I see a lot of hand waving about the temperature adjustments but I seldom see any serious scientifically rigorous challenge that addresses the reasons and methods that scientists give for making the adjustments.

Yep!

But doing science isn't free.

You're not going to get funding for that study from a government agency, or from a family trust managed by "progressive" administrators (regardless of the political position of the rich dead guy who established it).

If you take funding from, say, an oil company, or from a family trust started by a conservative that is somehow still managed by conservatives, any results not agreeing with the Global Heat Death scenario will be flamed as comparable to tobacco company sponsored lung cancer research - and can go whistle for a journal to publish them. (Isn't it amazing how research that DOES agree doesn't seem to have these problems, no matter how much the data has been "adjusted"?)

Other funding sources have similar issues.

So do you have any suggestions on where researchers can get funding for that study (and for all their future work in the field after it's done, if it doesn't agree with the dominant paradigm?)

Perhaps you have a few million to spare?

For the record, there actually was never a civil war where one side fought for the right to own white people under the banner of a "black power" flag. Also, there is not to this day (nor was there ever) a state that still flies that flag of white oppression.

For the record. the Civil War was not about one side fighting for the right to own black people under the banner of a "white power" flag, either.

The slavery issue was used in recruiting, convincing normally anti-war religious factions to drop their opposition (or even support it) under the "just war" doctrine, and eventually as a tactic near the end of the war to try to promote a slave revolt in the Confederacy. But the original fight (like the American Revolution, the "occupy" movement, and the RIAA/MPAA inspired draconian copyright regime) was about a crony capitalists / government axis using tariffs and laws to keep a large segment of the population as captive customers for overpriced monopoly products, suppressing both their trade with suppliers in other countries and their ability to make their own, lower-priced, replacement products.

It was the north's "1%" against the south-as-ghetto.

(Note that I say this as a descendant of a number of people who fought on the Union side.)

Unfortunately, the actual history of the conflict has been largely suppressed. IMHO the current anti-confederate-battle-flag move is both an attempt to finish off the suppression of the history of the conflict and to pre-emptively propagandize against any move by southern border states to take their own measures against what they perceive as a massive invasion across the southern border.

"Those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it." applies here - even if the history isn't studied because books about it are suppressed (e.g. removed from book stores and libraries because they contain the "evil racist flag").

... as in FIVE YEARS OLD and has already been figured into the equations for AGW, which is real, and is getting worse.

Get a grip.

It doesn't matter whether the Global Warming is Anthropogenic or not (other than to tell us that, if anything needs to be done about it, anthropogenesis says we CAN affect it because we already DID).

What matters is where it's going, whether the destination is disastrous, annoying, ho-hum, or maybe even good, whether it will sort itself without help, and if not, how much and how we need to intervene to make things better than if we don't bother.

Once climate change really kicks in ... an Alaskan winter is going to feel more like Death Valley does today.

Really? I though even the worst models were only predicting single-digit C changes to temperature averages.

You're talking well over an order of magnitude more warming that the doom-and-gloom crowd. They're talking the ideal ranges of various crops moving a couple hundred miles toward the poles or a couple hundred feet upslope (even when trying to spin it into extinction events). You're talking frying eggs on the ground in the dead of the Alaskan winter. They're not comparable.

What they say is that the short-term solar cycles have no effect on the climate.

"Little Substantial Effect" of the ups and downs of the individual cycles themselves and their usual cycle-to-cycle variations (rather than the exceptional cases of multi-cycle sunspot minimums), if I'm not mistaken.

If the Maunder Minimum (about five cycles long) was responsible, or even a substantial contributer to, the Little Ice Age, the effect of that variation Was substantial. It's the largest of three sunspot minima events that have been observed since sunspots were first noted as a significant phenomenon of scientific interest, and each of the minima was accompanied by a substantial worldwide cold snap. So let's not claim the scientists are dismissing it out-of-hand.

How about we set up a fund. You will all your assets to it. If global warming turns out to be wrong then your great-grandchildren get the money. If not then Al Gore's great-grandchildren get the money.

