I know, you stopped listening to your parents around age 12, but every now and again, they do have useful advice for you:
Only 5% of high school seniors get eight hours of sleep a night. Children get an hour less than they did 30 years ago, which subtracts IQ points and adds body weight.
Until age 21, the circuitry of a child’s brain is being completed. Bronson and Merryman report research on grade schoolers showing that “the performance gap caused by an hour’s difference in sleep was bigger than the gap between a normal fourth-grader and a normal sixth-grader.” In high school there is a steep decline in sleep hours, and a striking correlation of sleep and grades.
Tired children have trouble retaining learning “because neurons lose their plasticity, becoming incapable of forming the new synaptic connections necessary to encode a memory. … The more you learned during the day, the more you need to sleep that night.”
The school day starts too early because that is convenient for parents and teachers. Awakened at dawn, teenage brains are still releasing melatonin, which makes them sleepy. This is one reason why young adults are responsible for half the 100,000 annual “fall asleep” automobile crashes. When Edina, Minn., changed its high school start from 7:25 a.m. to 8:30 a.m., math/verbal SAT scores rose substantially.
Furthermore, sleep loss increases the hormone that stimulates hunger and decreases the one that suppresses appetite. Hence the correlation between less sleep and more obesity.
So, even though the temptation is to stay up as late as you possibly can . . . don’t. You’ll actually notice the difference the next day.
The way things are going, we may need to throw out even more contaminated “data” that has been used to track climate for over a century, because it can’t technically be called anything other than anecdotal:
The network relies on volunteers in the 48 contiguous states to take daily readings of high and low temperatures and precipitation measured by sensors they keep by their homes and offices. They deliver that information to the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), which uses it to track changes in the climate.
Requirements aren’t very strict for volunteers: They need a modicum of training and decent vision in at least one eye to qualify. And they’re expected to take measurements seven days a week, 365 days a year.
That’s a recipe for trouble, says Watts, who told FoxNews.com that less scrupulous members of the network often fail to collect the data when they go on vacation or are sick. He said one volunteer filled in missing data with local weather reports from the newspapers that stacked up while he was out of town.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Volunteers take their readings at different times of day, then round the temperatures to the nearest whole number and mark down their measurements on paper forms they mail in monthly to the NCDC headquarters in Ashville, N.C.
“You’ve got this kind of a ragtag network that’s reporting the numbers for our official climate readings,” said Watts, who found that 90 percent of the stations violated the government’s guidelines for where they may be located.
Watts believes that poor placement of temperature sensors has compromised the system’s data. Though they are supposed to be situated in empty clearings, many of the stations are potentially corrupted by their proximity to heat sources, including exhaust pipes, trash-burning barrels, chimneys, barbecue grills, seas of asphalt — and even a grave.
There’s an old saying, frequently used in statistical discussions, that the “plural of anecdote is not data”. This is an excellent example of unreliable information being collated and depended upon as if it was rigorous and objective.
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Clive sent a link to Lord Monckton’s “Answer to a ‘global warming’ fanatic”:
Dear Enquirer, – Thank you for taking the trouble to write to me. If I may, I shall highlight various passages from your letter in bold face, and then respond to them seriatim in Roman face.
“I am not a climate scientist, and so I can only go by the overwhelming consensus amongst scientists that man-made climate change is occurring and that it poses a grave threat to humanity.”
First, science is not — repeat not — done by consensus. Aristotle, in codifying the dozen worst fallacies to which mankind is prone, described this one as the “head-count fallacy”, or, as the mediaeval schoolmen called it, the argumentum ad populum. Merely because many people say they believe a thing to be true, they do not necessarily believe it to be true and, even if they do, it need not necessarily be true. Abu Ali Ibn al-Haytham, the astronomer, mathematician and philosopher of science in 11th-century Iraq who is credited as the father of the scientific method, said this —
“The seeker after truth does not put his faith in any mere consensus, however broad and however venerable. Instead, he subjects what he has learned from it to scrutiny using his hard-won scientific knowledge, and he verifies for himself whether it is true. The road to the truth is long and hard, but that is the road we must follow.”
More recently, T.H. Huxley, in the famous debate in which he defeated Bishop Soapy Sam Wilberforce in Oxford on the question of evolution, put it this way —
“The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the very highest of duties: blind faith the one unpardonable sin.”
