GreekReport – More than half of all police officers in Greece voted for pro-Nazi party Golden Dawn in the elections of May 6. This is the disconcerting result of an analysis carried out by authoritative newspaper To Vima in several constituencies in Athens, where 5,000 police officers in service in the Greek capital also cast their ballot. At some polling stations, Golden Dawn obtained 19 to 24% of votes. Read article
Nature – Not long ago, the story was simple. A vanguard of modern humans left their African birthplace 50,000–60,000 years ago and quickly conquered Asia. They turned left into Europe some 40,000 years ago, later crossing the Bering Strait and marching southward into the Americas. With their advance, Neanderthals and other earlier peoples dwindled and vanished. But in the past five years, the picture has grown more complex — and more interesting. Read article
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“Only strong personalities can endure history, the weak ones are extinguished by it”
- Nietzsche
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WashingtonTimes – The National Archives and Records Administration has lost track of dozens of boxes of confidential and secret government files at its records center just outside of Washington, the latest in a series of such incidents spanning more than a decade. The missing classified materials include four boxes of top-secret restricted files from the Office of the Secretary of Defense as well as records from several U.S. Navy offices, documents obtained by The Washington Times show. Read article
Daily Mail – Dinosaurs may be partly to blame for a change in climate because they created so much flatulence, according to leading scientists. Professor Graeme Ruxton of St Andrews University, Scotland, said the giant animals spent 150 years emitting the potent global warming gas, methane. Large plant-eating sauropods would have been the main culprits because of the huge amounts of greenery they consumed.Read Article
Editorial Comment – Yet more proof that you can get scientific funding for anything as long as it perpetuates the myth of anthropogenic global warming
Discovery – Adolf Hitler farted uncontrollably, used cocaine to clear his sinuses, ingested some 28 drugs at a time and received injections of bull testicle extracts to bolster his libido. The startling revelations come from Hiltler’s medical records, now up for auction at Alexander Historical Auctions of Stamford, Conn. Read article
PhysOrg (7 May 2012) – An abrupt cooling in Europe together with an increase in humidity and particularly in windiness coincided with a sustained reduction in solar activity 2800 years ago. Scientists from the German Research Centre for Geosciences GFZ in collaboration with Swedish and Dutch colleagues provide evidence for a direct solar-climate linkage on centennial timescales. Using the most modern methodological approach, they analysed sediments from Lake Meerfelder Maar, a maar lake in the Eifel/Germany, to determine annual variations in climate proxies and solar activity.
The study published online in Nature Geoscience reports the climatic change that occurred at the beginning of the pre-Roman Iron Age and demonstrates that especially the so-called Grand Minima of solar activity can affect climate conditions in western Europe through changes in regional atmospheric circulation pattern. Around 2800 years ago, one of these Grand Solar Minima, the Homeric Minimum, caused a distinct climatic change in less than a decade in Western Europe.
The exceptional seasonally laminated sediments from the studied maar lake allow a precise dating even of short-term climate changes. The results show for a 200 year long period strongly increased springtime winds during a period of cool and wet climate in Europe. In combination with model studies they suggest a mechanism that can explain the relation between a weak sun and climate change. Read Article
Reuters – Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi took a historic oath on Wednesday to join a parliamentary system crafted by the generals who locked her away for much of her long struggle against dictatorship, ushering in a dramatic new political era. Read article
A new book on the history of New Zealand has inadvertently stirred the climate change debate by revealing a near zero sea level increase over the past century.
The book, The Great Divide, includes a 100 year old map of Cloudy Bay lagoons in New Zealand, drafted back in 1912 to show the location of 20 kilometres of canals dug with wooden spades by ancient Maori.
However, when the 1912 map is shown alongside a satellite image of the same location from Google Earth, it reveals not only the startling accuracy of the original map (drafted at a time when aerial photography did not exist) but also a stunning lack of Pacific Ocean encroachment on the narrow shoal linking the lagoons to the sea.
The shoal is comprised of rock and pebbles, making it an ideal weathervane for sea level increase as it’s less prone to erosion than shifting sands. Even the narrowest and lowest part of the bar, marked with a black squiggle on the 1912 map, remains the same in 2012.
The Great Divide goes on sale this week, and among its revelations is confirmation that a massive comet-strike into the ocean off New Zealand’s southern coast caused a 220 metre high tsunami that may have been responsible for erasing evidence of human habitation in early New Zealand.
CNN – Nina Rhodes-Hughes wants the world to know that, despite what history says, Sirhan was not the only gunman firing shots when Kennedy was murdered a few feet away from her at a Los Angeles hotel. “What has to come out is that there was another shooter to my right,” Rhodes-Hughes said in an exclusive interview with CNN. “The truth has got to be told. No more cover-ups.” Read article
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ABC – In the early 1960s, America’s top military leaders reportedly drafted plans to kill innocent people and commit acts of terrorism in U.S. cities to create public support for a war against Cuba. Code named Operation Northwoods, the plans reportedly included the possible assassination of Cuban émigrés, sinking boats of Cuban refugees on the high seas, hijacking planes, blowing up a U.S. ship, and even orchestrating violent terrorism in U.S. cities. The plans were developed as ways to trick the American public and the international community into supporting a war to oust Cuba’s then new leader, communist Fidel Castro. Read Article
NY Times – Charles G. Taylor, the former president of Liberia and once a powerful warlord, was convicted by an international tribunal on Thursday of arming, supporting and guiding a brutal rebel movement that committed mass atrocities in Sierra Leone during its civil war in the 1990s. He is the first head of state to be convicted by an international court since the Nuremberg trials after World War II. Read Article
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The total warming during those 116 years was a statistically insignificant 0.046 degree Fahrenheit. If the record highs of 2011 are omitted, Texas cooled 0.055 degree from 1895 to 2010.
