As expected the cuts are beginning. We’ve already heard that NASA climate is effectively closing, now we have more details at NOAA and EPA.

Trump administration to cut climate change science agency NOAA’s budget by almost 20 percent claims new report

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4280688/NOAA-budget-cut-Trump-administration-memo-says.html

I had to share this tweet:

#Brexit & negative UKGov #renewables policies have killed industry causing mass redundancies in #Scotland. #indyref2 https://t.co/QtuAnx0ONv

— Chris Cathrine (@ChrisCathrine) March 4, 2017

Of course I will not stop trying to end the unreliables scam until every one of these bird/bat mincers has been torn down and those who pushed the scam have their names blackened as the scum of history.

The theory of developmental pathways is that technology develops not due to some spontaneous event which is often referred to in the media as a “discovery”, but because technology and learning has reached a stage where it is inevitable that it will be discovered. So, for example, whilst someone today claimed that CERN invented the internet … the fact was that other technology required a form of communication, and whilst the exact form of that communication may be down to one particular group or individual, whether or not they made their contribution it is certain that something very similar and arguably also quite possibly better would have been “invented”.
The importance of this theory is that it makes “invention” or “discovery” subject to scientific investigation. This is because we do not attribute discovery to chance, but instead to inevitability. Therefore, the theory states that in the same conditions with enough people working on it, given a reasonable time, the same invention would always have come about.
Thus if we know what the technological environment was like before a change in technology, we can determine the likely “developmental pathway” – as the most likely route by which the technology changed step by step from one state to another.
This allows us to make a science out of understanding technological development. Because rather than accepting the vague and often unsupportable claims of “inventors” (like Al Gore invented the internet), we can create hypothesis as to what conditions led to changes and use experiment to determine the most enerconic pathway

An ensemble model to sustain variability power.

Today, I discussed the fiddler dilemma in which I discussed the issues for the data fiddler as they constantly cherry pick random data leaving little randomness left. I then explained how a similar problem besets ensemble forecasting of climate. Because climate models inject variation as initial conditions – and the “variability power” diminishes over time meaning that much of the “variability space” remains unexplored by their ensemble forecasts.
However, I now realise I may have been a bit of a hypocrite. Because in the theory of developmental pathways, I have constantly suggested that there is an optimum developmental route. In part this is the reverse of the fiddler’s dilemma – physics/engineering and practicality of the technological environment means that only certain pathways are feasible. And since the physics/engineering does not change, if we can reproduce the technological environment we should be able to find an optimum route.
However, what about “natural variation”. What about (using the example I gave in the fiddler’s dilemma of navigating a city) … what about the individual who by chance goes down a technological back alley?
Hence this note … which is really saying that rather than trying to find the one single “developmental pathway”, I should consider development as a group of possibilities from an ensemble of pathways … and that I shouldn’t just consider optimums but as I suggested re climate models, I should continually allow for the continuous vibrant natural variation in the way technology develops.
In other words – yes the optimum might be one way – but sometimes the suboptimum fluke variations like micro$oft wins out.

Given a large number of meteorological stations some will be warming and some not. Thus by simply excluding cooling stations it is possible to manufacture a warming trend. Likewise, given a large number of possible ways to process data, some of those methods will create warming and some will create cooling. It is therefore also possible to manufacture a warming trend from random data by selecting the most advantageous methods to process the data.
But there is a catch – which I will call the “Fiddler’s dilemma” and this is that in order to fiddle the data this way, you need “natural variation” (ironic isn’t it – as they deny it exists) – but the more you filter the stations, or the data, or the ways to process the data, the more you lose this necessary natural variation and therefore your ability to apparently “honestly” fiddle the data.
When I started going on about the pause, I knew that sooner or later this “Fiddler’s dilemma” would strike. Because given a large set random set of meteorological stations, you could cherry pick stations to create a warming trend by constantly removing those that didn’t suit the kind of graph you wished to create.
However, as time went by, and the number of stations still left in your cherry picked set would grow smaller and smaller – but what is also very important, is that those left would be more and more like each other. In evolutionary terms, the population diversity would diminish down to almost nothing, so that like animal populations that lose genetic diversity the fiddler’s population of potential fiddles loses variability and becomes susceptible to chance adverse conditions.
So, whilst a huge population of available stations and techniques to process the data allows many different ways to fiddle a warming trend, if you use this approach, sooner or later the very act of weeding out those that don’t fit your preconceived ideas means that sooner or later it becomes impossible to keep the fiction going because the cherry picking data fiddler gets rid of the very variability they need for their scam.

