Solstice Morning

Today is the summer solstice -- the longest day of the year. I watched for the first moment that the sun peeked over our local hills (at 6:05 AM), and measured the azimuth as 36° from due north (I used a Brunton surveyor's compass, the "Classic" model, to do this). If the hills weren't there, sunrise would have been slightly earlier and the compass reading would have been a slightly smaller azimuth.

Tonight I will measure the azimuth at sunset as well. The hills are slightly lower there, so I'm expecting the azimuth to be something like 325° instead of the exact mirror of 36° (324°). But little errors like that aside, basically the sun will be traversing 360° - (2 x 35°) = 290° today -- the most it ever does at our latitude (33°). At noon today, the sun will be at the highest elevation ever seen at our latitude: 23° + (90° - 33°) = 80°.

Update and bump:

At 1:00 PM (instead of noon, because of daylight saving time), I measured the elevation of the sun, using the clinometer built into the Brunton surveyor's compass. I took 5 readings and averaged them. The result: 10.4° -- as predicted, within the limits of my instrument's accuracy.

Update and bump, II:

Just before sunset (at 7:28 PM) I measured the azimuth of where the sun will set. In doing so, I realized that I had made dumb error this morning when measuring the azimuth of the sunrise: I set the 14° deviation for magnetic north into the compass backwards, introducing a 28° error. The azimuth this morning should have been 64°, not 36°. The azimuth of the sunset should be 360° - 64° = 296°. That agrees very well with the 295° I just measured (with the magnetic north deviation set correctly!). This morning I computed the sun's azimuthal transit incorrectly as well, it should have been 360° - (2 x 64°) = 232° of azimuthal transit.

Puppiosity

You just know this cute, coy little puppy is about to do something totally, outrageously bad!

Via Cute Overload, natch...

Quote of the Day

From Captain Ed Morrissey at Captain's Quarters:

Ralph Nader has Democrats looking for a wooden stake and a truckload of garlic.

Thanks for the chuckle, Captain!

Operation Arrowhead Ripper: Day One

Michael Yon has filed a dispatch from the battle in Baqubah (Operation Arrowhead Ripper). An excerpt:

Our guys are tough. The enemy in Baqubah is as good as any in Iraq, and better than most. That’s saying a lot. But our guys have been systematically trapping them, and have foiled some big traps set for our guys. I don’t want to say much more about that, but our guys are seriously outsmarting them. Big fights are ahead and we will take serious losses probably, but al Qaeda, unless they find a way to escape, are about to be slaughtered. Nobody is dropping leaflets asking them to surrender. Our guys want to kill them, and that’s the plan.

A positive indicator on the 19th and the 20th is that most local people apparently are happy that al Qaeda is being trapped and killed. Civilians are pointing out IEDs and enemy fighters, so that’s not working so well for al Qaeda. Clearly, I cannot do a census, but that says something about the locals.

Go read the whole thing!

I am especially heartened by his report of the objective: to kill the Al Qaeda terrorists...

Inkjet Printers Lie!

Do you own an inkjet printer? If so, read this article! Here's the lead:

A new study says that on average, more than half of the ink from inkjet cartridges is wasted when users toss them in the garbage. Why is that interesting? According to the study, users are tossing the cartridges when their printers are telling them they're out of ink, not when they necessarily are out of ink.

Stand By For ... Global Cooling?

Here's some more recent research that suggests that global warming is tied more to solar power output than to mankind's activities. The article starts off with some political posturing, and then gets into the meat of it:

Climate stability has never been a feature of planet Earth. The only constant about climate is change; it changes continually and, at times, quite rapidly. Many times in the past, temperatures were far higher than today, and occasionally, temperatures were colder. As recently as 6,000 years ago, it was about 3C warmer than now. Ten thousand years ago, while the world was coming out of the thou-sand-year-long "Younger Dryas" cold episode, temperatures rose as much as 6C in a decade -- 100 times faster than the past century's 0.6C warming that has so upset environmentalists.

Climate-change research is now literally exploding with new findings. Since the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the field has had more research than in all previous years combined and the discoveries are completely shattering the myths. For example, I and the first-class scientists I work with are consistently finding excellent correlations between the regular fluctuations in the brightness of the sun and earthly climate. This is not surprising. The sun and the stars are the ultimate source of all energy on the planet.

It then details the research activities, and concludes the science discussion with this:

Our finding of a direct correlation between variations in the brightness of the sun and earthly climate indicators (called "proxies") is not unique. Hundreds of other studies, using proxies from tree rings in Russia's Kola Peninsula to water levels of the Nile, show exactly the same thing: The sun appears to drive climate change.

However, there was a problem. Despite this clear and repeated correlation, the measured variations in incoming solar energy were, on their own, not sufficient to cause the climate changes we have observed in our proxies. In addition, even though the sun is brighter now than at any time in the past 8,000 years, the increase in direct solar input is not calculated to be sufficient to cause the past century's modest warming on its own. There had to be an amplifier of some sort for the sun to be a primary driver of climate change.

Indeed, that is precisely what has been discovered. In a series of groundbreaking scientific papers starting in 2002, Veizer, Shaviv, Carslaw, and most recently Svensmark et al., have collectively demonstrated that as the output of the sun varies, and with it, our star's protective solar wind, varying amounts of galactic cosmic rays from deep space are able to enter our solar system and penetrate the Earth's atmosphere. These cosmic rays enhance cloud formation which, overall, has a cooling effect on the planet. When the sun's energy output is greater, not only does the Earth warm slightly due to direct solar heating, but the stronger solar wind generated during these "high sun" periods blocks many of the cosmic rays from entering our atmosphere. Cloud cover decreases and the Earth warms still more.

The opposite occurs when the sun is less bright. More cosmic rays are able to get through to Earth's atmosphere, more clouds form, and the planet cools more than would otherwise be the case due to direct solar effects alone. This is precisely what happened from the middle of the 17th century into the early 18th century, when the solar energy input to our atmosphere, as indicated by the number of sunspots, was at a minimum and the planet was stuck in the Little Ice Age. These new findings suggest that changes in the output of the sun caused the most recent climate change. By comparison, CO2 variations show little correlation with our planet's climate on long, medium and even short time scales.

It's well worth reading the whole thing, both for the details of the science and for the political commentary (by a scientist!).

The more actual research (as opposed to computer models) I read about, and the more I observe the behavior of the "true believers", the more skeptical I become about anthropogenic global warming...