In order to understand the workings of the thought-police there is no better place to start than with the Trial of Galileo.

It is well worthwhile taking twenty minutes or so to read the story of Galileo. Here was a brilliant scientist and mathematician, considered by many to be the founder of modern Physics, who feared for his life, because he accepted the theory of Copernicus that the Earth was not the centre of the universe and stayed still, but that the Earth revolved upon its own axis as it travelled round the Sun.

Since nobody today has any qualms about accepting such a notion it is difficult to believe that in 1597 Galileo wrote to Johannes Kepler to say that he dared not bring into the open his support for the Copernican theory. Why? Because the Catholic Church considered that it was against Holy Writ and the very idea that the Earth was not still and the centre of the Universe was considered absurd.

Western Siberia is currently stuck in a mini Ice Age as temperatures plummeted to nearly -80 degrees Fahrenheit, breaking all previous cold records. And meteorologists say that even icier weather is coming. Temps tumbled to -62 degrees Celsius (-79.6°F) at the Bolshoe Olkhovskoe oilfield in the Khanti-Mansi region this week. And the Kazym village in the Beloyarsky district showed a biting -58 degrees C (-72.4°F).

In the province of Nadym, the bone-shattering cold pushed past the -50 degrees C (-58°F) mark, forcing schools to shut down. In provinces like Yakutia, schools stayed open despite a bone-chilling -52 degrees C (-61.6°F). While these arctic temperatures are commonplace in eastern Siberia, it rarely gets this frigid in the west.

Image copyright: ESA

Scientists say they have identified a remarkable new feature in Earth’s molten outer core.They describe it as a kind of “jet stream” – a fast-flowing river of liquid iron that is surging westwards under Alaska and Siberia.

The moving mass of metal has been inferred from measurements made by Europe’s Swarm satellites. This trio of spacecraft are currently mapping Earth’s magnetic field to try to understand its fundamental workings. The scientists say the jet is the best explanation for the patches of concentrated field strength that the satellites observe in the northern hemisphere.

“This jet of liquid iron is moving at about fifty kilometres per year,” explained Dr Chris Finlay from the National Space Institute at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU Space).

Despite below-average temperatures breaking records across the Northern Hemisphere, the Washington Post is warning readers the North Pole may warm up 40-50 degrees on Thursday, which they blame for Arctic sea ice loss. Except the data doesn’t back up the claim. The Danish Meteorological Institute, which tracks Arctic sea ice, shows 2016 being similar to 2014 and 2015.

The anomalous weather event is a consequence of an always shifting jet stream, and not #Climate Change, which alarmists repeatedly claim is long-term weather over many years. Even 19 years of no statistical warming wasn’t long enough for NASA and NOAA to declare the great global warming scare was over. But a day of warming from a naturally occurring event is a beacon of impending doom.

It may be hard to believe that computer programming was once considered “woman’s work.” Today women are vastly underrepresented in science and technology-based industries. The number of women in STEM related subjects is so low that toy companies are even creating engineering sets specifically targeted for young girls.

So for those of us who’ve grown up in this reality, it’s hard to imagine a time or place where female programmers were the only people considered appropriate for the job.

I looked it up – I was curious. How many times does a normal healthy human being breathe in and breathe out in just one minute? Well, Google tells me that we exhale (that means breathe out for the scientifically illiterate friends of mine on Facebook) some fifteen to twenty times in one minute.

Let us take the lower number. What is 15 x 60? It equals 900 exhalations in every hour! Let us now multiply 900 by 24 to get the number of breaths in 24 hours. That comes to 21,600 exhalations of Carbon Dioxide at 40,000 parts per million in one single day by one average person.

The total world population is presently reckoned to be 7.4 billion. And rising! You do the maths for that!

Scientists from NASA and three universities have presented new discoveries about the way heat and energy move and manifest in the ionosphere, a region of Earth’s atmosphere that reacts to changes from both space above and Earth below.

Far above Earth’s surface, within the tenuous upper atmosphere, is a sea of particles that have been split into positive and negative ions by the sun’s harsh ultraviolet radiation. Called the ionosphere, this is Earth’s interface to space, the area where Earth’s neutral atmosphere and terrestrial weather give way to the space environment that dominates most of the rest of the universe – an environment that hosts charged particles and a complex system of electric and magnetic fields.

In 1973, glaciers were growing and animals were migrating south from the cold.

“The Ice Age Cometh” The Saturday Review, Saturday, March 24th, 1973

The National Center for Atmospheric Research and CRU both reported a very strong cooling trend since WWII.

