Killed more than 500,000 people.

Andrew McKillop has a new article posted at The Market Oracle. Here are some excerpts.

This is the global cooling fear

Intense flooding in the low countries of Europe became “darkly repetitive” during the Little Ice Age, writes McKillop. The cooling period  lasted 450 years,

For the Dutch, the Grote Mandrenke is nothing to do with Linux software, but means “The Great Drowning” and is named for the epic and massive flooding that occurred, more and more frequently in the Low Countries of Europe’s North Sea region as Europe’s Little Ice Age intensified.

Recent posts have stressed the complexity of climates and their component variables. However, global warming was invented on the back of a single metric: rising global mean temperatures the last decades of last century. That was de-emphasized during the “pause” but re-emerged lately with the El-Nino-induced warming. So this post is focusing on that narrow aspect of climate change.

There are several papers on this blog referring to a quasi-60 year oscillation of surface temperatures due to oceanic circulations. I have also noted the attempts by many to make the link between solar activity (SA) and earth climate patterns.

Dan Pangburn is a professional engineer who has synthesized the solar and oceanic factors into a mathematical model that correlates with Average Global Temperature (AGT). On his blog is posted a monograph (here) Cause of Global Climate Change explaining clearly his thinking and the maths.  I am providing some excerpts and graphs as a synopsis of his analysis, in hopes others will also access and appreciate his work on this issue.

The deep, dark ocean bottom teems with far more oases of life than once thought.

Searching along the sunless seafloor where tectonic plates pull apart, regions known as spreading ridges, researchers discovered that heat-spewing hydrothermal vents are at least three to six times as abundant as previously assumed. The finding also significantly boosts the likely number of marine ecosystems huddled around vents, the researchers report in the Sept. 1 Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

The Rev. Thomas Bayes was, as the honorific the Rev. suggests, a clergyman. Too bad he wasn’t a lawyer. Maybe if he had been, lawyers today wouldn’t be so reluctant to enlist his mathematical insights in the pursuit of justice.

In many sorts of court cases, from whether talcum powder causes ovarian cancer to The People v. O.J. Simpson, statistics play (or ought to play) a vital role in evaluating the evidence. Sometimes the evidence itself is statistical, as with the odds of a DNA match or the strength of a scientific research finding. Even more often the key question is how evidence should be added up to assess the probability of guilt. In either circumstance, the statistical methods devised by Bayes are often the only reasonable way of drawing an intelligent conclusion.

On some planets that orbit whirling stars, spring and autumn might be the best time to hit the beach, whereas summer offers a midyear respite from sweltering heat. These worlds’ orbits can take them over regions of their sun that radiate wildly different amounts of heat. 

“Seasons on a planet like this must be really strange,” says Jonathon Ahlers, a graduate student at the University of Idaho in Moscow, who presented his findings June 15 at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

In a post over at Peter Guest’s blog, Michael “Hockey Stick” Mann is quoted making one of the most remarkable statements that I’ve ever heard coming out of a supposed scientist’s mouth:

Proof is for mathematical theorems and alcoholic beverages. It’s not for science.

He goes on to explain that science is all about “credible theories” and “best explanations” and his gosh-darn critics supposedly don’t offer up any of those.

Now it seems pretty obvious that Mann’s attempt to separate proof from science stems from increasing public awareness that the warming predicted by the high-sensitivity models that Mann and others have championed just hasn’t occurred over the last fifteen years. No matter. You don’t need “proof” when you have “credible theories.”

Intensive physical exercise four hours after learning is the key to remembering information learnt, say Dutch researchers.

Exercise is known to release proteins that can boost the part of the brain related to memory, and this study suggests the timing of it is crucial.

The study, in Current Biology, tested 72 people on their memory recall.

And it found exercising a few hours after learning was more effective than immediately afterwards.

Al Gore even made some hardened liberal journalists sit up and question when in 2007 he told a joint session of the House Energy Committee and The Senate Environment Committee that the climate debate was over, “the science was settled”. The journalists knew, as any moderately informed person does, that science is never settled. But, what does “settled” mean in this context? The most reasonable definition is linked directly to a simple definition of science, namely the ability to predict. If you can’t predict then your science is wrong, as Feynman and others made clear.

Failed predictions prove that the science isn’t settled. Gore and the supporters of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) version of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) claim the science is settled, but their climate predictions (projections) are consistently wrong. The problem is wider because the weather predictions of national weather agencies who are, through the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) the IPCC, don’t work either.

