Category: Uncategorized

Uncategorized 24 Apr 2017

World Bank President: Lets Invest US $40 TRILLION in Renewables

via Watts Up With That?
http://ift.tt/1Viafi3

Guest essay by Eric Worrall

World Bank president Jim Yong Kim claims that investors who currently hold $40 Trillion worth of government bonds and other low yield investments would be better investing the money into renewables.

Climate change offers huge investment opportunity, Al Gore tells World Bank

by Sophie Hares

Climate change should be grasped as an opportunity to attract vast capital flows into low-carbon investments, create jobs and spur economic growth, rather than viewed as a money-absorbing burden, top officials and experts say.

Trillions of dollars are potentially available for climate investments and countries like India are blazing a trail in bringing cheap solar power to millions, but making sure the world’s poorest benefit will prove a big challenge, a World Bank meeting heard late last week.

“It’s the biggest opportunity in the history of the world – it’s the biggest investment opportunity, but we have to have a clear vision, we have to have policy leadership… to bring the world community together to get the financing that is needed to move the momentum more quickly,” former US Vice President Al Gore told the discussion.

World Bank president Jim Yong Kim said financing climate action could offer a more lucrative home for $US8.5 trillion ($11.2 trillion) in negative interest rate bonds, $US24.5 trillion in very low-yielding government-type bonds and a further $US8 trillion in cash, though a clear strategy still needed to be hammered out.

“Quite apart from what you think about climate change, there are opportunities for investments that will give you higher yield than any of those investments in which over $US40 trillion is sitting right now,” Kim said.

…

The key is how to unlock financing for economic growth that also brings climate benefits, according to former UN climate chief Christiana Figueres.

Friday’s launch of a $US2 billion green bond fund backed by the International Finance Corporation and asset management firm Amundi could help drive climate investments in developing countries, she added.

“Thinking that climate action is expensive and a burden, and is a responsibility, is so five minutes ago,” she said. “The exponential growth of technologies and the drop in prices (have) made this the best opportunity – and this is (the) story of growth of this century.”

…

Seven Shots Fired at the Office of Dr. John Christy

via Defeat Climate Alarmism
https://defyccc.com

Seven shots were fired at the office of Dr. John Christy in the University of Alabama after the “March for Science.”

Dr. Roy Spencer, another climate realist, working in the same building, writes:

“Given that this was Earth Day weekend, with a March for Science passing right past our building on Saturday afternoon, I think this is more than coincidence.”

“Local news reports that UAH police have classified this as a ‘random shooting’. So, the seven Belgian 5.7 millimeter bullets which hit windows and bricks around John Christy’s office from 70 yards away were apparently deemed to be ‘random’ occurrence.”

Belgian 5.7 millimeter cartridges can be only 5.7x28mm military cartridges. This type of cartridges was introduced relatively recently, and the weapons that use it are rare and expensive. Dr. John Christy testified before the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology in the hearing Climate Science: Assumptions, Policy Implications, and the Scientific Method on March 29, 2017. This shooting is an act of intimidation and retaliation against a witness, as well as an attack on the national scientific potential. Dr. Spencer and Dr. Christy maintain satellite temperature record, causing much consternation to climate alarmists.

The Union of Concerned Scientists, one of the open sponsors of the “March for Science,” stands accused of acts of retaliation against witnesses in my civil RICO lawsuit.

The People’s Climate March, scheduled to happen on April 29, includes the Communist Party of the USA and promises to be even more violent.

via Defeat Climate Alarmism https://defyccc.com

April 24, 2017 at 04:02PM

Uncategorized 24 Apr 2017

Most Ivanpah power comes from natural gas

via Errors in IPCC climate science
http://ift.tt/1F9oSq3

I had not heard much about the Ivanpah Solar Power Facility for a while – no wonder – when you convert the ever increasing natural gas usage to MWhrs – Ivanpah electricity production is mostly from natural gas.

via Errors in IPCC climate science http://ift.tt/1F9oSq3

April 24, 2017 at 11:37AM

Uncategorized 24 Apr 2017

Mind-Blowing Science

via Science Matters
http://ift.tt/2oqIky9

Cometh the man; Francis Bacon’s insight was that the process of discovery was inherently algorithmic. Photo courtesy NPG/Wikipedia

In a refreshing relief from Science Marches promoting slogans and tenets of climate dogma, we have an insightful look into a fruitful future for the scientific endeavor.

