Scientists Group to Refute Global Warming Claims

A group of leading New Zealand climate scientists has announced today the formation of the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition, aimed at refuting what it believes are unfounded claims about anthropogenic (man-made)global warming.

The coalition includes such well-known climate scientists as:
Dr Vincent Gray,Dr Gerrit J. van der Lingen,Prof. August H. ("Augie") Auer,Professor Bob Carter.

Some balance to unscientific rhectoric is indeed required,Unlike the IPCC and the inability of the virtual reality games they manufacturer(aka climate models) I can predict with 99.9% certainty that the disciples of the Church of Gaia will be screeching deniers ,atheists,and blasphymers at this scientific attack on their religion and their King Canute like belief that humanity is omniscient and can control the earth’s climate.

The balance is one of natural philosophy and the modal of opposition ie the balance of the budget.

Kyoto brings innovation from Finland

Finland annouces kyoto policy and achievement of goals .Finland’s new Energy and Climate Strategy outlines the measures that will be carried out in the energy and climate policy to meet Finland’s Kyoto commitments during the period of 2008–2012. The strategy includes very concrete commitments as regards what is to be done over the next 10 years. The resources and funding have also been allocated.
According to the Strategy, Finland will invest in the adoption of renewable energy sources, in energy conservation and in the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. In addition, Finland will utilize flexible mechanisms, defined in the Kyoto Protocol, to acquire emission units.

Nice rhectoric now for the reality........

United Power has signed a contract worth 4.5 billion euros ($5.58 bln) with Sweden's Basel AB on supplies via a power line running from Russia to Finland, the Russian-Finnish electricity company said Wednesday.
Company board chairman Andras Szep told a news conference that construction of a 300-mln-euro ($372-mln) undersea high-voltage power line connecting the Leningrad Nuclear Power Station to the Finnish town of Kotka would begin at the end of this year.
United Power is majority owned by Russia's Baltenergo, a St. Petersburg-based subsidiary of state-owned nuclear power generating monopoly Rosenergoatom. The other major shareholders are Finnish energy and investment firms.
Under the 15-20 year contract, Basel AB, majority owned by Finnish industrial firms, will buy around 90% of the electricity supplied by the power line, Szep said.
The project, proposed by Baltenergo, envisages construction of two 150-km power-line legs, each of 1,000-MW capacity.

A 900MW thermal power plant will be also built in the Leningrad region at cost of 600 mln euros ($745 mln) as part of the project. A tender for construction will be announced later this year, Kuznetsov said, adding that his company would not seek investment from Russia's Investment Fund.Through the project to link Russia's power network with neighboring Finland, 8.7 billion KW/h of electricity will be supplied annually.

Another remarkable result from the Kyoto treaty.

Coal to liquid fuels part 2

As we suggested in our previous post the market pricing of Fischer-Tropsch coal to liquid fuels is now a very cost effective option for NZ .The indigenous production of coal to liquid transport fuels would reduce NZ imports to zero ,change the current account to positive,create 5000 jobs in the SI ,and provide energy security for NZ for 500 years.

The reaction, called Fischer-Tropsch, was invented by German scientists Franz Fischer and Hans Tropsch in 1926. It was used by the Germans, who had coal but little access to petroleum, to produce motor and aviation fuels during World War II.

Until now, only Sasol has used the technology, in South Africa, to convert gas derived from coal to produce diesel,which currently makes 150,000 barrels of oil per day from coal.

The gasification process allows the removals of exogenous particulates such as sulphur and reduces carbon monoxide emmissions.

The gasification process will also provide low cost alterntives to the Southland primary producers.

The usual suspects are already screeching ,but they fail to understand either the processes or the measurable comparative outcomes.Their pet project ethanol ,which they fail to mention the production of 1 gallon of ethanol requires 1,700 gallons of water and the process generates 12 gallons of waste. The coal-to-liquids technology would have none of these issues.

The eonomics of the FT conversion is around 40$ per barrel,in NZ we understand it will be around 43-45$US per barrel.

3 Large scale projects are in the feasability stage ,although interestingly enough smaller projects are more cost efficient and less energy intensive.

A further contention is the energy outputs would be less carbon intensive as opposed to bringing in oil and condensates from the middle east.

