Coyote Blog

James Hansen, NASA climate scientist and lead singer in the climate apocalypse choir, responded to his  temperature data revisions a week ago:

What we have here is a case of dogged contrarians who
present results in ways intended to deceive the public into believing
that the changes have greater significance than reality. They aim to
make a mountain out of a mole hill. I believe that these people are not
stupid, instead they seek to create a brouhaha and muddy the waters in
the climate change story. They seem to know exactly what they are doing
and believe they can get away with it, because the public does not have
the time, inclination, and training to discern what is a significant
change with regard to the global warming issue.

The proclamations of the contrarians are a deceit

Um, whatever.  Remember, this is the man who had large errors in his data set, used by nearly every climate scientist in the world, for years, and which were only recently discovered by Steven McIntyre (whom Hansen refuses to even name in his letter).  These errors persisted for years because Mr. Hansen refuses to allow the software and algorithms he uses to "correct" and adjust the data to be scrutinized by anyone else.  He keeps critical methodologies that are paid for by we taxpayers a secret.  But it is his critics who are deceitful? 

In particular, he is bent out of shape that critics' first presented the new data as a revised ranking of the hottest years rather than as a revised line graph.  But it was Hansen and his folks who made a big deal in the press that 1998 was the hottest year in history.  It was he that originally went for this sound byte rather than the more meaningful and data-rich graph when communicating with the press.  But then he calls foul when his critics mimic his actions?  (Oh, and by the way, I showed it both ways).

Hansen has completely ignored the important lessons from this experience, while focusing like a laser on the trivial.  I explained in detail why this event mattered, and it was not mainly because of the new numbers.  In short, finding this mistake was pure accident -- it was a bit like inferring that the furniture in a house is uncomfortable solely by watching the posture of visitors leaving the house.  That's quite an deductive achievement, but how much more would you learn if the homeowners would actually let you in the house to inspect the furniture.  Maybe its ugly too.

So why does Hansen feel he should be able to shield himself from scrutiny and keep the details of his database adjustments and aggregation methodology a secret?  Because he thinks he is the king.    Just read his letter:

The contrarians will be remembered as court jesters. There is no point
to joust with court jesters. "¦ Court jesters serve as a distraction, a
distraction from usufruct. Usufruct is the matter that the captains
wish to deny, the matter that they do not want their children to know
about.

Why do we allow this kind of secrecy and spurning of scrutiny in science?  Is it tolerated in any other discipline?

Steve McIntyre has his response here.  McIntyre still has my favorite comment ever about Hansen and his gang:

While acolytes may call these guys "professionals", the process of
data adjustment is really a matter of statistics and even accounting.
In these fields, Hansen and Mann are not "professionals" - Mann
admitted this to the NAS panel explaining that he was "not a
statistician". As someone who has read their works closely, I do not
regard any of these people as "professional". Much of their reluctance
to provide source code for their methodology arises, in my opinion,
because the methods are essentially trivial and they derive a certain
satisfaction out of making things appear more complicated than they
are, a little like the Wizard of Oz. And like the Wizard of Oz, they
are not necessarily bad men, just not very good wizards.

Update:  If you have a minute, read Hansen's letter, and then ask yourself:  Does this sound like what I would expect of scientific discourse?  Does he sound more like a politician or a scientist?

I won't go back into all the details, but I have posted before about just how large the manual adjustments to temperature numbers are (the "noise") as compared to the magnitude of measured warming (the "signal").  This issue of manual temperature corrections is the real reason the NASA temperature restatements are important (not the absolute value of the restatement).

Here is a quick visual example.  Both charts below are from James Hansen and the GISS and are for the US only.  Both use basically the same temperature measurement network (the USHCN).  The one on the left was Hansen's version of US temperatures in 1999.  The one on the right he published in 2001.

The picture at the right is substantially different  than the one on the left.  Just look at 1932 and 1998.  Between the first and second chart, none of the underlying temperature measurements changed.  What changed  were the adjustments to the underlying measurements applied by the NOAA and by the GISS.  For some reason, temperatures after 1980 have been raised and temperatures in the middle of the century were lowered.

For scientists to apply a negative temperature adjustment to measurements, as they did for the early 1930's, it means they think there was some warming bias in 1932 that does not exist today.  When scientists raise current temperatures, they are saying there is some kind of cooling bias that exists today that did not exist in the 1930's.  Both of these adjustments are basically implying the same thing:  That temperature measurement was more biased upwards, say by asphalt and urbanization and poor sitings, in 1932 than they are today.  Does this make any freaking sense at all?

