Life

Nothing much going on. We'll probably start getting ready for Florida tonight. We are leaving early Saturday morning and won't return until March 9. There will be tons of photos up then.

My braces are off and it feels good. The whitening, on the other hand, was a pain in the butt. I didn't know it was so long and would be so uncomfortable. It was essentially 75 minutes (five 15 minute sessions) of sitting still with my mouth pried open. At least there was a tv I could watch. But the result is pretty good.

I could really live fine with the way my teeth are now but I still have a little more work to do.

With the news today about misreporting on Artic ice, everyone needs to take a close look at the three stories below. Because what we hear on the tv and read in the paper everyday is that global warming is caused by man and will soon flood the world. And NASA's James Hansen, probably the number 2 advocate in the world behind Gore, is in charge of the data. He can't seem to report it correctly though and his mistakes always show warming. This is the tip of the iceberg unfortunately, there are other cases out there.

GISS’ most recent data release originally reported last October as being extraordinarily warm– a full 0.78C above normal. This would have made it the warmest October on record; a huge increase over the previous month’s data.
Those results set off alarm bells with Steve McIntyre and his gang of Baker Street irregulars at Climateaudit.org. They noted that NASA’s data didn’t agree at all with the satellite temperature record, which showed October to be very mild, continuing the same trend of slight cooling that has persisted since 1998. So they dug a little deeper.
McIntyre, the same man who found errors last year in GISS’s US temperature record, quickly noted that most of the temperature increase was coming from Russia. A chart of world temperatures showed that in October, most of Russia, the largest nation on Earth, was not only registering hot, but literally off the scale. Yet anecdotal reports were suggesting that worldwide, October was actually slightly colder than normal. Could there be another error in GISS’s data?
An alert reader on McIntyre’s blog revealed that there was a very large problem. Looking at the actual readings from individual stations in Russia showed a curious anomaly. The locations had all been assigned the exact temperatures from a month earlier– the much warmer month of September. Russia cools very rapidly in the fall months, so recycling the data from the earlier month had led to a massive temperature increase.”

and

Arctic Sea Ice Underestimated for Weeks Due to Faulty Sensor
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By Alex Morales
Feb. 20 (Bloomberg) -- A glitch in satellite sensors caused scientists to underestimate the extent of Arctic sea ice by 500,000 square kilometers (193,000 square miles), a California- size area, the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center said.
The error, due to a problem called “sensor drift,” began in early January and caused a slowly growing underestimation of sea ice extent until mid-February. That’s when “puzzled readers” alerted the NSIDC about data showing ice-covered areas as stretches of open ocean, the Boulder, Colorado-based group said on its Web site.
“Sensor drift, although infrequent, does occasionally occur and it is one of the things that we account for during quality- control measures prior to archiving the data,” the center said. “Although we believe that data prior to early January are reliable, we will conduct a full quality check.’’
The extent of Arctic sea ice is seen as a key measure of how rising temperatures are affecting the Earth. The cap retreated in 2007 to its lowest extent ever and last year posted its second- lowest annual minimum at the end of the yearly melt season. The recent error doesn’t change findings that Arctic ice is retreating, the NSIDC said.
The center said real-time data on sea ice is always less reliable than archived numbers because full checks haven’t yet been carried out. Historical data is checked across other sources, it said.
The NSIDC uses Department of Defense satellites to obtain its Arctic sea ice data rather than more accurate National Aeronautics and Space Administration equipment. That’s because the defense satellites have a longer period of historical data, enabling scientists to draw conclusions about long-term ice melt, the center said.
“There is a balance between being as accurate as possible at any given moment and being as consistent as possible through long time-periods,” NSIDC said. “Our main scientific focus is on the long-term changes in Arctic sea ice.”

and if you are still with me (from a UK newspaper)

Claims of what we all suspected - that James Hansen is losing the plot - have been flooding in over the past week. (Unlike the water he imagines will shortly cover half the US if we don't go back to living like cavemen.) The leading climate change hysteric, called "an embarrassment to NASA", has "lost his mind", according to colleagues. Hansen was accused of "megalomania" and and "scientific authoritarianism" by Dr. Roger Pielke, Jr., former director of the University of Colorado's Center for Science and Technology Policy Research.
What do you mean, global temperatures are going down? (Photo: PA)
In Sunday's Guardian (natch), Hansen called coal-fired power plants "factories of death". Marc Sheppard responded eloquently today in American Thinker:
Even the realization of Al Gore's dream of "capping" carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants wouldn't satisfy NASA's James Hansen. He wants to shut them all down, despite the untold human misery such hysterical action would inevitably bring. And toward that preposterously unattainable end he is now pushing panic buttons with the alacrity of a man truly possessed.
In a wild rant in Sunday's Guardian responding to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown's green-lighting of the controversial Kingsnorth power plant, the head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies managed to outdo even his own sophomoric guilt trips and fear-mongering. [...]
So James, might you kindly explain - without mention of extinction or sea-level rise or ice sheet disintegration - just how you propose we close these "factories of death" without synchronously opening a global arena of human want, suffering and ultimate demise? [...] Even after last week's annual American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting, at which the Goracle likened his battle to stop global warming to that of 19th century abolitionists fighting to end slavery. Indeed - in gauging the measure of a movement, one need not delve far beyond its leadership.
As long ago as June 2008, Dr. Nicholas Drapela from Oregon State University Chemistry Department wrote this:
My dear colleague Professor Hansen, I believe, has finally gone off the deep end. When you have dedicated the bulk of your career to a cause, and it turns out the cause has been proven false, most people cannot bring themselves to admit the truth. [Hansen's recent claims] contain neither reason nor truth when compared to the volumes of daily literature being published in scientific journals today on climate change. It is not difficult to refute the words of Professor Hansen. On the contrary, one feels it is almost unfair. [...] The global warming 'time bomb', the 'present, dangerous situation', 'the perfect storm', 'global cataclysm', 'disastrous climate changes that spiral dynamically out of humanity's control.' These are the words of an apocalyptic prophet, not a rational scientist.
One by one, the most extreme scientific studies are being discredited and the most hysterical ringleaders are being exposed as scare-mongering rabble-rousers. Governments must surely now realise there are far greater priorities than the apocalyptic shrieking of the climate change industry.
Earlier this month, I predicted "open warfare between experts presenting serious, evidence-based research into the state of the planet and hysterical alarmists like James Hansen". Has it already begun?

