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.

Fred Singer claims in a recent post at WUWT that Climate Nay-Sayers are giving Climate Scientists a Bad Name.  I think that Fred puts me into this detestful category of deniers and the issue is again that (in)famous “back radiation” or Downwelling Longwave Radiation DLR. Fred writes:

• One of their favorite arguments is that the greenhouse effect does not exist at all — because it violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics; 
• i.e., one cannot transfer energy from a cold atmosphere to a warmer surface. 
• It is surprising that this simplistic argument is used by physicists, and even by professors who teach thermodynamics. 
• One can show them data of downwelling infrared radiation from CO2, water vapor and clouds, which clearly impinge on the surface. 
• But their minds are closed to any such evidence.

A major publisher of scholarly medical and science articles has retracted 43 papers because of “fabricated” peer reviews amid signs of a broader fake peer review racket affecting many more publications … 

[T]he Committee on Publication Ethics, a multidisciplinary group that includes more than 9,000 journal editors, issued a statement  suggesting a much broader potential problem. The committee, it said, “has become aware of systematic, inappropriate attempts to manipulate the peer review processes of several journals across different publishers.” Those journals are now reviewing manuscripts to determine how many may need to be retracted, it said. – Washington Post, March 27, 2015 

The Daily Bell published a reaction to the WaPo article on March 28 (see Real Tragedy of ‘Science’: Faith Declines as Fakery Grows). As that analysis explained, the scandal’s breadth is extraordinary. Dishonest scientists give us multiple reasons to distrust them. We have some additional thoughts.

Science, according to scientists, is about facts and evidence. These brave truth seekers prove their hypotheses with rigorous experimentation, and then share the newfound knowledge to make the world better.

That’s the theory. Reality is different.

Scientists are no more neutral than journalists are. Some try to expand human knowledge without regard for their own self-interest. Most are like everyone else; they just want to pay the bills and find meaning in their work.

The core problem is the idea that acting in one’s own self-interest is somehow wrong or shameful. This causes scientists to hide their true motivations and possibly mislead the public. The fabricated peer reviews reported in the Washington Post are a good example. The only surprise is that publishers are finally resisting.

Dare to publish a scientific study against Big Biotech, and Monsanto will defame and discredit you. For the first time, a Monsanto employee admits that there is an entire department within the corporation with the simple task of ‘discrediting’ and ‘debunking’ scientists who speak out against GMOs. 

The WHO recently classified glyphosate, a chemical in Monsanto’s best-selling herbicide Roundup, as carcinogenic – news that is really heating things up with biotech. So Monsanto has been demanding that the World Health Organization (WHO) and the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) retract their statements about the poisons’s toxicity to human health.

The company demands this even though a peer-reviewed study published in March of 2015 in the respected journal, The Lancet Oncology, conducted a analysis proving that glyphosate was indeed ‘probably carcinogenic.’

Monsanto’s vice president of global regulatory affairs Philip Miller told Reuters the following in interview:

“We question the quality of the assessment. The WHO has something to explain.”

It has already been explained, Mr. Miller. The study states:

“Glyphosate is a broad-spectrum herbicide, currently with the highest production volumes of all herbicides. It is used in more than 750 different products for agriculture, forestry, urban, and home applications. Its use has increased sharply with the development of genetically modified glyphosate-resistant crop varieties. Glyphosate has been detected in air during spraying, in water, and in food. There WAS limited evidence in humans for the carcinogenicity of glyphosate.

Glyphosate has been detected in the blood and urine of agricultural workers, indicating absorption. Soil microbes degrade glyphosate to aminomethylphosphoric acid (AMPA). Blood AMPA detection after poisonings suggests intestinal microbial metabolism in humans. Glyphosate and glyphosate formulations induced DNA and chromosomal damage in mammals, and in human and animal cells in vitro. One study reported increases in blood markers of chromosomal damage (micronuclei) in residents of several communities after spraying of glyphosate formulations.”

French Senator Jean Germain, a friend of windfarm victims, has been found dead in what appears to be a suicide. He had made increasingly effective political opposition against ‘Big Green’ interests in recent times. His death may be considered suspicious.  As UK national newspaper, The Guardian noted:

New report responds to Senator Birmingham’s apparent reliance on false claims by the Australian Government’s Bureau of Meteorology (BOM). The Senator’s letter dated December 18th, 2014 to Malcolm Roberts is refuted by overwhelming empirical scientific evidence, as outlined in excerpts from the report, below. Moreover, key players in the climate alarm narrative are exposed as beneficiaries of related financial scams.

In a report prepared at the invitation of Steve Austin, host on ABC-Radio 612 Brisbane, Australian government climate scientists are exposed as conspiring to create an alarmist and false picture of global warming. 

Independent analyst, Malcolm Roberts, of the Galileo Movement reports:

 “I’ve written to many of the people whose behaviours, opinions and/or claims are discussed in this report and whose core claim is that human CO2 caused Earth’s latest modest cyclic global atmospheric warming that ended in 1998. Most have responded. All have failed to provide empirical scientific evidence and logical scientific reasoning for the basis of their core claim. All seemed reluctant to address my questions adequately. They failed to meet my reasonable need for integrity, reassurance and understanding.”

