A Sense of Magnitude

Posts from the Past.

An interesting article about the return of sunspots in the solar cycle from spaceweather.com for July 14, 2010.

Sunspot 1087

Here is a closer look at 1087 comparing the size of the spot to the Earth

From the article:

The active region could swallow our planet ten times over and still have room to spare. Fortunately, we're 93 million miles away. We could still feel the effects of an eruption, however. The thicket of magnetic loops and filaments harbors energy for M-class solar flares. M-flares can heat and puff up Earth's upper atmosphere, causing satellites to experience extra drag as they orbit our planet; they can also cause waves of ionization to ripple around the planet, disrupting radio communications.

Do you really think that our burning of fossil fuels is all that significant to global temperature?  It is easy to magnify one's significance from the inside looking out but true relevance is determined from the outside looking in.

Awesome beauty.

When Fools Attempt Science

 Some of you may recall that class experiment about gossip where the teacher whispers something in the first person's ear then that person whispers it to the next person until everyone has passed the message around and the last person tells the class what they heard.  So it could start out "Tommy is chewing gum in class" and end up "Tommy was shooting a gun in class".

Apparently the same phenomena runs rampant through the leftist narratives about global warming.

"The "97 percent" figure in the Zimmerman/Doran survey represents the views of only 79 respondents who listed climate science as an area of expertise and said they published more than half of their recent peer-reviewed papers on climate change. Seventy-nine scientists—of the 3,146 who responded to the survey—does not a consensus make."

Read the rest at The Wall Street Journal: The Myth of the Climate Change '97%'