”Climate Experts” Obsessed With CO2, Ignored Remaining Universe Of Factors

Published on

Written by Pierre L. Gosselin

High profile German food chemist Udo Pollmer here at German public radio brings the following video to our attention.

In the video biologist and public speaker Allan Savory tells an audience how climate change and desertification has a lot more to do with the elimination of roaming herd animals over grasslands and vegetated areas over the 20th century.

Another tragedy of consensus science

Tragically, it used to be consensus science that the desertification of vast areas of land on all continents was caused by the over-grazing by herds of animals. As they chomped on the vegetation and moved on, they left the soil barren and exposed to evaporation and wind erosion. Animals that had lived there for thousands of years were suddenly deemed by consensus science to be the culprits.

Continue Reading No Comments

Climate Alarmists Promote Junk Time Series Cartoon

Published on

Written by William M Briggs

The popular web cartoon xkcd has provided a wonderful opportunity to plug my must-read (and too expensive) book Uncertainty: The Soul of Modeling, Probability & Statistics. Buy a copy and follow along.

In this award-eligible book, which has the potential to be read by millions and which has the power to change more lives than even the Atkins Diet, I detail (in the ultimate chapter) the common errors made in time series analysis. Time series are the kind of data you see in, for example, temperature or stock price plots through time.

Continue Reading 1 Comment

Unprecedented atmospheric disruption of a most regular climate cycle

Published on

Written by Natural Environment Research Council

Wind over the ocean. An unexpected change in wind direction has been caused by atmospheric waves in the Northern Hemisphere.
Credit: © oporkka / Fotolia
The normal flow of air high up in the atmosphere over the equator, known as the quasi-biennial oscillation, was seen to break down earlier this year. These stratospheric winds are found high above the tropics, their direction and strength changes in a regular two- to three-year cycle which provides forecasters with an indication of the weather to expect in Northern Europe. Westerly winds are known to increase the chance of warm and wet conditions, while easterlies bring drier and colder weather.

Continue Reading No Comments

Astronomers shed light on different galaxy types

Published on

Written by International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR)

Galaxies of Stephan’s Quintet in the constellation Pegasus, observed by the Hubble Space Telescope.
Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble SM4 ERO Team.
 Australian scientists have taken a critical step towards understanding why different types of galaxies exist throughout the Universe.

The research, made possible by cutting-edge instrumentation, means that astronomers can now classify galaxies according to their physical properties rather than human interpretation of a galaxy’s appearance.

For the past 100 years, telescopes have been capable of observing galaxies beyond our own galaxy, the Milky Way.

Only a few were visible to begin with but as telescopes became more powerful, more galaxies were discovered, making it crucial for astronomers to come up with a way to consistently group different types of galaxies together.

In 1926, the famous American astronomer Edwin Hubble refined a system that classified galaxies into categories of spiral, elliptical, lenticular or irregular shape. This system, known as the Hubble sequence, is the most common way of classifying galaxies to this day.

Despite its success, the criteria on which the Hubble scheme is based are subjective, and only indirectly related to the physical properties of galaxies. This has significantly hampered attempts to identify the evolutionary pathways followed by different types of galaxies as they slowly change over billions of years.

Dr Luca Cortese, from The University of Western Australia node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), said the world’s premier astronomical facilities are now producing surveys consisting of hundreds of thousands of galaxies rather than the dozens that Hubble and his contemporaries were working with.

“We really need a way to classify galaxies consistently using instruments that measure physical properties rather than a time consuming and subjective technique involving human interpretation,” he said.

In a study led by Dr Cortese, a team of astronomers has used a technique known as Integral Field Spectroscopy to quantify how gas and stars move within galaxies and reinterpret the Hubble sequence as a physically based two-dimensional classification system.

“Thanks to the development of new technologies, we can map in great detail the distribution and velocity of different components of galaxies. Then, using this information we’re able to determine the overall angular momentum of a galaxy, which is the key physical quantity affecting how the galaxy will evolve over billions of years.

“Remarkably, the galaxy types described by the Hubble scheme appear to be determined by two primary properties of galaxies-mass and angular momentum. This provides us with a physical interpretation for the well known Hubble sequence whilst removing the subjectiveness and bias of a visual classification based on human perception rather than actual measurement.”

