Making The NSA Spying On Us Even WORSE

Today, per the BBC: Obama Orders Curbs on Use if NSA Info

This is abysmally pathetic:

Senior officials tell the US media the centrepiece of the reforms will be the order to stop the NSA from storing information about Americans’ phone calls.

Storage of the data will instead fall to firms or another third party where it can be queried under limited conditions.

What the hell difference does that make?

The NSA is STILL spying illegally on Americans.  So nothing has changed there.  Its charter is to spy on other nations, and nothing in that charter violates our rights under the 4th Amendment, so I do not complain about that side of this.  However, the NSA charter DOES specifically prohibit it from spying on Americans, especially on American soil.

The only difference in this proposal is the storage – that they are going to PRIVATIZE THAT, of all things?  PRIVATIZE??!!  And that is supposed to make it all better?  That will even be WORSE!

It sounds like Dick Cheney must have been telling Obama what to do.

They propose intercepting it all just as before, and then giving Xe (Blackwater) or Halliburton control over the stuff?  Holy mother of God, do they think we are STUPID?

I trust the NSA – which has no guns – a lot more than I would ever trust those mass murders.

On this basis alone, I utterly and roundly reject this so-called “fix.”

Climate Scientists and Nature Magazine are Crazy, It Seems

An article in Nature magazine, Climate Change: The Case of the Missing Heat, discusses why the global warming ended for a time in 1998 (actually, besides that El Niño of 1998 it began earlier).  About the global average, the article says

Simulations conducted in advance of the 2013–14 assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggest that the warming should have continued at an average rate of 0.21 °C per decade from 1998 to 2012. Instead, the observed warming during that period was just 0.04 °C per decade

Now 0.04°C per decade is only 0.02°F per decade, and is only 0.4°C per CENTURY.  NO CATASTROPHE HERE!

But it also tells us how WRONG scientists can be.

The article further states that

One important finding came in 2011, when a team of researchers at NCAR led by Gerald Meehl reported that inserting a PDO pattern into global climate models causes decade-scale breaks in global warming.

No shit, Sherlock. Actually entering in a real-world (and pertinent) phenomenon into the models made them act more like the real world?

Wow. Whodathunk?

The PDO

The PDO is the Pacfic Decadal Oscillation.  It was discovered in 1997.  You might ask what it is.  And you might also ask what climate scientist discovered it.

Answering the latter first, it was NOT discovered by a climate scientist at all.  It was discovered by a biologist researching trends in salmon catches by fishermen in the northern Pacific.  His name is Steven Hare.

As to what the PDO is?  It is the observed shifting of the climate in the northern Pacific from one phase to another and then back again.  The shifts are called “phases,” and the phases are not short, and they are consistently long term, lasting about 2 or 3 decades or more.  (Hence the “decadal” in the name of the PDO.)  In a PDO warm phase, the northern Pacific is warmer than average, and the SE USA is also warm.  The rest of the USA in that case will be cooler than usual.  The opposite holds true in a PDO cool phase:  A cool northern Pacific matches with a cool phase in the SE USA, while the rest of the country is warmer than usual.  These phases are persistent.  There seems to BE no neutral phase to speak of – the PDO is usually in either a warm phase or a cool phase, but not long in the middle.

More than ten years ago people were already saying that the timing of the PDO’s phases indicated that its patterns suggested that we were likely to be ending our time in a PDO warm phase and thus heading into a slowdown and a possible/probable global cooling.

By 1990 we were all told that they knew what was happening with the climate and that it was CO2 causing the climate to warm – strongly implying that all the factors were known and all the factors were accounted for in the models and in their overall thinking. When the PDO was discovered, none of the climate scientist came out and said, “You know, we need to incorporate the PDO into the models, don’t we?”

OBVIOUSLY, ALL of the factors should be in the models. Any twerp with half a brain would know that.

It took them from 1997 – coincidentally the beginning of the hiatus (mentioned in the Nature paper) until 2011 – to FINALLY even THINK of putting the PDO into the models. And when they did, VIOLA! the models began to act more like the real world!

Are these guys numb nuts or what?

This is a science with so little science in it that it boggles the mind. Or at least too few actual scientists with brains capable of logic instead of wishful thinking. Not to mention the blatant cherry picking of not only data but also cherry picking of FORCINGS.  Forcings are a fancy way of saying “causes.” Leaving the PDO out until now is simply mind-blowing.

Maybe in about 250 years they will figure out that Trenberth’s sequestered heat in the oceans is just a total wishful thinking speculation/delusion. The editors of journals seem to be incapable of recognizing delusions and mere speculations.  For now, they are so illogical that they can’t tell the difference between speculation and evidence. Trenberth’s sequestered heat is an extraordinary claim – something never seen before or thought about before. He pulled it out of his butt, after all. And as an extraordinary claim, IT requires extraordinary proof. Yet, the editors at Nature cannot bring themselves to demand such extraordinary proof. Instead, they accept it at face value as if it is the truth of the matter.

So, once again, the skeptics who do demand the extraordinary proof are themselves now the ones who will be required to disprove Trenberth’s TOTAL GUESS.

