Liberals want to use racketeering laws to prosecute so-called climate-change skeptics. But the real conspiracy may be between plaintiff lawyers and Democratic politicians who have ganged up to shake down oil companies.

San Francisco, Oakland, New York and Seattle have sued five global oil giants—BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips , ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell —for billions in future damages from climate change. Brass-knuckled plaintiff firm Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro has been shopping around the lawsuit to other cities desperate for cash.

via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)

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June 9, 2018 at 03:34AM

From KING ABDULLAH UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY (KAUST) and the “don’t worry, nature always finds a way” department

Coral tricks for adapting to ocean acidification

A process that changes the regulation of genes could help corals acclimatize to the impacts of global warming.

Cells commonly control gene expression by adding a methyl group to part of the DNA, changing how the information on the DNA is read without changing its genetic code. Researchers at KAUST wanted to investigate whether DNA methylation could play a role in helping corals adapt to climate change.

They placed colonies of the smooth cauliflower coral, Stylophora pistillata, in seawater aquariums with varying acidity levels for two years. Ocean acidification is a consequence of climate change and hinders the ability of corals to produce the calcium carbonate skeleton they need to maintain their structures. The researchers hypothesized that DNA methylation might allow corals to mitigate these effects by changing the way they grow.

Colonies of the smooth cauliflower coral, Stylophora pistillata, were placed in seawater aquariums with varying acidity levels for two years. CREDIT © 2018 Eric Tambutté

After two years, the team sequenced the genomes of the corals and determined changes in methylation patterns.

“We noticed that corals grown under more acidic conditions had higher levels of DNA methylation,” says geneticist Yi Jin Liew. “Genes with increased methylation were related to cell growth and stress response, but not to calcification as we initially proposed,” he says.

In line with this finding, the team discovered that cell and polyp sizes in the corals also increased with rising acidity. “The coral polyps sit in little cavities called calyxes in which they can retreat for protection,” explains molecular biologist Manuel Aranda. Larger polyps have larger calyxes. “If the calyx is bigger, the coral needs to produce less skeleton to grow at the same pace. I call this the ‘Swiss cheese hypothesis,’ where the coral makes bigger holes so it needs to make less cheese, which allows it to grow at the same speed even though skeletal production is impaired.” This trait would be advantageous in an environment where competition for space and light is an important selective pressure.

The findings indicate that DNA methylation can be used as a marker of coral stress. This epigenetic mechanism might also be harnessed to grow corals under future ocean conditions to prime them for increased temperatures before placing them on reefs, says Aranda. This process is known as environmental hardening.

“We hope our contribution will change the current perception among reef biologists that epigenetics do not contribute much to coral resilience,” says Liew.

The team next plans to investigate whether these epigenetic changes can be passed down to future generations. “The idea is fairly revolutionary,” says Liew.

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The paper: http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/6/eaar8028

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June 9, 2018 at 03:31AM

Solar scientist and part-time NSA operative Leif Svalgaard has produced a prediction for solar cycle 25, four years after Rick Salvador published his 86 year prediction in the swiftly censored “Pattern Recognition in Physics”.

It appears at the end of a 30 page pdf document he has published on his website. This is an interesting document, with a wealth of gayly coloured butterfly diagrams, polar field reconstructions and more. Leif self deprecatingly follows his Prediction title with (At last) not only because it comes at the end of 30 pages of preamble, but because he’s acutely aware of his method’s limitations.

The reason this prediction has arrived so late in SC24 is that the method it relies on can’t be applied until shortly before the minimum of the preceding cycle, and it only gives the ability to estimate the peak amplitude of the approaching cycle. It has nothing to say about the cycle length, or what comes after. It predicts that Solar cycle 25 will be higher than SC24 but lower than SC20.

This is in sharp contrast to our orbital resonance theory, developed here at the talkshop, and distilled into a predictive model by Rick Salvador. In his 2013 PRP paper ‘A mathematical model of the sunspot cycle for the past 1000 years’, he gives a 100 year outlook prediction, which he recently re-scaled to match the new Clette et al numbering system when we discussed its progress recently.

The model is performing well, and has alreading closely predicted the average amplitude and descent to minimum of SC24, currently occurring, with 90+ spotless days in the first half of 2018. If the late start to SC24 is repeated, we might estimate that SC25 will get under way in a couple of years. It may run through to the early 2030s, subsuming the five year blip the model predicts between 2028 and 2037. Solar cycle 25 may be long and low.

If the longer term outlook predicted by Rick’s model comes to pass, we are in for a prolonged solar ‘grand minimum’, which is already starting to have effects on Earth’s weather, with late and large hailstones falling across northern Europe and June snow in Scandinavia.

via Tallbloke’s Talkshop

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June 9, 2018 at 03:24AM

  STT promotes nuclear power because it works: safe, affordable and reliable it’s the perfect foil for those obsessed about carbon dioxide gas – because it doesn’t generate any, while generating power on demand. One of the feeble ‘arguments’ against it, is that nuclear power plants are of such vast scale that they take longer … Continue reading "Small Modular Reactors: Pint-Sized Performers Add to Long-Term Nuclear Solution"

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June 9, 2018 at 02:30AM