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Merging Human Brains and Computers

Of all the tall tales in the science-fiction TV series Star Trek, what impressed me most when I was a  little boy was the Vulcan mind meld.

Laying his hands on the head of a human (or, in one of the films, a humpback whale), Mr Spock could, for a moment, dissolve the distance between two living things.

Each experienced everything the other felt, thought, knew and saw.

Now it seems scientists are about to make the Vulcan mind meld a reality – and go far beyond it.

Ten years ago, the US National Science Foundation predicted ‘network-enhanced telepathy’ – sending thoughts over the internet – would be practical by the 2020s.

BrainMan and machine: Computers could soon be hardwired into the human brain and unlock amazing powe

And thanks to neuroscientists at the University of California, we seem to be on schedule.

Last September, they asked volunteers to watch Hollywood film trailers and then reconstructed the clips by scanning their subjects’ brain activity.

‘We’re opening a window into the movies in our minds,’ Professor Jack Gallant announced.

Last week, the scientists boldly went further still. They charted the electrical activity in the brains of volunteers who were listening to human speech and then they fed the results into computers which translated the signals back into language.

The technique remains crude, and has so far made out only five distinct words, but humanity has crossed a threshold.

We can now read people’s minds. On Star Trek, the Vulcan mind meld had medical benefits, curing a nasty imaginary infection called Pa’nar syndrome.

Science fact soon?: The Vulcan mind meldScience fact?: Harnessing the power of the mind was a favourite of science fiction, including Star Trek’s Vulcan mind meld

But the new breakthroughs promise to deliver much greater – and real – benefits.

No longer need strokes and neurodegenerative diseases rob people of speech because we can turn their brainwaves directly into words.

But this is only the beginning. Neuroscientists are going to make the mind meld look like child’s play. Mankind is merging with its machines.

The process began centuries ago with simple devices such as eyeglasses and ear trumpets that could dramatically improve human lives.

Then came better machines, such as hearing aids; and then machines that could save lives, including pacemakers and dialysis machines.

By the second decade of the 21st Century, we have become used to organs grown in laboratories, genetic surgery and designer babies.

Read more here

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Der Spiegel: I Feel Duped On Climate Change

The saga continues as Spiegel Online publishes an English translation from the prominent Social Democrat and former German Environment Minister and CEO of the  renewable energy group RWE Innogy.

Excerpts from the interview are published below.

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Will reduced solar activity counteract global warming in the coming decades? That is what outgoing German electric utility executive Fritz Vahrenholt claims in a new book. In an interview with SPIEGEL, he argues that the official United Nations forecasts on the severity of climate change are overstated and supported by weak science.

SPIEGEL: You are an electric utility executive by profession. What prompted you to get involved in climatology?

Vahrenholt: In my experience as an energy expert, I learned that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is more of a political than a scientific body. As a rapporteur on renewable energy, I witnessed how thin the factual basis is for predictions that are made at the IPCC. In one case, a Greenpeace activist’s absurd claim that 80 percent of the world’s energy supply could soon be coming from renewable sources was assumed without scrutiny. This prompted me to examine the IPCC report more carefully.

SPIEGEL: And what was your conclusion?

Vahrenholt: The long version of the IPCC report does mention natural causes of climate change, like the sun and oscillating ocean currents. But they no longer appear in the summary for politicians. They were simply edited out. To this day, many decision-makers don’t know that new studies have seriously questioned the dominance of CO2. CO2 alone will never cause a warming of more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century. Only with the help of supposed amplification effects, especially water vapor, do the computers arrive at a drastic temperature increase. I say that global warming will remain below two degrees by the end of the century. This is an eminently political message, but it’s also good news.

SPIEGEL: You make concrete statements on how much human activity contributes to climatic events and how much of a role natural factors play. Why don’t you publish your prognoses in a professional journal?

Vahrenholt: Because I don’t engage in my own climate research. Besides, I don’t have a supercomputer in my basement. For the most part, my co-author, geologist Sebastian Lüning, and I merely summarize what scientists have published in professional journals — just as the IPCC does. The book is also a platform for scientists who apply good arguments in diverging from the views of the IPCC. The established climate models have failed across the board because they cannot cogently explain the absence of warming.

