Rajiv Singh started thinking about how to do his part to fight global warming 15 years ago. Dr. Singh, a scientist at Honeywell’s lab in Buffalo, began running computer models of tens of thousands of molecular combinations. He was seeking a better refrigerant, one of the most vexing chemicals for the environment.

Refrigerants cool homes, cars and buildings but also warm the planet at a far higher rate than carbon dioxide. Dr. Singh was searching for one stable enough to be useful but that degraded quickly so it did not linger to trap heat in the atmosphere. 

“You have to hit the chemistry books,” he said in a recent interview.

One of the most detailed genomic studies of any ecosystem to date has revealed an underground world of stunning microbial diversity, and added dozens of new branches to the tree of life. The bacterial bonanza comes from scientists who reconstructed the genomes of more than 2,500 microbes from sediment and groundwater samples collected at an aquifer in Colorado.

Stunning diversity, visualized. All the known major bacterial groups are represented by wedges in this circular “tree of life.” The bigger wedges are more diverse groups. Green wedges are groups that have not been genomically sampled at the Rifle site–everything else has. Black wedges are previously identified bacteria groups that have also been found at Rifle. Purple wedges are groups discovered at Rifle and announced last year. Red wedges are new groups discovered in this study. Colored dots represent important metabolic processes the new groups help mediate.

Tracking atmospheric particles in a pristine environment will help scientists understand the impact of industrial aerosols on climate, say researchers at conclusion of a study on Amazonian rainstorms.

Scanning the pristine skies above the Amazon rainforest revealed that small aerosol particles that form naturally in the upper atmosphere are carried to the lower atmosphere by rapid downdrafts associated with rainfall.

There, volatile organic compounds (VOCs) emitted by trees react with oxidants, and the oxidation products condense on the small particles and make them grow into the “nuclei” around which clouds form. Studying this process in a clean environment will help scientists improve their understanding of the effects of industrial era emissions on climate.

[Image Credit: Luiz. A. T. Machado, National Institute for Space Research, São José dos Campos, São Paulo, Brazil]

Blackgram is a popular bean grown primarily in southern Asia on the Indian subcontinent. It is a fairly nutritious pulse, recommended for diabetics and shown useful in helping to lower cholesterol. In addition, it contains high levels of protein, potassium, calcium, iron, niacin, thiamine and riboflavin.

Given the importance of this crop in the diets of many people in India, Pakistan, and the surrounding region, it comes as little surprise that researchers are interested in how blackgram might respond to future changes in atmospheric CO2and climate. Such was the case with the ten-member research team of Vanaja et al. (2015), who grew eighteen genotypes of blackgram from seeds in plastic pots inside open-top chambers at three CO2 levels (390, 550 and 700 ppm) across three distinct growing seasons (summer, rainy and winter seasons).

Their purpose in doing so was to evaluate which genotypes would perform the best in each growing-season climate regime under elevated CO2. Plant performance was thus evaluated based upon analyses of five morphological (root length, root volume, shoot length, number of branches and number of pods), six dry weight (root, stem, leaf, pod, fodder and total biomass) and eight yield (filled seed number, total seed count, filled seed weight, seed yield, test weight, husk weight, percentage of shelling and harvest index) plant growth traits.

NOAA confirmed that as of Oct. 24, 2016, no major hurricane has struck the U.S. in 11 years, despite climate change claims they should be increasing.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has confirmed that today marks the eleventh year since a major hurricane has struck the U.S. mainland, despite persistent claims they would increase in a warming world.  Dennis Feltgen, a NOAA spokesperson, said, “I can confirm that as of October 24, 2016, it will be a complete 11 years since a major hurricane has struck the United States, as defined by the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale of being a Category 3 or higher.”

NOAA also announced, “The current streak of no major hurricane landfalls onto the U.S. mainland remains intact. The last one to do so was Hurricane Wilma on October 24, 2005.” NOAA defines a major hurricane as having sustained winds of 111 mph or higher. Since NOAA started record keeping in 1851, this is the longest the U.S. has gone without a major hurricane making landfall, breaking all previous records.

Image copyright: JAN CHLEBIK/THE ICR)

“If you want a career in medicine these days you’re better off studying mathematics or computing than biology.”

This pithy aside was delivered by Sir Rory Collins, the head of clinical trials at Oxford University, in the middle of a discussion about the pros and cons of statins. It is a nice one-liner, but I didn’t think much more about it until a few days later, when I found myself sitting in a press conference to mark the launch of a new initiative on cancer.

Rubbing shoulders on the panel with the director of the Institute of Cancer Research, Professor Paul Workman, was a scientist I didn’t recognise, but it soon became clear this was exactly what Sir Rory had had in mind.

Dr Andrea Sottoriva is an astrophysicist. He has spent much of his career searching for Neutrinos – the elusive sub-atomic particles created by the fusion of elements in stars like our sun – at the bottom of the ocean, and analysing the results of atom smashing experiments with the Large Hadron Collider at Cern in Geneva.

“My background is in computer science, particularly as it applies to particle physics,” he told me when we met at the ICR’s laboratories in Sutton.

