New intensity scale ranks California’s ‘atmospheric river’ storm events just like hurricanes

Remember the series of reservoir filling and snowpack building winter storms California experienced mid-January? It was the result of an "atmospheric river" driving a series of Pacific storms onshore, just like the event that busted the Oroville Dam spillway in 2017, but not nearly as strong. Now there is a new scale to characterize strength…

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Inhalation cancer risk estimation of source-specific personal exposure for particulate matter–bound polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons based on positive matrix factorization

Abstract

In previous studies, inhalation cancer risk was estimated using conventional risk assessment method, which was normally based on compound-specific analysis, and cannot provide substantial data for source-specific particulate matter concentrations and pollution control. In the present study, we applied an integrated risk analysis method, which was a synthetic combination of source apportionment receptor model and risk assessment method, to estimate cancer risks associated to individual PAHs coming from specific sources. Personal exposure particulate matter samples referring to an elderly panel were collected in a community of Tianjin, Northern China, in 2009, and 12 PAH compounds were measured using GC-MS. Positive matrix factorization (PMF) was used to extract the potential sources and quantify the source contributions to the PAH mixture. Then, the lung cancer risk of each modeled source was estimated by summing up the cancer risks of all measured PAH species according to the extracted source profile. The final results indicated that the overall cancer risk was 1.12 × 10⁻⁵, with the largest contribution from gasoline vehicle emission (44.1%). Unlike other risk estimation studies, this study was successful in combining risk analysis and source apportionment approaches, which allow estimating the potential risk of all source types and provided suitable information to select prior control strategies and mitigate the main air pollution sources that contributing to health risks.

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California Wildfire Mitigation: “Turn Out the Lights…”

Guest drive-by by David Middleton PG&E Could Shut Off Power For Millions To Prevent Wildfires February 7, 2019 MATTHEW S. SCHWARTZ Pacific Gas & Electric could shut off power to more than 5 million customers when extreme weather conditions are ripe for wildfires to break out, the company said Wednesday. It's an expansion of the…

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Switching two Nitrilase Regioselectivity toward Succinonitrile by Mutating the Active Center Pocket Key Residues Through a Semi-Rational Engineering

Chem. Commun., 2019, Accepted Manuscript
DOI: 10.1039/C8CC10110H, Communication

zhi chen, Shuiqing Jiang, Hualei Wang, Liuzhu Wang, Dongzhi Wei
The 163Ala in bll6402NIT and 172Trp in blr3397NIT played a significant role in directing nitrilase regioselectivity. Amino acid mutation of two nitrilases in this two sites could alter the size...
The content of this RSS Feed (c) The Royal Society of Chemistry

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Report: Texas crude oil production breaks 1970s record

http://bit.ly/2RUnmGj Crude oil production in Texas has beaten a previous record set in the 1970s, a new report from the Texas Independent Producers Royalty Owners Association stated. Texas oil wells produced more than 1.54 billion barrels of crude in 2018, beating the previous record of 1.28 billion barrels set in 1973, TIPRO reported in its [...]

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Cu doping in CeO2 to form multiple oxygen vacancies for dramatically enhanced ambient N2 reduction performance

Chem. Commun., 2019, Accepted Manuscript
DOI: 10.1039/C9CC00123A, Communication

Shengbo Zhang, Cuijiao Zhao, Yanyan Liu, Wenyi Li, Jialu Wang, Guozhong Wang, Yunxia Zhang, Haimin Zhang, Huijun Zhao
Here we report the synthesis of Cu-doped CeO2 nanorods (denoted as Cu-CeO2-x, x represents the mass content (wt.%) of the doped Cu) by a facile hydrothermal method, followed by thermal...
The content of this RSS Feed (c) The Royal Society of Chemistry

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LA Mayor Declares Allegiance to the Green New Deal, Ditches Plans to Rebuild Natural Gas Infrastructure

Guest essay by Eric Worrall h/t Breitbart – Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti has thrown caution to the winds, by announcing plans to cancel a vital multi-billion dollar dollar plan to rebuild three large gas plants. Los Angeles ditches plan to invest billions in fossil fuels, Mayor Eric Garcetti says By SAMMY ROTH FEB 11,…

