Jon Stewart "Burn Notice"

On why people have to 'March' anyway (Republicans in the House of Representatives - Science, etc. Committee):

The Daily Show - Burn Notice

Excerpt from the 'hearing':

Bucshon: Is it true that this rule has no effect on the global temperature change?

Holdren: Can I take that? I’d like to respond to that.

Bucshon: There’s public comment out there that that question has been asked and answered saying no.

Holdren: You should look at the scientific literature [interrupted] rather than the public comments …

Bucshon: Of all the climatologists whose careers depends on the climate changing to keep themselves publishing articles? Yes, I could read that, but I don’t believe it.

from http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/09/17/3568923/bucshon-climate-scientists-money/

(Bucshon is the Representative from Indiana - from my district)

"US climate skeptic Soon funded by oil, coal firms"

* Funding came from Koch Foundation, Southern, Exxon, API
* Private science funding gets close look amid budget cuts
* Soon says never motivated by financial reward

By Timothy Gardner

WASHINGTON, June 28 (Reuters) - Willie Soon, a U.S. climate change skeptic who has also discounted the health risks of mercury emissions from coal, has received more than $1 million in funding in recent years from large energy companies and an oil industry group, according to Greenpeace.

Soon, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, has also gotten funding from scientific sources including NASA and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But starting early in the last decade, Soon began receiving more funding from the energy companies, Greenpeace reported.

Last year, the foundation of Charles Koch, chairman and CEO of privately held Koch Industries, gave Soon $65,000 to study how variations in the Sun are related to climate change.

Koch is co-owned by David Koch, founder of Americans for Prosperity, a group aligned with the Tea Party movement, which opposes new air pollution regulations.

Beginning in 2002, Soon's funding mostly came from oil companies, including Southern Co (SO.N: Quote), one of the largest coal burners in the United States, and the American Petroleum Institute, according to documents uncovered in a Freedom of Information Act request by Greenpeace and seen by Reuters.

"A campaign of climate change denial has been waged for over twenty years by Big Oil and Big Coal," said Kert Davies, a research director at Greenpeace US.

"Scientists like Dr. Soon who take fossil fuel money and pretend to be independent scientists are pawns."

Soon was criticized by many climate scientists for a 2003 paper he co-wrote, concluding that 20th century warming was not unusual compared to that of centuries past. About 5 percent of the study's funding, or $53,000, came from the API, they said.

Soon, who says global warming is mostly caused by changes in the Sun, not emissions from burning oil, gas and coal, has written some peer-reviewed studies on global climate change.

More recently, he has written non-peer reviewed papers. In 2007 he co-wrote a paper that concluded polar bears are not threatened by human-caused climate change, which was also funded partially by grants from the oil industry.

While corporate funding of science is not new, the focus on the ethics of such aid is growing as state and federal science grants are reduced amid budget cuts.
--
Soon co-wrote a May 25 opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal called "The Myth of Killer Mercury." In the piece, Soon was identified as a natural scientist from Harvard, but the newspaper did not disclose that he receives most of his funding from the energy industry. The Journal did not return a request for comment.

Soon wrote that the EPA, which is under court order to finalize rules on the pollution from power plants, wants to discipline the energy industry. "To build its case against mercury, the EPA systematically ignored evidence and clinical studies that contradict its regulatory agenda, which is to punish hydrocarbon use," the piece said.

...Soon agreed he had received funding from all of the groups and companies, but denied any group would have influenced his studies....

"Electrons are fantastically round..."

From the Guardian.uk


After three months of experiments in a basement laboratory in London, scientists can confirm – with more confidence than ever – that the electron is very, very round.

In the most exquisite measurements yet, researchers declared the particle to be a perfect sphere to within one billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a centimetre. Were the electron scaled up to the size of the solar system, any deviation from its roundness would be smaller than the width of a human hair, the team said.

Abstruse as the experiment might seem, the work has profound implications for scientists wrestling with the mysteries of the cosmos. Even the slightest elongation of the electron can reveal what unknown particles might exist in nature, and even explain why matter won out over antimatter in the universe we observe.

The findings, published in the journal, Nature, already rule out some kinds of particles that theories suggested could pop into existence at the Large Hadron Collider at Cern, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva.

"It's been hard work. We've been working on this for a long time and we've had a lot of ups and downs," said Jony Hudson, a physicist at Imperial College, London. "We have measured the shape really precisely. The deviations we were looking for are much smaller than the size of the electron. It is very, very round."

The concept of shape might seem obscure when it comes to a subatomic particle, but the rules are the same as for everyday objects. Pick up a pen, for example, and you feel its shape because electrons in the pen push back against the electrons in your hand.

And so it is with the electron itself. The particle is negatively charged, and the more evenly distributed the charge is around the centre of the particle, the more spherical it appears to be.

Scientists pursue ever more accurate measurements of the electron's roundness because any sign of it being mishapen could herald a major discovery. One leading idea known as supersymmetry, which says that every kind of particle we know has a heavy twin, requires the electron to have a slightly distorted shape.

"What's interesting is that the electron is so round it is becoming difficult for theories like supersymmetry to explain it," said Hudson, whose finding already rules out the existence of some supersymmetric particles.

Evidence that the electron is mishapen on a minuscule scale might also explain why the universe we see is made of matter instead of antimatter. At the birth of the cosmos, both were made in equal measure, but some subtle difference between the two caused antimatter to disappear. If the electron is elongated, it will behave differently to its antimatter counterpart, the positron. For example, each would wobble differently in an electric field.

"There must be a difference in the behaviour of matter and antimatter that we've not observed, and amazingly, the shape of the electron might just be enough to explain how the matter-antimatter imbalance built up over billions of years," Hudson said.

His team studied the roundness of electrons by measuring how much, or how little, the particles wobbled in an electric field. The rounder the electron, the less wobble it will display. In the experiment, electrons were anchored to a molecule called ytterbium fluoride and examined with a laser beam. Each measurement took only one thousandth of a second.

