[ASAP] Enzymatic Production and Enzymatic-Mass Spectrometric Fingerprinting Analysis of Chitosan Polymers with Different Nonrandom Patterns of Acetylation

Journal of the American Chemical Society

DOI: 10.1021/jacs.8b12561

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Catalyzing Clean Energy Innovation

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Skeptical ‘Politically Incorrect’ climate book surges to #1 Amazon Best Seller in ‘Climatology’ – Surpasses Carl Sagan’s ‘Cosmos’ book

Nearly a  year after it's release, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change, By Marc Morano (Regnery Books) continues to surge to number one in its categories. The book is a "#1 Best Seller in Climatology" on Amazon as of February 8. The book, which is in its 3rd printing has surpassed Carl Sagan's book [...]

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Watch: Morano on Fox & Friends on the Green Raw Deal: ‘This plan is plagiarism pure and simple’ – They recycled same ‘solutions’ of ‘wealth redistribution & central planning’ from previous eco-scares

Watch Segment here: http://bit.ly/2UM1iPZ Fox News Channel – Rush partial Transcript: AINSLEY EARHARDT (CO-HOST): The left's Green New Deal calling for World War II-level mobilization involving replacing every building in America — BRIAN KILMEADE (CO-HOST): Yup. EARHARDT: — banning nuclear energy — KILMEADE: Sounds good. EARHARDT: — ending air travel — KILMEADE: Finally. EARHARDT: — and even ensuring economic [...]

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Matt McGrath Bangs His Global Warming Drum-But Is Anybody Listening?

By Paul Homewood

You would think Matt McGrath would get fed up with writing "we're all gonna die" articles every week! After all, most people now longer pay any attention to his incessant propaganda.

 

The world is in the middle of what is likely to be the warmest 10 years since records began in 1850, say scientists.

The Met Office is forecasting that temperatures for each of the next five years are likely to be 1C or more above pre-industrial levels.

In the next five years there's also a chance we'll see a year in which the average global temperature rise could be greater than 1.5C.

That's seen as a critical threshold for climate change.

If the data matches the forecast, then the decade from 2014-2023 will be the warmest in more than 150 years of record keeping.

The Met Office says that 2015 was the first year in which the global annual average surface temperature reached 1C above the pre-industrial level, which is generally taken to mean the temperatures between 1850 and 1900.

Each year since then, the global average has hovered close to or above the 1C mark. Now, the Met Office says that trend is likely to continue or increase over the next five years.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-47144058#comment_133613579

In true BBC fashion, however, there are a lot of things that McGrath forgot to tell us, which would show that things aren't quite as black and white as he would like you to think.

Let's start with that fake map:

 

This claims to represent temperature anomalies, calculated against a baseline of 1951-80, three of the coldest decades of the entire 20thC.

In reality, however, there is no temperature data whatsoever for vast areas of the world, and NASA, who published the map, simply make up temperatures to fill the missing gaps (grey below).

https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/temp-and-precip/global-maps/

Note also that red swathe across the Arctic, intended to persuade us it is burning up there.

NASA, NOAA and the Met Office have virtually no data at all anywhere in the Arctic Circle, other than a tiny handful of sites around the edge, at least some of which are affected by UHI. It is scientifically well accepted that you cannot use these land sites to derive surface temperatures across the ice filled Arctic Ocean. Yet that is exactly what NASA and co do.

But let's take a look at the longer term trends in Arctic temperatures, according to the Met Office Hadley Centre. Bear in mind that 1951-80 baseline that NASA and the BBC are trying to persuade you is the norm.

 http://climate4you.com/

As you can see, temperatures back in the 1930s and 40s were similar to now, but declined sharply in the 1960s and 70s. We keep being told that Arctic temperatures are rising faster than the rest of the world because of global warming. But the rapid rise since 1980 is nothing more than a cyclical phenomenon.

 

In contrast to the sparse surface coverage, satellite data offers a much more complete picture of atmospheric temperatures. And these show that the temperature last year was nowhere near being a record , and was barely higher than 2002.

http://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/

https://www.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/v6.0/tlt/uahncdc_lt_6.0.txt

Those, for whom the UAH data is somewhat inconvenient, try to argue that you cannot compare tropospheric temperatures with surface ones, as it is like comparing chalk and cheese.

However, this was very definitely not what was being said a few years ago, when the two datasets were in broad agreement. For instance, this was what IPCC AR4 had to say in 2007:

For global observations since the late 1950s, the most recent versions of all available data sets show that the troposphere has warmed at a slightly greater rate than the surface, while the stratosphere has cooled markedly since 1979. This is in accord with physical expectations and most model results, which demonstrate the role of increasing greenhouse gases in tropospheric warming and stratospheric cooling; ozone depletion also contributes substantially to stratospheric cooling.

http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/faq-3-1.html

In other words, it was well accepted that tropospheric and surface temperature trends should track each other over time.

Defenders of the surface record point out that the various versions tend to agree closely. However, this means little, other than the fact that they all tend to rely on the same data, and that there is a lot of collusion.

Take a look at the chart below.

There is very close agreement in the 19th and early 20thC. Yet there was barely any temperature data at all in those days.

It would have been statistically impossible to derive a global temperature from such little data, yet somehow the Hadley Centre, NOAA and NASA all managed to work it out to great detail, and each came to similar results. Coincidence?

http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/full/10.1175/JTECH-D-11-00103.1

Another trick played by the alarmists, and eagerly echoed by the BBC, is to keep quiet about margins of error.

As already noted, there are absolutely massive uncertainties about the calculation of global surface temperatures, concerning coverage, sampling, measurement, UHI and other biases. The Hadley Centre attempt to measure this uncertainty, as I have shown below:

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcrut4/data/current/time_series/HadCRUT.4.6.0.0.annual_ns_avg.txt

For instance, although the estimated anomaly for 2018 was 0.596C (compared to a 1961-90 baseline), the actual range could be anywhere between 0.509 and 0.685C.

In my opinion, the real level of uncertainty is far greater than admitted. But even on these figures, we can see that statistically 2018 is only tied with years such as 2001. Apart from the record El Nino of 2015/16, there is no evidence statistically that global temperatures have gone up since 1998.

When we hear claims of hottest evah, we need to keep in mind that they are based on differences of hundredths of degrees, amounts so small that they cannot even be measured.

Pre Industrial

You may have noticed that, increasingly, reports of global temperatures always seem to talk in terms of warming since pre-industrial times, defined as 1850 to 1900.

