We all knew that the climate fraudsters were tampering with the data from individual stations. That has been well documented, and it was clear that what we could see was just the tip of the ice-berg.
However, despite the eco-nutters tampering with individual stations and those at NASA “retiring” any that inconveniently weren’t warming as they wanted, they still could not turn the cooling into warming and so they couldn’t help confirming what has been euphemistically called the “pause” in global warming (a term I started using on Wikipedia as the least likely to be immediately deleted – by what turned out to be almost certainly the same eco-zealots fabricating the data in the first place).
The problem was that there just wasn’t enough warming stations left as they systematically removed any that had cooled. So, eventually they hit on the scam of taking the sea buoy temperatures – not as actual temperatures, but as a fractional change in temperature so small as to be noise, which they then massively scaled up and then adding into the actual global temperature to produce the biggest load of codswallop.
Put simple, the “global temperatures” from the likes of NASA no longer tell us anything about global temperature. So, for the last few years, the bench mark for global temperatures as been the temperature from the satellites. Not only because it is so obvious when someone tampers with it, but mostly because it is technically superior.
To put it very simply: it measures the temperature over a region of the earth, and that is a direct averaging, which is independent of height (so very little problem if the height changes – contrary to the non-science we keep getting from the climate cretins).
But, I knew it would be just a matter of time before they found a way to tamper with the satellite temperature, and today that confirmation came. Compare the RSS (one of the satellite metrics) on the following two graphs:

The End of the World?

Fortunately not. We still have UAH which remains a credible source, but they will now be under incredible pressure to start showing warming. And it will be increasingly difficult to explain to those who have not been following the climate frauds why out of all the made up data, there is one and only one metric which remains credible (which just happens to show no warming).
So, you might think I’d be down in the dumps about this latest “success” for the forces of anti-science. But I’m not.
Because, just as I’m sick to the back teeth of climate data which no longer in any sense reflects what is happening to actual global temperatures, so all other decent researches will have the same loathing for the politically meddling and dishonesty which now infests almost all temperature metrics.
And that is what will eventually bring this scam crashing down: the fact that it is impossible to compare the temperature data in a paper a few years ago with the same temperature data now.  By now it will be a running joke in the subject that the data can’t be trusted. Of course many will try to spin it positively “yet another one over on the sceptics”. But there are always some people trying to do serious science even in a mickey mouse subject like this. And can you imagine trying to use data where you can’t compare work even a few years old because the basic key temperature data IN THE PAST keeps changing.
Imagine writing a paper: “in 2005 we showed a correlation of X1, but when we published in 2007 but THE SAME CORRELATION had to be changed to X2,  however, in the later research in 2013, the SAME CORRELATION is X3, and today when comparing SAME “data” a figure of X4 must be used. Of course, they can’t write the truth and will try to hide it. But they will treat it as a joke, in turn their colleagues will treat it as a joke, and all the academics will be treating the subject as a joke.
And when you get this kind of culture developing in a subject – soon people start making up data that doesn’t need to be made up. They assert things that cannot be asserted because they just cannot be bothered to do the work to process the data (which keeps changing anyway). And when they discoverer that no one cares whether the data is made up … they will just keep doing it. That kind of culture is ruinous to a subject, it saps moral, it puts off decent people from joining and any decent people will want out.
And that is when a subject is destroyed … not when external people think it is worthless … but when those in the subject know it is a joke.