The new study involved 488 galaxies observed by the 3.9m Anglo Australian Telescope in New South Wales and an instrument attached to the telescope called the Sydney-AAO Multi-object Integral-field spectrograph or ‘SAMI’.

The SAMI project, led by the University of Sydney and the ARC Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics (CAASTRO), aims to create one of the first large-scale resolved survey of galaxies, measuring the velocity and distribution of gas and stars of different ages in thousands of systems.

“Australia has a lot of expertise with this type of astronomy and is really at the forefront of what’s being done,” said Professor Warrick Couch, Director of the Australian Astronomical Observatory and CAASTRO Partner Investigator.

“For the SAMI instrument we succeeded in putting 61 optical fibres within a distance that’s less than half the width of a human hair.

“That’s no small feat, it’s making this type of work possible and attracting interest from astronomers and observatories from around the world.”

Future upgrades of the instrument are planned that will allow astronomers to obtain even sharper maps of galaxies and further their understanding of the physical processes shaping the Hubble sequence.

“As we get better at doing this and the instruments we’re using are upgraded, we should be able to look for the physical triggers that cause one type of galaxy to evolve into another — that’s really exciting stuff,” Dr Cortese said.

Story Source:

The above post is reprinted from materials provided byInternational Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR).Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference:

  1. L. Cortese, L. M. R. Fogarty, K. Bekki, J. van de Sande, W. Couch, B. Catinella, M. Colless, D. Obreschkow, D. Taranu, E. Tescari, D. Barat, J. Bland-Hawthorn, J. Bloom, J. J. Bryant, M. Cluver, S. M. Croom, M. J. Drinkwater, F. d’Eugenio, I. S. Konstantopoulos, A. Lopez-Sanchez, S. Mahajan, N. Scott, C. Tonini, O. I. Wong, J. T. Allen, S. Brough, M. Goodwin, A. W. Green, I.-T. Ho, L. S. Kelvin, J. S. Lawrence, N. P. F. Lorente, A. M. Medling, M. S. Owers, S. Richards, R. Sharp, S. M. Sweet. The SAMI Galaxy Survey: the link between angular momentum and optical morphology. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, September 2016

 

Continue Reading No Comments

How our brain slows down the effects of aging

Published on

Written by Ruhr-Universitaet-Bochum

Older people pay more attention to the details and look more closely than younger people.
Credit: © WONG SZE FEI / Fotolia
 The older we get, the more difficult it becomes to put the world around us in order. Yet, our brain develops remarkable strategies to slow down the effects of aging.

In order to process the information that we receive every day, we build categories into which we sort everything that makes up the world around us. Neuroscientists from Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) found out: the way we categorise things changes throughout our lifetimes. Their research results were now published in the journal Neuropsychologia.

The team surrounding Sabrina Schenk and Prof. Dr. Boris Suchan observed young and older people during a categorisation task. The participants of the study were asked to sort circles with varying colour combinations into one of two categories. Some of the circles were very similar to each other; others were distinctly different. To which category the circles belonged was indicated by a feedback during the test.

Brain waves and gaze direction offer insights

The scientists not only documented the test subjects’ answers, they also recorded their brain waves via an EEG and used an eye tracker to trace their line of vision. The results showed that both young and older subjects had no difficulties categorising the similar looking circles — the learning mechanism of both groups were comparable. It was only in the later stages of the experiment, when distinct looking circles where shown, that differences between the test groups became apparent. Older subjects found it more difficult to categorise these exceptions than their younger counterparts.

Brain compensates with attentiveness

“There are two main strategies which we use to categorise things. While we perceive similar looking members of a category holistically, we must specifically learn exceptions and memorise them,” Schenk explains. “Older people find it harder to switch from one strategy to the other.” But measurements of brain waves also showed that the elderly develop a particular selective attentiveness.

To put it simply: they pay more attention to the details and look more closely than younger people. This is also confirmed by the eye tracker, which records in which direction the participants are looking. “To a certain extent, the brain is able to slow down negative effects of aging by increasing its level of attentiveness,” summarises Schenk.

Further studies with gamers

A computer simulation at Canada’s University of Western Ontario has confirmed the results of the scientists in Bochum. In a next step the RUB team would like to test people whose attention level has been especially trained, like that of avid computer players. If these gamers do particularly well in the categorisation task, then the results may help the elderly specifically train their attentiveness.

