World Climate Report, an excellent resource for scientific climate analysis, published an article that demonstrates the falsehood of increased hurricane intensity to have any relationship to increases in sea surface temperatures (SST) or anthropogenic (man-made) climate change.
Scientist Philip Klotzbach in a published paper analyzed the work done by a couple of misguided colleagues and compared their conclusions to his:
Continue reading…
The over-exercised term “networking” seems to be in wider use because it can be applied to many things. For example, your brain and nervous system are a network; the behavior of certain “social” insects (bees, ants, etc.) is a form of networking; the interaction between objects in the solar system can be described as a network; the relationship between people’s political leanings and the books they buy or the blogs they read can be modeled as a network.
Researchers at the University of Michigan have developed algorithms to analyze networks to detect trends and predict behavior.
New analysis of networks reveals surprise patterns in politics, the web
When analyzing buyers of political titles purchased through Amazon, they found this interesting relationship:
For instance, researchers used the algorithm to sort books sold on Amazon.com into left- and right-wing groups, and they found the book most appealing to conservatives was actually written by Democrat Zell Miller.
Miller, the former governor of Georgia and U.S. senator, angered Democrats by endorsing George Bush during the last presidential election. Miller’s book, “A National Party No More, The Conscience of a Conservative Democrat,” was the book most central to the community of conservative book buyers, according to researchers.
When analyzed using Newman’s method [associate professor Mark Newman, who developed the technique], the network of books separated into four communities, with dense connections within communities and looser connections between them. One community was composed almost entirely left-wing books, and the other almost entirely of right-wing ones. Centrist books comprised the other two categories. The computer algorithm doesn’t know anything about the books’ content—it draws its conclusions only from the purchasing patterns of the buyers—but Newman’s analysis seems to show that those purchasing patterns correspond closely with the political slant of the books.
When it comes to political blogs, the algorithm shows that we tend to link to like-minded blogs while seldom crossing over to the other side:
In another example, Newman used the algorithm to sort a set of 1225 conservative and liberal political blogs based on the network of web links between them. When the network was fed through the algorithm, it divided cleanly into conservative and liberal camps. One community had 97 percent conservative blogs, and the other had 93 percent liberal blogs, indicating that conservative and liberal blogs rarely link to one another. In a further twist, the computer analysis was unable to find any subdivision at all within the liberal and conservative blog communities.
Now, I am certainly not qualified to analyze the psychology of this behavior, but I do know that people tend to gravitate towards the set of values and ideas that they hold as their own. I am not sure that I find this tendency “surprising.”
In a previous article, I discussed the effects of the Sun’s behavior on our environment. In that article, I mentioned the Maunder Minimum which occurred coincidentally with a period of cooler-than-normal temperatures here on Earth. In another article, I discussed the “solar conveyor belt” concept of solar plasma circulation. That article has a reference to a NASA article predicting an upcoming “solar storm.”
Yesterday, NASA published an article about a predicted decline in solar activity. The article suggests that observations of the “conveyor belt” can be used to predict solar activity levels in the distant future. Their prediction is for fewer sunspot numbers and lower solar activity during solar cycle 25 following the current cycle (24). This “low” solar peak should occur in 2022.
I wonder if this means we’re in for a period of “Global Unwarming?” If that should happen, then what will ALGOR and the Enviroloons* do for their amusement?
Inset: ALGOR tries in vain to warm things up again.
*a former vice-president turned enviroloon and his band of unscientific non-thinker followers who ignore science in pursuit of their enviro-cultist religion.
Excerpt from the NASA article:
NASA – Long Range Solar Forecast
The Great Conveyor Belt is a massive circulating current of fire (hot plasma) within the Sun. It has two branches, north and south, each taking about 40 years to perform one complete circuit. Researchers believe the turning of the belt controls the sunspot cycle, and that’s why the slowdown is important.
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Astronomy Picture of the Day is featuring the Mt. Saint Helens rock fin today. They link to a time lapse movie showing the rapid growth of this unusual phenomenon. The picture below shows the fin highlighted in the MSH WebCam. See Rock and Roll Volcano.
Beelzebub just keeps turning the old crank under the Cascades . . .
Don’t miss the near-realtime VolcanoCam image!
