Space is not empty. A wind of charged particles blows outwards from the Sun, carrying a magnetic field with it. Sometimes this solar wind can break through the Earth’s magnetic field. Researchers now have an answer to one of the questions about how this actually occurs. When two areas with plasma (electrically charged gas) and magnetic fields with different orientations collide, the magnetic fields can be “clipped off” and “reconnected” so that the topology of the magnetic field is changed, they explain.

The study has been carried out with data from the four Cluster satellites.

Credit: Image: ESA

This book is a “must read” for those concerned about the history of corruption in science – the authors provide ultra sharp analysis of fraud and deceit within the scientific community. ‘Betrayers of Truth: Fraud and Deceit in the Halls of Science‘ details certain cases and how the fraud came to be, and how people got away with it or the fact the evidence was ignored.  

Authors Broad and Wade are seeking to reveal the dark heart of science. Science by its nature is rational, but people aren’t – they are biased and seeking only personal and professional gain and standing. And it is this clash that we will see more clearly and the book progresses. The clash between the rational (facts) and the irrational (human nature).

Strike that. It’s a 50-State warning. That 57 came from elsewhere in the Obama administration.

Well, 50 is less than 57, so the warning is not as dire as you might have thought. Yet it’s still serious. Everybody knows that our beneficent government knows best and that all its cautions should be heeded. This is why you should listen to its bureaucratic experts, who are saying “climate change” will have “impacts.”   

Impacts!

“Very real impacts,” says the EPA. And what is real is not a fantasy. So get ready to rumble, weather wise. But before thinking about that, we have to understand what “climate change” is.

I must congratulate Daniel Swahn Lindbergh for a spirited reply to my arguments which were set out in my previous post, ‘Facebook Physics: Heat Retention.’ I will attempt to answer him.

What is it that distinguishes the so-called Greenhouse Gases? They are all opaque to incoming and outgoing Infrared radiation, known as Near IR and Far IR, unlike Oxygen and Nitrogen, which are transparent to both Near IR and Far IR. 

We can see this most clearly with Water Vapour, which in the form of clouds is clearly opaque, both against radiation and also visually. When, on a hot day when the Sun is shining brightly high in the sky, a great black cloud passes in front of the Sun, what happens? The radiation is scattered and there is an immediate cooling that any child can sense.

Image copyrightGETTY IMAGES

Out of the Nobel Prize winners that have been announced so far this year the average age is 72, but it was not always this way. The 2016 Nobel laureates for physics, medicine and chemistry: all men, at least 65 years old and mostly over 72.

Go back to the first half of the 20th Century, however, and the average laureate was “only” 56. Physics laureates, now typically a group of men in their late-sixties, used to have an average age of 47.

In fact, in all of the traditional sciences there has been a significant trend of Nobel laureates winning prizes later in life, starting from around the 1950s and continuing into the present day.

For fans of the hit #Netflix series ‘Stranger Things’, reality is becoming stranger than fiction. At least according to U.S. Department of Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz. Speaking on the Netflix-only Chelsea Handler show yesterday, Moniz was asked about a range of issues, and one was about the parallel universe depicted in Stranger Things (Review).

(Spoilers ahead) Handler asked Moniz if the DOE was actively investigating whether parallel universes exist like they do on Stranger Things, and if so, what did he know about them. Surprisingly, Moniz answered that he believes a “fictional DOE laboratory was operating in the 1980s. You can draw any inference you need from that.” He went on to say the DOE does work in parallel universes but didn’t elaborate. He also said that while he hasn’t seen a parallel universe himself, he was aware of its existence.

All of Human civilization fits neatly into the current interglacial period. The development of agriculture, settlements and societies were all enabled by a beneficial climate  for the last  10,000 years.

Interglacials usually average ~10,000 years so is our luck about to run out? It turns out that the answer is no, because we are very fortunate that human society has developed during an interglacial when the earth’s orbit  has very low eccentricity.

Eccentricity is important because it regulates the strength of polar maximum summer insolation caused by precession of the equinoxes every 21,000 years.  Precession determines the distance from the sun during a Polar summer. If summer coincides with the earth’s perihelion then summer insolation can be up to 20% higher than average. However if the earth’s orbit is nearly circular, as it is today,  then precession has little effect at all. That is why we have about 15000 years left before cooling begins.

The high demand for the lithium ion batteries that power electric vehicles like those produced by Tesla Motors could potentially do more harm than good to the environment, according to a report Sunday from The Washington Post.

The electric vehicle automaker uses Panasonic batteries, which, according to the report, uses graphite derived from mines in China. The mines are raining graphite particles down on the residents of several villages in northeastern in the country. 

Tesla told reporters its batteries do not include graphite from the Chinese company BTR, yet declined to identify its graphite source. Nearly 75 percent of the world’s graphite comes from the northeastern section of the China. The company’s refusal to explain where its graphite is produced could raise questions about the environmental soundness of its vehicles.

