In an article published in The Guardian on November 7th, the RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds) is quoted saying that since 1980, across 25 European countries, house sparrow numbers have declined by 147 million, a 62{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} drop to 90 million.  According to the same report, starlings have fallen by 45 million, down to 40 million. As for Skylarks, their population went down by 37 million, to 43 million today. Says the author of the article, “It’s principally agricultural intensification that is behind the crisis.” (1)

Populations ranging from 40 to 90 million birds, for the most common of passerine species, are surprisingly small, spread as they are over 25 countries. Thus, if the researchers quoted by the RSPB are correct in their estimates, we are entitled to conclude that wind turbines and their power lines will have a significant impact on the number of all passerines flying our skies, eating our insects etc. Indeed, we know for instance that, in Spain alone, wind turbines kill 6 to 18 million birds and bats a year (2). Supposing that Europe has about 5 times as many wind turbines as Spain, the death toll for Europe would be 30 to 90 million birds and bats per annum – i.e. roughly 10 to 30 million birds a year, given that bats are attracted to wind turbines and killed about twice as often as birds. Comparing the numbers, and all things being equal, it is obvious that bird populations will erode further on account of wind farms, much faster than previously thought.

But no mention is made of this in the article. It’s not surprising, as both the RSPB and The Guardian are promoting the installation of ever more wind farms across Europe.

If I drive my car to my local Supermarket and back, a distance of 5 miles, the engine gets hot. Why is that? Because of work done.  To be more specific the engine has got hot by reason of compression, combustion and friction all of which are forms of work that produce an increase of temperature. This illustrates very simply the First Law of Thermodynamics.

If you were to put your hand on that hot engine – well, please don’t – it would also illustrate what is meant by thermal contact. Your hand would be scorched. As it is the air surrounding the engine is warmed.

If I leave my car to stand say overnight in my driveway, what will happen? The engine will cool down, without any work. I do not have to cool my engine because everything under the Sun will cool down naturally and inevitably by the 2^nd Law of Thermodynamics. Even red-hot lava will cool to black basalt.

If I make a hot cup of coffee with boiling water at 100ºC the coffee will also cool by itself. If I wish to keep the coffee hot I can put it in a thermos flask. This will delay heat loss, but after 24 hours the coffee will be tepid. The coffee may be trapped, but heat is never trapped.

The Sun does not send heat through space but Solar Radiation. This radiation produces heat on contact with the surfaces of this planet, and the atmosphere is warmed from the bottom up – which explains why there is snow on the tops of mountains. The atmosphere cools by 2ºC for every 1,000 feet of altitude.

Clouds and Water Vapour, Carbon Dioxide and Methane all conspire to keep the Planet cool during the day, and also warmer during the night, by delaying (not trapping) heat. Thick cloud, fog and mist clearly intercept the Sun’s rays in the daytime. Only when the Sun breaks through is there a sudden rise in temperature.

Carbon Dioxide is a clear colourless gas, whose bubbles one can see in every carbonated drink – not to be confused with smoke. Carbon Dioxide is a food for plants – it is their breakfast, lunch and dinner. More Carbon Dioxide will lead to a greener world and increased food production. Plants not only feed off Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere but all produce Oxygen for us humans and all the animal kingdom to breathe. 

The deadly malaria parasite, a protozoan named Plasmodium, rides inside the bellies of mosquitoes to get from human to human. While some scientists have proposed using genetically engineered or sperm-free mosquitoes to fight malaria, a new method aims straight for the stomach: Researchers have found that feeding mosquitoes bacteria inoculates the insects against Plasmodium. And if the mosquitoes can’t carry the malaria parasite, they can’t accidentally pass it on to the humans they bite.

