Scientists say the extent of Antarctic sea ice cover is at its highest level since records began. Satellite imagery reveals an area of about 20 million square kilometres covered by sea ice around the Antarctic continent.

Jan Lieser from the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) said the discovery was made two days ago.

“This is an area covered by sea ice which we’ve never seen from space before,” he said.

“Thirty-five years ago the first satellites went up which were reliably telling us what area, two dimensional area, of sea ice was covered and we’ve never seen that before, that much area.

“That is roughly double the size of the Antarctic continent and about three times the size of Australia.”

The formation of sea ice around Antarctica every year is one of the biggest seasonal events on Earth.

The ice is generated in what scientists refer to as “sea ice factories” or polynia  – areas of the ocean surface where currents and wind patterns combine to generate sea ice.

“As soon as sea ice is produced in these polynias it is actually transported away from that so more sea ice can be produced,” Dr Lieser said.

The first large scale wind-power installation, some 100 km (65 miles) offshore the northwest coast of Germany has finally been connected to the grid. The Offshore-Windpark Deutsche Bucht is a wind farm with a total of 80 wind turbine towers, each with a hub height of 100 m (300 ft.) above the sea and a combined design output of some 400 Megawatts in electric power.

Connection to the Grid

Because of delays in getting the underwater cabling and connection to the power grid on land, the whole power park was standing idle for the last two years. In order to prevent potential damage to gear boxes and turbines, each tower was supplied with energy from small gasoline-powered electricity generators for that time. 

Several years behind schedule, the Bard 1 wind farm finally came altogether in March 2014. The wind farm was connected to the electric grid and started to deliver energy. Alas, it did not last very long.  In March, the separate AC-to-DC converter station at the facility suffered a “meltdown.” A new converter installed a few days ago was shut down not much later without explanation.

HVDC Converters

The alternating current (AC) coming from the turbines cannot be directly transmitted to the grid. Instead, it needs to be converted to high voltage direct current (HVDC) first. In principle, that is a straight forward task and has been solved for a long time. All the high-tension electric power transmission lines around the world use such HVDC converters. So what’s the problem with the wind farm converter?

Eighteen years (less one month) and counting; that’s the time since the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicted “global warming” of the earth’s climate but, given the length of the current cooling cycle,  the “warmists” are now calling it a “warming pause.” 

Approximately every 11 years, the sun undergoes a complete personality change from quiet and calm to violently active. The height of the sun’s activity, known as solar maximum, is a time of numerous sunspots, punctuated with profound eruptions that send radiation and solar particles out into the far reaches of space. 

NEW YORK – As the United Nations prepares for its 2014 Climate Summit in New York this month with an agenda to advance a new carbon-emissions regulatory agreement to supersede the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the Russian scientist who correctly predicted the lack of global warming over the past 19 years has gained new scientific support for his belief that Earth is in the beginning of a prolonged ice age. 

GREENBELT, Maryland, August 29, 2013 (ENS) – Using ice-penetrating radar, scientists have discovered a long, deep canyon that exists a mile beneath the Greenland ice sheet, data from a NASA airborne science mission and an international research team reveals. 

The scientific team identified a continuous bedrock canyon that extends from almost the center of the island and ends at its northern extremity in a deep fjord connecting to the Arctic ocean.

The canyon looks like a winding river channel at least 460 miles (750 kilometers) long, making it longer than the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River in the United States. In some places, it is half a mile deep, on the same scale as parts of the Grand Canyon.

Scientists say this immense feature beneath the Petermann Glacier fjord is even older than the ice sheet that has covered Greenland for the last few million years.

“One might assume that the landscape of the Earth has been fully explored and mapped,” said Jonathan Bamber, professor of physical geography at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom, and lead author of the study.

“With Google Streetview available for many cities around the world and digital maps for everything from population density to happiness one might assume that the landscape of the Earth has been fully explored and mapped,” said Bamber. “Our research shows there’s still a lot left to discover.”