14 Jul 1974, Page 1 – Lincoln Evening Journal

In 1981, James Hansen at NASA still showed much of the post-WWII cooling trend, as well as a Medieval Warm Period, Little Ice Age and a 7,000 year long global cooling trend.

Challenge_chapter2.pdf

Gavin Schmidt at NASA has since completely removed this cooling trend, and now shows warming from 1945 to 1975.

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CSV

Gavin didn’t do this tampering all at once. It has been a 16 year long project where he has tripled global warming by altering the data set.

Link to NASA files  2016  2012  2000

What is truly stunning is that satellite measured temperatures of the troposphere show little or no warming during that 16 year period when Gavin tripled global warming.

Wood for Trees: Interactive Graphs

Read more at realclimatescience.com

The myth that hydraulic fracturing, commonly called “fracking,” of oil and natural gas is responsible for the widespread, systemic contamination of groundwater (the stuff you drink) is one that is proving tremendously hard to kill. Like a hoard of Birkenstock-and-white-sock-wearing terminators—and here I paraphrase the film—proponents of fracking bans can’t be bargained with, can’t be reasoned with, can’t feel pity or remorse or fear, and they absolutely will not stop, ever, until fracking is dead.

No matter how many blows they get dealt, they keep on coming. No matter what the scientific literature says, they will not stray from their mission.

mwr-035-01-0007b.pdf

In the year 2000, NASA showed a total of 0.4C warming over land. In 2012, they showed 1.0C warming. Now they show 1.3C warming. They have tripled global warming over the past 16 years. All of this data was taken directly off the NASA web site.

A University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee professor is making headlines for his work suggesting the world is entering a period of global cooling.

“Now we’re getting a break,” Anastasios Tsonis, Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at UWM, said in an interview with the MacIver Institute.

Tsonis published a paper last March that found the world goes through periods of warming and cooling that tend to last thirty years. He says we are now in a period of cooling that could last up to fifty years.  

With record breaking cold temperatures around the world this winter, his research is starting to get a lot of attention.  Over the past couple of weeks, Tsonis has been featured in the British newspapers The Guardian and the Daily Mail.

Guess who the new climate ‘conspiracy theorists’ are?

When I first saw this published in the WaPo, I thought it was a joke: Why I’m trying to preserve federal climate data before Trump takes office.  Excerpts:

Trump is serious about overtly declaring war on science. This isn’t a presidential transition. It’s an Inquisition. It’s a 21st-century book burning. The incoming administration is likely to be willfully hostile toward the scientific process, with far-reaching implications.

One of the most tangible consequences of sharp cutbacks in federal funding for climate science is the potential loss of critical data — whether by neglect or malice — that underlie global efforts to understand our climate system. By all accounts, that’s exactly what Trump and his team want: Ignorance of how human actions are affecting our planet makes it easier to maintain the status quo.

It is becoming clear that not only do many scientists dispute the asserted global warming crisis, but these skeptical scientists may indeed form a scientific consensus.

Don’t look now, but maybe a scientific consensus exists concerning global warming after all. Only 36 percent of geoscientists and engineers believe that humans are creating a global warming crisis, according to a survey reported in the peer-reviewed Organization Studies. By contrast, a strong majority of the 1,077 respondents believe that nature is the primary cause of recent global warming and/or that future global warming will not be a very serious problem. 

Beware so-called ‘experts’ with ‘scientist’ tagged onto their job description. If you qualify in a proper science you are a ‘Physicist’, a ‘Chemist’ a ‘Biologist’ etc. These are proper terms indicating rigorous training in one of the ‘hard’ sciences.

Usually those trained in the ‘hard’ sciences are the smartest people. They have spent years studying at universities, passing tough exams. They openly share data and their collective efforts over the past 150 years or so, applying the traditional scientific method, has rewarded us with the industrial revolution and every technological advance of society.

Those who are less smart – less capable of applying rigorous mathematics, theorems and analytical reasoning – but who still want to be associated with the veneer of science opt to work in the ‘soft’ sciences (such fields are a modern phenomenon).

In his first inaugural address, U.S. President Obama said, “We’ll restore science to its rightful place…” He subsequently used this phrase to frame a number of activities across his administration.*While I, like many in the scientific community, was pleased with this declaration, I found the term “rightful place” to be thought-provoking.

The word “rightful” is usually taken to mean legitimate or morally appropriate. Yet, the word “right” has multiple meanings; it can mean morally good or justified, as noted above, but it can also mean true or correct as fact. It is the latter meaning that is essential for the position of science in government.