Deadly Bacteria Found In Dishwashers

June 22nd, 2011

DailyMail.Co.Uk

Dishwashers are a breeding ground for potentially killer bugs, say scientists.

The moist and hot environment serves as a perfect habitat for two types of dangerous fungi which can also be found in other kitchen appliances such as washing machines and coffee machines.

Researchers found 62 per cent of dishwashers contained the fungi Exophiala dermatitidis and E. phaeomuriformis on the rubber band in the door. Both of the black yeasts are known to be dangerous to human health.

Both Exophiala species displayed remarkable tolerance to heat, high salt concentrations, aggressive detergents and to both acid and alkaline water.

This explains why the fungi survived even in high temperatures between 60 to 80C and despite the use of detergents and salt in the dishwasher.
Researchers say that this is a combination of extreme properties not previously observed in fungi.

Exophiala dermatitidis is frequently encountered as an agent of human disease and is also known to colonise in the lungs of patients with cystic fibrosis.

On rare occasions it has caused fatal infections in healthy humans.

The researchers, whose findings are published in Fungal Biology, say the invasion of black yeasts into our homes is a potential health risk.

Biologist Dr Polona Zalar, of the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and colleagues said: ‘The discovery of this widespread presence of extremophilic fungi in some of our common household appliances suggests these organisms have embarked on an extraordinary evolutionary process that could pose a significant risk to human health in the future.’

In the case of dishwashers, high temperatures are intermittently produced and aggressive detergents and high concentrations of salt are used in each washing cycle.

The researchers studied the presence of fungus in dishwashers taken from a sample of private homes from 101 cities across the world.

They added: ‘Enrichment of fungi that may require specific environmental conditions was observed in dishwashers, 189 of which were sampled in private homes of 101 towns or communities.

‘One-hundred-and-two were sampled from various localities in Slovenia; 42 from other European countries; 13 and 3 from North and South America, respectively; 5 from Israel; 10 from South Africa; 7 from Far East Asia; and 7 from Australia.

‘Sixty-two per cent of the dishwashers were positive for fungi, and 56 per cent of these accommodated Exophiala. Both Exophiala species are known to be able to cause systemic disease in humans and frequently colonise the lungs of patients with cystic fibrosis.

‘We conclude that high temperature, high moisture and alkaline values typically occurring in dishwashers can provide an alternative habitat for species also known to be pathogenic to humans.’

Click here for the full report from DailyMail.co.uk

Government Claims Global Warming May Cause Cancer

April 29, 2010

CNSNews.com

by Matt Cover

A new government report says global warming could lead to an increase in both cancer and mental illness worldwide, and it calls for more federally funded research to determine how that might happen.

The report, A Human Health Perspective on Climate Change, was published by the Interagency Working Group on Climate Change and Health – a combination of scientists from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, NIH, State Department, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Department of Agriculture, the EPA, and the Department of Health and Human Services.

The report’s overall thrust is for more federally funded research to investigate the alleged links between global warming and public health, including the potentially negative effects from warming and the potentially negative side-effect of green technologies.

While the report touches on, for example, the health effects of unclean water and respiratory ailments, it also deals with two other types of health issues not normally associated with global warming: cancer and mental illness.

Cancer

While the report does not claim that global warming will cause new types of cancer, it says that “higher ambient temperatures” caused by global warming will have an effect on cancer rates, probably pushing them higher.

“There are potential impacts on cancer both directly from climate change and indirectly from climate change mitigation strategies,” the report said.

This increased risk supposedly comes from increased exposure to toxic chemicals, caused by global warming. The report also said that global warming would cause heavy rainfall, which would wash these toxic chemicals into the water. Hotter temperatures may also make these toxic chemicals even more toxic.

“One possible direct impact of climate change on cancer may be through increases in exposure to toxic chemicals that are known or suspected to cause cancer following heavy rainfall and by increased volatilization of chemicals under conditions of increased temperature,” states the report.

Another way that global warming will cause more cancer, the report said, was from increased exposure to ultraviolet (UV) radiation, which is known to cause some types of skin cancer. While UV exposure happens every time you go out into the sun, the report said that global warming will make it worse, leading to potentially more skin cancer.

“Another direct effect of climate change, depletion of stratospheric ozone, will result in increased ultraviolet (UV) radiation exposure. UV radiation exposure increases the risk of skin cancers and cataracts,” the report stated.