Story Source:

The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Ruhr-Universitaet-Bochum. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference:

  1. Sabrina Schenk, John P. Minda, Robert K. Lech, Boris Suchan. Out of sight, out of mind: Categorization learning and normal aging. Neuropsychologia, 2016; 91: 222 DOI: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2016.08.013

Continue Reading No Comments

New discovery shatters previous beliefs about Earth’s origin

Published on

Written by Western University

A new study led by Western University’s all-star cosmochemist Audrey Bouvier proves that the Earth and other planetary objects formed in the early years of the Solar System share similar chemical origins — a finding at odds with accepted wisdom held by scientists for decades.

The findings were published today by the journal Nature.

Bouvier, the Canada Research Chair (CRC) in Planetary Materials and an Isotope Cosmochemistry professor in Western’s Department of Earth Sciences, made the game-changing discovery in collaboration with Maud Boyet from the Magmas and Volcanoes Laboratory at Blaise Pascal University in Clermont-Ferrand, France.

 

solar-birth

With data uncovered through thermal ionization mass spectrometry, Bouvier and Boyet demonstrated that the Earth and other extraterrestrial objects share the same initial levels of Neodymium-142 (142Nd) — one of seven isotopes found in the chemical element neodymium — which is widely distributed in the Earth’s crust and most commonly used for magnets in commercial products like microphones and in-ear headphones.

In 2005, a small variation in 142Nd was detected between chondrites, which are stony meteorites considered essential building blocks of the Earth, and terrestrial rocks. These results were widely interpreted as an early differentiation of the interior of the Earth (including the crust and mantle) and these chondrites within the first 30 million years of its history.

These new results from Bouvier and Boyet show that these differences in 142Nd were in fact already present during the growth of Earth and not introduced later, as was previously believed.

“How the Earth was formed and what type of planetary materials were part of that formation are issues that have puzzled generations of scientists,” says Bouvier, Curator of the Western Meteorite Collection and also a principal investigator at Western’s Centre for Planetary Science and Exploration (CPSX). “And these new isotopic measurements of meteorites provide exciting answers to these questions about our origins and what made the Earth so special.”

By using vastly improved measurement techniques, Bouvier and Boyet deduced that different meteoritical objects found in the Solar System incorporated the elements neodymium (Nd) and samarium (Sm) but with slightly different isotopic compositions. These variations in stable isotopes also show that the Solar System was not uniform during its earliest times and that materials formed from previous generations of stars were incorporated in various proportions into the building blocks of planets.

This study was supported by the National Science Foundation, France-Canada Research Fund, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) CRC and Discovery Grant programs, the Institute of Earth Sciences of the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and ClerVolc, the Clermont-Ferrand Centre for Volcano Research.

Continue Reading No Comments

In new book, scholar peels back layers of deception on global warming

Published on

Written by Michael O’Brien

Michael Hart is a former official in Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs and now emeritus professor of international affairs at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, where he has taught courses on the laws and institutions of international trade, Canadian foreign policy, and the politics of climate change.

He held the Fulbright-Woodrow Wilson Center Visiting Research Chair in Canada-U.S. Relations and was Scholar-in-Residence in the School of International Service, Senior Fellow at American University in Washington, and is the founder and director emeritus of Carleton University’s Centre for Trade Policy and Law. In addition, he has taught courses in several other countries. He is the author, editor, or co-editor of more than a dozen books and several hundred articles.

Continue Reading No Comments

Explaining why the universe can be transparent

Published on

Written by Sean Nealon

Two papers published by an assistant professor at the University of California, Riverside and several collaborators explain why the universe has enough energy to become transparent.

The study led by Naveen Reddy, an assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at UC Riverside, marks the first quantitative study of how the gas content within galaxies scales with the amount of interstellar dust.

hubble

This analysis shows that the gas in galaxies is like a “picket fence,” where some parts of the galaxy have little gas and are directly visible, whereas other parts have lots of gas and are effectively opaque to . The findings were just published in The Astrophysical Journal.

Continue Reading No Comments

Polar bears trap Russian meteorologists in remote Arctic circle

Published on

Written by Tom Richard

Russian meteorologists are finding out just how well polar bears are doing in the harsh Environment of the Arctic. Five scientists are trapped on a remote Russian island because of a surplus of polar bears roving around their habitat. The Lords of the Arctic have surrounded the Russian weather station and don’t appear to be leaving anytime soon. That can be a real problem if your instruments are outside and you can’t reach them. polar-bears

Located a long way from Moscow, the weather station is on a remote island in the Arctic circle. The scientists have since run out of flares to scare off the ursine creatures, and it’s against Russian law to kill or shoot a polar bear unless it’s self-defense. The station chief, Vadim Plotnikov, said that without the flares there’s no other way to scare off the bears.

