Auroras affect sat-nav systems due to unknown mechanism 

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Alaskan aurora [image credit: NASA]

When they say ‘an as yet unknown driver is causing the problem’ they probably don’t mean a motorist

The leading hypothesis used to explain why the aurora borealis and its southern hemisphere counterpart, the aurora australis, play havoc with global positioning systems has been knocked into a cocked hat, reports Sott.net.

The spectacular auroras are produced when gas particles in the earth’s atmosphere collide with charged particles emitted by the sun. The resulting plasma turbulence has long been assumed to be the reason that the phenomena interfere with Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS).

Now, research led by Biagio Forte of the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering at the University of Bath in the UK has discovered that the predicted turbulence doesn’t actually exist, meaning that an as yet unknown driver is causing the problem.

To conduct the research Forte’s team collaborated with the European Incoherent Scatter Scientific Association (EISCAT), setting up in northern Norway to observe and analyse the aurora borealis using radar and a GNSS receiver.

As the radar team developed visual imagery of the phenomenon, the GNSS team looked at how it interacted with global positioning systems. The results ruled out plasma turbulence. Instead, the team write in the Journal of Geophysical Research Space Physics, the interference is caused by a “new instability mechanism”, as yet unknown.

Although the Bath researchers work generated far more questions than answers, the study is important because it shifts focus in what is rapidly becoming a critically important field. Global positioning data is already widely used in personal mobile phones, car navigation systems and aircraft, but the imminent roll-out of autonomous vehicles, as well as developments in remote-warfare, mean it will soon be ubiquitous.

“The potential impact of inaccurate GNSS signals could be severe,” said Forte. “Whilst outages in mobile phones may not be life threatening, unreliability in satellite navigations systems in autonomous vehicles or drones delivering payloads could result in serious harm to both humans and the environment.”

Source: Auroras affect sat-nav systems due to unknown mechanism — Science & Technology — Sott.net

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March 15, 2017 at 04:39AM

Trump Dropping Climate Change Impact From Government Reviews

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President Trump plans to drop climate change as a factor in making government decisions, Bloomberg reported Tuesday.

The move, which would reportedly cover environmental reviews of appliance standards, industry regulations and pipeline projects, would largely reverse how the Obama administration addressed climate change.

Former President Obama required government agencies to submit formal environmental reviews that factored the possible economic harm and impact projects would have from climate change.

Trump’s plan would also reconsider the metric the Obama administration used to measure projects’ expected economic costs and damage to the climate, called the “social cost of carbon,” Bloomberg reports. Obama used the metric to justify a set of environmental regulations.

Should Trump sign the order reversing this Obama-era approach, some changes could be implemented immediately while some could take years.

Bloomberg also reports the order would wipe out industry restrictions on methane emissions, a greenhouse gas.

Trump during the presidential race repeatedly promised to bring back coal jobs, and Bloomberg reports that this order would like lead to policy changes that make coal extraction easier.

American Energy Alliance President Tom Pyle praised the possibility that the Obama regulations would be reversed.

“President Obama created such a labyrinth of rules and orders and regulations to cement his agenda across practically every agency,” Pyle told Bloomberg.

Pyle, the leader of a fossil fuel-oriented advocacy group, said Obama’s policies restricted companies from fully utilizing non-renewable energy sources.

“It was designed to put into the mission of the agencies climate change first and make the rest of their mission second. This was a constraint deliberately set up by the previous administration to make it difficult to utilize coal, oil and natural gas,” Pyle said.

Environmentalists, on the other hand, argue that Trump’s approach will upend the climate change commitments the U.S. made abroad and hurt the country’s environment.

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March 15, 2017 at 04:25AM

Why Are Climate-Change Models So Flawed? Because Climate Science Is So Incomplete

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Environmental Protection Agency administrator Scott Pruitt said on CNBC’s Squawk Box that he does not believe that carbon dioxide is a primary contributor to global warming.

Environmental Protection Agency administrator Scott Pruitt said on CNBC’s Squawk Box that he does not believe that carbon dioxide is a primary contributor to global warming.