The report also highlighted a surprising way that global warming may cause more cancer: the development of green technologies. Green technologies often involve exotic metals and alloys that, according to the report, may cause cancer.

“Increased use of NiMH [nickel-metal-hydride] batteries [used in hybrid and electric cars] will necessarily require significant increases in nickel production and the impacts associated with nickel mining and refining,” states the report. “High-level nickel exposure is associated with increased cancer risk, respiratory disease, and birth defects; the same is true with certain other metals, especially cadmium and lead [used in solar cells and batteries].

“Increased production of solar cells also can lead to increased environmental risks,” reads the report. “For example, cadmium-tellurium (CdTe) compounds in photovoltaic systems and the potential for increased cadmium emissions from mining, refining, and the manufacture, utilization, and disposal of photovoltaic modules. Cadmium and cadmium compounds like CdTe are classified as known human carcinogens.”

Despite these warnings and predictions, the report admitted that the government knows little about whether or not any of these supposed new causes of cancer will actually cause any more cancer.

A globe is projected as people are seen in Town Hall Square on the opening day of the Climate Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, Monday Dec. 7, 2009. The largest and most important U.N. climate change conference in history opened Monday, with organizers warning diplomats from 192 nations that this could be the best, last chance for a deal to protect the world from calamitous global warming. (AP Photo/Peter Dejong)
“Very little is known about how such transfers will affect people’s exposure to these chemicals — some of which are known carcinogens — and its ultimate impact on incidence of cancer,” the report states. “The largest research gaps are in the materials and methods used for mitigation and adaptation, and their potential to increase or decrease cancer risks.”

Mental Health

Another effect of global warming, the report said, was increased mental illness caused by natural disasters. These disasters, which already occur but will be more catastrophic as the world warms, cause stress and anxiety, which can lead to mental illness.

“A variety of psychological impacts can be associated with extreme weather and other climate related events,” reads the interagency report.

The people most likely to be affected by global warming-caused mental illness are those already susceptible to mental illness, especially stress-induced mental illness.

The report states: “Extreme weather events such as hurricanes, wildfires, and flooding, can create increased anxiety and emotional stress about the future, as well as create added stress to vulnerable communities already experiencing social, economic, and environmental disruption. Individuals already vulnerable to mental health disease and stress-related disorders are likely to be at increased risk of exacerbated effects following extreme weather or other climate change events.”

The possible mental health conditions that could be caused by global warming range from irritability to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, sexual dysfunction, and drug abuse.

“The most common mental health conditions associated with extreme events range from acute traumatic stress to more chronic stress-related conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder, complicated grief, depression, anxiety disorders, somatic complaints, poor concentration, sleep difficulties, sexual dysfunction, social avoidance, irritability, and drug or alcohol abuse,” reads the report.

As with global warming-caused cancer, the report admits that much more scientific work is needed on the links between global warming and mental illness, saying “numerous research gaps exist.”

“More work is necessary to understand the effects of climate change and extreme weather events on mental health status, to determine how to mitigate these effects, and to overcome the barriers to utilization and delivery of mental health services following extreme weather events,” says the interagency report.

Despite the admissions that more research was needed, the report concluded that there was “abundant evidence” of man-caused global warming, saying that “climate change will have” direct impacts on public health.

“There is abundant evidence that human activities are altering the earth’s climate and that climate change will have significant health impacts both domestically and globally.”

The report then called for an “overarching” international research effort to determine how all of the “abundant evidence” of global warming would lead to poorer public health.

“To be successful, an overarching research program needs to be integrated, focused, interdisciplinary, supported, and sustainable, yet flexible enough to adjust to new information and broad enough to cover the very diverse components described in this document,” states the report. “The effort must also be multinational, multiagency, and multidisciplinary, bringing together the strengths of all partners.”

The other public health effects of global warming cited in the report include: asthma and other respiratory diseases, cardiovascular disease, heat-related deaths, human developmental effects, neurological diseases, waterborne diseases, weather-related deaths, and infectious and animal-borne diseases.

Click here to read the full report

Climate Scientists Back off Sea Level Claim

February 22, 2010

Guardian

By David Adam

Scientists have been forced to withdraw a study on projected sea level rise due to global warming after finding mistakes that undermined the findings.

The study, published in 2009 in Nature Geoscience, one of the top journals in its field, confirmed the conclusions of the 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It used data over the last 22,000 years to predict that sea level would rise by between 7cm and 82cm by the end of the century.