Update Radionz interview with Solid Energy

INFLUENCE OF SOLAR ACTIVITY ON STATE OF WHEAT
MARKET IN MEDIEVAL ENGLAND

There is a common miscomprehension of data supplied in scientific papers that measure temperature differentials of co2 levels over wide historical datasets.That they are always accurate and they provide measurement of temperature or climate on a yearly,or decadeal basis.

The temperature datasets of the icecores from vostok etc with measurement of radionucluides are estimates of large segemnts of time scales around 500 yaer intervals with assumptions of mean attributes or variables only.

Whilst we know reasonably accurately what the temperature and climatic history for the last 150 years is at various measurement stations,before that the data models are only best guess assumptions with wide areas of variation.

Data sets that can correlate climatic variation from recorded data are very rare.Jevons in 1875 published in the UK an interesting paper on the price of corn and its variablity due to the 11 year solar cycle and by the price differentials from the Corn exchange.

The cyclical nature of agriculture products is well documented due to adverse climatic conditions and the supply demand function of the market.

There is much dispute recently with the medieval warm period an its abscence from graphics and datasets of models from Mann etc and the IPCC.

In an interesting analsysis of historical datasets an Israeli team have found correaltion of causality of the solar variaiton and the wheat and grain production of medieval england.

The database of Prof. Rogers (1887), which includes wheat prices in
England in the Middle Ages, was used to search for a possible influence of solar
activity on the wheat market. We present a conceptual model of possible modes for
sensitivity of wheat prices to weather conditions, caused by solar cycle variations,
and compare expected price fluctuations with price variations recorded in medieval
England.

We analyze a direct link
between wheat prices and solar activity in the 17th Century, for which wheat prices
and solar activity data (derived from 10Be isotope) are available. We show that for
all 10 time moments of the solar activity minimums the observed prices were higher
than prices for the correspondent time moments of maximal solar activity (100%
sign correlation, on a significance level < 0.2%). We consider these results as a
direct evidence of the causal connection between wheat prices bursts and solar activity.

Another area of discussion also opens with this paper in the correlation of magnetic and gravitational forces on the soalr cycle and its relationship with the orbital process of Jupiter.

Breaking news German Chancellor

The German Chancellor Angela Merkel was assinated at the beach,the Germans are promising revenge.

How natural competition and attributes prevent sexual equality in employment

There is a lot of trumpet blowing in both the MSM and blogs over the high positions attained in public and in business leadership.Equally the uninformed say that the level of intergration and attainment of high positions in business is unfair to woman as the demographics suggest that there should be an equal proportion.

As companies face competition from globalisation,and the producers specialise more in their core business the competiton for areas of specialisation becomes global,and the natural data variances of competittion for available slots preclude the increase of employment opportunity.

As the president of Harvard found out observations of reality is not always an objective exercise.

"It does appear that on many, many different human attributes-height, weight, propensity for criminality, overall IQ, mathematical ability, scientific ability-there is relatively clear evidence that whatever the difference in means-which can be debated-there is a difference in the standard deviation, and variability of a male and a female population. And that is true with respect to attributes that are and are not plausibly, culturally determined."

The above statement costing Harvard 50m in subsidies to provide gender equality.

La Griffe du Lion in Prodigys journal has both quantified the data as pertaining to mathematical attributes with an interesting abstract and set of alogrithims.

The scientific literature abounds with studies of cognitive sex differences. From them we learn that cognitive gender gaps appear early in life, that girls display greater verbal ability, boys greater mathematical ability, that the mathematics gap increases gradually with age until the onset of puberty, when a rapid increase brings it to full flower by mid-adolescence. And that two features characterize the gap -- a higher male mean and a greater male variance.

As the competiton for slots increases we see less opportunity not more as say the competition increases at 100 competitors per slot, more than 70 percent of slot holders are male. At 1000 competitors per slot, men fill 80 percent of the slots. At 1 million we expect that the slots will be filled by men at 91 percent.

Coal the new black is to return as major transport fuel.

Professor Alan Goldman and his Rutgers team in collaboration with researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have developed a way to convert carbon sources, such as coal to diesel fuel.

