“The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, skepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin.” –  Thomas Huxley

This comment describes the career of John L. Daly (March 1943-January 2004). John lived on the beautiful island of Tasmania, where he became a climate devil gaining global attention in 1995 when he started the most successful early skeptics webpage “Still Waiting for Greenhouse.” He was an innovator in the climate area of using the internet to establish himself.

Scientists have long been puzzled by comets. Retired science writer, Edsel Chromie, who has studied the subject in a long career, shares his unique insight on this tantalizing mystery of outer space.

Edsel writes:

In 1985 I wrote to NASA explaining my unique concept of comets. I received a reply dated Nov. 21, 1985 from Stephen Maran, Senior Staff Scientist. He wrote: “Thank you for your letter of Nov. 7^th concerning your concept for explaining the nature of comets. Along with most other astronomers who have investigated the subject, I favor the dirty ice ball model. However, rather than debate the subject with those such as yourself who are proposing other theories, I’m just planning to wait for the results of the space probe visits to Halley’s Comet, which will show us whether there is an ice ball or not.” 

Over 30 years later NASA is still sending probes to comets trying to determine what is causing the bizarre activity. Now, they say they will examine the interior of comets to see if something in the interior is creating these effects.

In 1985 the International Cometary Explorer flew right through the tail of the Giacobini-Zinner Comet and Flight Director Robert Farquhar said: “With the ship well into the tail, we haven’t seen any dust at all. I’m very surprised.” In 1986 the scientists on the Imaging Team in Darmstadt, Germany reviewing the data from Halley’s Comet said: “Vega 1 showed that Halley’s Comet was cleaner than the clean rooms manufacturers use to assemble spacecraft. The surface is blacker than black coal. The blackest, least reflective paint we manufacture on Earth reflects more light.” Then NASA reported that the Vega 1 spacecraft was “zapped by an electrical charge” which destroyed the camera.

Must come down. Of course, we’re referring to lower atmospheric temperatures measured by satellites.

For months we have been saying that, once they started dropping, the satellite temperatures—our only truly global measure—were going to go down with a vengeance, which is what usually happens after a strong El Niño event spikes a fever. El Niño is a dramatic slowdown (or even a reversal) in the trade winds that diverge surface water away from the South American coast, “upwelling” much colder subsurface waters. When that stops, global temperatures rocket upwards, but that also builds up more and more cold water to be unleashed when the trade winds resume.

On Earth they produce mesmerizing riots of color that light up the night sky around the poles.

But our planet is not the only world to enjoy stunning aurora – better known as the northern and southern lights.

Now scientists are hoping to unravel the secrets of the biggest such polar light show in our solar system by focusing their attention on Jupiter’s aurora.

They are using the Hubble Space Telescope to study the giant planet’s atmospheric light shows, which cover an area larger than the entire Earth.

New images captured by the telescope reveal the flickers and flashes produced as high energy particles in the solar wind collide with gases over Jupiter’s poles.

Scientists at two of the world’s leading climate centres – NASA and NOAA – have been caught out manipulating temperature data to overstate the extent of the 20th century “global warming”.

The evidence of their tinkering can clearly be seen at Real Science, where blogger Steven Goddard has posted a series of graphs which show “climate change” before and after the adjustments.

When the raw data is used, there is little if any evidence of global warming and some evidence of global cooling. However, once the data has been adjusted – ie fabricated by computer models –  20th century ‘global warming’ suddenly looks much more dramatic.

The daily Berliner Kurier here writes today that solar physicists at the ultra-warmist Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) are warning that Europe may be facing “a mini ice age” due to a possible protracted solar minimum. 

Solar activity has been much lower than predicted earlier. Credit: D. Hathaway/NASA/MSFC

The Berliner Kurier writes:

That’s the conclusion that solar physicists of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research reached when looking at solar activity.”

To Professor Olle Inganäs (chaiman),

Dear Professor Inganäs,

On Feb. 11, 2016 the LIGO-team published the paper PRL 116, 061102 (2016): Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Merger. The experimental proof for the existence of a gravitational wave was announced: Mirrors of 40 kg had been displaced by 10-18 m during fractions of a second as measured with a Michelson-interferometer with 4 km arm length resulting in a strain of 10-21.

Scaling up these data by a factor of 1013 a relative accuracy must have been achieved by a hair’s breadth (10 microns) in relation to the distance to the next fixed star (4 light-years). This is by a factor of 1 Million better than the relative Mössbauer accuracy of 10-15 obtained so far.