In a study published last week in PLOS Pathogens, scientists introduced a bacteria called Chromobacterium Csp_P to a population of malaria- and dengue-infected mosquitoes. They found that in addition to wiping out a substantial chunk of the mosquitoes, it killed thePlasmodium pathogens in the stomachs of the survivors. They believe Chromobacterium-spiked traps could infect wild mosquitoes, effectively vaccinating them against malaria. Ideally, short-lived mosquitoes will contract Chromobacterium before they reach humans.

The Johns Hopkins team thinks the Chromobacterium fights Plasmodium in two ways. First, it activates mosquitoes’ immune systems, which then destroy the malaria parasites as collateral damage. But Chromobacterium also kills Plasmodium and the dengue virus in laboratory cultures. This means it probably pumps out a slurry of chemicals that attack Plasmodium directly. The scientists speculate that these toxins might one day be used to fight malaria in people.

Just when you thought that your next trip to a holiday resort was going to “the Moon” the news is discouraging. 

Not only did the latest supply rocket to the International Space Station blow up shortly after lift-off, now the Virgin Galactic spaceship suffered the same fate—poor Sir Richard Branson—with a few million bucks gone sour and the new era of “affordable”($250,000, no carry-on luggage) space travel will have to be postponed. The more than 800 people who have already paid or put down deposits for a trip on SpaceshipTwo will have to wait a while longer.

From Here to There

Ever since the Russian space capsule Sputnik graced the earth’s firmament, interplanetary and intergalactic travel has been the stuff of many futuristic desires.

When President John F. Kennedy gave his “Moon speech” on May 25, 1961 and uttered the words “First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the earth, “everyone was awestruck.

Despite a mountain of technological and material-science challenges, Kennedy’s vision was achieved with the Apollo 11 mission in 1969 when Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon. Since then the last manned landing there was achieved by Apollo 17, in 1972‚  more than 40 years ago. You might wonder why were there no more manned missions since then?

Respected Canadian scientist and author, Dr Klaus L E Kaiser posts a scathing condemnation of misinformation promoted by a pro-green, anti-industrial opinion piece in Canadian Chemical News (ACCN). 

On October 23, 2014, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Office of Pesticide Programs has published a list of 72 chemicals it proposes to remove from the “Approved Pesticide Inert Ingredient List” (docket # EPA-HQ-OPP-2014-0558) and comments are accepted till Nov. 21, 2014. 

NASA scientists witnessed another major solar flare on the Sun on Friday – the fourth such activity in the past week erupting from the biggest sunspot in nearly 25 years. 

This particular flare was classified an X3.1, meaning it was pretty damn intense. The latest powerful burst erupted from a particularly large active region on the sun that scientists have labelled AR 12192. That sunspot represents the most substantial activity on the fiery object at the centre of our Solar System in 24 years.

NASA explained:

Harmful radiation from a flare cannot pass through Earth’s atmosphere to physically affect humans on the ground, however – when intense enough – they can disturb the atmosphere in the layer where GPS and communications signals travel.

Any flare classified as X-class is serious business, but this one pales in significance compared with an X28 flare measured in 2003 during the Sun’s last solar maximum period.

“The biggest X-class flares are by far the largest explosions in the solar system and are awesome to watch. Loops tens of times the size of Earth leap up off the sun’s surface when the sun’s magnetic fields cross over each other and reconnect. In the biggest events, this reconnection process can produce as much energy as a billion hydrogen bombs,” NASA said.

“If they’re directed at Earth, such flares and associated CMEs [coronal mass ejections] can create long lasting radiation storms that can harm satellites, communications systems, and even ground-based technologies and power grids.”

The latest solar flare led to an hour-long radio blackout being reported by the US space agency’s weather prediction centre. 

New images from NASA have captured the beautiful golden [liquid methane] reflection of the sun on the polar sea of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. It is the latest image from a collaborative four year mission studying the Saturnine system. [Editor’s note: Fossil fuel theory busted?]

Flying by Titan in August, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft snapped the photo, which shows sunlight reflecting off Titan’s swirling surface. In the past, the spacecraft has captured separate images of the polar seas and the sun shining against them, but this is the first time both have been see together in one view, the agency stated.

