Check these “60 insane cloud formations” at the Matador Network:
Lenticular cloud, Mt. Fuji, Japan
and this one leaving this world
Lenticular UFO in Patagonia image A Lamy
Archive for October, 2013
Clouds – Just water and a bit of dirt
October 17, 2013The IPCC 95% trick: Increase the uncertainty to increase the certainty
October 17, 2013Increasing the uncertainty in a statement to make the statement more certain to be applicable is an old trick of rhetoric. Every politician knows how to use that in a speech. It is a schoolboy’s natural defense when being hauled up for some wrongdoing. It is especially useful when caught in a lie. It is the technique beloved of defense lawyers in TV dramas. Salesmen are experts at this. It is standard practice in scientific publications when experimental data does not fit the original hypothesis.
Modify the original statement (the lie) to be less certain in the lie, so as to be more certain that the statement could be true. Widen the original hypothesis to encompass the actual data. Increase the spread of the deviating model results to be able to include the real data within the error envelope.
- “I didn’t say he did it. I said somebody like him could have done it”
- “Did you start the fight?” >>> “He hit me back first”.
- “The data do not match your hypothesis” >>> “The data are not inconsistent with the improved hypothesis”
- “Your market share has reduced” >>> “On the contrary, our market share of those we sell to has increased!” (Note -this is an old one used by salesmen to con “green” managers with reports of a 100% market share!!)
And it is a trick that is not foreign to the IPCC – “we have a 95% certainty that the less reliable (= improved) models are correct”. Or in the case of the Cook consensus “97% of everybody believes that climate does change”.
A more rigorous treatment of the IPCC trick is carried out by Climate Audit and Roy Spencer among others but this is my simplified explanation for schoolboys and Modern Environ-mentalists.
The IPCC Trick
The real comparison between climate models and global temperatures is below:
Climate Models and Reality
With the error in climate models increased to infinity, the IPCC could even reach 100% certainty. As it is the IPCC is 95% certain that it is warming – or not!
Colour photographs from the Russia of 1909
October 16, 2013This is from Kuriositas. A magnificent collection of colour photographs from a Russia of a century ago.
The Century Old Color Photographs of Prokudin-Gorsky
In 1909 a remarkable project was initiated by Russian photographer Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky. His mission was to record – in full and vibrant color – the vast and diverse Russian Empire. Here, with his story, is a selection of his amazing century old full color pictures. …
The colors are quite remarkable – a technique which Prokudin-Gorsky developed himself. However, his travels through the Russian Empire were never a fait accompli. They were the culmination of a long and arduous struggle. Thanks to the tenacity of the photographer we now have a record of times a century ago, so clear and vivid that one feels it is almost possible to jump in to the picture …….. Prokudin-Gorsky came from a long line of Russian nobles who mostly enjoyed careers in the Russian army. Prokudin-Gorsky had a more cerebral bent and he studied chemistry in Saint Petersburg at the Institute of Technology in the city. He also studied painting and music at the Imperial Academy of Arts. Chemistry and the Arts may not immediately spring to mind as a happy marriage of subjects to many, but Prokudin-Gorsky’s interest in both would come together eventually. In 1889, at the age of twenty six he travelled to Berlin to study Photochemistry at the Technical University of the German capitol. There he met and studied under Adolf Miethe who was experimenting with three color photography. …….
The process used involved a camera that would take a set of three photographs. These pictures would be monochrome but each picture would be taken using a filter of a different color. When all three monochrome pictures were projected (using light which had to be specifically colored) then the original color scene could be reconstructed. However, this took some time to take …..
Here are just a couple of a quite remarkable collection which spans the mighty and the miserable:
Prokudin-Gorsky 40 Emir of Bukhara
Prokudin-Gorsky 25 Hard labour at the Bakalskiy Mine
Prokudin-Gorsky is credited with the first ever colour photograph in Russia – a portrait of Leo Tolstoy – in 1908.
Prokudin-Gorsky L.N.Tolstoy 1908 Wikimedia
Removing visual pollution
October 16, 2013The wind turbines seem to have been replaced by sheep!
Four wind turbines in the Yorkshire Dales are the first in Britain to be torn down
The 150ft high turbines of Chelker Reservoir, near Ilkley, will not be replaced after the council refused permission for two even bigger machines. According to campaigners, the turbines have not worked in years. In an unprecedented move, the utility company sent in contractors at the end of last month to dismantle the rusting structures.
