UK scientists are seeking permission to genetically modify human embryos for the first time. Researchers at The Francis Crick Institute in London want to use a controversial genetic technique to carry out research into infertility. 

The embryos would be destroyed after the research and not implanted into the womb.The government’s fertility watchdog said it had received the application, which would be looked at in due course.

In the UK, it is illegal to use gene editing of embryos in IVF treatment, but it is permissible for research purposes, under a licence.

“We have recently received an application to use Crispr/Cas9 (gene editing) in one of our licensed research projects, and it will be considered in due course,” said a spokesperson for the Human Fertilisation & Embryology Authority (HFEA)

When scientists in China announced they had genetically modified human embryos in a world first earlier this year, there was an outcry.

The embryos were never destined for use in IVF, but there were concerns the work could be a slippery slope towards designer babies.

The technique – known as gene editing – can make precise changes to DNA. But any alterations would be passed on to future generations if the embryos were ever to be used in human reproduction.

New study by respected German scientists discredits alarmist global warming claims. Carbon dioxide levels are not linked to temperatures and climate cooling, not warming more likely for the rest of this century. 

The Die kalte Sonne site here features a worrisome essay by German climate scientists Horst-Joachim Lüdecke, Dr. Alexander Hempelmann and Carl Otto Weiss. They carefully examined climate changes of the past and have found that the recent changes (of the last 40 years are nothing out of the ordinary and that we need to worry about a global cooling that will persist until 2080.

They published 2 papers on the subject in the journal European Geophysical Union (EGU) [2], [3]. According to the 2 scientists, climate is often cyclic. The first study appeared in February 2013 and it examined six of the longest existing thermometer data series recorded in Europe, as well as one dataset from an Antarctic ice core and another from a data series extracted from stalagmites. The datasets were covered the period of 1757 – 2010.

The second publication appeared in February 2015 and it examines the past 2500 years.

The last 2500 years

The analysis of the past 2500 years involved data from tree rings, sediment cores, stalagmites, etc. A plot of the data yields a climate operating with cyclic behavior.

How do you get an average global temperature when there are only eight thermometers in Antarctica? 

This is an extremely important video. When the American Physical Society, of which he was a long-time member, announced that the evidence for global warming was “incontrovertible,” Nobel Laureate  Ivar Giaever resigned.

“The only answer to that,” says Giaever, was that “I resigned.”

“Global warming has really become a new religion, because you can’t discuss it, ” says Giaever “It’s like the Catholic Church. There are a lot of incontrovertible truths in the Catholic Church, I’m sure.”

How do you get an average temperature when there are only eight thermometers at the South Pole?

Look at where the temperatures are measured, says Giaever. The United States is practically covered. But there are only eight thermometers at the South Pole according to NASA.

“That’s all they have!…. Eight thermometers! …. And it has never been as cold at the South Pole as it is now. There’s more ice than there ever has been.” 

Current conditions in the Arctic are completely within normal climatic variability, according to peer-reviewed studies. Any ‘meltdown’ linked to climate change is not shown in the scientific evidence. 

 Western mainstream media has been giving prominence to the claims of a team of global warming alarmist researchers who have alleged the Arctic is showing the first signs of dangerous anthropogenic climate change. Articles have been written outlining “tipping points” in the region that together form a chain reaction leading to apocalyptic consequences.  

    These alarmists have stated that “Global heating and climate disruption has already forced Arctic sea ice into a new state of ‘death spiral’ meltdown and it is anticipated to disappear in Summer months within a decade, or even a few short years, many decades ahead of previous estimates.” 

   They then go on to push an end of the world scenario of “The ALREADY accelerated escape of massive amounts of the powerful, heat trapping greenhouse gas, methane, buried in the frozen permafrost of northern Canada, Siberia and underwater ocean shelves, is of EMERGENCY, ‘LIFE OR EXTINCTION’-SCALE CONCERN. (Yes, really!)” http://ecosanity.org/blogsanity/compilation-arctic-meltdown-methane-time-bomb-emergency

    This is the state of the hysteria that is based on global warming starting a chain reaction of positive feedback loops.  Peer-reviewed scientific research highlighted below shows that the main drivers of these predictions all fail.

