It’s a damp, freezing cold day in January, and I’m at the bottom of a massive hole in the ground. This is one of a pair of 41-meter-deep shafts in a part of east London called the Limmo peninsula, a spit of land on the banks of the River Thames. From a drone’s-eye view, it looks as though a giant hole punch has taken two neat circles out of the silty earth.

Back in late 2012, two enormous tunnel-boring machines were lowered into these shafts. Workers fired up the 1,000-metric-ton behemoths (named Elizabeth and Victoria), and their rotating cutting heads slowly gouged their way westwards. When they finally reached Central London in May 2015, it marked the completion of the tunneling work on Crossrail, a new underground railway system that spans London.

Crossrail will be fully operation by the end of 2019, with an expected 200 million passengers carried through its arteries every year. For now, it is Europe’s biggest construction project, with a budget of £14.8 billion (about US $21 billion).

The Paris Agreement and, more generally, climate change policy, almost perfectly illustrate the contradictions of the post-modern industrialized world risk society, characterized by perceived threats confirmed by politicized science and governed by sub-politics beyond democratic control. – Lucas Bergkamp

The Journal of Environmental Risk has a special issue related the Paris Agreement [link].  There are two articles by Lucas Bergkamp, which are highlighted here.

The Paris Agreement on Climate Change:  A Risk Regulation Perspective.  Excerpts:

The Paris Agreement on Climate Change, which was concluded at COP-21 in December 2015, . . . has been called the ‘world’s greatest diplomatic success’ and a ‘historic achievement,’ but also an ‘epic failure’ and even a ‘fraud’ and ‘worthless words.’  Disappointed with the Paris Agreement, a group of eleven climate scientists signed a declaration stating that it suffers from “deadly flaws” and gives “false hope;” they argue that the time for “wishful thinking and blind optimism” is over, and “the full spectrum of geoengineering” should be considered.

OSLO (Reuters) – Reports of a historic dip in China’s carbon dioxide emissions in the past two years are premature because of uncertainty over data showing the pace of a decline in coal use by the world’s biggest consumer, a study showed on Monday.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) has been among those saying that energy-related carbon dioxide emissions by China, the biggest emitter, fell in 2015 and 2014 in what it hailed as a shift to cleaner energy after years of fast growth.

“Headlines about falling emissions may be misinterpreting the numbers,” the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research, Oslo, (CICERO) said in a statement of a report published in the journal Nature Climate Change.

China has promised to peak its carbon dioxide emissions by around 2030 as part of a 195-nation plan agreed in Paris in December to combat climate change, blamed for stoking more downpours, heatwaves and rising sea levels.

Just when you have adjusted your daily rhythm to the Daylight Savings Time in your respective Time Zone, there comes a new proposal to do away with time zones altogether.

As the Washington Post reports, there are some thinkers that want you to get up “at midnight” rather than in the morning hours to do your day’s work. Well, I’ve exaggerated a bit. In truth, you would still get up when the sun rises but, depending on where you live, it could be any time of the day on your clock. You might rightly ask:

What’s that crazy Idea all about?

This silly idea is to have the whole world use clocks set not to any local (day/night-based) setting but to ONE ONLY setting all around the world. According to the proponents of that nonsense, the whole world would just have one time zone only, the “universal time zone.” The minds behind that idea think it would be good, perhaps even necessary, to spur global trade in these days of global markets and worldwide internet connectedness.

Much of the debate about Global Warming stems from a lack of knowledge of basic Physics. The Sun does not send ‘heat’ through space, but radiation. This is a concept that is difficult to grasp for the average layman. Likewise Outer Space is a vacuum, which is by definition empty, and therefore has no temperature, although it is given a nominal Kelvin figure owing to what strays there.

Radiation has to encounter mass for heat to be produced. The Sun sends radiation across 90 – 95 million miles. This radiation passes through the 99{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of our atmosphere, which is composed of Nitrogen and Oxygen (which are transparent to both incoming and outgoing infrared) and then strikes or encounters the substance or mass of the Earth and Oceans. The Oceans and the Earth (that is the soil, the rocks, the sands, the buildings, the lakes, rivers and seas) warm up and they warm the atmosphere from the bottom up. That is why we have Standard Atmosphere used by all Airline Pilots and the Adiabatic Lapse Rate used in Physics.

That means that the air is 2ºC. cooler for every 1,000 feet of altitude, which is also why there is snow on the tops of mountains.  Were it otherwise the summits of Mt Blanc and Mt Everest would be amongst the hottest and not amongst the coldest places on Earth.

A new map of Mars’ gravity made with three NASA spacecraft is the most detailed to date, providing a revealing glimpse into the hidden interior of the Red Planet.

