Posted by Richard on May 14, 2007
It's a civics quiz. No, it's a citizenship test. No, it's the Fifth Carnival of Principled Government! Head on over there and check out Dana's clever carnival format, as Principled Discovery continues its quest to "uphold our founders' vision for our nation as found in our founding documents." Good stuff.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: carnivals, government, human rights, liberty | 1 Comment »
Posted by Richard on May 14, 2007
We've known since at least 2005 that Mars has been warming rapidly — much more rapidly than Earth. Anthropogenic climate change skeptics like Russian astronomer Habibull Abdussamatov have argued that the warming on both planets can be explained by solar radiation changes.
Defenders of the "scientific consensus" replied that Martian warming is due to wobbles in its orbit, not solar changes, and is irrelevant to the issue of the Earth warming. Meanwhile, Jupiter and Saturn have also shown evidence of warming, and evidence of warming on Triton and Pluto has existed for years.
Now, scientists have added Neptune to the list, and with a pretty strong correlation to what's happening on Earth:
Neptune is the planet farthest from the Sun (Pluto is now considered only a dwarf planet), Neptune is the planet farthest from the Earth, and to our knowledge, there has been absolutely no industrialization out at Neptune in recent centuries. There has been no recent build-up of greenhouse gases there, no deforestation, no rapid urbanization, no increase in contrails from jet airplanes, and no increase in ozone in the low atmosphere; recent changes at Neptune could never be blamed on any human influence. Incredibly, an article has appeared in a recent issue of Geophysical Research Letters showing a stunning relationship between the solar output, Neptune's brightness, and heaven forbid, the temperature of the Earth. With its obvious implications to the greenhouse debate, we are certain you have never heard of the work and never will outside World Climate Report.
According to H.B. Hammel of Boulder's Space Science Institute and G.W. Lockwood of Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, increased solar irradiation correlates 0.90 with Neptune's brightness increase and 0.89 with Earth's temperature rise.
So we know that solar energy output has increased for much of the 20th century (leveling off at the end of the century, just about when Earth's warming began leveling off), and we have evidence of warming on many other bodies in the solar system, and we have at least one model that closely correlates solar output with warming of two planets. But, hey, nobody cares because they've already arrived at a consensus — at least all the scientists who want to keep getting those nice grants have.
I haven't seen any information about Mercury's temperature, and I'm hesitant to bring up the evidence of warming on Venus. Some very smart people think Venus is an example of the "runaway greenhouse effect" that may be in our future if we ignore Al Gore. Never mind that the atmosphere of Venus is 96.5% carbon dioxide (the evil greenhouse gas), while Earth's CO2 level has risen from 0.028% to — gasp! — 0.036% (and that's a tenth of what it was a few hundred million years ago).
Gosh, practically every sizable body in the solar system seems to be getting warmer. I only have one more question, but I'm reluctant to ask it because this isn't that kind of blog.
Oh, what the heck…
Is Uranus getting hot?
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: environmentalism, global warming, science | 10 Comments »
