NASA-funded researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology are tapping information found in the cells of all life on Earth, and using it to trace life’s evolution. 

by Lester Haines, theregister.co.uk

The European Space Agency’s LISA Pathfinder spacecraft is due to blast off tomorrow from Kourou, French Guiana, on its mission to “test the technology needed to develop future space-borne gravitational wave detectors”. 

The launch date is not arbitrary. It celebrates the 100th anniversary of the publication of Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity – the work which predicted the existence of the gravitational waves which have to date eluded scientific observation.

Now, boffins hope, they can finally take the first step in unmasking the ripples of energy which, according to Einstein, are produced by events such as stars collapsing to form black holes.

The LISA (Laser Interferometer Space Antenna) Pathfinder will be carried aloft by a Vega rocket – ESA’s “small” lifter for payloads up to 2,000kg – and ultimately enter a Lissajous orbit* around Lagrange point L1 after an eight-week trip.

by Anthony Bright-Paul

While misguided global policymakers debate in Paris this week over ‘fixing’ earth’s climate to two degrees of warming serious thinkers agree there is no such metric as an average earth temperature. 

 Anthony Bright-Paul writes: There is no such thing as a Global temperature, and everybody knows that this is the truth and yet both Warmists and some Skeptics keep up the charade of pretending that such an elephant exists.

If I were to ask you the temperature in Singapore, or Jakarta, or Perth Australia, or of Moscow, or Denver at this very moment, it is not impossible with a computer to look up the temperatures at about 1 – 1.5 metres above the ground in any of these places. Furthermore in every single one of these places the temperature will change or will have changed some 3,600 times within the hour.

Everyone, that is everyone who is not an absolute simpleton and has a modicum of knowledge, knows that the Earth is rotating on itself and is travelling round the Sun in an ellipse, so that it is sometimes, I am informed, some 91 or 95 million miles from the Earth. So our distance from the Sun varies by a matter of 4 to 5 million miles!

The fact that we are hurtling round the sun – if my memory serves me aright at some 66,000 miles per hour, and that the Earth is tilting – these facts are now common knowledge, and account for the Seasons. So everyone who has the slightest wit knows that there are seasons, that we in Europe look forward to the Spring with hopeful anticipation, and to the approach of Winter with apprehension.

by Dr. Tim Ball

In the 19th century, English-speaking universities comprised two faculties, The Natural Sciences and the Humanities.  The word scientist didn’t exist until the middle of the century. Naturalist was the general name for people we call scientists today. 

Darwin, as a naturalist, published The Origin of Species in 1859 as a theory, which it remains today. Over time, the science community used Darwin’s Theory of Evolution effectively to replace religion, especially in the public school system. The use of the Theory to counter religion prevented science testing it, as the scientific method requires. The science community automatically ostracizes any scientist challenging Darwin for giving comfort to creationism.

A side effect of effectively removing God from the academic world was ironical, the same challenge Darwin faced. Alfred Russell Wallace, who sent Darwin a copy of his version of the Evolutionary Theory before Darwin published and chided him for not explaining the vast difference between humans and all other animals including the other primates. Wallace proposed a form of intelligent design. In his follow-up book, The Descent of Man Darwin suggested other animals variously had all the abilities of humans. The confusion all this creates foolish comments such as this by David Suzuki.

Economics is a very species–chauvinistic idea. No other species on earth – and there are may be 30 million of them – has had the nerve to put forth a concept called economics, in which one species, us, declares the right to put value on everything else on earth, in the living and non-living world.

He is wrong about the number of species; there are millions more. He is also wrong about humans as the only ones who put a value on everything. All animals put a value on everything. “Can I eat it or not?” It doesn’t get more basic than that. Of course, he doesn’t even seem to realize his statement disproves his argument. No other species could think of economics or write about it.

Darwin and the removal of God had a dramatic impact on the academic world. Religious studies remained a part of the Humanities, but now it was a minor academic study of religions as a curiosity rather than an answer to fundamental questions of why we are here and clearly different. If God didn’t put us here and makes us dramatically different then what did?

One response of the academic world involved social Darwinism. This applied his rule of nature to human behavior and triggered Herbert Spencer’s famous phrase, “Survival of the fittest.” Darwin liked it so much he included it in the sixth edition of his Origin of the Species.

A much larger response developed based on the academic ability to try and answer questions nobody else is asking or are of any consequence. This is why the saying “it’s academic,” means it is irrelevant to the real world. Academia created an entire new discipline with the oxymoronic title, the Social Sciences.

