Crazy World, Part n

of how journalism is interpreted too, or how to drop your company’s stock 15% in a simple interview which has nothing peculiar in it…

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The Press Messed Up And They Won’t Admit It

The whole climategate affair was a quite successful smear campaign where the press was played easily. Michael Tobis has more and you can comment there if you want or on the blogs he links to.

If you want to get someone convicted of murder, just accuse him of two. The stupid “truth is in the middle” crowd will then feel like reasonable good guys by sentencing him from one. Or maybe if they’re journalists, just widely circulate the accusations – they will certainly make people’s life harder even if they had no basis whatsoever.

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Bill Sweetman Suspended From [EDIT: Talking About F-35] Aviation Week & Space Technology

Haven’t followed his reporting but apparently it’s been overtly critical of the F-35. [add standard rants and speculations of industry journalism and corruption and ad revenue etc] He has written a book on the subject before so I’d gather he has investigated it quite a lot. Maybe he still got speculative and overextended. I don’t really know as I don’t have enough expertise to judge. He’s a good writer nevertheless.

EDIT: I misread the reporting, he’s still on the payroll but just not reporting on the F-35 anymore.

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Gate N

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.

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News, This Just Came In

Apparently there’s something going on. I’ll let the reportage speak for itself:

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Glaciologists on Himalaya

However, the oft quoted the Himalayan glacier may be gone by 2035 is still not a realistic conclusion based on the recent ongoing significant retreat of the many still large Himalayan glaciers.

Glaciologist Mauri Pelto commenting in November 2009. What’s ironic is that the main subject of Nature’s Climate Feedback’s blog post was some random offhand claim of no global warming glacier melt from an Indian geologist that made headlines. And Mauri was complaining why something like that gets the headlines and not real methodically prepared papers.

So why is this non-peer reviewed Himalayan report by another worth commenting upon, when many very important peer reviewed papers on glacier change are ignored? A read of this Ramesh report indicates the widespread and significant glacier retreat. The report also notes that all the glaciers observed have negative mass balance. After observing the significant and widespread retreat and mass loss the author deems it to slow to be due to global warming, without any real analysis of the climate data or what could be causing the loss. This simply does not warrant our attention. However, the oft quoted the Himalayan glacier may be gone by 2035 is still not a realistic conclusion based on the recent ongoing significant retreat of the many still large Himalayan glaciers. Can we stick to covering better material?

He was proven not only doubly but triply right. IPCC, the Indian geologist and the media representative – all three could be observed not holding the ball at that instant in time and subject by the astute commenter. I remember reading that.

There are probably more mistakes in the IPCC reports that are yet to be found, that’s how it is. This one was pretty bad though. Though no matter the exact subject, there will be a gate on every possible subject in rapid succession for months until people are numbed to the whole word. It brings hits. 2035 Gate. Himalayagate. Glaciergate. Pachaurigate. Sad.

Also, William has more on how it is, or could be.

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Astrospies and Other Nova Documentaries Online

Merry Christmas everyone!

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RQ-170 Sentinel A Morph Wing Aircraft?

Just a theory of the recently photographed “Beast of Kandahar”. I was browsing the NTRS (for another project), when I ran into this:

Lockheed Martin Two Hinge Morphing Wing wind tunnel test configuration at the Langley transonic tunnel, published in 2007

A hinge, actuators or a locking mechanism could explain the wing humps (if more conventional structures are still used). The high speed dash configuration could be used when a craft is needed for surveillance at some site where there is no UAV nearby. Or perhaps for combat missions, but I doubt that…

The pdf is here and is titled “Validation of the Lockheed Martin Morphing Concept with Wind Tunnel Testing”.

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“Hide the decline”

And what it means in relation to tree ring proxies, by Hrynyshyn, reviewing a book.

That excerpt appears immediately above a graph that shows how temperatures inferred from tree-ring records since about 1850 (the “proxies”) are a pretty good match for actual temperature records derived from thermometers right up until the 1980s. After that, the tree-ring data begin to show lower temperatures than were actually recorded.

Just why tree rings no longer provide useful proxy data for temperatures is not known. There are several theories, many of which suggest that climate change itself is the problem. Trees no longer grow as they once did before the climate started changing so rapidly. But the point is, there is no question that tree-ring growth rates of the past — before we had thermometers — can serve as useful proxies for historical temperature data. They are much less useful now, but that doesn’t matter so much because we have actual temperature records. All of this was sorted out back in 1998. It’s not new, nor even particularly interesting, to anyone familiar with the science.

It makes sense but at the same time I’m a bit baffled by this – how do you calibrate then? If you assume the trees are behaving nowadays than before…

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The Latest Fake Outrage Campaign

Hack and get some climate researchers’ emails. Then point to some pretty reasonable stuff as evidence of a conspiracy if taken out of context.

It seems there are a few cases certain people latch onto.

There was a certain lousy paper pushed for publication in the journal called Climate Research. It was crap – the claims in the paper conclusions could not be justified by the data or methods presented in it. It was also written by known fossil industry funded frauds. It went through anyway because of a bad reviewer and editor, and actually was pushed as support for policy. Like pushing creation science somewhere in a weak journal so you can cite it as “peer reviewed”. Many other editors for the journal quit as a result. Read the story here, where “Clare Goodess explains the circumstances behind the resignation of half of the editorial board of the journal Climate Research”.

I do hope for more openness on the data and algorithms front. Of course if you’re a climate researcher and get your data only with personal agreements (from the data collecting scientists and institutions who might work under lots of constraints – these might not be the same people who make models or the temperature reconstructions from the data).

I don’t know about the FOIA (government information) requests… It seems bad that things have been withheld. On the other hand if you get so much FOIA requests just for posturing’s sake from certain people that you’re swamped by them, that’s unreasonable as well.

Then there’s the alleged “trick” to hide some cooling. AFAIK, this is just a known proxy issue where they are in error at some point and thus when you make some plots you don’t use that period but “hide” it.

Quite weird arguments.  The FOI one is the most serious looking to me, and others seem just fake.

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