SPIEGEL: You claim that the standstill has to do with the sun. What makes you so sure?

Vahrenholt: In terms of the climate, we have seen a cyclical up and down for the last 7,000 years, long before man began emitting CO2 into the atmosphere. There has been a warming phase every 1,000 years, including the Roman, the Medieval and the current warm periods. All of these warm periods consistently coincided with strong solar activity. In addition to this large fluctuation in activity, there is also a 210-year and an 87-year natural cycle of the sun. Ignoring these would be a serious mistake …

SPIEGEL: … but solar researchers are still in disagreement over whether the cycles you mention actually exist. What do you think this means for the future?

Vahrenholt: In the second half of the 20th century, the sun was more active than it had been in more than 2,000 years. This “large solar maximum,” as astronomers call it, has contributed at least as much to global warming as the greenhouse gas CO2. But the sun has been getting weaker since 2005, and it will continue to do so in the next few decades. Consequently, we can only expect cooling from the sun for now.

SPIEGEL:It is undisputed that fluctuations in solar activity can influence the climate. Most experts assume that an unusually long solar minimum, evidenced by the very small number of sunspots at the time, led to the “Little Ice Age” that began in 1645. There were many severe winters at the time, with rivers freezing over. However, astrophysicists still don’t know the extent to which solar fluctuations actually affect temperatures.

Vahrenholt: Many scientists assume that the temperature changes by more than 1 degree Celsius for the 1,000-year cycle and by up to 0.7 degrees Celsius for the smaller cycles. Climatologists should be putting a far greater effort into finding ways to more accurately determine the effects of the sun on climate. For the IPCC and the politicians it influences, CO2 is practically the only factor. The importance of the sun for the climate is systematically underestimated, and the importance of CO2 is systematically overestimated. As a result, all climate predictions are based on the wrong underlying facts.

SPIEGEL: But you are doing exactly what you criticize climatologists of doing: Using a thin body of data, you make exact predictions. In your book, you estimate the sun’s influence on the climate down to the last 0.1 degrees. No one can do that.

Part 2: ‘Dozens of Solar Researchers Agree with Me’

Vahrenholt: I don’t claim that I know precisely whether the sun is responsible for a 40, 50 or 60 percent share of global warming. But it’s nonsense for the IPCC to claim that the sun has nothing to do with it.

SPIEGEL: On balance, you predict a global cooling of 0.2 to 0.3 degrees Celsius by 2035. Why such a risky prediction?

Vahrenholt: If you want to revitalize the deadlocked debate, you have to have the courage to name a number. And we derive this number from scientific studies on climate history to date.

SPIEGEL: So your contention that we are wrong about global warming is merely a provocation?

Vahrenholt: No. I mean it very seriously, and I know that dozens of solar researchers agree with me. I am perfectly aware of the defamation I will have to listen to in the near future. The climate debate also has some of the trappings of an inquisition. I’m curious to see which truth ministry will now initiate proceedings against me. Perhaps it’ll be the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, which is headed by Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, an adviser to the chancellor.

SPIEGEL: You claim that the standstill in global warming since 2000 has been caused in large part by a simultaneous decline in solar activity. But, in fact, the sun behaved relatively normally until the middle of the century, only becoming noticeably quieter after that. How does this fit together?

Vahrenholt: There are two effects: the declining solar activity, as well as the fluctuations in ocean currents, such as the 60-year Pacific oscillation, which was in a positive warm phase from 1977 to 2000 and, since 2000, has led to cooling as a result of its decline. Their contribution to the change in temperature has also been wrongly attributed to CO2. Most of all, however, the last sunspot cycle was weaker than the one before it. This is why the sun’s magnetic field has continued to weaken since 2000. As a result, this magnetic field doesn’t shield us against cosmic radiation quite as well, which in turn leads to stronger cloud formation and, therefore, cooling. What else has to happen before the IPCC at least mentions these relationships in its reports?