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Tuning the electron transport band gap of bovine serum albumin by doping with Vb12

Chem. Commun., 2019, Accepted Manuscript
DOI: 10.1039/C9CC00688E, Communication

Wenhui Liang, Chuanli Wu, Zhewei Cai, Yujie Sun, Hui Zhang, Ping Wu, Chenxin Cai
We report a facile and new method to tune the electron transport (ETp) band gaps of proteins (bovine serum albumin, BSA) via doping with other molecules (cyanocobalamin, Vb12). The results...
The content of this RSS Feed (c) The Royal Society of Chemistry

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GHCN v3.3 Stations By Altitude By Years (or “Mountains? What Mountains?”)

What happens to "High Cold Places" in the Global Historical Climate Network over the years? Why they jump on board for the Baseline period, then run off to the Beach for Modern Warming... Continue reading →

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California nixes plans for high-speed LA-SF rail line

So much for trains replacing planes in line with current US 'green' ideology? The UK equivalent is the HS2 project which is also under pressure from various quarters. Both eye-wateringly expensive.

California Governor Gavin Newsom announced on Tuesday that he was abandoning plans to build a high-speed rail line between Los Angeles and San Francisco, citing the high cost and the time it would take, reports Phys.org.

California Governor Gavin Newsom announced on Tuesday that he was abandoning plans to build a high-speed rail line between Los Angeles and San Francisco, citing the high cost and the time it would take.

"Let's be real," the newly elected Newsom said in his first State of the State address. "The project, as currently planned, would cost too much and take too long.

"There's been too little oversight and not enough transparency."

Newsom said he planned to concentrate instead on completing a high-speed rail link between the central and more rural towns of Merced and Bakersfield to reinvigorate the region's economy.

"I know that some critics will say this is a 'train to nowhere'," he said. "But that's wrong and offensive.

"The people of the Central Valley endure the worst air pollution in America as well as some of the longest commutes," he added. "And they have suffered too many years of neglect from policymakers here in Sacramento. They deserve better."

Plans for an LA-San Francisco bullet train had been backed by Newsom's predecessors Jerry Brown and Arnold Schwarzenegger and the line was expected to be completed in 2033, years behind schedule.

The rail service was intended to decongest key airports and highways that have reached saturation points in the most populous and richest state in the nation.

Continued here.

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Senate to vote on Ocasio-Cortez’s ‘Green New Deal’

  http://bit.ly/2IbN9Kr BY JORDAIN CARNEY,TIMOTHY CAMA AND MIRANDA GREEN – The Senate will hold a vote on the Green New Deal, an environmental and energy plan touted by progressives, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said on Tuesday. McConnell told reporters after a meeting of the Senate Republican caucus that he has "great interest" in the plan, [...]

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Worried about ‘Global warming’? Blame the Democrat Presidents! Analysis reveals GOP presidencies coincide with global cooling – ‘The top 6 warming presidencies were all Democrats’

From the website: Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science http://bit.ly/2So7i4T Global warming? Blame the Democrats. Posted by Andrew on 11 February 2019, 9:08 am An anonymous blog commenter sends the above graph and writes: I was looking at the global temperature record and noticed an odd correlation the other day. Basically, I calculated the temperature trend for each [...]

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BBC Repeat Fake Extreme Weather Disaster Claims

By Paul Homewood

 

h/t qaesoveritas

 

Politicians and policymakers have failed to grasp the gravity of the environmental crisis facing the Earth, a report claims.

The think-tank IPPR says human impacts have reached a critical stage and threaten to destabilise society and the global economy.

Scientists warn of a potentially deadly combination of factors.

These include climate change, mass loss of species, topsoil erosion, forest felling and acidifying oceans.

The report from the centre-left Institute for Public Policy Research says these factors are "driving a complex, dynamic process of environmental destabilisation that has reached critical levels.

"This destabilisation is occurring at speeds unprecedented in human history and, in some cases, over billions of years."

