Article: Those Ebola Vaccines in Testing Now? You Can Thank Dick Cheney for That

After 9/11, former Vice-President Dick Cheney saw that various exotic viruses might be used as bioterror weapons. He urged increased spending on studying the viruses in general and specifically on vaccines.

US badly informed by media. Media is appalled.

Article: Get your facts right: Italy, U.S. come bottom in modern life survey

Americans think that 32% of the people in the country are immigrants (no, it is 13%).

Americans think that 24% of girls aged 15-19 give birth each year (no, it is 3%).

Americans think that 15% of the people in the country are Muslims (no, it is 1%).

Elsewhere, it has been shown that Americans think that the proportion of people in the US who are homosexual is 10-15% or higher. The real number is about 3%.

Wow! Americans sure are dumb!

Actually, not.

Americans are mis-informed. Badly misinformed. Badly misinformed by the media.

Badly misinformed by a media whose coverage of many topics is often hysterical. And by "media" here, I mean broadcast and cable entertainment shows, too.

And by hysterical, I mean relentless coverage of some topics, like immigration and teen pregnancies. The shear overwhelming number of stories on these subjects makes people think the issue is bigger than it is.

Worse, article after article attacks (usually) whatever is viewed as the "conservative" or
"Republican" position. So there is a tendency to over-emphasize certain aspects: "Immigrants are wonderful! Look at all the happy children!" "Global warming is going to kill us all! Evil deniers are in the pay of the oil companies!"

The result is an intelligent populace bombarded by stupid.

Article: Gestapo impostor tricked Nazi sympathizers in WWII

Alternate title: How some Brits hated Jews so much that would rather see their own country crushed under the Nazi heel than let the Jews "win" World War II. And the man who stopped them.

Insane Jew hatred is not new (sadly).

Article: Mercury's hidden water-ice revealed

At Mercury's north pole, there are craters containing water-ice.

After the Messenger probe entered orbit around the planet in March 2011, it deployed a range of techniques to show that there are probably several billion tonnes of water ice locked up at the north pole.

There is contradictory evidence that the ice arrived recently and that is has been there a long time.

In the latest study, Dr Nancy Chabot and colleagues studied an impact crater called Prokofiev, the largest such depression at the planet's north pole. 

The uniform surface texture of presumed water-ice areas in Prokofiev crater suggest the deposits arrived relatively recently. 

If we wanted to colonize Mercury, or at least it's poles, this is good news.

Article: Feds: Don't expect winter to be polar vortex redux

If you thought last winter was a horror show, with cold blasts from the polar vortex and a lack of California rain, here's some good news: No sequel is expected this year, federal forecasters say. 

Mike Halpert of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Thursday that the upcoming winter looks pretty average in general. He doesn't expect a lot of extreme conditions like last year's cold outbreaks when Arctic air dipped south with the polar vortex. 

"A repeat of last winter is not particularly likely," said Halpert, acting director of NOAA's Climate Prediction Center in College Park, Maryland.

Okay, that makes 2 recent predictions (see posts below) saying we are going to have a repeat, and one saying not.

NOAA didn't predict last winter's extremes in last year's winter forecast.

It is not reassuring that NOAA didn't predict last year's winter accurately.

And, of course, the models that make long-range weather forecasts are related to those that make the global warming and climate change forecasts.

The articles reports on predictions by several models. The NOAA prediction is the warmest of all them.

Article: Climate change not responsible for altering forest tree composition, experts say

Summary: 

Change in disturbance regimes -- rather than a change in climate -- is largely responsible for altering the composition of Eastern forests, according to a researcher. Forests in the Eastern United States remain in a state of "disequilibrium" stemming from the clear-cutting and large-scale burning that occurred in the late 1800s and early 1900s, he contends.

Marc Abrams, professor of forest ecology and physiology.Moreover, Abrams noted, since about 1930 -- during the Smokey Bear era -- aggressive forest-fire suppression has had a far greater influence on shifts in dominant tree species than minor differences in temperature.

"To the north, intensive and expansive early European disturbance resulted in the ubiquitous loss of conifers and large increases of Acer (maple), Populus (poplar) and Quercus (oak) in northern hardwoods, whereas to the south, these disturbances perpetuated the dominance of oak in central hardwoods."

Fire suppression has resulted in more sugar maples and in denser, cooler forests.

Article: Global natural gas boom alone won't slow climate change

But it also will not make it any worse.

Every silver lining needs a cloud.

Because natural gas emits half the carbon dioxide of coal, many people hoped the recent natural gas boom could help slow climate change -- and according to government analyses, natural gas did contribute partially to a decline in U.S. carbon dioxide emissions between 2007 and 2012. 

This is the silver lining.

If Obama's EPA gets its way, it will gradually regulate coal-fueled power plants out of existence. In theory, the trend will continue, for the US, until we no longer use coal to generate electricity.

Now for the cloud.

But, in the long run, according to this study, a global abundance of inexpensive natural gas would compete with all energy sources -- not just higher-emitting coal, but also lower-emitting nuclear and renewable energy technologies such as wind and solar. 

This is a "free-market" working normally. People want the cheapest energy, power companies in the US and governments of poor countries will do their best to supply it.

Inexpensive natural gas would also accelerate economic growth and expand overall energy use.

This is considered to be a negative effect of the switch to fracking and natural gas.

[Sarcasm alert: Economic growth, pulling people out of poverty, developing the full human potential in all countries of the world is a bad thing. It must be stopped by right-thinking people. Fracking must be opposed!]

Five groups of scientists ran their own computer models (called "integrated assessment models") in an attempt to see whether or not swapping coal for methane made any difference to overall global warming.

They found that it did not.

What I wonder about the research is something that they did not report on. Was the effect of the switch so small that it is actually negligible? Even before figuring in all the effects?

Or, putting it another way, before they threw in a bunch of other factors, what was the actual effect on global warming of making the switch?

It sounds as if there must be some effect, but it is not mentioned.

One of the big complaints about the Australian carbon pricing scheme was that the effect of it would be well below a 0.01% reduction in global warming over a 50 year period.

[The research shows that] the global energy system could experience unprecedented changes in the growth of natural gas production and significant changes to the types of energy used, but without much reduction to projected climate change… 

"Abundant gas may have a lot of benefits -- economic growth, local air pollution, energy security, and so on. There's been some hope that slowing climate change could also be one of its benefits, but that turns out not to be the case," said McJeon.

So the overall effect would be beneficial.