Springer Publishing, one of the world’s leading publishers of Science, Technology and Medicine (STM) books and journals, issued an announcement this week that 64 different professional articles, primarily in the medical field, had been retracted.  It turns out that the vaunted peer review process, designed to ensure that multiple sets of experts evaluate the quality of the work before it hits the presses, had fallen apart. The peer reviews in some cases were found to be “highly suspicious” with bogus email addresses and questionable credentials.

Springer confirms that 64 articles are being retracted from 10 Springer subscription journals, after editorial checks spotted fake email addresses, and subsequent internal investigations uncovered fabricated peer review reports. After a thorough investigation we have strong reason to believe that the peer review process on these 64 articles was compromised. We reported this to the Committee on Publishing Ethics (COPE) immediately. Attempts to manipulate peer review have affected journals across a number of publishers as detailed by COPE in their December 2014 statement. Springer has made COPE aware of the findings of its own internal investigations and has followed COPE’s recommendations, as outlined in their statement, for dealing with this issue. Springer will continue to participate and do whatever we can to support COPE’s efforts in this matter.

New proof of systematic atmospheric geoengineering.  American inter-disciplinary scientist, Dr J. Marvin Herndon (pictured) provides a fascinating new study indicating that tropospheric spraying of coal fly ash has been taking place throughout the 21st century. 

Dr Herndon believes such spraying has been carried out on an international scale, and with significant ramping-up since about 2013. Herndon discloses “the consequences on public health are profound, including exposure to a variety of toxic heavy metals, radioactive elements, and neurologically-implicated chemically mobile aluminum released by body moisture in situ after inhalation or through transdermal induction.” He notes that long exposure to ultrafine-grain air pollution particulates has been associated with morbidity and premature mortality, so one “may therefore reasonably conclude that aerosolized coal fly ash … is detrimental to human health.”

Worryingly, this study points to a program of well-orchestrated disinformation, but no public disclosure, no informed consent, and no public health warnings.

Featured in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (ISSN 1660-460) Herndon writes: “The widespread, intentional and increasingly frequent chemical emplacement in the troposphere has gone unidentified and unremarked in the scientific literature for years.”

The paper, ‘Evidence of Coal-Fly-Ash Toxic Chemical Geoengineering in the Troposphere: Consequences for Public Health,’ may be accessed in its entirety at: http://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/12/8/9375/pdf.

The concept of mass environmental geoengineering isn’t new. In her 1962 book Silent Spring Rachel Carson called attention to the unintended consequences of herbicide and pesticide use, and launched the modern environmental movement. Now, there is growing evidence of a grave new and persistent global environmental public health threat that has gone unremarked in the scientific literature. Burning coal by electric utilities concentrates the impurities in “fly ash”, fine particles that used to go up the smokestack, but now are trapped because of their toxic environmental and public health hazards.

Papal Advisor Naomi Klein (pictured) admits in her much-publicized screed that ‘Global Warming’ is all about anti-capitalism – being nothing to do with science. 

Klein admits progressive policies on the environment are really about what Marx and Lenin said the communist revolution desired 100 years ago — the overthrow of capitalism. This is not about science, or health, at all. “Our economic model is at war with the Earth,” writes Klein. “We cannot change the laws of nature. But we can change our economy. Climate change is our best chance to demand and build a better world.”

Could the message be any clearer? “This [man-made climate change] is not about science, or health, at all.“

Please note that Klein uses the ambiguous term ”climate change” when she really means “man-made climate change”; it’s a classic case of misleading the public at large that any change in the climate is the fault of human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2).

Here’s further insight into Naomi Klein’s world via Martin Hertzberg’s review of Naomi Klein’s book “This Changes Everything. ” Dr Hertzberg, a respected scientist and author on climate change, writes:

It is tragic that what should have been a debate among objective scientists evaluating the data on weather and climate, has degenerated into a partisan political diatribe. Unfortunately, Klein’s most recent book only adds to the tragedy. In pursuit of her political agenda, facts are distorted and distinguished scientists are denigrated. Here are some examples.

Klein states: “Carbon Dioxide stays in the atmosphere one to two centuries with some of it remaining for a millennium or more”.

Some 50 published papers give at most 5 years for its lifetime in the atmosphere with the best estimate from C-14 decay observed after Russian above ground tests.

Klein states that the “Medieval Warm Period was thoroughly debunked long ago”.

