Tuesday, January 31, 2017

AMERICA WELCOMES BACK ITS MOST VENOMOUS REPTILE
   "Public opinion must rest upon things more stable than smartness"

Now  that  America  once  again  has  a government  dedicated  to the principle that the Bureau of Alchohol, Tobacco and Firearms exists to facilitate  citizen's enjoyment of all three, science activists, PCwallahs, Neo-Wobblies & SJW's  are suffering denial and  Casablanca-strength casino shock at political losses too deep to shrug or march off.

Rather than dwelling on their expectations of  anarchy and existential doom,  Carbon  Prohibitionists  of  all stripes should  recall how their political ancestors, The Drys and the Womens  Christian Temperence Union, coped with the  unthinkable  Constitutional coup de foudre  of Republican populists staging Repeal :

ANOTHER  MILESTONE  IN THE HISTORY OF BIPARTISANSHIP

PITTSBURGH (AP) -
Police say  a man bit the  ear off  another man in Pittsburgh as they  argued  about President Donald Trump.
The 30-year-old victim was bitten at his apartment at around 6:45 a.m. Monday in the city's East Liberty neighborhood after a verbal argument turned physical...
Police spokeswoman Emily Schaffer says she isn't able to say whether the victim supported Trump or opposed him.

      WHAT BULLYING LEFTY COCKWOMBLE HISTORIAN  HAS
                  DELINGPOLE  BEEN  READING  THIS  TIME ?


           "I'm on the right side of  history."
Declares Breitbart "Interpreter of interpretations" James Delingpole, taking time off from not reading science to applaud the  GWPF  press conference performance of  Trump's  Lord  High  EPA Executioner, Myron Ebell, as seen above. Delingpole seems something of a fan:
"... the joy of watching the feline Ebell goading the audience with his amused erudition, sweet politeness , and crushing one liners. He’s a cultured, fearsomely intelligent man... 
When the press essentially accused Ebell of representing evil oil interests, he replied by noting the vast power and corruption of what he called the Climate Industrial Complex – from grant-grubbing scientists to regulation-hungry rent-seeking businesses- which feeds on the global warming scam
And what did facts did Ebell adduce in dismissing model projections of climate change? The IPCC projections themselves ?  No way- he brandished a production so crude that the plotted data don't share a common baseline- the egregiously cherry picked , counterfactual and data-denying graph John Christy  shamelessly cut and pasted to present to  Congress alongside Ebell last June:
EBELL'S ALTERNATIVE FACTS

 Delingpole goes on to excoriate science journalists with whom he disagrees, which is to say all of them:
With one or two exceptions – none immediately spring to mind, but I’m sure there some – they are a bunch of despicable fails. They’re far too much in bed with the environmental movement; far too ready to transcribe their stories almost verbatim from the press releases of Greenpeace and the WWF or whichever renewable energy outfit has given them the sweet-talk; and far, far too reluctant to question the bullshit fed to them "
So where besides the feeble Ebell does  Delingpole turn for his facts? 

"Then, of course, there is the great Anthony Watts – founder of the most widely read and important sceptical website of the lot... I owe Wattsy an enormous amount the war we're fighting concerns the battle between openness, honesty, truth, liberty and freedom of expression on the one hand, and corrupt, dishonest, bullying authoritarianism on the other. What's particularly valuable about Watts Up With That? is ... Anyone is welcome to contribute to the debate,"
          --James Delingpole , Daily Telegraph  11 April 2013

Anyone, that is,  except  those who read the scientific literature- Watts and Delingpole are notorious for  automatically censoring  or banning their critics. The systematic exclusion of climate  scientists, has turned both Watts Up With That and Delingpole's Breitbart column  into two of the internet's  most Orwellian echo chambers.   If  this celebration of alternative facts as Newspeak  is  "debate" Delingpole is well justified in his conclusion:

"someone asked Myron Ebell what Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s chief policy adviser, thought about climate change.
“Well you can get an idea from the fact that when he was at Breitbart the guy he recruited to write about it was James Delingpole…” Ebell said... 
No wonder I got so many hate-filled glares when I poked my head into the crowded room, 15 minutes late.
The feeling’s mutual. But that’s OK because I’m on the right side of history, whereas their view of the world is toast. Welcome to the suck, guys. It’s only just beginning…"

Actually, the wannabe Widmerpool went on the warpath against science after being, well, totally crushed, on BBC prime-time by Royal Society President Sir Paul Nurse, witness these subsequent Breitbart ledes:

  1. * Cockwomble (coq-womm-bull) noun
    Person possessing properties of striking idiocy.
    That bloke is a f*cking cockwomble
    How the hell did no-one get punched?