At the time, Mark Siddall, from the Earth Sciences Department at the University of Bristol, said the study “strengthens the confidence with which one may interpret the IPCC results”. The IPCC said that sea level would probably rise by 18cm-59cm by 2100, though stressed this was based on incomplete information about ice sheet melting and that the true rise could be higher.

Many scientists criticised the IPCC approach as too conservative, and several papers since have suggested that sea level could rise more. Martin Vermeer of the Helsinki University of Technology, Finland and Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany published a study in December that projected a rise of 0.75m to 1.9m by 2100.

Siddall said that he did not know whether the retracted paper’s estimate of sea level rise was an overestimate or an underestimate.

Announcing the formal retraction of the paper from the journal, Siddall said: “It’s one of those things that happens. People make mistakes and mistakes happen in science.” He said there were two separate technical mistakes in the paper, which were pointed out by other scientists after it was published. A formal retraction was required, rather than a correction, because the errors undermined the study’s conclusion.

“Retraction is a regular part of the publication process,” he said. “Science is a complicated game and there are set procedures in place that act as checks and balances.”

Nature Publishing Group, which publishes Nature Geoscience, said this was the first paper retracted from the journal since it was launched in 2007.

The paper – entitled “Constraints on future sea-level rise from past sea-level change” – used fossil coral data and temperature records derived from ice-core measurements to reconstruct how sea level has fluctuated with temperature since the peak of the last ice age, and to project how it would rise with warming over the next few decades.

In a statement the authors of the paper said: “Since publication of our paper we have become aware of two mistakes which impact the detailed estimation of future sea level rise. This means that we can no longer draw firm conclusions regarding 21st century sea level rise from this study without further work.

“One mistake was a miscalculation; the other was not to allow fully for temperature change over the past 2,000 years. Because of these issues we have retracted the paper and will now invest in the further work needed to correct these mistakes.”

In the Nature Geoscience retraction, in which Siddall and his colleagues explain their errors, Vermeer and Rahmstorf are thanked for “bringing these issues to our attention”.

Click here for the full report

Climategate Scientists Admits There Hasn’t Been Global Warming Since 1995

February 15, 2010

Mail Online

By Jonathan Petre

The academic at the centre of the ‘Climategate’ affair, whose raw data is crucial to the theory of climate change, has admitted that he has trouble ‘keeping track’ of the information.
Colleagues say that the reason Professor Phil Jones has refused Freedom of Information requests is that he may have actually lost the relevant papers.
Professor Jones told the BBC yesterday there was truth in the observations of colleagues that he lacked organisational skills, that his office was swamped with piles of paper and that his record keeping is ‘not as good as it should be’.
The data is crucial to the famous ‘hockey stick graph’ used by climate change advocates to support the theory.

Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now – suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon.
And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.
The admissions will be seized on by sceptics as fresh evidence that there are serious flaws at the heart of the science of climate change and the orthodoxy that recent rises in temperature are largely man-made.
Professor Jones has been in the spotlight since he stepped down as director of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit after the leaking of emails that sceptics claim show scientists were manipulating data.
The raw data, collected from hundreds of weather stations around the world and analysed by his unit, has been used for years to bolster efforts by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to press governments to cut carbon dioxide emissions.
Following the leak of the emails, Professor Jones has been accused of ‘scientific fraud’ for allegedly deliberately suppressing information and refusing to share vital data with critics.
Discussing the interview, the BBC’s environmental analyst Roger Harrabin said he had spoken to colleagues of Professor Jones who had told him that his strengths included integrity and doggedness but not record-keeping and office tidying.
Mr Harrabin, who conducted the interview for the BBC’s website, said the professor had been collating tens of thousands of pieces of data from around the world to produce a coherent record of temperature change.
That material has been used to produce the ‘hockey stick graph’ which is relatively flat for centuries before rising steeply in recent decades.
According to Mr Harrabin, colleagues of Professor Jones said ‘his office is piled high with paper, fragments from over the years, tens of thousands of pieces of paper, and they suspect what happened was he took in the raw data to a central database and then let the pieces of paper go because he never realised that 20 years later he would be held to account over them’.
Asked by Mr Harrabin about these issues, Professor Jones admitted the lack of organisation in the system had contributed to his reluctance to share data with critics, which he regretted.
But he denied he had cheated over the data or unfairly influenced the scientific process, and said he still believed recent temperature rises were predominantly man-made.
Asked about whether he lost track of data, Professor Jones said: ‘There is some truth in that. We do have a trail of where the weather stations have come from but it’s probably not as good as it should be.
‘There’s a continual updating of the dataset. Keeping track of everything is difficult. Some countries will do lots of checking on their data then issue improved data, so it can be very difficult. We have improved but we have to improve more.’
He also agreed that there had been two periods which experienced similar warming, from 1910 to 1940 and from 1975 to 1998, but said these could be explained by natural phenomena whereas more recent warming could not.

