Say Anything Blog

On a bit more serious note on the “global warming” front, we have this:



Notice the near total absence of sun spots.

Then we have this:

Sunspot Cycle Predictions Solar physicists believe the speed of a massive circulating current of hot plasma within the Sun predicts the amplitudes of sunspot cycles approximately twenty years into the future. In recent years that speed has become lower than ever before observed. Based on the plasma-speed/future-cycle-amplitude theory, a team led by physicist Mausumi Dikpata of the National Center for Atmospheric Research predicts Cycle 24 will be intense. NASA solar physicist David Hathaway agrees, but predicts Cycle 25 will be extraordinarily weak. Dikpati’s team prediction for Cycle 24 is shown above in pink. Hathaway’s Cycle 24 and 25 predictions are shown in red.

Finally, there is this, the real punchline: “Solar Activity Diminishes; Researchers Predict Another Ice Age”

Global Cooling comes back in a big way

Dr. Kenneth Tapping is worried about the sun. Solar activity comes in regular cycles, but the latest one is refusing to start. Sunspots have all but vanished, and activity is suspiciously quiet. The last time this happened was 400 years ago—and it signaled a solar event known as a “Maunder Minimum,” along with the start of what we now call the “Little Ice Age.”

It may be a bit premature to be purchasing an extra pair of wool pants, or perhaps a fur coat, but still this is rather disconcerting news.

Wonder how Al Gore will respond to this one?

Forget global warming: Welcome to the new Ice Age:

Snow cover over North America and much of Siberia, Mongolia and China is greater than at any time since 1966.

The U.S. National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) reported that many American cities and towns suffered record cold temperatures in January and early February. According to the NCDC, the average temperature in January “was -0.3 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average.”

Posted for the irony, and the human interest, since one bad winter doesn’t mean that the Earth is really cooling—anymore than one hot summer driven by El Nino means it’s really warming. 

Trouble is the Gore-iacs want it both ways:  They want to use the data if it confirms, and argue it doesn’t matter, when it tends to contradict their fiercely held beliefs.

50 years ongoing, the results are illuminated by the nighttime view over Korea.

Audioslave, “I am the Highway”

There are lots of ways of interpreting the lyrics to this song.  One of my favorites involves the proper role of government.  “I am not your rolling wheels, I am the highway”. 

It’s the governments role to provide us with the road to prosperity, but it is ours to provide the means to get down that road ourselves.  The importance of this self determination is often missed by liberals, who think it unfair that somebody can go farther down this highway than others.

Got to here with a little practice.  My first try was around 25,600.

European geography quiz with the opportunity to win in a sweepstake.

More here.

There is a new article in the Weekly Standard on How Bush Decided on the Surge
that provides the image of an deeper, more insightful president than the simpletons in the press normally portray.

What is most interesting to me is that the surge was put in place based on the recommendations of the younger advisors and ran contrary to the advice of many high-power groups, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who favored (bluntly) acceptance of failure and ordered withdrawal, the Baker Commission which also favored a draw-down and withdrawal, and the State Departments plan of contain and surround the war zones, and just the two sides fight it out until there was a clear victor.

What Bush had to convince these various groups of was that the price of failure was greater than the cost that the surge presented, that a strategy of wait until Iraq stepped up would fail, that our troops needed to leave the Vietnam-styled pattern of “control and release” (whereby we grabbed a target, then failed to occupy it after gaining control), and so forth.

Probably the part that took the most guts was getting in front of America and a skeptical Democrat-controlled Congress and making the the case for a change in strategy that involved committing additional resources at a time when many felt the situation was beyond repair:

The 20-minute speech on January 10, 2007, was not Bush’s most eloquent. And it wasn’t greeted with applause. Democrats condemned the surge and Republicans were mostly silent. Polls showing strong public opposition to the war in Iraq were unaffected.

