With Christmas only a few weeks away, a new study says the Svalbard reindeer are getting weaker and asks if Santa will need more muscle to pull his sleigh [1]. So if your child hears about this so-called calamity from News reports, remind them it doesn’t matter: Santa Claus uses the species ‘saintnicolas magicalus’, or flying reindeer.
With ostensibly warmer winters, the study notes rain is falling on snow and freezing into ice. That makes it difficult for the animals to get at plant food, leading some to go hungry and some females birthing undersized calves. The adults they tracked in the survey have lost 12 percent of their weight when compared to those born in 1994.
The ecologists behind the survey are from the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research, and the James Hutton Institute. And their pointing the finger at Climate Change.
The Trump administration is well aware of the political use and scientific abuse of climate for a political agenda. I learned how aware while attending the Heritage Foundation Climate Conference on Thursday December 8 in Washington D.C.
The majority of the public sense there is something wrong as reflected in their lack of concern measured in all polls. They will be very angry when the extent of the deception is explained to them, as will happen as the new administration lays out the foundation for their policies. The question is what happens going forward. We know those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Similarly, you cannot prevent all misuses of any system and trying to do so only makes it inefficient and even unworkable. Science must be central to whatever direction taken.
There’s cold, and then there’s Antarctica cold. How does a frosty reading of 135.8 degrees below zero sound?A reading of 135.8 degrees below zero was measured in Antarctica, using remote sensing from satellites.
Based on remote satellite measurements, scientists recently recorded that temperature at a desolate ice plateau in East Antarctica. It was the lowest temperature ever recorded on Earth, though it may not get that recognition in the official record book.
A NASA satellite measured that temperature in August 2010; on July 31 of this year, another bone-chilling temperature of -135.3 degrees was recorded.
In contradicting a theory that’s been the standard for over eighty years, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have made a discovery holding major promise for the petroleum industry. The research has revealed that in the foreseeable future products such as crude oil and gasoline could be transported across country 30 times faster, and the several minutes it takes to fill a tank of gas could be reduced to mere seconds.
Over the past year, using high flux neutron sources at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), an Illinois group led by Yang Zhang, assistant professor of nuclear, plasma, and radiological engineering (NPRE) and Beckman Institute at Illinois, has been able to videotape the molecular movement of alkanes, the major component of petroleum and natural gas. The group has learned that the thickness of liquid alkanes can be significantly reduced, allowing for a marked increase in the substance’s rate of flow.
“Alkane is basically a chain of carbon atoms,” Zhang said. “By changing one carbon atom in the backbone of an alkane molecule, we can make it flow 30 times faster.”
The group’s discovery disproves a well-known theory that Princeton University professors Walter Kauzmann and Henry Eyring formed in the late 1940s. They had predicted that all alkanes have a universal viscosity near their melting points. Zhang said the theory had been cited over 3,000 times.
However, a rather distinct odd-even effect of the liquid alkane dynamics was discovered. The odd-even effect in solid alkanes is taught in almost every introductory organic chemistry textbook, i.e., the difference in the periodic packing of odd- and even-numbered alkane solids results in odd-even variation of their densities and melting points. However, the same effect was not expected in liquid alkanes because of the lack of periodic structures in liquids.
“The classical Kauzmann-Eyring theory of molecular viscous flow is over simplified,” Zhang said. “It seems some chemistry textbooks may need revisions.”
The Illinois scientists had the technological advantage of super high-speed (at the pico-second, 1 trillionth of a second) and super high-resolution (at the nano-meter, 1 billionth of a meter) “video cameras” making use of neutrons to take movies of the molecules. “A neutron ‘microscope’ is the major breakthrough in materials research and we use it to look at everything. There are things we’ve never seen before,” Zhang said.
The research, “Dynamic Odd-Even Effect in Liquid n-Alkanes near Their Melting Points,” has been published in the German publication Angewandte Chemie International Edition. The reported research discovery is fundamental to understand and improve a wide spectrum of chemical processes, such as lubrication, diffusion through porous media, and heat transfer.
“produce false evidence against an innocent person [or an odorless, tasteless, invisible atmospheric gas that is essential for plant growth] so that they appear guilty: ‘he claims he was framed’”
In 2007 Carbon dioxide (CO2) was given a show trial and found to be “guilty” even though the litigants had no standing and the evidence was, in the words of Chief Justice Roberts in his dissenting opinion, “pure conjecture”.
Guilty of what you ask? “Massachusetts had lost some of its coastal land, an injury that is expected to worsen over the course of the next century,” Mass. v EPA (2007). That’s it. That is the totality of the actual, hard “evidence” that was presented at trial that the CO2 emitted by the burning of hydrocarbons is causing an “injury” to “public health and welfare” and can therefore be classified as a “pollutant” under the Clean Air Act.
