Storms - Stoplights - Equality

Last Monday a storm came through. Sustained hurricane force winds in Northeast Illinois!? I suppose the usual suspects will allege global warming or cooling as a cause though common sense meteorology would say just an extreme local variation, no matter the long term pattern. As I drove home from work the closer I got the more and more trees and branches were on the ground - and power lines. When I got home, aside from lesser problems like a flying branch wrecking the fence gate, the electricity was out, it did not come back until Friday evening.

One thing I learned to appreciate during this is the common stoplight. One thinks of them just as a safety feature so many cars can get through an intersection safely. However when the light is out you go to stop sign rules. Every one gets through safely, but it takes forever. Even if one catches a red light at the beginning of the cycle one get through the intersection much faster than one gets through on stop sign rules. One intersection regularly had back up of over a mile in three directions.

While sitting in that four lane parking lot waiting my turn I mused that this is a good example of an equality of results. It takes every one about the same amount of time to get to the light and through the intersection. Stop lights are a great source of inequality, some cars get to the intersection with a green light and zip though at 60 miles an hour. Some catch the beginning of the red light cycle and sit there for a few minutes waiting for the green. This is so unequal, yes everyone gets through much faster with the stop light, but shouldn’t radical equality be a goal, it commonly espoused for economics and politics, why not traffic control?

While equality is certainly important in some areas, i.e. everyone should be equal before the law. Everyone should have and equal opportunity to seek education and employment of their choice. But when an equality of results is promised how do you get them?

The items that have been driving the growth of western and now world economies for the past few hundred years are the concentration of capital, free trade, and technological development. But all of these produce uneven results. While even those on the lower end do better than they would otherwise the discrepancy between the top and bottom is larger than before this development. The only way to equalize the results in to put such major impediments in the place of concentrating capital, free trade and technological development that these discrepancies cannot exist which means every one gets poorer and poorer. But it is closer to equal results!

That wait for my turn to go through the intersection was way to long.


See also:
Freedom
The Fourth of July

Earth Day 40

The 22d was the 40th Earth Day celebration, oh shucks, I forgot to make an appropriate comment.

But it is always good to remember Newsweek’s famous 1975 article on Climate Change.

There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production – with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now. The regions destined to feel its impact are the great wheat-producing lands of Canada and the U.S.S.R. in the North, along with a number of marginally self-sufficient tropical areas – parts of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indochina and Indonesia – where the growing season is dependent upon the rains brought by the monsoon.

The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it. In England, farmers have seen their growing season decline by about two weeks since 1950, with a resultant overall loss in grain production estimated at up to 100,000 tons annually. During the same time, the average temperature around the equator has risen by a fraction of a degree – a fraction that in some areas can mean drought and desolation. Last April, in the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded, 148 twisters killed more than 300 people and caused half a billion dollars’ worth of damage in 13 U.S. states.

To scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent the advance signs of fundamental changes in the world’s weather. The central fact is that after three quarters of a century of extraordinarily mild conditions, the earth’s climate seems to be cooling down. Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the cooling trend, as well as over its specific impact on local weather conditions. But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century. If the climatic change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic. “A major climatic change would force economic and social adjustments on a worldwide scale,” warns a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences, “because the global patterns of food production and population that have evolved are implicitly dependent on the climate of the present century.” The Cooling World, Newsweek, April 28, 1975 Click to read the whole article.
The article is reprinted on Dennis Sutton’s webpage. He is the editor of the must read Arts and Letters Daily.

He comments:
It may look foolish today, but in fact world temperatures had been falling since about 1940. It was around 1979 that they reversed direction and resumed the general rise that had begun in the 1880s, bringing us today back to around 1940 levels.

And the cycle started to turn over about 2002 and since 2007 is cooling again. And in about thirty or so years the cycle will start warming and in another 30 or so years. . .

To keep up with the latest climate change news follow Climate Debate Daily, which every day brings you the best of both sides of the controversy.

Related posts
State Police Blow up Global Warming
A Very Inconvenient Court Ruling
2007 Year of Global Cooling
Climate Change Schadenfreude

Update: December 31, 2010:
From Time Magazine June 24, 1974
Another Ice Age?