The entire focus, from psychology, sociology, economics, political science and others is humans and their behavior. Transitional among these subjects is anthropology because it tries to reconstruct our evolutionary history. Along the way it created indicators of our difference from other primates and identified the characteristic that identified us as the humans at that stage. The fact we can do this exercise shows how very different humans are. The fact academics do it measures how far removed they are from reality.

The first name assigned to a characteristically human trait was arrogantly academic in Latin. We were Homo Erectus, the primate that walked upright. Other primates showed some bipedalism and it wasn’t a particularly distinguishing intellectual feature. We were smarter than those other primates, so they decided what made us different was the ability to make tools, hence the name Homo Habilis, Man, the toolmaker.

Then primatologist Jane Goodall’s observation of chimpanzees making tools eliminated the difference. Clearly, we needed something on a higher intellectual scale so they decided humans could think conceptually. This involves taking two separate ideas and linking to evolve a third idea – solving problems or conceptual thinking. The Latin word chosen was sapiens, which means wise, so we became Homo sapiens, the wise ape.

Another study of chimpanzees involved placing them in a large, high room with bananas hanging from the ceiling and a pile of boxes in the corner. It didn’t take the chimpanzees long to pile up the boxes and get the bananas. A conceptually thinking, problem-solving chimpanzee forced the need for another unique quality for humans. They decided that our ability to tell lies made us unique. Doesn’t that just make your human chest swell with pride? Lying requires a double thought process, the truth then a way to get round it – a doubly wise process made us Homo sapiens sapiens, the doubly wise primate.

Again another study dismissed this claim to distinction. Researchers watching gorillas through a one-way glass noticed that one broke one of the toys. The gorilla was trained in American Sign Language (AMSLAN) so they asked him who broke the toy. Almost without hesitation the gorilla pointed at a fellow gorilla.

Over the years, I discussed these issues with anthropologists, but especially cultural anthropologist Professor Mel Holstein. He said the latest thinking involved the ability to think of, or be aware, of death. I described video showing elephants lingering over bones and carrying them around for some time that appear to indicate an awareness of death. We agreed this suggested some awareness of death. However, he said anthropologists considered thinking about death in the concept of an afterlife.

At that point, we agreed this brings us full circle. Concern about an afterlife is central to religion. Elimination of God and religion as the explanation for human presence and the difference is where the Social Sciences began. Essentially the Social Sciences amount to 100 years of human navel gazing. They add little to our understanding of life or death. Sociology is a good example because some say they try to prove scientifically what everybody already knew. The Social Science faculties are vast factories of bizarre ideas about people and society that they inflict on society through the schools and government, all without any moral responsibility.

**This article first appeared on The Rebel website.

– See more at: http://drtimball.com/2015/academics-going-round-in-circles/#sthash.TYJtUBUl.dpuf

by Carl Blesch-Rutgers, Rutgers

RUTGERS (US) — Scientist have described the process that allows corals to form skeletons, and they say water acidity doesn’t affect the process. 

Those skeletons—destined to become limestones—form massive and ecologically vital coral reefs in the world’s oceans.

In a publication in Current Biology, Tali Mass and colleagues at the Rutgers Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences show that specific proteins produced by corals can form limestones in test tubes.

These proteins, secreted by corals, precipitate carbonate that forms the corals’ characteristic skeleton.

“This is a first step toward understanding how coral build their skeleton,” says Mass, a postdoctoral researcher and lead author of the study.

Water acidity does not affect the process, which suggests that these organisms will survive in coming centuries when the world’s oceans are predicted to become more acidic. That also potentially bodes well for the health of the world’s coral reefs, which support ecosystems essential to marine diversity that in turn support fisheries.

“The good news is that the change in acidity will not stop the function of these proteins,” says Mass.

by P Gosselin, notrickszone.com

Veteran award-winning journalist Günter Ederer reports of a shocking new global warming data fraud in NASA’s global temperature data series, as relied on by the UN and government climate scientists.  The data has been carefully analysed by a respected data computation expert Professor Dr. Friedrich Karl Ewert and is being made publicly available for independent verification.

Professor Ewert’s findings seem to show NASA has intentionally and systematically rigged the official government record of global temperatures to show recent global warming where none would exist without the upwards ‘revisions.’

The astonishing results are now available online to the public.  P Gosselin of notrickzone.com reports:

Ederer reports not long ago retired geologist and data computation expert Professor Dr. Friedrich Karl Ewert began looking at the data behind the global warming claims, and especially the datasets of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS).

