UpdateI downloaded it and zoomed in and put a trend line at the upper boundary of uncertainty of this chart, a chart I disagree with anyway, the BBC claim is unscientific nonsense. Hyperbole to be exact Now you understand uncertainty right? So if I drew another trend line at the lower boundary of uncertainty (the actual temp could be anywhere within at any given point) and beyond the boundary of upper or lower uncertainty, that means obviously the range of uncertainty is huge. My other issue with this Hockey Stick chart is by stretching it like they have, conceals the uncertainty at the end of the chart because the blue is mixed with the red, basically you cannot see the scientific doubt on this chart for most of the last 100 years, and what uncertainty is there is far short of actual uncertainty. please log in to view this image So, if I use the upper bound, and scientifically it is possible (if not probable) that this is the trend and it is just as valid as the centre trend and lower boundary, because the whole range is uncertain. Not scary though is it Past anomalies are probability modeled. There are three problems with this 1. They are probabilities, the BBC represented it as fact. 2. Probability models cannot tell you the cause of warming. 3. Probability models cannot predict the next anomaly sets. There are many papers that say this BBC hyperbole was wrong, furthermore, when you write a paper, like this reconstruction, you are obliged to say why all the other papers are (technically) wrong. Mann never did. "Europe's recent summers were the 'warmest in 2,000 years'" is just not supported by scientific findings To claim it's warmer than the Roman warming period is insane, makes little sense. The MWP has not been deleted from science, just because of 1 Hockey Stick, especially when the paper never explained why all the other papers are wrong, let alone the Roman warming period Edit: Oh and that could only be the northern Hemisphere, there is almost no paleo climate data for most of the southern hemisphere and tropics, the vast majority of proxies come from the northern hemisphere, plus this chart switches from different types of proxies to keep the trend flat, rainfall, trees thermometers, 1209 proxies were used and spliced to make that reconstruction.So I would chance a guess and say the uncertainty margins are far bigger than shown on the chart. Update Reconstruction models, not CAGW or partisan spleggh Upon further research of how tree ring proxies are used in reconstruction models, I've found out some interesting facts relating to my claim that the uncertainty shown in the chart is not correct and that uncertainty is in fact greater. First is preprocessing of tree ring data. They remove non climate related factors believed to unrelated to climate effects on tree ring growth. Tree age is one such factor. The problem here is that there is no uncertainty is passed on to the reconstruction the proxy is used in. Uncertainty just disappears, because we cannot be 100% certain that adjustments to remove non climate related factors is perfect, there must be uncertainty of some kind. Another area of uncertainty involves the particular modelling assumptions used in order to reconstruct climate from tree rings. Many of the assumptions are default choices, often chosen for convenience or manageability. Differences in models that have different configurations please log in to view this image http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01621459.2015.1110524?journalCode=uasa20 Uncertainty is far greater than claimed, that's why the Hockey Stick shown by the BBC, it's basically junk.
Anyone who can't understand that the level of uncertainty diminishes in the period that has actually been measured via instrument when compared to the period that is being modelled based on tree rings, really needs to sit down and think about it........
The uncertainty in tree temperatures before trees existed is infinite. Therefore no matter how hot it gets we are colder now than the uncertainty in the past. Therefore no warming. Therefore the warming that doesn't exist wasn't caused by humans. Draw a graph with an infinite error bar on it in MS paint. Point proven.
if glass flows, does that explain why glass in some Windows is thicker at the bottom? Because as a smart bloke back in the day, I wouldn't have put the thin part at the bottom! Someone said QI had covered this, what did they say?
