Here are the great stories you might have missed this week:

Polynesian DNA in bones of extinct south american tribal people…not in Chile…not in Peru…not in Ecuador…all the way in Brazil.  John Timmer in Ars Technica http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/polynesian-dna-mysteriously-shows-up-in-a-brazilian-tribe/

-Brain games are all the rage, but are they really duds? Gareth Cook in The New Yorker http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/04/brain-games-are-bogus.html and a paper from PLOSone http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0059982

-Dear Dad, your Facebook posts suck…..great letter from science writer Tare Smith to her father about misinformationabout the autism/vaccine link.  At ScienceBlogs. http://scienceblogs.com/aetiology/2013/04/03/an-open-letter-to-my-dad-on-the-occasion-of-his-recent-anti-vax-facebook-postings/

-Going to see California sea lions is so 1970′s…No I mean it, they can dance to disco!!!  Peter Fimrite at the San Francisco Chronicle http://www.sfchronicle.com/science/article/Sea-lion-with-rhythm-and-taste-for-disco-4404457.php .  Video at SFGate http://blog.sfgate.com/stew/2013/04/02/sea-lion-boogies-to-disco/

-How do bees find the best flowers….it is quite logical. At ScienceDaily http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/04/130404122053.htm

-Yum, is that rocket fuel I taste?  An archeon that can live off perchlorate.  David Biello at Scientific American http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2013/04/04/new-extremophile-breathes-rocket-fuel/

-Great article about breaking into science writing.  Bora Zivkovic at Scientific American http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/incubator/2013/04/02/how-to-break-into-science-writing-using-your-blog-and-social-media-sci4hels/

-Coverage on the White House’s B.R.A.I.N initiative: Carl Zimmer at National Geographic http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/04/02/a-new-push-to-explore-the-brain/ , John Markoff and James Gorman at The New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/02/science/obama-to-unveil-initiative-to-map-the-human-brain.html , Carolyn Johnson at Boston.com http://www.boston.com/news/science/blogs/science-in-mind/2013/04/05/local-scientists-brain-mapping-dream-team-reflect-challenges-opportunity/GfMmxOaELZyA9xmQ6Gv6UL/blog.html , Meredith Wadman at Nature http://blogs.nature.com/news/2013/04/obama-launches-ambitious-brain-map-project-with-100-million.html

-When you work with bats you must post cute bat videos whenever you can.  Smallest macrochiropteran species, the blossom bat.  Dan Nosowitz at Popsci http://www.popsci.com/category/tags/blossom-bats

-A little closer to home.  UCR receives 3 million dollar grant from Kaiser Permanente.  At PHYS.org http://phys.org/wire-news/126535721/uc-riverside-medical-school-receives-3m-grant-from-kaiser-perman.html

A few weeks ago, one of the regular contributors to discussion on this blog (Pendantry), brought the work of Professor Guy McPherson (University of Arizona) to my attention. I must admit that I was a bit lazy and just watched the video embedded on Pendantry’s blog. However, in my defence, that was partly because I was shocked by what I saw and heard. Even though I have since embedded the same video on this blog, I had still done little more than scratch the surface to examine the huge amount of research to which McPherson refers. Here and now, I intend to put that right.

Having worked out how to get Professor McPherson’s attention (by inserting a link in my post to a specific post on his blog), he has since graciously joined the discussion. In welcoming him to my blog, I said this:

…Thanks also for providing a link to the new article on your brilliantly-named Nature Bats Last blog… I had thereby also found the Think Progress article by Joe Romm, highlighting the fact that, even today, the IPCC is still not incorporating the effects of positive feedback mechanisms into its projections. This would be truly incredible, were it not for the fact that I understand the pressure the IPCC is put under to avoid being “alarmist”… What amazes me, therefore, is that there are not more scientists like you who are speaking out about the way in which humanity is sleepwalking to catastrophe. However, I know, you say this is because they want to keep their jobs. What about [preserving] the lives of their children? By 2030, I will have reached retirement age, but my children will only be in their early 30s; they may even still be childless…

So, then, I am reluctantly coming round to Professor Guy McPherson’s view that both mainstream climate scientists and climate change sceptics are equally guilty of believing what they want to believe and seeing only what they want to see. This is because, when you investigate the ten positive feedback loops that McPherson has recently highlighted (see below) you realise that, in doing so, he is referring to the results of peer-reviewed research; all of which is already in the public domain.

The problem is that the vast majority of mainstream scientists are refusing to join the dots and admit that these 10 feedback loops are going to interfere with – and mutually reinforce – each other. It also does not help that the IPCC is still not incorporating these feedback loops into its projections (link below).