He further admitted that in the last 15 years there had been no ‘statistically significant’ warming, although he argued this was a blip rather than the long-term trend.
And he said that the debate over whether the world could have been even warmer than now during the medieval period, when there is evidence of high temperatures in northern countries, was far from settled.
Sceptics believe there is strong evidence that the world was warmer between about 800 and 1300 AD than now because of evidence of high temperatures in northern countries.
But climate change advocates have dismissed this as false or only applying to the northern part of the world.
Professor Jones departed from this consensus when he said: ‘There is much debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period was global in extent or not. The MWP is most clearly expressed in parts of North America, the North Atlantic and Europe and parts of Asia.
‘For it to be global in extent, the MWP would need to be seen clearly in more records from the tropical regions and the Southern hemisphere. There are very few palaeoclimatic records for these latter two regions.
‘Of course, if the MWP was shown to be global in extent and as warm or warmer than today, then obviously the late 20th Century warmth would not be unprecedented. On the other hand, if the MWP was global, but was less warm than today, then the current warmth would be unprecedented.’
Sceptics said this was the first time a senior scientist working with the IPCC had admitted to the possibility that the Medieval Warming Period could have been global, and therefore the world could have been hotter then than now.
Professor Jones criticised those who complained he had not shared his data with them, saying they could always collate their own from publicly available material in the US. And he said the climate had not cooled ‘until recently – and then barely at all. The trend is a warming trend’.
Mr Harrabin told Radio 4’s Today programme that, despite the controversies, there still appeared to be no fundamental flaws in the majority scientific view that climate change was largely man-made.
But Dr Benny Pieser, director of the sceptical Global Warming Policy Foundation, said Professor Jones’s ‘excuses’ for his failure to share data were hollow as he had shared it with colleagues and ‘mates’.
He said that until all the data was released, sceptics could not test it to see if it supported the conclusions claimed by climate change advocates.
He added that the professor’s concessions over medieval warming were ‘significant’ because they were his first public admission that the science was not settled.

Click here for the full report

Global Warming Update

February5, 2010

Townhall

By Walter E. Williams

John Coleman, founder of the Weather Channel, in an hour-long television documentary titled “Global Warming: The Other Side,” presents evidence that our National Climatic Data Center has been manipulating weather data just as the now disgraced and under investigation British University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit. The NCDC is a division of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Its manipulated climate data is used by the Goddard Institute of Space Studies, which is a division of the National Aeronautical and Space Administration. John Coleman’s blockbuster five-part series can be seen here.

The Coleman documentary presents research by computer expert E. Michael Smith and Certified Consulting Meteorologist Joseph D’Aleo. During the 1960s and into the 1980s, the number of stations used for calculating global surface temperatures was about 6,000. By 1990, the number of stations dropped rapidly to about 1,500. Most of the stations lost were in the colder regions of the Earth. Not adjusting for their lost made temperatures appear to be higher than was in fact the case. According to Science & Environmental Policy Project, Russia reported that CRU was ignoring data from colder regions of Russia, even though these stations were still reporting data. That means data loss was not simply the result of station closings but deliberate decisions by CRU to ignore them in order to hype their global warming claims. D’Aleo and Smith report that our NCDC engaged in similar deceptive activity where they have dropped stations, particularly in colder climates, higher elevations or closer to the polar regions. Temperatures are now simply projected for these colder stations from other stations, usually in warmer climates.

