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Another thing I have found with the ongoing debate about Anthropogenic Global Warming climate change has been the constant claims by the warmist camp about "consensus" in regards to the findings by tens of thousands ten thousand a thousand 99% of climate scientists that It's-All-The-Fault-Of-The-Evil-Humans. This in itself is enough to discredit their 'proof', as science in no way, shape, or form is about consensus. It means they truly do not understand the scientific method or how proofs are made.

This is something the late author and physician Michael Crichton addressed during a guest lecture at Cal Tech back in 2003.

I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had.

Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results.

The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus: Period.

Crichton went on to list a number of major failures in regards to "consensus science", some of which caused the loss of many lives. Others destroyed careers, even though later it was discovered that those who went against the consensus were right and everyone else was wrong.

Albert Einstein had his own take on consensus, having once stated "It doesn't matter if ten thousand scientists agree with me. It only takes one to prove me wrong." One of the smartest men in the modern era understood the fallacy of consensus science.

And this is the weakness of the 'theory' of Anthropogenic Global Warming. At the moment it's all consensus and no hard proofs. People, many of them non-scientists, look at some of the presented data and see a correlation between global average temperatures and the atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide. They come to the conclusion that the increase in carbon dioxide is the cause of the temperature rise. They've fallen into the Correlation Trap. Unfortunately, so have some of the so-called climate scientists, like Al Gore.

As anyone who deals with data and statistics can tell you, correlation does not imply causality. This means just because two factors correlate to each other does not automatically mean that one caused the other. There may be other factors that affect both and cause the correlation but have not been discovered, or have been discounted through ignorance, bias, or conscious decision.

Another possibility the correlation may show but that the warmists have chosen to ignore: CO₂ concentrations have changed because of changing temperatures, something ice core samples from Antarctica have shown to be the case over the past 400,000 years, where CO₂ levels have lagged temperature changes, not led them. But why should they let that data change the narrative? After all the 'consensus' is that it's all our fault, meaning no further discussion is needed or wanted.

Yeah, that will work out well for all of us.

Not.

It seems I just can't get away from AGW this week.

As a follow on to my previous two posts is this piece about the reconstruction of global temperatures over the past 2,000 years. (Well, actually 1,995 years, but who's quibbling?)

This latest reconstruction used a host of proxies from all over the world, but excluded tree-ring proxies - something used by a number of climate researchers, including Mann - because of their unreliability.

...Loehle notes that many long-term reconstructions of climate are based on tree rings, but "There are reasons to believe that tree ring data may not capture long-term climate changes (100+ years) because tree size, root/shoot ratio, genetic adaptation to climate, and forest density can all shift in response to prolonged climate changes, among other reasons." Furthermore, Loehle notes "Most seriously, typical reconstructions assume that tree ring width responds linearly to temperature, but trees can respond in an inverse parabolic manner to temperature, with ring width rising with temperature to some optimal level, and then decreasing with further temperature increases." Other problems include tree responses to precipitation changes, variations in atmospheric pollution levels, diseases, pest outbreaks, and the obvious problem of enrichment that comes along with ever higher levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Trees are not simple thermometers!

Instead, Loehle used such things as "borehole temperature measurements, pollen remains, Mg/Ca ratios, oxygen isotope data from deep cores or from stalagmites, diatoms deposited on lake bottoms, reconstructed sea surface temperatures, and so on." Loehle's reconstruction used everything except tree-ring data.

His results show both the Roman and Medieval Warm Periods as well as the Little Ice Age, which Mann's did not. Loehle's results also mirrored those of Svensmark, who used Carbon-14 data to determine solar activity over the past 1,000 years. Others have taken that even farther, going back almost 3,500 years. Loehle's global temperature chart mirrored that of the solar activity plotted by Svensmark and others, giving us further clues into another driving force behind climate change.

Could this be another bit of ammunition to use against the Global-Warming-Is-All-The-Fault-Of-The-Evil-Humans theory of climate change? Maybe.

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One of the most bothersome things I've noticed about those supporting AGW as fact is their constant citing of CO₂ data as the only thing we need to concentrate on. They seem to think that 'heat trapping' by atmospheric CO₂ is a linear relationship, meaning as the concentration of CO₂ increase, it's heat trapping increases likewise. But it doesn't. More than a few studies show that after it reaches a critical concentration, further increases have little effect on heat trapping. We're already past that point, meaning the CO₂ effects have reached saturation.

