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April 1, 2017 at 05:45AM
Month: April 2017
German Springs Arriving Later As Wikipedia Caught Whitewashing, Disinforming!
via NoTricksZone
http://notrickszone.com
Wikipedia and the Hamburg Forsythia Patch
by Dr. Sebastian Lüning and Josef Kowatsch
(Translated and rewritten by P Gosselin)
At the Hamburg Binnenalster near the Lombard Bridge, one finds a particular patch of forsythia, which blossoms every year when spring arrives at the north German port city. And just days ago on March 24, 2017, the famous patch blossomed again as it does every year.
So what’s the big deal about a spring flower patch blossoming in the spring?
It turns out that this particular patch is in fact one of great scientific interest as it has been scientifically observed since 1945. The dates at which the flowers blossom have been carefully recorded each year.
In the age of “rapid, unprecedented global warming”, you’d think that the blossoms would be appearing earlier and earlier as the global climate heats up like NASA insists it is. So it is all the more surprising that the data show that the opposite is in fact happening: the trend over the past 30 years is that this particular patch is blossoming later and later, indicating harsher and harsher winters.
Despite this year’s seemingly early spring in Europe, the most recent 2017 data point of the Hamburg Lombard Bridge forsythia blossoms in fact fits right with the overall 30 year trend.
Figure 1: The blossoming date of the Hamburg Lombard Bridge forsythia patch over the past 30 years with linear trend. The Y-axis is the number of days from the start of the year (January 1st). Spring at the site is arriving 3 weeks later!
The reason for the increasingly delayed spring blossoms likely has much to do with the trend of colder months of February over the past 30 years:
Figure 2: February mean temperatures in GERMANY over the past 30 years. Data from the German DWD National Weather Service. Chart by Josef Kowatsch.
Wikipedia censors, cherrypicks and disinforms
Lüning and Kowatsch add that because of the Lombard Bridge forsythia patch’s significance, it even has its own Wikipedia page.
The two authors at the Die kalte Sonne site note that Wikipedia makes no mention whatsoever of the later blossoms trend. In fact one skeptic who wishes to remain anonymous actually logged in the Wikipedia site and suggested the following important addition on the now famous Hamburg forsythia blossoms:
Over the past 50 years there’s been a detectable trend of earlier blossoming. However since 1988 the blossoming date of the Hamburg forsythia has been again coming later.[3]“
This is a perfectly legitimate scientific statement that notes fairly both a trend of earlier blossoms on one hand, and on the other hand the current trend of the past 30 years, where the blossoms have been appearing later. The official long-term dataset since 1945 can be viewed at this DWD website (second chart, yellow curve).
So did the Wikipedia editors allow the added information? Lüning and Kowatsch write:
It did not even take a half hour, before the additional information was taken down. The reason according to page editor “DeWikiMan”: The trend of later blossoming over the past 30 years is not sufficiently statistically established.”
Lüning and Kowatch refer readers to Figure 1 above, and of course characterize DeWikiMan’s reasoning as somewhat absurd, before going on to show that the Wikipedia editor is in fact an activist and a “classic gatekeeper”: Wikipedia profile here. They depict DeWikiMan as a cherry-picker and purveyor of disinformation, and suggest that Wikipedia ought to take a much closer look at this editor.
Lüning and Kowatsch summarize:
It is a pity that the original excellent concept of a voluntarily written online encyclopedia has been hijacked by political activists and rendered useless in a number of sensitive subjects areas”
via NoTricksZone http://notrickszone.com
April 1, 2017 at 05:44AM
China And Pakistan Join Forces For World’s Biggest Brown Coal Programme
via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)
http://www.thegwpf.com
In the dusty scrub of the Thar desert, Pakistan has begun to dig up one of the world’s largest deposits of low-grade, brown, dirty coal to fuel new power stations that could revolutionize the country’s economy.
China-Pak Economic Corridor will be constructed from 2014 to 2030.
The project is one of the most expensive among an array of ambitious energy developments that China is helping the country to build as part of a $55 billion economic partnership.
A $3.5 billion joint venture between the neighbors will extract coal to generate 1.3 gigawatts of electricity that will be sent across the country on a new $3 billion transmission network.
“When I came it was a mess. There was nothing here,” said Dileep Kumar, one of the first mining engineers at lead contractor Sindh Engro Coal Mining Co., standing atop the mile-wide hole in the earth, busy with yellow trucks and diggers on the floor below. “Now look at it. This wasn’t possible without the Chinese.”bs
On paper, Pakistan could be one of Asia’s top economies, with almost 200 million people spread over an area twice the size of California, from the ice-bound peaks of the Karakorum to the warm, dry shores of the Arabian Sea.
But it remains hobbled by corruption, political turmoil, terrorism and poverty, all underpinned by a crippling shortage of energy.
The country has natural gas reserves, four nuclear-power stations and the world’s largest dam. Some 700 kilometers north of the Thar mine another Chinese company is helping build a solar farm eight times the size of New York’s Central Park.
