Adding to the complexity, the oceans do not rise evenly all over the world as water is poured in. Air pressure, winds and currents can shove water in a given ocean to one side: since 1950, for example, a 1,000-kilometre stretch of the US Atlantic coast north of Cape Hatteras in North Carolina has seen the sea rise at 3–4 times the global average rate5. In large part, this is because the Gulf Stream and the North Atlantic current, which normally push waters away from that coast, have been weakening, allowing water to slop back onto US shores.
Finally, waters near big chunks of land and ice are literally pulled up onto shores by gravity. As ice sheets melt, the gravitational field weakens and alters the sea level. If Greenland melted enough to raise global seas by an average of 1 metre, for example, the gravitational effect would lower water levels near Greenland by 2.5 metres and raise them by as much as 1.3 metres far away.
It’s striking in this context to recall that, only 20 years ago, the phrase “Science Wars” was used in relation to generally leftish postmodernists in the humanities, who were seen as rejecting science and/or promoting pseudoscience (while some of this stuff was rather silly, there’s no evidence that it ever did any actual harm to science). These days postmodernist and related “science studies” critiques of science are part of the rightwing arsenal used by Steven Fuller to defend creationism and by Daniel Sarewitz on climate science. The routine assumption that the analyses put forward of innumerate bloggers are just as valid as (in fact more valid than) as those of scientists who have devoted their life to the relevant field is one aspect of this, as is the constant demand to “teach the controversy” on evolution, climate science, wind turbine health scares, vaccination and so on.Mind you, I would probably put anti-vaccination in the "mainly Left" side of the ledger.
In the short run, the costs of attacking science are small. Scientists aren’t that numerous, so their conversion into one of the most solidly anti-Republican voting blocs in the US has’t had much electoral impact. But, eventually the fact that conservatives are the “stupid party” gets noticed, even by rightwingers themselves.
A 61-year-old man — with a history of home-brewing — stumbled into a Texas emergency room complaining of dizziness. Nurses ran a Breathalyzer test. And sure enough, the man's blood alcohol concentration was a whopping 0.37 percent, or almost five times the legal limit for driving in Texas.
There was just one hitch: The man said that he hadn't touched a drop of alcohol that day.
"He would get drunk out of the blue — on a Sunday morning after being at church, or really, just anytime," says , the dean of nursing at Panola College in Carthage, Texas. "His wife was so dismayed about it that she even bought a Breathalyzer."
Other medical professionals chalked up the man's problem to "closet drinking." But Cordell and Dr. Justin McCarthy, a gastroenterologist in Lubbock, wanted to figure out what was really going on.
So the team searched the man's belongings for liquor and then isolated him in a hospital room for 24 hours. Throughout the day, he ate carbohydrate-rich foods, and the doctors periodically checked his blood for alcohol. At one point, it rose 0.12 percent.
Eventually, McCarthy and Cordell pinpointed the culprit: an overabundance of brewer's yeast in his gut.
That's right, folks. According to Cordell and McCarthy, the man's intestinal tract was acting like his own internal brewery.This makes me wonder whether some college students will try some experiments on themselves. Perhaps if you neutralise stomach acid first with an antacid, then take a tablespoon or two of freeze dried yeast, followed by some starch....
The patient had an infection with Saccharomyces cerevisiae , Cordell says. So when he ate or drank a bunch of starch — a bagel, pasta or even a soda — the yeast fermented the sugars into ethanol, and he would get drunk. Essentially, he was brewing beer in his own gut. Cordell and McCarthy the case of "auto-brewery syndrome" a few months ago in the International Journal of Clinical Medicine.
The story of Andrew Metcalfe, who is out of Agriculture, goes back quite a way. Metcalfe formerly headed Immigration. In 2011 he gave a background briefing to journalists (later attributed to him) in which he suggested that Abbott’s policy of turning back boats, while effective under Howard, would not work now, because the asylum seekers would scuttle the boats and Indonesia would not agree to the policy.
