On that Super El Nino Season

Yesterday, September 10th, was the peak of the Northern Hemisphere's hurricane season, I generally always run a post about that. So far this year, it has been very quiet, but I didn't realize it was this quiet until I saw this headline from Watts Up With That.  

There have been no hurricanes in the Atlantic — Yet! Making 2026 the quietest since satellite tracking began in 1966

Sure enough, I went to the National Hurricane Center (one of my everyday visits) and found this map.

Pretty much since last spring, the weather sites have been saying this year's El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycle was looking to be a very strong or even "Super" El Nino. As soon as I heard that, my memory fired on the other years we've had that were the El Nino side of the El Nino/La Nina cycle. In El Nino seasons, the north Atlantic storms tend to either be weaker or they stay away from Florida. Many re-curve out to the North Atlantic farther east than during La Nina years, even east of the Bahamas. I was looking forward to it. The fear mongering about how bad a Super El Nino is just seemed like the regular "if it bleeds it leads" Golden Law of the TV news.

You may have heard that Hawaii is having a busier hurricane season than usual. 

There are currently THREE hurricanes in the Pacific Ocean: Lowell, Karina, and Marie. The warming El Niño trend in the Pacific is increasing storm activity there while the Atlantic remains calm. 

That's the other side of the story.  They're not having a La Nina out there - that name applies to both the tropical Atlantic and Pacific waters. We're having very unusual conditions here, and I assume they're having very unusual conditions there. It's just that we're having better conditions, while they're having worse. 

The number of storms per 100 years - plot from 2024. As you can see, September 10th is the peak but the curve is a bit higher on the "later than" (right) side than earlier. Our lack of storms so far this year isn't an excuse for all my fellow Floridians to not keep an eye out for things that could develop. Hurricane season lasts until the end of November ("close enough" to Dec 1 on this graph) and what has happened so far this year has little to nothing to do with what's coming in the second half of the season. We have had storms in November before. 

To borrow someone's quote and beat it about the head and shoulders, "the season's not over until it's over." Keep your eyes open and enjoy the quiet times we're having.

The first report on Artemis II's heat shield is out

Going into the Artemis II mission last spring, probably the biggest concern we'd hear about was the heat shield issues that were seen on the unmanned Artemis I mission back in late 2022. Probably the best set of pictures I've got were posted in January of this year. The heat shield on an Orion capsule uses the ablative technique that has been used since the early days of spaceflight; the base of the capsule is coated with an ablative material called Avcoat that's supposed to essentially disintegrate slowly and in a controlled way. Instead, large chunks were missing. Lots of chunks. Back when the capsule was recovered, a single picture taken by a recovery diver was released. The heat shield was obviously much, much better than Artemis I's shield.

The Artemis 2 Orion heat shield underwater after splashdown on April 10, 2026. (Image credit: U.S. Navy) Some image processing by me to bring up the overall brightness of the image and get more of the shield to show up.

A report on the detailed examination performed on the Artemis II heat shield was released and reported on today. 

After the Artemis I mission in 2022, there were more than 100 char loss sites observed across the dish-shaped heat shield at the base of Orion, some of which were more than an inch deep. On the Artemis II heat shield, he said, there were approximately nine char loss sites observed. “So it was a big improvement,” said Hill, former director of Mission Operations at NASA.
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At the base of Orion are 186 blocks of a material called Avcoat; they are individually attached to provide a protective layer that allows the spacecraft to survive the heating of atmospheric reentry. Analysis after the Artemis I mission found that this Avcoat material was “impermeable,” essentially meaning it could not breathe. During reentry, gases became trapped in the heat shield, leading to cracking.

After considering several options, including swapping the heat shield out for a newer one with more permeable Avcoat, NASA decided instead to change Orion’s reentry profile. For Artemis II, it would return through Earth’s atmosphere at a steeper angle, spending fewer minutes in the environment where this outgassing occurred during Artemis I.

A quote about engineering I was told while I was still in school, and that I've stated here before, is that "engineering is the art of compromise" - it's practically always the case that when you improve the performance of something that you're struggling to improve, you make something else worse. The final design you end with is better at the one characteristic that you worked to change but something you weren't trying to improve got worse. In this case, the performance of the heat shield was remarkably better but "the new reentry profile reduced the vehicle’s “downrange” capability from 4,800 nautical miles to 1,775 miles. Downrange capability is the distance a spacecraft can travel, relative to the Earth’s surface, from the point of atmospheric reentry." 

Does reducing the downrange capability to less than 40% of what it started out as matter? It's not as good as it was, so that has to be considered differently for every mission. The trade is that reduction in downrange capability reduced the number of missing chunks from 100 to 9.

An interesting side note here is that this was talked about at a meeting of NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel and let's just say they haven't exactly always been fanboys of NASA management.  

Toward the end of the safety panel’s meeting on Monday, a few members made some striking comments about their experiences working with NASA this year. For long-time listeners to meetings of the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, which is distinctly independent from NASA and tasked with identifying safety issues, these were eye-opening statements.

In describing the panel’s deliberations during its quarterly meeting, Hill said, “Words like impressive, stunning, and shocking were all brought up about the progress that the agency has made in the last year, and even more rapidly just in the last four months.”

The bottom line here is that Panel's members and the other people they interviewed seem convinced the improvement is all due to Jared Isaacman, and they praise him for it. 

“In an empowering or enabling way, the changes that we are hearing in the leadership voice at the very top of the agency, and then down into the agency, are aligning the team on a coherent strategy and then taking the steps to execute on that strategy,” Hill said. “Again, it’s nothing short of impressive, and it’s directly related to recommendations we’ve had open for a number of years.” 

Some background on the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

I've mentioned a couple of times that NASA's next big telescope, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is launching Sunday morning on a Falcon Heavy at 7:26AM EDT, but I suppose I was quietly assuming that everyone has an idea about what that telescope is. 

I've been covering the NGRST since I first heard of it in February of 2022, and I thought maybe the good thing to do would be repost important parts of what I've covered. Rather than just post links to older posts, I'll "cut and paste" the important stuff.  

From NASA's Next Big Space Telescope 

I stumbled across a story today of an instrument that I should have known about but that had undergone a name change.  It was first referred to as the WFIRST, Wide Field Infra Red Space Telescope, a long but descriptive name for its mission.  It was recently renamed the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope by NASA; the name pays tribute to the late NASA executive and first Chief Astronomer who was one of the driving forces in getting the Hubble Space Telescope program through its hurdles.  

The telescope was named in a poll of astronomers as the next most important space telescope behind the James Webb Space Telescope.  Why?  The old name said wide field and that's the telescope's feature. 

