NASA finally began preparing the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) for testing Thursday, but the project is way behind schedule and over budget.

New video shows the telescope being moved onto a mobile stand for testing, but the project was slated to be in space by 2011. NASA announced last December that the JWST was halfway completed, but the project is currently $7.2 billion over its initial budget and seven years behind the original schedule. The JWST was initially projected to cost $1.6 billion.

The Government Accountability Office now estimates the final cost at $8.8 billion, and NASA has now scheduled the telescope for an October 2018 launch, adding to the telescope’s long history of major cost overruns and delays.

My wife Mary and I live in central Florida. Hurricane Matthew was expected to hit us around 8am Friday morning. Around 5pm Thursday, I decided to pick up a few groceries. It was too late. Every supermarket was closed. Streets were empty. It felt like I was driving on the set of a sci-fi movie.

We lost power 10pm Thursday night. Mid-morning Friday, the worst of the storm had passed us. Thank God we only lost one tree, which missed our house, and one section of our fence.

Mary and I took a ride to assess neighborhood damage. The streets were empty. A picture window was smashed at the corner food mart/gas station. We suspected it was the result of thug damage rather than hurricane damage. We saw three young black guys with their pants below their butts approaching. Accuse me of profiling, but my instincts told me they were up to no good. Sure enough, they spotted the broken window and made a beeline to it. I told Mary to video them with her phone. My foot hovered above the gas pedal for a fast getaway. When the thugs saw Mary shooting them, they wandered away. Mary called the emergency number posted on the store window.

When Elon Musk isn’t outlining plans to use his massive rocket to leave a decaying Planet Earth and colonize Mars, he sometimes talks about his belief that Earth isn’t even real and we probably live in a computer simulation.

“There’s a billion to one chance we’re living in base reality,” he said at a conference in June.

Musk is just one of the people in Silicon Valley to take a keen interest in the “simulation hypothesis”, which argues that what we experience as reality is actually a giant computer simulation created by a more sophisticated intelligence. If it sounds a lot like The Matrix, that’s because it is.

According to this week’s New Yorker profile of Y Combinator venture capitalist Sam Altman, there are two tech billionaires secretly engaging scientists to work on breaking us out of the simulation. But what does this mean? And what evidence is there that we are, in fact, living in The Matrix?

… and, perhaps, also radishes, snow peas, chard, and tomatoes – all for your balanced diet when dining on Mars.

Those are the plants that the current investigators at NASA think that you may be able to grow on planet Mars, provided these plants can be grown there at all. That’s why NASA is studying the subject at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Of course, they have high level backing from the White House that is fostering this week’s conference on “White House Frontiers: Robots, Space Exploration, and the Future of American Innovation.” The conference has five main themes, one of which is “Interplanetary Frontiers.” What could possibly be wrong, or go wrong?

Jesus turned barrels of water into wine, and good wine at that. Not a drop or two, but large pots, and in only a moment. The details might be important.

Jesus told them, “Fill the jars with water.” So they filled them to the brim. Then he told them, “Draw some out now and take it to the headwaiter.” So they took it. And when the headwaiter tasted the water that had become wine…

Evidently, Jesus never touched the jars. As soon as they were filled, the water in them turned to wine (though it’s possible the water turned to wine in the ladles). The time this took must have been short. A moment or two, tops.

This happened, so it had to happen some how. The question is how? If we have any physicists or chemists in the audience, perhaps they might take a guess. (If you say it didn’t happen, then suppose it did arguendo. Do not go on about how it didn’t.)

It’s not often in the crazy world of Climate Science that you find something wholly new, even crazier than the last crazy thing you read, and written by one of the most prominent climate crazies of all. I’m talking about “Climate Change Science: A Modern Synthesis: Volume 1 – The Physical Climate (2013)” by G. Thomas Farmer and John Cook. You can read extracts of it on Amazon or at Google Books. 

If we haven’t heard more of this 600 page monster (or of volume 2, which was also due out in 2013 but doesn’t seem to have appeared) it’s possibly because of its price ($119).

Editors Springer describe it thus: (the punctuation is theirs):

Volume One of a two-volume treatment of climate change science designed for an introductory science course

Describes the discipline of Climate Change Science, and individual climate change scientists whose expertise spans Earth history, geology, geography, biology, oceanography, astronomy, mathematics, physics, chemistry, engineering and more

Examines evidence of global warming that has entered mainstream discussions of climate change

Discusses the ideas and tactics of climate skeptics and deniers

‘Three centuries of winter temperature change on the southeastern Tibetan Plateau and its relationship with the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation’ studied in new paper.

Abstract

Long-term, high-resolution proxy records containing cold season temperature signals are scarce on the southeastern Tibetan Plateau (TP), limiting our understanding of regional climate and the potential driving forces. In this study, we present a nearly three centuries long reconstruction of winter (December–February) mean temperature for the central Hengduan Mountains, southeastern TP. The reconstruction is derived from a composite tree-ring width chronology of Pinus yunnanensis Franch from two high elevation sites (>3000 m above sea level). Our reconstruction passes all standard calibration-verification schemes and explains nearly 73 {154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of the variance of the original instrumental data. However, we were constrained to calibrate our full period (1718–2013) reconstruction of December–February mean temperature on the calibration period from 1959 to 1992 only, due to a decrease in temperature sensitivity of tree-ring index exhibited after 1992. Spatial correlation analysis shows that our reconstruction represents large-scale temperature variations in southwest China and the eastern TP. Our reconstructed December–February mean temperature shows a close association with the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) over the past three centuries, with warm (cold) periods coinciding with the positive (negative) phases of the AMO. This persistent relationship suggests that the AMO may have been a key driver of multidecadal winter temperature variations on the southeastern TP.