Secondly, the “consensus” you speak of does not in fact exist. Schulte (2008) reported that, of 539 scientific papers dated January 2004-February 2007 that contained the search phrase “global climate change”, not one provided any evidence that any anthropogenic influence on any part of the climate would prove in any degree catastrophic. That, if you do science by consensus, is the consensus.
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More than 150 years of global temperature records are to be re-examined by scientists in an attempt to regain public trust in climate science after revelations about errors and suppression of data.
The Met Office has submitted proposals for the reassessment by an independent panel in a tacit admission that its previous reports have been marred by their reliance on analysis by the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU).
Two separate inquiries are being held into allegations that the CRU tried to hide its raw data from critics and that it exaggerated the extent of global warming.
In a document entitled Proposal for a New International Analysis of Land Surface Air Temperature Data, the Met Office says: “We feel it is timely to propose an international effort to reanalyse surface temperature data in collaboration with the World Meteorological Organisation.”
As I’ve said several times, we may actually have a global problem with rising temperatures, and if so we need to consider the potential impact and possible ways to address it. However, the science is far from settled — in fact, it’s more unsettled now than it was at any time in the last fifteen years. Without reliable data, we can’t pretend to make any predictions or recommend any course of action because we don’t know whether global temperatures are rising or not.
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The BBC’s decision to broadcast Terry Pratchett’s speech on euthanasia tribunals is cited as evidence that the corporation is acting as an advocate on this highly emotional issue:
The Care Not Killing Alliance accused the BBC of flouting impartiality rules and adopting a “campaigning stance” in an attempt to step up pressure on the Government to legalise assisted suicide.
The decision to broadcast Sir Terry Pratchett’s speech advocating “euthanasia tribunals” in full earlier this month was an example of unbalanced reporting, the alliance claimed.
Lord Carlile, chairman of the alliance and the Government’s independent reviewer of terror legislation, has demanded a meeting with BBC bosses to seek answers over the “biased” coverage.
In a letter to Sir Michael Lyons, the chairman of the BBC trust, the Liberal Democrat peer also raised questions over the corporation’s failure to inform police that a veteran presenter had confessed to killing his lover on one of its programmes.
H/T to Elizabeth for the link.
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If it’s true that right wing bloggers and right wing Brit newspapers are now savaging the Warmists completely wrongly, well, isn’t that a story in its own right, given the huge scale of this phenomenon? Aren’t these bad bloggers and cynical Brit journos threatening the very future of the planet? And you guys are ignoring that? Why aren’t you grilling these bad, bad people? Why no big exposures of the wrongness and wickedness of Steve McIntyre? Why no stuff saying “What’s up with Watt’s Up With That??” One way or another, this is a huge story.
Trouble is, I guess they want the story to go one way, but that if they investigate it properly they fear that they’ll find it going the other way.
Who is Audi trying to sell their little green Panzerkampfwagens to? Folks who think the ad wasn’t Gorewellian enough:
“The ad only makes sense if it’s aimed at people who acknowledge the moral authority of the green police,” writes Grist magazine’s David Roberts on the Huffington Post. The target audience, according to Roberts, is men who want to “do the right thing.” He’s certainly right that the ad isn’t aimed at people (whom he childishly mocks as “teabaggers”) who worry that their liberties are being eroded.
But the message is hardly “do the right thing.”
To me, the target demographic is a certain subset of spineless, upscale white men (all the perps in the ad are affluent white guys) who just want to go with the flow. In that sense, the Audi ad has a lot in common with those execrable MasterCard commercials. Targeting the same demographic, those ads depicted hapless fathers being harangued by their children to get with the environmental program. MasterCard’s tagline: “Helping Dad become a better man: Priceless.”
The difference is that MasterCard’s ads were earnest, creepy, diabetes-inducing treacle. Audi’s ad not only fails to invest the greens with moral authority, it concedes that the carbon cops are out of control and power-hungry (in a postscript scene, the Green Police pull over real cops for using Styrofoam cups). But, because resistance is futile when it comes to the eco-Borg, you might as well get the best car you can.
Brian Micklethwait goes all gung ho and everything, trying to encapsulate the current situation in Climatestan:
Are you bored with Climategate? And bored with me writing about it, again and again? Yesterday, fellow Samizdatista Michael Jennings told me he is. I understand the feeling, and would be interested to hear if any of our commentariat shares it, but as for me, I can’t leave this thing alone. I mean, this is now the biggest single battle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness, and the forces of darkness are now in definite, headlong, ignominious retreat. I for one do not feel inclined to stop shouting about that any time soon.