The IPPR warns that the window of opportunity to avoid catastrophic outcomes is rapidly closing.

The authors urge three shifts in political understanding: on the scale and pace of environmental breakdown; the implications for societies; and the subsequent need for transformative change.

​They say since 2005, the number of floods across the world has increased by 15 times, extreme temperature events by 20 times, and wildfires seven-fold.

At least climate change features in policy discussions, they say – but other vitally important impacts barely figure.

What issues are being under-played?

• Topsoil is being lost 10 to 40 times faster than it is being replenished by natural processes ​
• Since the mid-20th Century, 30% of the world's arable land has become unproductive due to erosion
• 95% of the Earth's land areas could become degraded by 2050

These matters are close to home for British politicians, the authors argue, with the average population sizes of the most threatened species in the UK having decreased by two-thirds since 1970.

The UK is described as one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world.

Some 2.2 million tonnes of UK topsoil is eroded annually, and over 17% of arable land shows signs of erosion.

Nearly 85% of fertile peat topsoil in East Anglia has been lost since 1850, with the remainder at risk of being lost over next 30–60 years.

The IPPR says many scientists believe we have entered a new era of rapid environmental change.

The report warns: "We define this as the 'age of environmental breakdown' to better highlight the severity of the scale, pace and implications of environmental destabilisation resulting from aggregate human activity."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-47203344

 

I have no particular views on most of this report, but would strongly challenge this statement:

They say since 2005, the number of floods across the world has increased by 15 times, extreme temperature events by 20 times, and wildfires seven-fold.

 

That immediately set of the BS buzzer, so where did this patently ludicrous claim come from?

The report quoted by the BBC is from the IPPR. Note that this is not a scientific body, but a politically activist, left wing think tank:

 

https://www.ippr.org/research/publications/age-of-environmental-breakdown

 

And lo and behold, the same claim appears in the Summary:

 

And again on Page 13:

 

Readers may recall that I have come across EM-DAT (The International Disaster Database), and carried out a detailed analysis of their methodology last year, after similar wild claims from Lord Stern, which were also based on their disaster database.

My full analysis can be seen here. But in short, EM-DAT are registering disasters reported, rather than actually occurring, a crucial difference. This is something acknowledged by EM-DAT themselves.

I include below some of the key parts of my analysis:

Back in 2004, EM-DAT published a report, "Thirty Years of Natural Disasters 1974-2003". It included these comments:

 

 

https://www.emdat.be/publications?page=7

 

This evolution in reporting is self evident from Figure 2:

 

 

Nobody in their right mind would believe that there were hardly any natural disasters in the first half of the 20thC. Many disasters happened in the past, but which don't appear in the official stats.

A clue to this is that most of the apparent increase is due to small disasters:

 

In fact, the criteria for what constitutes a "disaster" is set at a very low level indeed:

Thousands of such small events would have escaped official notice in the past.

There is one more clue in the 2003 report:

While the number of reported disasters has remained pretty much flat from disaster agencies and governments, there was a huge increase from specialised agencies in the 1998 – 2000 period, along with a steady increase from insurance companies.

This is clear evidence that the apparent trend is solely due to how the data is collected.

 

In 2007, EM-DAT published another report, "Annual Disaster Statistical Review 2006", which included this statement:

It is worth noting that that CRED, who maintain EM-DAT only began publishing statistics in 1998. It is pretty obvious that it was this factor that led to the increased reporting of disasters around that time.

 

In short, many more disasters get to be officially registered by EM-DAT nowadays. Many that occurred in the past simply never appeared on the database.

 

But there is one last thing. Where did the IPPR report get their fake claim from? Look again at Page 13:

 

Who are GMO?

Fortunately IPPR tell us in their list of references:

 

 

J Grantham, eh? And that link takes us to:

 

 

It is the same Jeremy Grantham, the billionaire who funds the Grantham Institute. Oddly though, he has published this white paper under the auspices of Grantham, Mayo, & van Otterloo (GMO), the Boston-based asset management firm of which he is co-founder.

Why it was not formally vetted and issued by the Grantham Institute is a mystery, as is the question of why the IPPR have made use of work from a billionaire businessman, instead of proper scientists.