I started by reading what is currently the most popular post on McPherson’s blog, Climate-change summary and update, which starts by listing a nasty-looking trend in large-scale projections of global average temperature rise:

1. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (late 2007): 1 C by 2100
2. Hadley Centre for Meteorological Research (late 2008): 2 C by 2100
3. United Nations Environment Programme (mid 2009): 3.5 C by 2100
4. Hadley Centre for Meteorological Research (October 2009): 4 C by 2060
5. Global Carbon Project, Copenhagen Diagnosis (November 2009): 6 C by 2100
6. International Energy Agency (November 2010): 3.5 C by 2050
7. United Nations Environment Programme (December 2010): up to 5 C by 2050

Having done this, McPherson then goes on to list the 10 Positive Feedback Mechanisms that he has identified from recent research. Below, I have reproduced his list and, where they were missing, inserted links to more information in each case.

10 positive feedback mechanisms:
Methane hydrates are bubbling out the Arctic Ocean (Science, March 2010)
Warm Atlantic water is defrosting the Arctic as it shoots through the Fram Strait (Science, January 2011)
Siberian methane vents have increased… to about a kilometer across in 2011 (Tellus, February 2011)
Drought in the Amazon triggered the release of more carbon than the USA in 2010 (Science, February 2011)
Peat in the world’s boreal forests is decomposing at an astonishing rate (Nature Comms., November 2011)
Methane is being released from the Antarctic (Nature, August 2012)
Russian forest and bog fires are growing (NASA, August 2012)
Cracking of glaciers accelerates in the presence of increased carbon dioxide (J. of App. Physics, October 2012)
Exposure to sunlight increases [is] accelerating thawing of the permafrost (PNAS, February 2013)
Arctic drilling was fast-tracked by the Obama administration during the summer of 2012

Having listed these, McPherson then points out that the only one of these over which humanity has any control (and can therefore choose to stop or reverse) is the decision to drill for oil in the Arctic. The same could be said for all unconventional fossil fuels. However, acknowledging this reality, McPherson then adds… “Because we’ve entered the era of expensive oil, I can’t imagine we’ll voluntarily terminate the process of drilling for oil and gas in the Arctic (or anywhere else).”

For the sake of brevity, I will not comment on all of these mechanisms but, for those that are interested, here are some of the more notable responses I found (both dismissive and concerned) on the Internet.

Dismissive responses:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/03/arctic-methane-on-the-move/

Concerned responses:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_methane_release (includes a good list of references);
http://stephenleahy.net/2011/02/03/arctic-defrost-dumping-snow-on-u-s-and-europe/; and
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/01/31/1524981/why-climate-scientists-have-consistently-underestimated-key-global-warming-impacts/ (discussed below).

As intimated above, I want to focus on the fact that the IPCC is still not including any of these positive feedback mechanisms and is therefore continuing to be overly optimistic (i.e. under-reporting the nature, scale and urgency of the problems we have now created by failing to decarbonise our economies already).

Why is the IPCC being unduly optimistic?
Writing in the Scientific American magazine 6 years ago, in an article entitled ‘Conservative Climate’, David Biello gave us all the answer:

By excluding statements that provoked disagreement and adhering strictly to data published in peer-reviewed journals, the IPCC has generated a conservative document that may underestimate the changes that will result from a warming world, much as its 2001 report did.

The IPCC was set up by conservative political leaders in the 1980s (Reagan, Thatcher and Gorbachov) but its hands were tied from the start; its complicated internal and external review process (i.e. government-appointed reviewers) ensuring that it never publishes anything that is too scary. By refusing to countenance the possibility that more pessimistic opinions amongst the scientific community might actually be coming from those that are being the most objective, it has completely inverted the well-respected precautionary principle; and promoted instead the wait and see approach of climate sceptics everywhere.

However, the IPCC has not just wasted 6 years, it has wasted 20 years; and things are now getting serious: If you are not convinced, then I would invite you to read what Joe Romm on the Think Progress website has to say about all of this: He starts by informing the reader that the thawing of the permafrost will release “a staggering 1.5 trillion tons of frozen carbon, about twice as much carbon as contained in the atmosphere, much of which would be released as methane… 25 times as potent a heat-trapping gas as CO2 over a 100 year time horizon, but 72 to 100 times as potent over 20 years!”

Carbon emission (in billions of tons of carbon a year) from thawing permafrost
[from Schaefer et al, 2011]

It is little wonder, then, that Dave Roberts posted an item on the Grist website almost a year ago, entitled: Climate change is simple: We do something or we’re screwed.

If you have not done so already, please join Bill McKibben’s 350.org and/or join a local group promoting sustainable responses to the approaching socio-economic meltdown: To me, and many others who are not ideologically blinded to the nature of reality, this now seems to be the inevitable consequence of the refusal of our carbon-based civilisation to acknowledge the impossibility of perpetual growth on a finite planet.

I therefore fear that it may be time to “brace for impact!”.