Of course, there may be some other bias at work here that I don't know about.  But I and everyone else in the world are forced to guess because the NOAA and the GISS insist on keeping their adjustment software and details a secret, and continue to resist outside review.

Read much more about this from Steve McIntyre.

I got a lot of traffic this weekend from folks interested in the US historical temperature restatement at NASA-GISS.  I wanted to share to final thoughts and also respond to a post at RealClimate.org (the #1 web cheerleader for catastrophic man-made global warming theory).

1. This restatement does not mean that the folks at GISS are necessarily wrong when they say the world has been warming over the last 20 years.  We know from the independent source of satellite measurements that the Northern Hemisphere has been warming (though not so much in the Southern Hemisphere).  However, surface temperature measurements, particularly as "corrected" and aggregated at the GISS, have always been much higher than the satellite readings.  (GISS vs Satellite)  This incident may start to give us an insight into how to bring those two sources into agreement. 
2. For years, Hansen's group at GISS, as well as other leading climate scientists such as Mann and Briffa (creators of historical temperature reconstructions) have flaunted the rules of science by holding the details of their methodologies and algorithm's secret, making full scrutiny impossible.  The best possible outcome of this incident will be if new pressure is brought to bear on these scientists to stop saying "trust me" and open their work to their peers for review.  This is particularly important for activities such as Hansen's temperature data base at GISS.  While measurement of temperature would seem straight forward, in actual fact the signal to noise ration is really low.  Upward "adjustments" and fudge factors added by Hansen to the actual readings dwarf measured temperature increases, such that, for example, most reported warming in the US is actually from these adjustments, not measured increases.
3. In a week when Newsweek chose to argue that climate skeptics need to shut up, this incident actually proves why two sides are needed for a quality scientific debate.  Hansen and his folks missed this Y2K bug because, as a man-made global warming cheerleader, he expected to see temperatures going up rapidly so he did not think to question the data.  Mr. Hansen is world-famous, is a friend of luminaries like Al Gore, gets grants in quarter million dollar chunks from various global warming believers.  All his outlook and his incentives made him want the higher temperatures to be true.  It took other people with different hypotheses about climate to see the recent temperature jump for what it was: An error.

The general response at RealClimate.org has been:  Nothing to see here, move along.

Among other incorrect stories going around are that the mistake was due
to a Y2K bug or that this had something to do with photographing
weather stations. Again, simply false.

I really, really don't think it matters exactly how the bug was found, except to the extent that RealClimate.org would like to rewrite history and convince everyone this was just a normal adjustment made by the GISS themselves rather than a mistake found by an outsider.  However, just for the record, the GISS, at least for now until they clean up history a bit, admits the bug was spotted by Steven McIntyre.  Whatever the bug turned out to be, McIntyre initially spotted it as a discontinuity that seemed to exist in GISS data around the year 2000.  He therefore hypothesized it was a Y2K bug, but he didn't know for sure because Hansen and the GISS keep all their code as a state secret.  And McIntyre himself says he became aware of the discontinuity during a series of posts that started from a picture of a weather station at Anthony Watts blog.  I know because I was part of the discussion, talking to these folks online in real time.  Here is McIntyre explaining it himself.

In sum, the post on RealClimate says:

Sum total of this change? A couple of hundredths of degrees in the US
rankings and no change in anything that could be considered
climatically important (specifically long term trends).

A bit of background - surface temperature readings have read higher than satellite readings of the troposphere, when the science of greenhouse gases says the opposite should be true.  Global warming hawks like Hansen and the GISS have pounded on the satellite numbers, investigating them 8 ways to Sunday, and have on a number of occasions trumpeted upward corrections to satellite numbers that are far smaller than these downward corrections to surface numbers. 

But yes, IF this is the the only mistake in the data, then this is a mostly correct statement from RealClimate.org..  However, here is my perspective:

• If a mistake of this magnitude can be found by outsiders without access to Hansen's algorithm's or computer code just by inspection of the resulting data, then what would we find if we could actually inspect the code?  And this Y2K bug is by no means the only problem.  I have pointed out several myself, including adjustments for urbanization and station siting that make no sense, and averaging in rather than dropping bad measurement locations. 
• If we know significant problems exist in the US temperature monitoring network, what would we find looking at China? Or Africa?  Or South America.  In the US and a few parts of Europe, we actually have a few temperature measurement points that were rural in 1900 and rural today.  But not one was measuring rural temps in these other continents 100 years ago.  All we have are temperature measurements in urban locations where we can only guess at how to adjust for the urbanization.  The problem in these locations, and why I say this is a low signal to noise ratio measurement, is that small percentage changes in our guesses for how much the urbanization correction should be make enormous changes (even to changing the sign) of historic temperature change measurements.