The AGW faithful also ignore such things as solar activity, claiming it's variations to be so small as to be meaningless. But they overlook or ignore other effects variations in solar activity can have that has nothing to do with its radiance. Certainly Svensmark's work implies they are discounting a very big factor that affects Earth's climate. (It certainly seems to affect surface and atmospheric temperatures on Mars, the Jovian and Saturnian moons, and Pluto!)

This topic will continue to generate a lot of commentary. I won't say it will create a lot of debate because you cannot debate with true believers, particularly with those of the AGW faith.

And so it goes.

While not quite as prominent in the media as it has been, the debate about Anthropogenic Global Warming still goes on.

As I posted recently, sixteen concerned scientists wrote and signed a letter stating there is no need to panic about global warming. When I wrote that post I had barely skimmed through the 2700+ comments. Now that I've had a couple of days to look them over, it appears the AGW faithful came out in full force, decrying the sixteen and doing their best to diminish the stature of those scientists. They also kept repeating the same old discredited talking points as if that's all the justification that was needed. Others seemed to pull numbers, 'facts', and statistics out of thin air with no relevant cites to back up their claims about CO₂. Some tried to very hard to discredit any AGW skeptics by claiming they had been bought and paid for by the oil companies, again with no corroborating evidence to back up their claims. Far too many of them had no basic understanding of scientific method and what it meant when data sets of climate data were 'destroyed', making it impossible to check the results of "tens of thousands" of climate researchers. (That was another thing that bugged me as well as some of the commenters - claims by the faithful that "tens of thousands" climate scientists all agreed that AGW was fact. Somehow I doubt that there are that many researchers out there studying this issue. It seems like just another 'fact' pulled out of thin air. A few commenters challenged these claims but no backing evidence or cites were ever produced.)

Calls for drastic actions to 'save the planet' were made again and again, but not one of saying they were needed could give us any details about what we puny humans could possibly do to affect the chaotic system that is called climate to save something that needs no saving, other than to 'decarbonize' our civilization, which usually entails impoverishing the West.

Again we have to ask the question of the faithful: Cui bono?

The case for the "incontrovertible" and "settled Science" of AGW has suffered yet another series of blows. First, it appears there has been no warming over the past 15 years, claims by the warmists notwithstanding. The the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, home of ClimateGate and ClimateGate 2.0, reports that there has been no appreciable warming in that time period.

None of that stops the AGW faithful, who aren't letting things like actual data get in the way of their beliefs.

Then sixteen prominent scientists sign a letter saying there is no need to panic about global warming. The letter pokes holes in some of the claims made by AGW proponents and questions the motivations of those who have abandoned any pretense of scientific objectivity.

Why is there so much passion about global warming, and why has the issue become so vexing that the American Physical Society, from which Dr. Giaever resigned a few months ago, refused the seemingly reasonable request by many of its members to remove the word "incontrovertible" from its description of a scientific issue? There are several reasons, but a good place to start is the old question "cui bono?" Or the modern update, "Follow the money."

Alarmism over climate is of great benefit to many, providing government funding for academic research and a reason for government bureaucracies to grow. Alarmism also offers an excuse for governments to raise taxes, taxpayer-funded subsidies for businesses that understand how to work the political system, and a lure for big donations to charitable foundations promising to save the planet. Lysenko and his team lived very well, and they fiercely defended their dogma and the privileges it brought them.

Cui bono? indeed.

As more evidence points to climate change being a natural phenomenon one has to ask this question of the AGW proponents: Who are the 'deniers'? The AGW faithful who pick and chose data that backs their claims while ignoring data that contradicts their beliefs? Or those who look at all the data and find it does not support the claims for AGW?

Call this one a two-fer, covering two different aspects of AGW skepticism.

First, comes a peer reviewed article in Science that covers a study questioning the sensitivity of Earth's climate to CO₂ concentrations.

In particular, the study suggests that the probable sensitivity of the earth's climate to increases in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is far lower than the assumptions traditionally used by the (already discredited) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Not only that, the authors find that the existence of a so-called "fat tail" -- the notion that extreme temperature changes in response to increases in atmospheric CO2 are likely -- is illusory.

If this is indeed the case, then many of the defective climate models being used to predict climate catastrophe just became even more defective, and therefore, even less predictive of what future climate might be like.

Then, comes a follow up on the discrediting of the Mann 'hockey stick' graph.

