Category: Science

We are Completely F%$#ed

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Anthropogenic climate change is a problem, and the progress of this problem has been exceeding predictions for years.

Now, we are running into secondary effects that are making this a lot worse.

In this case, it appears that increasing temperatures in the tundra are driving bacterial activity which is in turn increasing temperatures in the tundra:

Scientists might have to change their projected timelines for when Greenland’s permafrost will completely melt due to man-made climate change, now that new research from Denmark has shown it could be thawing faster than expected.

Published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change, the research shows that tiny microbes trapped in Greenland’s permafrost are becoming active as the climate warms and the permafrost begins to thaw. As those microbes become active, they are feeding on previously-frozen organic matter, producing heat, and threatening to thaw the permafrost even further.

In other words, according to the research, permafrost thaw could be accelerating permafrost thaw to a “potentially critical” level.

“The accompanying heat production from microbial metabolism of organic material has been recognized as a potential positive-feedback mechanism that would enhance permafrost thawing and the release of carbon,” the study, conducted by researchers at the University of Copenhagen’s Center for Permafrost, said. “This internal heat production is poorly understood, however, and the strength of this effect remains unclear.”

The big worry climate scientists have about thawing permafrost is that the frozen soil is chock-full of carbon. That carbon is supposed to be strongly trapped inside the soil, precisely because it’s supposed to be permanently frozen — hence, “permafrost.”

However, as temperatures in the Arctic have risen due to human-caused climate change, permafrost is thawing, and therefore releasing some of that trapped carbon into the atmosphere. It’s yet another feedback loop manifesting itself in Arctic permafrost regions — as climate change causes it to thaw, the thawing causes more climate change, which causes more thawing, et cetera, et cetera.

Rinse, lather, repeat, die.

I am Unreasonably Stoked About This

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I don’t know why, but the taxonomic resurrection of the species Brontosaurus has me pleased to a completely unreasonably degree:

The brontosaurus, loved by kids the world over but cruelly snubbed by paleontologists for more than a century, is back. British and Portuguese fossil boffins have concluded the dinosaur existed as a separate genus after all.

It was back in 1879 that paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh named a collection of bones a brontosaurus, or Thunder Lizard, and described a massive herbivore with a long neck and tail that wandered across the plains of what is now America.

But within a couple of decades the existence of the Thunder Lizard was called into question, and the scientific community decided that the stumbled-upon brontosaurus was just an adolescent apatosaurus. There then followed a 100-year campaign to expunge the word brontosaurus from textbooks, but the name proved just too popular.

Now a study looking at the largest range of fossils of the genus has shown that the brontosaurus was a distinct genus. While the dino does have strong similarities to the apatosaurus, there are enough differences to separate the two, the study’s authors concluded.

Our research would not have been possible at this level of detail 15 or more years ago”, explains Emanuel Tschopp, a Swiss national who led the research from the Universidade Nova de Lisboa in Portugal, “in fact, until very recently, the claim that Brontosaurus was the same as Apatosaurus was completely reasonable, based on the knowledge we had.”

The initial argument for the non-existence of the brontosaurus was down to its sacrum bones, which link the tail to the base of the spine. The first Thunder Lizard found had five of these, compared to the apatosaurus’ three, but it was assumed that the brontosaurus bones were young and would have merged together to form these three bones.

But as more and more specimens were found, this theory started to look a little off. That was reinforced by other fossil evidence, so the new study turned to statistics to find out what was going on.

“The differences we found between Brontosaurus and Apatosaurus were at least as numerous as the ones between other closely related genera, and much more than what you normally find between species,” explained Roger Benson, a co-author from the University of Oxford.

I have no clue why I am so giddy over this news, but I am incredibly happy about this.

We are F%$#ed

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The Gulf Stream


Warmest year ever, but northeast, and the ocean just off of Greenland coast hit the coldest ever

A recent study shows that the Gulf Stream flow has decreased more in the past 100 years than at any time in the past 1000+ years:

Possible changes in Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) provide a key source of uncertainty regarding future climate change. Maps of temperature trends over the twentieth century show a conspicuous region of cooling in the northern Atlantic. Here we present multiple lines of evidence suggesting that this cooling may be due to a reduction in the AMOC over the twentieth century and particularly after 1970. Since 1990 the AMOC seems to have partly recovered. This time evolution is consistently suggested by an AMOC index based on sea surface temperatures, by the hemispheric temperature difference, by coral-based proxies and by oceanic measurements. We discuss a possible contribution of the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet to the slowdown. Using a multi-proxy temperature reconstruction for the AMOC index suggests that the AMOC weakness after 1975 is an unprecedented event in the past millennium (p > 0.99). Further melting of Greenland in the coming decades could contribute to further weakening of the AMOC.

