Copper nanowires offer an efficient, inexpensive approach to solar energy harvesting

The UK’s Met Office has refused to release historic climate discussions dating from before 2007, even though such scientific discussions are required to be “open and transparent”.

David Holland, the man whose FoI requests – refused by the Met Office – triggered the Climategate scandal, wants to see what scientists are discuss at an early, important stage of the IPCC process – called the “Zero Order Draft” stage. Subsequent stages One and Two involve NGOs and government officials, so the ZOD stage – the only part of the process which doesn’t have bureaucrats in the room – is an important one.

In an information tribunal held in May, Holland pointed out that much of the ZOD material is already on the web. He argued that the UK, as a signatory to the UN’s Aarhus convention, should allow these discussions to be made available to the people who pay for them.

The city of Warsaw, Poland, recently hosted the 19th Conference of the Parties (COP-19) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Conference host countries normally “play game,” but not in this case. Both the citizens of Poland and their government revolted.

Essentially, Poland CALLED the global-warming agenda, AKA the climate-change BLUFF.

Poland’s government sacked its Minister of the Environment (and host/chief of COP-19) half way through the conference and the people of Poland decided to give NGO’s like Greenpeace, Sierra Club and 350.org a clear “thumbs down. “ Japan was equally clear and announced a change from their previous Kyoto Protocol based commitment of a 25{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} reduction in CO2 emissions by 2020 to a mere 3.8{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117}.

Of course, the facts have been in favor of calling the climate bluff for quite some time already. From the revelations of shady scientists and shoddy science to nature’s failure to adhere to the fictitious predictions made by every single climate model created over the last decade, quite simply, the facts could no longer be hidden.

Chemistry is everywhere in the world around us – so why are we so scared of it, asks Dr Mark Lorch.

I really enjoy my job, I’m a chemist in academia. I get to wallow in the fascinating world of research science and then pass on my passions to eager young minds.

But my job is even better than that. I’m an academic who gets let out of my ivory tower and into schools, shopping centres and festivals where I perform all the most entertaining chemistry. And I pull out all the stops – liquid nitrogen gets sloshed around in abundance, hydrogen balloons are ignited like mini-Hindenburgs, and ethanol-fuelled rockets zip around the playgrounds. Chemistry is fun.

So why is everybody scared of chemicals?

Because we are, aren’t we? The very word chemical is often synonymous with toxin or poison. We use phrases like “it’s chock-full of chemicals” to imply something is artificial and bad for you.

Meaningless slogans like “chemical-free” pop up on products in health food stores and billboards. And nobody seems to mind, least of all the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). I know – I’ve complained to them and they told me that consumers clearly understand that “chemical-free” really means “free of synthetic chemicals”.

What’s the difference? Orange juice and E300 crystals

I don’t get the distinction. Why are synthetic chemicals worse than natural ones? Why is the synthetic food additive E300 bad, while the vitamin C in your freshly squeezed glass of orange juice is good? (Even though they are both the same thing.)

Chemistry is fascinating because of the way it can be used to synthesise new stuff – it’s like molecular Lego. The fact that everything is made from 100-odd building blocks is remarkable. Throw chemicals in a pot in the right way and you can build the world around us.

So why is chemistry the bad boy of the sciences? Why is there this chemophobia? Biology doesn’t get a bad rap – quite the opposite. Biology has amazing animals, plants, the human genome project and David Attenborough. It’s natural and good.

What about physics? Well, physics is just pretty damn cool. It’s got stars, lasers and the most impressive machine ever built – the Large Hadron Collider. All fronted by Brian Cox beautifully explaining the wonders of the universe. It doesn’t get any cooler than that.

Until the middle of the 19^th century everybody believed that the earth was static and unchanging, interrupted by earthquakes, hurricanes and other disasters, caused; usually by Gods, but after which the earth returned to its original static state.

It was the developments of the science of geology by Hutton and Lyall that changed this picture. They showed that the earth is in a constant state of change. Many of the rocks are formed from deposits made in previous history. In addition they contain remains of organisms that had lived at the time they had been deposited.

Charles Darwin, who joined captain Robert Fitzroy in a voyage around the world in HMS Beagle in 1831, was an enthusiastic naturalist who had also studied the new geology. He took the first volume of Lyall’s “Principles of Geology” with him on the voyage and picked up the second volume at Valparaiso during the trip.

It became obvious to him that the remains of early living organisms in geological strata were often very different from those alive today, so there must be an evolutionary change over time.

