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ON THIS DAY IN 1986, FLIGHT ATTENDANT NEERJA BHANOT DIED SAVING THE LIVES OF PASSENGERS ON PAN AM FLIGHT # 73: She was just two days short of her 22^nd birthday.

Flight #73 originated in Mumbai and was ultimately bound for New York. It was initially carrying 394 passengers, 9 infants, 19 Indian flight attendants and an American pilot and co-pilot.

During a stopover in Karachi, four heavily-armed hijackers—part of the Abu Nidal Organization–stormed the plane. Alerted to the hijacking, the pilot and co-pilot escaped from the cockpit via the Inertial Reel Escape Device, thus leaving the aircraft immobilized on the ground.

Realizing that the plane was pilotless, the hijackers sought out an American passenger, eventually singling out a 29-year-old Californian named Rajesh Kumar. Kumar was ordered to kneel facing the front of the aircraft with his hands behind his head. They threatened to kill him if Pan Am’s negotiators did not send them a flight crew immediately.

Bloodthirsty and dissatisfied with the speed of the negotiators’ response, the chief hijacker shot Kumar in the head and dumped him onto the tarmac. He died before he reached the hospital. Thereafter, they told the negotiators, a passenger would be executed every 15 minutes until a pilot was produced.

The hijackers then turned to purser Neerja Bhanot, who remained calm and collected even when a gun was put to her head. They demanded that she and the flight attendants under her control collect the passports from all passengers. Believing that the hijackers intended to kill the more than 40 Americans on board, she had the flight attendants hide some of the American passports in the seats and dumped the rest of them down the rubbish chute.

For a time, the hijackers considered executing a British national instead, but ultimately did not.

Meanwhile, Bhanot surreptitiously handed a passenger the instructions, hidden in a magazine, for how to open the door and deploy the slide in case the opportunity arose.

The hijackers were stymied. By late evening, the auxiliary power unit shut down, causing all but the emergency lights to come down. At that point, the hijackers tried to set off the explosive belt one of them was wearing. If they’d been successful, they could have blown up everyone on board. Instead, the explosion was rather puny. Immediately, they began shooting their guns and throwing grenades. With bullets ricocheting off the walls, passengers were dying everywhere.

In the bloody melee, Bhanot was able to open one of the aircraft doors. She could have escaped herself, but instead one-by-one she assisted passengers out the door. She died as a result of wounds suffered shielding three children from the hail of bullets.

(The passenger who had been slipped the instructions by Bhanot got his door open too and was able to deploy the slide. So Bhanot gets credit for causing two doors to open.)

Sources differ slightly on the number of dead and injured. I am going with 22 dead, including Bhanot, and 140 injured. Without her, the carnage likely would have been a lot worse.

All four hijackers were arrested, convicted and imprisoned in Pakistan. In late September 2001, Pakistani authorities released the chief hijacker, but he was picked up by American law enforcement authorities shortly thereafter, apparently with the blessing of the Pakistani government. He is currently serving 160 years in a federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana. His fellow terrorists were released in 2008 over the objections of the United States. One was reported dead in a 2010 drone strike, but his death is unconfirmed.

A movie called Neerja was made about Bhanot’s heroism in 2016.  (Unlike most real-life figures portrayed by gorgeous actors or actresses, Neerja Bhanot was drop-dead gorgeous herself. But beautiful or not, she had the right stuff.)

Rest in peace, Neerja.  Americans in particular have reason to thank you.

THE BABYLON BEE DOES IT AGAIN: Walmart Discontinues Auto Part Sales To Prevent Car Accidents.

I’d love to see some folks take this a step further and protest outside a Walmart auto service entrance with signs reading CARS KILL and STOP SELLING DEATH TOOLS and the like.

“EXTREME SELF-CITATION.” Some of The World’s Most-Cited Scientists Have a Secret That’s Just Been Exposed. Hey, if you won’t cite yourself, who will?

WELL, NOW IF THERE’S A RECESSION, TRUMP WILL BE ABLE TO CLAIM THAT THE FED ENGINEERED IT: ‘Grossly irresponsible’ – Larry Summers blasts ex-Fed president’s call to thwart Trump in 2020.

“For a former trusted official of the Fed, whose thinking is inevitably going to be tied to the Fed, to recommend that they … [use] rates so as to subvert the economy and influence a presidential election is grossly irresponsible, and is an abuse of the privilege of being a former Fed official,” said Summers, who formerly was Treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton and as an economic advisor to President Barack Obama.

