5 replies to this topic

[Rogerdodger]

Do you remember all the hoopla last week about the Russian subs planting a flag under the North pole to claim the oil?

Well, now it turns out that the pictures were 10 years old from the filming of the movie "Titanic"!

The latest scandal of the day is that news photos/film clips of a Russian submarine planting the flag at the North pole was actually that of a Russian submarine in the film Titanic.

The UK Guardian reports:

The images were reproduced around the world - including by the Guardian and Guardian Unlimited - alongside the story of Russia planting its flag below the North Pole on Thursday last week.But it has now emerged that the footage actually showed two Finnish-made Mir submersibles that were employed on location filming at the scene of the wreck of the RMS Titanic ship in the north Atlantic some 10 years ago.
This footage was used in sequences in James Cameron's 1997 blockbuster about the 1912 disaster.

And the fact highly paid well educated checker/editor who discovered the fraud?
A 13 year old Finnish boy named Waltteri Seretin who noted the simliarity of the film footage and contacted his local newspaper editor.

This is especially embarassing for Reuters, who was accused of distributing manipulated photos that exaggerated damage of the Lebanese war last year.

So my point is that one's motive often overshadows one's judgement.
In science, politics, medicine, religion, business, global warming, etc..., just because it is in print doesn't mean it's true.

***
In what appears to be a cover-up at NASA, the official temperature sensor locations have been removed from their web site after photos were made public of the units next to air-conditioner exhausts, heaters, trash burners, asphalt pavement and even jet airplane exhaust.



Bet you didn't hear this in "the news":
A change in climate history data at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies recently occurred which dramatically alters the debate over global warming. Yet, this transpired with no official announcement from GISS head James Hansen, and went unreported until Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit discovered it Wednesday.
McIntyre has been crunching the numbers used to determine such things as published by GISS, and has identified that the data have recently changed such that four of the top ten warmest years in American history occurred in the 1930s, with the warmest now in 1934 instead of the much-publicized 1998.

Four of the top 10 are now from the 1930s: 1934, 1931, 1938 and 1939, while only 3 of the top 10 are from the last 10 years (1998, 2006, 1999). Several years (2000, 2002, 2003, 2004) fell well down the leaderboard, behind even 1900.
Most importantly, according to the GISS, 1998 is no longer the warmest year in American history. That honor once again belongs to 1934.

Okies remember the 1930's very well: Dust Bowl.

Edited by Rogerdodger, 11 August 2007 - 10:32 PM.

[Rogerdodger]

Hurricaine Katrina was so devastating and so recent that some try to use it to prove that the weather is changing for the worse.
What are the facts?

America's Top Ten Natural Disasters:

10. Tri-State Tornado in Missouri, Illinois and Indiana - 1925. The storm is considered to be the most powerful tornado in American history, once it touched down, it carved a finger-like path of 219 miles, killing nearly 700 people, injuring more than 2,000, and destroying more than 15,000 homes.

9. Georgia-South Carolina Hurricane - 1881. Before the mid-20th Century, hurricanes were not named as they are today. The storm was the last large hurricane that hit the Savannah area head-on, causing major damage there and in Charleston. As the storm moved inland, it killed about 700 people before it dissipated over Mississippi.

8. San Francisco Earthquake - 1906. Everyone knows about this one. More than 100 years ago, the city of San Francisco was awakened by a massive earthquake that caved in streets and ruptured water and gas lines, which allowed fires to break out and continue unabated for days. Somewhere between 700 and 3,000 people were killed, and more than half of San Francisco's residents were left homeless.

7. Great New England Hurricane - 1938. The Category three storm plowed into Long Island from the south, then hopped across Long Island Sound to Connecticut, where it killed more than 700 people and destroyed 9,000 buildings in both New York and Connecticut.

6. Hurricane Katrina - August-September, 2005. More than 1800 people lost their lives in Katrina, the city of New Orleans was rendered virtually uninhabitable for months, and the politics of the situation divided many across the nation. Many victims of the storm continue to try to rebuild their lives today, and for some, there is no end to the misery in sight.

5. Sea Islands Hurricane - August 1893. Called the "Great Storm of 1893," experts estimate it was a Category 4 storm, but they have no way of knowing for sure. What is known, however, is that the storm killed between 1,000 and 2,000 people. Most of the victims died when storm surges washed across the barrier islands, or Sea Islands, of the North Carolina coast.

4. Chenier Caminada Hurricane - October 1893. Chenier Caminada is an island-like peninsula about 50 miles from New Orleans, where hundreds were killed by a massive storm that blasted that area of the Gulf Coast. According to experts, winds from that storm may have clocked 100 mph. In total, more than 2000 were killed by the storm.

3. Johnstown, Pa. Flood - May 31, 1889. After many days of rain, a dam in southwestern Pennsylvania ruptured, sending more than 20 million tons of water, in a wave 70 feet tall, sweeping down the Little Conemaugh River, scouring the landscape and much of the city of Johnstown in the process. More than 2,200 people perished in the flood.

