Image copyright: ISTOCK

Is our growing understanding of the psychology of crowds feeding in to how we police them?

Crowds are complex. Some people fear they may turn violent, with individual personalities becoming submerged in the group mentality. But some leading social psychologists who research crowds believe that this old picture is mistaken.

“The danger with this view of crowds as inherently violent isn’t just that it’s wrong, it’s that it might become true. It might lead us to treat crowds in ways that will enrage them,” says psychologist Professor Steve Reicher.

Of course crowds are not all the same – there are different types of crowd and controlling them requires different approaches.

This is yet another crappy epidemiologic study on air pollution that proves nothing about air quality. YET, I LOVE IT.

Why? Because the study contains rarely presented evidence concerning the bias in self-reported ‘data’ versus measured data.

So this study is junk science for the usual reasons including guesstimated exposure data, dubious health effect data, omission of confounding factors, weak/non-significant statistics, and the other usual portfolio of errors common to modern epidemiology practice.

But check out the study chart, below. Note how self-reported data biases the study results toward reporting positive correlations while the measured data keeps the correlations where they should be — i.e, at zero.

… it’s much ado about nothing.

As Fred Singer once wrote:

Even alarmists know HFCs are a nothing burger. From Reuters today:

Read more at junkscience.com

Latest research shows that the so-called tell-tale ‘hot spot’  signal for man-made global warming over the tropics does not exist. As such,independent scientists say that by their own metric climate alarmists scientists have inadvertently disproved their own theory of global warming.

The findings of the researchers are that: 

“These analysis results would appear to leave very, very little doubt but that EPA’s [Environmental Protection Agency] claim of a Tropical Hot Spot (THS), caused by rising atmospheric CO2 levels, simply does not exist in the real world. Also critically important, even on an all-other-things-equal basis, this analysis failed to find that the steadily rising Atmospheric CO2 Concentrations have had a statistically significant impact on any of the 13 critically important temperature time series data analyzed.”

Image copyrigh: tNASA/JPL-CALTECH/MSSS

The gouge in the ground probably made by Europe’s Schiaparelli probe as it hit the surface of Mars on Wednesday has been imaged by a US satellite. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has identified a large dark patch in the robot’s targeted landing zone consistent with a high-velocity impact.

Schiaparelli is widely thought to have crashed and been destroyed. Data transmitted from the probe before it lost contact indicated that its descent systems did not work properly. Its parachute was jettisoned too early and its retrorockets, designed to slow the robot to a hover just above the surface, fired only for a few seconds. They should have operated for half a minute.

The MRO imagery is not quite definitive because the resolution is low – just six metres per pixel. Its context is persuasive, however. The roughly 15m by 40m dark patch, which is probably dust and rock fragments thrown out from the impact, is sited some 5.5km west of Schiaparelli’s expected touchdown point in the equatorial Meridiani Plain.

Tellingly, the feature is not present in previous MRO pictures of the location.

The clincher, though, may be the artefact 1km to the south of the patch. This white blob looks to be Schiaparelli’s 15m-wide parachute which would have floated down behind the probe. Again, this was not present in earlier pictures.

Absolutely stunning new research by the University of Washington (et al) confirms that 500 newly discovered deep ocean seafloor methane gas seeps are flowing massive amounts of this powerful greenhouse gas into the overlying ocean along the entire coast of Oregon, Washington, and California. Research scientists involved in this project indicate that this very large continuously flowing plume of methane gas is likely making its way up through the ocean water column and into Earth’s atmosphere. Furthermore, they state that pending additional analysis, climate scientists may need to “adjust” climate models (see quotes below). 

As we reported earlier this week, a censor at the UN named Nick Nuttall has refused The Rebel’s request for official media accreditation, so we can cover the climate summit in Marrakech, Morocco.

As this is a first for The Rebel: We’ve decided to take this episode of “The Ezra Levant Show” and make it available for free.

Three thousand other journalists have been approved, but we’ve been blacklisted.

WATCH as Nick Nuttall explains why — not to us and our lawyers or Canada’s professional journalist associations, all of whom have written him formal letters in protest.

No, Nuttall went on the CBC to make his case that The Rebel is a “one person” enterprise, and furthermore, we’re “extremist.”

Even the CBC host wasn’t buying it!

Cyberattacks targeting the internet infrastructure provider Dyn disrupted service on major sites such as Twitter and Spotify on Friday, mainly affecting users on the U.S. East Coast.

It was not immediately clear who was responsible. Officials told Reuters that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation were both investigating. The disruptions come at a time of unprecedented fears about the cyber threat in the United States, where hackers have breached political organizations and election agencies. 

Homeland Security last week issued a warning about a powerful new approach for blocking access to websites – hackers infecting routers, printers, smart TVs and other connected devices with malware that turns them into “bot” armies that overwhelm website servers in distributed denial of service attacks. Dyn said it had resolved one attack, which disrupted operations for about two hours, but disclosed a second attack a few hours later that was causing further disruptions.

Blackgram is a popular bean grown primarily in southern Asia on the Indian subcontinent. It is a fairly nutritious pulse, recommended for diabetics and shown useful in helping to lower cholesterol. In addition, it contains high levels of protein, potassium, calcium, iron, niacin, thiamine and riboflavin.