NOAA says that Earth was red hot in September, with many places being the hottest ever!

Global Analysis – September 2016 | State of the Climate | National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI)

Only problem is, they don’t have thermometers on about half of the land surface, and many of their record temperatures are fake. Grey areas below represent missing data.

Note the record hot temperatures reported in Yemen, Oman, Central African Republic, South Sudan and The Congo.

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They don’t have any thermometers in those regions. The claimed record temperatures are completely fake.

Satellite temperatures show that NOAA’s record hot Africa was actually just about normal in September.

RSS / MSU Data Images / Monthly

Claims of record heat from NASA and NOAA are completely fraudulent, and are being made for political purposes. They have nothing to do with with climate or science.

“Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.”

• Adolf Hitler

Read more at realclimatescience.com

October 24th marked the 11-year anniversary of the last “major” hurricane to make landfall on the United States.  On the morning of October 24, 2005, Hurricane Wilma hit the southwest Florida peninsula as a Category 3 storm, and since then, no other hurricane Category 3 or stronger has made landfall on the U.S. — a span that is unprecedented in the historical records.

We often read articles that pit man v machines — will the robots take our jobs, will AI take over and make us stupid — and yes, I’ve written some of these articles.

But as is so often true with predicting the future, the truth will likely not be an either or scenario, but rather shades of grey. Instead of asking who will win, we should think about a merger between man and machine to bring out the best in both.

An interesting example of this is chess. It has been a long time since IBM’s Deep Blue beat the grand chess master, but more recently hybrid teams (made up up people and AI) seem to have the edge over both people only and machine only teams.

Image copyright: ISTOCK

Is our growing understanding of the psychology of crowds feeding in to how we police them?

Crowds are complex. Some people fear they may turn violent, with individual personalities becoming submerged in the group mentality. But some leading social psychologists who research crowds believe that this old picture is mistaken.

“The danger with this view of crowds as inherently violent isn’t just that it’s wrong, it’s that it might become true. It might lead us to treat crowds in ways that will enrage them,” says psychologist Professor Steve Reicher.

Of course crowds are not all the same – there are different types of crowd and controlling them requires different approaches.

This is yet another crappy epidemiologic study on air pollution that proves nothing about air quality. YET, I LOVE IT.

Why? Because the study contains rarely presented evidence concerning the bias in self-reported ‘data’ versus measured data.

So this study is junk science for the usual reasons including guesstimated exposure data, dubious health effect data, omission of confounding factors, weak/non-significant statistics, and the other usual portfolio of errors common to modern epidemiology practice.

But check out the study chart, below. Note how self-reported data biases the study results toward reporting positive correlations while the measured data keeps the correlations where they should be — i.e, at zero.

… it’s much ado about nothing.

As Fred Singer once wrote:

Even alarmists know HFCs are a nothing burger. From Reuters today:

Read more at junkscience.com

Latest research shows that the so-called tell-tale ‘hot spot’  signal for man-made global warming over the tropics does not exist. As such,independent scientists say that by their own metric climate alarmists scientists have inadvertently disproved their own theory of global warming.

The findings of the researchers are that: 

“These analysis results would appear to leave very, very little doubt but that EPA’s [Environmental Protection Agency] claim of a Tropical Hot Spot (THS), caused by rising atmospheric CO2 levels, simply does not exist in the real world. Also critically important, even on an all-other-things-equal basis, this analysis failed to find that the steadily rising Atmospheric CO2 Concentrations have had a statistically significant impact on any of the 13 critically important temperature time series data analyzed.”

Image copyrigh: tNASA/JPL-CALTECH/MSSS

The gouge in the ground probably made by Europe’s Schiaparelli probe as it hit the surface of Mars on Wednesday has been imaged by a US satellite. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has identified a large dark patch in the robot’s targeted landing zone consistent with a high-velocity impact.

Schiaparelli is widely thought to have crashed and been destroyed. Data transmitted from the probe before it lost contact indicated that its descent systems did not work properly. Its parachute was jettisoned too early and its retrorockets, designed to slow the robot to a hover just above the surface, fired only for a few seconds. They should have operated for half a minute.

The MRO imagery is not quite definitive because the resolution is low – just six metres per pixel. Its context is persuasive, however. The roughly 15m by 40m dark patch, which is probably dust and rock fragments thrown out from the impact, is sited some 5.5km west of Schiaparelli’s expected touchdown point in the equatorial Meridiani Plain.

Tellingly, the feature is not present in previous MRO pictures of the location.

The clincher, though, may be the artefact 1km to the south of the patch. This white blob looks to be Schiaparelli’s 15m-wide parachute which would have floated down behind the probe. Again, this was not present in earlier pictures.

Absolutely stunning new research by the University of Washington (et al) confirms that 500 newly discovered deep ocean seafloor methane gas seeps are flowing massive amounts of this powerful greenhouse gas into the overlying ocean along the entire coast of Oregon, Washington, and California. Research scientists involved in this project indicate that this very large continuously flowing plume of methane gas is likely making its way up through the ocean water column and into Earth’s atmosphere. Furthermore, they state that pending additional analysis, climate scientists may need to “adjust” climate models (see quotes below).