Hounded by the graying yet still sporadically feisty Washington Post, climate modelers have fled to Sicily, where they have taken refuge among geologists. Little did they reckon on the dogged pursuit of a lone HuffPo blogger. The fleeing modelers, led by Robert DeConto of U. Mass.-Amherst, were still reeling from the WaPo drubbing:
Warren Meyer, a mechanical and aerospace engineer by training who blogs at www.climate-skeptic.com, said that climate models are highly flawed. He said the scientists who build them don't know enough about solar cycles, ocean temperatures and other things that can nudge the earth's temperature up or down. ... "The hubris that can be associated with a model is amazing, because suddenly you take this sketchy understanding of a process, and you embody it in a model," and it appears more trustworthy, Meyer said. "It's almost like money laundering."
If true, this money-laundering charge would make "Climate-Gate" moot. Oddly, though, the Washington Post, once celebrated for its tireless pursuit of Watergate, did not follow up on the allegation.
I did. I asked the tough questions Americans want answered about climate modeling. What's more, I got the answers on camera. (The audio may be grainy, but the content is way gritty.)
DeConto and his fellow modeling mafiosi are unrepentant. Disguised only in dark glasses, they wander freely along the cobbled streets of Erice, an ancient town perched on a Sicilian mountain overlooking the sea. Being academics, they blend easily into the gaggle of ANDRILL geologists meeting here to pore over research results from a nearly mile-deep core they extracted from Antarctica's Southern McMurdo Sound.
What the geologists are finding may well bring greater realism to polar climate modeling. But will DeConto et pals make a model more to our liking? Not freakin' likely.
If anything, they seem bent on doubling down. DeConto allows that his sojourn among the ANDRILL geologists has readied him for a more, ahem, "sensitive" climate model. But sensitive to the wishes of the public? Hardly.
On viewing the geologists' results, he shrugs, Sicilian style, and says, "Our models may be dramatically underestimating how much worse it's going to get." I just know DeConto was smiling on the inside.
His enabler, the ANDRILL project, is an international collaboration among scientists from Germany, Italy, New Zealand, and the United States. It has so far extracted two virtually complete cores from a critical region of Antarctica. With careful analysis, ANDRILL scientists have been able to infer much of the behavior of Antarctica's mammoth ice sheets over the past 20 million years from numerous clues in the cores.
Once DeConto and his collaborator, David Pollard of Penn State University, figure out how to plug the new data in their software, look out! You can bet they will be presenting us with even scarier scenarios for what happens if we keep pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
Like what? Like this: The U.S. Geological Survey recently published research showing that an Anarctic ice sheet meltdown would raise world sea level by enough to soak the Statue of Liberty up to her bustline. (Sea level would rise as much as 240 feet. The top of Lady Liberty's torch stands 305 feet above water -- for now.)
Patriotic Americans don't want to picture such an undignified scenario. They want a blue-sky future, not a deep-water one. So why is Big Science supporting doomsayers like DeConto? I put the question directly to ANDRILL co-chief scientist David Harwood.
Make no mistake, climate modelers may have gone to the mattresses in Sicily for now, but they will be back. And, armed with ANDRILL data, they will be more dangerous (to deniers) than ever.
-----
Full Disclosure: My basic travel expenses are being covered by the ANDRILL project to enable me to cover this conference.
Follow Clay Farris Naff on Twitter: www.twitter.com/claynaff
Problem of Climate Change Discussed in Germany
Can earth survive climate change? Author McKibben sees a chance
Carbon Positive: a chance to protect children affected by climate change
Texas Oil Firms Oppose California Climate Law
Climate change, skiing and dissent
Oil Tycoons Caught Sneaking Millions to Groups Spreading Climate Change Doubt
has anyone here seen the statue of liberty lately?
the sea already is up to her ankles!!!
The report (TechnicalPresentation021710.pdf) on http://www.american-reporter.com/ is just a lot of rehashed publicity
showing spectra results easily explained by crystal field theory. When science is not on your side (you can do a lot of
fancy math and hand-jiving but Mother Nature has the last say), appeal to authority and bring out the celebrities:
"The company has assembled a formidable board of directors that include a former head of Westinghouse, a top federal
nuclear energy official, ..." The American Reporter is another left-wingnut rag. Show us something from, say, National
Science Foundation or the American Physical Society.