Chelker Reservoir, Addingham, Yorkshire – Daily Mail
Nightmare continues: Panel falls off Air India Dreamliner in flight
October 15, 2013A new problem every few days for Boeing with their Dreamliner but their share price does not seem to be much affected:
An Air India Boeing 787 Dreamliner. File photo
A large panel in the belly of a Bangalore-bound Dreamliner of Air India fell off mid-air, putting about 150 passengers on board at a grave risk, but the aircraft landed safely.
The DGCA is probing the incident which occurred on Saturday when an 8X4 feet panel in the fuselage fell off while the plane was on its way to Bangalore from Delhi, leaving a gaping hole in the cargo hold, official sources said.
There were 148 persons, including the crew, on board flight AI-803 which landed safely at the Bangalore airport, the sources said, adding that the hole was noticed by the ground staff when they came to inspect the aircraft for its return journey.
A spare panel was flown to Bangalore and fitted on the Boeing 787, which was later declared fit to fly. But the return flight was delayed by over nine hours, they said.
Confirming the incident, airline officials said a panel had fallen off but was replaced and the aircraft was cleared for flights.
“Yes, there was a gaping hole. During the normal transit inspection, it was observed. Engineers immediately rectified it,” an AI official said requesting anonymity.
“It was not an emergency. There was no safety problem,” he added.
Besides long-haul international operations, Air India operates the Dreamliners on domestic routes like from Delhi to Chennai, Bangalore and Kolkata.
German power play – silly EU CO2 rules for cars delayed at least till 2024
October 15, 2013It’s the right decision of course. The proposal was for yet another one of the many EU rules where the benefits are doubtful and the implementation would have had no measurable effects on the desired outcome.
But entirely due to German protectionism for its performance car industry – and much to the disappointment of Ford – the limit of 95g of CO2 per km for any vehicle’s emissions has now been delayed at least till 2024! Well Done Germany!
E 350 BlueTec
“The emissions limits are part of the EU’s drive to switch Europe to a low-carbon economy and slow the impact of climate change.”
The EU’s CO2 restrictions proposals for power plants and for aircraft and this one for cars are part of of a long line of “feel-good” proposals which the Greens are so fond of — full of sound and idiocy, accomplishing nothing. So far the EU has not proposed any restrictions on CO2 in human breath.
Hopefully by 2024, the idiocy of CO2 restrictions will have been recognised.
The German government has persuaded its EU partners to delay introducing new limits on CO2 emissions from cars. Environment ministers agreed to revise a deal, reached in July, that set a limit of 95g per km for the average car. That target for CO2 emissions was to take effect in 2020.
But Germany, famous for its high-performance cars, says the 95g limit should not take full effect until 2024.
Green activists deplored the new delay as a “shameful sop” to polluters.
A leading German Green Party MEP, Rebecca Harms, accused Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel of “riding roughshod” over the EU’s democratic process, because the 2020 agreement had already been reached between the European Parliament and the Council – the EU ministerial grouping.
“Weakening the agreed 2020 limits, which have long been known, is a shameful sop to German car manufacturers and will slow the development of new technologies to deliver more efficient and less polluting cars,” Ms Harms said after the ministers’ vote. ….
The UK was among the countries that supported the German environment minister’s position on Monday, German ARD news reports.
The German minister, Peter Altmaier, said “it’s not a fight over principles but how we bind the necessary clarity in climate protection with the required flexibility and competitiveness to protect the car industry in Europe”.
Correspondents say there has been intense lobbying by luxury carmakers such as BMW and Daimler, maker of Mercedes, over the EU legislation.
The emissions limits are part of the EU’s drive to switch Europe to a low-carbon economy and slow the impact of climate change.
A broad education is vital
October 15, 2013I got this in an email and I wish I knew the original source.
I do like crushed asians – preferably grilled.
(h/t Nessan)
Have Green Parties in Europe been hijacked by the Far Left?
October 15, 2013I have a theory that the fall of communism and the subsequent meltdown and demise of the Communist Parties in Western Europe (most immediately dropped the word “communist” from their names) then led to many of the core supporters of the communists hijacking the Green Parties to gain a measure of respectability. This infiltration of the green parties by the forces of the hard-left was enabled by the relative inexperience of the do-gooding environmental enthusiasts who had initially set up the Environmental parties.
It is my thesis that the take-over by the hard left of the Greens started after about 1995 (with the wall falling in 1990) and has been going on ever since. Not just the political parties but even organisations like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth and even the WWF have all effectively been taken over by the Far Left. The current behaviour of Greenpeace is a case in point. Today most Green Parties in Europe are indistinguishable in their policies from the Communist Parties of old (in Western Europe) though usually hidden under a cloak of environmentalism.