Saturday, January 28, 2017

                       VISITING  UNIVERSITY  OF  EAST  ANGLIA,  
QUEEN  IS  NOT AMUSED BY  CLIMATE SCIENCE  STAFF  CUTS

 UAE modeling spokeskankakas  upstaged by Fijian Cultural Exposition  have taken to drink or fled to the relative safety of low-lying  Pacific islands

WE PLAN TO PUSH ALL THE BUTTONS UNTIL ZEROS COME UP

The  Climate Wars  answer  to  The Insane Clown Posse  is  bringing  its Alternative Fact Providers ,  renowned disinformation  communications skills and conviction records  ethical standards from the Bible Belt to the Beltway:
ARLINGTON HEIGHTS, IL – The Heartland Institute will host the 12th International Conference on Climate Change (ICCC-12) at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Washington, DC on Thursday, March 23 and Friday, March 24, 2017. The theme of the two-day conference is
      RESETTING  U.S.  CLIMATE  POLICY  
Speakers will present to the Trump administration and members of Congress the case for ending the Obama administration’s “war on fossil fuels” and embracing forward-looking agenda based on scientific data and economic analysis.
The Heartland Institute is globally recognized as a leader of the climate change debate. In 2016, a peer-reviewed article in Global Environmental Change said “Heartland has been recognized by scholars as a significant contrarian actor, and has been prominently studied in past literature on organized climate skepticism.”

 In 2014, a peer-reviewed article in Geoforum about a report produced by Heartland for the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) said the report offered a “scientific background … quite similar to the IPCC report.”
Really?  Here's  what the Geoforum abstract says:

Reviewing the climate change reviewers: Exploring controversy through report references and citations

Abstract

There is a growing need to analyse the knowledge controversies about climate change. Human geography has a role in understanding of the motivations and sources of the participants in the debate. In this study, we explore the scientific background of the contrarian arguments, using Climate Change Reconsidered published by the conservative think tank Heartland Institute, in comparison with the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change The Physical Science Basis. Firstly, we surveyed the reference lists, which showed that in general the contrarian report used the same journals, as their most important sources. However, the differences are in the details: journals dealing with paleo-issues are more important for the contrarian report. Further, it is noteworthy that we found only 262 identical references (4.4% of all references) in the reports and their contextual analyses revealed that the rhetoric can be remarkably different, as can the way in which an article is used.... Should we take the ‘contrarians’ and their arguments seriously or not?
And  the  authors  un-Heartlandlike conclusion:
We found only 262 identical references 
(4.4% of all references) in the reports.
THE HEARTLAND PRESS RELEASE CONTINUES:
“The purpose of this conference is to introduce members of the Trump administration and newly elected members of Congress and their staff to leading scientists and economists who hold a data-based, non-alarmist view of the climate,” said Joseph Bast, president of The Heartland Institute. “It’s time to reset U.S. climate and energy policy away from the alarmism and fake science that dominated policymaking during the Obama era, and plot a new course based on real scientific data and economic analysis.”

Friday, January 27, 2017

A  VOICE  OF  REASON  AT  THE  BLOG  OF  THE  WALKING  DEAD



Go to the profile of Mirah Curzer

         Without Losing  Your  Mind

                    Self-Care Lessons for the Resistance

Since the election, a lot of people not previously involved in activism have jumped in with both feet...you’re going to have to learn these strategies or else burn out in the first six months.
1. Don’t Get Used to Trump — 
    Get Away From Him


... Stop refreshing Twitter and reading the news...at some point it will become too much to handle.
You can cope by shutting it out for a while — binge watching Netflix, playing with your dog, going to yoga...