That graphic gives the impression that the NGRST can capture 2,000 square degrees of sky in one shot, compared to 1.6 square degrees from the Hubble Space Telescope.  That's not quite right.  The NGRST's field of 2,000 degrees divided by the 1.6 of the HST says NGRST is 1,250 times bigger.  The NGRST website's FAQ says it's field of view is 100 times larger:

It has a primary mirror that is 2.4 meters in diameter (7.9 feet), and is the same size as the Hubble Space Telescope's primary mirror. The mirror has the same sensitivity as Hubble’s primary mirror but will only be one fifth the weight, showcasing an advancement in telescope technology. It will have the sensitivity and resolution comparable to Hubble, but with a field of view 100 times larger, combining excellent image quality with survey power.

Like the JWST, the NGRST will be sent to orbit around the L2 Lagrange point, about 930,000 miles away from earth in the direction radially away from Earth.  The mission is focused on the search for dark matter, dark energy and exoplanets, and will only carry two instruments:

The Roman Space Telescope will have two instruments, the Wide Field Instrument (WFI) and the Coronagraph Instrument (CGI) technology demonstration. The WFI provides wide field imaging and spectroscopy, with performance characteristics optimized for cosmology and exoplanet surveys. The CGI provides high contrast imaging and spectroscopy for observations of exoplanets and debris disks. The WFI is a 288-megapixel multi-band near-infrared camera, providing a sharpness of images comparable to that achieved by the Hubble Space Telescope over a 0.28 square degree field of view, 100 times larger than that of Hubble. The Coronagraphic Instrument is a high-contrast, small field of view camera and spectrometer covering visible and near-infrared wavelengths using novel starlight-suppression technology.

Rendering of NGRST, from NASA

Let me bounce back to the present to throw in that the one thing that stood out to me in that first article was that it said, "target date for launch is currently set for May of '27 and they claim to be on schedule" and, of course, August of '26 is pretty far ahead of "on schedule" when they said it would be ready to fly by May of '27. Fortuitously, they had to schedule the launch on the Falcon Heavy because when they were getting bids, nothing else was available. I've always thought that if you called Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX CEO, to arrange a launch like this, you'd give her all the details and she'd come back with something like "gee, it's too big for a Falcon 9... how about next month?" or something that knocked your socks off like that. 

Moving up to a recent post from this April, The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is complete

Here's where it gets wild. The September launch for the NGRST is eight months ahead of schedule, and under budget. When's the last time you heard something like that? I'm not sure I ever have.

According to NASA, Roman's primary mirror measures about 7.9 feet (2.4 meters) wide, which is similar to Hubble's. However, Roman has the ability to take images that capture a patch of the sky at least 100 times larger than Hubble can.

"Its surveying capabilities are over 1,000 times faster than Hubble, and can chart 200 times more sky in a single image," NASA administrator Jared Isaacman said during the conference. "What would take Hubble 2,000 years to process, Roman can do in a year — the images it captures will be so large there is not a screen in existence large enough to show them."

To put that into context, over its approximately 35 years of service so far, Hubble has gathered about 400 terabytes of data; once fully operational at its workstation in space, Roman should be able to create 500 terabytes of data per year.

The collection of different space telescopes; the Hubble, James Webb, and more, allow ground based astronomers to choose the right instrument for the objects they want to study in the sky.

Compared to the JWST, Roman's images — taken with its aptly named Wide Field Instrument (WFI) — will be 50 times wider but more shallow, because Roman doesn't need to access the deep universe the way the JWST does. As we discussed, it can't see infrared like the JWST can and therefore would be wasted in looking too far back.

More specifically, WFI is composed of a 300-megapixel visible-to-near-infrared imaging camera and slitless spectrometer (a special tool that allows scientists to capture light dispersion of objects in a field of view). But there is something uniquely special about that shallow, panoramic view.

The wide and shallow field will be well suited to surveying space, not getting too much information from things that it can't look closer at. 

They can just survey and hope to find a cool lead to zoom in on. This offers Roman the ability to catch events that transpire very quickly, such as fast radio bursts, and increases the chances that scientists can witness remarkable supernovas, colliding neutron stars and other easy-to-miss phenomena right as they happen.

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Well, as the kids used to say, whoomp there it is. I think that's more science on the NGRST than you're going to get anywhere else.

Solar Cycle 25 Update - a bit late

I've been forgetting to update the solar cycle and solar-terrestrial indices for a while. I mean I last updated this last December 29 and that update was even later than this.  

A highlight I've posted on solar cycle updates has been the "Last solar cycles comparison" from Space Weather News, and produced by a group called solen.info. NOTE: the plot is at the first link, not the second (solen.info). Here is the current plot:

It's pretty obvious that cycle 25, 2nd from the bottom (that is, 2nd weakest), peaked a little before the 60 months after cycle start line and the current reading is vertically between cycle 24 (weakest in the last hundred years) and cycle 22 (the black curve) which was in 1986-1996. What's not quite as obvious at first glance is the highest Smoothed Sunspot Numbers (SSNs) of cycle 25 are well above cycle 24, the previous cycle, on the bottom everywhere, but what you can't see on this graph is that cycle 24 had the lowest SSNs in the last hundred years, so cycle 25 has been quite a bit more active than 24 but that's just not saying much. "Hey, we're not the worst cycle in a hundred years!" 

Let's look at Cycle 25's raw data, note the first two vertical lines on the left (2018 and 2020) are still cycle 24:

You'll notice that the absolute peak of cycle 25 occurred during 2024. There were some days with very high solar flux in '24: the highest peak was in August as shown here: each black dot is one month. That peak was a highlight in the last post because that was around the time that I got closer to hearing Alaska on 6m as I ever have. Everything I've ever heard about working Alaska from guys around here is it's pretty much a "once in a lifetime" thing. During that "band opening" I never copied a single letter from Alaska, but a friend in Tennessee copied one 15 second transmission from the Alaskan.

Is there a chance of hearing Alaska down here again in what's left of cycle 25? My guess is that if the current trend holds, almost a smaller and mirror image of cycle 21, then no. The only thing that I think would help the chance of getting Alaska is for a second peak of SSN, equal to or stronger than the previous peak forms. A second peak would completely wipe out the right side (prediction) of the SSN for the rest of the cycle. The only hope would be that the SSN in the time I heard Alaska was well after that peak of the cycle in August. The November/December time frame I heard Alaska in is that short little straight line two dots after the August peak.

