You will be familiar with lithium-ion batteries, the little knob-sized things that keep your wrist watch and other small electronic devices going for years. Slightly larger lithium batteries power cell phones, cameras, walkie-talkies, and other small portable devices.  So, why should such batteries not be able to power your electric car as well?

The Khaleej Times reports that you’ll soon be able to hide – perhaps even make your shadow invisible – with the headline: Coming soon: Invisibility cloaks! But that’s not all. The article’s writer goes on to say the new research “may in the not too distant future protect a building from earthquakes by bending seismic waves around it.”

Australian climate change professor who warned about melting East Antarctic remains trapped in thick ice

“there is an increasing body of evidence, including by the AAE members, that have identified parts of the East Antarctic which are highly susceptible to melting and collapse from ocean warming” The Australasian Antarctic Expedition 

The House of Commons Energy and Climate Committee have now published the submissions of the review of the IPCC and what an impressive collection it is. It is great to see so many citizens putting in their own time and effort to produce these superb submissions.

In one of the numerous pages that didn’t make it to my submission I introduced the idea of the “citizen scientist” which is the scientific equivalent of the “expert patient”. Reading the submissions, I regret not including it.

The Expert Patient is the phenomenon in medicine, that more and more, doctors are coming across patients, that not only know more about their own illness than the doctor, but even know more about the latest medical research. Initially – and for obvious reasons – many doctors were quite hostile to this phenomena: it fundamentally changes the balance of power and therefore the relationship between doctor and patient.

However, after some initial resistance, it has now been accepted in medicine, as a de facto outcome of the internet, that many patients will be experts in their own condition. This phenomenon is one which doctors have not only learnt to live with, to the extent there are now numerous papers, but some are now encouraging patients to become their own experts.

Two German scientists, Horst-Joachin Luedecke and Carl-Otto Weiss of the European Institute for Climate and Energy, say that “two naturally occurring climate cycles will combine to lower global temperatures during the next century.”

Those Stubborn Facts:Antarctica Ice Sheets Safe

The IPCC’s climate science has long claimed that human CO2 emissions are producing an accelerated global warming, with a “runaway” warming trend, which is then being amplified in the north and south polar extremes. This dangerous warming is, of course, causing the ice sheets to melt, unleashing catastrophic sea level rise, and thus swamping coastal regions and low-lying islands, as we speak!

Want to get your work published in a scientific journal? No problem if you have a few thousand dollars you are willing to part with. 

These days a number of journals display trappings of a journal, promising peer-review and other services, but do not deliver.  They perform no peer review, and provide no services, beyond posting papers and cashing checks for the publication fees. 

What’s wrong with Science. And Nature. And Cell. A Nobel prize-winner attacks elite journals … BLUNT criticism is an essential part of science, for it is how bad ideas are winnowed from good ones. So when Randy Schekman, one of the 2013 crop of Nobel prize-winners (for physiology or medicine, in his case), decided to criticise the way scientific journals are run, he did not hold back.

Dr Schekman chose the week of the prizegiving (the medals and cheques were handed over on December 10th) to announce that the laboratory he runs at the University of California, Berkeley, will boycott what he describes as “luxury journals”. By that he meant those commonly regarded as the most prestigious, such as Cell, Nature and Science. – The Economist Dominant Social Theme: There is nothing wrong with modern science that a bit of stern criticism can’t cure.

Free-Market Analysis: We’ve often wondered what constitutes civilization. Ayn Rand believed civilization’s highest art was privacy. But perhaps, to a degree, it is the rigorous adoption and promulgation of the scientific method. We arrive at the idea by returning to the Renaissance, which changed the West by rediscovering science. What came after that, the Enlightenment and more importantly, the Age of Reason, were steps back from the initial brilliance of the Age.

American congressional representatives, recently permitted to read a controversial 10,000 word section censored from the original official government 9/11 Report, have sensationally asserted that the redacted pages place full responsibility for the planning and execution of 9/11 on one or more foreign intelligence agencies, not “terrorists.” President Bush and Isreali intelligence (Mossad) implicated (full story below).

Principia Scientific International takes the position that the greater community of scientists, engineers and expert analysts would not to shirk from addressing concomitant technical, forensic and logistical details that would prove or disprove what is now palpably beyond the realms of mere “conspiracy theory.”

‘Mossad, Bush planned, executed 9/11’

EPA Nifong and Beales prosecute US hydrocarbons, jobs, living standards and health

Former Durham, NC district attorney Mike Nifong was disbarred for withholding evidence from the defense and lying to the court in the trumped-up Duke lacrosse team rape case. Ex-Boston crime lab technician Annie Dookhan was prosecuted for faking test results and contaminating drug samples, to get accused dealers convicted. In both cases, charges against their victims were dismissed or are under review.

So how should we handle federal officials who’ve become unethical researchers and prosecutors – determined to get convictions, basing their cases on esoteric circumstantial evidence, allowing tainted and fraudulent evidence, hiding exculpatory information, rewriting the law, and denying defense counsel the right to cross-examine adverse witnesses or present their case?