You may be asking yourself "Why is he covering this again?" It's simple, really: far too many true believers still cite the Mann graph as incontrovertible proof of AGW.

I've had more debates with a number of them bringing up the graph as if it were holy writ despite the fact that once Mann allowed both his data sets and the algorithms used to analyze the data to be evaluated, both were found to be so profoundly flawed that the results were meaningless. When random data was used with the algorithms, the hockey stick was still there (though to a different amplitude), meaning the graph was built into the formula. That's not science. That's fraud. (Or possibly it's incompetence, but I'm learning more towards the former than the latter.)

The text of the ClimateGate 2.0 e-mails quoted in the linked post question the validity of Mann's work, with some lamenting their decisions not to question his work. One in particular tested Mann's algorithms, finding them wanting.

4241.txt: Rob Wilson again: " The whole Macintyre issue got me thinking...I first generated 1000 random time-series in Excel ... The reconstructions clearly show a 'hockey-stick' trend. I guess this is precisely the phenomenon that Macintyre has been going on about. "

4369.txt: Tim Osborn says " This completely removes most of Mike's arguments... "  and Ed Cook replies "I am afraid that Mike is defending something that  increasingly can not be defended. He is investing too much personal stuff in this and not letting the science move ahead."

When colleagues of Mann's are questioning the validity of his work and his emotional investment in his results, then we must question whether they are the results of science or just wishing it were true. In this case it is the second rather than the first.

And so dies the "incontrovertible proof".

I think it's time to buckle down and get back to some of the allegedly more important doings around the world. In this case we'll delve back into the It's-All-The-Fault-Of-The-Evil-Humans Anthropogenic Global Warming shtick.

I have to admit that I was goaded back to this subject by the WP Brother-In-Law as we discussed the matter post-Thanksgiving dinner. He had moderated his viewpoint quite a bit, particularly in light of the original ClimateGate scandal and further investigation on his own. While he no longer automatically assumes any climate change is automatically our fault, he's still on the fence about what to do about it.

With ClimateGate 2.0 making the rounds, as well as more data showing the climate models being used to predict future global climate seriously underestimate the effects of some factors while overestimating others, making the models useless (most are so defective they can't even predict past climate, meaning using data sets that encompass several decades of weather data up in to the 60's and 70's they weren't able to 'predict' the climate we actually experienced in the 80's and 90's), the debate is heating up again.

I won't delve deep into the controversy as I have expressed my opinion about the "settled science" more than once - that there is no such thing. New data, new observations, disproved theorums, and new hypotheses can unsettle the settled science at any time.

One of the latest blows against the warmist claims is this report that CO₂ may not warm the planet nearly as much as everyone thought.

The climate may be less sensitive to carbon dioxide than we thought - and temperature rises this century could be smaller than expected. That's the surprise result of a new analysis of the last ice age. However, the finding comes from considering just one climate model, and unless it can be replicated using other models, researchers are dubious that it is genuine.

I find the last sentence to be hypocritical. How many of the claims made by the IPCC, UEA, and a host of other climate researchers are any more valid than the one from this analysis? Many of the critics of this report used cooked data, algorithms which give the same answers regardless of the data fed into them, and outright fraud to 'prove' their theories. Isn't that the pot calling the kettle black?

Another instance of hypocrisy: data from NASA satellites show the radiation of heat from the Earth into space is higher than many of the warmists believed. You would think that information would have some effect on their predictions, but all we've heard from them has been a muted "It doesn't make a bit of difference" and then silence. New data and observations in contradiction of 'settled' science are supposed to lead to further investigation and modifications to or scrapping of theories that are not supported by that data. Instead, it is ignored in order to preserve the theories so many have staked their reputations (and funding) upon. That is not how science is supposed to work.

And so it goes.

Oh my, here we go again.

It seems the pseudoscience quacks are at it again, this time decrying the dangers of Smart Meters used for Smart Grid applications.

To hear them tell it Smart Meters will irradiate you with high levels of RF, causing all kinds of maladies including cancer, high blood pressure, scurvy, baldness, erectile dysfunction, higher taxes, and chronic halitosis. (Yes, I know these are ridiculous exaggerations, but so are the claims being made by this latest group of Luddites.) From their descriptions, you'd think these things were pumping out power equivalent to that of a microwave oven. They don't. They seem to believe they're transmitting constantly. They aren't.

