A new study in Nature says #Climate Change may force the polar vortex to dip down more often, triggering bone-chilling winters in Europe and North America. Many of the claims of an overheated Earth dissipate during winter as temperatures plummet and heating bills rise. Yet the authors write that as the Arctic warms and more sea ice melts, additional ocean water is exposed, absorbing the sun’s warmth.
The excess warmth then gets released over a longer time period, interrupting the polar vortex and pushing it down into lower latitudes. Sea ice, however, reflects the sun’s rays back into space, causing temperatures to plummet during the winter. That’s what happened in early 2014 and 2015 when Arctic air bullied its way toward more temperate regions.
I have always wanted to ask people if they knew the difference between global warming and global cooling. I think of this because one of my closest friends is a firm believer in the idea that man is warming the planet. So I must ask them if they really understand the difference between global warming and global cooling.
The answer is really simple. It depends on your start date.
If your starting point was the early 1980’s then you can show global warming. If your start date was 15-20 years ago you would find no cooling or warming. If your start date was 1600 AD (during the Little Ice Age) you’d find significant warming. I assume if you started in 1100 BC you’d find a cooling trend.
So what makes any one of these start dates the correct date?
Let’s say you are a firm believer that the planet is warming. Why assume man is responsible? I mean, there is a warming trend since the 1600’s. Did man cause that?
And was there any warming before the 1600s? Emphatically yes.
If you look at a chart showing temperatures for the past 600 million years, you will see that it has been far warmer than today for almost all of those 600 million years. Did man cause that?
For the science to be valid, there would have to be definitive proof that natural warming stopped and was replaced by man made warming.
I don’t believe any such proof has ever been shown.
Recent intelligence suggests that rutabagas (‘swede’ or ‘turnip’ to some) may be on the war path. But don’t worry, the U.S. Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) is standing by to defend you.
The government forces have been accumulating heavy artillery to counter any rutabaga threat. According to the Wall Street Journal, between 2004 and 2015, APHIS spent $4.8 million buying shotguns, rifles, night vision goggles, propane cannons, liquid explosives, pyro supplies, buckshot, drones, infrared scopes and other gear to counter any turnip insurrection.
Modern feminism isn’t compatible with science, a biologist wrote on a science blog Wednesday.
Dr. Alex Berezow, a biomedical scientist with a doctorate in microbiology writing on the blog of the American Council on Science and Health, found that much of mainstream feminist theory directly conflicts with modern biology, as it is inherently built on ideas which cannot be proven or refuted.
“Ideology is a double-edged sword. Dedication to a set of beliefs can be admirable, but when it leads to inflexibility and obstinance in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, it is a dangerous thing,” Berezow said. “[F]eminism has been built upon ideas that can neither be proven nor refuted, precisely the sort of evidence-free groupthink that typifies unscientific thinking.”
Berezow noted that many feminists “deny the prominent role of biology in our lives” allowing instead for the promotion of ideas that are “dangerous nonsense” on college campuses, which should be unbiased sources of truth.
Water used in oil production can be reused to water crops with no adverse effects, according to research published Monday by California government officials.
Officials in the state’s Cawelo Water District (Cawelo) concurred with toxicologists that the recycled water was safe for agricultural use. Researchers found no difference in crops which were irrigated with recycled water extracted during the oil production process,and those irrigated from other sources. This confirmed previous analyses that recycled water is safe for crops.
According to the WMO, carbon dioxide levels remained steady at 400 parts per million during 2015 thanks to a strong, naturally occurring El Niño that affected our climate and hastened global warming. That’s in line with the monitoring station at Mauna Loa, Hawaii, which uses a variety of #Science-based methods to measure carbon dioxide (CO2) levels across the globe.
The worldwide average of CO2 went up 2.3 parts per million (ppm) over 2014 levels, a 0.58 percent increase over the previous year. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) also said in its yearly bulletin that CO2 levels have gone up an average of 2.08 ppm per year during the last ten years.
Collectively, CO2 emissions make up the largest chunk of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, and President #Obama has pledged to “cut emissions 26%-28% by 2025 over 2005 levels” as part of the U.N.-backed Paris Climate Agreement. A large chunk of man-made emissions comes from coal-fired power plants in China and India, two nation states not required to cut emissions until 2030 under the recently ratified climate accord.
In 1982, NASA showed that sea level rise dropped off sharply after 1950.
NASA said that there was a high correlation with global surface temperature (i.e. global warming occurred from 1880 to 1940 and slowed considerably after 1950.)
The NASA/IPCC data wrecked two essential parts of the global warming scam – post-1950 warming and post-1950 sea level rise. So they found people who were willing to change the data to match the models. The current NASA sea level data is based on this confirmation bias fishing expedition.
This acceleration is an important confirmation of climate change simulations
The overlay below shows how they changed the post-1950 data to match the theory.
Church and White discovered a mysterious break in sea level in the year 1926, when sea level rise rates suddenly increased by almost 250% to 1,94 mm/year.
“The politician is sometimes tempted to encroach on the normal territory of the scientific estate. In such issues the problem is less often whether politics will presume to dictate to science than it is how much politics is to be influenced by the new findings of science.”[1]
The climate change debate has exposed a deeper problem with our science and scientific knowledge. The problem is not that science is unable to answer all of our questions. Rather, the problem is that the body politic has come to see science as an instrument to pass on ‘hot potatoes,’ i.e. complex issues raising a large range of empirical questions and implicating important value judgments. Scientists have failed to point out the limits of science and to bounce the ball back to the politicians.
In the market for ‘evidence’ for policy making, politicians demand arguments for their desired policies, which scientists supply in the form of research and reports. Their research, however, does little to resolve the policy issues faced by the body politic, and does not advance social progress. Climate science is the poster child of these developments.