Everyone who is anyone in Climate knows that NASA gave up with producing a global temperature figure when the pause had gone on long enough to be a total embarrassment to these huff and puff merchants.
Instead they started producing a metric which you can’t call “global temperature”, as that can only be achieved by a simple average of comparable temperatures. Instead they did something akin to converting everything to an energy figure, then adding in a whole lot of codswallop, fish foe, and other very smelly entrails, and then reconverted that vile concoction back to a “temperature”.
The approach they chose was simple: if the metric you have isn’t doing what you want, find some other metric that is and add it in. In this case the convenient bullshit came from ocean buoys measurements which happened to be warming. And sure – you can always find something in the climate going your way for a few years to boost the warming figures, but the problem is that almost all of them are part of some form of cycle, such that sooner or later what you gain as they warm, you more than lose as they go into the cooling phase.
And then … if you take a change so small that it cannot be measured and scale it up massively to get warming … it hardly takes any cooling at all to more than reverse the process. And as the laws of chance tell us … sooner or later shit happens.
Of course, we’re not going to see the shit hitting the fan. Because as soon as they get any cooling – they will retire the worst offending buoys as they did the land based stations so that they only have warming buoys. And unlike land based stations where retiring stations was pretty easy to spot, an ocean buoy is pretty easy to let “go missing”. So all this fraudulent meddling is easily hidden.
So we will never see any of the gnashing of teeth as those in NASA and NOAA desperately try to conjure warming out of cold sea water. However, we will all know it is there. And with the record colds that are starting to show in the US as we head towards a La Nina year, NASA & their loathsome ilk are almost certainly having a:

Terrible Christmas and a Rotten New Year

 

The lapse rate or average change in temperature is about 6.5C/km which means we have to change altitude by a mere 15m per 0.1C change. Furthermore, it has come to my attention that whilst Father Christmas comes down many chimneys – which happen to be about 7.5m tall, there is no mention of him ever climbing up.
Thus there must be a net gain in global temperature which we can work out as follows:
There are 7billion people on earth. Assuming 3.5/household, that is 2billion households. Or the increasing in temperature experienced by father Christmas (who doesn’t climb out of the chimney) is

2,000,000,000 x 0.1 /2 = 100,000,000C

Happy Christmas

For nearly 20 years the idiots pushing the politicised climate scam have asserted that “the science is settled” and denied any other possible cause to climate change other than CO2.
That only works as a propaganda tool if there isn’t another climate driver. Today I read that Svensmark has finally got his proof of a link between cloud formation and cosmic rays published.

“Scientists at the Technical University of Denmark have discovered what they call a game changing result in understanding how cosmic rays from supernovae – exploding stars – can influence Earth’s cloud cover and thereby climate by being mediated by the Sun. The new findings are published in the journal Nature Communications.
…
The principle is that cosmic rays – high-energy particles that traverse the galaxy from supernovae – knock electrons out of air molecules. This produces ions – electrically positive and negative molecules in the atmosphere. The ions help aerosols – clusters of mainly sulphuric acid and water molecules – to form and become stable against evaporation – a process is called nucleation.”

It is now undeniable that cosmic rays are partly responsible for climate change.
That in turn means it is even more likely the 1970-2000 warming was caused by a similar change in condensation nuclear from air born pollution – which like cosmic ray clouds, act to depress the temperature. But this time the main change that we noticed was the rapid removal of cooling-causing pollution when the clean air acts came in in the 1970s with the associated REGIONAL change in temperature a few days upwind of areas of economic activity like the US and Europe.
Now, it might be reasonable to ask why I’m not trying to publish this finding. The reason is that I’ve seen how many years upon years upon years it has taken for those like Svensmark to get what is in reality a fairly simple and pretty obvious link, past the climate stazi. So you will understand I have far better things to do with my life than spend the next decade trying to publish a paper just to show the totally obvious link between 1970-2000 reduction in pollution and the 1970-2000 rise in global temperature.
Happy Xmas
 

For those sceptics like me who’ve seen the evidence and followed the appalling behaviour of climate nutter academics, there has been no doubt that those like NASA are little more than environmental activists pretending to be scientists in order to use their pretended science to push the US and others toward a pure eco-nutter goal.
However, if you’re not a scientist, have not had time to follow the debate, and/or get all your news from those like the BBC who have pushed a relentless tirade of climate nutter output, even the most level headed pro-science politician might find it a little difficult to just take us sceptics at our word and do the right thing.
I can appreciate the problems for a sane level headed politician who doubts what he’s being told by the mass army of eco-nutters in academia and places like NASA. But equally I might be appalled if they didn’t follow the advice of academic scientists in other areas.
However, it seems Trump has found a way through this impasse:

President Trump has privately said he supports a public debate to challenge mainstream climate science, according to administration officials. But there’s infighting about how it should occur — if at all. The president has told U.S. EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt during several conversations that he supports Pruitt’s plan for a “red-team, blue-team” debate aimed at challenging the prevailing scientific consensus about humans’ impact on climate change, a senior administration official told E&E News. Another administration official said that “there is support for the initiative at the highest levels.” —ClimateWire, 11 December 2017

This of course, is the last thing the climate nutters want. Because they know full well that after 20years of the satellites showing no real warming, they do not have the evidence to back up their nuttery, and the only argument they have is “we’re climate ‘scientists’ do what we tell you”.
But now they are damned if they do, and damned if they do not. If they do debate, they will lose and they will lose in the most highprofile manner. If they don’t debate, Trump has called them out and they have shown they have nothing to offer except denier insults and he will wipe the floor with them.

Nearly two decades after I first highlighted the fact that there is no evidence that the Britons were Celts, it seems that British archaeologists and historians have finally accepted this fact. However, you can be forgiven for not having heard it.

Indeed, I only heard the news by chance at 2pm this morning – not by way of any grandiose press release – but in a snippet I heard by pure fluke in a BBC program on “Invasions”. Call me a sceptic but putting this out in  in a program that you’ve got to be a serious historical nerd to watch, when the Irish border and Brexit is filling all the newspapers must be a good way to get out this news with the least possible furore. A good year to bury bad news?

What does this all mean?

The simple fact, is that we Britons (who have for generations been taught that we used to be a Celtic race until the Anglo Saxon invasion and supposed genocide of the former “Celtic” peoples of Britain) were never Celts anyway. And that is about all it means.
Instead the term “Celt” rightly belongs to a tribal grouping of just one part of the nation of Gauls in France. And we have this on no lesser authority than Caesar himself: the conqueror of the Gauls.
However, just because you change the name of a football team doesn’t change the team, nor any of the basic stats. And likewise, just because generations of historians and archaeologists have been using the wrong tribal name to describe us Britons, hardly anything now changes about our history.
The Welsh (formerly thought to be the remnants of Celts in Britain) are still Welsh. They still have a distinct language and culture. They are still linguistically related to the Cornish, Bretons and Cumbrians. Welsh and Gaelic as languages are still more similar than for example Welsh and German, so they can be considered a different language group. In one sense, it is nothing more than a name change, a rebranding of our identity: We were never Celts – just plain ancient Britons.
But in another sense it is perhaps the most momentous change in British history we’ve seen in many generations. And … you’ve got to wonder how such a glaringly obvious mistake came to be relied on by so many generations of academics.
The answer is simple: such a fundamental thing wasn’t something anyone was researching. The matter was settled hundreds of years ago, and unless it was for awkward people like me – who don’t rely on research grants to decide what we resarch, there would have been no need to re-examine the matter.

A good year to bury bad news?

I can’t help wondering whether the timing of this news is entirely coincidental. In archaeological terms it’s simply a name change. But on the basis of a long held belief that the Scots and Irish are “Celtic” a whole generation of politicians, artists, writers & even footballers and created a “Celtic” identity that is now without foundation. I can’t see them being too pleased.
Just now, the papers are obsessed by Brexit and particularly the Irish ones are totally focussed on the issue of the Irish-Northern Ireland border. It is indeed a good year to bury the Celtic myth.