An Example

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For fun, I decided to see how well an inverted ENSO graph fitted with itself and find out whether this fit was optimised at any specific lag. One pattern (writing shown correctly) is dragged back in time to find whether the current period is matched by previous years.
If there is a match between a current El Nino and a previous La Nina it will be shown as a match in the upper half of the graph. If there is a match between a current La Nina and a previous El nino, it will be shown by a match in the bottom half of the graph at the lag.
I think there is a match in the lower half at around 1.2 years – and to highlight this I’ve paused the graphic temporarily. Around 70% of strong El Ninos are a match for a corresponding La Nina 1.2 years laters. This lag suggests a 70% chance a La Nina will follow 1.2 years after a (strong) El Nino.
There is also a match in the top half at around 2 years suggesting an El Nino tends to follow about 2years after a (strong) La Nina. Mayby 80% of strong La Ninas are followed by a El Nino 2 years later. Finally I tried to match the current pattern of El Ninos with previous ones. There might be a very weak match at 5.5years.
Given the El Nina peaked around December 2016, this suggests that there’s around a 70% chance of another La Nina peaking around February 2018. Note, this may sound high, but if La Nino and La Nina are equally probable, there’s a 50% (1 in 2) chance of having a La Nina at any point. So, the predictability of 2 in 3 – or that La Nina is twice as likely as El Nino – is only fractionally better than pure chance. The pattern is too chaotic to predict with any confidence over longer periods.

When the eco-idiots started going on about Arctic temperatures a few weeks ago, I thought one possible response was “we’d expect melting in an El Nino year”. However since El Nino is an equatorial phenomenon and Arctic melting isn’t … I was intrigued to find out whether there was a connection.
Well below is my highly scientific check:

Note Arctic temperatures from here and Enso from here. And for the sharp eyed amongst you, you will no doubt spot that I turned the El Nino/ENSO graph upside down because there are clearly some places where El Nino corresponds with cooler Arctic temperatures (like 1940) and La Nina with warmer (e.g. both sides of 1940). Also you’ll see a preponderance of La Ninas recently – and higher Arctic temperatures.
I think it’s reasonable to say that it is likely there is some kind of inverse relatinship but it is not strong and there’s also a low probablity that the apparent relationship is just chance (I tried dropping the graph down with various big offsets and with a bit of effort I could usually start to see possible correlations – this suggests apparent matches are relatively easy especially as I also allow inversion).
 

NotaLotOfPeopleKnowThat has an interesting graph which they post from NoTricksZone:

In a new paper (Stein et al., 2017), scientists find that Arctic sea ice retreat and advance is modulated by variations in solar activity.
In addition, the sea ice cover during the last century has only slightly retreated from the extent reached during coldest centuries of the Little Ice Age (1600s to 1800s AD), which had the highest sea ice cover of the last 10,000 years and flirted with excursions into year-round sea ice.
The Medieval Warm Period sea ice record (~900 to 1200 AD) had the lowest coverage since the Roman era ~2,000 years ago.

I know everyone is going to focus on the little blip (or not) at the end which either does or does not show Arctic ice is currently melting, but what I find interesting is that the amount of sea ice appears to have been increasing for the last 2000 years.
The irony of course, is why on earth would anyone want to continue the trend shown in the last 2000 years and head into an ice-age. Indeed, if it weren’t for the lies from eco-activists and if most people sat down rationally to think about it, we’d all be trying to work out a plan to stop us going into another ice age.
The same is also true with levels of CO2. During the ice-ages, CO2 levels fall to a dangerously low levels below which it is doubtful many plant species could survive. This means there is a plausible scenario that live on earth as we know it may cease during a future ice-age when (without human intervention) CO2 levels could plumet below the level at which most plants … and therefore most animals … could survive.
If I were even mildly tempted into religious beliefs … I could quite easily believe there was some god being who deliberately evolved humans to save the earth from an icy doom by releasing all that locked up CO2.

