A New Look at Nature’s Role in the Titanic’s Sinking - NYTimes.com

Now, a century after the liner went down in the early hours of April 15, 1912, two new studies argue that rare states of nature played major roles in the catastrophe.

The first says Earth’s nearness to the Moon and the Sun — a proximity not matched in more than 1,000 years — resulted in record tides that help explain why the Titanic encountered so much ice, including the fatal iceberg.

And a second, put forward by a Titanic historian from Britain, contends that the icy waters created ideal conditions for an unusual type of mirage that hid icebergs from lookouts and confused a nearby ship as to the liner’s identity, delaying rescue efforts for hours.

The Trentonian - Trentonian Editorial: Gung-ho alarmists

Now Mann is on the counterattack. His book “The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars” (Columbia) picks up where the email plotting left off before it was rudely interrupted by disclosure. Mann is looking to settle scores with his nemeses, the climate-change skeptics.In his self-serving view, if a skeptical scientist’s research was subsidized by private-sector dollars, that’s conclusive evidence of his being on the corporate take, the catamite of Big Bad Villainous Oil. But if an alarmist scientist is subsidized by government dollars, well now, that’s conclusive evidence of his noble and pristine motives. Mann himself received some $500,000 ladled out of the Obama “stimulus” pot. Can there be any doubt that his “findings” on any global-warming issue are always going to be “The sky is falling, the sky is falling!”?If there was any doubt, Mann dispensed with it in his book by stating: “Scientific truth alone is not enough to carry the day in the court of public opinion.”