Some scientists claim that anthropogenic (human-produced) CO2 (carbon dioxide) lasts in the atmosphere for hundreds or even thousands of years.  Of course, they also think that CO2 is the mother of all evils and, therefore, argue that the world needs to decarbonize, forget about using fossil resources (coal, oil, gas), and reduce the population from seven billion to one billion humans.

Well, if that’s so, the world must be suffering from CO2 exhalations by the ancient Sumerians, Egyptians, Romans, and everyone else who lived since that time.

How much CO2 is in the Air?

On a percentage basis, there is approximately 0.04{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} (or 400 ppm [parts per million]) CO2 in the air; (all numbers here are rounded to the nearest integer, just to keep things simple and not to get lost in small numerical details). Well, 0.04{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} does not sound like much, but when you consider the entire atmosphere, it’s a lot of tiny carbon dioxide molecules. Just to give you an idea as to how many there are, we need to count all gas molecules in the air first.

Gas Molecules in the Air

The air consists to 99{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of nitrogen and oxygen. On a volume basis, each Mole (a unit of measurement) of all these gases (nitrogen, oxygen, CO2, etc.) occupies the same space, as was learned a couple of hundred years ago. One Mole of gas occupies 23 [L], (L= liters) or roughly 5 gallons of space (at common air pressure). Further, there are 6×10^23 molecules in that space of 23 L of gas. That number is known as the Avogadro Constant (AC), named after Italian chemist Amedeo Avogadro (1776-1856).

There are slightly more than three trillion trees in the world, a figure that dwarfs previous estimates, according to the most comprehensive census yet of global forestation. 

Using satellite imagery as well as ground-based measurements from around the world, a team led by researchers at Yale University created the first globally comprehensive map of tree density. Their findings were published in the journal Nature on Wednesday.

A previous study that drew on satellite imagery estimated that the total number of trees was about 400 billion. The new estimate of 3.04 trillion is multiple times that number, bringing the ratio of trees per person to 422 to 1.

While the density of foliage was surprisingly high overall, the researchers cautioned that global vegetation is still in decline. The number of trees on Earth has fallen by 46{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} since the beginning of human civilization, according to the report. The researchers said they believed the findings would provide a valuable baseline for future research on environment and ecosystems.

“The previous information that we had about the global forest system all came from satellite images…we’re using all this information to provide more detailed understanding of what’s going on below the surface [of the canopy],” saidThomas Crowther, a postdoctoral fellow at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and the lead author of the study. “The numbers that we’ve generated are going to be useful for a wide variety of applications.”

Tipping is fine but “climate tipping points” are nonsense. I’m talking about climate models that have predicted such “points of no return.” You could view them as the terminal (maximum) speed in a free fall, only to come to a sudden stop when you hit the solid ground.

For example, the disgraced chairman of the IPCC (UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), R. Pachauri, declared in 2007 that the world had only about four years to save itself. The perceived danger: a runaway (tipping point exceedance) global warming that he claimed to result from carbon dioxide released by burning fossil fuels. The following year, 2008, one of Germany’s high priests of climate doom, Prof. S. Rahmstorf, Head of Earth System Analysis at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) produced a graph showing the then observed decline of sea-ice in the Arctic’s summer (Fig. 1).

One Paul Gilding recently posted an article with the title “Fossil fuels are finished—the rest is just detail.” That sure made my (thinning) hair curl. What a nonsense!

This poor man (?) has no idea what he is talking about. ‘Fossil fuels’ (more correctly, hydrocarbons) are driving the world and will continue to do so for a very long time; in fact they are the major energy source going—and growing by leaps and bounds!

Proof

To prove my point, let’s look at some energy/fuel facts, like the bar-graph showing the world energy production by source in the year 2013, source: Manhattan Inst.

Many years ago, a colleague approached the President of the University with our plan to hold a conference on the ideas of Immanuel Velikovsky. He angrily rejected the plan saying he would not allow anything on campus associated with that charlatan. The President was a physicist and Velikovsky (pictured) had challenged prevailing scientific views.