But the president, as best I could tell, wasn’t looking for affirmation. He was focused solely on victory in Iraq. The surge may achieve that. And if it does, Bush’s decision to spurn public opinion and the pressure of politics and intensify the war in Iraq will surely be regarded as the greatest of his presidency.

h/t Instapundit.

A recent poll finds

• Growing media attempts to influence public opinion and policies
• Poor quality
• A strong liberal bent in most media
• Fox News, CNN and NBC as the most accurate

A Sacred Heart University Poll found significantly declining percentages of Americans saying they believe all or most of media news reporting. In the current national poll, just 19.6% of those surveyed could say they believe all or most news media reporting. This is down from 27.4% in 2003. Just under one-quarter, 23.9%, in 2007 said they believe little or none of reporting while 55.3% suggested they believe some media news reporting.

In related news, the US media thinks the public is stupid and easily duped (joke).

H/T Gateway Pundit

Instapundit has a link to an interesting article on the “is happening” transformation of some agriculture to growing switchgrass for ethanol production. Here’s the key portion:

But yields from a grass that only needs to be planted once would deliver an average of 13.1 megajoules of energy as ethanol for every megajoule of petroleum consumed—in the form of nitrogen fertilizers or diesel for tractors—growing them. “It’s a prediction because right now there are no biorefineries built that handle cellulosic material” like that which switchgrass provides, Vogel notes. “We’re pretty confident the ethanol yield is pretty close.” This means that switchgrass ethanol delivers 540 percent of the energy used to produce it, compared with just roughly 25 percent more energy returned by corn-based ethanol according to the most optimistic studies.

People have been saying for a while that switchgrass is a much better biosource than corn is.  Corn is very hard on the land (sucks out nutrients and nitrogen like crazy), and probably isn’t a good choice for a sustainable energy alternative.

If the energy efficiency of switchgrass is anywhere near what is claimed, then this probably foretells the end of the “growing corn for ethanol” experiment.  Reality has a way of separating out the good ideas from the bad ones.

Indiana has had a voter ID law on the books since 2005 that requires photo identification.  The poster child for critics of this law is Faye Buis-Ewing, who was denied the right to vote in Indiana when she displayed her Florida drivers license.

OK, now think about that.

In order to get a drivers license, you have to be a resident of the state.  In order to vote in a state, you have to be a resident in that state.  Seems like Ms. Buis-Ewing should have been voting in Florida, not Indiana, right?

Kind of hard to understand the righteous indignation from the left:  The ID law worked as intended, it screened people who, based on their credentials, shouldn’t be voting in that state.  This is true even, as it turns out, that she owns a home in Indiana.  You can’t have your primary residence be in two states. (What part of “primary” didn’t she understand?)

But the logic of the left being what it is, she whined about it, and they made her their poster child.  In retrospect, that seems to have been a mistake. It turns out Ms. Buis-Ewing has declared herself a resident of both Florida and Indiana, and has even gone to the extent of being registered to vote.

It also appears that she and her husband have been declaring homestead exemptions on both properties.  And if that’s not violating the law, it’s pretty darn close. 

That aside, if your primary residency is in Indiana, you are required to have a driver’s license for that state (I believe you have six months to get one after establishing domicile).  So either she is a legal resident of Florida with a legal drivers license, or an legal resident of Indiana with an illegal drivers license.

The left sure has a funny notion of “heros”. All I have to say.

h/t Instapundit.

link here. Although it’s not been getting warmer:

In other breaking news, 2007 To Be Warmest Year Yet, Say UK Forecasters

They never get tired of the hyperbole, do they?

The BBC has a good article up on the reform of the US intelligence process. and how it led to a change in the US risk assessment of Iran.

I thought this part was particularly interesting:

The weakness of consensus

The aim is to avoid the weakness of all systems where co-ordination is the requirement. Co-ordination can lead to consensus and consensus can hide doubts and flaws.

The same weakness was evident in the British system of having a Joint Intelligence Committee, which came to a similarly wrong conclusion over Iraq despite doubts in the system lower down.

