Off Topic Dark Matter and other Astronomy information.

he will probably be in the bottom of the pot hole like a mars rover frantically trying to get out of the huge pot hole!

 

Tidal is still in it's infancy and the large offshore windfarms are highly productive, and their cost will fall as the number of supply chain issues reduces.

Siemens are building a huge new factory near Hull that will generate 1,000+ jobs directly and more as the area develops itself as a hub for wind turbine and renewable technology.

You know jack ****.

 

Another myth, the cost of "man made climate change damage" nonsense lies.

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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-35354579

Climate change: 2015 'shattered' global temperature record by wide margin

#endof

 

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#notproofanything
#interesting

 

Nut case, even if it was the hottest year on thermometer record, we have records that go back much further and show it was much warmer so it aint actually the warmest on record, just the record that suits your view.

End of? Even if accurate it is still not any evidence of CAGW It is evidence of the global average mean temperature increasing, but the global average mean doesn't mean **** to individual climates and the jetstream, it is a result of what they do and how they interact, not a driver you idiot

You think this proves CAGW, which means you are as about as intelligent as a potato, to link the two scientifically..

NASA went from 38% certain last year to what is the certainty for 2015?
by the way, I already covered that NASA in March and again in october edited the historical record, I posted both charts.
Changing history to make today warmer, doesn't actually make it warmer.

 

Hottest year records during an El Nino year too, yeah great science there NASA, you are meant to exclude strong El Nino years from trend data because they skew the results, we dont actually understand the El Nino phenomenon, yet the clima tards are on one hand saying El Nino will be super bad because of man made global warming and on the other hand saying all the bad weather is not because of El Nino, but climate change (man made)

Get your stories straight ******s

 

#endof


More muons logic
"Hottest ever"

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ROFL the 2015 hottest report, the word satellite does not appear once

Hottest year?

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#hottestyear

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@astroturfnaut #endof
NASA and NOAA scientists were forced to accept that El Niño was partly responsible for the overall record busting year and that some areas had not been as affected such as the states.

NASA spokesman said: "Phenomena such as El Niño or La Niña, which warm or cool the tropical Pacific Ocean, can contribute to short-term variations in global average temperature. A warming El Niño was in effect for most of 2015"


As I said, El Nino years are not used to trend average temperature for obvious reasons, science over religion mate

Gas guzzling US did not have a record warm year ironically, it all comes from fudged ocean data. We cant measure ocean temp very well and reading can be as much as half a degree off (Lindzen MIT)

Most countries didn't experience their warmest year.

When you can't fraud the land temp any more, just make up some warm oceans

 

So, this amazing record.. impossibly gained from 1500 stations world wide, then remodeled.
0.13c! .03 larger than the margin of error.

NASA are saying they can tell the temperature of the entire planet to that level of accuracy with half the world having no temp measuring stations

Oh sweet jesus
#pseudoscience

 

A distant planet may lurk far beyond Neptune
If Planet X exists, it may be anywhere from 250 to 1,000 times as far from the sun as Earth
BY
CHRISTOPHER CROCKETT
2:30PM, NOVEMBER 14, 2014

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THE LOST WORLD A hidden planet (foreground) might lurk in the uncharted realms of the solar system, leaving clues to its existence only in the orbits of dwarf planets or of chunks of ice in the outer edges of the Kuiper belt.

NICOLLE RAGER FULLER

Magazine issue: Vol. 186 No. 11, November 29, 2014, p. 18

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Out beyond Neptune, the solar system resembles the deep ocean: dark, remote and largely unexplored. To an Earth-bound observer, even the brightest objects, such as Pluto, are 4,000 times as faint as what the human eye can see. An undiscovered planet could easily lurk out there unnoticed, a possible fossil from a time when the giant planets jockeyed for position 4 billion years ago, scattering planets and asteroids in their wake. But even the largest telescopes would struggle to find such a faint spot of light. Most likely, the clues would be entangled in the distorted orbits of faraway ice boulders tumbling around the sun.

Astronomers Chad Trujillo and Scott Sheppard provided a hint about how such a world might reveal itself last March when they announced the discovery of a 450-kilometer-wide dwarf planet just outside the Kuiper belt — the icy debris field past Neptune (SN: 5/3/14, p. 16).

Their find, designated 2012 VP113, is on a course that loops around the sun in a vastly elongated orbit far from the known planets. It has thousands of neighbors but shares its odd trajectory only with Sedna, another dwarf planet, discovered in 2003.

