From the Vancouver Sun, “Little Ocean Tattletales Fail to Find Right Facts”:
They drift along in the worlds’ oceans at a depth of 2,000 metres — more than a mile down — constantly monitoring the temperature, salinity, pressure and velocity of the upper oceans.
Then, about once every 10 days, a bladder on the outside of these buoys inflates and raises them slowly to the surface, gathering data about each strata of seawater they pass through.
After an upward journey of nearly six hours, the Argo monitors bob on the waves while an onboard transmitter sends their information to a satellite that in turn retransmits it to several land-based research computers where it may be accessed by anyone who wishes to see it.
These 3,000 yellow sentinels — about the size and shape of a large fencepost — free-float the world’s oceans, season in and season out, surfacing between 30 and 40 times a year, disgorging their findings, then submerging again for another fact-finding voyage.
It’s fascinating to watch their progress online. (The URLs are too complex to reproduce here, but Google “Argo Buoy Movement” or “Argo Float Animation,” and you will be directed to the links.)
[Here's a good one. Below is a still from one of these movies, so you can get an idea of just how well these little guys are surveying the ocean. -- djm]
Still from a NASA animation showing tracks of free-floating oceanographic buoys.
When they were first deployed in 2003, the Argos were hailed for their ability to collect information on ocean conditions more precisely, at more places and greater depths and in more conditions than ever before.
No longer would scientists have to rely on measurements mostly at the surface from older scientific buoys or inconsistent shipboard monitors.
So why are some scientists now beginning to question the buoys’ findings? Because in five years the little blighters have failed to detect any global warming. They are not reinforcing the scientific orthodoxy of the day, namely that man is causing the planet to warm dangerously. They are not proving the predetermined conclusions of their human masters. Therefore they, and not their masters’ hypotheses, must be wrong.
In fact, “there has been a very slight cooling,” according to a U.S. National Public Radio (NPR) interview with Josh Willis at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a scientist who keeps close watch on the Argo findings.
I’d quote the whole thing, but the Sun deserves your traffic, so go read the whole thing.
update:
Cold Fury calls out global warming: “It ain’t science, it’s religion.”
The people pushing the GW agenda don’t give a good goddamn about Mother Earth. They want to return us all to a pre-industrial culture, with us as dirty sweaty agrarian peasants and them as the exalted overlords, wallowing in the rotting corpse of the richest, most powerful society the world has ever seen. The religion is all about making us accept it by making us think we’re saving ourselves.
They will never accept the limits they want to impose on us.
Damn straight, Al Gore and Barack Obama are only the most visible of the They.
NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio rocks,. and I mean hard. I’m going to be spending more time there than I have, I can tell. Just… damn!
Here’s what I found by just clicking on the “Next” link on the Argo page:
This is a map of “relative sea level around the Earth“. Red indicates highs, blue lows.
Here’s the trick: this map shows a variation of 500 mm above and below average. The total range, highest to lowest, is one meter. That’s right, about a yard on a globe 8000 miles in diameter, measuring a surface covered with waves well over one meter high.
There is nothing, nothing, we cannot know about our world if we choose to find out.
And if this is a firehose, just wait: It’s going to become a Niagra.
[Credit for both images to NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio.]
[Link to Sun via Dan at Protein Wisdom.]
