32605 I heard that snow has been making it down to sea level in Washington State! Whilst in Scandinavia there is hardly any snow at the sea level now.  You need to go north of the arctic circle for that.  Here in Oslo we had a decent amount of snow in November, but since Christmas the  NAO  has sen...

32604 By "amazing level of precision" I meant in a relative sense compared to how long ago we're talking about. Well, it's interesting data in the sense that climatic changes do get recorded.  But you can't really compare that with today's measured climate with much precision.  You get so...

midtskogen wrote:

I see nothing ethical in an uninformed democracy.

not to mention that uninformed voters are much more easily manipulated, which is exactly what we see is going on.

The idea that science has caused more harm than good [for humans] is of course easy to debunk, but to be fair, it is possible to argue that science could ultimately be the end of humans, if you believe in ideas like the Great Filter and that it has not yet happened.  It's not unthinkable that scien...

"sounds like an hilarious and deliberately forged meaning. A basic understanding of what you are going to vote and the consequences of your choice for others in years to come should be well into possibilities of educated people, moreover they have the right to be informed and it's their duty t...

An interesting local weather phenomenon is about to strike my area -- the Fraser gap wind (also sometimes called outflow winds or  squamishes ). When cold arctic air comes down out of Canada, it gets dammed up on the east side of the Cascade mountains, except at narrow terrain gaps like fjords, and...

32555 analyzing ice cores can reconstruct ancient climate data with an amazing level of precision.  we can even tell pretty accurately what gases comprised our atmosphere back then and their relative proportions. tree rings also work quite well (we can also tell when ancient volcanic eruptions occu...

red or purple foliage on planets around orange K type stars, perhaps black or violet foliage on planets around M type stars! also how about seasonal changes to the color of foliage on planets around sunlike stars? an earthlike earthsized planet was recently discovered around a star that is 40% the s...

there are some decidious trees that develop a purple-like color during the fall/autumn. Yeah, purple/red, always because of anthocyanin. Depending on the concentration of anthocyanin/chlorophyll and eventual other compounds, leafs of some trees range from violet to orange. It's not impossible but a...

32540 the compulsive thinking in climate science: "If obsvervations don't exist, there must be a way somehow to reconstruct them". The actual and reasonable thinking is: "If direct observations do not exist, then do there exist methods for reconstructing them by correlations to other...

32537 What you presented is very interesting- do you have access to New York City climate data?  You can look up  Berkeley Earth's New York Data . Their data before 1890, certainly before 1850, is pretty worthless in my opinion, reflecting the compulsive thinking in climate science: "If obsver...

I looked up the Berkeley data. 1911-1930 average: -12.6C.  No data before that.  Berkeley also has -9.9 for 1931-1960, but -13.3 for 1961-1990.  The warmest December on record was in 1938: -1.C.  The coldest in 1988: -22.4. Looking up the annual temperature trends for Svalbard on Berkeley Earth, I ...

32529 The observational astronomy text you listed is also highly interesting because it mentions photometry and spectroscopy and how to do scientific research with CCD cameras. Yes, this is what "observational astronomy"  means  nowadays. :)  The difference between it and casual observing...

32521 New Research: AMO, PDO Appear not to Exist If you want my immediate reaction, I think Mann has gone too far this time to erase natural variability.  Mann has been one of those who have previously identified a clear ~60 year semiperiodic signal in the North Atlantic, and now he argues that it'...

32520 Is it good for observational astronomy too?  I'm not sure if you're using  observational astronomy in the technical sense?  Almost everything in it is based on observational astronomy, because without observations and data, this would not be a science.  But it doesn't much discuss the details...