America Fans the Flames While Europe Puts Out the Fire, by Ted Snider

Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité – French Government Begins Blocking Websites it Doesn’t Like, by Michael Krieger

Read.

Learn.

Train.

Do More PT !

The paper – Rethinking the lower bound on aerosol radiative forcing by Bjorn Stevens of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany, published in the American Meteorological Society journal – finds that the effects of aerosols on climate are much smaller than those in almost all the computer models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Aerosols are the minute particles added to the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels (as well as by non-anthropogenic sources, like volcanoes). The reason they are important is that they are so often cited by alarmists to excuse the awkward fact that the world has stubbornly failed to warm at the disastrous rate they predicted it would.

Apparently – or so the excuse goes – these aerosols are masking the true extent of runaway climate change by cancelling out the effects of man-made CO2.

Here, for example, is a NASA expert in 2009:

Using climate models, we estimate that aerosols have masked about 50 percent of the warming that would otherwise have been caused by greenhouse gases trapping heat near the surface of the Earth

Here is a report on a study from another institution – NOAA – with a long track record of ramping up the alarmist cause.

A new study led by the U.S, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) shows that tiny particles that make their way all the way up into the stratosphere may be offsetting a global rise in temperatures due to carbon emissions.

Aerosols are often used to explain the lack of “global warming” in the cooling period between 1940 and 1970 (when the growth in industrialisation and all that extra man-made CO2 ought to have begun taking effect).

They have also been used in this 2011 paper – whose co-authors include one Michael Mann, which gives you an idea of its quality and reliability – for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS). It claims that the reason there has been a “hiatus” in global warming since 1998 is because of the effect of aerosol emissions. This got one of the BBC’s resident alarmists Richard Black very excited. He wrote it up in an article entitled Global warming lull down to China’s coal growth. (Oddly he forgot to surround it with scare quotes, or finish it with a question mark.)

The new Stevens paper has been described as a “game-changer” by one expert in the field, Nic Lewis.

According to the IPCC’s models, the effect of aerosols on climate could be as much as 4.5 degrees C. But Stevens paper suggests that this is a considerable overestimate and that the reduction they effect on temperature cannot be more than 1.8 degrees C.

This pretty much kills the alarmists’ “the aerosols ate my homework” excuse stone dead. If the cooling effects of aerosols turn out to be much smaller than the IPCC thinks, then what this means is that the rise in global temperatures attributable to man-made CO2 is also much smaller than the alarmists’ computer models acknowledge.

As Andrew Montford comments here:

CONAKRY (Reuters) – The number of suspected Ebola patients in Guinea has more than doubled from last month, the health ministry said on Thursday, highlighting a “fourth phase” of the epidemic after a dip in cases in early 2015.

The worst outbreak in history, which has killed more than 10,000 people in West Africa, appears to be on the wane, especially in Liberia where there are no current cases.

But there is still resistance to the anti-Ebola effort in Guinea, which is struggling to control the outbreak and has overtaken Sierra Leone as the main hub for transmission.

Dr Rafiou Diallo, a spokesman for Guinea’s health ministry, said there were 91 suspected and confirmed Ebola patients in treatment centers compared with just 39 in February.

“There is without doubt a spike in the number of cases, especially in Forecariah and Coyah (western Guinea). The explanation is there is still resistance that has not been overcome,” he said.

The number of Ebola cases in Guinea peaked in late December when there were nearly double current number of patients at 171, according to the World Health Organisation.

The current Ebola outbreak was first confirmed in Guinea’s remote southeastern forest region last March.

From there, it spread across the country and into neighboring states. Liberia and Sierra Leone were worst hit but Mali and Senegal also recorded cases.

Guinea’s President Alpha Conde has set mid-April as the target for completely ending the epidemic. Officials in Guinea have previously said Ebola was under control, only to see the virus later spread further.

“Officials are calling this the fourth phase of the epidemic characterized by an increase in cases following the dip in January,” Dr. Jean-Pierre Lamarque, regional health adviser for the French foreign ministry, said by telephone from Guinea.