I'd be tempted to throw 10% of my assets into such a fund (paying my heirs, if not actual great-grandchildren) IF Al Gore did the same. B-)

But since Al Gore is heavily betting his assets (and those of others that he manages) on businesses profiting from draconian government actions to combat "global warming" (such as carbon credit and pollution license marketplace schemes), if I "won" his assets would be substantially devalued, if they were still worth anything at all. Meanwhile, considering our relative net worths, he'd be a fool to engage in such a bet even if he had near-certainty odds of winning. B-b

In the summary Geoffrey.landis writes:

Phil Plait, known for his "bad astronomy" column, does a more detailed analysis of the claims,

I also find it ironic that, according to the Slashdot summary, Plait allegedly wrote, four years ago, a "detailed analysis" of last week's report (of a new solar model with a 97% match to the sun's actual behavior).

In the referenced article, Plait was deconstructing a previous report suggesting maybe the next solar cycle might be low, on the basis of extrapolations of the diclines seen in its two predecessors. He was not discussing the new model, which predicts, with substantial confidence, that (at least) the next TWO solar cycles would be almost nonexistent, comparable to the first two of Maunder Minimum's five nearly-missing cycles.

I also find it ironic that nobody else (that I've noticed) has commented on this yet.

If we're going to discuss this, let's at least have a reference to an authoritative article that is ACTUALLY TALKING ABOUT the model under discussion and the fallout if its predictions are accurate. B-)

A train system designed to reduce friction has better metrics in a vacuum environment?

Mars is NOT without atmosphere. It's about 1/100th as dens as that of Earth, but that's still not trivial.

The moon has an atmosphere, too. It's density is 13 orders of magnitude down from that of Earth, which makes it a pretty good vacuum. But that's because it loses air more quickly - on GEOLOGICAL time scales - compared with Earth. On HUMAN time scales, on the other hand, things like oxygen, nitrogen, water, and carbon dioxide hang around for quite a long time. (I THINK the half-life is longer than human written history.)

The moon's surface escape velocity is more than a fifth that of earth, and a non-trivial multiple of the speed of sound at ordinary (or even lunar) temperatures, so the molecules aren't just going to fly off any time soon. It doesn't have a magnetic field to protect it from the solar wind and its associated magnetic fluctuations. So over time scales compared to continental drift the Moon is leaky. But on human time scales it's not. Exhaust a bottle of air on the surface of the moon when your child is born and most of it will still be around when he dies of old age (assuming only current medical technology. B-) )

This has been a planning issue for those considering lunar industrialization. Much science fiction has industrial processes on the lunar surface, for the "cheap vacuum". But both the industry itself and human habitation in general will "Pollute the Moon with Air", quickly rendering the vacuum too "dirty" for such things (though still good enough to eliminate the need for a "roughing pump" for at least decades, if that's the ONLY source of new atmosphere). That would also be very good for evacuated-passageway transport systems like Hyperloop - PROVIDED they're only using motors, not compressed air, for propulsion. B-) But...

The length of time air would hang around has led to proposals to terraform the Moon, giving it a breathable atmosphere by crashing a LOT of icy orbital objects into it. (This, of course, would put it back to the Earth's situation. B-) )

While it would be back to a pretty good vacuum in time scales comparable to the evolution of life, it wouldn't decay substantially for time scales comparable to A life. Even if it started to become noticeably (without sensitive instruments) thinner in a few centuries, any space-going civilization capable of GIVING it the atmosphere would be capable of maintaining it.

I think the leakage is slow enough for civilization to fall - to stone-age levels - and rise again (maybe from descendants of apes) before it would be an issue, but I'm not sure: Looking up the half life of Lunar air loss on the net is a tad complicated: It's not talked about much. But the plotline involving an artificial Lunar atmosphere, in the game Half Life, is talked about a LOT. B-)

I would love to live in a walking neighborhood personally.

You LIKE being mugged?

Pedestrian friendly neighborhoods are the most oppressive tool in the despot's bag. Fight back! Tear up a sidewalk today.

You misunderstand the urban-planning term of art (which may have been chosen to sell you on that idea.)

"Walkable neighborhoods" are NOT "pedestrian friendly". They are "car hostile". They involve high-density housing with no practical automobile access. You are expected to do all your shopping by walking to the stores and carrying the groceries or other goods back home.

The stores, of course, have a small, captive, clientele. So they don't have the economy of scale of, say, a supermarket, and are priced like a convenience store. (Imagine only being able to get groceries from your local 7-11 and having to carry them home.)

