Shut-up Stupid Sunday: Climategate

All over the news last week the MSM was saying how stolen emails showed that “Global Warming” was actually a vast conspiracy.

If you are like me, and I know I am; you immediately started rummaging through your closet for your old ice skates and looked to book a flight to the South Caribbean to go ice skating on that huge ice ring known as the Atlantic Ocean, figuring that it was just a conspiracy that convinced you that the average world temperature is 57 degrees F, not the 67 degrees below zero that it must be because reporters are saying global warming is a fraud.

My plans for strapping on 60 lbs of hockey gear and taking a boat a mile off shore in the Caribbean so I could skate back were delayed as a little voice told me that maybe I should verify these reports before risking my life based on these reports.

If I hadn’t remembered that the very same reporters were reporting that in the 70’s scientists were predicting an ice age, which is why Harry Harrison didn’t write “Make Room, Make Room” back then, talking about Climate Change making the interior of the US uninhabitable, and it was never made into the movie “Solent Green” starring Charlton Heston. If it weren’t for that I would be skating on the frozen Caribbean right now.

I did my own investigation into what the stolen emails actually said. I came up with nothing. The full text of the stolen emails hasn’t been released only the supposedly damning sentences. The best analysis I found was this:

Basically the whole non-story is scientists used the word “fixed” in their climate modeling programs.

I worked as a programmer before the dot-com crash. I wrote a 250-page program for the mortgage industry, and I used to “fix” the data. I used SQL to access the customer database. SQL hates apostrophes, so while I was working on other things I made a quick fix by making the ‘ button on the keyboard type a *. From the beginning of the contact process until the last step before the mortgage papers were printed a customer might be called O*Reilly. That doesn’t mean Mr. & Mrs. O’Reilly’s loan didn’t exist it just meant that I used a fix to make the program work until I got around to modifying that part of the program. (Which I never did.)

So “fixing” data doesn’t necessarily invalidate the results. It’s just a term programmers use.

Dr. Phil Plait over at Bad Astronomy talks about other ways scientists use the word “fix” in their models. Just like in my mortgage program using the word “fix” doesn’t mean those mortgages don’t exist. The fact that he used “fixed” data in his program for the Hubble doesn’t mean that the universe doesn’t exist.

The other part of the non-story was that researchers erased some of the data they used. Somehow, even though this data is part of the open record and many other scientists have the exact same data they should have treated it as preciously as if it were the original Apollo Moon Landing Data that could never be reproduced. Apollo 11 missing tapes.

Some of this Data was terabytes gathered in the 80s. Back then Data storage was expensive. Go to any Mac bashing site and you’ll see PC fans saying Apple should have put a harddrive on the original Mac. If those people actually used a computer in 1984 they would know that it would add an additional $1,000 to add a massive 4-megabyte harddrive back then (That’s not a typo that’s megabyte not gigabyte). Back then it was actually cheaper to store the paper print outs and hire someone (in the late 80s these people became known as Wang Inputting Experts based on the Wang PC’s data entry program) to manually re-enter data.

For Data that was used often they were stored on huge reels of magnetic tape that were only labeled with a 2” by 3” piece of white tape that fell off easily. So dumping Data, especially if it existed elsewhere was commonplace.

So it turns out the despite the reports in the MSM that Global Warming is a hoax, the Earth’s average temperature is still 57 degrees and the Atlantic Ocean is above freezing so putting on 60 lbs of hockey gear and jumping off a boat miles from shore so you can skate home is not a good idea.

So to all those people that point to stolen emails taken out of context as proof that Global Warming is a hoax I say either “Shut-up Stupid” or slap on 60 lbs of skating gear and I’ll drop up you a mile from shore. If you skate back I’ll believe you.

Fantastic Future Friday: Through a Mirror Darkly

We do not live in a Universe where our reality is the only one, but a Multiverse where every possible decision has been played out. While experimenting with some of the new features in HTML 6.0 I accidentally typed in -alt.dim- Fantastic Future Friday -/alt.dim- and got the post and picture of the Project Savior who is a Conservative.

If you want to see our realities Project Savior’s Fantastic Future Friday post you will have to travel to that dimension in the Multiverse.

Friends,

On that fateful day 9/11 the way of life that we had enjoyed for a half century was attacked. It was an attack by shadowy enemies of freedom that were enabled by our own dependence on foreign oil. Since the 1970’s we have been sending billions of dollars to the enemies of freedom who would use our addiction to oil to fund our demise.

The biggest threat to our national security is our very own shortsighted thinking that strengthens our scary faceless enemies while weakening us in the process.

The most graphic attack was the horror of 9/11, but that was not the only attack, and it was not even the most effective attack.

The other attacks to our great nation have been the thousands of economic pinpricks that the ever-increasing cost of energy have slowly bled our strength. In the summer of 2008 as businesses needed to lay-off workers or close their doors altogether because of the high cost of fuel, that was an attack that has led to more deaths than the thousands that died on that fateful day on 9/11.

Every person who has died because they have been pushed into poverty due to the high cost of energy is a casualty in this new struggle.

