Written by Tony Heller
Prior to 60 years ago, September 17 was normally a very hot day in the US, with the hottest years being 1927, 1895, 1931, 1925 and 1955.
On September 17, 1927 almost half of the US was over 90F, and a large percent was over 100F.
Written by Martha Henriques
If there’s any subject that perfectly encapsulates the idea that science is hard to understand, it’s quantum physics. Scientists tell us that the miniature denizens of the quantum realm behave in seemingly impossible ways: they can exist in two places at once, or disappear and reappear somewhere else instantly.
The one saving grace is that these truly bizarre quantum behaviours don’t seem to have much of an impact on the macroscopic world as we know it, where “classical” physics rules the roost.
Or, at least, that’s what scientists thought until a few years ago.
Written by bloomberg.com
Google Inc. searches for the idea that once helped propel oil prices to nearly $150 per barrel have dwindled to almost nothing, according to a Sanford C. Bernstein analysis.
The theory that oil prices would have to rise as supply inevitably declined gained hold on popular imaginations in the mid- to late 2000s, but has since languished in internet obscurity, as new discoveries and technology, including the shale revolution that helped push U.S. oil production to a 40-year high, have ensured plentiful amounts of crude in recent years.
Written by Paul Homewood
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/icecover.uk.php
It is now safe to confirm that the minimum Arctic sea ice extent has now been passed this year, with an area of 4.083 million sq km on 7th September.
This is 22% greater than in 2012, despite two major storms in August that led to break up of ice.
The ice has been regrowing remarkably rapidly for the last week, and already stands above the start of the month. Tentatively, we may be seeing one of the fastest September growths on record.
Written by PSI staff
By revealing complex climate constraints on the productivity of Eurasia’s northern forests, our results question the a priori suitability of boreal tree-ring width chronologies for reconstructing summer temperatures. Diverse growth trends and climate responses across Eurasia’s boreal forest
Lena Hellmann et al (2016) , ,
The area covered by boreal forests accounts for ~16{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of the global and 22{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of the Northern Hemisphere landmass. Changes in the productivity and functioning of this circumpolar biome not only have strong effects on species composition and diversity at regional to larger scales, but also on the Earth’s carbon cycle. Although temporal inconsistency in the response of tree growth to temperature has been reported from some locations at the higher northern latitudes, a systematic dendroecological network assessment is still missing for most of the boreal zone. Here, we analyze the geographical patterns of changes in summer temperature and precipitation across northern Eurasia >60 °N since 1951 AD, as well as the growth trends and climate responses of 445 Pinus, Larixand Picea ring width chronologies in the same area and period. In contrast to widespread summer warming, fluctuations in precipitation and tree growth are spatially more diverse and overall less distinct. Although the influence of summer temperature on ring formation is increasing with latitude and distinct moisture effects are restricted to a few southern locations, growth sensitivity to June–July temperature variability is only significant at 16.6{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of all sites (p ≤ 0.01). By revealing complex climate constraints on the productivity of Eurasia’s northern forests, our results question the a priorisuitability of boreal tree-ring width chronologies for reconstructing summer temperatures. This study further emphasizes regional climate differences and their role on the dynamics of boreal ecosystems, and also underlines the importance of free data access to facilitate the compilation and evaluation of massively replicated and updated dendroecological networks.
Read full paper at iopscience.iop.org
Written by Pierre L. Gosselin
High profile German food chemist Udo Pollmer here at German public radio brings the following video to our attention.
In the video biologist and public speaker Allan Savory tells an audience how climate change and desertification has a lot more to do with the elimination of roaming herd animals over grasslands and vegetated areas over the 20th century.
Another tragedy of consensus science
Tragically, it used to be consensus science that the desertification of vast areas of land on all continents was caused by the over-grazing by herds of animals. As they chomped on the vegetation and moved on, they left the soil barren and exposed to evaporation and wind erosion. Animals that had lived there for thousands of years were suddenly deemed by consensus science to be the culprits.
Written by William M Briggs
The popular web cartoon xkcd has provided a wonderful opportunity to plug my must-read (and too expensive) book Uncertainty: The Soul of Modeling, Probability & Statistics. Buy a copy and follow along.
In this award-eligible book, which has the potential to be read by millions and which has the power to change more lives than even the Atkins Diet, I detail (in the ultimate chapter) the common errors made in time series analysis. Time series are the kind of data you see in, for example, temperature or stock price plots through time.
Written by Natural Environment Research Council
Written by International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR)
The research, made possible by cutting-edge instrumentation, means that astronomers can now classify galaxies according to their physical properties rather than human interpretation of a galaxy’s appearance.
For the past 100 years, telescopes have been capable of observing galaxies beyond our own galaxy, the Milky Way.
Only a few were visible to begin with but as telescopes became more powerful, more galaxies were discovered, making it crucial for astronomers to come up with a way to consistently group different types of galaxies together.