Arguing with Idiots By Glenn Beck

Mounting evidence of scientific fraud might make little difference in terms of the response to manmade global warming hysteria. Why? Vested economic and political interests have emerged where trillions of dollars and social control are at stake. Therefore, many people who recognize the scientific fraud underlying global warming claims are likely to defend it anyway. Automobile companies have invested billions in research and investment in producing “green cars.” General Electric and Phillips have spent millions lobbying Congress to outlaw incandescent bulbs so that they can force us to buy costly compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFL). Farmers and ethanol manufacturers have gotten Congress to enact laws mandating greater use of their product, not to mention massive subsidies. Thousands of major corporations around the world have taken steps to reduce carbon emissions including giants like IBM, Nike, Coca-Cola and BP, the oil giant. Companies like Google, Yahoo and Dell have vowed to become “carbon neutral.”

Then there’s Chicago Climate Futures Exchange that plans to trade in billions of dollars of greenhouse gas emission allowances. Corporate America and labor unions, as well as their international counterparts have a huge multi-trillion dollar financial stake in the perpetuation of the global warming fraud. Federal, state and local agencies have spent billions of dollars and created millions of jobs to deal with one aspect or another of global warming.

It’s deeper than just money. Schoolteachers have created polar-bear-dying lectures to frighten and indoctrinate our children when in fact there are more polar bears now than in 1950. They’ve taught children about melting glaciers. Just recently, the International Panel on Climate Change was forced to admit that their Himalayan glacier-melting fraud was done to “impact policy makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.”

What would all the beneficiaries of the global warming hype do if it becomes widely known and accepted that mankind’s activities have very little to do with the Earth’s temperature? I don’t know but a lot of people would feel and look like idiots. But I bet that even if the permafrost returned as far south as New Jersey, as it once did, the warmers and their congressional stooges would still call for measures to fight global warming.

Click here for full report.

The Guardian Discovers What ClimateGate Really Was

February3, 2010

Heraldsun

By Andrew Bolt

The only real things that’s changed now is the media’s willingness to see the fraud and fiddling that was always part of the great global warming scam. To finally see the fraud and fiddling that bloggers have written about for years.

Example? Well, take the Guardian.

For nearly three years, mathematician Douglas Keenan has campaigned to get the University of East Anglia, the University of Albany, the IPCC and the media to accept that a key piece of evidence behind the IPCC’s claims that the world was warming was based on a study that was wrong, if not outright fraudulent. Keenan described not just the tricking up of results to hide the urban heat island effect, but the disgraceful efforts by climate scientists and University of Albany administrators to hush up the scandal.

When Climategate broke last year (again, through the blogs), I discovered and noted that one Climategate scientist, Australian Tom Wigley, was so shocked by this particular scandal that he had written scathing (private) emails to the head of the now discredited Climatic Research Unit, Phil Jones, damning what had been done.

I also summarised the scandal, which had also been well-covered by other blogs:

One of the biggest problems with calculating temperature trends over the past century is how much to allow for the fact that measurements in our fast-growing concrete jungles will suffer from the “urban heat island” effect of all those extra machines and concrete. How much of the warming until 2001 must be discounted as a result?..

The IPCC’s 2007 report made an allowance that drew heavily on a 1990 paper by Phil Jones that dismissed the UHI effect as largely trivial. That in turn drew heavily on a paper by Professor Wang Wei-Chyung of Albany, State University of New York, which presented data from China which both Wang and Jones claimed came from stations that had “few, if any, changes in instrumentation, location or observation times”, and so could be relied upon.

Mathematician Doug Keenan and others obtained the original Wang data and used it to track down the Chinese weather stations. They found that 49 of the 84 stations used actually had no records of station location, eight had inconsistent histories, 18 had been moved a considerable distance, and only seven were known not to have been relocated. One station had five different locations in 30 years as far as 41 km apart.

Wang seemed to have lied. His data was essentially worthless, and Jones’ (and the IPCC’s) claim that the Urban Heat Island effect was trivial now seemed unsupported by solid evidence.

For all this time, the Guardian kept up its alarmist campaign on global warming, and ignored this particular scandal.

But today I read that the Guardian has a “scoop” thanks to its “investigation” and “today reveals” what it last year wouldn’t:

Phil Jones, the beleaguered British climate scientist at the centre of the leaked emails controversy, is facing fresh claims that he sought to hide problems in key temperature data on which some of his work was based.

A Guardian investigation of thousands of emails and documents apparently hacked from the University of East Anglia’s climatic research unit has found evidence that a series of measurements from Chinese weather stations were seriously flawed and that documents relating to them could not be produced.

