former scientific advisor to the French Cabinet. Last year he and three colleagues plotted an average temperature chart for Europe that shows a surprisingly different trend. Aside from a very cold spell in 1940, temperatures were flat for most of the 20th century, showing no warming while fossil fuel use grew. Then in 1987 they shot up by about 1 C and have not shown any warming since. This pattern cannot be explained by rising carbon dioxide concentrations, unless some critical threshold was reached in 1987; nor can it be explained by climate models.

Courtillot and Jean-Louis Le Mouël, a French geo-magneticist, and three Russian colleagues first came into climate research as outsiders four years ago. The Earth’s magnetic field responds to changes in solar output, so geomagnetic measurements are good indicators of solar activity. They thought it would be interesting to compare solar activity with climatic temperature measurements.

Their first step was to assemble a database of temperature measurements and plot temperature charts. To do that, they needed raw temperature measurements that had not been averaged or adjusted in any way. Courtillot asked Phil Jones, the scientist who runs the CRU database, for his raw data, telling him (according to one of the ‘Climategate’ emails that surfaced following the recent hacking of CRU’s computer systems) “there may be some quite important information in the daily values which is likely lost on monthly averaging.” Jones refused Courtillot’s request for data, saying that CRU had “signed agreements with national meteorological services saying they would not pass the raw data onto third parties.” (Interestingly, in another of the CRU emails, Jones said something very different: “I took a decision not to release our [meteorological] station data, mainly because of McIntyre,” referring to Canadian Steve McIntyre, who helped uncover the flaws in the hockey stick graph.)

ClimateGate: Thoughts from a Critical IPCC Reviewer...

Vincent Gray is a scientist from New Zealand, and an anthropogenic global warming skeptic.  He was one of the expert reviewers on the infamous IPCC report, though nearly all of his comments were ignored.  PajamasMedia has a brief piece by him that starts with this:

Nothing about the revelations surprises me. I have maintained email correspondence with most of these scientists for many years, and I know several personally. I long ago realized that they were faking the whole exercise.

When you enter into a debate with any of them, they always stop cold when you ask an awkward question. This applies even when you write to a government department or a member of Parliament. I and many of my friends have grown accustomed to our failure to publish and to lecture, and to the rejection of our comments submitted prior to every IPCC report.

Read the whole thing.

Al Gore's Organic Vegetable Patch...

More from the London Telegraph:

Just a few considerations in addition to previous remarks about the explosion of the East Anglia Climategate e-mails in America. The reaction is growing exponentially there. Fox News, Barack Obama’s Nemesis, is now on the case, trampling all over Al Gore’s organic vegetable patch and breaking the White House windows. It has extracted some of the juiciest quotes from the e-mails and displayed them on-screen, with commentaries. Joe Public, coast-to-coast, now knows, thanks to the clowns at East Anglia’s CRU, just how royally he has been screwed.

“Al Gore's organic vegetable patch” – gotta love that British humor...  Read the whole thing.

ClimateGate: Oh, the Animals!

Heh!

ClimateGate: How They All Squirmed...

By James Delingpole at the London Telegraph:

Among the many great amusements of the Climategate scandal are the myriad imaginative excuses being offered by the implicated scientists and their friends in the MSM as to why this isn’t a significant story. Here are some of the best:

Just go read it.  You know you want to...

ClimateGate: More Source Code Analysis...

Bloggers and scientists all over the world are digging into the IDL and Fortran programs that are part of the ClimateGate trove.  Here's a nice summary of the current findings from American Thinker.  A taste:

One can only imagine the angst suffered daily by the co-conspirators, who knew full well that the "Documents" sub-folder of the CRU FOI2009 file contained more than enough probative program source code to unmask CRU's phantom methodology. 

In fact, there are hundreds of IDL and FORTRAN source files buried in dozens of subordinate sub-folders. And many do properly analyze and chart maximum latewood density (MXD), the growth parameter commonly utilized by CRU scientists as a temperature proxy, from raw or legitimately normalized data. Ah, but many do so much more. 

Skimming through the often spaghetti-like code, the number of programs which subject the data to a mixed-bag of transformative and filtering routines is simply staggering. Granted, many of these "alterations" run from benign smoothing algorithms (e.g., omitting rogue outliers) to moderate infilling mechanisms (e.g., estimating missing station data from that of those closely surrounding). But many others fall into the precarious range between highly questionable (removing MXD data which demonstrate poor correlations with local temperature) to downright fraudulent (replacing MXD data entirely with measured data to reverse a disorderly trend-line).

In fact, workarounds for the post-1960 "divergence problem," as described by both RealClimate and Climate Audit, can be found throughout the source code. So much so that perhaps the most ubiquitous programmer's comment (REM) I ran across warns that the particular module "Uses 'corrected' MXD - but shouldn't usually plot past 1960 because these will be artificially adjusted to look closer to the real temperatures."

What exactly is meant by "corrected” MXD," you ask? Outstanding question -- and the answer appears amorphous from program to program. Indeed, while some employ one or two of the aforementioned "corrections," others throw everything but the kitchen sink at the raw data prior to output.

The more I discover or read about these “scientists”, the madder I get at them...

A Different Twist on ClimateGate...

Some commentators – predominantly political commentators – who are skeptical of AGW are not so much skeptical of the science as they are skeptical of the motivation for the science.  In particular, they believe that the environmental movement is largely controlled by socialists (or those even further to the left) who see the environmental issues as an excellent source of FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) that can be used as levers to get the electorate in democracies to choose to give government control over many areas of their lives.  These commentators think that the pro-AGW scientists are “useful idiots”, perfect for exploitation by the socialist activists in control of the environmental movement. 