As the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow explains in its amicus curiae brief to the US Supreme Court, that’s what Environmental Protection Agency regulators have been doing with global warming. They’re pulling every dirty prosecutorial trick in the book, to convict fossil fuels, carbon dioxide, and America’s economy and living standards of “endangering” the public welfare.

Since 2009, EPA regulators have shown a single-minded determination to slash hydrocarbon use, drive up the price of energy, and impose huge costs on companies, industries and an economy struggling to stay afloat and retain jobs. They want to control CO2 emissions from vehicles, electrical generating plants, and eventually the sources of nearly everything we make, grow, ship, eat and do. The damage to our livelihoods, liberties, living standards, legal system, health, welfare and life spans will be enormous.

Part 3: Extreme Weather Extinctions Enron Style

Adapted from the chapter Deceptive Extremes  in Landscapes & Cycles: An Environmentalist’s Journey to Climate Skepticism by Jim Steele

An Illusion of Extreme Climate Disruption

“While clearing larvae were starving in response to destruction of their hosts, survival in the outcrop was higher than previously recorded: an estimated 80% of larval groups survived.” ¹

C. D. Thomas, University of Leeds, United Kingdom

In Part 1, I documented how Camille Parmesan’s 1996 paper (heralded as proof that global warming was forcing butterflies northward and upward) had misread landscape change for climate change, how she failed to publish that “extinct” populations had now recovered and refused to provide the data to permit replication of her iconic paper. In Part 2, I documented how Parmesan hijacked the conservation success story of the Large Blue and the detailed conservation science of Jeremy Thomas in order to again blame global warming for expanding the range of endangered UK butterflies. In Part 3, I document how Parmesan kept half the evidence “off the books” to suggest extreme weather, supposedly caused by rising CO₂, was causing population extinctions in the Sierra Nevada, and our top climate scientists then embraced and spread that myth. 

Problems From Climate Changes Foreseen in a 1974 C.I.A Report – View Article – NYTimes.com

All living organisms depend for their survival on their range of genetic variability. 

Early evolution favours increasing complexity but, as a result, the organism becomes progressively more vulnerable to threats.  Eventually the genetic variability range is unable to cope, the organism becomes endangered, and finally extinct.

This process has happened many times in geological history. The larger dinosaurs, which existed over a period of over 135 million years from the Jurassic to the Cretaceous, became extinct after they became too large for their territory and for their ability to move – possibly assisted by the arrival of an asteroid. Their smaller cousins who survived were the ancestors of our birds.

Much effort is currently being exerted to prevent or reverse the process of decline of supposedly “endangered species”. One strategy is to provide more living space. This seems to have succeeded, at least for a while, in African wildlife parks where human predators are causing the evolution of elephants without tusks.

The strategy has been less successful in the USA, where the available territory is more limited. A recent article in “Time” magazine shows how many smaller communities in the USA are now threatened with black bears, wolves, cougars. wild pigs, alligators and even bald eagles, who sometimes eat pets and attack children. There are now foxes on the White House lawn. The extra creatures can only find food from human dwellings.

By comparison with the mid 1900s, the population of raccoons has gone up 2.700{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117},  beaver 2.400{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117},  cougar 1,600{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} wild turkey 1,500{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117},  deer 800{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117},  gray wolf 610{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117},  alligator 400{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117},  Canada goose 370{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117},  black bear 320{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117}, wild pig 120{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117}.

Living in tiny spaces can cause psychological problems

New York City has a housing problem. Currently, it has 1.8 million one- and two-person households, and only one million studios and one-bedroom apartments. The obvious solution seems to be to develop more small residential units.

New peer reviewed paper in ‘Current Biology’ (December 2013) shows that there is a strong link between the age of a science article and the availability of data, based on 516 studies.

Lead Author, Timothy H. Vines of ‘The Availability of Research Data Declines Rapidly with Article Age,’ describes how the major cause of the reduced data availability for older papers is the rapid increase in the proportion of data sets reported as either lost or on inaccessible storage media.

Main points:

Vines show that author responses included authors admitting their data was lost, stolen, stored in some distant or held on outmoded technology (e.g. floppy disk). Authors reported reluctance to retrieve such data. In two cases, authors complained that they would have to devote hours or days to retrieving the data.

A reader Russell writes in to tell me his Year 9 son Jordan and his friend, Tom, took on their teacher’s sacred belief in man-made global warming. Given no warning, and called insulting names in front of the class, they took up the challenge with gusto and stayed up til 1am that night to put the presentation together. Not surprisingly the teacher tried to pull out the next day, but the class would not let her.

One of the slides quotes Al Gore mocking “the tiny minority”, like the ones “who still believe that the moon landing was faked…”. Then it shows and quotes four Apollo Astronauts and Burt Rutan (the first private astronaut).

From reader Russell:

The other week at school my eldest son (15) was challenged by his teacher to present to the class why he is a ”climate change denier”. He had to do this presentation the next day.

At the start of his class the next day he advised the teacher he was ready.  She told him she wasn’t interested now, maybe another day. His classmates started heckling her saying ”You Chicken Miss”. She eventually agreed and got another teacher to sit in as well. Before my son spoke she showed the class the promo to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. After his presentation the class gave him a standing ovation. There is a lot more to this story, the above overview sort of explains what occurred.