Ewert painstakingly examined and tabulated the reams of archived data from 1153 stations that go back to 1881 – which NASA has publicly available – data that the UN IPCC uses to base its conclusion that man is heating the Earth’s atmosphere through the burning of fossil fuels. According to Ederer, what Professor Ewert found is “unbelievable”:

From the publicly available data, Ewert made an unbelievable discovery: Between the years 2010 and 2012 the data measured since 1881 were altered so that they showed a significant warming, especially after 1950. […] A comparison of the data from 2010 with the data of 2012 shows that NASA-GISS had altered its own datasets so that especially after WWII a clear warming appears – although it never existed.”

Ederer writes that Ewert particularly found alterations at stations in the Arctic. Professor Ewert randomly selected 120 stations from all over the world and compared the 2010 archived data to the 2012 data and found that they had been tampered to produce warming.

The old data showed regular cycles of warming and cooling over the period, even as atmospheric CO2 concentration rose from 0.03{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} to 0.04{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117}. According to the original NASA datasets, Ederer writes, the mean global temperature cooled from 13.8°C in 1881 to 12.9°C in 1895. Then it rose to 14.3°C by 1905 and fell back under 12.9°C by 1920, rose to 13.9°C by 1930, fell to 13° by 1975 before rising to 14°C by 2000. By 2010 the temperature fell back to 13.2°C.

But then came the “massive” altering of data, which also altered the entire overall trend for the period. According to journalist Ederer, Ewert uncovered 10 different methods NASA used to alter the data. The 6 most often used methods were:

• Reducing the annual mean in the early phase.
• Reducing the high values in the first warming phase.
• Increasing individual values during the second warming phase.
• Suppression of the second cooling phase starting in 1995.
• Shortening the early decades of the datasets.
• With the long-term datasets, even the first century was shortened.

Einstein has been proven wrong, yet again – at least on one thing. Second paper proves ‘spooky action at a distance’ is real, contrary to Einstein’s view. The theory riled Einstein as it suggested data could travel faster than light. 

In quantum physics, entangled particles are connected despite distance. This means the action of one will instantly change behaviour of the other. But NIST showed it was possible by separating photon pairs and sending them by fiber optic cable to detectors in distant rooms 184 metres apart. 

Einstein called it “spooky” and was referring, specifically, to entanglement – the idea that pairs of sub-atomic particles can be invisibly connected in a way that transcends time and space.

This offended Einstein, since passing information between two points in space faster than the speed of light is supposed to be impossible.

In 1964, the scientist John Stewart Bell devised an experiment designed to rule out hidden variables that could offer a non-weird explanation for ‘action at a distance’.

But all the ‘Bell tests’ performed still contained ‘loopholes’ that, according to critics, could invalidate proof of entanglement. 

Now a new paper, which appears in the Physical Review Letters, has provided the most solid proof yet that entanglement does indeed exist. 

University of Vermont climate study of sedimentary cores shows periods of extreme storminess occurred thousands of years before any human influence. 

Previous periods of extreme storminess: A 13,000 year scientific study of lake sediments by the reliable method of drilling and retrieving cores reveals that the climate of the United States has been through numerous periods of more extreme climate. The research explains:

   “ Storm magnitude, as estimated by average terrigenous layer thickness, was greatest at 11,800, 10,800, and 1,200 years before present, when New England climate was cool and moist.”

   “Storminess reached variable maxima lasting ~1,500 years, centered at approximately 2,600, 5,800, 9,100, and 11,900 years ago, and appears to be presently increasing toward another peak.”

https://www.uvm.edu/cosmolab/people/noren/noren_ms_thesis.pdf

Here we see the periods of greatest climate variation from the established normal happen when conditions are “cool and moist,” which runs contrary to current climate alarmism theory which states that a warmer, drier climate will result in more extreme events.

The research points out that the USA is “increasing towards another peak” in storminess therefore the peaks of extreme climate were larger before the industrial revolution that started in 1851.

As the 2015 Atlantic hurricane season winds down, NOAA is fear mongering again even as Atlantic hurricane activity has dropped a whopping 80 percent from 10 years ago. 

That’s according to a new analysis released yesterday by Dr. Roy Spencer, a meteorologist and team leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer flying on NASA’s Aqua satellite. To blunt this historical news, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced yesterday that global warming could be to blame for an active hurricane season last year around Hawaii. Meanwhile, as the Atlantic hurricane season finishes out its eleventh year, there hasn’t been a category 3 or higher hurricane to hit landfall in over a decade.

