Space weather events linked to nuclear testing

One high-altitude nuclear test even managed to create its own artificial aurora. Others knocked out orbiting satellites.

Our Cold War history is now offering scientists a chance to better understand the complex space system that surrounds us, says Phys.org.

Space weather — which can include changes in Earth’s magnetic environment— is usually triggered by the sun’s activity, but recently declassified data on high-altitude nuclear explosion tests have provided a new look at the mechanisms that set off perturbations in that magnetic system.

Such information can help support NASA’s efforts to protect satellites and astronauts from the natural radiation inherent in space. From 1958 to 1962, the U.S. and U.S.S.R. ran high-altitude tests with exotic code names like Starfish, Argus and Teak.

The tests have long since ended, and the goals at the time were military. Today, however, they can provide crucial information on how humans can affect space.

Climategate Email: UEA’s Phil Jones admits cooling trend (But adjusted data denies it)

From: Phil Jones 

To: John Christy  
Subject: This and that
Date: Tue Jul  5 15:51:55 2005

    John,
       There has been some email traffic in the last few days to a week - quite
   a bit really, only a small part about MSU. The main part has been one of
    your House subcommittees wanting Mike Mann and others and IPCC
    to respond on how they produced their reconstructions and how IPCC
    produced their report.
      In case you want to look at this see later in the email !

      Also this load of rubbish !

       This is from an Australian at BMRC (not Neville Nicholls). It began from the attached

    article. What an idiot. The scientific community would come down on me in no
    uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998. OK it has but it is only
    7 years of data and it isn't statistically significant.

Here’s a curious thing. The current satellite data shows a flat or cooling trend from 1998 to mid 2005, but Phil Jones own HadCRUT dataset shows a warming (though not as much as the uber-manipulated NASA GISS. Is this because HadCRUT has been adjusted so that the 1998-2005.5 trend is upwards since Jones made this admission?

Joelle Gergis, Data Torturer

.
.
The hockey jockeys never learn, and are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past ad nauseam.

Climate Audit

In 2012, the then much ballyhoo-ed Australian temperature reconstruction of Gergis et al 2012 mysteriously disappeared from Journal of Climate after being criticized at Climate Audit. Now, more than four years later, a successor article has finally been published. Gergis says that the only problem with the original article was a “typo” in a single word. Rather than “taking the easy way out” and simply correcting the “typo”, Gergis instead embarked on a program that ultimately involved nine rounds of revision, 21 individual reviews, two editors and took longer than the American involvement in World War II.  However, rather than Gergis et al 2016 being an improvement on or confirmation of Gergis et al 2012, it is one of the most extraordinary examples of data torture (Wagenmakers, 2011, 2012) that any of us will ever witness.

Also see Brandon S’s recent posts herehere.

View original post 5,671 more words

Updated sunspot group number reconstruction for 1749–1996 using the active day fraction method

Ilya Usoskin has kindly sent me the data for the new group sunspot number series he and his colleagues have published. I’ve done a rough and ready plot below. Excel file here in case you have problems wit the links below.

Group sunspot number average value. Missing values given as zero

T. Willamo¹, I. G. Usoskin^2,3 and G. A. Kovaltsov⁴

¹ Department of Physics, University of Helsinki, 00014 Helsinki, Finland
² Space Climate Research Unit, University of Oulu, 90014 Oulu, Finland
e-mail: Ilya.Usoskin@oulu.fi
³ Sodankylä Geophysical Observatory, University of Oulu, 90014 Oulu, Finland
⁴ Ioffe Physical-Technical Institute, 194021 St. Petersburg, Russia

Received: 4 October 2016
Accepted: 6 March 2017

1816: the year without a summer in London

.
.
Interesting and detailed post

Wanstead Meteo

Tornadoes, earthquakes, heavy rainfall, abnormally low temperatures, pea-souper fogs and exploding meteors are phenomena that marked the Year Without a Summer around the world 200 years ago. But how did London fair?

The monthly anomalies of the two years closely follow the same pattern between March and August

When extreme weather affects Britain, such as the floods plaguing northern England and Scotland, conditions in the capital are benign by comparison.

There is not a great deal written in the press about the weather in London in 1816. So, as ever, Luke Howard’s The Climate of London, is a primary reference point.

After a wild end to 1815 that was marked with snow and lightning 1816 started dry, cold and frosty. Though cold by today’s standards January 1816 was fairly average and much warmer than the previous two when the last Thames frost fair was held.

The highs and lows…

View original post 1,869 more words

UK Government needs to ‘stop faffing’ over Moorside nuclear, says union

How Moorside might look [credit: in-cumbria.com]

Moorside no more? The UK doesn’t seem to be making much, if any, progress with its plans for new nuclear power plants, as the old ones head for retirement.

The GMB union has once again demanded that the government “stop faffing” and step in to save the Moorside nuclear development from falling apart, reports Utility Week.

The union made the comments after Utility Week reported yesterday that National Grid has shelved a multi-billion project to connect the proposed plant to the transmission network.

