Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Cosmic Ray Increase Signals More Low Sunspots
Cosmic Rays Hit Space Age High
September 29, 2009: Planning a trip to Mars? Take plenty of shielding. According to sensors on NASA's ACE (Advanced Composition Explorer) spacecraft, galactic cosmic rays have just hit a Space Age high.
"In 2009, cosmic ray intensities have increased 19% beyond anything we've seen in the past 50 years," says Richard Mewaldt of Caltech. "The increase is significant, and it could mean we need to re-think how much radiation shielding astronauts take with them on deep-space missions."
Graphic: Energetic iron nuclei counted by the Cosmic Ray Isotope Spectrometer on NASA's ACE spacecraft reveal that cosmic ray levels have jumped 19% above the previous Space Age high.
The cause of the surge is solar minimum, a deep lull in solar activity that began around 2007 and continues today. Researchers have long known that cosmic rays go up when solar activity goes down. Right now solar activity is as weak as it has been in modern times, setting the stage for what Mewaldt calls "a perfect storm of cosmic rays."
"We're experiencing the deepest solar minimum in nearly a century," says Dean Pesnell of the Goddard Space Flight Center, "so it is no surprise that cosmic rays are at record levels for the Space Age."
Galactic cosmic rays come from outside the solar system. They are subatomic particles--mainly protons but also some heavy nuclei--accelerated to almost light speed by distant supernova explosions. Cosmic rays cause "air showers" of secondary particles when they hit Earth's atmosphere; they pose a health hazard to astronauts; and a single cosmic ray can disable a satellite if it hits an unlucky integrated circuit.
The sun's magnetic field is our first line of defense against these highly-charged, energetic particles. The entire solar system from Mercury to Pluto and beyond is surrounded by a bubble of magnetism called "the heliosphere." It springs from the sun's inner magnetic dynamo and is inflated to gargantuan proportions by the solar wind. When a cosmic ray tries to enter the solar system, it must fight through the heliosphere's outer layers; and if it makes it inside, there is a thicket of magnetic fields waiting to scatter and deflect the intruder.
"At times of low solar activity, this natural shielding is weakened, and more cosmic rays are able to reach the inner solar system," explains Pesnell.
Better stock up....
U.S. Northeast May Have Coldest Winter in a Decade (Update2)
By Todd Zeranski and Erik Schatzker
Sept. 28 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. Northeast may have the coldest winter in a decade because of a weak El Nino, a warming current in the Pacific Ocean, according to Matt Rogers, a forecaster at Commodity Weather Group.
"Weak El Ninos are notorious for cold and snowy weather on the Eastern seaboard," Rogers said in a Bloomberg Television interview from Washington. "About 70 percent to 75 percent of the time a weak El Nino will deliver the goods in terms of above-normal heating demand and cold weather. It's pretty good odds."
Warming in the Pacific often means fewer Atlantic hurricanes and higher temperatures in the U.S. Northeast during January, February and March, according to the National Weather Service. El Nino occurs every two to five years, on average, and lasts about 12 months, according to the service.
Hedge-fund managers and other large speculators increased their net-long positions, or bets prices will rise, in New York heating oil futures in the week ended Sep. 22, according to U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission data Sept. 25.
"It could be one of the coldest winters, or the coldest, winter of the decade," Rogers said.
Thursday, September 24, 2009
My doggie ate the global warming data...
Interpreting climate data can be hard enough. What if some key data have been fiddled?
By Patrick J. Michaels, National Review Online
Imagine if there were no reliable records of global surface temperature. Raucous policy debates such as cap-and-trade would have no scientific basis, Al Gore would at this point be little more than a historical footnote, and President Obama would not be spending this U.N. session talking up a (likely unattainable) international climate deal in Copenhagen in December.
Steel yourself for the new reality, because the data needed to verify the gloom-and-doom warming forecasts have disappeared.
Or so it seems. Apparently, they were either lost or purged from some discarded computer. Only a very few people know what really happened, and they aren't talking much. And what little they are saying makes no sense.
In the early 1980s, with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, scientists at the United Kingdom's University of East Anglia established the Climate Research Unit (CRU) to produce the world's first comprehensive history of surface temperature. It's known in the trade as the "Jones and Wigley" record for its authors, Phil Jones and Tom Wigley, and it served as the primary reference standard for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) until 2007. It was this record that prompted the IPCC to claim a "discernible human influence on global climate."
Putting together such a record isn't at all easy. Weather stations weren't really designed to monitor global climate. Long-standing ones were usually established at points of commerce, which tend to grow into cities that induce spurious warming trends in their records. Trees grow up around thermometers and lower the afternoon temperature. Further, as documented by the University of Colorado's Roger Pielke Sr., many of the stations themselves are placed in locations, such as in parking lots or near heat vents, where artificially high temperatures are bound to be recorded.
So the weather data that go into the historical climate records that are required to verify models of global warming aren't the original records at all. Jones and Wigley, however, weren't specific about what was done to which station in order to produce their record, which, according to the IPCC, showed a warming of 0.6° +/- 0.2°C in the 20th century.
Now begins the fun. Warwick Hughes, an Australian scientist, wondered where that "+/-" came from, so he politely wrote Phil Jones in early 2005, asking for the original data. Jones's response to a fellow scientist attempting to replicate his work was, "We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?"
Reread that statement, for it is breathtaking in its anti-scientific thrust. In fact, the entire purpose of replication is to "try and find something wrong." The ultimate objective of science is to do things so well that, indeed, nothing is wrong.
Then the story changed. In June 2009, Georgia Tech's Peter Webster told Canadian researcher Stephen McIntyre that he had requested raw data, and Jones freely gave it to him. So McIntyre promptly filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the same data. Despite having been invited by the National Academy of Sciences to present his analyses of millennial temperatures, McIntyre was told that he couldn't have the data because he wasn't an "academic." So his colleague Ross McKitrick, an economist at the University of Guelph, asked for the data. He was turned down, too.
Faced with a growing number of such requests, Jones refused them all, saying that there were "confidentiality" agreements regarding the data between CRU and nations that supplied the data. McIntyre's blog readers then requested those agreements, country by country, but only a handful turned out to exist, mainly from Third World countries and written in very vague language.
Enter the dog that ate global warming.
Roger Pielke Jr., an esteemed professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, then requested the raw data from Jones. Jones responded:
Since the 1980s, we have merged the data we have received into existing series or begun new ones, so it is impossible to say if all stations within a particular country or if all of an individual record should be freely available. Data storage availability in the 1980s meant that we were not able to keep the multiple sources for some sites, only the station series after adjustment for homogeneity issues. We, therefore, do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (i.e., quality controlled and homogenized) data.
If we are to believe Jones's note to the younger Pielke, CRU adjusted the original data and then lost or destroyed them over twenty years ago. The letter to Warwick Hughes may have been an outright lie. After all, Peter Webster received some of the data this year. So the question remains: What was destroyed or lost, when was it destroyed or lost, and why?
All of this is much more than an academic spat. It now appears likely that the U.S. Senate will drop cap-and-trade climate legislation from its docket this fall - whereupon the Obama Environmental Protection Agency is going to step in and issue regulations on carbon-dioxide emissions. Unlike a law, which can't be challenged on a scientific basis, a regulation can. If there are no data, there's no science. U.S. taxpayers deserve to know the answer to the question posed above.
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
TOP SECRET! "Global Warming Takes a Break" Shhh! TOP SECRET!
"the Earth has not warmed for nearly a decade and that we are likely entering one or even two decades during which temperatures cool."
Global warming takes a break
Posted: September 11, 2009
Imagine if Pope Benedict gave a speech saying the Catholic Church has had it wrong all these centuries; there is no reason priests shouldn't marry. That might generate the odd headline, no?
When a leading proponent for one point of view suddenly starts batting for the other side, it's usually newsworthy.
So why was a speech last week by Mojib Latif of Germany's Leibniz Institute not give more prominence?
Prof. Latif is one of the leading climate modellers in the world. He is the recipient of several international climate-study prizes and a lead author for the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He has contributed significantly to the IPCC's last two five-year reports that have stated unequivocally that man-made greenhouse emissions are causing the planet to warm dangerously.
Yet last week in Geneva, at the UN's World Climate Conference -- an annual gathering of the so-called "scientific consensus" on man-made climate change -- Prof. Latif conceded the Earth has not warmed for nearly a decade and that we are likely entering "one or even two decades during which temperatures cool."
The global warming theory has been based all along on the idea that the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans would absorb much of the greenhouse warming caused by a rise in man-made carbon dioxide, then they would let off that heat and warm the atmosphere and the land.
But as Prof. Latif pointed out, the Atlantic, and particularly the North Atlantic, has been cooling instead. And it looks set to continue a cooling phase for 10 to 20 more years. "How much?" he wondered before the assembled delegates. "The jury is still out."
But it is increasingly clear that global warming is on hiatus for the time being. And that is not what the UN, the alarmist scientists or environmentalists predicted. For the past dozen years, since the Kyoto accords were signed in 1997, it has been beaten into our heads with the force and repetition of the rowing drum on a slave galley that the Earth is warming and will continue to warm rapidly through this century until we reach deadly temperatures around 2100.
While they deny it now, the facts to the contrary are staring them in the face: None of the alarmist drummers ever predicted anything like a 30-year pause in their apocalyptic scenario.
Monday, September 21, 2009
Earth approaching zero-sunspot records
Earth approaching sunspot records
COREY JONES/THE CAPITAL-JOURNAL
Charlie Perry, a research hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Lawrence, sifts through graphs of data in explaining why he believes solar activity may have greater impacts on global temperatures than previously thought.
The average person may not associate coolness with the sun.
The sun releases energy through deep nuclear fusion reactions in its core and has surface temperatures as hot as 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit, according to NASA's Web site.
Not cool at all.
But the sun's recent activity, or lack thereof, may be linked to the pleasant summer temperatures the midwest has enjoyed this year, said Charlie Perry, a research hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Lawrence.
The sun is at a low point of a deep solar minimum in which there are little to no sunspots on its surface.
In July through August, 51 consecutive days passed without a spot, one day short of tying the record of 52 days from the early 1900s.
As of Sept. 15, the current solar minimum ranks third all-time in the amount of spotless days with 717 since 2004. There have been 206 spotless days in 2009, which is 14th all-time. But there are still more than 100 days left in the year, and Perry expects that number to climb.
Perry, who studies sunspots and solar activity in his spare time, received an undergraduate degree in physics at Kansas State University and a Ph.D in physics and astronomy at The University of Kansas. He also has spent time as a meteorologist.
A sunspot, Perry explains, is a location on the sun's surface that is cooler than the surrounding area. When there are more sunspots, the sun's surface becomes more dynamic and an opposite effect takes place, releasing more heat and energy when other parts of the sun become hotter.
A solar minimum is when the amount of spots on the sun is at a low and the reverse is true for a solar maximum. The complete solar cycle is about an 11-year process. Perry says the current solar minimum could continue into 2010.
"There's a fair chance it will be a cooler winter than last year," Perry said.
Perry said there is a feeling from some in the scientific community the Earth may be entering into a grand minimum, which is an extended period with low numbers of sunspots that creates cooler temperatures. The year without a summer, which was 1816, was during a grand minimum in 1800 to 1830 when Europe became cooler, Perry said. Another grand minimum was in 1903 to 1913.
Perry said there is anecdotal evidence the Earth's temperature may be slightly decreasing, but local weather patterns are much more affected by the jet stream than solar activity.
However, Perry said snow in Buenos Aires and southern Africa, the best ski season in Australia and a cooler Arctic region are some of the anecdotal evidence for a cooling period.
So, Perry said, sunspots may have a far greater impact on weather than previously thought.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Paul Kammerer Vindicated in Smithsonian
September 3, 2009
Toad "Fraud" May Have Been Ahead of His Time
Before Charles Darwin, there was Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, the French naturalist who proposed that an organism could pass to its offspring characteristics that it acquired during its lifetime. The classic example is the idea that giraffes got their long necks by gradually stretching them over successive generations in response to the need to reach food high in the trees. Darwin's theory-which held, in contrast, that giraffes with the longest necks were more likely to survive and reproduce-eventually won out, though Lamarckism persisted well into the 20th century (particularly in the Soviet Union, where it was revived as Lysenkoism).
One proponent of Lamarckism in the 1920s was Austrian biologist Paul Kammerer, who undertook a series of experiments on amphibians, including the midwife toad. These toads are special because they copulate on land and then the male keeps the eggs out of the water by carrying them around, on land, stuck to his own legs.
By placing the toads in an arid, hot environment, Kammerer induced the toads to mate in the water. Under these conditions, the toads simply deposited the eggs into the water-the male did not carry them-and only a few hatched into tadpoles. But later generations who grew up under normal conditions preferred to copulate in the water, and some males developed a trait called "nuptial pads" on their forelimbs (black spots that are used for gripping females and are common on water-dwelling toads). Kammerer believed that this was evidence that Larmarckian evolution was real.
... <snip> ....
Go to the original link for the rest of the article.
Saturday, September 12, 2009
More Cooling... Anecdote?... or Pattern?
Friday, September 11, 2009
Two Uplifting Items of Interest on Reich and Orgonomy
Idyllic grounds belie tussle over founder's research
By Jane Roy Brown
Globe Correspondent / September 6, 2009
RANGELEY, Maine - Viewed from the roof of the Wilhelm Reich Museum, the Rangeley Lakes melt into the sky along an infinite horizon. A blueberry field slopes downhill from this modern stone building with its multilevel rooftop terraces.
The puffy clouds and long views, the aroma of pine needles baking in the sun, and the pervasive quiet make it hard to believe that these 175 acres known as Orgonon were the scene of a little-known act of censorship by an unlikely branch of the government. On June 26, 1956, Food and Drug Administration agents arrived here to burn several boxes of the published research literature of Wilhelm Reich, the Austrian-born research physician and scientist who owned the property. (A month later, in New York, FDA agents would supervise the burning of several tons of Reich's publications - including hardcover books - from his private press.)
On-Line Interview with James DeMeo, PhD
on the subject of Wilhelm Reich and the Orgone Energy
The interview may require a paid subscription or log-in, but should become free within a month or two of the posting. There also is a DVD version available for purchase, and a free downloadable transcript.
Wednesday, September 02, 2009
Swine Flu Fascism. Take the Poison, Or Else!
State preps to relocate quarantined H1N1 victims
'Your home and other less restrictive alternatives are not acceptable'
Anti-Constitutional Activities and Abuse of Police Power by the
U.S. Food and Drug Administration and other Federal Agencies
by James DeMeo, Ph.D.
The pellagra epidemic created a culture of "pellagraphobia." Patients were shunned as "lepers" and ostracized. The diagnosis of pellagra resulted in social isolation and despair for the affected. Some hospitals refused admission to pellagrins. Isolation of hospitalized pellagrins originated in Tennessee and became common practice in other southern states. The unsuspecting patient was offered a plethora of unpleasant, illogical, and quixotic therapeutic options. Arsenic, salvarsan, calcium sulfide, iron, strychnine, quinine, autoserotherapy, partial appendectomy, and static electric shock were some of the prescribed therapies for pellagra.[8,14]
Severe "pellagraphobia" developed as the disease acquired a social stigma akin to that of leprosy, which left many victims and their families ostracized . Many hospitals refused admittance to, and some hospital staff refused to care for, patients with pellagra; the patients were often quarantined; and elementary schools tried to bar children whose family members had pellagra . The disease aroused a plethora of unsubstantiated etiologic suspicions that included the eating of moldy corn; inherited susceptibility; emancipation of the slaves; heavy exposure to sunlight (because the dermatitis was noted most often in the spring); and exposure to cottonseed oil (because the disease frequently occurred among sharecroppers) .
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