 ‘DO YOU believe,” CNBC’s Joe Kernen asked Scott Pruitt, the Environmental Protection Agency’s new director, in an interview last Thursday, “that it’s been proven that CO2 is the primary control knob for climate?”

Replied Pruitt: “No. I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do, and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact. So no — I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see. But we don’t know that yet. We need to continue the debate and continue the review and the analysis.”

It was an accurate and judicious answer, so naturally it sent climate alarmists into paroxysms of condemnation. The Washington Post slammed Pruitt as a “denier” driven by “unreason.” Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii called Pruitt’s views “extreme” and “irresponsible” — proof of his unfitness to head the EPA. Gina McCarthy, who ran the agency under President Obama, bewailed the danger global warming poses “to all of us who call Earth home,” and said she couldn’t “imagine what additional information [Pruitt] might want from scientists” in order to understand that.

Yet for all the hyperventilating, Pruitt’s answer to the question he was asked — whether carbon dioxide is the climate’s “primary control knob” — was entirely sound. “We don’t know that yet,” he said. We don’t. CO2 is certainly a heat-trapping greenhouse gas, but hardly the primary one: Water vapor accounts for about 95 percent of greenhouse gases. By contrast, carbon dioxide is only a trace component in the atmosphere: about 400 ppm (parts per million), or 0.04 percent.

Moreover, its warming impact decreases sharply after the first 20 or 30 ppm. Adding more CO2 molecules to the atmosphere is like painting over a red wall with white paint — the first coat does most of the work of concealing the red. A second coat of paint has much less of an effect, while adding a third or fourth coat has almost no impact at all.

There is a popular theory that atmospheric CO2 amplifies the creation of water vapor, thereby increasing warming through a “positive feedback loop.” But that theory so far is mostly speculative; climate projections using models based on it have consistently failed, nearly always predicting far more warming than has occurred. It should go without saying that if scientists cannot yet make accurate predictions about future climate change, then their understanding of climate science remains highly incomplete.

Earth’s climate system is unfathomably complex. It is affected by innumerable interacting variables, atmospheric CO2 levels being just one. The more variables there are in any system or train of events, the lower the probability of all of them coming to pass. Your odds of correctly guessing the outcome of a flipped coin are 1 in 2, but your odds of guessing correctly twice in a row are only 1 in 4 — i.e., ½ x ½ Extending your winning streak to a third guess is even less probable: just 1 in 8.

Apply that approach to climate change, and it becomes clear why the best response to the alarmists’ frantic predictions is a healthy skepticism.

The list of variables that shape climate includes cloud formation, topography, altitude, proximity to the equator, plate tectonics, sunspot cycles, volcanic activity, expansion or contraction of sea ice, conversion of land to agriculture, deforestation, reforestation, direction of winds, soil quality, El Niño and La Niña ocean cycles, prevalence of aerosols (airborne soot, dust, and salt) — and, of course, atmospheric greenhouse gases, both natural and manmade. A comprehensive list would run to hundreds, if not thousands, of elements, none of which scientists would claim to understand with absolute precision.

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March 15, 2017 at 04:25AM

Infamous Milgram experiments repeated: Only a few will stand up against authority

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The chilling Milgram experiments have been replicated, and yet again, 9 out of 10 are willing to inflict electric shocks and pain on another person. In these infamous experiments the power of a white lab coat was enough to get more than half the participants (26 out of 40) to deliver a fatal shock (the participants didn’t realize the shock was faked, and the victim an actor).

This willingness to obey authority is both a great strength of humanity when authority is worthy and yet leads to the darkest abyss when it is not.

By nature, we are largely empathetic creatures: most people really don’t want to cause pain, they get quite upset themselves in the process. Yet many people will override this inbuilt ethical wiring if a person in a position of authority insist they do. It’s time we talked about ways to train people to resist. There is hope as outlined below in a different study from last year.

Conducting the Milgram experiment in Poland, psychologists show people still obey

Press Release: The title is direct, “Would you deliver an electric shock in 2015?” and the answer, according to the results of this replication study, is […]

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March 15, 2017 at 04:16AM