In some ways, it doesn’t matter whether Velikovsky was right or wrong. The problem was the reprehensible actions of the scientific community. His treatment holds many lessons for today’s debate over climate change.

Complexity of the corruption by the few scientists who hijacked climate science is revealed by comparison. They quickly established their views as the prevailing ‘truth’ through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) by deliberately misusing climate science and also misusing basic science. They isolated anyone who challenged either part of their false science in the same way Velikovsky was marginalized.

In April 1815, the most powerful volcanic blast in recorded history shook the planet in a catastrophe so vast that 200 years later, investigators are still struggling to grasp its repercussions. It played a role, they now understand, in icy weather, agricultural collapse and global pandemics — and even gave rise to celebrated monsters. 

Around the lush isles of the Dutch East Indies — modern-day Indonesia — the eruption of Mount Tambora killed tens of thousands of people. They were burned alive or killed by flying rocks, or they died later of starvation because the heavy ash smothered crops.

More surprising, investigators have found that the giant cloud of minuscule particles spread around the globe, blocked sunlight and produced three years of planetary cooling. In June 1816, a blizzard pummeled upstate New York. That July and August, killer frosts in New England ravaged farms. Hailstones pounded London all summer.

A recent history of the disaster, “Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World,” by Gillen D’Arcy Wood, shows planetary effects so extreme that many nations and communities sustained waves of famine, disease, civil unrest and economic decline. Crops failed globally.

“The year without a summer,” as 1816 came to be known, gave birth not only to paintings of fiery sunsets and tempestuous skies but two genres of gothic fiction. The freakish progeny were Frankenstein and the human vampire, which have loomed large in art and literature ever since.

“The paper trail,” said Dr. Wood, a University of Illinois professor of English, “goes back again and again to Tambora.”

The gargantuan blast — 100 times bigger than Mount St. Helens’s — and its ensuing worldwide pall have been the subject of increasing study over the years as scientists have sought to comprehend not only the planet’s climatological past but the future likelihood of such global disasters.

A UN-endorsed carbon offset scheme designed to reduce emissions has actually increased them massively, a study by a green think tank has found. 

As well as pumping much as 600 million tonnes more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the carbon credits scheme has been abused by countries like Russia and the Ukraine which have used them as a money making scam.

Vladyslav Zhezherin, one of the co-authors of the study by the Stockholm Environment Institute says:

“This was like printing money.”

Another co-author Anja Kollmuss has told BBC News.

“We were surprised ourselves by the extent [of the fraud], we didn’t expect such a large number.”

“What went on was that these countries could approve these projects by themselves there was no international oversight, in particular Russia and the Ukraine didn’t have any incentive to guarantee the quality of these credits.”

To which the two obvious questions are:

Have any of these people actually been to Russia or the Ukraine?

and:

This stuff that these greenies have been smoking sounds totally amazing. How do we go about getting some?

Insightful (and inciteful?) new book by a respected professor examining the profit and loss trail of global warming investments shows how climate doom prophesy keeps the money rolling. 

1. Einstein’s Matter

Einstein’s gravitational field is not matter. According to Einstein [1],

“We make the distinction hereafter between ‘gravitational field’ and ‘matter’ in this way, that we denote everything but the gravitational field as ‘matter’.”

Thus, according to Einstein, not only is mass matter, but so too the electromagnetic fields. But Einstein’s gravitational field is not matter and so it is neither mass nor electromagnetic fields. Nevertheless, cosmologists frequently claim that Einstein’s gravitational field is matter, because it has a mass of its own.  For Example, the cosmologist Gerardus ‘t Hooft (Nobel Laureate for Physics) asserts that certain critics of General Relativity,

“suffer from the misconception that a gravitational field cannot have a mass of its own.” [2]

Einstein’s gravitational field having a mass of its own is like the man who thought himself a poached egg.

Researcher exposes wilful and deceptive misrepresentation by American Meteorological Association (AMS) of much-cited scientific paper. AMS declines to retract. 

Background: In 2000, the Bulletin of the Meteorological Society published “Impacts of Extreme Weather and Climate on Terrestrial Biota” by Camille Parmesan, Terry Root, and Michael Willig.