“They’re kind of in a no-man’s-land,” says Sheppard, of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C. “These objects couldn’t get out there with what we currently know.”

Something had to drag the two dwarf planets from their original, smaller orbits. Except nothing is close or massive enough to take the credit. At least, nothing astronomers are aware of.

The discovery of 2012 VP113 confirmed that Sedna is not a fluke but is possibly the first of a large population of icy bodies distinct from others in the rest of the solar system. So Trujillo and Sheppard continued to poke around the Kuiper belt, and the mystery deepened. They noticed that beyond 150 astronomical units (150 times the distance from the sun to the Earth), 10 previously discovered objects, along with Sedna and 2012 VP113, follow orbits that appear strangely bunched up.

“That immediately piqued our interest,” says Sheppard. Could an unseen planet, a Planet X, be holding the orbits of all these far-out bodies in place?

“The idea’s not crazy,” says David Jewitt, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “But I think the evidence is slim.” The trail of bread crumbs leading to an undiscovered planet is sparse: just 12 chunks of ice lead the way. But it’s enough to get some researchers wondering about a ninth (or 10th, depending on your attitude regarding Pluto) planet roaming the outer solar system and how it might have arrived there.

Kuiper belt clues
“The exciting thing for me is that 2012 VP113 exists,” says Megan Schwamb, a planetary scientist at Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan. “Whatever put Sedna on its orbit should have put a whole bunch of other objects out there.”



took a closer look at the orbits. The brothers claim, in the Sept. 1 Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters, that not one but two planets are needed to explain the perihelion clustering.

Around the same time, physicist Lorenzo Iorio at the Ministry of Education, Universities and Research in Bari, Italy, offered a different take. He says that the planet proposed by Trujillo and Sheppard, if it exists, must be much farther out — at least twice as far as the original prediction. By looking at gradual changes in the orbits of a few of the known planets, Iorio calculated that a planet twice as massive as Earth must be at least 500 astronomical units from the sun, according to research in the Oct. 11 Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters.

Others are more cautious. “The outer solar system can be full of all sorts of unseen and interesting things,” Jewitt says, “but the argument ... for a massive perturber is a bit puzzling.” First, 10 of the 12 bodies with peculiar perihelia dive far enough into the Kuiper belt to possibly feel Neptune’s gravity. And, second, he says, 12 objects is a tiny sample — the apparent perihelion clustering may just be an illusion caused by where researchers point their telescopes.

The recent speculation about additional planets has a familiar ring, says Jewitt. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, astronomers relied on apparent hiccups in Neptune’s motion and a handful of comets to kick off a search that eventually led to the discovery of Pluto. “Not much has changed since then,” he says. In fact, musings of a planet beyond Neptune have been around since before anyone knew Neptune existed.

Planet hunters
In 1834, German astronomer Peter Andreas Hansen allegedly suggested to a colleague that two planets were needed to explain oddities in the motion of what was then the farthest known planet, Uranus — oddities that led to the discovery of Neptune in 1846. Two years later, French astronomer Jacques Babinet claimed that Neptune also stumbled along its orbit, hinting that a ninth planet must have been causing Neptune to speed up and slow down as it ran around the sun.



WISE satellite, a 10-month mission to scan the entire sky twice with an infrared telescope. Massive planets are best seen in infrared light because they’re still cooling off from their formation. Jupiter, for example, radiates more heat than it receives from the sun.

Reporting in the Jan. 20 Astrophysical Journal, Luhman found no evidence for a Jupiter-mass planet within 82,000 astronomical units. Likewise, there’s no sign of something as massive as Saturn out to about a third as far. But Luhman says he can’t rule out a small, rocky planet, which would be too cold for WISE to pick up.

The best bet is to look for reflected sunlight, which is how scientists discovered Pluto and the Kuiper belt. But even large worlds at such enormous distances are extremely dim. If Pluto was twice as far from the sun, it would be one-sixteenth as bright because the sunlight not only has to get out there but also has to come back.

“We would not yet have detected the Earth,” says Jewitt, “if it were more than 600 astronomical units from the sun.” And that’s assuming researchers knew where to look. “That gives you an idea of the darkness of the outer solar system.”

Story continues below graph



Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, or LSST, an 8.4-meter-wide telescope being built in northern Chile with full operations planned for late 2023. Unlike other telescopes, it will have an enormous field of view and will make a decade-long movie of the sky, perfect for looking for moving points of light.

