It depends on what axis of maneuverability you're talking about. A vehicle will have a low moment of inertia around its narrow axes but poor about its long axes. Of course, that's why the flak concept is so important -- to make it harder to miss. One concept that the US military threw around for a bit was launching what basically amounted to a missile full of sand/grit into orbit, esp. one counter to the Earth's rotation. You want to ensure damage -- how about being nailed by hundreds of chunks of rock moving at a relative velocity of over 15,000 meters per second? It'd render LEO inaccessible for years.
As for your comments about making yourself more exposed in one axis while decreasing it in others, I think the author actually addressed that point well. Until we have tech that allows for virtually unlimited thrust at virtually no cost, there *will* be orientation implicit in space. You don't just go whatever direction you want in a gravity well, you still need to factor in launch windows, etc.
On that front, I'm reminded of an old game I used to play, called VGA Planets. A very fun multiplayer game, although everyone's empires tended to become too unwieldy to manage after many turns, and players would start to drop out until there was nobody left. In the game, you built various starships (freighters, warships, crew transports, etc) and dispatched them to various star systems to colonize their planets. Your planets and starbases had long-range radar and could detect incoming ships (some being stealthier than others) -- the closer it came, the more data you could get about it. By paying attention to the ship's trajectory and velocity, you could forecast where it was likely to be in future turns, and dispatch warships for an intercept and capture. A clever countermeasure, therefore, was to not always take the optimal route between planets, but to slightly offset your angle and velocity each turn so that if someone tries to set up an ambush, you sail past it. As a counter to the countermeasure, some players would send multiple warships and spread them out along the route, since capturing an unescorted Large Deep-Space Freighter didn't exactly require a powerful fleet. And I would have fun by setting the callsign for my most powerful warships, "Large Deep-Space Freighter", hoping that people who weren't paying enough attention to what they were seeing would mistake the callsign for the ship class (it actually worked several times).
Any way, the reality with space combat is much more boring. There's no way a Mars colony could become truly independent from Earth for many, many centuries. Try to trace back the resources needed to, say, run a CPU fab, or even a nuclear fuel cycle. Modern technology is produced from an unfathomably large web of interconnected part and resource dependencies that we have spread across the entire Earth. And future tech will be even more complicated to produce. So the reality is that if Mars wants to rebel, all Earth needs to do is cut off shipments to them and they'll slowly wither away as things break that they can't replace.
Urban vs. rural trends, w/many refs: link Windy vs. calm: linklink2. The use of jump-point analysis to detect station incongruities: link The use of a closely monitored reference network as a control: A general overview of calculations, detrending, etc: link. Further studies on that: linklink2
Now why the hell would you think yourself qualified to be involved in this discussion if you didn't already know this?
Don't you get it? The people raising these concerns are *not scientists*, *have no background in the field*, and *don't know what the hell they're talking about*.
Thank you for posting yet another reason why people who don't know what the F*** they're doing shouldn't be involved in the process. They *don't* just take raw data and average it. The heat island effect and expanding urbanization is automatically detrended by algorithms that have been widely studied in the peer-reviewed research, and the results have been validated (for example, by comparing urban vs. rural stations on windy days vs. calm days).
Huh? Just because H. pylori is the primary cause of peptic ulcers doesn't change the fact that diet can strongly affect how much, if any, symptoms arise. Over 80% of people infected by H. pylori are asymptomatic. Suppressing stomach acid formation via diet makes the stomach a more hostile place for H. pylori.
Furthermore, peptic ulcers haven't been nearly as studied as the planet's climate. Nor is comparing research from the early 20th century to the 21st century is clearly not a fair comparison. H. pylori was discovered as the cause of ulcers in the 1980s, a time when climate science as well was in its infancy.
Regarding your appeal to authority (dozens of peer reviewed papers)
You should actually familiarize yourself with them before you criticize. For example, one broke the data down into windy days and the other into calm days and compared urban sites to rural, to make sure the heat island effect from increasing urbanization is properly being canceled/scaled (the heat island effect significantly decreases on windy days, so if your urban stations get cooler on windy days than the rural stations do, you have a problem). There are all sorts of studies like this to make sure that the data is good.
Furthermore, this is just one climate measuring technique among many. While the different climate datasets don't match up perfectly, they're quite close to each other. If there was a fundamental error with one, it wouldn't.
