Climate-Gate for Dummies: Why you should care.

Climate-Gate for Dummies: Okay, for people who don't have the time to read up on what's actually going on, and perhaps to help the Mainstream Media journalist decide to get of their hands, here's my summation of what happened and why this is critically important.

1. Tree ring data. Why do we care? Because a wider tree ring can be an indication of a warm, longer growning season. What happened: The data gleaned from the tree core samples began to diverge from actual weather station readings in 1960. Weather stations were reporting warmer temps, while the tree ring data bagin to drop. What the scientists in this scandal did was to add MODERN temperature data TO the historical tree ring sample between 1960 to 1980 to "bring it in line" with the other readings. After 1980 they've disregarded the tree rings completely and have substituted other readings without stating this on their charts. This is the "divergence" talked about in the Mann emails. Once an estabilished historical methodology (tree rings) differs from something as straight-forward as temperature readings, we need to ask "Why".

2. The missing Medieval Warm Period. What is it? The area in history when the world was significantly warmer. Vikings FARMED Greenland, which is today covered in concrete-hard permafrost and ice. Grapes were grown in the UK, where we cannot grow grapes today. Alpine valleys were farmed in Germany and in the Alps where today, they can't be farmed due to snow.3. The Code. What is it? The source code, written in Fortran 90, which shows how that data has been artificially-altered to form a more dramatic "hockey stick". The "Little Ice Age" temps have been lifted artificially. The more recent two decades have been dramatically lifted using a parabolic curve, so that each year looks significantly worse (warmer) than the last. Why do we care? Any numbers you stick into this program will form a "hockey stick" when graphed. It's not scientific; it's a political tool generated in order to scare people into thinking there's a runaway greenhouse gasses warming trend. For the last 10 years we've been cooling, ever since 1998! Cooling for a decade!

And they can't explain why... Why do we care? The scientists, Mann, and even NASA's Hansen, have all "resampled" their data to remove, or minimize, the high temps of this period. This makes their "hocky stick graph" look more alarming, with a severe rise to 1998's peak. In actuality, 1998 as a single year was in no way close to thawing Greenland! Since then we've cooled dramatically.

4. The UK-MET. What is it? The national weather service of the UK. Why do we care? On Saturday, the UK-MET announce that they've pulled their "global warming forecasts" in order to "reexamine the numbers". UK-MET received all of their land-based temp data from, you guessed it East Anglia's CRU! That means they've looked at the Fortran code, and the emails and said "uh oh"! As they're an official agency within the Ministry of Defence (their spelling) , and as such directly inform the British government and the IPCC, this is a HUGE deal!

They expect this to take 3 years.

So what does all of this collectively mean? It shows that these scientists were pushing Global Warming at all costs. The emails show the pressure they were willing to level at ANYONE who wanted to publish a paper counter to their views. Anyone who wanted to be a "climateologist" needed to be "on the bandwagon" or face a blacklisting from peer-review journals. If you cannot get your work published, you could lose funding.

If the reports from the CRU, showing global warming, have been falsified, then similar-appearing reports from NOAA and NASA, PSU, and other universities, MAY ALSO HAVE BEEN FALSIFIED, or tainted with tampered temperature datasets.

NOAA and NASA have both been hit with FOIA information requests in order for the public to gain access to the raw temperature data used over the last 150 years. Neither agency has complied, in violation of Federal Law. NASA's James Hansen has been stone-walling for two years.

Hansen is possibly the biggest global-warming cheerleader, and argues for a ZERO-CARBON EMISSIONS plan starting immediately. Have a good laugh about that the next time you savor a Coca-Cola or a beer. They're all carbonated with CO2!

5. Conspiracy to commit fraud in the Media. 56 news agencies printed the SAME editorial today urging action at Copenhagen. No bias folks, move along now, nothing to see here!

6. ABC, NBC, and CBS, along with CNN have chosen to go along with the "hacked emails/don't mean nuthin'" theme song over the weekend, if they've even mentioned this at all. You'd think the network which gave us "false but essentially true" reporting would jump at the chance to use the Climate Gate data to "reprove Global Warming".