The two cardinal sins in Coalition eyes are believing in a carbon price and not believing in turning around boats.Metcalfe also came up with the "Malaysia solution", so of course he couldn't stay, even though Amanda Vanstone worked with him under Howard and spoke highly of him.
Blair Comley, who went to Resources after Labor scrapped the Climate Change department, had a major hand in Labor’s carbon policy and was a stronger defender of it. Enough said.
There are two new heads. Gordon de Brouwer becomes secretary of the Environment department and Renee Leon will head the Employment department. Both have been senior in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet (de Brouwer an associate secretary); sources say de Brouwer has a strong advocate in business leader Maurice Newman.What's the bet that if Maurice endorses him to head environment, he's a climate change skeptic in private?
Hitler is also a fan of alternative history. He wished the Muslims had conquered Europe, viewing Islam as appropriately martial and not "weak" like Christianity.
Normally I am against defamation proceedings,Well, given that he's been successfully sued for defamation, and could likely have been further sued for defamation by at least some of the "white aborigines" who took him to court under the Racial Discrimination Act instead, why am I not surprised?
"Sometimes people laugh at this comment, but the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun," he said.
"And in America, there are more good guys with guns than there are in Australia.
"So I would think the outcome would have been worse in Australia than it was there."
Maurice Newman, the former chairman of the ABC and the ASX who will be the chair of Tony Abbott’s Business Advisory Council, has launched an attack against the CSIRO, the weather bureau and the “myth” of anthropological climate change.
In an opinion piece written for the Australian Financial Review, Newman said much of the public service infrastructure would be resistant to change because of their “vested interests” in the status quo.
“The CSIRO, for example, has 27 scientists dedicated to climate change,” Newman wrote. “It and the weather bureau continue to propagate the myth of anthropological climate change and are likely to be background critics of the Coalition’s Direct Action policies.”...
Given Newman’s dismissal of climate science, one wonders why he sees the need for Direct Action of any type. The answer possibly lies in the government’s updated policy position: Abbott has conceded that the government will no longer seek to reach even the minimum 5 per cent emission reduction target if its reduced budget of $3 billion falls short of requirements.
Newman’s comments came a day after it was revealed that Abbott’s mentor John Howard would address one of the world’s most prominent climate skeptics think tanks, and the portfolios of science and climate change had been subsumed into other ministries.
Newman said money spent on pursuing the myths of climate change and global action was wasted, because they misallocate capital and add to unemployment.
In a paper posted last week on the arXiv preprint server1, Afshordi and his colleagues turn their attention to a proposal2 made in 2000 by a team including Gia Dvali, a physicist now at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich, Germany. In that model, our three-dimensional (3D) Universe is a membrane, or brane, that floats through a ‘bulk universe’ that has four spatial dimensions.
Ashfordi's team realized that if the bulk universe contained its own four-dimensional (4D) stars, some of them could collapse, forming 4D black holes in the same way that massive stars in our Universe do: they explode as supernovae, violently ejecting their outer layers, while their inner layers collapse into a black hole.
In our Universe, a black hole is bounded by a spherical surface called an event horizon. Whereas in ordinary three-dimensional space it takes a two-dimensional object (a surface) to create a boundary inside a black hole, in the bulk universe the event horizon of a 4D black hole would be a 3D object — a shape called a hypersphere. When Afshordi’s team modelled the death of a 4D star, they found that the ejected material would form a 3D brane surrounding that 3D event horizon, and slowly expand.
The authors postulate that the 3D Universe we live in might be just such a brane — and that we detect the brane’s growth as cosmic expansion. “Astronomers measured that expansion and extrapolated back that the Universe must have begun with a Big Bang — but that is just a mirage,” says Afshordi.
An all-time 24-hour record rainfall of 9.08” (as of 6 p.m. 9/12 MT--almost double the previous record) has deluged the city of Boulder, Colorado resulting in widespread flash flooding and the deaths of at least three people so far. 12.27" has accumulated since Monday 5 p.m. (September 9th). Needless to say, these are numbers that surpass most tropical storm events. Other locations in the Boulder and Rocky Mountain Front Range have picked up over 11” of precipitation in just the past 24 hours. The official Colorado state record of 11.08" for a 24-hour period set at Holly on June 17, 1965 might be in jeopardy. UPDATE A site near Eldorado Springs in Jefferson County has reported 14.60" of rainfall as of 9:40 p.m. MT on Thursday evening. It is not clear if this is a storm total or 24-hour total.
