The Problem With "Experts"

Over at Watts Up With That, one of the comments was so good that Anthony decided it deserved to be an article in its own right. This is something I find the Dextrosphere and talk radio do very well: We don't just dispense the news ex cathedra as the MainScream Media does. They seem so protective of their lofty status as gatekeepers that they won't allow anyone else to steal the spotlight from them.

Although he puts on a show of being a bombastic egomaniac, Rush Limbaugh knows when to shut up and let a caller carry the show. So does Neal Boortz. Back in the old days of ejectejecteject.com, Bill Whittle called one of my comments "profound", setting in motion a chain of events that ultimately led to the creation of this site. Neither Anthony, Rush, Neal, or Bill bothered to check the resumés of "Caleb Shaw", "Susan in Glendale", "Vick the Ranger", or "The Monster". It wasn't important who we were. What mattered was what we had to say.

Contrast this with the Gorebots who make the classic appeal to authority ("The science is in; the IPCC report says AGW is for real, and anyone who disagrees is a denier"); the technocrats who insisted that out of 300 million Americans, the only person who could fix our troubled financial markets was Timothy "Turbo Tax" Geithner; or the identity-politics crowd who insisted that "a wise Latina" would make a better Justice, or a Halfrican American who went to Indonesian madrassas could, simply by being who he is and assuming the office of POTUS, heal all our ills both foreign and domestic.

Over the course of my life I've learned from many people. Of course I've gained much from exposure to the writings and speeches of great intellects, but I've known people who were stoners of Jeff Spicoli's ilk, and people classified as mentally retarded, who have uttered nuggets of wisdom that have served me well. Smart people think that they are so much smarter than the common man that they are justified in ruling by force over them. Truly wise people recognize that no matter how smart they may be, they don't know everything, and that generally, everyone knows the most about his own life.

An Inconvenient Truth of Antarctic Ice

The GoreBull WarmingClimate Change hysterics love to point to ice falling from West Antarctica as proof that The Sky Is Falling. But one part of one continent does not a "globe" make. The far larger East Antarctica is showing signs of ice thickening there:

Ice core drilling in the fast ice off Australia's Davis Station in East Antarctica by the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Co-Operative Research Centre shows that last year, the ice had a maximum thickness of 1.89m, its densest in 10 years.

The average thickness of the ice at Davis since the 1950s is 1.67m.

A paper to be published soon by the British Antarctic Survey in the journal Geophysical Research Letters is expected to confirm that over the past 30 years, the area of sea ice around the continent has expanded.

Don't expect the MainScream Media to cover anything that might call into question the "settled scientific consensus".

Monckton Rips Gorebal Warming Again

You may recall the joy with which I recommendedViscount Monckton's Open Letter to John McCain. If you didn't read it then, you might want to take a detour to read it first, as a nice appetizer for that is to follow.

Here is but an excerpt of his Keynote address to the 2009 International Conference on Climate Change:

Gore no longer dares to publish his supposed “evidence” for “climate crisis,” because he is rightly terrified that we here will pounce on it at once and demonstrate that it is materially, serially, seriously inaccurate--demonstrate its falsity by the dull, outmoded method of reference to the facts, the science, and the data.

When Gore appeared before the Senate a few weeks ago, the hearing was supposed to be public. For it is one of the most ancient and settled principles of parliamentary democracy that the deliberations of those whom we elect, and the testimony that their committees hear, shall be open and visible to all. Yet, with the furtive connivance of Senator Boxer and her politicized snivel servants, the science slides Gore showed to the Senators were kept secret. I and others have asked for them. They are “not available at this time.” And the Senate is “exempt from the Freedom of Information Act.”

Why are those slides “not available at this time”? Because Gore is running scared. Rightly scared. Scared of prosecution for peddling a false prospectus in Generation Investment Management. Neither Gore nor any bed-wetter will any longer dare to debate the science of climate with us or anyone in the light of day. Gore’s speaking contract stipulates that he will not debate, he will not answer unscripted questions, and he will not be interviewed except by journalists acceptable to him. Which journalists are they? The dim ones that don’t know any science, and the prejudiced ones that don’t care. Just about all of them.

Recently four of us in this room were invited to a meeting of Government and opposition leaders and policymakers in Madrid, to debate the science and economics of climate against Al Gore (not a climate scientist); Railroad Engineer Pachauri, the head of the U.N.’s climate science working group (not a climate scientist); Sir Nicholas Stern, the author of the U.K. Socialist Government’s joke report on the economics of climate change (not a climate scientist); and the Environment Minister of Spain (not a climate scientist).

All four of us--three climate scientists and I (not a climate scientist) accepted the invitation to debate. All four of them refused. They said they would only come if they could speak on their own, without facing any challenge, any debate, any question, any fact, any inconvenient truth. Not one of them dared to face us. They did not have what in English we should call the cojones.