All I can see is the abstract, the article requires cash, but a number of locations have written about in a somewhat more accessible format:

Welcome to this week’s installment of “Don’t Mess with Geophysics.”

Last week, we learned about the possible destabilization of the Totten Glacier of East Antarctica, which could unleash over 11 feet of sea level rise in coming centuries.

And now this week brings news of another potential mega-scale perturbation. According to a new study just out in Nature Climate Change by Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and a group of co-authors, we’re now seeing a slowdown of the great ocean circulation that, among other planetary roles, helps to partly drive the Gulf Stream off the U.S. east coast. The consequences could be dire – including significant extra sea level rise for coastal cities like New York and Boston.

A vast, powerful, and warm current, the Gulf Stream transports more water than “all the world’s rivers combined,” according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. But it’s just one part of a larger regional ocean conveyor system – scientists technically call it the “Atlantic meridional overturning circulation” — which, in turn, is just one part of the larger global “thermohaline” circulation (“thermohaline” conjoins terms meaning “temperature” and “salty”).

For the whole system, a key driver occurs in the North Atlantic ocean. Here, the warm Gulf Stream flows northward into cooler waters and splits into what is called the North Atlantic Current. This stream flows still further toward northern latitudes — until it reaches points where colder, salty water sinks due to its greater density, and then travels back southward at depth.

This “overturning circulation” plays a major role in the climate because it brings warm water northward, thereby helping to warm Europe’s climate, and also sends cold water back towards the tropics. Here’s a helpful visualization, from Rahmstorf and the Potsdam Institute, of how it works: ……… (see top pic)

………

The system above has a key vulnerability. What keeps everything churning in the North Atlantic is the fact that cold salt water is more dense than warm water — so it sinks. However, if too much ice melts in the region — from, say Greenland — a freshening of the cold salt water could occur. If the water is less salty it will also be less dense, reducing its tendency to sink below the surface.

………

Rahmstorf points to a recent release by the National Climatic Data Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, finding that the winter of December 2014 through February 2015 was the warmest on record for the globe as a whole. However, there were several anomalies — not just a cold winter for the eastern U.S., but also record cold temperatures in the middle of the North Atlantic: ……… (see bottom pic)

………

However, there are many other effects, ranging from dramatic impacts on fisheries to, perhaps most troubling of all, the potential for extra sea level rise in the North Atlantic region.

That may sound surprising, but here’s how it works. We’re starting out from a situation in which sea level is “anomalously low” off the U.S. east coast due to the motion of the Gulf Stream. This is for at least two reasons. First, explains Rahmstorf’s co-author Michael Mann of Penn State University, there’s the matter of temperature contrast: Waters to the right or east of the Gulf Stream, in the direction of Europe, are warmer than those on its left or west. Warm water expands and takes up more area than denser cold water, so sea level is also higher to the right side of the current, and lower off our coast.

“So if you weaken the ‘Gulf Stream’ and weaken that temperature contrast…sea level off the U.S. east coast will actually rise!” explains Mann by e-mail.

This is going to get amazingly ugly.

What a F%$#ing Coward

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The Universe was created by the Flying Spaghetti Monster, hallowed be his noodly appendage, Ramen

Scott Walker traveled to London, the graveyard of gravitas for Republican Presidential candidates like Mitt Rmoney and Chris “Jabba the Governor” Christie, and when he is asked about evolution, he punts on it.

I mean that literally. He said, “I’m going to punt on that one as well.”

 I’m not surprised that Walker is a chickensh%$. It’s been obvious to me since he started to make national news, but I think that the press, and voters on both the myth and reality sides of the evolution will notice as well:

Likely 2016 presidential candidate Scott Walker refused to say Wednesday whether he believes in the theory of evolution, dodging that question and several others about foreign policy after delivering a speech about global trade in London.

“I’m going to punt on that one as well,” said Wisconsin’s Republican governor when asked about evolution at the end of an hour-long appearance at the prestigious Chatham House think tank. “That’s a question a politician shouldn’t be involved in one way or the other. So I’m going to leave that up to you.”

