Scientists issue New Zealanders grave warning about climate change

New Zealanders have been issued with a stark warning to expect "surprises" by scientists who say they cannot keep up with extreme weather events linked to climate change.
Scientists opened a climate change conference in Wellington yesterday by stating that changes in climate being experienced around the globe were beyond their worst-case scenarios.
The founding director of the Climate Change Research Institute, Martin Manning, said policy-makers needed to stop waiting for scientists to come up with answers about trends for the future, or definite measurements for how much sea levels or temperatures would rise by.
Almost simultaneously, devastating floods battered Sir Lanka, Brazil and Queensland earlier this year. Professor Manning said policy-makers should start getting prepared for greater risks, instead of waiting for the lengthy process of scientists linking events together.
Extreme rainfall around the world had been more than scientists had been predicting from climate models.
"Society needs to take over from science when we're talking about global risk management.
"We can't wait till the scientists understand everything."
Continue here
People in Canterbury are being warned of more earthquakes and aftershocks for years to come.
The Natural Hazards Manager at GNS Science, Kelvin Berryman, says it is impossible to tell for sure how long the aftershocks will continue.
But he says previous earthquakes, in this country and overseas, have been followed by seismic activity for up to 30 years.
Dr Berryman says while the current sequence of aftershocks will eventually drop off, there is a possibility it could trigger further earthquakes, beginning the cycle again
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Mosaic HIV vaccine imminent. Scientists to begin trialling breakthrough drug ‘next year’

Home » Health, North America, Science » Mosaic HIV vaccine imminent. Scientists to begin trialling breakthrough drug ‘next year’

An electron scan showsthe HIV-1 virus budding (in green) from a white blood cell in a laboratory.

An HIV vaccine that could outwit the deadly virus could undergo human trials in as little as a year’s time, scientists say.

The ‘mosaic vaccine’, which is being designed by an international team of investigators, works by being able to adapt to the virus as it mutates.

HIV’s ability to evolve rapidly is what lets it dodge current drugs.

Bette Korber from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, is one of the scientists who has worked on the project for 20 years.

She said: ‘We’re in the evolutionary fast lane studying HIV.

‘If you give just one drug, HIV evolves away from it. That why treatments involve three or four drugs at once.’

The HIV virus, which is largely made up of proteins, causes AIDS – a disease that destroys the body’s immune system leaving sufferers vulnerable to infections and tumours. The disease killed 1.8million people worldwide in 2009.

Traditional HIV vaccines are designed to stimulate the body’s immune system to recognize naturally occurring stretches of specific amino acids in the virus’ proteins.

Determined: Dr Bette Korber has dedicated her life to finding an effective vaccine for HIV after losing two friends to Aids.

However, a mosaic vaccine is composed of many sets of synthetic, computer-generated sequences of proteins. These can cue the body’s immune system to respond to a variety of HIV mutations.

It is put together using a huge database created by Korber and her colleagues at LANL, which contains information from hundreds of thousands of HIV fragments.

Such a vaccine could break a 25-year stalemate in the search for a cure of a disease that infects 7,500 people a day and kills two million a year. All previous vaccine trials have ended in failure.

Early computer models predicted that mosaic vaccines would perform better than natural HIV genes.

This was partly confirmed last year, when results published in Nature Medicine found mosaic vaccines provoked powerful immune responses in both mice and monkeys.

Now a consortium of researchers, supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and National Institutes of Health, hope to launch human trials of a mosaic vaccine by late 2012.

Dr Korber, who has lost a couple of friends to Aids, said she had high hopes for the novel approach.

‘It has been the focus of my life to make a vaccine happen,’ she said.

‘At this point, because of the results in animal studies, I’m confident this is a good approach that merits testing in humans.’

If the early phase safety trial shows the vaccine is safe to use on humans, scientists can move on to a phase two trial where the vaccine would be tested on larger groups to assess how well it works.

An estimated 73,000 Britons have HIV, including more than 21,000 who are unaware that they have the virus.

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Scientists complete first phase of Alpine Fault drilling project

Note the Google Science Fair ad.  Does it remind you of anything?

NZHerald A New Zealand-led team of international scientists has successfully drilled through the alpine fault in the western South Island, the first phase of a project to learn about earthquake mechanisms on the fault.