In 1926, the famous American astronomer Edwin Hubble refined a system that classified galaxies into categories of spiral, elliptical, lenticular or irregular shape. This system, known as the Hubble sequence, is the most common way of classifying galaxies to this day.
Despite its success, the criteria on which the Hubble scheme is based are subjective, and only indirectly related to the physical properties of galaxies. This has significantly hampered attempts to identify the evolutionary pathways followed by different types of galaxies as they slowly change over billions of years.
Dr Luca Cortese, from The University of Western Australia node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), said the world’s premier astronomical facilities are now producing surveys consisting of hundreds of thousands of galaxies rather than the dozens that Hubble and his contemporaries were working with.
“We really need a way to classify galaxies consistently using instruments that measure physical properties rather than a time consuming and subjective technique involving human interpretation,” he said.
In a study led by Dr Cortese, a team of astronomers has used a technique known as Integral Field Spectroscopy to quantify how gas and stars move within galaxies and reinterpret the Hubble sequence as a physically based two-dimensional classification system.
“Thanks to the development of new technologies, we can map in great detail the distribution and velocity of different components of galaxies. Then, using this information we’re able to determine the overall angular momentum of a galaxy, which is the key physical quantity affecting how the galaxy will evolve over billions of years.
“Remarkably, the galaxy types described by the Hubble scheme appear to be determined by two primary properties of galaxies-mass and angular momentum. This provides us with a physical interpretation for the well known Hubble sequence whilst removing the subjectiveness and bias of a visual classification based on human perception rather than actual measurement.”
The new study involved 488 galaxies observed by the 3.9m Anglo Australian Telescope in New South Wales and an instrument attached to the telescope called the Sydney-AAO Multi-object Integral-field spectrograph or ‘SAMI’.
The SAMI project, led by the University of Sydney and the ARC Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics (CAASTRO), aims to create one of the first large-scale resolved survey of galaxies, measuring the velocity and distribution of gas and stars of different ages in thousands of systems.
“Australia has a lot of expertise with this type of astronomy and is really at the forefront of what’s being done,” said Professor Warrick Couch, Director of the Australian Astronomical Observatory and CAASTRO Partner Investigator.
“For the SAMI instrument we succeeded in putting 61 optical fibres within a distance that’s less than half the width of a human hair.
“That’s no small feat, it’s making this type of work possible and attracting interest from astronomers and observatories from around the world.”
Future upgrades of the instrument are planned that will allow astronomers to obtain even sharper maps of galaxies and further their understanding of the physical processes shaping the Hubble sequence.
“As we get better at doing this and the instruments we’re using are upgraded, we should be able to look for the physical triggers that cause one type of galaxy to evolve into another — that’s really exciting stuff,” Dr Cortese said.
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The above post is reprinted from materials provided byInternational Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR).Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
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Written by Ruhr-Universitaet-Bochum
In order to process the information that we receive every day, we build categories into which we sort everything that makes up the world around us. Neuroscientists from Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) found out: the way we categorise things changes throughout our lifetimes. Their research results were now published in the journal Neuropsychologia.
The team surrounding Sabrina Schenk and Prof. Dr. Boris Suchan observed young and older people during a categorisation task. The participants of the study were asked to sort circles with varying colour combinations into one of two categories. Some of the circles were very similar to each other; others were distinctly different. To which category the circles belonged was indicated by a feedback during the test.
Brain waves and gaze direction offer insights
The scientists not only documented the test subjects’ answers, they also recorded their brain waves via an EEG and used an eye tracker to trace their line of vision. The results showed that both young and older subjects had no difficulties categorising the similar looking circles — the learning mechanism of both groups were comparable. It was only in the later stages of the experiment, when distinct looking circles where shown, that differences between the test groups became apparent. Older subjects found it more difficult to categorise these exceptions than their younger counterparts.
Brain compensates with attentiveness
“There are two main strategies which we use to categorise things. While we perceive similar looking members of a category holistically, we must specifically learn exceptions and memorise them,” Schenk explains. “Older people find it harder to switch from one strategy to the other.” But measurements of brain waves also showed that the elderly develop a particular selective attentiveness.
To put it simply: they pay more attention to the details and look more closely than younger people. This is also confirmed by the eye tracker, which records in which direction the participants are looking. “To a certain extent, the brain is able to slow down negative effects of aging by increasing its level of attentiveness,” summarises Schenk.
Further studies with gamers
A computer simulation at Canada’s University of Western Ontario has confirmed the results of the scientists in Bochum. In a next step the RUB team would like to test people whose attention level has been especially trained, like that of avid computer players. If these gamers do particularly well in the categorisation task, then the results may help the elderly specifically train their attentiveness.
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The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Ruhr-Universitaet-Bochum. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
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Written by Western University
A new study led by Western University’s all-star cosmochemist Audrey Bouvier proves that the Earth and other planetary objects formed in the early years of the Solar System share similar chemical origins — a finding at odds with accepted wisdom held by scientists for decades.
The findings were published today by the journal Nature.
