Category: Science

Remarkable people: Tim Smit

The Eden Project in Cornwall, England

To lead the project which took an old clay pit in a remote corner of the UK and converted it into a world class environmental visitor attraction is a tremendous achievement.

Homo sapiens? A game show!

Tim Smit had some fun with the business community at the 2009 Annual Convention of the UK Institute of Directors. Everyone, including he, was in their best business attire, but very few people could get away with crumpled shirt and jeans!

However, he has a serious message about the environment (1:55) and he knows a thing or two about people as well!

Monty Python: is there intelligent life on earth?

For fun, and on an Australian tack, Eric Idle is not so sure.

By John Lewis

Black holes, colliders and paradoxes

This is a very strange world that we live in.

It would be fair to say that my knowledge about what I am writing in this Post is minimal to the point of total ignorance.  So why open my mouth and prove it!  Because the conquest of fundamental questions about our world is not only an example of mankind at its greatest but also something of broad appeal.

That is proved by the continuing popularity of the BBC Television Series – Horizon.  In that series there have recently been two fascinating programmes: Who’s afraid of a big Black Hole? and How long is a piece of string? (Readers outside the UK will not be able to view these programmes.)

Here are the programme summaries:

Black holes are one of the most destructive forces in the universe, capable of tearing a planet apart and swallowing an entire star. Yet scientists now believe they could hold the key to answering the ultimate question – what was there before the Big Bang?

The trouble is that researching them is next to impossible. Black holes are by definition invisible and there’s no scientific theory able to explain them. Despite these obvious obstacles, Horizon meets the astronomers attempting to image a black hole for the very first time and the theoretical physicists getting ever closer to unlocking their mysteries. It’s a story that takes us into the heart of a black hole and to the very edge of what we think we know about the universe.

and

Alan Davies attempts to answer the proverbial question: how long is a piece of string? But what appears to be a simple task soon turns into a mind-bending voyage of discovery where nothing is as it seems.

An encounter with leading mathematician Marcus du Sautoy reveals that Alan’s short length of string may in fact be infinitely long. When Alan attempts to measure his string at the atomic scale, events take an even stranger turn. Not only do objects appear in many places at once, but reality itself seems to be an illusion.

Ultimately, Alan finds that measuring his piece of string could – in theory at least – create a black hole, bringing about the end of the world.

Read more of this strange world

The Moon and water!

NASA reveals that there is a significant amount of water on the Moon.

In a rather awful pun, NASA published update on the LCROSS Mission starts with the words, “The argument that the moon is a dry, desolate place no longer holds water.”

LCROSS
The visible camera image showing the ejecta plume at about 20 seconds after impact.

Anyway, the significance of the update is enormous.  As the NASA release goes on to say,

Scientists have long speculated about the source of vast quantities of hydrogen that have been observed at the lunar poles. The LCROSS findings are shedding new light on the question of water, which could be more widespread and in greater quantity than previously suspected.

Permanently shadowed regions could hold a key to the history and evolution of the solar system, much as an ice core sample taken on Earth reveals ancient data. In addition, water, and other compounds represent potential resources that could sustain future lunar exploration.

The BBC also reports the NASA data but, I am bound to say, in a rather more reader-friendly format.

By Paul Handover

Things aviation and the ‘wow’ effect.

Some stunning pictures.

Of the six active authors on this Blog, four have been or still are pilots.  Of course, only young Bob Derham is a ‘real’ pilot having been an Air Transport pilot for almost as long as Pontious Pilate (sorry, that’s an awful pun!).

Anyway, there has been a growing collection of some incredible photographs from odd sources around the Web and it seemed time to share a few.

Here’s a wonderful picture of an F-15C Eagle Fighter circling over the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida with Shuttle Mission STS 108 on the launch pad.

011129-F-1279W-025

See more aviation pictures

Climate warming – the argument continues

Alan Carlin’s response to Patrice Ayme.

Learning from Dogs is very grateful for having Alan and Patrice argue this very important issue through the medium of this Blog.  Because if there is one thing that has the power to overturn our way of life over the last 50 years, it is climate warming (as a result of man’s activities).

On the 26th October there was a Post published that contained Patrice’s reply to an earlier article containing Alan Carlin’s hypothesis.  Learning from Dogs invited Alan to reply to Patrice and this is his contribution.

With one exception the recent comments by Patrice Ayme are typical of what climate alarmists/warmists so often say when presented with serious climate science by skeptics.  They presumably do this in order to try to distract attention from their inability or unwillingness to respond to the scientific issues raised by skeptics or a desire to hide the weakness of their science.  They appeal to alleged authority; they attack the opposition, often personally–anything to avoid discussion of the science.