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has detected superhot blobs of gas, each twice as massive as the planet Mars, being ejected near a dying star. The plasma balls are zooming so fast through space it would take only 30 minutes for them to travel from Earth to the moon. The fireballs present a puzzle to astronomers, because the ejected material could not have been shot out by the host star.

This four-panel graphic illustrates how the binary-star system V Hydrae is launching balls of plasma into space. Credit: NASA, ESA, and A. Feild (STScI)

Below is the latest in a series of articles about the work of veteran science writer, Edsel Chromie, who has championed pioneering work on electromagnetism and planetary phenomena. In this article we look at the “flaky snowball” hypothesis for comets and how this flawed idea is still being simplistically depicted by the Science Channel (broadcast Sept. 30, 2016) in a film titled “Secret Life of Comets.”

In the film the narrator pointedly says:

“In the past three decades there have been over a dozen missions to comets and everyone have been a revelation. In 1994 21 fragments of a comet called Shoemaker-Levy 9 [pictured] smashed into Jupiter’s atmosphere and each impact released more energy than all of the world’s nuclear arsenal combined. The event rocked the scientific community.”

 

“And yet, it moves.”

Thus muttered Galileo Galilei under his breath, after being forced by the Inquisition to recant his claim that the Earth moved around the Sun, rather than the other way round. The public vindication of Copernican heliocentrism would have to wait another day.

Today, Galileo’s story is a well-known illustration of the dangers of both unchecked power and declaring scientific matters “settled.” Yet, throughout history, Galileo wasn’t alone. 

Scientists once knew that light moved through space via the luminiferous aether – how else could its waves travel? In 1887 Albert Michelson and Edward Morley proved that it wasn’t so, thanks to a “failed” experiment that was actually designed to conclusively demonstrate the existence of this invisible medium. Poor Michelson suffered a nervous breakdown when faced with such unexpected results.

On the far side of the Moon lies the Maunder crater, named after two British astronomers – Annie and Walter Maunder. Annie worked alongside her husband at the end of the 19th Century, recording the dark spots that pepper the Sun.

The name Maunder is still known in scientific circles, yet Annie has somehow slipped from history.

“I think the name Maunder is there and we have all rather forgotten that that’s two people,” says Dr Sue Bowler, editor of the Royal Astronomical Society magazine, Astronomy and Geophysics.

“She was acknowledged on papers, she published in her own name as well as with her husband, she wrote books, she was clearly doing a lot of work but she also clearly kept to the conventions of the day, I think.”

John Muir noted 150 years ago that Yosemite’s Lyell Glacier was a river of ice that stretched for 1,000 yards, but since that time has shrunk to 66 acres. Called a living glacier by Muir, global warming alarmists point to it as proof of#Climate Change. So did President#Obama this summer. There’s only one problem: the glacier has been steadily melting since we left the Little Ice Age in 1850.

Those who visit the Lyell Glacier can hear the steady whoosh of water flowing under its massive base, exposing bedrock up its spine. Obama pointed to Lyell Glacier as evidence of climate change when he visited Yosemite National Park in early June. Obama said the glacier had once been a mile wide, “but now it’s almost gone.” His visit came shortly after the United Nations released a report on famous landmarks that global warming may destroy. It was a perfectly orchestrated plan to justify more regulations before leaving office.

The future of hydraulic fracturing sounds a lot like science fiction. Fracking companies could eventually “beam up” oil and natural gas from the ground using microwaves, according to news reports.

Microwave fracking would zap shale formations with a beam as powerful as 500 household microwave ovens to release the valuable oil or gas. Experts estimate the first microwave fracking systems could be deployed in the field by 2017 and start producing oil by the end of that year.

The new tech would have major environmental advantages over conventional methods. Disposal of wastewater from fracking is the biggest objection to the process from environmentalists, who claim getting rid of the water can contaminate the ground and potentially cause very small earthquakes.

It would cause “a whole shift in the paradigm,” Peter Kearl, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of the microwave fracking company Qmast, told Ozy.com. “We don’t need water for our process and we don’t have wastewater to dispose of afterward.”

Dataism is the word coined by Yuval Noah Harari in his essay for an optimistic, practical implementation of Scientism.

Just as divine authority was legitimised by religious mythologies, and human authority was legitimised by humanist ideologies, so high-tech gurus and Silicon Valley prophets are creating a new universal narrative that legitimises the authority of algorithms and Big Data. This novel creed may be called “Dataism”. In its extreme form, proponents of the Dataist worldview perceive the entire universe as a flow of data, see organisms as little more than biochemical algorithms and believe that humanity’s cosmic vocation is to create an all-encompassing data-processing system — and then merge into it.

As an example, he says, “Every day I absorb countless data bits through emails, phone calls and articles; process the data; and transmit back new bits through more emails, phone calls and articles. I don’t really know where I fit into the great scheme of things, and how my bits of data connect with the bits produced by billions of other humans and computers.”