Earth and Planetary Sciences
jlynch | March 28, 2008
A report released today by the National Resources Defense Council and the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization shows that while the globe warmed by an average of one degree between 2003 and 2007, eleven western states warmed by 1.7 degrees and Arizona by 2.2 degrees for the last five years (2003 through 2007), the global climate has averaged 1.0 degree Fahrenheit warmer than its 20th century average while temperatures in the southwest averaged 1.7 degrees warmer (and those in Arizona were 2.2 degrees warmer). The full report is available here.
jlynch | February 7, 2008I was going to blog this later today, but now I see Tim over at Deltoid has beaten me to it, so I’ll post this without much comment. (Shakes fist in impotent fury at those damned Australians!) Like Tim, I received a heads-up from John Mashey regarding an online talk by Naomi Oreskes titled "The American Denial of Global Warming." It’s an hour long presentation that discusses the "history of the global warming disinformation campaign, led by corporate-funded policy operatives and ideologically-driven scientists, who employed the ’tobacco strategy’ to manipulate public opinion to create an…
jlynch | January 25, 2008
This is what Pluto and Charon look like from 3,600,000,000 kilometers. The picture was snapped by NASA’s New Horizons probe which expects to flyby the planet in 2015. Expected future highpoints for the mission are:
June 9, 2008 -- Pass Saturn’s orbit.
March 5, 2011 -- Pass Uranus’ orbit.
August 1, 2014 -- Pass Neptune’s orbit.
July 14, 2015 -- Flyby of Pluto around 11:59 UTC at 11096 km, 13.780 km/s
July 14, 2015 -- Flyby of Charon around 12:13 UTC at 26927 km, 13.875 km/s
2016-2020 -- possible flyby of one or more Kuiper Belt objects.
Set your alarms accordingly.
jlynch | December 9, 2007Tim Lambert has already highlighted this, but since some of the affair played out on this blog ... John Mashey has posted an extended account of the Oreskes/Schulte affair [pdf]. Regular readers will remember that Naomi Oreskes publicly responded to Schulte here and subsequent developments can be followed here and here. As Tim notes "Schulte seems to be guilty of professional misconduct."
jlynch | October 23, 2007According the Associated Press, the White House severely edited congressional testimony given Tuesday by the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on the impact of climate change on health. The testimony was cut from 14 pages to four, though some of the redacted material appears to have come up in questions.
The deletions directed by the White House included details on how many people might be adversely affected because of increased warming and the scientific basis for some of the CDC’s analysis on what kinds of diseases might be spread in a warmer climate and rising sea…
jlynch | September 24, 2007The following is posted on behalf of Naomi Oreskes:
On September 3, I was contacted by Mr. Schulte, who asserted that statements made in my response - specifically that "The Schulte piece misrepresents the research question we posed," that "the piece misrepresents the results we obtained," and that the "piece misrepresents my own interpretation of the severity climate question" - inaccurately describe his paper. Mr. Schulte also contacted the Chancellor of my university, describing my work and behavior in highly unflattering terms.
My understanding of the contents of Mr. Shulte’s paper was…
jlynch | September 9, 2007Did Klaus-Martin Schulte plagiarize his response to Naomi Oreskes from Christopher Monckton? Looks like it. You be the judge.
Is Monckton hanging around the comments of this blog, trying to scare people. Looks like it. You be the judge.
jlynch | September 6, 2007Following on from Oreskes' reply to Schulte, the endocrinologist replies with an open letter over at SPPI, a contrarian mouthpiece. Schulte notes:
I drafted the paper because I had become concerned that patients were being perhaps unduly alarmed by media reports of catastrophic climate change and were coming to harm through resultant stress. Peer-reviewed studies of patients' views on the subject of climate change had reinforced my concern... I am an endocrine surgeon with numerous published papers in the medical journals. My sole concern in this debate is the welfare of patients.
Ummmm.…
jlynch | August 31, 2007Naomi Oreskes’ reply to Schulte got me thinking about the journal Energy & Environment, which appears to be the climate science equivalent of Rivista di Biologia (more here on that particular turkey). The journal was founded in 1990 and it offers a home for climate contrarians. According to this 2005 article, the journal is found in only 25 libraries worldwide and is unlisted in the Journal Citation Reports. Actually, I’ll take that back, it makes Rivista look like Nature.
