Here are some youtubes of derspatz proving that you're never too old to learn new things ... and for me and LSCP, that meant trying out Snowboarding at Coronet Peak, Queenstown in New Zealand in the July school holidays just gone.
For a slobbish "likes to hang loose" cool and froody bighead like me, I discovered it came kinda a natural ... and I don't think I'll ever go back to skiing now. :)
But don't take me at my word, not while there are long and boring youtubes to be endured ! Most of the following were taken using a tiny webcam thingy I had clipped to my beanie, so where I look, you see !
First up ?
Me and LSCP riding the fast lift DOWN the mountain:
Next up, a long and boring (coz, let's face it, I was going pretty slow) run down "Meadows Express"
Here is a similar run to that except I take a detour and include some footage of LSCP doing pirouettes on a snowboard. ;) :)
And now for a spill so daring and dramatic that it took me clean off the mountain !
Excellent fun which I well recommend ... and the fact that I appeared to be some mad old man talking to himself while zipping(ish) down the piste (hey, I was giving camera commentary !) tended to keep living obstacles away. Heh.
Snowboarding. Try it some time ... but if your butt bruises easily then I would recommend that you get some padded pants first.
See http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/butterflies-linked-to-climate-change-20100317-qfm4.html (with the utterly misleading and inaccurate headline of "Butterflies fly early as planet warms" ... since when is Melbourne "the planet" ?) for how Melbourne Uni's AGW alarmist and publicly funded MMGCC (man made global climate change) advocate and lobbyist, David Karoly, has boldy attached his name to the gob-smacking latest lunacy being used to prop up the AGW religion.
Yes, if you visited the link, you just read how butterflies in Melbourne are to deemed a direct proof of Anthropogenic Global Warming.
Yep, David Karoly basically wants you to believe that Melboreds Urban Heat Island Effect (thanks to it being a growing city) equals Man-Made Global Climate Change.
ffs, the study revolves around studing creatures in A CITY, you know, a place where populations, buildings and roads increase and spread, and the UHI effect generally increases, ... so should any of us be surprised that the growth and changes of/in a city should have an effect on the flora and fauna found within ... and who would deny that it happens anyway ?
Sheesh, what next ... another look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_moth ("The Peppered Moth") and a revision to say it wasn't the amount of evil coal dust around that determined which colour varieties were "the fittest" for survival re: predation, but actually the amount of CO2 in the local atmosphere ?
Anyhoo, I've heard that Melboredites like to see themselves as the whole world, but isn't it getting a bit ridiculous to claim that the city's UHI equals Man-Made Global Climate Change ala Anthropogenic Global Warming ?
Aside from that, can you also now think of a better way your taxes should be spent than on the likes of Karoly and Co ?
Oh, and how is the collecting of data on breeding cycle of butterflys OUTSIDE Melbored's UHI going ?
Did the so called "scientists" bother to study that, or where they all just too busy pushing a barrow (one that also serves to carry the grant funding back to the lab) and providing Karoly with the subject matter for his next bit of advocacy and lobbying on his chosen religion, AGW ?
Hmmmm, let's look at that article provided in the link again. Oh, here we are:
"Dr Kearney said the study, which relates specifically to Melbourne, would prove a practical tool to forecast the impact of climate change on the city's biodiversity."
Nope, just Melbourne.
But it gets worse (or better, depending on which side of reason you are).
Look what has happened to the news item once it made its way out of Oz and on to the rest of the world.
Whatever happened to this being a study of the life cycle of butterflies in MELBOURNE !?
Butterflies emerging earlier due to climate change
Published: 7:20AM GMT 17 Mar 2010
Butterflies are emerging from their cocoons ten days earlier than 65 years ago because of climate change, experts warn.
The finding represents the first concrete evidence of a link between greenhouse gases and the timing of a natural event, according to researchers.
The team found that on average, the Common Brown butterfly (Heteronympha merope) has emerged earlier and earlier over the last half century, with an average of 1.6 days per decade over a 65 year span.
Researchers from the University of Melbourne said that the findings tally with a corresponding increase in temperature of 0.14 degrees Celsius per decade over the same period.
This warming is shown to be human-induced, researchers say.
Lead author of the study Dr Michael Kearney, from the Department of Zoology, said the findings could help our ability to forecast future impacts of climate change on biodiversity.
He said: "Shifts in these seasonal life cycle events represent a challenge to species, altering the food and competition present at the time of hatching. Studies such as ours will allow better forecasting of these shifts and help us understand more about their consequences."
