This story was great fun to write. It started as a humorous tweet on Friday night. By the end of the evening, I had my moon expedition all organised.

On Saturday, my plan to colonise the moon was published on The Daily Maverick. Thanks to the locals at Bosun’s in Knysna, and my friends on Twitter, for their contributions. The cherry on top was returning to Bosun’s to find that the people who though I was joking (or drunk) were muttering darkly about being left out of the story.

It seems like yesterday, but it’s already over 13 years ago that a comet, Shoemaker-Levy 9, having been broken up into a couple of dozen fragments on its previous pass, spectacularly slammed into Jupiter. It was the first time ever such an impact had been observed, and it was visible not only from Earth, but also from the spacecraft Voyager 2, which had a close-up view. Last year, NASA launched a mission to slam a large fridge into comet Tempel 1. It was amazingly successful, producing an explosion captured and analysed by astronomers all over the world. Next month, the Mars rover Opportunity could have a ringside seat for a repeat performance by a a newly-discovered asteroid headed for Mars.

Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet had been discovered not long before by Canadian atronomer David Levy, and his more famous American counterparts, champion hunter of comets and asteroids Carolyn Shoemaker, and her late husband, astrogeology poineer and would-be moonwalker Eugene Shoemaker. To date, “the SuperGene”, as he was sometimes referred to, is the only person whose remains are buried on the moon. (Bill Hollenbach, an amateur astronomer with a self-built observatory at the Wondercave in the Cradle of Humankind, northwest of Johannesburg, pointed out where exactly the site is located in the comments to a previous post.) Two of the famous pictures of the Shoemaker-Levy 9 impact, one of the comet string, and another of the impact explosions, are alongside (click on them for larger versions).

The new asteroid, designated 2007 WD5, was discovered by Andrea Boattini of the Catalina Sky Survey. By astronomical standards, the event is very likely. The asteroid has a one in 75 chance of hitting Mars at about 13:00 South African Standard Time (11:00 GMT) on 30 January 2008, and that chance could increase early in January, when more observations of the asteroid’s orbit have been taken. If it misses, it will miss by less than four times the diameter of the earth.

2007 WD5 is estimated to be the same size as the object that is believed to have caused the Tunguska event in Siberia in 1908. William Hartman has created a fascinating page about Tunguska with paintings that reconstruct eyewitness accounts. Wikipedia has lots of links and theories — ranging from likely to lunatic — about the event.

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Ron Baalke modified a Java-application by Osamu Ajiki, which permits you to plot and observe the orbits of WD5, Earth, Mars and Jupiter.

Here’s news, via Yahoo:

Scientists think they have discovered the energy source of auroras borealis, the spectacular color displays seen in the upper latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere.

This is just weird. I grew up with a huge world atlas published in 1972. Before the actual maps, all of which came in in several varieties to illustrate political, commercial, geographical and natural features of the earth, it contained lots of useful information on geography, ecology, astronomy, the environment (yup, environmental pollution was a major chapter even then), and demographics. It was a staple of my general knowledge education as a child.

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• This was first published as a column in print in Maverick magazine in South Africa on 6 September 2007. If the denial machine reads this, I am still waiting to be well-funded, so at least consider subscribing, please.
  

You can relax. The hottest year in recorded US history was not 1998, and 2001 isn’t even in the top ten anymore. Hey, facts change, you know.

The news couldn’t have come at a worse time for Newsweek. It had just published a cover emblazoned with the headline “Global Warming is a Hoax*” The footnote reads: “Or so claim well-funded naysayers who still reject the overwhelming evidence of climate change. Inside the denial machine. By Sharon Begley.”