Lang, noting the changes he saw taking place in his daughter after her second marriage, famously remarked in a letter to her: "At least allow me to remember you as the neat, trim, capable and attractive young lady of the 'Wake Up Australia' tour [when she was married to Greg Milton], rather than the slothful, vindictive and devious baby elephant that you have become. I am glad your mother cannot see you now."Nasty, but somewhat amusing in a multi-generational soap opera sort of way. (I never watched Dallas, but I wonder if the real life Rinehart saga indicates that the show may have been far more realistic than people imagined.)
I erred by not contesting the label “tax” for the fixed price period of the emissions trading scheme I introduced. I feared the media would end up playing constant silly word games with me, trying to get me to say the word “tax”. I wanted to be on the substance of the policy, not playing “gotcha”. But I made the wrong choice and, politically, it hurt me terribly.Why aren't I paid a lot of money to be a political adviser?
Hindsight can give you insights about what went wrong. But only faith, reason and bravery can propel you forward.
Labor should not in opposition abandon our carbon pricing scheme. Climate change is real. Carbon should be priced. Community concern about carbon pricing did abate after its introduction. Tony Abbott does not have a viable alternative.
While it will be uncomfortable in the short term to be seen to be denying the mandate of the people, the higher cost would be appearing as, indeed becoming, a party unable to defend its own policy and legislation: a party without belief, fortitude or purpose.
Labor is on the right side of history on carbon pricing and must hold its course. Kevin Rudd was both right and brave to say this in the dying days of the campaign.
Cotton. One of the major killers of human history was typhus, a bacterial disease spread by lice. It defeated Napoleon’s army; if Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture were historically accurate, it would feature less cannon fire and more munching arthropods. Wool was the clothing material of choice before cotton displaced it. Cotton is easier to clean than wool and less hospitable to body lice.And:
Pasteurization. This should be an obvious lifesaver, right up there with hand-washing and proper nutrition. But the rise of the raw milk movement suggests that a lot of people take safe dairy products for granted. Contaminated milk was one of the major killers of children, transmitting typhoid fever, scarlet fever, diphtheria, tuberculosis, and other diseases. One of the most successful public health campaigns of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was for pure and pasteurized milk—so successful that we don’t really remember how deadly milk can be.(I didn't realise that so many diseases had been associated with unpasteurised milk.)
Five "sniffer rats" have been in police training in the Dutch city of Rotterdam, learning how to distinguish between scents - including blood, drugs and explosives.There's video at the link, but wasn't working when I tried it.
The brown rats are due to go into active service next year, operating under the names Poirot, Magnum, Derrick - TV detectives popular in the Netherlands - and Jansen and Janssen, the Dutch names for the bowler-hatted detectives in Tintin.
It means the Netherlands will be the first country to use trained rats in civilian police investigations.
One reason for this, of course, is that for most Protestants (and some Catholics), the ideas I am describing – the whole Marian lore – is so bizarre, so outré, so sentimental, and so blatantly superstitious that it just does not belong within the proper study of Christianity. If anything, it’s actively anti-Christian. Even scholars prepared to wrestle with the intricacies of Gnostic cosmic mythology throw up their hands at what they consider a farrago of medieval nonsense.
As I’ll argue in a forthcoming post, that response is profoundly mistaken. If we don’t understand devotion to Mary, together with such specifics as the Assumption, we are missing a very large portion of the Christian experience throughout history. It’s not “just medieval,” any more than it is a trivial or superstitious accretion.
I wonder if the RSPCA there takes in all strays?Police are seeking the owner of the lion, believed to be someone who was illegally rearing it as a pet in a country where such animals are sometimes considered status symbols.