The Falcon 9 upper stage hit the moon - now the race starts

For the last several days, the web has been abuzz with talk about the Falcon 9 upper stage that was expected to crash into the moon. Much of the buzz has been wrong, or just trying to raise awareness (and funds), such as referring to it as a Falcon 9 rocket, when I think we all know that's just not how F9s work. The booster landed when this upper stage was making orbit (or about 8 minutes after liftoff, if you prefer). 

No, this was just the upper stage of the Falcon 9 that launched two private landers to the moon — Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost and Tokyo-based ispace's Resilience — launched to a high, moon-crossing Earth orbit in January 2025. The Falcon used up enough fuel that there wasn't enough to perform the usual maneuver to return to Earth. 

So the company performed a different maneuver to take care of this upper stage, Julianna Scheiman, director of NASA science and Dragon programs at SpaceX, said during a press conference on Aug. 3.

"For high-energy missions, we need to perform a different maneuver to ensure the second stage itself is safe per the appropriate rules and regulations, and so we did that here," she said.

The problem was reality had some other things in mind.

"What has happened is, essentially, a mixture of solar activity and gravity forces have put it on a path towards the moon," Scheiman said. 

The upper stage slammed into the moon at 2:35 a.m. EDT (0635 UTC). Because an exact impact spot wasn't known, they need to work with various other agencies to attempt to learn more, even if just before and after photos of the impact area. 

"NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and NASA’s ShadowCam instrument on the Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter will look for opportunities to capture before‑and‑after imagery of the impact site," NASA spokesperson Rob Garner, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, told Space.com. "Image availability depends on several factors, including the impact location, lighting conditions, and when each spacecraft’s orbit next carries it over the area, which may take a few days to receive any imagery." 

Today's impact occurred on the sunlit side of the moon, reducing chances of hobbyist observers seeing anything. A quick search for news like that turned up nothing. So far the only observatory that claims to be sure they saw the impact is the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, and reported detections of a lunar plume from the impact.

"We can safely say that we measured a response from the rocket stage impact as a sodium and lithium gas plume a few 10’s of kilometers in size lasting between 5 and 10 minutes after impact," Carl Schmidt told Inside Outer Space's Leonard David.

I'm only vaguely aware of what to expect from a measurement to detect the minerals in the dust column rising from the impact, but the Lowell Observatory provides this photo. I see this as showing two different frequency (or color) lights for sodium and one for lithium. This looks like what I'd expect.

Detections by the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, show evidence of a plume on the moon caused by the impact of a SpaceX rocket on Aug. 5, 2026. (Image credit: Carl Schmidt/Lowell Observatory)

A look at FT-13's heat shield by NASA Expert

The week is off to a slow start with most talk still about Starship's FT-13 last Friday, with one or two smaller, less-interesting (at least to me) stories. The big story about FT-13 is about the heat shield efforts the company has been going through, and a conversation with a former NASA engineer who studied heat shield materials for nearly four decades at NASA Ames Research Center. This expert warns that the current Starship heat shield tech is a “dead end” for rapid reuse. Even video channel Alpha Tech did a discussion that touched on the subject. 

From the quote about, "nearly four decades at NASA", I have to assume that was starting before the shuttles flew for the first time, so (in rough numbers) 1975 until 2015. The design work was done (or declared that way) by the late '70s, and my impression is they may have done some monitoring of the shuttle heat shields but this wasn't like "continuous process improvement" as much as it was "keeping an eye on things." 

So what's up? Why? A point both Alpha Tech's video and Ars Technica's article make is the Shuttles had an aluminum chassis that the heat shield was mounted on. SpaceX uses stainless steel, but not a conventional austenitic alloy like 304. That means that they developed their own alloy with improved properties (including cost!) over the common, COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) alloys. This source says SpaceX patented it as 30x. (Do I need to mention that Musk seems to like the letter X in product and business names?) 

The powerful advantage to using stainless steel instead of something like the aluminum alloys the Space Shuttles used is a much higher tolerance for heat. On top of that, it's better at the cryogenic temperatures of the fuels and oxidizers the ship uses. 

“Starship’s current thermal protection system is a dead-end for all missions that require full and rapid reusability,” Dan Rasky, a former NASA engineer who studied heat shield materials for nearly four decades at NASA Ames Research Center, told Ars. Rasky is credible: He co-invented PICA, the material used for Crew Dragon’s heat shield.

NASA confronted this same issue half a century ago during development of the Space Shuttle, which used thousands of lightweight ceramic tiles to insulate the vehicle’s aluminum structure. Although the tiles worked fairly well, the US space agency was never able to crack the code on “rapid” reuse. Each tile required post-flight inspections, so reuse of Space Shuttle orbiters remained expensive and time-consuming.
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However, according to a new analysis by Rasky and two other space industry officials, former NASA astronaut Charles Camarda and the head of the NASA transition team for the Trump-Vance White House, Charles Miller, significant challenges remain for rapidly reusing Starship.

They give us a handy photo to concentrate on. Notice that whitish streaks seem to diverge from edges and corners (points) on the hexagonal tiles. Seams or boundaries between the tiles. That implies that it's the super hot gas from the upper atmosphere, melting and pushing out material from under the tiles. SpaceX has shown in their own videos that they put something like a white plastic foam under the tiles. 

A close-up of Starship's heat shield after it landed in the Indian Ocean last week. Credit: SpaceX

The problem is that, with the signs of damage, such a heat shield would appear to require a fair amount of inspection and refurbishment before another launch. In other words, SpaceX has a ways to go to reach “full and rapid” reuse of Starship. “Full” means reusing both the booster and the Starship upper stage, and “rapid” reuse means turning each Starship around in days or weeks, instead of months, at considerable expense.

Here, the person that's saying this is completely missing the story. “Full rapid reuse” doesn't mean landing and flying again “in days or weeks” to Elon and crew. It means taking off again in a few hours. More like a commercial jet than a spaceship. 

On various podcasts and X social media postings, SpaceX founder Elon Musk has repeatedly stated that solving the reusable heat shield problem is one of the toughest problems the company faces. Back in February on a podcast with Dwarkesh Patel, Musk expounded on this, saying a reusable heat shield is “the biggest problem that remains” for Starship. “If you want to be able to land it, refill propellant, and fly again, you can’t do this laborious inspection of 40,000 tiles type of thing,” he said.

The Ars article reduces this down to the reasonable conclusion that Starship's heat shield will likely be good enough to deploy the third generation Starlink constellation like the ones FT-13 carried to orbit. But the experts are concerned that it will be unable to hit the high flight rate needed, with several hundred to thousands of low-cost launches annually, for large settlements on the Moon and Mars, orbital data centers, or large-scale space-based solar power. 