This important advance could significantly cut America's dependence on foreign oil – what President Bush called "an addiction" in his 2006 State of the Union address. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, our 286 billion tons of coal in the ground translate into energy reserves 40 times those of oil.

Goldman explained that the breakthrough technology employs a pair of catalytic chemical reactions that operate in tandem, one of which captured the 2005 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. This dynamic chemical duo revamps the Fischer-Tropsch (FT) process for generating synthetic petroleum substitutes, invented in 1920 but never developed to the point of becoming commercially viable for coal conversion.

The researchers combined this process with the action of a second catalyst, one which promotes olefin metathesis, for which the 2005 Nobel Prize was awarded. Metathesis means "to change places" and, here, the double-bonding atom groups change places with one another. Through this reaction, the second catalyst rearranges the molecular weight distribution of the olefins. The first catalyst then replaces the hydrogen atoms onto the new rearranged olefins; this returns the olefins back to their original hydrocarbon form, but now with a new, more desirable weight distribution.

The FT process which is economic at around 43us per barrel oil equivalent gives NZ a transport self suffienciency for around 500 years.

Russia prepares lunar program to recover energy resources

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."AC Clarke third law.

As I suggested in prescient prescriptions for innovation,sometimes innovation is indistinguishable from magic,significant change is unlikely to come about through incremental improvements to existing technology. Just as Edison's incandescent light bulb was not born from improving the candle, future technologies are likely to bear little resemblance to today's tried-and-true methods.Indeed a quantum leap is what sends the world forward in growth and technological progress.The quantum leap in IT as evidenced from the Apollo project was one forward path.

The ascendency of the presidency of the G8 by Russia this year set out a number of goals and prescriptions for the future,the two majors being energy and scientific innovation both being intrinsicialy linked.Over the last 6 months various signals on innovation in both energy and science have been released by the Russian government including major investments in both sectors.

Recently we have seen the creation of special scientific zones in the Russian Federation with tax and investment incentives and both government and business funding and investment from the Russian stabalization fund.

One last week was the announcement from President Putin on investment on nanotechnology and the input of 500mUS for development of various innovative products.Today in a parallel anouncement Norilisk Nickels announced the purchase of US company plug power through its vehicle Smart Hydrogen for a price of 241mUS.

Russia has also announced the expansion of its space program with a 10b us investment ,with the construction of the Klipper shuttle and lunar operations.

Russia is preparing to launch an ambitious lunar project which could provide access to alternative energy resources, a company involved in the project said Tuesday.

"The lunar project is aimed at recovering resources such as helium-3," said Nikolai Sevastyanov, the president and chief designer of leading Russian spacecraft-maker Energia. This isotope could be used to produce fuel when the earth's own energy resources become depleted.
The program could also be used to transfer environmentally hazardous, energy-consuming production facilities to the moon, the official said.
It will take an estimated $2 billion to implement the first leg of the project and another $40 billion to implement the second, Sevastyanov said.
The initial phase, to be implemented in 2010-2015, will involve Soyuz spaceships, Soyuz-FG and Proton launch vehicles, and DM-type boosters.
"The Russian segment of the International Space Station could be used as an assembly site for an inter-orbital space complex bound for the moon," he said.
The next stage, set for 2015-2020, will focus on the construction of a transportation system for ferrying people and supplies to and from the moon.
"It will involve manned spacecraft based on [Russia's next-generation reusable shuttle] Clipper and inter-orbital trawlers propelled by liquid-fuel jet engines. Trawlers using electric propulsion will be employed to transport heavy payloads," said Sevastyanov.

Helium 3 is to be used in energy production in fusion reactors being developed by ITER.One shuttle load of enriched helium3 would supply North America for 1 year.

Why the Moon? In fact, it will play an important role in the future global energy system, which will be based on controlled thermo-nuclear fusion. And this is easier to attain using helium-3 isotopes, which are difficult to obtain on Earth, but abound on the Moon.
Delivering helium-3 from the Moon to the Earth will obviously be a formidable technical task. This objective cannot be accomplished in a year or two, which means manned spacecraft will be indispensable. Interestingly, this task is even more important and less expensive than an expedition to Mars.
The first step is to build a large orbital spaceport to launch and receive reusable lunar craft, which will be assembled and repaired in near-Earth space. It will therefore be possible to deliver mining equipment to the Moon to extract helium-3 isotopes.