There was no climate crisis. There is no climate crisis. There will be no climate crisis. “Global warming” is not a global crisis. It is a global scientific fraud.

[Click on the title above, or date stamp below, to see the full article.]
I'd say Monckton had opened up a can of whoop-ass on Al Gore and his ilk, but that would be to damn his work with faint praise. This was a semitrailer full of industrial-strength, concentrated whoop-ass. You need to savor every word of this gem.

Man-Made Global Whining

Here's a lovely look by a professional meteorologist on how working in his profession is like working in climate science -- the dangers of trying to point out the truth: Global Whining vs. the Truth



And here's a must-read speech (really) on the whining, scheming and insanity of the Anthropogenic (i.e., Man-Made) Global Warming crowd by U.S. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher on the House floor, made 3 weeks ago during the debate on the economy-stiffling Lieberman-Warner bill that has temporarily been stopped. Dynamite. “Do you really think the world is filled with morons?”

30,000 Scientists: AGW Is Wrong

Some 30,000 scientists have now signed to indicate their agreement with the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine's Global Warming Review Paper, "Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide". Read the report (here, as a web page) to get some highly interesting facts. This is the abstract:

A review of the research literature concerning the environmental consequences of increased levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide leads to the conclusion that increases during the 20th and early 21st centuries have produced no deleterious effects upon Earth's weather and climate. Increased carbon dioxide has, however, markedly increased plant growth. Predictions of harmful climatic effects due to future increases in hydrocarbon use and minor greenhouse gases like CO2 do not conform to current experimental knowledge. The environmental effects of rapid expansion of the nuclear and hydrocarbon energy industries are discussed.

Global Warming Strikes Vermont

Apparently, Al Gore hasn't been able to make the rounds to Vermont frequently enough. Father Winter has decided to sneak in below Gore's radar.

Much of this week's winter carnival in Gilford has been canceled, due to too much winter.

Apparently a few feet of GW has hampered auto use.

[T]he cancellation of 2 events was due to poor road conditions and snow-filled parking lots.

Who knew that GW could be responsible for all this white stuff? I thought The Day After Tomorrow was just movie make-believe.

Something From Nothing

So, the boys (and probably some girls) at the CERN lab in Geneva are worried about the unclean vacuum. They're building a new particle accelerator. Why? Because it's going to accelerate really heavy atoms to really high energies. Their new toy is called the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).



And why are they worried? Well, because then need to economize on tremendous amounts of electricity. So, they build their electro-magnets out of superconductors that take a lot less electricity. But to be superconducting, they need to be super-cooled. But the electro-magnets need to be right up next to the beam of particles (those heavy lead atoms) so the beam can be easily (and cheaply) controlled. The beams are in their own tube, or pipe, so that all the air can be gotten out of the beam's way -- a vacuum. The magnets keep the beam centered in the pipe so that beam atoms don't accidentally collide with the pipe walls.



So, what's the problem? Nothing. Nasty nothing. The nasty nothing that is a vacuum.



See, when the beam particle energies get high enough, sometimes a beam particle will reach into that vacuum like it was a closet and pull out a pair of brand new particles (an oppositely charged particle/anti-particle pair, usually an electron-positron pair). This is a well-tested effect of what's called the quantum vacuum energy, first predicted by Georges Lemaître in 1934. Usually, such a brand new pair of particles will annihilate themselves without any release of energy -- effectively going home, back into that vacuum closet.



Now here's the nasty part. In a beam environment like the LHC, the boys worried that when a new pair was pulled out of the closet the positron would immediately fly off (and not be much of a problem, it's too light). But the electron would glom onto one of the beam particles. That would change the particle's charge. That would change the particle's direction, and it too would fly off -- hitting the beam pipe. And with a heavy particle, that would cause the pipe to heat up a tiny amount. So, what's nasty? The number of beam particles that this would happen to. The amount of heating. If there is a bit too much, then the super-cooled superconductors no worky. And the plan is to have them at 1.9 K -- super-cold.



To figure out how much heating (or whether they were just screwy wrong), the boys at LHC took a trip to visit the boys at the Brookhaven Lab on Long Island where the fairly new Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC, "Rick") lives. The RHIC beam isn't as powerful as CERN's LHC will be. They found the heating -- a minuscule amount. But that was with a beam of middling weight copper atoms.



The bad news is that the vacuum closet's propensity to open up scales as the seventh power of Z (i.e., Z times Z times Z times Z times Z times Z times Z), the number of protons in the nucleus. Copper's Z is 29. Lead's Z is 82. That means about a 1,500 times bigger effect. The vacuum closet also opens easier with higher energies. LHC will be running about 100 times higher energy beams than RHIC. So the boys expect over 100,000 times more heating than seen at RHIC.



What does it all mean? The LHC boys will have to add extra cooling, because of something from nothing.[Ed.: Click on the title to see the full post]