Scientists working on the NOvA experiment have spotted what they say is evidence of oscillating neutrinos for the first time in the lab’s particle accelerator. 

Since February 2014, boffins have been stashing data and recording interaction of the abundant, yet elusive, subatomic particles as they interacted in the specially-built Fermilab – a 14,000-ton far detector based in Ash River, Minnesota.

“People are ecstatic to see our first observation of neutrino oscillations,” said NOvA spokesbeing Peter Shanahan of the US Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Lab.

He added: “For all the people who worked over the course of a decade on the designing, building, commissioning and operating this experiment, it’s beyond gratifying.”

The data gathered by the researchers allowed systems to be tested before the beefy detector – which stands at 50 feet tall, 50 feet wide and measures 200 feet long – was fired up in November last year.

Fermilab explained the hard science involved in the experiment:

The neutrino beam generated at Fermilab passes through an underground near detector, which measures the beam’s neutrino composition before it leaves the Fermilab site. The particles then travel more than 500 miles straight through the Earth, no tunnel required, oscillating (or changing types) along the way.

About once per second, Fermilab’s accelerator sends trillions of neutrinos to Minnesota, but the elusive neutrinos interact so rarely that only a few will register at the far detector.

That’s what a colleague from former times asked recently. You had to choose between YES or NO. Only some 20 of the 150+ former colleagues he so canvassed bothered to answer.  He might have just as well asked “Do you have a mother?”—Silly questions deserve no answer.

Planet Earth

Planet Earth’s history of “climate change” (CC) is about 4,500,000,000 yearsin the making. Why would anyone think that it stopped yesterday, last year, last decade, last century, or even a millennium ago? Do you think the rate or direction of natural CC has changed because the dinosaurs died out many million years ago? Or do you believe it was because humans arrived en masse on the scene a few thousand years ago?

Let’s look at some real drivers of climate change.

Continental Drift, Earthquakes and Volcanoes

Have the mid-oceanic ridges stopped spreading or has the North American Plate stopped pushing over the Pacific Plate (also known as Juan de Fuca Plate)? None of that.

Have earthquakes and tsunamis become a thing of the past? Not at all (remember Fukushima)!

Every year there are approximately ten thousand earthquakes of Richter scale magnitude 2 or greater being recorded and once in a while there is a major movement in the earth’s crust, often with dramatic consequences for mankind. Quakes with magnitudes 8 or 9 release an amount of energy equal to many nuclear bombs, all within a few seconds.

Some 20 to 50 volcanoes are erupting all the time, some spewing plumes of ash and gas miles high into the atmosphere, others creating new mountains or islands out of red-hot lava. A few days ago, the Manam volcano (Papua New Guinea) erupted with sending volcanic ash as high as 65,000 feet (~20,000 m) into the sky. Guess what drove the plume that high? Carbon dioxide, coming out in vast quantities from the bowels of the earth! That’s the same atmospheric trace gas that you generate by burning coal, oil, wood, or gas to heat your home in winter!

Researchers at Stanford have laid down the first atom-thick sheet of tin, and it has the potential to revolutionize electronics thanks to its unique power propagation properties. 

The material has been dubbed stanene, a contraction of the Latin word for tin “stannum” and the “ene” suffix used for 2D materials. It does for the metal what boffins have been doing for carbon and other substances for years. The goal for stanene is to build a perfect electrical transmission system without wasted heat, but the new material isn’t playing ball.

According to theoretical physics, stanene should allow electrons to travel along its edges without colliding with other electrons and atoms along the way, thus avoiding wasting energy in heat. Given this would happen at room temperature, the material could bring about vastly more efficient electronics.

“I think the work is a significant breakthrough that once again expands the 2D-material universe,” saidYuanbo Zhang, a physicist at Fudan University in Shanghai. “It’ll be exciting to see how the material lives up to its expectations.”

The Stanford team, along with four partner universities in China, vaporized a sample of tin in a vacuum and let the atoms fall on a lattice of bismuth telluride. While the resultant substance looks like stanene, it appears that the base material that it’s lying on is interfering with the electron flow.

Nevertheless, the upper surface of the stanene does look exactly like the predictions for its composition, so the team is going to try again using larger amounts of tin and a new substrate.

