Showing posts with label NASA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NASA. Show all posts

Monday, August 20, 2012

Busted! Leaked emails snag global-warming alarmists


While NASA climate alarmist James Hansen insists record summer heat and drought are caused by man-made global warming, leaked internal emails from just three summers ago reveal that he and his colleagues expressed alarm that the planet was inexplicably … cooling.
Hansen, often called the “godfather of global warming,” announced earlier this month that blistering heat across the United States is so rare that it can’t be anything but the man-made global warming he has been warning about for decades.

“This is not some scientific theory,” he told the Associated Press. “We are now experiencing scientific fact.”
But in 2009, as the thermometer hit record lows in America, he and other climate scientists panicked in a flurry of emails: “Skeptics will be all over us – the world is really cooling, the models are no good.”
They lamented that Mother Nature was not cooperating with their predictions that global temperatures would smash heat records last decade. They blamed their miscalculation on sulfate emission trajectories and revised their forecast to show a cooling trend lasting until 2020.
Then, they predicted, global warming would return with a vengeance.
In an Oct. 12, 2009, email to Hansen of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, fellow warming alarmist Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., asked, “Where the heck is global warming?”
“We have been asking that here in Boulder where we have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record,” he added. “The Rockies baseball playoff game was canceled on saturday[sic] and then played last night in below freezing weather.”
Then Trenberth dropped a bombshell: “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.”
He ended by admitting the global warming “data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.”
The leaked e-mails were obtained from the computer server at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Britain. Some of the scientists there were copied in the emails between Trenberth and Hansen.
Critics say the hacked messages show that climatologists in the U.S. and U.K. have engaged in a conspiracy to manufacture a case that global warming is occurring due to auto and factory and other emissions related to human activities.
Critics say Hansen, who has called for a worldwide tax on carbon emissions and advocated a ban on the construction of coal-fired power plants, is an activist with a political agenda.
Ignoring the record-breaking 2009 cooling period, Hansen recently argued that the evidence for human-made global warming is “overwhelming.”
“We can say with high confidence that such extreme anomalies would not have occurred in the absence of global warming,” he said.
Left unexplained, however, is the 2009 cooling anomaly.
Trenberth, for his part, later explained that while most of the planet experienced record cooling that year, “there were exceptional conditions in Southern Australia,” where temperatures rose.
He now says the record heat wave is proof of “global warming from the human influences on climate.”
“This is a view of the future,” Trenberth warned last month in a PBS interview. “So watch out.”
His analysis, however, ignores cool spots like the Pacific Northwest, where Washington and Alaska have experienced the coldest spring and summer on record.

http://www.wnd.com/2012/08/busted-leaked-emails-snag-global-warming-alarmists/

Sunday, August 5, 2012

Watch NASA's live coverage of Mars rover landing


Watch NASA's live coverage of Mars rover landing

The big Curiosity rover, on a $2.5 billion science mission, arrives on the Red Planet Sunday evening with a most audacious maneuver.
 
Curiosity rover descends to surface of Mars
The final stage of Curiosity's descent to the surface of Mars will involve being slung on tethers below the spacecraft's landing stage.
(Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
The arrival of the Curiosity rover on Mars may well be the biggest, boldest extraterrestrial landing for NASA since Apollo 11 settled down on the moon on a summer's night in 1969.
Curiosity is scheduled to land in the Red Planet's Gale Crater late Sunday or very, very early Monday, depending on your Earthbound time zone. Confirmation of the landing should come at about 10:31 p.m. PT Sunday for folks on the U.S. West Coast, or 1:31 a.m. ET Monday for those on the East Coast. The rover will have actually touched down before that, but there's a 14-minute communications lag time for signals traveling the 154 million miles from Mars.
The space agency will begin its live coverage Sunday evening at 8:30 p.m. PT / 10:30 p.m. ET on the NASA TV site and will also show the coverage via UStream:
The $2.5 billion Mars Science Laboratory mission has been in its spaceflight phase for about eight months, since a liftoff from the Kennedy Space Center in late November. But the centerpiece of the mission is only just about to begin -- two Earth years of Curiosity roaming some 12 miles up a towering mound of sedimentary rock in Gale Crater known as both Aeolis Mons and Mount Sharp.
The science instruments carried by Curiosity will be looking for, among other things, carbon compounds and signs of whether Mars is, or ever might have been, habitable. The rover's uphill climb will take it through eons of Mars' geological evolution.
"The really cool thing about the Gale stratigraphic succession to me is it's a tour through nearly the entire history of Mars, where we can begin to understand these major changes in the environmental history of the planet," project scientist John Grotzinger said in an interview with CNET.
But first, Curiosity has to survive its landing. Much larger than earlier Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity -- the 1-ton machine is roughly the size of a very small car -- Curiosity posed a significant challenge to the engineers tasked with getting it down through the Martian atmosphere and onto the soil of the Red Planet.
At an altitude of about 7 miles, and about 7 minutes from the surface, a parachute will deploy to slow the spaceship's cruise stage from 13,200 miles per hour, first to 900 mph and eventually to 180 mph. About a mile above the surface, the rocket-powered landing stage will take over, slowing things further to the walking-speed rate of 2 mph. At the very modest altitude of 66 feet, the rover will finally separate out, and this is where things get most interesting -- Curiosity will be lowered the rest of the way to the surface on a bridle slung on three nylon tethers below the descent stage, with an umbilical providing a power and communication connection.
In the final few minutes, a high-definition camera will begin recording video. "It does eight frames per second, high-definition-quality video from the backshell coming off [all the way] to the ground," said project manager Pete Theisinger. "So it's a lot of data, it'll take a long time to get it back. But it should be a tremendous movie when it does."
Bill Harwood of CNET and CBSNews.com contributed to this report.