Hard hitting global and local news
Eli Rabett Eli Rabett Eli Rabett is a not quite failed professorial techno-bunny, a chair election from retirement, at a wanna be research university that has a lot to be proud of but has swallowed the Kool-Aid. The students are naive but great and the administrators vary day-to-day between homicidal and delusional.
Hank Roberts said… how far we’ve come: "We describe Dispute Finder, a browser extension that alerts a user when information they read online is disputed by a source that they might trust. Dispute Finder examines the text on the page that the user is browsing and highlights any phrases that resemble known disputed claims.
Circling the Drain In the Atlantic a letter from Paul Alivisator, director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Eric Isaacs, director of Argonne National Laboratory and Thom Mason, Director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory Most of the talk about sequestration has focused on its immediate impacts — layoffs, furloughs, and cancelled White House tours in the days and weeks ahead. But one severe impact of the automatic spending cuts will only be felt years — or even decades — in the future, when the nation begins to feel the loss of important new scientific ideas that now will not be explored, and of brilliant young scientists who now will take their talents overseas or perhaps even abandon research entirely.
While no one was looking the sun has gone cold, more precisely the sun gods have decreased total solar irradiation by about 4 W/m 2 to 1360.8 + 0.5 W/m 2 from 1365.4 + 1.3 W/m 2 ERB is the Earth Radiation Budget instrument, ACRIM is the Active Cavity Radiometer Irradiation Monitor, SORCE is the Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment carrying the TIM, Total Irradiation Monitor. The rest is left to the industrious reader. What happened was that apertures in earlier instruments were not properly chosen, allowing excess light to be scattered into the sensor (right side of the figure below) resulting in higher TSI being measured. The magnitude of the effect was determined in a purpose built testing facility at LASP. The error is not without consequences As Kopp and Lean point out, A nonzero average global net radiation at the top of the atmosphere is indicative of Earth’s thermal disequilibrium imposed by climate forcing. But whereas the current planetary imbalance is nominally 0.85 W/m 2 [Hansen et al., 2005], estimates of this quantity from space‐based measurements range from 3 to 7 W/m 2 SORCE/TIM’s lower TSI value reduces this discrepancy by 1 W/m 2 [Loeb et al., 2009].
I’ve really enjoyed Chris Mooney’s Point of Inquiry podcasts, so it’s too bad the latest one with pro-GMO activist Mark Lynas failed to wrestle significantly with real arguments about GMOs (Chris, you talk about GMOs too much to say you don’t want to delve into technical issues). One interesting issue did come out of the podcast – at one point Lynas says the Union of Concerned Scientists’ rejection of the National Academy of Sciences position on GMOs is a contradiction of UCS arguments that we should rely on the consensus opinion on climate change
Read more here: Scheduled For Release Friday, 5 PM
Eli Rabett Eli Rabett Eli Rabett is a not quite failed professorial techno-bunny, a chair election from retirement, at a wanna be research university that has a lot to be proud of but has swallowed the Kool-Aid. The students are naive but great and the administrators vary day-to-day between homicidal and delusional.
Taken from: Driverless cars, high speed rail, and climate comedy
Eli Rabett Eli Rabett Eli Rabett is a not quite failed professorial techno-bunny, a chair election from retirement, at a wanna be research university that has a lot to be proud of but has swallowed the Kool-Aid. The students are naive but great and the administrators vary day-to-day between homicidal and delusional.