Climate Change Schadenfreude

Anthony Watts, a leading critic of "Global Warming," of Watts Up With That and is trying (not very hard) to avoid an overdose of Schadenfreude. The Climate Research Unit computer assoiated with East Anglia University has been hacked.

The details on this are still sketchy, we’ll probably never know what went on. But it appears that University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit has been hacked and many many files have been released by the hacker or person unknown.
Snip
An unknown person put postings on some climate skeptic websites that advertised an FTP file on a Russian FTP server, here is the message that was placed on the Air Vent today:

We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to
be kept under wraps.
We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents

The file was large, about 61 megabytes, containing hundreds of files.

It contained data, code, and emails from Phil Jones at CRU to and from many people.

I’ve seen the file, it appears to be genuine and from CRU. Others who have seen it concur- it appears genuine. There are so many files it appears unlikely that it is a hoax. The effort would be too great.

More posts from Watts Up With That

Mike’s Nature Trick
Release of CRU files forges a new hockey stick reconstruction
CRU Emails – search engine now online
Bishop Hill’s compendium of CRU email issues Several pages of interesting (salacious) quotes for the email messages.
CRU Emails “may” be open to interpretation, but commented code by the programmer tells the real story A comment from a programmer

People are talking about the emails being smoking guns but I find the remarks in the code and the code more of a smoking gun. The code is so hacked around to give predetermined results that it shows the bias of the coder. In other words make the code ignore inconvenient data to show what I want it to show. The code after a quick scan is quite a mess. Anyone with any pride would be to ashamed of to let it out public viewing.



Gavin Schmidt on the premier Global Warming advocacy blog
Real Climate provides this response.

As many of you will be aware, a large number of emails from the University of East Anglia webmail server were hacked recently (Despite some confusion generated by Anthony Watts, this has absolutely nothing to do with the Hadley Centre which is a completely separate institution). As people are also no doubt aware the breaking into of computers and releasing private information is illegal, and regardless of how they were obtained, posting private correspondence without permission is unethical. We therefore aren’t going to post any of the emails here. We were made aware of the existence of this archive last Tuesday morning when the hackers attempted to upload it to RealClimate, and we notified CRU of their possible security breach later that day.

Nonetheless, these emails (a presumably careful selection of (possibly edited?) correspondence dating back to 1996 and as recently as Nov 12) are being widely circulated, and therefore require some comment. Some of them involve people here (and the archive includes the first RealClimate email we ever sent out to colleagues) and include discussions we’ve had with the CRU folk on topics related to the surface temperature record and some paleo-related issues, mainly to ensure that posting were accurate.


He also quotes the official comment of the East Anglia Univeristy

“We are aware that information from a server used for research information
in one area of the university has been made available on public websites,”
the spokesman stated.

“Because of the volume of this information we cannot currently confirm
that all of this material is genuine.”

“This information has been obtained and published without our permission
and we took immediate action to remove the server in question from
operation.”

“We are undertaking a thorough internal investigation and we have involved
the police in this enquiry.”



ANALYSIS


At the very least a major Climate Change research institution has been caught publishing and defending false data. More embarrassing is that the data in question is what under lies the famous “hockey stick” graph which is widely used in popular presentations supporting Global Warming. This data has been questioned by many, Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit has proven it false with two different methodologies.

How far this extends beyond East Anglia is anyone’s guess for now, but even Der Spiegel in an article published just before the hack became public headlines Climatologists Baffled by Global Warming Time-Out. Actually climate data has been getting more and more out of line with preditions for several years.

The hack was released about a month before the Copenhagen climate conference next month. Early enough to get wide publicity possibly influencing participants, but late enough to make a complete response impossible.

There are two questions of illegality alleged. Hacking a computer is a crime, The second is that it appears from the information released that CRU was suppressing Freedom of Information Request which I gather is a criminal offense in Britain.

Watch the unfolding drama at:

Watts Up With That
Real Climate
Climate Audit



HT: Duff and Nonsense

Heating Up the Campaign

It seems the Presidential Campaign is to tame and boring and needs to be heated up.