By David Biello | August 1, 2012 |
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Unscientific American on line chat on heat wave to cultists – blames 90s this week on AGW

By Joseph D’Aleo

Today the once great magazine Scientific American continued to propagate the hoax of global warming by blaming the two day heat wave in the east on greenhouse gases. They held an on line briefing by David Biello, chief propagandist today.

Overview Extreme Weather and Climate Change

Several temperature records were broken along the East Coast on Tuesday, with the mercury reaching into the high 90s at all three New York City airports and parts further north, such as Burlington, Vt., where residents and businesses are ill-prepared for such heat. The heat wave is expected to continue through the end of the work week along the Eastern Seaboard, and severe storms are parked over the Midwest, causing floods in Duluth, Minn.

Hot weather is an often overlooked cause of death worldwide and in the U.S., especially in low-income urban areas where residents might lack air-conditioners. In fact, high heat is the number one weather-related cause of death in the U.S. In an average year, heat kills more people than floods, hurricanes, lightning and tornadoes combined, according to the National Weather Service.

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Lets look at the facts.

First of all extreme cold kills twice as many as extreme heat. This will increase in the future if the greens have their way as power brownouts and blackouts and soaring heating oil prices and electricity rates put more and more people into fuel poverty. This will also cause more deaths from the heat waves that are an inevitable part of summer.

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Here is a look at Global Death and Death Rates Due to Extreme Weather Events, 1900-2008. Source: Goklany (2009), based on EM-DAT (2009), McEvedy and Jones (1978), and WRI (2009). Global rates have declined, which is disappointing to the radical population control freaks among the greens.

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This month had been cool without 90 degree days the first 19 days. Boston was averaging 4.7F below normal and Central Park 2.5F below. Cooler than normal weather will follow this brief heat.

Here is the EPA’s own heat wave Index.

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Here is a plot of state all-time record highs by decade.

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Temperatures did not reach 100F in NYC or BOS. 100F are not new phenomena. Also there is NO correlation with CO2.

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Boston also shows no upward trend.

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Here is all 50 states all 12 months the records by decade through the 2000s. Latest occuring record year used.

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The 2000s was an unusually benign decade. Last year had some brutal heat in Texas and Oklahoma and yes, this past winter and spring on the rebound from the second strongest La Nina in history and two of the coldest winters it was warm in the lower 48 states (though brutally cold in Eurasia and Alaska. Let’s see the tune Biello plays in winter when the snow and cold invade North America and the lower 48 states as a weak El Nino comes on. I am glad I cancelled my subscription to Scientific American and Science and Nature. You may wish to consider the same.

Featured

The article discusses how high-tech solutions were discusses, discarded and improved upon until they could finally be used to stop the stream of oil gushing into the Gulf.

Forty-eight hours into an attempt to muscle a gusher of oil back into the deep-sea well from which it spewed, the flow of petroleum and gas refused to slow. Screen after screen in a special room at BP’s headquarters in Houston showed the oil gushing undiminished, silently witnessed underwater by remotely operated vehicles(ROVs).

The room—called the HIVE, for Highly Immersive Visualization Environment—was hardly the only place at BP buzzing with activity. Earlier, locked in the 10-meter-square “intervention room” on the third floor, scientist fought scientist in the battle over whether to proceed with an established way to plug the leak, the so-called “top kill” operation…

Eugenicists push discredited overpopulation myth in pursuit of elite agenda to reduce global living standards.

Following the leak of a United Nations blueprint which outlined the plan to replace fearmongering about global warming with the contrived threat of overpopulation, a Scientific American report mimics precisely that talking point, pushing the notion that programs of mass abortion and birth control need to be encouraged in order to reduce the amount of humans on the planet exhaling carbon dioxide.

“Ultimately, family planning alone – such as the use of condoms and other reproductive health services – in parts of the world with growing populations, including the U.S., could restrain population growth significantly, this analysis finds,” writes David Biello.

To back up his argument, Biello links to an article by the completely discredited eugenicist Paul Ehrlich, who once stated that “everyone will disappear in a cloud of blue steam.”

Ehrlich, who co-authored Ecoscience with White House Science Czar John P. Holdren, the textbook that advocates putting drugs in the water supply to sterilize people, mandatory forced abortions, and a tyrannical eco-fascist dictatorship run by a “planetary regime,” is infamous for his spectacularly inaccurate predictions about how overpopulation would destroy the environment.

The article cited by Biello advocates a mass public relations campaign targeted at women to encourage them to have abortions in order to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. In other words, more babies need to be killed to prevent them from exhaling CO2. Coincidentally, the cover of the Scientific American issue in which the article appears features a set of human skulls.

As we revealed in a report last month, the true agenda behind fanning the flames of fears about overpopulation is to reduce living standards globally, by preventing the third world from ever becoming economically prosperous, while also eviscerating the middle classes of western nations.

