Written by climatism.wordpress.com
A Cambridge University professor has been accused of “crying wolf” by predicting the imminent disappearance of Arctic ice.
Peter Wadhams has been criticised by scientists who fear that he could undermine the credibility of climate science by making doom-laden forecasts. He repeatedly predicted that the Arctic would be “ice-free” by last summer, by which he meant it would have less than one million sq km of ice. His forecasts, reported around the world, turned out to be wrong.
Written by Andrew Follett
Russian officials announced a pair of major technological breakthroughs that will turn spent nuclear waste into fuel for reactors. If true, the new technology could change the world’s energy landscape in the next decade. 
Testing has already begun on components needed to reprocess waste into fuel, as has the construction of reactors to use it. The first of the new reactors should be completed by 2025.
Russia’s new reactors are theoretically capable of eliminating the production of radioactive waste, achieving a “closed loop” of nuclear power generation where waste would fuel other reactors. The country currently operates 35 nuclear reactors, getting about 19 percent of its electricity from them. The country already planned to build 20 new reactors and sell many more to other countries, according to the World Nuclear Association. The new breakthrough caused the Russian government to announce plans to build another 11 reactors.
Written by Wang, J., Liu, X., Zhang, X., et al.
Paper Reviewed: Wang, J., Liu, X., Zhang, X., Smith, P., Li, L., Filley, T.R., Cheng, K., Shen, M., He, Y. and Pan, G. 2016. Size and variability of crop productivity both impacted by CO2 enrichment and warming – A case study of 4 year field experiment in a Chinese paddy. Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment 221: 40-49.
Providing the rationale for their study, Wang et al. (2016) write that few studies have focused on the interaction between atmospheric CO2 enrichment and warming on crop growth, such that the combined effects of these two important variables “are still not well understood.” In an effort to advance our understanding in this area, the ten-member research team conducted an experiment examining the effects of these two variables on two important food crops: wheat and rice.
Written by Varner, J., Horns, J.J., et al.
Paper Reviewed: Varner, J., Horns, J.J., Lambert, M.S., Westberg, E., Ruff, J.S., Wolfenberger, K., Beever, E.A. and Dearing, M.D. 2016. Plastic pikas: Behavioural flexibility in low-elevation pikas (Ochotona princeps). Behavioural Processes 125: 63-71. 
Behavioral plasticity is the ability of a species to alter its behavior in response to changes in climate. It is an adaptive mechanism that allows species to persist in regions outside their normal climate envelope to which they are generally constrained and therefore represents a means by which they might persist in the face of ongoing climate change. However, behavioral plasticity is an understudied subject and there is much that remains to be learned about this topic.
Written by Jo Nova
For years, skeptical scientists have been pointing at data that showed the the world started warming somewhere from 1700 – 1820. This has been known from glaciers, sea level studies, ice cores, boreholes, ocean heat content estimates, and more proxies than any climate-nerd cares to name.
Finally, expert climate modelers are “surprised” to discover this:
“…their study had detected warming in the Arctic and tropical oceans from around the 1830s, just 80 years after the Industrial Revolution started in England. “It was an extraordinary finding,” she said. “It was one of those moments where science really surprised us. But the results were clear. The climate warming we are witnessing today started about 180 years ago.”
How many grant dollars did it take to figure out what skeptical scientists have been saying for years?
Written by James Gallagher, Rachael Buchanan & Andrew Luck-Baker
It’s not very often we get to talk about a revolution in understanding and treating depression and yet now doctors are talking about “one of the strongest discoveries in psychiatry for the last 20 years”.
It is based around the idea that some people are being betrayed by their fiercest protector. That their immune system is altering their brain. The illness exacts a heavy toll on 350 million people around the world, among them Hayley Mason, from Cambridgeshire:
“My depression gets so bad that I can’t leave the bed, I can’t leave the bedroom, I can’t go downstairs and be with my partner and his kids.
Written by co2coalition.org
Paper Reviewed: Viterito, A. 2016. The Correlation of Seismic Activity and Recent Global Warming. Journal of Earth Science & Climatic Change 7: 345. doi: 10.4172/2157-7617.1000345 
In this intriguing new study, Viterito (2016) shows that increasing seismic activity of the globe’s high geothermal flux areas (HGFAs) — which is indicative of increasing geothermal forcing — is “highly correlated with average global temperatures from 1979 to 2015,” while “the correlation between carbon dioxide loading and global temperatures for the same period is lower.” And he thus notes that “HGFA seismicity is a significant predictor of global temperatures.”
Written by Thomas Richard, Blasting News
Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. has a message for anyone linking #Climate Change with the Louisiana floods: it’s irresponsible and not based on #Science. He even produced multiple graphs showing a downward trend for these heavy precipitation events.