Read more at link.springer.com

 

Scientists have obtained remarkable new insights into the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. They have been examining rocks from the crater that the 15km-wide space object dug out of what is now the Gulf of Mexico some 66 million years ago.

The team says it can see evidence in these materials for how life returned to the scene soon after the calamity. Descendants of these small organisms are likely thriving today in amongst the crater’s smashed up materials.

The international project has shipped the hundreds of metres it drilled from beneath the Gulf floor earlier this year to the MARUM Center for Marine Environmental Sciences, at the University of Bremen, Germany. It is here that the cores are being catalogued, analysed and archived.

At one time, math teachers everywhere answered the age-old, “but when am I ever going to NEED this?” question by remarking that we wouldn’t carry around calculators in our pockets for the rest of our lives.

And yet, every smartphone (and many remaining “dumb” phones) have calculators built in as one of the simplest apps.

So, does that mean we no longer have to memorize our multiplication tables?

Machines have always existed to make our life easier, but that can have unintended consequences. For example, after the Industrial Revolution, when machines took over much of the manual labor, there was a noticeable increase in weight gain, obesity, and obesity-related diseases.  That has only increased as our jobs have moved us towards even more sedentary lifestyles, sitting at a desk all day.

Experts say California is in a permanent drought, caused by global warming and disappearing Arctic ice.

Precipitation there was above normal over the past 12 months, and there has been no trend over the past 120 years.

Climate at a Glance | National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI)

Five to ten inches of rain forecast this week for Northern California.

10-Day Precipitation Outlook for the Conterminous U.S.

Governor Brown was also hysterical about drought in 1977, which was followed by several years of California flooding.

Brown Warns of Drought Disaster – Says Hard Choices’ Face California – View Article – NYTimes.com

The 1977 drought was blamed on global cooling and expanding Arctic ice.

9 Jun 1977, Page 1 – at Newspapers.com

Nothing ever changes, expect that climate scientists periodically rename their scam as either global cooling or global warming.

Read more at realclimatescience.com

An Historical, not Hysterical Perspective: Much of the hysteria over atmospheric CO2 arises from dismissing the past, and thus losing the context for interpreting the present.  Recently, one scientist suggested that climate researchers should be schooled in geology before commenting on climate change.  Instead of that, of course, most of them are based in environmentalism.  So as a public service this post presents some excellent and time-tested evidence produced by Dr Guy LeBlanc Smith.  h/t Jeff Hayes

As the political fall out from Brexit continues Britain’s mainstream media are reporting that environmentalists and climate alarmists are in full panic mode. The growing fear is that the UK government is set on a course of wholesale reversals of pro-green legislation.

Today’s Independent newspaper (October 13, 2016) reports that the latest “bonfire” fears stem from newly-installed Prime Minister Theresa May’s first act –  to unceremoniously scrap the Department for Energy and Climate Change, merging it into the renamed Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS). In no uncertain terms this is seen by all sides as a huge blow to the green lobby. The issue of a successful Brexit seems pinned to appeasing populist demands in abandoning failed and needless environmental policy.

A worried Simon Bullock, a climate campaigner at Friends of the Earth, told The Independent that “some politicians would see Brexit as an opportunity to do away with climate change policies they regard as “wasteful, bureaucratic red tape”.”

Chicago mayor and Clinton crony Rahm Emanuel famously said to never let a crisis go to waste in politics. In the case of Hurricane Matthew, some political operatives and global warming true believers might have wanted the crisis to be worse than it was. It would be consistent with their history.

Hurricane Matthew killed at least 30 Americans and more than 1,000 in total. Damage is estimated to be at least $5 billion.

But apparently that’s not enough death and destruction for the alarmists.

Before Matthew made landfall Saturday in South Carolina, it had been more than 4,000 days since the last hurricane hit the U.S. That’s 10 years, 11 months and about a week.

Astronomers announced the discovery of a new dwarf planet orbiting the sun in the region beyond Pluto Tuesday. The new planet, dubbed 2014 UZ224, is more than 8.5 billion miles from the sun and has a diameter of about 330 meters.

Uz224 was discovered by Dr. David Gerdes, a professor of astronomy at the University of Michigan. Gerdes used an instrument called a Dark Energy Camera paid for by the U.S. Department of Energy to make maps of distant galaxies.

Gerdes used the camera to photograph small patches of the sky once per week. Stars and galaxies were so much further away than UZ224 that they appeared to be basically stationary. But the tiny planet was continually in a slightly different position as it was moving across the relatively stationary backdrop of stars.

Taking  anti-depressants could double the risk of having feelings which could lead to suicide – a controversial new study has suggested.

A review of trials of antidepressants taken by healthy adults with no signs of a mental health disorder has found the drugs used to treat the illness doubled the harms related to suicide and violence. 

Experts working on the study said the analysis was undertaken because the harms of antidepressants, including the risk of suicide, are often explained away as if they are disease symptoms or only a problem in children.

Professor Peter Gøtzsche, of the Nordic Cochrane Centre and lead author of the study, said: “While it is now generally accepted that antidepressants increase the risk of suicide and violence in children and adolescents, most people believe that these drugs are not dangerous for adults.

“This is a potentially lethal misconception.” He added: “The reporting of harms in drug trials is generally poor.

A major international effort is under way to research one of the greatest unknowns in weather forecasting – the influence of the jet stream.

For the first time, a fleet of drones and planes is being deployed from the United States, Iceland and Britain to investigate the flow of air crossing the Atlantic. Jet streams are powerful currents of high-altitude wind that govern the patterns of weather down on the surface.

The one over the Atlantic has frequently driven storms over Britain, most recently last winter, causing devastating floods. Early results indicate that the jet stream is narrower, stronger and more sharply defined than predicted by computer models – which could have implications for weather forecasts.