Not true! Hundreds of studies have established the existence of the world wide Medieval Warm period with temperatures exceeding current ones at a time when human CO2 emission was nil. Her discussion of the weather effect of volcanic eruptions neglects to mention the real big ones: Tambora and Krakatoa.

Klein completely discounts the “climategate” scandal.

The penultimate climate pow-wow is going to take place in Paris later this year. The 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference  (COP21) is widely touted as a “make-or-break” event to prevent a global climate catastrophe that’s supposed to be just around the corner. 

Most likely, there will be over 10,000 government and UN representatives, all the NGOs in the world, some industry observers and a few others from all corners of the world. Even Pope Francis plans to attend and provide encyclical guidance. For the majority of the blessed, the goal will be to convert the imbeciles (like you and me) to the bad-carbon-footprint and need-for-decarbonisation belief. Will their sermons fall on eagerly listening ears?

Row, row, row your Boat

Oh, these wannabe savers of the world are not likely to arrive by trans-Atlantic or trans-Pacific rowboat, nor by a wind-powered multi-mast “clipper;” those went out of style a hundred years ago. Of course, the attendees of the Paris event don’t need to spare any carbon whatsoever. After all, they are among the chosen few to tell the rest of the world what to do or not. The “new science” of how to save the earth does not apply to them, it’s just for the unwashed masses like you and me.

Basically, the do-gooders want you to “decarbonize” at all costs, everything, and most preferentially yourself. How else can you reduce the world population from 7 or 8 billion to fewer than one billion which Professor HJ Schellnhuber opines as necessary? He is the director of the Potsdam Institut für Klimafolgenforschung,  (a German government-funded outlet for climate impact research, commonly known as PIK) who has all the answers. Oh, even the Pontiff appears to approve of them, why else would he recently have named Schellnhuber to the 400-year old institution of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences (PAS)?

Trillions are being spent on the completely wrong scenario, an independent veteran meteorologist implies. Instead of warming, we need to worry about the coming 125-year cool period, which has already begun. 

David Dilley (pictured), a former National Weather Service (NWS) meteorologist, has spoken out in a just released 49-minute video that looks at climate change and what lies ahead.

The recent cold winters and expanding polar ice caps are ominous signs of a global cooling that has already begun, maintains David Dilley, now President and Founder of Global Weather Oscillations, Inc. Claims of warming have not been properly founded.

Dilley has forty-two years of professional experience in the meteorology and climatology and many publications. He was with NOAA for twenty years. Not only is the government wrong with its claims of a coming warming, Dilley accuses the federal government of fiddling with global temperature data with the aim of producing a false picture of what is going on.

In his must-see video presentation dubbed “Is Climate Change Dangerous?“, he examines the many drivers and factors behind climate change and why we need to focus on the real problem of a coming cooling.

FOREWORD: Cosmologists always claim that their black holes, mathematical fabrications entire, have an escape velocity. They even have an equation for it and by using this equation they assert that the ‘escape velocity’ at their black hole ‘event horizon’ is the speed of light.

This event horizon, they say, is at the ‘Schwarzschild radius’ of their black hole; and they have an equation for that too. On the other hand, the cosmologists also always assert that nothing can even leave the event horizon of their black holes. Light, they say, hovers forever at their event horizon as it tries to leave or escape the clutches of a black hole.

Thus, according to the cosmologists, their black holes have and do not have an escape velocity simultaneously at the same place. However, nothing can in fact have and not have an escape velocity simultaneously at the same place. This schizophrenic character of the black hole is sufficient to completely invalidate it.

But there is more. Escape velocity is a two body relation – one body escapes from another body. The black hole is, by its supposed mathematical construction, a one mass universe. Consequently the very concept of escape velocity does not even apply. Obviously, no cosmologist understands the meaning of escape velocity.

Scientists working on the NOvA experiment have spotted what they say is evidence of oscillating neutrinos for the first time in the lab’s particle accelerator. 

Since February 2014, boffins have been stashing data and recording interaction of the abundant, yet elusive, subatomic particles as they interacted in the specially-built Fermilab – a 14,000-ton far detector based in Ash River, Minnesota.

“People are ecstatic to see our first observation of neutrino oscillations,” said NOvA spokesbeing Peter Shanahan of the US Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Lab.

He added: “For all the people who worked over the course of a decade on the designing, building, commissioning and operating this experiment, it’s beyond gratifying.”

