There is a winner

The winner of the DARPA challenge was MIT. Sounds like like of social networking, along with deceptions were involved. It will be pretty cool to see all the data.

Technorati Tags: General

What sort of person knowingly misrepresents information?

by laverrue
Andrew Bolt’s mountain of disinformation:
[Via Deltoid]

Andrew Bolt claims that “new research” “once more shows Al Gore faked his findings in An Inconvenient Truth”. He offers his own translation of something which he attributes to “Elsevier”: (Yes, the company that publishes The Lancet.)

Former [sic] American vice president and Nobel Prize winner Gore has for years used the melting snow on Africa’s highest mountain (5892 metres) for his climate propaganda. The snow cover is shrinking and that is caused by man and his greenhouse gases!

The Dutch scientist Jaap Sinninghe Damsté debunks this story of climate guru Gore in the leading periodical Nature.

A natural process of large climate shifts seems to be the true cause, says the Dutch Organisation for Scientific Research on Thursday….

The researcher and European colleagues discovered that Kilimanjaro underwent successive periods of heavy monsoons and extreme dryness. Ice and snow retreat from the top in dry periods and return in the very wet ones….

Al Gore must find another symbol for his climate problem. Kilimanjaro does now have little snow on the peak, but that seems to be completely natural.

Well, it seems unfair to criticize Gore for not including the results of research published only yesterday. It is, however, perfectly fair to criticize Bolt for not including the results of the research in a post about that research.

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I believe that Gore has simply said that Kilimanjaro is simply representative of what would happen to glaciers in the face of global warming. But, the paper Bolt mentions does not appear to discuss the effects of current global temperatures. In fact, if you examine Figure 7 in the supplemental material, you can see that the last 100 years or so have seen a large trend towards a wetter BIT Index.

So, the loss of glaciers on the mountain would have to be due to something that is not natural. Because the natural processes should be tilted towards more ice on the glaciers, not less. If Bolt wants to use this paper, he would also have to admit that current trends of the glaciers on Kilimanjaro are ‘unnatural.’

Interestingly, last month Glacier loss on Kilimanjaro continues unabated indicated that the loss of ice on the mountain is unprecedented over the last 12,000 years or so.The paper also suggests it is not natural. It ends the Discussion section with this:

Hence, the climatological conditions currently driving the loss of Kilimanjaro’s ice fields are clearly unique within an 11,700-year perspective. These observations suggest that warmer near-surface conditions observed in the region, coupled with observed vertical amplification of temperature in lower latitudes (23–25), are playing an important role. Regardless of the contributions of various drivers, the ice fields atop Kilimanjaro will not endure if current conditions are sustained and adaptive actions to minimize the potential impacts should be developed quickly.

They too do not think the shrinking ice is natural. They can not yet pin it directly on climate change (agricultural trends in the surrounding areas may also be involved) but climate change can not be ruled out.

Technorati Tags: Environment, Science

It should be more easy to get out of war than into it

Bill Moyers on Constitutional Law; How Far We’ve Come:
[Via Firedoglake]

War isn’t a prospect that our forefathers took lightly, which is why they made it an act that was hard for the nation to commit. That was Bill Moyers’ point last night in his essay, a reflection on the Constitution. Constitutional powers, so carefully and democratically written, would have protected the country from mistakes we now suffer.

As Moyers pointed out, the authors of our Constitution had experienced war, and wrote knowledge beyond the experience of our present-day war presidents into the laws meant to keep this country viable. Failure of the country’s basic duty to its people has resulted from ignoring the law, a failure the founders anticipated. The government of the United States was the first democracy; thought from brilliant minds made the laws that would have kept it functional. It was not meant to fail, as it has when war presidents have failed to follow that well-wrought Constitution that they had sworn to protect and defend.

On Tuesday night President Obama took pains to say Afghanistan is not Vietnam, and of course he’s right. But war is war, no matter where or when it’s fought. Because its costs are great and its consequences unpredictable, the men who wrote our Constitution were determined to make it hard to go to war except to defend ourselves and our liberty.

Although long abandoned, such constraint deserves more respect than it gets. And in this regard, Afghanistan, along with Iraq, is like Vietnam. Almost unilaterally – with only a fig-leaf of Congressional approval – Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, both Bushes, and now Barack Obama committed us to costly wars far removed from the rationale of self-defense set forth by those delegates to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787.