A major impact of the Trump presidency is the revelation that many allegedly trusted and impartial organizations are staffed by hacks with a crude political agenda.

NEW CIVILITY WATCH: If You Want Civility You Just Might Be a Neo-Confederate and Because of That the Left Really Does Want You Dead.

The opinion pages of the nation’s major newspapers never cease to disappoint. Just a couple of weeks ago, the New York Times announced that it has suddenly discovered that everything to do with everything in American history was a direct result of slavery. Now some twit writing at the Washington Post reveals that the whole call for civility by people on the right triggers her because it is exactly like the rhetoric of defenders of slavery in the antebellum South.

In January of 2011, the New York Times reported, “In Tucson, Obama Urges Americans to New Era of Civility.” Yes, Obama’s a Democrat. But I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt that’s he’s not a closet neo-Confederate.

More at Commentary, where under the headline, “Truth? That’s What the Slaveholders Say!”, Jonathan Marks writes:

In fairness to the Washington Post, it has been more than twenty-four hours since it had to correct an op-ed falsely claiming that J.D. Vance, the author of Hillbilly Elegy, had lamented a decline in white births. Perhaps its editors regret the error. But what’s truly regrettable is the impulse to publish any and every article, no matter how wrong or foul, postulating that anyone who crosses the left is a racist.

“Vote for us, you bigots,” is quite an interesting argument for Democratic Party operatives with bylines to be making during in the early innings of a presidential election cycle.

Guest essay by Eric Worrall h/t JoNova; Aussie Federal MP Keith Pitt has urged the coal rich Queensland State Government to disconnect from the national grid, to stop demand from states which make “poor decisions” from driving up electricity prices when their renewable systems fail to deliver. Imagine if states like California were cut off…

SUNLIGHT IS THE BEST DISINFECTANT: Trump can change history by declassifying three Obama-era documents.

With the last few weeks’ definitive guide and follow-up on fish, a reader asked me about trimethylamine N-oxide, or TMAO. What is it?

TMAO is the latest justification given for why eating meat just has to be bad for you. Saturated fat didn’t take. Animal protein didn’t work. Iron was a dud. IGF-1 hasn’t panned out. Methionine isn’t enough. So now they’re using TMAO to convince you not to eat that steak.

How’s it supposed to work?

How TMAO Happens

When certain gut bacteria encounter choline (found in eggs and liver) or carnitine (found in meat, especially red meat), some of it is converted to trimethylamine, or TMA. TMA is the compound that gives fish its “fishy odor.” Fish is actually extremely high in TMA, which I’ll discuss later on. Then, the liver converts a portion of the TMA to TMAO. Studies have shown that elevated serum levels of TMAO are linked to heart disease, type 2 diabetes, kidney disease, and even all-cause mortality. There’s definitely some heterogeneity among the studies, but enough have found a strong connection between TMAO and all manner of poor health conditions that researchers have focused on this compound.

Okay, so anything that contains choline or carnitine will increase TMAO, which should in theory increase your risk of heart disease. Right? Let’s go down the list.

Dietary TMAO Precursors and Their Effects On Health

Eggs. The best source of TMAO-precursor choline in our diet—eggs—should absolutely skyrocket TMAO levels. Except it doesn’t happen.

Three eggs a day has no effect on TMAO levels, even as it increases choline levels and HDL cholesterol.

Okay, so maybe the choline slipped past the TMA-producing gut bacteria in that study, but what about if you quickly switch people from eating oatmeal for breakfast to eating eggs. Surely bad things will happen, right?

No. Eating eggs instead of oatmeal has no effect on TMAO levels. It increases carotenoid and choline levels, though.

Liver. Okay, liver has to do the trick. It has high levels of both carnitine and choline. But no: feeding liver (among other foods) to men fails to increase TMAO levels above control.

Carnitine. Forget meat. What if you go straight to the offensive precursor itself and give actual human women a big daily dose of carnitine for, I don’t know, 24 weeks? Surely it will do something bad.