The data gathered by the researchers allowed systems to be tested before the beefy detector – which stands at 50 feet tall, 50 feet wide and measures 200 feet long – was fired up in November last year.

Fermilab explained the hard science involved in the experiment:

The neutrino beam generated at Fermilab passes through an underground near detector, which measures the beam’s neutrino composition before it leaves the Fermilab site. The particles then travel more than 500 miles straight through the Earth, no tunnel required, oscillating (or changing types) along the way.

About once per second, Fermilab’s accelerator sends trillions of neutrinos to Minnesota, but the elusive neutrinos interact so rarely that only a few will register at the far detector.

A soft-bodied, fernlike creature reproduced in Earth’s ancient oceans about 565 million years ago, making it the earliest known example of procreation in a complex organism, a new study finds. 

Many scientists consider the creatures, called rangeomorphs, some of Earth’s first complex animals, although it’s impossible to know exactly what these organisms were, the researchers said. The creatures prospered in the ocean during the late Ediacaran period, between 580 million and 541 million years ago, just before the Cambrian era. Rangeomorphs could grow up to 6.5 feet (2 meters) in length, but most were about 4 inches (10 centimeters) long.

What’s more, rangeomorphs don’t appear to have been equipped with mouths, organs or the ability to move around, and the animals likely absorbed nutrients from the water, the researchers said. However, these ancient organisms had an unusually complex reproductive strategy for their time: They likely sent out an “advance party” to settle a new neighborhood, and then colonized the new area, the researchers said. [See Photos of Ancient ‘Baby’ Rangeomorphs Preserved in Ash]

The findings may help scientists understand the origins of modern marine life, they said.

“Rangeomorphs don’t look like anything else in the fossil record, which is why they’re such a mystery,” study lead author Emily Mitchell, a postdoctoral researcher in the University of Cambridge’s department of earth sciences, said in a statement. “But we’ve developed a whole new way of looking at them, which has helped us understand them a lot better — most interestingly, how they reproduced.”

Mitchell and her colleagues looked at fossils of a rangeomorph known as a Fractofusus found inNewfoundland, in southeastern Canada. Like other rangeomorphs, Fractofusus was immobile, and so its fossils capture exactly where the creatures lived in relation to one another during the Ediacaran period.

That’s what a colleague from former times asked recently. You had to choose between YES or NO. Only some 20 of the 150+ former colleagues he so canvassed bothered to answer.  He might have just as well asked “Do you have a mother?”—Silly questions deserve no answer.

Planet Earth

Planet Earth’s history of “climate change” (CC) is about 4,500,000,000 yearsin the making. Why would anyone think that it stopped yesterday, last year, last decade, last century, or even a millennium ago? Do you think the rate or direction of natural CC has changed because the dinosaurs died out many million years ago? Or do you believe it was because humans arrived en masse on the scene a few thousand years ago?

Let’s look at some real drivers of climate change.

Continental Drift, Earthquakes and Volcanoes

Have the mid-oceanic ridges stopped spreading or has the North American Plate stopped pushing over the Pacific Plate (also known as Juan de Fuca Plate)? None of that.

Have earthquakes and tsunamis become a thing of the past? Not at all (remember Fukushima)!

Every year there are approximately ten thousand earthquakes of Richter scale magnitude 2 or greater being recorded and once in a while there is a major movement in the earth’s crust, often with dramatic consequences for mankind. Quakes with magnitudes 8 or 9 release an amount of energy equal to many nuclear bombs, all within a few seconds.

Some 20 to 50 volcanoes are erupting all the time, some spewing plumes of ash and gas miles high into the atmosphere, others creating new mountains or islands out of red-hot lava. A few days ago, the Manam volcano (Papua New Guinea) erupted with sending volcanic ash as high as 65,000 feet (~20,000 m) into the sky. Guess what drove the plume that high? Carbon dioxide, coming out in vast quantities from the bowels of the earth! That’s the same atmospheric trace gas that you generate by burning coal, oil, wood, or gas to heat your home in winter!

Can climate experts truly understand Earth’s climate without factoring in the role of thermodynamics? Experts in the laws of thermodyamics are increasingly saying that they can’t, as all predictions of human-caused catastrophic climate change fail. 

Summary. Climate scientists promoting greenhouse gas theories usually omit or dismiss consideration of thermodynamics and rely on empirical models and observed data to assess the effect of anthropogenic CO2 (carbon dioxide) from combustion of ‘fossil fuels’ on the global and surface temperatures of the Earth.

