Archive for the “Science” Category

Yesterday my truck’s battery was dead. I just replaced it 4 months ago, so it seemed odd. I opened the hood, and the damn chipmunks had nested right under the hood at the front of the engine compartment. While I’m not sure they’re to blame for the battery failure, the mess they left behind was amazing.

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I love sitting on my deck, I get quite a few visits.

I’ve never seen a Cicada emerge from it’s original skin. I found one last night on a tree still squirming in his original shell, so I deposited him into a jar. Today, he started busting loose from his skin. It will be interesting to watch. I’ll keep you updated.

Heal the earth, insure the homeless, pay your mortgage and put food on your table. The Obamassiah has made a lot of promises. “Pass the stimulus and unemployment won’t go over 8%” said Obama earlier this year. It’s now about to hit 10%. ACORN/Census workers are plotting the GPS coordinates of your front door, and soon, you may be required to have a GPS in your car.

A federal commission concluded a GPS-based mileage tax to offset the revenue decline by newer, more fuel-efficient vehicles was the “best path forward”, and now University of Iowa researchers are tweaking a GPS system that will track your vehicles every move. With the current by-the-gallon fuel tax is not generating enough revenue, many are proposing a pay-by-the-mile tax. The only way to accomplish this would be to equip all vehicles with a device to track your mileage.

I think the concept of a pay-as-you go fuel tax may have merit, but using GPS is not the answer as it will allow a further breach of our civil liberties. With the technological advances in the last decade, far less intrusive technology could be used. How about a device that doesn’t track your vehicle, but records your mileage since your last fill up at the gas station and charges you at the pump?

Proponents of the project claim the GPS devices could also be used to as a tool to help manage traffic and relieve congestion. Bullshit. There are other ways to monitor traffic including below pavement ground sensors, cameras, etc.

As one blogger put it, “I’m also paranoid enough that I’d prefer not being harassed or suspected of a crime because I’m one of 200 other cars listed as “near” a crime scene.” Or another who said:

I’m a pretty good shade tree mechanic, even on newer cars.

You’d better believe that the transponder on my next car is going to get removed and will be emitting a nice, regular signal from the corner of the garage, while it gathers dust. It will keep company with the restrictive catalytic converter, intake manifold, and exhaust system that I removed from my sports car.

Welcome to George Orwell’s world.

Times disses Al film as convenient stretch of truth
By Herald staff
Tuesday, March 13, 2007 – Updated: 01:37 AM EST

http://news.bostonherald.com/national/view.bg?articleid=188169The New York Times [NYT] fires a shot today at Al Gore and his Academy Award-winning global warming film, “An Inconvenient Truth,” saying it involves “hype” and shoddy science. 

“Hollywood has a thing for Al Gore and his three-alarm film . . . So do many environmentalists, who praise him as a visionary, and many scientists, who laud him for raising public awareness,” the Times reports. “But part of his scientific audience is uneasy . . . these scientists argue that some of Mr. Gore’s central points are exaggerated and erroneous.”

Wow, the New York Times says so?

 Now ain’t that a bitch?

Posted by Tim Zank

By PATRICK CONDON, Associated Press Writer Mon Mar 12, 5:28 PM ET

MINNEAPOLIS – A North Pole expedition meant to bring attention to global warming was called off after one of the explorers got frostbite. The explorers, Ann Bancroft and Liv Arnesen, on Saturday called off what was intended to be a 530-mile trek across the Arctic Ocean after Arnesen suffered frostbite in three of her toes, and extreme cold temperatures drained the batteries in some of their electronic equipment.

READ THE FULL STORY HERE:

Gore says media miss climate message
Journalists have leaned toward balance at expense of consensus data, he says
http://www.dicksonherald.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070228/NEWS01/702280434/1297/MTCN02

“I think if it is important to look at the pressures that made it more likely than not that mainstream journalists in the United States would convey a wholly inaccurate conclusion about the most important moral, ethical, spiritual and political issue humankind has ever faced.”

Seriously, I think Tipper locks him in the garage with the car running at night. My guess is it’s a hybrid which explains why he’s just deranged and not comatose.

Posted by Tim Zank

Now this ought to really send Pruitt, Rouse (like Goose), and Good into the ozone, but the following article makes some real common sense observations. (which as we all know liberals are incapable of grasping)

Top 10 ‘Global-Warming’ Myths

Given Al Gore’s proclivity for invoking Winston Churchill in this drama, it is only appropriate to summarize his claims as such: Never in the field of political conflict has so much been asked by so few of so many … for so little.

9. Global-warming proposals are about the environment.

Only if this means that they would make things worse, given that “wealthier is healthier and cleaner.” Even accepting every underlying economic and alarmist environmentalist assumption, no one dares say that the expensive Kyoto Protocol would detectably affect climate. Imagine how expensive a pact must be — in both financial and human costs — to so severely ration energy use as the greens demand. Instead, proponents candidly admit desires to control others’ lifestyles, and supportive industries all hope to make millions off the deal. Europe’s former environment commissioner admitted that Kyoto is “about leveling the playing field for big businesses worldwide” (in other words, bailing them out).

8. Climate change is the greatest threat to the world’s poor.

Climate — or more accurately, weather — remains one of the greatest challenges facing the poor. Climate change adds nothing to that calculus, however. Climate and weather patterns have always changed, as they always will. Man has always best dealt with this through wealth creation and technological advance — a.k.a. adaptation — and most poorly through superstitious casting of blame, such as burning “witches.” The wealthiest societies have always adapted best. One would prefer to face a similar storm in Florida than Bangladesh. Institutions, infrastructure and affordable energy are key to dealing with an ever-changing climate, not rationing energy.

