Archive for March, 2012
March 10, 2012
A recent post by John O’Sullivan reminded me that it is time for the next solar minimum that is on its way to be named after the man who predicted it. Theodor Landscheidt (born in 1927 in Bremen, Germany, died on May 20, 2004) was an author and amateur climatologist. In 1989, Landscheidt forecast a period of sunspot minima after 1990, accompanied by increased cold, with a stronger minimum and more intense cold which should peak in 2030 which he described as the “Landscheidt Minimum”.
The sun goes through its cycles as it will and at its own pace and we continue to struggle to try and decipher the various cycles that exist, what causes them and what effects they have on the earth. Some of the cycles known or hypothesised to exist are the:
- 11 year sunspot cycle
- 22 year magnetic cycle
- 87 year Gleissberg cycle
- 166 year “unnamed” cycle
- 210 years Suess or de Vries cycle
- 2,300 years Hallstat cycle
- 6000 years Xapsos and Burke cycle
Landscheidt’s paper is here: New Little Ice Age instead of Global Warming?
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Tags:Dalton minimum, Landscheidt Minimum, Little Ice Age, Maunder Minimum, solar cycle, Solar variation, Theodor Landscheidt
Posted in Climate, Science, Solar science | Comments Off on Solar cycles and the Landscheidt minimum
March 9, 2012
Karoo, South Africa: image Wikipedia
The Karoo is a semi-desert natural region of South Africa with two main sub-regions – the Great Karoo in the north and the Little Karoo in the south. The region is known to contain shale-gas deposits some 4,000m below the surface but the extent of the deposits have yet to be fully investigated.
Now Econometrix has published a new report on the potential for growth that Karoo shale gas could provide. The report is supported by Shell who are planning to explore the deposits. A pdf version of the report is available from Shell here: Karoo Shale Gas Report – February 2012
To put quantitities in perspective the 485 trillion cubic feet of gas (14 trillion cubic metres) thought to be in the Karoo compares with 25 trillion cubic metres in China and about 13 trillion cubic metres in the US. (The Age of Gas: China has enough shale gas for 200 years).
IOL, South Africa reports:
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Tags:Karoo, Natural gas, Royal Dutch Shell, Shale gas, shale gas reserves, South Africa
Posted in Business, Energy, Environment, South Africa | Comments Off on South Africa could join the shale gas band-wagon
March 9, 2012
Two articles appear in The Hindu today.
Rahul Siddharthan has an opinion piece about the CNR Rao and SB Krupanidhi plagiarism case and brings out the issues involved and the responsibility of senior scientists. Their responsibility in determining and establishing the atmosphere in which research is carried out is obvious. But what is more disturbing is a news article where Professor Krupanidhi is quoted extensively. He continues to trivialise the acts of plagiarism and refuses to take any responsibility for the papers published under his supervision.
No science in ‘cut and paste’
More instances of plagiarism come to light
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Tags:CNR Rao, cut and paste, cut and paste science, India, Indian Institute of Science, Krupanidhi, Plagiarism
Posted in Academic misconduct, Ethics, India, Science, scientific misconduct | 1 Comment »
March 8, 2012
The evidence for the obvious mounts. The sun comes first and dominates and then come the oceans which provide the vehicle for distributing solar effects around the globe. The mythical effect of anthropogenic carbon dioxide on climate has yet to be supported by any direct evidence. Instead, the direct evidence observations of the last 12 years is that increasing carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere has been accompanied by a decline of “global” temperature.
A new paper by Jan-Erik Solheim (Department of Physics and Technology, University of Tromsø), Kjell Stordahl (Telenor Norway, Fornebu), Ole Humlum (Department of Geosciences, University of Oslo; Department of Geology, University Centre in Svalbard).
The long sunspot cycle 23 predicts a significant temperature decrease in cycle 24
Preprint: Accepted for publication in Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics February 9, 2012
Abstract. Relations between the length of a sunspot cycle and the average temperature in the same and the next cycle are calculated for a number of meteorological stations in Norway and in the North Atlantic region. No significant trend is found between the length of a cycle and the average temperature in the same cycle, but a significant negative trend is found between the length of a cycle and the temperature in the next cycle. This provides a tool to predict an average temperature decrease of at least 1.0 “C from solar cycle 23 to 24 for the stations and areas analyzed. We find for the Norwegian local stations investigated that 25-56% of the temperature increase the last 150 years may be attributed to the Sun. For 3 North Atlantic stations we get 63-72% solar contribution. This points to the Atlantic currents as reinforcing a solar signal.
Tags:Atlantic Ocean, Norway, solar, solar cycle, Solar cycle 23, Solar Cycle 24
Posted in Climate, Norway, Solar science | Comments Off on Norway: “25–56% of the temperature increase the last 150 years may be attributed to the Sun”
March 7, 2012
“Green” is also the colour of slime.
Subsidies are fundamentally corrupting.
Instead of promoting the commercialisation of a nascent technology (whether for later job creation or for pursuing policy goals), they lead more often than not to companies just maximising the subsidies they can get. And very often the vast amounts taken from tax money end up in the pockets of opportunistic individuals. It is no great secret that the “green” label has provided the path for the extraction (or is it extortion) of subsidies by developers and companies who have never had any intention other than maximising what could be extracted.