Over 40% of Russian territory was not included in global-temperature calculations for some other reasons, rather than the lack of meteorological stations and observations.
Over 40% of *most* territory isn't included, not just Russian territory. Have you seen what some of these stations look like? A station, say, sitting right next to a new exhaust vent or that has been overgrown by vegetation is worthless. You don't include bad data, period. I work at a hospital that does brain research. If we get MRI scans where the subject moved during the scan, we have no choice but to toss them. You note what you got, note what you removed, note why you removed it, and apply the process evenly and consistently across all data, but you'll get bogus results if you include known bad data.
Actually, it's really interesting news, if confirmed and if the organics are in quantity. Many people know that the moon has historically been viewed as having a shortage of hydrogen (the amount of water found recently was still pretty sparse). Most people don't know that there are also shortages of other elements critical to life, including carbon and nitrogen. Finding places on the moon where they could be found in greater concentration would be critical to long-term, sustainable human habitation.
In short, the topic that people are making all of this hullabaloo about failed peer review. Meaning that there were errors found in it that prevented publication. And so what do they do? They turn to the press and hype it up three ways until sunday, hoping people won't notice or care that a peer-review board found the claims bogus. You're burying the lede, trying to allege some sort of peer-review conspiracy, when the reality is that all that says is that a peer review board found the claims as inaccurate/without merit.
Want an inconvenient fact about this article? The selection of stations is not done manually. It's done in an an automated process that has been analyzed by dozens of peer-reviewed papers. The selection process is designed to eliminate bogus or artificially trended data, such as from urbanization, damaged equipment, etc. What the IEA is basically damning them for is not including data that an automated, peer-reviewed process found was bogus.
You simply cannot automatically assume that all stations are good and valid. Because they're just plain not. Heck, normally the deniers themselves are the first ones to point this out.
And lastly, why are we even listening to a report from the "Institute for Energy Analysis" in the first place? Are we going to frontline reports from the Institute for Petroleum Research next?
It's misinformation after misinformation. Almost all of the refusals to release data by the CRU come down to data shared by national weather services that they are contractually not *allowed* to share. Almost 100% of the data that they are allowed to share is publicly posted.
Now, there were a couple scientists who tried to find every excuse that they could not to share their particular data -- most notably, Phil Jones. But you only have to look at Jones' past to see why. He initially responded to all FOI requests -- including one by a financial trader named Douglas Keenan who fancied himself an amateur climate scientist (almost all of the professional climatologists are on one side of the issue, and its their ideological foes, generally people who don't know what they're doing, who are filing the requests). Keenan "discovered fraud" on the part of Jones's partner, Wei-Chyung Wang, and tried to get the FBI to arrest him. The university cleared Wang of all wrongdoing, but honestly, can you blame Jones for looking for any excuse not to have to deal with that again?
These are people who just want to work. They want to deal with litigious "amateur scientists" as much as they want a hole in their head.
Okay, how's this for credibility: the Russians are believed to have been the ones who hacked into the servers and then selectively released out-of-context quotes to try to discredit the CRU scientists. So gee, should I act shocked that they're continuing their assault? Russia is being the number one impediment these days to a global climate change accord, and it seems to go to the top. For example, they've been one of the main forces holding up a Copenhagen accord.
Back on the initial topic: 100 to 1 odds says that any data exclusions are due to bad data and incomplete records. This is the standard sort of mistake made by people who either don't know how the analyses are done or who deliberately want to mislead. The meteorological station calculations are NOT done by simply taking all data and averaging it. If you did that, the way that the amateur deniers think that contaminated data would enter the record -- such as stations becoming urbanized, being tampered with, etc -- would actually be true. But the data is first analyzed, problem stations detected (in an automated method), and eliminated from the record or normalized. And the preprocessing is itself studied to verify that it's valid -- for example, comparing individual regions to other climate analysis methods, comparing windy days with calm days to make sure the heat island effect has been properly eliminated, etc.
In short, claiming that many stations are being eliminated is complete nonsense because that's *supposed* to happen, and if you didn't do that, the record would be readily thrown off by human development and equipment faults. I'd bet dollars to donuts that this is all that this comes down to. And that quite a few people at the agency putting this out know this, but are deliberately using it for manufactured doubt nonetheless.