Real profile in courage there, Scotty boy.

I Made a Jive Ass Newbie Mistake on “Ball-Gate”

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Last week, I looked at deflate-gate (the Patriots ball inflation “scandal”), and ran some numbers.

I used °F, and figured that if the balls were filled up to 12.7 psi at 70°F, and they cooled to 20°F, you would get a pressure drop of 1.38°F.

Boyle’s law is PV=nRT, where P=pressure, V=Volume, n=the amount of the gas in moles, R=the ideal gas constant, at T=temperature.

Since in the football, volume, amount of gas, and the ideal gas constant remains the same, so we can reduce this to:

P1/T1=P2/T2

Then we can solve for P2: P2=(P1/T1)T2

So, the math looks good, where is the “Jive Ass Newbie Mistake?

Because the pressure in the football isn’t 12.5 psi it’s 27.2 (12.5+14.7) psi.

Boyle’s law is based on absolute pressure, not gauge pressure. Gauge pressure is the difference between the absolute pressure of what you are measuring and the atmospheric pressure.

I am a complete tool for screwing this up.

It turns out that using absolute pressure, a 31 degree ball will be 2.076 psi under-inflated.

So, “Ball-Gate” is largely just an effort by Roger Goodell to make people forget that he is an incompetent and corrupt liar.  (Ray Rice and Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, two name just 2)

Full disclosure: My wife is a Patriots fan, though I’m not.

I’ll be watching the Superbowl for the ads.

(On edit)
There also might be water vapor in the air used to inflate the ball that would further exacerbate the pressure drop as it condenses.

(2nd edit)
I just realized that I had not posted this on my blog before, the screw up was on a comment I made on Facebook.

Still, I will apologize here.

So, Now I’m Thanking Richard Nixon and Pierre Elliot Trudeau ……… Odd History

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It turns out that the surge, and subsequent drop, in crime in Canada also appears to be an artifact of lead exposure:

I’m happy to see lead at least get a shout out. Unless I’ve missed something, this might actually be the first time the New York Times has ever mentioned childhood lead exposure as a possible explanation for the decline in violent crime. Progress!

But while Eckholm is right to say that none of the other factors he mentions can explain a decline in violent crime that happened all over the world, he’s wrong to include lead in that list. It’s the one explanation that does have the potential to explain a worldwide drop in crime levels. In particular, the chart on the right shows the use of gasoline lead in Canada, which peaked in the mid-70s and then began dropping as catalytic converters became more common. Leaded gasoline was banned for good in 1990, and is now virtually gone with a few minor exceptions for specialized vehicles.

So what happened? As Zimring says, Canada saw a substantial decrease in violent crime that started about 20 years after lead emissions began to drop, which is exactly what you’d expect. I calculated the numbers for Canada’s biggest cities back when I was researching my lead-crime piece, and crime was down from its peak values everywhere: 31 percent in Montreal, 36 percent in Edmonton, 40 percent in Toronto and Vancouver, and 53 percent in Ottawa. CompStat and broken windows and American drug laws can’t explain that.

It is almost certain that lead exposure is a significant factor the rise and fall of crime world wide, and given the wide variations in techniques used by law enforcement, it is likely the most significant factor in the rise and fall of crime worldwide.

Given the clearly racist assumptions of broken windows policing, and the even more clearly racist subtext of America’s fascination with incarceration, it’s not surprising that the law enforcement establishment has studiously avoided looking at lead’s effects on crime.

Racially biased law enforcement philosophies, particularly when it generates more money for law enforcement and incarceration is a feature of, and not a bug in, our society.

It’s all Just Weather, Longhair

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A recent dendrochronology study has shown that California’s drought is the worst in at least 1200 years:

Scientists studying the severe drought that has beleaguered California for the past three years estimate that this drought is the worst one in the past 1,200 years. The new estimate comes from data they compiled on tree ring growth and soil moisture. Low (but not unprecedented) precipitation and record high temperatures are the main factors driving this drought, the scientists say. An online edition of the journal Geophysical Research Letters published this work on December 3, 2014.

It should be noted that the study primarily used the Blue Oak (Quercus douglasii) which are particularly good at showing rainfall, though, 1200 years is a lot longer than the typical life span of this tree.

My guess would be that they used other (probably less accurate) trees, and perhaps some other indicators.

It is not clear from the abstract whether there was a worse drought 1200 years ago, or if it’s just the worst in the 1200 years, and perhaps more.