The study, funded by an Australian Research Council grant to Monash, Melbourne and Wisconsin Universities, is due to be published in Royal Society journal Biology Letters.
The team looked at catterpillars raised in the lab and compared their development to increases in temperature and climate change models.
Professor David Karoly said: "Scientists have previously observed that biological events are happening progressively earlier in spring over the past few decades.
"This new work has tied the earlier emergence of butterflies directly to a regional temperature increase, and has tied the temperature increase very strongly to increases in greenhouse gas concentrations caused by humans."
If you hadn't already read the original report that specifically says the study was limited to Melbourne, a city, would it be fair to suggest that the above article would tend to have you think that researchers from the three listed universities had studied "the common brown butterfly" all around the world, and determined that all around the world, where ever it was found, it was hatching out 10 days earlier than it did around 65 years ago ?
Now ask yourself, why are the likes of Karoly and the Telegraph so keen for the natural cycle of climate change to be seen as being man made, global, ... and bad ?
[edit] About a month later now, and here is something else on the topic, this time from the award winning science blog "Watts Up With That" and commenting on "Confirmation Bias". See: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/04/23/butterfly-study-a-case-study-in-confirmation-bias/#more-18856
[edit++] Tis now June 2010, and here is the latest on the topic, this time from the Royal Society Publishing. See: http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2010/06/07/rsbl.2010.0053.short/reply ... and wonder if Karoly et al should be subjected to a rigorous public conducted enquiry in relation to grant funding, etc.
The long and short of the Royal Society published article is that both Kearney and Karoly are just plain wrong, wrong, wrong, and probably fraudulently so.
Anyone really surprised that this would prove to be the case ?
A quick break from talking about the natural cycle of climate change and how certain folk seem dead keen on making a religion about it and other folk just wanna rob us blind over it.
Time to go boating. Yeah, apologies to readers from the Northern Hemisphere who have got loved ones stranded under the English Channel, or stuck in a London or Paris train station or in a New York airport at the moment ... hey, howz that "Anthropogenic Global Warming" thing working out for ya ?
Here is my tube of my maiden voyage in the new old (built in the 1960s) water toy on her way to be dry-docked for some repairs and antifouling (ie, painted with special stuff to stop other stuff growing on it):
Howz all those Mussels on the stern drive legs, eh ? Mmmmm, where is a pot of boiling water and some chilli or garlic when you need it ?
That was Part 1. Short and sweet eh ? Well stay tuned for Part 2 ... it ain't so short, so hang on to your life-jackets, this is going to get rough !
Here she is a week later on the planned quicky excursion back to the mooring that actually turned out to be a mini-odyssey. Once again, apologies to snow-bound folk unable to travel or get home over in the Northern Hemisphere at the moment.
Somebody elsewhere asked me earlier: "Oh and about your boat, what happens if she's leaking again, I guess that means she won't get looked at again til after x-mas new year? Be a bummer to your holidays if that happens."
The following is my response to that:
See for yourself and note the lack of concern in my voice.
"Today I ..." shared a surprise adventure with LSCP that we could have prolly done without but all things considered, better that it happened when it did rather than later.
Today was the day the new old water toy went back into the water after a week in dry-dock getting her bum sanded and anti-fouled (cheers Adrian & Daniel at Aquarama) and a new steering helmet put on her starboard leg and having the leg bolted down (a common "fix" for older volvo penta legs and their reverse retaining clamp of suspect design), the old Ward 32'er is back on the water again and ready to get up and go.
What a difference a week and a whole bunch of work and money makes, because "get up and go" she now does !
After paying the bill and visiting the fuel jetty to pay for go-juice at expected standard extortion rates, LSCP headed off in the car and I back to the mooring. All was good and well and the salt air soon made the smile on my face set harder than pelican poo on the aft deck.
I easily solo navigated her up to Claremont jetty where LSCP (who had driven around there from the slipyards downstream on the other side of the river) jumped onboard and soon took over Skipper duties.
Yup, LSCP not only stands for "Life Style Choices Partner", but also "Lady Skipper, Cute n Pretty".
As the newtube shows, she made skippering look easy. Tis much easier to steer now that one leg isn't flapping around in the chop. As for the water in the bilge, that's no worries and quite a normal thing to happen in a wooden boat that has been out of the water for more than a couple of days. The timbers dry out and shrink a bit and in leaks wet stuff, but I found even just a couple of hours later on the mooring, things seemed to have already swollen up again and the bilge contents back to more or less what they were before she was taken out of the water a week ago.
Besides, just like with Witches, Ducks, and Very Small Rocks, wood floats.