Nope. TMAO skyrockets, an indication that these ladies’ gut bacteria are converting carnitine to TMA and TMAO, but serum C-reactive protein, interleukin-6, L-selectin, P-selectin, vascular cell adhesion molecule-1, intercellular adhesion molecule-1 and lipid profile markers are completely unaffected. If gut bacterial conversion of carnitine to TMAO is the preeminent risk factor for heart disease, you’d think some of these ladies’ cardiovascular risk factors would have responded. They had half a year to respond. They did not.

Okay, but maybe there’s lag time between TMAO increases and deleterious changes to health. Nope. They followed those same ladies after cessation of carnitine supplementation. Their TMAO levels dropped, but their health markers stayed the same. No change.

And here’s a study where they used carnitine to increase TMAO levels in patients on dialysis. Not only did nothing bad happen, but the carnitine even reduced markers of vascular injuries. Higher TMAO, better health.

Seafood. As I mentioned earlier, fish and shellfish come pre-contaminated with the TMAO precursor TMA. It’s what gives the characteristic fishy odor, and it definitely gets converted to TMAO. In fact, a human study from a few years ago found that feeding people fish spiked TMAO levels by 60 times. A more recent study even concluded that elevated TMAO levels are a reliable marker for cod intake. The more fish you eat, the more TMAO your body will process.

If you’re going to claim that TMAO is dangerous and causes heart disease, you’ll have to make the case that fish is dangerous and causes heart disease. All the evidence we have points in the opposite direction—that fish and shellfish are protective against heart disease.

So, Why Is TMAO Linked To Poor Health Then?

How do we explain the connection between increased TMAO and poor heart health?

Here it is linked to atrial fibrillation.

Here it is linked to stroke.

Here it is predicting heart events.

The connection is there. And in animal models, TMAO even appears to mechanistically increase atherosclerosis. The mice they dosed with TMAO to increase atherosclerosis were genetically engineered to be ApoE knockouts, a strain of lab mouse that gets heart disease from almost everything, but still.

The connection isn’t causal. It’s an observation. There are no controlled studies giving people foods (or even supplements) that raise TMAO and increase disease or death. There aren’t even prospective observational studies where they track a group’s food intake, TMAO levels, and death/disease over time.

You know what I think (and have always thought)?

High TMAO can be a marker for metabolic disease. It could indicate inhibited kidney function, as the kidneys are response for disposing of excess TMAO. It could indicate poor health in general.

The latest evidence is confirming what I’ve long suspected: the reason high TMAO levels are linked to cardiovascular disease and overall mortality is that both type 2 diabetes and chronic kidney disease cause elevated TMAO levels. The causality is reversed.

What’s one of the kidney’s primary jobs? Excreting waste materials and toxins. What’s going to happen if the kidney begins to fail or lose its functioning? The stuff that used to be excreted starts backing up. TMAO is supposed to be excreted in the urine via the kidneys. If the kidneys aren’t working, TMAO levels skyrocket.

But even then, high TMAO isn’t even necessarily a bad thing. Check out that study I linked to earlier where women were given carnitine every day. Their TMAO levels skyrocketed but nothing bad happened. No health markers worsened. In one study, they even improved.

The Takeaways…

That’s the thing with biology. There are dozens of reasons TMAO could be elevated, some of them bad, some of them harmless, some of them good.

There simply exists no credible evidence that increased TMAO because you’re eating fish, or eggs, or liver, or meat, does anything untoward to your health. I’m not ruling it out. But the evidence just isn’t there. There’s far more evidence that eating fish, eggs, liver, and meat improve your health.

That’s it for today, folks. If you have any further questions about TMAO, leave them down below. Until then, enjoy your choline and carnitine!

Thanks for reading.

References: 

Schiattarella GG, Sannino A, Toscano E, et al. Gut microbe-generated metabolite trimethylamine-N-oxide as cardiovascular risk biomarker: a systematic review and dose-response meta-analysis. Eur Heart J. 2017;38(39):2948-2956.

Dimarco DM, Missimer A, Murillo AG, et al. Intake of up to 3 Eggs/Day Increases HDL Cholesterol and Plasma Choline While Plasma Trimethylamine-N-oxide is Unchanged in a Healthy Population. Lipids. 2017;52(3):255-263.

Missimer A, Fernandez ML, Dimarco DM, et al. Compared to an Oatmeal Breakfast, Two Eggs/Day Increased Plasma Carotenoids and Choline without Increasing Trimethyl Amine N-Oxide Concentrations. J Am Coll Nutr. 2018;37(2):140-148.