With the upcoming UN-sponsored Paris Climate Talks in early December, NOAA’s scientists have instead released a new report saying that global warming may have played a role in the increased hurricane activity around Hawaii last year. To hammer home its point, NOAA reiterated that “tropical storm Iselle slammed into the Big Island in August 2014 and was one of three tropical disturbances that approached Hawaii last year, making it the third largest number” since recordkeeping began.

David Siegel of medium.com ran the article,  ‘What I Learned about Climate Change: The Science is not Settled‘ about his conversion from global warming alarmist to climate skeptic. 

Siegel’s article has now been read 9,000 times and suggests 46{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of alarmists are now climate skeptics.

More specifically the survey at the bottom of the article asked readers: If you were a supporter of decarbonization before reading this essay, please state your new view on climate change …  a large proportion of respondents indicated that:  “I found it very convincing and will try to have conversations with others about this.”  Brilliant right?

Meanwhile, Siegel has this follow-up  written on WUWT and he summarized his climate odyssey on climatecurious.org. He also has a follow up article giving a three-step recipe on how  “climate change” can be solved:

1. We must focus on liberal media outlets to get them to learn how biased they are and why they are buying the wrong story. It’s a huge challenge because they associate decarbonization with doing good for the environment, and to them, anyone who says otherwise is a hardcore conservative bent on destroying the future. It’s hard for them to admit they are wrong. The media parrots what the PR people tell them to say. Ask hard questions. Do what you can to influence liberal media, blogs, journalists, and others. Simply having conversations, asking questions, and sending people my essay will help.
2. I would like to target a small number of well-known people to convert and then they will spread the message naturally. The people on my list are influential liberals: Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Jeff Skoll, Jon Stewart, Elan Musk, George Clooney, Mike Bloomberg, George Soros, Thomas Steyer, etc. My goal is to put together a very small, very exclusive event where a few of such people can spend a day with the people I list in my article and learn what’s really going on in climate science. Then people can use verifiable science and influence to help us put the environmental movement (and climate science) back on track. If you can help me reach them, I hope to make this event a reality.

Even the “lukewarmer” position on anthropogenic global warming has become untenable on the basis of both observations and theory: 

1. Lindzen (pictured) & Choi papers based on ERBE satellite observations showed sensitivity (to doubled CO2 levels) of only ~0.18C

http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2013/01/new-paper-confirms-findings-of-lindzen.html

2. Dr. David Evans has shown, using the same flawed radiative model of the IPCC as the basis, that  “The ECS might be almost zero, is likely less than 0.25 °C”

http://joannenova.com.au/2015/11/new-science-18-finally-climate-sensitivity-calculated-at-just-one-tenth-of-official-estimates/

3. Kimoto has shown climate sensitivity is ~.15-.2C due to the IPCC false assumptions of a fixed lapse rate and a mathematical error in calculating the Planck feedback parameter:

http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/search?q=kimoto

4 Volokin et al have shown that planetary surface temperatures are a function of solar insolation and surface pressure only, not greenhouse gas concentrations, on all 8 planets for which we have adequate data, including Earth & Venus.

http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/search?q=volokin

5. The surface temperature and tropospheric temperature profile can easily be derived from physical first principles including the 1st LoT, Ideal Gas Law, Poisson Equation, Newton’s 2nd Law, and Stefan-Boltzmann Law for solar forcing only, and without greenhouse gas “radiative forcing,” and perfectly replicates the verified 1976 US Standard Atmosphere. Thus, once again, sensitivity to CO2 is mathematically proven to be essentially zero. 

http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/search?q=greenhouse+equation

6. Convection dominates radiative-convective equilibrium in the troposphere by a factor of ~8X, and increased greenhouse gases accelerate convection, thereby erasing any alleged cold-heats-hot greenhouse gas radiative effects on the surface. 

http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2015/08/why-greenhouse-gases-accelerate.html

7. Many other climate sensitivity estimates have concluded climate sensitivity is effectively zero, or so close to zero as to be unmeasurable and negligible.

A new report released this week by the U.N.-funded WMO said that the levels of the three most potent ‘greenhouse gases’ in our atmosphere reached new levels in 2014. The good news is that CO2 rose less than 2 ppm, with the other two gases barely climbing at all. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said carbon dioxide (CO2) levels increased to only 397.7 parts per million (PPM), up 1.9 PPM from 2013.