SPIEGEL: What you neglect to mention is that it hasn’t been proven yet that cosmic radiation, which is shielded by the sun at varying degrees of effectiveness, truly leads to more cooling clouds on Earth. So far, it is only a hypothesis.

Vahrenholt: It’s more than that. The Cloud Experiment, headed by physicist Jasper Kirkby, has been underway at the CERN particle research center near Geneva since 2006. The initial results of tests conducted in a chamber in which the earth’s atmosphere was simulated showed that cosmic particles do indeed lead to the formation of aerosol particles for clouds.

SPIEGEL: But the aerosols demonstrated in the Cloud Experiment are much too small. They would have to grow before they could actually serve as condensation germs for clouds. Whether this happens in nature is still an open question. You present this as a fact.

Vahrenholt: You will find many correlations between cloud cover and cosmic radiation in the book. I’d like to know why the IPCC doesn’t thoroughly examine this mechanism. My guess is that the answer to this question would jeopardize the entire foundation of the IPCC predictions.

SPIEGEL: Nevertheless, you should be more careful with prognoses on future solar activity. In 2009, US scientists predicted that there would be no sunspots for years. In fact, they returned in 2010. The truth is that we are experiencing rather normal solar activity at the moment.

Vahrenholt: The solar cycle is everything but normal. NASA scientists predict that this cycle will indeed be the weakest of the last 80 years. Not only did it start two years too late, but it’s also very weak. And, besides, you can’t just count sunspots. Cosmic particles continue to rain down on us because the sun’s magnetic field is hardly shielding us.

SPIEGEL: It’s true that there will be a large solar minimum sometime in the next 500 years. But no one knows exactly when. The probability that this will occur in the next 40 years is less than 10 percent. But, in your book, you predict: “It is clear that the sun will be responsible for colder periods in the first half of this century.” Do you know more than all astrophysicists combined?

Vahrenholt: The probability of a large solar minimum, as it occurred during the Little Ice Age, is indeed less than 10 percent. But we are at the beginning of a lighter decline in solar activity of the kind we see every 87 and every 210 years. I’ve spoken with many solar physicists who expect this to happen.

SPIEGEL: We know many other solar scientists who question this. Another maximum is just as statistically likely as a minimum. Predicting what the sun will do in the coming decades borders on fortune-telling.

Vahrenholt: I know only one German solar scientist who has expressed such doubt. Various American and British solar research groups believe that weak solar cycles are ahead. I take this seriously and expect only cooling from the sun until 2050.

SPIEGEL: And what will you do if temperatures continue to rise, after all?

Vahrenholt: Then I’ll give SPIEGEL an interview in 2020 and publicly admit that I’ve made a mistake. But I’m convinced that it won’t be necessary.

SPIEGEL: Do you seriously believe that all 2,000 scientists involved in the IPCC are deluded or staying true to the official line?

Vahrenholt: It’s not like that. However, I am critical of the role played by the handful of lead authors who take on the final editing of the report. They claim that they are using 18,000 publications evaluated by their peers. But 5,000 of them are so-called gray literature, which are not peer-reviewed sources. These mistakes come out in the end, just like the absurd claim that there will no longer be any glaciers in the Himalayas in 30 years. Such exaggerations don’t surprise me. Of the 34 supposedly independent members who write the synthesis report for politicians, almost a third are associated with environmental organizations like Greenpeace or the WWF. Strange, isn’t it?

Read the entire piece here.

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Is That a Crashed Flying Saucer on the Seabed?

By Ray Villard

This week, the mainstream media is reporting an undersea radar image of a “saucer shaped” object on the seabed in Baltic Sea’s Gulf of Bothnia, between Sweden and Finland. The discovery was made by Swedish oceanographers who say it’s nearly 200 feet across and lies 300 feet down.

The same object caused a stir last summer when it was originally spotted.

