Blink your eyes and it’s long gone. Carbonic acid exists for only a tiny fraction of a second when carbon dioxide gas dissolves in water before changing into a mix of protons and bicarbonate anions.

Despite its short life, however, carbonic acid imparts a lasting impact on Earth’s atmosphere and geology, as well as on the human body.

However, because of its short lifespan, the detailed chemistry of carbonic acid has long been veiled in mystery. Researchers with Berkeley Lab and the University of California (UC) Berkeley are helping to lift this veil through a series of unique experiments. In their latest study, they’ve shown how gaseous carbon dioxide molecules are solvated by water to initiate the proton transfer chemistry that produces carbonic acid and bicarbonate.

Scientists say they have the best evidence yet that there is hot lava spewing from the surface of Venus. 

The planet was known to have an active volcanic history but this is the best evidence yet for ongoing eruptions.

Four “hotspots” in a rift region of the planet’s northern hemisphere were seen to rise and fall dramatically in temperature over several days in 2008, suggesting an active lava flow.

The observations were collected by the Venus Express probe.

Lines of evidence

This European Space Agency mission arrived at the planet in 2006 and its findings had already hinted in 2010 that Venus might still be volcanically active.

That evidence was compiled from infrared measurements, because the planet’s surface is shrouded by a thick and swirling atmosphere. A distinct dark region towards the planet’s south pole suggested lava deposits that were less than 2.5 million years old.

Then in 2012 Venus Express researchers reported a spike in the sulphur dioxide content of the Venusian atmosphere, which happened in 2006-7 and declined gradually afterwards.

Electric cars are quick and quiet, with a range more than long enough for most commutes. If you want a car with extremely fast acceleration, the Tesla Model S is hard to beat. And, of course, electric vehicles avoid the pollution associated with conventional cars, including emissions of carbon dioxide from burning gasoline. Yet they account for a tiny fraction of automotive sales, mainly because the batteries that propel them are expensive and need to be recharged frequently.

A better battery could change everything. But while countless breakthroughs have been announced over the last decade, time and again these advances have failed to translate into commercial batteries with anything like the promised improvements in cost and energy storage. Some well-funded startups, most notably A123 Systems, began with bold claims but failed to deliver (see “What Happened to A123?”).

The Powerhouse, a new book by journalist Steve LeVine, chronicles the story behind one of the most dramatic battery announcements of recent years and explains how it came to nothing (see “The Sad Story of the Battery Breakthrough that Proved Too Good to Be True”).

The announcement was made in February 2012, at a conference in Washington, D.C., where a crowd of researchers, entrepreneurs, and investors had come to hear the likes of Bill Gates and Bill Clinton expound on the importance of new energy technology—and also to tap into one of the newest funding sources in Washington, the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy, or ARPA-E.

Founded in 2009, ARPA-E had been tasked with identifying potentially transformational research. The head of that agency, Arun Majumdar, was ready to unveil one of its first major successes: a battery cell, developed by the startup Envia, that could store twice as much energy as a conventional one. The cost of a battery that could take a car from Washington to New York without recharging, Majumdar said, would fall from $30,000 to $15,000. Electric cars would become far more affordable and practical (see “A Big Jump in Battery Capacity”).

Within months, GM licensed the technology and signed an agreement to support its development, gaining the right to use any resulting batteries. The deal was potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars to Envia, LeVine writes. But soon Envia was getting frustrated messages from GM engineers who couldn’t reproduce the startup’s results. The year after the announcement, the deal was scuttled. Envia’s impressive battery had been a fluke.

A former senior scientist from the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been speaking out against GMOs, but his voice is especially noteworthy among the many scientists who talk about genetically modified organisms. Why? Because he studied the impacts of altered crops on the environment. Read on to find out what this expert has to say about a genetically modified world and the ‘pesticide treadmill’ that biotech has us all running on.

Dr. Ramon Seidler’s credentials are nothing to sneeze at. He was a professor of microbiology at Oregon State University for 16 years before he worked at the EPA. He holds many honors, too, including being listed by the International Biographical Centre of Cambridge, England as one of the 2,000 outstanding World Scientists of the 20th Century.

During Seidler’s tenure at the EPA, he (along with other scientists) conducted GMO experiments that were contained in indoor environments. The experiments were meant to mimic what happens outside, just as if a farmer had planted a GM crop in Idaho, Michigan, or California. The gene transfer capabilities and survival rates of genetically modified seed were observed. He also observed transgenic DNA and Bt toxin products in agricultural ecosystems.

What he and his scientific peers found was that GE bacteria survived for years in soil, even after it was removed from the plants.

Everything must be green these days. It seems that anything not green is either dead or forbidden. 

