Science Odds and Ends

A new study by social psychologist Christopher Bryan and his colleagues at Stanford University shows just how easily people can be manipulated using their own vanity; by doing nothing more than changing the word "vote," to "voter," on a survey, Bryan et al, have demonstrated that it's possible to increase voter turnout in real-world elections. The team has published their results in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The next fantastic voyage across the red planet will begin in just over a year when NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover lands in a crater 96 miles wide and three miles deep that contains a geological record of the planet’s epic history.

On July 22, NASA officially announced that Curiosity will land at Gale Crater, where they hope to learn how Mars turned from a wet, potentially habitable planet into a dry, acidic wasteland. Mission managers selected the site over an ancient river-like delta in Eberswalde Crater, which may contain stronger traces of organic carbon.

“It’s like the layers in the Grand Canyon, a sequence of rocks laid out before you that traverse a lot of geologic history,” said planetary scientist John Mustard of Brown University, a 20-year veteran of Mars missions. “Layer by layer, Curiosity’s going climb from the bottom and up through Martian time.”

Medieval armor certainly looks heavy. And now researchers have demonstrated how the protection might have unwittingly put its wearers at a heavy disadvantage on the battlefield.

An armored combatant in the 1400s had between about 60 to 110 pounds of steel on his head and body. The scientists wanted to know how that weight affected performance. They recruited battle experts from the Royal Armouries Museum in Leeds, in the U.K., who got into replicas of four types of European armor.

TPP wrote: :VeryScared: O NO NOW what will the Holy Global Warmest, blame it on????????????

New NASA Data Blow Gaping Hole In Global Warming Alarmism

By James Taylor | Forbes – Wed, Jul 27, 2011

New NASA Data Blow Gaping Hole In Global Warming Alarmism

1) http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/3/8/1603/pdf
2)July 26, 2011 • 10:52 am New Paper “On the Misdiagnosis Of Surface Temperature Feedbacks From Variations In Earth’s Radiant Energy Balance” By Spencer and Braswell 2011
There is a new paper published which raises further questions on the robustness of multi-decadal global climate predictions. It is Spencer, R.W.; Braswell, W.D. On the Misdiagnosis of Surface Temperature Feedbacks from Variations in Earth’s Radiant Energy Balance. Remote Sens. 2011, 3, 1603-1613.
The University of Alabama has issues a news release on it which reads [h/t to Phillip Gentry]
Climate models get energy balance wrong, make too hot forecasts of global warming
http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2011/07/26/new-paper-on-the-misdiagnosis-of-surface-temperature-feedbacks-from-variations-in-earth%E2%80%99s-radiant-energy-balance-by-spencer-and-braswell-2011/
3) http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/03/30/lindzen-on-negative-climate-feedback/

Read the rest at: http://news.yahoo.com/nasa-data-blow-gaping-hold-global-warming-alarmism-192334971.html

The hype surrounding a new paper by Roy Spencer and Danny Braswell is impressive (see for instance Fox News); unfortunately the paper itself is not. News releases and blogs on climate denier web sites have publicized the claim from the paper’s news release that “Climate models get energy balance wrong, make too hot forecasts of global warming”. The paper has been published in a journal called Remote sensing which is a fine journal for geographers, but it does not deal with atmospheric and climate science, and it is evident that this paper did not get an adequate peer review. It should not have been published.

The paper’s title “On the Misdiagnosis of Surface Temperature Feedbacks from Variations in Earth’s Radiant Energy Balance” is provocative and should have raised red flags with the editors. The basic material in the paper has very basic shortcomings because no statistical significance of results, error bars or uncertainties are given either in the figures or discussed in the text. Moreover the description of methods of what was done is not sufficient to be able to replicate results. As a first step, some quick checks have been made to see whether results can be replicated and we find some points of contention.

“He’s taken an incorrect model, he’s tweaked it to match observations, but the conclusions you get from that are not correct,” Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University.