Yet power outages remain a way of life with blackouts of 12 hours or more even in Karachi and Islamabad. By one estimate, the shortage of electricity is wiping 2 percentage points off economic growth every year.
Thirst for energy is taking Pakistan in the opposite direction of Western countries that are trying to reduce coal power, or use cleaner-burning fuel and technologies.
Germany, which still relies on coal-fired stations for two fifths of its electricity, has promised to switch half of them off by 2030.
Pakistan, by contrast, relies on coal for just 0.1 percent of its power, according to the Pakistan Business Council. The Thar projects and others could see that jump to 24 percent by 2020, according to Tahir Abbas, analyst at Karachi-based brokerage Arif Habib Ltd.
Pakistan’s coal reserves would give the nation a cheap domestic alternative to expensive oil and gas imports.
The nation spends about $8 billion a year on imported petroleum and is one of the region’s biggest buyers of liquefied natural gas.
In an effort to curb the import bill and meet demand for power, Pakistan plans to dig up some of the world’s biggest known deposits of lignite, a lower-grade brown coal. But first, it must clear 160 meters of sand to get to the coal.
Full story
via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF) http://www.thegwpf.com
April 1, 2017 at 05:28AM
The electric sands of Titan
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View from Titan [artist’s impression]
‘The grains that cover Saturn’s [largest] moon act like clingy packing peanuts.’ An obvious question might be: where is Titan’s electrical charge coming from?
Experiments led by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology suggest the particles that cover the surface of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, are “electrically charged.”
When the wind blows hard enough (approximately 15 mph), Titan’s non-silicate granules get kicked up and start to hop in a motion referred to as saltation. As they collide, they become frictionally charged, like a balloon rubbing against your hair, and clump together in a way not observed for sand dune grains on Earth — they become resistant to further motion.
They maintain that charge for days or months at a time and attach to other hydrocarbon substances, much like packing peanuts used in shipping boxes here on Earth. The findings have just been published in the journal Nature Geoscience.
“If you grabbed piles of grains and built a sand castle on Titan, it would perhaps stay together for weeks due to their electrostatic properties,” said Josef Dufek, the Georgia Tech professor who co-led the study. “Any spacecraft that lands in regions of granular material on Titan is going to have a tough time staying clean. Think of putting a cat in a box of packing peanuts.”
The electrification findings may help explain an odd phenomenon. Prevailing winds on Titan blow from east to west across the moon’s surface, but sandy dunes nearly 300 feet tall seem to form in the opposite direction.
“These electrostatic forces increase frictional thresholds,” said Josh Méndez Harper, a Georgia Tech geophysics and electrical engineering doctoral student who is the paper’s lead author. “This makes the grains so sticky and cohesive that only heavy winds can move them. The prevailing winds aren’t strong enough to shape the dunes.”
To test particle flow under Titan-like conditions, the researchers built a small experiment in a modified pressure vessel in their Georgia Tech lab. They inserted grains of naphthalene and biphenyl — two toxic, carbon and hydrogen bearing compounds believed to exist on Titan’s surface — into a small cylinder. Then they rotated the tube for 20 minutes in a dry, pure nitrogen environment (Titan’s atmosphere is composed of 98 percent nitrogen).
Afterwards, they measured the electric properties of each grain as it tumbled out of the tube. “All of the particles charged well, and about 2 to 5 percent didn’t come out of the tumbler,” said Méndez Harper. “They clung to the inside and stuck together. When we did the same experiment with sand and volcanic ash using Earth-like conditions, all of it came out. Nothing stuck.”
Earth sand does pick up electrical charge when it’s moved, but the charges are smaller and dissipate quickly. That’s one reason why you need water to keep sand together when building a sand castle. Not so with Titan. “These non-silicate, granular materials can hold their electrostatic charges for days, weeks or months at a time under low-gravity conditions,” said George McDonald, a graduate student in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences who also co-authored the paper.
Visually, Titan is the object in the solar system most like Earth. Data gathered from multiple flybys by Cassini since 2005 have revealed large liquid lakes at the poles, as well as mountains, rivers and potentially volcanoes. However, instead of water-filled oceans and seas, they’re composed of methane and ethane and are replenished by precipitation from hydrocarbon-filled clouds.
Titan’s surface pressure is a bit higher than our planet — standing on the moon would feel similar to standing 15 feet underwater here on Earth.
“Titan’s extreme physical environment requires scientists to think differently about what we’ve learned of Earth’s granular dynamics,” said Dufek. “Landforms are influenced by forces that aren’t intuitive to us because those forces aren’t so important on Earth. Titan is a strange, electrostatically sticky world.”
Researchers from the Jet Propulsion Lab, University of Tennessee-Knoxville and Cornell University also co-authored the paper, which is titled “Electrification of Sand on Titan and its Influence on Sediment Transport.”
Source: The Electric Sands of Titan | Georgia Tech
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April 1, 2017 at 05:21AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 