Continue Reading No Comments

University official: Are climate professors ‘indoctrinating’ students?

Published on

Written by Valerie Richardson - The Washington Times

DENVER — The University of Colorado professors who shut down climate change debate in class have landed on the radar of a top school official, who says he wants to make sure students are being “educated, not indoctrinated.” colorado

John Carson, a member of the University of Colorado Board of Regents, said he plans to make inquires Thursday about an email from three University of Colorado at Colorado Springs professors who advised students to drop the class if they dispute climate change.

“I have a lot of questions after reading this reported email sent to students,” Mr. Carson told The Washington Times. “We should be encouraging debate and dialogue at the university, not discouraging or forbidding it. Students deserve more respect than this. They come to the university to be educated, not indoctrinated.”

Continue Reading 2 Comments

Carbon Fibre Masculinity, Homosociality, Gendered Surfaces, & Idiot Academics

Published on

Written by William M Briggs

Tell you right up front that the only way to be sure of solving the crisis in higher education is to nuke universities from orbit and then salt the grounds once the ashes blow away. See if you don’t agree by the post’s end.

Title of the peer-reviewed paper is “Carbon Fibre Masculinity: Disability and Surfaces of Homosociality” by Anna Hickey-Moody in Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities.  carbon-fiber

By “carbon fibre” she means carbon fiber; actual fibers of carbon. She says, “Contemporary cultural economies of carbon fibre are, in part, a late capitalist (Jameson) technology of hegemonic (or dominant) masculinity”. It takes a man to make carbon fiber.

Continue Reading No Comments

25 New Papers Prove a Remarkably Stable Modern Climate

Published on

Written by Kenneth Richard

It has by now become common practice for just about any and every unusual weather occurrence, extreme temperature anomaly,  or seismic event to be somehow, someway linked to the human practice of using energy derived from fossil fuels.   No hurricane, flood, drought, storm, wildfire … is spared from potential anthropogenic implication. paper-pile

Last week, a named hurricane (Hermine) that ultimately devolved into a tropical storm landed along the Florida coast — the first landfall in 11 years.  As expected, the usual suspects  reflexively blamed the storm on humans.

Continue Reading No Comments

How Continued Life on Earth Depends on Humans & MORE CO2

Published on

Written by Alan Carlin

Most people understand that our green planetary oasis in the immense universe is highly unusual in terms of the favorable conditions it offers for life on Earth. But from a long-term perspective, there are some troubling signs. The Earth’s internal temperatures are gradually cooling and less carbon dioxide is being naturally emitted into the atmosphere from sources within the Earth. Ice ages are becoming more severe with lower temperatures and declining levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2). plant-co2

These signs of an aging planet are troubling because they indicate Earth is very gradually becoming less accommodating for life. Fortunately, humans have come along and are capable of helping out–but only if they can understand the clues and take helpful actions based on them.

Continue Reading No Comments

Waiting For The Next Sunspot Cycle: 2019-2030

Published on

Written by Dr Stan Odenwald NASA

Forecasters are already starting to make predictions for what might be in store as our sun winds down its current sunspot cycle in a few years. Are we in for a very intense cycle of solar activity, or the beginning of a century-long absence of sunspots and a rise in colder climates?

2016-09-01-1472723838-9260456-Solar_Cycle_Prediction.gif

Figure showing the sunspot counts for the past few cycles.
(Credit: NASA/ARC: Hathaway)

Ever since Samuel Schwabe discovered the 11-year ebb and flow of sunspots on the sun in 1843, predicting when the next sunspot cycle will appear, and how strong it will be, has been a cottage industry among scientists and non-scientists alike. For solar physicists, the sunspot cycle is a major indicator of how the sun’s magnetic field is generated, and the evolution of various patterns of plasma circulation near the solar surface and interior. Getting these forecasts bang-on would be proof that we indeed have a ‘deep’ understanding of how the sun works that is a major step beyond just knowing it is a massive sphere of plasma heated by thermonuclear fusion in its core.