However, I do agree that things are now moving on, and that is what this posting is about.
[. . .]
If you don’t think you have any position to retreat to, then you stand and fight to the death. The Hockey Team, along with their most vocal fans, are now in this doomed position. But the CAGW camp as a whole is now deciding whether to back the Hockey Team or to cut them lose and concede the ground that the Hockey Team have so fraudulently occupied. This Guardian leader says to me that the high command of the Grande Armée of CAGW is now attempting a retreat in good order to a position further back, which it thinks it can hold, rather than making a futile last stand now that would only destroy them all. The CAGW camp, as they now wish to remain, losing the I but definitely keeping tight hold of the C, are now concluding that there is no future in defending the now utterly discredited Hockey Team, i.e. Mann and the East Anglians. And although the IPCC gets no mention in this Guardian leader, other CAGW-ers are already saying, with similar reluctance but similar definiteness, that the now utterly discredited IPCC will also have to be cut loose from polite society, certainly in its now utterly discredited form, as crafted during the last decade or so by the now utterly discredited Rajendra Pachauri.
[. . .]
Don’t get me wrong. Crushing Michael Mann and his Hockey Team, sending Pachauri packing, making the letters I, P, C and C spell L, I, E and S in the minds of all thinking people, getting the Met Office to stick to short-term weather forecasting, ripping the panda pants off the WWF – these are very important tasks. When pursuing your enemies after you have won a battle against them, it is important to ensure that as many as possible of the defeated ones do not keep any undeserved shreds of reputation with which to fight again. This is not an either/or thing. The climate skeptic blogosphere is big enough and clever enough to do it all, pushing the old media along with it (UK), or not and just replacing the old media for the duration of the battle (USA) — or the war, or for ever, for everything — as the case may be. But in among sneering at the disgraced Hockey Team, chuckling over the multiple lies and lavish living arrangements of the rascal Pachauri, and gags about how many inches of global warming have just descended upon this or that American city, we should also be getting stuck into the next fight.
I’ve done my best to include a sprinkling of decent links, to reports and to celebratory whoops from this last battlefield, but these are now potentially infinite. A few weeks ago I went on a foreign trip and was largely disconnected from the internet for the best part of a week. Since then, I have been trying and failing to catch up with Climategate. Last weekend, the story pretty much escaped from anyone’s single purview, so large and so complicated has it now become. Basically, a huge retreat in multiple directions is going on, and a huge pursuit, ditto, with CAGW defensive position after CAGW defensive position being overrun by advancing Skeptics. The IPCC citadel, its outer walls having crumbled when Climategate first broke, is now being comprehensively sacked.
Go read the whole thing, which is liberally studded with links to follow. Should keep you busy for a bit, anyway.
Lorne Gunter also appreciated Audi’s “Green Police” Super Bowl ad:
Far and away the cleverest ad from this year’s Super Bowl was Audi’s “Green Police” commercial for its A3 TDI clean diesel sedan, which is greencar.com’s 2010 Green Car of the Year. It’s easy to find on YouTube and well worth the search. The 60-second spot is a brilliant send up of the excesses of the environmental movement, so brilliant that green and lefty blogs have been angrily denouncing the ad ever since it aired on Sunday during the NFL Championship game.
Too bad nobody told the carmaker it’s OK to laugh at its own production. The company’s timid explanation is that Green Police are “caricatures” designed to gently steer people through “a myriad of decisions in their quest to become more environmentally responsible citizens.” (I am at this moment sticking out my tongue and making a poking motion toward the back of my throat with the index and middle fingers of my left hand.)
To the soundtrack of a re-recording of Cheap Trick’s 1979 hit song Dream Police, the ad features jumped-up little eco cops — often wearing fetching shorts and driving Segway-like, three-wheeled, enviro scooters — harassing ordinary people about the green morality of their everyday consumer choices.
On its website, Audi insists its ecocops are “not here to judge, merely to guide,” yet the first scene of the commercial features a young man paying for his groceries who chooses plastic over paper. Suddenly, a Green Police officer springs up from behind, slams the shopper’s face into the price scanner and exclaims “You picked the wrong day to mess with the ecosystem, plastic boy.”