The climate is the average weather, which raises the question; when does weather become climate? Since climate is an average of the weather, the average temperature for a 24-hour period is the climate of the day. If the science is settled, then the weather forecasts should also be accurate, but they are still increasingly unreliable beyond 48 hours. One use of the millions of weather data points created for my doctoral thesis was by a statistician, Alexander Basilevsky. He was working on Markov Chains defined as follows:

John Casey, a former space shuttle engineer and NASA consultant, is out with the provocative book Dark Winter: How the Sun Is Causing a 30-Year Cold Spell, which warns that a radical shift in global climate is underway, and that Al Gore and other environmentalists have it completely wrong. The earth, he says, is cooling, and cooling fast.

First I must credit Joseph Postma for alerting me to the existence of Horace’s (easier to write than de Saussure) hot box.  For May 31, 2016 he posted an article—The Radiative Greenhouse Effect & Ontological Mathematics—on his website—Climate of Sophistry.  Horace’s hot box was the focus of this article.  

So having no knowledge of Horace’s hot box I went to the internet and found: “He [Horace] had constructed the first known Western solar oven in 1767, trying several designs before determining that a well-insulated box with three layers of glass to trap outgoing thermal radiation created the … highest temperature—230 °F.” (Wikipedia)   

At http://solarcooking.org/saussure.htm I read:  “the increased use of glass during the eighteenth century made many people aware of its ability to trap solar heat. as Horace de Saussure, one of Europe’s foremost naturalists of the period, observed: “it is a known fact, and a fact that has probably been known for a long time, that a room, a carriage, or any other place is hotter when the rays of the sun pass through glass.”

Ocean experts have called for international action to generate the kinds of maps of global seabeds that space missions have already returned for the Moon and Mars.

The call to “map the gaps” comes from GEBCO, the General Bathymetric Chart of the Ocean, a body first set up in 1903 to compile maps from naval surveys around the world.

But more than a century on from the first international charts, vast expanses of the ocean are still represented by just a single point where an ancient mariner threw a lead-weighted rope over the ship side.

A paper recently published attempts to measure the relationship between ice accumulation and temperature in Antarctica for the last 31000 years.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2016GL068356/full

Night-time vision evolved millions of years ago in early mammals, a study suggests.

The photoreceptors that help us see in dim light developed from colour-detecting cone cells in Jurassic mammals, according to genetic evidence.

The evolution of night-time vision is regarded as a landmark event in the rise of mammals.

A nocturnal lifestyle allowed the first of their kind to avoid predatory dinosaurs, say scientists.

Co-researcher Dr William Ted Allison of the University of Alberta, Canada, said the development of night vision was a “critical step” in the dominance of mammals.

Hardly a month or even a week goes by without a new study.

The most recent of these climate drivers brought to my attention was brought to light in a study in Nature Communications.coming out examining another natural factor scientists have found that provably affects temperature or climate — a factor neither the climate models, nor the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have or, perhaps even can, account for.

In it, researchers at the Australian National University Research School of Earth Sciences measured trace elements and stable isotopes in stalagmites from the Indonesian island of Flores, comparing ancient rainfall patterns to records from East Asia and the central-eastern equatorial Pacific. They found alternating multi-century-long El Niño/La Niña-like patterns have affected global climate for at least the past 2,000 years. Climate models do not reproduce those patterns.

The primary source of warmth for the Earth is radiant energy provided by our Sun. Just as the Sun radiates energy into space, the Earth, being warmer than space, also radiates energy out into space. Most of the energy it radiates into space is in the form of infra-red radiation, though light is a contributor as well. The Earth will radiate about the same amount of energy into space as it receives from the Sun on average. The Earth is often called a black body radiator, though this is not technically correct.

The energy equilibrium with the Sun ignores some heat from the Earth’s core, energy due to the Earth’s magnetic field interactions with the magnetic field of the Sun, gravitational tide effects due to the moon, or energy due to material from space entering our atmosphere at high speeds. It is commonly claimed by those who advocate catastrophic global warming due to man’s emissions of carbon dioxide that the total greenhouse gas effect is a warming of the Earth’s surface by about 33ºC.

They say this warming is caused by the infra-red (IR) radiation absorbing gases of water vapor, carbon dioxide, and methane in the atmosphere. These gases are said to cause the Earth to retain and even multiply the energy it receives from the Sun, so that the Earth’s surface is warmer than it would otherwise be. Of these gases, water vapor is much the most important, but carbon dioxide is said to have a large enough effect that man’s additions to the concentrations in the atmosphere will do serious harm to the Earth’s flora and fauna, as well as man himself.

‘Cargo Cult Science’ was the title of the commencement address delivered by Richard Feynman to the graduates of Caltech in 1974.  The following are excerpts from an edited version of this address as published in his book titled “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!” 

“I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are examples of what I would like to call cargo cult science.  In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people.  During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now.  So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones, and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land.  They’re doing everything right.  The form is perfect.  It looks exactly the way it looked before.  But it doesn’t work.  No airplanes land.”  …