Articles Tagged "Doug L. Hoffman"
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Wednesday, March 20th 2013, 11:43 AM EDT
The recent meteor break-up over Russia, and the close pass of asteroid 2012 DA14, serve to reminded people that all objects in the solar system are subject to the occasional collision. A look at the surface of Earth's Moon, or the surface of Mars, gives ample evidence of collisions past. Lest we think it can't happen to us, Earth's surface also bares the scars of bombardment from space.
For example, the Manicouagan Crater, located in Canada, is one of the oldest known impact craters on Earth (see the image below). It is thought to have been caused by the impact of a 5 km (3 mi) diameter asteroid about 215.5 million years ago, during the Triassic Period. The crater is a multiple-ring structure about 100 km (60 mi) across, with its 70 km (40 mi) diameter inner ring its most prominent feature.
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Tuesday, March 12th 2013, 8:39 PM EDT
Appearing the the journal Science—a publication with a notably biased stance regarding the theory of AGW—the report of a new study of historical global temperatures has reignited global warming fever in the news media and blogosphere:
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Sunday, March 3rd 2013, 6:10 PM EST
The 11 year solar cycle—the waxing and waning of activity on the Sun—is well known, if not well understood. The solar cycle is the periodic change in the Sun's activity, including changes in levels of solar radiation and the ejection of solar material. Solar cycles have been observed for hundreds of years by earthbound observers noting changes in the sun's appearance. Generations of scientists have kept detailed records of changes in the number of sunspots, flares, and other visible manifestations. Changes in solar activity affects space weather, which can be important when launching satellites. It can also impact conditions here on Earth, adversely affecting communications, radio broadcasts and power grids. For these reasons, forecasting the solar cycle is not just an idle pursuit for Sun gazing scientists.
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Tuesday, January 29th 2013, 12:34 AM EST
The Met Office says temperatures will remain flat until 2017
A newly released study from the Research Council of Norway has climate change alarmists abuzz. One of the things the alarmists have been pushing for is to halt warming at a 2°C increase at any cost (and they mean that literally). In the Norwegian study, much to the alarmists' dismay, researchers have arrived at an estimate of 1.9°C as the most likely level of future warming. The report also recognizes that temperatures have stabilized at 2000 levels for the past decade even though CO2 levels have continued to rise. Meanwhile, a reconstruction of the Eemian interglacial from the new NEEM ice core, published in the journal Nature, shows that in spite of a climate 8°C warmer than that of the past millennium, the ice in Northern Greenland was only a few hundred meters lower than its present level. This finding casts doubt on the projected melting of ice sheets and resulting sea-level rise.
After rising sharply through the 1990s, Earth’s mean surface temperature has leveled off nearly completely at its 2000 level. Ocean warming also appears to have stabilized, despite the fact that CO2 emissions and other anthropogenic factors claimed to contribute to global warming are still on the rise. Clearly, a number of factors affect climate development, not just the usual suspects cited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
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Tuesday, January 22nd 2013, 3:27 PM EST
Ecologists are proposing to create general ecological models so they can simulate nature rather than study it..
General Circulation Models (GCM), which simulate the physics and chemistry of Earth's land, oceans and atmosphere, are an essential component of the pseudoscience behind the global warming scam. Using large, complex computer programs doing indecipherable things while burning up exa-cycles of supercomputer time allows climate scientists to lay down a fake science smokescreen few can penetrate. Naturally, other scientists, with lower funding, are envious of climate modelers and their play toys, including ecologists. In an impassioned plea published in Nature, a group of environmental scientists argue that it is high time that they get to build models of their own. General Ecosystem Models (GEMs) could radically improve understanding of the biosphere and inform policy decisions about biodiversity and conservation they claim. But are they really aware of what they are asking for?