Ah, but on WHAT mooring "a couple of hours later" ?
Well, that's where the Adventure began.
After LSCP took her for a burn, she then assumed "grab the pole and hook up the mooring rope" position up forward. We idled up to the mooring and she deftly hooked up the mooring rope and slipped it over the thingumy on the front of the boat wot such things attach to, and I did my bit and turned off the engines and batteries.
Picture perfect, with no swearing or shouting at each other. Quite amazing really, especially considering the stiff breeze we were working against that was busy trying to push us ashore.
Then a strange thing happened.
Another mooring passed us.
WTF ?
How can that happen ... we're attached properly to our mooring !
Uh, yup ... but what was our mooring attached to ?
A long line of heavy duty chain that wasn't attached to anything other than algae and the wet stuff we were floating in.
fcukity fcukity fcuk ! (which is French for "oh bother, the train has stopped in the middle of the Chunnel")
Before I could get to the anchor, we had drifted aground ... well, the nicely newly antifouled/painted stern drive legs had. Meh.
So, then began the telephone ring around.
First up a call to Freo Sea Rescue (I'm a member and both boats registered with them for rescue attention ... well worth the $35 a year considering that they would tow me all the way back from Rotto at no cost).
Then a call to the owner of the mooring to tell him that it was no more and that the contractors employed to check it may have stuffed up because at the end of the chain there was a massive shackle missing its pin. A pin that holds it to the trio of chain linked concrete blocks at the bottom or whatever it is that is down there. A pin that is supposed to be wired to the shackle to prevent it coming loose like it just had.
Then a call to the DPI (Department of Planning and Infrastructure - all moorings are registered/licensed with them).
Then the owner rang back to say he had contacted the contractor but they wouldn't be able to attend until Wednesday (so what were we to do until then ?) and he suggested I get back onto the DPI again as they have access to some emergency moorings. Good to know !
Then the Freo rescue called to confirm our predicament (that we needed pulling into deeper water so we could start the engines and motor elsewhere).
By this stage another boaty on a nearby mooring had noticed our situation and rowed his tender over. LSCP and I were in the middle of sorting out a long rope to go from the bow to a nearby mooring with the idea of hooking it up and pulling ourselves into deeper water. I was in my Jesus boots and shorts and up to my waist in (thankfully warm) water (so much for Jesus boots allowing walking ON water) holding the bow into the wind. Anyhoo, the boaty rowed the rope out to the mooring and tied it on then came back and he and LSCP sat up forward and hauled on the rope while I put my back to the stern and heaved up while pushing and before you could say "ewwww, a jelly fish, and WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT SQUISHY THING I STEPPED ON" we were in deep enough water again.
So, time to call Freo Rescue again and say "thanks, but we're ok now" (I intend to send them an online donation later tonight for their troubles), and also call the mooring contractors who had called while we were hauling.
They confirmed they couldn't get there until Wednesday but wanted to know where they could pick up the recovered mooring equipment from. I told them they would know once I knew where I was going to end up.
Okay, where were we ? On somebody else's mooring, wondering.
We decided to go back to Claremont Jetty, tie up there, then walk up to the club to see if they had temporary/short term pens or moorings available.
No such luck ... especially seeing as we weren't members. Still, they were very helpful with what they could do, which was to lend me their phone to sit through "on hold music" until an obviously Very Busy DPI were able to offer a rescue by registering my port-less vessel to one of the emergency moorings they have.
Excellent, even though it was around 9km away in [deleted for now]. So, after "merry festivus"es were exchanged with the DPI and the Claremont Club staff, LSCP headed off in the car and I in the boat. Talk about having an unplanned workout ... and so much for the plans of getting her back in the water and back to her mooring in about an hour !
Still, what better way to get used to skippering her alone ... especially seeing as this was only the second time I'd actually skippered her since purchase. On the way around to [deleted for now] with the salt spray slipping by the middle window and helping with setting my smile again, I got to thinking how blessed it was that the mooring should go when we were there to attend to it rather than in the middle of the night and have the boat smashed up on shore.
Yeah, I'm a glass half-full kinda guy.
Are we there yet ?
Almost there ...
So after having a laugh with Poseidon and telling the Sirens (I did say "Odyssey" earlier) they were wasting their time coz I already have all the lurv'n'comfort I need with my LSCP, etc, etc, I made it into the still waters of [deleted for now].
Now WTF is that DPI mooring ... and how am I going to tie up on it without LSCP to help ?