To address their first point, Smart Meter transmitters have a maximum output of a watt or less on the two radio bands used for this purpose. In most cases Smart Meter transmitter output is in the milliwatt range (thousandths of a watt) because they don't need to transmit very far. Your cell phone transmits more power than that and you hold it against your head. A Smart Meter is usually located outside your home and is nowhere near the occupants.

Second, Smart Meters only transmit when commanded to do so by the utility, generally a few times a day. Even so, the exposure from Smart Meters is still a small fraction of that from a number of other RF sources in and around the home even if it transmits 100% of the time (See Figure 1 in linked PDF above.) With the low duty cycle of Smart Meters (each transmission lasts less than a second), the maximum exposures experienced will be even less. Your laptop or tablet using its wireless connection will expose you to more RF than a Smart Meter ever will. Yet none of the Luddites using them complains about this RF exposure. (Maybe it's because laptops and iPads are useful to these science-ignorant do-gooders, so they're willing to overlook the 'dangers' they pose.)

The pseudo-scientific crap these folks are peddling will do more harm than the Smart Meters they're condemning.

This is the price we pay for indoctrination masquerading as an educational system.

I saw this over at Maggie's Farm and knew I had to share it.

We've all seen pictures and videos of magnets suspended in mid air over some superconducting material bathed in liquid nitrogen. That in itself is pretty neat. But the video below goes beyond that, showing something called quantum levitation, where the superconducting material is held in place over magnets in such a way that it keeps its orientation above them. The superconducting 'puck' keeps the same height or tilt or other orientation due to quantumtatively locked levitation, even if it's moving.


Neat stuff indeed!

It seems the work to commercialize the use of silicon in lithium-ion batteries is proceeding apace.

The folks a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have been working on a process to easily use silicon nanowires to greatly increase the capacity of Li-Ion batteries. LBNL has been testing batteries made with the silicon anodes for over a year now and found the new cells maintain their capacity after "many hundreds of charge-discharge cycles." The cells have approximately eight times the capacity of existing Li-Ion cells.

If this process holds up and is cost effective to implement, electric cars will become more of a reality as battery packs capable of giving cars extended driving range (400+ miles) will become available. It also means the physical size of battery packs used in hybrid electric cars, laptop computers, and a whole host of other devices using these batteries will shrink even as the capacity increases. Imagine a laptop, tablet, or smart phone that will give you a full 24 hours of use before its battery needs to be recharged.

I think we're going to have to rewrite a few bumper stickers. This one in particular is going to need a change:


It seems the folks over at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland have discovered that neutrinos, massless and chargeless sub-atomic particles, can exceed the speed of light, something Einstein's special theory of relativity says is impossible.

At first researchers didn't believe what they had measured, so they asked other researchers to independently verify their results. So far no one has claimed CERN's findings are in error.

Does this mean that we'll also have to edit Albert Einstein's formula to read E=mc²±1dB?

This isn't the first of Einstein's theorems dealing with relativity that have been found to be in error. Others have been found wanting or weren't as complete as Einstein thought they were.

We must also remember Einstein's words when it came to any of his theories: "It doesn't matter if ten thousand scientists agree with me. All it takes is one to prove me wrong."

These are words that 'climate' scientists should take to heart, too. (This means you, Al Gore.)

It's another Tech Tuesday!

As the price of copper has been rising, researchers have been looking for a replacement that is less expensive but would have the conductivity of the copper it would replace.

For some applications, the use of fiber optics has replaced the copper wiring and coaxial cabling used by telephone and cable companies. Both use optical fiber rather than copper for new builds due to its higher bandwidth and lower cost.

But for things like carrying electricity something else is needed. Enter carbon nanotubes.

Researchers from Rice University have managed to produce a cable using carbon nanotubes for carrying electricity.

Enrique Barrera, a professor of mechanical engineering and materials science at Rice, said that highly conductive nanotube-based cables could be just as efficient as traditional metals at one-sixth of the weight. He added that such cables may initially find use in applications where weight is a critical consideration, such as in airplanes and automobiles. In the future, he said, it could replace traditional wiring in homes.

The university's release continued, "The cables developed in the study are spun from pristine nanotubes and can be tied together without losing their conductivity. To increase conductivity of the cables, the team doped them with iodine and the cables remained stable. The conductivity-to-weight ratio beats metals, including copper and silver, and is second only to the metal with the highest specific conductivity, sodium."