Everybody knows Physics, everybody without exception. We learn Physics from the day we are born, and we go on learning Physics every day thereafter – not in a classroom, mind, but in the University of Life.
Heat is defined as the transfer of kinetic energy. Yesterday my wife brought her oil-filled radiator into our breakfast room. Quite idly, I stretched my right hand out to touch it, little realising it had been on for half an hour. Wow! I experienced an immediate transfer of kinetic energy. I guess most husbands have also had the experience of being handed a hot plate by their partners right out of the oven. The experience of the transfer of kinetic energy can be alarmingly immediate and painful.
There are thousands of ways we experience the transfer or kinetic energy by contact, which the Physicist calls Conduction. I well remember as a young man walking on the hot sands of the Riviera without sandals. It was like walking on hot coals. I had to rush into the sea to cool my feet.
The Warmists are very fond of saying ‘The Science is settled’ and in point of fact they are largely right. Between the Warmists and the Skeptics there is a great deal of agreement on the science. The disagreements mostly come over the use or abuse of the English language. Just as one small example, many of the Warmists are unable apparently to distinguish between ‘causation’ and ‘correlation’. That is a matter of linguistics and not of science per se.
The Green House Gas Gang began in 1896 when Svante Arrhenius of Sweden discovered heat storage increases with increased carbon dioxide levels. This father of the gang was a child prodigy, Nobel Committee member, Nobel Laureate and founding member of the Eugenics movement. In 1900 he became involved in the creation of the Nobel Prize, in 1901 he was a member of the Nobel Committee and in 1903 he helped give himself a Nobel Prize for Chemistry.
He served on the Nobel Committee until 1927 where he exerted enormous influence on the selection of all prize winners. In 1922 he helped father the State Institute for Racial Biology, which was to have been a Nobel Institute. The principles for this had been in discussion by the literati for decades and were incorporated in the US Progressive Movement of the 1900’s and fully implemented by the Nazi eugenics programs.
According to the most highly-cited estimate of recent (1992 – 2011) polar ice sheet melt rates, the land ice on Greenland and Antarctica has been contributing to sea level rise at a rate of 0.59 mm/year in the modern era, which means the equivalent of 5.9 centimeters (2.3 inches) per century of sea level rise might eventually accrue if the polar ice sheets continue melting at current rates for the next 10 decades.
Global warming science in full meltdown. Influential climate analyst Tony Heller exposes key errors made 115 years ago by the “grandfather” of greenhouse gas theory. The findings, say Heller, make the climate theory of Swedish Chemist Svante Arrhenius “inadmissible” and “junk science.”
Heller’s analysis could have huge implications. US President-elect, Donald Trump, given a populist mandate to dismantle the “hoax” of man-made global warming, is set to target the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) for its wasteful multi-billion dollar climate change boondoggle.
Leading Trump’s EPA transition team is Myron Ebell, the Director of Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI). Ebell and Heller are long-time friends championing skepticism of establishment climate alarm.
There is no empirical evidence of man-made Global Warming whatsoever. There never has been and there never will be. Oh yes! There is a theory and plenty of scientists have an ‘opinion’ on the matter. But opinion is not science. A great number of apparatchiks also ‘believe’ that the Globe is getting hotter and hotter and indeed only today I read in the BBC Science section that we are near to reaching that famous tipping point. But belief is not science either.
Of course the Globe warms every day and cools every night. The weather likewise changes every day and the seasons are rotating all the time. The temperature is different in different places all over the globe – watch the Meteo on EuroNews or watch CNN or the BBC. They all show magnificently the different and ever-changing temperatures throughout the world. That is empirical. Those temperatures are taken by thermometers at some 5ft above the ground.
President-elect Donald Trump’s senior space policy advisor, Bob Walker, recently observed to the Guardian newspaper that NASA has been reduced to “a logistics agency concentrating on space station resupply and politically correct environmental monitoring.”
Instead, “We see NASA in an exploration role, in deep space research.” He added, “Mr. Trump’s decisions will be based upon solid science, not politicized science.”
We should definitely expect a major budgetary realignment of NASA’s annual Earth Science Directorate funding which has increased 50{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} to a current $2 billion under the Obama Administration, compared with $2.8 billion for space exploration. A great place to start serious slashing will be with the ideologically corrupted NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS).
The GISS, which inappropriately bears the distinguished name of father of modern rocketry Robert H. Goddard, should definitely not be confused with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, a major national scientific and engineering center.
Instead, this small enclave of temperature data modelers located in a midtown Manhattan office building relies primarily upon sparse surface data (not the far more reliable satellite measurements available since 1979) that is mostly supplied by others.
Check the issuing source the next time you hear media reports claiming that “NASA says that blah, blah year, month, day is hottest in record.” If mentioned at all, you should not be surprised to see that it came from the GISS.
