A rule issued by the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) that would charge commercial herring vessels up to $700 a day to monitor catches has triggered a lawsuit that poses a direct threat to agencies’ discretionary power.
The post Small fish could mean big trouble for Feds appeared first on CFACT.
via CFACT
May 17, 2023 at 04:21AM
Credit: Robert A. Rohde @ Wikipedia
Re. the well-known 100,000 year problem, the researchers propose new climate-related evidence for ‘the shift from the 40,000-year cycles to the 100,000-year cycles we experience today’.
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Approximately 700,000 years ago, a “warm ice age” permanently changed the climate cycles on Earth, says Phys.org.
Contemporaneous with this exceptionally warm and moist period, the polar glaciers greatly expanded.
A European research team including Earth scientists from Heidelberg University used recently acquired geological data in combination with computer simulations to identify this seemingly paradoxical connection.
According to the researchers, this profound change in the Earth’s climate was responsible for the change in the climate cycles, thus representing a critical step in the later climate evolution of our planet. Their study is published in the journal Nature Communications.
Geological ice ages—called glacial periods—are characterized by the development of large ice sheets in the Northern Hemisphere. In the past 700,000 years, phases shifted between distinct glacial and warm periods about every 100,000 years.
Before then, however, the Earth’s climate was governed by 40,000-year cycles with shorter and weaker glacial periods. The change in the climate cycles occurred in the Middle Pleistocene Transition period, which began approximately 1.2 million years ago and ended about 670,000 years ago.
“The mechanisms responsible for this critical change in the global climate rhythm remain largely unknown. They cannot be attributed to variations in the orbital parameters governing the Earth’s climate,” explains Associate Professor Dr. André Bahr of the Institute of Earth Sciences at Heidelberg University. “But the recently identified ‘warm ice age,’ which caused the accumulation of excess continental ice, did play a critical role.”
For their investigations, the researchers used new climate records from a drill core off Portugal and loess records from the Chinese Plateau. The data was then fed into computer simulations. The models show a long-term warming and wetting trend in both subtropical regions for the past 800,000 to 670,000 years.
Contemporaneous with this last ice age in the Middle Pleistocene Transition period, the sea surface temperatures in the North Atlantic and tropical North Pacific were warmer than in the preceding interglacial, the phase between the two ice ages.
This led to higher moisture production and rainfall in Southwest Europe, the expansion of Mediterranean forests, and an enhanced summer monsoon in East Asia. The moisture also reached the polar regions where it contributed to the expansion of the Northern Eurasian ice sheets.
“They persisted for some time and heralded in the phase of sustained and far-reaching ice-age glaciation that lasted until the late Pleistocene. Such expansion of the continental glaciers was necessary to trigger the shift from the 40,000-year cycles to the 100,000-year cycles we experience today, which was critical for the Earth’s later climate evolution,” states André Bahr.
Source here.
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Study: Moist and warm conditions in Eurasia during the last glacial of the Middle Pleistocene Transition (2023)
via Tallbloke’s Talkshop
May 17, 2023 at 03:17AM
By Paul Homewood
Some of the UK’s top scientists are struggling to deal with what they describe as a huge rise in abuse from climate crisis deniers on Twitter since the social media platform was taken over by Elon Musk last year.
Since then, key figures who ensured “trusted” content was prioritised have been sacked, according to one scientist, and Twitter’s sustainability arm has vanished. At the same time several users with millions of followers who propagate false statements about the climate emergency, including Donald Trump and rightwing culture warrior Jordan Peterson, have had their accounts reinstated.
Climate scientists say the change has been stark, and they are fighting to make themselves heard over a “barrage” of often hostile comments.
“There’s been a massive change,” said Mark Maslin, professor of earth system science at University College London and the author of popular books including How to Save Our Planet. “I get so much abuse and rude comments now. It’s happening to all of us, but I challenge the climate deniers so I’ve been really targeted.”
Maslin says he used to have regular meetings with Sean Boyle, Twitter’s former head of sustainability, who was laid off in Musk’s mass cull of staff shortly after he began his takeover in April 2022. Maslin said Boyle discussed the platform’s work to develop ways of ensuring that trusted information was pushed to the top.
“They were using climate change as a good test bed, because it was fairly clear who the good and bad actors were,” Maslin said. “But he was sacked and Twitter became the wild west.”
Maslin said he will stay on the platform and push back against conspiracy theories with scientific evidence. “I want people to understand there are solutions. There is a real need for us to be on social media defending the truth, however nasty the responses get.”
But not all scientists have found standing up to regular hostility an easy feat. Doug McNeall, a statistician working on climate change at the Met Office Hadley Centre in Exeter, said he had blocked or muted many accounts on Twitter even before Musk’s arrival. “I got to the point where it was definitely affecting my mental health,” he said.