Running non-stop for more than three months, Hudson's team took 25 million measurements of electrons and averaged them out. They found no sign of the electron wobbling in the field, meaning it is more spherical than any previous experiment had shown. "To the best of our knowledge, with the experimental precision we have, the electron appears to be round," Hudson said.

In an accompanying article, Aaron Leanhardt at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, said the work provided a window "on the high energy soul of the cosmos".

"This work has important ramifications for the types of particles that can be discovered at high-energy accelerators, and may eventually help to explain the composition of the observable universe," Leanhardt wrote.

"Nations again try to bridge rich-poor climate gap"

AP-Cancun

World governments begin another attempt Monday to overcome the disconnect between rich and poor nations on fighting global warming, with evidence mounting that the Earth's climate already is changing in ways that will affect both sides of the wealth divide.

During two weeks of talks, the 193-nation U.N. conference hopes to conclude agreements that will clear the way to mobilize billions of dollars for developing countries and give them green technology to help them shift from fossil fuels affecting climate change.

After a disappointing summit last year in Copenhagen, no hope remains of reaching an overarching deal this year setting legal limits on how much major countries would be allowed to pollute. Such an accord was meant to describe a path toward slashing greenhouse gas emissions by mid-century, when scientists say they should be half of today's levels.

Eighty-five countries have made specific pledges to reduce emissions or constrain their growth, but those promises amount to far less than required to keep temperatures from rising to potentially dangerous levels.

The recriminations that followed the Danish summit have raised questions over whether the unwieldy U.N. negotiations, which require at least tacit agreement from every nation, can ever work.

Adopting scaled back ambitions for Cancun, if successful, could restore confidence in the process...

While delegates haggle over the wording, timing and dollar figures involved in any agreement, scientists and political activists at the conference will be offering the latest indications of the planet's warming. Some 250 presentations are planned on the sidelines of the negotiations.

Meteorologists are likely to report that 2010 will end up tied for the hottest year globally since records began 131 years ago.
The U.N. scientific body that won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for its climate change report, which called global warming "unequivocal" and almost certainly caused by human activity, is expected to tell the conference its findings and warnings of potential disasters are hopelessly out of date.

Agronomists are due to report on shifting weather patterns that are destabilizing the world's food supply and access to clean water, and that could lead to mass migrations as farmers flee drought or flood-prone regions.

As often during the three-year process, attention will focus on the United States and China, two often belligerent nations representing the industrialized and developing world.

"Why Can’t Scientists Say the Recent Extreme Weather Events Are ‘Proof’ of Climate Change"

From Climate Central:

Massive flooding and extreme heat in Pakistan, devastating heat and wildfires raging across Russia, a giant iceberg calving off Greenland, a wicked hot summer on the U.S. East Coast: this is exactly the stuff scientists such as ourselves have been warning would be a likely consequence of climate change. So, it might seem frustrating when you read a news report saying something along the lines of "while these events are consistent with climate change, no single event can be directly linked to or regarded as proof of climate change."

If that is the case, you may be wondering when we are going to get that definitive proof – the smoking gun, if you will – that links today’s weather events to climate change. The thing is that if we continue to look for proof in those terms, it may take a very long time.

The reason is that the extreme weather events we are seeing today are theoretically possible with or without climate change. That’s why these events don’t prove the existence of human-caused climate change any more than last winter’s snowstorms disproved it. While there’s overwhelming observational evidence showing that humans are affecting climate, this evidence comes from long-term trends, rather than individual events.

Extreme events are related to climate change, however: the odds of them happening are much greater with climate change.


Take the deadly 2003 heat event in Europe that killed an estimated 40,000 people. To explore links between climate change and that heat wave, Dr. Peter Stott of the UK Met Office and colleagues ran two types of climate simulations. One replicated conditions of a natural climate (unmodified by human influences) and the other included both natural influences and the effects of human emissions of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels and other activities. The authors estimated the probability of exceeding an extreme temperature threshold in both simulated climates. In their paper, published in Nature in 2004, they wrote: “According to our calculation, there is a greater than 90% chance that over half the risk of European summer temperatures exceeding a threshold of 1.6K (which is the same as 1.6 degrees Celsius, or 2.9 degrees Fahrenheit) is attributable to human influence on climate.”

In other words, Stott and colleagues asserted with very high confidence that the chances of having a heat wave of a magnitude similar to the 2003 event had doubled because of human-induced warming. But notice what their analysis did not find. It did not conclude that the heat wave would not have occurred, absent human influences on climate. That is because that heat event could still have taken place without human-induced climate change, although with relatively lower likelihood.

We can estimate probabilities, but rarely can it be asserted with 100 percent confidence that there is a causal relationship between variables. That might be how some findings by scientists get interpreted, but scientists don’t tend to talk that way. So we could run computer models today and try to determine how likely the extreme weather of this summer was with and without human influences. And we could estimate by how much human-induced climate change has elevated the odds of these events happening. But we cannot say in a scientifically rigorous way that the event was definitely due to climate change.

The point is that while it is a perfectly reasonable question to ask: “Was this event due to climate change?” it would more useful to ask a related question: “are we putting ourselves at greater risk of experiencing this kind of event?” And to that scientists can answer with high confidence: yes! .....

"Climate change deniers accused of McCarthyism"

By Louise Gray at Telegraph.co.uk:

In a letter published in the journal Science, more than 250 members of the US National Academy of Sciences, including 11 Nobel Prize laureates, condemned the increase in "political assaults" on scientists who argue greenhouse gas emissions are warming the planet.

The 'climategate' scandal and mistakes by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have led to a surge in attacks on climate scientists around the world.

In the US politicians have called for a criminal investigation of climate scientists, while in the UK eminent professors have received hate mail and even death threats.

In a strongly worded letter, the group of scientists likened the situation to the 'McCarthy era' in the US where anyone suspected of communist links was threatened with persecution. The period in the 1950s was named after the anti-communist pursuits of Senator Joseph McCarthy.