Archbishop Pietro Parolin said in response to an interview question with Venezuelan newspaper El Universal that “celibacy is not an institution but look, it is also true that you can discuss (it) because as you say this is not a dogma, a dogma of the church.” Parolin also noted, even though the church is not a democratic institution, it must "reflect the democratic spirit of the times and adopt a collegial way of governing."
According to the National Catholic Reporter, Parolin’s comments “are raising eyebrows today, with some wondering if they herald looming changes in Catholic teaching and practice.”
Brown’s team has found more than 40 different microbes living in the guts of giant pandas at the Memphis Zoo that could help decompose the corn cobs and other tough plant materials so it can be more easily and efficiently processed to make ethanol.
The study is using the feces from giant pandas Ya Ya and Le Le. Pandas, which have a short digestive tract, feast on a diet of tough bamboo. Bacteria with extremely potent enzymes break down the woody bamboo efficiently and quickly.
“The time from eating to defecation is comparatively short in the panda, so their microbes have to be very efficient to get nutritional value out of the bamboo,” Brown said. “And efficiency is key when it comes to biofuel production — that’s why we focused on the microbes in the giant panda.”
Brown’s team found the specific bacteria that break down lignocellulose into simple sugars, which can be fermented into bioethanol, and they found other bacteria that can transform those sugars into oils and fats for biodiesel production.
The microbes in pandas’ guts are accessible via their feces and can easily be cultured, Brown said.
It is the scourge of many a middle-aged man: he starts getting a pot belly, using lighter weights at the gym and somehow just doesn’t have the sexual desire of his younger years.What a complicated design is the human body, heh?
The obvious culprit is testosterone, since men gradually make less of the male sex hormone as years go by. But a surprising new answer is emerging, one that doctors say could reinvigorate the study of how men’s bodies age. Estrogen, the female sex hormone, turns out to play a much bigger role in men’s bodies than previously thought, and falling levels contribute to their expanding waistlines just as they do in women’s.
The discovery of the role of estrogen in men is “a major advance,” said Dr. Peter J. Snyder, a professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, who is leading a big new research project on hormone therapy for men 65 and over. Until recently, testosterone deficiency was considered nearly the sole reason that men undergo the familiar physical complaints of midlife.
It is a little bemusing that the only concrete decision taken by the yet-to-be-sworn-in government is to waste money – having to pay Steve Bracks a couple of years’ wages for nothing amidst suggestions that the New York consul general’s post will instead go to a Liberal Party worthy.Is that right, the bit about the 2 years salary?
Increasing atmospheric partial pressure of CO2 (pCO2) is a major threat to coral reefs, but some argue that the threat is mitigated by factors such as the variability in the response of coral calcification to acidification, differences in bleaching susceptibility, and the potential for rapid adaptation to anthropogenic warming. However the evidence for these mitigating factors tends to involve experimental studies on corals, as opposed to coral reefs, and rarely includes the influence of multiple variables (e.g., temperature and acidification) within regimes that include diurnal and seasonal variability. Here, we demonstrate that the inclusion of all these factors results in the decalcification of patch-reefs under business-as-usual scenarios and reduced, although positive, calcification under reduced-emission scenarios. Primary productivity was found to remain constant across all scenarios, despite significant bleaching and coral mortality under both future scenarios. Daylight calcification decreased and nocturnal decalcification increased sharply from the preindustrial and control conditions to the future scenarios of low (reduced emissions) and high (business-as-usual) increases in pCO2. These changes coincided with deeply negative carbonate budgets, a shift toward smaller carbonate sediments, and an increase in the abundance of sediment microbes under the business-as-usual emission scenario. Experimental coral reefs demonstrated highest net calcification rates and lowest rates of coral mortality under preindustrial conditions, suggesting that reef processes may not have been able to keep pace with the relatively minor environmental changes that have occurred during the last century. Taken together, our results have serious implications for the future of coral reefs under business-as-usual environmental changes projected for the coming decades and century.
CAPRICORNIA’S newest federal candidate believes the United Nations contracted a private company to cause the floods in Central Queensland in 2010 and 2011.And remember who helped launch Rise Up Australia - none other than Christopher Monckton.