Despite reporting on 2007 as A Year of Global Cooling I expected the Presidential election campaign would increase world temperatures by at least a degree centigrade and even more in the US.

However the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reports the US has had a cooler than normal spring


Graphic: NOAA


The University of Alabama, Huntsville and Remote Sensing Systems of Santa Rosa two instituions that analyse and report temperature data obtined by satalite report that global temperatures were cooler in May


Graphic: RSS


Three months do not make a trend but how can we have a decent Global Warmng debate without Global Warming?


Come on all you candidates, staff, reporters, pundits and bloggers, put out more hot air, let’s heat this thing up!



HT: Watts Up With That

Going North

Made my occasional visit to our Marquette Michigan office in the Upper Peninsula.




I took a driving break at a good half way point



At another break I stopped at Florence Wisconsin and checked the weather station.



This is part of the National Network of weather stations that collects data on “global warming” as well as more mundane purposes, like the weather report. The network has come under considerable criticism lately because many (over half surveyed so far) have a larger margin of error than the alleged extant of global warming. I didn’t do a formal survey but this looks much better than most. The white boxes at the bottom are old equipment, the weather station is the little box on the antenna near the top of the picture.


I always plan to travel in the good weather



This the land of the Great North Woods.










Took a wrong turn going home and got to visit Norway



Michigan that is. This town in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth centurys was the last transit point for settlers from the Scandinavia, from here they went to set up homesteads or got jobs in the mines across the Upper Peninsula and Northern Wisconsin.



More pictures

2007 – a Year of Global Cooling.

Worried about Global Warming – well don’t sell your parka just yet.



Geophysicist David Denning wrote an article for the Washington Times entitled a "Year of Global Cooling". Anthony Watts of copied the article here adding photos and links

Keeping in mind that the weather in one year does not constitute a trend here are some highlights:

South America this year experienced one of its coldest winters in decades. In Buenos Aires, snow fell for the first time since the year 1918. Dozens of homeless people died from exposure. In Peru, 200 people died from the cold and thousands more became infected with respiratory diseases. Crops failed, livestock perished, and the Peruvian government declared a state of emergency.

Unexpected bitter cold swept the entire Southern Hemisphere in 2007. Johannesburg, South Africa, had the first significant snowfall in 26 years. Australia experienced the coldest June ever. In north-eastern Australia, the city of Townsville underwent the longest period of continuously cold weather since 1941. In New Zealand, the weather turned so cold that vineyards were endangered.

snip

exreme cold weather is occurring worldwide. On Dec. 4, in Seoul, Korea, the temperature was a record minus 5 degrees Celsius. Nov. 24, in Meacham, Ore., the minimum temperature was 12 degrees Fahrenheit colder than the previous record low set in 1952. The Canadian government warns that this winter is likely to be the coldest in 15 years.

snip

The New Statesman, no less, this week publishes a piece by sensible David Whitehouse which says flatly:… The fact is that the global temperature of 2007 is statistically the same as 2006 as well as every year since 2001. Global warming has, temporarily or permanently, ceased. Temperatures across the world are not increasing as they should according to the fundamental theory behind global warming – the greenhouse effect. Something else is happening and it is vital that we find out what or else we may spend hundreds of billions of pounds needlessly.

Going much further:

In the Russia Information Agency "Novosti" “Dr. Oleg Sorokhtin, Merited Scientist of Russia and fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, is staff researcher of the Oceanology Institute” predicts A Cold Spell Soon to Replace Global Warming

Earth is now at the peak of one of its passing warm spells. It started in the 17th century when there was no industrial influence on the climate to speak of and no such thing as the hothouse effect. The current warming is evidently a natural process and utterly independent of hothouse gases.

The real reasons for climate changes are uneven solar radiation, terrestrial precession (that is, axis gyration), instability of oceanic currents, regular salinity fluctuations of the Arctic Ocean surface waters, etc. There is another, principal reason—solar activity and luminosity. The greater they are the warmer is our climate.

