Military vs. The Fires...

I found these photos (at StrategyPage) of the U.S. military aircraft helping fight last week's fires.

The top photo shows an Air Force C-130 Hercules dumping 3,000 gallons of fire retardant on the Poomacha Fire. This is the view from the open bay of the plane, looking down at the two nozzles as they dump the fire retardant.

The Poomacha Fire is still burning, and is still not 100% contained. The last update I read said that air assets were still on the job, 10 days after the fire started. The main challenge is that the fire is burning in some quite remote and inaccessible areas, especially on the north and northeast flanks of Mt. Palomar.

The bottom photo shows a Navy MH-60S Seahawk about to fill its bucket. I believe the photo is showing it over Sweetwater Reservoir, with Dictionary Hill and Spring Valley in the background. If I'm correct, then it would have been fighting the Harris Fire, near our home.

More photos and a bit of the story can be found here.

Paul Tibbets, RIP...

Another well-known member of the Greatest Generation has died, at 92. Brigadier General Paul W. Tibbets was the pilot of the B-29 Enola Gay when it dropped the first atomic bomb used in anger on Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945.

I had the great honor to meet General Tibbets in the mid-1990s. He was a featured guest at an airshow I attended, and at one point he was at a B-29 exhibit. I spoke with him there very briefly; I had the chance to tell him that I had greatly enjoyed his book (The Flight of the Enola Gay), and that I was very glad that he had been there to fly the Enola Gay for that mission. I don't remember what he said in response, but I do remember the appreciative smile, and a firm handshake.

Rest in peace, General. Your country remains proud of its soldiers, anti-military wackos and the lamestream media notwithstanding.

There's a locked-down Wikipedia article on General Tibbets (locked down because anti-military kooks persistently edited the article to add defamatory and inflammatory remarks).

Obituaries from major newspapers here, here, here, and here.

Oops...

The List Universe has a great list of the Top 30 Failed Technology Predictions. Here are the first 5, just to give you a taste.

1. “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.” — Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC), maker of big business mainframe computers, arguing against the PC in 1977.

2. “We will never make a 32 bit operating system.” — Bill Gates

3. “Lee DeForest has said in many newspapers and over his signature that it would be possible to transmit the human voice across the Atlantic before many years. Based on these absurd and deliberately misleading statements, the misguided public … has been persuaded to purchase stock in his company …” — a U.S. District Attorney, prosecuting American inventor Lee DeForest for selling stock fraudulently through the mail for his Radio Telephone Company in 1913.

4. “There is practically no chance communications space satellites will be used to provide better telephone, telegraph, television, or radio service inside the United States.” — T. Craven, FCC Commissioner, in 1961 (the first commercial communications satellite went into service in 1965).

5. “To place a man in a multi-stage rocket and project him into the controlling gravitational field of the moon where the passengers can make scientific observations, perhaps land alive, and then return to earth - all that constitutes a wild dream worthy of Jules Verne. I am bold enough to say that such a man-made voyage will never occur regardless of all future advances.” — Lee DeForest, American radio pioneer and inventor of the vacuum tube, in 1926

Go read the rest!

Grim Polka...

Peggy Noonan on Hillary Clinton's performance in Tuesday night's Democratic 2008 presidential candidate debate:

The story is not that Mrs. Clinton signaled, in attitude and demeanor, who she believes is her most dangerous foe, the great impediment between her and an easy glide to the nomination. Yes, that would be Tim Russert.

The story is that she talked about policy. Not talking points, but policy. In talking about it she seemed, for the first time, to be revealing what's inside.

It was startling. It's 1993 in there. The year before her fall, and rise.

I spent a day going over the transcripts so I could quote at length, but her exchanges are all over, it's a real Google-fest. Here, boiled down, is what she said.

Giving illegal immigrants drivers licenses makes sense because it makes sense, but she may not be for it, but undocumented workers should come out of the shadows, and it makes sense. Maybe she will increase the payroll tax on Social Security beyond its current $97,500 limit, to $200,000. Maybe not. Everybody knows what the possibilities are. She may or may not back a 4% federal surcharge on singles making $150,000 a year and couples making $200,000. She suggested she backed it, said she didn't back it, she then called it a good start, or rather "I support and admire" the person proposing such a tax for his "willingness to take this on."