This did not use to be the case. NASA, NOAA and the Hadley Centre all used to report on the anomaly values, sometimes converting to an actual temperature.

The predominant use of the rise since pre-industrial stems from the "2C" target formalised at Paris.

And the reason is very clear. From a PR point of view, it sounds much more scary.

For instance, measured in terms of anomaly from 1981-2010, last years HADCRUT temperature was 0.3C. That would be unlikely to frighten anybody, particularly when it is an impossible job to measure global temperatures to such a degree of accuracy.

Moreover, people know full well that their own local temperatures can vary by much more than that on a daily basis.

To sell the scare to the public, the numbers needed to be beefed up. Hence talk of 1.5C and 2.0C.

The fact that we have already, supposedly, has a full degree of warming since the 19thC, without any deterioration in climate, is neither here nor there. People need to be scared.

Yet whenever the BBC or the rest of the media broadcast the latest propaganda, they never seem to mention that the 19th was the end of the Little Ice Age, arguably the coldest era since the Ice Age.

I have yet to hear anybody seriously argue that it would be good to return to those cold days of the past. Even Matt McGrath!

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Climate hypochondria and tribalism vs. ‘winning’

Reposted from Dr. Judith Curry's Climate Etc. Posted on February 7, 2019 by curryja | by Judith Curry Some reactions from Wednesday's Congressional testimony. I'm starting this post while sitting in the Phoenix airport waiting for my delayed flight home (by the time I get home, I will have been up for 24 hours today/tomorrow).…

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Ni (II)-Doped Anionic Metal-organic Framework Nanowire Arrays for Enhancing Oxygen Evolution Reaction

Chem. Commun., 2019, Accepted Manuscript
DOI: 10.1039/C9CC00009G, Communication

Zhi-Qiang Jiang, Fengyu Li, Junxue Zhu, Jin Lu, Tian Wen, Lei Zhang
Herein, an anionic metal–organic framework nanowire arrays not only directly grown on Cu foam but also captured Ni (II) ions at ultra-small particles level. The hybrid material exhibited high activity...
The content of this RSS Feed (c) The Royal Society of Chemistry

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US Refined Coal Surging

Despite predictions that US coal production and use are doomed, Trump policies are sparking an increase in "clean coal", i.e. refined coal. Activists/alarmists say there is no such thing as clean coal, but as usual they conflate actual air pollution with CO2 emissions, which are plant food rather than toxic. A recent article from EIA explains the rise of refined coal U.S. production and use of refined coal continues to increase. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

U.S. production of refined coal, which is coal that has been processed to reduce emissions when burned, reached record highs in 2017, and it is expected to increase even further in 2018. Use of refined coal has increased despite the general decline in total U.S. coal consumption since 2008. For the first three quarters of 2018, EIA estimates that refined coal production totaled 121 million short tons (MMst), which is 21% of the total U.S. coal production of 563 million short tons.

According to EIA estimates, refined coal's share of total coal tonnage consumed for U.S. electricity generation will have increased from 15% in 2016 to more than 18% through October 2018. EIA began collecting data on generation from refined coal in 2016.

Refined coal generated more than 235 million megawatthours (MWh) of U.S. electricity in 2017, or 20% of net coal generation, an increase of 2% from 2016. EIA estimates of refined coal through October 2018 suggest an even larger increase in refined coal use to more than 22% of total coal generation.

Refined coal is most commonly made by mixing proprietary additives to feedstock coal. These additives increase the production of mercury oxides, which can then be captured by using mercury emission reduction technologies such as flue gas desulfurization scrubbers and particulate matter control systems.

Refined coal production qualifies for a tax credit under the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004. To qualify for the refined coal tax credit, producers must have a qualified professional engineer demonstrate that burning the refined coal results in a 20% emissions reduction of nitrogen oxide and a 40% emissions reduction of either sulfur dioxide or mercury compared with the emissions that would result from burning feedstock coal. The tax credit was designed to increase with inflation and was valued at $6.91 per short ton produced in 2017 and $7.10 per short ton in 2018. EIA surveys show respondents continued to add refined-coal burning plants even as older conventional coal plants retire, with 36 new refined coal plants coming online from 2016 through October 2018.

Summary

US technology is progressing to reduce air pollution. The principal issues are:
Nitrogen oxides (NOx), Sulfur dioxide (SO2), Mercury (HG), and Particulate matter (PM).

The combination of refining the coal feedstock along with scrubbers is removing the actual environmental hazards. What is left is the unproven claim of global warming/climate change as the reason to deprive people of the benefits of burning coal for gaining power. Power to the people indeed.

Footnote:

A previous post highlighted the mismanaged Ontario phase-out of coal power plants, driven by CO2 obsession but justified by appealing to air pollution.  See Ontario Coal Phase-out: All Pain, No Gain

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Legally it’s the wrong time? Coal mine rejected by judge who hopes to change weather

Sometimes we have laws, and sometimes it's the wrong time for them

A judgement today in a minor NSW court banned a coal mine in the hope of making storms and floods nicer for our great grandchildren. Curiously, it was not the much hated thermal coal mine, it was a coking coal mine – the stuff we use in making steel. It takes 600 kilogram of coal to make one ton of steel and Australian coking coal is considered some of the worlds best. It follows that either the world uses less steel, or it buys the coal from somewhere else. Does the judge have something against steel? Let's melt down wind turbines and solar panels instead.

Most likely the world will buy the coal from somewhere else. It will likely be less pure and more polluting with few environmental controls or workers rights, but hey-de-ho, Judge Preston is not there to worry about environmental global concerns. It's not like he's a judge in the NSW Land and Environment Court. Oh…

Effectively, an Australian court decided to increase global pollution by blocking a clean coal mine. As usual, there is no scientific or legal consistency; No principle apart from impressing [...]

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[ASAP] Cu-Based Single-Atom Catalysts Boost Electroreduction of CO2 to CH3OH: First-Principles Predictions

The Journal of Physical Chemistry C

DOI: 10.1021/acs.jpcc.8b12449

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[ASAP] Gate-Tunable Fano Resonances in Parallel-Polyacene-Bridged Carbon Nanotubes

The Journal of Physical Chemistry C

DOI: 10.1021/acs.jpcc.9b00643

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New Mexico Embraces Transition to 100% Clean Energy

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[ASAP] Induction of Enzyme-like Peroxidase Activity in an Iron Porphyrin Complex Using Second Sphere Interactions

Inorganic Chemistry

DOI: 10.1021/acs.inorgchem.8b02707

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[ASAP] Influence of the Counterion on the Synthesis of Cyclic Carbonates Catalyzed by Bifunctional Aluminum Complexes

Inorganic Chemistry

DOI: 10.1021/acs.inorgchem.8b03475

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[ASAP] Electro-Mechanical Conductance Modulation of a Nanopore Using a Removable Gate

ACS Nano

DOI: 10.1021/acsnano.8b09266

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Wall Street Journal Comments That German Government Running “World’s Dumbest Energy Policy”

The German language Epoch Times here reports how the entire editorial board at the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) commented how the "German government under Angela Merkel was running the "world's dumbest energy policy".