And Wigley and his emails are “revealed”, too:

Today the Guardian reveals how Jones withheld the information requested under freedom of information laws. Subsequently a senior colleague told him he feared that Jones’s collaborator, Wei-­Chyung Wang of the University at Albany, had “screwed up”.

The leaked emails from the CRU reveal that the former director of the unit, Tom Wigley, harboured grave doubts about the cover-up of the shortcomings in Jones and Wang’s work. Wigley was in charge of CRU when the original paper was published. “Were you taking W-CW [Wang] on trust?” he asked Jones. He continued: “Why, why, why did you and W-CW not simply say this right at the start?”

This example actually suggests how complicit the media has been in keeping the global warming scare alive by failing to report what was actually under its nose.

But now there’s a great change. There is now a race on to uncover the next big IPCC scandal, and I doubt the great climate change scare can survive. The papers will, of course, take the credit.

Click here for full report.

Climate Chief Was Told of False Glacier Claims Before Copenhagen

February3, 2010

The Times

By Ben Webbster

The chairman of the leading climate change watchdog was informed that claims about melting Himalayan glaciers were false before the Copenhagen summit, The Times has learnt.

Rajendra Pachauri was told that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment that the glaciers would disappear by 2035 was wrong, but he waited two months to correct it. He failed to act despite learning that the claim had been refuted by several leading glaciologists.

The IPCC’s report underpinned the proposals at Copenhagen for drastic cuts in global emissions.

Dr Pachauri, who played a leading role at the summit, corrected the error last week after coming under media pressure. He told The Times on January 22 that he had only known about the error for a few days. He said: “I became aware of this when it was reported in the media about ten days ago. Before that, it was really not made known. Nobody brought it to my attention. There were statements, but we never looked at this 2035 number.”

Asked whether he had deliberately kept silent about the error to avoid embarrassment at Copenhagen, he said: “That’s ridiculous. It never came to my attention before the Copenhagen summit. It wasn’t in the public sphere.”

However, a prominent science journalist said that he had asked Dr Pachauri about the 2035 error last November. Pallava Bagla, who writes for Science journal, said he had asked Dr Pachauri about the error. He said that Dr Pachauri had replied: “I don’t have anything to add on glaciers.”

The Himalayan glaciers are so thick and at such high altitude that most glaciologists believe they would take several hundred years to melt at the present rate. Some are growing and many show little sign of change.

Dr Pachauri had previously dismissed a report by the Indian Government which said that glaciers might not be melting as much as had been feared. He described the report, which did not mention the 2035 error, as “voodoo science”.

Mr Bagla said he had informed Dr Pachauri that Graham Cogley, a professor at Ontario Trent University and a leading glaciologist, had dismissed the 2035 date as being wrong by at least 300 years. Professor Cogley believed the IPCC had misread the date in a 1996 report which said the glaciers could melt significantly by 2350.

Mr Pallava interviewed Dr Pachauri again this week for Science and asked him why he had decided to overlook the error before the Copenhagen summit. In the taped interview, Mr Pallava asked: “I pointed it out [the error] to you in several e-mails, several discussions, yet you decided to overlook it. Was that so that you did not want to destabilise what was happening in Copenhagen?”

Dr Pachauri replied: “Not at all, not at all. As it happens, we were all terribly preoccupied with a lot of events. We were working round the clock with several things that had to be done in Copenhagen. It was only when the story broke, I think in December, we decided to, well, early this month — as a matter of fact, I can give you the exact dates — early in January that we decided to go into it and we moved very fast.

“And within three or four days, we were able to come up with a clear and a very honest and objective assessment of what had happened. So I think this presumption on your part or on the part of any others is totally wrong. We are certainly never — and I can say this categorically — ever going to do anything other than what is truthful and what upholds the veracity of science.”

Dr Pacharui has also been accused of using the error to win grants worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Clich for full report.

Leaked Climate Emails Scientist ‘Hid’ Data Flaws

February 2, 2010

Guardian

By Fred Pearce

Phil Jones, the beleaguered British climate scientist at the centre of the leaked emails controversy, is facing fresh claims that he sought to hide problems in key temperature data on which some of his work was based.

A Guardian investigation of thousands of emails and documents apparently hacked from the University of East Anglia’s climatic research unit has found evidence that a series of measurements from Chinese weather stations were seriously flawed and that documents relating to them could not be produced.
Link to this audio

Jones and a collaborator have been accused by a climate change sceptic and researcher of scientific fraud for attempting to suppress data that could cast doubt on a key 1990 study on the effect of cities on warming – a hotly contested issue.

