DAVOS 2011 kicks-off today: 35 heads of state, 2500 delegates

January 26, 2011

http://www.weforum.org/

wef

35 heads of state and over 2,500 delegates are expected to attend.

If the WEF’s guidelines are followed there will be at least one woman for every four men!!

http://blogs.ft.com/rachmanblog/2011/01/davos-trying-to-solve-the-worlds-problems-in-four-days/

The WEF Chinese delegation will total over 60 people this year and the Indian will again be significant with 130 delegates. India will be launching an India Inclusive campaign to stress the benefits of economic progress and the growth of a vibrant middle-class and average incomes, while minimising the political impact of increasing disparities in wealth, as the new entrepreneurs of India globalise their operations – Tata, Ambanis, Mittals, Mahindra, Bhartis, Godrejs are all names we are becoming increasingly familiar with on a world stage. Chinese participation is up fivefold in the last decade, Indian up fourfold.
The G20 is very well represented too. All countries have president/prime minister or ministerial representation here except Argentina, with the latter’s central banker as its representative.

Euro bail-out bond: Asia to the rescue with record demand

January 26, 2011

The Telegraph reports:

Asian and Middle-East investors have thronged to buy the first issue of AAA-rated bonds by the eurozone’s new bail-out fund, marking a key moment in the evolution of Europe’s monetary union.

The auction of €5bn (£4.3bn) of five-year bonds to fund the first stage of the Irish loan package was nine times subscribed, reflecting appetite for bonds ranked with core German or French debt but offering higher returns. The yield was 2.89pc, compared with 2.31pc for Bunds.

The outcome was not in doubt after Japan said it would buy 20pc of this month’s total issue by the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), and China emerged as a white knight for EMU debt. Asian investors bought 38pc of the issue.

“It is the biggest order book ever. We will check before notifying the Guinness Book of Records but nobody can remember anything like that in the world,” said Klaus Regling, head of the EFSF. Ralf Umlauf from Helaba said the auction was “a step in the direction of a eurobond”.

The demand came from over 500 investors and totalled over $ 60 billion (about €45 billion).

 

Once again: Qantas + RR engine + B747 = return to base

January 26, 2011

The Rolls Royce Engine Syndrome (RES) strikes again.

This time – one very thirsty engine

Qantas

Another drama ... A Qantas 747 was forced to return to Bangkok yesterday. image: http://www.news.com.au

Flight QF2 carrying 352 passengers was about 30 minutes into its flight from Bangkok International Airport when one of its engines began “consuming fuel more quickly than normal” a Qantas spokesman said.
It was forced to return to Bangkok where it landed safely about 7pm local time (11pm AEST). Affected passengers are expected to spend a second night in temporary accommodation with Qantas scrambling to send a replacement engine from Sydney for the troubled Boeing 747 today.
“As far as possible we will try and get passengers who need to return to Sydney urgently on other flights but that will be dependent on availability on other airlines,” the spokesman said.

“It was not actually an engine failure, (the pilots) did not shut the engine down they just reduced the thrust.” However one passenger on the flight says the engine “blew”.

The spokesman said there were no other replacement Qantas aircraft available in Bangkok.

Read more: http://www.news.com.au/travel/news/another-engine-problem-for-qantas/story-e6frfq80-1225994833407#ixzz1C7bLqCgl

The strange and murky case of Silvia Bulfone-Paus: 12 retractions so far …..

January 25, 2011

Twelve papers where Sylvia Bulfone-Paus was the senior author have been retracted.

Silvia Bulfone-Paus: image retraction watch

That itself is sufficiently unusual and remarkable. But the story seems to go back a long way. Retraction Watch has been following the story.

In September 2010 Nature carried the story of a formal investigation which had started in July 2010 of scientific misconduct being carried out at the Research Center Borstel in Germany (Forschungszentrum Borstel, Leibniz Gemeinschaft, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Medizinischen Fakultäten der Universitäten Lübeck und Kiel). The story however was not about the investigation but about a destabilising influence:

But events around such an investigation in Germany have taken a troubling and damaging turn from such good practice in the past few months. An unknown agitator using the presumed pseudonym Marco Berns is engaged in an e-mail and Internet offensive against two biomedical researchers whom he accuses of scientific fraud.