This sounds like the kind of "advancing the art and science of spaceflight" that we think NASA could help with, but the problem with that is that NASA dropped this kind of research decades ago. 

The experts noted that NASA has not made substantial investments in thermal protection research for vehicles entering from low-Earth orbit (speeds of Mach 25) for three decades. The underlying technologies on Starship, they note, are all based on work done for the space shuttle, National Aerospace Plane, or X-33 programs. No one today, they said, is seriously investing in new, advanced thermal materials for orbital reentry. 

I think that SpaceX has shown that they might be the best place to go for this sort of development. I've seen video clips where Elon discussed how they've altered the recipe for the heat shield tiles and gotten better performance. Perhaps they just haven't gone far enough down that adventure. Or perhaps it's something else entirely. Maybe instead of the white plastic foam sheet they have the tiles mounted on, perhaps they need a layer of something else there. Another tile? In other words, a sandwich of tile, foam, tile, and foam? 

I may have just hit the point where I say, "don't launch that"

It's a first. Someone wants to do a wide-impact study in space and I may have just hit the first time I've ever wanted to say, "I don't think that's a good idea." Maybe one test flight, one experiment, but I'm not ready to say "sounds great! Go for it!" Neither am I ready to go sign up to protest their launches. 

The story appeared in several places today such as SpaceWeather.com that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) had recently granted approval to a startup company to orbit a test mirror that's intended to reflect sunlight to parts of the world that going through their night. 

Last week, the FCC authorized Reflect Orbital Inc. to launch a huge space mirror named “Eärendil-1.” From an orbit about 625 km high, it will cast a moving, 5-km-wide patch of light onto the Earth about as bright as a full Moon. Later, the company could combine beams from multiple satellites to create much brighter spotlights. Reflect Orbital wants to launch 50,000 more by 2035, selling sunlight-on-demand to solar farms, construction sites and search-and-rescue teams. 

In case you missed it, astronomers - both hobbyists and professionals - have been complaining about not being able to take time exposures without catching reflections from satellites pretty much since SpaceX started launching Starlinks. Those complaints have been blamed on them, but Starlink satellites aren't the same size as that 50,000 mirror constellation that Reflect Orbital is talking about doing (Orbital Radar says there aren't even 10,000 Starlink satellites in use today - there are 9,532) - and neither are the Starlink satellites as big as those mirrors that Reflect Orbital is proposing. 

An artist's concept of sunlight beamed down from orbit. Bats, fireflies, and other creatures of the night could find their darkness interrupted by roving spots of artificial sunlight. Image credit: SpaceWeather.com

If Reflect Orbital's plan is realized, it could be calamitous not only for astronomy but also for the natural world as a whole. Nocturnal animals and night-blooming plants, tuned by evolution to the rhythm of day and night, would suddenly find their darkness interrupted by moving pools of redirected sunlight. Small favors? Reflect Orbital says the light will not be bright enough to start fires.

The FCC acknowledged that there are concerns about this but replied with a limp, "... optical astronomy and the environment lie largely outside their jurisdiction. They can only regulate the project's use of radio signals." Apparently, no US agency regulates how bright a satellite may shine. The EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) is known for ruling with intelligence and accuracy about as often as "pigs will fly and the Earth will fry" to borrow a line (Snookeroo), so I'd hate to get them involved. 

One of the odd aspects to this is the fact that they're reflecting sunlight down. I'd be less concerned about lasers because they're monochromatic, and I'd be rather surprised if as many "nocturnal animals and night-blooming plants" reacted to a monochromatic laser as would react to reflected sunlight. 

Miami-based company launches a nuclear reactor on Transporter-17

During the talk about the Transporter-17 mission out of Vandenberg SFB yesterday, what was probably the most technically interesting payload on the Rideshare mission wasn't mentioned at all. 

The satellite from Miami-based City Labs is named BOHR, short for Betavoltaic Orbital High-Reliability, and it launched on a SpaceX rideshare mission Tuesday alongside 80 other payloads. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket released the BOHR satellite into an orbit between 350 and 400 miles (nearly 600 km) in altitude. 

City Labs bills the BOHR mission as “the world’s first commercial nuclear-powered satellite and first nuclear CubeSat.” CubeSats are modest in scale, and images released by City Labs suggest BOHR is built on a “1U” CubeSat platform, a cubical design measuring about the same size as a softball. BOHR’s power source is a nuclear betavoltaic battery that generates electricity from the decay of tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen.

It probably goes without saying that City Labs is rather proud of BOHR and talks it up by calling it “a historic step for commercial nuclear power in space” and  “BOHR demonstrates that safe, compact, and regulatory-approved nuclear power systems are ready for routine commercial deployment. This capability enables persistent, always-on payload operations that are not constrained by sunlight or battery life,” to quote Peter Cabauy, CEO of City Labs, in a statement. 

While this photo doesn't look to be as small as a softball, this the BOHR test cubesat system.

This is a test mission for City Labs, who plan to use the experimental NanoTritium power generator in demonstration mode to supply electricity to a payload onboard the BOHR CubeSat. 

The spacecraft itself uses conventional solar power for regular operations, the company said. Betavoltaic batteries are best suited for low-power applications that require a reliable, long-duration source of electricity. These use cases include remote terrestrial sensors—such as in undersea or polar locations—and instrumentation for secure communications. City Labs is also studying the use of its NanoTritium technology to power implantable medical devices. 

Those of us who live near the Cape have seen protestors for anything that can be considered nuclear powered and the BOHR module went through all the tests to clear it for flight. It's important to point out that the company’s betavoltaic power systems are small—in the nanowatt to microwatt range—far short of the electricity required to power a smartphone, much less a large spacecraft or a Moon base. 

BOHR was the first commercial nuclear mission to pass through the Federal Aviation Administration’s new nuclear launch approval process. The FAA authorized City Labs to launch the BOHR mission last September.

[T]he BOHR satellite carries just a tiny amount of radioactive material, and the tritium isotope decays more quickly than plutonium or uranium. It’s also less toxic than other well-known nuclear fuels. “Tritium emits a weak form of radiation, a low-energy beta particle similar to an electron. The tritium radiation does not travel very far in air and cannot penetrate the skin,” the Nuclear Regulatory Commission says on its website.

The small amount of power the BOHR reactor can generate underlines the idea that this must be the first step in the development of flight-rated reactors that produce orders of magnitude more power than this one - millions to billions of times more power. How big those steps can be point toward how long it will be before reactors capable of generating usable numbers of watts can be used.

