The scare story caravan has moved on to pastures new these days, not unrelated to the fact that at the end of 2024 the extent of sea ice in Antarctica was roughly the same as the 1981 to 2010 average. According to the U.S.-based National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC), “this provides a sharp illustration of the high variability of Antarctica sea ice extent”. It does indeed, and it also provides us with a classic case study of how a short-term natural variation, well understood by many scientists, is weaponised by activists in science, politics and journalism to induce mass climate psychosis with the aim of promoting the political Net Zero lunacy. //

All of the confusion – designed to constantly promote Net Zero – arises because narrative-driven commentators assign most weather and climate changes to humans adding trace amounts of a trace gas into the atmosphere. It leaves little room for explaining the role of natural variation in the changing climate. Antarctica has not warmed for at least 70 years and a recent paper found that the summer temperature had shown a dramatic 1°C fall from 1977-1999, followed by a pause since the turn of the century. Another paper found that Antarctica sea ice extent had slowly increased since the start of continuous satellite recordings in 1979. //

Measuring temperatures and ice levels over the tiny span of modern human measurements is not. The proponents of this are not engaged in serious research; they are working backward from a conclusion in pursuit of an agenda. //

Cherry-picking of data, careful tweaking of information, the control of the flow of information: Not science. Not open inquiry. Not a scrupulous examination of facts, of data. This is activism and fear-mongering. Nothing more. Nothing less.

Since those initial reports were published in Western media, a small band of dedicated space trackers have been using open source data to try to identify precisely which space object fell into Kenya. So far, they have not been able to identify the rocket launch to which the large ring can be attributed.

Now, some space trackers believe the object may not have come from space at all. //

However, an anonymous X account using the handle DutchSpace, which despite the anonymity has provided reliable information about Ariane launch vehicles in the past, posted a thread that indicates this ring could not have been part of the SYLDA shell. With images and documentation, it seems clear that neither the diameter nor mass of the SYLDA component matches the ring found in Kenya.

Additionally, Arianespace officials told Le Parisien newspaper on Thursday that they do not believe the space debris was associated with the Ariane V rocket. Essentially, if the ring does not fit, you must acquit.

So what was it?

With this announcement, Meta becomes the third major corporation to bail out of the burning DEI airplane since Trump was reelected. Walmart terminated its DEI programs in late November, and McDonalds dropped its programs Tuesday. They join a growing list of companies deciding DEI is terrible for business since the US presidential election season got underway:

Boeing — November, 2024
Toyota — October 2024
Harley-Davidson — August 2024
Caterpillar — September 2024
Stanley Black & Decker — September 2024
Brown-Forman — September 2024
Molson Coors — September 2024
Lowe's — August 2024
Ford — August 2024
John Deere — July 2024
Tractor Supply — June 2024

David135
13 hours ago
Name names. Produce emails of all WH and Fed emails employees who were pressuring him and his company. Give them to the Taibbi gang to sort through. That would help a little.

bpbatch David135
12 hours ago
Yep, this. Musk put himself in danger with the Biden regime by exposure through the Twitter Files. Commission a "Facebook Files" type investigation and let the cards fall where they may, despite the political outcome. Do this, and I'll trust Zuck more, otherwise he's proving he's moving towards the constitutional right only for financial reasons and to save FB from the overturning of Section 230. //

veritaseequitas
2 hours ago
A) He must be losing money
B) He will change back if and when the Communist Democrats get back in office
C) He's a wuss who was too afraid to be a trail blazer. //

Mark Clancey
10 hours ago
What Could Mark Zuckerberg Do to Convince People He's Turned Into a Defender of Liberty?
Get on his knees and beg God and this nation for forgiveness that he spent $450 million to rig and steal the 2020 election. Until then he's just a garden variety Marxist twerp looking for secular salvation that will not come. //

Political-Paige
42 minutes ago edited
A tale of two billionaires.

Faced with the exact same pressures, Zuckerberg censored, lied, undermined a presidential election, and sentenced us to 4 years of national rot, while Musk spent 44 billion dollars of his own money to restore free speech across the globe and brought us back from the brink.

Starship will test its payload deployment mechanism on its seventh test flight. //

blackhawk887 Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
8y
18,175
Keith Tanner said:
2.7 megawatts of electrical power! It's running the computers, the gimbal actuators and the flaps. Anything else?
Mostly flaps. They need to apply a lot of torque at a high speed, which means lots of power.

2.7 MW isn't really that much, though, except for the fact that it's electric power. Each Raptor turbopump puts out 75 MW of shaft power, and each Raptor combustion chamber puts out 7,000 MW of thermal power.

