“I’ve been a solar physicist for 30 years, and I’ve never seen anything quite like this,” says Richard Harrison, head of space physics at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire.

He shows me recent footage captured by spacecraft that have their sights trained on our star. The Sun is revealed in exquisite detail, but its face is strangely featureless.

“If you want to go back to see when the Sun was this inactive… you’ve got to go back about 100 years,” he says.

This solar lull is baffling scientists, because right now the Sun should be awash with activity.

There is a new company, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies(HTT) that intends to revolutionize high speed continental travel. It’s CEO, Dirk Ahlborn, recently announced an agreement with the Slovakian government to build Hyperloops from Vienna, Austria to Bratislava, Slovakia, and from Bratislava to Budapest, Hungary. Its competitor, Hyperloop One, recently tested an open air propulsion test of a vehicle with its “Blade Runner” test rig.

The Japanese “bullet trains” going at 200 mph are like snails in comparison. The new hyper-things are envisaged to do about 760 mph. That’s even faster than modern transatlantic planes by a good measure.

So, what’s the Idea?

Well, see for yourself in the nearby picture. A kind of a sealed capsule travelling in an airtight tube that has a vacuum on the front end and, possibly, air pressure pushing the capsule on the rear end.

Introduction

Each possible cause of global warming has a different pattern of where in the planet the warming occurs first and the most. The signature of an increased greenhouse effect is a hotspot about 10 km up in the atmosphere over the tropics.

We have been measuring the atmosphere for decades using radiosondes—weather balloons with thermometers that radio back the temperature as the balloon ascends through the atmosphere. They show no hotspot whatsoever.

So an increased greenhouse effect is not the cause of the recent global warming. So we now know for sure that carbon emissions are not a significant cause of the global warming.

The Theory

The theoretical signatures come from the latest big report from the IPCC, which is the most authoritative document for those who believe carbon emissions caused global warming. The IPCC Assessment Report 4 (AR4), 2007, Chapter 9. Figure 9.1, in Section 9.2.2.1, page 675, shows six greenhouse signature diagrams.

http://ipccwg1.ucar.edu/wg1/Report/AR4WG1_Print_Ch09.pdf.

In each diagram the horizontal axis is the latitude, from the north pole (90 degrees north) through the equator to the south pole (90 degrees south). The vertical axis shows the height in the atmosphere, marked on left hand side shown as 0 – 30 km (and on the right hand side as the corresponding air pressures in hPa). The coloured regions on each diagram shows where the temperature changes occur for each possible cause (red +1°C, yellow +0.5°C, green −0.5°C, blue −1°C per century).

There is a new paper generating some press attention (e.g. Chris Mooney at the Washington Post) that strongly suggests global warming is leading to specific changes in the atmospheric circulation over the Northern Hemisphere that is causing an enhancement of surface melting across Greenland—and of course, that this mechanism will make things even worse than expected into the future.

We are here to strongly suggest this is not the case.

The new paper is by a team of authors led by Marco Tedesco from Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. The main gist of the paper is that Arctic sea ice loss as a result of human-caused global warming is causing the jet stream to slow down and become wigglier—with deeper north-south excursions that hang around longer.  This type of behavior is referred to as atmospheric “blocking.”

Few people know that skin is an organ; even fewer know it’s the largest organ of the body. It is the contact, called an interface, between two completely different environments; the body and the world. It controls movement of gases, liquids and solids in both directions all the time. The surface of the Earth is similar as the interface between the atmosphere and the underlying surfaces. Accurate measurement and understanding of processes are critical to what is happening in the atmosphere, under ground and in the oceans. Unless we understand the dynamics across the interface we will not know what is going on above and below the surface.

Science divides the world and its atmosphere into layers depending on what they are studying. For example, geophysicists start in the centre of the Earth with the Solid Inner Core extending through the Liquid Outer Core, the Mantle and the crust. Climate science identifies layers (Figure 1) but even at this point we begin seeing the limitations. The layers are based on energy from the Sun. They ignore volumes of geothermal energy that move through the crust, especially under the oceans where the crust is thinner and more perforated.

Simple, but major, differences between land and water illustrate the problems. Movement of heat from within the earth is different primarily because of circulation. Solar energy penetrates up to 50 meters into the ocean while it hardly penetrates the soil at all. It takes much more energy to raise the temperature of water than land, but it also cools much slower.

Rates of evaporation – that is molecules of water that are given enough velocity by heat energy to escape the surface – are also very different. There is an unlimited supply of molecules in the oceans. Since this is the major source of energy transfer to the atmosphere, it is critical to weather and climate.

Figure 1 shows atmospheric layers. It shows the boundaries (interfaces) above the surface, such as the Tropopause and the Stratopause but leaves out the major critical interface between the atmosphere and the earth. These boundaries separate by temperature, but you can use other measures. The term atmosphere is an example because it encompasses the entire region to the edge of space and is different from the lithosphere and hydrosphere. It also includes the thinnest but most important zone, the biosphere. It is a very narrow zone that contains virtually all life on the planet yet is mostly within a few meters of the surface.

Parts of Germany have been hit hard by unusually harsh downpours, flooding and thunderstorms over the recent days, prompting some alarmist scientists to barge into TV and radio studios to announce it’s due to human-made climate worsening.

Now Spiegel science journlalist Axel Bojanowski comments on this behavior in a commentary titled: “Heavy rains in Germany: The storms and the climate bluff“.

Bojanowski tells readers that the long-term data do not support any links to climate change (let alone man) and that the recent climate doomsday headlines made with every occurring weather anomaly seem to have become “knee-jerk” reactions by German media outlets.