As you know, summer is in the air and in this hemisphere it will begin in a few weeks on June 21^st. Right now, any bush or flower that is worth its salt is blooming or getting ready to do so soon. After all, the warm and wet season is short at higher latitudes; soon enough it will be either too dry or too cold again for the plants to do their natural thing like assimilating “carbon.”

Assimilating “Carbon”

Assimilating carbon or, more correctly “carbon dioxide” (CO2) from the atmosphere is any plant’s order of the day. That’s the only way it can grow and produce fruits, seeds, or underground shoots to advance and propagate. The CO2 in the atmosphere is absolutely vital in that process, just like water, nutrients and sunshine.

Without plenty of all, it may succumb to frost, shrivel in heat, die from thirst, or starve from lack of nutrition. The CO2 in the atmosphere is perhaps the most critical aspect for survival. While many plants can hibernate or suspend growth for lengthy times to survive cold or heat, lack of or overabundance of moisture, without any CO2 in the air they would soon all be dead. With them, essentially all other life on earth would die as well.

Those who follow the news will have noticed that the wires are abuzz with stories about how many people have died in India over the past couple of weeks because of a pre-monsoon heat wave that certain areas of India have endured. Like clockwork these same news stories blame those deaths on anthropogenic “climate change”.

Bluntly stated, your modern lifestyle, which is primarily powered by hydrocarbon energy, is killing people in India—you are therefore committing voluntary manslaughter because your use of hydrocarbon energy is voluntary!

India’s deadly heat wave over the past couple of weeks that is blamed for >2,000 deaths “is a taste of extreme weather conditions that are set to become more common as greenhouse gases heat up the planet . . .” RTCC

“Climate change blamed as thousands die in Indian heat” Financial Times

“Heat And Death In India: Global Warming’s Direct Effect” ScienceBlogs

This absurd notion is a direct result of the IPCC proclaiming that severe heat waves are being caused by air conditioning and refrigeration and therefore we have a moral obligation to get rid of air conditioning and refrigeration around the globe so that we can prevent such heatwaves from occurring again in the future.

A couple of Arctic explorers, actually adventurers, have gone missing and are presumed to have drowned. Just a few weeks ago, Marc Cornelissen and his companion kept armchair explorers enthralled with tweets and soundtracks like “Skiing in shorts: Tropical day in the Arctic.”

Are people like Cornelissen real explorers or just out to garner attention for stunt-like actions and publicity for their Arctic adventures?

What’s the Arctic?

The Arctic is a vast expanse, covering land in Siberia, Greenland and Canada’s Arctic Archipelago as well as a large tract of ocean. In fact, most of the Arctic (defined here as the area north of the 67^th parallel of latitude) is not land but sea.

Some people think that any area with saltwater in northern hemisphere is part of the Arctic. For example, the National Snow & Ice Data Center (NSDIC) daily measurements of “Arctic sea-ice” include sea-ice in areas well south of the polar circle (67 N), in fact even south of mid-latitude (45 N). No wonder people get confused as to what constitutes “the Arctic.” That kind of misleading definition of “Arctic” is also the cause of some people looking for adventure and publicity by “exploring” the Arctic.

For a few weeks each summer, you may get daytime temperatures above freezing. Also, the 24-hour sunshine may give you a false sense of security and warmth but it does not last long and often ends in tragedy. Numerous private yachts and adventurers had to be rescued in recent years from becoming stranded in Arctic sea-ice when trying to traverse the North-West-Passage or “skiing to the North Pole.”

Of course, all these adventurers (they are not “explorers”) are relying on Canada to rescue them from the inclement conditions and unforeseen problems. Even with the best available technologies that is not always possible—when fog or blinding “whiteout” snowstorms obscure anything beyond a few feet away nobody can come to these souls’ rescue.

Recent scientific studies on the behaviour of methane released into the environment contradicts climate science predictions about the gas as a global warming risk. Analysis of the impact of the terrible 2010 BP Gulf of Mexico oil disaster (picture right) and a study of peat bogs, shows climate scientists may be wrong to claim such “greenhouse gases” can cause catastrophic long term impacts.

For years computer models used by climate scientists have predicted alarmist outcomes if humans permit levels of “greenhouse gases,” such as CO2 and methane in the atmosphere, to rise.

Melting permafrost due to CO2-driven global warming is said to be one of the major dangers to humanity due to its release of greenhouse gases, which they claim causes a worrying “positive feedback” loop of warming.

In particular, it was believed the release of methane (CH4), along with CO2, would boost the warming feedback leading to “runaway” warming. But findings by experts studying global peat bogs, a main emitter of methane, shows that this particular scare story is not supported by the science.

