Friday, December 18, 2009
"If you believe in scientific openness," warming critics wrote me, "you
should be pleased that the climate-gate files became public." Well, I do
believe in openness. The success and credibility of science is anchored in
openness; new ideas and findings must be exposed to the scrutiny of other
scientists. By contrast, governments insist on the need for diplomatic and
military secrecy; the result of which is perpetual warfare. But contrary
to the impression conveyed by the media, the U.S., thankfully, has no
official-secrets act. Conscientious government workers, willing to risk
their careers by leaking classified information, may be the only check on
government excesses carried out behind a screen of national security
http://bobpark.physics.umd.edu/WN03/wn100303.html.
But it was no Daniel
Ellsberg who hacked the climate-gate files. The unauthorized release of e-
mail files from a climate unit at the University of East Anglia had no such
high-minded purpose. It has the smell of goons hired by an Exxon or a
Peabody Coal.
A hacked e-mail passage that was widely quoted in media accounts of climate-
gate, begins: "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at
the moment and it is a travesty that we can't." Francisco Valero, Director
of the Atmospheric Research Laboratory at the Scripps Institution for
Oceanography, says the statement is totally correct. The problem began
where most of our problems began: at the start of The Bush administration.
Because Al Gore initiated it, the Bush administration postponed and
eventually canceled the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR), meant to
continuously monitor Earth's radiance from the L1 point between Earth and
Sun. Instead NASA began a program to get the information from low Earth
orbit: CERES, Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System (CERES). The
problem is that the low-Earth orbit satellite is so close that it sees only
a narrow swath on each pass around the planet. Climate models require
accurate radiance measurements over the diurnal cycle, and those data are
not at hand. DSCOVR was designed to provide what the low-Earth orbit
satellites cannot. An $18.7 billion NASA budget sent to the White House
last Sunday includes only $5 million for continued refurbishing of DSCOVR.
That is also a travesty.
It's known as underestimating your enemy. Militants in Iran were
intercepting live video feeds from U.S. Predator drones. The US hadnt
bothered to encrypt the image data coming from the drones. Using off-the-
shelf software programs such as SkyGrabber, available on the web for as
little as $26, the Iranian-backed insurgents see what we see. Its
reminiscent of the ways the Vietcong found to counter the huge US advantage
in technology.
Todays issue of Science Magazine names Ardis discovery as
the Breakthrough of the Year
http://bobpark.physics.umd.edu/WN09/wn100209.html.
The 4.4 million year
old skeleton completely revised our thinking of how we came to be, and how
far we are from the Chimpanzee.
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