“I spent years debating quite strongly with climate sceptics, including people I assume were paid,” he added. “But there can be a real personal cost interacting over a long time with people who are abusing you.”
McNeall said it was hard for scientists to work out how to cut through the false information on Twitter. “I just can’t tell if people are seeing disinformation or getting good scientific information about what is happening,” he said. “That’s really worrying.”
This raises several points.
First, it confirms that pre-Musk Twitter was censoring climate sceptics.
Secondly, far too many climate scientists want to be political activists too. If they want to carry on publishing scientific papers, then fine. But it is not their job to tell us to change our lifestyles. These are political matters, to be determined by governments and voters. If they want to get involved in politics, then they should rightly expect to be criticised.
Thirdly, if they don’t want the hassle of defending their views, then the answer is very simple – don’t go on Twitter. Ben Pile summed it up nicely, when he called them planet-saving super heroes.
They actually think they are more important than they really are.
https://twitter.com/clim8resistance/status/1657873031681785859
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
May 17, 2023 at 02:59AM
Renewables driven power pricing and supply calamities have led to the dreaded ‘N’ word being uttered in public. Nuclear power is back in vogue and attracting plenty of attention, some of it for all the right reasons.
While climate alarmists keep banging on about carbon dioxide gas (and politicians keep listening) any power source that generates CO2 will be demonised and punished accordingly.
In Australia perfectly operable coal-fired power plants are being shut down with plans to dynamite them in order to ensure that this country never has meaningful power generation, ever again. Which is why STT promotes ever-reliable nuclear power, the only stand-alone generation source that does not emit carbon dioxide gas during that process.
Vijay Jayaraj takes a different tack, arguing that nuclear power should be promoted simply because it is safe, reliable and affordable.
Nuclear Energy Is a Game Changer, But Not for Climate Reasons!
Real Clear Energy
Vijay Jayaraj
24 April 2023
Nuclear energy offers humanity the safest, most efficient approach to harnessing natural resources for its use. As the densest energy source available, nuclear fuel requires the least amount of material and land for electricity production.
This is sufficient reason to support the technology. Yet, some promote it as a means to address a manufactured climate emergency – worse yet, as a mere stop-gap in a transition to weather-dependent wind turbines and solar panels.
Presenting nuclear energy as a so-called solution to climate change damages the credibility of those making the case and detracts from the real benefits of the technology. Suggesting that nuclear is only a bridge to the least dense energy sources – wind and solar – is absurd.
Uranium was discovered in 1789 by Martin Klaproth, a German chemist. However, it was not until the 1930s that scientists understood that its atoms could be split to release energy.According to the World Nuclear Association, “Uranium has the advantage of being a highly concentrated source of energy which is easily and cheaply transportable. The quantities needed are very much less than for coal or oil. One kilogram of natural uranium will yield about 20,000 times as much energy as the same amount of coal.”
Unlike intermittent solar and wind energy, nuclear power plants can operate virtually continuously to provide a steady source of electricity. In the United States, for example, nuclear plants have an average capacity factor of over 93 percent, compared to around 35 percent for wind power and even less for solar.
It is no wonder that some of the world’s leading economies rely heavily on nuclear. More than 70 percent of all electricity consumed in France comes from nuclear. All the aircraft carriers of the U.S. Navy are nuclear-powered, as are about 40 percent of major U.S. naval combatant vessels.
I’ve come across multiple people who advocate for nuclear energy as a solution to a climate crisis. The problem is not with their advocacy of nuclear energy. Rather, their misstep is accepting a popular, but fallacious, theory that carbon dioxide is dangerously overheating the planet – or with their lacking the courage to confront the falsehood.
Fortitude is required in the politicized milieu of the climate debate to state the simple fact that very significant climate change occurred many times well before there were industrial emissions of carbon dioxide.
Periods warmer than today existed 2,000 and 1,000 years ago when Romans grew citrus in northern England and Vikings grew barley on Greenland, respectively. The modern warming phase that began in the 17th century, starting the exit of the Little Ice Age, was well underway at the advent of our era of heavy industrialization.
In addition, the effect of CO2 emissions from the burning of fossil fuels on atmospheric temperature is a highly debated topic.
It may not be a debate acknowledged in the mainstream media or by political elites, but thousands of scientists view assertions that CO2 is driving dangerous warming as gross exaggerations contrary to common sense and scientific integrity. Computer models attempting to predict the warming effect of CO2 almost universally fail.
So, people advocating for nuclear power on the basis of its potential to address a nonexistent climate emergency undermine their arguments for the technology’s actual benefits of safety and efficiency. The last thing we want is a mischaracterization of a wonderful and groundbreaking technology in the name of climate change.
Nuclear energy is awesome, and supporters should make an equally awesome – and factual – case for it.
Real Clear Energy
via STOP THESE THINGS
May 17, 2023 at 02:30AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 