I started to think 'why don't they relay the images' but then satellites are designed for specific tasks. This is a great and expensive idea. But I'm sure the shared information/data/services are worth it
Was so disappointed when I read the link, interesting as it was, it wasnt this http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-kQakOSNBY.../n8z39tQBCv4/s1600/moonraker-space-battle.jpg
Immune system gene leads to schizophrenia clue Excessive synapse pruning linked to protein variant BY LAURA SANDERS 12:57PM, JANUARY 29, 2016 please log in to view this image CUTTING CONNECTIONS C4 protein (green) is found on human nerve cells growing in a dish (cell bodies shown in blue). The protein may cause people with schizophrenia to lose nerve cell connections, researchers propose. IMAGE COURTESY OF HEATHER DE RIVERA (MCCARROLL LAB) please log in to view this image EMail please log in to view this image Twitter please log in to view this image Facebook please log in to view this image Reddit please log in to view this image Google+ SPONSOR MESSAGE From the tangled web of schizophrenia biology, scientists have pulled out one tantalizing thread. Variants of a protein that helps snip connections between nerve cells in the brain may contribute to the disorder, scientists report January 27 in Nature. “It’s not the answer, but it’s an answer,” says psychiatrist and neuroscientist Henry Nasrallah of Saint Louis University School of Medicine. The findings give scientists a clue that may help unravel more insights into how schizophrenia takes hold of the brain, he says. The study is the first time scientists have been able to move from genetic studies to a biological insight into schizophrenia risk, says geneticist David Goldstein of Columbia University. “Genetics got us there,” he says. “That’s why this is a big deal.” The research was sparked by genetic studies that identified a mammoth stretch of DNA on chromosome 6 as particularly suspicious. Called the major histocompatibility complex, or MHC, this DNA chunk carries information used by the immune system to help identify invaders. But why these genes were involved in schizophrenia was a mystery. “The MHC association in schizophrenia was considered an almost intractable problem in human genetics,” says study coauthor Steven McCarroll, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School and the Broad Institute. New ways of analyzing genetic structure yielded an answer. It has to do with the snipping of connections called synapses between brain cells, McCarroll says. This process, called synaptic pruning, is in full swing during adolescence, a time when schizophrenia symptoms often first show up. By looking at genetic material of more than 60,000 people with or without schizophrenia, McCarroll and colleagues pinpointed versions of a gene within the MHC called complement component 4, or C4, that elevate the risk of schizophrenia. About 1 percent of people get schizophrenia. For people with a version of the C4 gene that leads to more C4 protein in the brain, the risk increases to 1.27 percent, the researchers calculate. C4 protein is found on brain cells, often at synapses. In postmortem brains from people with schizophrenia, there were signs that the C4 gene had been more active than in people without the disorder, the team found. Further experiments with mice showed that C4 helps control synaptic pruning. Synapses in the brains of mice that didn’t have C4 weren’t pruned effectively, the researchers found. That result hints that the opposite might be going on in people with schizophrenia: Too much C4 might cause excessive pruning. A surplus of synapse trimming, particularly during adolescence, could disrupt elaborate neural connections and lead to the scattered thinking and hallucinations that often come with schizophrenia. Some scientists had suspected that synaptic pruning goes into overdrive in schizophrenia, Goldstein says. Postmortem brains showed a paucity of synapses, for instance. But this study is the “clearest, strongest evidence we have of synaptic pruning” being implicated in schizophrenia, Goldstein says. Synaptic pruning may not be the only thing that matters for schizophrenia, Nasrallah cautions. A range of genetic and environmental influences could all contribute to the disorder. “There are so many different ways to become schizophrenic,” he says. But studying the link between the gene and synaptic pruning may help pinpoint where and how those influences converge in the brain, he says. Geneticist Dimitrios Avramopoulos of Johns Hopkins University says that while the evidence for C4-related pruning in schizophrenia is interesting, it’s “not undisputable proof at this point.” He says more work is needed to be confident that the results are solid.
Guardian article on black holes https://www.theguardian.com/science...s-a-black-hole-stephen-hawking-reith-lectures What is a black hole? Sisu already got to it though: please log in to view this image
Odd star’s dimming not aliens’ doing Astronomers baffled by bizarre stellar behavior but find no sign of civilization BY CHRISTOPHER CROCKETT 7:00AM, FEBRUARY 2, 2016 please log in to view this image ALIEN CAMOUFLAGE A horde of shattered comets (illustrated) could explain why the light from Tabby’s star has been flickering and fading for over a century. JPL-CALTECH/NASA please log in to view this image EMail please log in to view this image Twitter please log in to view this image Facebook please log in to view this image Reddit please log in to view this image Google+ SPONSOR MESSAGE Tabby’s star is an oddball. Branded as a home to an “alien megastructure,” it flickers and dims like an aging lightbulb. Twice, the star’s light plummeted by roughly 20 percent and then quickly rebounded. That was after the star steadily dimmed by about an additional 20 percent between 1890 and 1989, astronomer Brad Schaefer of Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge reports online January 13 at arXiv.org. “Twenty percent dimming is inexplicable,” says Schaefer, who discovered the century-long fading in a photograph archive