Why Phi? – exoplanetary resonances of HD 40307

Moons of Pluto

This one may have slipped through the net, so to speak. The link to Pluto is explained below.

Star HD 40307 has six planets orbiting between 7 and 198 days, but here the focus will be on the outer three: e, f and g. These were reported in 2012 (whereas b, c, and d were found in 2008).

However, it seems the resonances described below have been overlooked, if lack of related internet search results can be relied on.

An Acoustic Anomaly

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Mysterious happenings here – something to do with fracking perhaps?

OK Geological Survey Field Blog

by Andrew Thiel, OGS Research Scientist

“What is that?” asked Dr. Walter, pointing to the seismograms displayed on a flat screen TV hanging on the wall of the OGS seismic lab. There were a series of red marks that indicate automatic picks by the computer as potential earthquakes. However, these marks were spaced very regularly, so regularly that at first glance they looked like some sort of mechanical noise. The problem with that assumption was that they were showing up on stations all across the state, all at the same time. Anything that widespread is usually associated with a correspondingly large scale event, like an earthquake. This pattern we were seeing looked nothing like an earthquake, or even a series of earthquakes. Other potential causes we guessed at were military aircraft, meteor shower, or something related to gas pipelines. We dubbed this acoustic pattern ‘The Anomaly.’ 

This .gif is a…

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Climate change activists ‘target wrong building’ in London protest

Biomass on the move [image credit: Drax]

Classic 😂

Climate change activists brought traffic to a standstill in the City of London today after mistakenly targeting a building which contains the offices of a leading renewable energy company, reports London’s Evening Standard.

Members of protest group Reclaim the Power dressed in white boiler suits and swarmed Moorgate during rush hour, unfurling a banner reading: “No Borders, No Nations, No Gas Power stations.”

The group was protesting against energy company Drax over plans to build a new power station in north Yorkshire.

However, although formerly based in Moorgate, Drax has had its London headquarters in nearby Noble Street since last year.

NASA’s TESS discovered three new planets nearby, including temperate ‘sub-Neptune’

Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center / Scott Wiessinger

Quoting from the abstract of the study in Nature Astronomy:
‘The planets orbit close to a mean-motion resonant chain, with periods (3.36 days, 5.66 days and 11.38 days, respectively) near ratios of small integers (5:3 and 2:1).’

One of the astronomers said: “For TOI-270, these planets line up like pearls on a string. That’s a very interesting thing because it lets us study their dynamical behavior. And you can almost expect, if there are more planets, the next one would be somewhere further out, at another integer ratio.”

“There is a good possibility that the system hosts other planets, further out from planet d, that might well lie within the habitable zone. Planet d, with an 11-day orbit, is about 10 million kilometers out from the star.”

In fact the distance-to-star ratios of the planets (named b,c and d) are very similar:
b:c = 1:1.542 and c:d = 1:1.553 (for comparison Earth:Mars is 1:1.524).

NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, has discovered three new planets that are among the smallest, nearest exoplanets known to date, reports Tech Explorist.

The planets circle a star only 73 light-years away and incorporate a small, rough super-Earth and two sub-Neptunes — planets about a large portion of the size of our own icy giant.

The sub-Neptune farthest out from the star seems, by all accounts, to be inside a temperate zone, implying that the highest point of the planet’s atmosphere is inside a temperature extend that could support a few types of life.

Shockingly thick first year ice between Barents Sea and the North Pole in mid-July

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But not as shockingly thick as those who claim the sea ice is all melting rapidly and assorted drastic measures must be taken, no expense spared.

polarbearscience

In late June, one of the most powerful icebreakers in the world encountered such extraordinarily thick ice on-route to the North Pole (with a polar bear specialist and deep-pocketed, Attenborough-class tourists onboard) that it took a day and a half longer than expected to get there. A few weeks later, in mid-July, a Norwegian icebreaker also bound for the North Pole (with scientific researchers on board) was forced to turn back north of Svalbard when it unexpectedly encountered impenetrable pack ice.

A polar bear on hummocked sea ice in Franz Josef Land. Photo by Michael Hambrey, date not specified but estimated based on tour dates to be 22 or 23 June 2019.

Apparently, the ice charts the Norwegian captain consulted showed ‘first year ice‘ – ice that formed the previous fall, defined as less than 2 m thick (6.6 ft) – which is often much broken…

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IPCC Scientists: Setting a Climate Deadline is Dangerous

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Climate nonsense on stilts has gone way too far. Time to kick the stilts away.

Science Matters

Recently published in Nature is a comment article Why setting a climate deadline is dangerous by
Shinichiro Asayama, Rob Bellamy, Oliver Geden, Warren Pearce & Mike Hulme.