If your home is in a "transit-oriented development" - and it actually HAS some transit - you can try carrying your groceries back on a bus or (if you're VERY lucky, aren't working, and can time your shopping trip for rush hour) a commuter train.

(Of course such high-density developments are primarily constructed in low-income neighborhoods. So the transit agencies get their bond measures through by promising the higher-income cities they serve that they will refuse to serve the developments, to avoid becoming a commuter-service for petty thieves and burglary rings into their ritzy suburbs and white-collar office spaces. So you end up with "transit-oriented" and "walkable" developments with no transit.)

Thus begins the war on roads, think of the children!

Straight out of page 48 of Agenda 21.

Some people think that this is part of a coordinated effort by governments, worldwide, to increase their own power by coralling the bulk of their populations in high-density urban areas, limiting their access to transportation, and making them totally dependent on government controlled services.

By that model, "Transit oriented developments" (i.e. no space to park a car for you - go only where and when public transit deigns to take you), "walkable neighborhoods", and "getting people over their love affair with cars" (by designing road networks to make commuting and recreational travel difficult and unpleasant) isn't enough. They've been closing roads in much of the rural areas, in the name of "protecting the environment". Next step: Make it a public policy to abandon or close non-wilderness rural roads.

... if you visit the first article linked in the story, while using AdBlock, you get a giant pop-up complaining about your doing so. :-)

Not if you also use noscript. B-)

Even though it's funded by adblock, I still believe it. May not be such high percentages, but it will certainly take a measurable chunk away.

I'm surprised it's not more.

Perhaps that's me, though. My browsing tends to be sites, such as Slashdot, where the meat I'm after is text, and the site's chaff is mainly icons, formatting-prettys, buttons, and other things that are static, image-light, and either susceptable to substantial compression or rendeded by the browser from small descriptions. Ads, meanwhile, tend to be image-rich, moving, and flashy, and designed for the add site's customer (who has litte concern for the viewer's costs) which chews up bandwidth.

I'll presume it's so low either because others browse more bandwidth-intensive sites or site designers, in this age of broadband and optimized-only-for-appearance site design tools, are also not interested in keeping the bandwidth down (and the resulting performance up).

Individual sites cry foul because they cannot meet their advertising targets affecting their revenue, but from the point of view of the user that is active on the net they are bombarded by advertising. Stripping even 10% away can be a good thing...

For reducing viewer distraction, cutting bandwidth costs, and avoiding delays in web-page rendering.

I NEED to suppress the ads when I'm at the ranch, with only slow dialup. A single image can make a page take minutes to load, when it could have been up in a second or less. So imagine one surrounded by banner ads, sidebar ads, embedded ads, footer ads, and so on. One animated ad can make the page take half an hour or more to load, and dynamic content can make it never finish at all, as the content changes outstrip the bandwidth.

I even browse Slashdot with a configuration hack corresponding roughly to enabling firefox's long-lost "delay image loading" option. To do otherwise, even in classic mode and with "patron status or enough karma to disable ads", would be impractical.

Without adblock plus AND noscript, (and maybe flashblock,) I'd be off the web when out of town.

Except Snowden gave the information to everyone, US and foreign.

Riddle me this: How do you give it to the American People WITHOUT also giving it to everyone else, US and foreign?

Do you REALLY think 321 million people can keep a secret?

What happened is that people who used the system very day, day in and day out, became so fast at entering the machine settings the rate of UI events exceeded the ability of the custom monitor software written for the machine to respond correctly to them.

Which is still to some extent a UI issue.

But the literal "killer" is what happened next:
  1) The machine detected that it had screwed up.
  2) But the UI reported this by a cryptic error message: "MALFUNCTION nn" - where the 1 = nn = 64 error codes not only weren't explanatory, but weren't even included in the manual.
  3) And if the operator hit "P" (for "proceed") the machine would GO AHEAD AND OPERATE in the known-to-be-broken mode, giving the patient a fatal (high-power, not-swept-around) electrons rather than a 100x weaker flood of x-rays, with NO FURTHER INDICATION that something is still wrong (unless you count the patient sometimes screaming and running out of the room.)

If 2) and 3) aren't user interface problems, what is?