Zhang AQ, Mitchell SC, Smith RL. Dietary precursors of trimethylamine in man: a pilot study. Food Chem Toxicol. 1999;37(5):515-20.

Samulak JJ, Sawicka AK, Hartmane D, et al. L-Carnitine Supplementation Increases Trimethylamine-N-Oxide but not Markers of Atherosclerosis in Healthy Aged Women. Ann Nutr Metab. 2019;74(1):11-17.

Samulak JJ, Sawicka AK, Samborowska E, Olek RA. Plasma Trimethylamine-N-oxide following Cessation of L-carnitine Supplementation in Healthy Aged Women. Nutrients. 2019;11(6)

Fukami K, Yamagishi S, Sakai K, et al. Oral L-carnitine supplementation increases trimethylamine-N-oxide but reduces markers of vascular injury in hemodialysis patients. J Cardiovasc Pharmacol. 2015;65(3):289-95.

Svingen GFT, Zuo H, Ueland PM, et al. Increased plasma trimethylamine-N-oxide is associated with incident atrial fibrillation. Int J Cardiol. 2018;267:100-106.

Liang Z, Dong Z, Guo M, et al. Trimethylamine N-oxide as a risk marker for ischemic stroke in patients with atrial fibrillation. J Biochem Mol Toxicol. 2019;33(2):e22246.

Haghikia A, Li XS, Liman TG, et al. Gut Microbiota-Dependent Trimethylamine N-Oxide Predicts Risk of Cardiovascular Events in Patients With Stroke and Is Related to Proinflammatory Monocytes. Arterioscler Thromb Vasc Biol. 2018;38(9):2225-2235.

Jia J, Dou P, Gao M, et al. Assessment of Causal Direction Between Gut Microbiota-Dependent Metabolites and Cardiometabolic Health: A Bidirectional Mendelian Randomization Analysis. Diabetes. 2019;68(9):1747-1755.

The post What’s TMAO, and What Does It Have to Do With My Health? appeared first on Mark's Daily Apple.

HMM: Lawfare Expects McCabe Arrest – That Explains Why CNN Hired Him…. “When McCabe is charged the media narrative will be it’s because he took the job with CNN… Trump/Barr weaponizing the DOJ and trying to kill free speech etc. CNN doesn’t have to defend their action in hiring a known liar, they’ll instead frame McCabe as a victim, a fellow traveler to the larger cause of justice – whose indictment is evidence of how far Trump and Barr will go to destroy their enemies etc.”

But:

However, it is worth remembering how this entire internecine mess was started.

Andrew McCabe lied to INSD about leaking to the media when the INSD was investigating leaks to the media. McCabe’s statements contradicted the statements of his assigned DOJ lawer, Lisa Page; who said McCabe instructed and coordinated the leaks to journalist Devlin Barrett of the Wall Street Journal.

When confronted with two sets of competing stories, Lisa Page -vs- Andrew McCabe, it appears the IG-INSD asked Page if she could prove her side of the story. The need to prove her version of events appears to be the impetus for Page revealing her text messaging. Page’s texts proved her story, and proved McCabe was lying.

However, from that text messaging review (June/July 2017), in addition to texts between Page and McCabe, the investigation turned-up discussions between Lisa Page and Peter Strzok.

And that’s how that whole thing got started.

McCabe’s pretty obviously dirty here, but maybe not obvious enough for CNN to shy away from him. I mean, this is CNN.

THAT’S DIFFERENT, BECAUSE IT CAN’T BE USED AGAINST BOLSONARO AND TRUMP: More Fires Now Burning in Angola, Congo Than Amazon: Maps.

HEH: Scientists: Climate Change Killed Us Years Ago And The Trump Presidency Is Some Sort Of ‘Lost’ Final Season Situation.

I KNOW YOU’RE SHOCKED TO HEAR THIS: Footage from camera outside Epstein’s cell deemed unusable. Stuff like this should be a strict-liability crime for those responsible, like in drug manufacturing cases.

GOVERNMENT MEDICINE: I Was a Physician at a Federally Qualified Health Center. Here’s Why I No Longer Believe Government Health Care Can Work.

For example, one of the requirements for federally qualified health centers is that they must maintain a certain number of physician assistants and nurse practitioners. Rural health clinics were the first sites to receive a federal mandate to hire non-physician practitioners.