This article shows the deep foundation thermodynamics provides for the way the atmosphere behaves and quantifies why, how, and how much CO2 affects temperature.  This cannot be done without thermodynamics.

Article identifies two conservation equations , eight rate laws and two physical properties affected by CO2 that constitute a nonlinear algebraic model of the steady-state effect of CO2 on T. The first six relations come directly from thermodynamics.

Turns out there are several affects, one positive and at least two negative. The climate sensitivity, CS = change in temperature for doubling of atmospheric CO2 from 400 ppmv in 2014 to 800 is not much, vanishingly small, probably between -1C < CS < 0.8C. Replacing US coal fired power plants with natural gas probably changes Earth’s temperature after 50 years between -0.000001C < T₅₀ – T₀ < +0.0000008C.

Introduction. The science of thermodynamics is central to the practice of engineering; mechanical, electrical, aeronautical and particularly chemical. We hold thermo in reverence because we know we must obey the law and we earn our livings applying it.

 “If your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.” — Arthur Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1928) [3]

“The fascination of a growing science lies in the work of the pioneers at the very borderland of the unknown, but to reach this frontier one must pass over well-traveled roads; of these one of the safest and surest is the broad highway of thermodynamics.” — Gilbert Lewis and Merle Randall, Thermodynamics and the Free Energy of Chemical Substances (1923) [2]

“A theory is the more impressive the greater the simplicity of its premises, the more different kinds of things it relates, and the more extended its area of applicability. Therefore the deep impression that classical thermodynamics made upon me. It is the only physical theory of universal content which I am convinced will never be overthrown, within the framework of applicability of its basic concepts.” — Albert Einstein, Autobiographical Notes (c. 1940s) [4]

“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” — Max Planck, on how Boltzmann‘s statistical thermodynamics and atomic hypothesis triumphed over those as Ernst Mach and others of the energetics school (c. 1947) [18]

“In whatever system where the weight attached to the wheel should be the cause of motion of the wheel, without any doubt the center of the gravity of the weight will stop beneath the center of its axle. No instrument devised by human ingenuity, which turns with its wheel, can remedy this effect. Oh, speculators about perpetual motion, how many vain chimeras have you created in the like quest. Go and take you place with the seekers after gold.” — Leonardo da Vinci (1494) [32]

“The future belongs to those who can manipulate entropy; those who understand but energy will be only accountants.” — Frederic Keffer [24]

Researchers at Stanford have laid down the first atom-thick sheet of tin, and it has the potential to revolutionize electronics thanks to its unique power propagation properties. 

The material has been dubbed stanene, a contraction of the Latin word for tin “stannum” and the “ene” suffix used for 2D materials. It does for the metal what boffins have been doing for carbon and other substances for years. The goal for stanene is to build a perfect electrical transmission system without wasted heat, but the new material isn’t playing ball.

According to theoretical physics, stanene should allow electrons to travel along its edges without colliding with other electrons and atoms along the way, thus avoiding wasting energy in heat. Given this would happen at room temperature, the material could bring about vastly more efficient electronics.

“I think the work is a significant breakthrough that once again expands the 2D-material universe,” saidYuanbo Zhang, a physicist at Fudan University in Shanghai. “It’ll be exciting to see how the material lives up to its expectations.”

The Stanford team, along with four partner universities in China, vaporized a sample of tin in a vacuum and let the atoms fall on a lattice of bismuth telluride. While the resultant substance looks like stanene, it appears that the base material that it’s lying on is interfering with the electron flow.

Nevertheless, the upper surface of the stanene does look exactly like the predictions for its composition, so the team is going to try again using larger amounts of tin and a new substrate.

New study shows climate scientists have previously under-estimated the major cooling role forests play in regulating climate. Forests cover over 21{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of the Earth’s surface. Scientists say their global regulation of surface temperature highlights the important role of forests in local, regional and global climate. 

The new paper [1] published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, shows that the transpiration of forest ecosystems through the growing season dissipates more energy and lowers the Bowen ratio. In other words, this study reinforces the need for government climate researchers to include land use and land cover change when seeking to calculate human impact on the global energy balance.