People can get used to anything, and if you don’t take steps to prevent it, you will get used to Trump

2. Focus Your Energy on One or Two Issues
... Don’t tell people to stop talking about racism because climate change is more mportant, or that health care can wait because we have to focus on LGBTQ rights. It’s all important.

3. Make Activism Fun
...Volunteer for an immigrants’ rights clinic with a group of colleagues, and then go out for drinks afterwards and feel free to be proud of yourselves... activism is supposed to be fun for the protestors.

4. Take Care of the Basics... Go to therapy. Yes, really.


Get enough sleep. You’d be amazed what sleep-deprivation does to your body & mind.


Go to the doctor. And the dentist. It’s hard to focus on social justice when a toothache is keeping you up


Exercise. You don’t have to run a marathon, but do some yoga or go for a jog or at least take a long walk...


Make your bed. Seriously, it takes like two minutes max and makes such a difference.


Oh, and call your mother, if you can.

              JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH  2.0                                 

Monday,  I get my first look at  the  Holy Grail of solid state physics.

Scientists  have  been  hunting  metallic  hydrogen  since the material was  first  theoretically predicted in 1935. If you wonder how hard it can be to realize so simple an elemental transformation, consider that while 15 years sufficed  to get from the discovery of fission to fuse hydrogen isotopes  into artifical stars, getting them to solidify as metal took fully another lifetime. Yet though  alien to Earth, metallic hydrogen's existence has never rbeen  in  doubt: the  mass of Jupiter and Saturn militates for its  existance  as the  most  common  form of  condensed matter in the solar system. Gas  giant  planets,  have central  pressures  so  high that all the matter  deep within them must necessarily be squashed into the metallic state, but  their overall densities are far too low to be accounted for by denser elements, like aluminum or iron, leaving metallic hydrogen, solid or molten, (in the sense that water is molten ice), to account for the bulk of the solar sysytem's planetary mass.

The phenomenal static pressure needed to condense the gas into a solid was achieved by the antithesis of Big Science. Instead of a border-spanning cyclotron like CERN's giant hadron collider , this experiment took place between the pointy ends of two  utterly flawless diamonds of less than engagement ring size. held together in a high tech vise you can hold in the palm of your hand.

UPDATED MONDAY AFTERNOON 
The hunt has long been led by Harvard's  Cabot Professor of Natural Science,  Isaac Silvera,  winner of the  physics  Nobel for getting to molecular hydrogen.

He did't stop there. In a glorious throwback to the days when Newton ground his own telescope mirrors and lenses, Silvera went the full Spinoza to achieve his goal. Having shattered, and dented  dozens of  commercially-made diamond anvils  trying to get past the three million atmospere limit that frustrated his experimental competitors, he philosophically decided to go to Amsterdam and train as a diamond cutter himself, the better to understand why diamond anvils break, and find ways to move forward to the glittering ten micron speck I saw today.  

Though  mirror-like, the world's first sample of metallic hydrogen  appears  warmer  in tone  than polished  silver  or  aluminum,  though this  hint of color  may be an artifact - the absorbtion  spectrum of the diamond through which it  is viewed  is subject to a pressure-driven red shift , and  the 4.95 million atmosphere  pressure in question rivals that at the center of the Earth.

Created in December out of  liquid  hydrogen held close to absolute zero, it has since been warmed to the relatively torrid temperature of liquid nitrogen, 77 K, where it has hung around for the last month-  it seems to be an honest to gosh solid. Skeptics have raised complaints , and will doubtless do so until they make some for themselves, but so far there is no optical  evidence of some transient trick of high pressure quantum chemistry, like protons creating a sort of shiny fools hydrogen by attacking the  sapphire nanofilm that isolates the hydrogen from the diamond anvil.  

I know Silvera  through shared  fascination with high pressure  minerals - he operates at pressures of up to five million atmospheres- a hundred times higher than I need to implode basalt into a mixture of garnets and jade, has led to us compare notes over the decades. 