Given the importance of this crop in the diets of many people in India, Pakistan, and the surrounding region, it comes as little surprise that researchers are interested in how blackgram might respond to future changes in atmospheric CO2and climate. Such was the case with the ten-member research team of Vanaja et al. (2015), who grew eighteen genotypes of blackgram from seeds in plastic pots inside open-top chambers at three CO2 levels (390, 550 and 700 ppm) across three distinct growing seasons (summer, rainy and winter seasons).

Their purpose in doing so was to evaluate which genotypes would perform the best in each growing-season climate regime under elevated CO2. Plant performance was thus evaluated based upon analyses of five morphological (root length, root volume, shoot length, number of branches and number of pods), six dry weight (root, stem, leaf, pod, fodder and total biomass) and eight yield (filled seed number, total seed count, filled seed weight, seed yield, test weight, husk weight, percentage of shelling and harvest index) plant growth traits.

NOAA confirmed that as of Oct. 24, 2016, no major hurricane has struck the U.S. in 11 years, despite climate change claims they should be increasing.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has confirmed that today marks the eleventh year since a major hurricane has struck the U.S. mainland, despite persistent claims they would increase in a warming world.  Dennis Feltgen, a NOAA spokesperson, said, “I can confirm that as of October 24, 2016, it will be a complete 11 years since a major hurricane has struck the United States, as defined by the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale of being a Category 3 or higher.”

NOAA also announced, “The current streak of no major hurricane landfalls onto the U.S. mainland remains intact. The last one to do so was Hurricane Wilma on October 24, 2005.” NOAA defines a major hurricane as having sustained winds of 111 mph or higher. Since NOAA started record keeping in 1851, this is the longest the U.S. has gone without a major hurricane making landfall, breaking all previous records.

Image copyright: JAN CHLEBIK/THE ICR)

“If you want a career in medicine these days you’re better off studying mathematics or computing than biology.”

This pithy aside was delivered by Sir Rory Collins, the head of clinical trials at Oxford University, in the middle of a discussion about the pros and cons of statins. It is a nice one-liner, but I didn’t think much more about it until a few days later, when I found myself sitting in a press conference to mark the launch of a new initiative on cancer.

Rubbing shoulders on the panel with the director of the Institute of Cancer Research, Professor Paul Workman, was a scientist I didn’t recognise, but it soon became clear this was exactly what Sir Rory had had in mind.

Dr Andrea Sottoriva is an astrophysicist. He has spent much of his career searching for Neutrinos – the elusive sub-atomic particles created by the fusion of elements in stars like our sun – at the bottom of the ocean, and analysing the results of atom smashing experiments with the Large Hadron Collider at Cern in Geneva.

“My background is in computer science, particularly as it applies to particle physics,” he told me when we met at the ICR’s laboratories in Sutton.

NOAA says that Earth was red hot in September, with many places being the hottest ever!

Global Analysis – September 2016 | State of the Climate | National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI)

Only problem is, they don’t have thermometers on about half of the land surface, and many of their record temperatures are fake. Grey areas below represent missing data.

Note the record hot temperatures reported in Yemen, Oman, Central African Republic, South Sudan and The Congo.

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They don’t have any thermometers in those regions. The claimed record temperatures are completely fake.

Satellite temperatures show that NOAA’s record hot Africa was actually just about normal in September.

RSS / MSU Data Images / Monthly

Claims of record heat from NASA and NOAA are completely fraudulent, and are being made for political purposes. They have nothing to do with with climate or science.

“Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.”

• Adolf Hitler

Read more at realclimatescience.com

A University of Washington atmospheric sciences and meteorology professor is making headlines this week for observing how bad the federal government sucks at making accurate weather predictions.

 weather woman/ClassicGamer84

The professor, Cliff Mass of the University of Washington, says that weather forecasting in the United States is woefully inaccurate — and laughably technologically inferior — compared to both the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts and the UKMET model, which is purely British.

Just this month, Mass has pointed to Hurricane Matthew and a Seattle area windstorm as examples of the U.S. National Weather Service’s taxpayer-funded awfulness.

The National Weather Service dramatically oversold last weekend’s Seattle windstorm as the possible equivalent of a cataclysmic 1962 extratropical cyclone that Pacific Northwest old timers are still talking about.

Friday 21 October 2016 witnessed millions of internet users in the United States suffering hours of disrupted service coming at a time of rising threats and counter threats of international cyber wars. Sites attacked included Reddit, Twitter, Etsy, Github, Soundcloud, Spotify as well as the New York Times, Paypal, Pinterest and Tumblr, and some cable firms.

Reuters was quick to report that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation were both investigating. According to www.newsmax.com:

“The disruptions come at a time of unprecedented fears about the cyber threat in the United States, where hackers have breached political organizations and election agencies.

Homeland Security last week issued a warning about a powerful new approach for blocking access to websites – hackers infecting routers, printers, smart TVs and other connected devices with malware that turns them into “bot” armies that overwhelm website servers in distributed denial of service attacks. Dyn said it had resolved one attack, which disrupted operations for about two hours, but disclosed a second attack a few hours later that was causing further disruptions.”