Science, in other words, has been stood on its head.

The REAL story here should be this:

When INCLUDING the PDO makes the computer models behave like the real world, then the climate models were wrong all that time they did not include the PDO.

Instead, they shunt this important finding into the background and return to Trenberth and his delusion.

It just makes your mind reel, doesn’t it?

More on That El Niño And Its Cause

This is a cross-post of my comment on WattsUpWithThat. com on a post in which Bob Tisdale, their resident El Niño expert, tells how the El Niñ forms.

Taking an earlier post by Bob and the YouTube videos referenced in it, I here show month by month the early stages of the biggest documented El Niño in our short history of El Niños.

I should note that three days ago, on the same day as my last post, which was on this subject, I submitted my post here to Anthony Watts of WUWT.  And two days later Bob – who had promised to stop posting because he didn’t have time – re-posted a hand-illustrated version of his hypothesis of how El Niño starts.

However, his re-post is completely contradicted by his YouTube video.  That is what this post is about.  It appears that I am disagreeing on this with someone who knows 1,000 times more than I do about it.  But his own data-based maps contradict the sequence in his hypothesis.

For those technically minded, this gets good…

I begin:

Thoughts on the El Niño Southern Oscillation and Its Possible Cause

It is probable that I am wrong on this, but I am the sort that doesn’t take it personally when I am wrong, so why not ask the question that is in my head?

The EL Niño Southern Oscillation is pretty erratic in both warm and cold phases (El Niño and La Niña), in magnitude, in timing, and in duration.  Four or five years ago I conjectured that some unknown heat source is the cause of it and that ENSO itself is just an intermediate step in the processing of huge amounts of heat energy in the equatorial Pacific.  I speculated then if perhaps hydrothermal vents and/or undersea volcanoes could be the fundamental source of this heat energy.  I considered this possible because of two reasons. First, I could not find any description of the causes of ENSO, just descriptions OF it – as if it just falls out of the sky each time, with no cause.  Most articles seemed to assume IT was the cause.  Yet its vast heat energy had to have come from somewhere, somewhere other than itself.

We do know that heat is coming up out of the vents, along with minerals that sustain weird life forms. The academic focus on these vents has been mostly centered on the sexy study of the life forms found at vents, plus studying the chemistry present and its potential benefits.

But I wondered then if the heat may be something to look at, too. No one seemed to be looking at that aspect.

The basic question was:  Could the vents have irregular but somewhat cyclical heat output that has not been identified or connected with ENSO that might be underlying why and when El Niños occur?

(Even if this is wrong, it seems to me to be worth looking into it, if only to determine why it is wrong – to eliminate it as a possibility. Except no one else seemed to be even asking this question.)

Alternatively, could the ocean currents in the region vary in direction and thus direct the heat in different directions at different times (perhaps getting dispersed in some of those directions before any heat energy buildup occurs)?

Terrestrial Heat Flow
Today while looking for something entirely different, I ran across this image of four maps, with one of them being a heat flow map:

Heat Flow Map at lower left shows very elevated heat flow on the Pacific Rise               (from globalchange.umich.edu)

That map in the lower left really caught my attention.  “Heat flow” here means the heat coming up from the Earth’s core and being able to be measured at the surface.  That deep red at the edge of the Nazca tectonic plate is just about perfectly situated to be adding heat to the ocean right at the area where the El Niños begin.  The upper end of it is very close to the eastern end of the El Niño phenomenon, right where the intersection is.  The plate boundary going east from that intersection is called the Galapagos Rift.  On most of the heat flow maps that rift seems to be where much of the heat is shown.

Two questions arise:

1. Is enough heat brought up there to affect the temperatures of the equatorial current?
2. Is it silly to think that the heat is cyclical?

THE REALLY IRONIC THING ABOUT THE EDWARD SNOWDEN ISSUE

The ironic part of all this is that the NSA was probably tapping Edward Snowden’s phone, right along with the rest of ours – and yet they never discovered what he was doing.

It kind of makes you think they are a bunch of numb nuts, a bunch of doofuses, doesn’t it?  The NSA that couldn’t shoot straight? Or who couldn’t listen straight?

Add that to the missed clues on 9/11 – or the JFK murder, or all the other ACTUAL spies like Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen – and you have an intelligence community that is probably wasting our money playing at James Bond and at being Our Man Flint.

Aldrich Ames – got away with spying for years, right under the nose of the CIA

Robert Hanssen – same story as Ames: No one suspected what he was doing for a very long time 

But are they really more like Inspector Clouseau or like Inspector Gadget?  Are they actually a bunch of klutzes stumbling and muddling through?

It may be the biggest joke of all that we may not really have anything to worry about the NSA program at all.  The NSA is almost certainly drowning in data – or WILL be very soon.  If they couldn’t deal with the “intelligence” before, why would we expect them to be any better at it now, just because they have MORE?  Isn’t that a bigger haystack in which to find needles?

Yes, they may have better, more powerful magnets with which to find needles – but are all needles magnetic?  And what if the hay is magnetic, too?  The available evidence is that they far too often are caught with their pants down and only close the barn door after the horses have all escaped – after the damage has already been done.