It's a Pathfinder for future reactor systems that will be tested and used in space. 

'Acceleration without fuel' - revolutionary thruster aces first tests on orbit

News broke on Space.com this afternoon about successful tests of the first of its kind thruster that uses superconducting magnets to move a satellite in space. 

Zenno Astronautics, a spin-off from the University of Auckland, has flown its new "Supertorquer" system on the Mira satellite built by California-based start-up Impulse Space. The tests began shortly after Mira's launch in November last year aboard the SpaceX Transporter 12 mission and saw the shoebox-size device perform with flying colors, Zenno Astronautics CEO and founder Max Arshavsky, told Space.com.

Superconducting magnetics can convert solar energy input directly into momentum in space, by interacting with the Earth's magnetic field, so the solar energy input takes the place of liquid fuels carried for onboard thrusters. The problem with this approach has been that the hardware to do it was too big, complex, and heavy to fit on a satellite. 

"It's a technology that allows a spacecraft to not tumble violently in space and point in the right direction," Arshavsky said. "The unit has multiple super-conducting magnets that are positioned in different axes. When we power up the magnets, they generate a magnetic field, which interacts with Earth's magnetic field, and because we can control the magnetic field on the satellite, we can control the way in which it turns with respect to Earth."

Shoebox size? Like this? I'll guess that's about a foot along the horizontal axis and around 4" on the vertical. It wouldn't work on some really small satellites, but maybe that's not the target mission. For now.

Zenno Astronautics' Supertorquer attitude control system uses superconducting magnets powered by solar energy to generate thrust aboard satellites. The system was recently tested in orbit. (Image credit: Zenno Astronautics)

If you're familiar with any of the demonstrations of superconductivity like I've seen, you might be thinking, "doesn't that require super cold liquid to soak the wires in?" The wires have to be super, single digit-Kelvin temperatures, but liquids aren't required. Nor does it depend on the environment where it's operating (the satellite) be that cold. 

The unit housing the superconducting magnets is wrapped in layers of insulation and fitted with a heat pump that removes all the excess heat from the system. Every time the satellite needs a push, the superconducting coils power up, drawing energy from a battery charged by the satellite's solar panels. 

Superconducting magnetics are a potentially huge field, Arshavsky talks about using magnetics to make Earth to Mars missions more reasonable. The details there aren't clear to me, but I've never studied things like the solar magnetic field, that I know we live in and are affected by but without important details. CEO Arshavsky has been looking at other applications. 

"Once you have super-conducting technology available in space, you can then create very strong magnetic fields and you can use them for various use cases," he said. "You can accelerate things in space very fast or change the trajectory of a satellite completely without fuel."
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Powerful superconducting magnets could also provide a solution to the problem of cancer-causing cosmic radiation that explorers will encounter during stays on the moon or trips deeper into space.

"When we go to space, we get hurt by radiation, and these superconducting magnets can create umbrellas of magnetic fields around the spacecraft to protect the interior," said Arshavsky. "So we can shield people in space from that radiation."

Zenno Astronautics company plans to fly a larger demonstrator on an undisclosed mission later this year.

Yeah, he's a CEO, so I automatically figure that some percentage is too wishful and it's not all easy or maybe not even doable at all, but it's some pretty interesting stuff. 

Headlines that caught my eye

Some serious stories, others just because they're odd headlines  

First, something we talked about several times, "NASA launches rescue mission to save Swift space telescope from burning up in Earth's atmosphere." 

The Swift Boost mission successfully launched the LINK satellite, built by Arizona-based Katalyst Space Technologies, on Friday (July 3) at 4:36 a.m. EDT (0836 GMT), according to NASA. LINK will rendezvous with NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory and tow it to a stable orbit, saving it from impending destruction as its trajectory dips farther into the atmosphere. 

The LINK spacecraft is on its way toward the Swift Observatory satellite, and once close enough to the Swift, LINK will spend two to three weeks performing observations of Swift to assess optimal grapple points on the observatory. They say there aren't enough good images of the satellite to plan how to grab it and lift it to a safer orbit. 

Next, how does spaceflight relate to the semiquincentennial? 

There was clearly no spaceflight at the start of the Republic. There was no flight of any kind.

In November 1783, a bit over 7 years after July of 1776, a hot-air balloon designed by the Montgolfier brothers carried two men on a 25-minute flight over Paris, beginning the age of flight and leading to all sorts of speculation about better types of flight to come. 

It was 120 years later before the Wright Brothers first flight on the beaches of North Carolina in 1903. It took less than half that 120 year gap before the first manned spaceflight took place. Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin took that ride for the first time on April 12, 1961. Comparatively it's nothing short of amazing that eight years later, Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon. Let's see... 120 years... 58 years... 8 years? That's an incredible pace of advancement. 

Let me ask a question that may not go over well. 

Have you ever wanted to observe Uranus? 

The planet! Not that. This is a little late, but the headline stands on its own. "Want to see Uranus? July 4 could be your best chance in decades"

Although we often hear that only five planets are visible to the unaided eye, Uranus can also be seen from Earth under the right conditions. As the seventh planet from the sun, it is very faint — near the threshold of naked-eye visibility at roughly sixth magnitude — so viewing it requires a very dark sky with little to no significant light pollution.

The article on Space.com includes several little images to help guide you to the planet, which will only be visible to your naked eye if you live in a place with good, dark skies, and the fact that this should have been a story for Saturday morning means their guides won't be quite right. A planetarium program or the Stellarium web page could get you there. 

Finally, a story that blew my mind in disbelief the first time I skimmed it.  

A Semiconductor manufacturing test bed flew on the booster for today's Starlink satellite/Falcon 9 launch

If it flew with the Starlink satellites, I would have been much less confused, but when it became apparent they really meant on the booster I realized they were talking about an eight minute test - maybe a few seconds longer or shorter.  

Two semiconductor fabrication test beds hitched a sub-orbital ride on the first stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that launched another batch of Starlink satellites from Cape Canaveral shortly after sunrise Sunday. 

In addition to boosting 29 satellites for SpaceX’s internet service, the Falcon 9 first-stage booster carried two manufacturing pods for Washington, D.C.-based startup Besxar Space Industries on an eight-minute, 19-second ride to space and back.

If you're used to watching these Falcon 9 launch videos, you'll recall that the booster continues upward after stage separation, typically well beyond the Karman line at 100km, the recognized border of space, and reach a peak altitude of around 120 km.

Besxar says these short-duration, sub-orbital flights with their rapid turnarounds are ideal for fine-tuning its manufacturing process. The test-bed Fabships, called the ‘Clipper Class’, are about the size of a microwave oven.