And let's all not forget that the CRU dataset is just one dataset using one particular type of datasource and one particular analysis. There are many datasources and many analyses, and of equal prominence to CRU's datasets are NOAA's and NASA's. No, the different datasets don't match up perfectly (for example, whether 1998 or 2005 was the hottest year -- they were close), but the datasets all yield similar results.
This is a different tech than most of Iceland's geothermal: EGS. Most of Iceland's geothermal is from natural reservoirs (although Iceland is starting to move in the direction of EGS, too).
Basel is EGS's "Altamont Pass". Altamont Pass was a wind farm that gave wind turbines their (undeserved) reputation as being bird killers. They built a wind farm right in the middle of a bird flyway, using low, fast-spinning turbines. It was a learning experience; nobody would be stupid enough to do that again.
It's the same thing with EGS and earthquakes. In Basel, they deliberately fractured an active fault that had previously destroyed the city. Nobody is going to be dumb enough to do that again.
And the fossil fuel industry stands to lose trillions if strong warming legislation passes. Your point? First off, nobody goes into climate science if they want to be wealthy, and secondly, they could make far more money shilling for industry, like Soon and Baliunas.
If you want to talk about "too much money invested", almost every industry in the world currently is invested in carbon. Tens of trillions of dollars are dedicated *directly* to the production, refinement, transportation, and use of carbon-based fuels. The amount of investment is incredibly lopsided in favor of industry interests to *deny* global warming.
If that's the case, it's not only stupid, it's actively immoral, and the whole ethical foundation of the scientific enterprise needs to be overhauled.
What led to this is the same sort of logic that leads to IP in the corporate world: "We spent all this effort building up this dataset/program/whatnot, and you want us to just release it for free, immediately, so others can scoop us on publication?"
Well, yes, that's exactly what we want -- so long as you're properly cited in the research of others. If current funding realities mean that you'd lose funding for that, then the funding system needs to change, too.
Sadly, this is the paradigm many institutions approach things from -- just like in the corporate world.
I think there is actually a very easy way to solve this problem...show us the code. Give out ALL the raw data, every little scrap, along with the source code for the programs they are using to manipulate it.
While that may sound great, it's not always possible, or even legal. There are WMO rules, for example, that prohibit the sharing of certain data. That's why, for example, there are some major hurricane models whose results are publicly available but whose data is not available. I think it's stupid, but it is the case.
Beyond such barriers, there's also the issue that many of the scientists who have been resisting FOI requests had initially been abiding by them. There seems to be a perception in the scientific community that certain people are filing FOI requests deliberately to waste their time in order to stifle research. Or worse. You need to keep in mind that most of the people filing the FOI requests are ideological foes of the scientists they're submitting requests for, since almost all climate scientists accept AGW. So, for example, one denier (a financial trader named Douglas Keenan who considers himself an amateur climate scientist) submitted a FOI request for the data on a paper authored by Phil Jones and Wei-Chyung Wang, which Jones complied with. Keenan "discovered fakery" in the paper and tried to get Wang arrested. The university invested and cleared Wang of any wrongdoing, but the damage was already done. Is it any surprise that Jones started trying to find excuses to duck FOI requests in the future?
Which climate skeptics are on the payroll of "big oil"
You do realize that the American Petroleum Institute not only funds the AGW thinktanks, but Exxon-Mobil actually outright offered a prize for anyone who could get a paper published that defended their positions, right? If you want a specific example, Soon and Baluinas, 2003. Here's some of their background. Half the board of Climate Research resigned in protest after Soon and Baliunas's publication, by the way. So when you see hacked emails showing scientists dissing people like them, or McIntyre, or any of that ilk, realize that the scientists *really do* think that these people are putting out garbage and have vested agendas. It's just that when speaking publicly, they usually have more tact.
Perhaps a 8" piece of Chinese junk for $350, but not a quality scope that will actually let you make use of the full resolution you'd normally be able to get from a 8". Heck, even reasonably good eyepieces alone cost $30-$60 each, and you'd want at least three or so.
One thing worth considering about autotrackers that don't have a GPS is that you have to know a whole slew of bright starts to be able to reliably align them. "Center telescope on Deneb.... Center telescope on Alkaid...." etc. It's only if your scope contains a GPS that you don't have to know the night sky.