In this case, the only exception is Ayme’s weird contention that there should not be a tropospheric hotspot in the tropics IF the UN GHG hypothesis should be correct.  This is weird because there is actually rare agreement between most informed alarmists/warmists and skeptics that such a hot spot should be present IF the UN hypothesis is correct.  So his contention that it is an “absurdity” puts him at odds with his much favored UN reports and with his views on the science of warming.  For further information see Evans here (which is a link from the link I originally gave–but perhaps Ayme did not bother to read it before responding??)

As Evans points out this alleged hotspot predicted by the UN climate hypothesis is actually crucial to the UN hypothesis “because the same water vapor feedback that produces the hotspot in IPCC climate theory also doubles or triples the temperature increases predicted by the IPCC climate models.  If the IPCC climate modellers just turn down the water vapor feedback in their models enough so their theoretical signatures match the observed warming patterns, then the predicted temperature increases due to projected carbon emissions are greatly reduced and are no longer of much concern.”  So Ayme apparently did not realize that his statement that there should be no hotspot means that he believes that one of the crucial features of the UN climate hypothesis is wrong and hence that his views of the science are wrong.

I note that except for his weird statement on the hotspot, he makes no serious attempt to respond to or analyze my four fundamental scientific tests of the UN GHG hypothesis.

For a different view as to the objectivity (or lack thereof) of the IPCC see here.

Most of the remainder of Ayme’s comments are best ignored as attempts to distract readers from the fundamental (and telling) scientific tests discussed in my post.

Alan Carlin

By Paul Handover

Unintended consequences – for the albatross!

Using our Planet as a dustbin!

Once again, a piece in Naked Capitalism caught my eye this time courtesy on one of Yves’ readers who came across this:

These photographs of albatross chicks were made just a few weeks ago on Midway Atoll, a tiny stretch of sand and coral near the middle of the North Pacific. The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking.

To document this phenomenon as faithfully as possible, not a single piece of plastic in any of these photographs was moved, placed, manipulated, arranged, or altered in any way. These images depict the actual stomach contents of baby birds in one of the world’s most remote marine sanctuaries, more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent.

Midway chick

More pictures of this terrible way to treat a magnificent bird are here.

By Paul Handover

Climate warming – two very different views!

Thank goodness for two so very different opinions.

The problem for lay persons, such as me, is that it is very difficult to read in the popular media well-reasoned arguments for each side of important issues, such as climate.  You can see my confusion being expressed in the opening paragraphs of an earlier Post on Climate Change.

It might not be rhetoric to say that the issue of man-made climate change could be one of the most pressing issues of all for mankind.  Thus having two very clearly opposing views is incredibly useful.  Learning from Dogs is grateful to both guest authors.

On the 16th October, we published a general Post about the subject that tended to lean towards the view that mankind was not affecting the climate in such a direct way as had previously been thought.

That was then followed by a Post largely consisting of an article by Patrice Ayme arguing, scientifically, that there was a direct link between mankind and global warming.

Then a Post that contained the full article by Alan Carlin arguing, again on scientific grounds, that there was not a direct link.

Patrice commented on the Alan Carlin article.  But to give greater visibility to this debate, this Post carries Patrice’s comment.  We hope to have a response from Alan Carlin soon.

Read Patrice’s comment on Alan’s article

Climate warming: the debate continues

Alan Carlin believes that rising greenhouse gases are not the cause of warming, on scientific grounds.

Yesterday we published a long guest Post from Patrice Ayme who argued that climate warming is a very serious risk to this planet, as we know it.

Alan Carlin has gracefully given Learning from Dogs permission to reproduce his article that argues, on a scientific basis, that man-made greenhouse gases are not the cause of warming.

Again, this is an article that needs to be read.  Alan’s Blog is here.

Read Alan Carlin’s article

Climate warming: the debate

Patrice Ayme believes it is real, on a scientific basis.

On the 16th October, we published a Post called Climate warming?.  The sub-heading gave a clue to the content of the Post: What’s the truth about climate warming, e’rr change?

My stance was to express doubt about man causing climate warming. But then, a good friend of this Blog, Patrice Ayme, added this comment:

Lowest ice on record in the Arctic was 2007, then 2008, and now 2009. [More exactly the sea with more than 15% ice reflecting.]
As I pointed out on http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2009/05/ (May 31, 2009).
The sun has been going down in the last 30 years or so… Watch the nice graph there, extracted from Science Mag…
We are just coming out of a solar minimum so pronounced that cosmic rays, less deflected by the sun’s magnetic field, have become a problem… This explains why greenhouse heating has been less pronounced than some expected in the last few years. Things should pick up in the next 7 years, as the sun heats up. The multiplying factor is 3 or 4…

It seemed appropriate to ask Messrs Ayme and Carlin for permission to reproduce both their Blog articles. Both very kindly agreed – thanks Gents.

These are long articles – but will inform you in a way that the mass media never do.

Here’s Patrice (Alan Carlin’s article tomorrow):
Read more about this important subject