Berns’s libellous messages are targeted at dermatologist Ralf Paus and immunologist Silvia Bulfone-Paus, a married couple who both hold joint positions at the University of Manchester, UK, and the University of Lübeck, Germany.

The trial-by-Internet is disturbing a formal investigation, organized by the Research Center Borstel in Germany and begun in July, into some of the pair’s publications.

“Marco Berns” and his accomplice (or alter ego?) “Martin Frost” were posting articles on the internet since at least the end of 2009 and had also been subjected to “cease and desist” demands from lawyers representing the Research Centre. Some of these articles questioned Sylvia Bulfone-Pause’s use of academic titles among other wrong doings.

It does seem that the formal investigation started in July 2010 partly – if not wholly – because of the allegations which had been made by Berns and Frost in 2009. Formally the reason for the investigation was that Bulfone-Pause herself had reported some manipulation of data in papers published about research carried out under her supervision but how and when such manipulation had been discovered is not very clear.

In any case the investigation was completed and the results were published by the Research Centre on 2nd December 2010.

The Commission concludes that scientific misconduct (has ocurred) within the laboratory group “Immunobiology” for years. In 6 out of 8 of the analyzed publications in which, the two former research assistants, Dr. E. Bulanova and Dr. V. Budagian, recorded as first authors, manipulation of images found that the manipulation of the reproduction of scientific results. Data corruption within the meaning of “independent inventors” of results are not available. Given the primary responsibility of the first authors in data collection and data presentation in a scientific publication, these two first authors of these publications (bear the) main responsibility for scientific misconduct.

The blame was put squarely on Drs. Bulanova and Budagian – both Russian – and as their supervisor, Bulfone-Paus received a firm slap on the wrist:

The 6  publications complained of (were) produced under the senior authorship of Prof. Dr. Bulfone-Paus………  The Commission considers that this a lack of supervision which must be expected from the senior author / group leader, even if the first author of the offending publications are experienced scientists. The senior author / research group leader, therefore, carries a key responsibility for the scientific wrongdoings within their work group.

Nature reported:

An external investigation, launched in July and chaired by Werner Seeger, a biomedical researcher at the University of Giessen, Germany, found that two former postdocs with the centre’s immunology group were guilty of using pictures of protein blots from unrelated experiments to support their findings on signalling in cells involved in allergic reactions such as asthma. The pair’s supervisor, Silvia Bulfone-Paus, who chairs the centre’s immunology and cell biology department, bears “substantial responsibility” for the manipulations, the committee found, but added that they found no evidence of data fabrication.

The three Directors of the Research Centre are Prof. Dr. Dr. S. Bulfone-Paus, Prof. Dr. U. Schaible and Prof. Dr. P. Zabe. And the elusive Martin Frost continued his writings implying that the Russian scientists could actually just be scapegoats for the more senior authors involved and that some of their wrongdoing could be traced back to 1999!!

Now the six retractions have grown to be 12 papers — so far.

This story is not over yet……..

Another perversion of science: Confirmation bias in the name of global warming dogma is also scientific misconduct

January 25, 2011

A new paper has been published in Ecology Letters

Ran Nathan, Nir Horvitz, Yanping He, Anna Kuparinen, Frank M. Schurr, Gabriel G. Katul. Spread of North American wind-dispersed trees in future environments. Ecology Letters, 2011; DOI: 10.1111/j.1461-0248.2010.01573.

In this paper the authors have assumed that climate change will cause changes to CO2 concentration and wind speed. They have assumed also that increased CO2 will “increase fecundity and advance maturation”. They have then modelled the spread of 12 species as a function of wind speed.

So far so good – they have actually modelled only the effect of wind speed  which they assume will reduce due to climate change.