Also, objects moving out of view with a manual scope is rather annoying, IMHO, especially if you're trying to show something to someone else.
On the other hand, setting up a scope to track can take some time, so if you're only planning to be out for a few minutes, it's usually not worth the time for autotracking.
I second what you wrote. To the original author: You'll need to have your expectations in order when you buy a telescope. And stay far, far away from the Chinese junk; it's borderline worthless. Some tips are below. First, your viewing expectations:
Binoculars (~$100):
* Moon: Great. Almost like in books or photographs.
* Planets: Points of light. You will probably see the Galilean moons around Jupiter. You probably won't see Saturn's rings, but you might.
* Galaxies and globular clusters: The brightest galaxies and globular clusters will look like fuzzy blurs on the starfield.
* Open clusters: The brightest open clusters, such as the Pleiades, will have a number of stars visible within. Don't expect much from others.
* Nebulae: Don't expect to see any but the brightest of them, and expect those to be in black and white, with no real detail of relevance.
Low-end, 4-6" telescope (~$350):
* Moon: Wonderful. Better than books and photographs.
* Planets: Points of light. You will see the Galilean moons around Jupiter. If you're *very* lucky, you might see cloud bands. You will likely see Saturn's rings, but no real detail. You can get enhanced planet detail by stacking photographs (you'll need a webcam or DSLR and an appropriate mount)
* Galaxies and globular clusters: The brightest galaxies and globular clusters will look like fuzzy blurs on the starfield. You can get greater detail if you hook up a camera and do long exposures (with tracking) or stacking of photos. You'll need a webcam or DSLR and an appropriate mount for this.
* Open clusters: Like binoculars, but more stars.
* Nebulae: Don't expect to see any but the brightest of them, and expect those to be in black and white, with relatively little detail. Color and detail can be greatly enhanced by long exposures (with tracking) or stacking of photos. You'll need a webcam or DSLR and an appropriate mount for this.
High-end, 8-12" telescope (~$1000 or more). Assuming good viewing conditions:
* Moon: Wonderful. Better than books and photographs.
* Planets: Mercury and Venus are points of light. You might make out Mars' polar ice caps. You will see the Galilean moons around Jupiter, as well as cloud bands. You will see Saturn's rings, and perhaps some detail on them. Uranus and Neptune are dim points of light. Greater detail can come from stacking of images (you'll need a webcam or DSLR and an appropriate mount)
* Galaxies and globular clusters: The brightest galaxies and globular clusters will *still* look like fuzzy blurs on the starfield, although on some globular clusters, you may see some individual stars. You can get much greater detail if you hook up a camera and do long exposures (with tracking) or stacking of photos. You'll need a webcam or DSLR and an appropriate mount for this.
* Open clusters: Like a smaller telescope, but even more stars.
* Nebulae: Only expect to see those that are at least fairly bright, and expect those to be in black and white, with relatively little detail. Color and detail can be dramatically enhanced by long exposures (with tracking) or stacking of photos. You'll need a webcam or DSLR and an appropriate mount for this.
In short: No matter what you get, as far as consumer products go, the moon is great, while planets, galaxies, globular clusters, open clusters, and nebulae are generally disappointing unless you do long exposures and/or stacking to enhance them. But going with a better scope with a bigger aperture will let you see more detail with your bare eyes.
General tips:
* You may not even have given this a second thought, but think strongly about the physical size of what you buy. A pair of binoculars is a nothing task to grab and toss into the car to head out of town and go stargazing. A 50lb, 8-foot long Newtonian? Not so much. A big, heavy object will discourage you from using it. If
Can you explain the massive deforestation evident from satellite imagery in South America? Huge swaths of land that used to be rainforest are now used for grazing cattle and soybean/palm oil farms.
The satellite deforestation record doesn't completely match up with the surface deforestation record, so both of them are suspect. Plus, ten years ago, a scientist made an error on a non-peer-reviewed graph that was later used as the cover of a report on deforestation.
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It depends on what axis of maneuverability you're talking about. A vehicle will have a low moment of inertia around its narrow axes but poor about its long axes. Of course, that's why the flak concept is so important -- to make it harder to miss. One concept that the US military threw around for a bit was launching what basically amounted to a missile full of sand/grit into orbit, esp. one counter to the Earth's rotation. You want to ensure damage -- how about being nailed by hundreds of chunks of rock moving at a relative velocity of over 15,000 meters per second? It'd render LEO inaccessible for years.
