More Spectacular Fraud From Scientific American

Scientific American claims that 2015 was the “Biggest Year Ever for U.S. Wildfires” – with more than 10 million acres burned.

2016-01-08-12-42-01

Global Warming Helped Exacerbate Biggest Year Ever for U.S. Wildfires – Scientific American

Their claim is flagrantly false. In 1937, more than twice that many acres burned.

2015-10-29-08-59-40

October 9, 1938 – NYTimes

Earlier in the 1930s, more than 50 million acres burned. Burn acreage in their claimed record year of 2015 was about 20% of the early 1930s. But their fraud is much worse than it seems.  The current numbers include Alaska, whereas the 1930’s numbers most likely didn’t.

2015-10-30-11-17-46figure16-1

Indicator 3.16: Area and percent of forest affected by abiotic agents

And to top it all off, they didn’t even get their 2015 number correct. It was less than 10 million acres, which includes Alaska.

2016-01-08-12-56-562016-01-08-12-53-38

National Interagency Fire Center

2015 was actually one of the quietest fire years on record in the southwest and Rocky Mountains, because it was very wet. Most of the burn acreage was in Alaska.

This year, 63% of ALL wildfire acres burned in the U.S. burned in Alaska, much of it over remote tundra ecosystems.

Official Year-to-Date Wildfire Stats: Beyond the Rhetoric & Hysteria – A New Century of Forest Planning

Last12mPNormUS

http://hprcc.unl.edu/products/maps/acis/Last12mPNormUS.png

The level of fraud on display from Scientific American is quite spectacular. But it gets even worse. When CO2 was 280 PPM, burn acreage in the conterminous US was 50 times higher than 2015.

2016-01-08-13-35-222016-01-08-13-34-55

https://www.nifc.gov/PIO_bb/Policy/FederalWildlandFireManagementPolicy_2001.pdf

It is time for Republicans in Congress to bring this scam to an end.

About Tony Heller

Just having fun
This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.

85 Responses to More Spectacular Fraud From Scientific American

  1. Ronald Reagan: “But Dick, the Soviets do lie and steal and cheat, don’t they?”
    Richard Allen: “Yes sir, they do.”
    Ronald Reagan: “I thought so.”

    • Keitho says:

      On the one hand they claim that humanity is a cancer, a disease that will kill the Earth. On the other hand they claim that they are trying to save the Earth for future generations of humans.

      Anybody can see the plain evil in that thinking. “You” are the evil human cancer that must be excised so that Earth can be saved for “Our” future generations. Every comment in Gopher’s link is indicative of this “superman” mentality and we are the “untermenschen”.

      No wonder they want to do away with democracy. Evil, evil bastards.

  2. Gail Combs says:

    Child: “But Daddy, the Socialist do lie and steal and cheat, don’t they?”
    Richard Allen: “Yes sweetheart, they do.”
    Child: “I thought so.”

    • Gail, you know the context of the original conversation, don’t you?

      • Gail Combs says:

        Yes, and an even better quote is:

        Reagan calmly explained that the Soviet leadership had “openly and publicly declared that the only morality they recognize is what will further their cause, meaning they reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat.”

        That of course is the motto of the ClimAstrologists busy spinning propaganda. Socialist Pascal Lamy, former Director-General of the World Trade Organization told us why.

        The reality is that, so far, we have largely failed to articulate a clear and compelling vision of why a new global order matters — and where the world should be headed.

        So the socialists/communists/progressives came up with Global Warming to drive the masses into accepting the need for their totalitarian masters.

        It really is that simple. Once you understand the goal and they will lie to achieve it, everything else makes sense except why people like Marty and CommonFuture Fool want to wear slave collars.

        • gofer says:

          “We are on the verge of a global transformation.
          All we need is the right major crisis…”

          – David Rockefeller,
          Club of Rome executive member

          http://www.green-agenda.com

        • Gail Combs says:

          “We are on the verge of a global transformation.
          All we need is the right major crisis…”

          Even if we have to pull it out of
          http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2012/12/14/article-0-16853E79000005DC-136_634x443.jpg

        • powers2be says:

          ClimAstrologist. Brilliant.

