Why is this big news? It means increases in carbon dioxide emissions likely cause less warming than most climate models suggest.
Michaels and Knappenberger say Lewis’s findings basically eliminate “the possibility of catastrophic climate change–that is, climate change that proceeds at a rate that exceeds our ability to keep up.”
Members of the global science and lay communities have begun to learn of the confirmed omission of 80 years of instrumental data from contemporary ocean acidification (OA) scientific products. The missing ~2 million data points comprise a majority of the world’s historical ocean pH measurements. The data was replaced without disclosure, by a model hind cast. The substituted history, known as the FEEL2899 report (1) was itself used as the technical basis for testimony to the US Congress (2). In turn, OA mitigation research funding was augmented, and the regulation of anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions was strengthened and deepened.
This occurrence of a model-replacing-data-without-disclosure has few publicized precedents of this scale. Already some in media have chosen to headline this as a case of “pHraud” (3). Whatever it is called, a fundamental question remains whether or not this omission will ever be corrected. Currently the major obstacle to rapid correction appears to be a consensus among those in power, that ocean pH cannot (and could never) be instrumentally measured using any conceivable means for any conceivable ocean purpose by any conceivable scientist. Therefore those in power effectively assert that the world must put aside expectations of data accessibility and transparency, and accept the PMEL authors’ formerly undisclosed SeaCarb model hindcast replacement as the entire truth of past ocean pH.
Read it all.
Fish oil is now the third most widely used dietary supplement in the United States, after vitamins and minerals, according to a recent report from the National Institutes of Health. At least 10 percent of Americans take fish oil regularly, most believing that the omega-3 fatty acids in the supplements will protect their cardiovascular health. […]
From 2005 to 2012, at least two dozen rigorous studies of fish oil were published in leading medical journals, most of which looked at whether fish oil could prevent cardiovascular events in high-risk populations. These were people who had a history of heart disease or strong risk factors for it, like high cholesterol, hypertension or Type 2 diabetes.
All but two of these studies found that compared with a placebo, fish oil showed no benefit.
Last month, in an epic climbdown, the U.S. Dietary Guidelines Advice Committee, whose guidelines influence millions of people, finally dropped its recommendation to restrict cholesterol. “Cholesterol is not a nutrient of concern for overconsumption,” it said. So go ahead – eat all the eggs you want.
Just about everything we thought we knew about the evils of cholesterol and fats has turned out to be wrong. The doctors, the nutritionists, the dietitians, the heart societies, the experts at Health Canada, the food pyramid that hung on the wall in school – the entire health and medical establishment, in fact, have been perpetuating a big fat fraud.
It gets worse…
It’s not the first time I’ve posted on this. And it won’t be the last. (h/t Ottawa MJ)
This week in the journal Nature, an international team of scientists reported evidence for hydrothermal vents on the Saturnian moon Enceladus, with temperatures of its rocky core surpassing 90C in spots. The discovery, if confirmed, would make Enceladus the only place other than Earth where such chemical reactions between rock and heated water are known to be occurring today — and for many scientists, it would make Enceladus a most promising place to look for life.
“The most surprising part is the high temperature,” said Hsiang-Wen Hsu, a scientist at the University of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics and lead author of the paper. “But that’s the number we could derive.”
h/t Kevin B
Out of Africa: A new twist on predicting U.S. hurricanes.
A new paper published in Geophysical Research Letters finds astonishingly large errors in the most widely used ‘state of the art’ climate models due to incorrect calculation of solar radiation and the solar zenith angle at the top of the atmosphere.
“More research is needed,” say all the people who make money from such pointless research.
Phys Org: UNC School of Medicine researchers discovered a gene called R2d2 – Responder to meiotic drive 2 – that breaks Gregor Mendel’s century-old “law of segregation,” which states that you have an equal probability of inheriting each of two copies of every gene from both parents.
From the Not Climate, Just Weather Network.
Study shows: skeptics know more about climate science than believers
Say, about that cholesterol – “a move that could undo almost 40 years of government warnings about its consumption.”
h/t Kevin B.
The new peer-reviewed paper, authored by a team of prominent researchers led by Dr. Corrine Keet of John’s Hopkins Children’s Center, studied over 23,000 U.S. children and found no statistically significant difference in asthma rates between those who live in inner-city neighborhoods (and are thus subject to higher pollution levels) and those who do not (once controlling for other factors). Instead, researchers concluded that poverty was a greater predictor for higher asthma rates than outdoor air pollution.
The study still points to air pollution as a cause for asthma, only it’s indoor air pollution–think second hand smoke, rodents, mold, etc.–that may be the main culprit.