Here are my recommendations:

1. NOAA and GISS both need to release their detailed algorithms and computer software code for adjusting and aggregating USHCN and global temperature data.  Period.  There can be no argument.  Folks at RealClimate.org who believe that all is well should be begging for this to happen to shut up the skeptics.  The only possible reason for not releasing this scientific information that was created by government employees with taxpayer money is if there is something to hide.
2. The NOAA and GISS need to acknowledge that their assumptions of station quality in the USHCN network are too high, and that they need to incorporate actual documented station condition (as done at SurfaceStations.org) in their temperature aggregations and corrections.  In some cases, stations like Tucson need to just be thrown out of the USHCN.  Once the US is done, a similar effort needs to be undertaken on a global scale, and the effort needs to include people whose incentives and outlook are not driven by making temperatures read as high as possible.
3. This is the easiest of all.  Someone needs to do empirical work (not simulated, not on the computer, but with real instruments) understanding how various temperature station placements affect measurements.  For example, how do the readings of an instrument in an open rural field compare to an identical instrument surrounded by asphalt a few miles away?  These results can be used for step #2 above.  This is cheap, simple research a couple of graduate students could do, but climatologists all seem focused on building computer models rather than actually doing science.
4. Similar to #3, someone needs to do a definitive urban heat island study, to find out how much temperature readings are affected by urban heat, again to help correct in #2.  Again, I want real research here, with identical instruments placed in various locations and various radii from an urban center  (not goofy proxys like temperature vs. wind speed -- that's some scientist who wants to get a result without ever leaving his computer terminal).  Most studies have shown the number to be large, but a couple of recent studies show smaller effects, though now these studies are under attack not just for sloppiness but outright fabrication.  This can't be that hard to study, if people were willing to actually go into the field and take measurements.  The problem is everyone is trying to do this study with available data rather than by gathering new data.

Postscript:  The RealClimate post says:

However, there is clearly a latent and deeply felt wish in some sectors for the whole problem of global warming to be reduced to a statistical quirk or a mistake.

If catastrophic man-made global warming theory is correct, then man faces a tremendous lose-lose.  Either shut down growth, send us back to the 19th century, making us all substantially poorer and locking a billion people in Asia into poverty they are on the verge of escaping, or face catastrophic and devastating changes in the planet's weather.

Now take two people.  One in his heart really wants this theory not to be true, and hopes we don't have to face this horrible lose-lose tradeoff.  The other has a deeply felt wish that this theory is true, and hopes man does face this horrible future.  Which person do you like better?  And recognize, RealClimate is holding up the latter as the only moral man. 

Update:  Don't miss Steven McIntyre's take from the whole thing.  And McIntyre responds to Hansen here.

Editors-

Oh, the delicious irony.

As a skeptic of catastrophic man-made global warming, I was disturbed to see that Newsweek in its August 13, 2007 issue (The Truth About Denial)
had equated me with a Holocaust denier.  There are so many interesting
scientific issues involved in climate change that it was flabbergasting
to me that Newsweek would waste time on an extended ad hominem
attack against one side in a scientific debate.  I was particularly
amazed that Newsweek would accuse the side of the debate that is
outspent 1000:1 with being tainted by money.  This is roughly
equivalent to arguing that Mike Gravel's spending is corrupting the
2008 presidential election.

However, fate does indeed have a sense of humor.  Skeptics' efforts of the sort Newsweek derided just this week
forced NASA-Goddard (GISS) to revise downward recent US temperature
numbers due to a programming mistake that went unidentified for
years, in part because NASA's taxpayer-paid researchers refuse to
release their temperature adjustment and aggregation methodology to the
public for scrutiny.  The problem was found by a chain of events that
began with amateur volunteers and led ultimately to Steven McIntyre (he
of the Michael Mann hockey stick debunking) calling foul.