I’m posting this because it took some time to align all the various layers, because it may be interesting to see, not because it seems to show anything in particular.

A few of things of note:

1. Source: http://www.nsstc.uah.edu/climate/
2. Dec 2015 is missing (so composite of Nov/Jan used as placeholder)
3. Whilst this sequence is dominated by a “super” El Nino year, it’s not at all clear to me (apart from the El Nino months) that I’m seeing a huge amount of red. The regional variability is still much greater than any supposed global trend – which means any global trend may be the result of a chance occurance of similar long-term regional variability.
4. There’s a clear pattern of Equatorial heat. It starts around June15 and then grows west of the Americas until it spreads out all over the equator from Dec15 to Jun16
5. The other thing is that it appears heat patterns move eastward around the latitude of the British Isles and westward at the equator (although a finer division of time would be necessary).
6. The colder than average areas (in what is otherwise a warmer period due to El Nino) seem to dominate in the “eastward moving” zones at about 50/60 North and south. But there’s also a few hotter than average areas in these zones.

If you ever wondered why NASA should have employed Hansen, who was such an eco-activist that I understand he was arrested six times, this incredibly revealing document, from NASA’s “Societal Impact of Spaceflight” (2007) explains why. In part NASA used the environment to justify massive funding for itself, in part as NASA itself says:

NASA realized that it needed to research environmental-atmospheric impacts of the shuttle to defend itself, if necessary, against possible opposition more positively, Fletcher sought to align his agency with environmental values. In 1973, he told congress that NASA should be considered “an environmental agency.” he declared: “everything we do …helps in some practical way to improve the environment of our planet and helps us understand the forces that affect it. Perhaps that is our essential task, to study and understand the earth and its environment.”

That’s right! It was no accident that NASA brought in eco-activists. Indeed, it appears to have been part of a deliberate policy to align itself with the environmental movement and to use environmentalism to create alarm thereby justifying its own budgets to the politicians and public.

That is why NASA climte could fabricate the data apparently with impunity – the policy of egging the data to fit an environmentalist agenda was sanctioned at the highest level within NASA

NASA and the Environment: Science in a Political context

W. Henry Lambright

The advent of the space age has paralleled the rise of the environmental movement. NASA was born in 1958 and Rachael Carson wrote silent spring in 1962; that book is generally seen as marking the onset of modern environmentalism. NASA has intersected with the environmental movement—a set of values and interest groups concerned about the need to protect our natural setting for the current and future generations—in many ways over the years. How did NASA do so? How did it evolve an environmental mission? What did it do with that mission? What were the consequences for society—and NASA—of its environmental role? To answer these questions, this paper will discuss two of the most important ways NASA and the environmental movement related.

First, NASA has had direct impacts through the images of earth taken by Apollo astronauts as well as by satellites in earth orbit. Those satellite images and theories about earth as a system evolved into an organized NASA program, initially called mission to planet earth (MTPE), later the earth sciences program. Second, there was an indirect relation through NASA’s mission from earth. comparative planetology came into existence as a new field; learning about other planets stimulated better understanding of earth.

There are many other issues in the NASA–environment relation, such as space debris and the contamination of other planets, but these two themes—earth monitoring and comparative planetology—are especially salient in NASA’s history, present, and likely future. The first theme focused on the use of space-based remote sensing and became the dominant emphasis in NASA’s environmental history.

There evolved a set of satellites that can be seen as environmental satellites. They are the centerpiece of NASA’s mission to earth. That mission has had an uncertain, somewhat uneasy relationship with other parts of NASA and other agencies. Some people think it is NASA’s most societally relevant mission whereas others think it is extraneous to NASA and belongs somewhere else—the national oceanic and atmospheric administration (NOAA) is the usual candidate. Virtually every observer has found it a controversial mission, one in need of high-level policy attention and improvement for the sake of NASA, the nation, and the world.

The second theme, comparative planetology, has indirectly influenced the main debate—a reminder of the fact that earth is an island home in the vast sea of space and is the only planet (so far) supporting life. NASA’s long association with the environmental and earth sciences has been fruitful but it has also been contested and even tortuous. The history of NASA and its environmental mission is one of science in a political context.

Beginnings in the Apollo Years

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