Astrophysics knows two solar activity cycles, of 11 and 200 years. Both are caused by changes in the radius and area of the irradiating solar surface. The latest data, obtained by Habibullah Abdusamatov, head of the Pulkovo Observatory space research laboratory, say that Earth has passed the peak of its warmer period, and a fairly cold spell will set in quite soon, by 2012. Real cold will come when solar activity reaches its minimum, by 2041, and will last for 50-60 years or even longer [I pulled the quote from the article and added it 7/4/2008.]



--------------------------

I read a very negative comment in a blog that there was no “General Circulation Model” for the Atmosphere that had been independently validated. The GCM is what one would plug the data into to produce worldwide climate estimates. So I did some investigating. Here s a good history of GCM’s. Note the explanation for the last few years is a lot less detailed than the earlier years. Certainly the original statement I read is much over stated but still it seems the state of the GCM is less than I would have expected to support enforcing mandatory policies.

Also Freeman Dyson a dean of the scientific community is less than impressed

My first heresy says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models. Of course, they say, I have no degree in meteorology and I am therefore not qualified to speak. But I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models.

---------------------------


However in 2007 there has been a major dump of hot air into the atmosphere, Al Gore's documentary film: “An Inconvenient Truth”

My posts on it are at Warmmonger Considered for Peace Prize. and A Very Inconvient Court Ruling

. . . [E]rror four is substantive. A central claim to (at least the popular versions) Global Warming theory is that CO2 rises precede and cause temperature rises, thus current man made rises in CO2 levels will warm the earth to the point it is uninhabital.

"‘Error': Direct coincidence between rise in CO2 in the atmosphere and in temperature, by reference to two graphs.

Error 4. In scenes 8 and 9, Mr Gore shows two graphs relating to a period of 650,000 years, one showing rise in CO2 and one showing rise in temperature, and asserts (by ridiculing the opposite view) that they show an exact fit. Although there is general scientific agreement that there is a connection, the two graphs do not establish what Mr Gore asserts.

There are differences between methods used to produce the data, but general scientific agreement is that temperatures rise 1500 to 2000 years before the rise in CO2. "

When I took research methodology the instructor was quite insistent that

If ‘A’ comes before ‘B’

Then either
‘A’ causes ‘B’ or
Both are caused by a third factor or
There is no cause and effect relation between them

But never does 'B' cause 'A.'


More on Gore from High School Student Kristin Byrnes.

===========================

Antohnoy Watts of Watts Up With That is conducting an audit US Surface weather stations that provide information to the USHCN (U.S. Historical Climatology Network) to see if they are providing accurate data. He is recording the results at Surface Stations.org.

He summarized the results here and provides a nice graphic.



[Update 11/23/2009:
See the latest update 5/31/09 (858 of 1221 (78%) complete. 10% in CRN ratings 1and 2. ]


CRN3, CRN4, and CRN5 all have a greater margin of error that what is proposed as the amount of man made Global warming in the last century. That is 87% of the stations surved so far. Of course that is not a random sample and may change as other stations are surveyed. Most of the stations that did not meet standards had problems that cause overreporting of temperature.


An example is the station at Detroit Lakes MN. This is the station whose unusual data led to the discovery of “Y2K” error (now corrected) in the way data was processed. It is located near an air conditioner that dischares hot air close enough to the station to effect readings.



--------

So Hank, what do you know about Global warming?

Does Climate change? Of Course. It has for millennia, usually in regular cycles.
Is the Climate getting warmer? It has been since the end of the mini ice age in the middle of the Nineteenth Century.
How much warming is there? On the high side of the regular cycle.
Are we going to go into a cooling cycle in the near future? I do not know, it is a distinct possibility.
Is there going to be additional warming? I do not know.


Is man made Global Warming a threat?

I do not know, but the
Rush to War Stop Global Warming
is not justified on the evidence.



My Environment posts

A Very Inconvient Court Ruling

Below in Warmmonger Considered for Peace Prize I quoted the source as saying there were eleven errors in Al Gore's documentary An Inconvient Truth. The final order by the court changed the total to nine, combining two errors and dropping another one. A post from the National Center for Public Policy Research has the text of the Court Decision. Note the judge used more judicious language than the news articles, but it is still pretty strong indictment against the documentary being what it claims to be.