If it is the former, that drought corresponds to the Mayan collapse, which many (though by no means all) archaeologists attribute (at least in part) to an extended drought.  (The Mayan collapse is a matter of some dispute in academe.)

In either case, the fact that this drought is worse than 300 year long drought that destroyed Anasazi civilization between 1150 and 1450. 

What is going on here is, to use the technical term, seriously weird climate sh%$, and it requires willful ignorance not to consider anthropogenic climate change as a primary factor.

String Theory Taken to Its Logical Conclusion

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Proponents of the controversial theory have taken to arguing that their theory is so elegant that it should require no experimental verification:

This year, debates in physics circles took a worrying turn. Faced with difficulties in applying fundamental theories to the observed Universe, some researchers called for a change in how theoretical physics is done. They began to argue — explicitly — that if a theory is sufficiently elegant and explanatory, it need not be tested experimentally, breaking with centuries of philosophical tradition of defining scientific knowledge as empirical. We disagree. As the philosopher of science Karl Popper argued: a theory must be falsifiable to be scientific.

I agree wholeheartedly.

BTW, that sound you hear is Richard Feynman spinning in his grave.

Chief among the ‘elegance will suffice’ advocates are some string theorists. Because string theory is supposedly the ‘only game in town’ capable of unifying the four fundamental forces, they believe that it must contain a grain of truth even though it relies on extra dimensions that we can never observe. Some cosmologists, too, are seeking to abandon experimental verification of grand hypotheses that invoke imperceptible domains such as the kaleidoscopic multiverse (comprising myriad universes), the ‘many worlds’ version of quantum reality (in which observations spawn parallel branches of reality) and pre-Big Bang concepts.

 These unprovable hypotheses are quite different from those that relate directly to the real world and that are testable through observations — such as the standard model of particle physics and the existence of dark matter and dark energy. As we see it, theoretical physics risks becoming a no-man’s-land between mathematics, physics and philosophy that does not truly meet the requirements of any.

My knowledge of string theory is minimal, coming from my (PhD in physics) brother who mocks it for its lack ability to make meaningful predictions. (There’s also the representation in pop culture in Big Bang Theory, but I do not take my lead from such)

On the other hand, I know bullsh%$ when I hear it, and the idea that an unprovable theory should be accepted on the basis of its aesthetics is definitely bovine scatology.

This is an indictment of those string theorists who are calling for its acceptance on pure faith, but it is more than that: It is a searing indictment of string theory by those who are its greatest proponents.

H/T DC at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

F%$#ing Flowers!!!!!

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I mean that quite literally.

I have had a most unpleasant day.

I do not know which angiosperm gives off copious amounts of pollen in November in Maryland in a final bit of libidinous excess.

Some plant is f%$#ing their proverbial roots off, and my nose is running like a faucet.

Or maybe it’s the beginning of a cold.

Hopefully it’s the plant thing.

A Triumphant Fist Pump for Stephen Hawking, Because He Cannot for Himself

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We now have some experimental verification of the existance of Hawking radiation:

Scientists have come closer than ever before to creating a laboratory-scale imitation of a black hole that emits Hawking radiation, the particles predicted to escape black holes due to quantum mechanical effects.

The black hole analogue, reported in Nature Physics1, was created by trapping sound waves using an ultra cold fluid. Such objects could one day help resolve the so-called black hole ‘information paradox’ – the question of whether information that falls into a black hole disappears forever.

The physicist Stephen Hawking stunned cosmologists 40 years ago when he announced that black holes are not totally black, calculating that a tiny amount of radiation would be able to escape the pull of a black hole2. This raised the tantalising question of whether information might escape too, encoded within the radiation.

………

Hawking radiation, the result of attempts to combine quantum theory with general relativity, comprises these escaping particles, but physicists have yet to detect it being emitted from an astrophysical black hole. Another way to test Hawking’s theory would be to simulate an event horizon in the laboratory.

To this end, Jeff Steinhauer, a physicist at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, used a collection of rubidium atoms chilled to less than 1-billionth of a degree above absolute zero. At such temperatures, the atoms are tightly packed and behave as a single, fluid quantum object and so can be easily manipulated. The cold temperature also ensures that the fluid, known as a Bose-Einstein condensate, provides a silent medium for the passage of sound waves that arise from quantum fluctuations.

