Curtains of vapor and ice miles high and hundreds of miles long might erupt from rifts on Saturn’s icy, ocean-harboring moon Enceladus, researchers say. 

In fact, most of the seemingly discrete geysers seen on Enceladus until now may have just been optical illusions of these much broader “curtain” eruptions, the scientists said in the new study.

Enceladus is Saturn’s sixth-largest moon, a 310-mile-wide (500 kilometers) satellite coated with an icy shell. Years ago, researchers had thought Enceladus was cold and geologically dead, but in 2005, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft spotted water vapor and icy particles erupting from the moon. [See Enceladus’ Curtain-like Jets in Action (Video)]

Scientists then determined that these outbursts originate from four “tiger stripes” — fractures on Enceladus’ south pole named after the cities Alexandria, Baghdad, Cairo and Damascus. These explosions are fed by a network of cracks that may carry water up from a giant subsurface ocean.

Initially, planetary scientist Joseph Spitale, of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, and his colleagues thought these eruptions were concentrated jets. But now, they’ve found that these explosions may actually be giant curtains of vapor and ice.

“A lot of things that looked like jets were optical illusions — they were really curtains,” Spitale told Space.com.

The scientists analyzed Cassini images of what they thought were jets from Enceladus in order to determine where these eruptions come from and what might cause them.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released a statement todaythat carbon dioxide levels have reached a new global level of 400 parts per million for March, even though global temperatures have not risen for nearly 19 years.  This means that for March 2015, carbon dioxide levels across the globe remained at 400 ppm* for the entire 31-day period with no increase in global mean temperatures as measured by RSS satellites.

NOAA began tracking its own carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in May 1974 concomitantly with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The first measurement of atmospheric CO2 levels was started by C. David Keeling of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in 1958 on Mauna Loa, Hawaii. Prior to that, NOAA has relied on ice core samples and sediment for earlier reconstructions of atmospheric CO2 levels. The International Energy Agency, however, reported on March 13 that global emissions from the burning of fossil fuels stalled in 2014, never rising above 2013 levels.

Temperatures on a nearby “super Earth” exoplanet varied dramatically recently, suggesting that large and very active volcanoes may exist on the alien world’s surface, a new study reports. 

Researchers using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope found that temperatures on 55 Cancri e — a planet eight times more massive than Earth that lies 40 light-years away — swung between about 1,832 to 4,892 degees Fahrenheit (1,000 to 2,700 degrees Celsius) from 2011 to 2013.

“This is the first time we’ve seen such drastic changes in light emitted from an exoplanet, which is particularly remarkable for a super Earth,” study co-author Nikku Madhusudhan, of the University of Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy in England, said in a statement. “No signature of thermal emissions or surface activity has ever been detected for any other super Earth to date.” [The Strangest Alien Planets (Gallery)]

This atmospheric variability was observed on the “day side” of 55 Cancri e, which lies so close to its host star that it completes one orbit every 18 hours. The planet is tidally locked, meaning one side always faces the star and the other always faces away.

The researchers said they aren’t sure what’s behind the huge temperature shift, but they’ve got a leading candidate in mind.

“We think a likely explanation for this variability is [that] large-scale surface activity, possibly volcanism, on the surface is spewing out massive volumes of gas and dust, which sometimes blanket the thermal emission from the planet, so it is not seen from Earth,” lead author Brice-Olivier Demory, of Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, said in the same statement.

If this interpretation is correct, volcanism on 55 Cancri e would likely be even more intense than it is on Jupiter’s moon Io, the most volcanically active body in Earth’s solar system, researchers said.

The rationale for the crop loss prediction in SSRC Press Release 2-2015 is as follows:

1. Recent trends have been affirmed the predicted shift of global climate from the past era of global warming to a new period of intense global cooling. This climate shift was also defined in detail in the December 10, 2014 Global Climate Status Report (GCSR), an SSRC publication, and the schedule for the next phase of global temperature decline in the November 20, 2014, SSRC Press Release 4-2014. 

2. The ongoing reduction in energy output from the Sun has been confirmed including: a. NASA and the Royal Observatory of Belgium verified this month (April) that the current 11-year solar cycle has recently peaked and that the second of two small peaks at the top of this cycle was the stronger of the two. Importantly, sunspot records going back to 1750 shows this stronger second sunspot peak only occurs in a long term declining period of solar activity just prior to an historic cold epoch.