“Gravity maps allow us to see inside a planet, just as a doctor uses an X-ray to see inside a patient,” said Antonio Genova of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge. “The new gravity map will be helpful for future Mars exploration, because better knowledge of the planet’s gravity anomalies helps mission controllers insert spacecraft more precisely into orbit about Mars. Furthermore, the improved resolution of our gravity map will help us understand the still-mysterious formation of specific regions of the planet.” Genova, who is affiliated with MIT but is located at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, is the lead author of a paper on this research published online March 5 in the journal Icarus.

The improved resolution of the new gravity map suggests a new explanation for how some features formed across the boundary that divides the relatively smooth northern lowlands from heavily cratered southern highlands. Also, the team confirmed that Mars has a liquid outer core of molten rock by analyzing tides in the Martian crust and mantle caused by the gravitational pull of the sun and the two moons of Mars. Finally, by observing how Mars’ gravity changed over 11 years – the period of an entire cycle of solar activity — the team inferred the massive amount of carbon dioxide that freezes out of the atmosphere onto a Martian polar ice cap when it experiences winter. They also observed how that mass moves between the south pole and the north pole with the change of season in each hemisphere.

The map was derived using Doppler and range tracking data collected by NASA’s Deep Space Network from three NASA spacecraft in orbit around Mars: Mars Global Surveyor (MGS), Mars Odyssey (ODY), and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Like all planets, Mars is lumpy, which causes the gravitational pull felt by spacecraft in orbit around it to change. For example, the pull will be a bit stronger over a mountain, and slightly weaker over a canyon.

A handwritten manuscript from nearly 400 years ago has revealed a glimpse of the recipe for the mythical ‘philosopher’s stone.’

The 17th century document was penned by Isaac Newton, and is a copy of another known alchemist’s text.

After decades in a private collection, the text was purchased by the Chemical Heritage Foundation in the US, which has revealed the early steps in a process alchemists thought could turn lead to gold.

In the text, the alchemist describes the process for making ‘philosophic mercury,’ according to Chemistry World.

Shortened as ‘sophick,’ philosophic mercury was thought to be a key substance in the creation of the philosopher’s stone, researchers say.

‘Philosophic mercury was [thought to be] a substance that could be used to break down metals into their constituent parts,’ James Voelkel, the CHF’s curator of rare books, told Chemistry World.

If we eliminated, worldwide, all anthropogenic (man-made) carbon dioxide (CO2) the atmospheric concentration would only reduce by 11-12 ppmv taking us back to the 2003 level when it was warmer than 2008. See table below and the subsequent graph concerning this analysis. These clearly show CO2 concentration is not warming the earth. If we removed almost twice that amount (20 ppmv) we would go back to the 1998 level. It was warmer in 1998 than in 2008 (by ~0.6 C). This is so simple to see, isn’t this the first thing the UN IPCC should have looked at. However, they probably knew this because Table 1 below was subsequently eliminated from the 2001 report, even though it is still online in other reports.

Table 1. Global sources and  Absorption of CO2

tonto.eia.doe.gov – document page 6, pdf page 26, Table 3.

See www.tech-know.eu – for further references

Abstract

A paper by C. Corda (A Clarification on the Debate on “the Original Schwarzschild Solution”, EJTP 8, No. 25 (2011) 65-82) purports equivalence of Schwarzschild’s original solution (1916) and Hilbert’s subsequent solution (1917), the latter commonly but incorrectly called ‘Schwarzschild’s solution’. The derivation of Schwarzschild’s actual solution by Corda is, in fact, a copy of Schwarzschild’s original derivation with only changes in notation and equation numbering. It adds nothing new to the problem. Corda’s subsequent arguments on gravitational collapse follow those advanced by Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler for Hilbert’s solution, in their book ‘Gravitation’, and suffer thereby from the very same shortfalls. Consequently, Corda has failed to prove his alleged equivalence of the Schwarzschild and Hilbert solutions. Moreover, it is not difficult to prove that these are not equivalent. Furthermore, all methods employed to otherwise ‘extend’ Droste’s solution into Hilbert’s solution thus producing a black hole constitute a violation of the rules of pure mathematics and are invalid.

 

1 Introduction

One hundred years ago, on the 13th of January 1916, Karl Schwarzschild communicated his solution to Einstein’s gravitational field for a `mass point’. Then, less than five years ago, on the 25th of May 2011, a paper by Christian Corda was published which reproduced most of Schwarzschild’s paper. In a prelude on page 70 of his paper, Corda stated,

“In our approach we will suppose again that a(r,t) = 0, but, differently from the standard analysis, we will assume that the length of the circumference centred in the origin of the coordinate system is not 2πr. We release an apparent different physical assumption, i.e. that arches of circumference are deformed by the presence of mass of the central body M. Note that this different physical hypothesis permits to circumnavigate the Birkhoff Theorem [4] which leads to the ‘standard Schwarzschild solution’ [3].”