She has been accused of doubletalk and she has denied it. And she is right. It was triple talk, quadruple talk, Olympic level nonresponsiveness. And it was, even for her, rather heavy and smug. Her husband would have had the sense to look embarrassed as he bobbed and weaved. It was part of his charm. But he was light on his feet. She turns every dance into the polka. And it is that amazing thing, a grim polka.

After those debates (which I watched online, growing more and more frightened as the candidates droned on endlessly with amazingly leftist positions), my impressions of Hillary were hard for me to articulate. The summary was clear, though: anybody but Hillary, please. Ms. Noonan has nailed it, though, with her characteristic ability to vividly describe people and impressions. Her whole piece is on OpinionJournal, free. I hope you'll read the whole thing…

Scientists Speak Up...

It appears that the IPCC doesn't have quite the consensus of climatologists that the anthropomorphic global warming faithful would have us believe. John R. Christy is director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and a participant in the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC was co-recipient of this year's Nobel Peace Prize, along with Al Gore (aka “The Goracle”). In a Wall Street Journal ($) editorial yesterday, Mr. Christy said:

I'm sure the majority (but not all) of my IPCC colleagues cringe when I say this, but I see neither the developing catastrophe nor the smoking gun proving that human activity is to blame for most of the warming we see. Rather, I see a reliance on climate models (useful but never "proof") and the coincidence that changes in carbon dioxide and global temperatures have loose similarity over time.

There are some of us who remain so humbled by the task of measuring and understanding the extraordinarily complex climate system that we are skeptical of our ability to know what it is doing and why. As we build climate data sets from scratch and look into the guts of the climate system, however, we don't find the alarmist theory matching observations. (The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellite data we analyze at the University of Alabama in Huntsville does show modest warming -- around 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit per century, if current warming trends of 0.25 degrees per decade continue.)

It is my turn to cringe when I hear overstated-confidence from those who describe the projected evolution of global weather patterns over the next 100 years, especially when I consider how difficult it is to accurately predict that system's behavior over the next five days.

Mother Nature simply operates at a level of complexity that is, at this point, beyond the mastery of mere mortals (such as scientists) and the tools available to us. As my high-school physics teacher admonished us in those we-shall-conquer-the-world-with-a-slide-rule days, "Begin all of your scientific pronouncements with 'At our present level of ignorance, we think we know . . .'"

I haven't seen that type of climate humility lately. Rather I see jump-to-conclusions advocates and, unfortunately, some scientists who see in every weather anomaly the specter of a global-warming apocalypse. Explaining each successive phenomenon as a result of human action gives them comfort and an easy answer.

Others of us scratch our heads and try to understand the real causes behind what we see. We discount the possibility that everything is caused by human actions, because everything we've seen the climate do has happened before. Sea levels rise and fall continually. The Arctic ice cap has shrunk before. One millennium there are hippos swimming in the Thames, and a geological blink later there is an ice bridge linking Asia and North America.

Unlike Jim Hansen (the proselytizer-in-chief of the anthropomorphic global warming movement), John Christy actually sounds like a scientist – looking for actual evidence and understanding, as opposed to grant funding. The Wall Street Journal is not the preferred venue for scientists, but my guess would be that John Christy had difficulty finding any of the usual venues who would publish anything with his perspective, despite his impeccable credentials.

Mr. Christy starts his editorial by rejecting his “share” of the Nobel Peace Prize, and poking at Al Gore:

I've had a lot of fun recently with my tiny (and unofficial) slice of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But, though I was one of thousands of IPCC participants, I don't think I will add "0.0001 Nobel Laureate" to my resume.

The other half of the prize was awarded to former Vice President Al Gore, whose carbon footprint would stomp my neighborhood flat. But that's another story.

It's well worth reading the whole thing, if you're a WSJ subscriber. If you're not a WSJ subscriber, it's also possible that the WSJ will release this editorial for free viewing at OpinionJournal.com (they usually do this within a week of the original editorial's publication), or you can hope that Rupert Murdoch will change the model of the WSJ site from subscription to free (something he's openly discussed as a possibility).

John Christy is not the first well-known climatologist to speak skeptically about the anthropomorphic global warming (AGW) movement, not by a long shot. But, to my knowledge, he is the first member of the IPCC to have done so, at least in a public venue. Given the political power of the AGW movement, one must admire the courage of Mr. Christy – his willingness to speak skeptically about AGW may well have consequences to his career…