This week, the mainstream media is reporting an undersea radar image of a “saucer shaped” object on the seabed in Baltic Sea’s Gulf of Bothnia, between Sweden and Finland. The discovery was made by Swedish oceanographers who say it’s nearly 200 feet across and lies 300 feet down.

The same object caused a stir last summer when it was originally spotted.

Team Ocean Explorer said this image shows 300m “drag marks” around an unidentified — possibly flying — object.

These most recent reports have renewed a firestorm of news reports and blogs saying that scientists have found something resembling a “classic flying saucer,” and that further investigation is needed. A sonar image of an “object of interest” (pictured above) shows what has an uncanny resemblance to Han Solo’s starship the Millennium Falcon from the film “Star Wars.”

The mystery was compounded later in the week by the report of a smaller disk-shaped object nearby. Both images are interpreted to show a rigid tail or drag marks more than 1000 feet-long. Some people have speculated these skid marks suggest that the object might have moved across the floor as it crashed.

Read the rest here.

 

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Century of Ocean Warming Good for Corals, Research Shows

From: The Australian

 

A GOVERNMENT-run research body has found that the past 110 years of ocean warming has been good for the growth of corals spanning more than 1000km of Australia’s coastline.

The findings undermine predictions that global warming will devastate coral reefs, and add to a growing body of evidence showing corals are more resilient than previously thought – up to a certain point.

The study by the Australian Institute of Marine Science, peer-reviewed findings of which were published today in the leading journal Science, examined 27 samples from six locations from the West Australian coast off Geraldton to offshore from Darwin.

At each site, scientists took cores from massive porites corals – similar to a biopsy in humans – and counted back to record their age in much the same way tree rings are counted.

Although some cores extended to the 18th century, they focused on the period from 1900 to 2010.

The researchers found that, contrary to their expectations, warmer waters had not negatively affected coral growth.

In fact, for their southern samples, where ocean temperatures are the coolest but have warmed the most, coral growth increased most significantly over the past 110 years.

For their northern samples, where waters are the warmest and have changed the least, coral growth still increased, but not by as much.

“Those reefs have actually been able to take advantage of the warmer conditions,” said Janice Lough, a senior AIMS research scientist and one of the study’s authors.

Read the rest here.

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The Wall Street Gene: What Makes a Top Trader? Researchers Point to Dopamine

By Jonah Lehrer

It’s been a tough few years for Wall Street. Traders got big bonuses for taking foolish risks, while taxpayers got stuck with the bill. But without the financial industry’s machinations, Facebook couldn’t go public, your neighbor couldn’t get a mortgage and we’d all be stuck buying cars with cash.

How can we ensure that Wall Street doesn’t get carried away as it did before the 2008 meltdown?

This raises the obvious question: How can we ensure that Wall Street doesn’t get carried away as it did before the 2008 meltdown? That traders aren’t seduced by foolish risks in the near future?

One approach has been increased governmental regulation, such as the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, which attempts to reign in the excesses of the financial industry with new rules and restrictions. Only time will tell if this strategy works.

A different approach to reducing the irrationality of Wall Street can be found in new research led by Steve Sapra and Paul Zak, neuroeconomists at Claremont Graduate University. Dr. Zak got the idea for the paper after spending time with leading analysts and traders at a conference. “These guys are a pretty weird bunch,” he says. “They’re very rational and very competitive.”

Dr. Zak wanted to see if he could find the genetic signature of this personality type. Did certain genes correlate with investment success? What’s the difference between the prudent decisions of somebody like Warren Buffett—he’s famously unwilling to invest in bubbles—and the reckless bets that cause so many other traders to lose vast sums of money?

There was reason to think that such a link might exist. Previous research had shown, for instance, that 29% of the variation in whether or not people invest in stocks depends on their DNA. Studies of professional traders had demonstrated that approximately 25% of individual variation in portfolio risk is due to genetics. Other scientists had found correlations between testosterone levels and risk-taking—more hormone equals more risk—and shown that, at least among London traders, men with higher hormone levels in the morning generate larger profits.