Mankind has gotten a really bad rep lately as environmentalists blame us for everything from blizzards to droughts to rising sea levels and the infinitesimal warming in the last 100 years. So it’s refreshing to read today that when woolly mammoths disappeared 11,000 years ago, we had little, if anything, to do with it. That’s according to a new study detailing how researchers set out to discover why these giant animals went extinct after the last glacial period.

Most theories put forth suggested their demise came from the over-eager predation and habitat intrusion of man. But these new findings showed that abrupt global warming helped kill off the woolly mammoth and that we had a small, secondary role. The study’s lead author, professor Alan Cooper, who is the director of the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA at the University of Adelaide, said “This abrupt warming had a profound impact on climate that caused marked shifts in global rainfall and vegetation patterns. Even without the presence of humans we saw mass extinctions.”

That’s because short, rapid bursts of global warming dramatically altered rainfall amounts, which in turn resulted in a dearth of vegetation that these ice age animals relied on for sustenance.

Global warming alarmists have suggested that the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica may collapse, causing disastrous sea level rise. This idea is based on the concept of an ice sheet sliding down an inclined plane on a base lubricated by meltwater, which is itself increasing because of global warming.

In reality the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets occupy deep basins, and cannot slide down a plane. Furthermore glacial flow depends on stress (including the important yield stress) as well as temperature, and much of the ice sheets are well below melting point. 

The accumulation of kilometres of undisturbed ice in cores in Greenland and Antarctica (the same ones that are sometimes used to fuel ideas of global warming) show hundreds of thousands of years of accumulation with no melting or flow. Except around the edges, ice sheets flow at the base, and depend on geothermal heat, not the climate at the surface. It is impossible for the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets to ‘collapse’.

In these days of alarmist warnings about climate warming, the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica have an important role. Many papers have described their melting at the present times, and dire predictions of many metres of sea level rise are common. Christoffersen and Hambrey published a typical paper on the Greenland ice sheet in Geology Today in May, 2006.

Their model, unfortunately, includes neither the main form of the Greenland Ice Sheet, nor an understanding of how glaciers flow. They predict the behaviour of the Ice Sheet based on melting and accumulation rates at the present day, and the concept of an ice sheet sliding down an inclined plane on a base lubricated by meltwater, which is itself increasing because of global warming.

The same misconception is present in textbooks such as The Great Ice Age (2000) by R.C.L. Wilson and others, popular magazines such as the June 2007 issue of National Geographic, and other scientific articles such as Bamber et al. (2007), which can be regarded as a typical modelling contribution. The idea of a glacier sliding downhill on a base lubricated by meltwater seemed a good idea when first presented by de Saussure in 1779, but a lot has been learned since then.

In the present paper we shall try to show how the mechanism of glacier flow differs from this simple model, and why it is impossible for the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets to collapse. To understand the relationship between global warming and the breakdown of ice sheets it is necessary to know how ice sheets really work.

Coral reefs are a lot more resilient than previously thought. At least according to a newstudy published yesterday that showed Pacific island coral reef can grow fast enough to match rising sea levels, even with increased ocean temperatures. 

Because they grow vertically on shallow reef flats, researchers observed that Porites microatolls coral is keeping pace with current sea level rise, but may have trouble under the worst-case IPCC scenarios. The Porites microatoll, whose growth is largely lateral and limited by exposure to air, is named for its resemblance to island atolls (see picture).

Researchers at the Florida Institute of Technology, who published their study in the Royal Society Open Science, say their findings provide the first evidence that “well-managed reefs will be able to keep up with sea-level rise through vertical growth.” However, if CO2 emissions rise past 670 parts per million (ppm), which may cause ocean temperatures to increase 2.2 degrees Celsius, reefs will have a hard time keeping up with the projected sea level rise.

Currently CO2 levels worldwide are 400 ppm (.o4 percent), but once they cross the 670 ppm threshold, the corresponding rise in ocean temperatures may hamper even a healthy reefs ability to survive. “Reefs will continue to keep up with sea-level rise if we reduce our emission of greenhouse gases,” said Florida Tech’s Rob van Woesik, a professor at FIT’s Department of Biological Sciences and the study’s lead author. “If reefs lose their capacity to keep up with sea-level rise they will drown.”

The study, which focused on Palau island in the western Pacific Ocean, was also co-authored by researchers from the University of Queensland and the Palau International Coral Reef Center. Palau is an island country that is part of the larger Pacific island group of Micronesia and relies on the reef system to break apart storm waves.