Radioactive Communist Zombies

Smokers are Dumb

A new study out showing that smokers have, on average, lower IQs than nonsmokers.  Reuters reports:

Young men who smoked a pack of cigarettes a day or more had IQ scores 7.5 points lower than non-smokers, Dr. Mark Weiser of Sheba Medical Center in Tel Hashomer and his colleagues found.

Of course, this begs the question: does smoking make you dumb, or do you have to be dumb to smoke?

Apparently, you have to be dumb to smoke (as if that weren't obvious):

The researchers also compared IQs for 70 pairs of brothers in the group in which one brother smoked and the other did not. Again, average IQs for the non-smoking sibling were higher than for the smokers.

The findings suggest that lower IQ individuals are more likely to choose to smoke, rather than that smoking makes people less intelligent, Weiser and his team conclude.

I could see a whole marketing campaign for the tobacco industry.  Or as the study's authors suggest, a whole new anti-smoking campaign aimed at the less intelligent.  "Hey dummy: smoking will kill your ass!"

Scientists Know Why the Climate Cooled . . . Kinda.

If you haven't noticed, it's been rather cold lately (except in the Pacific Northwest where it's been rather warm).  In fact, the globe has cooled or at least stopped warming for about the past decade.  And now scientists have an explanation, sort of.  In the Wall Street Journal today it is explained:

[T]he concentration of water vapor in the stratosphere has dropped about 10% in the past decade, triggered by unexplained cooler temperatures at certain high altitudes above the tropics. The study concludes that in the last decade the decline in water vapor slowed the rate of rising temperatures by about 25%, thus partly negating the heat-trapping effect of increasing greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane.

The key phrase there is "unexplained cooler temperatures at certain high altitudes above the tropics."  Scientists still don't know what caused those cooler temperatures, called "cold point" temperatures.  But scientists are still grasping at straws to explain it all:

The overall picture is still far from complete. Water vapor's role may be important, but "it doesn't rule out other contributing factors," such as changes in ocean currents and solar activity, says Dr. Solomon.

Nor do current warming models fully account for all the complexities of water-vapor shifts in the stratosphere. And scientists have yet to pin down why cold point temperatures in the tropics fell in the past decade.

The models didn't predict the past decade's cooling.  Changes in ocean currents and solar activity could be to blame.  If the models can't predict what's going to happen today how can they be trusted to predict what's going to happen 90 years from now?  They can't.

Kang and Kodos Coming for a Visit?

A "mystery object" is going to zoom by the Earth tomorrow (Wednesday) and scientists don't know what it is.  According to the AP:

Astronomers say it may be space junk or it could be a tiny asteroid, too small to cause damage even if it hit. It's 33 to 50 feet wide at most.

Of course this is obviously a cover-up of a UFO.  Aliens are doing a fly-by and the government is covering it up by calling it "space junk" or a "tiny asteroid."  This could be the beginning of an alien attack!

Seriously, the object is so small is would do no damage if it hit the Earth.  I'm surprised it was spotted before it got this close.

Now if it starts changing vectors, we might have a different story. 

 

The Coming (Mini) Ice Age

According to at least one scientist, this year's unusually cold weather is not a fluke, but the beginning of a trend.  David Rose writing in the U.K. Daily Mail reports:

Professor Mojib Latif, a leading member of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which has been pushing the issue of man-made global warming on to the international political agenda since it was formed 22 years ago . . .

He and his colleagues predicted the new cooling trend in a paper published in 2008 and warned of it again at an IPCC conference in Geneva last September.

And Professor Latif says at around 50% of the warming we have experienced in the 20th century had a natural cause: the same one that's now causing this cooling trend that could last 30 years.

The bitter winter afflicting much of the Northern Hemisphere is only the start of a global trend towards cooler weather that is likely to last for 20 or 30 years, say some of the world’s most eminent climate scientists.