From Longview (WA) Daily News Online:
Visitors to the Johnston Ridge Observatory Friday should have a “spectacular” view of the latest lava growth in the Mount St. Helens’ crater, a geologist said.
A large “slab” or “fin” of molten rock is growing within the crater, pushing itself up and over previous lava dome growth, said Dan Dzurisin, a geologist with the U.S. Geologic Survey in Vancouver.
The section with the fin has been growing since November, but it changed shape as it encountered other growth within the crater. It’s moving steadily toward the west, pushing other rock and debris out of its way as it goes.
The fin grows about four to five feet a day but loses some of that growth from rockfalls off its tip, Dzurisin said. The fin is about 300 feet tall from its base, reaching to 7,700 feet above sea level. That puts it about 70 feet below Shoestring Notch, the lowest point of the mountain’s horseshoe-shaped crater.
Photo: A helicopter inspects the outcropping (AP)The feature is in full view from the Johnston Ridge Observatory, which opens after its winter shutdown on Friday. Clear skies are forecast.
Update From JRO:
The Johnston Ridge Observatory (JRO), home of the VolcanoCam, opens today and begins another visitor season.
The visitor center will be open from 10:00 am until 6:00pm, daily, throughout the summer. If views of Mount St. Helens via the VolcanoCam whet your appetite, standing just five miles from the only active volcano in the Lower 48 States is a five-course meal. Come up and get a first-hand look of the ongoing volcanic activity, including that 300 foot high “volcanic fin” jutting out from the new dome. It is only a matter of time before gravity collapses that fin.
During the past couple of weeks I have been collecting some internet references to articles that discuss the hype and science of climate change. These are a few more to add to our list of references on this subject.
I hope to keep adding to this list and eventually make an information page in the sidebar that contains references to articles and to other “Global Warming” topical blog articles.
- From BBC News: A load of hot air? by Simon Cox and Richard Vadon.
- From The Calgary Sun: Let’s put a freeze on global warming hype by Licia Corbella.
- From FoxNews: The Greenhouse Myth by Steven Milloy.
- From Chicago Sun-Times: Nothing to fear but the climate change alarmists by Mark Steyn.
- Committees of Correspondence has a good repost of information about global warming and hurricanes.
The above courtesy of Cox and Forkum in their fine post on “The Real recycling Problem.”
And one of my favorites:
- Aliens Cause Global Warming (PDF file), A lecture by Michael Crichton.
These are all good resources to invoke when your local moonbat starts spewing the doom and gloom.
This article from Science Blog suggests that “human-induced climate changes” will affect tectonic plate activity. In the excerpt below, the authors frantically suggest that we will be experiencing unprecedented plate movement as a result of the evils of men:
The erosion caused by rainfall directly affects the movement of continental plates beneath mountain ranges, says a University of Toronto geophysicist — the first time science has raised the possibility that human-induced climate change could affect the deep workings of the planet.
From that description, one might expect that Earth may soon experience alternating earthquakes and hurricanes as mankind continues to cause devastation to the planet.
The article continues with more about the professor conducting the computer models:
“In geology, we have this idea that erosion’s going to affect merely the surface,” says Russell Pysklywec, a professor of geology who creates computer models where he can control how a range of natural processes can create and modify mountains over millions of years. Pysklywec conducts field research in the Southern Alps of New Zealand, where the mountains are high and geologically “young.” He found that when mountains are exposed to New Zealand-type rainfall (which causes one centimetre of erosion per year) compared to southern California-type rainfall (which erodes one-tenth of a centimetre or less), it profoundly changes the behaviour of the tectonic plates beneath the mountains. “These are tiny, tiny changes on the surface, but integrating them over geologic time scales affects the roots of the mountains, as opposed to just the top of them,” says Pysklywec. “It goes right down to the mantle thermal engine — the thing that’s actually driving plate tectonics. It’s fairly surprising — it hasn’t been shown before.”
Wait! Did he say “geologic time scales?” You mean this is going to take some time?
“As a concept, imagine blanketing the European Alps with a huge network of ordinary garden sprinklers. The results suggest that the subtle surface weathering caused by the light watering have the potential to shift the tectonic plates, although you would have to keep the water on for several million years.”
At this rate, we’re doomed to destroy our planet just in time for the Sun to blow up.
You may read the entire article: Climate change could affect tectonic plates
Also see Science Daily and the University of Toronto