“With a regular cadence of launch and reentry missions, we can now iterate faster than ever—transforming space into a critical extension of America’s semiconductor supply chain,” said Pilipiszyn, who previously worked for OpenAI in its early days.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket soars past the Sun during the Starlink 10-50 mission on July 5, 2026. The rocket also carried onboard two Fabships on the rocket’s booster from the Washington D.C. based startup, Besxar. Image: Michael Cain/Spaceflight Now

Like the others, this one has more details to make reading it more worthwhile.

Happy summer solstice!

The Summer Solstice happened earlier this year than others I've checked before. The exact minute of this years summer solstice was 4:24 a.m. EDT (0824 GMT) . It's now officially summer, and today is the longest day of the year. I used to wonder if anyone has ever measured that with the extremely accurate clocks we have these days. There's always some wobble to the Earth such that times can move around with days milliseconds longer or shorter than predicted. Today is supposed to be 0.3664 milliseconds (or 366.4 microseconds, if you prefer) longer than 24 hours.  

Screen capture from TimeandDate.com

The sunrise/sunset app I have on my phone (really old - I think it's not supported anymore) says sunrise this morning was in the minute it calls 6:26 AM. The earliest sunrise of the year was called 6:25 AM and the phone app said sunrise was 6:25 from June 2 until June 19. Sunrises will get later every morning from here until the new year. Sunset, meanwhile is 8:21 and doesn't reach the latest sunset of the year, 8:23, until June 25 and stays there until July 8th. After that, sunsets get earlier until around the end of November. 

You were expecting symmetry?

It's there, but not what most people seem to expect. Sunrise and sunset don't both move smoothly getting earlier and later reaching their min/max on the solstice. In the summer, the earliest sunrise is before the solstice, latest sunset is after. In the winter, the earliest sunset is before the solstice, late November/early December and latest sunrise is after it - the first week of January. That seems like mirror image symmetry. I should emphasize this in the northern hemisphere. I've never checked this pattern in the southern hemisphere.

I went looking through the blog history searching for articles on this and found that I've only written about the summer solstice a couple of times before, but have written about the winter solstice more times. That's probably at least partly because I greatly prefer our winter over our summer, so I look forward to the winter solstice more.

If you've ever spent time with a good globe, you'll know about an analemma, that shows the motion of the sun - usually shown as seen from the equator. I've posted one pretty picture an amateur took of the sun that recorded the phenomenon for a full year. That was in a winter solstice post. 

Is that Hunga Tonga volcano still affecting the world?

In his daily posting over at Virtual Mirage, "Bad Moon Rising," Larry Lambert mentioned the incredible volcanic eruption of Hunga Tonga, more properly Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai, that erupted in January of '22. I've written about the eruption and its effects several times and by coincidence had recently been thinking that we're closing in on five years since that eruption. Shortly after the eruption, reports began appearing that the "experts" were saying this was the most violent explosion ever recorded by the worldwide network that monitors for nuclear explosions:

Titled “A nuclear-test monitor calls Tonga volcano blast 'biggest thing that we've ever seen',” it reports that an international group that monitors for likely atomic detonations has reported that at every one of their sites around the world - 53 of them - the infrasonic wave from the Tongan volcano is the largest thing they've ever measured, even bigger than the Soviet Union's Tsar Bomba, the biggest nuclear detonation in history. [BOLD added - SiG] 

It absolutely wasn't just another volcano going off. Hunga Tonga injected three times more water into the upper stratosphere than was originally estimated. It injected 150-million metric tons or almost 40 Trillion gallons of water vapor into the atmosphere. The concern expressed at the time of the eruptions was that water vapor is a potent greenhouse gas and it was going to affect the weather for years. How big an effect and for how long?

The problem with answering that is hidden in the part about "most violent eruptions ever seen" - nobody had any real experience to base calculations on. How can anyone trust a model that has never been verified to properly model this sort of input? 

For what it's worth, after about a year, a consensus began to circulate that it would cause warming for five years. It took perhaps a whole minute to get this copy of the University of Alabama Huntsville plot of global temperatures as reported by the experts, and draw a vertical line on it to show the eruption of Hunga Tonga. (On the right at 2022 and a black line)

It's a busy plot. When the volcano blew at the start of 2022, the running average temperature in red was cooler than the prediction dotted line, and it started warming noticeably by the beginning of 2023. As of the end of the red line at the beginning of year four, the red line is still above the predicted temperature's dotted line, which includes the modeled global warming. You'll note that the peak temperature in early '24 is the highest temperature on the entire chart.

The right side of this plot is the beginning of 2027, and I think the current shape of the plot looks like the temperature will be close to the predicted, dotted line by the start of next year. 

Hunga Tonga was a very different event than people are used to even for big volcanic eruptions. Typically, volcanic eruptions cause cooling because they're a source of sulfur dioxide, SO₂. Instead, Hunga Tonga injected the trillions of gallons of seawater which causes warming. 

It's practically a running joke that people think whatever weather they had when they were five years old is the way it always was and always should be. They don't recognize that changes happen both over short and long time intervals; basically "the only thing that's constant is change". Look at the plots I posted in my Earf Day piece and tell me what the temperature should be to within a tenth of a degree.

Did it just turn into summer?

Not weather-wise, or at least not the weather at the ground level. I'm talking about a difference in how the ionosphere's E layer is behaving. 

I've written about Sporadic E propagation, often referred to as Es, many times and I've talked about how Sporadic E showing up at 50 MHz (the 6 meter ham band) is more common in summer than winter.  This one is probably the most read introduction. Several times, I've shown screen captures from a site called DXMaps and the density of "red blob" tracks of contacts visibly goes up as summer arrives and gets going. Here's one I took several minutes ago:

I've mentioned several times that I'm somewhat of a paper chaser in ham radio, spending most of my radio time on 6m pursuing the FFMA (Fred Fish Memorial Award); this post (from November of '25) has the most info and I'll borrow some of it for here. 

Along the same line, the only accomplishments I’m actively “chasing” on the VHF six meter band are both in the category of “difficult to practically impossible.” The easier one is probably 6m DXCC (100 recognized countries worked and confirmed). I currently have 90 confirmed with another three “waiting for confirmation.” I’m closer to DXCC on 6m than any of the other major awards. Easy or obvious one first, DXCC is more likely than Worked All States - WAS. 

WAS is practically impossible from my location. I’m pretty sure last November (‘24) was the closest I ever came to even hearing Alaska, and that was hearing other stations in the southeast calling the guy in Alaska. I saw him “spotted” on some of the sites online that report that, but never actually heard him. I was hoping for this year, but it hasn’t been good so far.