The article is Science has outgrown the human mind and its limited capacities by Ahmed Alkhateeb, a molecular cancer biologist at Harvard Medical School.

It starts with a great quote:

The duty of man who investigates the writings of scientists, if learning the truth is his goal, is to make himself an enemy of all that he reads and … attack it from every side. He should also suspect himself as he performs his critical examination of it, so that he may avoid falling into either prejudice or leniency.
– Ibn al-Haytham (965-1040 CE)

First the author reminds readers of the current sorry state of scientific research: overwhelming quantity of papers with diminishing quality (bogus findings, unreplicable studies, sloppy methodology, etc.). He then raises an intriguing question:

One promising strategy to overcome the current crisis is to integrate machines and artificial intelligence in the scientific process. Machines have greater memory and higher computational capacity than the human brain. Automation of the scientific process could greatly increase the rate of discovery. It could even begin another scientific revolution. That huge possibility hinges on an equally huge question: Can scientific discovery really be automated?

Alkhateeb gets to the point of Bacon’s forming the scientific process:

The Baconian method attempted to remove logical bias from the process of observation and conceptualisation, by delineating the steps of scientific synthesis and optimizing each one separately. Bacon’s vision was to leverage a community of observers to collect vast amounts of information about nature and tabulate it into a central record accessible to inductive analysis. In Novum Organum, he wrote: ‘Empiricists are like ants; they accumulate and use. Rationalists spin webs like spiders. The best method is that of the bee; it is somewhere in between, taking existing material and using it.’

The Baconian method is rarely used today. It proved too laborious and extravagantly expensive; its technological applications were unclear. However, at the time the formalization of a scientific method marked a revolutionary advance. Before it, science was metaphysical, accessible only to a few learned men, mostly of noble birth. By rejecting the authority of the ancient Greeks and delineating the steps of discovery, Bacon created a blueprint that would allow anyone, regardless of background, to become a scientist.

Bacon’s insights also revealed an important hidden truth: the discovery process is inherently algorithmic. It is the outcome of a finite number of steps that are repeated until a meaningful result is uncovered. Bacon explicitly used the word ‘machine’ in describing his method. His scientific algorithm has three essential components:

First, observations have to be collected and integrated into the total corpus of knowledge.
Second, the new observations are used to generate new hypotheses.
Third, the hypotheses are tested through carefully designed experiments.

If science is algorithmic, then it must have the potential for automation. This futuristic dream has eluded information and computer scientists for decades, in large part because the three main steps of scientific discovery occupy different planes. Observation is sensual; hypothesis-generation is mental; and experimentation is mechanical. Automating the scientific process will require the effective incorporation of machines in each step, and in all three feeding into each other without friction. Nobody has yet figured out how to do that.

Experimentation has seen the most substantial recent progress. For example, the pharmaceutical industry commonly uses automated high-throughput platforms for drug design.

Automated hypothesis-generation is less advanced, but the work of Don Swanson in the 1980s provided an important step forward. He demonstrated the existence of hidden links between unrelated ideas in the scientific literature; using a simple deductive logical framework, he could connect papers from various fields with no citation overlap. In this way, Swanson was able to hypothesise a novel link between dietary fish oil and Reynaud’s Syndrome without conducting any experiments or being an expert in either field.

The most challenging step in the automation process is how to collect reliable scientific observations on a large scale. There is currently no central data bank that holds humanity’s total scientific knowledge on an observational level. Natural language-processing has advanced to the point at which it can automatically extract not only relationships but also context from scientific papers. However, major scientific publishers have placed severe restrictions on text-mining. More important, the text of papers is biased towards the scientist’s interpretations (or misconceptions), and it contains synthesised complex concepts and methodologies that are difficult to extract and quantify.

Summary

Nevertheless, recent advances in computing and networked databases make the Baconian method practical for the first time in history. And even before scientific discovery can be automated, embracing Bacon’s approach could prove valuable at a time when pure reductionism is reaching the edge of its usefulness.

Such an approach would enable us to generate novel hypotheses that have higher chances of turning out to be true, to test those hypotheses, and to fill gaps in our knowledge. It would also provide a much-needed reminder of what science is supposed to be: truth-seeking, anti-authoritarian, and limitlessly free.