Their results basically showed no effect of wind speed:

“Future spread is predicted to be faster if atmospheric CO2 enrichment would increase fecundity and advance maturation, irrespective of the projected changes in mean surface windspeed”.

And now comes the perversion!

From their fundamental conclusion that wind speed has no effect and that therefore any CO2 increase resulting from climate change will enhance the spread of the trees, they invoke “expected” effects to deny what they have just shown:

“Yet, for only a few species, predicted wind-driven spread will match future climate changes, conditioned on seed abscission occurring only in strong winds and environmental conditions favouring high survival of the farthest-dispersed seeds. Because such conditions are unlikely, North American wind-dispersed trees are expected to lag behind the projected climate range shift.”

This final conclusion is based on absolutely nothing  and their modelling showed nothing and yet this paper was accepted for publication. I have no problem that a result showing “no effect of wind speed” be published but suspect that it needed the nonsense, speculative conclusion to comply with current dogma.

Science Daily then produces the headline: Climate Change Threatens Many Tree Species

when the reality is

This study Shows No Effect of Wind Speed But Yet We Believe that Climate Change Threatens Many Tree Species

“Our research indicates that the natural wind-driven spread of many species of trees will increase, but will occur at a significantly lower pace than that which will be required to cope with the changes in surface temperature,” said Prof. Nathan. “This will raise extinction risk of many tree populations because they will not be able to track the shift in their natural habitats which currently supply them with favorable conditions for establishment and reproduction. As a result, the composition of different tree species in future forests is expected to change and their areas might be reduced, the goods and services that these forests provide for man might be harmed, and wide-ranging steps will have to be taken to ensure seed dispersal in a controlled, directed manner.”

Whether the perversion is by the authors themselves anticipating what is needed to get a paper published or whether it is due to pressure from the Journal Ecology Letters or by their referees is unclear.

Abstract:

Despite ample research, understanding plant spread and predicting their ability to track projected climate changes remain a formidable challenge to be confronted. We modelled the spread of North American wind-dispersed trees in current and future (c. 2060) conditions, accounting for variation in 10 key dispersal, demographic and environmental factors affecting population spread. Predicted spread rates vary substantially among 12 study species, primarily due to inter-specific variation in maturation age, fecundity and seed terminal velocity. Future spread is predicted to be faster if atmospheric CO2 enrichment would increase fecundity and advance maturation, irrespective of the projected changes in mean surface windspeed. Yet, for only a few species, predicted wind-driven spread will match future climate changes, conditioned on seed abscission occurring only in strong winds and environmental conditions favouring high survival of the farthest-dispersed seeds. Because such conditions are unlikely, North American wind-dispersed trees are expected to lag behind the projected climate range shift.

In essence this paper is only based on belief and the results actually obtained are denied. It seems to me that denying or twisting or “moulding” results actually obtained to fit pre-conceived notions is not just a case of confirmation bias but comes very close to scientific misconduct.

Shocking! Study claims IKEA is confusing customers into submission!

January 24, 2011

Alan Penn is Professor of Architectural and Urban Computing at The Bartlett School of Graduate Studies, University College London, and Director of the VR Centre for the Built Environment. He has studied IKEA’s London store and draws the (un)remarkable conclusion that the layout has been cunningly designed – horror of horrors – to get customer’s to buy more.

Duh!!

(I hate that word but cannot find a better one)

The Scotsman reports:

IKEA Wembley store

Study claims Ikea’s ‘maze’ is selling ploy

Professor Alan Penn, director of the Virtual Reality Centre for the Built Environment at University College London, studied the Swedish firm’s north London store and came to the conclusion that their success, in part, is down to confusing their customers into submission by designing their stores like a maze.

Unlike John Lewis stores, which have a grid layout to create an open and accessible environment, Ikea stores require customers to enter and follow a path through the entire store to reach the exit.