Yep, that’s both gentle and non-judgmental, alright.
Audi’s ad is an incredibly useful example of how a message can be interpreted in radically different fashion by different audiences. To many in the green movement, Audi is poking fun at their expense and minimizing the danger to the environment posed by allowing people to make their own decisions. To many libertarians, Audi is illustrating the kind of dictatorial control over peoples’ lives that many in the green movement believe to be essential “for our own good”.
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Don’t worry, anti-smoking campaigners! Even though the evil smoking empire is in retreat, and smokers get worse press than child molesters and people who talk at the theatre, there’s a new moral front opening up: third-hand smoke! The war isn’t over yet:
Lingering residue from tobacco smoke which clings to upholstery, clothing and the skin releases cancer-causing agents, work in PNAS journal shows.
Berkeley scientists in the US ran lab tests and found “substantial levels” of toxins on smoke-exposed material.
They say while banishing smokers to outdoors cuts second-hand smoke, residues will follow them back inside and this “third-hand smoke” may harm.
Efforts are currently underway to determine if there’s a strong media response to this “new threat”. If so, funding will be sought to research the possibility of “fourth-hand smoke” and possibly even “fifth-hand smoke”.
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I’d heard some of this from my daughter before and had gotten used to the idea that she needed a little deprogramming from time to time. But as I listened to the rote repetition of a political agenda from children not old enough to read, I decided it was time for a word with the teacher. She wanted to know which specific points in the catechism I found objectionable. I declined to answer. As environmentalism becomes increasingly like an intrusive state religion, we dissenters become increasingly prickly about suggestions that we suffer from some kind of aberration.
The naive environmentalism of my daughter’s preschool is a force-fed potpourri of myth, superstition, and ritual that has much in common with the least reputable varieties of religious Fundamentalism. The antidote to bad religion is good science. The antidote to astrology is the scientific method, the antidote to naive creationism is evolutionary biology, and the antidote to naive environmentalism is economics.
Economics is the science of competing preferences. Environmentalism goes beyond science when it elevates matters of preference to matters of morality. A proposal to pave a wilderness and put up a parking lot is an occasion for conflict between those who prefer wilderness and those who prefer convenient parking. In the ensuing struggle, each side attempts to impose its preferences by manipulating the political and economic systems. Because one side must win and one side must lose, the battle is hard-fought and sometimes bitter. All of this is to be expected.
But in the 25 years since the first Earth Day, a new and ugly element has emerged in the form of one side’s conviction that its preferences are Right and the other side’s are Wrong. The science of economics shuns such moral posturing; the religion of environmentalism embraces it.
At least, for Canadians watching the game on CTV, we didn’t get to see most of these ads, including Audi’s brief trip into the very near future:
Audi’s effort won both best and worst titles from the readers at the Wall Street Journal.
Update: Nick Gillespie also thought this ad to be quite noteworthy:
. . . the great ad in last night’s game was, IMO, the Audi “Green Police” spot, and not simply because it showcased a classic Cheap Trick tune to astonishingly great (read: totally nostalgic for late-era boomers who grew up thinking Robin Zander was cool and Bun E. Carlos was an animatron and Rick Nielsen was crazy funny and that Tom Petersson was, like Kurt Von Trapp in The Sound of Music or Jan Brady in The Brady Bunch, well, I don’t know but he must have done something to be there) advantage. No, it was also right up to the moment I realized that it was a pitch for a car that I will never purchase, it seemed like a Mike Judge vision of a future that is almost the present (finally, a reason to thank SCOTUS for flipping the coin toward George W. Bush in 2000).
Will it move cars? Who knows. It moves . . . minds. Which rarely come with the sort of 100,000 mile warranty that is standard even on overpriced, underpowered, and breakdown prone vehicles like Audis.
Some interesting comments to Nick’s post:
grrizzly|2.8.10 @ 9:04AM|# Imagine a Holocaust movie. Jews are in concentration camps. Regularly sent to gas chambers. Suddenly one man receives documents proving he is not a jew. He’s set free. He walks away. Happy End. This is what the ad is.
iowahawk|2.8.10 @ 9:10AM|# I thought it was the best Super Bowl ad of all time, and not for the reasons Audi was hoping for. Hilarious, creepy and upbeat all at the same time. And the punchline: The sponsor (Audi) merrily approves of the dystopian fascism. My jaw hit the ground.