But then in Gores own words:

Q. There's a lot of debate right now over the best way to communicate about global warming and get people motivated. Do you scare people or give them hope? What's the right mix?

A. I think the answer to that depends on where your audience's head is. In the United States of America, unfortunately we still live in a bubble of unreality. And the Category 5 denial is an enormous obstacle to any discussion of solutions. Nobody is interested in solutions if they don't think there's a problem. Given that starting point, I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are, and how hopeful it is that we are going to solve this crisis.(Interview with Grist Magazine’s David Roberts and Al Gore about An Inconvenient Truth) HT: Krystin Byrnes for the quote.

An attitude that can easily slip into poor fact checking, over dramatization, and even lying.


Most of the errors are Global Warning Marketing, items that would impress no real scientist and could be easily knocked down by anyone who looks, but sound very impressive to concerned and uniformed members of the public who would be unlikely to look further. Just propaganda to convince the poor schmuks in “Category 5 denial.”


However error four is substantive. A central claim to (at least the popular versions) Global Warming theory is that CO2 rises precede and cause temperature rises, thus current man made rises in CO2 levels will warm the earth to the point it is uninhabital.

‘Error': Direct coincidence between rise in CO2 in the atmosphere and in temperature, by reference to two graphs.

Error 4. In scenes 8 and 9, Mr Gore shows two graphs relating to a period of 650,000 years, one showing rise in CO2 and one showing rise in temperature, and asserts (by ridiculing the opposite view) that they show an exact fit. Although there is general scientific agreement that there is a connection, the two graphs do not establish what Mr Gore asserts.

There are differences between methods used to produce the data, but general scientific agreement is that temperatures rise 1500 to 2000 years before the rise in CO2. source



When I took research methodology the instructor was quite insistent that

If ‘A’ comes before ‘B’

Then either
‘A’ causes ‘B’ or
Both are caused by a third factor or
There is no cause and effect relation between them

But never

Does ‘B’ causes‘ A’

If temprature rise come before the CO2 rise then there is a major problem with the data if one wants to support Global Warming.

While there is much more to Global Warming theory than what Gore put in “An Inconvenient Truth,” correcting the error noticed by the court invalidates the main point of Mr. Gore’s documentary.

Warmmonger Considered for Peace Prize.

Live Science reports that Al Gore is in the running for this year's Nobel Peace Prize for his documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.” Though the British courts have discovered some inconvient truths that might shoot down his nomination if some one tells the Nobel committee.



British Law prevents presenting partisan political propaganda to students. A concerned parent filed a suit and won. The court ruled "An Inconvenient Truth" is a political presentation not a science presentation, and determined there were at least eleven Material Errors of Fact.

Gore presents Mt Kilimanjaro's melting snows as proof of global warming. In fact, the snows are vanishing thanks to local factors, including deforestation.

Gore suggests Antarctica's ice cover is melting. Most studies says it is increasing or stable.

Gore shows scary graphics of cities drowning in seas that rise 7m, causing millions of refugees. But the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says the seas will rise at worst by 59cm this century.

Gore uses images of Hurricane Katrina and suggests it was caused by global warming. The Government's expert in this case admitted such one-off events can't be blamed on warming.

Gore suggests ice-core evidence shows rising CO2 caused temperature rises, which ended the past seven ice ages. In fact, the CO2 rises followed temperature rises by 800 to 2000 years.

Gore claims global warming could stop the Gulf Stream, causing an ice age in Europe. Recent studies deny it.

Gore blames global warming for species losses and coral reef bleaching. The Government couldn't show evidence to back this claim.

Gore claims a study showed polar bears had drowned because of vanishing ice. The study actually said just four polar bears drowned, and only because of a bad storm.

Gore suggests Greenland's ice could melt, causing a dangerous rise in sea levels. In fact, Greenland's ice won't melt for thousands of years.