A professor in the Environmental Studies Program at the University of Colorado, Pielke has been at the forefront of the global warming debate for over a decade. As a climate expert, he’s even testified before Congress on extreme weather events and written a book on disasters and climate change.
Written by World Nuclear News
Russia has reached two more milestones in its endeavour to close the nuclear fuel cycle. Mashinostroitelny Zavod (MSZ) – part of Russian nuclear fuel manufacturer TVEL – has completed acceptance tests of components for its ETVS-14 and ETVS-15 experimental fuel assemblies with mixed nitride fuel for the BREST and BN fast neutron reactors. 
MSZ has also announced the start of research and development work on the technical design of the “absorbent element” of the core of the BREST-OD-300 reactor.
Written by Steve Milloy
Steve Milloy, Dr. John Dunn & and Dr. Stan Young versus EPA before the National Academy of Sciences over EPA’s illegal human experiments. August 24 at 1pm ET via webinar. You can listen in. Instructions below.
Summary of Event
EPA secretly hired the National of Sciences (NAS) to whitewash its program of illegal human experimentation. When Milloy learned of the EPA’s plans, Milloy exposed them and compelled the NAS to re-open the virtually concluded process and have apublic meeting, which will take place on Aug. 24 at 1pm ET. A more detailed explanation is in Milloy’s July 24 commentary in the Washington Times (also reprinted below).
Written by Steven Milloy
NASA is reconsidering whether tank foam debris caused the Columbia disaster. That’s quite a shift from days earlier when the foam was the “leading candidate” — an explanation that quickly became embarrassing. 
We may never know precisely what happened to Columbia, but one thing should be clear — NASA should not be in charge of investigating itself.
A chunk of foam insulation broke off the external fuel tank during launch, perhaps damaging Columbia’s heat-protecting tiles. “We’re making the assumption that the external tank was the root cause of the accident,” said shuttle program manager Ron Dittemore in the immediate aftermath.
Written by Alan Carlin
Climate alarmism is probably the greatest hoax/scam in world history. The main evidence for catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW), the principal alleged adverse effect of human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), is climate models built by CAGW supporters in a field where models with real predictive power do not exist and cannot be built with any demonstrable accuracy beyond a week or two because climate and weather are coupled non-linear chaotic systems. 
Without the models, the whole hoax/scam collapses.
Written by Professor Roger A. Pielke, Jr.
Modern science rests upon “a bald-faced but beautiful lie” from which it draws its “political and cultural power.” That is how Dan Sarewitz describes the myth that underpins modern science.
That lie holds that scientists following their curiosity, motivated by little else and certainly not political considerations, advance understandings and thus our ability to make wise decisions. THB is also an effort to critique this “beautiful lie.” 
A key element in that lie is that scientists are neutral arbiters of truth, who sit above the rough and tumble of political debates. Like philosopher kings, their neutrality should be used to arbitrate our difficult debates. Sounds great. Most myths do.
Written by Daniel Sarewitz
Science, pride of modernity, our one source of objective knowledge, is in deep trouble. Stoked by fifty years of growing public investments, scientists are more productive than ever, pouring out millions of articles in thousands of journals covering an ever-expanding array of fields and phenomena. But much of this supposed knowledge is turning out to be contestable, unreliable, unusable, or flat-out wrong. From metastatic cancer to climate change to growth economics to dietary standards, science that is supposed to yield clarity and solutions is in many instances leading instead to contradiction, controversy, and confusion. Along the way it is also undermining the four-hundred-year-old idea that wise human action can be built on a foundation of independently verifiable truths. Science is trapped in a self-destructive vortex; to escape, it will have to abdicate its protected political status and embrace both its limits and its accountability to the rest of society.
Written by Dr Klaus L E Kaiser
From climate doomsters to media politicos, the world is being bombarded with mis-constructs, unfounded claims and outright lies. Some listeners and readers may fall for such deceits but many others are thinking to themselves and quietly walking away. 
Time and again, I have experienced that phenomenon after giving a talk to (mostly) retired professionals from a variety of disciplines. They approach me in private with statements like “fully agree with you but am afraid to speak out.” Too few speak up in public – though they may voice their views indirectly at the ballot box.
However, times are slowly changing. Many people have become dissatisfied with main stream media reports and become more willing to stand up against misleading advertising, destructive policies and rapidly rising costs. In my perception, the recent Brexit vote is a harbinger of more of such “rebellions” to come, some likely to be equally surprising.
Written by David Matthews
As the new editor-in-chief of Science, a highly selective journal that still has the controversial power to make scientific careers, the biochemist and former University of Pittsburgh senior manager is worried about an apparent rejection of science by some parts of the public – and thinks that academics should look closely at how their own behaviour may have contributed.