Make no mistake this is a war, a war unlike any other previous war. It is a war for dominance over civilizations source of energy.

Now in this war there are many vague unnamed critics who would argue that we should take the low road. In this case the low road is very low, 2,000 feet to 2 miles down. They say we should grab the remaining oil and gas and use it up in the next 25 years before anyone else can.

I say boldly and loudly to those critics that taking the low road has never been the American way. The American way has always been to take the high road, that when faced with a challenge we don’t merely fall back on the old ideas of the past. Instead we forge new roads and conquer challenges through new innovations, surmount obstacles with the power of new ideas.

This war for control of energy, our civilizations lifeblood, will be fought on several fronts. The main artillery will be coming from the labs in universities across this country as a surge of 30,000 scientists and technicians will investigate new cheaper, more powerful, and lighter solar energy panels. To win this battle we will back up our unwavering resolve with a $3 billion a year investment.

In the beginning stages, the battlefields will in the American homes as we build and install these new more powerful solar panels to replace the energy that comes at the cost of the lives of American workers and soldiers, with heavenly power that shines down on America from the sun.

As our new smart offensive against the enemies of freedom progresses, it will move to building a new smart energy grid to reduce waste of our precious resources. New methods of mass transit will be deployed so that we can fight this enemy here so we don’t have to fight them over there.

As we gain control of more and more of the energy resources of the planet we must keep in mind the need for a permanent solution, and that’s where the final front will be fought.

The final front in this war for energy will start with a commitment to NASA in the form of a $4 billion increase in the Constellation Project. This commitment will not only allow us to return to the moon but it will give us a secure way to access space.

This commitment will include not only building the Ares family of spacecraft, but the new Maia ion propulsion transport. Named after the shyest God she will handle the heavy moving of material from Low Earth Orbit to higher orbits and even to the Moon.

She won’t be in the spotlight like her swifter siblings but she will carry out the most important step in battle to forever control America’s energy sources.

Her most important mission will be to take solar panels from Low Earth Orbit into the higher Geo-Synchronous Orbit where the sun is always shining. Once there they can beam this heavenly energy back to America to forever power our freedom loving way of life.

In this war to control the energy source for civilization, our commitment is strong and our resolution is unwavering. This is a war that not only can we win, but it is a war that we will win.

And by winning the war for energy we will lead America into a Fantastic Future.

Wednesday Writing Update

As my life has gotten busier, for the better, the first casualty has to be “What we know Wednesday”. It was my least viewed series and the hardest to write. I actually had to look up all the stuff I was talking about, even the things that I was 99% sure of, it was an attempt to hold myself to a higher standard. As a result it took a lot longer to write than the “Shut-up Stupid Sunday” my most popular series. If I get more time I will bring back the “What we know Wednesday” series because even though it was time consuming I found it very rewarding to take a deeper look into topics I thought I knew a lot about.

In it’s place I’m going to keep anyone who is interested updated on my writing career.

“Invasive Thoughts” – I’ve finished the back cover and sent everything off to the publisher. It is in pre-production now, they do the final proof-reading (I’ve proof read it about 20 times and my wife has proof read it 3 times, but as anyone who has read this blog knows spelling and grammar is not my strongest attribute as a writer. So I really pity the proofreader.)

I’ve got to wait for them to finish that and the cover art. I often feel that “wait” is the worst 4-letter word in the English language.

“The Setting Earth” – My First Draft is done, I’ve got 5 things that need to be included in the early part of the book to make the ending more powerful. 4 are easy the 5th one is hard, one of the characters needs to be competent at his job, just not as good as the insecure, young tech who saves the day. So I need to flesh him out more than I did.

I was shooting for the first draft to be 65,000 words and it ended up being 65,900. Not Bad.

“The Pizza Diaries” - In the last week I wrote or rewrote 15,000 words into the book. I’m afraid this one will go in spurts as it is a collection of horror/humor stories that revolve around a Pizza Delivery Driver that runs into all sorts of unusual things. So far he has run into an incompetent Satanic Cult that wanted to use him as a sacrifice, a shopkeeper that runs an inter-dimensional dating service, an outbreak of the living dead, a shape-shifter that drains people of their blood, and a rival pizza place that is run by Aliens that use people as their source of food.

It is nice having the same main character for these short stories as when I get an idea I don’t have to build a character from scratch, but I need to make sure the story can revolve around him.

Other than that its been awhile since I’ve had a short story accepted, so I will have to check and see what stories I’ve sent out that have gone past the 3 month mark without receiving a response and submit them elsewhere. I’m always afraid I will see one that has just gone past the 3-month mark with no reply, I’ll send it to the next magazine and then it will be accepted by the first one. So far that hasn’t happened but it is one of my fears.

Legal Disclaimer:

In order to comply with the new FCC guidelines on blogs I must reveal any compensation I have received from anyone or anything I have blogged about.

This evil minion has dropped a bird, and a snake at my feet. I’m not sure if that counts as compensation but you can’t be too transparent.

This evil minion has made numerous funny faces at me that have made me laugh.

And these evil minions are just so damn cute that it has to count as compensation.