Bouvier, the Canada Research Chair (CRC) in Planetary Materials and an Isotope Cosmochemistry professor in Western’s Department of Earth Sciences, made the game-changing discovery in collaboration with Maud Boyet from the Magmas and Volcanoes Laboratory at Blaise Pascal University in Clermont-Ferrand, France.
With data uncovered through thermal ionization mass spectrometry, Bouvier and Boyet demonstrated that the Earth and other extraterrestrial objects share the same initial levels of Neodymium-142 (142Nd) — one of seven isotopes found in the chemical element neodymium — which is widely distributed in the Earth’s crust and most commonly used for magnets in commercial products like microphones and in-ear headphones.
In 2005, a small variation in 142Nd was detected between chondrites, which are stony meteorites considered essential building blocks of the Earth, and terrestrial rocks. These results were widely interpreted as an early differentiation of the interior of the Earth (including the crust and mantle) and these chondrites within the first 30 million years of its history.
These new results from Bouvier and Boyet show that these differences in 142Nd were in fact already present during the growth of Earth and not introduced later, as was previously believed.
“How the Earth was formed and what type of planetary materials were part of that formation are issues that have puzzled generations of scientists,” says Bouvier, Curator of the Western Meteorite Collection and also a principal investigator at Western’s Centre for Planetary Science and Exploration (CPSX). “And these new isotopic measurements of meteorites provide exciting answers to these questions about our origins and what made the Earth so special.”
By using vastly improved measurement techniques, Bouvier and Boyet deduced that different meteoritical objects found in the Solar System incorporated the elements neodymium (Nd) and samarium (Sm) but with slightly different isotopic compositions. These variations in stable isotopes also show that the Solar System was not uniform during its earliest times and that materials formed from previous generations of stars were incorporated in various proportions into the building blocks of planets.
This study was supported by the National Science Foundation, France-Canada Research Fund, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) CRC and Discovery Grant programs, the Institute of Earth Sciences of the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and ClerVolc, the Clermont-Ferrand Centre for Volcano Research.
Written by Michael O’Brien
Michael Hart is a former official in Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs and now emeritus professor of international affairs at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, where he has taught courses on the laws and institutions of international trade, Canadian foreign policy, and the politics of climate change.
He held the Fulbright-Woodrow Wilson Center Visiting Research Chair in Canada-U.S. Relations and was Scholar-in-Residence in the School of International Service, Senior Fellow at American University in Washington, and is the founder and director emeritus of Carleton University’s Centre for Trade Policy and Law. In addition, he has taught courses in several other countries. He is the author, editor, or co-editor of more than a dozen books and several hundred articles.
Written by Sean Nealon
Two papers published by an assistant professor at the University of California, Riverside and several collaborators explain why the universe has enough energy to become transparent.
The study led by Naveen Reddy, an assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at UC Riverside, marks the first quantitative study of how the gas content within galaxies scales with the amount of interstellar dust.
This analysis shows that the gas in galaxies is like a “picket fence,” where some parts of the galaxy have little gas and are directly visible, whereas other parts have lots of gas and are effectively opaque to ionizing radiation. The findings were just published in The Astrophysical Journal.
Written by Tom Richard
Russian meteorologists are finding out just how well polar bears are doing in the harsh Environment of the Arctic. Five scientists are trapped on a remote Russian island because of a surplus of polar bears roving around their habitat. The Lords of the Arctic have surrounded the Russian weather station and don’t appear to be leaving anytime soon. That can be a real problem if your instruments are outside and you can’t reach them. 
Located a long way from Moscow, the weather station is on a remote island in the Arctic circle. The scientists have since run out of flares to scare off the ursine creatures, and it’s against Russian law to kill or shoot a polar bear unless it’s self-defense. The station chief, Vadim Plotnikov, said that without the flares there’s no other way to scare off the bears.
Written by Valerie Richardson - The Washington Times
DENVER — The University of Colorado professors who shut down climate change debate in class have landed on the radar of a top school official, who says he wants to make sure students are being “educated, not indoctrinated.” 
John Carson, a member of the University of Colorado Board of Regents, said he plans to make inquires Thursday about an email from three University of Colorado at Colorado Springs professors who advised students to drop the class if they dispute climate change.
“I have a lot of questions after reading this reported email sent to students,” Mr. Carson told The Washington Times. “We should be encouraging debate and dialogue at the university, not discouraging or forbidding it. Students deserve more respect than this. They come to the university to be educated, not indoctrinated.”
Written by William M Briggs
Tell you right up front that the only way to be sure of solving the crisis in higher education is to nuke universities from orbit and then salt the grounds once the ashes blow away. See if you don’t agree by the post’s end.
Title of the peer-reviewed paper is “Carbon Fibre Masculinity: Disability and Surfaces of Homosociality” by Anna Hickey-Moody in Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities. 
By “carbon fibre” she means carbon fiber; actual fibers of carbon. She says, “Contemporary cultural economies of carbon fibre are, in part, a late capitalist (Jameson) technology of hegemonic (or dominant) masculinity”. It takes a man to make carbon fiber.