A recent analysis of voting patterns in the Swedish Parliament seems to support my hypothesis. The Environmental Party (MP) seems to be much more closely aligned to the Far Left Party (V) than to the Social Democrats (S) and closer than the Social Democrats are to the Far Left. This same picture spans all the main policy committees; Traffic, Justice, Foreign Affairs, Business and Industry and Environment and Farming.
Voting Patterns in the Swedish Parliament
In the diagram above the red bars indicate the level of agreement between the Greens (MP) and the Far Left (V) compared to the alignment of MP with S and of S with V.
Environmental parties would like to claim that this is because the Far Left has come closer to them but that doesn’t hold water. In issues of jobs or employment or industry or business or health, the Environmental Party policies are often just traditional Marxist dogma.
William Sermon’s remedies from 1673
October 15, 2013A paperback version is available here but an ancient copy found during a house clearance in Derbyshire is to be auctioned reports the Daily Mail.
Sermon 1673 (via Daily Mail -Caters News Agency)
It was written in 1673 by Royal Physician, William Sermon, who was a physician of Charles II. …..
Dr Sermon, who first gained medical experience in the Army and went on to become a physician for King Charles II, died six years after his book was published at the age of 50.
He was described by 17th century historian Anthony Wood as ‘that forward, vain and conceited person.’
Dr Sermon was apparently a great believer in alcohol to combat illness.
For ‘pain in the head through cold’, he suggested: ‘Abstain from taking milk which is cool in operation and drink thin wine or such liquors.’And for a patient suffering from toothache, Dr Sermon writes: ‘To make rotten teeth sound, take the juice of water cresses and white wine in equal measure, mix them together and rub the teeth and gums therewith.’
He adds that ‘the ashes of tobacco is of excellent use to cleanse the teeth and to make them white’.
sermon 1673 paperback
by William Sermon
ISBN-13: 9781240842629
Publisher: EEBO Editions, ProQuest
Publication date: 1/28/2011
Some of Sermon’s remedies might not pass muster today:
- For the sickness bug… ‘Taking young swallows, burn them in their feathers, altogether in a new earthenware pot, covered very close, add thereto as much castor and beat them well together and put in to a glass vessel and let it stand three days after which distill it in a glass for patient to take.’
- For earache… ‘Take a loaf made with one part of caraway seeds, and cut it through the middle and apply it to the ears.’
- For toothache… ‘Take the juice of water cresses and white wine in equal measure, mix them together and rub the teeth and gums therewith.’
- To whiten teeth… ‘The ashes of tobacco is of excellent use to cleanse the teeth and to make them white’.’
- For a headache… ‘Abstain from taking milk which is cool in operation and drink thin wine or such liquors.’
The book will be sold at Hansons Auctioneers in Derby on October 24 and is expected to sell for about £500.
“Wicked” Greenpeace casting a dark shadow over the world
October 14, 2013
Wicked Green Pirate: image by http://nowio.deviantart.com/
Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth have become merely destructive movements. And their self-righteous beliefs in their world-view seem to justify any means. Not just piracy and drug-running, now Greenpeace have also been labelled “wicked” for their opposition to Golden rice. Patrick Moore – who was a co-founder of Greenpeace – called their opposition to GM crops in general and Golden rice in particular a “crime against humanity”.
And now the UK Secretary for the Environment, Owen Paterson called them “wicked” saying “they could be condemning millions of people in the developing world to a premature death”.
BBC: Opponents of the development of a type of genetically modified (GM) rice enriched with vitamin A are “wicked”, the environment secretary has said.
In an interview with the Independent, Owen Paterson said they could be condemning millions of people in the developing world to a premature death.
Mr Paterson backed a letter from international scientists calling for the rapid development of “golden rice”. …. Mr Paterson told the newspaper: “It’s just disgusting that little children are allowed to go blind and die because of a hang-up by a small number of people about this technology.
“I feel really strongly about it. I think what they do is absolutely wicked. There is no other word for it.”
Mr Paterson did not specify any particular groups in his interview but also said opponents of GM technology were “casting a dark shadow over attempts to feed the world”. ……
….. Meanwhile, in a letter to US journal Science, a group of leading academics accused Western non-governmental organisations of fuelling opposition to the development of GM technologies. They wrote: “If ever there was a clear-cut cause for outrage, it is the concerted campaign by Greenpeace and other non-governmental organisations, as well as by individuals, against golden rice.”
Environmental campaigners such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth have said there are more effective solutions to vitamin A deficiency.
The Independent adds:
In the strongest attack yet on the anti-GM lobby Mr Paterson told The Independent that NGOs such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth that oppose GM technology were “casting a dark shadow over attempts to feed the world”.
The k2p blog 