Using laser light, Steinhauer manipulated the fluid to flow faster than the speed of sound. Like a swimmer battling a strong current, sound waves travelling against the direction of the fluid become ‘trapped’. The condensate thus becomes a stand-in for the gravitational event horizon.

Pairs of sound waves pop in and out of existence in a laboratory vacuum, mimicking particle-antiparticle pairs in the vacuum of space. Those that form astride this sonic event horizon become the equivalent of Hawking radiation. To amplify these sound waves enough for his detectors to pick them up, Steinhauer established a second sonic event horizon inside the first, adjusting the fluid so that sound waves could not pass this second event horizon, and are bounced back. As the soundwaves repeatedly strike the outer horizon, they create more pairs of soundwaves, amplifying the Hawking radiation to detectable levels.

I would also note that this is a wicked cool experiment.

Using a moving fluid and sound as an analogue for an event horizon is completely sick.  (In a good way)

Science, Bitches!

We Are Completely F%$#ed

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Three weeks ago, I wrote how warming in the Arctic is producing massive methane plumes as the methane hydrate on the ocean floor melts, well it’s also happening off the East Coast of the United States:

Plumes of bubbles streaming from hundreds of newly discovered sea-floor seeps between North Carolina and Massachusetts are likely to contain methane and could be adding as much as 90 tonnes of the planet-warming gas to the atmosphere or overlying waters each year, research published Sunday in Nature Geoscience suggests.


An estimated two-thirds of the emissions emanate from sediments at depths where methane-rich ices may be decomposing due to warming waters along the ocean bottom, the researchers say. Effects of these plumes on climate and ocean chemistry are not yet clear, but could extend well beyond the plumes themselves.

………

However, many of the sources along the continental slope lie at cold depths in which ices have formed at high pressures within sea-floor sediments, which once trapped methane produced by microbes living there. These ices may now be slowly breaking down because of the warming of overlying waters, says Skarke. At least one previous study2 has hinted that warming waters are destabilizing methane-rich ices at moderate depths farther south along the US Atlantic coast.

This is end of the world stuff.

Seriously.

We Are Unbelievably Screwed

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If the report of massive plums of methane developing is both true, and a new phenomena driven by anthropogenic climate change, then we are already on the far side of of this disaster, and we have gone from prevention to mitigation:

This week, scientists made a disturbing discovery in the Arctic Ocean: They saw “vast methane plumes escaping from the seafloor,” as the Stockholm University put it in a release disclosing the observations. The plume of methane—a potent greenhouse gas that traps heat more powerfully than carbon dioxide, the chief driver of climate change—was unsettling to the scientists.

But it was even more unnerving to Dr. Jason Box, a widely published climatologist who had been following the expedition. As I was digging into the new development, I stumbled upon his tweet, which, coming from a scientist, was downright chilling:

If even a small fraction of Arctic sea floor carbon is released to the atmosphere, we’re f’d.
— Jason Box (@climate_ice) July 29, 2014


Box, who is currently a professor of glaciology at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, has been studying the Arctic for decades. His accolade-packed Wikipedia page notes that he’s made some 20 expeditions to the Arctic since 1994, and served as the lead author on the Greenland section of NOAA’s State of the Climate report from 2008-2012. He also runs the Dark Snow project and writes about the latest findings in the field at his blog, Meltfactor.

………

“We are ‘sniffing’ methane,” Ulf Hedman, the science coordinator of the Swedish Polar Research Secretariat, wrote in a post highlighted by Climate Change SOS. “We see the bubbles on video from the camera mounted on the CTD or the Multicorer. All analysis tells the signs. We are in a Mega flare. We see it in the water column, we read it above the surface, and we follow it up high into the sky with radars and lasers. We see it mixed in the air and carried away with the winds. Methane in the air.”

“Methane is more than 20 times more potent than CO2 in trapping infrared as part of the natural greenhouse effect,” Box said. “Methane getting to the surface—that’s potent stuff.”

It’s especially worrying because the Arctic is warming faster than nearly anywhere else on Earth. Now, along with melting sea ice and thawing permafrost, we have to add to our list of ‘feedback loop’ concerns that warming Arctic oceans may be releasing fonts of methane. That is, the warmer the ocean gets, the more methane gets spewed out of those stores on the continental shelf, and the warmer the ocean gets, ad infinitum.

We need to get beyond the denials being driven by people who hate Al Gore and people who are making too much money on fossil fuels to allow for meaningful action to be taken, and we need to do it now.