Below Principia Scientific International has pleasure in providing readers with full links to all sections of Roberts’ findings:

America’s FTC might be chasing after snake-oilers offering “detect cancer” smartphone apps, but that doesn’t mean your mobe can’t play a genuine diagnostic role. 

Researchers from the Massachusetts General Hospital reckon with a bit of cloudy goodness, custom-made add-on optics and the right reagent kit, smartphones can gather data that helps with cancer diagnoses.

The hospital boffins probably have a better claim to respectability than Health Discovery, since the hospital isn’t selling anything, but has merely published findings in PNAS.

The setup, here, doesn’t do the analysis on the smartphone, nor does it solely rely on the smartphone as the diagnostic tool.

Rather, their “digital diffraction diagnosis” system uses a separate imaging module to capture a hologram of the sample, then sends the image upstream to a cloud computing environment to conduct the analysis.

The samples are marked with “microbeads” before image capture (see image above). These “bind to known cancer-related molecules”, the hospital’s release states. The group also developed image processing software it claims can process 10 Mbytes of data in “less than nine hundredths of a second”.

Working with PAP smear data, the researchers say their system matched conventional pathology in identifying samples as high risk, low risk, or benign.

Similar results were observed for lymph node biopsies and in human papilloma virus detection, the hospital reckons.

Among other things, the hospital hopes to improve the system by integrating bigger databases into its back-end in the future.

At a current $1.80 per assay, the hospital says the technology would be particularly useful in regions with poor access to he kind of pathology infrastructure typically associated with cancer diagnostics. 

Nasa’s Curiosity rover has found that water can exist as a liquid near the Martian surface. Mars should be too cold to support liquid water at the surface, but salts in the soil lower its freezing point – allowing briny films to form. 

The results lend credence to a theory that dark streaks seen on features such as crater walls could be formed by flowing water.

The results are published in the journal Nature.

Scientists think thin films of water form when salts in the soil, called perchlorates, absorb water vapour from the atmosphere.

The temperature of these liquid films is about -70C – too cold to support any of the microbial life forms that we know about.

Forming in the top 15cm of the Martian soil, the brines would also be exposed to high levels of cosmic radiation – another challenge to life.

But it’s still possible that organisms could exist somewhere beneath the surface on Mars, where conditions are more favourable.

Is the oil we rely on for energy really derived from organic sources (as per fossil fuel theory), or is it constantly being regenerated within earth’s mantle from rocks (as per abiogenic oil theory)?

Very briefly, Liew et al. (2014) begin their recent report on the climatic history of Taiwan by describing how high-resolution pollen records from four lakes and a bog – which they recovered from both high and low altitudes in northern and southern Taiwan – were used together with radiocarbon dating to develop a 4000-year temperature history of the subtropical mountain island. 

The result of this effort was a temperature history that compares well with trends that previously had been developed for China and Europe. And again, very briefly, it revealed the occurrence of a relatively long cold period from approximately 1920 BC to 30 AD, which was followed by the Roman Warm Period (about 30-360 AD), which was followed by the Dark Ages Cold Period (about 360-760 AD), which was followed by the Medieval Warm Period (about 760-1300 AD), which was followed by the Little Ice Age (about 1300-1850 AD). Then, last of all, the record depicts the gradual development of the Current Warm Period, which at this point in time appears to be at its peak, having not risen further than where it is now over the past couple of decades.

Therefore, in light of these and other well-documented findings that are reported and analyzed in the Medieval Warm Period Project portion of the Data section of our website (co2science.org) – which can readily be accessed here – it can clearly be seen that there is nothing unusual, unnatural or unprecedented about the current state of earth’s warmth, which was clearly eclipsed by the Medieval Warm Period at various locations around the globe.

In my related article I explained there is an epoch in the Earth’s history termed the “Great Oxygenation Event.” It happened a long time ago, roughly 350 million years ago, when much of today’s coal beds in the earth’s rocks began forming. 

It all began with one simple and then-new invention by Mother Nature. That invention has been truly great and everlasting; it’s widely known under the term PHOTOSYNTHESIS.

Photosynthesis

Photosynthesis (PS) is the process by which algae and plants convert carbon dioxide (CO2) to organic matter, like the wood of trees. Any other organism on this planet that is not an alga or plant itself feeds on the former. Therefore, CO2 is the source of all life on earth. There is not a single organism that does not require the carbon atom as a basic building block.

Photosynthesis brings about another product, rarely mentioned but vital to all higher organisms on the planet, and that is molecular oxygen (O2). There is no other source of O2 on earth but photosynthesis. Therefore, without carbon dioxide there also would be no free oxygen in our atmosphere.

There is an epoch in the Earth history termed the “Great Oxygenation Event” (GOE). I described it in my recent post on the rise of molecular oxygen in earth’s atmosphere.