"We call for an end to McCarthy-like threats of criminal prosecution against our colleagues based on innuendo and guilt by association, the harassment of scientists by politicians seeking distractions to avoid taking action, and the outright lies being spread about them," the letter read.

The defence of climate science comes after a number of scandals cast doubt on the theory of man-made global warming. Emails stolen from the University of East Anglia (UEA) appeared to show scientists were willing to exaggerate temperature change in a scandal known as 'climategate', although two separate inquiries have found no evidence of misconduct.

The scientists fear the scandals have led to a witch hunt against those involved.

James Inhofe, a US senator and long-standing climate sceptic, has called for a criminal investigation of climate scientists. Professor Phil Jones, the head of the Climatic Research Unit at the UEA, said he considered suicide after receiving hate mail and death threats.

Worst of all, they fear politicians and interest groups in industry are using doubt over climate science to prevent the world from acting to reduce the threat of global warming.

"Society has two choices: we can ignore the science and hide our heads in the sand and hope we are lucky, or we can act in the public interest to reduce the threat of global climate change quickly and substantively. The good news is that smart and effective actions are possible. But delay must not be an option."

The letter points out that there is uncertainty attached to theory of evolution and the Big Bang. But like these theories, climate change has been "overwhelmingly" accepted by scientists.

"There is compelling, comprehensive and consistent objective evidence that humans are changing the climate in ways that threaten our societies and the ecosystems on which we depend," they said.

"Many recent assaults on climate science and, more disturbingly, on climate scientists by climate change deniers, are typically driven by special interests or dogma, not by an honest effort to provide an alternative theory that credibly satisfies the evidence."

...But the planet would pay a much higher price in the long run than it could afford if it ignored the need for action to save the wildlife the world depended on, the organisation warned.

Speaking ahead of a meeting of the scientific advisory body for the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the IUCN said governments had failed to meet targets to halt biodiversity loss by 2010.

NASA Slated To Receive Billions To Study Earth

From NPR

NASA, the agency known for exploring space, will be spending a lot more time studying Earth in the next few years.

The Obama administration has proposed a budget for NASA that includes billions of dollars for satellites and other tools to help scientists investigate Earth-bound problems, especially climate change.

That represents a major turnaround for NASA's Earth Science Division, which had been allowed to languish during much of the 1990s.

Back then, the division had so little money it wasn't able to replace aging satellites that monitor things such as polar ice, coastal wetlands, ocean temperatures and chemicals in the atmosphere.

But things have changed dramatically since the arrival of the Obama administration, says Edward Weiler, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate.

"This administration has a clear priority for science in general and Earth science in specific," he says.

And now the White House has unveiled plans to give NASA's Earth science programs $2.4 billion in new money over the next five years. That's an increase of more than 60 percent.

Much of the new money will be spent trying to reinvigorate efforts to determine how fast the Earth's climate is changing, Weiler says.

"We've got to measure how fast the ice is being depleted, how fast carbon dioxide is being added to the atmosphere as opposed to being taken out of it," he says.

Scientists think carbon dioxide from sources like cars and power plants is the most important contributor to global warming. But they still don't know much about what happens to carbon dioxide once it gets into the atmosphere, says Michael Freilich, director of NASA's Earth Science Division.

"In order to figure out where it's going, how it's being exchanged between the atmosphere and the ocean, and the atmosphere and the land, you have to make a whole variety of measurements," Freilich says.

The extra funding will help scientists get those measurements. One chunk is paying for a new Orbiting Carbon Observatory to replace the original, which crashed into the ocean last year just after it was launched.

The new funding will also allow NASA to replace twin satellites called GRACE that have been making detailed measurements of the Earth's gravity field since 2002.

That may sound like something only science wonks would care about. But GRACE has proved to have many more practical applications than anyone expected, Weiler says.

For example, he says, GRACE has been used to collect data on gravitational fields to measure the amount of ground water in California's San Joaquin Valley, an important agricultural resource. And the measurements are showing that "ground water is disappearing more quickly than it's being replenished," Weiler says.

Scientists say global warming may be contributing to this loss of water by changing rainfall patterns in the western U.S.

The proposed NASA budget still needs approval from Congress. But NASA officials say lawmakers seem to like the space agency's new focus on the Earth.

"Darwin Foes Add Warming to Targets"

From the New York Times:

Critics of the teaching of evolution in the nation’s classrooms are gaining ground in some states by linking the issue to global warming, arguing that dissenting views on both scientific subjects should be taught in public schools.

In Kentucky, a bill recently introduced in the Legislature would encourage teachers to discuss “the advantages and disadvantages of scientific theories,” including “evolution, the origins of life, global warming and human cloning.”

The bill, which has yet to be voted on, is patterned on even more aggressive efforts in other states to fuse such issues. In Louisiana, a law passed in 2008 says the state board of education may assist teachers in promoting “critical thinking” on all of those subjects.

Last year, the Texas Board of Education adopted language requiring that teachers present all sides of the evidence on evolution and global warming.

Oklahoma introduced a bill with similar goals in 2009, although it was not enacted.

The linkage of evolution and global warming is partly a legal strategy: courts have found that singling out evolution for criticism in public schools is a violation of the separation of church and state. By insisting that global warming also be debated, deniers of evolution can argue that they are simply championing academic freedom in general.

Yet they are also capitalizing on rising public resistance in some quarters to accepting the science of global warming, particularly among political conservatives who oppose efforts to rein in emissions of greenhouse gases.

In South Dakota, a resolution calling for the “balanced teaching of global warming in public schools” passed the Legislature this week.

“Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant,” the resolution said, “but rather a highly beneficial ingredient for all plant life.”

The measure made no mention of evolution, but opponents of efforts to dilute the teaching of evolution noted that the language was similar to that of bills in other states that had included both. The vote split almost entirely along partisan lines in both houses, with Republican voting for it and Democrats voting against.