The concept of “Climate Change” promoted by The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) denies the existence of evolution. They believe in the old Medieval concept of an unchanging static world, affected only by “Natural Variability” which can only be “changed” by human greenhouse gas emissions.

Evolution of living organisms means their ever changing interaction in every place at every level. This process was called “Ecology” by Ernst Haeckel.

Environmental “Ecologists” treat the whole world as a collection of static “ecosystems” – regions where the organisms are uniformly distributed. They believe that there is a moral virtue in their largest possible variety; in “biodiversity.” Both these concepts are unknown to evolutionary theory.

Evolution is also diametrically opposed to the concept of “sustainability.” Evolution happens, it cannot be stopped or reversed. The only sensible policy is adaptation.

Everyone knows that money doesn’t grow on trees, but how about inside tree leaves? Believe it or not, a new study finds it does. Well, sort of.

The Finding

The Nature Communications journal has published a report according to which the Eucalyptus (Myrtaceae sp.) tree’s leaves accumulate gold. Though gold and money are not quite identical (they used to be before the Bretton Woods Agreement was nixed), this finding allows a more effective search for underground gold deposits in the Australian outback.

More sensitive modern analytical techniques let you determine the gold concentration in a small sample of Eucalyptus tree leaves with ease. Just analyze enough Eucalyptus tree leaves from all prospective mining areas and, voila, you’ll know exactly where your new gold mine ought to be located.

Background

Of course, the knowledge that some plants may help you in finding mineral deposits is not new. Already in medieval times people recognized correlations of certain plants abundance with potential mine locations. There are many plants associated with specific minerals. That knowledge dates back hundreds or even thousands of years. For example, trace elements like zinc are important micro-nutrients for a variety of flowering plants. Naturally, you’ll find them in higher abundance in areas rich in zinc. The same is true for other micro-nutrients or trace elements like selenium, molybdenum and manganese. However, the association of the Eucalyptus tree with gold is new; at least to me.

The Waubra Foundation has just issued an “Explicit Warning Notice” (1) to wind turbine manufacturers, developers, acousticians and governments worldwide.

Recently “rediscovered” research funded by the US Department of Energy and involving NASA and multiple other research organizations has shown that the health damaging effects directly caused byinfrasound and low frequency noise (ILFN) emitted by wind turbines have been known to the wind industry, governments and acousticians in general, since 1985 (date of the official field study led by Dr. Neil Kelley). But this health risk has been covered up ever since, denounces the Foundation. “Health authorities have been careful to exclude ILFN measurement and exposure limits from noise regulations”, said its CEO, Dr. Sarah Laurie. “To this date, they continue to deny any problem exists with ILFN emitted by wind turbines, ignoring complaints of victims and their right to be protected against known health hazards from industrial installations”.

The wind industry argues that modern turbines are different, but it has not proved that they are safe with respect to the emission of ILFN. The onus is on them, and on the health authorities, to “prove a positive”, argues the Foundation. “Like any product, it must be tested to be safe before it is sold”, says Dr. Laurie. “There is gross negligence on the part of the authorities for approving modern wind turbine installation close to habitations without having verified that these machines are harmless.”

In view of this, and in the name of thousands of victims, the European Platform Against Windfarms (EPAW), and the North American Platform Against Windpower (NA-PAW), are hereby demanding that governments immediately:

1) – adopt the evidence-based health protective ILFN exposure limits recommended by Kelley in 1985;

2) – wherever wind turbine neighbors complain of effects on their sleep and/or health, monitor in their homes the full spectrum of noise pollution and infrasound down to 0,1 Hz, accurately, transparently and independently of wind developers, and

3) – actively enforce regulation breaches, ensuring affected neighbors are able to have the non-compliant wind turbines turned off at night so they can sleep.

“Sleep deprivation has been used as an effective means of torture and a technique for extracting confessions,” stated Dr. William Hallstein in his recent letter to the Board of Health of Falmouth, Massachusetts. (2)

Dr. Neil Kelley said in a recent interview: “ (subsequent research found that) the majority of the physics responsible for creating the annoyance associated with this (1985) downwind prototype are applicable to large (modern) upwind machines.” (3) Dr. Laurie concludes: “wind turbine designs may have changed, but human physiology has not”.

When you put climate change in this context the problem distills down to nothing more than a claim based on computer model projections so the obvious solution to the problem is to show why the computer model projections are wrong. This is why from day one I have targeted the forcing parameter of the computer models which is a pure fabrication created to project catastrophic warming from CO₂ when none is physically even possible.

