From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accidents_by_country
Saint-Laurent-des-Eaux, France
17 Oct 1969
50 kg of uranium dioxide melted inside of the A1 nuclear reactor of Saint-Laurent-des-Eaux, during a refueling operation
Melting point = 2865 °C (3140 K)
http://jcp.aip.org/resource/1/jcpsa6/v25/i6/p1089_s1?isAuthorized=no
More info:
http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/3577916?uid=3739448&uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=3737720&uid=4&sid=21101552799357

Just because those Cubans are rabidly anti-communist doesn’t mean they aren’t simultaneously extremely liberal. Although some of our more reactionary friends may have convinced themselves otherwise, the presence of one doesn’t necessarily exclude the other. Remember, like most civilized countries, Cuba had government-subsidized medicine and public education through the college level long before Castro took power.

As for the potential unreliability of the temp measurements, that has not escaped me, I mention it in my post to Rob, above. Its why I prefer to rely on the satellite data. It is not only more precise and accurate, it is much more persuasive. A 40% reduction in summer ice in 30 years is difficult to dismiss with a hand wave and a little sarcasm.

Deliberate scientific fraud? What you do not properly adddress is motivation. Although scientists may be just as likely to cook the data to ensure their funding as businessmen are motivated to lie through their teeth to protect their investments, the scientists have neither the organization, the funding, the experience, the coordination or the past history to pull it off as slickly and successfully as the American Petroleum Institute and their friends in the Republican Party. Scientists may be tempted to lie, but they’re neither as good or as practiced at it as corporate executives are.

Now, about those 2016 election forecasts…don’t be shy, don’t make me drag up some of your October and November posts.

For example, water vapor is a much more effective greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, and the effect of the former should totally mask that of the latter, but it is CO2 that seems to track the temperature rise, while H2O varies so much spatially and temporally it is impossible to measure its overall levels. There are probably several intermediate factors at work. I suspect it is caused by the fact water vapor has a negative feedback associated with it (freeze-out at high altitudes, precipitation, or cloud formation) while carbon dioxide just accumulates after it overwhelms its natural sinks.

However, those who might find the causation financially inconvenient will do everything they possibly can to first deny the correlation itself as non-existent. The denialists have devised a defense in depth, they are now abandoning their front-line trenches and falling back to prepared positions further to the rear. A desire to avoid paying the bill is something you can always count on.

-edit- I got my cause and effect confused in one of the sentences.

Again, to accurately measure the quantity of radiation that hits us would require detectors almost everywhere. Right now there are several ways we detect solar radiation. Most accurate ground measurements use pyranometers and pyrheliometers. Most solar observation networks use satellites or a combination of satellites and ground stations. Check out this chart here. You see the column titled “Uncertainty in annual GHI values”? That is the one to pay attention to. 2-7% is claimed by SoloarGIS. And that network has only been in operation since 1994 and even that figure is BS. The ground stations that have been up since 1960 (not 1880!) have as high as an estimated 22% inaccuracy, but it’s probably even much larger than that. The others don’t even try to calculate how much they are off. But I’ll tell you they are all off by large margins-margins so big that making an accurate assessment of the solar radiation hitting the earth at any moment are impossible – and, subsequently, knowing what amount of radiation hitting the poles and melting ice.

Trust me…I did data analysis for for the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) already back in the last century in the glorious Clinton era. I know all about the sun and how little we know about it. I also know how to manipulates statistics and calculations to BS anyone in either direction who wants to believe. If I wanted to support man-made “climate change” with engineered statistics spoken with authority – I could do that too. It’s a game. Science institutions and universities are just like corporations, making themselves and their products (or research) needed.

C’mon ER, you can tell me! You’ve been playing the devil’s advocate all these years because you’re secretly one of those ultra-conservative Cuban-Americans that votes GOP every election…right? You like watching Robert, Bowser and Alcaray cheer you on, while you laugh because you are really even more conservative than Marco Rubio. Everytime they give you an attaboy, you get this perverse joy. But you never reveal your hand, because that would ruin all the fun.

The solar activity curve in blue is NOT sunspot number (a complex formula designed to characterize the 11 year solar magnetic cycle). The units of solar activity are watts per square meter, and corresponds to solar energy output. (In my chart below, it is labeled “Solar Activity”.)

I don’t know for sure, but I don’t think sunspot number and solar activity, are closely correlated. Still, just glancing at it, I do see some vague similarity in the curves in the years you mention. All you can really say for sure, is that all the curves seemed to more or less track each other until around 1970, when CO2 and temperature take off in unison, and solar activity/sunspots remain relatively stable.

The satellite data on sea ice started coming in 1979, and I have confidence in its precision. I know solar energy and sunspot data have been quite dependable for well over a century. I’m not as confident that CO2 and temperature data have been measured consistently for that period, but the fact temperature seems to abruptly start in different years on both graphs suggests they are from different sources. Still, the two temp curves appear to be pretty much in synch. I guess they are statistical averages from multiple weather stations.

So how do I interpret all this? The world is getting warmer and CO2 levels are rising. The sun may have some effect, but it is not clear how much, and something drastic happened around 1970 and is superimposed on that, that the ice data confirms. What could cause the sudden change? If I had to guess, I’d say the ocean’s abilility to hold excess CO2 in solution is saturating, and that has caused atmospheric levels of the gas to rise, but I could be wrong. Sudden rises in CO2 could also be a result of deforestaion in the Amazon.

There has been a lot in the news lately of dropping pH in the sea, allegedly due to CO2 dissolved in the water.