"Devastating comment"

After having wasted billions of euros on renewable energies, saddling consumers with ultra high power prices, shutting down nuclear power plants, Germany has just decided to shut down its coal power plants by the year 2038. The Journal writes on the move to exit coal:

Having wasted uncountable billions of euros on renewables and inflicted some of Europe's highest energy prices on German households and businesses, now Berlin is promising to kill the one reliable power source Germany has left."

The Epoch Times calls the Wall Street Journal commentary "a devastating comment on the conduct of political decision-makers in a country that is not geopolitically considered an explicit opponent of the US."

Even exceeds Europe's "stupid environmental policy"

The Epoch Times, along with the Wall Street Journal, also says that "although stupid environmental policy is routine throughout Europe, with reference to the fuel taxes of French President Emmanuel Macron, who had triggered the protests of the yellow vests, the looming German renunciation of coal, however, would easily exceed even this standard."

Last reliable source will be shut down

"After the leadership in Berlin had already wasted countless billions of euros on renewable energies and had imposed the highest energy prices on European households and companies, Germany was now also offering the prospect of the end for the only reliable source of energy left to the country," The Epoch Times wrote.

The Epoch Times also questions Berlin's move with regards to pollution, writing that if the government complains that it is unduly polluting the environment, then it must ask itself why it had been "making the wrong political decisions for more than a decade" since it decided to burn more coal in lieu of the nuclear power plants which were shut down in 2011 in the wake of the Fukushima accident.

Green folly, dangerously dependent

And as Germany pushes to complete its Nord Stream 2 monster pipeline for delivering gas from Russia, the WSJ believes that Germany is dangerously making itself energy dependent on foreign countries. Just the compensation that has to be paid to coal power plants operators for the early shutdown will cost consumers 40 billon euros, the Epoch Times writes.

The WSJ does not think Chancellor Merkel will come to her senses, but hopes her successor Annegret Kramp Karrenbauer will. The WSJ adds:

Her successor will have the opportunity to name Ms Merkel's green folly, and Germany's troubled electricity customers should hope that this is the case." 

<img class="wort-pixel" src="https://vg06.met.vgwort.de/na/408ebf488a494fa392946e22f769ddd4″ alt="" width="1″ height="1″ /><span id="mce_marker" data-mce-type="bookmark" data-mce-fragment="1″>​</span>

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Challenge Cities On Track to Beat Their Paris Climate Target

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Refutation of the the Belgian climate manifesto by the Climate Inteligence Foundation.

English Translation shared from NoTricksZone ~ctm What follows is translation of a guest contribution from the Climate Intelligence Foundation in response to a manifesto by 3400 Belgian academics who in lock-step claim "it is five to twelve". According to them, draconian measures are necessary to save the world. Hat-tip Dr. Hans Labohm It's an as…

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Aussie Court Rejects New Coal Mine Because Climate Change

Guest essay by Eric Worrall An Australian court has just rejected an application to build a new coal mine, because of the alleged impact burning coal extracted from the mine would have on global warming. Court rules out Hunter Valley coalmine on climate change grounds Michael McGowan Fri 8 Feb 2019 10.20 AEDT Last modified…

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OCASIO-CORTEZ BUNGLED GREEN NEW DEAL’S RELEASE. HER STAFF TOOK ITS WEBPAGE OFFLINE

http://bit.ly/2MZagH6 By MICHAEL BASTASCH Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York bungled the release of the "Green New Deal." Her office was forced to take down a summary of the bill because it contained a series of gaffes. Those included anti-nuclear power language, a reference to "farting cows" and welfare for "unwilling" workers. Democratic New York [...]

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WSJ writer slams Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal, says it looks like Dem parody bill

https://fxn.ws/2SjT7NS By Lukas Mikelionis | Fox News The Wall Street Journal's Kimberley Strassel issued a blistering critique of the proposed Green New Deal, saying that the proposal reads like a parody of the Democratic Party done by Republicans. "By the end of the Green New Deal resolution (and accompanying fact sheet) I was laughing so hard [...]

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Exfoliation of Transition-Metal Dichalcogenides Using ATP in Aqueous Solution

Chem. Commun., 2019, Accepted Manuscript
DOI: 10.1039/C8CC10259G, Communication

Xinyi Liu, Huan Chen, Jing Lin, Yi Li, Liangqia Guo
A facile environmentally friendly liquid ultrasonic exfoliation of transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs) was proposed by using ATP as the exfoliation reagent. A biosensing platform for the detection of adenosine based...
The content of this RSS Feed (c) The Royal Society of Chemistry

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Green New Deal: Read the full text

http://bit.ly/2MT3lPB Read the Green New Deal Full Text Share This Story, Choose Your Platform! FacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditGoogle+TumblrPinterestVkEmail

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WORLD COOLING – BUT RAPID WARMING FORECAST

http://bit.ly/2MVoDMh Dr David Whitehouse, GWPF Science Editor Average global temperature has been falling for the last 3 years, despite rising atmospheric CO2 levels. 21st century average global surface temperature change and CO2 rise; graph GWPF A big story at the beginning of each year is the release of the global surface temperature of the previous year. [...]

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Rush Limbaugh on ‘Green New Deal’: ‘The left has literally have gone nuts on this climate change business’

http://bit.ly/2Gwb7Of RUSH: Holy smokes. Holy smokes! This is great. I love it! I love it, folks. You know, the left has gone nuts. They literally have gone nuts on this climate change business. Trying to keep up with things here breaking just as the program is started. I want to go through some of the things [...]

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Delingpole: Alarmists Cook up Warming Scare as Planet Cools

http://bit.ly/2SkfjaE By James Delingpole Excerpt: But look at those scary claims more closely and you'll notice something they would rather you hadn't noticed: If 2018 is not as hot as 2016, 2017, and 2015, that means the planet is cooling not warming. In truth these "hottest year evah" claims are pretty meaningless anyway. Marc Morano lays to rest this [...]

