In an hour or so, I’m heading up the coast for the day to see Caesarea, then this evening, back south to Ben Gurion to go through the supposed lengthy flight check in, then a 13-hour flight to Philly, then a layover, then a five-hour flight back to California. Not looking forward to any of it, other than the initial sightseeing.
Anyway, probably off line until at least early Saturday morning, eastern time. I may use wifi on the flight to LA, if I’m sufficiently conscious.
[Saturday-morning update]
Well, I seem to be sufficiently conscious (despite not really having gotten anything resembling sleep for over 36 hours). From the plane over eastern Tennessee, heading west.
[Bumped]
I’ve always found the west bound trans-Atlantic flight better than the east bound, but 18 hours, not in orbit, is just a long time to be in a plane.
Make sure you walk around regularly during the flights to prevent blood clots. Have a safe trip.
Sounds like you missed Jerusalem, based on your earlier mention that Friday was your available time for being a tourist
It would be a direct flight Tel Aviv to LA?
I thought it was too far away for a direct flight. But it seems you are correct and El Al does that route with no stops on a 777-200ER. Pretty surprising. The LR has even more range.
Now boarding USS Cygnus to probe the event horizon in a search of comments.
After you’ve caught up on some sleep, you’ll want to read this:
http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015/01/30/forget-climategate-this-global-warming-scandal-is-much-bigger/
They need to cover this more often, but in some ways, it seems like old news.
Sincere non-rhetorical question: Have the criticisms described in the Breitbart article also been published in the major science journals, and if not, why not?
I know my question has been asked and answered before, including right here on this blog, but I’ve failed to absorb the answer. Thank you for serious replies.
You say that like journals are unbiased arbitrators of truth and science when in fact they are not.
It is a bit like asking if fighting white privilege is a part of the Republican party platform and then claiming that if it isn’t, there is no such thing as white privilege.
Surely by now, you have read enough stories linked on this site to the personal experiences of scientists who have dared challenge the political narrative surrounding the impending global warming apocalypse and how it has effected their careers.
Those skeptic scientists that understand the hows and whys of the historic surface records and the adjustments do like Zeke Hausfather accept that there are reasons, and it’s not all a big conspiracy, it’s the James Delingpole’s of the world, journalists and others who don’t have a fkg clue about the science, who continue to cherry pick this or that station record (Paraguay FFS!) to continue to scream out their Great Global Warming Conspiracy Theory, and so sell their stories.
It is old news, Watt’s has abandoned his “Surface Station Project” after the results he got were not the ones he expected, and in the “New Zealand’s NIWA temperature train wreck” linked to it was the skeptics Treadgold and Co’s legal case that ended in a train wreck, some of the weather stations had been moved to higher altitude, and from memory the time of day the temperatures had been taken had changed throughout the record.
From a cursory check of the Web, it appears that Watts has not abandoned his Surface Stations Project.
From Wikipedia, and I take Wikipedia as authoritative here because the Wingnuts and Deniers don’t have enough “muscle” to control a controversial Wikipedia article, Watts had agreed to cooperate with and to a priori accept the results of another surface temperature project, BEST, “Whatever the outcome.”
Watts is engaged in, how shall I put it, a micturation contest with BEST over the siting of their stations, with the BEST folks claiming there is no evidence that “poor siting” biases the results with Watts claiming it does. A large amount of space is devoted by the Wikipedia article on Anthony Watts on this back-and-forth ‘its-‘t’taint.
This is a far cry from Watts abandoning his own Surface Station Project because he doesn’t like the numbers. That is a pretty serious charge to level against someone in the public discourse on temperature record and climate. Good thing a person is using an Internet “handle.” A person commenting or blogging under their name could get sued for saying stuff like that . . .
And that was all over 2 and a half years ago with – as far as I know – no further updates or publicity on his Surface Station Project.
And absence of evidence is not evidence of absence
It’s abundantly clear (and I don’t think anyone denies this?) that a poorly sited thermometer is less accurate than a properly sited one. If, say, air conditioning is installed near the thermometer, the hot air emanating from them will bias the records. The same goes for things like barbecues – and I recall one of the stations Watts reported on (Cave Creek, Arizona) having such a barbecue pit in close vicinity to the thermometer. I also recall quite a few instances where the outdoor components of air conditioning had been installed near the thermometers. Many of the stations were in flagrant violation of the NOAA’s guidelines for siting.
Regardless of which way this biases the data, the fact remains; it imparts errors, and thus makes the data less useful.
And I never heard of any such errors that biased in the opposite direction – not sure if there were any, of course: I just never heard of them.
If there are such errors that cancel out, then good.
Even if such errors occur in both directions and tend to cancel out, that’s still imparting far greater uncertainty into the data (and thus any result). GIGO (Garbage in, garbage out). What you get is such a huge uncertainty range as to make the results meaningless.
However… there does seem to be a preponderance of error in one direction (warmer in the present, cooler in the past), making the data even further suspect.
It does seem that way, doesn’t it? Curious
However… there does seem to be a preponderance of error in one direction (warmer in the present, cooler in the past), making the data even further suspect.
The interesting thing to me is that the thermal models I worked with at NASA all did the same thing. Now, those models were for the Orbiter, and before Columbia, there was good rational for accepting false positives. However, after Columbia, the internal hedging became problematic, and it took some serious discussions to get people to understand that their ability to rationalize the models’ bias did not mean the models provided solutions that tended towards safety in all instances.
That NASA might also hedge towards a rationalized “safer” approach to accept false positives in its climate models would not surprise me.