when it comes to actions over Georgia

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(6) NUCLEAR DECAY RATES AND COSMOS - RUSSIAN STUDIES

Zbigniew Jaworowski [jaworo@clor.waw.pl]

Dear Benny,

It was interesting to read Oliver Manuel's item (15) "To know that you do not know is the best" (CCNet 28 August 08), including a paper by J.H. Jenkins et al. on "Evidence for correlation between nuclear decay rates and Earth-Sun distance" dated August 25, 2008. The same phenomenon was described in 1998 by S.E. Shnoll et al. from Lomonosov Moscow State University (shnoll@pcb.iteb.serpukhov.su) in a paper "Realization of discrete states during fluctuations in macroscopic processes", published in English at Physics-Uspekhi 41(10): 1025-1035, 1998) (Uspekhi Fizicheskikh Nauk, Russian Academy of Sciences) (PACS numbers: 01.90.+g,06.20.+f,89.90.+n).

http://home.t01.itscom.net/allais/blackprior/shnoll/shnoll-1.pdf

The abstract of the paper says:

"It is shown that due to fluctuations, a sequence of discrete values is generated by successive measurement events whatever the type of the process measured. The corresponding histograms have much the same shape at any given time and for processes of different nature and are very likely to change shape simultaneously for various processes and in widely distant laboratories. For a series of successive histograms, any given one is highly probably similar to its nearest neighbors and occurs repeatedly with a period 24 hours, 27 days, and about 365 days, thus implying that the phenomenon has a very profound cosmological (or cosmogonic) origin."

The paper is an effect of  >40 years of studies, and parts of it were published several times before, after the first observation in 1955 of this phenomenon in various biochemical reactions. The paper cites 14 publications on this subject in Russian, the first in 1958. Later they found the phenomenon in homogenous chemical reactions with low-molecular compounds, as well as in diverse physico-chemical measurements: (a) velocities of latex particles an an electric field; (b) discharge time delay in neon lamp RC oscillator; (c) transverse relaxation time tau2 of water protons using the spin echo technique; (d) amplitude of concentration fluctuations in the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction; (e) radioactive decay of various isotopes. They found that the phenomenon does not depend on the measurement techniques and the nature of the phenomena under investigation. The measurements of radioactivity, for example, were performed with Geiger counters, liquid and solid scintillation counters, and solid state detectors. The activity of 3H, 14C, 32P, 60Co, 204Tl, 226Ra, 210Po, 214Po, 218Po and 239Pu was measured, as well as the secondary x-ray quanta at 5.9 keV and 6.3 keV which accompany the K-capture associated with the 55Fe to 55Mn transformation. The bulk of the experimental data, however, were derived from the measurements of the alpha activity of 239 Pu specimens firmly attached to silicon solid state detectors. Control measurements were performed as necessary for eliminating the dependence of the results on the amplitude cut-off regime etc.

The geographical distribution of the simultaneous measurements was rather large, the minimum distance between a pair of laboratories was >100 and up to many thousands  kilometers. The study sites were at Moscow, Pushchino, Tomsk, Leningrad, Pacifi Ocean, Indian Ocean, and White Sea beyond the Arctic Circle.

They summarized their results as follows:

Because of fluctuations, any sequence of measurements of processes of arbitrary nature yields a series of discrete values. Some of such values occur much more often than others - we observe 'allowed' and 'forbidden' states of microscopic objects. The corresponding histograms exhibit extrema - peaks and troughs. the shape of the spectrum of allowed and forbidden states - the relative distances between the levels ond their populations - is at all times similar for processes of different natures, and is very likely top vary synchronously for different processes, even when they occur in laboratories many miles away from each other. There is a certain 'lifetime;' for the given shape of histograms: in series of consecutive histograms, a histogram is most likely to be similar to its closest neigbors. The shapes of histograms are very likely to recur with a period of 24 hours, 27 days, and 365 days. All this 9regu;ar time variation of consecutive histograms, similarity of histograms for simultaneous independent measurements of processes of different nature and possibly occurring at different geographical points) points to existence of a universal cosmophysiocal (cosmogonic) cause of this phenomenon.

In conclusions the Russian authors (six of them) analysed a question: Why there have been no results from other laboratories? Jenkins et al. paper is probably the first paper from such an "other laboratory".

Best wishes,

Zbigniew Jaworowski

Prof. Dr hab. Zbigniew Jaworowski

Konstancin, Poland

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(7) OUR MELTING MEDIA

Philip Stott [sinfonia1@mac.com]

Dear Benny,

Today, 'Global Warming Politics' contrasts the Arctic and the Antarctic, and brings some complexities to our melting media:

'Poles Apart'

Climate is always changing, and the physical and biological effects of climate change are always immensely complex, both regional and locally. There is no simple set of linear responses to world average climate change, whether 'cooling' or 'warming'. Moreover, what are deemed to be physical and ecological responses to average change more often than not turn out to be the product of highly-localised or regional causes, some of which may have nothing to do with world average changes...