For me, this meant supervising a physician assistant from day one. And within a few months, a brand new nurse practitioner was added to my list of responsibilities. Despite this extra workload, there was no time allotted in my schedule to provide education, review charts or discuss cases—nor was I compensated for my extra duties.

Federal regulations also create massive amounts of paperwork. While the medical staff worked hard to move patients through the registration process, my schedule often ran hours behind as forms were signed and documents reviewed.

This bottleneck often led to me starting my day late and working into the evening. When I started coming in a bit later than my assigned start time, knowing that patients would not be ready for me, I was given a stern warning by administrators.

Medicine is going to get worse, as those best-qualified to become doctors decide the bureaucratic BS isn’t worth the bother.

And do read the whole thing.

THIS IS USUALLY THE CASE WITH MUCH-HYPED ENVIRONMENTAL STORIES: Everything You’ve Heard About the Amazon Fires Is Wrong.

"A picture is worth a thousand words" is one of the dumbest aphorisms ever coined. Speaking as a former television producer, I'd say a picture takes a thousand words to explain. Take this much-circulated NASA satellite photo showing vast smoke plumes over the Amazon region:

Combined with a report from the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research that says the agency had detected 39,194 fires in the region, a 77 percent jump up from the same period in 2018, that picture has launched alarmed headlines around the world.

"Amazon rainforest is burning at an unprecedented rate," declares CNN. The Daily Beast gives us "Record Number of Wildfires Burning in Amazon Rainforest." Here's NBC News: "Amazon wildfires could be 'game over' for climate change fight."

Interestingly, when NASA released the satellite image on August 21, it noted that "it is not unusual to see fires in Brazil at this time of year due to high temperatures and low humidity. Time will tell if this year is a record breaking or just within normal limits."

So why are there so many fires? "Natural fires in the Amazon are rare, and the majority of these fires were set by farmers preparing Amazon-adjacent farmland for next year's crops and pasture," soberly explains The New York Times. "Much of the land that is burning was not old-growth rain forest, but land that had already been cleared of trees and set for agricultural use."

It is routine for farmers and ranchers in tropical areas burn their fields to control pests and weeds and to encourage new growth in pastures.

What about deforestation trends?  Since the right-wing nationalist Jair Bolsonaro became Brazil's president, rainforest deforestation rates have increased a bit, but they are still way below their earlier highs:

Various researchers have noted a U-shaped relation between environmental degradation and economic growth. As development takes off, levels of pollution and land degradation rise, but they begin to improve once certain thresholds of per capita incomes are attained. A 2012 study found, after parsing data from 52 developing countries between 1972 and 2003, that deforestation increases until average income levels reach about $3,100 per capita. As it happens, Brazilian per capita incomes reached $3,600 per capita in 2004,which is when deforestation rates began trending decisively downward.

While problematic deforestation is still taking place in the Amazon region, a 2018 study in Nature reported that the global tree canopy cover had increased by 865,000 square miles from 1982 to 2016. As Brazilians become wealthier, the deforestation trend in the Amazon will likely turn around toward afforestation, as it already has done many other countries.

* As it happens, this post is only about 430 words.

IT’S COME TO THIS: Stop Sharing Those Viral Photos of the Amazon Burning, says…Mother Jones, astonishingly enough.

Earlier: Don’t Panic: Amazon Burning Is Mostly Farms, Not Forests.

SOCIALISM MAKES A LOT OF THINGS (AND PEOPLE) DISAPPEAR: ‘Monopoly: Socialism’ Game Disappears From Target’s Website.

IT’S ALMOST AS IF HE HAS SOMETHING TO HIDE: Michael Mann Refuses to Produce Data, Loses Case.

TO BE FAIR, SOCIALISTS ARE NEVER HAPPY: Hasbro Has a New ‘Monopoly: Socialism’ Game and Socialists Are Not Happy.

DEAR LORD. THE THINGS THESE PEOPLE BELIEVE:  Spiders are getting ANGRIER because of evolutionary trick to survive ‘climate chaos’.

WHEN YOU UNDERSTAND THAT SNOPES IS JUST A DEMOCRATIC PARTY MESSAGE-CONTROL TOOL, IT ALL MAKES SENSE: A ‘Fact Checker’ Declares War On Satire: When we make fun of liberals, Snopes pretends to take us seriously and labels our jokes ‘false.’