A leaked UN blueprint concerning the need to re-energize the move towards global government outlined a plan to re-brand global warming as “overpopulation” as a means of dismantling the middle classes while using “global redistribution of wealth” and increased immigration to reinvigorate the pursuit of a one world government.

The aim of globalist institutions is to “limit and redirect the aspirations for a better life of rising middle classes around the world,” in other words to reduce the standard of living for the middle classes in Western Europe and America.

Similarly, in his report, Biello decries the potential that “richer people” would lead to more consumption, once again revealing the eugenicist fervor that environmentalists embrace in deliberately preventing the third world from lifting itself out of poverty and mass starvation.

In reality, whenever a country is allowed to develop and become more prosperous, population figures drop naturally, underscoring the fact that environmentalists do not really care about the threat posed by overpopulation, their primary concern is the threat posed to the elite by a stronger middle class globally.

Environmental controls which prevent third world nations from developing infrastructure arefueling overpopulation, starvation and misery, which is precisely how the elitists want it to remain.

Warnings about the threat posed by overpopulation are fundamentally flawed. In reality,underpopulation will be seen as the biggest danger to human prosperity in the latter half of the 21st century.

The UN’s own figures clearly indicate that population is set to stabilize in 2020 and then drop dramatically after 2050. As the Economist reported, “Fertility is falling and families are shrinking in places— such as Brazil, Indonesia, and even parts of India—that people think of as teeming with children. As our briefing shows, the fertility rate of half the world is now 2.1 or less—the magic number that is consistent with a stable population and is usually called “the replacement rate of fertility”. Sometime between 2020 and 2050 the world’s fertility rate will fall below the global replacement rate.”

Of course, the globalist agenda to reduce world population by as much as 80% in the name of saving the environment, a figure achievable only via draconian and genocidal measures, has nothing to do with the environment and everything to do with whittling down the number of slaves so that they can be more easily controlled on the plantation.

Holdren and Ehrlich’s eco-fascist plan to sterilize people through the water supply is already taking effect, as global sperm counts drop and gender-bending chemicals pollute our rivers and lakes, while feminizing antiandrogens are sprayed on our food in the form of pesticides.

Global sperm counts have dropped by a third since 1989 and by half in the past 50 years. The rate of decline is only accelerating as more and more couples find it harder to have children. In studies of white European men, the rate of decline is as much as 50 per cent in the last 30 years. In Italy, this equates to a native population reduction of 22 per cent by 2050. Population reduction is already occurring amongst native residents in many areas of Europe and America.

The agenda to reduce global population, a process that could naturally be achieved by alleviating third world poverty and lifting the living standards of people worldwide, is instead being enacted through the deliberate mass poisoning of our food and water supplies.

In addition, governments are already developing neutron bombs that destroy humans but not buildings, “for extreme ethnic cleansing in an increasingly populated world,” according to a 2007 British Ministry of Defence report, which predicted that their use could lead to the “application of lethal force without human intervention, raising consequential legal and ethical issues.”

As the video below demonstrates, overpopulation is a myth. Globalists and their eugenicist minions have misrepresented population statistics for decades in order to justify their agenda to wipe out large portions of the population. If this genocidal agenda continues, humanity will go the way of the Brontosaurus.

John Lennon called it right on the overpopulation myth.

U.S. roads paved with glass panels encasing photovoltaics and LEDs would double as a national power grid

Excerpt - There are about 260,000 kilometers of roadway in the U.S. National Highway System alone, and thousands more in state highways, suburban thoroughfares and rural roads. Could all that asphalt be replaced with a solar technology that would also double as the nation’s power grid?

The key to making this work will be the glass: The solar road panel prototype is 1,024 modules – each containing a solar cell, a light-emitting diode and, someday, an ultracapacitor for storage – sandwiched between a layer of some yet-to-be developed glass and a layer of conducting material. “Nobody’s tried to drive on glass long-term”…

In addition to needing strength, this glass will be textured to allow tires to grip and water to run off. It will also be embedded with heating elements – like a car’s rear windshield – to melt snow or ice. And it will need to be self-cleaning, coping with the grit and grime of an endless procession of tires as well as dust, dirt and other highway detritus. Needless to say, such glass does not exist yet but Brusaw hopes to partner with researchers at The Pennsylvania State University’s Materials Research Institute to develop it… Read more by David Biello, Scientific American

Supplementary: Global Investments into Solar Energy

haplif – Frank Kalder (Global Haplifnet)

david_biello

This little electronic missive is to plant a stake in the ground as well as serving as the proverbial cri de coeur: here I am, sucking up electricity on some servers somewhere and taking up the real estate that might otherwise be squatted by mine enemies. So, expect the occasional post, and a little bit of lightheartedness. The kind of thing I can’t do over at my day job: Scientific American.