Fighting Somnapathy

I've used the made up word "somnapathy" for several years now as a web handle. I don't know how or why I came up with the idea for the portmanteau. The word "somna" is Swedish for "to fall asleep" -- it meshed better than the Latin equivalent "soma" would have. And then the apathy part is pretty much self explanatory. I suppose I was probably in a state of somnapathy when I donned it -- I was probably fairly tired and I didn't much care about anything at the moment.

I've been meaning to come up with a better name for this blog than the placeholder "Just Thoughts," and I kept coming back to this idea of somnapathy. And how it's actually a very dangerous state. We all come by it here and there, particularly when we're not particularly busy, or have perhaps just finished being particularly busy. It happened to me a lot as an undergrad, as I imagine is quite common.

When I started this blog I didn't want it to just be a bloggy blog where I talked about mundane details or ranted about my life -- I wanted to make it about something. But at the same time I didn't want to make that something so specific that it would constrain what I could or could not say here. It's a problem I've been kicking around half seriously for a few days now, and as a result I have come up with the new title as seen above.

Fighting Somnapathy.

Because in the end, the most valuable use this blog can have is to be productive. So if I want to dig into climate change and report my findings, I can do that here. If I want to rant about the current state of the space program and its place in the federal budget, I can do that here. If I want to fool around with data and make charts and graphs and maps, I can do that too. And even if nobody sees it, I'll still feel like my whims will have been sufficiently productive.

About that Raw Data from the 80s....

I don't mean for this to be a climate change blog in the slightest, nor did I intend to actually update this blog more than one day in a row. But I feel like my previous post here might be well supplemented by addressing a third issue that the skeptics and pundits have raised recently. Namely, the issue of the missing raw data from the 1980s.

This won't be nearly the in depth analysis my previous post was. I haven't found quite as many justifications or explanations for this, nor is there all that much to look into -- the facts are fairly straightforward. And while the climategate business is a clear smear job intended to coincide with the Copenhagen Diagnosis where the accusers are afraid of context, this is harsher and more damaging. But that said, there are a few things we need to keep in mind anyway.

Making Sense of Climategate

INTRO

I spent the greater part of last night reading up on this so called "climategate," realizing that I didn't have a great handle on the alleged damning evidence or what it was that made people so upset. I was going to just put this up on Facebook, but I figured it was more of a blog thing, so here we are. I had to weed through quite a bit of scientific gobbledeegoop, and everyone should be aware that I'm not exactly fluent in that sort of thing (though I try real hard). Where possible, I will link to sources so that you can check up if you like and correct me if I have perhaps misinterpreted something along the way.

First off, is a link is very much worth reading. It was posted on a blog called RealClimate, which is run by leading climate scientists. Full disclosure on them, the domain is hosted by a PR firm, but they have never exercised editorial control over its contents, nor are the contributors paid for their time (more info on that here)

That disclosurey stuff out of the way, the link is here.