H/T Robert Walker, who explains in his post at Science 2.0 Should IPCC Openly Challenge ‘Only 12 Years To Save Planet’ Deadline Rhetoric? Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Ever since the IPCC report in 2018, there’s been an increasing surge of doomist reporting, to the point that it is no surprise that there are many of our youngsters are naturally depressed and suicidal, thinking there is little point in life, and that they won’t live to be adults. Others are leading the way with politically unrealistic demands that we decarbonize completely within 12 years. These new requirements they are making are not supported at all by science, rather they are a result of emotional rhetoric, journalistic exaggerations, and junk science

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Why Climate Change Wasn’t Behind Paris’s Record-High Temperature

Fine summer weather [image credit: BBC]

Heatwaves happen. But if one dares to exceed a previously recorded temperature for the time of year, it must somehow be your fault. Natural variation isn’t even considered, because it would weaken the warmist narrative.

It’s summer, temperatures are hot － sometimes record hot － and as usual, climate alarmism reaches record highs as climate activists have a field day with fearmongering rather than with facts and data, writes Chris Martz @ Climate Change Dispatch.

Every week, various weather events end up getting caught in the spokes of the wheel of climate; it’s an endless cycle. Rinse, wash, repeat.

This time, it’s the [second] European heatwave this summer.

A Bit of Historical Perspective

While countries like the Netherlands, Germany, and Belgium have recorded their hottest temperatures on record this week, Paris’s record high of 108.7°F (42.6°C) on Thursday, July 25, made international headlines and consequently sparked climate insanity.

Paris Agreement hampered by inconsistent pledges, new research finds

This study is probably stating the obvious, but doing so in a bit more detail than some other less formal assessments. Being a study, they can’t say anyone’s climate ‘pledge’ was not worth the paper it was written on, because that wouldn’t be polite. Instead they question ‘ambition’ and use phrases like ‘at worst, grossly ineffective’. But we get the idea. Whether the whole Paris thing is an exercise in futility anyway is another discussion.

Some countries’ Paris Climate Agreement pledges may not be as ambitious as they appear, a new study has found.

The Paris Agreement takes a bottom-up approach to tackling climate change, with countries submitting pledges in the form of nationally determined contributions (NDCs) to greenhouse emissions, says EurekAlert.

However, writing today in Environmental Research Letters, researchers from the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), Spain, reveal a lack of consistency and transparency between the various commitments.

How much public consultation on carbon targets, Boris? Net Zero

New Prime Minister Boris Johnson hasn’t had to wait long for critics of his approach to energy and climate to open fire.

In his first session as PM in the House of Commons, Boris Johnson made two notable statements yesterday, writes Ben Pile @ The Conservative Woman.

First, he declared that the Conservative Party is the party of democracy, and that as such it will defend the result of the referendum.

Second, he reaffirmed his commitment to the Net Zero 2050 target – the policy that Theresa May had stolen from his leadership campaign to secure her own ‘legacy’. Only one of those statements can be correct.

Many believe that the Net Zero 2050 (NZ2050) target lacks a democratic mandate.

‘Terminators’ on the Sun trigger plasma tsunamis and the start of new solar cycles

Sunspots [image credit: NASA]

This looks timely as predictions of the possibly imminent – or not – start of solar cycle 25 jockey for position, so to speak. Is there a new and better method here?

In a pair of new papers, scientists paint a picture of how solar cycles suddenly die, potentially causing tsunamis of plasma to race through the Sun’s interior and trigger the birth of the next sunspot cycle only a few short weeks later, reports EurekAlert.

The new findings provide insight into the mysterious timing of sunspot cycles, which are marked by the waxing and waning of sunspot activity on the solar surface.

While scientists have long known that these cycles last approximately 11 years, predicting when one cycle ends and the next begins has been challenging to pin down with any accuracy. The new research could change that.

In one of the studies, which relies on nearly 140 years of solar observations from the ground and space, the scientists are able to identify “terminator” events that clearly mark the end of a sunspot cycle.

Mainstream media abandons journalism for activism on climate change

Credit: planetsave.com

For whatever reasons, large parts of today’s media are bending over backwards to support the notion that man is changing the climate – and in a negative way. Opposing lines of evidence and theory are routinely ignored or dismissed as unworthy of attention. Recently some of them have even attempted to whitewash the notorious ‘Climategate’ episode of 2009 that exposed the e-mails of biased climate scientists trying to promote the man-made warming idea.
What happened to genuine reporting?

For more than 20 years I’ve watched media outlets fail to accurately portray the debate surrounding climate change, writes H. Sterling Burnett in The American Spectator. Unfortunately, things are getting worse.

Over the past six months, news outlets including The Guardian, long a mouthpiece for leftist propaganda, and Telemundo announced they will now use the fear-invoking term “climate emergency” instead of the more descriptive phrase “climate change.”

