Tag Archives: Science & Technology

National Insecurity

Russians in Nanotech Race with US, China?

Russia Pours Billions in Oil Profits Into Nanotech Race

Back in the mid-1980s, a joke made the rounds that the Kremlin was preparing a major announcement: After a decade-long top-secret crash program, socialist science had succeeded in building the world’s largest microprocessor.

That was then. After sleeping through the high tech revolutions of the late 20th century, the Russian government is dumping billions into the burgeoning science of nanotechnology. The Kremlin last June announced the creation of Rosnanotekh, a state nanotechnology corporation slated for $5 billion in initial funding — an outlay that propels Russia past China in nanotech spending, and puts the country on a par with the United States in government-funded nano research.

Russia shooting for another technological “surprise” like Sputnik? (Remeber though, the ChiComs are lurking out there too.)

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Is THIS what they mean by “Happy as a clam?”

Clam, 405, is oldest animal ever

A British scientific team discovered the 405-year-old clam, named after the Chinese dynasty and not the former Liberal Democrat leader, at the bottom of the ocean, and hope its longevity will reveal the secrets of ageing. So significant is the find that Help The Aged have awarded a £40,000 grant to the team to investigate how the molusc, born when Queen Elizabeth I was on the throne and William Shakespeare was writing The Merry Wives of Windsor, has survived over the centuries.

Space Patrol

Private Space Progress

Bigelow Space Modules: Sky High Plans Face Transportation Concerns

Two privately-built prototype modules are circuiting the Earth – prelude technology to seed space with far larger orbital housing that support human occupants.

This has been a very thoughtful, systematic development of the technology and capability of extending the reach and presence of “private” space (i.e. non-governmental space development).

It’s high time!

Meanwhile, Bigelow is far from the only one to have irons in the fire:

Carnegie Mellon Sets Sights on Google’s Lunar X Prize

William “Red” Whittaker and the wizards at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute in Pittsburgh, hope to use their expertise to snag $20 million in the Google Lunar X Prize.

Carnegie Mellon is one of seven teams so far to have sent in a letter of intent and a $1,000 deposit to compete for the $20 million grand prize, according to Brett Alexander, the X Prize Foundation’s executive director of space prizes and the Wirefly X Prize Cup.

The private space moon race has started.

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Paradigm Shift on Oil in Order

The concept of “peak oil” is near and dear to the hearts of the doomsayer schools of environmentalism. Here’s another perspective on the issue that seems to be based on something more than a case of enviromentalist “vapors”.

Russia is far from oil’s peak

The good news is that panic scenarios about the world running out of oil any time soon are wrong. The bad news is that the price of oil is going to continue to rise. “Peak Oil” is not our problem. Politics is. Big Oil wants to sustain high oil prices. US Vice President Dick Cheney and friends are all too willing to assist.

What is the “peak oil” theory?

The Peak Oil school rests its theory on conventional Western geology textbooks, most by American or British geologists, which claim oil is a “fossil fuel”, a biological residue or detritus of either fossilized dinosaur remains or perhaps algae, hence a product in finite supply. Biological origin is central to Peak Oil theory, used to explain why oil is only found in certain parts of the world where it was geologically trapped millions of years ago.

That would mean that dinosaur remains became compressed and over tens of millions of years fossilized and were trapped in underground reservoirs perhaps 1,200-2,000 meters below the surface of the Earth. In rare cases, so goes the theory, huge amounts of biological matter should have been trapped in rock formations in the shallower ocean regions such as in the Gulf of Mexico or North Sea or Gulf of Guinea. Geology should be only about figuring out where these pockets in the layers of the earth, called reservoirs, lie within certain sedimentary basins.

On the other hand…

An entirely alternative theory of oil formation has existed since the early 1950s in Russia, almost unknown to the West. It claims that the conventional US biological-origins theory is an unscientific absurdity that is unprovable. They point to the fact that Western geologists have repeatedly predicted finite oil over the past century, only then to find more, lots more.

Not only has this alternative explanation of the origins of oil and gas existed in theory, the emergence of Russia as the world’s largest oil and natural-gas producer has been based on the application of the theory in practice.(Emphasis added.)