Lynne Jones, an astronomer at the University of Washington in Seattle, says the LSST could find 20,000 to 40,000 more bodies in the Kuiper belt. With about 20 times as many Kuiper belt objects in hand, astronomers should be able to see if there are more objects with bizarre orbits and determine if the bunching of perihelia is real or just an artifact of having found only a few.

Plus, says Jones, LSST could detect an Earth-sized planet out to between 300 and 500 astronomical units, depending on how reflective its surface is.

For planetary scientists, if a remote Planet X exists the question is: How do you form a planet that far from the sun? Renu Malhotra, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona in Tucson, says the problem is time. At that distance, the planet building materials would have been smeared over a ring several hundred billion kilometers around. “To make a planet the size of the Earth,” says Malhotra, “could take longer than the age of the solar system.” The only solution, she says, is to steal the planet from somewhere else.

Uranus and Neptune are the most likely thieves, pilfering planets from the space between their orbits. Malhotra says that a close encounter with either of those giants could slingshot an Earth-sized ball of rock to well beyond the Kuiper belt.

Planet X might also be extrasolar, says planetary scientist Rodney Gomes of the National Observatory in Rio de Janeiro. The sun was born in a nebula along with several thousand other stars, and many of those probably had planets of their own. As stars jostled each other, planets could have been torn away from one star and captured by the gravity of another. Perhaps Planet X is just the result of a brief game of interstellar catch.

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The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope in Chile, illustrated here, will make a 10-year-long movie of the night sky starting in 2023.
LSST
“The jury’s still out on whether you need to have a planet there or not,” Schwamb says. A close encounter with a passing star could have lured Sedna and 2012 VP113 away from their siblings, like an astronomical pied piper. Stellar flybys are rare, however, and the star must pass close enough for the two dwarf planets to notice but not so close that it disrupts the entire Kuiper belt and possibly the outer planets.


The odds go up if the star is a relative, born in the same nebula as the sun. In addition to tossing planets around, stellar siblings could have tugged on the debris swirling around the sun. The distorted orbits would have frozen in place after the sun’s brothers and sisters drifted away.

For 168 years, the lure of planets hiding beyond Neptune has never faded. The remoteness of the outer solar system, Jewitt says, “leaves open the door to all sorts of wild speculation.”

The hunt for Planet X “is one of those things that’s very high risk,” Luhman says, “but if it was found, it would be a huge discovery.” Astronomers have discovered more than 1,800 planets orbiting other stars, and yet our own backyard is still largely a mystery. “We haven’t explored all of the solar system yet,” Sheppard says, “so people always want to believe that there’s something else out there.”

 

Ocean heating doubles
Much of water’s added warmth at great depth, analysis finds
BY
THOMAS SUMNER
11:00AM, JANUARY 18, 2016

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HOT WATER Earth’s oceans are now absorbing twice as much heat as they were 18 years ago, new research shows. Warming water can contribute to coral bleaching (shown) and the collapse of coral ecosystems.

KELSEY ROBERTS/USGS

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The ocean is taking heat. That’s the conclusion of a new study that finds that Earth’s oceans now absorb heat at twice the rate they did 18 years ago. Around half of ocean heat uptake since 1865 has taken place since 1997, researchers also report online January 18 inNature Climate Change.

Warming waters are known to contribute to coral bleaching (SN Online: 10/8/15) and they take up more space than cooler waters, raising sea levels. While the top of the ocean is well studied, its depths are trickier to query. The researchers gathered 150 years of ocean temperature data in order to get a better picture of heat uptake from surface to seabed. They compiled temperature readings collected by everything from a 19th century sailing expedition of the HMS Challenger to modern automated ocean probes. The far-flung data sources, combined with computer simulations, created a timeline of ocean temperature changes, including cooling from volcanic eruptions and warming from fossil fuel emissions.

About 35 percent of the heat taken in by the oceans during the industrial era now resides at a depth of more than 700 meters, the researchers found. They say they’re unsure whether the deep-sea warming offset warming at the sea’s surface.

Shock, horror. What does this tell us?

 

2015 smashed heat records
Warming and El Niño pushed global temperatures up
BY
THOMAS SUMNER
5:18PM, JANUARY 20, 2016

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HEATING UP The ongoing strong El Niño and global warming fueled by fossil fuel emissions made 2015 the hottest year on record, scientists report. Blue areas were cooler than their long-term averages; red areas were warmer.

NOAA

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Things are definitely heating up. Spurred by global warming and a “super El Niño,” 2015 smashed records, becoming by far Earth’s hottest year since record-keeping began in 1880.