2. Great Okeechobee Hurricane, Florida - September 1928. More than 2,500 people perished -- most of them migrant workers who lived along the shores of Florida's Lake Okeechobee. They had no warning of the approaching storm until it was too late.

1. Galveston Hurricane - September 1900. The worst natural disaster in American history, at least in terms of loss of life was the devastating Category 4 hurricane that all but demolished the city of Galveston, Texas. The death toll of more than 8,000 meant that one in every six residents of Galveston lost their lives to the storm, an almost unfathomable number by modern standards.

Edited by Rogerdodger, 11 August 2007 - 10:43 PM.

[Rogerdodger]

More science fraud:

A stem-cell scientist branded a cheat for faking research has been commended for achieving a breakthrough discovery, albeit by accident.

The latest twist in the extraordinary story of Woo Suk Hwang, the disgraced South Korean, came yesterday as American scientists published analysis that concluded he should be credited with a world first. However, they said that his failure to recognise his own breakthrough – using a technique that takes its name from the virgin birth – cast further doubt on his abilities and integrity.

According to a US study published in the journal Cell Stem Cell, a line of human embryonic stem cells created by Professor Hwang, which he claimed fraudulently to have cloned, were in fact the first to have been made by a different process that has significant medical potential.

Edited by Rogerdodger, 11 August 2007 - 11:54 PM.

[stocks]

These are actually burning tires at a trash dump:

http://www.flickr.co...10343595&size=l

[Rogerdodger]

Of course perhaps the most famous scientific hoax of all time was an effort to "prove" evolution:

The "Piltdown Man" is a famous hoax consisting of fragments of a skull and jawbone collected in 1912 from a gravel pit at Piltdown, a village near Uckfield, East Sussex. The fragments were thought by many experts of the day to be the fossilised remains of a hitherto unknown form of early human. The Latin name Eoanthropus dawsoni ("Dawson's dawn-man", after the collector Charles Dawson) was given to the specimen.

The significance of the specimen remained the subject of controversy until it was exposed in 1953 as a forgery, consisting of the lower jawbone of an orangutan combined with the skull of a fully developed, modern man.

The Piltdown hoax is perhaps the most famous archaeological hoax in history. It has been prominent for two reasons: the attention paid to the issue of human evolution, and the length of time (more than 40 years) that elapsed from its discovery to its exposure as a forgery.

What will we find to be a hoax in the next 40 years?

[stocks]

Something rather odd happened the other day. If you go to NASA's Web site and look at the "U.S. surface air temperature" rankings for the lower 48 states, you might notice that something has changed.

Then again, you might not. They're not issuing any press releases about it. But they have quietly revised their All-Time Hit Parade for U.S. temperatures. The "hottest year on record" is no longer 1998, but 1934. Another alleged swelterer, the year 2001, has now dropped out of the Top 10 altogether, and most of the rest of the 21st century – 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004 – plummeted even lower down the Hot 100. In fact, every supposedly hot year from the Nineties and this decade has had its temperature rating reduced. Four of America's Top 10 hottest years turn out to be from the 1930s, that notorious decade when we all drove around in huge SUVs with the air-conditioning on full-blast. If climate change is, as Al Gore says, the most important issue anyone's ever faced in the history of anything ever, then Franklin Roosevelt didn't have a word to say about it.

And yet we survived.

So why is 1998 no longer America's record-breaker? Because a very diligent fellow named Steve McIntyre of climateaudit.com labored long and hard to prove there was a bug in NASA's handling of the raw data. He then notified the scientists responsible and received an acknowledgment that the mistake was an "oversight" that would be corrected in the next "data refresh." The reply was almost as cool as the revised chart listings.

Who is this man who understands American climate data so much better than NASA? Well, he's not even American: He's Canadian. Just another immigrant doing the jobs Americans won't do, even when they're federal public servants with unlimited budgets? No. Mr. McIntyre lives in Toronto. But the data smelled wrong to him, he found the error, and NASA has now corrected its findings – albeit without the fanfare that accompanied the hottest-year-on-record hysteria of almost a decade ago. Sunlight may be the best disinfectant, but, when it comes to global warming, the experts prefer to stick the thermometer where the sun don't shine.

One is tempted to explain the error with old the computer expert's cry: That's not a bug, it's a feature. To maintain public hysteria, it's necessary for the warm-mongers to be able to demonstrate that something is happening now. Or as the Fort Worth Star-Telegram put it at the end of 1998:

"It's December, and you're still mowing the lawn. You can't put up the Christmas lights because you're afraid the sweat pouring off your face will short out the connections. Your honeysuckle vines are blooming. Mosquitoes are hovering at your back door.

"Hot enough for you?"

http://www.ocregiste...cle_1804986.php