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The 10 Most Insane Requirements Of The Green New Deal

The Green New Deal isn't just un-American, it's also completely bonkers.
By David Harsanyi

FEBRUARY 7, 2019
Note: Ocasio-Cortez's office has taken down their page describing the Green New Deal.

A number of Democratic Party presidential hopefuls - including Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand, Julian Castro, and Beto O'Rourke, for starters - have already endorsed or expressed support for the "Green New Deal" (GND). Today, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Edward J. Markey dropped details about her plan.

It is not hyperbole to contend that GND is likely the most ridiculous and un-American plan that's ever been presented by an elected official to voters. Not merely because it would necessitate a communist strongman to institute, but also because the societal cost are unfathomable. The risible historic analogies Markey and Ocasio-Cortez rely on, the building of the interstate highway system or moon landing, are nothing but trifling projects compared to a plan that overhauls modernity by voluntarily destroying massive amounts of wealth and technology. That is the GND.

While some of the specifics need to be ironed out, the plan's authors assure us that this "massive transformation of our society" needs some "clear goals and a timeline."The timeline is ten years. Here are some of the goals:

Ban affordable energy. GND calls for the elimination of all fossil fuel energy production, the lifeblood of American industry and life, which includes not only all oil but also natural gas - one of the cheapest sources of American energy, and one of the reasons the United States has been able to lead the world in carbon-emissions reduction.

Eliminate nuclear energy. The GND also calls for eliminating all nuclear power, one of the only productive and somewhat affordable "clean" energy sources available to us, in 11 years. This move would purge around 20 percent of American energy generation so you can rely on intermittent wind for your energy needs.

Eliminate 99 percent of cars. To be fair, under the GND, everyone will need to retrofit their cars with Flintstones-style foot holes or pedals for cycling. The authors state that the GND would like to replace every "combustion-engine vehicle" - trucks, airplanes, boats, and 99 percent of cars - within ten years. Charging stations for electric vehicles will be built "everywhere," though how power plants will provide the energy needed to charge them is a mystery.

Gut and rebuild every building in America. Markey and Cortez want to "retrofit every building in America" with "state of the art energy efficiency." I repeat, "every building in America." That includes every home, factory, and apartment building, which will all need, for starters, to have their entire working heating and cooling systems ripped out and replaced with...well, with whatever technology Democrats are going invent in their committee hearings, I guess.

Eliminate air travel. GND calls for building out "highspeed rail at a scale where air travel stops becoming necessary." Good luck Hawaii! California's high-speed boondoggle is already in $100 billion dollars of debt, and looks to be one of the state's biggest fiscal disasters ever. Amtrak runs billions of dollars in the red (though, as we'll see, trains will also be phased out). Imagine growing that business model out to every state in America?

A government-guaranteed job. The bill promises the United States government will provide every single American with a job that includes a "family-sustaining wage, family and medical leave, vacations, and a pension." You can imagine that those left in the private sector would be funding these through some unspecified "massive" taxation. On the bright side, when you're foraging for food, your savings will be worthless.

Free education for life. GND promises free college or trade schools for every American.

A salubrious diet. The GND promises the government will provide "healthy food" to every American (because there are no beans or lettuce in your local supermarket, I guess).

A house. The GND promises that the government will provide, "safe, affordable, adequate housing" for every American citizen. I call dibs on an affordable Adams Morgan townhouse. Thank you, Ocasio-Cortez.

Free money. The GND aims to provide, and I am not making this up, "economic security" for all who are "unable or unwilling" to work. Just to reiterate: if you're unwilling to work, the rest of us will have your back.

Bonus insanity: Ban meat. Ocasio-Cortez admits that we can't get zero emissions in 10 years "because we aren't sure that we'll be able to fully get rid of farting cows and airplanes that fast." The only way to get rid of farting cows is to get rid of beef.

The GND uses the word "massive" to explain the size "investments" (formerly known as "taxes") 13 times. How will we pay for this plan? "The same way we did the New Deal, the 2008 bank bailouts and extend quantitative easing," say Markey and Cortez, who earned her degree in economics at an institution of higher learning that should be immediately decertified. The plan itself seems to insinuate that billionaires can pay for the whole thing. Of course, best case scenario, it is estimated that instituting a top marginal tax rate of 70 percent would raise a little more than $700 billion over that decade. She does not explain how we're going to raise the other 20 bazillion dollars it will cost to tear down modernity.

Cortez and Markey claim that 92 percent of Democrats and 64 percent of Republicans support the Green New Deal. I'm not sure where that number is derived. But ask them again when government agents come to take out their water heater.

Cortez demonstrates the failure of our education system which has indoctrinated instead of educated our young people. There is a new movement to go after universities to recover tuition for their failure to educate (they indoctrinate) and prepare students for real world jobs. Students leave and are qualified for jobs as social media trolls, activists and social justice warriors but not prepared for real jobs. Students leave with debts equivalent to home mortgages, that will delay or deny their future. I only hope this movement grows and we penalize the schools and eat into their precious endowment money to create more balanced and useful education.

Markey is a typical Massachusetts politician (doesn't matter if they have a D or R after their name) who is just full of himself. A friend sat in a restaurant and at the table behind him was someone who spoke loudly and used the word I more times than Obama at his SOTU addresses - it was Ed Markey.

All this for what?? It really has little to do with climate which is not becoming more severe (see the updated alarmist claim fact check here) and is solely meant to advance the green agenda and give the government more power over every aspect of out life.

The Green New Deal isn't just un-American, it's also completely bonkers.
By David Harsanyi

FEBRUARY 7, 2019
Note: Ocasio-Cortez's office has taken down their page describing the Green New Deal.

A number of Democratic Party presidential hopefuls - including Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand, Julian Castro, and Beto O'Rourke, for starters - have already endorsed or expressed support for the "Green New Deal" (GND). Today, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Edward J. Markey dropped details about her plan.

It is not hyperbole to contend that GND is likely the most ridiculous and un-American plan that's ever been presented by an elected official to voters. Not merely because it would necessitate a communist strongman to institute, but also because the societal cost are unfathomable. The risible historic analogies Markey and Ocasio-Cortez rely on, the building of the interstate highway system or moon landing, are nothing but trifling projects compared to a plan that overhauls modernity by voluntarily destroying massive amounts of wealth and technology. That is the GND.

While some of the specifics need to be ironed out, the plan's authors assure us that this "massive transformation of our society" needs some "clear goals and a timeline."The timeline is ten years. Here are some of the goals:

Ban affordable energy. GND calls for the elimination of all fossil fuel energy production, the lifeblood of American industry and life, which includes not only all oil but also natural gas - one of the cheapest sources of American energy, and one of the reasons the United States has been able to lead the world in carbon-emissions reduction.