          Well posted and your most compelling question begs an answer. Marty and CommonFuture fall into one of only two possible slots. Slot 1 – The bureaucrat that makes their living off the transfer of private sector tax dollars to budget busting administrator in order to enforce the heavy hand of our GovMint. Slot 2 – the average IQ public school student brainwashed by the steady drumbeat of fear and guilt advanced by Slot oner’s.

  3. Pathway says:

    We need more acres burned not less. The BLM estimates that 250,000 acres need to burn annually in Colorado just to keep up with succession.

  4. inMAGICn says:

    “it is time for Republicans in Congress to bring this scam to an end.”
    Thanks for the laugh!

    • willys36 says:

      That group of 535 people is the most irrelevant, useless group that has ever existed. Congress should be disbanded and let’s just exist under our Marxist dictator and be done with it.

      • Gail Combs says:

        Charley Reese nailed it twenty years ago and the only thing that has changed is the $4 trillion in debt is now $18,775,084,981,440 ( Total US government debt was “guesstimated” to be $21.7 trillion. ) In 2005 federal debt was about 60 percent of GDP, in the last ten years the federal debt has almost doubled to 103 percent GDP.

        Too much bureaucracy? Blame Congress. Too many rules? Blame Congress. Unjust tax laws? Congress wrote them. Out-of-control bureaucracy? Congress authorizes everything bureaucracies do. Americans dying in Third World rat holes on stupid U.N. missions? Congress allows it. The annual deficits? Congress votes for them. The $4 trillion plus debt? Congress created it.

        To put it into perspective just remember that 100 percent of the power of the federal government comes from the U.S. Constitution. If it’s not in the Constitution, it’s not authorized.

        Then read your Constitution. All 100 percent of the power of the federal government is invested solely in 545 individual human beings. That’s all. Of 260 million Americans, only 545 of them wield 100 percent of the power of the federal government.

        That’s 435 members of the U.S. House, 100 senators, one president and nine Supreme Court justices. Anything involving government that is wrong is 100 percent their fault….

        Don’t be conned. Don’t let them escape responsibility.
        http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/1995-03-07/news/os-ed-charley-reese-545-column-07111120110711_1_congress-votes-deficits-bureaucracy

        • Richard Keen says:

          “To put it into perspective just remember that 100 percent of the power of the federal government comes from the U.S. Constitution. If it’s not in the Constitution, it’s not authorized.”
          My random statistic (see below) is that 90% of what the Feds do is NOT authorized by the constitition, and should be done – or not done – by the states or people (10th Amendment).
          http://www.lessgovsd.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/10th-Amendment-e1321158301717.jpg
          Of course, as a generation of Amerikanskis have been taught, the Constitution is a “living document”. Who among us would take out a loan, subscribe to cable TV or cell phone service, adopt a cat, buy an airline ticket, sign a traffic ticket, write a will, or purchase monkey food on Amazon, based on a “living document”? I was going to throw in “get married”, be we’ve seen where that one went.
          A living document has no life.
          http://ponderingprinciples.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Chess-Rules-Living-Document.jpg
          http://www.libertyjuice.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/Whos-Your-Daddies…article1.jpg

        • Gail Combs says:

          I hold the nine Supreme Court justices much more responsible than the others. They (and the jury) were supposed to put the breaks on unconstitutional laws.

          As Thomas Jefferson put it to Tom Paine in a 1789 letter, “I consider trial by jury as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.” ….
          http://prorev.com/juries.htm

          Here is how the politicians have gotten around the US Constitution to make sure citizens are denied their right to a trial:

          The Seventh Amendment, passed by the First Congress without debate, cured the omission by declaring that the right to a jury trial shall be preserved in common-law cases… The Supreme Court has, however, arrived at a more limited interpretation. It applies the amendment’s guarantee to the kinds of cases that “existed under the English common law when the amendment was adopted,” …

          The right to trial by jury is not constitutionally guaranteed in certain classes of civil cases that are concededly “suits at common law,” particularly when “public” or governmental rights are at issue and if one cannot find eighteenth-century precedent for jury participation in those cases. Atlas Roofing Co. v. Occupational Safety & Health Review Commission (1977). Thus, Congress can lodge personal and property claims against the United States in non-Article III courts with no jury component. In addition, where practice as it existed in 1791 “provides no clear answer,” the rule is that “[o]nly those incidents which are regarded as fundamental, as inherent in and of the essence of the system of trial by jury, are placed beyond the reach of the legislature.” Markman v. Westview Instruments (1996). In those situations, too, the Seventh Amendment does not restrain congressional choice.

