Creekside Chatter

If - as shown by last week's terror attack - the relatively simple step of improving the assessment of intelligence was not accomplished by introducing a new bureaucracy, why should we assume the vastly more complex health care system will be improved by adding layers of bureaucracy? We shouldn't and it won't.

Wolfgang Knorr of the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol reanalyzed available atmospheric carbon dioxide and emissions data since 1850 and considers the uncertainties in the data.

In contradiction to some recent studies, he finds that the airborne fraction of carbon dioxide has not increased either during the past 150 years or during the most recent five decades.

The research is published in Geophysical Research Letters.

Mike Colt, 19, and girlfriend Carol Sturgell, 18, found the urns of Delbert and Barbara Hahn in a pile of trash. Their search for information about the couple led to a military funeral on in Bushnell.

What a great story.

One week ago, President Obama quietly signed an executive order that makes an international police force immune from the restraints of American law.

Interpol is the shorthand for the International Criminal Police Organization. It was established in 1923 and operates in about 188 countries. By executive order 12425, issued in 1983, President Reagan recognized Interpol as an international organization and gave it some of the privileges and immunities customarily extended to foreign diplomats. Interpol, however, is also an active law-enforcement agency, so critical privileges and immunities (set forth in Section 2(c) of the International Organizations Immunities Act) were withheld. Specifically, Interpol's property and assets remained subject to search and seizure, and its archived records remained subject to public scrutiny under provisions like the Freedom of Information Act. Being constrained by the Fourth Amendment, FOIA, and other limitations of the Constitution and federal law that protect the liberty and privacy of Americans is what prevents law-enforcement and its controlling government authority from becoming tyrannical.

On Wednesday, however, for no apparent reason, President Obama issued an executive order removing the Reagan limitations. That is, Interpol's property and assets are no longer subject to search and confiscation, and its archives are now considered inviolable. This international police force (whose U.S. headquarters is in the Justice Department in Washington) will be unrestrained by the U.S. Constitution and American law while it operates in the United States and affects both Americans and American interests outside the United States.

Interpol works closely with international tribunals (such as the International Criminal Court — which the United States has refused to join because of its sovereignty surrendering provisions, though top Obama officials want us in it). It also works closely with foreign courts and law-enforcement authorities (such as those in Europe that are investigating former Bush administration officials for purported war crimes — i.e., for actions taken in America's defense).

Why would we elevate an international police force above American law? Why would we immunize an international police force from the limitations that constrain the FBI and other American law-enforcement agencies? Why is it suddenly necessary to have, within the Justice Department, a repository for stashing government files which, therefore, will be beyond the ability of Congress, American law-enforcement, the media, and the American people to scrutinize?

Rep Pete Hoekstra blinks out a message to the public by raising a series of loaded questions in a Fox News interview.

• Has the al-Qaeda franchise in Yemen made a strategic decision to attack the United States?
• The Ft Hood shooter was also connected to Yemen, “is there a pattern”?
• Is US intelligence failing to connect the dots?
• Is the White House is stonewalling on inquiries by the House?
• Is al-Qaeda evolving techniques to “get [weapons] into other environments where they can do significant damage”?

This just seems to get worse every day.

When countless people turned on their new Christmas Kindles for the first time yesterday, what do you think was the first thing that they did? That’s right: they bought ebooks to fill up their Kindle hard drives. A lot of them.

In fact, those new Kindle owners broke a record. According to Amazon, yesterday marked the first time that more ebooks were sold than real books.

Dec 17, 2009

Fact-based climate debate

By Lee C. Gerhard, IPCC Expert Reviewer

It is crucial that scientists are factually accurate when they do speak out, that they ignore media hype and maintain a clinical detachment from social or other agendas. There are facts and data that are ignored in the maelstrom of social and economic agendas swirling about Copenhagen.

Greenhouse gases and their effects are well-known. Here are some of things we know:

• The most effective greenhouse gas is water vapor, comprising approximately 95 percent of the total greenhouse effect.