The particular irony is that the person who is in charge of this
database, and is responsible for the decision not to allow scientific
scrutiny of his methodologies, is none other than James Hansen, who
Newsweek held up as the shining example of scientific objectivity in
its article.  Newsweek should have been demanding that taxpayer-funded
institutions like NASA should be opening their research to full review,
but instead Newsweek chose to argue that Mr. Hansen should be shielded
from scrutiny.

Warren Meyer

This is really big news, and a fabulous example of why two-way scientific discourse is still valuable, in the same week that both Newsweek and Al Gore tried to make the case that climate skeptics were counter-productive and evil. 

Climate scientist Michael Mann (famous for the hockey stick chart) once made the statement that  the 1990's were the
warmest decade in a millennia and that "there is a 95 to 99% certainty
that 1998 was the hottest year in the last one thousand years." (By
the way, Mann now denies he ever made this claim, though you can watch him say
these exact words in the CBC documentary Global
Warming:  Doomsday Called Off).

Well, it turns out, according to the NASA GISS database, that 1998 was not even the hottest year of the last century.  This is because many temperatures from recent decades that appeared to show substantial warming have been revised downwards.  Here is how that happened (if you want to skip the story, make sure to look at the numbers at the bottom).

One of the most cited and used historical surface temperature databases is that of NASA/Goddard's GISS.  This is not some weird skeptics site.  It is considered one of the premier world temperature data bases, and it is maintained by anthropogenic global warming true believers.  It has consistently shown more warming than any other data base, and is thus a favorite source for folks like Al Gore.  These GISS readings in the US rely mainly on the US Historical Climate Network (USHCN) which is a network of about 1000 weather stations taking temperatures, a number of which have been in place for over 100 years.

Frequent readers will know that I have been a participant in an effort led by Anthony Watts at SurfaceStations.org to photo-document these temperature stations as an aid to scientists in evaluating the measurement quality of each station.  The effort has been eye-opening, as it has uncovered many very poor instrument sitings that would bias temperature measurements upwards, as I found in Tucson and Watts has documented numerous times on his blog.

One photo on Watt's blog got people talking - a station in MN with a huge jump in temperature about the same time some air conditioning units were installed nearby.   Others disagreed, and argued that such a jump could not be from the air conditioners, since a lot of the jump happened with winter temperatures when the AC was dormant.  Steve McIntyre, the Canadian statistician who helped to expose massive holes in Michael Mann's hockey stick methodology, looked into it.  After some poking around, he began to suspect that the GISS data base had a year 2000 bug in one of their data adjustments.

One of the interesting aspects of these temperature data bases is that they do not just use the raw temperature measurements from each station.  Both the NOAA (which maintains the USHCN stations) and the GISS apply many layers of adjustments, which I discussed here.  One of the purposes of Watt's project is to help educate climate scientists that many of the adjustments they make to the data back in the office does not necessarily represent the true condition of the temperature stations.  In particular, GISS adjustments imply instrument sitings are in more natural settings than they were in say 1905, an outrageous assumption on its face that is totally in conflict to the condition of the stations in Watt's data base.  Basically, surface temperature measurements have a low signal to noise ratio, and climate scientists have been overly casual about how they try to tease out the signal.

Anyway, McIntyre suspected that one of these adjustments had a bug, and had had this bug for years.  Unfortunately, it was hard to prove.  Why?  Well, that highlights one of the great travesties of climate science.  Government scientists using taxpayer money to develop the GISS temperature data base at taxpayer expense refuse to publicly release their temperature adjustment algorithms or software (In much the same way Michael Mann refused to release the details for scrutiny of his methodology behind the hockey stick).  Using the data, though, McIntyre made a compelling case that the GISS data base had systematic discontinuities that bore all the hallmarks of a software bug.

Today, the GISS admitted that McIntyre was correct, and has started to republish its data with the bug fixed.  And the numbers are changing a lot.  Before today, GISS would have said 1998 was the hottest year on record (Mann, remember, said with up to 99% certainty it was the hottest year in 1000 years) and that 2006 was the second hottest.  Well, no more.  Here are the new rankings for the 10 hottest years in the US, starting with #1:

1934, 1998, 1921, 2006, 1931, 1999, 1953, 1990, 1938, 1939

Three of the top 10 are in the last decade.  Four of the top ten are in the 1930's, before either the IPCC or the GISS really think man had any discernible impact on temperatures.  Here is the chart for all the years in the data base:

There are a number of things we need to remember:

• This is not the end but the beginning of the total reexamination that needs to occur of the USHCN and GISS data bases.  The poor correction for site location and urbanization are still huge issues that bias recent numbers upwards.  The GISS also has issues with how it aggregates multiple stations, apparently averaging known good stations with bad stations a process that by no means eliminates biases.  As a first step, we must demand that NOAA and GISS release their methodology and computer algorithms to the general public for detailed scrutiny by other scientists.
• The GISS today makes it clear that these adjustments only affect US data and do not change any of their conclusions about worldwide data.  But consider this:  For all of its faults, the US has the most robust historical climate network in the world.  If we have these problems, what would we find in the data from, say, China?  And the US and parts of Europe are the only major parts of the world that actually have 100 years of data at rural locations.  No one was measuring temperature reliably in rural China or Paraguay or the Congo in 1900.  That means much of the world is relying on urban temperature measurement points that have substantial biases from urban heat.
• All of these necessary revisions to surface temperatures will likely not make warming trends go away completely.  What it may do is bring the warming down to match the much lower satellite measured warming numbers we have, and will make current warming look more like past natural warming trends (e.g. early in this century) rather than a catastrophe created by man.  In my global warming book, I argue that future man-made warming probably will exist, but will be more like a half to one degree over the coming decades than the media-hyped numbers that are ten times higher.

So how is this possible?  How can the global warming numbers used in critical policy decisions and scientific models be so wrong with so basic of an error?  And how can this error have gone undetected for the better part of a decade?  The answer to the latter question is because the global warming  and climate community resist scrutiny.  This weeks Newsweek article and statements by Al Gore are basically aimed at suppressing any scientific criticism or challenge to global warming research.  That is why NASA can keep its temperature algorithms secret, with no outside complaint, something that would cause howls of protest in any other area of scientific inquiry.

As to the first question, I will leave the explanation to Mr. McIntyre:

While acolytes may call these guys "professionals", the process of
data adjustment is really a matter of statistics and even accounting.
In these fields, Hansen and Mann are not "professionals" - Mann
admitted this to the NAS panel explaining that he was "not a
statistician". As someone who has read their works closely, I do not
regard any of these people as "professional". Much of their reluctance
to provide source code for their methodology arises, in my opinion,
because the methods are essentially trivial and they derive a certain
satisfaction out of making things appear more complicated than they
are, a little like the Wizard of Oz. And like the Wizard of Oz, they
are not necessarily bad men, just not very good wizards.

For more, please see my Guide to Anthropogenic Global Warming or, if you have less time, my 60-second argument for why one should be skeptical of catastrophic man-made global warming theory.

Update: Nothing new, just thinking about this more, I cannot get over the irony that in the same week Newsweek makes the case that climate science is settled and there is no room for skepticism, skeptics discover a gaping hole and error in the global warming numbers.

Update #2:  I know people get upset when we criticize scientists.  I get a lot of "they are not biased, they just made a mistake."  Fine.  But I have zero sympathy for a group of scientists who refuse to let other scientists review their methodology, and then find that they have been making a dumb methodology mistake for years that has corrupted the data of nearly every climate study in the last decade.

Update #3:  I labeled this "breaking news," but don't expect to see it in the NY Times anytime soon.  We all know this is one of those asymmetric story lines, where if the opposite had occurred (ie things found to be even worse/warmer than thought) it would be on the front page immediately, but a lowered threat will never make the news.

Oh, and by he way.  This is GOOD news.  Though many won't treat it that way.  I understand this point fairly well because, in a somewhat parallel situation, I seem to be the last anti-war guy who treats progress in Iraq as good news.

Update #4: I should have mentioned that the hero of the Newsweek story is catastrophic man-made global warming cheerleader James Hansen, who runs the GISS and is most responsible for the database in question as well as the GISS policy not to release its temperature aggregation and adjustment methodologies.  From IBD, via CNN Money:

Newsweek portrays James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, as untainted by corporate bribery.

Hansen
was once profiled on CBS' "60 Minutes" as the "world's leading
researcher on global warming." Not mentioned by Newsweek was that
Hansen had acted as a consultant to Al Gore's slide-show presentations
on global warming, that he had endorsed John Kerry for president, and
had received a $250,000 grant from the foundation headed by Teresa
Heinz Kerry.

Update #5: My letter to the editor at Newsweek.  For those worried that this is some weird skeptic's fevered dream, Hansen and company kind of sort of recognize the error in the first paragraph under background here.  Their US temperature chart with what appears is the revised data is here.

