Posts by gardener21 13 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jan 2010
er .. contrary to what it says in this article, ESA haven't yet identified the final touchdown point of Philae. The photo shows the initial landing place and captures Philae mid-bounce. They've also located the probable second bounce point, but not yet the final position. More info here:
http://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/Images/2014/11/OSIRIS_spots_Philae_drifting_across_the_comet
It might well be a statistically small sample for the conclusions drawn. Of the 3,208 studied, those who'd had sex with more than 20 women had a lower risk of prostate cancer, while those who'd had sex with more than 20 men had a higher risk. But what isn't clear from this article, or the abstract of the paper in Cancer Epidemiology, is how many of the 3,208 fell into those groups.
If it turns out, for example, that only 20 men fell into the group of having sex with >20 men then that would be a very small sample upon which to draw any conclusions.
It is interesting that Nature Geoscience published two papers about Antarctica yesterday:
Recent climate and ice-sheet changes in West Antarctica compared with the past 2,000 years
Eric Steig, et al
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ngeo1778.html
Acceleration of snow melt in an Antarctic Peninsula ice core during the twentieth century
Nerilie J. Abram, et al
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ngeo1787.html
The first is the one referred to in the El Reg article. it reports that normal variation in West Antarctica is quite large, so the recent warming can't be confidently attributed to a long term warming trend. The latter article reports that recent levels of summer melt in the Antarctic Peninsula are unprecedented over the last 1000 years.
Curious that only one of these papers gets reported by El Reg.
Surely you have to be served with an injunction before you can be bound by it. Only then will you know what it is you are not allowed to do.
Newspapers are informed by the courts when an injunction is issued, so they know what they cannot say. If twitterers are similarly bound, then the injunction should be issued to all on twitter - perhaps via a twitter acount.
The article quotes Klaus Winter as saying, "It is remarkable that there is so much concern about the effects of greenhouse conditions on tropical forests". However, the full original quote went on a bit further:
"It is remarkable that there is so much concern about the effects of greenhouse conditions on tropical forests. However, these horror scenarios probably have some validity if increased temperatures lead to more frequent or more severe drought as some of the current predictions for similar scenarios suggest."
I am by no means an expert in this area, but it is Intriguing to read more about the actual research. The existing picture is that temperatures cooled in most arctic regions for a long time, but they have begun to rise from around 1990 onwards. It is suspected that the post 1990 increase is related to man made climate change.
The tree ring data was drawn from 69 trees, from the treeline of the Khibiny Mountains on the Kola Peninsula in NW Russia. It showed a similar pattern of declining temperatures, until around 1970, and then a warming pattern since 1990.
The interesting bit being that the temperature variations from the tree ring data, up until about 1970, seem to closely match with solar activity. Since 1970, they no longer correlate with solar activity and other features seem to have come to dominate.
Can we have a Reg article about how new research into tree ring data confirms the recent warming trend in the arctic? It further shows that natural effects used to dominate temperature variations in the area studied, but now something else is dominating.
Interesting. A research paper is published showing data drawn from tree rings which is believed to indicate the summer temperatures over 400 years in one place: the Kola peninsula in NW Russia.
Lewis Page then assumes that the whole of the arctic region had the same summer temperatures as this one place in NW Russia.
He then starts assuming this casts doubt on other evidence about average global temperatures.
Temperature records relating to one place, are extrapolated to a much larger area, then to the whole globe. Marvellous.
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