Articles Tagged "Newsletter"

The New Year brings dreams of solar cycles of old, so distant now, sweetly remembered for their profusion of sunspots. We hear many times from operators who became licensed as teenagers at the peak of Solar Cycle 19, in the late 1950s, when a few watts and a modest radiator on 10 meters could span the globe every day and night.

If you were a teenaged ham at the peak of Solar Cycle 19, you looked forward to the next peak in activity, but were probably disappointed when Solar Cycle 20 peaked around 1969 with somewhat of a broader peak, but at a far lower level.

Solar Cycle 21 peaked around 1980, and was quite an improvement over the last cycle, as was Solar Cycle 22, which looked a lot like Solar Cycle 21. Cycle 22 peaked around 1991-1992, with a more pronounced double peak. The formerly teenaged ham was now solidly into middle age, and still wondering if sunspot activity would ever roar back to the levels of the late 1950s.

Solar Cycle 23 was another double peak, but significantly lower in 2000, 2001 and 2002 than the previous cycle, perhaps disappointing the middle-aged ham, who then sees solar activity slide into a long and low minimum over the next decade, in a way that was impossible to imagine as a teenaged ham enjoying Solar Cycle 19. The 160 meter operators -- quite happy in this situation with a much quieter Sun -- have no such longing for the active Sun of yesteryear.

NZCLIMATE TRUTH NEWSLETTER NO 300
SEPTEMBER 1ST 2012
THE IPCC CONFESSION

First, ,let me celebrate reaching NZClimateTruth Newsletter No 300.

Since I became interested in the "Greenhouse Effect", when I was in China in 1990, I have published 128 Greenhouse Bulletins and 300 NZClimate Truth Bulletins. These have covered every aspect of this subject. They are a history of what has happened,, a review of the published information, including all the IPCC publications, and a record of my own steady disillusion with its claims.. They have been circulated by Email to many people all over the world and many have been the basis for published works, some of which are "peer reviewed" and others which have appeared in parts of the Web. I have amalgamated all of the Greenhouse Bulletins into complete volumes.

I have never attempted to have a website or a blog as I have preferred to spend my time studying and commenting.

All of this material is available free on demand. It would be useful to anybody interested in the history of what has happened.

The Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment says conditions placed by the US as part of its climate fast-start finance initiative is killing the Indian solar panel industry. According to the CSE, the US Exim Bank and the Overseas Private Investment Corporation are offering low-interest loans to solar project developers in India only if they buy the equipment, the solar panels and cells from US companies. As a result most orders are being bagged by US companies rather than local manufacturers, putting the domestic solar photo-voltaic industry at risk, says CSE deputy director Chandra Bhushan. Fast start finance is a $30 billion fund set up under the aegis of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC). The fund, adopted at the Copenhagen climate meet in 2009, is meant to help developing nations deal with the impact of climate change and limit greenhouse gas emissions, says Bhushan. --Labonita Ghosh, Economic Times of India, 17 August 2012

In the week when BASF announce that they are moving their Plant Science headquarters from Germany to America, the Scientific Alliance looks at the influence of environmental activists.

This week BASF, German-based and the world’s largest chemical company, announced it was withdrawing from the development of genetically modified crops in Europe (BASF to concentrate plant biotechnology activities on main markets in North and South America).

After a relatively late start in the field, it has built up a core competence which has resulted in the approval (after a long struggle) for the Amflora potato (containing high amylopectin starch for industrial use). The company has also been trialling a blight resistant potato which could have led to large reductions in fungicide spraying and significant cost reductions for farmers. But, because the European regulatory and business environment for crop biotechnology still seems so negative, the company has thrown in the towel and will transfer its key expertise to the USA.

In the short term, this looks like a sensible business decision; rather than continue to invest in a technology which had no apparent chance of being profitable in Europe for the foreseeable future, BASF has decided to concentrate on core businesses here while applying its biotechnology expertise in more welcoming markets. In the long term, this pretty much guarantees that European farmers and citizens and the EU economy will miss out on the benefits of a technology offering great benefits and few risks. And it reinforces the reputation of Europe as backward-looking and anti-science. The Luddite tendency has notched up another victory.