Rise Up Australia Party’s Paul Lewis yesterday expressed concern his views might not get him elected....
The self-proclaimed born-again Christian said he had visited friends in the region over the past six years. During his visits in the past three years he said it was obvious “weather manipulation” technology was being used.
He said aerial tankers bought by a private company from the US defence force were sub-contracted by the UN to spray chemicals on clouds over CQ in 2010, causing high levels of rainfall.
Last Saturday, the hosts of the Minnesota-based radio show “The Sons of Liberty,” Bradlee Dean and Jake McMillan, claimed that homosexuals are responsible for half of all murders committed in large cities. Where they would get such a wildly inaccurate notion, nobody knows. Facts or actual information seldom interfere with the dissemination of hatred.Well, I had missed the "killer gays" meme back in the 1990's, but it good to see that it gets an airing at the ABC collective. (You remember - the Australian, Bolt, Catallaxy.)
Dean, who is founder and executive director of a nonprofit Christian youth organization, You Can Run But You Cannot Hide International (wow, doesn’t that Mad Max-inspired name make Christianity seem appealing?), said he was quoting a New York City judge named John Martagh. But, after just a little digging, the Huffington Post revealed the quote came from a 1992 newspaper column by an evangelical loony who never cited his statistical source, but is still quoted from time to time in anti-gay rhetoric. So this is just one of those lies that gets repeated enough it becomes a kind of truth for the liars.
In all Abbott’s talk about the mandate he will have, it is worth noting his own view in other circumstances. He wrote after the Howard government’s 2007 defeat: “[Opposition leader Brendan] Nelson is right to resist the intellectual bullying inherent in talk of ‘mandates’. What exactly is Rudd’s mandate anyway: to be an economic conservative or an old-fashioned Christian socialist? The elected opposition is no less entitled than the elected government to exercise judgement and to try to keep its election commitments.”Thanks for explaining that to us, Tony!
Should the evidence become compelling that global warming is due to human activity, that such global warming is likely to have significantly negative consequences for human existence, and that changes in human activity could realistically reverse those consequences, the LDP would favour market-based options.I doubt that a libertarian Senator will ever change on this - but if their website is to be believed, they may prefer carbon pricing to "direct action".
As University of Reading climate scientist Ed Hawkins noted last year,And this is nicely illustrated by this lovely gif, which I don't think I have seen before:
"Around 80% of the ~100 scientists at the Bjerknes [Arctic climate science] conference thought that there would be MORE Arctic sea-ice in 2013, compared to 2012."The reason so many climate scientists predicted more ice this year than last is quite simple. There's a principle in statistics known as "regression toward the mean," which is the phenomenon that if an extreme value of a variable is observed, the next measurement will generally be less extreme. In other words, we should not often expect to observe records in consecutive years. 2012 shattered the previous record low sea ice extent; hence 'regression towards the mean' told us that 2013 would likely have a higher minimum extent.
The sixth point to make is that there is a paradox at the heart of the AUS polity: the public appear to despise the Centre-Left’s psephologically whilst broadly agreeing with the Centre-Left ideologically. Thus the Centre-Left has been wiped out at both state and federal levels, yet there is no great public enthusiasm for austerity or Hewson “Fightback” program. This is demonstrated by Abbott’s Big Government me-tooism on the subjects of Gonski education, national disability and some kind of national broadband program. He is also reluctant to revisit industrial relations, a traditional favorite of the L/NP Right. ...
The tenth and final point to make is that the ALP did not really deserve to lose this election. going by the its performance, politicians and policies. Its economic administration was competent, there were no appalling ministerial scandals (apart from leadership tussles which were finally settled), its headline policies were broadly popular. At some basic level the electorate has made a bad decision – especially given that revoking the carbon and mineral taxes will empower the oligarchy. I draw this conclusion reluctantly as I am a fervent populist. I can only hope that the electorate comes to their senses in due course. In the meantime the ALP must work overtime to make themselves fit for government, as they did after the 1975-77 disasters.