The hardest one, the FFMA (Fred Fish Memorial Award – the first person to achieve this award) is for working and confirming all 488 Maidenhead grids in the continental US. "Continental" means I don't need Alaska or Hawaii. I have 345 grids confirmed with another five that I’ve worked but can’t get confirmed. To be brutally honest, the FFMA is practically impossible from here, too. Unsurprisingly, when your goal is to reach every place  in the country, you're most likely to get everyone from the center of the country, and it turns out there has been one issued in Florida, in the northwestern most corner of the state. That's about 500 miles away - near Pensacola.

All of that is to set up that, to some degree, I can look at the map of contacts being reported on DXMaps and have a pretty good idea if areas I need to work are being heard and reported. I don't see any on that display map. 

While that's a bit of a downer, the number of Es openings should be going up with the highest numbers showing up in mid-June through mid-July. It's not coincidental that two of the biggest 6m contests of the year are the in this interval. Contests are good ways to get lots of stations on the air for quick, short contacts. 

Summer is a good time of year around here for staying inside the house. At least I have things to chase on the radio.

A look at the coming hurricane season

Since the usual space news stories are on the small side, I'm going to divert to a different sort of science - atmospheric physics and weather. That was driven by it being the time of year to ensure we're ready for the coming Atlantic hurricane season which starts on June 1. And that's partly motivated because storms before the season officially starts happen often enough that they capture attention in planning.

I think it should be obvious if you've read here before, but I should say that I'm not a meteorologist or a hurricane expert in any sense. I'm just someone who has lived through many hurricanes because of growing up in Florida and being 72 years old. The state of Florida takes hurricane preparation seriously, especially with the numbers of people moving in from the overbearing-to-collapsing blue states, so they publish a variety of websites with information on preparing. Like the Plan & Prepare website here. 

Whether you follow these storms or not,  you may have heard about a persistent (if not permanent) weather condition that goes back and forth between el Niño and la Niña states, and is called the el Niño/Southern Oscillation or ENSO. This is seen primarily in sea surface temperatures along the equator between South America and Pacific islands. In the el Niño pattern the temperatures in that belt are warmer than "usual" and in the la Niña state they're cooler. (and I'll drop the accent marks over the "n" from here on)

Earlier in the year, we were told to expect a la Nina pattern this season, but that has been reversed to el Nino with some sources warning of a "Super El Nino". In general, in Florida and the SE US, el Nino seasons reduce our chances of a hurricane. The National Weather Service ENSO prediction (April update) doesn't sound like the "Super El Nino" prediction.  

I've mentioned meteorologist Ryan Maue on these pages several times (earliest post? I think) starting when he was a graduate student at Florida State University, one of the major meteorology departments that study hurricanes. Simply, in an era of insanity and blaming everything that happens on CO₂ concentrations - followed by perennially making up new things to blame on CO₂ - he has remained data-driven and therefore a voice of sanity. Ryan keeps track of a metric they call Accumulated Cyclone Energy or ACE and provides this summary showing it's a far below average year. 

I think when the year to date ACE is 12% of a normal year, that's far below average.

The next thing I like to keep track of is the predictions for the hurricane activity for the season. One of the big names in doing this is Colorado State University, and Dr Phil Klotzbach issues numbers annually. His predictions are for lower activity than average, but spread over the entire Atlantic basin from Africa to the US and the west ends of the ocean, the Gulf of America, and the Caribbean, there are variations to keep track of, too. 

While the photo predicts every line in that chart to be lower than normal, it's important to realize that there's also luck involved and it's better to be more prepared than you need to be. Like everything else in life. 

To borrow some of the notes that appear below that photo:

Primary Drivers: The "El Niño" Factor
The defining feature of the 2026 season is the transition from a weak La Niña to a moderate-to-strong El Niño during the peak months (August–October).

• Wind Shear: El Niño typically creates high vertical wind shear across the Atlantic's Main Development Region (MDR). This "rips" storms apart before they can organize.
  
• Atmospheric Stability: Sinking air (subsidence) over the Caribbean and Atlantic is expected to suppress storm formation further.
  
• Atlantic Temperatures: While the Atlantic remains warm, it is not as anomalously hot as in recent record-breaking years, and the shear from El Niño is expected to be the dominant "hurricane slayer" this season.

In my years of observing, I've noticed that el Nino moves the tendency for storms to "re-curve" to a northerly path and then toward the east farther out to the east than in la Nina years. Yeah, I tend to get an early sigh of relief when I see predictions for an el Nino year.

Historical Analogs
CSU identifies years with similar climate setups to help predict 2026’s behavior. The primary analog years are:

• 2006 and 2009: Very quiet seasons for Florida landfall due to strong El Niño conditions.
  
• 2015: An extremely quiet year for the U.S. East Coast.
  
• 2023: A high storm count (20) but mostly storms that stayed out to sea, though Florida’s Big Bend was hit by Hurricane Idalia.
  
• Quality over Quantity: A below-average forecast does not mean zero risk. Forecasters frequently cite 1992 (Hurricane Andrew) as the ultimate warning: a very quiet, below-average year that produced one of the most devastating Category 5 landfalls in Florida history.
  
• Western Formation: Because El Niño suppresses storms in the deep tropics, 2026 may see more "homegrown" development in the Gulf of Mexico or Western Caribbean. These storms often have shorter lead times for us here in Florida.

So that's an overview of what we know about the coming hurricane season. It's always appropriate to keep an eye on the weather patterns and the one week forecasts with probabilities of development. Much like a loonie with a gun and intent to do something violent, it only takes one.

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is complete

Complete and being readied for launch in September. 

I've been following the progress of the NGRST since first hearing about it in early 2022. It was first referred to as the WFIRST, Wide Field Infra Red Space Telescope, a long but descriptive name for its mission.  It was renamed around that time in '22 the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope by NASA; the name pays tribute to the late NASA executive and first Chief Astronomer who was one of the driving forces in getting the Hubble Space Telescope program through its hurdles. 

On Tuesday (April 21), NASA had a reveal of the NGRST at their Goddard Space Flight Center along with talks by Administrator Jared Isaacman and several others.  For this:

Engineers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, complete the final integration of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope's major components on Nov. 25, 2025, joining the spacecraft and telescope assemblies in the facility's largest clean room. (Image credit: NASA/Jolearra Tshiteya)

"I very much hope, and in fact, expect, that the most exciting science from Roman is going to be the things that we didn't expect, that we couldn't predict, but that will set the new deep questions for future missions to address," Julie McEnery, senior project scientist of Roman said during a press conference on Tuesday.