Our founders knew too well the habits of European kings who went to war at the drop of a royal hat or for the lust of a royal heart. Matters of life and death, they argued, should never be so easily decided by one man. In the now quaint but still elegant language of their day, they understood – and these are the words of James Madison – that: “In war, the public treasures are to be unlocked; and it is the executive hand which is to dispense them.” But that was not a good idea, Madison said. Such a mixture of powers would be a temptation “too great for any one man.” Even a good man, of good intentions. Madison worried that: “The strongest passions and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast; ambition, avarice, vanity, the honorable or venial love of fame, are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace.”

They were not naïve, our founders. The question of war was no theoretical exercise for them. The new republic was threatened on all sides. Its young government had to be able to defend itself; the new chief executive – not a king but a president – would need, at times, to act quickly and decisively. So the founders debated the question vigorously. Where do we vest the power of war?

Charles Pinckney of South Carolina wanted to give it to the Senate alone. Pierce Butler, also of South Carolina, wanted to vest it in the President, quote, “who will have all the requisite qualities and will not make war but when the Nation will support it.” That idea brought Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts to his feet, shocked: “I never expected to hear in a republic a motion to empower the executive alone to declare war.” And George Mason of Virginia agreed. “I am against giving the power of war to the executive,” Mason said, “because he is not safely to be trusted with it — or to the Senate [...] I am,” he said, “for clogging rather than facilitating war.”

In the end the delegates compromised, as usual, with an eye to checks-and-balances. They gave Congress the power to declare war legally, but left the President free to repel sudden attacks. The delegate from Connecticut, Oliver Ellsworth, summed up their collective wisdom when he said, “It should be more easy to get out of war than into it.”

How far we’ve come.

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Too bad we seem to have done this the wrong way so many times that we now have it backwards.

Technorati Tags: Science

Taking data out of context is a fool’s game

Lies and the Lying Liars:
[Via Fables of the reconstruction]

Remember that claim wingers made that Obama had too few people with private sector experience in his administration? Yep.

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The author of the original figure, when tracked down, was aghast that activists and pundits had distorted his work. In fact, even he admitted it was a subjective exercise. But that did not prevent people who had no clue to the context of the underlying data to misuse it for their own political advantage.

Their own political advantage. For pundits, failing to vet information or lying to gain political advantage is part of the job description. Their goal is not to inform. It is to gain political advantage for their views, pure and simple.

Anyone who uses ‘information’ from a pundit should realize that lying and misrepresentation are most likely present. So, check it out first.

Technorati Tags: General, Politics

Doing some writing

I’ve been spending a lot of time replying to comments the last few days. I guess i have to figure out ways to get automatically linked at WUWT if I really want to get more traffic.

Actually, I’m going to try and write some more today. That and watch the Amazing Race marathon on TV.

Technorati Tags: General

I don’t expect this will be enough

Met Office to reveal climate data

[Via BBC News | Science/Nature | World Edition]

The Met Office is to announce it will publish the raw data it uses to analyse man-made global warming.

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It is good news to hear that the Met Office will release the data that it had previously said could not be released. Proprietary data can be very useful but the nature of IP makes it sometimes problematic. Nice to see them respond this way. I hope they are telling the truth that they were planning this all along but that sounds about as sincere as someone saying they resigned to spend more time with their families.

I hope this will be enough. The data will be available. I wonder what the next demand will be. I have seen some that go like this “What is so great about the data? Unless you teach us how to use it, it is useless. where are the manuals for the models?”

If this follows previous sorts of denialist’s requests, there will be more demands, usually by moving the goalposts. Denial is just too much a part of their system.

[Listening to: From Now On from the album "Even in the Quietest Moments (Remastered)" by Supertramp]

The coolest contest

DARPA
Ten balloons like this one will be put up to kick off the DARPA Network Challenge on Saturday.

Balloon hunt goes viral
[Via Cosmic Log]

More than 300 teams have signed up for this weekend’s DARPA Network Challenge, a $40,000 balloon hunt organized by the Pentagon’s think tank to study how social networking works. And one of the things that has come out of the experiment is that you could earn some of the prize money yourself, just by being in the right place at the right time.

The idea is simple: The first team to report the locations of 10 weather balloons put up across the nation on Saturday wins the prize. But the social-networking strategy can get devilishly complex … or just plain devilish.

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Leave it to DARPA to come up with such a neat competition. Place 10 weather balloons in public areas around the country for a day, then take them down. The first tea ti identify where all 10 balloons were wins.

A social network is important but simply putting up a Facebook page will not cut it. Some really interesting ideas will come out of this. Which is really the point.