Their predictions – based on an analysis of natural cycles in water temperatures in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans – challenge some of the global warming orthodoxy’s most deeply cherished beliefs, such as the claim that the North Pole will be free of ice in
summer by 2013.

According to the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado, Arctic summer sea ice has increased by 409,000 square miles, or 26 per cent, since 2007 – and even the most committed global warming activists do not dispute this.

That area, 409,000 miles, is 1.5 times bigger than Texas. 

If Arctic ice is growing and we're in for 30 years of cooler weather, what does this do to global warming?  Perhaps it was natural?

William Gray, emeritus Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Colorado State University, said that while he believed there had been some background rise caused by greenhouse gases, the computer models used by advocates of man-made warming had hugely exaggerated their effect.

According to Prof Gray, these distort the way the atmosphere works. ‘Most of the rise in temperature from the Seventies to the Nineties was natural,’ he said. ‘Very little was down to CO2 – in my view, as little as five to ten per cent.’

If as little as five or ten percent of warming is caused by CO₂, then cutting CO₂ and in the process massively distorting our economy, will have very little effect.

But some will say the science of global warming is "settled" (like it was once settled science that light traveled through ether) and the cold snap is just "weather" and not "climate."

Or maybe the models just don't work very well.

Cell Phones Prevent Alzheimer's?

While cell phone have been blamed for causing brain tumors (and there's little or no evidence they do), research suggests they may prevent Alzheimer's and improve memory.  At least in mice.

LiveScience reports:

The researchers showed that exposing old Alzheimer's mice to the electromagnetic waves generated by cell phones erased brain deposits of beta-amyloid, a protein strongly associated with Alzheimer's disease. Clumps of beta-amyloid form so-called brain plaques that are a hallmark of the disease. The scientists speculate the cell phone radiation increases brain temperature, causing brain cells to release the nasty plaques.

The researches but mice genetically modified to develop Alzheimer's and healthy mice in the electromagnetic field like a cell phone would give off for a couple of hours a day.  The Alzheimer's mice got better, the normal mice had better memories.

Of course, what works in mice does not always transfer to humans.  But it's an interesting result that is rather surprising.  Doesn't mean cell phones don't cause brain cancer and doesn't mean using your cell phone will help your memory or stave off dementia.

It's just interesting.

Cancer from the Triassic Period

Seems in parts of China the lung cancer rate among non-smoking women is abnormally high.  Scientists studying the phenomenon are blaming . . . volcanic eruptions 250 million years ago.  The Los Angeles TimesGreenspace blog has details:

Lead author David J. Large, from the University of Nottingham, suggests that silica from the volcanic event blamed for mass extinctions about 250 million years ago precipitated onto the peat bogs that over time became the coal deposits mined in the region. Chemical interaction between the mineral and volatile organic compounds may be the culprit for the high cancer rates, the authors suggest. 

"From a geological perspective an aspect of this coal that has not been considered and could have produced coal with unusual properties is its paleogeography and geological setting, precisely adjacent to the Permo-Triassic Boundary (PTB). This geological boundary coincides with the largest known mass extinction event, an event that resulted from a major geochemical perturbation of the Earth’s oceans and atmosphere (17) and may have influenced the coal chemistry."

Crystalline silica, which also is found in asbestos, is a known carcinogen.

Which just goes to show that nature has ways to kill you you'd never suspect.  Greens like to talk about man-made killers like pollution. But nature can and will kill you, sometimes in surprising ways.  

Disinfectant Resistant Bacteria

Evolution in action:  You know those anti-bacteria soaps and gels that say they kill 99.99% of all bacteria?  I always worry about that 0.01% they don't kill.  Now they have no competition, are apparently immune to the disinfectant, and can grow like mad.  Evolution of the species.

And now scientists are finding bacteria that not only survive disinfectants, but thrive!  LiveScinece reports:

[A] new lab study shows one pesky bacterium eats cleansers for breakfast: When disinfectant was applied to lab cultures of the bacteria, they adapted to survive not only the disinfectant but also a common antibiotic.