Couldn't find it ... but I did find a complementary temporary mooring and was able to pull up my fine craft along side and hook onto it by myself. Then it was a simple matter of paddling ashore using one of the waveskis and towing the other one, then LSCP returned with me.
Another call to the DPI and the lovely and patient lady explained exactly where it was and yeah verily what other numbers were nearby ... and instructed me to call back when we were safely tied up there.
The instructions proved instructive and after a bit of mucking around making our own multiple mooring ropes, we had a new temporary home.
Yes, we are now "there yet".
All that remained was to secure the wayward mooring for the contractor team, paddle ashore with me singing LSCP's praises all the way for her patience as well as apologising for the one (maybe two) occasions I, uh, "failed to effectively communicate" and did an exasperated naggy whinge thing.
The poor girl is now horrible sun-burnt as she wasn't expecting to be in the sun much at all for what we originally planned ... but seriously (and as I said multiple times throughout the long afternoon) "you wouldn't read about it" (let alone plan for it !)
And yet here you are doing that very thing ... and well done if you made it this far.
Anyhoo, I get home to hear about cyclones up North and folk stranded under the English Channel and New York snowed in, etc, etc, and so how can I think of our afternoon's troubles and inconveniences being anything other than an adventure ?
Merry (good natured) Bah Humbug to one and all and may all your travels be adventures ... rather ordeals. Grin.
Above image from: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/04/jo-nova-finds-the-medieval-warm-period/#more-13698 It shows the Real Story of the climate cycle as opposed to the one Michael Mann fraudulently wanted the IPCC (et al) to believe in ... one with no prior warmer-than-now time called "The Medieval Warm Period" that helps prove that humankind is NOT the cause of global climate change.
I am a climate scientist, and it is clear that the evidence that “human activity is prominent [sic] agent in global warming” is NOT overwhelming. The repeated statement that it is does not make it so. Further, even if we accepted the hypothesis, cap-and-trade legislation does not do anything about it.
Here are the facts. We have known for years that the Mann hockey stick model was wrong, and we know why it was wrong (Mann used only selected data to normalize the principal component analysis, not all of it). He retracted the model. We have known for years that the Medieval Warm period occurred, where the temperatures were higher than they are now (Chaucer spoke of vineyards in northern England).
Long before ClimateGate it was known that the IPCC people were trying to fudge the data to get rid of the MWP. And for good reason. If the MWP is “allowed” to exist, this means that temperatures higher than today did not then create a “runaway greenhouse” in the Middle Ages with methane released from the Arctic tundra, ice cap albedo lost, sea levels rising to flood London, etc. etc.), and means that Jim Hansen’s runaway greenhouse that posits only amplifying feedbacks (and no damping feedbacks) will not happen now. We now know that the models on which the IPCC alarms are based to not do clouds, they do not do the biosphere, they do not explain the Pliocene warming, and they have never predicted anything, ever, correctly.
As the believers know but, like religious faithful, every wrong prediction (IPCC underestimated some trends) is claimed to justify even greater alarm (not that the models are poor approximations for reality); the underpredictions (where are the storms? Why “hide the decline”?) are ignored or hidden.
As for CO2, we have known for years that CO2 increases have never in the past 300,000 years caused temperature rise (CO2 rise trails temperature increase). IPCC scientists know this too (see their “Copenhagen Diagnosis”); we know that their mathematical fudges that dismiss the fact that CO2 has not been historically causative of temperature rise are incorrect as well. We have also known for years that the alleged one degree temperature rise from 1880 vanishes if sites exposed to urban heat islands are not considered.
We have long known that Jones’s paper dismissing this explanation (Jones, et al. 1990. Assessment of urbanization effects in time series of surface air temperature over land, Nature 347 169- 172) is wrong and potentially fraudulent (see the same data used to confirm urban heat islands in Wang, W-C, Z. Zeng, T. R Karl, 1990. Urban Heat Islands in China. Geophys. Res. Lett. 17, 2377-2380). Everyone except Briffa knows that the Briffa conclusions are wrong, and why they are wrong; groups in Finland, Canada (lots of places actually) show cooling by this proxy, not warming; the IPCC even printed the Finn’s plot upside down to convert the fact (cooling) into the dogma (warming).
Prof. McCarthy is, of course, part of the IPCC that has suppressed dissenting viewpoints based on solid climate science. His claim to support by “peer review” is nonsense; he has helped corrupt the peer review process. We now have documentary evidence that Jones, Mann, and the other IPCC scientists have been gaming peer review and blackballing opponents. On this point, the entire IPCC staff, including Prof. McCarthy, neither have nor deserve our trust.