H/t Crooks and Liars.

Another Day, Another Study Proving Antivaxxers full of It

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Parents worried about getting young children vaccinated against infectious diseases have fresh cause for reassurance, researchers say.

A new review of existing scientific evidence has concluded that childhood vaccines are safe and don’t cause serious health problems such as autism or leukemia.

“Our findings support that vaccines are very safe for children, and add to a substantial body of evidence that the benefits of vaccination outweigh the very low risks,” said senior author Dr. Courtney Gidengil, an associate physician scientist at RAND Corporation and an instructor at Harvard Medical School. “Hopefully, this will engage hesitant parents in discussions with their health care providers.”

The review found strong evidence that the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine is not associated with autism, which is consistent with previous reviews of this rumored link.

Some parents have chosen not to have their children vaccinated because of a now-debunked and retracted study published in 1998 that suggested that the MMR vaccine might cause autism. It was later reported that the study’s author, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, had altered some of the study’s results.

The researchers behind the new study also found no link between childhood leukemia and vaccines for MMR, DTaP (diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis), tetanus, influenza and hepatitis B.

Overall, vaccines given to children 6 or younger are safe, causing few side effects, the review concluded. The findings are published in the July 1 online edition and the August print issue of the journal Pediatrics.

The fact that Andrew Wakefield is still a free man, when the death toll of his fraud numbers in the thousands, dishonors both the justice system and the scientific community.

Magnets How do They F%$#ing Work?

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Once again, it’s time to roll the Insane Clown Posse video Miracles, (Completely NSFW) because the Talibaptists are going full ICP Here

One of the joys of Neil deGrasse Tyson and his science show Cosmos, is the way that it makes the heads of the primordial wing of the Christian right explode.

Case in point, they have now come out opposing electromagnetism:

If there is one topic in each week’s Cosmos that sends the Christian fundamentalists into a frenzy, it is evolution.

 You see, scientists understand that most sciences cannot be done correctly if you ignore the scientific fact of evolution. Yet, week in and week out, creationists critique the job Tyson and his team of writers are doing, calling them speculative and misleading.

 Creationists would have you believe that Tyson and his crew are force-feeding viewers a story of evolution dreamed up in the minds of those who simply want to refute God and spread atheism.

 Calling evolutionary biologists names such as “evolutionists”—a word not used outside of the creationists sphere—is an attempt to demean the science as nothing more than a religion; ironically, the very thing they are trying to sell you on.

 This week’s episode, titled, “The Electric Boy” was about scientist Michael Faraday. Faraday’s study of electricity led to some of the biggest discoveries and inventions in the history of mankind, ranging from the electric motor to the discovery of electromagnetic waves that surround just about everything.

 How on earth could creationists be upset with electricity? Well, Tyson had the audacity to mention that Faraday’s discoveries helped us explain how birds navigate the globe using the earth’s electromagnetic waves, and that their brains are evolutionarily wired for such a task.

Seriously. What is wrong with these people, and why do we allow them to breed?

Big Ag Will Kill Us Now

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The good folks at I F%$#ing Love Science point us to a study that strongly indicates that neonicotinoid pesticides cause colony collapse disorder in bees:

A new study claims to have pegged neonicotinoids as the definitive cause of Colony Collapse Disorder. But does the data really justify the conclusions?

European honey bees are incredibly important pollinators. Unfortunately, they’re disappearing at a rapid rate due to a phenomenon known as colony collapse disorder (CCD). What actually causes CCD isn’t completely understood. CCD has confused scientists since it was first described, or had its name changed, in 2006. It is likely caused by a number of different factors, working together – however, there has been a large focus on a certain group of insecticides known as neonicotinoids. In December of 2013, in an attempt to mitigate their involvement, the EU implemented a two-year memorandum on three commonly used insecticides in the neonicotinoid family. Many, including their own government, criticized the science behind the moratorium.

There is a desperate need for new studies to accurately test the different variables involved in CCD. New research from Dr. Alex Lu attempts to peg neonicotinoid insecticides as the underlying cause of CCD. The study set up 18 hives to test the effects of two neonicotinoids, clothianidin and imidacloprid, from 2012-2013. Six colonies were selected from three different sites in central Massachusetts, and sublethal doses of each insecticide were given orally to treatment hives via a syrup solution. Six of twelve treated colonies abandoned their hives while only one of the six control hives abandoned theirs. Neonicotinoids obviously do not help bees, but whether this study has found them to be the ‘smoking gun’ isn’t exactly as clear as many are making it out to be. Only 18 hives were used in this study which is too small of a sample size to control for other variables and definitely too small to form a definitive conclusion as to the affects of neonicotinoids. The way he tests for CCD-like symptoms is not a definitive indication that is occurring. Hive abandonment is not automatically CCD. Honey bees may abandon their hives for any number of different reasons, and this study doesn’t control for any of them.