GMB slammed the government for “continued dithering” following the latest in a series of setbacks.

Climategate email revisited: Ed Cook throws the tree ring circus under the bus

Just a little reminder of the science still championed by Al Gore, Barack Obama, the UN IPCC, the UK parliament’s climate change committee and all those august institutions of science such as the Royal Society, the AAAS, and the rest. Ed cook offered to put a bomb under it in 2003 by telling the truth (in bold), but none of the Hockey Jockeys at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit wanted to know.

From: Edward Cook <drdendro@xxxx.columbia.edu>
To: Keith Briffa <k.briffa@xxx.ac.uk>
Subject: An idea to pass by you
Date: Wed, 3 Sep 2003 08:32:11 -0400
Hi Keith,

After the meeting in Norway, where I presented the Esper stuff as
described in the extended abstract I sent you, and hearing Bradley’s
follow-up talk on how everybody but him has fucked up in
reconstructing past NH temperatures over the past 1000 years (this is
a bit of an overstatement on my part I must admit, but his air of
papal infallibility is really quite nauseating at times), I have come
up with an idea that I want you to be involved in. Consider the
tentative title:

“Northern Hemisphere Temperatures Over The Past Millennium: Where Are
The Greatest Uncertainties?”

Authors: Cook, Briffa, Esper, Osborn, D’Arrigo, Bradley(?), Jones
(??), Mann (infinite?) – I am afraid the Mike and Phil are too
personally invested in things now (i.e. the 2003 GRL paper that is
probably the worst paper Phil has ever been involved in – Bradley
hates it as well), but I am willing to offer to include them if they
can contribute without just defending their past work – this is the
key to having anyone involved. Be honest. Lay it all out on the table
and don’t start by assuming that ANY reconstruction is better than
any other.

Here are my ideas for the paper in a nutshell (please bear with me):

Dinosaur asteroid hit ‘worst possible place’

Credit: quora.com

The energy that went into making the impact crater is thought to be equivalent to 10 billion Hiroshima A-bombs, as BBC News explains. Nowhere to run/hide/escape.

Scientists who drilled into the impact crater associated with the demise of the dinosaurs summarised their findings so far in a BBC Two documentary on Monday.

The researchers recovered rocks from under the Gulf of Mexico that were hit by an asteroid 66 million years ago. The nature of this material records the details of the event.

It is becoming clear that the 15km-wide asteroid could not have hit a worse place on Earth.

Britain’s ageing ice cream vans are belching out pollution

Image credit: Chris Sampson / Wikipedia

Even buying an ice cream from a van could be a health hazard, in Britain at least, according to the Mail on Sunday’s roadside test results. A pre-existing condition might be triggered by the fumes, they say. The anti-diesel campaign rumbles on.

Diesel-engined ice cream vans are spewing out dangerously high levels of a deadly pollutant which is especially harmful to young children, a Mail on Sunday investigation has revealed.

The engines are kept running while the vans are parked to power their fridges, leaving queuing families to breathe in a pollutant that can trigger asthma attacks after just a few minutes’ exposure and is responsible for thousands of deaths each year.

Cartoon of the day: Dilbert does denial

Today's Dilbert is a hoot
via @ScottAdamsSays pic.twitter.com/sL8EkVTQhF

— Good Ideas vs. Bad (@BadIdeasVs) May 14, 2017

Tory ‘energy bill cap’ savings dwarfed by Climate Change Act charges

In the Telegraph, Christopher Booker writes

“I would defy anyone unfortunate enough to hear the Today programme at 8.10 last Tuesday morning to have made head or tail of an interview in which our Business Secretary, Greg Clark, droned on for 10 minutes with Justin Webb about the Tories’ promise of a “cap” on energy bills. The essence of this flood of deathly jargon was that, thanks to something called the Competition and Markets Authority, this could save 17 million households a total of £1.4 billion a year.

“What Clark and Webb never mentioned, of course, were the figures recently published by the Office for Budget Responsibility, showing the soaring cost of those green subsidies and taxes we all pay for through our energy bills. These are officially projected to more than double by the end of this Parliament, from £7.3 billion last year to £14.7 billion, or from £292 a year for each household to £565.”

You’re Calling Me “Anti Science?”

Credit: BBC

A brief run-through of some of the problems with ‘man-made warming’ theories, which so often get swept under the carpet and treated as unmentionable.

One of the main accusations launched by climate activists is that anyone arguing against man-made global warming is “anti-science.”

They tell us that the science is “settled,” and that anyone who objects is ignoring a blindingly obvious set of facts.

But what to do about someone like me, asks Steven Wright in Climate Change Dispatch?

Good News! We Have Lots More Forest Than We Thought

.
.
Time to update those climate models.

American Elephants

A new survey using high-definition satellite images has found 378 million additional hectares of forest around the globe—it’s as if all of Earth’s forests just grew by 9%.