Everyone knows they need to manage their stress. When things get difficult at work, school, or in your personal life, you can use as many tips, tricks, and techniques as you can get to calm your nerves.
So here’s a science-backed one: make a playlist of the 10 songs found to be the most relaxing on earth.Sound therapies have long been popular as a way of relaxing and restoring one’s health. For centuries, indigenous cultures have used music to enhance well-being and improve health conditions.
Now, neuroscientists out of the UK have specified which tunes give you the most bang for your musical buck.
The study was conducted on participants who attempted to solve difficult puzzles as quickly as possible while connected to sensors. The puzzles induced a certain level of stress, and participants listened to different songs while researchers measured brain activity as well as physiological states that included heart rate, blood pressure, and rate of breathing.
According to Dr. David Lewis-Hodgson of Mindlab International, which conducted the research, the top song produced a greater state of relaxation than any other music tested to date.
In fact, listening to that one song — “Weightless” — resulted in a striking 65 percent reduction in participants’ overall anxiety, and a 35 percent reduction in their usual physiological resting rates.
Try it….
That is remarkable.
Equally remarkable is the fact the song was actually constructed to do so. The group that created “Weightless”, Marconi Union, did so in collaboration with sound therapists. Its carefully arranged harmonies, rhythms, and bass lines help slow a listener’s heart rate, reduce blood pressure and lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol.
When it comes to lowering anxiety, the stakes couldn’t be higher. Stress either exacerbates or increases the risk of health issues like heart disease, obesity, depression, gastrointestinal problems, asthma, and more. More troubling still, a recent paper out of Harvard and Stanford found health issues from job stress alone cause more deaths than diabetes, Alzheimer’s, or influenza.
In this age of constant bombardment, the science is clear: if you want your mind and body to last, you’ve got to prioritize giving them a rest. Music is an easy way to take some of the pressure off of all the pings, dings, apps, tags, texts, emails, appointments, meetings, and deadlines that can easily spike your stress level and leave you feeling drained and anxious.
Of the top track, Dr. David Lewis-Hodgson said, “‘Weightless’ was so effective, many women became drowsy and I would advise against driving while listening to the song because it could be dangerous.”
So don’t drive while listening to these, but do take advantage of them:
Rajiv Singh started thinking about how to do his part to fight global warming 15 years ago. Dr. Singh, a scientist at Honeywell’s lab in Buffalo, began running computer models of tens of thousands of molecular combinations. He was seeking a better refrigerant, one of the most vexing chemicals for the environment.
Refrigerants cool homes, cars and buildings but also warm the planet at a far higher rate than carbon dioxide. Dr. Singh was searching for one stable enough to be useful but that degraded quickly so it did not linger to trap heat in the atmosphere.
“You have to hit the chemistry books,” he said in a recent interview.
October 24th marked the 11-year anniversary of the last “major” hurricane to make landfall on the United States. On the morning of October 24, 2005, Hurricane Wilma hit the southwest Florida peninsula as a Category 3 storm, and since then, no other hurricane Category 3 or stronger has made landfall on the U.S. — a span that is unprecedented in the historical records.
One of the most detailed genomic studies of any ecosystem to date has revealed an underground world of stunning microbial diversity, and added dozens of new branches to the tree of life. The bacterial bonanza comes from scientists who reconstructed the genomes of more than 2,500 microbes from sediment and groundwater samples collected at an aquifer in Colorado.
Stunning diversity, visualized. All the known major bacterial groups are represented by wedges in this circular “tree of life.” The bigger wedges are more diverse groups. Green wedges are groups that have not been genomically sampled at the Rifle site–everything else has. Black wedges are previously identified bacteria groups that have also been found at Rifle. Purple wedges are groups discovered at Rifle and announced last year. Red wedges are new groups discovered in this study. Colored dots represent important metabolic processes the new groups help mediate.
We often read articles that pit man v machines — will the robots take our jobs, will AI take over and make us stupid — and yes, I’ve written some of these articles.
But as is so often true with predicting the future, the truth will likely not be an either or scenario, but rather shades of grey. Instead of asking who will win, we should think about a merger between man and machine to bring out the best in both.
An interesting example of this is chess. It has been a long time since IBM’s Deep Blue beat the grand chess master, but more recently hybrid teams (made up up people and AI) seem to have the edge over both people only and machine only teams.
Tracking atmospheric particles in a pristine environment will help scientists understand the impact of industrial aerosols on climate, say researchers at conclusion of a study on Amazonian rainstorms.
Scanning the pristine skies above the Amazon rainforest revealed that small aerosol particles that form naturally in the upper atmosphere are carried to the lower atmosphere by rapid downdrafts associated with rainfall.
There, volatile organic compounds (VOCs) emitted by trees react with oxidants, and the oxidation products condense on the small particles and make them grow into the “nuclei” around which clouds form. Studying this process in a clean environment will help scientists improve their understanding of the effects of industrial era emissions on climate.
[Image Credit: Luiz. A. T. Machado, National Institute for Space Research, São José dos Campos, São Paulo, Brazil]
Is our growing understanding of the psychology of crowds feeding in to how we police them?
Crowds are complex. Some people fear they may turn violent, with individual personalities becoming submerged in the group mentality. But some leading social psychologists who research crowds believe that this old picture is mistaken.
“The danger with this view of crowds as inherently violent isn’t just that it’s wrong, it’s that it might become true. It might lead us to treat crowds in ways that will enrage them,” says psychologist Professor Steve Reicher.
Of course crowds are not all the same – there are different types of crowd and controlling them requires different approaches.