7. Global warming means more frequent, more severe storms.

Here again the alarmists cannot even turn to the wildly distorted and politicized “Summary for Policy Makers” of the UN’s IPCC to support this favorite chestnut of the press.

6. Global warming has doomed the polar bears!

For some reason, Al Gore’s computerized polar bear can’t swim, unlike the real kind, as one might expect of an animal named Ursa Maritimus. On the whole, these bears are thriving, if a little less well in those areas of the Arctic that are cooling (yes, cooling). Their biggest threat seems to be computer models that air-brush them from the future, the same models that tell us it is much warmer now than it is. As usual in this context, you must answer the question: Who are you going to believe — me or your lying eyes?

5. Climate change is raising the sea levels.

Sea levels rise during interglacial periods such as that in which we (happily) find ourselves. Even the distorted United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports refute the hysteria, finding no statistically significant change in the rate of increase over the past century of man’s greatest influence, despite green claims of massive melting already occurring. Small island nations seeking welfare and asylum for their citizens such as in socially generous New Zealand and Australia have no sea-level rise at all and in some cases see instead a drop. These societies’ real problem is typically that they have made a mess of their own situation. One archipelago nation is even spending lavishly to lobby the European Union for development money to build beachfront hotel resorts, at the same time it shrieks about a watery and imminent grave. So, which time are they lying?

4. The glaciers are melting!

As good fortune has it, frozen things do in fact melt or at least recede after cooling periods mercifully end. The glacial retreat we read about is selective, however. Glaciers are also advancing all over, including lonely glaciers nearby their more popular retreating neighbors. If retreating glaciers were proof of global warming, then advancing glaciers are evidence of global cooling. They cannot both be true, and in fact, neither is. Also, retreat often seems to be unrelated to warming. For example, the snow cap on Mount Kilimanjaro is receding — despite decades of cooling in Kenya — due to regional land use and atmospheric moisture.

3. Climate was stable until man came along.

Swallowing this whopper requires burning every basic history and science text, just as “witches” were burned in retaliation for changing climates in ages (we had thought) long past. The “hockey stick” chart — poster child for this concept — has been disgraced and airbrushed from the UN’s alarmist repertoire.

2. The science is settled — CO2 causes global warming.

Al Gore shows his audience a slide of CO2 concentrations, and a slide of historical temperatures. But for very good reason he does not combine them in one overlaid slide: Historically, atmospheric CO2, as often as not, increases after warming. This is typical in the campaign of claiming “consensus” to avoid debate (consensus about what being left unspoken or distorted).

What scientists do agree on is little and says nothing about man-made global warming, to wit: (1) that global average temperature is probably about 0.6 degree Celsius — or 1 degree Fahrenheit — higher than a century ago; (2) that atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide have risen by about 30% over the past 200 years; and (3) that CO2 is one greenhouse gas, some level of an increase of which presumably would warm the Earth’s atmosphere were all else equal, which it demonstrably is not.

Until scientists are willing to save the U.S. taxpayer more than $5 billion per year thrown at researching climate, it is fair to presume the science is not settled.

1. It’s hot in here!

In fact, “It’s the baseline, stupid.” Claiming that present temperatures are warm requires a starting point at, say, the 1970s, or around the Little Ice Age (approximately 1200 A.D to the end of the 19th Century), or thousands of years ago. Select many other baselines, for example, compared o the 1930s, or 1000 A.D. — or 1998 — and it is presently cool. Cooling does paint a far more frightening picture, given that another ice age would be truly catastrophic, while throughout history, warming periods have always ushered in prosperity. Maybe that’s why the greens tried “global cooling” first.

The claim that the 1990s were the hottest decade on record specifically targets the intellectually lazy and easily frightened, ignoring numerous obvious factors. “On record” obviously means a very short period, typically the past 100+ years, or since the end of the Little Ice Age. The National Academies of Science debunked this claim in 2006. Previously rural measuring stations register warmer temps after decades of “sprawl” (growth), cement being warmer than a pasture.

Posted by Tim Zank

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Sometimes…

From the AP

A tourists uses his video camera as he stands near graffiti inscriptions saying ‘Tourists go home, Oaxaca is anti-capitalist’ at a wall in downtown Oaxaca, 500 Km (350 miles) south of Mexico City, Mexico, on Wednesday, July 19, 2006. More than a month of protests and blockades by striking teachers trying to oust the state governor have forced authorities to cancel the city’s famed cultural events, including a traditional dance festival and as most tourists are staying away, the protests are costing the city millions in tourism revenues.(AP Photo/Alexandre Meneghini)

They don’t want us there? Hey – maybe we don’t want you here!

As reported by MSNBC.com

An asteroid possibly as large as a half-mile or more in diameter is rapidly approaching the Earth. There is no need for concern, for no collision is in the offing, but the space rock will make an exceptionally close approach to our planet early on Monday, July 3, passing just beyond the Moon’s average distance from Earth.

Astronomers will attempt to get a more accurate assessment of the asteroid’s size by “pinging” it with radar.

[.. The latest calculations show that 2004 XP14 will pass closest to Earth at 04:25 UT on July 3 (12:25 a.m. EDT or 9:25 p.m. PDT on July 2).  The asteroid’s distance from Earth at that moment will be 268,624-miles (432,308 km), or just 1.1 times the Moon’s average distance from Earth.