          In contrast to the near-universal support for the civil jury trial in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, modern jurists consider civil jury trial neither “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty,” Palko v. State of Connecticut (1937), nor “fundamental to the American scheme of justice,” Duncan v. Louisiana (1968).
          http://www.heritage.org/constitution/#!/amendments/7/essays/159/right-to-jury-in-civil-cases

          On top of that our schools system makes no attempt to teach students their rights and duties as citizens and as members of a jury.

        • R. Shearer says:

          Thousands of bureaucrats have acquired a share of that power, if not technically, certainly in practice, among these the IRS, EPA, FDA, DOT, OSHA, DHS, etc.

        • Gail Combs says:

          “Thousands of bureaucrats have acquired a share of that power, if not technically, certainly in practice…”
          ………….

          That is for sure!

          Eons ago at ChiefIO, I tracked down the Supreme Court OK to transfer the power of writing law from Congress to the bureaucracy.

          Essentially the Supreme Court said as long as the proposed new reg was published in the Federal Register and the public allowed to comment it was Constitutional. Because it satisfied reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” in their minds. How ever as the fiasco over NAIS showed, with thousands of comments opposed to the idea, allowing the public to comment does not mean the public gets to VETO a reg. We STILL got stuck with animal ID because that is what the World Trade Organization mandated we have.

          Tenth Amendment – Reserved Powers. Amendment Text | Annotations. The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

          Given Article 1 Section 8. the Supreme Court had to reach really really far up their arses to pull that decision out. IIRC it was during the time of FDR when he was threatening to pack the Supreme Court.

          Article 1 Section 8. The Congress shall have power…
          To make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by this Constitution in the government of the United States, or in any department or officer thereof.

          What a CROCK! how can citizens comment on the 81, 405 pages written by thousands of bureaucrats?

        • Richard Keen says:

          Gail Combs says:
          January 9, 2016 at 10:26 pm
          What a CROCK! how can citizens comment on the 81, 405 pages written by thousands of bureaucrats?
          ….
          Especially if you have to pass it to find out what’s in it.

      • Ted says:

        Beyond that, the jury trial has been largely destroyed by modern sentencing practices. 100 years ago, if you were accused of robbing a bank, you were tried for bank robbery, and faced perhaps 10 years in jail. Today, for the exact same crime, you’ll be charged with bank robbery, conspiracy to commit bank robbery, assault with intent to cause great bodily harm, attempted murder, unlawful discharge of a firearm, use of a firearm in the commission of a felony, use of a vehicle in commission of a felony, fleeing from justice, reckless driving, failure to yield to an officer, probably terrorism, and very possibly failure to report the proceeds to the IRS. (I’m probably missing several) The charges will total about 300 years in jail. But if you’ll just give up your right to a trial and plead guilty to whichever mid-level charge they choose, they’ll let you off with a mere 10 years. THE PENALTY IS THE SAME, BUT YOU NO LONGER GET A TRIAL.

        It’s painfully common today for completely innocent people to plead guilty to minor offences, rather than gamble on the hope that they can beat every one of the inflated charges they’ll see in a trial. If I remember correctly, something like 95% of federal trials end in plea bargains, and never get to a jury. State and local courts are better, but not by much.