Due to recent advances in scientific understanding of permafrost and the effects CH4 has on the atmosphere, there is no evidence to warrant concern about dangerous climate change.

Making the position plain in the renowned book ‘Peatlands and Climate Change,’ Maria Strack, of the International Peat Society, disavows the unfounded fears trumpeted among climate scientists. In fact, the best evidence shows peatlands will actually become a sink for any increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide, man-made global warming’s biggest “threat.” So rather than there being more CO2 escaping into the atmosphere, there will likely be less due to the increased uptake potential of further exposed peatland. 

A professor famous for predicting the imminent demise of the human race at regular intervals since the 1970s has predicted the imminent demise of the human race. 

Paul Ehrlich, who is the Bing Professor of Population Studies at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, says it’s definitely on this time. In a tinned statement issued on Friday, the arm-waving prof lays it on the line:

There is no longer any doubt: We are entering a mass extinction that threatens humanity’s existence … the window of opportunity is rapidly closing …

“[The study] shows without any significant doubt that we are now entering the sixth great mass extinction event,” Ehrlich said …

“If it is allowed to continue, life would take many millions of years to recover, and our species itself would likely disappear early on,” said lead author Gerardo Ceballos.

The idea is that humanity is causing lots of species of animals, plants etc to become extinct and this will develop into a runaway death snowball in which we ourselves will disappear – for example, because crops are no longer being fertilised by bees, or similar.

The doom scenario is laid out in a paper by Ehrlich, Ceballos and their colleagues in the journal Science Advances. You can read it for free.

If we do all die off reasonably soon in a runaway biodiversity loss doom event, it will be good news for Professor Ehrlich’s credibility.

On February 28, Roof was arrested for drug possession at a mall in Columbia, where he was searched by officers after storekeepers complained that he was acting unusually and asking questions about opening hours and the number of staff on the premises. The Wall Street Journal reports a police incident document said Roof was found to have strips of Suboxone, a pain drug sometimes used to treat opiate addiction. He did not have a prescription for the drug, which is commonly sold illegally on the street.
(Source: The Daily Beast)

Suboxone is a powerful psychoactive drug which is utilized in breaking heroin and narcotic pain reliever addictions.  Just like methadone*, suboxone has it downside risks and adverse side effects. It is a medication which contains two primary ingredients — buprenorphine and naloxone. Buprenorphine is a synthetic opiate; naloxone is drug that blocks feelings of euphoria.

*Methodone is such a dangerous drug that dedicated clinics were set up around the country because patients could not be trusted with more than one day’s dose at a time; hence, the daily visit to the methadone clinic. Methadone is actually more dangerous than all prescribed narcotic painkillers and can threaten a patient’s life with each dose. As a matter of fact, a methadone user doesn’t have to be addicted to methadone to die from it—the very first dose can kill, unlike both heroin and morphine (this last claim has been legitimately questioned by some).

These two ingredients — buprenorphine and naloxone –work in tandem assisting the addicted drug user in their intention to break a very strong habit.  Like any drug that can successfully replace heroin, it is quite powerful and has some serious side effects.

On March 24, Mark Maslin, like the other members of Scientific Reports’ editorial board, received an email with huge ramifications. The message—from the academic journal’s publisher, Nature Publishing Group—told Maslin that his publication was doing a pilot project for a new article-evaluation process. For $750, authors could now fast-track papers through peer review and get a yay-or-nay verdict from a paid pool of third-party reviewers within three weeks.

Maslin, a climatology professor at University College London, was taken aback, not because of the short time span—peer review, an anonymous and voluntary inevitability of academic life, is a notoriously protracted procedure—but for its implications.

“This wasn’t how I thought the journal, or any journal, should operate,” he says, arguing that fast-tracking would exacerbate existing inequality: Well-funded labs could buy their way into the express lane to get published sooner (and, with more titles to their names, increase their odds of securing funding and grants), while cash-strapped universities and poorer researchers in low-income countries, particularly in Asia, would have to wait. Moreover, Maslin thought that tapping a limited group of reviewers—rather than being able to seek out the most qualified people worldwide—would diminish the quality of the review. So, he quit.

Then, roughly 150 other Scientific Reports editors threatened to do the same (the journal has more than 2,700 editorial board members) if concerns were not addressed. Two followed through. The month-long pilot, now complete, had intended to fast-track just 40 biology papers. Instead, it ignited a firestorm.

Ontology: In the last post we discussed how although certain mathematical operations can be performed, it does not mean that they are actually representative of reality, i.e., that they’re “ontological”.  

If you perform a mathematical operation which has no actual physical meaning, and then extrapolate from that position, then you’ve created a false underlying ontology which means that everything which is implied or which comes out of that calculation, is false.  Such is the case with the climate alarm radiative greenhouse effect.

