Straighten Up & Fly Right

Oooooooooo … we’re on the way out
First Dirk Hartog in 1616, then Tranqility Base in 1969, next up Kepler-69c before 2322? 
       

Second star to the right and straight on till morning - Kepler satellite finds “another“  However, back in the mud, pseudosciencers are failing to find their global warming worlds, as 15 year temperatures nosedive into cooler times. The just-in-casers and do-gooders are doubting. Even school boards & their tests are falling back to evidence-based Earth. Good!
           
So, how about some more brain cells for our stone age cortexes (courtesy of Dr Lerner) to keep us from groupthink and our other tribal pleistocene emotions. And maybe a brain software enlightening book, to keep our thoughts  straightened up and flying right .
    
 Right flying trying Brady

Light Hunters

Fleet-footed Ferreters,
We travel fast, we travel light
We’re going hunting in the night

At 13.82 billion years young, normal mass up to 27% and Hubble expansion speed of 68, our newest primeval Universe map never looked better. Big Bang Theory still triumphant.      
Hunt, hunt, hunt … Matt Ridley shines an evidence-based light on our greening fossil fueled world: crops up & land use down; forests & animal numbers up - the Greenies are down too. Björn Lomborg states the obvious: 1.3 billion people need electricity now- Earth Hour nosedives. Mr FOIA releases the Climategate 3.0 emails – global warmer “scientist” hate-mail exposes The Team again, as our globe now cools naturally, globally
         
Back in reason’s sunlight, the SOHO sun probe caught sunspot AR1692 shooting out a M-1 solar flare which as predicted hit Earth 2 days later showering shimmering green curtain auroras over my Uppsala. Now that’s bright & beautiful night science.
 
Lights Lover Brady

Bright Lights

Luminous Luminaries,
Heads up, scopes out, bright times acoming

Incoming! Comet Lemmon and Comet Panstarrs, solar system inbounds, due for Sun rendezvous 24 March and 9 March. Whooooeee! Not linked to the Russian meteorite, and both not linked to asteroid 2012 DA14 flyby  It’s always been busy up there.   
Climate “metal-umberella-protection-schemes” not needed either? Climate models run far too hot (even Sweden’s favourite ECHAM5 model has 2 degree error biases) , way above the  present cooling air temps. Ocean heat has flatlined too. Brighter icy times ahead?    
     
So, bright idea?: evidence-based energy for every one! Let’s let those other 2 billion people have easy energy access too. Let’s turn off backbreaking energy-poverty renewables and turn ON easy electricity, put human well-being before feel-good energy saving schemes.
         

Bright Light Brady

Best Year Ever

Happy Hominans,     
“Never has there been less hunger, less disease or more prosperity”. Global poverty has just been halved, global inequality is at a record low, an alltime high African life expectancy (55) and British too (81).  AIDS is in an 8 year drop and Malaria cut to one fifth. War deaths and natural  disaster deaths are at century lows. ”We are living in a golden age … the great advances of mankind come … from ordinary people.” Let’s keep on doing it! 
               
Our Earth is at a 30 year plant maximum: 20% greener AND 16% increase in biomass, mainly due to increased CO2, even as temperatures and sea levels have now flattened out.  Peak farmland is now here as we city loving humans leave behind expanding wildernesses.
“Now we are confident that we stand on the peak of cropland use, gazing at a wide expanse of land that will be spared for Nature.”  No lifestyle changes needed
     
Animal species numbers are increasing, reversing “alarmist estimates of extinction rates”.
Science and scientists are also now reining in their “gone native” rogue males and females.  
——————————————————————————————
This calls for a  song. A hug-your-hominans song!
 Still the One           
We’ve been together since way back when,
Sometimes I never want to see you again,
But I want you to know, after all these years,
You’re still the one I want whisperin’ in my ear,
You’re still the one — who can scratch my itch,
Still the one — and I wouldn’t switch,
We’re still having fun, and you’re still the one. 
—————————————————–
Even top Dark Greens are dropping their “catastrophic scare story” moralizing speaches: James “Gaia” Lovelock – “We never intended a fundamentalist Green movement that rejected all energy sources other than renewable … the Greens … failure to understand that the needs of the Earth are not separable from human needs”; Mark “6 Degrees” Lynas -“I am also sorry that I helped to start the anti-GM movement … I could not have chosen a more counter-productive path. I now regret it completely“. They’re rejoining the rest of us hominans in furthering the Enlightenment ideals of science and reason to make our world even better. Welcome back boys! Time for some catch-up reading?
         
2013 should be even better … and exiting too 
Reasonably optimistic hominan Brady

Glacial Gifts

Festive Greetings!
Human beings, I’ve been thinking. Hmm…  

Top left is Everest. Behold the beauty of bare rock and ice. 3.8 billion pixels of raw reality.

So we see. But some see ideology (and money?): “We want to tell the bigger story of climate change in the area, and we are working with Microsoft’; ‘ photographs showing the effect of climate change since 1921′. But Breashears brags: “GlacierWorks is not about advocacy or activism.” Hmm … David, any photos yet of all the advancing glaciers?
  
Lets look elsewhere. First, recently in the Media and even … in the scientific litterature!
“it is evident that glacier surging is more extensive than previously reported in the Karakoram and that the number of glacier surges has increased recently,” driven, as noted above, by positive mass balances.”; the result that “the regional mass balance is just positive at +0.11 ± 0.22 m/year water equivalent.” And in further support of this finding, they write that “recent glacier expansion (Hewitt, 2005) and speed-up over the region (Quincey et al., 2009; Heid and Kaab, 2011) tally with the gain of mass calculated in this study.” ; “between 1961 and 2000, mean summer temperature declined at all climate stations (Fowler and Archer, 2006), probably resulting in a decreasing glacier melt.” Glaciers, up and down … naturally. Everest is best without the activist interests

So, Happy Festive Season! … with no ideology or politics, just (small) worldly beauty
Glacially Active Brady

Night Creatures

Astronomical Critical Thinkers,
Creatures-of-the-Night, time to go hunting, under theself controlof science’s sword. 
        