Drs. Sapra and Zak began by analyzing the genes of 60 professional traders working in five major Wall Street firms. (They collected the DNA samples in 2008—only three of the firms are still in business.) The scientists focused on a short list of genes that are known to affect the activity of dopamine, a neurotransmitter in the brain.

In recent years, it’s become clear that dopamine helps to regulate decisions involving risk and reward, allowing us to experience both the thrill of getting what we want and the pain of losing it all.

Read the rest here.

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Sea Levels Rising and Falling with Sunspot Activity

via WattsUpWithThat

Guest post by David Archibald

The background to this is that, in 2009, evil environmentalists in the New South Wales Government made a regulation that councils in that state would have to base their building permits on an expected sea level rise of 900 mm by 2100. This had the effect of wiping billions of dollars off the value of coastal properties, as well as ruining peoples’ lives etc. By comparison, sea level rose 200 mm in the 20th Century.

The NSW Govt. regulation was gleefully enforced by Lake Macquarie Council to the detriment of its residents. Lake Macquarie is 140 km north of Sydney. In response, a local property developer, Mr Jeff McCloy, organised a public meeting at which Professor Ian Plimer, Professor Bob Carter and myself spoke. 400 people attended on four days’ notice. The subject of the public meeting was sea level rise.

Before we go on to the oceans, let’s start with a smaller body of water first – Lake Victoria in East Africa. It was known back in the 1920s that the level of Lake Victoria went up and down with the solar cycle. This is the data on the level of Lake Victoria from 1896 to 2005:

image

The relationship with solar activity broke down in the 1930’s and resumed in the 1970’s. There was also a very rapid rise in the 1960’s. Taking out the period of the solar relationship breakdown and detrending the data from 1968, this is what the relationship looks like (data courtesy of Dr Peter Mason):

image

Read the rest here.

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Climate Change Controversy in the Wall Street Journal

by Patrick J. Michaels

This article appeared in Cato.org on February 2, 2012.

The Current Wisdom is a monthly Cato feature written by Senior Fellow Patrick J. Michaels on global climate change. These articles usually feature new and interesting items in the scientific literature with important implications for climate change regulations.

This edition departs from our usual routine because of the very vitriolic fight that has broken as the result of publication of a January 27 op-ed titled “No Need to Panic about Global Warming” in The Wall Street Journal. Authored by 16 high-profile scientists, it made common-sense climate arguments that readers of this Wisdom and other Cato publications on climate science and policy are certainly familiar with.

The January 27 piece can be summarized as follows:

Patrick J. Michaels is a Senior Fellow in Environmental Studies at the Cato Institute.

More by Patrick J. Michaels

• There has been no net warming for “well over ten years;”

• Global warming forecasts confidently made by the UN in 1990 were clearly exaggerations;

• Carbon dioxide, the main “greenhouse” emission, stimulates plant growth;

• Climate scientists on the federal dole have a track record of punishing those who do not express alarmist views;

• Climate alarmism, public funding, and the growth of government and taxation create self-feeding mutual incentives; and

• Doing “nothing” about climate change in the next 50 years has little effect on climate mitigation compared to initiating taxation now.

None of the above are earthshaking propositions to any serious student of climate change. Monthly temperature departures from average show no significant trend going back to 1996. If one is concerned about biasing from the warm El Nino year of 1998, beginning post-2000 yields the same result. The UN was forecasting that global temperatures would be rising around twice the mean rate actually observed in surface temperatures. Greenhouse owners jack up the carbon dioxide concentration of their air several fold to stimulate plant growth. Alarmism breeds funding and new agencies that require more tax dollars, and funding begets tenure. The futility of politically feasible emissions reductions policies has been demonstrated for decades.

By January 30, the New York Times, whose editorial stance on global warming is (to put it mildly) different than that of the Journal, brought in their high-profile environmental blogger, Andrew Revkin, to carp principally about the last bullet item.

His post, “Scientists Challenging Climate Science Appear to Flunk Climate Economics,” claimed that the Journal scientists had misrepresented the work of Yale economist William Nordhaus, quoting the latter’s “wise policy” (no bias there) of slowly introducing a carbon tax.