“It is so well done and so cunningly done that I have little doubt that it is intentional,” said Penn, whose team has previously studied retail strategies and monitored how consumers respond.
In his study of the Ikea store in Brent, Penn found that the weaving yellow path quickly leaves customers disorientated. It only takes minutes before they have no idea where the exit lies, he found. Although all stores are required to include shortcuts for fire regulations, he said these were always positioned outside the customer’s normal field of vision.
Penn said the only comparable shopping environment he knew of was the Bazaar in Isfahan, a medieval Iranian marketplace. “The way to the exit is always behind you,” he said.

Obviously  John Lewis and other proper UK stores would not stoop to such despicable tactics ! In the words of one of the comments to this article:

I do think it is important for customers to stand up to the evil nordic fascist monsters who run Ikea.

Footnote from the Wall Street Journal:

Swedish furniture giant IKEA, the world’s No. 1 furniture retailer by sales, said Friday it benefited from cash-strapped consumers trading down in a continued challenging economic climate, as it reported higher sales and net profit for fiscal 2010. The company, famous for its low-cost ready-to-assemble furniture, said net profit for the fiscal year to Aug. 31 rose 6.1% to EUR2.7 billion. Revenue rose 7.7% to EUR23.1 billion.

Prices were unchanged in fiscal 2010 although Ohlsson said the company has been able to reduce prices by 2.6% in the current fiscal year and sees the possibility of further prices cuts next fiscal year. IKEA’s improved supply chain is key to maintaining low prices while also bucking the trend of other retailers by boosting margins. Gross margin rose to 46.1% from 44.6% a year earlier.

I wonder who funded this study? A competitor to IKEA? or could it be IKEA?

IKEA is still a privately held company – so I won’t be buying shares after this study – but I would if I could.

Related: https://ktwop.wordpress.com/2010/08/28/the-ikea-phenomenon/

New study confirms Himalayan glaciers will not disappear any time soon

January 24, 2011
This NASA image shows the formation of numerou...

Glacial lakes, Bhutan: Image via Wikipedia

Reuters reports:

(Reuters) – Some Himalayan glaciers are advancing despite an overall retreat, according to a study on Sunday that is a step toward understanding how climate change affects vital river flows from China to India.

“Our study shows there is no uniform response of Himalayan glaciers to climate change and highlights the importance of debris cover,” scientists at universities in Germany and the United States wrote in the study of 286 glaciers.

The findings underscore that experts in the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) were wrong to say in a 2007 report that Himalayan glaciers could vanish by 2035 in a headlong thaw. The panel corrected the error in 2010.

The report said that 58 percent of glaciers examined in the westerly Karakoram range of the Himalayas were stable or advancing, perhaps because they were influenced by cool westerly winds than the monsoon from the Indian Ocean.

Science News says:

Glaciers largely stable in one range of Himalayas

Dirk Scherler of the University of Potsdam, Germany, and his colleagues report in the January 23 Nature Geoscience. ……. but in Karakoram, 58 percent of studied glaciers were stable or slowly expanding up to 12 meters per year…..

The new findings are consistent with what Kenneth Hewitt of Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, has observed, and point to the fact “that the picture of climate change effects in high Asia is much more complicated than most people realize.”

Indeed, for much of the past century Karakoram’s glaciers were in retreat. A 2005 paper by Hewitt described a turnaround that commenced only in the late 1990s. In the new study, Scherler’s team looked for factors that might affect the responsiveness of Himalayan glaciers to regional warming. A rocky blanket quickly emerged as a major one.

D. Scherler, B. Bookhagen and M.R. Strecker. Spatially variable response of Himalayan glaciers to climate change affected by debris cover. Nature Geoscience (in press, online January 23, 2011). DOI: 10.1038/NGEO1068.

Sea of Okhotsk: The saga continues…..

January 23, 2011

From Itar-Tass today:

from Itar-Tass

VLADIVOSTOK, January 23 (Itar-Tass) – An unusually strong ice nipping in the Sakhalin Bay of the Sea of Okhotsk impedes the efforts of the Admiral Makarov and the Krassin icebreakers to lead to clear waters The Bereg Nadezhdy transport refrigerator and the Sodruzhestvo floating factory.