Ontological Mathematics

– Mathematical Freedom –

Mathematics frees us from conscious subjectivity and arbitrariness, from our emotions, experiences, senses, desires, will and mystical intuitions. These have no bearing on objective mathematics. Only mathematics is rigorous, systematic and analytic. Everything else is belief, delusion, opinion, conjecture and interpretation.

Mathematics is the ultimate egalitarian, equal opportunities, meritocratic subject. It doesn’t care about how much money you had when you were growing up, who your parents were, where you lived, what your social status was, how popular and fashionable you were. All that matters is how good you are at it, how talented, how meritorious. Mathematics is the supreme hammer that smashes to smithereens all bullshit and charlatanry. You can bullshit a bullshitter. You can’t bullshit a mathematician. No blowhard can succeed in mathematics. You have to put up or shut up. You have to walk the walk, and not … like so many … just talk the talk.

I hope to make it more clear here the relevance of the climate alarm pseudoscience radiative greenhouse fraud in the light of the physical concept of energy flux density.

Recall this diagram of the mechanism of the radiative greenhouse effect, from the University of Washington Department of Atmospheric Sciences: 

Keep in mind that the reasoning of this diagram and the others like it form the basis of greenie environmentalist anti-human & anti-social climate alarm and pretty much all of climate science.

What they do in the top left corner is divide the input flux from Sunlight such as to spread it over the entire Earth surface at once.  This is where the divisor of 4 comes from because a cross-section interception disk of light from the Sun has ¼ the surface area as a globe Earth with the same radius.

Is this a physically valid procedure?  Mathematically you can do it, and you can call it an average, and you can say it conserves total energy and everything…but does it make physical sense?  Does it reflect actual physics as reality actually “computes” and performs itself?

If the answer isn’t obvious to you yet, then consider this:  Does a stove temperature equivalent to 2000 W/m^2 of radiation which equals 320 degrees Fahrenheit have the same effect on matter as 2000/4 = 500 W/m^2 which equals 91 degrees Fahrenheit, but applied 4-times longer?

Think of cooking a turkey if it helps.  Or invert the example:  can you use 4-times the energy (with its equivalent transform to temperature via the Stefan-Boltzmann Law) but applied in ¼ of the time to get the same end result?

In spring 2015, MBARI researchers discovered a large, previously unknown field of hydrothermal vents in the Gulf of California, about 150 kilometers (100 miles) east of La Paz, Mexico. Lying more than 3,800 meters (12,500 feet) below the surface, the Pescadero Basin vents are the deepest high-temperature hydrothermal vents ever observed in or around the Pacific Ocean.

They are also the only vents in the Pacific known to emit superheated fluids rich in both carbonate minerals and hydrocarbons. The vents have been colonized by dense communities of tubeworms and other animals unlike any other known vent communities in the in the eastern Pacific.

Like another vent field in the Gulf that MBARI discovered in 2012, the Pescadero Basin vents were initially identified in high-resolution sonar data collected by an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV). MBARI’s yellow, torpedo-shaped seafloor-mapping AUV spent two days flying about 50 meters above the bottom of the Basin, using sound beams to map the depth and shape of the seafloor.

The AUV team, led by MBARI engineer David Caress, pored over the detailed bathymetric map they created from the AUV data and saw a number of mounds and spires rising up from the seafloor. Data from the AUV also showed slightly warmer water over some of the spires, which implied that they might be active hydrothermal-vent chimneys. A team of geologists led by David Clague then used a tethered underwater robot, the remotely operated vehicle (ROV) Doc Ricketts, to dive down to the seafloor, fly around the vents, and collect video and samples of rocks and hot water spewing from the chimneys.

Trick-cyclists in America have come out with research which could explain why the debate on climate change continues to rumble on, even though there is a solid consensus on the facts of the matter. 

Essentially, according to the researchers, people tend to live in “echo chambers” as far as climate matters go, seeking out information and advisers who agree with what they already believe. Thus, they may persist in deluded views regardless of what others think.

“Individuals who get their information from the same sources with the same perspective may be under the impression that theirs is the dominant perspective, regardless of what the science says,” explains Professor Dana Fisher, the corresponding author who led the research.

The prof is of course correct: people will continue to believe marginal bloggers on climate matters, even when their “information” is debunked by proper climate scientists: here’s a case from last year in which various dubious lunatic-fringe blogs – “DeSmogBlog”*, “Climate Central” etc – were found to be peddling misinformation on hurricanes in defiance of qualified climatologists. And yet many people continue to believe what these bloggers say.

A recent NASA report throws the space agency into conflict with its climatologists after new NASA measurements prove that carbon dioxide acts as a coolant in Earth’s atmosphere.