AsiaOne – Cheng was accused of trying to lure a former classmate, who is now a military officer, to meet with Chinese officials abroad for money but the officer turned him in to Taiwanese authorities, they said. Prosecutors raided Cheng’s office and homes in southern Taiwan on Wednesday and took him into custody along with his wife early Thursday on suspicion of violating national security law. This marked the second spying case in less than a week, after two former agents were indicted Monday on charges of collecting information for China. Taiwan and China have spied on each other ever since they split in 1949 at the end of a civil war. Beijing still claims the island as its territory awaiting reunification – by force if necessary. Read article
PhysOrg.com – A new report on the international surveys, “Belief About God Across Time and Countries,” was issued by the General Social Survey of the social science research organization NORC at the University of Chicago. It is based on a comprehensive, international study of belief in God and includes information from the International Social Survey Program, a consortium of the world’s leading opinion survey organizations. Tom W. Smith, director of the General Social Survey, wrote the report. The data came from 30 countries in which surveys about belief in God have been taken at least twice, in some cases, since 1991. Researchers asked questions to determine people’s range of beliefs, from atheism to strong belief in God; their changing beliefs over their lifetime; and their attitude toward the notion that God is concerned with individuals. Read Article
Clim. Past Discuss., 8, 1005-1056, 2012 doi:10.5194/cpd-8-1005-2012
A model-data comparison of the Holocene global sea surface temperature evolution
Authors:
G. Lohmann1, M. Pfeiffer1, T. Laepple1, G. Leduc2, and J.-H. Kim3
1Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, Bussestrasse 24, 27570 Bremerhaven, Germany
2Kiel University, Institute of Earth Sciences, Ludewig-Meyn-Str. 10, 24118 Kiel, Germany
3Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, P.O. Box 59, 1790 AB Den Burg, Texel, The Netherlands
Abstract.
We compare the ocean temperature evolution of the Holocene as simulated by climate models and reconstructed from marine temperature proxies. We use transient simulations from a coupled atmosphere-ocean general circulation model, as well as an ensemble of time slice simulations from the Paleoclimate Modelling Intercomparison Project. The proxy dataset comprises a global compilation of marine alkenone- and Mg/Ca-derived sea surface temperature (SST) estimates. Independently of the choice of the climate model, we observe significant mismatches between modelled and estimated SST amplitudes in the trends for the last 6000 yr. Alkenone-based SST records show a similar pattern as the simulated annual mean SSTs, but the simulated SST trends underestimate the alkenone-based SST trends by a factor of two to five. For Mg/Ca, no significant relationship between model simulations and proxy reconstructions can be detected. We tested if such discrepancies can be caused by too simplistic interpretations of the proxy data.
We therefore considered the additional environmental factor changes in the planktonic organisms’ habitat depth and a time-shift in the recording season to diagnose whether invoking those environmental factors can help reconciling the proxy records and the model simulations. We find that invoking shifts in the living season and habitat depth can remove some of the model-data discrepancies in SST trends. Regardless whether such adjustments in the environmental parameters during the Holocene are realistic, they indicate that when modeled temperature trends are set up to allow drastic shifts in the ecological behavior of planktonic organisms, they do not capture the full range of reconstructed SST trends. These findings challenge the quantitative comparability of climate model sensitivity and reconstructed temperature trends from proxy data. Read Paper
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Quaternary Science Reviews Volume 30, Issues 27–28, December 2011, Pages 3947–3959
Combined dendro-documentary evidence of Central European hydroclimatic springtime extremes over the last millennium
Authors:
Ulf Büntgena, b, , , Rudolf Brázdilc, d, Karl-Uwe Heussnere, Jutta Hofmannf, Raymond Konticg, Tomáš Kynclh, Christian Pfisterb, Kate?ina Chromác, Willy Tegeli
Abstract
A predicted rise in anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and associated effects on the Earth’s climate system likely imply more frequent and severe weather extremes with alternations in hydroclimatic parameters expected to be most critical for ecosystem functioning, agricultural yield, and human health. Evaluating the return period and amplitude of modern climatic extremes in light of pre-industrial natural changes is, however, limited by generally too short instrumental meteorological observations. Here we introduce and analyze 11,873 annually resolved and absolutely dated ring width measurement series from living and historical fir (Abies alba Mill.) trees sampled across France, Switzerland, Germany, and the Czech Republic, which continuously span the AD 962–2007 period.
Even though a dominant climatic driver of European fir growth was not found, ring width extremes were evidently triggered by anomalous variations in Central European April–June precipitation. Wet conditions were associated with dynamic low-pressure cells, whereas continental-scale droughts coincided with persistent high-pressure between 35 and 55°N. Documentary evidence independently confirms many of the dendro signals over the past millennium, and further provides insight on causes and consequences of ambient weather conditions related to the reconstructed extremes.
A fairly uniform distribution of hydroclimatic extremes throughout the Medieval Climate Anomaly, Little Ice Age and Recent Global Warming may question the common believe that frequency and severity of such events closely relates to climate mean stages. This joint dendro-documentary approach not only allows extreme climate conditions of the industrial era to be placed against the backdrop of natural variations, but also probably helps to constrain climate model simulations over exceptional long timescales. Read Paper
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