Eliminate nuclear energy. The GND also calls for eliminating all nuclear power, one of the only productive and somewhat affordable "clean" energy sources available to us, in 11 years. This move would purge around 20 percent of American energy generation so you can rely on intermittent wind for your energy needs.

Eliminate 99 percent of cars. To be fair, under the GND, everyone will need to retrofit their cars with Flintstones-style foot holes or pedals for cycling. The authors state that the GND would like to replace every "combustion-engine vehicle" - trucks, airplanes, boats, and 99 percent of cars - within ten years. Charging stations for electric vehicles will be built "everywhere," though how power plants will provide the energy needed to charge them is a mystery.

Gut and rebuild every building in America. Markey and Cortez want to "retrofit every building in America" with "state of the art energy efficiency." I repeat, "every building in America." That includes every home, factory, and apartment building, which will all need, for starters, to have their entire working heating and cooling systems ripped out and replaced with...well, with whatever technology Democrats are going invent in their committee hearings, I guess.

Eliminate air travel. GND calls for building out "highspeed rail at a scale where air travel stops becoming necessary." Good luck Hawaii! California's high-speed boondoggle is already in $100 billion dollars of debt, and looks to be one of the state's biggest fiscal disasters ever. Amtrak runs billions of dollars in the red (though, as we'll see, trains will also be phased out). Imagine growing that business model out to every state in America?

A government-guaranteed job. The bill promises the United States government will provide every single American with a job that includes a "family-sustaining wage, family and medical leave, vacations, and a pension." You can imagine that those left in the private sector would be funding these through some unspecified "massive" taxation. On the bright side, when you're foraging for food, your savings will be worthless.

Free education for life. GND promises free college or trade schools for every American.

A salubrious diet. The GND promises the government will provide "healthy food" to every American (because there are no beans or lettuce in your local supermarket, I guess).

A house. The GND promises that the government will provide, "safe, affordable, adequate housing" for every American citizen. I call dibs on an affordable Adams Morgan townhouse. Thank you, Ocasio-Cortez.

Free money. The GND aims to provide, and I am not making this up, "economic security" for all who are "unable or unwilling" to work. Just to reiterate: if you're unwilling to work, the rest of us will have your back.

Bonus insanity: Ban meat. Ocasio-Cortez admits that we can't get zero emissions in 10 years "because we aren't sure that we'll be able to fully get rid of farting cows and airplanes that fast." The only way to get rid of farting cows is to get rid of beef.

The GND uses the word "massive" to explain the size "investments" (formerly known as "taxes") 13 times. How will we pay for this plan? "The same way we did the New Deal, the 2008 bank bailouts and extend quantitative easing," say Markey and Cortez, who earned her degree in economics at an institution of higher learning that should be immediately decertified. The plan itself seems to insinuate that billionaires can pay for the whole thing. Of course, best case scenario, it is estimated that instituting a top marginal tax rate of 70 percent would raise a little more than $700 billion over that decade. She does not explain how we're going to raise the other 20 bazillion dollars it will cost to tear down modernity.

Cortez and Markey claim that 92 percent of Democrats and 64 percent of Republicans support the Green New Deal. I'm not sure where that number is derived. But ask them again when government agents come to take out their water heater.

Cortez demonstrates the failure of our education system which has indoctrinated instead of educated our young people. There is a new movement to go after universities to recover tuition for their failure to educate (they indoctrinate) and prepare students for real world jobs. Students leave and are qualified for jobs as social media trolls, activists and social justice warriors but not prepared for real jobs. Students leave with debts equivalent to home mortgages, that will delay or deny their future. I only hope this movement grows and we penalize the schools and eat into their precious endowment money to create more balanced and useful education.

Markey is a typical Massachusetts politician (doesn't matter if they have a D or R after their name) who is just full of himself. A friend sat in a restaurant and at the table behind him was someone who spoke loudly and used the word I more times than Obama at his SOTU addresses - it was Ed Markey.

All this for what?? It really has little to do with climate which is not becoming more severe (see the updated alarmist claim fact check here) and is solely meant to advance the green agenda and give the government more power over every aspect of out life. 

from Climate Change Skeptic Blogs via hj on Inoreader http://www.icecap.us/

Grid-scale electricity storage can’t save renewables

Image credit: energy-storage.news

No surprise there, but the points made deserve emphasis. No amount of ideology can defeat the realities of engineering and economics.

Engineer pours cold water on battery and hydrogen technologies – GWPF press release.
– – –
A new briefing paper from the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) dismisses the idea that grid-scale electricity storage can help bring about a UK renewables revolution.

According to the paper's author, Professor Jack Ponton, an emeritus professor of engineering from the University of Edinburgh, current approaches are either technically inadequate or commercially unviable.

Many commentators have suggested that intermittent power from wind turbines could simply be balanced with batteries or pumped hydro storage, but as Professor Ponton explains, this approach is unlikely to be viable.

"You need storage to deal with lulls in wind generation that can last for several days, so the amount required would be impracticably large. And because this would only be required intermittently, its capital cost could probably never be recovered".

Professor Ponton also thinks that another potential saviour of the renewables revolution – hydrogen storage – has been unjustifiably hyped:

"A major problem with hydrogen is its low volumetric energy density. The only practical way of storing the large volumes required would be in underground caverns or depleted gasfields. We are already short of this type of storage for winter supplies of natural gas."

Professor Ponton concludes that a lack of suitable storage technologies means that intermittent renewables cannot replace dispatchable coal, gas and nuclear power and so a sensible energy policy cannot be based on them.

"Wind and solar power are not available on demand and there are no technologies to make them so. Refusing to face these inconvenient facts poses a serious threat to our energy security".

Grid-Scale Storage: Can it solve the intermittency problem? (PDF)

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Why Phi? – Resonances of exoplanetary system Kepler-107

Orbital (top line) and synodic relationships of Kepler-107, plus cross-checks

The system has four planets: b,c,d, and e.

The chart to the right is a model of the close orbital relationships of these four recently announced short-period (from 3.18 to 14.75 days) exoplanets.

It can be broken down like this:
b:c = 20:13
c:d = 13:8
d:e = 24:13 (= 8:13 ratio, *3)
b:d = 5:2
c:e = 3:1
(1,2,3,5,8, and 13 are Fibonacci numbers)

In fact d:e is slightly closer to 21:34, *3 – again, Fibonacci numbers.
Solar system comparisons – Venus:Earth orbit ratio is 13:8, and Jupiter:Saturn is very near 5:2.