The NGRST is heading for the L2 Lagrange Point, currently the home of the James Webb Space Telescope, the European Union's Euclid infrared space telescope and a place for passing visitors, such as the Escapade mission on the way to Mars (bottom of that post). 

NASA has chosen a Falcon Heavy to get this payload to its destination. There have been 11 Falcon Heavy launches to date, with a 100% success rate for the 230-foot-tall, heavy lift vehicle. Not surprising since it's three different Falcon 9s strapped together (although the upper stage is different) and it's the most reliable vehicle ever. 

Here's where it gets wild. The September launch for the NGRST is eight months ahead of schedule, and under budget. When's the last time you heard something like that? I'm not sure I ever have.

According to NASA, Roman's primary mirror measures about 7.9 feet (2.4 meters) wide, which is similar to Hubble's. However, Roman has the ability to take images that capture a patch of the sky at least 100 times larger than Hubble can.

"Its surveying capabilities are over 1,000 times faster than Hubble, and can chart 200 times more sky in a single image," NASA administrator Jared Isaacman said during the conference. "What would take Hubble 2,000 years to process, Roman can do in a year — the images it captures will be so large there is not a screen in existence large enough to show them."

To put that into context, over its approximately 35 years of service so far, Hubble has gathered about 400 terabytes of data; once fully operational at its workstation in space, Roman should be able to create 500 terabytes of data per year.

The collection of different space telescopes; the Hubble, James Webb, and more, allow ground based astronomers to choose the right instrument for the objects they want to study in the sky.

Compared to the JWST, Roman's images — taken with its aptly named Wide Field Instrument (WFI) — will be 50 times wider but more shallow, because Roman doesn't need to access the deep universe the way the JWST does. As we discussed, it can't see infrared like the JWST can and therefore would be wasted in looking too far back.

More specifically, WFI is composed of a 300-megapixel visible-to-near-infrared imaging camera and slitless spectrometer (a special tool that allows scientists to capture light dispersion of objects in a field of view). But there is something uniquely special about that shallow, panoramic view.

The wide and shallow field will be well suited to surveying space, not getting too much information from things that it can't look closer at. 

They can just survey and hope to find a cool lead to zoom in on. This offers Roman the ability to catch events that transpire very quickly, such as fast radio bursts, and increases the chances that scientists can witness remarkable supernovas, colliding neutron stars and other easy-to-miss phenomena right as they happen.

An illustration of the field of view of Roman Space Telescope vs. the Hubble Space Telescope. From the NASA Roman telescope mission website.

It's My Favorite Fake Holiday - It's Earf Day 2026

Yes, it's time for our annual bacchanalia of the made-up holiday they call Earth Day, my very favorite holiday to make fun of. Even more than Kwanzaa. 

As befitting the environmental movement, my tribute to Earth Day is almost entirely recycled, and is almost entirely useless. The only way it could fit the environmental movement better would be if everything I said was factually wrong. Everything here is factually correct. 

I've posted on Earf Day so many times that it's hard not to be repetitive, even if I was trying not to be. So nothing this time about Ira Einhorn murdering his girlfriend or the completely discredited book, The Population Bomb.  No, wait.  I just mentioned them both.  Rats! 

The simple truth is that virtually everything about the holiday and the environmental movement is crap. The modern green movement is simply about rich, privileged people wanting to have places to visit that they think are pretty; and especially unspoiled.  They want pretty, natural, wild-looking places to visit on vacations. If that means the people who are living in or near those places have to live lives that range from austere to practically unsurvivable, the greenies think that's just wonderful.  

When you think of it that way, it's easy to realize that the greenies care only about themselves and their enjoyments of life. Of course we should all protect the wilderness! It's theirs! That was never as clear to me as it was while reading Apocalypse Never by Michael Shellenberger a couple of years ago. He vividly talks about people in the wilds of Africa who desperately need better ways to grow food, get water and most desperately need electricity. Instead they're kept in a life of desperation by the environmentalists.

Probably the worst example is the one that we get beat up about every day: climate change. Notice they don't mention "global warming" any more. It's just "change." As if the worldwide climate has always been the same. Let's start with that simple observation. They scream that the temperature has gone up since 1850! We're all going to die! What they don't tell you is that the temperature in 1850 was among coldest periods in the last 10,000 years. 

That's Indonesia. How about if we reconstruct the temperature half a world away? North Atlantic instead of south Pacific; Greenland instead of Indonesia (the scale is different, but 10,000 years ago is 7975 BC).

Sorry. The temperature has gone up not just from 1850 but from from one of the half-dozen coldest periods in the last half billion years.  

The closer you look, the worse the picture is. Borepatch ran a piece in 2024 about one of the more insidious things they do: they change the historical records to make the older temperatures look cooler and the newer ones look hotter. That's right; they're lying in all the official documents and have been for as long as this Con has been going on. One of the things that convinced me that skepticism was proper was the Surface Stations Project that Watts Up With That? started back in the '00s and was closed a few years ago. Their final product was a report on the official stations that create the weather record and how large percentages of them weren't sited properly; over 62% were incapable of accuracy better than 2 degrees C. Another 6% couldn't measure within 5 degrees C. They're too close to roads, too close to sources of heat like air conditioner outputs, even airport runways, and more problems. Then there was outright fraud in editing records. 

And this isn't even going near things like how bad their models are. They still basically can't handle clouds properly. Virtually none of their predictions ever actually prove to be the case. Instead we get useful idiot celebrities who are too young to understand that both weather and climate change (to be charitable). If a 20 or a 40 year old can't remember similar weather, it doesn't mean anything. 

You know the current fuss about the temperature by 2100 isn't supposed to go up more than 1 degree or "we all gonna die"? (say that like Jasmine Crockett saying "we done pickin' cotton"). In these two plots the one on the left is the prediction they push on us; the one on right is shows the error expected in yellow.  For example, at the right end of the plot on the left, it shows their global temperature as increasing by 3.75 degrees by 2100.   The uncertainty shown on the right is +22.5 / -15 degrees.  That's over 37 degrees uncertainty out of 4?  In the kind of simulations I'm used to that's so bad it's unusable.  The remarkable part is how bad the people who released this plot were at doing this math (read this). They're an embarrassment to people who can do this math, and the ones who can should get listened to far more than they do. 

Maybe if the people pushing this climate change stuff could do this math they wouldn't have their morons burning down cities. If the people burning down cities or ruining their lives by getting upset by this could understand the papers referenced, the world would be safe from them.