The mirror-like reflection, known as the specular point, is in the south of Titan’s largest sea, Kraken Mare – just north of an island archipelago separating two separate parts of the sea. To the human eye, this would appear as a haze but through Cassini’s Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS), “real color information” is provided in wavelengths that correspond to atmospheric windows, making the moon’s surface visible.

“The highest resolution data from this flyby — the area seen immediately to the right of the sunlight — cover the labyrinth of channels that connect Kraken Mare to another large sea, Ligeia Mare. Ligeia Mare itself is partially covered in its northern reaches by a bright, arrow-shaped complex of clouds. The clouds are made of liquid methane droplets, and could be actively refilling the lakes with rainfall,” stated NASA.

Back when Wisconsin and western Russia once shared an address south of the equator, a violent collision in the asteroid belt blasted Earth with meteorites.

The space rock smashup showered Earth with up to 100 times more meteorites than today’s rate (a rock the size of a football field hits the planet about every 10,000 years). Yet, only a dozen or so impact craters have been found from the ancient bombardment 470 million years ago, during the Ordovician Period. Most are in North America, Sweden and western Russia. There are only about 185 known impact craters on Earth of any age, while the moon has more than 100,000.

But the number of Ordovician craters may soon take off. That’s because it’s easier and cheaper than ever to hunt down evidence that confirms an impact. The clinchers include shocked minerals, deformed rocks and structural features that match other craters. [Crash! 10 Biggest Impact Craters on Earth]

“Google Earth images are not good enough to identify an impact structure,” noted planetary geologist Christian Köeberl on Oct. 22, at the Geological Society of America’s annual meeting in Vancouver, British Columbia. During the Vancouver meeting, researchers presented new clues that bring suspected craters in Wisconsin, Kentucky and Tennessee closer to official listings as Ordovician impact craters.

Focus on stopping global warming and extreme weather is unscientific and immoral. Ottawa, Canada, November 2, 2014: “IPCC Chairman Dr. Rajendra Pachauri was right to advocate “a global agreement to finally reverse course on climate change” when he spoke to delegates tasked with approving the IPCC Synthesis Report, released today,” said Tom Harris, executive director of the Ottawa, Canada-based International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC).

“The new direction governments should follow must be one in which the known needs of people suffering today are given priority over problems that might someday be faced by those yet to be born.”
 
“Yet, exactly the opposite is happening,” continued Harris. “Of the roughly one billion U.S. dollars spent every day across the world on climate finance, only 6{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of it is devoted to helping people adapt to climate change in the present. The rest is wasted trying to stop improbable future climatic events. That is immoral.”

For those of us who love our national parks and are confronted daily with media, politicians, and pundits warning us of a coming global-warming disaster, it’s only natural to ask what that warming will mean for our national parks.  This is exactly what the well-known Union of Concerned Scientists discuss in their recent report, National Landmarks at Risk: How Rising Seas, Floods, and Wildfires Are Threatening the United States’ Most Cherished Historic Sites.

I’ve done research since 1968 on the possibility of human-caused global warming and its possible ecological effects, and have published widely on this topic, discussing possible effects on biodiversity and on specific endangered species as well as on forests, cities, and historical evidence of Arctic sea ice change. I’ve also been involved in the development of some aspects of some climate models, and having developed a computer model of forests that is one of the principal methods used to forecast global warming effects on vegetation, I sought out the UCS report with great interest.

The aurora borealis – otherwise known as the northern lights – is a vivid demonstration of the Earth’s magnetic field interacting with charged particles from the sun. It’s also beautiful, and worth braving a cold night out when visiting the high northern (or southern) latitudes. 