The scientists drilled adjacent boreholes to depths of 101m and 152m on river terraces next to Gaunt Creek, near Whataroa 140km south of Greymouth on the West Coast, early last month.

They collected rock cores and made geophysical scans of the borehole walls, project co-leader Rupert Sutherland of GNS Science said today.

“They installed permanent monitoring instruments to record temperatures, pressures, and seismic activity inside the boreholes before back-filling both holes,” he said.

“We were astonished that we managed to collect such high-quality rock cores across a zone that has been smashed by literally thousands of magnitude 8 earthquake movements over millions of years.”

For more go here:  http://www.nzherald.co.nz/science/news/article.cfm?c_id=82&objectid=10712830&ref=rss

I wrote for Investigate Magazine from 2000-2005, then decided to invest my energy in the alternative media, when I became aware of the rise of fascism that was being concealed from the public under the guise of hoaxes, such as the "war on terror," by the mainstream media.

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Union Of Concerned Scientists Releases Report On US Nuclear Plant Safety, Finds NRC Oversight Weakness At Indian Point NPP

From a just released report by the Union of Concerned Scientists, focusing on US Nuclear Power Plant oversight by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. “Many of the serious safety or security lapses at U.S. nuclear power plants in 2010 happened because plant owners — and often the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) — failed to address known safety problems.” And something potentially concerning to Buchanan, NY residents where Indian Point NPP is located: “the NRC did not always serve the public well in 2010. This report analyzes serious safety problems at Peach Bottom, Indian Point, and Vermont Yankee that the NRC overlooked or dismissed. At Indian Point, for example, the NRC discovered that the liner of a refueling cavity at Unit 2 has been leaking since at least 1993. By allowing this reactor to continue operating with equipment that cannot perform its only safety function, the NRC is putting people living around Indian Point at elevated and undue risk.” The report’s conclusion: “when the NRC tolerates unresolved safety problems — as it did last year at Peach Bottom, Indian Point, and Vermont Yankee — this lax oversight allows that risk to rise. The more owners sweep safety problems under the rug and the longer safety problems remain uncorrected, the higher the risk climbs.”

Indian Point section from the report:

The Indian Point nuclear plant in New York features two pressurized water reactors (PWRs). To refuel a PWR, workers flood the refueling cavity with water, which allows them to remove irradiated fuel assemblies from the reactor core and replace them with fresh fuel assemblies. The water both removes decay heat from the irradiated fuel assemblies and shields the radiation they emit, protecting the workers.

The Final Safety Analysis Reports (FSARs) submitted by the plant owner with the application for an operating license for Unit 2 stated that the refueling cavity was “designed to withstand the anticipated earthquake loadings,” and that “the liner prevents leakage in the event the reinforced concrete develops cracks.” When the NRC issued the operating license for Unit 2, the leakage prevention function of the liner for the refueling cavity became part of the licensing basis. However, NRC inspectors at Indian Point recently found that the liner has been leaking 2 to 20 gallons per minute since at least 1993 (NRC 2010v), and that the plant owner has not yet delivered on repeated promises to fix the leak. That means the device installed to prevent leakage after an earthquake is leaking before an earthquake even occurs. The liner has no other safety function. Yet NRC managers have dismissed the longstanding problem, noting that the refueling cavity leaks only when it is filled with water (NRC 2010o).

[more...]

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“Scientists” Pull a Snow Job on Reporters in Teleconference

Some things never change: Cover of Newsweek, January 22, 1996. h/t to World Climate Report

Update: James Taylor’s post on Forbes supports our position. A number of alarmists have been organized to team up on the comment section to defend the undefensible. Please add your voice of support to shout them down in the comments section.

By Joseph D’Aleo, CCM, AMS Fellow

As we reported, the eco-pressure group, the Union of Concerned Scientists, as part of a continuing misinformation campaign sponsored a teleconference yesterday with a very confused Jeff Masters of Weather Underground, opportunist Mark Serreze of NSIDC and a UCS environmentalist. Their performance was a scientific disappointment to say the least as one scientist wrote me “Masters lost all my respect. Serreze never had it”. He didn’t mention the UCS. It is the crazy uncle no one talks about.