1st up, the UKs BBC is caught closing off the scientific climate debate “28Gate“, in 2006.  
Billionaire businessman Grantham in Nature  says we are short of Phosphorus and Potash, the world’s fertilizers, but the USGS says we’ve at least 7000 & 1500 years left. Hmm …
   
The UN ”makes up” CO2 levels for its world economic growth predictions. Bad boys. WWF-UK boss Nussbaum gets angry with UK Govt. for not forcing Brits to pay to stop his company’s collapse. Bad Green! Wind turbines cheating the UK and Danish economies. Renewable energy runs out again. “Its an ill wind that blows nobody any good” 
     
However out of the night we see brightness as world wealth increases inexorably with world health. This is in spite of what governments do to help or hinder. The same seems to go for Power Density increases and Rose’s Law of Quantum Computing too. Good! So let’s return from our night-creature hunt, for now, to enjoy some more planetary pleasures
                                                       
Or why not go astronomical and look up at the beautiful eclipse sunrise and the amazing islands of magnetism awaiting our sunfilled gaze.
 
Creature-of-the-Night … and Day  Brady

One Wonders

Oooooooooooo … 

Care for a stroll to the edge of our Universe? Please meet the new Hubble eXtreme Deep Field (XDF). Just 13.2 billion light years away, watch hydrogen light up the Dark Ages.
         
Do “ozone destroyers” roll down from the industrial North? During normal winters? How about the halogens (Iodides and Bromides) from the Antarctic sea ice shelves and from sea spray, volcanoes, polar magnetic fields, cosmic rays ? Another human folly? Hmm …      
     
Was that an unnatural man made beast visiting New York’s ”Sandy” shores? Or maybe just one of many similar natural hazards that humans are adapting very well to? Better forecasts led to less casualties and smaller material losses … good.

Hydrogen & Helium, Bromine & Iodine, H2O & CO2 – we love those chemicals … or not?
One wonders why we willingly wantonly wildly worry?
eXtremely Beastly Brady 

Ice Adapts

[UPDATE: (14 Oct 2012) Could Climate Catastrophism cooly calmly collapse?]
Cryogenic Connoisseurs,
The annual Arctic and Antarctic cooling championships are underway for the 5th fabulous year. Those silly shenanigans are again heating up The Media, if not our glorious globes
    
Let’s look left. From caring California to windy Washington to balmy Britian to sunny Sweden  roiling reports rolled in of rollicking record reductions, of icy escapades. (here and here and here and here)
      
However counter spotters of our nether regions noticed Antarctica’s antics of expanding ice and harped on about historical happenings. (here and here and here and here)
          
Now our northern neighbours notice natural nuances to their alarmist admonitions.            (here and here and here and here)
 
Oh what silly sausages we Ice Age adapted hominan humans sometimes are.
              
Stay skeptical and enjoy our Interglacial.
Cryo Brady

Curiosity, Opportunity & Innovation

Curious Critters,
Curiosity: The new Mars surface car-sized rover has touched down at 05:17 UT on Mon 6th Aug 2012; $2.5 billion in costs, 7 years to plan, 7 mins to land, 7 mins to know…WOW!
      

Opportunity: the other Mars rover bravely gathers it’s 9th year of successful science for us humans. However, some humans back on Earth are still taking every opportunity to spread doom & gloom even after 4800 years of failed predictions. Slow learners?   
 
Innovation: one of the 4 hoursemen (effort, resources, luck and innovation) continually creating the increasing (and increasingly well distributed) wealth of our world … and also continually defeating our ever noisy apocalyptics. 92% of innovators are not scientists.
     
Hopefully smart talks like these will give pause to our current batch of misguided, noble-cause certain, morally rightous, political activist scientists. There are a lot of other professions out there (full of non-scientists) already doing a marvellous job of continually innovating to enrich and beautify our world. Let’s let them do it. 
Curious Brady

Sparkling-Sedulous, Silly-Scandalous

Summer Scientists,
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly … so sang summer’s science song.
  
The Good: The Higgs Boson (filling the Standard Model) has just been found at 126 GeV (133 proton masses)  - next stop Supersymmetry? Dark Matter particles may have been found too, in galaxy clusters and in our Milky Way’s core too. The world (& India) sets another record breaking crop yield year. The Flynn Effect (highly schooled, critical thinking, scientific reasoners -below Fig 9.2) now has females passing males for first place in the most intelligent generation ever, decreasing violence & increasing democracy.  
                
The Bad: Psychology and neuroscience have been caught fudging data, again. Pain and Cancer researchers can’t seem to reproduce Big Pharma’s peer-reviewed science. US droughts & heat waves were worse in the 1930s & 1980s and Swedish downpours were flooding in the 1930s too. UK conference says: “A large majority of science journalists are extremely naive about scientists … fraud is “very very underreported”. Ooooo … not good.
     
& The Ugly:  Biofuels should again induce starvation, privation and riots in the poor of the world as 40% of the US drought reduced food supply continues to be diverted into petrol tanks “to help the poor”.  German solar power and  UK wind power  are leading to energy poverty so even western citizens are not safe from their governments’ mismanagement.
      
Maybe our world-worrying-warriors need to break out of their self-made save-the-world Matrix, lighten up … and … Mambo …
          
… get out a bit more and soak up the sunny joy of living in our human wonder-world.

Summer Science Sailing Brady … and …
   … Clint