To attack the CO₂ forcing parameter it is critical to determine the claimed basis for the forcing parameter which requires a lot of digging and going back through references, and in the process of doing this one is exposed to a wide variety of information that is not normally considered. Through this digging although the explicit basis for the genesis of the forcing parameter is never stated in general terms it is based on a 100ppmv increase in atmospheric CO₂ concentration from 280 to 380ppmv and an accompanying 0.6°C increase in global temperature. Other information gleaned is that the forcing parameter is of the form 5.35ln(C/C_o) and this is converted to temperature with a climate sensitivity factor of 0.75°C/W/m².

 Given this it is a simple matter to test the viability of the forcing parameter to see if it gives results consistent with the global temperature record. Derek Alker’s fresh analysis concurs with my own, as set out below.

If science was driving this issue the 33 years of cooling with a fourfold increase in global CO₂ emissions from 1942 to 1975 would be all that is needed to debunk the computer model projections but as this is not an issue of science but one of belief simply stating facts is of little value in exposing the fraud.

Climate Change although never actually defined to any scientific or legal standard is generally accepted to mean global warming caused by increased CO₂ emissions from fossil fuels. Last year the Hadley Centre under scrutiny resulting from “climategate” had the unfortunate circumstance of the HadCRUT3 dataset showing more global cooling since 2002 than any of the other datasets and especially the UAH and RSS MSU satellite based datasets. 

This meant a decade of cooling with increasing CO₂ and a death blow exposing the climate change fraud. Hadley revised the dataset to HadCRUT4 which although it did not eliminate the decade long global cooling it reduced the cooling to near zero. (http://www.climate4you.com/ )

Without realizing it the Hadley Centre had produced a temperature graph with a linear best fit to 1997 showing zero global warming and sent this data to the IPCC where it was incorporated into this graph from the unauthorized release of IPCC 5AR by Alec Rawls (see below).

 This graph shows that global warming had already ended by December 1997 when the Kyoto Protocol was initiated to stop global warming! This makes every claim in support of the Kyoto Accord completely fraudulent as well as making all claims in IPCC 2001 AR3 and IPCC 2007 AR4 completely false as well. This is where the head of the UN can be taken to task for reprehensibly blaming Typhoon Haiyan on climate change when climate change means global warming and global warming officially ended 16 years ago!

This is the form of attack that needs to be made demanding that the wording used be defined in true terms by any making these claims. 

There is no science involved just fraud so silly arguments about scientific misconceptions. What needs to be exposed is the fraud and this is perfectly laid out for us in the PBS interview of Timothy Wirth which Tim Ball has often pointed out.

Wirth served under President Clinton in the State Department. He is now president of the United Nations Foundation and he organized the 1988 Senate hearing at which James Hansen addressed global warming.

In the interview Wirth admits to compromising the air conditioning before the crucial US Congressional hearing of 1988 when NASA’s Dr James Hansen gave, what many analysts believe, was the crucial testimony that swayed policymakers into believing global warming was a serious problem.

 Asked whether he had cynically altered the temperature in the hearing room that day Timothy Wirth replied:

“… What we did it was went in the night before and opened all the windows, I will admit, right? So that the air conditioning wasn’t working inside the room and so when the, when the hearing occurred there was not only bliss, which is television cameras in double figures, but it was really hot. …”

“So Hansen’s giving this testimony, you’ve got these television cameras back there heating up the room, and the air conditioning in the room didn’t appear to work. So it was sort of a perfect collection of events that happened that day, with the wonderful Jim Hansen, who was wiping his brow at the witness table and giving this remarkable testimony.”

Wirth went on to lead the U.S. negotiating team at the Kyoto Summit. In the 1975 Newsweek article about our cooling world the term used was the grammatically correct “climatic change”

With only 13 years separating the end of a 33 year period of global cooling from Hansen’s 1988 presentation he was not going to use the term global warming and with zero actual physical evidence for his fabricated computer model projections Hansen resorted to what is called “consensus science” and simply claimed 99{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} certainty!  

The one thing that Hansen didn’t do that day in front of your committee is use the term “global warming.” He said, “Gentlemen, I’m 99 percent sure that human beings are contributing to climate change,” but he didn’t quite have the nerve, because he was outside scientific consensus at the time.

Oh, Hansen went a long way. This was a very, very brave statement. He was on the edge of the science and almost 20 years younger than he is today, so he’s relatively new in the field. He’s working for the federal government, and certainly this was not cleared far up the line, what he had to say. So the summary of what Jim Hansen had to say that year, plus the fact that it had gotten so much attention from the press — it was on every channel, Hansen was widely reported. He went as far as anybody could possibly have expected him to go, I think. Again, it was a very brave thing for him to do.

