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.

New data from ocean microbes in the Soledad basin off the coast of Baja, Calif., confirms a La Niña-like effect cooled surface waters 4,000 to 10,000 years ago.

Previous studies of one microbe species in sediment cores found cooler waters during this period of the Holocene, but scientists were not sure whether La Niña was at play, or more local effects like deeper waters welling to the surface were responsible.

Trade winds move warm waters from east to west over periodic cycles that occur over several years. La Niña – the cooling effect – brings cooler, drier weather to the United States. It is the opposite of warmer, wetter El Niño-induced seasons. In addition to these global effects, currents and local weather conditions also circulate deep, cold, nutrient-rich waters to the surface, an upwelling that replenishes nutrient-depleted surface waters.

Adding data from two more microbial species — one a summer-loving variety and another that lives in deeper waters — researchers now confirm the La Niña cooling effect. Hannah Grist, a graduate student at the University of Colorado, Boulder, presented the new results at a poster Thursday morning at the American Geophysical Union’s Fall Meeting in San Francisco. 

Below is a letter from Drs Judy Ryan and Marjorie Curtis to Mr Mark Scott, the Managing Director of the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC). Up to 200 political, media and other interested, or possibly, concerned,  parties such as the BBC, are openly copied in. Mr Scott is the first member of the Australian  public to to be held accountable by public letter.

Judy and Marjorie have been holding prominent Catastrophic Anthropogenic  Global Warming (CAGW) alarmists such as David Karoly, Tim Flannery, Will Steffen and Lesley Hughes individually accountable for close to one year now. The letters and email lists are on Judy’s Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/judy.ryan.75457?fref=browse_search.  They will also be on the Galileo Movement Facebook page soon.

As many interested parties are openly copied in;  the  lack of response from the alarmist  does not look good on the public record. A legitimate question is:- Why don’t they respond with the evidence to support their  hypothesis? It should be easy. The case  for holding CAGW alarmists individually accountable is building.

Sunday, 15 December 2013

Mr. Mark Scott

Managing Director

Australian Broadcasting Corporation GPO Box 9994

Sydney NSW 2001

Dear Mr. Scott:

We are writing this public email to you to express our concern regarding the biased, inadequate, incorrect, and alarmist reporting by the ABC on the subject of ‘Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming’ (CAGW), or any other weather related event.

We notice that you were made aware of this matter on the 15th February 2013 by notice delivered by registered post from Mr. Malcolm Roberts http://www.conscious.com.au/docs/letters/ABC-ManagingDirector.pdf.

In that notice you were asked to ensure that unless you, as the managing director of the ABC, have empirical scientific evidence that damaging warming is caused by human emissions of CO2, the ABC should cease making direct or implied public claims that it is. You were also requested to retract past such claims and associated claims if you did not have the evidence to back them up. You were further requested to ensure that future ABC broadcasts on climate and the environment be objective, factual, balanced and correct.”

You did not respond to that notice or act upon any of the reasonable requests therein. Under your stewardship, the ABC has continued the policy of biased alarmist, reporting on CAGW. As the ABC chief executive receiving a handsome salary from the taxpayers you are the one person most responsible for ensuring that the ABC reports truthfully, factually and in accordance with the ABC Charter. 

The year 1981 was a big one in my business life. It was the year Paul Allen and I incorporated Microsoft in our home state of Washington.

As it turns out, 1981 also had big implications for my current work in health, development, and the environment. Right when Paul and I were pulling all-nighters to get ready for the release of the MS-DOS operating system for the brand new IBM-PC, two rival professors with radically divergent perspectives were sealing a bet that the Chronicle of Higher Education called “the scholarly wager of the decade.”

This bet is the subject of Yale history professor Paul Sabin’s new book. The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble over Earth’s Future provides surprising insights for anyone involved in addressing the world’s “wicked problems.” Most of all, it gave me new perspective on why so many big challenges get bogged down in political battles rather than being focused on problem-solving.

