Yet another climate related retraction

Scientists have been forced to withdraw a study on projected sea level rise due to global warming after finding mistakes that undermined the findings.

The study, published in 2009 in Nature Geoscience, one of the top journals in its field, confirmed the conclusions of the 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It used data over the last 22,000 years to predict that sea level would rise by between 7cm and 82cm by the end of the century.

(…)

The paper – entitled “Constraints on future sea-level rise from past sea-level change” – used fossil coral data and temperature records derived from ice-core measurements to reconstruct how sea level has fluctuated with temperature since the peak of the last ice age, and to project how it would rise with warming over the next few decades.

(…)

“One mistake was a miscalculation; the other was not to allow fully for temperature change over the past 2,000 years. Because of these issues we have retracted the paper and will now invest in the further work needed to correct these mistakes.”

(source)(via)

-elsewhere-

Gay Soldiers Don’t Cause Disruption, Study Says

WASHINGTON — A comprehensive new study on foreign militaries that have made transitions to allowing openly gay service members concludes that a speedy implementation of the change is not disruptive. The finding is in direct opposition to the stated views of Pentagon leaders, who say repealing a ban on openly gay men and women in the United States armed forces should take a year or more.

The study, “Gays in Foreign Militaries 2010: A Global Primer,” is to be released Tuesday by the Palm Center, a research group at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Environmental Group Hits back at Climate Skeptics

(…)Dan Lashof and Bob Deans at the National Resources Defense Council are out with a primer of what scientists know and, perhaps the more scurrilous question, how they know it. Here are a couple of their bullet points:

* The past decade was the hottest on record. For the years 2000–09, the average global temperature was 57.9 degrees Fahrenheit, about one degree higher than the 20th-century average, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported in January.

* A third of the perennial sea ice has vanished in just 30 years. We’ve lost an area of sea ice equal to the entire United States east of the Mississippi, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

A facty primer, no doubt (and you can read the whole thing here). But none of that gets at the question du jour, which is how big a role humans are playing. Until later on. Lashof and Deans say it’s a big one, and their source for saying so is a government report compiled by the nation’s top science, defense, and diplomatic agencies—NOAA, NASA, the Pentagon, the National Science Foundation, the Department of State (none of which have been marred in scandal)—over the course of two decades, through four presidential administrations.

Everything Obama Thought He Knew About Health Cost Control Is Wrong

Petraeus for president: Are you sure you mean that?

Petraeus is said to be registered R, but of the nearly extinct Northeastern genus Rockefellerus (i.e., David Frum, only more so), but ticket-balancing has a long tradition behind it. Ronald Wilson Reagan himself gave us VP and President George Herbert Walker Voodoo Economics Read My Lips (Fooled Ya!) Bush, and had thought it was a bright idea in ‘76 to bring liberal Senator Richard Schweiker onto his proposed presidential ticket.

But some observations, based on watching the General on Meet the Press this morning:

* He thinks Iran is “a ways” away from a nuclear weapon, and favors our continuing the “pressure track” that we’re now on. Not the slightest hint of impatience with the current administration’s engagement policy – instead, words that in effect approve of it, as laying the pretext for unspecified future action.
* He clearly opposes detainee interrogation methods that go beyond the Army Field Manual, believing they eventually end up “biting us on the backside,” and also aren’t necessary. And he explicitly favors closing Guantanamo, though isn’t “seized” with the notion that it must be closed by any certain date.
* He likes to deflect difficult or potentially controversial questions – such as the ones above, also on “don’t ask, don’t tell,” and on Mullah Baradar’s capture and interrogation – by referring to orderly, methodical processes, or by methodically explaining why it would be out of order for him to answer.
* He doesn’t say “Pock-ee-stan,” but he does say “Pah-ki-stan” – not “Pack-i-stan” like all red-blooded American conservatives…

In other words it would be versy similar to having John McCain on the ticket again.

More on Petraeus

Second, it’s pretty funny how terrorist rights supporters like Ackerman love to use the military prestige of a general when his position agrees with theirs. But when a person like General Michael Hayden, former head of the CIA, and in a position to know far more about interrogation and intelligence than the head of U.S. Central Command defends enhanced interrogation methods, well we can just ignore him. I could easily turn Ackerman’s silly “open letter” around and ask, who are you, Spencer Ackerman, to claim to know better than a former CIA director? Why should we listen to Petraeus but not Hayden? The words of a serving general like Petraeus carry far less weight than the statements of a retired general who is now free to speak his mind.

Good question. I respect General Petraeus’s opinion that doesn’t mean I have to agree with every bit of what he says. Why is it always all or nothing in these columns. (Rhetorical question, I know it’s because the columnist is intellectually dishonest.)

Toyota: Dems ‘not industry friendly’

The July 2009 presentation also says the Department of Transportation and National Highway Transportation Safety Administration “under Obama administration” is “not industry friendly,” and anticipates a “more challenging regulatory and enforcement environment.”

It says the NHTSA “new team has less understanding of engineering issues and are primarily focused on legal issues.”

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0210/33248.html#ixzz0gH08p0sn

They act surprised. What in the history of the Democratic Party or in the Obama campaign would have ever led them to believe that it would be industry friendly?