Auroras are centered on the Earth’s magnetic poles, visible in a roughly circular region around them. Since the magnetic and geographic poles aren’t the same, sometimes the auroras are visible farther south than one might expect, while in other places it’s farther north. [Aurora Photos: Northern Lights Dazzle in Night-Sky Images]

In the Northern Hemisphere, the auroral zone runs along the northern coast of Siberia, Scandinavia, Iceland, the southern tip of Greenland and northern Canada and Alaska. Auroras are visible south of the zone, but they are less likely to occur the farther away you go. The Southern Hemisphere auroral zone is mostly over Antarctica, or the Southern Ocean. To see the southern lights (or aurora australis), you have to go to Tasmania, and there are occasional sightings in southern Argentina or the Falklands – but those are rare.

Wind power is too variable and too unpredictable to provide a serious alternative to fossil fuels, a new study by the Scientific Alliance and the Adam Smith Institute has confirmed. The researchers concluded that, although it is true that the wind is always blowing somewhere, the base line is only around 2 percent of capacity, assuming a network capacity of 10GW. 

The majority of the time, wind will only deliver 8 percent of total capacity in the system, whilst the chances of the wind network running at full capacity is “vanishingly small”. As a consequence, fossil fuel plants capable of delivering the same amount of energy will always be required as backup.

The report was undertaken by the Scientific Alliance and the Adam Smith Institute. Using data on wind speed and direction gathered hourly from 22 sites around the UK over the last nine years, the researchers were able to build a comprehensive picture of how much the wind blows in the UK, where it blows, and how variable it is.

They found that, contrary to popular opinion, variability was a significant factor as “swings of around 10 percent are normal” across the whole system within 30 – 90 minute timeframes. “This observation contradicts the claim that a widespread wind fleet installation will smooth variability,” the authors write.

Likewise, and again contrary to popular assumptions, wind does not follow daily or even seasonal outputs. There were long periods in which the wind was not blowing even in winter, making it difficult to match generation of wind power to demand. The report concludes that covering these low periods would either need 15 storage plants the size of Dinorwig (a pumped storage hydroelectric power station in Wales with a 1.7GW capacity), or preserving and renewing our fossil plants as a reserve.

Most significantly, it found that the system would be only running at 90 percent of capacity or higher for 17 hours a year, and at 80 percent or higher for less than one week a year; conversely, total output was at less than 20 percent of capacity for 20 weeks of the year, and below 10 percent during nine weeks a year.

Here is why carbon is my favorite atom. It is quite beautiful really; once you learn to behold and appreciate it. I cover chemistry, physics, politics and common sense. 

Chemistry Lesson.

With over 100 elements in the periodic table of atoms, why is one so special that it has its own branch of chemistry? Chemistry is divided into two main branches: organic and inorganic. Organic chemistry is the science of molecules with carbon. Inorganic is the chemistry of molecules of all the other elements. Yet organic chemistry is much larger and more complicated, interesting and useful than inorganic chemistry. There are many more different organic molecules than inorganic ones. Organic chemistry is the science of life and medicine. Carbon is one of the few elements known since antiquity.

Organic chemistry has many sub-branches: petroleum, coal, petrochemical, polymer, textile, rubber, agricultural, biochemical, pharmaceutical, paper, perfume, cosmetics, food, nanotech, diamond. Discovery of DNA by Crick & Watson is one of the greatest discoveries of mankind. Major areas of study are: chemical bonds, molecular structure, reaction rates, catalysis, acid-base, stereochemistry, alkanes (linear & cyclic), alkenes & alkynes, aromatics, combustion, polymers, alkyl halides, substitution/elimination/addition reactions, alcohols & ethers, aldehydes & ketones, acids & esters, amines/Imines/nitriles, nitrates/amino acids/amides, conjugation & Diels-Alder, sugars/starches/carbohydrates, DNA & nucleic acids, amino acids/peptides/proteins, blood, metals, Fullerenes, spectroscopy, chromatography, polarimetry, nuclear magnetic resonance, purification by crystallization, distillation, extraction, absorption.

The debate about man-made climate change is finished – because it has been categorically proved NOT to exist, one of the world’s leading meteorologists has claimed.