Today the Guardian reveals how Jones withheld the information requested under freedom of information laws. Subsequently a senior colleague told him he feared that Jones’s collaborator, Wei-­Chyung Wang of the University at Albany, had “screwed up”.

The revelations on the inadequacies of the 1990 paper do not undermine the case that humans are causing climate change, and other studies have produced similar findings. But they do call into question the probity of some climate change science.

The apparent attempts to cover up problems with temperature data from the Chinese weather stations provide the first link between the email scandal and the UN’s embattled climate science body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, as a paper based on the measurements was used to bolster IPCC statements about rapid global warming in recent decades.

Wang was cleared of scientific fraud by his university, but new information brought to light today indicates at least one senior colleague had serious concerns about the affair.

It also emerges that documents which Wang claimed would exonerate him and Jones did not exist.

The revelations come at a torrid time for climate science, with the IPPC suffering heavy criticism for its use of information that had not been rigorously checked – in particular a false claim that all Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035 – and UEA having been criticised last week by the deputy information commissioner for refusing valid requests for data under the Freedom of Information Act.

The Guardian has learned that of 105 freedom of information requests to the university concerning the climatic research unit (CRU), which Jones headed up to the end of December, only 10 had been released in full.

The temperature data from the Chinese weather stations measured the warming there over the past half century and appeared in a 1990 paper in the prestigious journal Nature, which was cited by the IPCC’s latest report in 2007.

Climate change sceptics asked the UEA, via FOI requests, for location data for the 84 weather stations in eastern China, half of which were urban and half rural.

The history of where the weather stations were sited was crucial to Jones and Wang’s 1990 study, as it concluded the rising temperatures recorded in China were the result of global climate changes rather the warming effects of expanding cities.

The IPCC’s 2007 report used the study to justify the claim that “any urban-related trend” in global temperatures was small. Jones was one of two “coordinating lead authors” for the relevant chapter.

The leaked emails from the CRU reveal that the former director of the unit, Tom Wigley, harboured grave doubts about the cover-up of the shortcomings in Jones and Wang’s work. Wigley was in charge of CRU when the original paper was published. “Were you taking W-CW [Wang] on trust?” he asked Jones. He continued: “Why, why, why did you and W-CW not simply say this right at the start?”

Jones said he was not able to comment on the story.

Wang said: “I have been exonerated by my university on all the charges. When we started on the paper we had all the station location details in order to identify our network, but we cannot find them any more.

“Some of the location changes were probably only a few metres, and where they were more we corrected for them.”

In an interview with the Observer on Sunday Ed Miliband, the climate change secretary, warned of the danger of a public backlash against mainstream climate science over claims that scientists manipulated data. He declared a “battle” against the “siren voices” who denied global warming was real or caused by humans. “It’s right that there’s rigour applied to all the reports about climate change, but I think it would be wrong that when a mistake is made it’s somehow used to undermine the overwhelming picture that’s there,” he said.

Last week the Information Commissioner’s Office – the body that administers the Freedom of Information Act – said the University of East Anglia had flouted the rules in its handling of an FOI request in May 2008.

Days after receiving the request for information from the British climate change sceptic David Holland, Jones asked Prof Mike Mann of Pennsylvania State University in the United States: “Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith [Briffa] re AR4? Keith will do likewise.

“Can you also email Gene [Eugene Wahl, a paleoclimatologist in Boulder, Colorado] and get him to do the same … We will be getting Caspar [Ammann, also from Boulder] to do the same.”

The University of East Anglia says that no emails were deleted following this exchange.

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Watery “Super Earth” Spotted 40 Light Years From Earth

December 18, 2009

The Register

By Lester Haines

The body – dubbed GJ1214b – is circling dim host star GJ1214 every 38 hours at a distance of just 1.3 million miles. The star’s modest surface temperature of 2,700°C, though, means that GJ1214b itself is a balmy 200°C.

The planet has a mass and radius of 6.5 and 2.7 times that of Earth, respectively. The density obtained from these figures “suggests that GJ1214b is composed of about three-fourths water and other ices, and one-fourth rock”.

CfA graduate student Zachory Berta, who first identified the planet, said: “Despite its hot temperature, this appears to be a waterworld. It is much smaller, cooler, and more Earthlike than any other known exoplanet.”