From the 70's to the 90's  I worked   just across the street  from Ike, on making  diamonds out of just one kind of atom, and finding archaeological jade sources, in  the Peabody Musem and the Hoffman Center for Experimental Geophysics.  Having followed his progress towards the conditons prevailing at the literal center of the Earth, I'm prepared to believe my eyes-- if the silvery glint seen in this clip is what it seems - the first glimpse of the simplest metal, Ike & Co.'s experimental journey may end with an encore  in Stockholm.

So what has this got to do with  climate change?  Possibly a lot , since if  metallic hydrogen proves metastable, as diamonds are, at room temperature,  high temperature superconductivity could move out of the lab,  and  into the arena of energy conservation.

It could also slash the cost of going into space in single stage vehicles-  Imagine the space shuttle going into orbit without a booster-  as Ike pointed out in 2010:
Metastable  metallic hydrogen would be a very light-weight,  low volume,  powerful rocket  propellant.  
One of the characteristics of a propellant is its specific impulse,  Isp.  Liquid (molecular)  hydrogen-oxygen  used in modern rockets has an Isp of ~460s; metallic hydrogen has a theoretical  Isp of 1700s !   
Detailed analysis shows that such a fuel  would allow single-stage rockets  to enter into orbit  or  carry economical payloads  to the moon.  


Tuesday, January 24, 2017

               ABSOLUTELY FABULOUS  ALTERNATIVE FACTS !

How many genes 'n memes do these kindred spirits share ?
Will the face that launched a thousand Federal science webpage takedowns make the Presidential Science Advisor read Vogue?


Monday, January 23, 2017

         THE  MARTIAN CHRONICLE  OF  HIGHER EDUCATION

WE  INTERRUPT  THIS TRANSMISSION FROM  PHIL PLAIT'S  
THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE IN BLOG FORM
JAN. 23 2017 8:45 AM

Curiosity Finds An(other) Alien Visitor on Mars

The Curiosity rover has been on Mars since Aug. 6, 2012. In the more than four years it’s been there, it’s seen wonders beyond our Earthly reckoning: evidence of ancient flowing water, evidence of ancient standing water, methane in the atmosphere now, carbon in the rocks, dark basaltic sand dunes, weird lumpy moons circling a dusty red planet.
TO  REMIND  READERS  IN  GROVERS  MILLS THAT  THIS  ALIEN  METEORITE  LANDED  IN  
THE WALL STREET  JOURNAL  12 YEARS AGO :

