The Mayaguez Incident...

Long-time readers of this blog may remember that I was on board the USS Long Beach in May of 1975, during the Mayaguez incident.  The Cambodian Kmer Rouge forces captured the Mayaguez, a US Navy supply ship manned by a civilian crew.

At the time the Mayaguez was captured, the USS Long Beach was in the port of Sattahip, Thailand, and much of the crew (including me) was in Bankok.  The crew was recalled and the ship got underway on the second day of the four-day incident.  We sailed just over 200 miles to the southeast, to Koh Tang island, some 60 miles off the coast of Cambodia (modern satellite photo at right).  I remember seeing the island from the deck of the ship, watching the air support and ship-based bombardment in action.

Forty one Americans died in the Mayaguez incident, including eighteen who died in heavy fighting on Koh Tang.

Just recently it occurred to me that at this remove their might actually be a book about the incident, and in fact I found two, which I bought and read: The Last Battle, by Ralph Wetterhahn and The Four Days of Mayaguez by Roy Rowan.  Both were fascinating reads for me, the former for its rich content, the latter for the human story of the captured crew.

One thing about both books absolutely floored me: neither of them contains any mention of the USS Long Beach, or any other US Navy ships besides the USS Holt, the USS Wilson, and the USS Coral Sea (all of which were direct participants in the battle).  I don't know for certain how many other US Navy ships were present, as my memory of events almost 35 years ago is a bit shaky.  But my best estimate is that at least six US Navy ships were there (and I think one Australian ship as well). 

My role on the ship kept me in CIC (Combat Information Center) most of the time, and I had access to some information as the battle progressed.  On reading these books, I realize now that what I “knew” at the time was very sketchy and often inaccurate.  The USS Long Beach's primary role was air defense control, and that's the main involvement I remember us actually having in the incident.  However, there was discussion of our Marine detachment (roughly 60 men) participating in the rescue effort, and also there was the possibility that the 5 inch guns on board would be used in supporting the troops on Koh Tang.

It was quite a strange experience to read two books about an incident that I was a witness to...

ClimateGate: Excellent Observations and Discussions...

Armed and Dangerous is a new blog to me, written by Eric S. Raymond, who may be familiar to you as the author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar.  Based on reading the posts on the front page, I've added it to my daily reading list.  There are some excellent posts on ClimateGate up there now, with the comments being just as interesting as the posts themselves...

Two Adult Cats, Badly in Need of a Home...

The Steele Canyon Veterinary Clinic has two beautiful, fluffy adult Siamese cats (one flame-point, one lilac-point) available for adoption.  If one of these steals your heart, please call them at 619/659-7274.  Both are in need of a loving home, either together or separately...

  

ClimateGate: McIntyre Begins Digging into the Data...

I've been waiting eagerly for this: the well-informed AGW skeptic Steve McIntyre has started digging into the trove of ClimateGate data.  Of course he's finding interesting stuff.  This post is also interesting, for a completely different reason: McIntyre is attempting to get other scientists who were revealed by the ClimateGate emails to be critical of the IPCC data to comment (without success so far).

If you're at all interested in ClimateGate and the AGW debate, I highly recommend regularly visiting Climate Audit (Steve McIntyre's blog)...

ClimateGate: WSJ Weighs In...

The Wall Street Journal has an editorial on ClimateGate with this conclusion:

The response to this among the defenders of Mr. Mann and his circle has been that even if they did disparage doubters and exclude contrary points of view, theirs is still the best climate science we've got. The proof for this is circular. It's the best, we're told, because it's the most-published and most-cited—in that same peer-reviewed literature.

Even so, by rigging the rules, they've made it impossible to know how good it really is. And then, one is left to wonder why they felt the need to rig the game in the first place, if their science is as robust as they claim. If there's an innocent explanation for that, we'd love to hear it.

It's a good, short piece – read the whole thing here.

ClimateGate: Skewed Science...

Interesting piece from the Canadian newspaper, the National Post.  Since the ClimateGate story broke, such skeptical pieces are suddenly being published all over the place.  It's too bad that it takes a scandal to prod the lamestream media into more balanced reporting.  Now I'm actually a little worried that they're headed too far the other way!

Here's an excerpt:

Millions of measurements, global coverage, consistently rising temperatures, case closed: The Earth is warming. Except for one problem. CRU’s average temperature data doesn’t jive with that of Vincent Courtillot, a French geo-magneticist, director of the Institut de Physique du Globe in Paris, and a former scientific advisor to the French Cabinet. Last year he and three colleagues plotted an average temperature chart for Europe that shows a surprisingly different trend. Aside from a very cold spell in 1940, temperatures were flat for most of the 20th century, showing no warming while fossil fuel use grew. Then in 1987 they shot up by about 1 C and have not shown any warming since. This pattern cannot be explained by rising carbon dioxide concentrations, unless some critical threshold was reached in 1987; nor can it be explained by climate models.

Courtillot and Jean-Louis Le Mouël, a French geo-magneticist, and three Russian colleagues first came into climate research as outsiders four years ago. The Earth’s magnetic field responds to changes in solar output, so geomagnetic measurements are good indicators of solar activity. They thought it would be interesting to compare solar activity with climatic temperature measurements.

Their first step was to assemble a database of temperature measurements and plot temperature charts. To do that, they needed raw temperature measurements that had not been averaged or adjusted in any way. Courtillot asked Phil Jones, the scientist who runs the CRU database, for his raw data, telling him (according to one of the ‘Climategate’ emails that surfaced following the recent hacking of CRU’s computer systems) “there may be some quite important information in the daily values which is likely lost on monthly averaging.” Jones refused Courtillot’s request for data, saying that CRU had “signed agreements with national meteorological services saying they would not pass the raw data onto third parties.” (Interestingly, in another of the CRU emails, Jones said something very different: “I took a decision not to release our [meteorological] station data, mainly because of McIntyre,” referring to Canadian Steve McIntyre, who helped uncover the flaws in the hockey stick graph.)

ClimateGate: Thoughts from a Critical IPCC Reviewer...

Vincent Gray is a scientist from New Zealand, and an anthropogenic global warming skeptic.  He was one of the expert reviewers on the infamous IPCC report, though nearly all of his comments were ignored.  PajamasMedia has a brief piece by him that starts with this:

Nothing about the revelations surprises me. I have maintained email correspondence with most of these scientists for many years, and I know several personally. I long ago realized that they were faking the whole exercise.

When you enter into a debate with any of them, they always stop cold when you ask an awkward question. This applies even when you write to a government department or a member of Parliament. I and many of my friends have grown accustomed to our failure to publish and to lecture, and to the rejection of our comments submitted prior to every IPCC report.

Read the whole thing.

Al Gore's Organic Vegetable Patch...

More from the London Telegraph:

Just a few considerations in addition to previous remarks about the explosion of the East Anglia Climategate e-mails in America. The reaction is growing exponentially there. Fox News, Barack Obama’s Nemesis, is now on the case, trampling all over Al Gore’s organic vegetable patch and breaking the White House windows. It has extracted some of the juiciest quotes from the e-mails and displayed them on-screen, with commentaries. Joe Public, coast-to-coast, now knows, thanks to the clowns at East Anglia’s CRU, just how royally he has been screwed.

“Al Gore's organic vegetable patch” – gotta love that British humor...  Read the whole thing.