The discovery was made as part of the ground-based MEarth Project, which uses “an array of eight identical 16-inch-diameter RC Optical Systems telescopes that monitor a pre-selected list of 2,000 red dwarf stars”.

CfA elaborates: “Each telescope perches on a highly accurate Software Bisque Paramount and funnels light to an Apogee Alta U42 camera containing a charge-coupled device (CCD) chip, which many amateurs also use.”

The ‘scopes keep an eye out for dips in brightness where an exoplanet transits its host star. Whereas super-Earths (between five 5 and 10 Earth masses) transiting bright stars such as our Sun are impossible to spot from Earth, those like GJ1214b which transit a dim host are within the capability of ground-based technology.

In this case, GJ1214 is around one-fifth the size of the Sun with a luminosity “only three-thousandths as bright”.

Having made their discovery, the CfA team then used the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) spectrograph at the European Southern Observatory “to measure the companion’s mass and confirm it is a planet”.

The exact nature of GJ1214b is unknown, but Berta suggested “some of the planet’s water should be in the form of exotic materials like Ice VII”, described as “a crystalline form of water that exists at pressures greater than 20,000 times Earth’s sea-level atmosphere”.

The CfA also has tantalising evidence of an atmosphere surrounding the planet, since when the team “compared the measured radius of GJ1214b to theoretical models, they found that the observed radius exceeds the model’s prediction, even assuming a pure water planet”.

This anomaly could be explained by an inhospitable atmosphere which is “gradually boiling off”, although it will fall to space-based instruments such as the Hubble Space Telescope to determine the facts.

MEarth project head David Charbonneau concluded: “Since this planet is so close to Earth, Hubble should be able to detect the atmosphere and determine what it’s made of. That will make it the first super-Earth with a confirmed atmosphere – even though that atmosphere probably won’t be hospitable to life as we know it.”

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New Human Sensory System Found Under Skin

December 11, 2009

Examiner

By Meg Marquardt

Researchers have found an entirely new system related to touch hidden beneath our skin. The study, published in the journal Pain, suggests that this network may play a pivotal role in diseases that cause chronic pain, such as intense migraines and fibromyalgia.

The sensory network is completely separate from the long nerves nestled beneath our skin that send back signals of textures, temperature, and pain to our brains. That traditional system is a workhorse, gathering in all the data in such an effective manner that someone with a normally functioning touch system would never know that a second one was there.

But what about someone without a functioning touch system? When David Bowsher, MD, of University of Liverpool’s Pain Research Institute diagnosed two patients with a rare form of an already rare disease, it was clear that something odd was happening. The patients had congenital insensitivity to pain. Most who have the condition struggle to feel anything, have injured themselves severely, and have some form of a mental handicap. But besides a lack of pain, the only issue with these patients was excessive sweating.

“For all intents and purposes, they had adequate sensation for daily living and could tell what is warm and cold, what is touching them, and what is rough and smooth,”said Bowsher. [EurekAlert]

He decided to send samples of the patient’s skin across the Atlantic to Frank Rice, PhD at Albany Medical College, who specializes in pain studies. Inside that skin, there was a mystery. There weren’t any of the normal nerves that tell us when something is frigid to the touch or that our cell phone is vibrating. But others were there, sensory nerves on the blood vessels and sweat glands.

“For many years, my colleagues and I have detected different types of nerve endings on tiny blood vessels and sweat glands, which we assumed were simply regulating blood flow and sweating. We didn’t think they could contribute to conscious sensation. However, while all the other sensory endings were missing in this unusual skin, the blood vessels and sweat glands still had the normal types of nerve endings. Apparently, these unique individuals are able to ‘feel things’ through these remaining nerve endings,” said Rice. “What we learned from these unusual individuals is that there’s another level of sensory feedback that can give us conscious tactile information.” [EurekAlert]

Though discovered in those who feel little pain, researchers wonder if the new system can help explain problems in those that feel too much pain.  Diseases with chronic pain like fibromyalgia and migraines have unknown causes, which makes thier treatments fairly ineffective. More research into the sensory system is needed, though, for it is a truly unique phenomenon.

“It’s almost like hearing the subtle sound of a single instrument in the midst of a symphony,” said Rice. “It is only when we shift focus away from the nerve endings associated with normal skin sensation that we can appreciate the sensation hidden in the background.” [EurekAlert]

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