As for your comments about making yourself more exposed in one axis while decreasing it in others, I think the author actually addressed that point well. Until we have tech that allows for virtually unlimited thrust at virtually no cost, there *will* be orientation implicit in space. You don't just go whatever direction you want in a gravity well, you still need to factor in launch windows, etc.
On that front, I'm reminded of an old game I used to play, called VGA Planets. A very fun multiplayer game, although everyone's empires tended to become too unwieldy to manage after many turns, and players would start to drop out until there was nobody left. In the game, you built various starships (freighters, warships, crew transports, etc) and dispatched them to various star systems to colonize their planets. Your planets and starbases had long-range radar and could detect incoming ships (some being stealthier than others) -- the closer it came, the more data you could get about it. By paying attention to the ship's trajectory and velocity, you could forecast where it was likely to be in future turns, and dispatch warships for an intercept and capture. A clever countermeasure, therefore, was to not always take the optimal route between planets, but to slightly offset your angle and velocity each turn so that if someone tries to set up an ambush, you sail past it. As a counter to the countermeasure, some players would send multiple warships and spread them out along the route, since capturing an unescorted Large Deep-Space Freighter didn't exactly require a powerful fleet. And I would have fun by setting the callsign for my most powerful warships, "Large Deep-Space Freighter", hoping that people who weren't paying enough attention to what they were seeing would mistake the callsign for the ship class (it actually worked several times).
Any way, the reality with space combat is much more boring. There's no way a Mars colony could become truly independent from Earth for many, many centuries. Try to trace back the resources needed to, say, run a CPU fab, or even a nuclear fuel cycle. Modern technology is produced from an unfathomably large web of interconnected part and resource dependencies that we have spread across the entire Earth. And future tech will be even more complicated to produce. So the reality is that if Mars wants to rebel, all Earth needs to do is cut off shipments to them and they'll slowly wither away as things break that they can't replace.
Urban vs. rural trends, w/many refs: link
Windy vs. calm: link link2.
The use of jump-point analysis to detect station incongruities: link
The use of a closely monitored reference network as a control:
A general overview of calculations, detrending, etc: link.
Further studies on that: link link2
Now why the hell would you think yourself qualified to be involved in this discussion if you didn't already know this?
Don't you get it? The people raising these concerns are *not scientists*, *have no background in the field*, and *don't know what the hell they're talking about*.
Now prove that this is the only data set that is used to make climate change observations.
Prove to me you don't beat your wife.
Thank you for posting yet another reason why people who don't know what the F*** they're doing shouldn't be involved in the process. They *don't* just take raw data and average it. The heat island effect and expanding urbanization is automatically detrended by algorithms that have been widely studied in the peer-reviewed research, and the results have been validated (for example, by comparing urban vs. rural stations on windy days vs. calm days).
What they're allowed to release is released. Download at your leisure.
You're calling BS on the AP. Keenan went to the FBI because in his fantasy world Wang had used government money to commit fraud.
Huh? Just because H. pylori is the primary cause of peptic ulcers doesn't change the fact that diet can strongly affect how much, if any, symptoms arise. Over 80% of people infected by H. pylori are asymptomatic. Suppressing stomach acid formation via diet makes the stomach a more hostile place for H. pylori.
Furthermore, peptic ulcers haven't been nearly as studied as the planet's climate. Nor is comparing research from the early 20th century to the 21st century is clearly not a fair comparison. H. pylori was discovered as the cause of ulcers in the 1980s, a time when climate science as well was in its infancy.
Regarding your appeal to authority (dozens of peer reviewed papers)
You should actually familiarize yourself with them before you criticize. For example, one broke the data down into windy days and the other into calm days and compared urban sites to rural, to make sure the heat island effect from increasing urbanization is properly being canceled/scaled (the heat island effect significantly decreases on windy days, so if your urban stations get cooler on windy days than the rural stations do, you have a problem). There are all sorts of studies like this to make sure that the data is good.
Furthermore, this is just one climate measuring technique among many. While the different climate datasets don't match up perfectly, they're quite close to each other. If there was a fundamental error with one, it wouldn't.