Looking at the semi-major axis (distance from the star Kepler-107) ratios:
b:c = 4:3
c:d = 1.3812:1 (2 – phi = 1.382)
d:e = 3:2

This is a good example of a close-knit Fibonacci/Phi related exoplanetary system.
Data here.

Research paper: A giant impact as the likely origin of different twins in the Kepler-107 exoplanet system
The paper refers to 'the compact and near-resonant system Kepler-107'.

Why Phi? – Talkshop links

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Climate change alarmists burned by studies showing destructive wildfires in decline

Global burned area dropped by about 25 percent over the previous 18 years, study shows

By Valerie Richardson - The Washington Times - Monday, July 30, 2018

Scenes of Californians fleeing their homes and Greeks swimming out to sea have fueled alarm about climate change fueling deadly wildfires, but recent studies show that such destructive blazes are on the decline worldwide.

A September 2017 report in the journal Science found that global burned area dropped by about 25 percent over the previous 18 years, a finding consistent with a May 2016 paper published by the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

"[G]lobal area burned appears to have overall declined over past decades, and there is increasing evidence that there is less fire in the global landscape today than centuries ago," said the study by British researchers at Swansea University.

Even in California, which for years has wrestled with fire devastation, a study in the International Journal of Wildland Fire found that the number of wildfires burning more than 300 acres per year has been tailing off since a peak in 1980.

"The claim commonly made in research papers and the media that fire activity is increasing throughout the western USA is certainly an over-statement," the authors, Jon E. Keeley and Alexandra D. Syphard, said in The Orange County Register.

Mr. Keeley is a scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey, and Ms. Syphard is with the Conservation Biology Institute.

Such findings appear to fly in the face of widespread reports that human-caused global warming is increasing the severity and frequency of wildfires by fueling drought and higher temperatures.

"Extreme heat and wildfires made worse by climate change, say scientists," an Associated Press article proclaimed this week on NBC News.

"We now have very strong evidence that global warming has already put a thumb on the scales, upping the odds of extremes like severe heat and heavy rainfall," Stanford University climate scientist Noah Diffenbaugh told the AP.

Yale Environment 360 declared in an Oct. 2 article, "Stark Evidence: A Warmer World Is Sparking More and Bigger Wildfires," and concluded that "the fires being seen today ... are man-made, or at least man-worsened."

This year's U.S. wildfire season was forecast to be worse than average, and so far it has kept with predictions, with 98 wildfires blackening 4.6 million acres as of Monday, more than the 10-year average of 3.7 million acres, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.

California has been hit hardest, but firefighters made progress Monday. They lifted some evacuation orders on the Carr fire in Shasta County about 150 miles north of Sacramento, the deadliest and most destructive of the blazes, and reached 30 percent containment on the Ferguson fire near Yosemite National Park.

Six people have been killed so far in the California wildfires, including two firefighters, a great-grandmother and two of her great-grandchildren. About 410,000 acres have burned across the state amid unpredictable winds and high temperatures.

The death toll in Greece rose to 91 on Sunday as wildfires swept through seaside communities, at one point sending dozens of people out to sea to escape the flames engulfing the resort town of Mati, as shown on a dramatic video.

California Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, cited global warming last week as a factor in his proposal to reduce the legal liability of Pacific Gas & Electric Co., the utility company whose equipment was found to have sparked 15 of the state's 2017 wildfires.

Mr. Brown and legislative leaders announced amended legislation July 2 to heighten California's wildfire response, saying the effort "will help prepare the state to deal with the increasingly extreme weather and natural disasters caused by climate change."

In a May report, "Indicators of Climate Change in California," state Environmental Protection Agency Secretary Matthew Rodriguez said extreme weather events like wildfires are "not isolated incidents."

"They are suggestive of the significant and increasingly discernible impacts of climate change in California," Mr. Rodriguez said. "The most dramatic impacts include wildfires that are larger and more frequent, and the most severe drought since recordkeeping began."

Others have argued that news coverage of fire disasters has contributed to the perception that wildfires driven by increased carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are raging out of control, despite evidence to the contrary.

"[M]any consider wildfire an accelerating problem, with widely held perceptions both in the media and scientific papers of increasing fire occurrence, severity and resulting losses," said the Royal Society paper. "However, important exceptions aside, the quantitative evidence available does not support these perceived trends."

In the Western United States, the study found that the limited data on fire severity "indicate little change overall, and also that area burned at high severity has overall declined compared to pre-European settlement."

What's responsible for the drop-off? The Science article pointed to an expansion of agriculture production in savannas and grasslands, resulting in a roughly 25 percent decrease in global burned area "despite the influence of climate."

The discrepancy was not lost on climate skeptics such as Australia's JoNova, who concluded Monday, "Global warming means a global fall in wildfires."

Anthony Watts, who runs the Watts Up With That website, added: "Remember when we were told that wildfires would increase due to global warming? Never mind."

University of Washington atmospheric sciences professor Clifford Mass said a host of factors may have contributed to this year's California wildfires, including a modest temperature increase over the past several decades.

Add to that the drought, an increase of non-native invasive species, a huge influx of homeowners in fire-prone areas and aggressive fire suppression in the first half of the 20th century that left some forests overgrown and ripe for ignition.

"So there is a lot of talk of climate change 'supercharging' fires, but really no proof of it," Mr. Mass said in an email. "And some fires are clearly NOT associated with climate change, like the wine country fires of last October."

His conclusion? "I suspect climate change is a minor element in the CA wildfires, while fire suppression and human population growth into the wildlands are the dominant elements."

See more on the 11 major alarmist claims here. More detail with charts and data is provided in the clicks following each summary.

from Climate Change Skeptic Blogs via hj on Inoreader http://www.icecap.us/

Ruthenium catalyzes the synthesis of γ-butenolides fused to cyclohexanones

Chem. Commun., 2019, Accepted Manuscript
DOI: 10.1039/C9CC00101H, Communication

RAJU THOMBAL, Seoung-Tae Kim, Mu-Hyun Baik, Yong Rok Lee
Ruthenium(II)-catalyzed reactions of cyclic diazodicarbonyl compounds with β-ketoamides for chemo- and stereoselective construction of cyclohexanone-fused γ-butenolides is described. This study represents the first example for the addition of enol substrate...
The content of this RSS Feed (c) The Royal Society of Chemistry

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Theoretical Basis Of Sampling: Reader Question

From Ernst:

I was wondering if you could help me as a layman grasp a problem I'm wrestling with. Say I have a large tray and pour a gallon of white paint in it. Then I 'toss' a quart of black paint on top of it. The end result looks like a work of modern art. Assume the white paint represents patients who won't have heart attacks and black those that will. Imagine now we are color blind to complete the analogy. What sampling logic can I use to ensure 'randomization' for a clinical trial using the spilled paint as an analogy?