We know how hard it can be to understand the atmosphere on earth, but maybe we should count ourselves lucky that we are not on the outer extremes of the solar system.

Pluto has always been seen as a bit of an oddball (its classification in the solar system is still an area of debate) and now it seems its atmosphere is pretty extreme too.

Nasa’s New Horizons probe passed by the planet back in 2015, however it is still sending information back to earth and recent research on the data has revealed just how varied the climate on this tiny outpost can be. 

It is easy to assume that this small rock on the outskirts of our solar system is just that, a lump of hard, dry rock, but now it seems that liquid nitrogen may have once flowed on the surface and may well do again.

Some parts of Pluto can spend around 50 years in perpetual night.”

NEW YORK (AP) — Scientists have deleted nearly half the genes of a microbe, creating a stripped-down version that still functions, an achievement that might reveal secrets of how life works.

It may also help researchers create new bacteria tailored for pumping out medicines and other valuable substances.

The newly created bacterium has a smaller genetic code than does any natural free-living counterpart, with 531,000 DNA building blocks containing 473 genes. (Humans have more than 3 billion building blocks and more than 20,000 genes).

But even this stripped-down organism is full of mystery. Scientists say they have little to no idea what a third of its genes actually do.

“We’re showing how complex life is, even in the simplest of organisms,” researcher J. Craig Venter told reporters. “These findings are very humbling.”

Some of the mystery genes may be clues to discovering unknown fundamental processes of life, his colleague Clyde Hutchison III said in an interview. Both researchers, from the J. Craig Venter Institute in La Jolla, California, are among the authors of a paper on the project released Thursday by the journal Science.

The DNA code, or genome, is contained in a brand-new bacterium dubbed JCVI-syn3.0.

The ash tree is likely to be wiped out in Europe, according to a review of the evidence.

The trees are being killed off by the fungal disease ash-dieback along with an invasive beetle called the emerald ash borer.

According to the research, published in the Journal of Ecology, the British countryside will never look the same again.

The paper says that the ash will most likely be “eliminated” in Europe.

This could mirror the way Dutch elm disease largely wiped out the elm in the 1980s.

The US space agency’s Dawn satellite continues to return remarkable images from the dwarf planet Ceres.

Now just 385km above the surface (lower than the space station is above Earth), the probe has revealed new features inside the mini-world’s Occator Crater.

This is the 92km-wide depression that has multiple bright spots of what arethought to be exposed salts.

The new imagery reveals a dome in a smooth-walled pit in the centre-most bright area of the crater.

With a resolution now of 35m per pixel, Dawn can make out numerous fractures that cut across the top and down the flanks of this dome.

European scientists are worried they could soon lose a vital tool for monitoring Earth’s ice fields.

The Cryosat-2 radar spacecraft has transformed studies of the Arctic, the Antarctic and Greenland, but is now operating beyond its design lifetime.

A group of 179 researchers is concerned the ageing mission could die in orbit at any time.

They have urged the European Commission (EC) and the European Space Agency (Esa) to start planning a replacement.

“The mission is now central to international efforts to monitor the state of the cryosphere,” they write in a letter to top officials at the EC and Esa.

The Moon used to spin on a different axis and show a slightly different face to the Earth, a new study suggests.

Using data collected by Nasa’s Lunar Prospector mission in the late 1990s, scientists spotted two hydrogen-rich regions near the Moon’s poles, probably indicating the presence of water ice.

The icy patches are opposite each other – the line between them passes through the middle of the Moon – so it appears that this used to be its spin axis.

The work appears in the journal Nature.

It describes a gradual wobble, or “true polar wander”, adding up to about a six-degree shift altogether.

In recent times, some new political movements have arisen in Germany. For example the political party “Alternative für Deutschland” (AfD), founded just three years ago, has won several seats in German State parliaments at the most recent election, a few days ago.

In Dresden (a city in the German State of Saxony), thousands of people go regularly on quiet “walkabouts” on Mondays, without any disturbance, unless provoked by others.

What’s their “Beef?” 

Among their various complaints is one specific and rather novel term: “Die Lügenpresse,” a term that means “liar’s press.”  What the people mean by that term simply is purposely false or misleading information propagated by a large segment of the media, from newspapers to television reportages and – as much of that information is frequently “fed” to them by government sources and, by extension, also such governments.