Over 40% of Russian territory was not included in global-temperature calculations for some other reasons, rather than the lack of meteorological stations and observations.
Over 40% of *most* territory isn't included, not just Russian territory. Have you seen what some of these stations look like? A station, say, sitting right next to a new exhaust vent or that has been overgrown by vegetation is worthless. You don't include bad data, period. I work at a hospital that does brain research. If we get MRI scans where the subject moved during the scan, we have no choice but to toss them. You note what you got, note what you removed, note why you removed it, and apply the process evenly and consistently across all data, but you'll get bogus results if you include known bad data.
Actually, it's really interesting news, if confirmed and if the organics are in quantity. Many people know that the moon has historically been viewed as having a shortage of hydrogen (the amount of water found recently was still pretty sparse). Most people don't know that there are also shortages of other elements critical to life, including carbon and nitrogen. Finding places on the moon where they could be found in greater concentration would be critical to long-term, sustainable human habitation.
In short, the topic that people are making all of this hullabaloo about failed peer review. Meaning that there were errors found in it that prevented publication. And so what do they do? They turn to the press and hype it up three ways until sunday, hoping people won't notice or care that a peer-review board found the claims bogus. You're burying the lede, trying to allege some sort of peer-review conspiracy, when the reality is that all that says is that a peer review board found the claims as inaccurate/without merit.
Want an inconvenient fact about this article? The selection of stations is not done manually. It's done in an an automated process that has been analyzed by dozens of peer-reviewed papers. The selection process is designed to eliminate bogus or artificially trended data, such as from urbanization, damaged equipment, etc. What the IEA is basically damning them for is not including data that an automated, peer-reviewed process found was bogus.
You simply cannot automatically assume that all stations are good and valid. Because they're just plain not. Heck, normally the deniers themselves are the first ones to point this out.
And lastly, why are we even listening to a report from the "Institute for Energy Analysis" in the first place? Are we going to frontline reports from the Institute for Petroleum Research next?
It's misinformation after misinformation. Almost all of the refusals to release data by the CRU come down to data shared by national weather services that they are contractually not *allowed* to share. Almost 100% of the data that they are allowed to share is publicly posted.
Now, there were a couple scientists who tried to find every excuse that they could not to share their particular data -- most notably, Phil Jones. But you only have to look at Jones' past to see why. He initially responded to all FOI requests -- including one by a financial trader named Douglas Keenan who fancied himself an amateur climate scientist (almost all of the professional climatologists are on one side of the issue, and its their ideological foes, generally people who don't know what they're doing, who are filing the requests). Keenan "discovered fraud" on the part of Jones's partner, Wei-Chyung Wang, and tried to get the FBI to arrest him. The university cleared Wang of all wrongdoing, but honestly, can you blame Jones for looking for any excuse not to have to deal with that again?
These are people who just want to work. They want to deal with litigious "amateur scientists" as much as they want a hole in their head.
Okay, how's this for credibility: the Russians are believed to have been the ones who hacked into the servers and then selectively released out-of-context quotes to try to discredit the CRU scientists. So gee, should I act shocked that they're continuing their assault? Russia is being the number one impediment these days to a global climate change accord, and it seems to go to the top. For example, they've been one of the main forces holding up a Copenhagen accord.
Back on the initial topic: 100 to 1 odds says that any data exclusions are due to bad data and incomplete records. This is the standard sort of mistake made by people who either don't know how the analyses are done or who deliberately want to mislead. The meteorological station calculations are NOT done by simply taking all data and averaging it. If you did that, the way that the amateur deniers think that contaminated data would enter the record -- such as stations becoming urbanized, being tampered with, etc -- would actually be true. But the data is first analyzed, problem stations detected (in an automated method), and eliminated from the record or normalized. And the preprocessing is itself studied to verify that it's valid -- for example, comparing individual regions to other climate analysis methods, comparing windy days with calm days to make sure the heat island effect has been properly eliminated, etc.
In short, claiming that many stations are being eliminated is complete nonsense because that's *supposed* to happen, and if you didn't do that, the record would be readily thrown off by human development and equipment faults. I'd bet dollars to donuts that this is all that this comes down to. And that quite a few people at the agency putting this out know this, but are deliberately using it for manufactured doubt nonetheless.