The mention of doping the carbon nanotubes with iodine reminded me of an article I read years ago about conducting polymers, specifically polyacetylene. When doped with iodine the polymer's conductivity increased dramatically. Such a polymer would have all kinds of uses, particularly where weight was a factor (like in aircraft, as mentioned above). If I recall correctly from the article Plastics That Conduct Electricity (Scientific American, February 1988, no link available), the polymer would be used for carrying control and other signals throughout the aircraft, but not power as its conductivity wasn't quite good enough for that purpose. But nothing came of it, at least in the aircraft industry, as optical fiber has supplanted it due to its light weight and virtually unlimited bandwidth.

But carbon nanotubes can carry the required power and do it with less weight. The raw material used to create the nanotubes is limitless, as carbon is one of the most abundant elements on earth, not far behind hydrogen. Depending upon the structure of the nanotube cable, they could carry more current for a given size. This means smaller gauge wiring to carry the same amount of power.

Is there anything carbon can't do?

Feeling the need to take a break from the ongoing debt ceiling drama, perhaps a little good news for a change?

One thing I've found to be true over the seven different decades I've trodden this earth is that it's the complicated things that tend to have the easiest answers. That's particularly true of the sciences, where some of the most sophisticated inventions use the simplest of materials and configurations. That's certainly true of this neat means of storing electrical energy, using nothing more than graphite and water.

A combination of two ordinary materials - graphite and water - could produce energy storage systems that perform on par with lithium ion batteries, but recharge in a matter of seconds and have an almost indefinite lifespan.

Dr Dan Li, of the Monash University Department of Materials Engineering, and his research team have been working with a material called graphene, which could form the basis of the next generation of ultrafast energy storage systems.

"Once we can properly manipulate this material, your iPhone, for example, could charge in a few seconds, or possibly faster." said Dr Li.

The ability to rapidly charge a battery system is key to being able to make electric vehicles a more viable alternative to liquid fuel burning vehicles. If a vehicle's batteries can be charged in the same amount of time it takes to fill a fuel tank, then EV's can become more attractive to the motoring public.

But even if Dr. Li and his team perfect their technology, there's another problem that will need to be solved: How to get all the electrical energy needed for a rapid recharge to the charging station? That's a lot of power to dump in a very short time.

After reading this, I think we should pray there is some anthropogenic global warming coming our way, otherwise it might get a bit chilly here on Earth...and the other planets as well.

If the solar scientists are right, we might be seeing decades of much lower solar activity after the peak of this rather anemic sunspot cycle.

Scientists have studied sunspots and the sun's 11-year activity cycle for 400 years, and they're getting increasingly savvy about spotting the harbingers of "space weather" years in advance, just as meteorologists can figure out what's coming after the next storm.

Storms from the sun are expected to build to a peak in 2013 or so, but after that, the long-range indicators are pointing to an extended period of low activity -- or even hibernation.

The previous two periods of low solar activity, the Maunder and Dalton Minimums, led us the what is called the Little Ice Age. It wasn't until the early 1800's that solar activity picked up again and ended the Little Ice Age. These types of solar minimums have created havoc worldwide and one such minimum that ended the Medieval Warm Period may have helped usher in the Black Plague in Europe which wiped out from one-third to one-half of the population. Agriculture suffered and previously habitable lands became too cold to grow crops or raise livestock, like Greenland or Newfoundland. (Yes, Greenland was once green. The Vikings had settled, farmed, and thrived there for over 400 years before the Little Ice Age made it impossible for them to survive there.)

Somehow the AGW folks have convinced themselves we'd be better off with a colder world despite having not one shred of evidence to support their beliefs and plenty of evidence to the contrary. They can choose to ignore the possibility that a warmer world would be better, with the Roman and Medieval Warm Periods giving us a good indication of that.

The peak of present sunspot cycle - Cycle 24 - is expected in 2013, and it's expected to be a particularly weak one. But wait, there's more!

All these signs suggest that the current solar cycle, Cycle 24, "may be the last one for quite some time," Hill said. The next upswing in solar storms, Cycle 25, may be "very much delayed ... very weak, or may not happen at all."

The solar activity upswing at the start of Cycle 24 was almost 2 years late, and what activity we have seen is far below that seen in Cycles 23, 22, and 21, with Cycle 23 having been one of the most energetic in centuries. Is it a coincidence that Earth's climate warmed during that period? Is it a coincidence that the climate on Mars, and Jupiter's and Saturn's moons also warmed during that same period?

Not likely.

I know I've written about these before, but the post was lost when my original blog site disappeared.

