Why is a U.S. Government Agency, NASA, blocking climate data and how they calculated the results of their analysis? Shouldn't that be illegal? After all, we taxpayers are providing the funding for NASA to conduct this research. Think it isn't happening? Read this article about Steven McIntyre, of the infamous Climate Audit website.

Science data (particularly if federally funded) should be open to all. The very nature of discovery and understanding is to question and analyze. When I hear pundits say "The debate on Global Warming is over", I am at a loss because I don't recall exactly when that debate ever occurred and who decided it was over. And it is looking more and more like there are many that do not want this topic to be analyzed, audited, or debated.

Facts and Fictions of Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth", by Kristen Byrnes. This is an extremely detailed examination of Al Gore's claims in his movie concerning Global Warming.

A good read. Please note the complexity of issues involved.

I love this quote. "Al Gore doesn’t know what he’s talking about." But, he does know how to make a buck!

What is becoming clearer is that the Global Warming "scam" isn't about saving the Planet (which doesn't need much saving if you ask me), but is about money, influence, and power.

I have worked on some very large DotNetNuke websites (100k+ users), and while performance is typically fairly good, there are times when the websites are very slow, and in some cases the pages "timeout".

Many times the performance of the website is directly attributable to the performance of the database. Often this is due to the volatile nature of your database resulting in the table indexes becoming fragmented. This means that look up queries could run slower over time.

If you are experiencing performance issues coming from your database, check the fragmentation on your indexes on your DNN tables (particularly those associated with your user accounts). Below is the SQL Server 2005 interface for viewing index fragmentation (on an AdventureWorks table).

While this interface (above) is useful for a looking at a few tables, one at a time, there are quite a few DNN tables in a typical installation, and this can get tedious. Here is an excellent article, "Queries Dragging? Try Defragging",  in SQL Server Magazine (InstantDoc 96059), by Eric Peterson, with a downloadable stored procedure that you can use to analyze and tune the fragmentation of your table indexes. The stored procedure will save you a lot of time in analyzing and defragging tables.

Global climate modeling is far from an exact science, but to the politicos it appears to be gospel.

Here is an article by Arthur B. Robinson, Sallie L. Baliunas, Willie Soon, and Zachary W. Robinson, of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, entitled "Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide". It includes a petition purpotedly signed by 19,000 scientists.

It is a fairly long look at the data on Earth tempature data, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and climate impact. It is not very good news for the "Global Warming is Real and the Earth is going to end" crowd. Here are some excerpts:

"Not one of the temperature graphs shown in figures 4 to 7, which include the most accurate and reliable surface and atmospheric temperature measurements available, both global and regional, shows any warming whatever that can be attributed to increases in green-house gases."

"There are no experimental data to support the hypothesis that increases in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are causing or can be expected to cause catastrophic changes in global temperatures or weather. To the contrary, during the 20 years with the highest carbon dioxide levels, atmospheric temperatures have decreased."

There are a lot of people who believe global warming is real. Of course, there are a lot of people who believe in the Easter Bunny, too. Global climate modeling involves a complex combination of sciences in aerodynamics, physics, chemistry, and computational mathematics.

The statistical modeling by the leading authors on the existence of global warming was analyzed by a group of Statisticians, including my advisor at George Mason University, Dr. Ed Wegman, and resulted in their congressional testimony, an excerpt of that you can find here.

Here is an excerpt from Congressman Ed Whitfield's (Kentucky) opening statement from the hearings on "Questions Surrounding the 'Hockey Stick' Temperature Studies: Implications for Climate Change Assessments", on July 27, 2006:

"Dr. Wegman was not seeking to impugn the integrity of any of the scientists who work in this area, but it is clear that peer review somehow failed to pick up the flaws in the hockey stick studies. Dr. Wegman simply raises the possibility that, given the evident publishing relationship among the authors of many of the relevant works, combined with the failure to involve statisticians, Dr. Mann's peers may have been too close to the topic to scrutinize the studies as rigorously as they might have. Whatever the case, Dr. Mann's peers failed to catch the errors Wegman, the NRC, and McIntyre identified."