“One of the things that drew me to this position…is there’s a crisis in public trust in science,” he tells Times Higher Education after starting in the Science post on 1 July. “I don’t pretend to have answers to that question but it is something that I care deeply about.”
Berg, who started his career in chemistry but then moved on to span a host of other disciplines including biochemistry and personalised medicine, acknowledges that society’s confidence in science does “wax and wane” over time but thinks that, this time, things are different.
In the US, “scientists have been labelled as another special interest group”, he says.
Part of this is down to the polarisation of American politics and the rise of an anti-intellectual spirit, Berg thinks. His fears echo Atul Gawande, an American health writer, who earlier this year told graduating students at the California Institute of Technology that “we are experiencing a significant decline in trust in scientific authorities”.
In his address, Gawande cited a study that showed a significant decline in trust in science among American conservatives. In 1974, conservatives had the most trust in science, but by 2010, they had the least, and substantially less than liberals in particular.
Donald Trump, who has erroneously linked vaccines to autism, blamed China for creating the concept of global warming to undermine US manufacturing and claimed that environmentally friendly light bulbs can cause cancer, can be seen as one manifestation of this long-term collapse in conservative trust in science in the US.
But researchers are not entirely blameless for this rising hostility, thinks Berg. “Scientists are guilty of behaving in some ways of making this stick more than it needs to,” he says.
Too often they have gone beyond explaining the scientific situation and ventured into policy prescriptions, notably in the case of climate change, he thinks. “The policy issues should be informed by science, but they are separate questions,” he says. “Scientists to some degree, intentionally or otherwise, have been mashing the two together,” he adds, and urges scientists to be more “transparent” about “where the firmness of your conclusions end”.
Another area where scientists have overstepped the reach of their evidence is in drug development, where there “has been a tendency maybe to overhype early results”, Berg suggests.
“Scientists…say ‘we have this really important discovery and it will lead to new drugs for treating cancer in the next few years’, when the reality is that they have swum the first lap of a sixteen-lap race,” he warns.
Berg’s interest in the communication of science comes in part from his time leading the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, the basic research arm of the US’ National Institute of Health (NIH), where he was director from 2003 to 2011.
There he found that the NIH’s policies towards researchers, although well thought through, were “pretty close” to being “opaque” and in need of better elucidation, he says.
But some in the scientific community argue that high-profile journals such as Science are partly to blame for the very overhyping of results that Berg decries.
A paper published in 2011 made waves after it found that there was a correlation between journal impact factors (JIFs) – which measure average paper citation rates over the past two years and are highest for prestigious journals such as Science, Nature and Cell – and the rate of retractions. Science had the second highest rate of retractions among the journals studied, below only the New England Journal of Medicine.
This could be because these journals are more highly scrutinised, the authors said. But it could also be because of demands from such journals for “clear and definitive” results, they suggested, which incentivise researchers to cut corners to come up with a neat scientific story.
Berg acknowledges that there is a “delicate balance” to strike between sharing the exciting fruits of research with the public and being sure not to exaggerate findings.
He argues that Science has “by and large” got this balance right, although he admits that “there have been things that garner lots of publicity that turn out to be overblown or just plain wrong”.
Although only six weeks into his job, Berg has already taken aim at JIFs, an oft-criticised way to rank journals and gauge the quality of scientists’ work. In a Science editorial and blog, Berg calculated that because papers have such a big spread of citations within any one journal, it makes little sense to use the JIF to predict how many citations any one article will have.
JIFs have been “abused by the scientific community and the scientific administrative community”, he tells THE, and have taken on “a life of their own”. Some journals specify their impact factors to three decimal places – this level of specious detail should be “like fingernails on a chalkboard” to a scientist, he says.
Berg stops short of saying that Science will no longer release its JIF, as “transparency is good”. But actively publicising an impact factor is “a much harder case to make”, he says.
Science and others have also been under fire for their high rejection rates: the Nobel prizewinning cell biologist Randy Schekman accused prestigious journals of behaving “like fashion designers who create limited-edition handbags or suits” because “they know scarcity stokes demand, so they artificially restrict the number of papers they accept”.
Science Advances, an online only, open access journal launched in 2014, is a way to ease this problem, Berg argues, as it can accommodate articles too long to fit into Science itself.
It is “certainly the goal” for Science Advances to be as prestigious as Science itself, he says. “I don’t see it as the consolation prize if you don’t get in to Science.”
But even if the clout of Science Advances grows, Berg acknowledges that there may always be a “prestige edge” for physical journals – such as Science – where space is inevitably scarce.
Read more at www.timeshighereducation.com