Perhaps Bob Ward might like to raise a complaint with the BBC for using fake data, supplied by his boss!

As for the IPPR, it was a silly question. They are not a scientific organisation, but simply exist to promote their left wing agenda. Facts do not matter to them.

 

Which all brings us back to Roger Harrabin and the BBC. Surely it should have been immediately apparent to any journalist in his field that the claims made by the IPPR simply did not stand up to the slightest scrutiny.

After all, even the IPCC never made such outlandish claims, and could find no real evidence that extreme weather was increasing, despite intense efforts to do so.

Is Harrabin so incompetent that he simply echoed these lies, without even bothering to check them out?

Or is he so tied up in his quasi religious devotion to the evils of climate change, that, a bit like the Soviets and their tractor statistics, he assumed they must be right?

 

Either way, the BBC have made it clear to their reporters that they must not simply accept the word of sceptics like Lord Lawson, but challenge them instead. This is a classic instance where Harrabin has failed in his duty to question the fake science he has been fed.

It is no good the BBC simply saying they have only reported what "scientists" have said. What is good for the goose is good for the gander.

A strong complaint is in order!

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Climate Change Takes Fashion Week by Storm (and by Drought and by Fire . . .)

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Fernbach et al.: Advantages of Pre-Registration of Study Design

Guest Essay by Kip Hansen We recently saw on this blog a  guest essay from Joel O'Bryan regarding a paper from Fernbach et al. titled "Extreme opponents of genetically modified foods know the least but think they know the most" which appears in the form of a "Letter" in the journal Nature – Human Behavior.    The…

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Finding: Jet aircraft trails create extra rain and snow from clouds

WASHINGTON—Planes flying over rain or snow can intensify the precipitation by as much as 10-fold, according to a new study. The rain- and snow-bursts are not caused by emissions from the aircraft but are the peculiar consequence of the aircrafts' wings passing though clouds of supercooled water droplets in cloud layers above a layer of…

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NASA: ‘The world is a greener place than it was 20 years ago’ – ‘Thanks to tree planting & agriculture’

http://bit.ly/2SuWPob A multi-decade, high resolution study of the Earth's surface has finally yielded some good news: the planet is a much greener place than it was in the mid '90s, and the source of this greening has surprised many. The 20-year-long data record was produced by an instrument on board two satellites orbiting the planet [...]

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[ASAP] Simulation of a Solvate Ionic Liquid at a Polarizable Electrode with a Constant Potential

The Journal of Physical Chemistry C

DOI: 10.1021/acs.jpcc.8b09369

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[ASAP] Phase Transformations of Metal–Organic Frameworks MAF-6 and ZIF-71 during Intrusion–Extrusion Experiments

The Journal of Physical Chemistry C

DOI: 10.1021/acs.jpcc.8b12047

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[ASAP] Unraveling the Defect Emission and Exciton–Lattice Interaction in Bilayer WS2

The Journal of Physical Chemistry C

DOI: 10.1021/acs.jpcc.8b11011

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[ASAP] Effect of Water on the Structural, Optical, and Hot-Carrier Cooling Properties of the Perovskite Material MASnI3

The Journal of Physical Chemistry C

DOI: 10.1021/acs.jpcc.8b11651

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[ASAP] Molecular Dynamics Simulation of Hydration and Swelling of Mixed-Layer Clays in the Presence of Carbon Dioxide

The Journal of Physical Chemistry C

DOI: 10.1021/acs.jpcc.8b11589

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[ASAP] Correction to “Compensation Effect in H2 Permeation Kinetics of PdAg Membranes”

The Journal of Physical Chemistry C

DOI: 10.1021/acs.jpcc.9b01090

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[ASAP] Origin of the Immiscibility of Alkanes and Perfluoroalkanes

Journal of the American Chemical Society

DOI: 10.1021/jacs.8b10745

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[ASAP] Unraveling the Impact of Halide Mixing on Perovskite Stability

Journal of the American Chemical Society

DOI: 10.1021/jacs.8b11210

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