The Union of Concerned Scientists recall had sponsored a workshop on Mt. Washington in 2007 in which they promised ski areas that snow would be hard to come by even in northern areas and they might consider another profession.  That very winter, northern New England set a record for the greatest seasonal snow and ski areas had the best year in their history. Across the hemisphere that winter was surpassed only by 1977/78, 2009/10. Through January this winter, the Northern Hemisphere had more snow than any of those years and will rank likely in the top 5.

The UCS was not alone in predicting warming means less snow. NOAA in their CCSP and the EPA in their TSD said most cities with winter avergaes near freezing (the case of most metros in the east) would see more rain and much less snow. Recall the IPCC stated: “Milder winter temperatures will decrease heavy snowstorms”. Recall RFK Jr. in 2008 promised DC children would be deprived of the fun of sledding due to warming – of course all-time record snows fell in 2009/10 and sleds and skiis were the only way to get around the DC area.

Now the alarmists have flipped their position claiming warming means more snow although it is a major stretch to think that would apply to Los Angeles, Houston, Dallas, New Orleans, and Atlanta in a warming world. But back to the teleconference.

“Heavy snowstorms are not inconsistent with a warming planet,” said scientist Jeff Masters.  “In fact, as the Earth gets warmer and more moisture gets absorbed into the atmosphere, we are steadily loading the dice in favor of more extreme storms in all seasons, capable of causing greater impacts on society.” “The old adage, ‘It’s too cold to snow,’ has some truth to it,” said Masters. “A colder atmosphere holds less moisture, limiting the snowfall that can occur.”

First of all the winter was colder than normal not warmer as can be seen by this preliminary analysis from NOAA CPC.

Enlarged.

Second the global oceans are colder than normal, especially around the United States as seen from this UNISYS SST anomaly analysis.

Enlarged.

Third the amount of moisture in the air this winter was below normal (blues) in all the areas that had abnormal snow.

Enlarged.

The actual tropspheric precipitable water content from surface to 500mb shows most the tropical atmosphere has over ten times the water content of the polar and middle latitudes.

Enlarged.

Marc Morano collated other scientist responses on Climate Depot. He adds (1) tropospheric relative and specific humidity has significantly declined since ‘safe CO2 levels’ of 1948, 2) atmospheric water vapor has declined since satellite measurements began in 1983, 3) there has been no statistically significant global warming since 1995.

Enlarged.

The snow resulted from a rapid cooling as we went from a strong El Nino to a strong La Nina and high latitude blocking consistent with a warm AMO mode and a still quiet sun (maybe some residual help from the high latitude volcanoes of recent years). Global temperature anomalies may have plunged more than a whole degree (F) from their peak last summer and early fall. February 2011’s anomaly (UAH) came in as -0.018F relative to the 30 year average. Recall global temperatures lag ENSO by about 7 months. Global teleconnections are most similar to the late 1950s, 1960s and 1970s when frequent snowy cold winters caused the world to increasingly think an ice age was coming.

Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, said less sea ice in the Arctic translates to more moisture in the atmosphere, and could also cause an atmospheric circulation pattern in polar regions known as Arctic Oscillation.

“It’s still cutting-edge research and there’s no smoking gun, but there’s evidence that with less sea ice, you put a lot of heat from the ocean into the atmosphere, and the circulation of the atmosphere responds to that,” Serreze said.

He would not know cutting edge research if he fell over it. Forecasters were using the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation in forecasting temperatures for over a decade. It correlates very strongly with the Northern Hemispheric temperatures and with wintertime North Atlantic Oscillation and the Arctic Oscillation. Even the IPCC talks about the natural cyclical behavior of the AMO (60-70 year cycle). The warm AMO mode which began in 1995 biases the atmosphere towards a negative AO and NAO. It also contributes to less arctic ice as the warmer than normal waters near the Barents Sea work their way under the ice and thin it from the bottom. See.