What am I talking about? Laser spark plugs.



Quite of bit of progress has been made since I last covered it about 4 years ago or so, with the size of the laser units now being slightly larger than traditional spark plugs. One of the advantages of laser plugs versus traditional spark plugs? More efficient combustion.

Engines make NOx as a byproduct of combustion. If engines ran leaner - burnt more air and less fuel - they would produce significantly smaller NOx emissions.

Spark plugs can ignite leaner fuel mixtures, but only by increasing spark energy. Unfortunately, these high voltages erode spark-plug electrodes so fast, the solution is not economical. By contrast, lasers, which ignite the air-fuel mixture with concentrated optical energy, have no electrodes and are not affected.

These lasers also improve efficiency, according to their creators. Conventional spark plugs sit on top of the cylinder and only ignite the air-fuel mixture close to them. The relatively cold metal of nearby electrodes and cylinder walls absorbs heat from the explosion, quenching the flame front just as it starts to expand.

Lasers, Taira explains, can focus their beams directly into the center of the mixture. Without quenching, the flame front expands more symmetrically and up to three times faster than those produced by spark plugs.

Another plus of laser ignition is that there can be more than a single ignition point within the cylinder, which in turn gives better control over combustion.

While I don't expect to see sets of these new laser plugs in the local auto parts store any time soon, it does show us research and development of systems that will increase the efficiency of internal combustion engines continues.

On the energy front, it appears fusion is back in the news.

The claim that fusion power was "only 20 years away" has been made for the past 50 years or so. While science is closer to achieving the goal, it's the means of getting there that has been intriguing. Much of the effort (and the money) has been spent on one of two possible technologies for achieving break-even fusion: high temperature/high pressure magnetic confinement and laser ignition.

The first uses a tokamak reactor, basically a torus surrounded by electromagnets used to generate a magnetic field to contain a high-temperature plasma. The second uses 'pellets' containing tritium or deuterium that are dropped sequentially into the focus point of a large number of laser beams (the National Ignition Facility uses 192 very high power laser beams). The beams are supposed to collapse the pellets to create a high temperatures and pressures in their core which should force the tritium and deuterium to fuse.

The problems with both of these technologies is the expense (billions, so far) and the complexity of the systems. Even if they were able to achieve above break-even yields, meaning they were generating more energy than they were using, commercialization of the technology could take a decade or more and cost additional billions.

But as MSNBC has been reporting, the more promising fusion technologies are those on the fringes. One in particular, called polywell fusion, something I've covered before, is showing great promise.

EMC2 Fusion doesn't have tens of millions of venture capital to play with -- but it does have a $7.9 million Navy contract to test a plasma technology known as inertial electrostatic confinement fusion, also known as Polywell fusion. The idea is to accelerate positively charged ions in an electrical cage to such an extent that they occasionally spark a fusion reaction, releasing energy and neutrons. The concept was pioneered by the late physicist Robert Bussard, and carried forward by the EMC2 Fusion team in Santa Fe, N.M.

So far every generation of the Bussard-designed WB ("whiffle ball") reactors has performed just as Bussard's calculations have said they would. Each generation of WB reactors has been larger than its predecessor and each generation's results have scaled likewise.

Should polywell fusion turn out to be something that actually works it will turn the energy industry on its ear, creating a source of cheap and clean power that doesn't have the downsides of present day uranium cycle fission power plants.

Another thing to mention - should polywell succeed, the cost of building fusion power plants will be in the double-digit millions, not billions.

There's been a lot of media coverage over the past few weeks about air traffic controllers falling asleep on the job, specifically those working the so-called graveyard shift (approximately 11PM to 7AM). While the media coverage makes it seem as if this is a new problem, I have a feeling it's far more common than the FAA is willing to admit.

Working the midnight shift is tough. Not everyone can do it. It takes a certain amount of discipline to make it work. I know this from personal experience as I worked the graveyard shift for a number of years when I was employed in the defense industry.

The FAA had controllers working swing shifts, meaning their work schedules rotated so they worked all three shifts over a period of weeks or months. That's a formula for chronic fatigue, higher absenteeism, and higher accident rates. Put another way, it's a formula for disaster, particularly for such a critical job like air traffic control.

Instead, controllers should be working the same shift all the time. It makes it easier to adapt to the off hours.