Garret Moddel from colorado.edu have debunked all this ZPE wet dreams in his paper "Assessment of proposed
electromagnetic quantum vacuum energy extraction methods" (xxx.lanl.gov). Unfortunately for himself, who has a
US patent “Quantum vacuum energy extraction,” Patent 7379286, he did not understand the physics of EM surface waves on
Casimir tubes; thus his scheme is worthless. After exchanging a couple of emails, Moddel admitted to me that his patent
was a mistake. Sensible people becoming silly.
As I said before, I emailed Rowan. The faculty at Rowan were tight-mouthed and referred me to Black Light Power for
any discussion. They are backing away from BLP claims that they confirmed hydrinos.
The report (TechnicalPresentation021710.pdf) on http://www.american-reporter.com/ is just a lot of rehashed publicity showing spectra results easily explained by crystal field theory. When science is not on your side (you can do a lot of fancy math and hand-jiving but Mother Nature has the last say), appeal to authority and bring out the celebrities: "The company has assembled a formidable board of directors that include a former head of Westinghouse, a top federal nuclear energy official, ..." The American Reporter is another left-wingnut rag. Show us something from, say, National Science Foundation or the American Physical Society.
Garret Moddel from colorado.edu have debunked all this ZPE wet dreams in his paper "Assessment of proposed electromagnetic quantum vacuum energy extraction methods" (xxx.lanl.gov). Unfortunately for himself, who has a US patent “Quantum vacuum energy extraction,” Patent 7379286, he did not understand the physics of EM surface waves on Casimir tubes; thus his scheme is worthless. After exchanging a couple of emails, Moddel admitted to me that his patent was a mistake.
Sensible people becoming silly.
As I said before, I emailed Rowan. The faculty at Rowan were tight-mouthed and referred me to Black Light Power for any discussion. They are backing away from BLP claims that they confirmed hydrinos.
You're ignoring the part that's settled: AGHG forcing is happening now; it's going to get warmer; the ice will continue to melt. How fast, how soon? Indeed, we seem to be ahead of schedule.
Although not widely believed by scientists as yet, water can replace oil as fuel.
Future cars will become substantial power plants when suitably parked, ending any need to build coal or nuclear plants - demonstrating far less expensive alternatives to all fossil fuels. Automobiles might pay for themselves!
See Running on Water: at http://www.aesopinstitute.org
To learn more about water as fuel, visit the website of parallel technology developer, BlackLight Power.
Scientists understandably have a hard time accepting fractional Hydrogen, the basis of this radically new energy.
Laboratories should repeat the fractional Hydrogen experiment published by Rowan University, also successfully performed by GEN3 Partners, who advise Fortune 100 firms.
National labs and universities should do that experiment and design their own.
As technology using water as fuel is demonstrated and reaches the market, it will become increasingly difficult to ridicule, ignore or deny.
Following the Pearl Harbor attack, within a few months a bomber rolled off an assembly line every 59 minutes.
These radically new technologies are much simpler and inherently cost-competitive.
Let's have an all out effort to develop them rapidly!
There will be widespread support to end the rising cost of imported oil.
Surprisingly rapid reduction in the need for fossil fuel can be led by consumer demand.
Revolutionary energy technologies, such as fractional Hydrogen and Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (Cold Fusion) do not fit long accepted paradigms. And they threaten to disrupt powerful people who have vested interests to protect. Those who think people like Maxwells make sense, might want to review websites such as http://www.LENR-CANR.org
There can be found an up-to-date snapshot of the hard to accept new science that has emerged from a tabletop demonstration of a nuclear reaction that threatened to topple the careers of a galaxy of hot fusion scientists - who have spent billions of taxpayer dollars with no product and zero contribution to energy production.
Probing the fringes of science is an inherently risky enterprise.
In a world hurting for a strong economy, the nice surprise is that nothing less is likely to provide practical paths to power production that need no fossil fuels.
Mistakes and an excess of optimism come with the territory. So do remarkable discoveries and persistent people.
As new technologies reach the market such snide comments will inevitably reflect badly on their originators.
Until that occurs, they are to be expected.