Even though the overall solar cycle was weak, this strong secondary solar peak was brief, yet powerful resulting in a temporary spike in global temperatures 2014-2015. b. NASA and the broader solar physics community have acknowledged that this current solar cycle (number 24) is the weakest in 100 years, as was correctly predicted by the SSRC. See SSRC Press Release 1-1015.

It is expected to weaken further in the next two 11 year solar cycles, number 25 and 26. The SSRC believes this next cold epoch which has already begun, will last until the 2040’s and will produce the same global crop devastation as the Dalton Minimum (1793-1830). The following Figure 1, depicts the SSRC predicted decline in solar activity over the next two decades with the lowest level of sunspots and global temperatures in 2031.

The historical record of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, claimed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as the justification for greenhouse gas reduction, is a fraud.  Research by a Freiburg, Germany professor, Ernst-Georg Beck of the Merian-Schule, shows that the IPCC construed and concocted the pre-1957 CO2 record from measurements on recently drilled ice cores, ignoring more than 90,000 direct measurements by chemical methods from 1857 to 1957. [fn. 1]

The IPCC’s hoked-up record attempts to prove that CO2 concentrations have been steadily increasing with the progress of human industrial civilization. Beck’s work confirms a wealth of previous investigations which demonstrate that the IPCC cherrypicked its data in an attempt to prove that we must stop industrial development and return to the horse-and-buggy age, or face oppressive heat and melting of the polar ice caps.

It shows that the Kyoto Treaty on reduction of greenhouse gases was based on a scientific fraud which violates the laws of the universe, denying the well-established determination of climate by cyclical variations in the EarthSun orbital relationship and in the Sun’s heat output.

In a thorough review of 175 scientific papers, Professor Beck found that the founders of modern greenhouse theory, Guy Stewart Callendar and Charles David Keeling (a special idol of Al Gore’s), had completely ignored careful and systematic measurements by some of the most famous names of physical chemistry, among them several Nobel prize winners.

Measurements by these chemists showed that today’s atmospheric CO2 concentration of about 380 parts per million (ppm) have been exceeded in the past, including a period from 1936 to 1944, when the CO2 levels varied from 393.0 to 454.7 ppm.

A major inquiry has been launched into the reliability of official global surface temperature records following widespread allegations that data has been manipulated to prove that global warming is happening. 

According to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), from which the US government draws official statistics, 2014 was the hottest year globally since records began in 1880. However, Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) and the University of Alabama (UAH), both of which rely on satellite systems to gauge global temperatures, show no such warming.

NOAA gathers its data from a network of more than 3,000 weather stations known as the Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN).However, in the light of the different pictures being painted by the satellites and weather stations, analysts have examined the data and point to hundreds of examples of data from the weather stations being “adjusted”, potentially exaggerating global warming.

Writing in the Telegraph, Christopher Booker explained: “Figures from earlier decades have repeatedly been adjusted downwards and more recent data adjusted upwards, to show the Earth having warmed much more dramatically than the original data justified.”

A study published this week in the peer-reviewed journal ‘Scientific Reports’ revealed thatglobal warming is not progressing at the rate suggested by the worst-case computer models released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). 

The study, which was led by Patrick T. Brown of Duke University, examined 1,000 years of temperature records that showed global warming was not progressing as fast as it would even under the most severe emissions scenarios as outlined by the IPCC.

The study showed that “natural variability in surface temperatures, caused by interactions between the ocean and atmosphere, and other natural factors, can account for observed changes in the recent rates of warming from decade to decade.”

Using the term climate “wiggles,” the researchers note they could slow or speed the rate of warming from decade to decade, and either heighten or cancel out the effects of greenhouse gas emissions, which are believed to cause global warming. If not properly explained and accounted for, these wiggles may alter the dependability of climate modelsand lead to an “over-interpretation of short-term temperature trends.“

“By comparing our model against theirs, we found that climate models largely get the ‘big picture’ right but seem to underestimate the magnitude of natural decade-to-decade climate wiggles,” Brown said. “Our model shows these wiggles can be big enough that they could have accounted for a reasonable portion of the accelerated warming we experienced from 1975 to 2000, as well as the reduced rate in warming that occurred from 2002 to 2013.”