Reading the Red Planet

By RUSSELL SEITZ       Updated March 11, 2005 12:01 a.m. ET


In 1880, a myopic Harvard graduate was almost killed galloping headlong into the captain of an opposing polo team. Given a telescope to gaze through as a convalescent pastime, Percival Lowell soon thought that he saw not just canals on Mars but greenery. He devoted himself to astronomy and founded an eponymous observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz.
But much of what he sketched of Mars others could neither see nor photograph. In 1976 NASA's Viking Lander revealed a panorama of desolation -- a world seemingly as dead as Lowell's reputation. Yet science often beggars fiction. A generation later, a whiff of embalming fluid may herald the discovery of life on Mars.
Ice Floes
Last year, a flood of purple prose about water as the cradle of life on the Red Planet flowed from the Opportunity probe's discovery that Mars's saline sands were once as damp as the underside of a walrus. This year, a satellite orbiting the planet has found evidence of an equator once carpeted by ice floes and a recently active geyser. Things have gotten a lot more colorful too. Beyond hematite blueberries and green vitriol on the surface, the spectrum of the Martian atmosphere shows inklings of organic complexity.
Earthbound telescopes have found more than inklings. There is, it now appears, formaldehyde along with methane -- i.e., coal gas -- in Mars's tenuous air. This is a big deal because they exist in equilibrium, a discovery rich with vital implications. Oxygen and sunlight turn methane into the deadly preservative, but because Mars lacks an ozone layer, the pungent formaldehyde molecules are soon zapped out of existence by ultraviolet rays. The solar wind is blasting methane off the top of the Martian stratosphere, too, so the megatons of formaldehyde in the Martian air imply a constant infusion of fresh methane.
So what? Some geophysicists insist that methane on Earth arises from inorganic sources (e.g., carbide minerals), not just from life (either end of a cow) and its decay (coal). But unlike the tectonically vigorous Earth, Mars's effete geology lacks a crustal conveyor belt to exhume gases from its depths. Absent such upheaval, Occam's razor cuts in: The alternative methane source is life.
Ah, life on Mars! We've heard that one before. Few other potential tourist destinations have offered so wide a range of speculation. Edgar Rice Burroughs, better known for Tarzan, tipped his hat to Trollope by portraying Mars as hunt country, where Confederate veteran John Carter encounters not little green men but 15-footers with four arms and an attitude. Before long he encounters red, white, and yellow Martians galloping astride eight-legged saber-toothed sloths, pursuing 10-legged foxes and maidens demurely attired in stainless-steel brassieres.
The high-water mark of Hollywood's Saturday serials was Flash Gordon's arrival on the Martian scene. Hot on the heels of Orson Welles's 1938 "War of the Worlds" broadcast came "Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars," whose hero kept fit by wrestling an octopus in the aquarium of Ming the Merciless, an art deco eco-terrorist who set the stage for Michael Crichton's latest technothriller by changing Earth's climate with a Nitron raygun. America loved it, and Cole Porter soon had Bing Crosby crooning: "Have you heard, it's in the stars, / Next July we collide with Mars?"
Porter was off by 35 years, but eventually collide we did -- more space probes have crashed on Mars than landed. NASA's past failures to fish up Martian life may be due to random bad luck with landing sites -- one mile off a Palm Springs fairway, after all, and the landscape seems as sterile as Death Valley. Magnification matters, too. It's hard to overlook a cavalry of giant sloth, but bacteria are seriously small and often tucked into unattractive places.
It makes one wonder what we may have missed. Bits of Mars are occasionally flung to Earth by impacting asteroids, ending up as the meteorites called shergottites. Reports of tiny fossils in one of them have not panned out, but the rocks match the isotopic composition of Mars so exactly that few doubt that they have been whacked into the inner solar system like golf balls of the gods. Plain-vanilla physics likewise dictates that bits of Earth have hit the Martian fairways over the eons too. One day, Earthmen on Mars may trip over alien-looking rocks from home.
This is less peculiar than it sounds. Deep space is a hostile place, but precisely because it's cold out there, cosmic rays and the solar wind can take a long time to sterilize things flying through it. What if a hypervelocity impact on Earth sent not bits of dead dinosaur but some mineral-encased spores clear to Mars?
If anything earthly got to Mars alive, it can have done only one of three things: lived long, prospered or died. If hardy critters from Earth's ecological skid row landed in Martian brine 10 or 10,000 eons ago -- bacteria that thrive in acid hot springs, for instance, or Antarctic frost heaves -- it's bad news for Carl Sagan fans today. What will become of funding for the SETI project -- searching for extraterrestrial intelligence -- if we meet the aliens and they is us? Or us is them?
It would be nice to have some evidence either way. A few strenuous years could see the dispatch of some purpose-built probes to solve the conundrum. Recent Mars-destined instruments have focused not on life but on rocks, and you can't do molecular biology with a geologist's pick. NASA needs money enough to send several robots (in case one crashes as usual) carrying not Viking's Edsel-vintage life detectors but 21st-century mass spectrometers, biochips and glimmerings of artificial intelligence to run them.
If this little fleet sniffs a shift in the light and heavy isotopes in the air, or notices DNA in whatever damp cavern it can drill into, it's even money that we will have to get used to having neighbors. But don't get your hopes up, B-movie fans. The odds against Martians sacking Grover's Mills, N.J. -- à la Orson Welles -- remain, well, astronomical. Think slime and you won't be disappointed.
Full Bandwidth, Please
In 1969, the Eagle landed on the moon in pathetic black and white after rising in thunder and flame like 9/11 run backward. Mars deserves better. This time, the taxpaying audience should demand NASA's full bandwidth and the eye-popping resolution of an IMAX camera. For if we encounter anything not of this Earth on Mars, its image will begin a new and endless iconic dynasty. You can only be alone in the same universe once

Sunday, January 22, 2017

AND JUST LIKE THAT THEY WAS NO MORE CLIMATE CHANGE
                             WHICH THERE NEVER WERE

WATTS'  COMMENTARIAT  EMBRACES  ITS LATEST SCIENTIFIC CONSENSUS:



And just like that “Global Warming Vanished” No mention of it on the white house.gov page. Praise God. This is the biggest leftist agenda being shoved down the American peoples throats and they try to make it believable or threaten us deniers. But that it the LIE, there is nothing to deny cause it was all made up by a bunch of power hungry people who thought they could fool the ignorant of America..