ABC News (here and here) lists a number of cases in the US where subsidies have been extracted, huge bonuses paid and then bankruptcy filings prevents any possibility of getting any recourse to the beneficiaries. They point out that “the Energy Department explicitly allows for federal funds to be used to pay out executive bonuses.” The “subsidy” industry is of course already well established in Europe with exorbitant “feed in tariffs”, carbon trading certificates and grants to solar and wind developers.
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Tags:Abound Solar, Beacon Power, bonuses from subsidies, Chapter 11 filing, corruption, Ener1, Green subsidies, Solyndra
Posted in Business, Corruption, Environment, Ethics | Comments Off on “Green” is also the colour of slime – when companies take their subsidies, pay their bonuses and then go bankrupt..
March 6, 2012
It seems to be becoming the standard defence for senior authors in Indian academia to blame their juniors when found guilty of plagiarism. The recent case of plagiarism by Prof. CNR Rao (Science Advisor to the Indian PM) and Prof. SB Krupanidhi of the Indian Institute of Science where they took refuge first in blaming a student and then in trying to trivialise the plagiarism is a case in point.
Now a Professor Rajanish Dass at the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad has blamed his co-author, Sujoy Pal (a research associate) for the plagiarism he was found guilty of. Dass has claimed that it was due to “ignorance and not intention” and has gone to the Gujarat High Court to try and delay the inevitable. Ironically Dass claims to be working on e-governance!
Students and research associates rank very low in the hierarchy of Indian academia and are convenient scapegoats for senior scientists and professors when they try to shrug off their responsibilities for wrong-doings.
Times of India:
A Gujarat high court ruling on Monday has come as a breather for IIM-A professor Rajanish Dass, who was held guilty of plagiarism in a preliminary inquiry conducted by the institute.
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Tags:e-governance, IIM-A, Indian Institute of Management, Plagiarism, Rajanish Dass
Posted in Academic misconduct, India | 7 Comments »
March 4, 2012
P. Gosselin reports on his blog that Norwegian scientists are already predicting that La Niña may come back for a 3rd year.
(Related: La Niña will last well into 2011 and could extend into 2012)
It wasn’t all that long ago when a number of climate scientists were projecting the Earth would soon fall into an almost permanent, increasing El Niño mode, where the surface temperatures of the equatorial Pacific would always be like what we saw in 1998 – all man-made.
Today a number of German-language papers are reporting that Norwegian scientist Tore Furevik of the Bjerknes Centre of the University of Bergen says he expects the opposite to happen at least this year. Furevik says that La Niña may come back for third straight year. “The situation is simlar to the previous year,” he says.
Die Welt here writes that “there are no signs that La Nina is going to disappear anytime soon” and that according to Norwegian experts “it will occur even more strongly than in 2011″.
The Wiener Zeitung of Vienna, Austria adds:
The La Niña phenomena has been persisting since 2010 and there are no signs of it going away. We had this strong cooling in 2010 and instead of getting warmer, we stayed in a long cold phase’, said Furevik. “And it appears as if an even stronger La Niña will occur.’”
Furevik’s La Niña forecast contradicts the experts’ forecast, where an ensemble of models show the trend towards an El Niño for the 2nd half of the year:
Tags:El Niño-Southern Oscillation, La Nina, Pacific Ocean, University of Bergen
Posted in Climate, Oceans | Comments Off on La Niña may come back for a third straight year
March 2, 2012
The Age of Gas is not just dawning but is well and truly underway with China revealing reserves sufficient for 200 years. At 25 trillion cubic meters (875 trillion cubic feet) of recoverable reserves these could be almost twice the recoverable reserves in the US.
As shale gas comes into play all over the globe there is going to be a run on large gas turbines for power generation. Gas turbine manufacturers (and the big 4 are GE, Siemens, Alstom and MHI) can expect a sellers market within 2 or 3 years as the economic recovery pressurises generation capacity.
from Wikipedia
The Telegraph:
China is planning an investment blitz to unlock its vast reserves of shale gas, convinced it can match the energy revolution under way in the US and meet a significant part of its fast-growing fuel needs.
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Tags:Age of Gas, China, dash for gas, gas glut, gas turbines, sellers market, Shale gas
Posted in China, Energy, Engineering, Gas | 2 Comments »
March 2, 2012
Sticking to science – and experimental science at that – while ignoring the politicisation and religious overtones of “climate science”, Henrik Svensmark continues to painstakingly build his cosmic theory of climate change.
Supernova remnants → cosmic rays → solar modulation of cosmic rays →variations in cluster and sulphuric acid production → variation in cloud condensation nuclei → variation in low cloud formation → variation in climate.
When experiments or observations show that model predictions are wrong it is time to ditch the falsified hypotheses and to build new hypotheses. Far too often in ” global warming science” the hypotheses and the models become “incontrovertible dogma” and rather than test the falsifiability of the hypothesis with observations and experiment, data are fudged to fit the dogma. Svensmark’s approach is an oasis of proper science in a desert of pseudo-science.
Nigel Calder reports:
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Tags:climate change, Cloud condensation nuclei, cloud seeding, Cosmic ray, Henrik Svensmark, Nigel Calder, solar effects
Posted in Climate, Science, Solar science | 2 Comments »
The k2p blog 