Russias goals and objectives for energy security are not for the short term but for the future.

Astronomers find alcohol cloud 288 billion miles wide

Astronomers based at Jodrell Bank Observatory have discovered a giant bridge of methyl alcohol, spanning approximately 288 billion miles, wrapped around a stellar nursery. The gas cloud could help our understanding of how the most massive stars in our galaxy are formed.

The new observations were taken with the UK's MERLIN radio telescope which have recently been upgraded. The team studied an area called W3(OH), a region in our galaxy where stars are being formed by the gravitational collapse of a cloud of gas and dust. The observations have revealed giant filaments of gas that are emitting as 'masers' (molecules in the gas are amplifying and emitting beams of microwave radiation.

Our discovery is very interesting because it challenges some long-accepted views held in astronomical maser research. Until we found these filaments, we thought of masers as point-like objects or very small bright hotspots surrounded by halos of fainter emission,” said Dr Lisa Harvey-Smith, who is the Principal Investigator for the study and is presenting results at the Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting on 4th April.

Predicting earthquakes from space by measurement of the Ionosphere

A Russian strategic nuclear-powered submarine is poised to launch an innovative, compact, 80-kg spacecraft from the Barents Sea in the second quarter of this year.
The Compass 2 satellite is expected to help make the first step in the practical forecasting of earthquakes from space.
The move comes as a result of extensive research into specific phenomena in the Earth's magnetosphere and ionosphere, often observed prior to earthquakes, by the Institute of Terrestrial Magnetism, Ionosphere and Radio Waves Propagation (IZMIRAN) of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

The first observations of ionosphere anomalies manifested days before major earthquakes date back to the 1960s. At first, treated no more seriously than UFOs, palm reading and astrology, the findings elbowed their way into the scientific domain in 1979 as the institute launched its Interkosmos 19 satellite. A recording analyzed after one major earthquake showed a prolonged area (narrow in latitude and very broad in longitude) of abnormal, low-frequency noise centered exactly above the earthquake's epicenter several hours before the first shock was felt. Officially registered as a scientific discovery, the phenomenon was later confirmed by findings from other satellites.

This area of research received a powerful push in December 1988 in the wake of a devastating earthquake in Armenia. A pool of Soviet scientific institutions developed a forecasting system that was to be deployed first onboard the Mir orbiter and then across the orbit within a network of unmanned spacecraft. After the Mir, Salyut 6, and Salyut 7 completed the early stages of the plan, the program was effectively buried with the demise of the Soviet Union, but went forward at the end of the turbulent 1990s.

While other precursors of major earthquakes - the concentration of radon, an inert gas, near the epicenter; the concentration of electrons in the ionosphere above the epicenter; and the content of crust-emitted metal-rich aerosols in the air, leading to an abnormally strong electric field there - had been piling up for a long time, they were always obtained as by-products of other research programs. Sufficient statistical data array required a separate specialized satellite. The first international Complex Orbital Magneto-Plasma Autonomous Small Satellite, or Compass, was orbited in December 2001 as a by-load together with the Meteor 3M, a Russian weather satellite, to provide insight into possible links between Earth's crust and magnetosphere behavior. This first field test of an earthquake forecast assessment system largely failed because, while early findings were very promising, the equipment developed jointly by Russia, Hungary, Greece, Ukraine and Poland soon ceased to operate.

Certain progress was made, however, as the data of Compass's launch mate, Meteor 3M, were analyzed by special methods to obtain earthquake precursors. On aggregate, 44 of 47 events registered between October 2002 and May 2003 agreed with data retrieved from land-based seismic records. The generally positive result has led to the upcoming Compass 2 launch and is likely to lead to a follow-up Compass 3 effort. The latter satellite is to be launched in the fourth quarter of 2006 to test more modern and efficient monitoring systems.

On the ground, the Vulkan will include a network of geophysical laboratories, a downlink station and an analysis center. The ground facilities lack the scope and access to recordable events, which explains the need for an orbital component to yield a global survey of seismic activity with accurately timed warnings (one to five days between a precursor and a possible earthquake). All in all, two groups of small satellites are to be deployed at 400-500- and 900-1,000-km solar synchronous orbits.