For mainstream scientists, there is no credible challenge to evolutionary theory. They oppose the teaching of alternative views like intelligent design, the proposition that life is so complex that it must be the design of an intelligent being. And there is wide agreement among scientists that global warming is occurring and that human activities are probably driving it. Yet many conservative evangelical Christians assert that both are examples of scientists’ overstepping their bounds...

Lawrence M. Krauss, a physicist who directs the Origins Initiative at Arizona State University and has spoken against efforts to water down the teaching of evolution to school boards in Texas and Ohio, described the move toward climate-change skepticism as a predictable offshoot of creationism.

“Wherever there is a battle over evolution now,” he said, “there is a secondary battle to diminish other hot-button issues like Big Bang and, increasingly, climate change. It is all about casting doubt on the veracity of science — to say it is just one view of the world, just another story, no better or more valid than fundamentalism.”

Not all evangelical Christians reject the notion of climate change, of course. There is a budding green evangelical movement in the country driven partly by a belief that because God created the earth, humans are obligated to care for it.

Yet there is little doubt that the skepticism about global warming resonates more strongly among conservatives, and Christian conservatives in particular.

"It's official: An asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs"

LONDON (Reuters) – A giant asteroid smashing into Earth is the only plausible explanation for the extinction of the dinosaurs, a global scientific team said on Thursday, hoping to settle a row that has divided experts for decades.

A panel of 41 scientists from across the world reviewed 20 years' worth of research to try to confirm the cause of the so-called Cretaceous-Tertiary (KT) extinction, which created a "hellish environment" around 65 million years ago and wiped out more than half of all species on the planet.

Scientific opinion was split over whether the extinction was caused by an asteroid or by volcanic activity in the Deccan Traps in what is now India, where there were a series of super volcanic eruptions that lasted around 1.5 million years.

The new study, conducted by scientists from Europe, the United States, Mexico, Canada and Japan and published in the journal Science, found that a 15-kilometre (9 miles) wide asteroid slamming into Earth at Chicxulub in what is now Mexico was the culprit.

"We now have great confidence that an asteroid was the cause of the KT extinction. This triggered large-scale fires, earthquakes measuring more than 10 on the Richter scale, and continental landslides, which created tsunamis," said Joanna Morgan of Imperial College London, a co-author of the review.

The asteroid is thought to have hit Earth with a force a billion times more powerful than the atomic bomb at Hiroshima.
Morgan said the "final nail in the coffin for the dinosaurs" came when blasted material flew into the atmosphere, shrouding the planet in darkness, causing a global winter and "killing off many species that couldn't adapt to this hellish environment."

Scientists working on the study analyzed the work of paleontologists, geochemists, climate modelers, geophysicists and sedimentologists who have been collecting evidence about the KT extinction over the last 20 years.

Geological records show the event that triggered the dinosaurs' demise rapidly destroyed marine and land ecosystems, they said, and the asteroid hit "is the only plausible explanation for this."

Peter Schulte of the University of Erlangen in Germany, a lead author on the study, said fossil records clearly show a mass extinction about 65.5 million years ago -- a time now known as the K-Pg boundary...

"The KT extinction was a pivotal moment in Earth's history, which ultimately paved the way for humans to become the dominant species on Earth," Gareth Collins wrote in a commentary on the study.

(Collins has created a website at http://impact.ese.ic.ac.uk/ImpactEffects/Chicxulub.html which allows readers to see the effects of the asteroid impact.)

Scientists, Global Warming and "Skeptics"

Recently I went to a lecture by Ben Brabson.

He is a physicist and climate scientist. He showed some of the latest data and also addressed the recent media problems. This is from the right wing making a big deal out of a couple of what were essentially typos in the IPCC report plus the content of some hacked emails.

I don't take such attacks by the right wing seriously anyway - but apparently some people do. Some media demigods pound away on these things until some people think that they are speaking the truth.

The IPCC thing was mostly in regards to the melting of the glaciers on the Himalayans. The data showed models where the glaciers may be gone by 2350, but in one place, the number 2035 was used. Apparently if one were to read the context, it would be clear that 2350 was the date - but the 2035 number has been used to discredit the entire 3000 page report.

The emails were the sort of thing where scientists were bantering back and forth - and which pieces were taken out to suggest that the scientists were not being forthright with the public. I can imagine climate scientists discussing some of the right-wing nonsense and it not sounding as scientific as what they would present to the public.

Ben Brabson said that he had worked with Phil Jones, the British climate scientist who had written many of the emails in question. Some of Brabsons emails were also part of the hacked ones. Brabson explained about one email in particular that could sound worse than it was.

From the New York Times: Scientists Taking Steps to Defend Work on Climate

“It’s clear that the climate science community was just not prepared for the scale and ferocity of the attacks and they simply have not responded swiftly and appropriately,” said Peter C. Frumhoff, an ecologist and chief scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “We need to acknowledge the errors and help turn attention from what’s happening in the blogosphere to what’s happening in the atmosphere.”

A number of institutions are beginning efforts to improve the quality of their science and to make their work more transparent. The official British climate agency is undertaking a complete review of its temperature data and will make its records and analysis fully public for the first time, allowing outside scrutiny of methods and conclusions. The United Nations panel on climate change will accept external oversight of its research practices, also for the first time...

Ralph J. Cicerone, president of the National Academy of Sciences, the most prestigious scientific body in the United States, said that there was a danger that the distrust of climate science could mushroom into doubts about scientific inquiry more broadly. He said that scientists must do a better job of policing themselves and trying to be heard over the loudest voices on cable news, talk radio and the Internet.

“This is a pursuit that scientists have not had much experience in,” said Dr. Cicerone, a specialist in atmospheric chemistry.

The battle is asymmetric, in the sense that scientists feel compelled to support their findings with careful observation and replicable analysis, while their critics are free to make sweeping statements condemning their work as fraudulent....

“Scientists must continually earn the public’s trust or we risk descending into a new Dark Age where ideology trumps reason,” Dr. Pachauri said in an e-mail message.

But some scientists said that responding to climate change skeptics was a fool’s errand.

