Advanced, unconventional nuclear reactors could shake up the industry as soon as 2030, according to a new reports by leading scientists. 

If the government promoted advanced nuclear technology and streamlined the permitting process, such reactors could become operational in the next 15 years, according to Britain’s government-backed Energy Technologies Institute and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

The report found that the biggest hindrance to unconventional reactors is bureaucratic delays in government approval processes and the public’s fear of nuclear power.

“Like any other nuclear power technology, this one is potentially compelling because the world desperately needs carbon-free sources of non-intermittent power,” the MIT Technology Review report states. “But fears about the safety of nuclear plants have made them so costly as to discourage investors.”

This elementary article could have, and should have, been written and published long ago.  The condensation of water vapor to form dew or frost on solid natural and artificial surfaces is a commonly observed natural phenomenon.  It is well understood that the latent heat released as water vapor condenses slows the radiational cooling of these surfaces during the diurnal temperature cycle.

There can be little doubt that the ability of atmospheric water vapor to condense (releasing its significant latent heat of condensation to its environment) limits the minimum possible temperature of the common diurnal temperature oscillation.  The ability of this same atmospheric water vapor (and certain other atmospheric gases) to absorb portions of the radiation emitted by the earth’s surface has nothing to do with this minimum temperature limitation.

Back in the late 1800s, Emperor Napoleon III of France offered a prize to anyone who could come up with a substitute for butter that would be cheap enough to be used by the lower classes. The winning spread, invented by a chemist named Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès and composed of rendered beef fat and skim milk, became known as margarine. 

Mège-Mouriès may have won the prize, but he couldn’t fool the French into eating the stuff — not even the poor French — so he sold the patent to a Dutch company. Later that century, in the face of a beef-tallow shortage (I know; hard to believe), another chemist, from Binghamton, New York, came up with a way to manufacture margarine from a combination of animal and vegetable fats.

Let us be clear at the outset: the global climate is changing, and has always been changing. The earth has warmed by 1C over the last 150 years. That is not the issue. The issue is whether the human emissions of carbon dioxide since 1850 are heralding an imminent and certain global climate catastrophe that could be averted by engineering projects. 

This book should leave any dispassionate reader deeply disturbed. It should be required reading for people in policy and politics who deal with these matters. No thought leader should be ignorant of the contents.

Do the terms Prosciutto or Speck have any meaning to you? They should!

True prosciutto is one of many Italian delicacies, especially that from Parma region, a kind of air-dried bacon that melts on your tongue. As common for bacon, it has small parts of fat. In the context here, “Speck“ is the German term for the fat in cured bacon that makes the delicacy even smoother. You can buy the original prosciutto at high-end deli shops in the U.S., including the west coast (nothing but the finest for them, ever). IMHO, even steadfast vegetarians would savor it.

Now, horror of horrors, a “veggie version” prosciutto may be coming to your local deli soon. This novel delicacy is not to excite your taste buds with new impressions, oh no, not at all. Its sole raison d’etre is to save the world from the climate Armageddon (supposedly) approaching at a meteoric speed and its (claimed) cause:  rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere resulting from mankind’s meat consumption, etc.

Much research has been done on determining the connection between solar activity and weather/climate conditions. Extreme weather incidents – i.e. disastrous flooding from extreme precipitation – has always existed … and well before the introduction of human industrial/consumer CO2 emissions … the name Noah rings a bell, yes? 

Studies investigating the relationship between the sun and flooding continue to be pursued. The newest research examined solar forcing and the floods of central Europe using river discharge data and varved sediments.

The peer-reviewed findings:

The three researchers discovered that flood frequency in both records is significantly correlated to changes in two types of solar activity,” namely, (1) “the solar Schwabe cycle” and (2) “multi-centennial oscillations.” And they thus further conclude that (3) “the unexpected direct response of variations in River Ammer flood frequency to changes in solar activity might suggest that the solar top-down mechanism is of particular relevance for hydroclimate extremes.

This study determined that flooding frequency over 5,500 years was tied to solar activity across inter-annual and multi-centennial timescales.

Clearly, CO2 emissions and other human influences are not a prerequisite for extreme precipitation and the resulting flood disasters.

Prior severe weather/climate research and peer-reviewed articles.

Read more at www.c3headlines.com

It’s a banner week for the end of the world, because we’ve officially pushed atmospheric carbon levels past their dreaded 400 parts per million. Permanently.

According to a blog post last Friday from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, “it already seems safe to conclude that we won’t be seeing a monthly value below 400 ppm this year—or ever again for the indefinite future.” Their findings are based on weekly observations of carbon dioxide at Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory, where climate scientists have been measuring CO2 levels since 1958.

What’s so terrifying about this number? For several years now, scientists have been warning us that if atmospheric carbon were allowed to surpass 400 parts per million, it would mark a serious “milestone.” In 2012, the Arctic was the first region on Earth to cross this red line. Three years later, for the first time since scientists had begun to record them, carbon levels remained above 400 parts per million for an entire month.

ORIGIN: This legend about the “unsolvable math problem” combines one of the ultimate academic wish-fulfillment fantasies — a student not only proves himself the smartest one in his class, but also bests his professor and every other scholar in his field of study — with a “positive thinking” motif which turns up inother urban legends: when people are free to pursue goals unfettered by presumed limitations on what they can accomplish, they just may manage some extraordinary feats through the combined application of native talent and hard work. And this particular version is all the more interesting for being based on an incident that really is true!