Gore shows the drying up of Lake Chad and claims this was caused by global warming. The Government's expert agreed this was not the case.

Gore claims rising seas have forced people to flee Pacific islands to New Zealand. There is no record of any such warming-caused evacuation.

Only eleven, the judge most have wanted to get home for dinner on time.

Soruce” Melbourne Australia Herald Sun

But then even a High School Student can demonstrate “An Inconvenient Truth” isn’t.


But I do have an idea on how Al Gore can make a genuine contribution to peace. He can go to Iran and teach physics. That should put their nuclear program back at least twenty years.

UPDATE Oct 14 2007: The final decision of the court modifed the numger of errors to nine, coming two of them and deleting the third. See A very Inconvient Court Ruling



HT” Watts Up With That

State Police Blow up Global Warming - Updated

Well almost.

Climate Audit brings us the following from Salem Virginia:

The suspicious device blown up by a State Police Bomb Squad Thursday evening turned out to be a weather station.
It happened outside the Medical Office Building on the east side of Lewis Gale Medical Center. We were told a visitor contacted authorities after seeing a suspicious object hanging from a tree. Authorities brought out a robot to check it. The device was blown up around 7:00 p.m. At no time was the hospital or any other buildings at Lewis Gale evacuated.
Friday afternoon, Salem Police said the package was actually a remote weather station. A hospital employee had attached it to the tree and used putty to weather-proof it. Police say no criminal charges will be filed.

I would like to know how long the weather station was there before someone noticed.

===============================

The Global Warming theory assumes that the world temperature data is of consistent quality over time. To verify that Climate Audit is building a data base of all the official USHCN weather stations to evaluate their data.

While some stations are excellent examples of a well located and maintained station following USHCN standards, this is all to common. There is a change in the external environment of the station which effects the results, usually raising the reported temperatures. The stations are unmanned and not visited very often.




In 1999 the air conditioners were removed from the roof of the adjacent building and placed a few feet from the weather station. The station has reported an average temperature four degrees higher since the move.


Garbage In -- Garbage Out

HT: David Duff
David says the real Hat Tip goes to Anthony Watts

UPDATE August 11, 2007


Anthony Watts provides more information. It seems there is more at play than the air conditioners, which if not entirely innocent should have their offense down graded from felony to infraction.

Regular readers may remember that I posted about a climate station in Detroit Lakes MN last week, surveyed by volunteer Don Kostuch, and cross posted it to the website Climate Audit that had two air conditioner units right next to it. It looked like an obvious cause and effect because in 1999 on May 5th, it was determined that the a/c units were moved off the roof of the radio station where this station resides and moved them to the ground where the temperature sensor is close by.

However, some folks on the blogosphere just went, well, a little ballistic over that assertion. It was a good thing too, because their very loud and somewhat uncivil complaints led to an examination of this idea: if its not the a/c units, what then did cause the temperature jump at that time?


Steve McIntyre, of Toronto operates www.climateaudit.org and began to investigate the data and the methods used to arrive at the results that were graphed by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS).
What he discovered was truly amazing. Since NASA does not fully publish the computer source code and formulae used to calculate the trends in the graph, nor the correction used to arrive at the "corrected" data. He had to reverse engineer the process by comparing the raw data and the processed data..
Here is one of his first posts where he begins to understand what is happening. "This imparts an upward discontinuity of a deg C in wintertime and 0.8 deg C annually. I checked the monthly data and determined that the discontinuity occurred on January 2000 - and, to that extent, appears to be a Y2K problem. I presume that this is a programming error."

Read the whole post: It gets even more amazing



NOTE:

He also reports

Steve McIntyre's Climate Audit is down due to excessive traffic that may have been caused by either or a combination of these things:
1- Rush Limbaugh mentioning the website in Thursday's Show
2- Denial of Service (DOS) attacks
3- Being Slashdotted the next day
4- All of the above

surfacestations.org has been off line for unrelated reasons, someone accidentally cut a cable.

Earth Day

Today is Earth Day, which was founded as part to the fight against the dreaded scourge of Global Cooling. : -)

Environment Modification Update

Global Warming is good