• Carbon dioxide concentration has been continually rising for nearly 100 years. It continues to rise, but carbon dioxide concentrations at present are near the lowest in geologic history.

• Temperature change correlation with carbon dioxide levels is not statistically significant.

• There are no data that definitively relate carbon dioxide levels to temperature changes.

• The greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide logarithmically declines with increasing concentration. At present levels, any additional carbon dioxide can have very little effect.

We also know a lot about Earth temperature changes:

• Global temperature changes naturally all of the time, in both directions and at many scales of intensity.

• The warmest year in the U.S. in the last century was 1934, not 1998. The U.S. has the best and most extensive temperature records in the world.

• Global temperature peaked in 1998 on the current 60-80 year cycle, and has been episodically declining ever since. This cooling absolutely falsifies claims that human carbon dioxide emissions are a controlling factor in Earth temperature.

• Voluminous historic records demonstrate the Medieval Climate Optimum (MCO) was real and that the “hockey stick” graphic that attempted to deny that fact was at best bad science. The MCO was considerably warmer than the end of the 20th century.

• During the last 100 years, temperature has both risen and fallen, including the present cooling. All the changes in temperature of the last 100 years are in normal historic ranges, both in absolute value and, most importantly, rate of change.

Contrary to many public statements:

• Effects of temperature change are absolutely independent of the cause of the temperature change.

• Global hurricane, cyclonic and major storm activity is near 30-year lows. Any increase in cost of damages by storms is a product of increasing population density in vulnerable areas such as along the shores and property value inflation, not due to any increase in frequency or severity of storms.

• Polar bears have survived and thrived over periods of extreme cold and extreme warmth over hundreds of thousands of years - extremes far in excess of modern temperature changes.

• The 2009 minimum Arctic ice extent was significantly larger than the previous two years. The 2009 Antarctic maximum ice extent was significantly above the 30-year average. There are only 30 years of records.

• Rate and magnitude of sea level changes observed during the last 100 years are within normal historical ranges. Current sea level rise is tiny and, at most, justifies a prediction of perhaps ten centimeters rise in this century.

The present climate debate is a classic conflict between data and computer programs. The computer programs are the source of concern over climate change and global warming, not the data. Data are measurements. Computer programs are artificial constructs.

Betty James has a right to be proud of her son Tim:

He made almost $2.5 million playing for the Heat, Hornets and 76ers... And James earned plenty playing professionally in Japan, Turkey and Israel, too. But as he traveled all over the globe playing his beloved game, seeing a world he never thought he'd see growing up poor in Miami, he didn't learn to merely value or appreciate America's freedoms....

"He decided he wanted to fight to protect them, too," the story continues.

'Tis the season for patent court rulings! Yesterday Microsoft lost an appeal to a patent infringement case for how their Office suite (particularly Word) handles the opening of OpenXML documents. Microsoft made these the default document formats for the latest versions of Office (2007 for Windows, and 2008 for Mac), and as such have been widely adopted.

What does this mean for Mac users? Not much, except that Mac users who run Office might expect an update to their Office suites in the near future, which will change how Office reads OpenXML documents. Microsoft has been ordered to halt all sales of Word that use the old method of opening the documents by January 11th, so they should be hastily working on an update for current and future releases.

The court ruling stated that this only applies to the technologies in Office 2003, 2007, and later for the PC; however, while the Mac is not specifically mentioned I expect Microsoft will be changing how OpenXML is handled in all of their applications.

OpenXML file format is free for anyone to use, and is supported in a variety of Office suites (OpenOffice, anyone?) so support for it in Microsoft Office will not be going away. Overall for Office users this is a rather transparent event, which at the worst may result in a few delays for Microsoft while software gets updated.

Personally, I prefer Pages and Textedit for my word processing needs. For more on the court ruling, see this CNET article.

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