“Climate scientists are paid to do climate science,” said Gavin A. Schmidt, a senior climatologist with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies. “Their job is not persuading the public.”

The facts of the matter are that there are already plenty of actual global warming consequences. The models point to more - but it's not just a matter of looking to the models - it's a matter of seeing what is right in front of us. Sure there are people whose interest it is to pretend that there are no problems (people who profit by the status quo - by ignorance) and some will deny what is happening and try to prevent remedial action for as long as possible.

Progress on Solar Solutions

From IBM:

Made in IBM Labs: IBM Sets World Record by Creating High-Efficiency Solar Cell Made from Earth-Abundant Materials
Breakthrough holds potential to deliver more energy at a fraction of the cost

ARMONK, N.Y. - 11 Feb 2010: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced it has built a solar cell -- where the key layer that absorbs most of the light for conversion into electricity, is made entirely of readily-available elements -- that set a new world record for efficiency and holds potential for enabling solar cell technology to produce more energy at a lower cost. Comprised of copper (Cu), tin (Sn), zinc (Zn), sulfur (S), and/or selenium (Se), the cell's power conversion demonstrates an efficiency of 9.6 percent -- 40 percent higher than the value previously attained for this set of materials. In order to achieve progress in solar cell research, IBM is leveraging its world-class expertise in microprocessor technology, materials and manufacturing.

"In a given hour, more energy from sunlight strikes the earth than the entire planet consumes in a year, but solar cells currently contribute less than 0.1 percent of electricity supply -- primarily as a result of cost," said Dr. David Mitzi, who leads the team at IBM Research that developed the solar cell. "The quest to develop a solar technology that can compare on a cost per watt basis with the conventional electricity generation, and also offer the ability to deploy at the terawatt level, has become a major challenge that our research is moving us closer to overcoming."

The IBM researchers describe their achievement of the thin-film photovoltaic technology in a paper published in Advanced Materials this week, highlighting the solar cell's potential to accomplish the goal of producing low-cost energy that can be used widely and commercially.

The solar cell development also sets itself apart from its predecessors as it was created using a combination of solution and nanoparticle-based approaches, rather than the popular, but expensive vacuum-based technique. The production change is expected to enable much lower fabrication costs, as it is consistent with high-throughput and high materials utilization based deposition techniques including printing, dip and spray coating and slit casting.

Currently available thin film solar cell modules based upon compound semiconductors operate at 9 to 11 percent efficiency levels, and are primarily made from two costly compounds -- copper indium gallium selenide or cadmium telluride. Attempts to create affordable, earth abundant solar cells from related compounds that are free of indium, gallium or cadmium have not exceeded 6.7 percent, compared to IBM's new 9.6 efficiency rating.

Over the past several years, IBM researchers have pioneered several breakthroughs related to creating inexpensive, efficient solar cells. IBM does not plan to manufacture solar technologies, but is open to partnering with solar cell manufacturers to demonstrate the technology.

"If It’s That Warm, How Come It’s So Darned Cold?"

by James Hansen, Reto Ruedy, Makiko Sato, Ken Lo

An Essay on Regional Cold Anomalies within Near-Record Global Temperature

Overview. Public skepticism about global warming was reinforced by the extreme cold
of December 2009 in the contiguous 48 United States and in much of Eurasia. The summer of
2009 was also unusually cool in the United States. But when a cold spell hits, we need to ask:

* Cold compared to what. Our memory of the past few winters? Winters of our
childhood? Winters earlier in the 20th century?
* Cold where and for how long? Regional cold snaps are expected even with large
global warming. Weather fluctuations can be 10, 20 or 30 degrees, much larger than average
global warming.
* The reality of seasons. As the plot of Earth we live on turns away from the sun, in
winter or at night, it cools off. That’s true even with global warming, albeit not quite so much.

Our data show that 2009 was tied for the second warmest year in the 130 years of near-global
instrumental measurements – and the Southern Hemisphere had its warmest year in that entire period.
Before discussing these data, and their reconciliation with regional cold anomalies, we must consider
the time frame of comparison.

If we look back a century, we find cold anomalies that dwarf current ones. Figure 1 shows
photos of people walking on Niagara Falls in 1911. Such an extreme cold snap is unimaginable today.
About a decade earlier, in February 1899, temperature fell to -2°F in Tallahassee, Florida, -9°F in Atlanta,
Georgia -30°F in Erasmus, Tennessee, -47°F in Camp Clark, Nebraska, and -61°F in Fort Logan, Montana.

The Mississippi River froze all the way to New Orleans, discharging ice into the Gulf of Mexico.

As we will show, climate is changing, especially during the past 30 years. The changes are
perceptible, even though average temperature change is smaller than weather fluctuations. The answer
to the simple question: “How come it’s so damned cold” turns out to be simple: “Because it’s winter.”...

"Evidence Builds on Color of Dinosaurs"

An illustration showing the likely colors of Anchiornis huxleyi.

From the New York Times:

Until last week, paleontologists could offer no clear-cut evidence for the color of dinosaurs. Then researchers provided evidence that a dinosaur called Sinosauropteryx had a white-and-ginger striped tail. And now a team of paleontologists has published a full-body portrait of another dinosaur, in striking plumage that would have delighted that great painter of birds John James Audubon.

“This is actual science, not ‘Avatar,’ ” said Richard O. Prum, an evolutionary biologist at Yale and co-author of the new study, published in Science.

Dr. Prum and his colleagues took advantage of the fact that feathers contain pigment-loaded sacs called melanosomes. In 2009, they demonstrated that melanosomes survived for millions of years in fossil bird feathers. The shape and arrangement of melanosomes help produce the color of feathers, so the scientists were able to get clues about the color of fossil feathers from their melanosomes alone.

That discovery prompted British and Chinese scientists to examine fossils of dinosaurs that are covered with featherlike structures. The 125-million-year-old species Sinosauropteryx, for example, has bristles on its skin, and scientists found melanosomes in the tail bristles. They concluded that the dinosaur had reddish-and-white rings along its tail.