Scientific, Technical, and Medical (STM) publishing is big business. It generates $19 billion in revenue per year, the majority of which is earned by a few powerful publishers that enjoy profit margins of up to 40 percent.  Inflated subscriptions sold to academic libraries keep them moving ahead because the librarians feel they have no choice but to buy. These companies add little value to the actual publishing product but they are entrenched.

Many forces are now at work to change the status quo which has existed for more than 100 years.

The primitive publishing model employed by these publishers is actually a detriment to science. Research paid for by taxpayers is often restricted behind pay walls, major breakthroughs that could potentially save lives languish in articles whose publication is delayed for no reason. In some cases, published findings that have passed a traditional peer review process are subsequently found to be fraudulent.

Performed behind a smokescreen of anonymity, these publishers are the master puppeteers pulling the strings of scientific research to no one’s benefit but their own. The issue is that science publishing is not an esoteric academic silo with no impact on the world. Scientific findings ultimately affect every human being on the planet. Something has to change.

Until now, despite moving from paper to pixels, the publication of scientific research had not harnessed the full potential of the internet. Most journals still use a system that’s rooted in the pre-web era of print and its associated rhythms and rules. Although solving some of these problems requires a significant cultural shift in academia, many of them are solvable using existing technologies that are already standard in other industries and in the culture of the web at large.

The Hindustan Times reports a new use for women’s nail polish: as an indicator for the chemical rohypnol, commonly known as the “date rape drug.” The idea, said to be an invention of four students at North Carolina State University, is still in the development stage.

Recent observations of the effects of a massive solar storm on the Earth’s atmosphere made by NASA using the SABER instrument on the TIMED satellite have very important implications for the two main classes of hypotheses backing the idea of catastrophic man-made global warming. 

During this solar storm, gigantic quantities of energy were dumped into the Earth’s upper atmosphere by highly energetic particles.  The SABER instrument measures the infrared emissions from the Earth’s upper atmosphere.  The NASA measurements of those infrared emissions during the solar storm showed that 95{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of the energy dumped into upper atmosphere was quickly re-emitted into space.  There was no significant warming of the Earth’s surface.

The significance with respect to the various man-made global warming hypotheses of this observation has often not been well-explained by critics of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (AGW).  The fact that the energy arrives in the atmosphere as energetic particles has often been glossed over in such commentaries, yet this is very important. 

The energy of the solar storm is not of the same nature as the mix of ultraviolet (UV), visible light, and near and mid infrared radiation which provides the Earth with heat energy on a daily basis.  Though this important difference exists, the results of the solar storm energy measurements by NASA are still crucially significant for one of the principal global warming hypotheses and somewhat significant for the other main AGW hypothesis.

There are two standard hypotheses for the global warming mechanism that CO₂ is supposed to provide at a catastrophic level:

1)  A large back-radiation effect near the Earth surface caused by water vapor and CO₂, which warms the surface.

2)  A delay or decrease in radiation in the upper troposphere or stratosphere caused by increased CO₂ and NO.

As I have discussed many times on my blog, most recently in Simple Explanation of Why Greenhouse Gases Do Not Warm the Earth’s Surface, back-radiation at the Earth’s surface is insignificant because the mean free path for the infrared radiation absorptions of water vapor and carbon dioxide are very short and the corresponding temperature differences between the surface and the lower few meters of the atmosphere are therefore very small. 

The smaller than claimed infrared radiation from the surface is very quickly absorbed and distributed to nitrogen, oxygen, and argon in the air due to the very high collision rate in the lower atmosphere.  These primary air molecules do not radiate this energy and it is then mostly transported by convection upward or toward the poles.  Water vapor and CO₂ actually slightly increase the rate of energy transport upward following the downward temperature and density gradients. 

Thus Hypothesis 1 fails to make physical sense.  As more and more proponents of catastrophic AGW have realized this failure, they have turned to the second hypothesis as the justification for AGW.

Pick up a research paper on battery technology, fuel cells, energy storage technologies or any of the advanced materials science used in these fields, and you will likely find somewhere in the introductory paragraphs a throwaway line about its application to the storage of renewable energy.  Energy storage makes sense for enabling a transition away from fossil fuels to more intermittent sources like wind and solar, and the storage problem presents a meaningful challenge for chemists and materials scientists… Or does it?