First, randomization is of no interest, except in those cases we worry about a person trying to fool himself, or others. This is why we have referees flip coins at sporting events, because it is presumed the results cannot be controlled. But we could just as easily have the referee decide without a coin. After all, we presume the referee is fair.

We fear doctors aren't so fair, particularly when it comes to investigating their hot new treatment ideas. Like I've said a million times: all scientists agree confirmation bias exists, they just think it always happens to the other guy. Hence removing causal control of evidence selection.

Randomization is asked for in classical statistics, especially frequentism, because it is believed probability is ontic, and thus the randomization is adding something to an observation. If you select a randomization systematically, and not randomly, the observation has been "blessed", as it were, and somehow it counts less. I am in agreement with Judea Pearl on this subject: cause is primary, not randomness.

None of that is very systematically thought out, but then neither is much in the philosophical aspects of frequentism. We can blame this on the math, which is too easy and beautiful.

Second, how to sample your paint? Well, to what end? Since all the black paints will have heart attacks, presumably we can't save them, but we might like to find them to sell them cushions they can carry around for when they eventually keel over.

By definition, blacks are all over the place with no pattern that we can predict—and we can't predict because we can't identify all the causes of their dispersion. We know one part of the cause, the tossing, but the other aspects are a mystery. So we begin by believing the blacks would be anywhere. We do have the idea that 1 in 4 people (if we consider paint comprised as individual dots) are blacks.

If you're going to now sample, you have to have a sampling mechanism, by which I mean you have to cause people to come into your net. On the assumption blacks could be anywhere, then it does not matter what you do: just grab people as they walk by your door. One in four, on average—and here we could compute this distribution exactly (which distribution changes dynamically, since we know the population size)—will be black.

But then there might be the idea that people are clustered together, in the sense that threads of blackness run through the connected blobs of white. Yet because we don't know the structure, or the cause of the structure, of these isolated contiguous groups, it's the same as believing the blacks could be anywhere.

Think of it this way (another example I use). If I tell you the evidence is "We have a 6-sided device that must be activated and upon each activated it can take one of 6 states only, labeled 1-6", the probability of "6" is 1/6. But change the evidence to "We have a 6-sided device that must be activated and upon each activated it can take one of 6 states only, with some sides possibly more frequent, labeled 1-6", the probability of "6" is still 1/6. Because we don't have any information in the new evidence that allows us to change our probability.

We can't push that analogy any farther, though. For the second set of evidence leads to a prediction question after the first point (first activation) is sampled. That's not the same with the paint because we are not trying to predict geographically.

There is no reason to do any geographic sampling, because here we know some of that initial cause of blackness. By assumption, again, blacks could be anywhere. So we don't need to be careful about setting up some kind of grid, or blocks, and sampling within these. Unless we do know, like in the picture heading the post. But this implies we know something of the cause of the placement of the blacks. If we do have that, then certainly we can use it.

Gist: if you can't tell black from white by looking, then just grab whomever comes by, until you've collected enough evidence to be confident the predictions you make with your probability model will have skill.

from Climate Change Skeptic Blogs via hj on Inoreader http://bit.ly/2GwgZHe

Australian court rejects coal mine on climate grounds

Lots of coal in Australia

Are some judges being tempted into overstepping their roles in cases like this? If they are 'calling climate scientists to testify' as the report says, which climate scientists get invited? The ruling could yet be appealed.

An Australian court on Friday delivered a landmark ruling by rejecting plans to build a coal mine on the grounds it would worsen climate change, reports Phys.org.

Chief Justice Brian Preston said a planned open cut coal mine in a scenic part of New South Wales state would be in "the wrong place at the wrong time".

The ruling by the New South Wales Land and Environment Court was notable for citing not only local impacts of building the proposed Gloucester Resources mine, but also secondary "climate change impacts" of the eventual use of the coal.

"It matters not that this aggregate of the Project's GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions may represent a small fraction of the global total," the justice said.

"Not every natural resource needs to be exploited."

The case was unusual in referring to the 2015 Paris Agreement and United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and calling climate scientists to testify.

Will Steffen, a noted climatologist, told the court that Australia's average surface temperature had increased one degree centigrade over the last century.

Baker & McKenzie's global head of climate law, Martijn Wilder, said the decision reinforced the trend in legal judgements around the world that directly link fossil fuels and climate change.

Continued here.

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Cold Weather Saps EV Range

By Paul Homewood

 

From CNBC:

 

Hoping to increase the appeal of their battery-electric vehicles, automakers have begun rolling out an assortment of "long-range" models, such as the Tesla Model 3, Chevrolet Bolt EV, Jaguar I-Pace and Nissan Leaf Plus.

Under ideal conditions, these products can deliver more than 200 miles per charge and, in some cases, even 300.  But as many owners discovered last week as winter storms slammed much of the country, cold weather conditions do not qualify as "ideal." A new AAA study finds that when the thermometer drops to 20 degrees Fahrenheit, range falls by an average of 41 percent on the five models it tested.

"We found that the impact of temperature on EVs is significantly more than we expected," said Greg Brannon, AAA's director of Automotive Engineering."

Some EV drivers — including this correspondent — recently found that range can drop by half when the mercury tumbled into negative territory. But the AAA study appears to be the first to have used standard, repeatable methodology to confirm the problem and compare the effect of winter temperatures on different models.

There were several surprises that emerged from the research, according to Brannon, starting with the fact that the impact on range was pretty much uniform among all five of the battery-electric vehicles AAA tested: the BMW i3s, the Chevrolet Bolt EV, the Nissan Leaf, the Tesla Model S and the Volkswagen e-Golf.

"It's something all automakers are going to have to deal with as they push for further EV deployment because it's something that could surprise consumers," said Brannon.

Different factors can affect the loss of range, he and other experts have noted. Simply turning on the electric vehicles, or EVs, AAA studied in 20 degree weather revealed a 12 percent loss in range. On a vehicle like the Chevy Bolt, with an EPA rating of 238 miles per charge, that would drop range to 209 miles. But that part of the test assumed operating the vehicle with neither cabin heat or even seat-heaters turned on.