Read on in full at: http://web.mac.com/sinfonia1/Global_Warming_Politics/A_Hot_Topic_Blog/Entries/2008/8/28_Poles_Apart.html

'Home Page' at: http://web.mac.com/sinfonia1

Every good wish,

Philip

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(8) LOVE THIS FROM THE EU

Chris Horner [CHorner@cei.org]

It seems that, for internal purposes, the EU Commission wants to use a 2005 baseline year because their data before the ETS was in place, like say for 1990, isn't reliable.

http://www.euractiv.com/en/climate-change/eu-pressure-co2-effort-sharing/article-172919 

Yeah, I'd say that by their constant revision of 1990 emissions upward, even 16 years after the fact (to reduce their Kyoto violation) that we'd already gotten that point. But I don't ever recall hearing it when they insisted on the 1990 baseline for Kyoto, to which they cling to like grim death for obvious reasons.

Chris Horner

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(9) AND FINALLY: ACTIVITY IS QUITE ON THE SUNSPOT FRONT

Online Opinion, 29 August 2008

http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=7824

By Mark S. Lawson

Who has noticed that the period 2014-2015 keeps on turning up in the debate on greenhouse science? For that is when greenhouse proponents say the long-delayed global warming apocalypse will start happening. In addition, that general date has turned up in forecasts made by an arch sceptic, and two researchers in the US have forecast that sunspot activity will cease entirely by 2014.

As the two sides do not agree on anything else at all this is odd - odd enough to be worth exploring.

One group to point at the 2015 date is led by Noel Keenlyside of the Leibnitz Institute of Marine Science in the German city of Kiel. As reported in the journal Nature (letters, May 1) Keenlyside and colleagues added the affect of climate cycles to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change models to forecast that global temperatures will remain stable or perhaps even dip down for the next few years, before heading up. The paper does not give a date for the expected kick up in temperatures but in a subsequent interview with the Daily Telegraph in the UK Keenlyside stated that the earth will start to warm again in 2015.

Keenlyside was forecasting from his research into the powerful Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMO) climate cycle which, he says, has a global effect and will weaken to its long term mean. He also emphasises that his work in no way contradicts that of the IPCC - he is merely adding climate cycles on top of the panel's predictions - but his work seem to have horrified the hardliners. There have been internet reports that prominent scientists have tried to challenge the Keenlyside team to bets on temperature trends. However, other climate cycles seem to be following the AMO lead. In April, NASA announced that the Pacific Decadal Oscillation has shifted from its warm mode to its cool mode - a switch that will not be discussed here but may also result in significant cooling.

More recently, another group observing the sun has also come up with the date 2014 but for quite different reasons. As has been noted a few times in the media, the sun has gone quiet - too quiet - with the next solar cycle so far not putting in an appearance. Scientists have known for a very long time that the earth has a distinct 11-year cycle. At its height, indicated by lots of sunspots, the sun is very active giving off lots of flares and solar storms which affect satellites. At the bottom of the cycle there are few or no spots, and a marked lack of activity.

The last cycle was officially declared over by NASA in March 2006 with one group at the space agency putting out a release confidently forecasting that the next cycle would be 20 to 50 per cent stronger than the old.

The sun responded to this piece of scientific hubris by going quiet. A few spots from the new cycle have been sighted, as well as a few spots from the old - scientists can tell which spots the cycle belongs to by their magnetic polarity - but very little has happened.

At the time of writing the sun is still spot free. NASA solar physicist David Hathaway points out, quite rightly, that the sun's behaviour is within major statistical limits - just. The average solar cycle lasts 131 months plus or minus 14 months and the current cycle - the quiet period counts as part of the old cycle - has lasted nearly 143 months. The solar cycle went quiet for years at the beginning of last century before restarting, Hathaway notes, so nothing out of the ordinary has happened - at least, not yet.

Another group at the US National Solar Observatory in Tucson, Arizona, William Livingston and Matthew Penn, believe that there may be a deeper process at work. Sunspots are highly magnetic regions that are somewhat cooler than the rest of the sun's surface (they appear dark compared to the rest of the sun, but if seen separately would appear very bright) and the two researchers have been tracking both the temperature and magnetic strength of the spots. They found that the spots have been warming up and becoming less magnetic. An average of the trend is a straight line going down which hits the bottom of the graph at 2014. They have concluded that, although sun spots may appear briefly from time to time in the next few years, they will disappear by 2014.

This conclusion is in a paper submitted to the journal Science three years ago but rejected in peer review. With the sun now so quiet the paper has been resurrected from a filing cabinet in the observatory and circulated informally. Dr Livingston told me (by phone from his office in Tucson) that the paper had been rejected on the grounds that it was a purely statistical argument so it would be better to wait and see what happened, and he considered that a fair point. They are now waiting "for the right moment" to resubmit.

But what happens after 2014? Dr Livingston says that as they are using a purely statistical argument, without any theory to back it, they do not know. All they know is that the trend reaches zero in 2014. Conventional theory on the sun's inner workings never forecast anything like this - in fact, forecast the exact opposite - but has been revised to say that the sun will restart some time next year.

With the sun being quiet for a surprisingly long time, plenty of commentators are pointing to the possibility of a Maunder Minimum - a period from 1645 to 1715 with very few sunspots which is associated with a series of bitter winters known as the Little Ice Age. Although it is widely acknowledged that there must be some link between the sun's activity and climate, the nature of the link and its effectiveness is hotly debated. The IPCC models, the ruling orthodoxy, gives star billing to the effect of industrial gases in the atmosphere and places solar variations in the also ran category. However, as we shall see those models have proved largely useless for forecasting - in the short term, at least - and there are no rival climate theories. The sceptics largely decline to forecast, pointing out, with some justification as it turns out, that there is as yet no means of forecasting what the sun will do.

FULL STORY at http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=7824

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