The paper introduced to the peer-reviewed literature analyses by Parmesan that extreme weather events had caused an extinction event in California’s Sierra Nevada and advocated the extreme weather was the mechanism by which global warming was driving animals northward and upward as Parmesan claimed in her first controversial paper discussed here.

According to Google Scholar, the BAMS paper has been cited by 324 consensus articles. Thomson Reuter’s Essential Science Indicators report that by December 2009, Parmesan went on to be ranked #2 among highly cited authors for papers devoted expressly to global warming and climate change.

Below (see link) is a map of Parmesan’s study site first published in Singer, M., and C. D. Thomas (1996) Evolutionary responses of a butterfly metapopulation to human and climate-caused environmental variation. American Naturalist, vol. 148, p. S9–S39. I have added call out boxes. Notice how surgically “climate change” supposedly killed individuals on the annual plant Collinsia (Xs) in the logged clearing while just a few feet away the same species was originally reported to be thriving on its normal host plant in undisturbed habitat.

The observations of those thriving populations were later “amputated” from Parmesan’s extinction story that she spun in “Impacts of Extreme Weather and Climate on Terrestrial BiotaParmesan et al biased their conclusion by omitting observations that all other individuals in the surrounding natural habitat had survived better than had ever been observed during the same weather events.

Springer Publishing, one of the world’s leading publishers of Science, Technology and Medicine (STM) books and journals, issued an announcement this week that 64 different professional articles, primarily in the medical field, had been retracted.  It turns out that the vaunted peer review process, designed to ensure that multiple sets of experts evaluate the quality of the work before it hits the presses, had fallen apart. The peer reviews in some cases were found to be “highly suspicious” with bogus email addresses and questionable credentials.

Springer confirms that 64 articles are being retracted from 10 Springer subscription journals, after editorial checks spotted fake email addresses, and subsequent internal investigations uncovered fabricated peer review reports. After a thorough investigation we have strong reason to believe that the peer review process on these 64 articles was compromised. We reported this to the Committee on Publishing Ethics (COPE) immediately. Attempts to manipulate peer review have affected journals across a number of publishers as detailed by COPE in their December 2014 statement. Springer has made COPE aware of the findings of its own internal investigations and has followed COPE’s recommendations, as outlined in their statement, for dealing with this issue. Springer will continue to participate and do whatever we can to support COPE’s efforts in this matter.

New proof of systematic atmospheric geoengineering.  American inter-disciplinary scientist, Dr J. Marvin Herndon (pictured) provides a fascinating new study indicating that tropospheric spraying of coal fly ash has been taking place throughout the 21st century. 

Dr Herndon believes such spraying has been carried out on an international scale, and with significant ramping-up since about 2013. Herndon discloses “the consequences on public health are profound, including exposure to a variety of toxic heavy metals, radioactive elements, and neurologically-implicated chemically mobile aluminum released by body moisture in situ after inhalation or through transdermal induction.” He notes that long exposure to ultrafine-grain air pollution particulates has been associated with morbidity and premature mortality, so one “may therefore reasonably conclude that aerosolized coal fly ash … is detrimental to human health.”

Worryingly, this study points to a program of well-orchestrated disinformation, but no public disclosure, no informed consent, and no public health warnings.

Featured in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (ISSN 1660-460) Herndon writes: “The widespread, intentional and increasingly frequent chemical emplacement in the troposphere has gone unidentified and unremarked in the scientific literature for years.”

The paper, ‘Evidence of Coal-Fly-Ash Toxic Chemical Geoengineering in the Troposphere: Consequences for Public Health,’ may be accessed in its entirety at: http://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/12/8/9375/pdf.

The concept of mass environmental geoengineering isn’t new. In her 1962 book Silent Spring Rachel Carson called attention to the unintended consequences of herbicide and pesticide use, and launched the modern environmental movement. Now, there is growing evidence of a grave new and persistent global environmental public health threat that has gone unremarked in the scientific literature. Burning coal by electric utilities concentrates the impurities in “fly ash”, fine particles that used to go up the smokestack, but now are trapped because of their toxic environmental and public health hazards.