If your job is to make people laugh, what do you do when your brand of humor is classified as dangerous?

I run the Babylon Bee, a satirical website, and we’ve had to face that question a lot lately. The “fact checkers” at Snopes.com—once a reliable source for distinguishing reality from urban legends—have been smearing the Bee as “fake news.” They don’t seem to have a problem when we make fun of Trump-worship, conservatives, fundamentalism and megachurches. But when we target Democrats and the left, suddenly we’re branded liars.

The most recent controversy began when Snopes published a thorough “debunking” of our satirical take on Georgia state Rep. Erica Thomas ’s false claim that a white man in a supermarket told her to “go back to where you came from.” Our humorous headline: “Georgia Lawmaker Claims Chick-fil-A Employee Told Her to Go Back to Her Country, Later Clarifies He Actually Said ‘My Pleasure.’ ”

Snopes knew this was a joke but questioned our “brand” of satire. The website called us “junk news” and a “ruse.” It accused us of intentionally “muddying the details” of a current event to “fool” people. . . .

This ugly dispute has demonstrated the danger of assigning authority to supposedly unbiased fact-checkers. They have the power to slap a joke they don’t like with a “false” rating and defame the authors as purveyors of lies and fakery. Last year Facebook threatened to forbid us to collect money from ads, and even to boot us entirely, after Snopes “fact checked” a piece of ours headlined “CNN Purchases Industrial Washing Machine to Spin the News.”

The Left understands and employs the power of mockery. And it wants to keep that power to itself.

HONG KONG CRISIS CONTINUES: Demonstrators confront Beijing’s disinformation campaign –including fake tweets. Remember, all the demonstrators ask is that Beijing honor the Sino-British Declaration of 1984 which guaranteed a distinct system of rule until 2047.

BREAKING NEWS: Check out Michael Yon’s website for his video updates. He posted his latest video today, a report on the civil unrest at Yuen Long train station.

RELATED: A recent StrategyPage.com podcast which analyzes the Hong Kong demonstrations and provides background on the crisis.

SNAPSHOT FROM 2008: The aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk anchors in Victoria Harbor, preparing for a port call in Hong Kong. Good photo — it caught the city in in the background.

HMM: U.K. Government ‘Extremely Concerned’ by Reports of China Detaining Hong Kong Consulate Employee.

PLUS: Crew Describe Climate of Fear at Cathay After Hong Kong Sackings.

Cathay, founded by an American and an Australian during British rule in 1946, was caught in the middle of the crisis 11 days ago, when China demanded it suspend staff involved in the protest movement.

The firm agreed, firing two pilots, but has since been plunged into turmoil after CEO Rupert Hogg was replaced last week.

Another pilot, Jeremy Tam, who is also a pro-democracy lawmaker, said on Tuesday that he and others had quit the airline as the internal political pressure was intolerable.

“That (China’s aviation regulator) has reached into Hong Kong and directly pressured a local airline is undoubtedly ‘white terror’,” he wrote on his Facebook page, using a popular Hong Kong expression used to describe anonymous acts that create a climate of fear.

“There have been resignations from frontline staff to the company’s CEO because of this political trial.”

The airline confirmed Tam was no longer an employee and said it could not comment on internal staff matters. China’s aviation regulator has not responded to Reuters’ requests for comment.

It looks like Beijing is trying to make examples of a few, trying to scare the rest of Hong Kong back into line. But the protests — already more than four months old — are probably too big for that.

Beijing can’t cave to Hong Kong without risking increased dissent on the mainland, but can’t pull off another blacked-out Tiananmen massacre because a few million smartphones would record the carnage.

It’s a helluva fix they’re in, and it couldn’t be happening to a nicer bunch of thugs.

MICHAEL YON EMAILS FROM HONG KONG:

Yesterday’s protest was massive. I have not even slept yet. Estimated 1.7m people. Crowds are notoriously difficult to estimate, but I will confirm it was absolutely massive, stretching for miles in pouring rain. Massive.

Hong Kong is China’s brain tumor. Do nothing…tumor grows. Operate…the procedure could kill the communist party.

This is very serious, Gentlemen. Do not underestimate what is happening here.

I won’t.

HEADLINE OF THE DAY: Moose crashes pool party, steals taco. Be glad he only took the taco. Moose bites can be pretti nasti.