Note here: they put their money where their mouth is, and lo and behold…it worked!

This has geopolitical consequences of staggering magnitude.

THAT is a profound understatement! Read the rest of this and THEN look at the price on the corner gas station, and scratch your head along with the Chief.

How could US geology be so far behind the 8-ball on this? Hey! We’ve had long practice at trailing the rest of the world in geological theory:

Russian geophysicists used the theories of brilliant German scientist Alfred Wegener fully 30 years before Western geologists “discovered” Wegener in the 1960s. In 1915, Wegener published the seminal text The Origin of Continents and Oceans, which suggested an original unified landmass or Pangaea more than 200 million years ago that separated into present continents by what he called continental drift.

Up to the 1960s, supposed US scientists such as Dr Frank Press, the White House science adviser, referred to Wegener as “lunatic”. Geologists at the end of the 1960s were forced to eat their words as Wegener offered the only interpretation that allowed them to discover the vast oil resources of the North Sea.

Perhaps in some decades Western geologists will rethink their mythology of fossil origins and realize what the Russians have known since the 1950s. In the meantime, Moscow holds a massive energy trump card.

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German Scientists Declare Speed of Light Broken

What’s being reported here as being new is the release of a peer-reviewed paper of this research.

According to modern physics, the speed of light is a fundamental, unbreakable limit. Yet two physicists are now claiming they have done just that, and propelled a stream of photons faster than the speed of light.

Günter Nimtz and Alfons Stahlhofen of the University of Koblenz, Germany, have been researching a phenomenon known as quantum tunnelling. Two prisms are placed together. When a light is shown through the prisms, a detector picks up the light and records information about the photon. However, when the two prisms are separated, Nimtz and Stahlhofen discovered that photons would occasionally “tunnel” between the prisms — arriving at the detector sooner than should theoretically be possible.

Dr. Nimtz, and his experimental set-up was featured on a NOVA show episode a few years ago. The Chief was impressed!

However, Dr. Aephraim Steinberg, from the University of Toronto, disagrees with the findings. He says its all just a matter of interpretation. The “wave packet” of the virtual photon exceeded the speed of light, but no actual information was transmitted that fast. Therefore, according to Steinberg, Einstein’s cosmic speed limit remains safe.

This is just WRONG that no “information” was transmitted! In the above mentioned NOVA episode, Nimtz transmitted a recognizable recording of Mozart Symphony no.40 through his system. As he pointed out, in response to the argument cited by Steinberg, “It seems to me that Mozart 40 carries quite a bit of information.”

So, where does this lead us?

Being able to violate the speed of light would undermine our current understanding of space and time, and lead to a number of bizarre effects, such as being able to travel backwards in time.

The Chief was impressed with the experiment when he saw it on TV, and is still impressed. Critics can squawk all they want, but if the science works, the science works!

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More Inconvenient Truth – for AlGore

Survey: Less Than Half of all Published Scientists Endorse Global Warming Theory
Comprehensive survey of published climate research reveals changing viewpoints

In 2004, history professor Naomi Oreskes performed a survey of research papers on climate change. Examining peer-reviewed papers published on the ISI Web of Science database from 1993 to 2003, she found a majority supported the “consensus view,” defined as humans were having at least some effect on global climate change. Oreskes’ work has been repeatedly cited, but as some of its data is now nearly 15 years old, its conclusions are becoming somewhat dated.

This is the stuff cited ad nauseum by AlGore and his ilk to justify their quasi-hysterical warnings of disaster.

Medical researcher Dr. Klaus-Martin Schulte recently updated this research. Using the same database and search terms as Oreskes, he examined all papers published from 2004 to February 2007. The results have been submitted to the journal Energy and Environment, of which DailyTech has obtained a pre-publication copy. The figures are surprising.

Only if you don’t keep up with the REAL (as opposed to junk) science.

Of 528 total papers on climate change, only 38 (7%) gave an explicit endorsement of the consensus. If one considers “implicit” endorsement (accepting the consensus without explicit statement), the figure rises to 45%. However, while only 32 papers (6%) reject the consensus outright, the largest category (48%) are neutral papers, refusing to either accept or reject the hypothesis. This is no “consensus.”

No shit, Sherlock!

The figures are even more shocking when one remembers the watered-down definition of consensus here. Not only does it not require supporting that man is the “primary” cause of warming, but it doesn’t require any belief or support for “catastrophic” global warming. In fact of all papers published in this period (2004 to February 2007), only a single one makes any reference to climate change leading to catastrophic results.(Emphasis NOT added by Chief.)

The truth is out there!

Space Patrol

Forward, Into the Past!

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Time travel could be possible … in the future

It may take more than a nuclear-powered De Lorean or a spinning police box, but time travel could actually be a possibility for future generations, according to an eminent professor of physics. Prof Amos Ori has set out a theoretical model of a time machine which would allow people to travel back in time to explore the past.

…Doctor Who?

The way the machine would work rests on Einstein’s theory of general relativity, a theory of gravity that shows how time can be warped by the gravitational pull of objects. Bend time enough and you can create a loop and the possibility of temporal travel.

Prof Ori’s theory, set out in the prestigious science journal Physical Review, rests on a set of mathematical equations describing hypothetical conditions that, if established, could lead to the formation of a time machine, technically known as “closed time-like curves.” In the blends of space and time, or spacetime, in his equations, time would be able to curve back on itself, so that a person travelling around the loop might be able to go further back in time with each lap.

In the blends of space and time, or spacetime, in his equations, time would be able to curve back on itself, so that a person travelling around the loop might be able to go further back in time with each lap. In the past, one of the major challenges has been the alleged need for an exotic material with strange properties – what physicists call negative density – to create these time loops.

“This is no longer an issue,” he told The Daily Telegraph. “You can construct a time machine without exotic matter,” he said. It is now possible to use any material, even dust, so long as there is enough of it to bend spacetime into a loop. Even though Prof Ori, of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, believes his new work strengthens the possibility of a real Tardis, he would not speculate on when a time machine would be built, or even if it would ever be possible.

This is way cool.

Space Patrol

NASA to Meet Armageddon?

NASA Insiders Propose Stepping Stone Path to Deep Space

No, this one isn’t a thermonuclear war, or the set of military events prophesied prior to the appearance or reappearance of the Messiah, but a more banal reference to the Bruce Willis movie that featured a space mission to land on an asteroid & destroy it.

Other than being a showcase of some hideously erroneous physics, the one thing from the movie that is being seriously proposed is a manned landing on an “earth crossing” asteroid to take place sometime between the currently planned goals of returning to the moon, and then later going to Mars.

…there’s ongoing discussion of mounting a piloted mission to an asteroid – a voyage by astronauts to a near-Earth object, termed NEO for short. These proponents feel certain of the scientific payoff from reaching, first-hand, an asteroid – perhaps even becoming able to exploit these chunks of celestial flotsam to further humankind’s plunge into the cosmos. Space technologists argue that a NEO trip could be a valuable shakeout of people, equipment, and procedures prior to hurling astronauts beyond the Moon to the distant dunes of Mars.

For others, NEOs are viewed as downright dangerous, in terms of a head-on collision between Earth and a space rock. It’s best to get to know these incoming beasts ahead of time.

This would be a sort of neat project…and would have some real scientific merit on its own well beyond that of another robotic mission.

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Bee Epidemic ID’d by Scientist

Asian Parasite Killing Western Bees

SOme good news for beekeepers, but correspondingly bad news for enviro moonbats who have been predicting TEOTWAKI (see this site jargonology section) due to the imminent loss of pollination from honeybees.

A parasite common in Asian bees has spread to Europe and the Americas and is behind the mass disappearance of honeybees in many countries, says a Spanish scientist who has been studying the phenomenon for years.

The culprit is a microscopic parasite called Nosema ceranae said Mariano Higes, who leads a team of researchers at a government-funded apiculture centre in Guadalajara, the province east of Madrid that is the heartland of Spain’s honey industry.

What’s the science?

He and his colleagues have analysed thousands of samples from stricken hives in many countries.

Sounds about right to the Chief.

“We started in 2000 with the hypothesis that it was pesticides, but soon ruled it out,” he told Reuters in an interview on Wednesday.

Pesticide traces were present only in a tiny proportion of samples and bee colonies were also dying in areas many miles from cultivated land, he said.

Ooops! There goes one of the enviro moonbats’ favorite hypotheses!

They then ruled out the Varroa mite, which is easy to see and which was not present in most of the affected hives. For a long time Higes and his colleagues thought a parasite called Nosema apis, common in wet weather, was killing the bees. “We saw the spores, but the symptoms were very different and it was happening in dry weather too.”

So much for several possible biohazards.

Then he decided to sequence the parasite’s DNA and discovered it was an Asian variant, Nosema ceranae. Asian honeybees are less vulnerable to it, but it can kill European bees in a matter of days in laboratory conditions.

“Nosema ceranae is far more dangerous and lives in heat and cold. A hive can become infected in two months and the whole colony can collapse in six to 18 months,” said Higes, whose team has published a number of papers on the subject.

Another theory points a finger at mobile phone aerials, but Higes notes bees use the angle of the sun to navigate and not electromagnetic frequencies.

Darn! Another moonbat fave bites the dust!

Other elements, such as drought or misapplied treatments, may play a part in lowering bees’ resistance, but Higes is convinced the Asian parasite is the chief assassin.

Why? DNA apprehends another perp!

“We’ve no doubt at all it’s Nosema ceranae and we think 50 percent of Spanish hives are infected,” he said.

Spain, with 2.3 million hives, is home to a quarter of the European Union’s bees.

His team have also identified this parasite in bees from Austria, Slovenia and other parts of Eastern Europe and assume it has invaded from Asia over a number of years. Now it seems to have crossed the Atlantic and is present in Canada and Argentina, he said. The Spanish researchers have not tested samples from the United States, where bees have also gone missing.

OK. If N. ceranae is the culprit, it’s hard to deal with, right? I mean TEOTWAKI must still be on schedule for the moonbats to be justified, right?

Wrong.

Treatment for Nosema ceranae is effective and cheap — 1 euro (US$1.4) a hive twice a year — but beekeepers first have to be convinced the parasite is the problem.

Science comes through!

OK. So what’s the fix?

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1st “Deep” SD Science Project

National Science Foundation funds research project at Homestake

Even before the excitement has died down from the announcement that the National Science Foundation had chosen Lead for the new national underground science laboratory comes news that a local geological engineer and his colleagues were approved for a $450,000 experiment at the mine.

“A group of me and four of my colleagues went together and wrote a proposal to the National Science Foundation, and we ended up getting it,” Bill Roggenthen, co-principal investigator of the project and professor of geological engineering at South Dakota School of Mines & Technology, said Wednesday.

Roggenthen said that the three-year, $450,000 project was approved Sunday and will begin in the fall. “What we will be doing is to test how much improvement you get with a 3D array of seismometers in terms of sensitivity. It’s my hope that we are able to advance the field of seismology and our understanding of the deep interior of the Earth,” he said.

Seismology is the study of earthquakes and their effects, and seismometers are the instruments that measure them.

Roggenthen said that Homestake was a perfect fit because of its unique structure. “This project can just be done much easier at Homestake, primarily because it has great access,” Roggenthen said. “And with a 3D array, you need to be able to distribute the seismometers throughout the area, and with Homestake, that access is possible.” The project will be the first of its kind in the world and hopefully, Roggenthen said, will become a unique part of the mine’s facilities.

IMHO this is an interesting and elegant experimental setup. I wish I could work on it myelf!

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Deep Science Coming to South Dakota

It’s Homestake:
NSF picks Lead site for National Laboratory

The National Science Foundation has chosen Homestake gold mine in Lead as the site for a proposed national underground science laboratory, state officials announced today. Deep labs protect sensitive experiments from cosmic rays. Homestake is 8,000 feet deep, with hundreds of miles of tunnels at dozens of levels.

dusel.jpg
Click on image for enlarged view.

This is a great thing for South Dakota, and will enable use of the existing infrastructure of the closed Homestake gold mine located in Lead (pronounced leed, you know, like an ore lead in the rock).

According to the NSF announcement, a 22-member panel of impartial “external experts,” reviewed four sites – including proposals from Colorado, Washington and Minnesota – before voting unanimously for Homestake.

The University of California at Berkeley is the lead research institution for the Homestake proposal. Berkeley physicist Kevin Lesko, who heads the “Homestake collaboration” of scientists, said the NSF decision would help attract even more researchers to the project. “It removes the uncertainty,” he said.

A new national laboratory in Lead could host experiments costing hundreds of millions of dollars – or even billions of dollars, over the course of decades. The lab could have a visitors center and education programs that would reach students throughout the region.

China Watch, Defense Matters!, National Insecurity

ChiCom Space Militarization

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China’s Space Threat: How Missiles Could Target U.S. Satellites

The Chief has noted these sorts of developments, very often from coverage by Bill Gertz in the Washington Times. Here’s some more from another source – Popular Mechanics, which has lately been covering some serious topics, such as debunking the 9-11 conspiracy theorists that think the buildings came down from internal explosives.

For China, a nation that has already sent humans into space and developed intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), the technology involved in the test was hardly remarkable. But as a demonstration of a rising military posture, it was a surprisingly aggressive act, especially since China has long pushed for an international treaty banning space weapons. “The move was a dangerous step toward the abyss of weaponizing space,” says Theresa Hitchens, director of the Center for Defense Information, an independent defense research group in Washington, D.C. “China held the moral high ground about space, and that test re-energized the China hawks in Congress. If we’re not careful, space could become the new Wild West. You don’t just go and blow things up there.” In fact, after the Chinese test, India publicly stepped up its development of anti­satellite technology. And some Israeli officials have argued that, given China’s record of selling missile technology to Iran, Israel should develop its own program.

As always, the ChiComs bear close watching.

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Look Out for Global Cooling!

Read the sunspots

Here’s some very interesting climate science that is NOT based on somebody’s theoretical computer model of what they THINK may happen, based on what they ESTIMATE happened in the past. This one is based on specific measurement of what did happen previously, and ties it together with what’s happening now.

Article Abstract: The mud at the bottom of B.C. fjords reveals that solar output drives climate change – and that we should prepare now for dangerous global cooling

Surprise, surprise, surprise! The SUN drives climate change, not an extra tank of gas in your SUV.

Ooops! So much for Kyoto, AlGor, etc. Oscar or not, mother nature’s a bitch, isn’t she Al?

While we’re at it, here’s a whole series are some other articles on the topic of climate – all of which have the effect of pretty well demolishing the GlowBull Warming alarums: Climate change: The Deniers

The Post’s series on scientists who buck the conventional wisdom on climate science. Here is the series so far:

Statistics needed — The Deniers Part I
Warming is real — and has benefits — The Deniers Part II
The hurricane expert who stood up to UN junk science — The Deniers Part III
Polar scientists on thin ice — The Deniers Part IV
The original denier: into the cold — The Deniers Part V
The sun moves climate change — The Deniers Part VI
Will the sun cool us? — The Deniers Part VII
The limits of predictability — The Deniers Part VIII
Look to Mars for the truth on global warming — The Deniers Part IX
Limited role for CO2 — the Deniers Part X
End the chill — The Deniers Part XI
Clouded research — The Deniers Part XII
Allegre’s second thoughts — The Deniers XIII
The heat’s in the sun — The Deniers XIV
Unsettled Science — The Deniers XV
Bitten by the IPCC — The Deniers XVI
Little ice age is still within us — The Deniers XVII
Fighting climate ‘fluff’ — The Deniers XVIII
Science, not politics — The Deniers XIX
Gore’s guru disagreed — The Deniers XX
The ice-core man — The Deniers XXI
Some restraint in Rome — The Deniers XXII
Discounting logic — The Deniers XXIII
Dire forecasts aren’t new — The Deniers XXIV
They call this a consensus? – Part XXV
NASA chief Michael Griffin silenced – Part XXVI
Forget warming – beware the new ice age – Part XXVII
They call this consensus? – Part XXVIII
Dire Forecasts Aren’t New – Part XXIX

So much for consensus on GlowBull Warming!

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Rock ‘n’ Roll at Kileauea

Swarm of small quakes rocks Big Island
Rangers close most of Volcanoes National Park

More than 260 small earthquakes shook the upper East Rift Zone of Kilauea Volcano beginning early this morning, prompting officials to close off most of the Hawaii Volcanoes National Park as a precaution to protect visitors.

Scientists from the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory have been monitoring the situation closely since the swarm of earthquakes began around 2:15 a.m. As of 4:30 a.m., nearby residents felt the rumble with 10 of the earthquakes reaching a magnitude greater than 3.

The Chief had the opportunity to visit this area a few years ago…one of the most incredibly awesome natural phenomena that can be imagined to see MELTED ROCK flowing beneath a crust of hardened lava, while you’re standing there watching it!

Anyway, the concern is that historically a flurry of quakes like this in an (in this case) active or potentially active volcaninc area can be a precursor to an increase (or start) of volcanic activity. If something more happens, we’ll all hear about it. If not, not.

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Approaching Einstein’s Speed Limit!

Automatic Telescope Spots Light-Speed Explosions

According to Einsteinian relativity, the absolute speed limit is the speed of light of approximately 186,000 mi/sec (or 298,000 km/sec).
Some recent observations found large masses of stuff being blown out from dying stars at speeds much closer to this than anything previously observed in astronomy.

Some dying stars smolder into darkness while others quickly shed their coat of hot gases. But some go out with a bang, propelling their remains through the cosmos at more than 99.9997 percent of the speed of light–the maximum speed limit in the universe.

Using a robotic telescope at the European Space Organization’s La Silla Observatory in Chile, called the Rapid Eye Mount (REM) telescope, astronomers have measured once-theoretical speeds of the explosions known as gamma-ray bursts for the first time.

“This is very exciting,” said Stan Woosley, an University of California astronomer and astrophysicist who was not involved in the research. Woosley said the energy found in the bursts “strain the models” dictating how fast matter can go.

The findings are detailed in the latest issue of the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

The Chief finds this TRULY far-out stuff very interesting. I forget who it was that said that “The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it’s stranger than we CAN imagine.” The Chief concurs.

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Student Project Flushes Out Water Problem

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Oregon Student Finds School’s Toilet Water Cleaner Than Drinking Fountains

EEEEEEEEUUUUUU! This potential science fair project is, or should be, an embarrassment to the school administration when the water quality in the school toilets was better than the hall water fountains. ‘

Katherman, 13, used Q-tips and petri dishes, swabbing the spigots of four fountains and sampling one toilet, dunking the cotton in the bowl’s center and then dragging it around the rim for a complete sample. He took the results to the school lab put them under a light to speed up the bacteria’s growth. The petri dishes with fountain water were swarming with bacteria. The sample from the toilet was clean, probably because the toilets are doused with cleansing chemicals daily.

What is equally disturbing is the thought that occurs to the Chief that this problem may be potentially present at other locations than this particular school.

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Global Warming? Bring it on!

Not the End of the World as We Know It

In spite of what the MSM regularly trumpets, not even all the Euros buy into the Glowbull Warming religion, as indicated by this report from der Spiegel. Starting with a historical trace of the development of the current Glowbull Warming hysteria, the piece goes on with a rational examination of the science involved.

Largely unnoticed by the public, climate researchers are currently embroiled in their own struggle over who owns the truth. While some have always seen themselves as environmental activists aiming to shake humanity out of its complacency, others argue for a calmer and more rational approach to the unavoidable. One member of the levelheaded camp is Hans von Storch, 57, a prominent climate researcher who is director of the Institute for Coastal Research at the GKSS Research Center in Geesthacht in northern Germany. “We have to take away people’s fear of climate change,” Storch told DER SPIEGEL in a recent interview. “Unfortunately many scientists see themselves too much as priests whose job it is to preach moralistic sermons to people.”

Keeping a cool head is a good idea because, for one thing, we can no longer completely prevent climate change. No matter how much governments try to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, it will only be possible to limit the rise in global temperatures to about 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century. But even this moderate warming would likely have far fewer apocalyptic consequences than many a prophet of doom would have us believe.

For one thing, the more paleontologists and geologists study the history of the earth’s climate, the more clearly do they recognize just how much temperatures have fluctuated in both directions in the past. Even major fluctuations appear to be completely natural phenomena.

In spite of AlGor’s and Rosie’s assertions that “the science is in” it is noted

A healthy dose of skepticism is a good idea, especially when scientists become all too confident and make themselves out to be oracles. But there can be a wide gap between their predictions and the end result — a fundamental weakness of all computer simulations that present only incomplete pictures of reality….Other factors that can either weaken or strengthen the greenhouse effect are still not fully understood today.

Noting some of the contradictory phenomena, the big gorilla of the situation is noted:

But the main problem lies in correctly calculating the effects of clouds. The tops of clouds act as mirrors in the sky, reflecting sunlight back into space — thus cooling the planet. But the bottom sides keep the heat radiated by the earth from escaping into the atmosphere — causing temperatures to rise. Which of the two effects predominates depends primarily on the altitude at which clouds form. Simply put, low clouds tend to promote cooling while high clouds increase warming. So far scientists agree on only one thing, namely that more clouds will form in a greenhouse climate. They just don’t know at which altitude.

Even the most powerful computer models are still too imprecise to simulate the details. However, the clouds alone will determine whether temperatures will increase by one degree more or less than the average predicted by the models. This is a significant element of uncertainty.

Confessing to being a wanna-be beach bum, the Chief says “Bring it on & warm it up!”

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More than chickenfeed at stake

No nice guys among robber barons in pet food industry

More on this situation continues to come out…but noticeably NOT in the USA MSM…apparently this doesn’t fit the NY Slimes’ test of “All the news that fits, we print”…so once again this report comes from the Great White North, eh?

The robber barons of the $15-billion-a-year pet food industry are not nice guys They’re not the guy next door who happened to go into the right business; not like Joe the Barber where you can go get your money back for a bumbled buzz cut or Uncle Charlie in the chocolate factory.

It’s thanks to the allusive robber barons of the multi-billion dollar pet industry and their unbridled greed that melamine-tainted pet food has now made its way into poultry at 38 Indiana farms.

Read the article for more of the sad details. These guys are the sort of turkeys that give capitalism a bad name.

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Environmental Crisis on Mars!

Climate change hits Mars

Mars is being hit by rapid climate change and it is happening so fast that the red planet could lose its southern ice cap, writes Jonathan Leake.

Scientists from Nasa say that Mars has warmed by about 0.5C since the 1970s. This is similar to the warming experienced on Earth over approximately the same period.

Hmmmm….similar to Earth’s warming – hold that thought!

Since there is no known life on Mars it suggests rapid changes in planetary climates could be natural phenomena.

Uh…hello? “…rapid changes in planetary climates COULD be natural phenomena” ?! Could be? What else are the possibilities?

Since we haven’t been to Mars yet, it’s a bit of a reach to think that V-8 SUV’s are causing the problem, so what’s left…space aliens that beat us up there with their SUV’s? Sort of doubtful.

Hmmmm. Let’s think again…what affects both Earth and Mars? Hey! What about the SUN!  What a concept: solar activity can affect planetary climates! What’ll be next?

Space Patrol

SciFi Brought into Reality

An Introductin to Planetary Defense

Speaking of advance planning…these guys are really serious about this topic.

This book offers a serious look at defending the planet in the event of an extra-terrestrial invasion. Travis Taylor, et al, have written the definitive book on the defense of earth against a potential alien incursion. Whatever your beliefs on the subject, the book serves as an important primer on the potential future of warfare on every level. It is tightly grounded in current day realities of war and extrapolates thoughtfully but closely about future potentials. It should be on the reading list of anyone who is serious about national security and the future of war.

The authors carefully make their case from every angle beginning with the statistical probability of an alien invasion. Chapter two discusses possible weapons, tactics and strategies for defense. This is followed with a look at what might motivate such an attack. And finally, who should know about preparations for defense, what a first and subsequent responses should be, and how we should be preparing and funding our defense.

Perhaps this seems to be…a bit far out?…but perhaps it shouldn’t be.