Nordhaus responded that the Journal piece “completely misrepresented my work.”

At that point, Revkin opened up the controversy to commentary. Readers can decide for themselves.

Here is Nordhaus’s complete comment on the Journal op-ed:

The piece completely misrepresented my work. My work has long taken the view that policies to slow global warming would have net economic benefits, in the trillion of dollars of present value. This is true going back to work in the early 1990s (MIT Press, Yale Press, Science, PNAS, among others). I have advocated a carbon tax for many years as the best way to attack the issue. I can only assume they either completely ignorant of the economics on the issue or are willfully misstating my findings.

And here is the response of the Journal article authors:

We have accurately represented Professor Nordhaus’s findings in our Wall Street Journal editorial of 01-27-12, while making and intending no statement regarding his policy beliefs and advocacy. In his 2008 book, A Question of Balance, Weighing the Options on Global Warming Policies, Professor Nordhaus provided the computed discounted costs and benefits for a variety of policies, assuming the IPCC central value for warming due to increased atmospheric CO2 (3 degrees C for doubling of CO2).

He finds (Table 5.3 of the book) that a policy of delaying greenhouse gas controls for 50 years gives a benefit-to-cost ratio just slightly less than his “optimum” policy. The optimum policy is a universal harmonized carbon tax, which Professor Nordhaus advocates. It starts small and is increased gradually over decades. In terms of net benefits, the 50-year-delay policy is far better than more aggressive policies that would severely limit atmospheric concentrations of CO2 or model-calculated global temperature rises.

Both the 50-year-delay policy and the optimum policy allow world economies to continue to develop with relatively little disruption. Aggressive policies considered in the book do not have this characteristic and display sharply higher abatement costs and lower benefit-to-cost ratios.

As we note in the Wall Street Journal editorial, several more aggressive policies are negative return propositions.

Furthermore, in Chapters I and VI, Professor Nordhaus takes pains to explain that the requirement of universality of policy application is critical; regional, national, or group participation differences can be expected to lower policy effectiveness, perhaps substantially: “… there are substantial excess costs if the preponderance of sectors and countries are not fully included. We preliminarily estimate that a participation rate of 50 percent, as compared with 100 percent, will impose an abatement-cost penalty of 250 percent.” (Chapter 1, p.19). Therefore the optimum policy should be considered an ideal upper limit that may not be achieved in real world application.

We wish to emphasize once again that the above assumes that the IPCC climate results are correct and that significant environmental damage would result, both of which we strongly dispute. The statements made in the Wall Street Journal editorial report Professor Nordhaus’s findings accurately and do not bear on his policy advocacy.

Here is Table 5.3:

Of course, that wasn’t the end.

It seems that if one ever needs to start a fire in the woods, simply rub two climatologists together. So, in the wee hours of February 1, a response to the Journal article, signed now by 38 scientists, was published.

For clarity, let’s call this one “Trenberth et al.”, for its senior author, Kevin Trenberth of the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research.

Summarizing Trenberth et al.:

• The authors of the original Journal article were largely not climate scientists, and those that were, held “extreme views.”

• Warming has not “abated” in the last decade.

• Scientific societies worldwide concur that “the earth is heating up and humans are primarily responsible”. More than 97% of all actively publishing climate scientists “agree that climate change is real and human caused”.

• ”… The transition to a low-carbon economy will not only allow the world to avoid the worst risks of climate change, but could also drive decades of economic growth.”

Trenberth et al. is surprisingly weak and incomplete. The 16 original authors are all individuals that are highly competent in their fields, most are physicists of one stripe or another, and all can read and summarize a scientific literature. In fact, most would hold that climate science is nothing more than applied physics.

“Extreme views” lie in the eye of the beholder, and science only grudgingly backs away from established paradigms. For example, despite the obvious jigsaw-puzzle fit of the earth’s continents, it took 100 years of bickering before continental drift was accepted over geological stasis. And, in this case, the “extreme view” of the most prominent climate scientist of the 16, MIT’s Richard Lindzen, is hardly an outrage.