Just as Rivista has an "interesting" editor in Guiseppe Sermonti, Energy & Environment has an unorthodox editor…
jlynch | August 31, 2007Many readers will no doubt know the 2004 paper in Science by historian of science Naomi Oreskes, a paper which discussed the consensus position regarding anthropogenic climate change. Predictably, the paper received much vitriol from the climate contrarians and denialists. Now, a medical research (Klaus-Martin Schulte, who appears to be a consultant in endocrine surgery) has claimed that Oreskes’ paper is not only outdated but also wrong. This claim has been extensively crowed over not only by Inhofe’s EPW Press Blog but by other Right wing sites and, indeed, our own beloved Uncommon Descent…
jlynch | August 20, 2007Average number of 110+ degree days at Phoenix Sky Harbor per year by decade:
1950s: 6.7
1960s: 10.3
1970s: 17.0
1980s: 19.0
1990s: 13.6
2000s: 21.6
Notice a trend? No comment necessary. The record for the number of days in a year to reach at least 110 degrees is 28. Today was number 26 for this year. (source)
jlynch | August 12, 2007Jim Lippard has highlighted an article in the latest Skeptic which provides a taxonomy (below) of answers to why this universe is the way it is. Jim neglected to mention that the article is freely available online as a PDF.
1. One Universe Models1.1 Meaningless Question1.2 Brute Fact1.3 Necessary/Only Way1.4 Almost Necessary/Limited Ways1.5 Temporal Selection1.6 Self Explaining
2. Multiple Universes2.1 Multiverse by Disconnected Regions (Spatial)2.2 Multiverse by Cycles (Temporal)2.3 Multiverse by Sequential Selection (Temporal)2.4 Multiverse by String Theory (with Minuscule Extra Dimensions…
jlynch | August 4, 2007The School of Earth and Space Exploration (SESE) here at ASU has joined forces with NASA to scan the original Apollo images of the Moon and to place them online for the general public. See here. [Hat tip to /. for the link]
jlynch | June 14, 2007George Monbiot ends his "debate" with Alexander Cockburn (see here and here) with a paragraph that more-or-less encapsulates how I feel:
I have followed Alexander Cockburn’s writing for many years and I have admired it. His has been an important and persuasive voice on many progressive issues. But I can no longer trust it. I realise that he is blinded by a conviction that he remains right whatever the facts might say. In his determination to admit nothing, he will cling to any straw, including the craziest fulminations of the ultra-right, and he will abandon the rigor and scepticism that once…
jlynch | June 11, 2007Awhile back, Mark Hoofnagle took on what he termed "the lunatic ravings" of Alexander Cockburn in The Nation. In his piece, Mark noted that Cockburn wrote:
Not so long ago, [Martin] Hertzberg sent me some of his recent papers on the global warming hypothesis, a construct now accepted by many progressives as infallible as Papal dogma on matters of faith or doctrine. Among them was the graph described above so devastating to the hypothesis.
To which Mark replied:
Ah, papers! But wait. Where are these papers published? Where are the citations? Where is the peer review? How can we possibly…
jlynch | June 3, 2007
For an explanation of why the shadow of the shuttle’s launch plume is pointed towards the Moon, see APOD (which also has a hi-res version of the image).
jlynch | June 1, 2007Over at Denialism, Mark neatly outlines Alexander Cockburn’s descent into crankdom regarding global warming, a descent that neatly illustrates the clarity of Mark’s crank HOWTO (which predates his exposure to Cockburn’s droolings - I know as it was I who tipped him onto them).
Update (6/2): Tim @ Deltoid catches Cockburn in the quote mine.
jlynch | March 20, 2007
This evening I watched probably one of the coolest live webcasts I've ever witnessed - the second test launch of SpaceX's Falcon 1 rocket. Unfortunately, after stage separation, things went a little awry:
To recap, the Falcon 1 rocket blasted off at 0110 GMT (9:10 p.m. EDT) tonight on a demonstration test flight from Omelek Island in the central Pacific Ocean. The first stage engine, which had experienced an abort on the pad earlier tonight due to low chamber pressure readings, powered the rocket skyward for nearly three minutes. The spent stage then separated for a planned parachute-aided…
jlynch | March 12, 2007
Image of Io taken by the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on New Horizons at 11:04 Universal Time on February 28, 2007. The picture shows the enormous 290-kilometer (180-mile) high plume from the volcano Tvashtar. See here for more details.