Up until three years ago, the organization’s much-chronicled “top climate scientist” director was James Hansen, a politically protected Civil Service employee-cum-anti-fossil energy activist who was arrested four times for noncompliance with police orders during public demonstrations. On February 13, 2013, he was handcuffed in front of the White House alongside actress Daryl Hannah, Sierra Club founder Adam Werbach, 350.org founder Bill McKibben, former NAACP president Julian Bond, and a few dozen others protesting to block the Keystone XL pipeline.
Hansen first gained national media attention as star witness at then-Sen. Al Gore’s 1988 Committee on Science, Technology, and Space hearings where he famously testified that he was 99{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} certain that temperatures had increased under human-caused greenhouse influence. In 2009, Hansen’s former supervisor John Theon wrote to the Minority Office at the Environment and Public Works Committee that he had “embarrassed NASA” with his alarming claims which were not supported by scientific evidence.
As Theon noted, “NASA scientist James Hansen has created worldwide frenzy with his dire climate warning, his call for those who dissent against manmade global warming fear, and his claims that he was allegedly muzzled by the Bush Administration despite doing 1,400 on-the-job media interviews!” He added that “climate models are useless” because they “do not realistically simulate the climate system because there are many sub-grid scale processes that the models either replicate poorly or completely omit.”
Theon continued, observing, “Furthermore, some scientists have manipulated the observed data to justify their model results. In doing so, they neither explain what they have modified in the observations, nor explain how they did it.”
True to form, in January 2015 the GISS, now headed by climate alarm blogger Gavin Schmidt, rolled out a report that 2014 was the hottest year ever measured. That claim was presumably based upon available records dating back to 1880 . . . nearly a century before accurate global satellite records existed.
Schmidt has since admitted that the likelihood that 2014 was the warmest year since 1880 is just 38{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117}. Yet when asked by the Daily Mailwhether he regretted that his press release hadn’t mentioned this, they reported that he gave no response.
According to satellite measurements, 2014 (a major El Niño year) was actually the third-warmest in 36 years since satellite measurements have been recorded. John Christy, a professor of atmospheric science and director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, argues that any recorded temperature changes since 2001 are “statistically insignificant.”
It is tragic to see the agency that applied solid science to put humans the Moon become publicly identified with and misrepresented by a junk science-premised climate alarm propaganda machine. Nevertheless, in a recent interview posted in The Independent, a British online newspaper, NASA GISS Director Schmidt “warned” President-elect Donald Trump that government scientists are “not going to stand” for any interference with their work.
Asked if he would resign if the Trump Administration adopted an extreme form of “climate change denial,” Schmidt replied that this was “an interesting question,” but one which would not cause him to quit “in or of itself.”
Perhaps we might hope that the Trump Administration will solve Schmidt’s decision quandary by eliminating the GISS altogether. While no one I know denies that natural climate changes, it’s high time for a political climate change that gets NASA back to doing reliable science we can once again trust.
If a burst pipe in your house is flooding your basement, you’re probably going to be more worried about that than the couple termites you previously spotted. But multiply those termites times a thousand and suddenly the bigger threat to your house might be, well, the little things.
The same holds true for science. Science fraud draws urgent attention whenever it comes to light, the equivalent of a busted pipe emergency. But it turns out, most scientists think it’s a far lesser threat to their field than the small, but legion, instances of under-reporting of negative findings and scientists’ use of shoddy methodology.
And — although it may be surprising coming from two people who run a blog that often focuses on scientific misconduct — we agree.
Is there any level on which a climate consensus can be said to exist? Only at the most obvious level, which is that everyone agrees that the climate changes. The realists know that the climate has always changed, drastically over millions of years of alternating Ice Ages and Warm Periods and within a narrower range over the warm last 12,000 years, with such periods as the Minoan Warm Period, the Roman Warming, the Medieval Warm Period, and the present warm period.
The catastrophic man-made global warming alarmists claim that the climate was very stable prior to the Industrial Age, which just happens to have had its start at the end of the Little Ice Age according to the Climate Realists. But, since man became powerful and plentiful with the Industrial Age, the alarmists say that climate change now occurs mostly due to man.
We have today one of the most astonishing examples of a regression in scientific education. It used to be common knowledge and taught in schools at all levels that carbon dioxide (CO2) is a vital, airborne plant food, but it is currently being condemned as being a “pollutant” because many people have come to believe, due to a massive disinformation campaign, that higher levels of this plant food would be harmful to the biosphere. So pervasive, so effective is this ongoing disinformation campaign that it is now considered by many to be a moral imperative for humanity to abandon the use of its primary source of energy—burning hydrocarbons—because doing so produces CO2.
Let me say that again. So pervasive, so effective has been the campaign that has demonized CO2—the gas that feeds the biosphere—that it is now generally accepted that humanity has a moral obligation to limit its production of it, even if doing so would cause a profound regression in global economic development! They say that they have “science” on their side but do they? Let’s review what science “knows” and what it doesn’t.