Lindzen holds that the “sensitivity” of surface temperature to changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide has been overestimated because of an inaccuracy in the way that computer models magnify warming. In and of itself, it is mainstream, not extreme, to entertain the hypothesis that doubling carbon dioxide on its own would only cause a bit more than 1 degree (C) of global surface warming. Computer models arrive at much higher values, around 3.5°C, by amplifying the carbon dioxide effect because a slightly warmer atmosphere contains more water vapor, which itself is a potent greenhouse gas. Clouds are also changed in a way that enhances warming. There is evidence from the outgoing radiation signal of the earth that the effects of water vapor and clouds have been overestimated.

The 38 must somehow disagree with Susan Solomon, whose 2010 article in Science attributing the lack of recent warming—that the 39 deny—to unanticipated changes in stratospheric water vapor with no known cause.

The 38 must somehow disagree with the global temperature sensing from satellites, which also shows no net warming for the last 14 years. Now, one could argue that the satellites are measuring temperatures above the surface in the lower atmosphere, but the computer models that the 38 find so accurate, predict that the lower atmosphere should be warming faster than the surface over most of the planet.

Finally “more than 97% of all actively publishing* climate scientists agree that climate change is real and human caused” is probably an underestimate, as virtually everyone acknowledges that the surface temperature is warmer than it was, and that multifarious human activities have some influence on climate. Rather, he misses the point well-made by the original Journal article, which is that the rise in surface temperature is clearly below the values first forecast by the UN in 1990. The core—unsettled—issue in climate science is the “sensitivity” of temperature to carbon dioxide, and there are several independent lines of evidence, including the surface temperature history and the water vapor problems, that argue that it has been substantially overestimated.

In global warming, it’s not the heat, it’s the sensitivity. But don’t expect much sensitivity and expect a lot of heat when climatologists voice their opinions.

* The part about “actively publishing” is saved for another day. The climategate emails—and there are plenty by, to, or about these 39 scientists, detail how difficult it is to publish anything they disagree with, thanks to intimidation and manipulation of editors, blackballing of those who disagree with them, and other blood sports.

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Invisibly Waterproof Your iPhone

Last week, while covering an unrelated event in Park City, Utah, we stumbled upon a demonstration by a couple of guys from the company Liquipel, who we’d been hearing about for a few days and had been attempting to book for “This Could Be Big” since first seeing their video of an apparently waterproofed iPhone.

The video, and the subsequent coverage of it on the Internet, had boosted Liquipel’s visibility through the roof, but skeptic we remained… until the guys started dunking their specially treated iPhone into a tank of water, in front of our very eyes. Incredulous, we poked, we prodded, and examined the surface of the phone, and everything remained in working order despite repeated exposure to water. Their explanations were somewhat vague, but the results seemed to be there. Of course, the kicker was when they brought out a specially treated piece of tissue paper that demonstrated the same resistance to water as their Liquipel-treated iPhone.

Full Story & Video

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Bad Astronomer Does Bad Statistics: That Wall Street Journal Editorial

Published by at 7:00 am under Statistics,Wx & Climate

Remember when I said how you shouldn’t draw straight lines in time series and then speak of the line as if the line was the data itself? About how the starting point made a big difference in the slope of the line, and how not accounting for uncertainty in the starting date translates into over-certainty in the results?

If you can’t recall, refresh your memory: How To Cheat, Or Fool Yourself, With Time Series: Climate Example.

Well, not everybody read those warnings. As an example of somebody who didn’t do his homework, I give you Phil Plait, a fellow who prides himself on exposing bad astronomy and blogs at Discover magazine. Well, Phil, old boy, I am the Statistician to the Stars—get it? get it?1—and I’m here to set you right.

The Wall Street Journal on 27 January 2012 published a letter from sixteen scientists entitled, No Need to Panic About Global Warming, the punchline of which was:

Every candidate should support rational measures to protect and improve our environment, but it makes no sense at all to back expensive programs that divert resources from real needs and are based on alarming but untenable claims of “incontrovertible” evidence.