So what was the bet? University of Illinois economist Julian Simon challenged Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich to put his money where his mouth was and wager up to $1,000 on whether the prices of five different metals would rise or fall over the next decade. Ehrlich and Simon saw the price of metals as a proxy for whether the world was hurtling toward apocalyptic scarcity (Ehrlich’s position) or was on the verge of creating greater abundance (Simon’s).

We have to kill eagles in order to save them. That’s now the official policy of the U.S. Interior Department. On Friday, the agency announced that it would grant some wind-energy companies permits that will allow them to kill or injure bald and golden eagles for up to 30 years without penalty.

The move is an unprecedented gift to the wind-energy industry, which has been lobbying for the 30-year permit for several years. Shortly after the deal was announced, the wind-energy lobby issued a statement that would make George Orwell proud. An official with the American Wind Energy Association declared that this “is not a program to kill eagles.” It is, he claimed, “about conservation.”

Well then. We can now rest easy. Big Wind is saving eagles by getting permits to kill them.

Dozens of environmental groups, including the American Bird Conservancy, the Conservation Law Center, and the National Audubon Society, opposed the deal. Under the headline “Interior Dept. Rule Greenlights Eagle Slaughter at Wind Farms,” Audubon issued a statement calling it “a stunningly bad move” and quoting the group’s president and CEO, David Yarnold: “Instead of balancing the need for conservation and renewable energy, Interior wrote the wind industry a blank check.” He called it “outrageous” that “the government is sanctioning the killing of America’s symbol, the Bald Eagle.”

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.

It was only five years ago in December that Al Gore claimed that the polar ice caps would be completely melted by now. But he might be surprised to find out that Arctic ice coverage is up 50 percent this year from 2012 levels.

“Some of the models suggest that there is a 75 percent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during some of the summer months, could be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years,” Gore said in 2008.

The North Pole is still there, and growing. BBC News reports that data from Europe’s Cryosat spacecraft shows that Arctic sea ice coverage was nearly 9,000 cubic kilometers (2,100 cubic miles) by the end of this year’s melting season, up from about 6,000 cubic kilometers (1,400 cubic miles) during the same time last year.

This came as a shock to researchers who saw Arctic sea ice coverage shrink to a documented low in 2012. However, now sea ice coverage has expanded to reach the sixth record low, according to AFP.

The EPA’s highest-paid employee and a leading expert on climate change deserves to go to prison for at least 30 months for lying to his bosses and saying he was a CIA spy working in Pakistan so he could avoid doing his real job, say federal prosecutors.

Perfluorotributylamine (PFTBA) is the latest greenhouse gas scare (GHGS). The media and web sites like countercurrents.org  are full of statements like “PFTBA is 7,100 times more powerful than carbon dioxide at warming the Earth” according to University of Toronto scientists who claim to have found an average of 0.18 parts per trillion of PFTBA in the Toronto air samples.

Enough to power patio heaters for the next few millennia

Images taken from the Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn have given the clearest pictures yet of the planet’s largest moon Titan and revealed vast seas of methane on the north pole that are more than 200 times larger than all the proven hydrocarbon reserves here on Earth.

In a recent article in the Guardian entitled, “How journals like Nature, Cell and Science are damaging science,” with a subtitle reading, “The incentives offered by top journals distort science, just as big bonuses distort banking,” Randy Schekman, one of the editors of eLife, starts out with a plaintive and humble “ I am a scientist.” With such a demure start, it might seem surprising that the article itself devolves immediately afterwards into a piece that has inspired incredulous ridicule in emails, on Twitter, and in the comments on the article — not because the initial statement is false, but because the very next statement is laughable given the author and the context:

Mine is a professional world that achieves great things for humanity. But it is disfigured by inappropriate incentives. The prevailing structures of personal reputation and career advancement mean the biggest rewards often follow the flashiest work, not the best. Those of us who follow these incentives are being entirely rational – I have followed them myself – but we do not always best serve our profession’s interests, let alone those of humanity and society.

Schekman shared in this year’s Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine, certainly one of the “biggest rewards” in science. (Commendably, he donated his prize money to his university.)

Luckily, when a prize-winner of Schekman’s caliber complains about the incentives in science, people sit up and take notice. Unfortunately for him, most responses were incredulous or derisive.