        And even in the rare cases that do go to trial, most juries, when shown a long list of charges, will tend to convict just about anyone of SOMETHING, on the belief that an innocent person couldn’t possibly have been charged with so many crimes. The fact that all the crimes are different aspects of the same act usually goes over their heads. Prosecutors don’t need to prosecute anymore. They just tack on enough charges to make a jury feel guilty about letting such an evil criminal go free. And with the insane number of laws we have today, any decent prosecutor can come up with a dozen charges against the first name his finger hits in the phone book.

        • Gail Combs says:

          The state says you are a criminal

          Are you a criminal? The state says that you are. Harvey A. Silverglate’s Three Felonies A Day says in his book that federal prosecutors invent creative interpretations of statutes and by doing so create new felonies out of thin air. So many felonies that the average person in this country commits three felonies a day….

          We have so many laws and regulations on the books today that it is impossible for any adult to read them all much less obey them. Many of these laws defy logic and are completely insane.
          For example in Massachusetts it was not only illegal to give my pony manure to my neighbor for her garden, it was also illegal for her to add a store bought lettuce leaf to her manure pile!

          There is a flip side to this. Political favoritism.

          If you are not registered as voter for the party in power at minimum or better yet a big party donor, forget justice. Even when a cop caught a crook with a sheet as long as my arm with my stolen semi, he let the SOB go and the state refused to bring the guy to trial. We spent FIVE YEARS spending a full day in court every month, while the crook didn’t even bother to show. This went on until the case was tossed because it was too ‘stale’!

          The Hearland – Peter Gleick fiasco is another example. Even with a team of lawyers and publicity it was immossible to force the State to bring criminal charges against Gleick

          The burden of excess regulation has other ramifications too. The U.S. GDP is just $16 trillion instead of $54 trillion The growth of federal regulations over the past six decades has cut U.S. economic growth by an average of 2 percentage points per year, according to a new study in the Journal of Economic Growth. As a result, the average American household receives about $277,000 less annually than it would have gotten in the absence of six decades of accumulated regulations—a median household income of $330,000 instead of the $53,000 we get now.

          http://www.ldjackson.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/regulation-drowning.gif
          Regulatory Nightmare – The Cost Of Doing Business In America

          Jeff Id over at the Air vent gets into this a bit too.
          Inequality

          Free Think

          Solution to Success

          and if you have not read it
          Yet Another Blog Kerfuffle
          As a teaser:

          …Definitely a strong comment, which I do believe is accurate. The evidence of the video however, caused Brandon Shollenberger to go off the deep end and post a blog using the video part of my comment only and left the rest of the context out. I’m rather pissed at him for his mischaracterizations and hadn’t realized just how far some people would go to defend evil behaviors but the internet never seems to have a lower bound….

        • gator69 says:

          Gail, That looks like my desk on a good day. To give you an idea of just how bad things have become for banks, any complaint receive by a bank employee must now be reported to a central complaint department per federal regulations. That means if Ms Muckenfuch thinks her bank’s lobby hours are convenient, it is now a federal case. If Mr Ballsack thinks it is unfair that his bank cooperated with the IRS in freezing accounts, it is a federal case. If Harry Huddlefusser thinks the teller that waited on him is wearing too much perfume, it is a federal case. These incidents are entered into a database for “specialists” to review, and then logged so that federal regulators can review them periodically. This is insane.

        • Gail Combs says:

          Gator, it is not only insane it is a colossal waste of tax payer money and another major increase in the number of Parasites sucking at the government tit. Parasites that now, thanks to Unions can not be fired and even if they are get a very very handsome pension.

        • gator69 says:

          Worse Gail, it is a waste of taxpayer money, and the bank’s money (which is also yours).

          I left the banking industry back in 2012 to work on a local project with some investors who had found a way to clean up an environmental issue while making a tidy profit without government handouts. It was a prototype that is now being deployed to every continent except Antarctica. Once we got it off the ground, I decided to go back to banking, while leaving the door open for a return if needed.

          When I left banking in 2012 I was working for one of the largest banks in America, and had witnessed a 20 fold increase in auditors as a result of Dodd-Frank. Auditors do not make money, they bleed money, they are federally mandated leaches. Imagine you run a repair shop, and one day Uncle Sam walks in and tells you that your 1 bookkeeper is not enough, and that you must hire 19 more. When I returned to banking I chose a regional bank, and disccovered that they had 18 times more auditors thanks to DF. In my opinion, armed guards at banks would be better utilized if they kept government officials out, at least bank robbers don’t take all of the money.