We have tolerated years of the refusal of Mann and Jones to release data. Now, we learn that much of these data were discarded (one of about 4 data sets that exist), something that would in any other field of science lead to disbarment. We have been annoyed by Al Gore, who declared this science “settled”, refused to debate, and demonized skeptics (this is anti-science: debate and skepticism are the core of real science, which is never settled). The very fact that Prof. McCarthy attempts to bluff Congress by asserting the existence of fictional “overwhelming evidence” continues this anti-science activity.
All of this was known before Climategate. What was not known until now was the extent to which Jones and Mann were simply deceiving themselves (which happens often in science) or fraudently attempting to deceive others. I am not willing to crucify Jones on the word “trick”. Nor, for that matter, on the loss of primary data, keeping only “value added” data (which is hopelessly bad science, but still conceivably not fraud).
But the computer code is transparently fraudulent. Here, one finds matrices that add unexplained numbers to recent temperatures and subtract them from older temperatures (these numbers are hard-programmed in), splining observational data to model data, and other smoking guns, all showing that they were doing what was necessary to get the answers that the IPCC wanted, not the answers that the data held. They knew what they were doing, and why they were doing it.
If, as Prof. McCarthy insists, “peer review” was functioning, and the IPCC reports are rigorously peer reviewed, why was this not caught? When placing it in context made it highly likely that this type of fraud was occurring?
The second question is: Will this revelation be enough to cause the “global warming believers” to abandon their crusade, and for people to return to sensible environmental science (water use, habitat destruction, land use, this kind of thing)? Perhaps it will.
Contrary to Prof. McCarthy’s assertion, we have not lost just one research project amid dozens of others that survive. A huge set of primary data are apparently gone. Satellite data are scarcely 40 years old. Everything is interconnected, and anchored on these few studies. Even without the corruption of the peer review process, this is as big a change as quantum mechanics was in physics a century ago.
But now we know that peer review was corrupted, and that no “consensus” exists. The “2500 scientists agree” number is fiction (God knows who they are counting, but to get to this number, they must be including referees, spouses, and pets).
The best argument now for AGW is to argue that CO2 is, after all, a greenhouse gas, its concentration is, after all, increasing, and feedbacks that regulated climate for millions of years might (we can hypothesize) be overwhelmed by human CO2 emissions. It is a hypothesis worthy of investigation, but it has little evidentiary support.
Thus, there is hope that Climategate will bring to an end the field of political climatology, and allow climatology to again become a science. That said, people intrinsically become committed to ideas. The Pope will not become a Protestant even if angel Gabriel taps him on the shoulder and asks him to. Likewise, Prof. McCarthy may claim until the day he retires that there remains “overwhelming support” for his position, even if every last piece of data supporting it is controverted. As a graduate student at Harvard, I was told that fields do not advance because people change their minds; rather, fields advance because people die.
What the hell was Phil Jones and the rest of his colluding CRU crew using for raw data anyway ?
... The Australian data comes in for particular criticism as the programmer discovers World Meteorological Organisation codes are missing, station names overlap and many co-ordinates are incorrect.
At one point the programmer writes about his attempts to make sense of the data. "What a bloody mess," he concludes.
In another case, 30 years of data is attributed to a site at Cobar Airport but the frustrated programmer writes: "Now looking at the dates. something bad has happened ... COBAR AIRPORT AWS [automatic weather station] cannot start in 1962, it didn't open until 1993!"
In another he says: "Getting seriously fed up with the state of the Australian data ... so many false references ... so many changes ... bewildering." ...
Wow, weather station data from a weather station not established until 32 years later ... now THERE is a "trick" !
Seems to me that the only thing holding up AGW now is religious blind faith and wishful thinking ... and why would anyone want it to be true anyway, hmmm ?
This is Big News. At long last, after near a decade of being stymied and stonewalled, the Base Data used to help give the world the infamous "Hockey Stick Graph" has been made available for suitable scientific peer-review scrutiny ... and it is now plain why such desperate efforts were made to keep it from being scrutinised in the first place.
Rather than repeat what has already been said, get thee instead to the following links from the award winning science blog "wattsupwiththat.com":
Or if you don't have the time to be reading all that at the moment, then enjoy the following rant from Hitler ... but please pardon any mis-translating of German into English I may have inadvertently made in providing subtitles. Heh.
So, "man-made climate change" is in fact shown to be "mann-made climate change". Not that I expect the AGW environmentalist religionists to suddenly abandon their cult just because a central sacred icon to it has been hurled down. They'll soon find something to replace it with ... such is the nature of such True Believers.
Posts
