Environment

A Call for Hearings on Fraudulent Climate Science

Now that the lid has been blown off of the Climate Crisis Fraud, it’s time for the U.S. Senate to conduct hearings into the mess. Yesterday, Senator James Inhofe (R OK) called for hearings with a letter to Senator Ma’am, head of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works (EPW). Inhofe, the ranking member of the committee, released this yesterday (excerpt):

Washington, D.C.—Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.), Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, sent a letter today to EPW Committee Chairman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) requesting hearings on the recent disclosure of emails between some of the world’s most preeminent climatologists—emails that reveal apparent attempts to manipulate data, vilify scientists with opposing viewpoints, and circumvent information disclosure laws.

“The emails reveal possible deceitful manipulation of important data and research used by the US Global Change Research Program and the IPCC,” Inhofe wrote. “For instance, one scientist wrote of a ‘trick’ he employed to ‘hide the decline’ in global temperature trends, as well as discussed attempts to ‘redefine what the peer-review literature is’ to prevent papers raising questions about anthropogenic global warming from appearing in IPCC reports.” [more…]

Solar Tsunamis

There are signs that the current solar cycle, presently in a relatively low activity state, is on the move to become more active as we enter the second year of the eleven-year cycle. This is a movie of an event captured last February that scientists are calling a “solar tsunami.” It is a towering wave of plasma that lifts itself more than the width of the Earth above the solar surface and hurls massive amounts of solar matter into space.

From NASA:

The twin STEREO spacecraft confirmed their reality in February 2009 when sunspot 11012 unexpectedly erupted. The blast hurled a billion-ton cloud of gas (a “CME”) into space and sent a tsunami racing along the sun’s surface. STEREO recorded the wave from two positions separated by 90o, giving researchers an unprecedented view of the event:

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Above: A solar tsunami seen by the STEREO spacecraft from orthogonal points of view. The gray part of the animation has been contrast-enhanced by subtracting successive pairs of images, resulting in a “difference movie.”

Please note that this is actual science and not the filtered version that you get from, say, the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit. You can click on the movie above to see a larger version.

Fall Colors in Coastal California

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Many folks who don’t live here, see the California Coast as a place where you don’t have four seasons. While the seasons here don’t take on many of the extreme characteristics of the weather experienced elsewhere, we do have distinct seasons.

The colors in these trees with deciduous leaves give the suburban areas a definite sense of fall. By January, the leaves will all have fallen and the branches will be bare until late march or early April. Click on the image to enlarge.

Merced River – Panorama

OK – Just one more panoramic image from our vacation. I took this the first night away from home on our way to the Gun Bloggers Rendezvous – this is the Merced River (South Fork) that ran immediately behind our hotel room at the Yosemite View Lodge, just outside the National Park boundary.

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Other than a five foot high fence obstructing the view (refer to the right end of the panorama), this was what we had for ambiance that evening. We sat on the back patio and waited for the stars to come out and after that, the moonrise over the canyon wall.

Click on the panorama thumbnail to see full size.

The Gore Minimum Continues

The Sun is a star – a main sequence star whose business is to fuse hydrogen atoms into helium atoms. Fusion is a steady but somewhat unstable and potentially violent thermonuclear process. During fusion, solar mass, heat and pressure force hydrogen atoms to combine to become helium atoms. This transformation of atomic states produces energy in the form of multispectral photons (visible light, heat, x-rays, ultra-violet, cosmic rays, magnetic flux, radio-frequency emissions and more). We all know the effects of UV on skin disease, and lately, the effects of magnetic flux on the electrical grid. The Sun, like fire, can be good and bad.

The current Solar Minimum has been exceptionally quiet much to the despair of climate alarmists. They are being forced to re-invent the so-called ‘climate crisis.’ But, don’t relax just yet, because we know their tactics:

  1. The media will print or broadcast sensationalized headlines to sell copy regardless of scientific value
  2. The media will print or broadcast manipulated science with half-truths and invalid conclusions to damage politicians with whom they do not agree
  3. Politicians seize on these unverified claims in order to blame their opponents
  4. Uneducated/uninformed people are as gullible as ever

Meanwhile, Old Sol refuses to cooperate: From SOHO Pick of the Week:

The Sun had no sunspots for 51 days in a row July 11 – Aug. 30, 2009 — just nearly breaking the record of 52 days for the longest quiet period for this solar cycle. That record was set last summer. As we watch 50 days of that period with STEREO (Behind) in a wavelength of extreme UV light, we see some activity, such as prominences popping about here and there, but no active regions strong enough to form a sunspot.

Late on Aug. 31, a little sunspot emerged (not shown in the clip that ends on Aug. 28th) to interrupt the long string of quiet days. Even so, this little sunspot measured about nearly 3000 km (1800 miles) across. Nevertheless, it is likely that the current year’s number of blank days will be the longest in about 100 years. It is not shown many signs of picking up the pace so far.

Beating the Heat

snow-plow1.jpgThe last several days have been the usual end-of-summer heatwave here in Southern California. Our house isn’t air-conditioned, so we open the windows and blow outside air through the family room, where we spend a lot of our time.

One thing we did do, was to look through some of our vacation pictures from last winter when we went to the Grand Canyon. Pictures like this one (click to enlarge) remind us why we only visit the snow. Several of these monster snowplows passed us on our way to the National Park entrance that day.

EV Phone Home

tesla.jpgTesla Motors is a Silicon Valley-based manufacturer of Electric Vehicles (EV). They are the only company to offer EVs for sale to the general public in North America or Europe.

Tesla EVs use the lithium-ion battery technology and have a range of over 200 miles on a full charge. The standard EV roadster is capable of 0-60 in 3.9 seconds.

While all that sounds wonderful, the Tesla Electric Car just might have a few drawbacks . . .

Right: The Tesla Standard EV

From Planet Gore:

More on Tesla [Henry Payne]

President Obama, Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm, and an army of Washington politicians with no experience in the auto industry say that electric vehicles are the future. They’re so sure of it, they’ve invested $489 million of your taxpayer doctors [sic] in the EV tech leader, Tesla. But as Tad Friend’s in-depth look at Tesla for The New Yorker shows, the future is not quite ready for primetime.

A few highlights:

  • The price for the power train alone for battery-powered Tesla cars costs $15,000 — or about five times more than a standard gas-powered sedan. The average price paid for an entire new car in America today is $26,000.
  • Tesla’s hard-driving founder, Elon Musk, says Tesla plans to populate American rest stops with QuickCharging stations, which will allow drivers to recharge their batteries in “just” 45 minutes. In the meantime, Americans have to plug it into 110-volt wall sockets. Friend tried that while test-driving the Tesla for his story. “Its battery gained only nine miles in two hours,” he writes.
  • To charge the Tesla in the five minutes that American are used to spending at the gas pump (while on their way to work or taking the kids to soccer practice) it “would require an 840-kW connection, which would drain the grid as much as a 100-unit apartment building does in the course of a day.”
  • And then there’s this from longtime Detroit product guru, Bob Lutz (now with GM), an admirer of Tesla — even as he points out the gulf between a boutique technology currently prized by Hollywood millionaires and a mass-produced technology: “Over thirty-five hundred parts sourced from around the world have to come together at the right place and the right time to produce sixty to seventy of these things an hour. And to make them, you need. . . an unbelievable amount of reliability testing that Tesla can’t afford to do right now — and we can’t afford not to.”

Emphasis mine. This is just another example of the non-achievable Utopian hope and change that all those uninformed voters (I have some less politically-correct descriptions of them, which I won’t present here) thought they were going to get.