A new paper published this week shows it’s possible to turn carbon dioxide into limestone, but the price tag isn’t cheap. Scientists pumped large amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) and water into underground basalt rocks, and the resulting chemical mix reacted with the rocks’ calcium magnesium to form limestone. Limestone is considered a more permanent solution for storing CO2 because it’s now been converted to stone. The technique was published in a new in the journal Science.

“It’s no longer a gas,” said Juerg Matter, a co-author of the study at the University of Southampton in England. “Basically carbon dioxide converted it into stone.” Previous experiments done in the lab showed it could take thousands or hundreds of thousands of years for this process to occur. In this study, it took about two years and converted 95 percent of the gas.

Another process is known as carbon capture sequester (CCS), where large amounts of CO2 are pumped and stored deep underground to slow down global warming. Once the gas is pumped into the ground, it can be stored in into depleted oil wells, but it runs the risk of escaping. With this new method, the gas is converted to stone. Previous efforts to store large amounts of CO2 in the ground using CCS have made little progress.

Read the full article at: examiner.com

Early trial data shows a drug developed using artificial intelligence can slow the growth of cancer in clinical trials.

The data, presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology conference, showed some tumors shrank by around a quarter.

The compound will now be taken into more advanced trials.

Scientists said we were now in an explosive stage of merging advances in computing with medicine.

Spotting every difference between a cancerous and a healthy cell is beyond even the brightest human minds.

US scientists have produced their most precise date yet for the landslide that shaped the iconic canyon running through what is now Zion National Park.

The colossal rock avalanche occurred about 4,800 years ago, they say, based on a study of some of its boulders.

The researchers have also re-examined the details of the event.

They find the slide probably contained some 286 million cubic metres of debris – enough to cover New York’s Central Park to a depth of about 80m.

That volume dammed Zion Canyon’s Virgin River, creating a lake that remained for centuries.

CRISPR – get to know this acronym. It’s good to know the name of something that could change your future.

Pronounced “crisper”, it is a biological system for altering DNA. Known as gene editing, this technology has the potential to change the lives of everyone and everything on the planet.

A bold statement but that is the considered view of many of the world’s leading geneticists and biochemists I’ve spoken to in recent months when working on my latest Panorama – Medicine’s Big Breakthrough: Editing Your Genes.

CRISPR was co-discovered in 2012 by molecular biologist Professor Jennifer Doudna whose team at Berkeley, University of California was studying how bacteria defend themselves against viral infection.

A comprehensive new MIT-led study of the potential for geothermal energy within the United States has found that mining the huge amounts of heat that reside as stored thermal energy in the Earth’s hard rock crust could supply a substantial portion of the electricity the United States will need in the future, probably at competitive prices and with minimal environmental impact.

An 18-member panel led by MIT prepared the 400-plus page study, titled “The Future of Geothermal Energy.” Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, it is the first study in some 30 years to take a new look at geothermal, an energy resource that has been largely ignored.

The goal of the study was to assess the feasibility, potential environmental impacts and economic viability of using enhanced geothermal system (EGS) technology to greatly increase the fraction of the U.S. geothermal resource that could be recovered commercially.

Russell Reichelt, chairman of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, said this week that activist scientists, green lobbyists, and environmental organizations have distorted “surveys, maps and data” to intentionally mislead the “extent and impact of coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef.”

A new report on the barrier reef’s health was released last week by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (GBRMPA) and the Australian Institute of Marine Science. It showed that only 22 percent of the reef was affected by the now-dissipated 2015-2016 El Niño, and that current conservation efforts over the last few years have taken the reef off of the World Heritage sites ‘watch’ list.

A couple of weeks back, New Scientist published an article trying to up the ante on climate sensitivity. 

One headline-making 2013 study had concluded that the immediate warming that would result froma doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere would be around 1.3°C – significantly less than most previous estimates. But this was before global temperatures shot past 1°C above pre-industrial levels last year, as predicted by New Scientist in July 2015. If the 2013 study was repeated using that value, it would give an estimate for the immediate warming of 1.6°C, says Piers Forster…

In an essay published on Saturday May 7, 2016, Oregon Legislator Mike Nearman asked those who objected to his skepticism about Anthropogenic Global Warming to provide the evidence (data) that convinced them we are headed for a climate catastrophe. In response, he got the typical name-calling and other bad behavior we have come to expect from those thoroughly sold on the prevailing paradigm.

Most of us who actually are scientists realize that Nearman was precisely correct to request the robust empirical data that should back up all science, but in the case of Global Warming is substantially missing. Proponents like to confuse the issue by providing evidence of warming that could come from several natural sources and ignore the crucial question about a link to human activities. And when confronted with the ruse, some resort to calling opponents “absolute idiots.”

Of course, the only “absolute idiots,” are those who believe that science is too sacred to be questioned.

Scientists continually question prevailing wisdom to see if we can improve on it. When science first emerged out of the politics and religion of the seventeenth century with the formation of the British Royal Society, the founding members chose the motto “Nullius in verba” or “Take no one’s word for it.” That expressed their determination to avoid the domination of authority and to decide scientific matters by an appeal to data gathered by experiment. Once freed from the domination of politics and religion, science made amazing progress.

1988 was a barn-burner year for climate alarmists. Then-Sen. Al Gore’s steamy congressional hearing trumpeted a planet on fire, and the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was created to produce pseudo-scientific evidence blaming it on unfair capitalist industrial prosperity-spawned CO2 emissions.

Canadian Environment Minister Christine Stewart explained the real cause for urgency. She told editors and reporters of the Calgary Herald, “No matter if the science of global warming is all phony . . . climate change [provides] the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.”

Stewart was wrong. Consequences of that phony science upon environmental and energy regulatory policies matter a great deal. So let’s consider some inconvenient facts.