They also said methane levels measured 1,833 parts per billion (PPB) in 2014, and were up only 9 PPB from 2013. The globally averaged level of nitrous oxide in 2014 grew to 327.1 PPB, which is 1.1 PPB above the previous year. The largest greenhouse gas in our atmosphere is water vapor, which makes up 95{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of all so-called greenhouse gases. All of which may be bad news if you’ve instituted economy-crippling policies ahead of a UN-sponsored climate treaty.

But if you’ve ever wondered what the greenhouse gas/effect means, this may help: A greenhouse is a glass-covered enclosure that is pumped with higher amounts of CO2 (usually around 1,800 PPM) to promote plant growth. As the sun’s visible and ultraviolet light passes through the glass ceiling and walls, it gets absorbed by the floor, ground, and greenhouse contents. This heat then radiates off the items in the greenhouse and, because it’s in an enclosed structure (the glass), is unable to escape into the cooler air around the structure.

Think of it like your car in the hot sun. It’s not filled with CO2, but the heat has no way to escape because of the glass and steel enclosure. Government climate scientists believe that gases like water vapor and CO2 act like the glass and steel, preventing the heat from escaping into space, giving you an Earth-sized greenhouse. Hence the term “greenhouse effect” and “greenhouse gases.” But they seem to overlook the fact earth’s atmosphere is open to space (i.e. nothing like a closed greenhouse). 

The theory of global warming involves a lot of assumptions. First it states that, with all things being equal, the Earth “maintains a constant average temperature averaged out over the course of a year.” As sunlight comes in, it heats the air and Earth, some gets absorbed, some gets emitted back into outer space, and what’s left maintains a relatively moderate temperature for the planet. Remember, energy can’t be destroyed. So what comes in has to either be converted into something else, absorbed, or reflected back into outer space.

According to the ‘theory’ how fast this energy is radiated back into outer space depends on how much of a particular gas is in the atmosphere, like water vapor, clouds, carbon dioxide, and methane. The more of a particular gas we have in the atmosphere, the less energy can get bounced back out into space.

This, say climate scientists, causes the lower atmosphere to stay warmer (near the surface), but also warms the upper atmosphere (remember, energy can’t be destroyed). Water vapor is the most potent shield for keeping this energy from escaping the Earth. For a more in-depth tutorial and examples, go here.

Global warming theory also says that increased levels of carbon dioxide and certain other gases are causing an increase in the average temperature of the Earth’s atmosphere. It predicts that the upper atmosphere will warm from trapped heat, just like in a greenhouse. The surface of the Earth warms later to reach equilibrium. Except since 1979, we’ve had orbiting satellites measuring the atmosphere and it shows the upper atmosphere is warming much less than expected by this theory.

Because nature abhors imbalances, global warming theory also says that the lower atmosphere must then respond to this upper atmospheric heat by increasing in temperature until the energy coming in equals the energy going out. To do this, the Earth’s temperature at the surface goes up to meet the temperature of the upper atmosphere and balance is restored. But as noted above that isn’t happening. That fact alone should put the greenhouse gas theory into the coffin.

But there is far too much money involved in the global-warming cottage industry and, as less hysterical climate scientists keep trying to say, the planet is not as sensitive to imbalances as some people would have you believe. In fact, the Earth is quite adept at keeping up with changes as it has done so for the last 4.5 billion years.

The largest CO2 sponge on the planet are the oceans around us. The largest emitter of CO2 on the planet are microbes that produce CO2 as they consumer decaying organic matter. What man contributes, while significant, barely registers when compared to natural, ongoing processes (including, but not limited to, volcanic activity beneath the oceans).

Regardless of all this, the 2014 CO2 level is actually a 12-month average as CO2 in the atmosphere fluctuates throughout the year, and is lower when the Northern Hemisphere is in full bloom (plants absorb CO2) and higher in the winter (when more ocean is covered in ice and fewer plants are in bloom).

To put this in context, CO2 levels went up on such an infinitesimal scale as to be unquantifiable. Methane, which is considered to have 21-23 times the heat trapping power of CO2, rose to 1,833 PPB in 2014. That’s up 9 parts per billion (with a B). Mix 9 red marbles into a billion white marbles, and you begin to understand the silliness that ensues every time one of these reports come out.

Which always seem to happen right before a UN-sponsored climate conference like the one coming up in December.

Read more by Thomas Richard at www.examiner.com