The discovery, which the researchers reported last week in Nature, supports research showing that birds are dinosaurs, having descended from a group of bipedal dinosaurs called theropods.

Dr. Prum and his colleagues, meanwhile, had set out on a similar quest. “We had a dream: to put colors on a dinosaur,” said Jakob Vinther, a graduate student at Yale.

Working with paleontologists at the Beijing Museum of Natural History and Peking University, the researchers began to study a 150-million-year-old species called Anchiornis huxleyi. The chicken-sized theropod was festooned with long feathers on its arms and legs.

The researchers removed 29 chips, each the size of a poppy seed, from across the dinosaur’s body. Mr. Vinther put the chips under a microscope and discovered melanosomes.

To figure out the colors of Anchiornis feathers, Mr. Vinther and his colleagues turned to Matthew Shawkey, a University of Akron biologist who has made detailed studies of melanosome patterns in living birds. Dr. Shawkey can accurately predict the color of feathers from melanosomes alone. The scientists used the same method to decipher Anchiornis’s color pattern.

Anchiornis had a crown of reddish feathers surrounding dark gray ones, and its face was mottled with reddish and black spots. Its body was dark gray, but its limb feathers were white with black tips.

Given the full detail of the findings, Dr. Prum said, “it was like writing the first entry in a Jurassic field guide to feathered dinosaurs.”

...The color pattern on Anchiornis was so extravagant that the scientists are confident it served some visual function. “It was definitely for showing off,” Mr. Vinther said.

Some features, like the crest, might have allowed the dinosaur to attract mates. But white and black limb feathers might have helped Anchiornis escape predators...

"Global Cooling? Tell It to the Jellyfish"

From Common Dreams - by Michael Winship

There are certain newspaper headlines that catch your eye and stop you in your tracks. Like the New York Post's famous "Headless Body in Topless Bar." Or such tabloid greats as "Evil Cows Ate My Garden," "Double Decker Bus Found on Moon," and my personal favorite, "Proof of Reincarnation: Baby Born with Wooden Leg."

Along similar lines, I was startled this week when London's Daily Mail published an article headlined, "Could we be in for 30 years of global COOLING?" Triggered by the unusual cold and snow in the United Kingdom over the last few weeks, the article began, "Britain's big freeze is the start of a worldwide trend towards colder weather that seriously challenges global warming theories, eminent scientists claimed yesterday."

The story went on to reference various researchers and their institutions, including the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado in Boulder, which reported, according to the Mail, that, "The warming of the Earth since 1900 is due to natural oceanic cycles, and not man-made greenhouse gases."

This was followed by an article on the Fox News Web site with the headline, "30 Years of Global Cooling Are Coming, Leading Scientist Says."

There are only two small problems, as was pointed out by Steve Benen on Washington Monthly magazine's "Political Animal" blog: "First, the National Snow and Ice Data Center said no such thing. The director of the NSIDC said, 'This is completely false. NSIDC has never made such a statement and we were never contacted by anyone from the Daily Mail.'" (Subsequently, both Fox and the Mail removed the reference to the NSIDC in their articles.)

Second, as proof of global cooling, both stories cited research conducted by Mojib Latif, a prominent climate modeler with the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Latif's response to their reporting? "I don't know what to do," he said. "They just make these things up."

Latif's work on climatology is complex and often difficult to understand, which is why the Fox and Daily Mail reporters may have his story mixed up -- it wouldn't be the first time journalists have been confused by his findings. But as cogently interpreted by the physicist and climate expert Dr. Joseph Romm of the liberal Center for American Progress, "Latif has NOT predicted a cooling trend -- or a 'decades-long deep freeze' -- but rather a short-time span where human-caused warming might be partly offset by ocean cycles, staying at current record levels, but then followed by 'accelerated' warming where you catch up to the long-term human-caused trend. He does NOT forecast 2 or 3 decades of cooling."

In fact, as Latif told the British newspaper the Guardian, "I believe in manmade global warming... There is no doubt within the scientific community that we are affecting the climate, that the climate is changing and responding to our emissions of greenhouse gases."

And if you don't believe him, ask the jellyfish.

Jellyfish don't lie. Well, sometimes they lie -- deceased and desiccated along the beach, which from strolling along various Eastern Seaboard shores is about the extent of my knowledge of them. That, and that Ogden Nash couplet, the one that goes, "Who wants my jellyfish? I am not sellyfish!"

But according to the Associated Press, the jellyfish population is rising. The news service reports, "Scientists believe climate change -- the warming of oceans -- has allowed some of the almost 2,000 jellyfish species to expand their ranges, appear earlier in the year and increase overall numbers, much as warming has helped ticks, bark beetles and other pests to spread to new latitudes."
(Scrippsia pacifica)
This has led to all manner of consequences, some you would expect, others not. A 2008 National Science Foundation study found populations growing along the East Coast -- in the Chesapeake Bay area, people are stung about half a million times a year. In the Middle East and Africa, swarms have jammed hydroelectric and desalination plants, forcing them to shut down. In Japan, the fishing industry is losing up to $332 million a year because jellyfish swarms fill the nets, crowding out mackerel, sea bass and other fish.

The AP reports that in October, off the eastern coast of Japan, "Jelly-filled nets capsized a 10-ton trawler as its crew tried to pull them up. The three fishermen were rescued." I know this all sounds like something out of a Godzilla movie, but it's serious stuff.

And speaking of jellyfish, here's a headline you may not see anytime soon: "Senate Passes Sweeping Climate Bill."

Although in a January 14 speech to the Energy Finance Forum, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said, "Taking on the clean-energy challenge... may be the most important policy we will ever pass. And we cannot afford to wait any longer to act," the cap-and-trade climate bill that narrowly passed the House of Representatives back in June malingers in the purgatory of the Senate.