Kevin Drum published this map on his blog, which he says was originally from the Washington Post.  He does not include a link so I can't give any more background on the chart.  For example, I have no idea which surface temperature data set it is based on.

The fact that smart guy like Kevin Drum can publish this uncritically just demonstrates how little even vociferous global warming advocates actually understand about the issue.  Because all this chart does is reinforce a skeptic argument that the global surface temperature data set is corrupted and can exaggerate warming trend data.

Let's start with this:  I have read much of the IPCC reports and have skimmed the rest, and I can say with certainty that these reports contain no theory about how increasing the concentration of atmospheric CO2 from 0.03% to 0.04% causes warming of 2C or more focused in hotspots as small as a 50 mile radius.  There is absolutely no theory, and I would argue no way, that a general global warming trend of 1-1.5C per century is causing warming 2-3 times that rate narrowly over San Jose, California or Phoenix, AZ.

The fact that many of these hotspots are focused over urban areas is a good indicator that this temperature data set is corrupted with urban heat island biases.  This is a different kind of man-made effect but one which is local and is not the result of a global warming trend, and thus should not be in a database aimed at measuring this global warming trend.

Something like 10 years ago I saw a similar chart online based on USHCN measurement stations.  At that time, the chart showed a hotspot over Tucson

At the time, Anthony Watt was running his Surface Stations project to document the conditions of all the USHCN temperature stations (the crosses on the map) that formed the basis of the US global warming / temperature trend numbers.  So I drove down to Tucson to see the temperature station in the middle of that hotspot.  What I found was that the temperature station that 100 years ago was in a rural open field was now measuring the temperature of an asphalt parking lot in the middle of a large city:

As an aside, this was a fun project as I still see this picture reproduced in random places from time to time.  After this picture got some publicity, the government shut this station down and moved it to a better location.

But the point is that the hotspot on the temperature change map was both real and fake.  Real in the sense that Tucson was definitely hotter due to the change in land use, as are most all cities (just watch the weather in a city and they will often say that it will be a low of 45 in the city, and 40 in the outlying areas).  My son and I measured the urban heat island in Phoenix for a high school science project.  We found it to be as high as a 6-8F difference between city and the surrounding countryside at certain times of day.

But the hotspot was fake because this had nothing to do with global warming from CO2, and thus including this hotspot in the temperature data was exaggerating the global warming trend.  This is especially true since there are only a few data points, so this reading for Phoenix was averaged into the reading all over the Southwest and tended to raise the official temperatures for much of Arizona, not just in Tucson.  Where temperature stations are sparse, such as in northeast Montana, a single bad surface temperature station can corrupt the data for a large area.  This effect is even further exaggerated in places like Africa, where temperature stations can be hundreds of kilometers apart.

This is one reason satellite temperature measurement makes so much sense, as it is not subject to these sorts of biases (though it has other issues, including sensor drift and the fact that satellites can shift orbits and eventually die).  Whenever you see high temperature records today, they are usually set in the city at the airport, a big paved facility in the center of an urban area that 50 years ago was probably an open field.  There is a good chance the record has more to do with urbanization around the temperature measurement station than with global warming.

I believe the scientific community at NOAA and GISS have been almost criminally negligent with the surface temperature network over the last 30 years.  In the late 80's, when we became concerned with global warming, experts knew all to well about vast problems in how we measure surface temperatures.  We have invested tens of billions of dollars to fight global warming, but practically zero to measure it better.  We should have invested in a better, more reliable, less biased (in the scientific not political sense of that word) measurement system.  The amount of money we wasted in Solyndra would have paid for the upgrades, but we still have done nothing.  As a result, much of the warming signal is actually manual corrections to the raw data, undermining the signal to noise ratio of this critical metric and calling into question the bias (in the political not scientific sense) of these manual corrections (eg here and here).  For example, it turns out the past continues to cool.

Postscript Bonus:

The Danish Meteorological Institute, which has a key role in monitoring Greenland’s climate, last week reported a shocking August temperature of between 2.7C and 4.7C at the Summit weather station, which is located 3,202m above sea level at the the centre of the Greenland ice sheet, generating a spate of global headlines.

But on Wednesday it posted a tweet saying that a closer look had shown that monitoring equipment had been giving erroneous results.

“Was there record-level warmth on the inland ice on Friday?” it said. “No! A quality check has confirmed out suspicion that the measurement was too high.”