Before Serreze took over NSIDC seeing the huge grant funding windfall opportunity, an honest scientist in their blog in 2007 admitted the roles of the oceans in arctic ice and the uncertainty that existed in the science:

“One prominent researcher, Igor Polyakov at the University of Fairbanks, Alaska, points out that pulses of unusually warm water have been entering the Arctic Ocean from the Atlantic, which several years later are seen in the ocean north of Siberia. These pulses of water are helping to heat the upper Arctic Ocean, contributing to summer ice melt and helping to reduce winter ice growth. Another scientist, Koji Shimada of the Japan Agency for Marine – Earth Science and Technology, reports evidence of changes in ocean circulation in the Pacific side of the Arctic Ocean. Through a complex interaction with declining sea ice, warm water entering the Arctic Ocean through Bering Strait in summer is being shunted from the Alaskan coast into the Arctic Ocean, where it fosters further ice loss.” Many questions still remain to be answered, but these changes in ocean circulation may be important keys for understanding the observed loss of Arctic sea ice.”

CO2 has nothing at all to do with it. Cold open arctic waters serve as a major sink of CO2 just as the warm tropical waters serve as a source.  Roger Pielke Sr. suggests the ocean heat content (OHC) as a more robust measure of temperature trends. Models suggest OHC should be rising rapidly as the greenhouse gases build, especially in the tropics. Here is the buoy based OHC in the top 300 meters of the equatorial from NOAA (between 5 degrees north and south of the equator) Pacific from 130 E to 80W. During El Ninos, the eastern half is warm and the west cool, in La Ninas the eastern half is cool and the western warm. The fact there is not net warming, instead actually a slight cooling of the entire belt may the most damning proof that global warming is nothing more than a government funded political campaign.

Enlarged.

Meanwhile, check out the interesting snow stories as we enter the last quarter mile of the winter season. Ask the people in these areas whether they think global warming is something to worry about.

Enlarged.

And Central Park’s snowiest months:

Enlarged.

Chicago had a helleva February.

Enlarged.

Minneapolis is climbing the top ten list of snowiest winters.

Enlarged.

As is Boston.

Enlarged.

“Scientists” Pull a Snow Job on Reporters in Teleconference Update: James Taylor’s post on Forbes supports our position. A number of alarmists have been organized to team up on the comment section to defend the undefensible. Please add your voice of support to shout them down in the comments section.

By Joseph D’Aleo, CCM, AMS Fellow

As we reported, the eco-pressure group, the Union of Concerned Scientists, as part of a continuing misinformation campaign sponsored a teleconference yesterday with a very confused Jeff Masters of Weather Underground, opportunist Mark Serreze of NSIDC and a UCS environmentalist. Their performance was a scientific disappointment to say the least as one scientist wrote me “Masters lost all my respect. Serreze never had it”. He didn’t mention the UCS. It is the crazy uncle no one talks about.

The Union of Concerned Scientists recall had sponsored a workshop on Mt. Washington in 2007 in which they promised ski areas that snow would be hard to come by even in northern areas and they might consider another profession.  That very winter, northern New England set a record for the greatest seasonal snow and ski areas had the best year in their history. Across the hemisphere that winter was surpassed only by 1977/78, 2009/10. Through January this winter, the Northern Hemisphere had more snow than any of those years and will rank likely in the top 5.

The UCS was not alone in predicting warming means less snow. NOAA in their CCSP and the EPA in their TSD said most cities with winter avergaes near freezing (the case of most metros in the east) would see more rain and much less snow. Recall the IPCC stated: “Milder winter temperatures will decrease heavy snowstorms”. Recall RFK Jr. in 2008 promised DC children would be deprived of the fun of sledding due to warming – of course all-time record snows fell in 2009/10 and sleds and skiis were the only way to get around the DC area.

Now the alarmists have flipped their position claiming warming means more snow although it is a major stretch to think that would apply to Los Angeles, Houston, Dallas, New Orleans, and Atlanta in a warming world. But back to the teleconference.

“Heavy snowstorms are not inconsistent with a warming planet,” said scientist Jeff Masters.  “In fact, as the Earth gets warmer and more moisture gets absorbed into the atmosphere, we are steadily loading the dice in favor of more extreme storms in all seasons, capable of causing greater impacts on society.” “The old adage, ‘It’s too cold to snow,’ has some truth to it,” said Masters. “A colder atmosphere holds less moisture, limiting the snowfall that can occur.”

First of all the winter was colder than normal not warmer as can be seen by this preliminary analysis from NOAA CPC.

Enlarged.

Second the global oceans are colder than normal, especially around the United States as seen from this UNISYS SST anomaly analysis.