In a commentary piece, “Ecosystems: Time to model all life on Earth,” Drew Purves, of the Environmental Science Group at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK, and colleagues have proposed that global models of Earth's ecosystem, analogous to global climate models, be developed to place environmental science on an even footing with climate science. The lack of such GEM programs causes the authors to opine:
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Wednesday, January 16th 2013, 5:22 PM EST
Time and again the proponents of catastrophic climate change use the mantra of “settled science” to shout down their critics. This is nothing less than blind faith that science actually knows what is going on in the complex environment that regulates this planet's climate. Imagine a part of that system that is literally only 10km from anywhere on Earth, a component of our environment that science thought it understood quite well. Now imagine the embarrassment when a major review in a noted journal finds that previous datasets associated with this component are wrong and have been wrong for more than a quarter of a century. Yet that is precisely what has happened. The area in question is Earth's stratosphere and the impact of this report is devastating for climate scientists and atmospheric modelers everywhere.
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Saturday, December 29th 2012, 5:29 PM EST
According to NOAA's National Snow Analyses page, most of the US is under a blanket of snow. Record cold temperatures are being set in the northern tier while tornadoes sweep across the south. Even sunny Florida has had to contend with overnight freezes in the interior that threatened citrus crops. Average low temperatures ranged from the mid-20s, mainly in north Florida, to the mid-40s. Alachua recorded the lowest at 25 degrees and Fort Lauderdale the highest at 46 degrees.
views 17,112
Tuesday, December 4th 2012, 2:42 AM EST
A new report says that Glaciers are melting, but not as fast as some say. In fact, Antartica is gaining almost as much ice as it loses.
A new “comprehensive” report about the melting of Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets is being touted by climate alarmists as “grim news” but in fact says no such thing. This latest estimate, published this week in Science, combines data from many sources including 20 years of satellite data and 32 years of ice-sheet simulations to arrive at a mixed conclusion. It estimates that, between 1992 and 2011, the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets lost 1350 ± 1010 and 2700 ± 930 Gt of ice, respectively. That is equivalent to an increase in global mean sea level of 11.2 ± 3.8 mm, less than 1/2 an inch. Moreover, while some areas were loosing ice mass others were gaining mass from snowfall. The East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS), which occupies over 75% of Antarctica, experienced mass gains during the final years of the study.
views 44,455
Wednesday, November 14th 2012, 5:40 PM EST
Climate modelers are still trying to create a clockwork climate machine
For half a century, climate scientists have been attempting to simulate the workings of Earth's climate system in computer models. Over that period of time computers have increased in computational power a million fold, allowing models to grow in complexity and, if you accept the word of the modelers themselves, accuracy. Today's models may produce more realistic output but that should not be confused with more accurate output—modern climate models are still unable to accurately predict future fluctuations in Earth's environment. Why this should be so is highlighted in a new paper published in the Journal Of Advances In Modeling Earth Systems (JAMES), a publication of the American Geophysical Union. In it the tuning secrets of those modern-day mystics, climate modelers, are revealed.
Early on, computer modelers were content to capture the rough behavior of isolated parts of the physical world: heat transfer, fluid flow in ocean and atmosphere, and such. These models were created to provide scientists with insight into natural processes where it was impractical to perform real-world experiments. This is a thoroughly reasonable application of computer models. But as computers became larger and more powerful the modelers soon expanded the complexity of their code, aiming eventually to simulate the system of the world. Sadly, the development of these models went hand in hand with the rise of climate change alarmism—the over hyped and unproven theory that human activity was causing a dangerous warming of the global climate.
views 17,246
Friday, November 2nd 2012, 6:16 PM EDT
Photo-shopped images helped feed the frenzy.
In a mad rush to prove who can put out the most inane press release, various warm-mongers, news hacks and climate alarmists have gone on a predictable spree, trying to blame Hurricane Sandy and the resulting disaster in the US Northeast on CO2 levels. Who are these clowns? Even the IPCC issued a statement saying that global warming was not to blame. Have none of these empty headed blatherskites noticed that it has been more than seven years since a major hurricane struck the US, the longest such period since the Civil War? Evidently not, since they continue to spew unscientific twaddle and the news media continues to lap it up like a dog eating its own vomit.
Almost falling over each other to put out the most outrageous statement, the world's warmist agitators have filled the air waves, news papers and social media sites with an avalanche of anti-knowledge. Our friend Marc Morano, over at Climate Depot, has a sizable list of comments on both sides of this jerkfest. Here are a few examples:
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