And next week, Senator Reid will allow a vote on an amendment to the legislation lifting the Federal debt ceiling. Proposed by Alaska Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski, it would block the enforcement funding of the Environmental Protection Agency, giving free rein to the coal industry and other big polluters to ignore the Clean Air Act.

The activist group Credo Action, part of the company Working Assets, warns, "You would think this would be easy to stop, but the vote is predicted to be close with many Democrats considering voting for the bill... The coal industry has been working furiously to close deals with senators across the political spectrum, including those who say they want to protect the environment."

Jellyfish.

"Scientists Worry Machines May Outsmart Man"

From the New York Times:

A robot that can open doors and find electrical outlets to recharge itself. Computer viruses that no one can stop. Predator drones, which, though still controlled remotely by humans, come close to a machine that can kill autonomously.

Impressed and alarmed by advances in artificial intelligence, a group of computer scientists is debating whether there should be limits on research that might lead to loss of human control over computer-based systems that carry a growing share of society’s workload, from waging war to chatting with customers on the phone.

Their concern is that further advances could create profound social disruptions and even have dangerous consequences.

As examples, the scientists pointed to a number of technologies as diverse as experimental medical systems that interact with patients to simulate empathy, and computer worms and viruses that defy extermination and could thus be said to have reached a “cockroach” stage of machine intelligence.

While the computer scientists agreed that we are a long way from Hal, the computer that took over the spaceship in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” they said there was legitimate concern that technological progress would transform the work force by destroying a widening range of jobs, as well as force humans to learn to live with machines that increasingly copy human behaviors.

The researchers — leading computer scientists, artificial intelligence researchers and roboticists who met at the Asilomar Conference Grounds on Monterey Bay in California — generally discounted the possibility of highly centralized superintelligences and the idea that intelligence might spring spontaneously from the Internet. But they agreed that robots that can kill autonomously are either already here or will be soon.

They focused particular attention on the specter that criminals could exploit artificial intelligence systems as soon as they were developed. What could a criminal do with a speech synthesis system that could masquerade as a human being? What happens if artificial intelligence technology is used to mine personal information from smart phones?

The researchers also discussed possible threats to human jobs, like self-driving cars, software-based personal assistants and service robots in the home. Just last month, a service robot developed by Willow Garage in Silicon Valley proved it could navigate the real world.

A report from the conference, which took place in private on Feb. 25, is to be issued later this year. Some attendees discussed the meeting for the first time with other scientists this month and in interviews.

The conference was organized by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, and in choosing Asilomar for the discussions, the group purposefully evoked a landmark event in the history of science. In 1975, the world’s leading biologists also met at Asilomar to discuss the new ability to reshape life by swapping genetic material among organisms. Concerned about possible biohazards and ethical questions, scientists had halted certain experiments. The conference led to guidelines for recombinant DNA research, enabling experimentation to continue.

The meeting on the future of artificial intelligence was organized by Eric Horvitz, a Microsoft researcher who is now president of the association....

"Forgotten Experiment May Explain Origins of Life"

Originally considered a dud, an old volcano-in-a-bottle experiment designed to mimic conditions that may have brewed the components of life might have been right on target.

After reanalyzing the results of unpublished research conducted by Stanley Miller in 1953, chemists realized that his experiment had actually produced a wealth of amino acids — the protein foundation of life.

Miller is famed for the results of experiments on amino acid formation in a jar filled with methane, hydrogen and ammonia — his version of the primordial soup. However, his estimates of atmospheric composition were eventually considered inaccurate. The experiment became regarded as a general rather than useful example of how the first organic molecules may have assembled.

But the latest results, derived from samples found in an old box by one of Miller's former graduate students, come from a device that mimicked volcanic conditions now believed to have existed three billion years ago. The findings suggest that amino acids could have formed when lightning struck pools of gas on the flanks of volcanoes, and are a fitting coda for the late father of prebiotic chemistry.

"What's amazing is that he did it," said study co-author Jeffrey Bada, a Scripps Institute of Oceanography biochemist and Miller's former student. "All I did is have access to his extracts."

Bada stumbled across the original experiment by accident when a colleague of Miller's mentioned having seen a box of experimental samples in Miller's office. Bada, who inherited Miller's scientific possessions after his death in 2007, found the box — literally labeled "1953-1954 experiments" — in his own office.

Inside it were samples taken by Miller from a device that spewed a concentrated stream of primordial gases over an electrical spark. It was a high-powered variation on the steady-steam apparatus that earned him fame — but unlike that device, it appeared to have produced few amino acids, and was unmentioned in his landmark 1953 Science study, "A Production of Amino Acids Under Possible Primitive Earth Conditions."

But Miller didn't have access to high-performance liquid chromatography, which lets chemists break down and classify samples with once-unthinkable levels of precision. And when Bada's team reanalyzed the disregarded samples, they found no fewer than 22 amino acids, several of which were never seen by Miller in a lifetime of primordial modeling.

Perhaps amino acids first formed when the gases in Miller's device accumulated around active volcanoes, said Bada. "Instead of having global synthesis of organic molecules, you had a lot of little localized factories in the form of these volcanic islands," he said.

"The amino acid precursors formed in a plume and concentrated along tidal shores. They settled in the water, underwent further reactions there, and as they washed along the shore, became concentrated and underwent further polymerization events," explained Indiana University biochemist Adam Johnson, a co-author of the study. "And lightning" — the final catalyst in the equation — "tends to be extremely common with volcanic eruptions."

"These findings add to a growing body of literature suggesting that areas near volcanoes could have been hotspots of organic chemistry on early Earth," he said.

"Glowing Jellyfish Earns Nobel"

Yea for Aequorea Victoria! :)


Aequorea victoria, the jellyfish from which green fluorescent protein is derived. Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie and Roger Y. Tsien won the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for taking the ability of the jellyfish to glow green and transforming it into a tool of molecular biology to watch the dance of living cells and the proteins within them. (photo from the NYT)

Research into the mysterious green glow of a jellyfish earned three scientists this year's Nobel Prize for Chemistry, the Nobel Foundation announced Wednesday.