Read the rest @ http://news.yahoo.com/guinea-says-number-ebola-patients-more-doubles-since-153922232.html

For the past two years, a company called Carbon3D has been secretly developing a new type of 3D printing—one that would be far faster than polyjet, stereolithography and selective laser sintering. This week they pulled the sheets off, and it looks pretty nuts.

Called CLIP, for Continuous Liquid Interface Production, the technology combines elements of SLA with a photochemical process, and the result is that parts are not so much printed—that is, they’re not laid down/cured/sintered one layer at a time—so much as they are grown, out of what seems an impossibly shallow dish of liquid

Read the rest @ http://www.core77.com/posts/32917/Company-Unveils-Radical-Layerless-3D-Printing-Technology-25-to-100-TimesFaster-Than-Standard-3D-Printing

By Phillip Morris, The Plain Dealer

Eric Holder’s damn punks: Phillip Morris

By Phillip Morris, The Plain Dealer

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder on the shooting of two Ferguson, Missouri police officers: “This was not someone trying to bring healing to Ferguson,” he said. “This was a damn punk who was trying to sow discord in an area that’s trying to get its act together.”Carolyn Kaster, Associated Press

CLEVELAND, Ohio — Damn punk!

That’s a good start. Perhaps we’re getting somewhere. Precise language matters when cultural norms are explored or uncomfortable conversations broached. Perhaps we can build something useful from U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder’s widely noted Ferguson invective.

Holder was in the ballpark when he used the description “damn punk” to describe the person who shot and wounded two police officers in Ferguson, Missouri early Thursday morning as a protest ended.

Holder didn’t know the identity, race or sex of the shooter when he issued his angry insult. But he knew enough to make a calculated judgment. He knew that the would-be killer needed to be called out and labeled in a way that few leading black officials have been willing to use in branding the lethal parasites who routinely terrorize and destabilize urban communities.

It’s about time.

“This was not someone trying to bring healing to Ferguson. This was a damn punk who was trying to sow discord in an area that’s trying to get its act together and trying to bring together a community that has been fractured for too long,” he said.

That’s one useful way of looking at the attack. But it may not have been as Machiavellian or orchestrated as Holder deduced. Eric Frein, for instance, the survivalist accused of killing one Pennsylvania state trooper and severely wounding another last fall, more neatly fits the description of a sociopath, a damn punk with intent to kill cops and destabilize communities.

Frein reportedly confessed to authorities that he killed the troopers in an attempt to “wake up people” and to force change in government. The Ferguson shooter appears to be a different kind of damn punk, but potentially just as lethal.

This was a damn punk who was trying to sow discord in an area that’s trying to get its act together.

St. Louis County law enforcement officials say that Jeffrey Williams, 20, the man arrested in connection with the officers’ shootings, told them he was actually aiming at someone who had robbed him earlier. The Ferguson cops just happened to get in the way of the bullets.

Skeptical investigators, much like Holder, still believe that the attack was an ambush aimed at law enforcement — even though Williams was not recognized by the organized protesters as one of their own. Who knows?

What is important here, however, is to cultivate a greater focus on the damn punks who terrorize American streets. While it is currently en vogue to demonize police, America’s inner cities teem with ruthless young men who routinely kill and maim with a shocking disregard for life — not because of twisted political motives.

And that is why the passion contained in Holder’s anger must be amplified. The damn punk — or punks — of whom Holder spoke represent a far greater threat to urban America than the police departments now under community fire and U.S. Department of Justice scrutiny.

Jeffrey Williams may be innocent of the felony assault charges he faces in Ferguson. Time will tell. He may indeed be the non-productive, harmless man his family described for The New York Times — an unemployed male who lives with his pregnant girlfriend and spends his time playing and betting on video basketball games.

Or, he may be a young man who would fire recklessly into a crowd to avenge himself.

Or, he may be a would-be cop killer.

Regardless, America loses on all counts.

That’s why Holder’s contempt for damn punks must become a more pronounced sentiment for fed-up communities with long histories of ignoring or tolerating serious internal threats. Each successive generation of young punks makes it more difficult to break concentric circles of dysfunction, hopelessness, despair and violence.

It’s time those communities, under siege by these punks, started publicly identifying and rejecting those whose sole purpose is to kill, steal, leach and destroy. Damn punks are the core of the problem — not blue uniforms.

Thank you, Mr. Holder.