Author Archive

The Truth about Antarctica’s Larsen C Ice Floe

Written by Richard F. Cronin

The large Larsen C ice floe (size of Delaware) is stuck along the Antarctic Peninsula due to the Coriolis effect. Antarctic scientists from the British Antarctic Research group and the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) aren’t impressed. It happens every one or two decades.

Continue Reading 2 Comments

University of Texas creates Sustainable Plastics Breakthrough

Written by Jennifer Lui

University of Texas scientists aren’t loafing around: Chemically engineered yeast are rising to the occasion and producing chemicals for sustainable plastics.

By rewiring the metabolism of Yarrowia lipolytica, a yeast, researchers are able to produce triacetic acid lactone, TAL. TAL is a polyketide, a naturally occurring molecule commonly found in plants and bacteria, chemical engineering professor Hal Alper said. The chemical can then be used to synthesize new chemicals and create plastics and other materials.

Continue Reading

Ocean Surface Temps Cool in 2018, Major Driver of Climate

Written by Ron Clutz

The best context for understanding decadal temperature changes comes from the world’s sea surface temperatures (SST), for several reasons:

  • The ocean covers 71{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of the globe and drives average temperatures;
  • SSTs have a constant water content, (unlike air temperatures), so give a better reading of heat content variations;
  • A major El Nino was the dominant climate feature in recent years.

Continue Reading 1 Comment

Fake Publishers Are Ruining Science

Written by Alan Burdick

 In the fall of 2015, a young scholar named Anna Olga Szust began sending her C.V. and a cover letter to scores of scientific journals, with the hope of being named an editor. Editors play a vital role in the world of science publishing, checking the methodology of authors and managing the peer-review process; they are the thin red line between fact and fakery. At the same time, being appointed a journal editor is one of the many essential rungs in a scientist’s climb toward credibility and tenure.

Continue Reading 1 Comment

Less Stupid than Climate Scientists

Written by PSI contributor

 
Let’s imagine the weather forecast for next Tuesday  (7 day forecast) called for a clear and sunny day with a high temperature of 15 C.  You would appear pretty stupid if instead the weather turned out to be a torrential downpour at just 5 C and you went out in short sleeves without an umbrella. And all because you ignored what was going on outside (reality) and dressed according to what the forecast (weather model) predicted.

Continue Reading 10 Comments

What Makes Circadian Clocks Tick?

Written by Biophysical Society

Circadian clocks are found within microbes and bacteria, plants and insects, animals and humans. These clocks arose as an adaptation to dramatic swings in daylight hours and temperature caused by the Earth’s rotation. But we still don’t fully understand how these tiny biological clocks work.

During the 62nd Biophysical Society Annual Meeting, held Feb. 17-21, in San Francisco, California, Andy LiWang at the University of California, Merced presented his lab’s work studying the circadian clock of blue-green colored cyanobacteria.

Continue Reading

Who Needs Dark Matter? An Alternative Explanation for the Galactic Rotation Anomaly

Written by Raymond HV Gallucci, PhD, PE

The galactic rotation anomaly, whereby there is a flattening of the rotational velocity curve with radius, was the prime driver for development of the theory of ‘Dark Matter” by Jan Oort and Fred Zwicky in the 1930s, reinforced by Vera Rubin over 30 years later based on more observations of galactic rotation.

She concluded that the mass densities of galaxies were uniform well beyond the galactic bulge, requiring that some form of ‘invisible’ matter be present to account for the rotational anomaly on a purely gravitational basis.

Continue Reading 6 Comments

Wind Turbine Noise Exposure Proven A ‘Pathway to Disease’

Written by Natalie McGregor

In a World first, Australia’s Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT) has declared that the “noise annoyance” caused by wind turbine generated low-frequency noise and infrasound “is a plausible pathway to disease”.

At the AAT hearing in Adelaide, the impacts of wind farm noise were considered by a senior Federal Court judge; the most thorough medical and scientific inquiry on the subject matter conducted in Australia to date.

Continue Reading 3 Comments

In Climate Science, You’re Right When You’re Wrong

Written by Tony Heller

Eighteen years ago, Britain’s top climate experts announced the end of snow.

According to Dr. David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, within a few years winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event”. “Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” he said.

Continue Reading

NOAA Caught Lying About Arctic Sea Ice

Written by James Delingpole

The Arctic is melting catastrophically! Sea ice levels are experiencing their most precipitous decline in 1500 years! Something must be done – and fast…

Well, so claims the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and we know by now what that means, don’t we? Yep: the Arctic sea ice is doing just fine. Yep: yet again, the NOAA is telling porkies.

Continue Reading 7 Comments

Consensus? 97 New Papers In 2018 Skeptical of Climate Alarm

Written by Kenneth Richard

In just the first 8 weeks of 2018,  97 scientific papers have been published that cast doubt on the position that anthropogenic CO2 emissions function as the climate’s fundamental control knob…or that otherwise serve to question the efficacy of climate models or the related “consensus” positions commonly endorsed by policymakers and mainstream media sources.

Continue Reading 1 Comment

Our next energy and security crisis: rare earth minerals

Written by Paul Driessen

Oil and natural gas aren’t just fuels. They supply building blocks for pharmaceuticals; plastics in vehicle bodies, athletic helmets, and numerous other products; and complex composites in solar panels and wind turbine blades and nacelles.

The USA was importing 65{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of its petroleum in 2005, creating serious national security concerns. But fracking helped cut imports to 40{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} and the US now exports oil and gas.

Continue Reading 4 Comments

A 3-Dimensional Excursion through 2-Dimensional “Flatland” as an Analogy for 4-Dimensional Light and Coulombic Force in Three Dimensions

Written by Raymond HV Gallucci, PhD, PE

This paper was conceived while attending the Electric Universe Conference in Phoenix in 2017.  While the Einstein Universe postulates time as a fourth dimension, this postulates a non-time fourth dimension, i.e., another spatial-type dimension, although we cannot perceive it.

Just as in “Flatland,” a 19th century novella that has often inspired comparisons of inter-dimensional phenomena, particularly how phenomena in dimension n + 1 would be manifested to observers restricted to dimension n, the possibility of light or the Coulombic force being a lower-dimensional (third) manifestation of a higher-dimensional (fourth) phenomenon is considered.  Given our inability to deal with four dimensions, with n = 2, a possible analogy with an extension to n = 3 is considered geometrically as a surrogate.

Continue Reading