And let's all not forget that the CRU dataset is just one dataset using one particular type of datasource and one particular analysis. There are many datasources and many analyses, and of equal prominence to CRU's datasets are NOAA's and NASA's. No, the different datasets don't match up perfectly (for example, whether 1998 or 2005 was the hottest year -- they were close), but the datasets all yield similar results.
Hello... Altamont Pass *is* in California....
California got to the wind farm game early, and screwed up the reputation of wind turbines by bad placement and inferior tech.
Is your name Louis Michaud?
This is a different tech than most of Iceland's geothermal: EGS. Most of Iceland's geothermal is from natural reservoirs (although Iceland is starting to move in the direction of EGS, too).
Basel is EGS's "Altamont Pass". Altamont Pass was a wind farm that gave wind turbines their (undeserved) reputation as being bird killers. They built a wind farm right in the middle of a bird flyway, using low, fast-spinning turbines. It was a learning experience; nobody would be stupid enough to do that again.
It's the same thing with EGS and earthquakes. In Basel, they deliberately fractured an active fault that had previously destroyed the city. Nobody is going to be dumb enough to do that again.
And the fossil fuel industry stands to lose trillions if strong warming legislation passes. Your point? First off, nobody goes into climate science if they want to be wealthy, and secondly, they could make far more money shilling for industry, like Soon and Baliunas.
If you want to talk about "too much money invested", almost every industry in the world currently is invested in carbon. Tens of trillions of dollars are dedicated *directly* to the production, refinement, transportation, and use of carbon-based fuels. The amount of investment is incredibly lopsided in favor of industry interests to *deny* global warming.
And that's all irrelevant to the science anyway.
If that's the case, it's not only stupid, it's actively immoral, and the whole ethical foundation of the scientific enterprise needs to be overhauled.
What led to this is the same sort of logic that leads to IP in the corporate world: "We spent all this effort building up this dataset/program/whatnot, and you want us to just release it for free, immediately, so others can scoop us on publication?"
Well, yes, that's exactly what we want -- so long as you're properly cited in the research of others. If current funding realities mean that you'd lose funding for that, then the funding system needs to change, too.
Sadly, this is the paradigm many institutions approach things from -- just like in the corporate world.
I think there is actually a very easy way to solve this problem...show us the code. Give out ALL the raw data, every little scrap, along with the source code for the programs they are using to manipulate it.
While that may sound great, it's not always possible, or even legal. There are WMO rules, for example, that prohibit the sharing of certain data. That's why, for example, there are some major hurricane models whose results are publicly available but whose data is not available. I think it's stupid, but it is the case.
Beyond such barriers, there's also the issue that many of the scientists who have been resisting FOI requests had initially been abiding by them. There seems to be a perception in the scientific community that certain people are filing FOI requests deliberately to waste their time in order to stifle research. Or worse. You need to keep in mind that most of the people filing the FOI requests are ideological foes of the scientists they're submitting requests for, since almost all climate scientists accept AGW. So, for example, one denier (a financial trader named Douglas Keenan who considers himself an amateur climate scientist) submitted a FOI request for the data on a paper authored by Phil Jones and Wei-Chyung Wang, which Jones complied with. Keenan "discovered fakery" in the paper and tried to get Wang arrested. The university invested and cleared Wang of any wrongdoing, but the damage was already done. Is it any surprise that Jones started trying to find excuses to duck FOI requests in the future?
Which climate skeptics are on the payroll of "big oil"
You do realize that the American Petroleum Institute not only funds the AGW thinktanks, but Exxon-Mobil actually outright offered a prize for anyone who could get a paper published that defended their positions, right? If you want a specific example, Soon and Baluinas, 2003. Here's some of their background. Half the board of Climate Research resigned in protest after Soon and Baliunas's publication, by the way. So when you see hacked emails showing scientists dissing people like them, or McIntyre, or any of that ilk, realize that the scientists *really do* think that these people are putting out garbage and have vested agendas. It's just that when speaking publicly, they usually have more tact.
Perhaps a 8" piece of Chinese junk for $350, but not a quality scope that will actually let you make use of the full resolution you'd normally be able to get from a 8". Heck, even reasonably good eyepieces alone cost $30-$60 each, and you'd want at least three or so.