Plait in response to these seemingly ho-hum words took the approach apoplectic, and fretted that “denialists” were reaching lower. Reaching where he never said. He never did say what a “denialist” was, either; but we can guess it is defined as “Whoever disagrees with Phil Plait.”

The WSJ‘s crew said, “Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now.” This allowed Plait to break out the italics and respond, “What the what?” I would’ve guessed that the scientists’ statement was fairly clear and even true. But Plait said, “That statement, to put it bluntly, is dead wrong.” Was it?

Plait then slipped in a picture, one which he thought was a devastating touché. He was so exercised by his effort that he broke out into triumphal clichés like “crushed to dust” and “scraping the bottom of the barrel.” You know what they say about astronomers. Anyway, here’s the picture:

Read the rest here.

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Experts say Gingrich Moon Base Dreams Not Lunacy

By SETH BORENSTEIN | Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich wants to create a lunar colony that he says could become a U.S. state. There’s his grand research plan to figure out what makes the human brain tick. And he’s warned about electromagnetic pulse attacks leaving America without electricity.

To some people, these ideas sound like science fiction. But mostly they are not.

Several science policy experts say the former House speaker’s ideas are based in mainstream science. But somehow, Gingrich manages to make them sound way out there, taking them first a small step and then a giant leap further than where other politicians have gone.

Gingrich’s promise that “by the end of my second term we will have the first permanent base on the moon” got amped up in a recent debate in Florida, which lost thousands of jobs with the end of the space shuttle program. By then, the lunar base had become a colony and even a potential state, and his moon ideas were ridiculed by rival Mitt Romney.

Returning to the moon and building an outpost there is not new. Until three years ago, it was U.S. policy and billions of dollars were spent on that idea.

Staying on the moon dates at least to 1969, when a government committee recommended that NASA first build a winged, reusable space shuttle followed by a space station and then a moon outpost. In 1989, President George H.W. Bush proposed going to the moon and staying there.

Sixteen years later, in 2005, his son, President George W. Bush, proposed a similar lunar outpost, phased out the space shuttle program and spent more than $9 billion designing a return to the moon program.

George Washington University space policy director Scott Pace, who was NASA’s associate administrator in the second Bush administration and is a Romney supporter, said the 2020 lunar base date Gingrich mentioned was feasible when it was proposed in 2005.

But it is no longer, felled by funding cuts and President Barack Obama’s decision to cancel the program. Pace said it would be hard to figure out when NASA could get back to the moon, but that such a return is doable.

What kept killing return-to-the moon plans were the costs, starting in 1969. The proposal died 20 years later when the price tag was released: more than $700 billion in current dollars. The second President Bush’s plans started running into problems due to insufficient funding. After a special commission said those plans were not sustainable, Obama cancelled the return-to-the-moon program. Instead, he ordered NASA to aim astronauts toward an asteroid and eventually Mars, something many space experts say is even more ambitious.

“Some of you may like it and you may dislike it, but I gave the boldest explanation of going into space since John F. Kennedy in 1961,” Gingrich said this week in Florida. “I believe in an America of big ideas and big solutions. I believe if we unleash the American people we will rebuild the American dream.”

In Florida, nearly all the Republican presidential candidates promoted private companies sending astronauts into space. Several companies are building private spaceships. Commercial space companies taking over the job of getting Americans into low Earth orbit is a cornerstone of the Obama space plan. But, again, money has been an issue.

For example, NASA received $406 million in its current budget for private space programs. Obama had asked Congress for $805 million.

Neal Lane, former head of the National Science Foundation and White House science adviser during the Clinton administration, said Gingrich’s proposals aren’t crazy, although he may disagree with some of them. Gingrich’s ideas and actions are “very pro-science,” said Lane, who credited Gingrich with protecting federal science research from budget cuts in the 1990s.

“He’s on the edge of mainstream thinking about big science. Except for the idea of establishing a colony on the moon, it’s not over the edge,” added Syracuse University science policy professor Henry Lambright.

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