Paper Reviewed: Gervais, R. 2016. Anthropogenic CO2 warming challenged by 60-year cycle. Earth-Science Reviews 155: 129-135. 

In an important paper, Gervais (2016) fit several different time series of sea-level rise with a sinusoidal form having a period of approximately 60 years, which thereby confirmed “the cycle reported for the global mean temperature of the Earth,” and which also revealed that “the last maximum of the sinusoid coincides with the temperature plateau observed since the end of the 20th century.” And he further notes that “once this cycle is subtracted from observations, the transient climate response is revised downwards consistent with the latest observations.”

There is no end to agenda-driven government and environmental activist claims based upon speculative theories, contrived data, and demonstrably false computer modeling predictions that we are experiencing a known human-caused climate crisis. 

The solutions, of course, are to abandon fossil fuel use in favor of heavily subsidized “free” and “renewable” alternatives; to expand the growth and overreach of energy regulatory agencies; to reward university departments that bend objectivity to secure research grants; to justify donations to environmental activist lobbies; and to enrich a host of politicians, prophets, and profiteers who cash in on “save the world” hype to fill campaign coffers and personal bank accounts.

James Lovelock’s parting words last time we met were: “Enjoy life while you can. Because if you’re lucky, it’s going to be 20 years before it hits the fan.” It was early 2008, and the distinguished scientist was predicting imminent and irreversible global warming, which would soon make large parts of the planet uninhabitably hot or put them underwater. The fashionable hope that windfarms or recycling could prevent global famine and mass migration was, he assured me, a fantasy; it was too late for ethical consumption to save us. Before the end of this century, 80% of the world’s population would be wiped out.

His predictions were not easy to forget or dismiss. Sometimes described as a futurist, Lovelock has been Britain’s leading independent scientist for more than 50 years. His Gaia hypothesis, which contends that the earth is a single, self-regulating organism, is now accepted as the founding principle of most climate science, and his invention of a device to detect CFCs helped identify the hole in the ozone layer. A defiant generalist in an era of increasingly specialised study, and a mischievous provocateur, Lovelock is regarded by many as a scientific genius.

Now here’s a question for you guys – I’m really impressed how interested you all are in Physics and Science in general. Well, we don’t want to take too much notice of Phd.s do we, as they are always quarrelling amongst themselves? Let us just keep to our own observations and avoid bigots like the plague.

Let’s take the Sahara. The Sun shines down and the radiation passes through the Oxygen and Nitrogen that makes up 99{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of the atmosphere and encounters the surface of the Planet – in this case sand. We all know that radiation has to encounter mass to produce heat. So the sands get pretty hot. You can see David Attenborough in one of his films standing there and saying that the temperature of the sand was circa 70ºC and the air above it was 40ºC. Pretty damn hot, eh?

A large polar bear population with lots of adult males – due to bans on hunting – means more survival pressure on young bears, especially young males.

To blame more problems with young male bears on lack of sea ice due to global warming ignores the downside to the reality Norway asked for when it banned hunting more than 40 years ago. More hungry young males coming ashore looking for food is one of the potential consequences of living with a large, healthy population of polar bears.

Biologist Ian Stirling warned of such problems back in 1974. Svalbard area polar bear numbers have increased 42{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} since 2004 and more hungry young polar bears almost certainly mean more polar bear problems, as folks in Svalbard (see map and quotes below) have experienced this year. According to a Yahoo News report this morning (28 September 2016, As Norway’s Arctic draws visitors, more polar bears get shot):

In the Southern Hemisphere, sea-ice levels just smashed through the previous record highs across Antarctica, where there is now more ice than at any point since records began. In the Arctic, where global-warming theorists preferred to keep the public focused due to some decreases in ice levels over recent years, scientists said sea-ice melt in 2014 fell below the long-term mean. Global temperatures, meanwhile, have remained steady for some 18 years and counting, contrary to United Nations models predicting more warming as carbon dioxide levels increased.

Of course, all of that is great news for humanity — call off the carbon taxes and doomsday bunkers! However, as global-warming theories continue to implode on the world stage, the latest developments will pose a major challenge for the UN and its member governments. Later this month, climate “dignitaries” will be meeting in New York to forge an international agreement in the face of no global warming for nearly two decades, record ice levels, and growing public skepticism about the alleged “science” underpinning “climate change” alarmism.

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — A university professor in Pennsylvania has been sentenced to a year and a day in prison on a conviction of defrauding NASA by letting graduate students and researchers do all the work on a $700,000 project. 

U.S. District Court Judge Harvey Bartle III also ordered Yujie Ding on Wednesday to pay a fine of $3,000 and restitution of $72,000. His wife, Yuliya Zotova, was sentenced to three months in prison.

Authorities said the Lehigh University engineering professor and his wife told NASA that their startup company ArkLight would develop a cutting-edge sensor used to track climate change. Instead, prosecutors alleged, they used the company “as a front to funnel federal grant money to themselves for research performed by students and others.”

According to scientists de Freitas, Dedekind, and Brill (2015), removing “contaminated data” from New Zealand’s  nation-wide temperature record — and using updated measurement techniques rather than error-ridden outdated ones — reduces the long-term (1909 to 2009) New Zealand warming trend from today’s +0.91°C to +0.28°C, a 325% change.

de Freitas et al., 2015

New Zealand’s national record for the period 1909 to 2009 is analysed and the data homogenized. Current New Zealand century-long climatology based on 1981 methods produces a trend of 0.91 °C per century. Our analysis, which uses updated measurement techniques and corrects for shelter-contaminated data, produces a trend of 0.28 °C per century.