Enjoy Every Sandwich|2.8.10 @ 9:16AM|# When I saw the ad I was thinking “this will give Al Gore a hard-on, assuming he still gets those”. It’s a left-wing dream world.
PM770|2.8.10 @ 11:20AM|# Right. I think Audi probably owes Al one clean television.
Tulpa|2.8.10 @ 11:28AM|# It’s called extremely skilled advertising. Give different messages to different target audiences, hopefully a message that makes them want to buy your product. I looked at it and liked the (obviously ironic) portrayal of the Green Police, while your average lefty is saying “Yeah man, they should totally send swat teams to people’s houses looking for light bulbs!”
Update, 9 February: Added the tag GreenGestapo, as this appears to be trending in the blogosphere . . . I expect to have further use for the tag in the future.
Update, 2 February 2014: The original video has been removed, so here’s another link instead:
And Mark Steyn‘s original comments, recently republished:
A man asks for a plastic bag at the supermarket checkout. Next thing you know, his head’s slammed against the counter, and he’s being cuffed by the Green Police. “You picked the wrong day to mess with the ecosystem, plastic boy,” sneers the enviro-cop, as the perp is led away. Cut to more Green Police going through your trash, until they find … a battery! “Take the house!” orders the eco-commando. And we switch to a roadblock on a backed-up interstate, with the Green Police prowling the lines of vehicles to check they’re in environmental compliance.
If you watched the Super Bowl, you most likely saw this commercial. As my comrade Jonah Goldberg noted, up until this point you might have assumed it was a fun message from a libertarian think-tank warning of the barely veiled totalitarian tendencies of the eco-nanny state. Any time now, you figure, some splendidly contrarian type — perhaps Clint lui-même in his famous Gran Torino — will come roaring through flipping the bird at the stormtroopers and blowing out their tires for good measure. But instead the Greenstapo stumble across an Audi A3 TDI. “You’re good to go,” they tell the driver, and, with the approval of the state enforcers, he meekly pulls out of the stalled traffic and moves off. Tagline: “Green has never felt so right.”
So the message from Audi isn’t “You are a free man. Don’t bend to the statist bullies,” but “Resistance is futile. You might as well get with the program.”
Strange. Not so long ago, car ads prioritized liberty. Your vehicle opened up new horizons: Gitcha motor running, head out on the highway, looking for adventure. … To sell dull automobiles to people who lived in suburban cul de sacs, manufacturers showed them roaring round hairpin bends, deep into forests, splashing through rivers, across the desert plain, invariably coming to rest on the edge of a spectacular promontory on the roof of the world offering a dizzying view of half the planet. Freedom!
Update, 9 February, 2017: The original and revised video links have all gone sour, so here’s a current version of the ad, triggered by Audi’s latest Super Bowl ad fiasco.
Amusingly, the tag line shown at the end of the commercial, Audi: Truth in Engineering, is proven to be false by the company’s systematic cheating on emission testing software in their cars (being part of the Volkswagon group, where the cheating was first discovered in their diesel models).
In late 2015, Volkswagen Group became embroiled in an emissions cheating scandal that also involved its Audi brand. Delicious irony — here was a brand that had touted itself a leader in environmental stewardship only to be unmasked as a fraud of epic proportions.
As late as November 2016, new revelations about the extent of Audi’s emissions scam were still coming to light. It was revealed that the scandal was not limited to diesel-engine cars, as previously thought, but included gasoline-powered Audi models as well.
So it was a curious choice for Audi to pat itself on the shoulder for yet another politically correct stand — pay equality for women — when its credibility was torn to shreds in its core competency: automobile manufacturing. Perhaps Audi thought this would provide good cover from their credibility woes, or perhaps they banked on an inattentive public with amnesia. A pretty good bet, I admit. But I have a long memory and a nose for hypocrisy.
So what is the answer to George Clooney’s questions? What should he tell his daughter?
I would tell her (and mine) that once a person has lied to you, then you can no longer trust that person. That if the person is truly repentant, they will find a way to make it up to you and rebuild the trust. But if they they try to distract from the extent of their dishonesty, you might as well put that relationship in the junkyard.
