This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: It’s science!

  • Exploding Stars and Climate Change

    NASA, exploding star

    Although the article claims that they just tested this concept, this theory has been around for a while. It had also been proven in the laboratory and observed in nature.

    Exploding stars are influencing our weather, scientists find

    Increased cosmic rays, in our atmosphere, result in increased cloud formations. Increased cloud formations reflect more heat back into space. Cosmic rays force water droplet formation, contributing to cloud formation and precipitation.

    Cosmic rays fluctuate, going through cycles of increased and decreased volume. Solar winds influence the volume of cosmic rays entering the atmosphere. Solar winds act as a primary line of defense against cosmic rays, the Earth’s magnetic field acts as a secondary line of defense.

    So, an increase of solar winds decreases the volume of cosmic rays entering the atmosphere. Likewise, a decrease in solar winds allows for an increase in volume of cosmic rays that enter. The sun has been providing us visual clues, for centuries, to support this.

    An increase of solar sunspot activity is related to an increase in solar winds. A decrease of solar sunspot activity is related to a decrease in solar winds. By extension, an increase of solar sunspot activity causes the volume of cosmic rays, entering the atmosphere, to decrease. A decrease of solar sunspot activity allows more cosmic rays to enter.

    Sunspot activity has been plotted for centuries. Minimum sunspot activity was spotted during the Maunder and Dalton sunspot minimums. In many instances, no sunspot activity was detected for a long period. This is also known as the, “Mimi Ice Age”.

    Records of sunspot activity, when matched with the Mimi Ice Age and with the recent warming, show sunspot activity averages and global temperatures “marching in step”. As sunspot activity goes up, average global temperatures go up. As sunspot activity goes down, average global temperatures go down. Superimpose the cosmic ray activity with these two, and you will see a generally symmetrical inverse pattern.

    Climate change is a natural process.

    By Sarah Knapton, Science Editor, telegraph.co.uk:

    The researchers claim that cosmic rays, coupled with the activity of the Sun, were linked to the Medieval Warm Period around year 1000AD and the cold period in the Little Ice Age between the 13th and 19th centuries, when the Thames regularly froze over during the winter, allowing frost fairs to be held.

    The sun is showing signs of entering another protracted solar minimum. The past three solar sunspot cycles show a downward trend in solar activity. By the way, the Earth’s magnetic field is also weakening. Using history as a guide, the climate is changing, but not in the direction that the mainstream media is currently portraying.

  • Ebola doctor dies after he tests negative

    Ebola doctor dies after he tests negative

    The Washington Post reports that Doctor Martin Salia has died from the Ebola virus, just a few weeks after he tested negative for the disease;

    When Martin Salia’s Ebola test came back negative, his friends and colleagues threw their arms around him. They shook his hand. They patted him on the back. They removed their protective gear and cried.

    But when his symptoms remained nearly a week later, Salia took another test, on Nov. 10. This one came back positive, sending the Sierra Leonean doctor with ties to Maryland on a desperate, belated quest for treatment and forcing the colleagues who had embraced him into quarantine.

    “We were celebrating. If the test says you are Ebola-free, we assume you are Ebola-free,” said Komba Songu M’Briwa, who cared for Salia at the Hastings Ebola Treatment Center in Freetown. “Then everything fell apart.”

    So they flew him to Nebraska where he died yesterday;

    “Dr. Salia was extremely critical when he arrived here, and unfortunately, despite out best efforts, we weren’t able to save him,” said Dr. Phil Smith, medical director of the biocontainment unit.

    Salia arrived Saturday to be treated at the Omaha hospital, where two other Ebola patients have been successfully treated.

    We’ve been scolded by the healthcare industry because we’re panicking about the spread of this disease, but, you know, when it’s the healthcare industry that is flying around the world taking the disease with them, like luggage, I think we have the right to panic. It’s almost as if the US government wants to create a crisis here. It also seems that the healthcare professionals don’t know what they’re doing in regards to the virus.

  • How Earth avoided the Stone Age–Maybe

    Jonn mentioned to me the other day he’s had a number of folks contact him about a story from the Washington Post Capital Weather Gang which discussed how a massive Coronal Mass Ejection narrowly missed the planet in July of 2012:

    On July 23, 2012, the sun unleashed two massive clouds of plasma that barely missed a catastrophic encounter with the Earth’s atmosphere. These plasma clouds, known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs), comprised a solar storm thought to be the most powerful in at least 150 years.

    “If it had hit, we would still be picking up the pieces,” physicist Daniel Baker of the University of Colorado tells NASA.

    From further down in the article:

    A CME double whammy of this potency striking Earth would likely cripple satellite communications and could severely damage the power grid. NASA offers this sobering assessment:

    Analysts believe that a direct hit … could cause widespread power blackouts, disabling everything that plugs into a wall socket. Most people wouldn’t even be able to flush their toilet because urban water supplies largely rely on electric pumps.

    According to a study by the National Academy of Sciences, the total economic impact could exceed $2 trillion or 20 times greater than the costs of a Hurricane Katrina. Multi-ton transformers damaged by such a storm might take years to repair.

    How strong a storm are we talking? They compared it to the first observed CME/solar flare, the Carrington Event of 1859, named for the British astronomer who observed it:

    During the Carrington event, the northern lights were seen as far south as Cuba and Hawaii according to historical accounts. The solar eruption “caused global telegraph lines to spark, setting fire to some telegraph offices,” NASA notes.

    NASA says the July 2012 storm was particularly intense because a CME had traveled along the same path just days before the July 23 double whammy – clearing the way for maximum effect, like a snowplow.

    “This double-CME traveled through a region of space that had been cleared out by yet another CME four days earlier,” NASA says. ” As a result, the storm clouds were not decelerated as much as usual by their transit through the interplanetary medium.”

    NASA also has a little more technical writeup for those so inclined. But without getting into the nuts and bolts about the hows, whys, or deep Physics of what would happen should such a CME hit our planet again, let’s consider the implications.

    From a normal everyday Joe standpoint, a long-term blackout would be devastating, far beyond the $2T figure quoted in the article. While I didn’t have access to how they came up with that figure, I would have to assume that is only damage to grid transformers, equipment, and electronics. Since I have moved to the land of, “Live Free or Die,” I’ve experienced two “lengthy” power disruptions–once in 2008 after a severe ice storm, and one in 2010 after a winter wind storm. Both resulted in my power being lost for a week, with some customers not restored for double that.

    While I was inconvenienced without a stove (electric) or hot water (same) and no way to do laundry, I still had a generator with which to run my well pump, refrigerator, furnace, microwave, and a few lights. Imagine a large urban area or a large swath of the country going without power for MONTHS, perhaps YEARS. It would take at least that long to recover. A large power transformer is not something that is easily or quickly constructed. To replace one typically takes a 12-18 month lead time just to manufacture it. Also, many of those bulk power transformers are not American-made. For example, there’s Hyosung, Mitsubishi, and ABB, to name a few I’ve recently encountered. Transport to the substation or power plant sites is lengthy and difficult, and testing and commissioning takes skilled personnel a good deal of time.

    Now let’s focus on the national security/military aspect of such an event. GPS? Useless. SATCOM? Probably down, depending on how “hardened” those communications are. Remember, CME is in many ways like an EMP, which our equipment is designed to handle, but only to a certain point. Logistics would be back to the paper age–no computers. Again, depending on how hardened military electronics are will determine how affected our aircraft, ships, and even basic communications will work during an after a CME event on the scale of the Carrington Event.

    Where it comes down to, IMO, is that while our training and SOME of our weaponry will still be superior, in a place like, say, Afghanistan, we’d be knocked back to a technological level on par with that of the enemy. Any tech advantage would be gone, with the inevitable increase in risk to our troops and casualties. Imagine being back to an 1860 Army, with little in the way of 21st Century technology to help take the fight to the enemy and defeat them. And even with superior tactics and training, without a little bit of “whiz-bang”, their superior numbers could be very daunting, indeed.

    So, does this mean we should, to paraphrase Gremlins, invest heavily in canned food and shotguns? While it has been estimated that such an event has about a 12 percent chance of hitting us sometime in the next 10 years, at some point you have weighed the risks versus the panic issue. Most utilities are well aware of CME implications, and have procedures in place to down power or deenergize their bulk power transformers entirely in the event of a CME. This would minimize damage. For those who did sustain damage, load could be shed based on supply and demand. Having been stationed on Guam, rolling blackouts were pretty much a way of life for several months after a power plant was taken off line due to a brown tree snake–but that’s a story for another time. Don’t be surprised if it does happen, don’t be surprised if it results in major disruptions, but another, “Oh noes! We’s all gonna die!” event? Meh. Suck it up and recover.

  • Prostituting Science

    Over at Forbes, Patrick Michaels, Director of the Center for the Study of Science at the Cato Institute and a senior fellow in research and economic development at George Mason University, has written a serious and thought-provoking piece regarding the deleterious impact of the fraud of global warming on the world scientific community. Michaels, citing an article in the Australian literary journal, Quadrant, by Garth Paltridge, whom Michaels characterizes as one of the world’s most respected atmospheric scientists, posits a harsh view of the inevitable and devastating impact of the current climate change hysteria on future scientific research.

    For those of us who have smelled a rat since the outset of this latest “sky is falling” phenomenon, there’s little in the article to surprise us and a whole lot of material to support “I told ya so’s.” As we Deniers long suspected, Paltridge and Michaels lay the blame for the specious science supporting the Goreist fanaticism right at the feet of leftist politics and federal funding. Says Paltridge:

    “…the average man in the street, a sensible chap who by now can smell the signs of an oversold environmental campaign from miles away, is beginning to suspect that it is politics rather than science which is driving the issue.”

    And then continues with this:

    “Science changed dramatically in the 1970s, when the reward structure in the profession began to revolve around the acquisition of massive amounts of taxpayer funding that was external to the normal budgets of the universities and federal laboratories. In climate science, this meant portraying the issue in dire terms, often in alliance with environmental advocacy organizations. Predictably, scientists (and their institutions) became addicted to the wealth, fame, and travel in the front of the airplane:

    “A new and rewarding research lifestyle emerged which involved the giving of advice to all types and levels of government, the broadcasting of unchallengeable opinion to the general public, and easy justification for attendance at international conferences — this last in some luxury by normal scientific experience, and at a frequency previously unheard of.”

    Every incentive reinforced this behavior, as the self-selected community of climate boffins now began to speak for both science and in the service of drastic regulatory policies. In the measured tones of the remarkably lucid and precise writer that he is, Paltridge explains how the corner got painted:

    “The trap was fully sprung when many of the world’s major national academies of science (such as the Royal Society in the UK, the National Academy of Sciences in the USA and the Australian Academy of Science) persuaded themselves to issue reports giving support to the conclusions of the IPCC [the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change]. The reports were touted as national assessments that were supposedly independent of the IPCC and of each other, but of necessity were compiled with the assistance of, and in some cases at the behest of, many of the scientists involved in the IPCC international machinations. In effect, the academies, which are the most prestigious of the institutions of science, formally nailed their colors to the mast of the politically correct.

    Since that time three or four years ago, there has been no comfortable way for the scientific community to raise the specter of serious uncertainty about the forecasts of climatic disaster.”

    Michaels closing quote from the Paltridge article is this:

    “In the light of all this, we have at least to consider the possibility that the scientific establishment behind the global warming issue has been drawn into the trap of seriously overstating the climate problem — or, what is much the same thing, of seriously understating the uncertainties associated with the climate problem — in its effort to promote the cause. It is a particularly nasty trap in the context of science, because it risks destroying, perhaps for centuries to come, the unique and hard-won reputation for honesty which is the basis of society’s respect for scientific endeavor.”

    There it is from an eminent climate scientist, just what we here at American Thinker have been suspecting all along. Global warming is a both scam perpetrated by greedy opportunists like Al Gore, as well as a cult composed of those disaster-dependent ding-a-lings among us who have no incentive in life if that life is not imminently threatened by whatever the latest perceived threat may be; and lastly by a bunch of avaricious academics willing to sell their scientific souls to that big government devil for a place to nose into the trough of federal funding for research.

    I’m not sure it’s quite as bad as Paltridge predicts but I do know that for me, someone’s scientific credentials on whatever I read from now on will be immediately met with a cynical,

    “So who funded your study?”

    Crossposted from American Thinker

  • PTSD Vaccine??

    Apparently some researchers at MIT have found some interesting correlation between a stomach hormone and PTSD that could possibly lead to a vaccine for PTSD.

    It’s a breakthrough that could help thousands of American soldiers returning from dangerous deployments. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology believe they may have discovered a way to create a vaccine that could prevent post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

    “What it’s going to do is that they’ll still have perfectly strong memories of the event. They just won’t have the bad health consequences,” said Ki Goosens, an assistant professor of neuroscience neuroscience with the McGovern Institute for Brain Research.

    Apparently, by blocking the receptors for a hormone known as Ghrelin they were able to lower “fear” which they hope prevents the debilitating effects of PTSD. (NO, this won’t make some fearless robot “Universal Soldier”) They don’t claim that this is some magic cure, memories and traumatic experiences will still be completely real and intact, their hope is just that it can keep PTSD from developing.

    I know they call it a vaccine, but that is because it can be administered prior to going into known stressful situations, ie. combat. However, this should also work after a traumatic experience as well. It could potentially help troops suffering now and would be able to be used to treat people who suffer severe trauma from, say, a rape, violent attack, childhood abuse, etc…

    This should be interesting…..

  • Oh, Sh!t – Here We Go Again. Solyndra Part III, Anyone?

    Or Part IV.  Or maybe Part V – hell, I’ve lost count.

    Energy Dept. Seeks Company to Turn Sunshine Into Gasoline

    No, I’m not kidding.

    The process was apparently discovered by a Federal lab in Albuquerque in 2007.  It produces hydrocarbons that are precursors to motor fuels from CO2, sunlight, and (presumably) a catalyst.  At the time of discovery, it was estimated to be “15 to 20 years” away from being market-ready.

    Yeah, the process works – on a lab “proof-of-concept” prototype.  But that’s far different than an economically-viable industrial production line.  And the last time I checked, 2007 was 6 years ago rather than “15 to 20”.  I seriously doubt the process will be producing fuel at anything resembling competitive costs any time soon.

    Here we go again.  Looks like we’ll now have $23/gal “sunshine-gas” for DoD vehicles to go with that $25/gal bio-fuel oil for ships.  Just the thing for an era of declining DoD budgets, eh?

    I wonder which “friend of the Administration” will get the contract for this financial boondoggle and obvious example of cronyism critical and important research effort?

    This looks more to me like just another example of the current Administration steering Federal dollars for “clean energy” to political allies and cronies as a payback rather than a serious effort at clean energy.  Further, their track record to date with “green” projects does nothing but support that impression.

    But what do I know?

  • The REAL Cause of That Unrest in Syria

    Well, according to some, it’s due to drought caused by global warming.

    Seriously.  That’s really what some folks are claiming.

    That’s just par for the course, though.  As the linked article also shows, eighty years ago the idiots in charge in Damascus blamed freaking yo-yos for causing a severe drought – and banned them.

    Historical climate data shows that Syria and the rest of that part of the Middle East has been subject to periodic droughts for literally thousands of years.  And yet there are tools who come up with this kind of pseudo-scientific crap to try and justify their cause du jour – as well as gullible fools who eat it up like candy.

    Looks like the old quote erroneously attributed to P T Barnum was right.  There really is one born every minute.

  • Rats With Antlers or…

    Bow (deer) season is underway here.

    Aside from a few poacher/road hunter types deer season is a pretty orderly affair here in West Virginia.

    The deer eat my apples, corn, flowers, etc. I eat them. Seems a fair trade?

    Deer cost billions in property damage to automobiles alone each year, but there still limits to what hunters can legally kill (harvest for the squeamish).

    PETA and their ilk decry even these rather modest efforts. Save for one curious case:

    Slaughter on the Island: Highjacking the Flag of Conservation

    Nestled in the Pacific Ocean approximately 30 miles from the mainland of Santa Barbara sits a beautiful island where majestic Roosevelt elk and Kaibab mule deer roam free. Ferried across a treacherous channel, these grand species were brought to Santa Rosa Island some 80 years ago, but their days are officially numbered. A complete slaughter of these magnificent animals is scheduled to occur before the midnight tide rises on Dec. 31, 2011. Sharpshooters will be en route to the island soon to comply with a 1996 court settlement and 2007 legislation that reinstated the extermination order.

    The 83-square-mile island was privately owned for more than a century before being sold to the National Park Service in 1986 for $30 million. Used as a cattle and sheep ranch for much of its modern history, overgrazing disrupted the balance of the island`s ecosystem. The 1996 lawsuit settlement required the removal of all cattle, sheep and feral hogs from the island, followed by a phased reduction of elk and mule deer to culminate at the end of 2011 with complete extermination.

    As this is a government-mandated animal slaughter, you may ask where the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) have been in the process. They have been curiously absent, giving us a clear picture of their definition of “conservation.”

    I don’t hunt much myself any more, got a friend who loves freezing his ass off and/or getting soaking wet who does, and I get as much meat as I want. Still I can recognize bull shit when I see it.

    (more…)