Did they evolve to do so?  Looks like it:

The bacteria were able to more efficiently pump out antimicrobial agents. The adapted bacteria also had a genetic mutation that allowed them to resist ciprofloxacin-type antibiotics specifically.

This has implications for hospitals and other environments needing to kill germs.  Over-use of disinfectant can and will give us more disinfectant resistant bactreia.

MRSA, or methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, has become a deadly and growing problem in hospitals in recent years.

So what's the solution?  I don't know.  We'll have to come up with better disinfectants to kill the stronger bugs.  This is one arms race it would be very costly to lose. 

Natural Climate Change

Climate change is natural, constant, and has been going on since before fossil fuels were burned for energy on the planet.  And we've seen global warming before, long before, in fact.  That according to Howard Bloom writing in today's Wall Street Journal.  Says Mr. Bloom:

 In the two million years during which we climbed from stone-tool wielding Homo erectus with sloping brows to high-foreheaded Homo urbanis, man the inventor of the city, we underwent 60 glaciations, 60 ice ages. And in the 120,000 years since we emerged in our current physiological shape as Homo sapiens, we've lived through 20 sudden global warmings. In most of those, temperatures have shot up by as much as 18 degrees within a mere 20 years.

But the real stroke of luck is that it's been 12,000 years since the last ice age and we are way over due for one.  According to Mr. Bloom, we should be preparing for the natural variations in climate, not spending bazillions to fight natural global warming.

More on Solar Power Satellites

The Japanese aren't the only ones looking at solar power satellites to provide clean energy to Earth.

MSNBC reports that an American group is investigating the possibility, too (links original):

Last week, California regulators proposed a plan to approve a 15-year contract with the American company Solaren Corp. to supply space-based solar power to utility giant Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) by 2016.

Space based solar power wouldn't have to worry about clouds, weather, cleaning the solar collectors, or even night.  But the idea is not without its problems and the biggest problem is cost:

[Marty] Hoffert [a physicist at New York University] estimates that Solaren could manage to get about 50 percent transmission efficiency in a best-case scenario, meaning that half of the energy collected by space solar panels would be lost in the transfer down to Earth.

Solaren would then need to launch a solar panel array capable of generating 400 megawatts. The total launch weight of all the equipment would be the equivalent of about 400 metric tons, or 20 shuttle-sized launches, according to Hoffert.

And what does a shuttle launch cost?  According to Wikipeadia the cost is $1.3 billion per launch.  So we're talking $26 billion for 400 megawatts.  (And the shuttle program is ending, anyway.)

The other controversy is over how to get the power from space to the ground.  The choices are laser or microwave.  But clouds affect lasers but lasers are cheaper.

Solar Power Satellites is a great idea.  Problem is the cost of getting material into space has to drop significantly.  A space elevator would be a great way of doing that.  But so far all they've reached is less than a kilometer.

Solar Power Satellites are a good idea (eventually) even if you don't believe in man-made global warming.  And after the CRU emails, why would you?

Garbage In: Garbage Out

(Hat Tip Instapundit)

Frank J. Tipler wraps up Climategate very neatly:

The now non-secret data prove what many of us had only strongly suspected — that most of the evidence of global warming was simply made up. That is, not only are the global warming computer models unreliable, the experimental data upon which these models are built are also unreliable.

In other words, the (simplified) computer models don't even have good data to start with, so how can what they predict be at all accurate.  Garbage in; garbage out. 

Tipler calls the actions of the "scientists" treasonous:

It is an act of treason against science. It is also an act of treason against humanity, since it has been used to justify an attempt to destroy the world economy.

Which is I think letting the so-called scientists off the hook.

President Obama, despite the revelations of Climategate is planning to go to Copenhagen and say the U.S. will reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  The left and their enablers in the mainstream media are acting as if Climategate didn't happen.  But remember Climategate when you lose your job due to the devastation lowering Greenhouse Gases will wreak upon the economy.