Indeed, Rudolf Mössbauer was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics in 1961 for this achievement. In order to substantiate this extraordinary claim, it is absolutely necessary to demonstrate experimentally LIGO’s ability to measure a displacement of 10-18 m that is one thousandth of a proton radius. The reader is assured that the calibration of the system can be achieved by moving the mirrors by such a tiny distance with radiation pressure: “The detector output is calibrated in strain by measuring its response to test mass motion induced by photon pressure from a modulated calibration laser beam [63].” Ref. [63] is an unpublished e-print describing the calibration method by radiation pressure.

Formula (10) gives the calculable connection between displacement and the radiation power of an auxiliary laser shining on the mirror. Unfortunately no data are given as to the laser power, wave form, number of oscillations in order to compare with the documented effect that was exerted on the mirrors by the wave GW150914, as displayed in the “discovery paper”.

An enquiry with the Albert Einstein Institut revealed that such data do not exist. Prof. Karsten Danzmann declared that the calibration procedure is much more complicated than could be expected from the announcement in the discovery paper (http://www.kritikrelativitaetstheorie.de/Anhaenge/Anfrage%20LIGO-Experiment.pdf , document 13).

In order to understand it, one would need to study lengthy technical documents such as arXiv:1007.3973v1 [gr-qc] 22 Jul 2010 which, however, does not present either a calibration curve “mirror displacement versus laser power”. In view of this statement one must conclude that an experimental proof for the claimed accuracy of the system does not exist, certainly none which is intelligible and could be accepted by the scientific public.

It would be easy to move the mirrors by radiation pressure similarly as the gravitational wave did on 15-09-14 , but no data have been published since then that would document this calibration measurement. In view of Prof. Danzmann’s statement one must suspect that LIGO was not calibrated as announced in the discovery paper with the consequence that the claim having detected a gravitational wave is not substantiated experimentally.

It is quite possible that GW150914 was a test signal injected into the system before the science run started. The second “discovery” GW151226 shows a very weak signal that is hardly discernable in the noise as admitted by the authors themselves.

In the early seventies there was a claim by Joe Weber having detected gravitational waves. Repetitions of his measurements by several groups came up with null results. Weber was not awarded a Nobel Prize, a wise decision by the Committee. In the present instance it is not easily possible to repeat independent experiments with interferometers of 4 km arm length.

One should insist, however, that the LIGO-group carries out the calibration as described in their discovery paper and publishes the results. Such data were included in the previous Technical Document LIGO-T030266-00 – D 9/22/03 (https://dcc.ligo.org/public/0027/T030266/000/T030266-00.pdf ) where much higher laser power was applied to achieve measurable displacements. Hence, it is surprising to notice that direct calibration data were not included in Ref. [63] on this far more auspicious occasion. As more events like GW150914 are expected, one should wait and see whether they materialize.

With my best regards,

Wolfgang Engelhardt

******

Wolfgang Engelhardt’s scientific background is shown on his profile, accessed at researchgate.net

The sun has gone “completely blank” for the second time this month suggesting that Earth could be heading for a mini ICE AGE.

Earlier this month, there were no sunspots on the massive star’s surface for four days – something which hadn’t happened since 2011. This has since happened again.

This afternoon’s top climate fraud is a claim that warming temperatures and disappearing sea ice threatens penguins.

Global warming threatens penguin population | khou.com

Had the author actually done any research, she would have known that Antarctic sea ice is increasing, not decreasing.

Around 1250 A.D., historical records show, ice packs began showing up farther south in the North Atlantic. Glaciers also began expanding on Greenland, soon to threaten Norse settlements on the island. From 1275 to 1300 A.D., glaciers began expanding more broadly, according to radiocarbon dating of plants killed by the glacier growth. The period known today as the Little Ice Age was just starting to poke through.

Summers began cooling in Northern Europe after 1300 A.D., negatively impacting growing seasons, as reflected in the Great Famine of 1315 to 1317. Expanding glaciers and ice cover spreading across Greenland began driving the Norse settlers out. The last, surviving, written records of the Norse Greenland settlements, which had persisted for centuries, concern a marriage in 1408 A.D. in the church of Hvalsey, today the best preserved Norse ruin.

Colder winters began regularly freezing rivers and canals in Great Britain, the Netherlands and Northern France, with both the Thames in London and the Seine in Paris frozen solid annually. The first River Thames Frost Fair was held in 1607. In 1607-1608, early European settlers in North America reported ice persisting on Lake Superior until June. In January, 1658, a Swedish army marched across the ice to invade Copenhagen. By the end of the 17th century, famines had spread from northern France, across Norway and Sweden, to Finland and Estonia.

Second largest 2-month drop in global average satellite temperatures– Largest 2-month drop in tropical average satellite temperatures.