Osamu Shimomura of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts; Martin Chalfie of Columbia University; and Roger Tsien of the University of California at San Diego won for the discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein GFP.

Each will take a third of the prize.

GFP was first observed in 1962, in the crystal jellyfish which drifts with the currents off the west coast of North America.

Since then, the protein has become one of the most important tools in contemporary bioscience, the foundation said. Using GFP, researchers have developed ways to watch processes that were previously invisible, like the development of nerve cells or how cancer cells spread.

Osamu Shimomura, a Japanese citizen, was the first to isolate GFP from the crystal jellyfish, discovering that the protein glowed bright green under ultraviolet light.

American scientist Martin Chalfie demonstrated GFP's value as a luminous genetic tag in nature. One of Chalfie's first experiments, the foundation said, involved using GFP to color individual cells in a transparent roundworm.

Roger Tsien, also an American, extended the color palette beyond green. Researchers can now give various proteins and cells different colors, enabling them to follow different biological processes at the same time, the foundation said.

By using DNA technology, researchers can now connect GFP to other proteins that were previously invisible, or to various cells, the Nobel Foundation said. The glowing marker allows them to watch the movements, positions and interactions of whatever carries the glowing tag.

The Nobel Foundation said GFP can help with researching nerve cell damage during Alzheimer's disease or insulin-producing beta cells created in the pancreas of a growing embryo. In one spectacular experiment, researchers succeeded in tagging different nerve cells with "a kaleidoscope of colors" in the brain of a mouse, the foundation said.

_______________ A "Brainbow"

The Hidden Symmetries Between Elementary Particles

(NYT) An American and two Japanese physicists on Tuesday won the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work exploring the hidden symmetries between elementary particles that are the deepest constituents of nature.

Yoichiro Nambu, of the University of Chicago’s Enrico Fermi Institute, will receive half of the 10 million kroner prize (about $1.3 million) awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Makoto Kobayashi, of the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) Tsukuba, Japan, and Toshihide Maskawa, of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics (YITP), Kyoto University, will each receive a quarter of the prize.

Ever since Galileo, physicists have been guided in their quest for the ultimate laws of nature by the search for symmetries, or properties of nature that appear the same under different circumstances.

However, in the 1960s, Dr. Nambu, who was born in Tokyo in 1921, suggested that some symmetries in the laws of nature might be hidden or “broken” in actual practice.

A pencil standing on its end, for example, is symmetrical but unstable and will wind up on the table pointing in only one direction or the other. The principle is now embedded in all of modern particle physics.

“You have to look for symmetries even when you can’t see them,” explained Michael Turner of the University of Chicago, who described his colleague as “the most humble man of all time.”

In 1972, Dr. Kobayashi and Dr. Maskawa, extending earlier work by the Italian physicist Nicola Cabibbo, showed that if there were three generations of the elementary particles called quarks, the constituents of protons and neutrons, this principle of symmetry breaking would explain a puzzling asymmetry known as CP violation. This was discovered in 1964 by the American physicists James Cronin and Val Fitch - a discovery that also won a Nobel prize.

C and P stand respectively for charge and parity, or “handedness.” Until then, physicists had naively assumed that if you exchanged positive for negative and left-handed and right-handed in the equations of elementary particles, you would get the same answer.

The fact that nature operates otherwise, physicists hope, is a step on the way to explaining why the universe is made of matter and not antimatter, one of the questions that the Large Hadron Collider, the new particle accelerator now preparing for operation, is designed to explore.

"Physicists urge U.S. to prioritize energy efficiency"

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. can reduce its dependence on foreign oil and greenhouse gas emissions by making cars and buildings much more energy efficient, according to a study released Tuesday by a large national association of physicists.

The 46,000-member American Physical Society argues the need for action is urgent because the energy crisis is the worst in U.S. history. It also says that the physics and chemistry behind the human causes of climate change - such as heat-trapping pollution from the burning of fossil fuels - is "well understood and beyond dispute."

The report argues that the country can still go a long way to reduce energy use in cost-effective ways that allow for continued comfort and convenience. Although efficient energy technologies can save money, the U.S. has been slow to catch on, the report says. It recommends that the federal government adopt policies and make investments.

"The opportunities are huge and the costs are small," the report said...

"The bottom line is that the quickest way to do something about America's use of energy is through energy efficiency," said Burton Richter, the chairman of the study panel and a 1976 Nobel Prize winner in physics. "Energy that you don't use is free. It's not imported and it doesn't emit any greenhouse gases. Most of the things we recommend don't cost anything to the economy. The economy will save money."

The report concludes that the projected growth of energy use in buildings - 30 percent by 2030 - could be cut to zero using existing technology and what's likely to become available in the next decade at the current level of research and development. It argues that the federal government should encourage states to set standards for residential buildings and make sure they're enforced.

"One of the things we would love to see is all buildings have Energy Star labels," Richter said. "Right now you don't know how much energy a building is going to use that you're interested in moving into. We'd like to see an energy audit required before a building is sold or even built."

Some of the report's suggestions included installing roofs that reflect rather than absorb the sun's energy in hot climates, more efficient heating, cooling, lighting and appliances, and more government investment in research and development in building technologies...

"Common plastics chemical linked to heart problems"

ROCKVILLE, Maryland (Reuters) - A major study links a chemical widely used in plastic products, including baby bottles, to health problems in humans like heart disease and diabetes, but U.S. regulators said on Tuesday they still believe it is safe.

The chemical bisphenol A, or BPA, is commonly used in plastic food and beverage containers and in the coating of food cans.

Until now, environmental and consumer activists who have questioned the safety of BPA have relied on animal studies.

But the study by British researchers in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that among 1,455 U.S. adults, those with the highest levels of BPA were more likely to have heart disease, diabetes and liver-enzyme abnormalities than those with the lowest levels.

U.S. Food and Drug Administration officials said they would review the new findings, which were not yet published when the agency issued a draft conclusion in August that BPA is safe at current exposure levels...