In Florida, rather than competing for news on climate matters, six news outlets — Miami Herald, Orlando Sentinel, The Palm Beach Post, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Tampa Bay Times, and WLRN Public Media — are collaborating on climate coverage under the moniker Florida Climate Reporting Network (FCRN).

This means each news outlet that receives their climate stories from FCRN will be speaking with one voice on the issue.

NOAA on water vapor – 2019 edition

[click on image to enlarge]

NOAA’s latest offering on this topic is here. Of course we’re pitched into the world of ‘greenhouse gas’ theory. But it seems to be a world of considerable uncertainty, if the phrases highlighted (by the Talkshop) are anything to go by. Most attention is given to CO2 in the media, but it’s only a very minor player in the atmosphere (0.04%). There’s no accepted figure for ‘water vapor’ (NOAA uses US spelling) as exact data doesn’t exist, although ballpark estimates from various readings can be found. Why do greenhouse gas believers obsess about CO2 when they don’t know a lot about what’s going on with water vapor, which is on the face of it far more important to their theory?

Water Vapor is the most abundant greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, which is why it is addressed here first. However, changes in its concentration is also considered to be a result of climate feedbacks related to the warming of the atmosphere rather than a direct result of industrialization.

The feedback loop in which water is involved is critically important to projecting future climate change, but as yet is still fairly poorly measured and understood.

UHI May Account For Half Of Climate Warming In China

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Whether the urban heat island effect is in fact warming ‘the climate’ is debatable, but in a propaganda war it can be made to seem so. In any case this needs as wide a coverage as possible, to offset at least some of the alarmist spin about supposed man-made warming that’s pushed down everyone’s throat on a daily basis.

NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

A new study by Nicola Scafetta shows that a considerable percentage of China’s global warming from 1940 to today is due to the phenomenon of urbanization. However, the models mistakenly associated this same warming to anthropogenic forcing:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092181811930102X?dgcid=author

Near-surface temperature records show that China warmed by about 0.8 °C from 1950 to 2010. However, there exists an ongoing debate about whether this warming might have been partially due to urbanization bias. In fact, homogenization approaches may be inefficient in densely populated provinces that have experienced a significant urban development since the 1940s. This paper aims to complement previous research on the topic by showing that an alternative approach based on the analysis of the divergence between the minimum (Tmin) and maximum (Tmax) near-surface temperature records since the 1940s could be useful to clarify the issue because urban heat island (UHI) effects stress the warming of nocturnal temperatures…

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Putting a Cap on Heat Hysteria

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Forecaster Joe Bastardi attempts to cool some fevered brows with a more rational view of recent weather.

PA Pundits International

Joe Bastardi  ~   

It’s summer, it’s hot, and the climate-change agenda is turning up the heat on the weaponization of weather. So I thought some perspective may be in order.

No question the last three Julys have been warmer than average for a large area of the nation.

But for perspective, the three Julys before that were quite cool in the U.S.

The 2015-16 Super El Niño, with its input of massive amounts of water vapor, changed all that. How can we tell it’s water vapor and not CO2? Because nighttime lows (mins) are beating out daytime highs (maxes) in relation to averages. The moisture in the air when the air is stable at night effectively keeps temperatures up (as do Urban Heat Islands). However, because there is not enough corresponding warming aloft, more clouds form during the day from convective processes as it heats up…

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Global energy demand to double by 2050

While many richer countries play fake climate games with their so-called ‘virtue signalling’ energy policies, the not-so-well-off majority try to get more access to those same power sources which are so necessary for better living conditions, e.g. air conditioning in hotter countries, and for general prosperity and health: more schools, hospitals, roads and all the rest.

Global power consumption will more than double over the next 30 years, says The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF).

Global oil and gas demand will respectively surge 22% and 66% from 2020 to 2050. There’s an unimaginable urbanization boom occurring around the world that means more energy use.

We, of course, don’t see much of it here in the West, but global cities swell in population by some 80 million people every year: e.g., the rise of the “megacity” with 10 million residents.

Basically all population growth in the decades ahead will take place in urban areas, all of which will be in the still developing nations (non-OECD), where poverty and insufficient access to energy is far more rampant than our worst nightmares could ever imagine.

Climate Swindle: Meet the new scare, same as the old scare

The climate apocalypse bandwagon first got going nearly as long ago as the first moon landing, but shows no signs of falling apart despite a dismal record of no-show of its forecasts, as Climate Change Dispatch explains. The urge to blame humans for any and all vagaries, real or imagined, of the climate seems deep-rooted despite this ongoing lack of predictive success.