        • Gail Combs says:

          Gator, I saw the same.

          Industry now has OSHA Compliance Officers, EPA Compliance Officers, as well as buildings full of accountants and lawyers. One commenter at another site who worked for a large corporation said the IRS had permanent offices and personnel at their corporate headquarters.

          We as tax payers and consumers pay fpr all this. It is not just the 151 taxes on a loaf of bread but all the salaries of the parasites involved in the taxes and regs. The cost is enormous and it is why we can not compete with China.

        • Jason Calley says:

          Gator, the only major difference between government and common robbers, is that the robber does not claim that he is doing it for your own good.

        • gator69 says:

          And, not all robbers have guns. 😉

  5. Richard Keen says:

    “Biggest Year Ever for U.S. Wildfires” they say, without ever mentioning the period of record. Since 1980? Maybe. Since 1930? Hell no. This is another example of “Keen’s first rule ot liberal factoids” – never trust a “fact” (or statistic, whatever) from a lib. They make them up, or pull preexisting bits out of their a**es. That bit of wisdom occurred to me 15 years ago during a presidential debate, when one Albert Gore blew out a statistic about how much pharmaceuticals spent on advertising vs. research, and the media congratulated him on his handle of the facts. Except the facts were absolutely bogus and invented on the spot (review of the debate shows no evidence of Al reaching into his backside at that time), and the Kaiser Family Foundation gave a short report a week or so later with correct numbers (which were way, way, different). But by then Al had already gotten away with it.
    So it is with this nonsense on Sci Am, IPCC summaries, Obamadrivel, etc. The lie is halfway around the world before the truth gets its shoes on.

    • Ted says:

      87.43% of all statistics are made up on the spot.

      • Richard Keen says:

        No, the correct figure is 87.45%.

        • Jason Calley says:

          With error bars of plus or minus 99.9% — but why bother with error bars?

        • Richard Keen says:

          Error bars – what’s the error on these?
          Do you really think “global temperatures” are accurate to 0.05 degrees or so, which is what the NCDC, GISS, and CRU plot as error bars?
          Those error bars are just more numbers pulled out of collective pie exits.

        • Gail Combs says:

          “Do you really think “global temperatures” are accurate to 0.05 degrees or so, which is what the NCDC, GISS, and CRU plot as error bars?”

          Actually I think the error is closer to +/- 2C and possibly more like 5C. The lowest it can be is 0.5C.

          The pull out the law of large numbers to make the error less but that doesn’t play because each data point is unique in time, location and instrumentation.

          The law of large numbers is a principle of probability according to which the frequencies of events with the same likelihood of occurrence even out, given enough trials or instances. As the number of experiments increases, the actual ratio of outcomes will converge on the theoretical, or expected, ratio of outcomes.

          For example, if a fair coin (where heads and tails come up equally often) is tossed 1,000,000 times, about half of the tosses will come up heads, and half will come up tails. The heads-to-tails ratio will be extremely close to 1:1. However, if the same coin is tossed only 10 times, the ratio will likely not be 1:1, and in fact might come out far different, say 3:7 or even 0:10…
          http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/law-of-large-numbers

          With temperature readings the ClimAstrologist are NOT repeating the same experiment over and over. This is one of the reasons they use anomalies.