The fishery ships got stuck in the ice December 31, 2010, and the caravan did not manage to move a single mile forwards since Saturday morning. It is still mired at a distance about 30 miles away from the areas of open floating ice, the Far-Eastern Shipping Line said.

The rescue operation is multi-stage and complicated, as the Admiral Makarov and the Krassin will first have to free the refrigerator from the ice trap, after which they will have to return for the floating factory, deadlocked in the ice together with the 348 crewmembers aboard.

Awaiting the caravan at the edge of the ice shield are the icebreaker Magadan and the tanker Viktoria. The latter will have to refuel the two icebreakers before they start the voyage back into the ice-packed spaces of the sea.

 

Global cooling indicators are increasing

January 23, 2011

The conditions in the relatively thin, chaotic surface layer of atmosphere surrounding the earth within the earth-sun system are what we call climate in the long term over large geographic regions and what we call weather in the short term over small geographic regions. I am convinced that these conditions are dominated by the sun and that the primary vehicles for transporting energy around the earth’s surface (and which is decisive for the chaotic boundary layer) are the oceans. The energy carrying capacity of the atmosphere is small compared to that of the oceans.

The major ocean cycles which seem to be most relevant are the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO). The El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) seems to be superimposed on the major cycles which which may even derive from ENSO and the deep ocean circulation patterns. The major cycles also contain sub-cycles such as the Nothern Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) or the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI). There are other minor cycles such as the Arctic Oscillation Index (AO) and the Antarctic Oscillation (AAO).

The indicators that we are in a period of 20 – 30 years of global cooling are increasing:

1. The quiet sun is perhaps the most important indicator we have that we are entering (or have entered) a global cooling period. The period 2000 – 2030 could well be similar to that during the Dalton Minimum between 1790 – 1820.

Image Attachment

graphics credit: sc25.com

2. There have been regular periods of warming and cooling in the past.

Alternating periods of warm and cooler weather have been with us as far back as our climate records go. Some of the past cooler periods have been more severe than others, like the Sporer, Maunder and Dalton Minimums. Professor Don Easterbrook has documented some 20 such cool periods over the last 500 years

Figure 1

graphic: Don Easterbrook

3. Taking just the main ocean cycles, the AMO is a 66 year cycle.

AMO peaks occurred on May 1878 and November 1944. The next peak is forecasted to occur in April 2011. The last trough occurred in January 1978, and the next trough is expected to occur in June 2044. As we see here, the length of a complete cycle is about 66.5 years.

The AMO went positive in 1994 and actually peaked in July 2010 and is now on its way down. It should go negative sometime in 2015 and remain negative till about 2048.

4. The Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) has a shorter cycle of about 60 years.

graphic: digitaldiatribes.files.wordpress.com

The PDO cycle is not quite as long as AMO. Because the periods differ, their peaks and troughs will vary relative to each other. This has an interesting long-term result in terms of warming and cooling. The PDO had a peak in the function in October 1929 (about 15 years prior to AMO). The next peak occurred May 1990 (about 21 years prior to the anticipated AMO peak). The period here is about 60.5 years.

PDO has gone negative since September 2007  and will remain in negative territory probably for the next 30 years. For about 2 decades the PDO and the AMO will both be negative (but as can be seen above the amplitude of the short term variations are so large that short periods in the positive region are perfectly possible and inevitable, even while the long term average is negative or vice versa.)

5. ENSO and the efects of La Niñas and El Niños.

Returning to Matti Vooro’s article:

During negative or cool phases of PDO and AMO, there are more La Niñas than during the positive phases. This contributes to more cold winters and colder years during negative PDO. During positive or warm phases of PDO and AMO, there are significantly more El Niños. This is why there is more warming when the PDO is positive. The current negative or cool PDO and the La Niña are why we have had all the recent cold weather. The La Niña’s may have directly contributed to the Red River Flooding of 2009 and the recent flooding in Australia and Brazil.