Patients who suffered brain damage as a result of taking a swine flu vaccine are to receive multi-million-pound payouts from the UK government. 

The government is expected to receive a bill of approximately £60 million, with each of the 60 victims expected to receive about £1 million each.

Peter Todd, a lawyer who represented many of the claimants, told the Sunday Times: “There has never been a case like this before. The victims of this vaccine have an incurable and lifelong condition and will require extensive medication.”

Following the swine flu outbreak of 2009, about 60 million people, most of them children, received the vaccine.

It was subsequently revealed that the vaccine, Pandemrix, can cause narcolepsy and cataplexy in about one in 16,000 people, and many more are expected to come forward with the symptoms.

Across Europe, more than 800 children are so far known to have been made ill by the vaccine.

Narcolepsy affects a person’s sleeping cycle, leaving them unable to sleep for more than 90 minutes at a time, and causing them to fall unconscious during the day. The condition damages mental function and memory, and can lead to hallucinations and mental illness.

In the May 2000 issue of Reason Magazine, award-winning science correspondent Ronald Bailey wrote an excellent article titled “Earth Day, Then and Now” to provide some historical perspective on the 30th anniversary of Earth Day. 

In that article, Bailey noted that around the time of the first Earth Day, and in the years following, there was a “torrent of apocalyptic predictions” and many of those predictions were featured in his Reason article. Well, it’s now the 45th anniversary of  Earth Day, and a good time to ask the question again that Bailey asked 15 years ago: How accurate were the predictions made around the time of the first Earth Day in 1970?

The answer: “The prophets of doom were not simply wrong, but spectacularly wrong,” according to Bailey. Here are 18 examples of the spectacularly wrong predictions made around 1970 when the “green holy day” (aka Earth Day) started:

1. Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”

2. “We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation,” wrote Washington University biologist Barry Commoner in the Earth Day issue of the scholarly journal Environment.

3. The day after the first Earth Day, the New York Times editorial page warned, “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.”

4. “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” Paul Ehrlich confidently declared in the April 1970 Mademoiselle. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”

On her web site, Climate Etc., Judith Curry (pictured) posted her notes on her latest presentation of what she calls the Uncertainty Monster. 

(NaturalNews) While the debate rages on about whether or not vaccines cause autism, a confidential document has surfaced that makes clear what science has led Natural News readers to believe: Yes, vaccines are linked to autism. 

The document,^[PDF] which runs over 1,000 pages, is from the fraudulent and corrupt GlaxoSmithKline. Several hundred pages in, it’s revealed that vaccines are tied to autism. It’s blatantly outlined in a chart, along with a long list of other conditions caused by vaccines, including “motor development delay,” “tremor” and “altered state of consciousness.” Autism is listed in this chart as a nervous system and mental impairment disorder associated with receiving GSK’s Infanrix hexa vaccine.⁽¹⁾

Open letter from alumni accuses University of Queensland of promoting fraudulent claims by global warming alarmists.

Academics exposed for financial conflict of interest as respected analyst, Malcolm Roberts, asserts, “John Cook and / or his employer are receiving funds in return for his deceiving the public, politicians and journalists.” 

The full letter by Malcolm Roberts to Professor Peter Høj,  Vice Chancellor and President of The University of Queensland, is published below.

Dear Professor Høj:

As an honours engineering graduate from the University of Queensland I am inquiring of you as to the reasons our university supports the work of John Cook who serially misrepresents climate and science? Specifically, why is our university wasting valuable funds to mislead the public through a free course and by producing associated international video material?

http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/queensland/uq-offers-free-course-to-combat-climate-change-deniers-20150422-1mqtic.html

Please refer to the lower half of page 4 of Appendix 5, here: http://www.climate.conscious.com.au/CSIROh!.html

It details John Cook’s fabrication of an unscientific ‘consensus’. Science is not decided by claims of consensus. Resorting to claims of consensus is unscientific and contradicts the scientific process.

Fabricating false claims of scientific consensus is not honest.

Science is decided by empirical scientific evidence. John Cook has repeatedly failed to provide any such evidence that use of hydrocarbon fuels is causing the entirely natural climate variability we experience.