Continue Reading No Comments

New paper: climate change & CO2 levels function of lagged solar activity

Published on

Written by hockeyschtick.blogspot.co.uk

A new paper under open review for Earth System Dynamics finds Holocene climate change can be explained on the basis of lagged responses to changes of solar activity. According to the author,

This paper analyzes the lagged responses of the Earth’s climate system, as part of cosmic-solar-terrestrial processes. Firstly, we analyze and model the lagged responses of the Earth’s climate system, previously detected for geological and orbital scale processes, with simple non-linear functions, and we estimate a correspondent lag of ~1600-yr for the recently detected ~9500-yr scale solar recurrent patterns. 

Secondly, a recurrent and lagged linear influence of solar variation on volcanic activity and carbon dioxide (CO2) has been assessed for the last millennia, and extrapolated for future centuries and millennia. As a consequence we found that, on one side, the recent CO2 increase can be considered as a lagged response to solar activity, and, on the other side, the continental tropical climate signal during late Holocene can be considered as a sum of three lagged responses to solar activity, through direct, and indirect (volcanic and CO2), influences with different lags of around 40, 800 and 1600 years. 

Note the ~1600 year lag of response to solar activity is essentially the same as the well-known ~1500 year “never-ending climate cycle” identified by numerous peer-reviewed, published papers.

Note also the paper explains CO2 levels on the basis of a lagged function of solar activity, due to variations in solar heating of the oceans, and ocean in-gassing and out-gassing of CO2, not as a result of the ~4% CO2 contribution from mankind.

The paper shows the (noisy) 1600-year climate cycle in the ice core 10Be proxy of solar activity of the past 1800 years peaked in the 1900’s. The orange lines are modeled on the basis of a function of three lagged compenents of solar activity cycles and is currently on a downswing until ~2100, indicating potentially cooler Earth temperatures ahead.

According to the author, “we propose the global ocean circulation processes, that include the well known meridional overturning circulation, and the thermohaline circulation, as a global mechanism capable of explaining the lagged forcing (volcanic activity & CO2) and continental tropical climate responses to solar activity variations.”
 

The Earth’s climate system recurrent & multi-scale lagged responses: empirical law, evidence, consequent solar explanation of recent CO2 increases & preliminary analysis

Jorge Sánchez-Sesma

Received: 18 Aug 2016 – Accepted: 31 Aug 2016 – Published: 07 Sep 2016

Abstract. This paper analyzes the lagged responses of the Earth’s climate system, as part of cosmic-solar-terrestrial processes. Firstly, we analyze and model the lagged responses of the Earth’s climate system, previously detected for geological and orbital scale processes, with simple non-linear functions, and we estimate a correspondent lag of ~1600-yr for the recently detected ~9500-yr scale solar recurrent patterns. Secondly, a recurrent and lagged linear influence of solar variation on volcanic activity and carbon dioxide (CO2) has been assessed for the last millennia, and extrapolated for future centuries and millennia. As a consequence we found that, on one side, the recent CO2 increase can be considered as a lagged response to solar activity, and, on the other side, the continental tropical climate signal during late Holocene can be considered as a sum of three lagged responses to solar activity, through direct, and indirect (volcanic and CO2), influences with different lags of around 40, 800 and 1600 years. Thirdly, we find more examples of this ~1600-yr lag, associated with oceanic processes throughout the Holocene, manifested in the mineral content of SE Pacific waters, and in a carbon cycle index, CO3, in the Southern Atlantic. Fourthly, we propose the global ocean circulation processes, that include the well known meridional overturning circulation, and the thermohaline circulation, as a global mechanism capable of explaining the lagged forcing (volcanic activity & CO2) and continental tropical climate responses to solar activity variations. Finally, some conclusions are provided for the lagged responses of the Earth’s climate system with their influences and consequences on present and future climate, and implications for climate modelling are preliminarily analyzed.

 

Continue Reading No Comments

Harvest Moon 2016: When and How to See September’s Full Moon

Published on

Written by Calla Cofield, Space.com

Summer’s end is on the horizon, and the arrival of autumn will be heralded by a Harvest Moon on Sept. 16, when there will also be a penumbral lunar eclipse.

The term “Harvest Moon” refers to the full moon that falls nearest to the autumnal equinox, which will take place on Sept. 22. This full moon will also be a penumbral lunar eclipse, although the effects may not be visible to the naked eye.

Continue Reading No Comments