Blogger has been down for about 12 hours and a bunch of people with offsite hosting were having hell trying to post. Now we are fixed.

More good stuff to come, in the meantime check out Johnny carson busting "psychic" Uri Geller as a fraud. Apparently he and James Randi were pissed he was using a cheesy magic trick to proclaim himself a psychic, must be some kind of magician code. I heard about this for years but never actually saw it before now.

Also for the debunking files, Peter Doran, a climatologist who discovered counterintuitive patterns of cooling in the antarctic addresses claims that his research runs counter to global warming as suggested by Anne Coulter and Michael Crichton. Basically, it does, but only if you quote him out of context and then attribute statements to him that he never said.

In January 2002, a research paper about Antarctic temperatures, of which I was the lead author, appeared in the journal Nature. At the time, the Antarctic Peninsula was warming, and many people assumed that meant the climate on the entire continent was heating up, as the Arctic was. But the Antarctic Peninsula represents only about 15 percent of the continent’s land mass, so it could not tell the whole story of Antarctic climate. Our paper made the continental picture more clear.

My research colleagues and I found that from 1986 to 2000, one small, ice-free area of the Antarctic mainland had actually cooled. Our report also analyzed temperatures for the mainland in such a way as to remove the influence of the peninsula warming and found that, from 1966 to 2000, more of the continent had cooled than had warmed. Our summary statement pointed out how the cooling trend posed challenges to models of Antarctic climate and ecosystem change.

Newspaper and television reports focused on this part of the paper. And many news and opinion writers linked our study with another bit of polar research published that month, in Science, showing that part of Antarctica’s ice sheet had been thickening - and erroneously concluded that the earth was not warming at all.
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In a rebuttal in The Providence Journal, in Rhode Island, the lead author of the Science paper and I explained that our studies offered no evidence that the earth was cooling. But the misinterpretation had already become legend, and in the four and half years since, it has only grown.

Our results have been misused as "evidence" against global warming by Michael Crichton in his novel "State of Fear" and by Ann Coulter in her latest book, "Godless: The Church of Liberalism." Search my name on the Web, and you will find pages of links to everything from climate discussion groups to Senate policy committee documents - all citing my 2002 study as reason to doubt that the earth is warming. One recent Web column even put words in my mouth. I have never said that "the unexpected colder climate in Antarctica may possibly be signaling a lessening of the current global warming cycle." I have never thought such a thing either.
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In the meantime, I would like to remove my name from the list of scientists who dispute global warming. I know my coauthors would as well.

This reflects a problem that people have understanding global warming and a constant canard from the global warming deniers. Global warming is a measurement of Global Mean Surface Temperature. Lets think about each of these words now.

Global - meaning all over the earth.
Mean - meaning the average temperature
Surface - meaning they do not include the earth's molten core and what not
Temperature - you guys get it

Yes his paper showed a portion of a continent was cooling. But that has nothing to do with, say it with me, Global Mean Surface Temperature. Lots of areas vary year to year, and that's why scientists are slow to attribute the current heat wave to global warming, because cooling elsewhere or a steep drop in temperature might change the global average for the year. So far, in 2006, that doesn't appear to be the case, and we seem to be having one of the hottest years ever for the globe. I'm sure somewhere on earth it's colder than usual, but this does not have any bearing on the veracity of global warming.