Haha.. I am one happy women and am so glad we will tap into OIL & GAS since it is so abundant and lowers the cost of energy on ALL Americans. AND JUST LIKE THAT, THEY WAS NO MORE CLIMATE CHANGE, WHICH THERE NEVER WERE. The earth has cycles and just cause it warms and cools at different times does not mean you can shove you money grubbing agenda down our throats.

THANK GOD FOR TRUMP.. THE SILENT MAJORITY SPOKE AND IT ISN’T FOR DAMN CLIMATE CHANGE. Just that name is ridiculous. Duh of course the climate changes. Hello wake up, its a new day in America.









  PAT  BUCHANAN  GIVES  TRUMP  FIRST  SCIENCE  UPDATE

BRIEFING RECYCLED FROM UNREAD MEMO TO  PRESIDENT BUCHANAN 
FOUND  IN  LINCOLN  BEDROOM  
President  Trump  was  briefed yesterday on the latest scientific news to come to the attention of Pat Buchanan, who focused his two minute slideshow on British reports  of   John  Tyndall  FRS demonstrating the absorption of warmth  by  gases  released  by steam engines & blast furnaces to the Royal Society, news the former Nixon speechwriter thinks urgent because  East Coast liberals like Whig ex-President  James Buchanan have denied it.
The pundit says that being Pennsylvanian, his  presidential  namesake  is  intimately familiar with the strategic importance of coal and the new-fangled  Titusville Rock Oil  in  sustaining   the  Age  of  Steam,  and  shares  the  Whig  Base's indigation at the impious suggestion that  God-given resources can somehow vitiate Scripture, and alter the Postdiluvocene climate.
In his  State Of The Union  message the President lamented  the coal states vulnerability to  alternative fuels touted by  Nantucket whaling magnates, Newfoundland seal-harvesters and other Northerners, and proposed a compromise, in which Kansas and  Missouri are admitted to the Union as whale oil free states.
"All for which the  States  have  ever contended, is  to be let alone and permitted to manage their domestic institutions in their own way. As sovereign States, they, and they alone, are responsible  before  God and  the world  for  the  bounty [of steam-coal ] existing  among  them.  For this the [whalers] of the North are not more responsible and have no more right to interfere than with similar resources and practices in Russia or in Brazil "
Citing oeconomic concerns that America is approaching Peak Wood, the  President  chided  Illinois  Congressman  Abraham  Lincoln  for being in thrall to rail-splitting interests, and dismissed his  suggestion that a  Presidential  Office Of Natural Philosophy Policy might be of advantage to the Executive, saying:
" What do you think I am, sir ! Some sort of Scientific Republican ? "
“It is beyond the power of any president, no matter what may be his own political proclivities, to restore  a return to [wood-burning] among the states. Wisely limited and restrained as is his power under our Constitution and laws, he alone can accomplish but little for good or for evil on such a momentous question.”
President  Buchanan  dismissed  testimonials to  Tyndall from Profs. Silliman of  Yale &  Agassiz of  Harvard  College  as the work of known Geognostics, who authored the disasterous  proposal to defend the Alamo by building a Quincy granite wall along the  Mexican Border, and originated specious  warming theories  based on the works of  Erasmus Darwin, and the French elitist & suspected Libertinarian Baron Fourier.

Freed from the onerous intelectual workload of  McLaughlin Group  broadcasts , Pat will now be able to tutor  the President  weekly, and expects  to continue  with  a briefing on  molecular biology,  as soon as the heliostatic semaphore internet brings word of the discovery of molecules from the Continent.