But the whole thing is a fabrication and my approach is, and always has been, to refute this fraudulent conjecture with hard physical evidence. 

 

Fads come and go, but sometimes they stay around and, after a while, everyone wonders how the world ever lived before. The question here is whether electric cars are just another fad or are they the beginning of a whole new way of doing things, such as going to the beach, or grocery shopping.

In order to get a handle on that question, let’s look at some critical information.

Energy Equivalency

First, consider the amount of a typical gas tank’s worth of electric energy. Let’s say your car has a tank of 50 L (approximately 15 US gallons) gasoline. The energy equivalency is 33.4 kWh (kiloWatt-hours) per gallon of gasoline. Therefore, if your car had batteries and an electric motor only and everything else being equal, you would need a battery system with a storage capacity of approximately 10 times the number of kWh of the number of liters of gasoline; therefore 500 kWh of electric energy storage.

Energy Efficiency

The internal combustion engine (ICE) has a lower efficiency of energy (fuel to usable power) conversion than an electric motor (EM); roughly 27{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} compared to 80{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} for the EM. In other words, the ratio of stored power to usable power for the EM is approximately three times that of the ICE. Therefore, in calculating the effective cost of running an electric car this also needs to be considered.

Cost of Electricity

Nationwide, the average residential cost of electric power is in the order of 12.5 cent/kWh, prior to additional costs. Adding those additional costs would bring it to somewhere in the $0.15 to $0.20 range per kWh, depending on other conditions such as “cost of delivery”, taxes and so forth. With that, to “fill up” your electric car with 500 kWh of electricity would cost about $90 on average.

Hello Warsaw: Greenland ice loss will be OK ‘even under extreme scenarios’

Daniel Wolf Savin and Michael Hahn have been fascinated by the universe since they were boys. For Savin, a senior research scientist in the Columbia Astrophysics Laboratory, discovering Albert Einstein at age 12 spurred the desire to “learn everything about the universe.” Years later, Hahn, an associate research scientist who grew up 40 miles from Savin’s home town in Connecticut, started gazing at the stars as a teenager; he eventually became president of the astronomy club at his alma mater, Carnegie Mellon.

Now the two have made a big leap toward cracking one of the biggest mysteries in astrophysics—why the corona, or plasma surrounding the sun, is so much hotter than the sun’s surface.

The coronal heating problem, as it is known, is important because the corona is the source of solar wind, which is responsible for the northern and southern lights and can also disrupt telecommunications and power grids. “Satellites can be slowly pushed out of their orbits if they’re deflected by the solar wind so if we can better understand the cause, we can create better models for space weather,” says Savin, referring to conditions beyond the atmosphere.

COMMENT TO FASULLO, J.T., C. BOENING, F. LANDERER, AND R.S. NEREM, AUSTRALIA’S UNIQUE INFLUENCE ON GLOBAL SEA LEVEL IN 2010-2011, GEO. RES. LETT., 2013, IN PRESS

Albert Parker

al***********@****il.com

The lack of global warming over this century in the measurements of ground and deep oceans temperatures and the lack of positive acceleration in the measurements of sea levels suggest that the climate models have greatly exaggerated the influence of the anthropogenic carbon dioxide emission. However, rather than feeling uncomfortable with possibly wrong theories, many authors have recently re-focused their attention from “warming” to “weather extremes”, blaming climate “variability” and “uncertainty” for the lack of warming, or sorting out the most unrealistic explanations for the lack of warming of temperatures and accelerations of seas as it is the case of the claimed storage of 4.572·10¹² m³ of water in Australia discussed in the commented paper.

The latest news about global warming report of temporary falls of the rate of rise of sea levels because of formation of Lake Eyre in Australia.  “Global sea level has been rising as a result of global warming, but in 2010 and 2011, sea level actually fell by about a quarter of an inch. Scientists now say they know why: It has to do with extreme weather in Australia. The sea level drop coincided with some of the worst flooding in that continent’s history. Dozens of people died and torrents washed away houses and cars, forcing thousands from their homes. Some of those floodwaters simply ran back into the ocean, so they didn’t affect sea level. But a lot of that water was trapped on the Australian land mass. That’s because the continent has an odd geography.” writes Richard Harris [1] reporting on a work recently published by John Fasullo and others in the paper here commented [2].

