Jul 242010
 

A few additional updates on the ScienceBlogs debacle (sounds way better than “Pepsi-Gate”):

Seed Magazine happened to forget that their blogging platform has been built upon a time bomb. The magazine has filled their server with dozens of unhinged activists who pretend to be interested in science but whose real passion is radical left-wing politics.

Interestingly, Myers says Luboš Motl’s claim to have been invited to join ScienceBlogs was ludicrous because Myers and the existing ScienceBlog bloggers were going to blackball him anyway so he’d never have been accepted. Right. If that kind of reinforcing self-selection were going on, it goes a long way toward explaining the mindset of so many bloggers in the ScienceBlogs  community and also why the decision to add “Food Frontiers” without consulting the bloggers already in the network was so contentious. It’s no wonder the communications were so poor between Seed Media and its client bloggers – I certainly wouldn’t welcome trying to explain the benefits of enhancing revenue through corporate sponsorship to the anti-corporate types at ScienceBlogs. I empathize with Seed Media.

Jun 092010
 

Roy Spenser offers a climate model based on natural forcings from the the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation (AMO), and the the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) (a measure of El Nino and La Nina activity). The correlation he obtains to the post 1975 warming is truly remarkable.

Using a natural forcing model, Roy Spenser obtains remarkable agreement with observed temperature variations.

What impresses me is that he trains the model in a flat temperature period and it nevertheless predicts the observed warming. This correlation, though, begs the question of whether there isn’t some other ultimate factor responsible for the variation in the indicies used and temperature – solar forcing perhaps? Hat Tip: Watt’s Up With That

May 032010
 

Watt’s Up With That has a detailed first hand report of the oil rig fire from geologist Jimmy Haigh, a commenter at the site. The report includes some spectacular photos of the rig as it burned and sank in 5000 feet of water. Eleven men are missing and will probably not be found.

Note the hole burned through the helipad in this photograph from the morning of the second day of the fire.

© 2010-11 Hans Schantz except as noted. Suffusion theme by Sayontan Sinha

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