Background

Why was I looking at the Celts nearly two decades ago? The answer was that I was not. I had no interest in the Celts. Instead I was interested in the development of early Christianity in Britain and I was getting extremely confused with references to the “Celtic Church”.
The problem was that evidence now shows that Christianity has been present in Britain from a very early period but in England. It was therefore quite clear that there must have been a church in Roman Britain – the part that wasn’t “Celtic” and there is no(?) evidence for any “Celtic” church at this period. I just couldn’t understand whether this “Celtic church” was the same as the one in Roman Britain or whether there may have been two different churches.
And in trying to understand whether there were two early churches, I found I had to understand what was and wasn’t meant by “Celtic”. And so as I traced back the evidence on the British “Celts” and I repeatedly found no evidential foundation for what was being said. Indeed, I then started reading all the available Roman texts to find out what they were saying about the Celts. And none of them referred to Celts in Britain. None of it pointed to the Celts being in Britain.
After thoroughly checking, I eventually raised the subject on the Britarch forum, and got nothing but howls of incredulity from every reply. However, when did that ever stop me?
And that is the story so far, but it will not be the end of the matter. In nearly two decades of quiet research, do you really think I have not developed my ideas further?

Anyone who has done physics, will have heard of viscosity which is usually described in terms like “honey is viscous because it doesn’t flow freely and water is not”.
Fortunately … just the mention of viscosity ought to be enough to put off everyone from reading further – so I make no apologies for the numerous videos which I think were fun!
The problem is that most people have never spotted the glaring anomalies with viscosity. We all accept that atoms in a liquid are in constant movement – yet if they experienced viscosity then as a form of “friction” between particles, it would cause them to all stop moving within a fraction of a second and everything would be a solid. Likewise, we accept that sound waves propagate through a liquid or gas almost unattenuated, but we somehow accept that if instead of being moved toward and back, that if instead the molecules are moved past each other they somehow dramatically change from almost frictionless movement to experience “friction”. That is total absolute bollocks!
I thought if I looked I could find a description of what actually happens at the molecular level – but it’s strangely difficult to find anything on the subject. That often means the “experts” haven’t got a clue which means that as I’ve no reputation to tarnish by admitting how little I know on the subject, I’m quite happy to ask the very awkward question of what viscosity really is. Continue reading →

As a thoroughly convinced supporter of most products of Openoffice I regularly use the spreadsheet for all kinds of things. So, when I wanted to analyse some historical sites I naturally started by importing a CSV (comma separated variable) file into a simple spreadsheet. This gave me the basics of name, location, etc.
However, I realised very soon that because I could not afford to visit all the sites, I was severely limited in what information I could get. And therefore I had to rely on: images available on the web, descriptions (often only a few words about each location), maps, aerial photography and streetview.
Most of this information is visual, so for each site I wanted to have stored alongside the text descriptions and “yes/no” about what features were at a site, the original source photos. And whilst I have copy-n-pasted images to a table many times before, it has always been problematic.
Paradoxically, although you’d think storing an image with data would be easy in calc (spreadsheet), my experience is that it is best stored in openoffice writer, as it copes much better with resizing to fit images than openoffice calc . In writer (when you remember how?) they stay in the table, but in calc, it seems like the images have a life of their own and very quickly I find odd images all over the place that no longer “belong” to any record. (Maybe that’s because you inevitably try to sort tables – and the images get “left behind”).
However, openoffice tables may be better formatted and easier to work with when images are present, but they are much more difficult to use when the data extents over several screen widths. You gain because the tables expand – but that means that very quickly the table is absolutely enormous if any of the fields are large. And that is what I had, images + several screen widths of columns. Also, it’s a real pain when you have odd data for example data that is really a choice of “OPTIONS” (small, medium, big, mega).