Using climate control revealed an even bigger surprise, according to Brannon, as range dipped by an average 41 percent — which would bring an EV like the Bolt down to just 140 miles of range.

The problem is that unlike a car with an internal combustion engine that can warm the cabin with waste heat, EVs have to tape into their batteries to power the climate control system.

Part of the problem, said the AAA director, is that "lithium-ion batteries like the same sort of temperatures that we do, around 70 degrees."

Much below that and the chemistry used to store energy runs into various problems. Among other things, battery components develop increased resistance that limits how much power they can hold, as well as how fast a battery pack can be charged or discharged, explained Timothy Grewe, chief enginer for electric propulsion systems at General Motors.

https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/aaa-confirms-tesla-bmw-nissan-050138500.html

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China En Route To Being World’s Largest LNG Market

By Paul Homewood

 

h/t Dennis Ambler

 

 

Talking of gas!

 

https://www.naturalgasworld.com/resources/LNG%20Condensed%20Vol%201%20Issue%201%20Jan%202019(2).pdf

 

 

As I have often pointed out, China's appetite for energy is voracious, and it will get its hands on whatever is available, wherever it comes from.

Anyone who thinks they are in the least bit bothered about CO2 emissions needs to get real.

from Climate Change Skeptic Blogs via hj on Inoreader http://bit.ly/2DZpPeV

Selective fluorination of perovskite iron oxide/ruthenium oxide heterostructures via a topotactic reaction

Chem. Commun., 2019, Advance Article
DOI: 10.1039/C8CC09443H, Communication

Akira Chikamatsu, Yusuke Suzuki, Takahiro Maruyama, Tomoya Onozuka, Tsukasa Katayama, Daisuke Ogawa, Tetsuya Hasegawa
SrFeO₂F/SrRuO₃ epitaxial bilayer films were fabricated via a topotactic reaction with polyvinylidene difluoride while maintaining the epitaxial relationship.
To cite this article before page numbers are assigned, use the DOI form of citation above.
The content of this RSS Feed (c) The Royal Society of Chemistry

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New storm chasing series takes the Internet by storm

Here's some free publicity for a pretty cool series.  And hey it's all about the weather. ~ctm My guess is that somebody will come up with a similar series about chasing "climate disruption". – Anthony   "Chicago, IL – February 5, 2019 – This past weekend Limitless Light This past weekend Limitless Light Productions premiered…

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Fate of 14 C-acetyl sulfamethoxazole during the activated sludge process

Abstract

Compared to antibiotic parent molecule, human metabolites are generally more polar and sometimes not less toxic in wastewater. However, most researches focus on the fate of parent molecule. Therefore, behaviors of human metabolites are little known. Moreover, though much has been done on the fate of antibiotics during activated sludge process, there are still some limitations and gaps. In the present study, [Ring-¹⁴C] acetyl sulfamethoxazole (¹⁴C-Ac-SMX) was used to investigate the fate of human metabolite of SMX during activated sludge process at environmentally relevant concentration. At the end of 216 h, 3.1% of the spiked activity in the initial aqueous phase was mineralized, 50% was adsorbed onto the solid phase, and 36.5% still remained in the aqueous phase, indicating that adsorption, not biodegradation, was the main dissipation pathway. In the existence of microbial activities, accumulation into the solid phase was much higher, which was less bioavailable by chemical sequential extraction. The multimedia kinetic model simultaneously depicted the fate of Ac-SMX in the gas, aqueous, and solid phases, and demonstrated that microbially accelerated accumulation onto the solid phase was attributed to lower desorption rate from the solid phase to the aqueous phase, where adsorption rate was not the key factor. Therefore, Ac-SMX cannot be efficiently mineralized and remain in the aqueous or the solid phases. The accumulation in the solid phase is less bioavailable and is hard to be desorbed in the existence of microbial activities, and should not be easily degraded, and may lead to the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria and genes after discharge into the environment.

from Climate Change Skeptic Blogs via hj on Inoreader http://bit.ly/2TDBvJI

Exposure-complaint relationships of various environmental odor sources in Styria, Austria

Abstract

In the planning and authorization process of industrial plants or agricultural buildings, it needs to be ensured that odor emissions do not annoy nearby residents in an unacceptable way. Previous studies have shown that odor-hour frequency is an important predictor for odor annoyance. However, odor-hour frequencies can be assessed for day and night separately. The present study relates complaint rates with different odor types and different metrics of frequency calculated via a dispersion model. Binary logistic regression analyses show that odor type and frequency of odor-hours are important predictors for complaints, while type of residential area does not increase the predictive value of the model. The combination of calculated frequency of day time odor-hours and type of odor explains complaint rates best. It is recommended to keep odor emissions as low as possible, especially for highly annoying odor types.

from Climate Change Skeptic Blogs via hj on Inoreader http://bit.ly/2BqkprA

Investigating adsorption performance of heavy metals onto humic acid from sludge using Fourier-transform infrared combined with two-dimensional correlation spectroscopy

Abstract

Efforts to improve sludge resource utilization have become increasingly important. In this study, humic acid (HA) was extracted from sludge samples collected from a sewage treatment plant, and then used for the adsorption of heavy metals. We used two-dimensional correlation spectroscopy (2D-COS) integrated with Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) to explore the adsorption between sludge HA (HA) and three metal ions (Cu, Ni, and Pb). The resulting adsorbing data conformed to the isotherm of Langmuir adsorption. The maximum capacity values (q_m) were 5.34, 1.49, and 26.29.8 mg/g for Cu, Ni, and Pb, respectively. The data from 2D-FTIR-COS analysis showed that the susceptibility of the functional group followed the order 2300 → 1130 → 1330 → 1480 → 1580 cm⁻¹ for Cu(II) and Ni(II), and 2300 → 1130 → 1330 → 1480 → 1200 → 1580 cm⁻¹ for Pb(II). The sludge HA with Pb(II) showed more adsorption sites than sludge HA with Cu(II) and Ni(II), and these adsorption sites could preferentially bond with Pb(II) at × 1 compared with Cu(II) and Ni(II). Our findings indicate that 2D-FTIR-COS technology has great potential for application as a useful tool for understanding the adsorption mechanism between adsorbents with heavy metals.

from Climate Change Skeptic Blogs via hj on Inoreader http://bit.ly/2THOxGc

Attaining the 2030 Agenda: WSDS India 2019

from Climate Change Skeptic Blogs via hj on Inoreader https://on.nrdc.org/2SAfhuH