One example from Iraq concerned the source known as Curveball, who was given undue prominence, especially in the assessment of so-called mobile chemical weapons vehicles.

The system has also been strengthened by the creation of an overarching Director of National Intelligence (DNI), to whom the NIC reports. It was created after the failures to predict and interdict the attacks of 9/11.

Again the danger of creating yet another post is that intelligence gets reduced in a longer and longer process of examination into the lowest common denominator.

Of course this is interesting to apply to other situations, like the so-called consensus on global warming or the consensus on that dreck Y2K.  The nature of consensus is that it can sweep doubts and uncertainties under the rug in the interest of forming a well-defined narrative.

In the consensus-forming scenario, a given expert has the greatest uncertainty regarding his own contributions but agrees that the things he isn’t expert on are likely true.  So you end up with a bunch of people, who are experts in their own area, but agreeing on things that they have no expertise in, and a consensus that is formed on ignorance, rather than on informed understanding.  And this consensus carries the weight of a “team of experts”

There are places where paying attention to consensus makes sense, for example, if you talk to physicists about the value of some measured physical quantity, they are speaking from authority.  However, global warming, international intelligence or even Y2K are all areas where the field is complex enough that no one person can really be an expert on everything.

In this case, consensus is driven by man’s desire to create a narrative to explain something that is very complex, and as a result what you have is an agreed to story, rather than a true finding of facts.

BEIJING, China (AP)—China displayed the first image of the moon captured by its Chang’e 1 lunar probe at a gala ceremony Monday, marking the formal start of the satellite’s mission to document the lunar landscape.

Unveiling the image at the Beijing Aerospace Control Center, Premier Wen Jiabao hailed it as a major step in “the Chinese race’s 1,000-year-old dream” of exploring the moon. The black and white image clearly showed craters on the moon’s surface.

Who’d a thunk it???

Remember folks, you heard it here first!  Must attribute!

Hot off the presses, there is a new study that has just been released by Craig Loehle, “A 2000-year global temperature reconstruction based on non-treering proxies. ” First here’s the punch line:

What this says basically is that, in keeping with medieval records suggesting a warm Europe for that period, that global temperature was warmer during that period than it is currently.

Obviously that’s a problem for believers in anthropogenic global warming.

I’ll note that this is in Energy & Environment, and there is some skepticism about the degree of true peer review for this journal.  Nonetheless, the principle holds that “if a thing is true, it is true regardless of who said it”, it’s reasonable to treat this research skeptically, but to also start with the assumption of good faith on the part of Loehle. 

I say that because we all know that he will be smeared by the left-wing for daring to question their views; and if not the journal he published his report in, then instead expect any cooperate funding his organization receives to be scruitinized.  That does always seem to be a substitute for reason on their side.

And about damned time, too. I was starting to wonder if he had any balls left.

Bush used his opening statement to list areas where he said “Congress has work to do”: health care; security; the budget; education; housing; trade; help for military veterans; law enforcement and the judiciary.

He complained about progress on a number of bills before Congress, including children’s health insurance, spending plans and internal surveillance legislation, saying Congress has wasted much of the past nine months.

“Now the clock is winding down. In some key areas, Congress is just getting started,” Bush said.

“One of Congress’ basic duties is to fund the day-to-day operations of the federal government. Yet Congress has not sent me a single appropriations bill,” Bush said.

Bush said congressional Democrats are wasting time with proposed legislation calling the actions of Ottoman Turks against Armenians during World War I “genocide.” Watch Bush address the Turkey issue »

“With all these pressing responsibilities, one thing Congress should not be doing is sorting out the historical record of the Ottoman Empire,” Bush said. “The resolution on the mass killings of Armenians beginning in 1915 is counterproductive. ...

“Congress has more important work to do than antagonizing a democratic ally in the Muslim world, especially one that’s providing vital support for our military every day,” Bush said.