(The hectare is an SI accepted metric system unit of area equal to 100 ares (10,000 m²) and primarily used in the measurement of land. An acre is about 0.4047 hectare and one hectare contains about 2.47 acres. I don’t do metric, and assume that some of you don’t either. You can also think of it as an area of forest equal to sixty percent of the size of Australia, if that helps)

“The forests have been identified in drylands in the Sahara desert, around the Mediterranean, southern Africa, central India, coastal Australia, western South America, north-east Brazil, northern Columbia and Venezuela and northern parts of Canada and Russia.”

*The image is of coastal Australia.

View original post

Natascha Engel’s Views on Fracking

“any contamination of the water table from shale extraction in this country is almost impossible.”

Source: Natascha Engel’s Views on Fracking

Wave Swell plans wave device deployment off Tasmania

Credit: Wave Swell Energy

It’s essentially an artificial blowhole according to the company CEO. They say the device uses resonance to make the most energy out of the water that washes into it, by operating at the natural frequency of the waves, and claim it’s ‘120% more efficient than a conventional device’.

Wave Swell Energy plans to install a commercial scale wave energy plant in the Bass Strait, off King Island in Tasmania, reports Tidal Energy Today.

Wave Swell’s series of one-megawatt generators will cost up to $7 million to build, and at peak times will provide up to half the power for King Island’s 1,600 residents, according to the Australian Maritime College (AMC).

The Australian-based wave energy developer said it expects the cost of wave power to be less than 10 cents per kilowatt hour when built at scale.

Cartoon of the day: Josh on Wind energy

Labour party energy/climate policy revealed in leaked manifesto

_____Image Credit: Matt.______

The UK Labour party has a leak, and its election manifesto has escaped into the wild. Here’s what it says about energy and climate.

Sustainable Energy

Labour’s energy policy is built on three simple principles:

• To ensure security of energy supply and ‘keep the lights on’

• To ensure energy costs are affordable for consumers and businesses

• To ensure we meet our climate change targets and transition to a low carbon economy

The UK energy system is outdated, expensive and polluting. Privatisation has failed to deliver an energy system that delivers for people, businesses or our environment.

One-in-ten households are in fuel poverty, yet according to the Competition Markets Authority customers are overcharged an enormous £2 billion every year.

Labour understands that many people don’t have time to shop around, they just want reliable and affordable energy. So the next Labour Government will:

Sun sets on Europe’s biggest solar company

H/T GWPF

Is solar power in terminal decline in Europe, as subsidies and public enthusiasm dwindle?

Germany’s SolarWorld, once Europe’s biggest solar power equipment group, said on Wednesday it would file for insolvency, overwhelmed by Chinese rivals who had long been a thorn in the side of founder and CEO Frank Asbeck, once known as “the Sun King”.

SolarWorld was one of the few German solar power companies to survive a major crisis at the turn of the decade, caused by a glut in production of panels that led prices to fall and peers to collapse, including Q-Cells, Solon and Conergy.

Astrophysicists find that planetary harmonies around TRAPPIST-1 save it from destruction: Why Phi?

Exoplanets up to 90 times closer to their star than Earth is to the Sun.

Excellent – we outlined this ‘resonance chain’ (as they have now dubbed it) in an earlier post here at the Talkshop [see ‘Talkshop note’ in the linked post for details].

When NASA announced its discovery of the TRAPPIST-1 system back in February it caused quite a stir, and with good reason says Phys.org.

Three of its seven Earth-sized planets lay in the star’s habitable zone, meaning they may harbour suitable conditions for life.

But one of the major puzzles from the original research describing the system was that it seemed to be unstable.

“If you simulate the system, the planets start crashing into one another in less than a million years,” says Dan Tamayo, a postdoc at U of T Scarborough’s Centre for Planetary Science.

KAM theorem, and its application to the stability of the Solar system. Why Phi?

I’m not expecting much discussion of this post, I don’t understand it either, though I have run across KAM before in another context, and eventually some light may dawn that illuminates some relationship with our phi-solar system dynamics work. I’ll just leave it here for now so it doesn’t get lost. One random synchrony is that Gabriella Pinzari is at the same university as Nicola Scafetta. Maybe we can get him interested enough to talk to her about our theory.

The following message is a guest post by Boris Khesin. Boris summarizes the wonderful talk given by Gabriella Pinzari at the workshop.  –Jim Colliander

Gabriella Pinzari (30min talk) described her joint result with her advisor Luigi Chierchia on a recently found fix for the famous KAM theorem, or rather for its application to the stability of the Solar system.

Namely, the original KAM theorem in Arnold’s 1963 paper claimed the persistence of the Liouville tori for perturbations of integrable systems under some nondegeneracy assumption – some determinant must be nonzero. This was a perfectly correct statement proved in the paper. But Arnold applied it to the Solar system without properly checking that for that system the determinant is indeed nonzero. (More precisely, Arnold checked the non-degeneracy condition for the first nontrivial case, the planar three-body problem, and claimed that this could extend to the general case: spatial, arbitrary n.) However, it turned out to be identically zero in the spatial case.