Mankind has gotten a really bad rep lately as environmentalists blame us for everything from blizzards to droughts to rising sea levels and the infinitesimal warming in the last 100 years. So it’s refreshing to read today that when woolly mammoths disappeared 11,000 years ago, we had little, if anything, to do with it. That’s according to a new study detailing how researchers set out to discover why these giant animals went extinct after the last glacial period.

Most theories put forth suggested their demise came from the over-eager predation and habitat intrusion of man. But these new findings showed that abrupt global warming helped kill off the woolly mammoth and that we had a small, secondary role. The study’s lead author, professor Alan Cooper, who is the director of the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA at the University of Adelaide, said “This abrupt warming had a profound impact on climate that caused marked shifts in global rainfall and vegetation patterns. Even without the presence of humans we saw mass extinctions.”

That’s because short, rapid bursts of global warming dramatically altered rainfall amounts, which in turn resulted in a dearth of vegetation that these ice age animals relied on for sustenance.

Coral reefs are a lot more resilient than previously thought. At least according to a newstudy published yesterday that showed Pacific island coral reef can grow fast enough to match rising sea levels, even with increased ocean temperatures. 

Because they grow vertically on shallow reef flats, researchers observed that Porites microatolls coral is keeping pace with current sea level rise, but may have trouble under the worst-case IPCC scenarios. The Porites microatoll, whose growth is largely lateral and limited by exposure to air, is named for its resemblance to island atolls (see picture).

Researchers at the Florida Institute of Technology, who published their study in the Royal Society Open Science, say their findings provide the first evidence that “well-managed reefs will be able to keep up with sea-level rise through vertical growth.” However, if CO2 emissions rise past 670 parts per million (ppm), which may cause ocean temperatures to increase 2.2 degrees Celsius, reefs will have a hard time keeping up with the projected sea level rise.

Currently CO2 levels worldwide are 400 ppm (.o4 percent), but once they cross the 670 ppm threshold, the corresponding rise in ocean temperatures may hamper even a healthy reefs ability to survive. “Reefs will continue to keep up with sea-level rise if we reduce our emission of greenhouse gases,” said Florida Tech’s Rob van Woesik, a professor at FIT’s Department of Biological Sciences and the study’s lead author. “If reefs lose their capacity to keep up with sea-level rise they will drown.”

The study, which focused on Palau island in the western Pacific Ocean, was also co-authored by researchers from the University of Queensland and the Palau International Coral Reef Center. Palau is an island country that is part of the larger Pacific island group of Micronesia and relies on the reef system to break apart storm waves.

Since 1936 the ‘scientific method’ has been recognised by Australian law (Subsection 73B(1) of the ITAA 1936) as: – ‘Systematic investigative and experimental activities that involve testing a hypothesis (new idea) by deductive formulation of its consequences. 

These deductions must be rigorously tested by repeatable experimentation and logical conclusions drawn from the results of the experiments. The hypothesis must be based on principles of physical, chemical, mathematical, or biological sciences’ (this would include the Second Law of Thermodynamics).

In 1972 Australian universities abandoned the procedure that had been used for award of their highest degrees in science to that time. DSc candidates were required to submit a doctoral thesis embodying an original research finding (details of a tested hypothesis). This was “peer reviewed” by two or more external scientists selected by the university as most appropriately qualified.

It was recognised that a candidate who had tested an original hypothesis may be equally or better able to interpret the results than an external reviewer. Candidates were therefore entitled to a “right of reply” to the written report or comments of the universities’ reviewers. In reply they could produce references or call on reviewers of their own selection.

University authorities were able to fairly assess the candidate’s new research finding and determine if it merited the award of their highest degree. This procedure raised standards in all scientific disciplines to which it applied but by 1974 it was abandoned by all Australian universities as too tedious and time consuming to cope with the rapidly increasing number of candidates aspiring to higher degrees.

With continuing rates of increase since 1970’s, Australian universities now resemble production-line ‘higher degree factories’!

Australian National University astronomer Professor Brian Schmidt (picture) is a Nobel Laureate for physics.  On Monday the 15th of September 2014 he appeared on the ABC national Australian television programme Q&A. 