The claim by Fasullo surprisingly accepted in the peer review is that “Australia’s hydrologic surface mass anomaly is responsible for the fall in the reconstruction of global mean sea level.” Apart from the fact that the global mean sea level (GMSL) reconstructions are not measurements but very questionable computations, it appear unbelievable that the natural formation of Lake Eyre in the centre of Australia can be considered responsible for a drop of a quarter of an inch in the GMSL.

Alternative fuels have failed to catch on because they require a major adjustment in the way society works. Here’s an alternative to that.

Considering the fact that over 10{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of crude oil is used for jet fuel, it appears that refined oil is going to be around for a long time.

 

If you can’t beat ‘em, then join ‘em, says Herskowitz. With a revolutionary system for making gasoline out of hydrogen extracted from water, and from carbon dioxide, two of the most common substances on earth, Herskowitz believes that he and his team at Ben-Gurion (including Prof. Miron Landau, Dr. Roxana Vidruk, and others at BGU’s Blechner Center for Industrial Catalysis and Process Development) have come up with the one alternative fuel that can succeed on a wide scale.

Mexican study affirms a 1951 finding by top American scientists that carbon dioxide (CO2) cannot cause global warming. Applying known scientific values, more eminent scientists are coming forward to confirm that atmospheric CO2 mixes with clouds and water vapor to cause only cooling. As such, the credibility of “consensus science” claims about man-made global warming being caused by rises in CO2 levels are left in serious doubt.

Professor Nasif Nahle (Monterrey, Mexico) provides a peer-reviewed paper, ‘Determining the Total Emissivity of a Mixture of Gases Containing Overlapping Absorption Bands,’ that uses known and well-established values from the results of experiments performed previously by H. C. Hottel, B. Leckner, M. Lapp, C. B. Ludwig, A. F. Sarofim, et al, showing that the combined effect of overlapping absorption bands of water vapor with CO2 causes a reduction on the total absorptivity of the mixture of those gases in earth’s atmosphere. As such, water vapor and CO2 are proven to combine to cause global cooling, not warming.

Nahle’s paper affirms the long-forgotten findings of the eminent former head of Britain’s Met Office, CEP Brooks, and the American Meteorological Society (AMS) that also revealed that CO2 in the atmosphere could not cause warming. Brooks, Britain’s top climatologist at the time, along with America’s best meteorologists agreed that the idea that CO2 could warm the climate:

“was never widely accepted and was abandoned when it was found that all the long-wave radiation [that would be] absorbed by CO2 is [already] absorbed by water vapor.”

[see:“Geological and Historical Aspects of Climatic Change.” In Compendium of Meteorology, edited by Thomas F. Malone, pp. 1004-18 (at 1016). Boston: American Meteorological Association]

Scientists at Principia Scientific International (PSI), who peer-reviewed Nahle’s paper, are currently advising colleagues that the most reliable data available now confirms that CO2 is shown to act as a coolant in earth’s climate. As such, the notion of a so-called ‘greenhouse gas’ warming effect may be regarded as refuted, while environmental measures by governments and individuals to reduce “carbon emissions”  to combat climate change are, in turn, rendered pointless.

A teacher in South Korea wrote to ask me for more information about global warming theory, to help his class. Below is an excerpt of my reply.

In regard to CO2 and global warming, the two have become so linked in the public mind that the warming mechanism itself (the Greenhouse Effect) is seldom referred to or discussed. Rather, it’s taken for granted. For a detailed explanation of this mechanism, then, I’d refer your students to MIT professor Richard Lindzen’s essay Greenhouse Effect.

In Lindzen’s piece your students will discover that the popular notion of the Greenhouse Effect differs from the accepted scientific explanation. The popular view has it that gases like carbon dioxide absorb and trap thermal radiation (infrared light), thus keeping the Earth warm by reducing its ability to release heat-rays to outer space.

In this view “greenhouse gases” function much like a blanket or winter clothing. As this infrared image suggests, after all, a body that’s inhibited from releasing heat-rays will cool off more slowly, which is the same as saying “will stay warmer.”

Based on the earlier book by John D. Hamaker and Donald A. Weaver “The Survival of Civilization” (1982), Weaver also published a companion book “To Love and Regenerate the Earth” (2002). Both books are available freely as electronic (pdf) files from www.soilandhealth.org.

The main idea in both works is the “re-mineralization” of soil as a means to produce better yields of agricultural products. This re-mineralization essentially means adding finely ground rock powder to mineral-depleted or mineral-lacking soil. Without doubt, finely ground rock from almost any source will provide potassium and phosphate-type minerals that are vital for plant growth. However, grinding rock to a fine powder requires not just the equipment but a large amount of energy as well.