This month, The Wall Street Journal celebrated its 130th anniversary by republishing salient articles spanning that period, including this retrospectively illuminating report from February 2, 1978:

A climatic disaster, triggered by the continued burning of oil and coal, could result in the submergence of much of Florida, Holland and other low-lying areas in the next 50 years, an Ohio State University scientist predicted… “I contend that a major disaster – a rapid five-meter rise in sea level caused by deglaciation of West Antarctica – may be imminent or in progress, after atmospheric carbon dioxide has only doubled,” John H. Mercer, a glacier geologist, asserted.

By some miracle, fortunately, Florida and Holland were still with us over a decade later.

Artificial islands in the North Sea could power millions of UK homes

Artist’s impression of Dogger Bank island [credit: The Independent]

For some on-and-off hours per day, perhaps they could. We’ve heard this one before but it’s being talked up again, as they start to run out of good offshore sites nearer to the coasts of power-hungry and fuel-averse north European countries. But an artificial island plus long-distance undersea power cables won’t come cheap, and that’s without the vast cost of all the wind turbines.

Wind farms that are built more than 30km off the coast can yield more energy but are costly – at least for now, says WIRED.

Dogger Bank, a windy and shallow stretch of sea 125 kilometers (km) off the East Yorkshire coast isn’t an awful lot to look at, unless you’re an energy firm looking for the perfect place to drop a huge new wind farm.

Green Germany risks running out of power

Residential solar panels in Germany.
Credit: Wikimedia Commons/ Sideka Solartechnik

The German energy crunch looms in the next few years, not unlike some other over-committed renewables enthusiasts, for example Britain. European countries don’t seem to see or admit the potential problem of relying on each other for imports. Somebody has to have an excess of power for that to work, but as more countries favour renewables over power stations the availability of on-demand electricity must inevitably decline.

H/T The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)

FRANKFURT (Reuters) – Germany, a poster child for renewable energy, is renouncing nuclear and coal.

The problem is, say many power producers and grid operators, it may struggle to keep the lights on.

The country, the biggest electricity market in the European Union, is abandoning nuclear power by 2022 due to safety concerns compounded by the Fukushima disaster and phasing out coal plants over the next 19 years to combat climate change.

In the next three years alone conventional energy capacity is expected to fall by a fifth, leaving it short of the country’s peak power demand.

Former terror chief warns Extinction Rebellion ‘are extreme anarchist group’

Oxford Circus climate demo [image credit: London Evening Standard]

Needless to say this is greeted only with amusement by the targets of his criticism. Any publicity is good publicity from their POV.

Richard Walton, Senior Fellow at Policy Exchange, says the movement of climate protestors seeks a ‘subversive agenda’ and calls for police and government to crack down on the group, as Energy Live News reports.

A former Head of the Metropolitan Police Counter Terrorism Command (SO15) has warned that Extinction Rebellion are an extreme anarchist group and should be treated as such.

Richard Walton, Senior Fellow at Policy Exchange, says the movement of climate protestors seeks a “subversive agenda” rooted in political extremism, eco-socialism and radical anti-capitalism.

Formed in 2018, the group is now made up of tens of thousands of followers spread across hundreds of local groups – Mr Walton claims it is a campaign of a pre-existing network of activists called ‘Rising Up!’, the campaigning arm of a company called Compassionate Revolution Ltd, which he believes has origins in the anti-globalisation Occupy Movement.

He calls for politicians to stop endorsing or legitimising the group, which he says promotes an ideology of ‘post capitalism’ and ‘de-growth’, encourages law-breaking, increases the burden on the UK’s police force and causes serious economic and social disruption.

Mr Walton even suggests “it is not inconceivable that some on the fringes of the movement might at some point break with organisational discipline and engage in violence” and calls for police to be significantly more proactive in enforcing laws that relate to public protest.

He argues legislation needs to be urgently reformed in order to support this and states the Crown Prosecution Service should prosecute offenders to uphold the rule of law and act as a deterrent.

Continued here.

Cosmic Ray Update: New Results from the Moon

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Plus: how big will the bite of the ongoing solar minimum be, compared to the last one? We’re due to find out sometime soon.

Spaceweather.com

July 16, 2019: Note to astronauts: 2019 is not a good year to fly into deep space. In fact, it’s shaping up to be one of the worst of the Space Age.

The reason is, the solar cycle. One of the deepest Solar Minima of the past century is underway now. As the sun’s magnetic field weakens, cosmic rays from deep space are flooding into the solar system, posing potential health risks to astronauts.

NASA is monitoring the situation with a radiation sensor in lunar orbit. The Cosmic Ray Telescope for the Effects of Radiation (CRaTER) has been circling the Moon on NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft since 2009. Researchers have just published a paper in the journal Space Weather describing CRaTER’s latest findings.

Above: An artist’s concept of Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

“The overall decrease in solar activity in this period has led to an increased flux of…

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