His response to a question put to him by an eleven year old boy in the audience is a typical example of why it is very unwise to passively accept the word of an Authority. Presented here are a number of the nonsensical claims made by a Nobel Laureate on matters of cosmology and mathematics; symptomatic of just how intellectually decrepit astronomy and astrophysics have become.

1. Expanding Infinity

The question put to Professor Schmidt by eleven year old Lachlan Irvin, via his father Peter, was, “how can something as infinitely large as the universe actually get bigger?”[1]

Such a reasonable question requires a reasonable answer. Alas, it did not come. Schmidt began his reply withthe following:

“Ah, yes, this is always a problem: infinity getting bigger. So, if you think of the universe and when we measure the universe it, as near as we can tell, is very close to being infinite in size, that is we can only see 13.8 billion light years of it because that’s how old the universe is, but we’re pretty sure there’s a lot more universe beyond the part we can see, which light just simply can’t get to us. And our measurements are such that we actually think that very nearly that may go out, well, well, thousands of times beyond what we can see and perhaps an infinite distance.” [1]

FOREWORD: Cosmologists always claim that their black holes, mathematical fabrications entire, have an escape velocity. They even have an equation for it and by using this equation they assert that the ‘escape velocity’ at their black hole ‘event horizon’ is the speed of light.

This event horizon, they say, is at the ‘Schwarzschild radius’ of their black hole; and they have an equation for that too. On the other hand, the cosmologists also always assert that nothing can even leave the event horizon of their black holes. Light, they say, hovers forever at their event horizon as it tries to leave or escape the clutches of a black hole.

Thus, according to the cosmologists, their black holes have and do not have an escape velocity simultaneously at the same place. However, nothing can in fact have and not have an escape velocity simultaneously at the same place. This schizophrenic character of the black hole is sufficient to completely invalidate it.

But there is more. Escape velocity is a two body relation – one body escapes from another body. The black hole is, by its supposed mathematical construction, a one mass universe. Consequently the very concept of escape velocity does not even apply. Obviously, no cosmologist understands the meaning of escape velocity.

A soft-bodied, fernlike creature reproduced in Earth’s ancient oceans about 565 million years ago, making it the earliest known example of procreation in a complex organism, a new study finds. 

Many scientists consider the creatures, called rangeomorphs, some of Earth’s first complex animals, although it’s impossible to know exactly what these organisms were, the researchers said. The creatures prospered in the ocean during the late Ediacaran period, between 580 million and 541 million years ago, just before the Cambrian era. Rangeomorphs could grow up to 6.5 feet (2 meters) in length, but most were about 4 inches (10 centimeters) long.

What’s more, rangeomorphs don’t appear to have been equipped with mouths, organs or the ability to move around, and the animals likely absorbed nutrients from the water, the researchers said. However, these ancient organisms had an unusually complex reproductive strategy for their time: They likely sent out an “advance party” to settle a new neighborhood, and then colonized the new area, the researchers said. [See Photos of Ancient ‘Baby’ Rangeomorphs Preserved in Ash]

The findings may help scientists understand the origins of modern marine life, they said.

“Rangeomorphs don’t look like anything else in the fossil record, which is why they’re such a mystery,” study lead author Emily Mitchell, a postdoctoral researcher in the University of Cambridge’s department of earth sciences, said in a statement. “But we’ve developed a whole new way of looking at them, which has helped us understand them a lot better — most interestingly, how they reproduced.”

Mitchell and her colleagues looked at fossils of a rangeomorph known as a Fractofusus found inNewfoundland, in southeastern Canada. Like other rangeomorphs, Fractofusus was immobile, and so its fossils capture exactly where the creatures lived in relation to one another during the Ediacaran period.

Can climate experts truly understand Earth’s climate without factoring in the role of thermodynamics? Experts in the laws of thermodyamics are increasingly saying that they can’t, as all predictions of human-caused catastrophic climate change fail. 

Summary. Climate scientists promoting greenhouse gas theories usually omit or dismiss consideration of thermodynamics and rely on empirical models and observed data to assess the effect of anthropogenic CO2 (carbon dioxide) from combustion of ‘fossil fuels’ on the global and surface temperatures of the Earth.

This article shows the deep foundation thermodynamics provides for the way the atmosphere behaves and quantifies why, how, and how much CO2 affects temperature.  This cannot be done without thermodynamics.

