A common sense layman on global warming

Phillip Winn, over at the Boar's Head Tavern (a great religion discussion site, if you haven't discovered it yet), has posted a common sense layman's reaction to claims of global warming that is pretty close to my opinions.

I've especially wondered (for years--it was the first thought I had about this when they first heard of "global warming") about the placement of the temperature monitoring stations. Are they close to growing population centers? There are heat islands around cities, after all. What are the chances a nice backwoods weather station in 1865 is going to be closer to paved roads and strip malls today? How much does that bias its records?

Winn mentions station placement more generally and links to a blog entry on "how not to measure temperature." Love the photo on the link. What were they thinking?

Back from vacation

Sorry for the long delay, but it was a busy end to the summer. I'm back, now that school's started. Which actually means that I have less free time, but I'll be spending more of it blogging, for some strange reason.

And now...on with our show.

Astronomy and religion intersect.

Well, maybe not in those terms. But there's a nice astronomy/spaceflight comment on a religion blog I've gotten to like a lot, Boars Head Tavern. Joel Hunter likes this kind of stuff, he says, and he's posted a list of what he'd do if he were the NASA administrator.

One of my favorites:

* move mountains and work tirelessly and loudly to expedite the Constellation program–get Orion and the heavy lifter built–human mission to the moon no later than 2015 (c’mon, Kennedy got ‘em to do it in 7 years; we can, too)

Amen, brother! Let's get men back on the moon; it's been too long. I've never understood those astronomers (it's obviously not all of us!) who want to fight turf wars for robotic missions to the complete exclusion of manned space missions.