BUT... governments are taking notice. Australia, Denmark, Saudi Arabia have all tenatively gone on record now stating there needs to be an "investigation of the science involved". Bravo chaps! If the heat stays on, perhaps this will snowball, and we'll finally get an accurate and honest accounting of our global climate.

Still think I'm crazy? Read this: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/25/uh-oh-raw-data-in-new-zealand-tells-a-different-story-than-the-official-one/

Harry_Read_Me.txt Climate Gate Revelations

Okay, on first look Climate-Gate is like realizing your white wife of more than 10 years was once a black man, and wondering from where the hell your three red-headed children really came! I've started looking at the comments posted by the programmer "Harry" in the "Harry_Read_Me.txt" file (I've got it, and if you'd like it in a .doc form, just send me an email and I'll happily email it over) and some of them are pretty scary. It's amazing just how poorly written the code must be that Harry is attempting to fix. Harry's work on the CRU project evidently dates from 2006 to 2009, and this file is 274 pages of frustration, source code revisions, work-arounds, and data-manipulation.

Based on Harry_Read_Me.txt, none of the reports from the CRU could have possibly be claimed to be based on "fact". They're all 100% bullshit.

Digital Camera AF systems

First of all, these are my thoughts, based on my experiences, and are not to be taken as fact.

On third-party camera lens inconsistency: Are ya'll sure it's the lens? Here's the reason I ask. I own a Nikon D300. It takes a pretty nice photo. Sometimes. In examining its inconsistency I found that at f8 and above, the depth of field is masking pretty consistent back-focus errors. The sensors in the body are focusing, but the image generated at the imager focal plane is "pushed back".

Now the D300 is a wonderful body, and it has this feature called AF Fine Tune, where you can walk the focus point back and forth by up to 20 "points". I'll call them points because they've got no real equivalent in actuality. The distance of focal inaccuracy varies based on the distance away from the camera body. So... the body can be adjusted. This is a great idea BUT it doesn't solve the fact that it's the BODY which has a problem. It demonstrates this problem with my Nikon 18-55mm kit lens, and with my Sigma 70-200mm f2.8 EX HSM Macro lens. One lens was $129, the other $899. You tell me which lens has the better engineering inside! Same issue with both lenses.

A Nikon body has a hex-head screw inside the mirror box which serves as a "stop". Actually, it has two of them, one for the viewfinder mirror, and another one, farther back, which sets the position of the AF system mirror. Ah HA! Now, as my camera has aged over the course of a year, and I've shot with it professionally, that little mirror has slapped countless times against its stop screw. I think it has moved the screw slightly.

Here's why this is important: even if you adjust the system using AF Fine Tune, you cannot manually focus properly. The eyeball result at the imager (from the big mirror) does not match the result from the AF sensor's mirror, and the AF sensor mirror controls what the lens thinks it should be doing. Nevermind that the stock D300 focusing screen is woefully inept for manual focus precision, it's simply impossible to come away with a manual focus setting which is "correct" at the imager plane when the system is out of whack.

With the AF Fine Tune you can set an overall camera "default", and you can set a plus/minus position for each lens. you can also set it to "On" or "Off". If it's "On" then it uses the stored lens setting. If it's "Off", it uses the system default. Since this setting behaves like a percentage, and not a physical distance, not only does the focus error change for every distance range, it changes for each lens' focal length too! 18mm behaves differently than 55mm which behaves differently than 200mm. General rule of thumb is this; the greater the distance, the larger the focus error. At least this is true with my D300 camera body.

So why is this important? Third party lenses are retro-engineered, based on the examination of OEM MFG's camera bodies and lenses. Physically, they need to be spot-on, or as close as possible to accurate. Now, given that the AF system's mirror can be misaligned quite easily, where the elements in a camera lens cannot (if they're properly installed and within their limits inside the lens' internal mechanism), does it make sense to blame the third party lens manufacturers, or the mass-produced camera bodies?

To sum it up, I feel if there's a sharp area somewhere in your photo, blame the camera, not the lens.