        • Richard Keen says:

          Gail,
          Agreed – +/- 1 or 2 C at the absolute best.
          I’m a co-op observer, and am quite familiar with the vagaries of measure something called a “surface air temperature”. First of all, the standard thermometers are good to +/- 0.5 C (1 F), per NWS specs. And that’s just measuring the temperature of the air at the location of the thermometer. The thermometer is in a box or shield, which can modify the temperature of the air going into it, is over terrain that changes (grass and trees grow or die, gain or lose leaves…), houses and runways go in nearby, and so on. Then these variable measuring systems are unevenly and sparsely spaced around the globe, and that coverage varies over the years as stations open, close, move, or change esposure and systems.
          There would be something to say about using anomalies, IF the network of stations never changed (location, exposure, technology…), but the network is always changing, and the baseline for the anomalies also changes.
          So a “global surface temperature” is a fantasy, which can never reliably find a 0.3C warming due to CO2.
          What the surface network is useful for is detecting regional and local climate changes, if the stations are meticulously maintained and calibrated, like the new US Climate Reference Network stations or some of the better co-op stations (like, dare I say, mine in Coal Creek Canyon, Colorado). With proper attention, those stations are good to better than 0.3C (0.5F), I’d say.
          Speaking of Colorado, IPCC model consensus is that the higher elevations should be the most rapidly warming area of the “lower 48” states, at a rate of 4C by 2100, or 1F every 15 years. So Coal Creek Canyon, elevation 2730m/8950 feet, has COOLED by that amount, 1F, since 2000.
          Ooooopsss.

        • Jason Calley says:

          Well, I just looked for the link but cannot find it…. I remember reading a paper perhaps two years ago that attempted to quantify the real error bars on reported global temperatures. My memory is that it was about plus or minus two degrees. I’ll see if I can track that down.

        • Gail Combs says:

          Richard, As I said it is the reason (one of ) they use anomalies but that is just an excuse I have had tossed at me.

          Interesting that the temp is still good to only 0.5F since that is what ” Meteorology: A Text-book on the Weather, the Causes of Its Changes, and Weather Forecasting” 1918 by Willis Isbister Milham said.

          I was a chemist/QC engineer by the way and familiar with the problems of measurement so every time they trot out the hottest by 0.02C I just shake my head.

          I couldn’t measure the temperature of a mix batch that accurately and that is with the mixer on. You are always going to have cold and hot spots.

        • Gail Combs says:

          Jason my collection on error

          On Thermometer resolution, and ERROR
          http://pugshoes.blogspot.se/2010/10/metrology.html

          http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/11420

          This page shows the differences between GHCN anomaly snapshots released in recent years. The number of confidence interval violations is interesting, as is the ~4C/century of “adjustment” warming from the 2014 to 2015 snapshots.
          http://www.elcore.net/GISTEMP_Overconfidence_Intervals.html

          Klaus Hager carried out a study comparing MMTS and Glass thermometers side by side for a period of 8.5 years and found that the MMTS gave a mean difference that was 0.93C warmer. Klaus Hager is a 44-year veteran German meteorologist and wrote a peer-reviewed paper on his findings. http://wkserv.met.fu-berlin.de/Beilagen/2013/Autom%20WSt_Hager.pdf

          Another peer-reviewed study Sensor and Electronic Biases/Errors in Air Temperature Measurements in Common Weather Station Networks by Lin et. al. concluded:

          Therefore, the RSS errors in the MMTS are from 0.31° to 0.62°C from temperature -40°C to -50°C (Fig. 5)… For the HO-1088 sensor, the self-heating error is quite serious and can make temperature 0.5°C higher under 1 m/s airflow, which is slightly less than the actual normal ventilation rate in the ASOS shield (Lin et al. 2001a). http://ams.allenpress.com/archive/1520-0426/21/7/pdf/i1520-0426-21-7-1025.pdf

          In the peer reviewed study “Air Temperature Comparison between the MMTS and the USCRN Temperature Systems” Hubbard et. al. concluded:

          Although the MMTS temperature records have been officially adjusted for cooler maxima and warmer minima in the USHCN dataset, the MMTS dataset in the United States will require further adjustment. In general, our study infers that the MMTS dataset has warmer maxima and cooler minima compared to the current USCRN air temperature system.” http://www.homogenisation.org/files/private/WG1/Bibliography/Applications/Applications%20(F-J)/hubbard_etal.pdf

        • Richard Keen says:

          Gail,
          And thank you for the links for my collection.
          Note that the Weather Service, the operational branch of NOAA that manages the co-op network, is quite aware that stations have no better than +/- 1F (0.5C) accuracy. Even though the MMTS output is to 0.1F, instructions are to round the max/min temperatures to the nearest whole degree before entering them on the B-91 form, which is what goes on record. The liquid-in-glass systems were also read to the whole degree, although in some older records you could see where careful observers entered half degrees (e.g., max of 95-1/2), which the data entry folks just rounded to 96. So, NWS knows +/- 1F is a practical limit to accuracy.
          However, the folks at NCDC, GISS, et al. are confident they can extract 0.05C accuracy from 1F rounded input data. Perhaps they use data corrector plates like the one installed on Hubble to correct the flawed mirror. Or, perhaps and more likely, they pulled a procedure out of their nozzles and keep using it because “our algorithm is working as designed”
          http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/07/01/ncdc-our-algorithm-is-working-as-designed/
          BTW, note that Hager and Lin claim the MMTS has a warm bias, while Hubbard et al. finds warmer max and cooler min for the MMTS. Of course, Hubbard talks about “adjusted bias”, an interesting concept.
          Meanwhile, my experience (with 3 years of overlap) for my station is the MMTS has a slight cool bias for both max and min.
          That tells me the bias, e.g. correction, depends on the specific MMTS and original thermometers used (remember, +/- 1F for each), and the specific climate they’re placed in (sunny or cloudy, windy or calm, etc.).
          In my case, I’ve found the small adjustments for my specific station; using NCDC standard adjustments would introduce, not remove, error.

    • Steven Douglas says:

      Need I remind you that Gore and Obama are Nobel Prize winners? They don’t just give those out to anyone, you know. I think a little more deference, reverence and decorum for Stockholm’s anointed is in order, if you please.
      *bows head and suppresses smug little smirk in a moment of silence and solemn reflection*

      • DD More says:

        Steve, Oslo not Stockholm for the peace prize.

        The Nobel Peace Prize is an international prize which is awarded annually by the Norwegian Nobel Committee according to guidelines laid down in Alfred Nobel’s will. The Peace Prize is one of five prizes that have been awarded annually since 1901 for outstanding contributions in the fields of physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, and peace. Starting in 1969, a Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel has also been awarded.

        Whereas the other prizes are awarded by specialist committees based in Sweden, the Peace Prize is awarded by a committee appointed by the Norwegian Storting.
        http://nobelpeaceprize.org/en_GB/about_peaceprize/

  6. Steve Case says:

    I’m sure our host fired off a letter explaining SA’s error, so I expect a formal retraction next issue if not sooner.

    Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

    • Gail Combs says:

      At this point most people have walked away from Science Fiction American. — Voting with you feet. —

    • Frank K. says:

      Fortunately, the extremely left wing SciAm is going the way of Time, Newsweek etc., which is to say they have become increasingly irrelevant as they lose both readership and revenue. I suppose they are the media version of Chipotle…

      • Steve Case says:

        I hope you’re right, but I have my doubts.

        • Gail Combs says:

          Yeah,
          All those school libraries and town libraries that buy the rag so the kiddies have ‘good science’ to read.

      • Ted says:

        Am I the only one who misses Omni? I don’t remember their political slant, or even if there was one. But their science stories were much more interesting than Science Fiction American’s ever were. Better fiction stories, too.

        • Gail Combs says:

          Analog with John Campbell as editor!

          When we moved and the new school library did not have it, I insisted Dad get a subscription. Then he read the entire magazine and so did Mom before I got to.

          My most embarrassing moment as a kid was coming home at Thanksgiving as a college freshman with a copy of Heinlein’s Time enough for Love, and finding Mom reading it.

        • Jason Calley says:

          Hey Gail! Darn… you have good taste. As a youth I had an Analog subscription also, and John Campbell was perhaps the most important reason why. As for “Time Enough For Love” — I still think it was perhaps Heinlein’s best novel, and that is high praise indeed. He was a huge influence on my principles and standards of life. Somewhere packed away in my house I have a photo of a much younger version of myself standing next to Heinlein.

          (By the way, if you still read old science fiction, (though I do not know how you could find the time), track down any old story or book by Cordwainer Smith. Wonderfully creative!)