Yes, that’s a good idea. We could set up a committee of experts to examine all grants in detail, and get them checked by external experts as well, before deciding on who to give money to.But this part is most telling:
Oh wait a second, we do that already, it’s called the Australian Research Council.
Now, I’ve been both an applicant and a reviewer of ARC grants, so I can tell you personally that the grant process is no cake run. The competition is fierce and the amount of grant money available is limited. The review process is exhaustive and more than a little harrowing. Only around 20% of all grants get funded, and you have to be exceptionally good for your grant to get up.
Great, now we have a bunch of auditors telling researchers what their priorities should be, that’s going to work out just fine. Not to mention the cost of having this team doing the re-prioritising. Anyone willing to bet that the amount of money saved by shuffling around grants with funny names that politicians don’t understand will be more than gobbled up by the Commission of Audit team?It reminds me of the Howard government's poor judgement in stopping small funding for Australian contribution to dangerous asteroid hunting.
Oh, and the funds clawed back from these “wasteful” projects to will be put into “new medical research programs for dementia, diabetes and tropical disease”. Yeah, except that isn’t the ARC’s role at all, that’s a completely different funding body, the National Health and Medical Research Council or the NH&MRC.
I suppose it would be too much to expect that the Coalition would actually understand how research is funded in Australia.
This is hard to see as anything other a cynical attempt to defund topics the Coalition doesn’t like.
"Urine is an incredibly complex biofluid. We had no idea there could be so many different compounds going into our toilets," noted David Wishart, the senior scientist on the project.
Wishart's research team used state-of-the-art analytical chemistry techniques including nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, gas chromatography, mass spectrometry and liquid chromatography to systematically identify and quantify hundreds of compounds from a wide range of human urine samples.
To help supplement their experimental results, they also used computer-based data mining techniques to scour more than 100 years of published scientific literature about human urine. This chemical inventory—which includes chemical names, synonyms, descriptions, structures, concentrations and disease associations for thousands of urinary metabolites—is housed in a freely available database called the Urine Metabolome Database, or UMDB. The UMDB is a worldwide reference resource to facilitate clinical, drug and environmental urinalysis. The UMDB is maintained by The Metabolomics Innovation Centre, Canada's national metabolomics core facility.
One of the best tours of how people died in the past is The Deadly Truth: A History of Disease in America by Gerald Grob. It’s a great antidote to all the heroic pioneer narratives you learned in elementary school history class, and it makes the Little House on the Prairie books seem delusional in retrospect. Pioneers traveling west in wagon trains had barely enough food, and much of it spoiled; their water came from stagnant, larvae-infested ponds. They died in droves of dysentery. Did you ever play with Lincoln logs or dream about living in a log cabin? What a fun fort for grown-ups, right? Wrong. The poorly sealed, damp, unventilated houses were teeming with mosquitoes and vermin. Because of settlement patterns along waterways and the way people cleared the land, some of the most notorious places for malaria in the mid-1800s were Ohio and Michigan. Everybody in the Midwest had the ague!
Six billion dollars over four years. Or, given the total revenue over that time will be about $1,657bn, that’s about 0.36% of the budget over those years. Not a lot of room for error.
But they were about attacking waste. There was oodles of it, don’t you know. So how did they end up $6bn better off?
Well, today Joe Hockey and Andrew Robb, in a laughable 22-minute press conference, announced they will be cutting the growth of the foreign aid budget by $4.5bn, rephasing the water buyback scheme from over four years to over six years (a saving of $650m over four years) and a further 0.25% efficiency dividend for the public service to get $428m.
Those three measures account for 92% of the improvement of the Liberal party’s budget bottom line.
Talk about taking the tough choices. Cutting the growth in foreign aid. Who knew that was the biggest waste in government spending!As Jericho then points out, the ridiculous thing is that Abbott is also trying to straddle the fence of whether or not the "commission of audit" will mean further cuts.
All this is a testament to the brutal efficiency of Abbott's opposition. He's quite prepared to bludgeon the government with an argument he later rejects. It's shameless, but it works because he does it with confidence and a straight face.