Article identifies two conservation equations , eight rate laws and two physical properties affected by CO2 that constitute a nonlinear algebraic model of the steady-state effect of CO2 on T. The first six relations come directly from thermodynamics.

Turns out there are several affects, one positive and at least two negative. The climate sensitivity, CS = change in temperature for doubling of atmospheric CO2 from 400 ppmv in 2014 to 800 is not much, vanishingly small, probably between -1C < CS < 0.8C. Replacing US coal fired power plants with natural gas probably changes Earth’s temperature after 50 years between -0.000001C < T₅₀ – T₀ < +0.0000008C.

Introduction. The science of thermodynamics is central to the practice of engineering; mechanical, electrical, aeronautical and particularly chemical. We hold thermo in reverence because we know we must obey the law and we earn our livings applying it.

 “If your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.” — Arthur Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1928) [3]

“The fascination of a growing science lies in the work of the pioneers at the very borderland of the unknown, but to reach this frontier one must pass over well-traveled roads; of these one of the safest and surest is the broad highway of thermodynamics.” — Gilbert Lewis and Merle Randall, Thermodynamics and the Free Energy of Chemical Substances (1923) [2]

“A theory is the more impressive the greater the simplicity of its premises, the more different kinds of things it relates, and the more extended its area of applicability. Therefore the deep impression that classical thermodynamics made upon me. It is the only physical theory of universal content which I am convinced will never be overthrown, within the framework of applicability of its basic concepts.” — Albert Einstein, Autobiographical Notes (c. 1940s) [4]

“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” — Max Planck, on how Boltzmann‘s statistical thermodynamics and atomic hypothesis triumphed over those as Ernst Mach and others of the energetics school (c. 1947) [18]

“In whatever system where the weight attached to the wheel should be the cause of motion of the wheel, without any doubt the center of the gravity of the weight will stop beneath the center of its axle. No instrument devised by human ingenuity, which turns with its wheel, can remedy this effect. Oh, speculators about perpetual motion, how many vain chimeras have you created in the like quest. Go and take you place with the seekers after gold.” — Leonardo da Vinci (1494) [32]

“The future belongs to those who can manipulate entropy; those who understand but energy will be only accountants.” — Frederic Keffer [24]

New study shows climate scientists have previously under-estimated the major cooling role forests play in regulating climate. Forests cover over 21{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of the Earth’s surface. Scientists say their global regulation of surface temperature highlights the important role of forests in local, regional and global climate. 

The new paper [1] published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, shows that the transpiration of forest ecosystems through the growing season dissipates more energy and lowers the Bowen ratio. In other words, this study reinforces the need for government climate researchers to include land use and land cover change when seeking to calculate human impact on the global energy balance.

Global warming alarmists have suggested that the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica may collapse, causing disastrous sea level rise. This idea is based on the concept of an ice sheet sliding down an inclined plane on a base lubricated by meltwater, which is itself increasing because of global warming.

In reality the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets occupy deep basins, and cannot slide down a plane. Furthermore glacial flow depends on stress (including the important yield stress) as well as temperature, and much of the ice sheets are well below melting point. 

The accumulation of kilometres of undisturbed ice in cores in Greenland and Antarctica (the same ones that are sometimes used to fuel ideas of global warming) show hundreds of thousands of years of accumulation with no melting or flow. Except around the edges, ice sheets flow at the base, and depend on geothermal heat, not the climate at the surface. It is impossible for the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets to ‘collapse’.

In these days of alarmist warnings about climate warming, the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica have an important role. Many papers have described their melting at the present times, and dire predictions of many metres of sea level rise are common. Christoffersen and Hambrey published a typical paper on the Greenland ice sheet in Geology Today in May, 2006.

Their model, unfortunately, includes neither the main form of the Greenland Ice Sheet, nor an understanding of how glaciers flow. They predict the behaviour of the Ice Sheet based on melting and accumulation rates at the present day, and the concept of an ice sheet sliding down an inclined plane on a base lubricated by meltwater, which is itself increasing because of global warming.