I'm back from IL, getting my braces off tomorrow, leaving for Florida a week from Saturday. Life is good.

The welfare state is back again in full force...

RONALD REAGAN started it, Bill Clinton finished it and last week Barack Obama was accused of engineering its destruction. One of the few undisputed triumphs of American government of the past 20 years – the sweeping welfare reform programme that sent millions of dole claimants back to work – has been plunged into jeopardy by billions of dollars in state handouts included in the president’s controversial economic stimulus package.
As Obama celebrated Valentine’s Day yesterday with a return to his Chicago home for a private weekend with family and friends, his success in piloting a $785 billion (£546 billion) stimulus package through Congress was being overshadowed by warnings that an unprecedented increase in welfare spending would undermine two decades of bipartisan attempts to reduce dependency on government handouts.
Robert Rector, a prominent welfare researcher who was one of the architects of Clinton's 1996 reform bill, warned last week that Obama’s stimulus plan was a “welfare spendathon” that would amount to the largest one-year increase in government handouts in American history.
Douglas Besharov, author of a big study on welfare reform, said the stimulus bill passed by Congress and the Senate in separate votes on Friday would “unravel” most of the 1996 reforms that led to a 65% reduction in welfare caseloads and prompted the British and several other governments to consider similar measures.

Here are 25 random things about me that I did for another web site:

1. I was 22 when I flew on an airplane for the first time and I’ve flown hundreds of times since then, including 9/11 when I got stuck in Chicago.
2. I have never done an illegal drug in my life (and I’ve never smoked a cigarette either).
3. I’m still close with a number of guys from my grade school days, count them as my best friends and get together with them often.
4. I know that stupid people is a subjective term but I have little patience for them.
5. I worked in Congressman Ralph Regula’s Canton office for almost five years and loved going to work every day.
6. The older I get the more pet peeves I have.
7. I’m adopted and have never had the desire to find my natural birth parents. My sister is adopted too and I think she tried to find hers but I don’t think she was successful.
8. I wish that everyone would take personal responsibility in their lives and not expect someone else to do everything for them.
9. I don’t look good in a suit, whether it cost $2000 or $250 (I would never again spend $2000 on a suit).
10. I love Massillon and the history of the city and our football team but I’m probably more obsessed with Ohio State football at this point in my life. But if given the choice I would take a Tiger state championship over a Buckeye national one.
11. I haven’t missed a Massillon v. McKinley football game since 1980; that’s 33 straight games including the playoffs.
12. I don’t know anyone who is a worse singer than me except maybe my wife.
13. I collect ticket stubs from events that I attend and probably have over 300. The 1992 Olympics, a bullfight in 1988, and the Buckeyes national championship win are a few of my favorites.
14. I don’t drink more than two alcoholic drinks a day but that sounds like I need to have two drinks every day. In reality, I probably have two drinks a week now.
15. I was always the fastest kid in my grade until Craig Johnson transferred to Massillon during my junior year in high school and proceeded to set the state record in the 100 meter dash that year (he used to beat me by more than five yards which is a lot in a race that distance).
16. I once walked away from a blackjack table in New Orleans with $3400 of winnings and took all of it home with me.
17. My parents did a great job in raising me and I appreciate that more and more as I make decisions about how to raise Henry and Jack.
18. I took my last college class in Madrid, Spain before returning home and passing the required foreign language test to receive my International Relations degree (I think there were only four other people who received it in 1988).
19. I am genuinely afraid of where our President and Congress want to take our country. Say what you will about George Bush but he never wanted to fundamentally change the foundation of our nation.
20. Sports allowed me to be in the cool group growing up but absent that I probably would have been a nerd.
21. I feel blessed to be at my mom’s side when she passed away. I didn’t think that would happen since I live two hours away but I’m glad I was there.
22. I’m still not sure what I want to do in life when I grow up. I’m pretty sure I’ll be a writer but I need to take the first step and start writing.
23. I played football in college for a year at the University of Dayton.
24. I formed a business with a friend to buy houses and rent them to mentally retarded adults in Stark County. We own two and are looking at a third.
25. Some day I’m going to buy a large sailboat and sail the Caribbean Islands. I may have two drinks a day then…
26. If I could take my family and friends and trade places with anyone in the world it would be Jimmy Buffett.
27. I was an average student who was labeled with the famous moniker “he would do well if he applied himself”.
28. My wife Sarah is a source of strength for me and I’m glad she is Mrs. Briggs. I’m proud of what she has accomplished in life and know that she will be much more successful in whatever she does than I ever will be.
29. I never knew that having kids would be so much fun and wish I hadn’t waited until my late 30s. I’m not sure what was important in life before them.
30. Was this supposed to be 25 or 30 random things?

Henry at his Children First graduation last June.