This all reeks of conspiricism to me, and it's in my general nature to be skeptical of such claims.  Stupidity and avarice, it seems to me, are perfectly sufficient to explain everything I've seen so far in ClimateGate.

But here's an observation that I must admit lends a little weight to the contentions of these commentators.  I'm going to start watching this a little more credulously than I have been...

Video Primer on the AGW “Settled Science”

Thanksgiving in Jamul...

Today is the first day Debbie and I have had together in about two weeks – first I was off on a combined personal and business trip, then she was up in Murietta, cooking for a fancy-schmancy dog training seminar (trainers and trainees).  She got back home late last night.

Our Thanksgiving Day feast this year will be with our friends and neighbors, Jim and Michelle Barnick (who live just up the hill from us).  They're having a few dozen friends and relatives over.  Our contribution is the pumpkin pie, which Debbie and I just finished making. 

We had some help from the dogs.  I made the pie crusts (a simple crust made of ginger snap crumbs and butter).  I accidentally brushed a few crumbs off onto the floor, where Race (our border collie yearling) found them.  You could see him immediately take on a wondering look, as if to say “Where the hell has this been my whole life?” 

Then a little while later I had the job of mixing the filling.  After pouring the filling into the pies (and a couple of extra custard cups), I had a nice, big mixing bowl coated with the filling mixture.  Basically that's eggs, evaporated milk, and pumpkin, with some spices and sugar.  If you're a dog, I don't think it gets any better than that.  Suffice it to say that the mixing bowl was shortly extremely clean, at a molecular level.  I could have just let it dry and thrown it back in the cabinet, but for form's sake I actually did wash it off...

Now the pies are in the oven, the dishes are all washed, and we're just relaxing for a bit.  In a few hours we'll wander up the hill to start our feast.  A few hours after that, we'll be painfully full of excellent food and drink, and we'll be smiling from the good company of our friends...

Happy Thanksgiving to you all, on this beautiful day in the chaparral of Lawson Valley, just east of Jamul...

ClimateGate Editorial...

By Lorrie Goldstein in the Toronto Sun.  The lede:

If you're wondering how the robot-like march of the world's politicians towards Copenhagen can possibly continue in the face of the scientific scandal dubbed "climategate," it's because Big Government, Big Business and Big Green don't give a s*** about "the science."

They never have. 

Go read the whole thing.

Can citizens win against the warmenists?  I think that maybe, just maybe, the answer is “yes!”

The Proclamation...

We have much to be thankful for, even as there is much to be worried about.  I've never heard it said better than this:

By the President of the United States of America.


A Proclamation.


The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature, that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God. In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign States to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict; while that theatre has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union. Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defence, have not arrested the plough, the shuttle or the ship; the axe has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battle-field; and the country, rejoicing in the consiousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom. No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union.


In testimony whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the Seal of the United States to be affixed.


Done at the City of Washington, this Third day of October, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and of the Independence of the Unites States the Eighty-eighth.


By the President: Abraham Lincoln

It Begins...

Skeptical scientists are starting to tear into the raw data recently revealed by hackers who posted thousands of documents from East Anglia's CRU (see earlier posts).  Some New Zealanders have found that the raw data from their country was heavily – and arbitrarily – manipulated to show a hockey stick where none exists in the raw data.

Expect much, much more of this sort of disclosure...

And Yet It Cools...

Go read Jules Crittenden...

ClimateGate Satire...

IowaHawk is well-known for his satirical pieces lampooning just about everything deserving of lampooning.  Some of them are roll-around-on-the-floor funny, especially if they happen to be on a topic that's near and dear to your heart.

Well, now he's speared ClimateGate.  And I'm just now recovering.  If you enjoy satire, and you have a working knowledge of the AGW debate and ClimateGate, then put down your morning beverage, swallow, and go read.

One little sample:

Many of those behaviors are on display in the security film, as we see a sexless group of drone graduate students processing a raw datum with saliva, sawdust and Fortran code. After each iteration the time series is presented to the Alpha Grantwriter to see if fits inside his graph. Several graduate drones die of exhaustion, but the data eventually fit the template.

Next the Alpha Grantwriter flies to an international climate research conference with the completed PowerPoint template, where he will share his guano with other Alpha Grantwriters over cocktails in the hotel lounge. This is a process metascientists refer to as "peer review."

Lordy, that man can throw those words around...

Cruel Farce...

You've probably seen the recent news stories about the Belgian man who spent 23 years supposedly in a coma, but actually fully conscious – but unable to communicate.  A Poe-esque horror story...

Well, not so fast.  There are two separate lines of evidence that the poor man is actually conscious.  One of these lines of evidence is based on brain scanning, which the researcher involved cautions is “experimental” and “speculative”.  The other line of evidence is based on “facilitated communication” – the notion that a skilled facilitator can assist the patient in communicating.

Facilitated communication (FC for short) has a long and heart-breaking record.  Hundreds of parents of autistic children were bilked out of thousands of dollars by supposed FC experts claiming they could help their children communicate.  Experts have thoroughly demolished every claim of FC, yet it persists (though thankfully at a much reduced level).  Basically the FC experts just made it all up, collecting a nice fee in the process.

So when I heard that the Belgian man was communicating “with the assistantance of an FC expert”, all my red flags went up.  My favorite debunker of FC was James Randi, the magician and well-known skeptic, famous for his debunkings of junk science in general.  So this morning I went poking around at his web site, and voila! – Mr. Randi has been writing about this incident already, calling it a cruel farce and a vehicle for the FC expert to get a lucrative book deal.

Read the whole thing, and watch this little video of the FC expert in action.  Then make up your own mind about whether this poor Belgian man is being exploited or assisted...