This is why things like pesticides should be proved safe before use, and not allowed until proved they are unsafe, as is the USDA’s policy in the United States.

This is a small study, and as such, it should not be the sole basis of regulatory policy, but I do think that this is a good justification to throwing a few million dollars at a larger study, before we lose our almond, avocado, apples, peaches, pears, etc.

Flight MH370 Sort-Of Found

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Basically, the telemetry data from the 777’s motors was subjected to additional analysis, and Doppler shift allowed them to locate the track of the plane to southwest of Perth, Australia:

Inmarsat leveraged a “groundbreaking but traditional mathematics-based process” to analyze data from other flights that use its satellite network and establish a pattern that helped investigators nail down Malaysia Airlines Flight 370’s (MH370) final flight path as traveling south over the Indian Ocean, an Inmarsat executive explains.

Inmarsat’s initial analysis, handed over to investigators on March 11, helped investigators establish the now-famous northern and southern arcs as possible flight corridors for MH370 after it dropped off radar on March 8 over the Andaman Sea.

Inmarsat VP External Communications Chris McLaughlin says the company continued to analyze its data, and concluded on March 23 that the aircraft’s last known position was in the middle of the Indian Ocean, well southwest of Perth.

“What we discovered and what we passed to the investigation … is that the southern path predicted fits very well with the path that’s been indicated by our pings,” McLaughlin says. “To all intents and purposes, there’s no way [the aircraft] went north.”

A key calculation done by Inmarsat was determining the “Doppler shift” in the ping, or the slight change in the frequency of the signal caused by the movement of the aircraft relative to the satellite in space.

“From that process – a compression or an expansion of the wavelengths – you can determine whether the aircraft is getting closer or farther away,” McLaughlin explains. “It’s been a groundbreaking but traditional mathematics-based process that was then peer-reviewed by others in the space industry, and indeed contributed to by Boeing.”

It increasingly looks to be some sort of horrible accident, and not malice, with the most rational theory being an electrical fire followed by a diversion to the nearest airport, and then extended operation on autopilot: (The author is a pilot, and it is the only explanation that makes sense)

There has been a lot of speculation about Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. Terrorism, hijacking, meteors. I cannot believe the analysis on CNN; it’s almost disturbing. I tend to look for a simpler explanation, and I find it with the 13,000-foot runway at Pulau Langkawi.

We know the story of MH370: A loaded Boeing 777 departs at midnight from Kuala Lampur, headed to Beijing. A hot night. A heavy aircraft. About an hour out, across the gulf toward Vietnam, the plane goes dark, meaning the transponder and secondary radar tracking go off. Two days later we hear reports that Malaysian military radar (which is a primary radar, meaning the plane is tracked by reflection rather than by transponder interrogation response) has tracked the plane on a southwesterly course back across the Malay Peninsula into the Strait of Malacca.

The left turn is the key here. Zaharie Ahmad Shah1 was a very experienced senior captain with 18,000 hours of flight time. We old pilots were drilled to know what is the closest airport of safe harbor while in cruise. Airports behind us, airports abeam us, and airports ahead of us. They’re always in our head. Always. If something happens, you don’t want to be thinking about what are you going to do–you already know what you are going to do. When I saw that left turn with a direct heading, I instinctively knew he was heading for an airport. He was taking a direct route to Palau Langkawi, a 13,000-foot airstrip with an approach over water and no obstacles. The captain did not turn back to Kuala Lampur because he knew he had 8,000-foot ridges to cross. He knew the terrain was friendlier toward Langkawi, which also was closer.

………

For me, the loss of transponders and communications makes perfect sense in a fire. And there most likely was an electrical fire. In the case of a fire, the first response is to pull the main busses and restore circuits one by one until you have isolated the bad one. If they pulled the busses, the plane would go silent. It probably was a serious event and the flight crew was occupied with controlling the plane and trying to fight the fire. Aviate, navigate, and lastly, communicate is the mantra in such situations.