It’s a radical finding. The study upends more than half a century of research that assumed outdoor air pollution in cities was to blame for higher asthma rates–a hypothesis repeatedly used by EPA regulators to justify the agency’s regulations.
The study couldn’t come at a worse time for the agency. EPA is preparing to tighten national standards for ground-level ozone (the main ingredient in smog) by as much as 20 percent. To justify the move, EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy argued she was “following science” to “protect those most at-risk–our children, our elderly, and people already suffering from lung diseases like asthma.”
Science: Constrained work output of the moist atmospheric heat engine in a warming climate
Incoming and outgoing solar radiation couple with heat exchange at Earth’s surface to drive weather patterns that redistribute heat and moisture around the globe, creating an atmospheric heat engine. Here, we investigate the engine’s work output using thermodynamic diagrams computed from reanalyzed observations and from a climate model simulation with anthropogenic forcing. We show that the work output is always less than that of an equivalent Carnot cycle and that it is constrained by the power necessary to maintain the hydrological cycle. In the climate simulation, the hydrological cycle increases more rapidly than the equivalent Carnot cycle. We conclude that the intensification of the hydrological cycle in warmer climates might limit the heat engine’s ability to generate work.
I’ll let the engineers race to explain in the comments.
Update. Or try this.
Suppose say, that for the last 100 years my family have been maintaining a weather station at the bottom of our garden, diligently recording the temperatures day by day, and that what these records show is this: that in the 1930s it was jolly hot – even hotter than in the 1980s; that since the 1940s it has been cooling.
What conclusions would you draw from this hard evidence?
Well the obvious one, I imagine, is that the dramatic Twentieth Century warming that people like Al Gore have been banging on about is a crock. At least according to this particular weather station it is.
Now how would you feel if you went and took these temperature records along to one of the world’s leading global warming experts – say Gavin Schmidt at NASA or Phil Jones at CRU or Michael Mann at Penn State – and they studied your records for a moment and said: “This isn’t right.” What if they then crossed out all your temperature measurements, did a few calculations on the back of an envelope, and scribbled in their amendments? And you studied those adjustments and you realised, to your astonishment, that the new, pretend temperature measurements told an entirely different story from the original, real temperature measurements: that where before your records showed a cooling since the 1940s they now showed a warming trend.
The National Weather Service (NWS) in New York City is calling the potential for epic snowfall “historic,” while the Boston office says the incoming storm is a “textbook case for a major winter storm/blizzard.” Three-day snow totals could reach 24-36 inches in each city–good enough to rival the biggest Northeast snowstorms on record.
[…]
What’s making this particular storm so potent? In sharp contrast to last week’s nor’easter, there’s no shortage of cold air this time around. A blocking high-pressure system to the north will slow the storm’s advance to a crawl–with the center spending up to 24 hours just off Long Island–right as it is peaking in strength. Combine that with a roaring, perfectly kinked jet stream, and you have all the ingredients for an explosive storm that will reach “bomb” criteria, funneling Arctic air southwards and converting it into a thick blanket of wind-whipped white. All the extra cold air may also boost snow totals, because “drier,” colder snow is up to 50 percent fluffier than “wet” snow that falls with temperatures nearer the freezing point.
Peer-reviewed pocket-calculator climate model exposes serious errors in complex computer models;
The paper, Why models run hot: results from an irreducibly simple climate model, by Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, Willie Soon, David Legates and Matt Briggs, survived three rounds of tough peer review in which two of the reviewers had at first opposed the paper on the ground that it questioned the IPCC’s predictions.
When the paper’s four authors first tested the finished model’s global-warming predictions against those of the complex computer models and against observed real-world temperature change, their simple model was closer to the measured rate of global warming than all the projections of the complex “general-circulation” models…
The link provided for download is broken, you can find it here instead. Click “pdf”.
“Artificial Amplification of Warming Trends Across the Mountains of the Western United States”
Protein deniers defy consensus;
Open any introductory biology textbook and one of the first things you’ll learn is that our DNA spells out the instructions for making proteins, tiny machines that do much of the work in our body’s cells. Results from a study published on Jan. 2 in Science defy textbook science, showing for the first time that the building blocks of a protein, called amino acids, can be assembled without blueprints — DNA and an intermediate template called messenger RNA (mRNA). A team of researchers has observed a case in which another protein specifies which amino acids are added.
“This surprising discovery reflects how incomplete our understanding of biology is,” says first author Peter Shen, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow in biochemistry at the University of Utah. “Nature is capable of more than we realize.”