When I worked graveyard shift you could always tell when someone new to the shift would make it or not. All you had to do was ask them when they slept. If the answer was anything other than "I go to sleep at the same time every day" you knew they wouldn't last long. That was the secret to surviving the graveyard shift: going to sleep at exactly the same time every day, followed only by making sure you got enough sleep. For me it was going to bed around 8:30 in the morning and waking up sometime between 3 and 4 in the afternoon. Some of my co-workers would bed down some time after noon and wake sometime during the early evening. It was different for all of us.

What the FAA has done is make it almost impossible to set a schedule that would allow their controllers to get enough sleep. Constantly changing shifts makes it impossible. Physiologists claim it takes approximately one day for every hour of time 'shift' in our wake/sleep cycles. That means if you go from a day shift to graveyard shift, it will take a little over a week to adjust to the new sleep time (assuming bed time is now sometime around 8 in the morning rather than midnight). If the shift changes every week, then you will never adjust to the changed hours and you will be tired all the time.

Even if the shift change is on a monthly basis, there will still be at least one week where everyone will be 'off' until they adjust. It plain doesn't work that well.

Maybe it's time for the FAA to change how they do things.

The long overdue upswing in the 11-year sunspot cycle has started, though many believe the solar maximum this cycle (Cycle 24) will be half that of Cycle 23.

Some of the AGW faithful are claiming this upswing disproves the link between sunspots and climate cycles, but if the lengthy solar minimum (when sunspots are at their minimum number) had the effect many solar astronomers and atmospheric physicists believe it did, then the future solar maximum (when sunspots are at their maximum number) should have less affect on Earth's climate (and that of Mars, the Jovian moons, and so on) than the previous solar maximum.

But I have a different reason than many others out there to be glad the number of sunspots on the sun's surface are increasing, that being radio propagation.

When the sun is quiet, as happens at the bottom of the aforementioned 11-year sunspot cycle, shortwave radio propagation on a number of radio bands won't be nearly as good as it is at the top of a cycle. Being an amateur radio operator since the 1970's, I have always looked forward to the peak of the sunspot cycles knowing the lower frequency amateur radio bands would experience good long range propagation, meaning more of the bands could be used to communicate across the globe.

Who cares if it affects the global climate? I want to see the 12 and 10-meter amateur radio bands open up so I can work some of those rare overseas stations reachable only during the peaks of the sunspot cycles.

Bring it on!

For as long as man has used fire, he has also had to deal with fire when it is out of control. Usually that means dowsing it with water, dirt, or other means of snuffing it out.

Over the past two hundred years or so fighting fire has meant using some kind of apparatus to move large amounts of water, allowing those fighting the fire to put out the flames. While quite effective, it has a number of downsides, including soaking everything anywhere near the fire. This usually damages objects and possessions within a structure almost as badly as if they had been burned. A limited source of water can also severely restrict the effectiveness of this method. While fire departments and fire engineers have been working to develop new ways of putting out fires more effectively, progress has been slow...until now.

Instead of using water, researchers at Harvard University have found a way of extinguishing flames using electricity.

No, that isn't a misprint. They're talking about using electrical fields to put out fires.

Firefighters currently use water, foam, powder and other substances to extinguish flames. The new technology could allow them to put out fires remotely -- without delivering material to the flame -- and suppress fires from a distance. The technology could also save water and avoid the use of fire-fighting materials that could potentially harm the environment, the scientists suggest.

In the new study, they connected a powerful electrical amplifier to a wand-like probe and used the device to shoot beams of electricity at an open flame more than a foot high. Almost instantly, the flame was snuffed out. Much to their fascination, it worked time and again.

Ironically, the effect of electric fields on fire was observed over 200 years ago, but little research has been done on the phenomenon until recently.

Using such an apparatus would certainly solve a number of problems, including eliminating the need for large amounts of water to fight fires or risking the lives of firefighters to enter burning structures in order to attack the fire more aggressively.

As Glenn Reynolds would say, "Faster please."

I forgot to post this earlier, but better late than never.

By way of Viking Pundit:

Saw a red bumper sticker today with the text: If this bumper sticker is blue, you're driving too fast.

Lordy, but I love science geek humor!

At least according to a recent study that Randall Parker links to, joking that he hopes the egalitarian PC won't drag him away in the middle of the night.

There's even a book written on the subject, peer-reviewed and all that, by Richard Lynn and a Finnish scholar, _IQ and the Wealth of Nations_.  Why is wasn't given a larger hearing among the chattering classes is solely because of a childish disregard for group differences.