The same misconception is present in textbooks such as The Great Ice Age (2000) by R.C.L. Wilson and others, popular magazines such as the June 2007 issue of National Geographic, and other scientific articles such as Bamber et al. (2007), which can be regarded as a typical modelling contribution. The idea of a glacier sliding downhill on a base lubricated by meltwater seemed a good idea when first presented by de Saussure in 1779, but a lot has been learned since then.

In the present paper we shall try to show how the mechanism of glacier flow differs from this simple model, and why it is impossible for the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets to collapse. To understand the relationship between global warming and the breakdown of ice sheets it is necessary to know how ice sheets really work.

This article makes two significant points: – 1) The IPCC definition of “Greenhouse Effect” on page 946 of their Report No. 4, 2007, is wrong and no “Greenhouse Effect” is possible from the way IPCC define it. 2) Radiant energy reaching the Earth from the Sun is the only source of heat to maintain or vary global climate. Total radiant heat gained must establish equilibrium with total radiant heat lost.

As in the past, global climate change can only be due to longer or shorter-term variations in solar radiation.

The erroneous IPCC definition

Readers are invited to consider a fundamental error in physics in the IPCC Report No. 4, 2007.

The definition of ‘Greenhouse Effect’ on page 946 contains an erroneous statement that would invalidate the premise on which most of the report is based.

We should have particular regard to the IPCC sentences that state: “Atmospheric radiation is emitted to all sides, including downward to the Earth’s surface. Thus, greenhouse gases trap heat within the surface-troposphere system.”

The definition then goes on to explain that the temperature of the Earth’s atmosphere decreases with height and the infrared radiation emitted to space originates from high altitude where the average temperature is -19°C in balance with the net incoming solar radiation.

The enveloping atmosphere keeps the Earth’s surface at a much higher temperature as IPCC says averaging +14°C so there is a temperature gradient all the way up to the limits of our gaseous atmosphere with, on average, all higher parts of the column of air being at lower temperature than those below it.

This gradient is measured thousands of times each day as our aeroplanes climb to high altitude but of course the main transfer of heat to the upper atmosphere is by convection. This is quite violent at times with typhoons, hurricanes, or tropical thunderstorms each afternoon.

Nevertheless, total radiant heat outward from the whole Earth must remain in equilibrium with the radiant heat inward from the Sun. The IPCC definition (below) claims that ‘Greenhouse gases’ (CO2, methane, water vapour, etc.) absorb thermal infrared radiation emitted by the Earth’s surface and by the atmosphere itself due to the same gases.

In 1988, climate scientist James Hansen announcedto a select committee in Congress that over the next ten years, temperatures would increase .35 degrees Celsius. The actual increase was .11 degrees.  Hansen (pictured being arrested) overestimated his findings by 300 percent. Now Hansen has a new study coming out this week in the journal Atmospheric Physics and Chemistry warning that humanity could face a “sea level rise of several meters by the end of the century.” That’s a ten-foot-rise of sea levels, over 300 percent higher than what the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has predicted.

In fact, the IPCC conservatively estimates that if temperatures increase 2 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, we may see a three-foot-rise in sea levels. However, as an April 2015 study published in the peer-reviewed journal Scientific Reports 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 indicated that climate models underestimate the magnitude of natural decade-to-decade climate variability, which leads to an “over-interpretation of short-term temperature trends.”

Hansen’s new study, which was previewed by the Daily Beast today, says that the IPCC’scomputer models are underestimating the sensitivity of ice sheets to rising temperatures. Hansen et al combined “ancient paleo-climate data with new satellite readings” and a new and improved computer model of the climate system to demonstrate that “ice sheets can melt in a matter of decades,” and not millenia. Sea level rise has been occurring at roughly the same rate since about 10,000 years ago.

If all this doom and gloom sounds a lot like the climatastrophe flick The Day After Tomorrow, you wouldn’t be too far off the mark. Much of that movie was based on research done by Hansen and incorporated into Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth. “Parts of [our coastal cities] would still be sticking above the water,” Hansen told the Daily Beast, “but you couldn’t live there.” He also believes that averting warming by only 2 degrees Celsius by 2100 would create a “highly dangerous” future.

In the past decades we have been overwhelmed by books on Global Warming and its successor Climate Change. We have also been exposed to a large (though much smaller) number of books that take a skeptical view of these issues.