Enlarged.

Third the amount of moisture in the air this winter was below normal (blues) in all the areas that had abnormal snow.

Enlarged.

The actual tropspheric precipitable water content from surface to 500mb shows most the tropical atmosphere has over ten times the water content of the polar and middle latitudes.

Enlarged.

Marc Morano collated other scientist responses on Climate Depot. He adds (1) tropospheric relative and specific humidity has significantly declined since ‘safe CO2 levels’ of 1948, 2) atmospheric water vapor has declined since satellite measurements began in 1983, 3) there has been no statistically significant global warming since 1995.

Enlarged.

The snow resulted from a rapid cooling as we went from a strong El Nino to a strong La Nina and high latitude blocking consistent with a warm AMO mode and a still quiet sun (maybe some residual help from the high latitude volcanoes of recent years). Global temperature anomalies may have plunged more than a whole degree (F) from their peak last summer and early fall. February 2011’s anomaly (UAH) came in as -0.018F relative to the 30 year average. Recall global temperatures lag ENSO by about 7 months. Global teleconnections are most similar to the late 1950s, 1960s and 1970s when frequent snowy cold winters caused the world to increasingly think an ice age was coming.

Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, said less sea ice in the Arctic translates to more moisture in the atmosphere, and could also cause an atmospheric circulation pattern in polar regions known as Arctic Oscillation.

“It’s still cutting-edge research and there’s no smoking gun, but there’s evidence that with less sea ice, you put a lot of heat from the ocean into the atmosphere, and the circulation of the atmosphere responds to that,” Serreze said.

He would not know cutting edge research if he fell over it. Forecasters were using the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation in forecasting temperatures for over a decade. It correlates very strongly with the Northern Hemispheric temperatures and with wintertime North Atlantic Oscillation and the Arctic Oscillation. Even the IPCC talks about the natural cyclical behavior of the AMO (60-70 year cycle). The warm AMO mode which began in 1995 biases the atmosphere towards a negative AO and NAO. It also contributes to less arctic ice as the warmer than normal waters near the Barents Sea work their way under the ice and thin it from the bottom. See.

Before Serreze took over NSIDC seeing the huge grant funding windfall opportunity, an honest scientist in their blog in 2007 admitted the roles of the oceans in arctic ice and the uncertainty that existed in the science:

“One prominent researcher, Igor Polyakov at the University of Fairbanks, Alaska, points out that pulses of unusually warm water have been entering the Arctic Ocean from the Atlantic, which several years later are seen in the ocean north of Siberia. These pulses of water are helping to heat the upper Arctic Ocean, contributing to summer ice melt and helping to reduce winter ice growth. Another scientist, Koji Shimada of the Japan Agency for Marine – Earth Science and Technology, reports evidence of changes in ocean circulation in the Pacific side of the Arctic Ocean. Through a complex interaction with declining sea ice, warm water entering the Arctic Ocean through Bering Strait in summer is being shunted from the Alaskan coast into the Arctic Ocean, where it fosters further ice loss.” Many questions still remain to be answered, but these changes in ocean circulation may be important keys for understanding the observed loss of Arctic sea ice.”

CO2 has nothing at all to do with it. Cold open arctic waters serve as a major sink of CO2 just as the warm tropical waters serve as a source.  Roger Pielke Sr. suggests the ocean heat content (OHC) as a more robust measure of temperature trends. Models suggest OHC should be rising rapidly as the greenhouse gases build, especially in the tropics. Here is the buoy based OHC in the top 300 meters of the equatorial from NOAA (between 5 degrees north and south of the equator) Pacific from 130 E to 80W. During El Ninos, the eastern half is warm and the west cool, in La Ninas the eastern half is cool and the western warm. The fact there is not net warming, instead actually a slight cooling of the entire belt may the most damning proof that global warming is nothing more than a government funded political campaign.

Enlarged.

Meanwhile, check out the interesting snow stories as we enter the last quarter mile of the winter season. Ask the people in these areas whether they think global warming is something to worry about.

Enlarged.

And Central Park’s snowiest months:

Enlarged.

Chicago had a helleva February.

Enlarged.

Minneapolis is climbing the top ten list of snowiest winters.

Enlarged.

As is Boston.

Enlarged.

View the original article here