A new study from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism suggests that sceptical views on climate change are only published because of the power of lobbying groups and political bias. But perhaps there is also bias in the opposite direction.

Green is good

At least, that’s the general assumption among the chattering classes and across much of the media. Companies compete to demonstrate their eco-credentials via reduced waste or recycled packaging (both worthwhile aims in themselves) and publish sustainability or environmental performance reports. Governments compound the message by increasing green taxes. But this means that everything tends to be looked at through green-tinted glasses, making objective judgement difficult.

A current interesting example of this attitude comes from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, in the form of a new report called Poles Apart: The international reporting of climate scepticism. Only the executive summary is available for free download, but this is quite enough to provide food for thought (those wanting to read the complete publication will need to shell out £19.95).

The conclusions as reported are that Brazil, China, France and India have a much lower proportion of stories sceptical of climate change in the media than do the UK and USA. In these two countries, there were both more sceptical articles and the proportion increased substantially following the ‘Climategate’ revelations in the leaked University of East Anglia emails. The author, James Painter, looked at newspapers reflecting both left-of-centre and right-of-centre editorial lines in all six countries, and additionally reviewed all ten UK national newspapers.

Our Sun has been very active this past week, with the average solar flux rising nearly 12 points to 155.5, while the average daily sunspot numbers dropped nearly 41 points to 96.1. This implies fewer, but more intense, sunspots. Sunspot numbers for September 22-28 were 86, 90, 88, 108, 103, 82 and 116, with a mean of 96.1. The 10.7 cm flux was 150.8, 158.2, 190.4, 168.8, 148.2, 139 and 133.4, with a mean of 155.5. The estimated planetary A indices were 3, 3, 4, 4, 67, 30 and 24, with a mean of 19.3. The estimated mid-latitude A indices were 2, 2, 3, 4, 20, 22 and 13, with a mean of 9.4.

A huge sunspot group numbered 1302 emerged on September 22. This was the source of a coronal mass ejection that triggered an immense geomagnetic storm. The planetary A index peaked at 67 on September 26, followed by 30 the next day and 24 on September 28. The planetary K index reached 8 for two of the three-hour reporting periods on September 26, indicating an intense geomagnetic storm. The resulting aurora was observed in many places, including Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, North Dakota and South Dakota. On September 22, there was a major X1.4 class solar flare at 1100 UTC, with a large CME, but this was when sunspot 1302 was just coming over the horizon, so it wasn’t Earth-directed. On September 24 sunspot group 1302 produced a larger X1.9 flare, and today the group is just past the point where it is directly facing Earth, but still in the middle of the visible solar disc. It could still produce more flares.

A UK Education adviser has proposed that climate change should no longer form part of the national curriculum for schools. It may come as a surprise to some that it is in fact a government requirement that children should have to learn about something which is still controversial, rather than basic underlying science. But this is simply part of a trend in recent years to teach about social issues rather than impart the core knowledge of the science behind them.

The story was first reported in the Guardian (Climate change should be excluded from curriculum, says adviser) but taken up by a variety of other sources. Tim Oates, the adviser in question, is the director of research at Cambridge Assessment, one of the organisations which sets GCSE and A-Level exams in the England, Wales and Northern Ireland. He was charged by the coalition government with reviewing the entire 500 page national curriculum, which defines what children from 5 to 16 should be taught. Originally introduced following the Education Reform Act of 1988, the national curriculum was intended to define the core knowledge in key subjects which all state school pupils should be taught (the private sector does not have to abide by the same rule). However, from such sensible-sounding beginnings, it has now grown into the all-encompassing hydra we see today.

A review is certainly needed. The range of prescriptive teaching means that non-core activities such as music and team games have suffered and teachers complain of the lack of flexibility available to them. There is no evidence that pupils at private schools suffer because their teachers have greater freedom to plan lessons appropriately. After all, many parents are prepared to endure a certain amount of financial hardship to pay for their children to be taught in this way.

Click source to read FULL Newsletter from Benny Peiser

CLICK source to download PDF file and read CCNet 29th May Newsletter from Benny Peiser