 

Electric sparks might have helped break down lunar dirt, suggesting the moon may be significantly more active than previously thought, a new study finds. 

This kind of sparking might take place throughout the solar system, from Mercury to the satellites of Jupiter and Saturn, researchers added.

The giant craters that pockmark the face of the moon bear witness to a violent past full of cosmic impacts. Meteorites continue to bombard the moon, breaking down or “weathering” its soil. Indeed, the moon is much harder hit than Earth, whose thick atmosphere protects the planet from many incoming space rocks. [The Greatest Moon Crashes of All Time]

The moon is also constantly hit by high-energy electrically charged particles. For instance, electrons and protons often burst from the sun, and more energetic particles known as cosmic rays also regularly strike from elsewhere in the Milky Way galaxy.

Previous studies only investigated how these high-energy particles electrically charge the uppermost layer of the lunar surface. Lead study author Andrew Jordan, a space physicist at the University of New Hampshire, and his colleagues explored whether high-energy electrically charged particles might also penetrate deeper into the moon.

Lunar soil is an electrical insulator, meaning it has extremely low conductivity. Any electrically charged particles that do penetrate deep into it can thus get trapped inside and accumulate.

For decades, scientists have known this phenomenon, known as deep dielectric charging, can occur in spacecraft. If too much charge accumulates, the resulting electrical sparks can damage electronics.

The researchers focused on craters near the lunar poles that host permanently shadowed regions. These dark areas can reach temperatures as low as minus 400 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 240 degrees Celsius). The colder lunar soil gets, the more electrically insulating it becomes.

The Sun had a flurry of flare activity at the end of August, releasing over half a dozen solar flares in a day, some of which were accompanied by coronal mass ejections. 

As ever-more scientists denounce misguided attempts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, the evidence grows that more CO2 in the atmosphere, not less, is best. 

 A new book ‘About Face!’ by two respected scientists and an economist makes the case for adding more CO2 to earth’s atmosphere. 

The scientists are Madhav Khandekar in Canada and Cliff Ollier in Australia, plus economist Arthur Middleton Hughes in the USA. They show us why CO2 is essential to all life on earth. It is plant food. 

The authors say, “We believe that the more CO2 there is in the atmosphere the bigger and better plants will grow all over the world. Three million people die each year because the prices of food are too high for them. We want to increase CO2 in the atmosphere and reduce world malnutrition.”

The Authors’ Synopsis

This book is highly controversial as billions of dollars are involved in ethanol and climate control. The Obama Administration is planning to shut down all coal fired electric plants because they emit CO2 in amounts more than the EPA permits. This will cost more than $300 billion dollars and result in more than 100,000 unemployed. We say that such actions are unnecessary and wrong.

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issues periodic reports that predict the warming of the earth and that the warming will raise the level of the oceans, and bring on wild weather such as hurricanes, droughts, floods, tornadoes, etc. None of this is true. It has no scientific basis.

Today, more than one million people die from malaria in Africa and other less developed areas. None die from malaria in the US, Europe, Australia or other developed countries where the mosquitos that spread malaria have been wiped out using DDT.

The US and UN have forbidden these less developed areas to use DDT. This must be changed. More than three million people die from malnutrition because of the high price of food partly due to 14{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of the world corn crop being converted to ethanol.  We cite studies that show that increasing CO2 in the atmosphere by 300 ppm will increase food production by 36{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} in every country in the world on all continents.

New ebook exposes so-called “greenhouse gases” as not the cause of global warming. Author, Anthony Bright-Paul demonstrates how science and the observable facts prove precisely the opposite – such gases encourage our planet to cool. 

Guided by years of private correspondence gleaned from eminent scientists not invested in the cause of human-caused climate change, Bright-Paul demonstrates for lay readers that such “greenhouse gases” scatter, deflect and reflect the incoming solar radiation. “This is not only obvious to scientists but also to any normal sentient observant being,” insists the author.

The book ‘Climate for the Layman’ thereby builds a seemingly irrefutable case that the Sun warms the Earth and Oceans, and they in turn warm the atmosphere from the bottom upwards.