Researchers from the Institute of the Terrestrial Magnetism, Ionosphere and Radiowave Propagation RAS have observed a chain of interconnected precursors of catastrophic earthquakes in the magnetosphere, geomagnetic field and the Earth’s ionosphere.

They used data from ionosphere observations of the world’s earth-based network of ionosphere stations, which excludes seasonal and daily variations in the state of the ionosphere. It transpired that 10-15 hours prior to an earthquake there are irregularities that arise in the ionosphere – spikes of electronic density (up to 50% of the norm) of 1 to 3 kilometres in length that move horizontally at a rate comparable to the speed of sound. 15-17 hours prior to the underground tremor an electronic spike appears in the magnetosphere.Physicists have proposed a mechanism over which such phenomena take place. Under the “preparation” of a serious earthquake in the Earth’s crust, micro-cracks appear in the region of the future rupture and here an enormous volume of energy is discharged into the atmosphere that exceeds the energy of even a nuclear explosion. A short time before the main tremor radon and other gases, containing elements of radioactive decay, are discharged into the atmosphere from the tectonic depths. The particles start to move in space, while the electromagnetic radiation promotes the penetration of charged particles into the ionosphere. This is where the observed electronic spikes come from.

Global cooling Niwa confirms New Zealand trend

As we suggested here on the 3 March 2006 this year is to be one of the coldest for 15 years.Due to a number of cosmic and solar factors namely expected increase of cosmic radiation we can expect a colder winter and colder climatic conditions for 2006.The movement from neutral to La Nina conditions has already occurred as can be observed from the colder winter in eastern europe and north east asia.The lower then average summer temperatures also confirm this with colder water temperatures and one of the coldest Antarctic summers on record.

In a press release, the Geneva-based agency wmo http://www.wmo.ch/index-en.html said tempearatures in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific had been between 0.5 and 1.0 C (0.9 and 1.8 F) below normal since the start of the 2006. "Combined with broader tropical Pacific ocean and atmosphere conditions, this is consistent with the early stages of a basin-wide La Nina event," it said.

Niwa are in climate denial however refusing to acknowledge the consensus of the worlds meterological organisation of a La Nina event.

The publication of the march figures confirm the colder oscillation as predicted last October,

March was cold with mean temperatures being the lowest since 1993. The national average temperature of 14.2 ¢XC (almost 3.0 ¢XC lower than in February) was 1.5 ¢XC below the 1971-2000 normal. These were well below average in many regions, particularly in the South Island,

Fitzsimmons has the Audacity to issue a statement suggesting we start saving power for a rainy day when it is the greens that have circumvented the construction of 1500mw of low cost renewable energy.

Cyclical oscillations in biodiversity an explanation ?

The grand precession of the earth and the solar system around the spiral of the milky way ,has been thought to have cause changes to the earth and the solar system as we pass through cosmic clouds in a 64 million journey through the disc of the galaxy and back.
A substantial amount of theory exists on this as a prime vector in the cause of global cooling.

This weeks new scientist has another paper on this subject and the possibilty of this as a vehicle for global extinction.

The solar system's up-and-down motion across our galaxy's disc periodically exposes it to higher doses of dangerous cosmic rays, new calculations suggest. The effect could explain a mysterious dip in the Earth's biodiversity every 62 million years.
The solar system moves through the Milky Way rather like a child on a merry-go-round. It completes a circuit of the galaxy once every 100 million years or so but as it goes it bobs up and down through the dense galactic disc.

Still other researchers have pointed out that the clouds could compress the solar wind, which shields the solar system from energetic cosmic rays from the galaxy. These cosmic rays - charged particles accelerated to high energies by supernova explosions - could then leak into the Earth's atmosphere. There they could spur the formation of clouds - cooling the planet - and destroy the ozone layer, killing off species by allowing harmful ultraviolet light to reach the Earth's surface.

If the flux of cosmic rays drops, fewer clouds will form and the planet will warm up. No one yet understands the mechanism, which was first described in the late 1990s. But what makes it controversial is that climate models used to predict the consequences of rising levels of greenhouse gases do not allow for the effect, and may be inaccurate.