Update #6: Several posts are calling this a "scandal."  It is not a scandal.  It is a mistake from which we should draw two lessons:

1. We always need to have people of opposing opinions looking at a problem.  Man-made global warming hawks expected to see a lot of warming after the year 2000, so they never questioned the numbers.  It took folks with different hypotheses about climate to see the jump in the numbers for what it was - a programming error.
2. Climate scientists are going to have to get over their need to hold their adjustments, formulas, algorithms and software secret.  It's just not how science is done.  James Hansen saying "trust me, the numbers are right, I don't need to tell you how I got them" reminds me of the mathematician Fermat saying he had a proof of his last theorem, but it wouldn't fit in the margin.  How many man-hours of genius mathematicians was wasted because Fermat refused to show his proof (which was most likely wrong, given how the theorem was eventually proved).

Final Update:  Some parting thoughts, and recommendations, here.

I have always hated the inevitable posturing during the party presidential conventions that the newly selected vice-presidential candidate would have unprecedented access to the president and that the presidential candidate would reinvent the office of the vice-presidency to take advantage of his running mate's unique skills, blah blah.  Kennedy giving NASA to Johnson not-withstanding, this is mostly face-saving for the vice-presidential candidate, since he or she has typically just been relegated to an appendage of the person they were very recently running against.  Also, there just isn't any Constitutional role for the vice-president short of breaking ties in the Senate and fogging a mirror in case the President dies.

Say what you will about the Bush White House, but I can pretty much gaurantee we are not going to hear much this election cycle about powerful and active future vice-presidents.

One of the difficulties that climate scientists face is that it is not that easy to come up with a single global temperature.  Before satellites, with limited measurement points and 75% of the world under water, global temperature is not much more than a guess.  With satellites, the job is easier but not wholly straight-forward.

Spencer and Christy have been using NASA data for a while to try to compute a global temperature, and have released new results  (the top graph is the whole earth, the second is the northern hemisphere, the third is the southern hemisphere):

The first oddity is one that the climate community struggles with but downplays in public.  It is that increases in these tropospheric measurements should be, if the theory of CO2-based anthropogenic global warming is correct, higher than temperature increases observed on the ground.  In fact, just the opposite is true.  Why ground temperatures increases should be higher than troposphere increases is something no explained by the standard greenhouse models (but is explained by alternatives).

The second oddity is the difference between the northern and southern hemispheres.  As you can observe, there really has not been any warming in the last decades in the south.  Why should that be?  One might assume it is because CO2 is produced mainly in the northern hemisphere, but my understanding is that scientists a while back determined that there was incredibly good mixing in the atmosphere and that CO2 concentrations don't vary that much around the globe.  I know that the northern hemisphere tends to have more temperature variability at the ground, since it has more land and land heats and cools faster than over the sea, but I am not sure this is sufficient to explain the difference.

I am with TJIC when he says that while colonizing space is a cool thing to do, it doesn't justify government coercion.

For a while now, I have been wanting to post on some of my positions that have changed since I was 18, as I have morphed from a secular conservative to a full fledged libertarian anarcho-capitalist.   One such issue is on space.  I used to be a supporter of government space programs (it was hard not to be such, watching moon landings and Tang commercials in my formative years).  My logic was that the government wastes trillions on all kind of stupid stuff, and the space program was kind of interesting.  I supported it as one of the government's least-bad things.

Unfortunately, I have realized that if you add up every person in the United States's list of least-bad government programs you get ... the totality of the US budget.  Each program has a supporter that thinks that program is a kind of cool exception in the morass of government waste.  I have also, by the way, come to the conclusion that the space program is a direction-less mess, and is not really as interesting as I once thought it was.  The planetary probes are still cool (and probably have the most bang for the buck) but the ISS just seems like a UN building in space and the current plans for Moon and Mars missions appear to be NASA full-employment programs rather than realistic missions.

I find these NASA animated zooms from space down to a single building or landmark to be totally addictive.

Courtesy of Nature Noted, comes this article on two enormous blocks of ice set to collide in the next week in Antarctica.

As the Nasa site linked above puts it:

It is an event so large that the best seat in the house is in space: a massive iceberg is on a collision course with a floating glacier near the McMurdo Research Station in Antarctica. NASA satellites have witnessed the 100-mile-long B-15A iceberg moving steadily towards the Drygalski Ice Tongue. Though the iceberg's pace has slowed in recent days, NASA scientists expect a collision to occur no later than January 15, 2005.