BASE

Realising that the project to analyse the data could take up to a month, I reasoned that it was worth spending some time optimising the method of recording the data. From my previous experience with Access & MySQL that was clearly a form based approach with a database “table” (aka spreadsheet) sitting in the background being populated by the form.
So, whilst I’d tried and failed before, I thought it worth taking a look at the Openoffice base product because my application was SO SIMPLE. My reasoning: “how could it fail to do something so simple?” (Well it did)
Obviously, I’d had a look at base before, but I wasn’t impressed because it seemed to lack all the features that I had found so useful in Access. However, because I didn’t need complex features and it was mainly a question of “scale” and efficiency of data entry and I didn’t need a lot of complex features, I decided to give it another go.
Now, the reality is that when you open base, there isn’t a lot there which is immediately off putting. Indeed, there is no option for importing or exporting data – which was the first thing I had to do. And it drives you potty when you can’t even start a project without reading loads of help forums to find the answer.
It turned out that “all I had to do” was copy and paste. I put that in quotation marks, because it’s almost unusable as a feature. Yesterday (as I tried to migrate out of base) the only way I could copy my data out of base was to another version of base connected with MySQL, was that I had to copy each table, close down base, open it up again, then paste, and close it down for each and every table (it keeps trying to paste the same data no matter what you do until you force it to clear it’s memory by closing it down).
And why was I trying to store my data in MySQL – because base crashed the first day I used it, wiping out my entire database (and there is no automatic backup as in other products) and it has crashed regularly ever since. Fortunately, I managed to recover the form, which was paradoxically the main man-hours of effort. But it has crashed almost every day I’ve used it. And for the simplest of things … like just dragging a box around on the form designer …. CRASH … and not only Based but the whole of open office goes and at that time it included work that had not been saved in writer.
So, in case you want the short answer to whether to use base, I can’t honestly recommend it to anyone for any purpose.

Recommendation

NO – DON’T USE IT Continue reading →

From my previous experience examining the physics of falling over, I’ve realised that the simplest things are often the hardest to explain.
This is an unfinished article – unfinished because I’m metaphorically “stuck in the mud”. I’ve been reading up what I can, but e.g. I’ve bought a book on “Soil Mechanics” which doesn’t even mention Mud in the index. Mud is a pretty ubiquitous thing – but it seems that just like physical mud, most scientists just try to avoid it altogether.
So, any comments or inspiration will be gratefully received in comments.

---

 
The physics of mud can be distinguished by many questions:

1. Why is mud slippery
2. Why do we slowly sink in mud but not water
3. Why does water make loose soil stick together?
4. Why does the removal of water then turn mud into solid?
5. How can a solid flow
6. Why is mud – mud coloured?

The specific question I have relates to why a patch of waterlogged ground will turn to mud. In science there are four states of matter (and two that do not matter).

• Solid
• Liquid
• Gas
• Plasma

Mud however does not fit any of these. It has some of the properties of a solid, in that small quantities can support their own weight. But it also behaves like a liquid. But ground is clearly “solid” – and waterlogged ground is still solid, at least until it is agitated, whereupon it can (but does not always) turn to mud.
The specific properties of mud are:

• Softness
• Adhesiveness
• Slipperyness
• Churability
• Suction
• … and capacity to dampen explosives (OK from this you might guess I got the list from a military book).

One of the big questions about mud – is why when soil is just small rocks – doesn’t something like sand turn to mud. A possible reply was found in this reply on Stackexchange by John Rennie:

There is a profound difference between sand and mud.
Sand is composed of grains of silicon dioxide, and these grains are relatively large and approximately round but with jagged facets. The grittiness of water/sand mixtures is due to physical interactions between these grains. At low volume fractions sand water dispersions have low viscosity, but at volume fractions of greater than around 0.5 interactions between the grains cause the dispersions to become dilatant.
On the other hand mud is composed largely of clays. The word clay is a generic term for a large class of aluminosilicates all of which have a layered crystal structure and many of which delaminate in water to form small and very thin platelike crystals. This has two consequences. Firstly a small amount of clay expands to take up a large amount of water, so clay dispersions are typically very viscous. Hence the gluely feel of clays. Secondly, under shear the plates tend to align and can slide over each other even at high volume fractions of clay. That is why clay is thick at low shear rates but can be deformed at high stresses – this property is known as shear thinning.
Both sand/water dispersions and clays are non-Newtonian fluids, but their behaviour under shear is essentially opposite.

This answer seems to explain the difference, but given the lack of any reference to evidence to support the answer I would wonder whether it was a knowledgeable person’s guess rather than the result of careful testing. My main concern, is that it would appear to me that mud moves because the water lubricates the particles – and that is as true of clay used by potters as it is of boot-sucking mud.

