Earth Science

Indicates Newport-Inglewood fault more important than previously thought
Risk in the next 30 years of 'big one' increased from about 4.7% to 7.0%
However, study says risk of smaller quakes has actually gone down

…"We stumbled on these things completely by chance," says Susannah Maidment of Imperial College London, whose team was trying to study bone fossilisation by cutting out tiny fragments of fossils.

Instead, they found blood-like cells and collagen from 75-million-year-old dinosaur fossils – 10 million years before T. rex appeared.

Although the cells are unlikely to contain DNA, those extracted from better preserved fossils using the same technique may do so, she says. …

At least 42 people were killed Tuesday and 1,117 have been injured after a major earthquake struck Nepal, triggering landslides and toppling buildings less than three weeks after the Himalayan nation was ravaged by its worst quake in decades.

Tuesday's magnitude-7.3 earthquake was centered near the Chinese border between Nepal's capital, Kathmandu, and Mt. Everest. It was followed closely by at least five aftershocks measuring from magnitude-5.6 to magnitude-6.3. …

…planet Earth is in the process of forming one monumental supercontinent… [land masses imaged from 150M years ago to 175M years from now]

At least 876 people are known to have died in a powerful earthquake in Nepal, with many more feared trapped under rubble, officials say. The 7.8 magnitude quake struck an area between the capital, Kathmandu, and the city of Pokhara… Tremors were felt across the region, with further loss of life in India, Bangladesh, Tibet and on Mount Everest.…

…8,000 fans at a concert in Leipzig jumped so energetically that they set off a "mini-earthquake".… strong enough to rip the wall paper in houses in the Waldstrassen neighbourhood. …Geophysical Observatory in nearby Collm was alerted.…

Holland, Oklahoma’s seismology chief, is determined to find the cause of an unprecedented earthquake epidemic in the state. And he suspects pumping wastewater from oil and gas drilling back into the Earth has a lot to do with it.

“If my research takes me to the point where we determine the safest thing to do is to shut down injection -- and consequently production -- in large portions of the state, then that’s what we have to do,” Holland said. “That’s for the politicians and the regulators to work out.”

[Of course, confirmation bias could not be possible when he's looking for confirmation of his theory.]

…found seven partial skeletons, amounting to around 150 bones…. "Given the size of these bones, which surpass any of the previously known giant animals, the new dinosaur is the largest animal known that walked on Earth…. Its length, from its head to the tip of its tail, was 40m. Standing with its neck up, it was about 20m high - equal to a seven-storey building." …lived in the forests of Patagonia between 95 and 100 million years ago….

It appears that news media and some pro-environmental organizations have the tendency to accentuate or even exaggerate the damage caused by climate change. This article provides a rationale for this tendency…. We find that the information manipulation has an instrumental value, as it ex post induces more countries to participate…

246 But at cruise altitude, flying in the lower stratosphere at 35,000’ or higher, switching to tanks with high-sulfur jetfuel would create denser, wider contrails with sulfate aerosols serving as cloud condensation nuclei, mimicking the effect of cosmic rays. The clouds so created would be long-lasting, and brighter with a high albedo reflecting more sunlight back into space.

Thousands of jetliners flying high over the planet every day would create a cooler earth, and no more global warming. The sulfate aerosols are high enough in the stratosphere not to precipitate and cause acid rain - and high-sulfur jetfuel is less expensive than low-sulfur.

This solution to global warming isn’t just cost-free, it saves money. It’s perfectly designed to drive human-hating eco-fascists completely nuts.
-- Jack Wheeler

Posted by: Up with people! at September 30, 2012 10:47 AM

On June 27, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a statement saying it had "complete[d] the process of implementation of a set of recommendations issued in August 2010 by the InterAcademy Council (IAC), the group created by the world's science academies to provide advice to international bodies."

Hidden behind this seemingly routine update on bureaucratic processes is an astonishing and entirely unreported story. The IPCC is the world's most prominent source of alarmist predictions and claims about man-made global warming… cited by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the U.S. and by national academies of science around the world as "proof" that the global warming of the past five or so decades was both man-made and evidence of a mounting crisis.

The "recommendations" issued by the IAC were not minor adjustments to a fundamentally sound scientific procedure. Here are some of the findings of the IAC's 2010 report. … In plain English: the IPCC reports are not peer-reviewed. … authors are selected from a "club" of scientists and nonscientists who agree with the alarmist perspective favored by politicians.… The scientists they interviewed commonly found the Synthesis Report "too political" (p. 25).

Plenary sessions to approve a Summary for Policy Makers last for several days and commonly end with an all-night meeting. Thus, the individuals with the most endurance or the countries that have large delegations can end up having the most influence on the report (p. 25).

How can such a process possibly be said to capture or represent the "true consensus of scientists"?

Another problem documented by the IAC is the use of phony "confidence intervals" and estimates of "certainty" in the Summary for Policy Makers (pp. 27-34). Those of us who study the IPCC reports knew this was make-believe when we first saw it in 2007. Work by J. Scott Armstrong on the science of forecasting makes it clear that scientists cannot simply gather around a table and vote on how confident they are about some prediction, and then affix a number to it such as "80% confident." Yet that is how the IPCC proceeds.

The IAC authors say it is "not an appropriate way to characterize uncertainty" (p. 34), a huge understatement. Unfortunately, the IAC authors recommend an equally fraudulent substitute, called "level of understanding scale," which is more mush-mouth for "consensus."

… The news release means that the IAC report was right. That, in turn, means that the first four IPCC reports were, in fact, unreliable. Not just "possibly flawed" or "could have been improved," but likely to be wrong and even fraudulent.

It means that all of the "endorsements" of the climate consensus made by the world's national academies of science -- which invariably refer to the reports of the IPCC as their scientific basis -- were based on false or unreliable data and therefore should be disregarded or revised. It means that the EPA's "endangerment finding" -- its claim that carbon dioxide is a pollutant and threat to human health -- was wrong and should be overturned.

Just as Jim Hansen, the head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, has recently likened man-made global warming to “a great moral issue” like “slavery,” a group of 49 former NASA scientists issued a letter to NASA Administrator Charles Bolton asking for the administration refrain from including “unproven and unsupported remarks” about climate science in its communications.

The Washington Monument, which is slated for repairs after it was damaged in an earthquake last year, appears to be sinking, according to preliminary data collected by the National Geodetic Survey.

The Federal Communications Commission says it is looking into the failures of cell phone service that occurred Tuesday afternoon after the East Coast earthquake. For as long as an hour after the quake, wireless customers in Washington and elsewhere reported being unable to get calls through. Jamie Barnett, chief of the FCC's Public Safety & Homeland Security Bureau, said that when the cell phone networks get overloaded by call volume, crucial calls might fail to go through. "We were very concerned with the fact that 9-1-1 calls were also congested," he said. "We want to make sure that people who need emergency help are able to get it."