The book argues that far from cutting down on Carbon Dioxide (CO2) emissions, this gas, which every human being and member of the animal kingdom exhales night and day, could (and should) naturally increase from the current supposedly “dangerous” 350 parts per million (ppm) to 1,000 ppm in order to make Earth a truly green planet.

A veritable thumb in the eye to alarmist propaganda, this books demonstrates that plants love Carbon Dioxide and produce Oxygen as a by-product; an inescapable and well-known Biological fact.

As Bright-Paul and other informed skeptics (Natural News) are telling us:

“Practically everything you have been told by the mainstream scientific community and the media about the alleged detriments of greenhouse gases, and particularly carbon dioxide, appears to be false, according to new data compiled by NASA’s Langley Research Center. As it turns out, all those atmospheric greenhouse gases that Al Gore and all the other global warming hoaxers have long claimed are overheating and destroying our planet are actually cooling it, based on the latest evidence.”

 http://www.naturalnews.com/040448_solar_radiation_global_warming_debunked.html#ixzz3C9iiNxZm

This has long been the assessment of independent climate analyst, Hans Schreuder and his associates. Schreuder, a key figure in Principia Scientific International (PSI) has his essay, Greenhouse Gases cool the atmosphere made a central feature in this book.

Bright-Paul espouses a core theme of Schreuder and PSI scientists – that the atmosphere is warmed from the bottom upwards and the principal heat exchange mechanism is conduction and convection (not radiation, as per current climate science orthodoxy). This heat exchange is taking place simultaneously over the whole surface of the Planet. It warms and cools the atmosphere – everywhere and all at once.

As respected Canadian Geophysicist, Norm Kalmanovitch, explains:

“Virtually all the heat uptake of the atmosphere is from conduction and latent heat transfer from water vapour condensing into clouds with the majority of this coming from latent heat transfer. By comparison gases like water vapour with a permanent dipole moment or gases like CO₂ which can have a dipole moment induced at wavelengths resonant with particular internal molecular vibrations have the capability of absorbing and re-emitting photons in random directions but since this process only redirects energy without permanent absorption there is no net transfer of energy to these molecules and therefore no net heat uptake.”

America’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the mainstream media and scientific journals are participating in what may be the most heinous and far-reaching medical cover up of our time. 

The long running controversy over the role of vaccines in the steadily expanding autism epidemic – which the CDC says affects 1 in every 68 U.S. children – continues to bubble to the surface.  With the recent publication of a study revealing African-American boys receiving their first MMR vaccine before 36 months of age are 3.4 times more likely to develop autism vs. after 36 months, and the confessions of William Thompson, a senior CDC scientist turned whistleblower, who revealedthat his own agency covered up the autism-vaccine link in African-American boys over at least the past decade, we may be witnessing the long suppressed emergence of the truth about vaccine-induced brain damage.

But powerful forces are at play here, and only hours ago, it was was revealed that the journal that published the highly concerning MMR/autism study — Translational Neurodegeneration — removed it suddenly from their website, with the following explanation:

“This article has been removed from the public domain because of serious concerns about the validity of its conclusions. The journal and publisher believe that its continued availability may not be in the public interest. Definitive editorial action will be pending further investigation.”

One would assume stories of this magnitude — with direct health implications to millions of U.S. children — would make national headlines, or that there would at least be critical responses and/or denials in major news outlets or by public and private health organizations whose responsibility it is to respond to these concerns and/or allegations. To the contrary, what we are witnessing is an eerie and highly conspicuous silence surrounding Thompson’s revelations, who has been called a “medical Edward Snowden,” in acknowledgment of how devastating and unrecoverable these charges are to the CDC’s credibility, and by implication, it’s entire ever-expanding one-size-fits-all immunization schedule.

The old-time daily “Silver Fix” of the London Metal Exchange is gone. Established in 1897 to facilitate the exchange of metal between buyers and sellers, it had received some bad press in recent years. Hues of undue manipulations surfaced, rightly or wrongly and the old-time system finally gave way to a new electronic system of matching supply and demand.