Some people in the blue islets say and have been saying it’s been cold. It has been, locally, in the US, Europe and Siberia. But globally averaged, January 2010 was warm. At least according to this data. They’ll be checking it thoroughly since January only ended a few days ago.
Anyway, it’s one of the beginner fallacies to extrapolate globally from a local (or short time) situation, and it seems to sit very tight even among some engineer friends of mine who should clearly know better. It’s “cold here now hence IPCC is wrong” or some variation thereof, like Peter Sinclair reviewed a year and again a few weeks ago.
BEGIN EDIT: I think I misread the Britannica part. Netherlands has half of it’s area highly developed and half of that highly developed area is low lying, so a quarter of the total. END EDIT
The Netherlands is an example of a country highly susceptible to both sea-level rise and river flooding because 55% of its territory is below sea level where 60% of its population lives and 65% of its Gross National Product (GNP) is produced
If this too is wrong, you bet the WG1 people are pissed off. (WG1 is the scientific basis, WG2 the effects and WG3 is the mitigation ways working group of IPCC.)
But it seems Britannica has information in similar vein:
The Netherlands is bounded by the North Sea to the north and west, Germany to the east, and Belgium to the south. If the Netherlands were to lose the protection of its dunes and dikes, the most densely populated part of the country would be inundated (largely by the sea but also in part by the rivers). This highly developed part of the Netherlands, which generally does not lie higher than about three feet (one metre) above sea level, covers more than half the total area of the country. About half of this area (more than one-fourth of the total area of the country) actually lies below sea level.
So, the question becomes tides and how sea level is measured: if it’s the mean sea level, then even low stuff over sea level is unlivable because of the tides (unless you put dikes and pump it dry of course).
A big setback for the Michael Mann smear campaign.
Here’s the science relevance context, the subject area Mann has worked on, temps in the 1000 year timescale. While some others work on instrumental records, say last 100 or 200 years, some work on ice age stuff that takes 100,000 years etc etc. Some of the 1000 year reconstruction papers were by him, and hence the lines in that IPCC graph labelled MBH1999 and MJ2003 and I don’t know if he’s the M in some other too.
But he hasn’t also worked, at least to my knowledge on other stuff like radiative forcing. Notice how nicely the report is laid online, for everyone to read, hint hint…
From all places, a libertarian, who is arguing for laymen to trust experts.
Come to think of it, there’s a certain class of rhetoric I’m going to call the “one way hash” argument.
and
The talking point on one side is just complex enough that it’s both intelligible—even somewhat intuitive—to the layman and sounds as though it might qualify as some kind of insight. (If it seems too obvious, perhaps paradoxically, we’ll tend to assume everyone on the other side thought of it themselves and had some good reason to reject it.) The rebuttal, by contrast, may require explaining a whole series of preliminary concepts before it’s really possible to explain why the talking point is wrong. So the setup is “snappy, intuitively appealing argument without obvious problems” vs. “rebuttal I probably don’t have time to read, let alone analyze closely.”
This time seems a sloppy reference to Amazon droughts in IPCC AR4 WG2 that turns out to be correct in the end. Scruffy Dan:
Sounds, like the same type of issue as the Himalayan glacier error, citing the grey-literature, rather than the peer-reviewed literature. But on closer inspection the text of the IPCC is correct, and consistent with the science. The error was lazy citation.They should have cited the peer-reviewed literature, rather than a report from WWF.
So this is Amazongate. Awaiting for the next gate.
“Rockets are special” is an interchangeable meme with “rockets are expensive”. Well, hopefully they get less special. Armadillo’s been making progress, from the latest update:
For the very first time, a complete system was operated without the presence of any of the manufacturer’s representation on site. This may seem like a small thing in light of the fact we all knew it would eventually come, but getting there is always a good thing.
Some day launch vehicles will be Refuel And Go Again.
It works! Armadillo did the important, expensive and meticulous scientific research:
During a tour of the shop I was explaining how our particular rocket engines worked. While doing this I discovered that an injector we had performed no less than a half dozen tests on was plumbed up backwards from what I was pointing out. This immediately explained much more to me than I would have cared to admit at the moment.
Suffice it to say that it is indeed possible to film cool an engine with LOX…
The competitor to F-22, Sukhoi’s new PAK-FA fighter is going to do its first flight today. Secret Projects Forum is the place to follow it. They’ll probably link to further material like pictures if any will be available.
These things like major fighters are far between nowadays. Dry for the aerospace enthusiast, though otherwise probably good for all.
EDIT: Postponed to Friday, some talk of a small mishap during taxi runs…
EDIT2: Well, it was done on Friday, I wasn’t updating then because I got a flu. Wikipedia has pretty good pics. The preliminary renderings from last year now seem to have been accurate. The small fin pics in the middle of Matej’s page.