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ESR calls for even more naming and shaming of the climate fraudsters:
I too long to see the frauds and the fellow-travellers in the hell they’ve earned for themselves. But revenge, while it’s a tasty dish that long-time public “deniers” like Delingpole and myself are now thoroughly enjoying, isn’t the best reason to hound them and their enabling organizations out of public life. The best reason not to relent, to name and shame the fraudsters and shatter their reputations and humilate them — ideally, to the point where there’s a rash of prominent suicides as a result — is this:
If we don’t destroy them, they’ll surely ramp up yet another colossal, politicized eco-fraud to plague us all.
He’s quite right, many of the people deeply involved in the swindle would have been just as happy in another pseudo-scientific attempt to wrest control of the economy in order to “protect us” from ourselves.
Any conspiracies in sight? Yes, actually . . .
Conspiracy #1: Most of the environmental movement is composed of innocent Gaianists, but not all of it. There’s a hard core that’s sort of a zombie remnant of Soviet psyops. Their goals are political: trash capitalism, resurrect socialism from the dustbin of history. They’re actually more like what I have elsewhere called a prospiracy, having lost their proper conspiratorial armature when KGB Department V folded up in 1992. There aren’t a lot of them, but they’re very, very good at co-opting others and they drive the Gaianists like sheep. I don’t think there’s significant overlap with the scientists here; the zombies are concentrated in universities, all right, but mostly in the humanities and grievance-studies departments.
Conspiracy #2: The hockey team itself. Read the emails. Small, tight-knit, cooperating through covert channels, very focused on destroying its enemies, using false fronts like realclimate.org. There’s your classic conspiracy profile.
My model of what’s been going on is basically this: The hockey team starts an error cascade that sweeps up a lot of scientists. The AGW meme awakens chiliastic emotional responses in a lot of Gaianists. The zombies and the green-shirts grab onto that quasi-religious wave as a political strategem (the difference is that the zombies actively want to trash capitalism, while the green-shirts just want to hobble and milk it). Pro-AGW scientists get more funding from the green-shirts within governments, which reinforces the error cascade — it’s easier not to question when your grant money would be at risk for doing so. After a few times around this cycle, the hockey team notices it’s riding a tiger and starts on the criminal-conspiracy stuff so it will never have to risk getting off.
Following up to yesterday’s post on Newfoundland and Labrador premier Danny Williams and his decision to seek care out-of-country for his heart condition:
I have always argued that every Canadian should be free to seek treatment wherever he or she wants. Elective or lifesaving, complicated or straightforward, it is none of my business where Danny Williams goes for his operation, or who pays for it.
True, there would be something of a hypocrisy factor at play if Mr. Williams has preached the virtues of Canada’s state-monopoly care and now, when he has to put his faith in the system, he has flown the coop rather than stand in line for a treatment he could receive here.
But we don’t know what exactly is wrong with the brash and charming politician, who is one of the few chunks of flavour in the floury roux of Canadian politics. Perhaps what ails him can only be fixed south of the border — in which case, the province might even have paid for his treatment in a foreign clinic.
The point I am trying to make here is that only because we have turned health care into a political hot potato are any of us even wondering whether the premier is justified in going to an American clinic.
Well, when an ordinary person has to wait months and months just to see a specialist, and then wait even longer for surgery, while the political class can (apparently) get immediate attention and care, it becomes difficult to continue believing that all Canadians are entitled to equal care . . .
I can’t disagree with Lorne Gunter here:
What I resent is the way premiers and prime ministers won’t free you or me to buy insurance that would enable us to procure first-class care in times of need. What I resent is the way many limousine liberals lash us to the mast of the good ship Medicare, then run off to the United States when it’s their lives or their families’ on the line. They are like public school trustees who send their kids to private school.
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Wired discusses the results of NASA’s first UAVSAR 3D image of the devastated area:
NASA’s radar-equipped jet has returned its first 3-D image of Port-au-Prince, Haiti. This false-color image clearly shows the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden Fault extending east of the city.
The image supports a Jan. 21 U.S. Geological Survey report that suggested the section of the fault (indicated by the black arrow above) nearest to Port-au-Prince (yellow arrow) did not slip significantly in the magnitude 7 Jan. 12 earthquake.
The new image, taken by JPL’s Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar attached to a modified Gulfstream III jet, shows that the ground rupture moved westward from the epicenter. The section of the fault in the image did not rupture, a situation that increases the risk of another significant earthquake in the future.
[. . .]
The colors in the image, which shows a swath of about 12.5 miles, are the result of three different radar polarizations that make vegetation appear green, water appear blue and urban areas look reddish.
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