        • Gail Combs says:

          A friend and old co-worker of my husband wrote Concordance to Cordwainer Smith

        • Jason Calley says:

          I am impressed. I have a copy of that on my bookshelf!

          Small world… 🙂

        • Gail Combs says:

          At his 50th birthday party the author of that book was roasted by Hal Clement.

          It was hilarious. They both were doing research at Nevada test site and had to drive like Hades to get out of the way before the bomb went off. Only problem was Hal would pull back on the steering wheel to gain altitude…

        • gator69 says:

          I had forgotten about Omni. That brings back a whole set of memories I had misplaced. Thanks!

  7. Rosco says:

    You’ve gotta get with reality – everyone knows the 1930’s never actually existed.

    • Frank K. says:

      Actually, modern scientists have applied advanced statistical methods to this issue, and discovered that what we thought was a ** whole ** tree in the 1930s was really only ** half ** a tree. Hence, they developed the peer-reviewed Tree Observations Bias (TOBS) algorithm to obtain the corrected burn acreage…

  8. Scientific American is neither scientific not American…

  9. Since Little Marty or cfghsjshd have not bothered to pop by yet (I expect they are still in Infant School, or what you Yanks call Kindergarten) , I’ll add their contribution:

    Whether fires are up or down, it’s ALL OUR FAULT!!!! (Kos Sks sez so)

  10. BruceC says:

    A single bushfire, the Black Thursday bushfires, in Victoria, Australia on 6th Feb 1851, burnt ~ 5 million acres …….. >12.3 million hectares. 3 million hectares more than the entire 2015 ‘wildfire’ season in the US.

    “The temperature became torrid, and on the morning of the 6th of February 1851, the air which blew down from the north resembled the breath of a furnace. A fierce wind arose, gathering strength and velocity from hour to hour, until about noon it blew with the violence of a tornado. By some inexplicable means it wrapped the whole country in a sheet of flame — fierce, awful, and irresistible.”

  11. Leon Brozyna says:

    Propagandists don’t do too well with basic research … I guess real facts don’t interest them. I must admit that the Forest Service has a real knack for understatement:

    Since 2000, an increase in area burned has occurred, although it has not yet reached the levels recorded between 1925 and 1960.

    At least they’re not proclaiming the recent burns as unprecedented, unlike hyperventilating pretend journalists.

  12. fearocean says:

    what we allow is it what will continue …. Govern- ments …. the word speak for itself

  13. gator69 says:

    I wonder why the Pope denied this man an audience?

    (Dr. Markó serves as a professor at Universite Catholique de Louvain in Belgium and co-authored The Bankruptcy of Climatism)

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohYGZG0y7dM

    The IPCC: Starving generations of innocents worldwide, all in the name of communism.

  14. RAH says:

    BTW Steven didn’t mention that at the link he provided above https://web.archive.org/web/20151228140951/https://www.nifc.gov/fireInfo/nfn.htm
    for the National Interagency Fire Center that it shows that in 2006 total acreage burned was 9,830,389 so 2015 wasn’t even “The Biggest Year Ever” in the last 10 years!

  15. Jason Calley says:

    It only makes sense that fires burned more acreage back on the 1930s. Back in the 1930s we humans only had 500,000 years of experience in controlling fire.

    Today we have had 500,080.

  16. dmmcmah says:

    It snowed last night (4th time in a week) but the permanent drought is back. Sunny days in the forecast for the next 2 weeks! Hail to Joe Romm!

  17. They LET Idaho burn!!! I saw it first hand. Then they came back and educated us how more acreage burning than before…no wonder! Budget follows acreage. I said the same thing when the EPA allowed the Colorado River to be contaminated…they needed the disaster to prop up their budget that has been drained by citizen litigation. Read RANGE magazine on the wildfires of the NW. Citizens had them CONTAINED. Then the “officials” took over nearly burning down the entire Owyhee county with the Soda Fire; it was less than 300 acres and contained at the hand off. So the story of big government adds another monotonous chapter to its epic volume.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *