"account must be taken of psychological reactions—even in the influential research community—to the variations towards greater or less warmth as and when they occur." Hubert Lamb
April 29, 2015
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Steve Jefferson
W. M. Keck Observatory
sjefferson@keck.hawaii.edu
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Example of mapping out and analyzing the speeds of stars in an elliptical galaxy. Blue colors show regions where the stars are hurtling toward the observer on Earth, and red colors show regions that are moving away, in an overall pattern of coherent rotation. The top panel shows the original data, as collected using the DEIMOS spectrograph at the W.M. Keck Observatory. The bottom panel shows a numerical model that matches the data remarkably well, from using the combined gravitational influence of luminous and dark matter. Credit: M. Cappellari and the SLUGGS team
The speeds of stars on circular orbits have been measured around both spiral and elliptical galaxies. Without dark matter, the speeds should decrease with distance from the galaxy, at different rates for the two galaxy types. Instead, the dark matter appears to…
ESA is set to support Japan’s ‘touch-and-go’ Hayabusa-2 spacecraft, now en route to a little-known asteroid, helping to boost the scientific return from this audacious mission.
A flawless launch last December marked the start of a six-year round-trip for Japan’s Hayabusa-2, which is on course to arrive at the carbon-rich asteroid 1999 JU3 in June 2018.
Once there, it will study the surface in detail in preparation for dispatching three diminutive landing drones. It will also deliver the Mascot lander, developed by the DLR German Aerospace Center in cooperation with France’s CNES space agency and equipped with a ‘hopper’ mechanism to enable it to explore the tiny world from multiple locations.
MASCOT
Hayabusa will also use explosives to fire a copper impactor into the 980 m-diameter asteroid, then scoop up the debris fragments in…
News of this has revived the muttering and outright ranting about how Evile!!! Lomborg is. This is because the policy conclusions of the Consensus Centre (and Lomborg in his writings prior to the CC being established) shows that investing in renewable energy and other mitigation and adaptation measures regarding climate change is less effective at improving health and raising living standards in the developing world than other measures, such as insuring access to micro nutrients, suppressing and treating malaria, etc.
Obviously, Lomborg and the CC are right. Nicholas Stern estimates the cost of dealing with climate change at between 1% and 5% of global GDP. Providing micro nutrients for the poor costs pennies per person. The only…
Ban Ki-Moon “I’m not a scientist. What I want is their moral authority. Business leaders and all civil society is on board [with the mission to combat climate change]. Now we want faith leaders. Then we can make it happen.”
An unsettling insight into the mind of the cabal.
VATICAN CITY – Papal heavies shut down an awkward question at a Vatican press conference today when a journalist asked UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon his views on climate sceptics.
Marc Morano, covering the Vatican climate conference for Climate Depot, asked Ban Ki-Moon whether he had a message for the Heartland Institute delegation of scientists who have flown to Rome to urge the Pope to reconsider his ill-advised position climate change.
But before he could finish the conference hosts interrupted to ask which organisation he worked for, then directed the microphone to a more tame questioner, while a security guard came over to mutter in Morano’s ear “You have to control yourself or you will be escorted out of here.”
Morano, together with Christopher Monckton (one of the Heartland delegation) and your correspondent, only narrowly made it into the carefully stage-managed conference where – as…
These deviations from the predictions might be caused by dark matter, a form of matter that neither emits nor absorbs light. But, according to Mike Capell, a senior researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology working on the AMS experiment, it’s too soon to tell.
“It’s a real head scratcher,” Capell says. “We cannot say we are seeing dark matter, but we are seeing results that cannot be explained by the conventional wisdom about where cosmic rays come from and how they get here. All we can say right now is that our results are consistently confusing.”
Lomborg-the-economist agrees completely with the IPCC and Flannery on the climate science. But he disagrees on the economic and policy positions. Obviously it’s a disaster if the Flannery-IPCC economic predictions are subject to analysis.
Flannery, self-satirical, on the appointment of Lomberg:
“Mr Lomborg’s views have no credibility in the scientific community. His message hasn’t varied at all in the last decade and he still believes we shouldn’t take any steps to mitigate climate change. When someone is unwilling to adapt their view on the basis of new science or information, it’s usually a sign those views are politically motivated.”
So here’s Tim Flannery ten years ago, predicting permanent rainfall drops, back-to-back El Ninos, dry dams by 2007. How much has he changed his position based on the evidence?
ABC’s Lateline, June 10, 2005:
I’m afraid that the science around climate change is firming up fairly quickly…
…. the most worrying [phenomenon] is this semi-permanent el Nino-like condition that’s occurring as the Pacific Ocean warms up, and we’re seeing much longer el Ninos than we’ve seen before and often now back-to-back el Ninos with very little of the la Nina cycle, the flood cycle, in between.
… we’ve seen some quite considerable and look to be permanent rainfall drops across much of southern and eastern Australia.
look at the Warragamba catchment figures, they’ve got about two years of supply left…
MAXINE McKEW: So does that mean, really, we’re faced with – if that’s right – back-to-back droughts and continuing thirsty cities?
TIM FLANNERY: That’s right. That looks to be the case.
It has not taken long for the left wing press to attack the investigation into the integrity of global temperature records!
The UK’s most prominent climate change denial group is launching an inquiry into the integrity of global surface temperature records.
The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), established by notable climate-change sceptic Lord Lawson, announced an international team of “eminent climatologists, physicists and statisticians” would investigate the reliability of the current data.
Professor Terence Kealey, the former vice-chancellor of the University of Buckingham, has been appointed chair of the international temperature data review project.
Professor Kealey studied medicine at Oxford University before lecturing on clinical biochemistry, which is primarily concerned with the analysis of bodily fluids, at Cambridge University. It is unclear what experience he has in the field of climate change.
The other five commissioners of the data review project: Petr Chylek, Richard McNider, Roman…
Above the Nepal earthquake captured as it happened. It is all the more poignant when you see how every day normal life was happening only to be snatched away in an instant..
The BBC reported on a previous time when the same fault ruptured –
Saturday’s magnitude-7.8 earthquake struck to the north-west of Kathmandu
The last time the fault ruptured at this location was in back in 1344
It was preceded in 1255 by a big event to the east of Kathmandu
The last rupture there was in 1934, hinting strain might accumulate westward
2015’s quake follows the pattern with a gap between events of 80 years or so
When Bollinger and his colleagues saw this historic pattern of events, they became greatly concerned.
“We could see that both Kathmandu and Pokhara would now be particularly exposed to earthquakes rupturing the main fault, where it likely last did in 1344, between the two cities,” explains Paul Tapponnier, from the Earth Observatory of Singapore, who was working with Bollinger.