Contributing editor Robert J Samuelson repudiated the story in the very next issue, however. He calls it a “moral crusade”, “righteous indignation” that “undermines good journalism”, “a vast oversimplification of a messy story” and “a wonderful read, marred only by its being fundamentally misleading.” Wow. With friends like these…

Then there’s Steve McIntyre, already infamous in climate change circles for revealing the fatal flaws in the Michael Mann “hockey stick” chart adopted by the UN’s International Panel for Climate Change. His original aim had been to verify the adequacy of the US network of temperature sensors, many of which were being influenced by encroaching urbanisation. Some of them sit in the middle of hot tar parking lots, or near the hot exhaust fans of air conditioning units, for example.

The NASA official in charge of the most cited database of US temperatures, James Hansen, not only refused to disclose the adjustments that were being made to correct for bad siting of sensors, but also removed public access to the locations of meteorological stations. McIntyre had to reconstruct both. He did.

In The American Spectator, Michael Fumento wrote: “In retrospect, you knew there would be trouble when you put the people responsible for the Space Shuttle program in charge of tracking US temperatures.”

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Trust a government bureaucracy like NASA to make rocket scientists look like idiots:

The link goes to this history page, where the alternative text for the main image is: “Sputnik: Fortieth Anniversary”.

Now those of you who studied advanced applied mathematics may already suspect that something is wrong here. Indeed, a little bit of calculation makes it clear that in fact, it is Sputnik’s 50th anniversary today. Here’s the proof. Close your eyes if you’re scared of complicated maths: Δt = t₂ — t₁. Since t₁ = 1957 and t₂ = 2007, it follows that Δt = 50. QED. No wonder NASA’s super-expensive tax-funded space ships keep breaking.

Never mind the Soviets. Google is watching.

Having searched the planet to exhaustion, Google is aiming higher. It is sponsoring a $30 million Ansari X-Prize to the first privateer to land a robotic explorer on the moon. The goal is to prove that private space exploration is not only possible, but can be done cheaper and more efficiently than the government can do it. Recalling how proud I was to be human on that day in 2004 when SpaceShipOne won the first X-Prize for suborbital space flight, I’ll be following this attempt with a great deal of interest.

You’ll probably also be allowed onto Sergey Brin and Larry Page’s exclusive private aeroplane runway at NASA’s Moffett Field if you manage to get to the moon before the US government does, in six or more years, at a cost to the taxpayer of billions of dollars.

So hurry. And while you’re there, please take new photographs of the weird section (pictured here), which was last photographed by the Lunar Obiter back in the 1960s. Just to make sure that it really is Swiss cheese.

I’ve made several updates to my original post on the errors in NASA’s GISS database for US temperatures. After half a dozen, another major inline update seemed immoderate.

Since Steve McIntyre’s site, Climate Audit, remains down, he borrowed Anthony Watts’ blog to explain in considerable detail why the error isn’t trivial, and to forward a response to a letter by GISS warmer-in-chief James Hansen (link in PDF).

Hansen’s letter appears defensive, argumentative and not a little arrogant:

No need to read further unless you are interested in temperature changes to a tenth of a degree over the U.S. and a thousandth of a degree over the world. <…>

My apologies if the quick response that I sent to Andy Revkin and several other journalists, including the suggestion that it was a tempest inside somebody’s teapot dome, and that perhaps a light was not on upstairs, was immoderate. It was not ad hominem, though.

From McIntyre’s reply to the letter:

Hansen may have been for 1934 before he was against it. But now that he’s for 1934 once again, he can’t say that he was for it all along.

Hat tip: Kriek Jooste.

The science is settl… oops! This couldn’t have come at a worse time for the original Global Cooling alarmist, Newsweek. It just published a screed against climate change skeptics, containing this quote:

This sounded what would become a recurring theme for naysayers: that global temperature data are flat-out wrong. For one thing, they argued, the data reflect urbanization (many temperature stations are in or near cities), not true global warming.

CNN Money carries a rebuttal of the Newsweek piece. So does Marc Morano at the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, as well as NewsBusters Noel Sheppard and Amy Ridenour.

But it gets better. Much, much better.

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