Viscosity

The sinking of person in mud is mostly due non-Newtonian behaviour of mud.  i.e Mud can have very high viscosity initially when force is applied to it.

There’s no doubt that global warming is a load of unscientific nonsense, but it’s far from clear what that means in terms of the future, because although the climate is clearly not going to comply with this idiocy in the long run, it’s also true that people continue to believe a lot of unscientific nonsense.
From a scientific point of view the future is clear: CO2 is a relatively unimportant gas, there are extremely good candidates in sulphates and con-trails for the 1970-2000 warming which is ALL that was ever a concern, the bandwagon can be traced from its beginning and at no point was science ever in the driving street – instead it was environmentalists pushing it uphill against the science all the way, and whilst climate takes a time to reveal the truth – the climate itself will not comply with this millennium stupidity.
However … I don’t think that is enough to convince many people, indeed I can be certain that there will always be a minority who will continue to believe that CO2 must be a major problem irrespective of the lack of any evidence to support them.
And … unfortunately, just as NASA completely fabricated a new metric (which doesn’t show temperature but a fake figure which is only vaguely related to temperature) … so it does not seem beyond the bounds of belief, to think that NASA, or whoever controls the satellites that have provided the only independent and untampered with metric for (near) global temperature would find a way to change their output so as to create a fabricated warming in the satellite measurements as well.
But I know myself … that as soon as I have to start altering the data to make it fit the theory … I lose confidence in the theory. And I’ve worked in cultures where data tampering was the norm … and not only is it very obvious what is going on to anyone coming in … but the culture spreads until the whole organisation is rotten and not fit to work for. This I think … this knowledge that they cannot make the data fit … will be more poisonous to the global warming madness than anything we sceptics could ever say.
The key change is one from a culture of “the data generally agrees – even if we’re currently in an outliar period” to one of “the data does not agree – so we have to find a way to make it agree”.
To put it another way … the very fact they stopped using temperature data and started using a metric that no longer means anything (certainly not temperature) was an admission that the models had failed.

Where now?

Scenario 1
That the academics and eco-nutters suddenly embrace science, admit that they were wrong and sceptics get financial compensation for the time and effort we have spent because of their mistakes … (just having a laugh).
Scenario 2
That as those academics leading the nuttery retire, as new data continues to come in showing they’ve been stupid, that the “new guard” find a way to maintain their own status by subtly dropping the stupidity about CO2. No apologies, no compensation, but at least we move closer to real science.
Scenario 3
That the culture of data tampering remains so endemic that no one has a clue what the global temperature is doing and the scam keeps going because everyone is clueless as to one is really happening.
Scenario 4
We already know that global warming is pretty much a religion amongst its believers. But they at least pretend it has something to do with “science”. However, one strong possibility is that global warming gradually morphs into a fully fledged religion. The advantage of this approach for the believers is this is what they currently are anyway – and there is none of the inconvenience of pretending to try to justify their views from science. In other words, we see a move toward the view that if the majority of people believe something to be true, then it is true – and you’re wrong to reject it irrespective of what the (impartial) evidence says.

Addendum – The stupidity of Greens

Of course, one factor I omitted was the utter stupidity of Greens. Just as it is very likely that their zealous cleaning of the atmosphere of sulphates caused a sudden increase in temperature (1970-2000) so it’s equally possible that the Greens will jump on another bandwagon with equally unforeseeable consequences – either for the climate – or for their own credibility – or global warming may suddenly become a huge inconvenience for their next crusade (whatever that is).
For example – I’ve no doubt that even if it caused 10x as much pollution, most greens would fall for “electric planes”. And as con-trails are likely to be causing some degree of warming – a sudden change like that could see a massive and …. yes we all know “worrying change” in the climate. OK, electric planes are about as crazy as electric cars for serious journeys (not a two minute trip to the “wholefood” shop). But so are most of the schemes invented and pushed by greens.