The Version 6.0 global average lower tropospheric temperature (LT) anomaly for June, 2016 is +0.34 deg. C, down 0.21 deg. C from the May value of +0.55 deg. C (click for full size version):

This gives a 2-month temperature fall of -0.37 deg. C, which is the second largest in the 37+ year satellite record…the largest was -0.43 deg. C in Feb. 1988.

As I pointed out recently, the ozone levels at Mauna Loa seem to be just oscillating across an an unchanging range, indicating no trend.  And ozone is well mixed so at least that non-trend (if not absolute levels) should also apply over the Antarctic.  And that does seem to be so.  The “hole” too just oscillates, expanding and contracting in a random way. And in October 2015 the Antarctic ozone hole reached a record size.  No shrinking there!  Which is very frustrating to Greenies.

But they were determined to find something to support their thinking so pulled together all the data they could find on the hole and tortured it with statistics.  They did something that is totally illegitimate in statistics:  Data dredging.    If you look hard enough at any set if statistics you can generally find SOME trend or correlation somewhere.  The problem is that  extending the data base in some way usually wipes out the trend or correlation.  There is a classic example of that here in a study of lynching in the American South.

So what did the authors dredge out?  It would be funny if it were not so pathetic.  They found a trend line going through the data for September only.  In Septembers since 2000, the ozone has been behaving itself, too bad about the other months of the year. How you can draw any inferences from that — let alone the sweeping inferences they do draw — I do not know.

The hole in the ozone layer over the Antarctic has finally begun to ‘heal’ after persisting for years.

A new study has recorded an ozone increase in the icy region, suggesting the agreement signed nearly three decades ago to limit the use of substances responsible for ozone depletion, is having a positive effect.

As well as creating an identifying ozone increase, it’s slowing the rate of ozone depletion in the stratosphere – Earth’s second major atmospheric layer.

Ozone is a gas composed of three oxygen molecules which can be hazardous to our health on the ground, but in the upper atmosphere it protects us by soaking up ultraviolet radiation from the sun.

Without it, the planet’s surface would be exposed to dangerous levels of UV-B rays which can shred DNA, leading to mutations that cause cancers.

If you can trust the media and some companies’ claims, the idea of self-driving (AKA “autonomous”) vehicles is rapidly gaining traction. Now, the U.S. Natl. Safety Transportation Agency (NHTSA) has released a report about a fatal incident, back in May, 2016, that’s said to have been caused by the failure of an autonomously steered vehicle to recognize a light-colored tractor unit against a bright background, as the New York Times and other media report.

Since then, both the car manufacturer and the NHTSA have emphasized the need for (the human) driver-seat occupant of “driverless cars” to be in control of the vehicle – at all times.

Really, the question must be:

Who, actually, is in Charge?

Somehow, I must have totally misunderstood the whole idea of “driverless vehicles.” If I, as the driver-seat occupant am totally responsible for everything that the autonomous beast does, why do I need – or even want – any autonomous (or is it “automated” ?) “back-seat driver?” Who (if anyone or anything) is in control and responsible for the vehicle?

The May 24, 2016 Science program “Secret Mission of the Voyager Mission”, showed a photograph of the “volcano” of Io. It was simply a light blue glow, not a view of volcanic ash spewing from the surface. Since this was photographed in 1980 by the Voyager spacecraft no volcano cone or even a small stream or mound of lava has been seen on Io. The scientists cite the gravity of Jupiter as the source for gravitational flexing that causes Io to generate heat in its interior that creates the volcanic action. However, they completely ignore the fact that the magnetic field of Jupiter is reported to be 10,000 times stronger than the magnetic field of the Earth and Io orbits within this powerful magnetic field. This will certainly generate a charge of static electricity capable of exciting atoms of gases to a glowing state of excitement wherever there is an abnormal ferrous mineral deposit on the surface of Io.

It also reported that the dark spokes within Saturn’s rings keep pace with the rotation of the magnetic field of Saturn. This is not a coincidence. It is the magnetic field intensity that causes the glow of the rings of Saturn in the first place. So the variation in the intensity of the magnetic field causes the atoms of gases to glow brightly or the lose their glow whenever the magnetic field intensity ceases or diminishes in intensity.

China shut down numerous wind turbines because much of the new electricity was wasted, causing serious damage to the country’s electrical grid.

China has poured more than $80 billion building new green energy in 2014 alone, while the U.S. spent a “mere” $34 billion. More than one-in-three wind turbines currently installed worldwide are in China. Even with this enormous number of turbines, China still produces less electricity from wind than America, indicating the country is so over-saturated with turbines that it is damaging the power grid, potentially leading to blackouts.