Worldwide surface temperatures were on average 0.90 degrees Celsius warmer than the 20th century average of 13.9°, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA reported January 20 in a joint announcement. That’s well above the previous record of 0.74 degrees above average set in 2014 (SN Online: 1/16/15). The 0.16-degree difference between the two years is the largest margin by which an annual temperature record has ever been broken.

What’s more, the new record leaves little room for doubt. NOAA reported over 99 percent confidence that 2015 was in fact the hottest year on record, considering gaps in weather data, compared with just 48 percent confidence when 2014 nabbed the title.

“2015 was the warmest year because it was warm throughout the year,” said Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City. Ten months set all-time records during 2015. December was the biggest record breaker, with temperatures reaching 1.11 degrees higher than the 20th century average for that month. “It was picking up that El Niño assist in the last three months,” Schmidt said. But even without the boost, “this still would have been the warmest year on record,” he said.

Earth has now seen 39 consecutive years of temperatures above the 20th century average, as measured by a global armada of weather stations, buoys and ships. Heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere largely contributed to that long-term rise in surface temperatures (SN: 4/4/15, p. 14). Last year, however, got an additional temperature boost from the ongoing El Niño (SN Online: 7/16/15), a naturally occurring worldwide weather disruption caused by unusually warm seawater piling up in the eastern Pacific.

The current El Niño, among the strongest on record, contributed as much as 0.15 degrees to the new record, estimates Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.

Similar El Niños contributed to high temperatures observed during previous record-setting years, such as 1998, now tied for the sixth-hottest year on record. During non-El Niño years, heat accumulates under the surface in the Pacific Ocean. Every three to five years or so, changing wind patterns push this vast pool of warm seawater eastward toward the Americas and closer to the sea surface. The warm seawater then heats up the atmosphere.

Strong El Niño events often precede global cooling, however, especially when an event prompts El Niño’s meteorological sibling, La Niña. The rise and fall of temperatures around the 1997–1998 El Niño contributed to a perceived slowdown in global warming (SN: 6/27/15, p. 6).

El Niños usually contribute the most heat during their second years, but that might not be the case this time around. The current El Niño, which kicked off last March, may have done most of its warming early, Trenberth says. That’s partly because the event almost began in 2014 before wavering (SN: 11/1/14, p. 6) and reached its peak strength in November of last year, unlike most events that peak a month later. If the current El Niño is mostly tapped out, 2015’s heat record could stand for a while, Trenberth predicts, though NOAA and NASA gave better-than-even odds of a hotter 2016.

 

#endof
The global average temperature of 62.45 degrees Fahrenheit for 1997
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/199713

Global average temperature 2015 = 58.62F

@astroturfnaut Hottest year ever, sure

 

Since when is 62.45F 1997 cooler than 58.62F 2015

 

When you've been told lies about 1997 by deniers

 

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The same site you've posted from explains exactly how


The State of the Climate November 2015 report noted that in order for 2015 to not become the warmest year in the 136-year period of record, the December global temperature would have to be at least 0.81°C (1.46°F) below the 20th century average—or 0.24°C (0.43°F) colder than the current record low December temperature of 1916. In fact, December 2015 was the warmest month of any month in the period of record, at 1.11°C (2.00°F) higher than the monthly average, breaking the previous all-time record set just two months ago in October 2015 by 0.12°C (0.21°F). This is the first time in the NOAA record that a monthly temperature departure from average exceeded 1°C or reached 2°F and the second widest margin by which an all-time monthly global temperature record has been broken. (February 1998 broke the previous record of March 1990 by 0.13°C / 0.23°F.)

With the contribution of such record warmth at year's end and with 10 months of the year record warm for their respective months, including the last 8 (January was second warmest for January and April was third warmest), the average global temperature across land and ocean surface areas for 2015 was 0.90°C (1.62°F) above the 20th century average of 13.9°C (57.0°F), beating the previous record warmth of 2014 by 0.16°C (0.29°F). This is not only the highest calendar year temperature, but also the highest temperature for any 12-month period on record. The global temperatures in 2015 were strongly influenced by strong El Niño conditions that developed during the year.

The 2015 temperature also marks the largest margin by which an annual temperature record has been broken. Prior to this year, the largest margin occurred in 1998, when the annual temperature surpassed the record set in 1997 by 0.12°C (0.22°F). Incidentally, 1997 and 1998 were the last years in which a similarly strong El Niño was occurring. The annual temperature anomalies for 1997 and 1998 were 0.51°C (0.92°F) and 0.63°C (1.13°F), respectively, above the 20th century average, both well below the 2015 temperature departure.

https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/201513