A hurt thumb and fake science

My thumb hurts. That's what I get for having to power wash the drive and garage doors to get rid of all that green mold caused by all that hot weather last winter and spring.... NOT!

Anyway, BION holding the sprayer on a 2600 PSI washer has hurt my thumb. Durn you Algore, where were you when I needed you??

You know, the earth hasn't become warmer in 10 years yet NewsPeak acts like they have never heard of that fact...Come to think of it, if Algore didn't tell them, and we know he didn't... then they don't know...

And now we have Sharon Begley claiming that GW is causing the floods.

It's almost a point of pride with climatologists. Whenever someplace is hit with a heat wave, drought, killer storm or other extreme weather, scientists trip over themselves to absolve global warming. No particular weather event, goes the mantra, can be blamed on something so general. Extreme weather occurred before humans began loading up the atmosphere with heat-trapping greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide. So this storm or that heat wave could be the result of the same natural forces that prevailed 100 years ago—random movements of air masses, unlucky confluences of high- and low-pressure systems—rather than global warming.

Now let me see... they are wise and great when saying what Sharon wants, but Dodos when they don't. Okay, so much for balance... And don't you just love this...

Extreme weather occurred before humans began loading up the atmosphere with heat-trapping greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide.

Uh Sharon, what happened to all that carbon dioxide the last ten years?? Last winter?

What did it do? Run and hide in a cave??? We needed it!

Well, here is the answer.

"We can look at climate-model simulations and likely attribute [specific extreme weather] to human activity," says Gerry Meehl of the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

Yessir. Models, simulations and likely. Three words that just give me a lot of confidence that these people know what they are doing. I mean it just sounds so.... scientific....

Michael Crichton, whose intelligence is largely disregarded because he has made a ton of money writing science fiction as opposed to science fantasy explained it all over five years ago.

Cast your minds back to 1960. John F. Kennedy is president, commercial jet airplanes are just appearing, the biggest university mainframes have 12K of memory. And in Green Bank, West Virginia at the new National Radio Astronomy Observatory, a young astrophysicist named Frank Drake runs a two week project called Ozma, to search for extraterrestrial signals. A signal is received, to great excitement. It turns out to be false, but the excitement remains. In 1960, Drake organizes the first SETI conference, and came up with the now-famous Drake equation:

N=N*fp ne fl fi fc fL

Where N is the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy; fp is the fraction with planets; ne is the number of planets per star capable of supporting life; fl is the fraction of planets where life evolves; fi is the fraction where intelligent life evolves; and fc is the fraction that communicates; and fL is the fraction of the planet's life during which the communicating civilizations live.

This serious-looking equation gave SETI an serious footing as a legitimate intellectual inquiry. The problem, of course, is that none of the terms can be known, and most cannot even be estimated. The only way to work the equation is to fill in with guesses. And guesses-just so we're clear-are merely expressions of prejudice. Nor can there be "informed guesses." If you need to state how many planets with life choose to communicate, there is simply no way to make an informed guess. It's simply prejudice.

As a result, the Drake equation can have any value from "billions and billions" to zero. An expression that can mean anything means nothing. Speaking precisely, the Drake equation is literally meaningless, and has nothing to do with science.

The problem is that 99% of the ardent believers in the nonsense that is GW never had Algebra or even General Science. So they are incapable of understanding even the oh so simple explanation that Crichton gives out.

I repeat.

"Yessir. Models, simulations and likely." Three words that just give me a lot of confidence that these people know what they are doing. I mean it just sounds so.... scientific...."

And then Sharon lectures:

In a warmer world, air holds more water vapor, so when cloud conditions are right for that vapor to form droplets, more precipitation falls.

Well, assuming there is a source of water vapor... true. But that "conditions" she speaks of is a cold front. Now a funny thing happens. The amount of water that condenses out when warm air meets a cooler object depends on the temperature of the cooler object. A mild cold front causes X amount. A strong cold front causes X x 10.

Check your air conditioner. The cooler you set it the more water it produces.

In other words the warm air is the tank, but the spigot is the cooler air.

Now, if the globe is getting warmer, where did that cold air come from?

On the other hand, if the globe is getting cooler.....and we had a record cold winter and spring....

Later chums. All this fake science is making my aching thumb worse...