at Harvard University. “Tabby’s star is doing something utterly unique.” It’s no wonder that Jason Wright, an astronomer at Penn State, suggested to the Atlantic that maybe astronomers had stumbled upon a fleet of solar collectors built by an advanced civilization. A cloud of comets or other interplanetary debris is more likely, but even these down-to-earth ideas are problematic. “We’re left with a real mystery,” Schaefer says. Tabby’s star, also known as KIC 8462852, sits about 1,480 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus. Tabby’s was one of roughly 150,000 stars monitored by NASA’s Kepler space telescope. Kepler spent four years staring at one patch of sky, looking for dips in starlight as planets passed in front of their suns. Nearly 800 days into Kepler’s mission, the light from KIC 8462852 dropped by 15 percent and then just as quickly returned to normal. Almost two years later, a sharp 22 percent dip occurred among a series of rapid fluctuations. The behavior was so odd that Kepler’s data-sifting computers ignored it. Volunteers known as the Planet Hunters,who scour the data by eye, flagged KIC 8462852 as “bizarre.” Yale University astronomer Tabetha Boyajian, after whom the star is informally named, and colleagues published these findings online September 13 at arXiv.org. “We were working on it for years and had no idea what to do with it,” Boyajian says. While younger stars are often erratic, KIC 8462852 is middle-aged and well past its temper-tantrum stage. Infrared telescopes see no sign of a warm dusty disk encircling the star that might occasionally block the light. “We’ve learned a whole bunch about this system,” she says, “It’s very normal except for this one feature.” Whatever is passing in front of the star can’t be a solid body, judging by how the light dimmed and rebounded. And it must be huge to block 20 percent of the light, comparable in size to the star itself. A cloud of disintegrating comets, perhaps nudged toward KIC 8462852 by a faint red star that appears to sit close by, seems the most likely culprit, Boyajian and colleagues conclude. please log in to view this image DEEP DROP For most of Kepler’s four-year mission, the light from Tabby’s star was steady. But twice, the light’s brightness plummeted by roughly 20 percent. T. BOYAJIAN ET AL/ARXIV.ORG 2015, JPL-CALTECH/NASA (DATA) A comet horde, however, doesn’t explain why the star faded through the 1900s. “That’s the second piece of evidence that shows this star is really weird,” says Boyajian. “It’s a very frustrating piece of evidence as well.... It doesn't point to an obvious explanation for what to think of next.” To account for the gradual fading, Schaefer calculated that there would need to be about 648,000 giant comets. “I do not see how it is possible for something like 648,000 giant comets to exist around one star,” he wrote, “nor to have their orbits orchestrated so as to all pass in front of the star within the last century.” Schaefer suspects that there is a dusty gas cloud orbiting the star. Similar dimming trends show up in 18 of 28 similar types of stars in the Harvard archive, independent data analyst Michael Hippke from Neukirchen-Vluyn, Germany, and Daniel Angerhausen of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., report online January 27 at arXiv.org. This leads Hippke and Angerhausen to propose the most banal explanation of all for the century-long dimming: imperfect data calibration. “This claim is easily proved wrong,” says Schaefer. Hippke and Angerhausen mixed photographs with different color sensitives, he says, and that can lead to apparent brightness changes where there are none. They also used photographs with known defects such as smeared images and double exposures. “Colloquially put, these are garbage,” he says. “Garbage in, garbage out.” Strange stellar behavior sometimes leads to out-of-the-box thinking. Perhaps an armada of solar-collecting stations, erected by extraterrestrial engineers, could occasionally block Kepler’s view, Wright and colleagues suggested in the Jan. 1 Astrophysical Journal. If anyone has set up camp around the star, however, they’re being quiet about it. Tabby aliens aren’t broadcasting detectable radio signals, Gerry Harp, an astrophysicist at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., and colleagues reported online November 5 at arXiv.org. An advanced civilization can’t hide from the laws of thermodynamics, notes Schaefer. All that harvested solar energy has to go somewhere. There should be an infrared glow equal to about 20 percent of the star’s energy to balance the thermodynamic checkbook. But there is no excess infrared light emanating from the star. Most researchers suspect the culprit will be a little more prosaic. “There are all sorts of things that make dips,” says Alice Quillen, an astrophysicist at the University of Rochester in New York. “I’m not trying to be boring, because aliens would be cool, too.” Comets or a debris disk far from the star remain the favored ideas, even though they can’t explain all the available data. “There has to be some solution,” Schaefer says. “We’ve effectively refuted every proposal on the table. Either there’s some completely new idea or we’re doing something wrong.” For now, ground-based planet searches and an army of amateur astronomers are keeping an eye on Tabby’s star. If scientists can catch the star in the act, they might finally get a handle on what’s going on.
http://www.theguardian.com/environm...hore-windfarm-to-be-built-off-yorkshire-coast Tobes has to take credit for this link to be fair, looks like the investment in Hull will explode as support services are required! 7MW turbines are still smaller than the ones being developed, but this proven technology can only improve and increase the current 10% grid feed from wind power on any given day.
The proposed site off Hornsea would generate enough power for 1m homes at full operating speed. The entire project will see 174 turbines installed, so dividing that backwards - 1 will power approx 5,750 homes (as long as they don't all use their kettles)
