Italian Court Jails Scientists for Failure to Predict Earthquake

Rarely since a Catholic inquisition in Rome condemned Galileo Galilei to spend the remainder of his days under house arrest for the heresy of teaching that the Earth revolves around the sun, has an Italian court been so wrong about science.

Today, a court in the central Italian city of L’Aquila, 380 years after that miscarriage of justice, sentenced six scientists and a government bureaucrat to six years in jail on manslaughter charges for their failure to predict a 2009 earthquake that left more than 300 people dead.

via CSMonitor.com.

Al Gore is soooo pissed right now.  He’s so wishing that the U.S. had tried those evil scientists who claimed global warming was a hoax.

No better way to silence your opposition than place them in jail.

Windfarms Increase Night Temperatures (a la Global Warming)

U.S. main stream media so far slow to respond:

Large windfarms can increase local night time temperatures by fanning warmer air onto the ground, new research has revealed. The study used satellite data to show that the building of huge windfarms in west Texas over the last decade has warmed the nights by up to 0.72C.  …

“West Texas has seen rapid expansion of windfarms, with turbine numbers rising from 111 in 2003 to 2358 in 2011.  Zhou’s team compared the land surface temperatures at the windfarms with other areas across this period and detected a clear rise at night.  …

The scientists say the effect is due to the gentle turbulence caused by the wind turbines. After the sun has set, the land cools down more quickly than the air, leaving a cold blanket of air just above the ground. But the turbine wakes mix this cold layer with the warmer air above, raising the temperature.  …

“The result looks pretty solid to me,” said Steven Sherwood at the climate change research centre at the University of New South Wales, Australia. “The same strategy is commonly used by fruit growers, who fly helicopters over the orchards rather than erect windmills, to combat early morning frosts.”

via Guardian.

Himalayan Glaciers Lost No Ice in 10 Years

The authors of the U.N.’s climate policy guide were red-faced two years ago when it was revealed that they had inaccurately forecast that the Himalayan glaciers would melt completely in 25 years, vanishing by the year 2035.

Rajendra Pachauri, head of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and director general of the Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) in New Dehli, India, ultimately issued a statement offering regret for what turned out to be a poorly vetted statement.

A new report published Thursday, Feb. 9, in the science journal Nature offers the first comprehensive study of the world’s glaciers and ice caps, and one of its conclusions has shocked scientists. Using GRACE, a pair of orbiting satellites racing around the planet at an altitude of 300 miles, it comes to the eye-popping conclusion that the Himalayas have barely melted at all in the past 10 years.  …

Some previous estimates of ice loss in the high Asia mountains had predicted up to 50 billion tons of melting ice annually, said Wahr, who is also a fellow at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences. Instead, results from GRACE pin the estimated ice loss from those peaks — including ranges like the Himalayas and the nearby Pamir and Tien Shan — at only about 4 billion tons of ice annually.

Bristol University glaciologist Jonathan Bamber, who was not part of the research team, told the Guardian that such a level of melting was practically insignificant.

“The very unexpected result was the negligible mass loss from high mountain Asia, which is not significantly different from zero,” he told the Guardian.

via Fox News.

What the?!  This is the problem with some (not all) scientists.  There is the whole scientific method which is appropriate; but too many of these global warming folks seem to forget that you must rely on the results of testing (a/k/a observations) to enforce your conclusions.  When the results (i.e. observations) are not in-line with your hypothesis (i.e. conjecture) then your hypothesis WAS WRONG.

i.e. Why is this guy — who was so clearly wrong years ago — still working at the U.N.?  And how much are we paying him to be wrong all the time?

The problem with society and the media that they continue to give attention to these “scientists” who are wrong, and then wrong, and then wrong, again and again.  We should not pay any attention to their their kooky ideas.

How this news story should read is:

Disgraced scientist, Rajendra Pachauri, once the former head of the U.N.’s IPCC and who was also the director of TERI has officially been proved wrong by actual scientific observations.  Mr. Pachauri, once a prominent raising star in the scientific community is now selling cars in southern Kentucky.  When contacted he stated, “I now realize I was wrong for many years issuing false reports based on bogus data but there can be no doubt that now is the time to get into a new Ford Feista which is both cute and gets great gas mileage.”