By that I meant that you won't see any cloud detail. Yes, you can see phases even with binoculars sometimes.
One thing worth considering about autotrackers that don't have a GPS is that you have to know a whole slew of bright starts to be able to reliably align them. "Center telescope on Deneb.... Center telescope on Alkaid...." etc. It's only if your scope contains a GPS that you don't have to know the night sky.
Also, objects moving out of view with a manual scope is rather annoying, IMHO, especially if you're trying to show something to someone else.
On the other hand, setting up a scope to track can take some time, so if you're only planning to be out for a few minutes, it's usually not worth the time for autotracking.
I second what you wrote. To the original author: You'll need to have your expectations in order when you buy a telescope. And stay far, far away from the Chinese junk; it's borderline worthless. Some tips are below. First, your viewing expectations:
Binoculars (~$100):
* Moon: Great. Almost like in books or photographs.
* Planets: Points of light. You will probably see the Galilean moons around Jupiter. You probably won't see Saturn's rings, but you might.
* Galaxies and globular clusters: The brightest galaxies and globular clusters will look like fuzzy blurs on the starfield.
* Open clusters: The brightest open clusters, such as the Pleiades, will have a number of stars visible within. Don't expect much from others.
* Nebulae: Don't expect to see any but the brightest of them, and expect those to be in black and white, with no real detail of relevance.
Low-end, 4-6" telescope (~$350):
* Moon: Wonderful. Better than books and photographs.
* Planets: Points of light. You will see the Galilean moons around Jupiter. If you're *very* lucky, you might see cloud bands. You will likely see Saturn's rings, but no real detail. You can get enhanced planet detail by stacking photographs (you'll need a webcam or DSLR and an appropriate mount)
* Galaxies and globular clusters: The brightest galaxies and globular clusters will look like fuzzy blurs on the starfield. You can get greater detail if you hook up a camera and do long exposures (with tracking) or stacking of photos. You'll need a webcam or DSLR and an appropriate mount for this.
* Open clusters: Like binoculars, but more stars.
* Nebulae: Don't expect to see any but the brightest of them, and expect those to be in black and white, with relatively little detail. Color and detail can be greatly enhanced by long exposures (with tracking) or stacking of photos. You'll need a webcam or DSLR and an appropriate mount for this.
High-end, 8-12" telescope (~$1000 or more). Assuming good viewing conditions:
* Moon: Wonderful. Better than books and photographs.
* Planets: Mercury and Venus are points of light. You might make out Mars' polar ice caps. You will see the Galilean moons around Jupiter, as well as cloud bands. You will see Saturn's rings, and perhaps some detail on them. Uranus and Neptune are dim points of light. Greater detail can come from stacking of images (you'll need a webcam or DSLR and an appropriate mount)
* Galaxies and globular clusters: The brightest galaxies and globular clusters will *still* look like fuzzy blurs on the starfield, although on some globular clusters, you may see some individual stars. You can get much greater detail if you hook up a camera and do long exposures (with tracking) or stacking of photos. You'll need a webcam or DSLR and an appropriate mount for this.
* Open clusters: Like a smaller telescope, but even more stars.
* Nebulae: Only expect to see those that are at least fairly bright, and expect those to be in black and white, with relatively little detail. Color and detail can be dramatically enhanced by long exposures (with tracking) or stacking of photos. You'll need a webcam or DSLR and an appropriate mount for this.
In short: No matter what you get, as far as consumer products go, the moon is great, while planets, galaxies, globular clusters, open clusters, and nebulae are generally disappointing unless you do long exposures and/or stacking to enhance them. But going with a better scope with a bigger aperture will let you see more detail with your bare eyes.
General tips:
* You may not even have given this a second thought, but think strongly about the physical size of what you buy. A pair of binoculars is a nothing task to grab and toss into the car to head out of town and go stargazing. A 50lb, 8-foot long Newtonian? Not so much. A big, heavy object will discourage you from using it. If
Can you explain the massive deforestation evident from satellite imagery in South America? Huge swaths of land that used to be rainforest are now used for grazing cattle and soybean/palm oil farms.
The satellite deforestation record doesn't completely match up with the surface deforestation record, so both of them are suspect. Plus, ten years ago, a scientist made an error on a non-peer-reviewed graph that was later used as the cover of a report on deforestation.