…. The AMO is affected by ENSO cycles, especially El Ninos, so we saw a brief warming of AMO during 2010. Climate history shows that global cooling was strongest when both the PDO andAMO were both simultaneously in the negative or cool mode – like in 1964-1976 and again 1916 to 1923. The AMO cycles have been quite variable. During its last cycle it was in the negative or cool mode for 30 years (1964-1994] and its cycle seems to be related to the Meridional Overturning Circulation [MOC] and the changes in the Atlantic Thermohaline Circulation [THC]. There are a number of estimates when it will again go negative. My best estimate is about 2015 based on the most frequent past intervals of around 20 years and the cooler waters that feed the MOC from the Southern Oceans. Once it does go negative, the global temperature anomalies may drop further until about 2030, the Arctic temperature may cool further and the Arctic ice extent should increase again.

Professor Easterbrook has made a global forecast for temperature:

The IPCC projections are no longer credible but it must be borne in mind that these projections had little to do with actually bringing science to make the best forecast possible but instead were focused on poltical objectives; it seems mainly to redistribute wealth and to demonise CO2 so as to drive the carbon trading market.

That global cooling is upon us seems more and more likely and I apprehend that Easterbrooks’s lowest curve will materialise and show that the current Landscheidt minimum will be comparable to the Dalton minimum.


Cold Fusion: Another fraud or a breakthrough?

January 22, 2011

In March 1989, Stanley Pons and Martin Fleishmann claimed to have achieved cold fusion at room temperature but their experiment could not be reproduced.

File:Igloo.jpg

Cold fusion lab (igloo) under construction : image wikipedia

While cold fusion is considered highly improbable, it is not impossible and there remains a nagging suspicion (hope?) that some “miracle”, perpetual machine may suddenly appear in the most unlikely place and perhaps even outside main-stream science.

Physorg reports on another claim this time from Bologna, Italy:

Despite the intense skepticism, a small community of scientists is still investigating near-room-temperature fusion reactions. The latest news occurred last week, when Italian scientists Andrea Rossi and Sergio Focardi of the University of Bologna announced that they developed a cold fusiondevice capable of producing 12,400 W of heat power with an input of just 400 W. Last Friday, the scientists held a private invitation press conference in Bologna, attended by about 50 people, where they demonstrated what they claim is a nickel-hydrogen fusion reactor
. Further, the scientists say that the reactor is well beyond the research phase; they plan to start shipping commercial devices within the next three months and start mass production by the end of 2011.

Rossi and Focardi say that, when the atomic nuclei of nickel and hydrogen are fused in their reactor, the reaction produces copper and a large amount of energy. The reactor uses less than 1 gram of hydrogen and starts with about 1,000 W of electricity, which is reduced to 400 W after a few minutes. Every minute, the reaction can convert 292 grams of 20°C water into dry steam at about 101°C. Since raising the temperature of water by 80°C and converting it to steam requires about 12,400 W of power, the experiment provides a power gain of 12,400/400 = 31. As for costs, the scientists estimate that electricity can be generated at a cost of less than 1 cent/kWh, which is significantly less than coal or natural gas plants……….

…… Rossi and Focardi’s paper on the nuclear reactor has been rejected by peer-reviewed journals, but the scientists aren’t discouraged. They published their paper in the Journal of Nuclear Physics, an online journal founded and run by themselves, which is obviously cause for a great deal of skepticism. They say their paper was rejected because they lack a theory for how the reaction works. According to a press release in Google translate, the scientists say they cannot explain how the cold fusion is triggered, “but the presence of copper and the release of energy are witnesses.”

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-01-italian-scientists-cold-fusion-video.html

But not everybody is dismissing this latest claim.

Steven Krivit of the New Energy Times describes why he believes that the Rossi and Focardi LENR device is probably real and is an advancement on the Piantelli process.

But there seems to be a vested interest here and I remain unconvinced.

Especially since they claim that they cannot fully explain what happens but are going to be producing “commercial units” anyway it sounds like a scam. They will probably sell some units to the gullible  before they disappear from view.

Just another fraud.