During boost, Starship's thermal power output is roughly equal to half the entire United States' average electric generation power output.

LA Department of Water and Power (LADWP) CEO Janisse Quiñones has repeatedly claimed during press conferences that her utility did everything it could to prepare for the forecasted wind event and support the Los Angeles Fire Department as it responded, but left out one key fact: the Santa Ynez Reservoir in the hills above Pacific Palisades, which holds 117 million gallons of water and normally feeds those tanks, had been drained and taken offline for repairs to its cover even though the state's brush fire season was ongoing. //

A LADWP spokesperson said in a statement to the LA Times that the utility was "still evaluating the effect of the reservoir being placed offline, and that staffers were conducting a root-cause analysis." The spokesperson added, “Our primary focus is to provide water supply throughout the city. The system was never designed for a wildfire scenario that we are experiencing.”

Why not? The system, at least in the Palisades, is in an area where a suburban area adjoins rural, difficult-to-access mountains and canyons, and where wildfire risk is often high. //

Anon, good nurse!
10 hours ago
This all boils down to 117 million gallons of water to fight a raging wildfire rather than 3 million, right? Like, it seems like a lot of words to avoid the obvious fact that 117 is a lot more than 3....
Also, whatever happened to "if it saves one life...."? Are we not doing that anymore?

JohnV1787 Anon, good nurse!
9 hours ago
I was thinking that too. Maybe the water pressure, uphill pumping and other physics don't make it possible to keep those 3 tanks perfectly filled all of the time, but you could fill them 35 times with a full reservoir. That extra water could have done something...maybe not extinguish the raging fire completely but perhaps dampen areas enough that it couldn't spread farther and do more damage. The dismissive attitude that it wouldn't have mattered anyway must really grate on those poor people who just lost their homes and businesses and wish that the fire department at least had the chance to try.

Set to be killed by Trump, the rules mostly lock in existing trends. //

The net result of a number of Supreme Court decisions is that greenhouse gasses are pollutants under the Clean Air Act, and the EPA needed to determine whether they posed a threat to people. George W. Bush's EPA dutifully performed that analysis but sat on the results until its second term ended, leaving it to the Obama administration to reach the same conclusion. The EPA went on to formulate rules for limiting carbon emissions on a state-by-state basis, but these were rapidly made irrelevant because renewable power and natural gas began displacing coal even without the EPA's encouragement.

Nevertheless, the Trump administration replaced those rules with ones designed to accomplish even less, which were thrown out by a court just before Biden's inauguration. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court stepped in to rule on the now-even-more-irrelevant Obama rules, determining that the EPA could only regulate carbon emissions at the level of individual power plants rather than at the level of the grid.

All of that set the stage for the latest EPA rules, which were formulated by the Biden administration's EPA. Forced by the court to regulate individual power plants, the EPA allowed coal plants that were set to retire within the decade to continue to operate as they have. Anything that would remain operational longer would need to either switch fuels or install carbon capture equipment. Similarly, natural gas plants were regulated based on how frequently they were operational; those that ran less than 40 percent of the time could face significant new regulations. More than that, and they'd have to capture carbon or burn a fuel mixture that is primarily hydrogen produced without carbon emissions.

Months later, according to the SFC, AVM provided all the relevant source code and scripts, but the suit continued. AVM ultimately paid Steck's attorney fee. The case proved, once again, that not only are source code requirements real, but the LGPL also demands freedom, despite its "Lesser" name, and that source code needs to be useful in making real changes to firmware—in German courts, at least.

"The favorable result of this lawsuit exemplifies the power of copyleft—granting users the freedom to modify, repair, and secure the software on their own devices," the SFC said in a press release. "Companies like AVM receive these immense benefits themselves. This lawsuit reminded AVM that downstream users must receive those very same rights under copyleft.". //

At the top is perhaps the best-known case in tech circles, the Linksys WRT54G conflict from 2003. While the matter was settled before a lawsuit was filed, negotiations between Linksys owner Cisco and a coalition led by the Free Software Foundation, publisher of the GPL and LGPL, made history. It resulted in the release of all the modified and relevant GPL source code used in its hugely popular blue-and-black router.

The backstory, such as it exists from reports and retrospectives, is that Cisco bought Linksys, Linksys outsourced certain chipset development to Broadcom, and Broadcom outsourced firmware development to an overseas developer. Everybody up the chain ended up with a lawsuit once people started looking.

Cisco made history yet again in 2007 when it was the first entity to be actually sued by the FSF over GPL violations, which started in 2003 and continued to come up with new hardware products. Cisco settled the case with the FSF in 2009, making a donation to the FSF and appointing a Free Software Director at the company to keep track of its licensing obligations.