The United Kingdom’s Daily Mail reported Sunday that the scientist at the center of the controversy over fraudulent scientific assertions which serve as the basis for United Nation reports and the Obama Administration’s economy killing energy program has admitted that he has trouble “keeping track” of information and that his record keeping is “not as good as it should be.”

Professor Phil Jones, whose data is crucial to the theory of climate
change, is refusing Freedom of Information requests to produce the
data.  Colleagues say the reason is that the Professor may have
actually lost the relevant papers. 

Sunday on the BBC Jones said there was truth to the observations of colleagues that he lacked organizational skills.  He conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now and suggested global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon.  Jones said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.

Jones has been in the spotlight since he stepped down as director of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit after the exposure of emails openly discussing the manipulation of data.  That raw data, collected from hundreds of weather stations around the world and analyzed by his unit, was used for years to bolster efforts by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to press governments to cut carbon dioxide emissions.

Professor Jones stands accused of ‘scientific fraud’ for deliberately suppressing information and refusing to share vital data with critics.  But he denied he had cheated 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, 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.”

Professor Jones agreed that there had been two historical periods which experienced similar warming, from 1910 to 1940 and from 1975 to 1998, but he said these could be explained by natural phenomena whereas more recent warming could not.

Skeptics 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.

But Dr Benny Pieser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, said Professor Jones ‘excuses’ for his failure to share data were as hollow as he had shared with colleagues and ‘mates’ [by e-mail].  He said that until all the data was released, skeptics could not test it to see if it supported the conclusions claimed by climate change advocates and added that the professor’s concessions over medieval warming were ‘significant’ because they were his first public admission that the science was not settled.

The Obama Administration and Congressional Democrats continue to fight for an energy policy they call “Cap and Trade” (or Restrict and Tax by critics) which would cost anyone who owns a light switch or rents one in America.  At a time of increasing concern over national financial stability, critics believe such a program would have devastatingly harmful effects both directly and in secondary costs to American consumers. 

Supporters also believe Al Gore invented the Internet and that he is not

profiteering from climate change claims now suspected to be false.

To read the Daily Mail report, click here..

PASADENA, Calif. — NASA’s Kepler space telescope, designed to find Earth-size planets in the habitable zone of sun-like stars, has discovered its first five new exoplanets, or planets beyond
our solar system.

Kepler’s high sensitivity to both small and large planets enabled the discovery of the exoplanets, named Kepler 4b, 5b, 6b, 7b and 8b. The discoveries were announced Monday, Jan. 4, by   
members of the Kepler science team during a news briefing at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Washington.

"These observations contribute to our understanding of how planetary systems form and evolve from the gas and dust disks that give rise to both the stars and their planets," said William Borucki of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. Borucki is the mission’s science principal investigator. "The discoveries also show that our science instrument is working well. Indications are that Kepler will meet all its science goals." 

Known as "hot Jupiters" because of their high masses and extreme temperatures, the new exoplanets range in size from similar to Neptune to larger than Jupiter. They have orbits ranging from 3.3 to 4.9 days. Estimated temperatures of the planets range from 2,200 to 3,000 degrees

Fahrenheit, hotter than molten lava and much too hot for life as we know it. All five of the exoplanets orbit stars hotter and larger than Earth’s sun.

"It’s gratifying to see the first Kepler discoveries rolling off the assembly line," said Jon Morse, director of the Astrophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "We expected Jupiter-size planets in short orbits to be the first planets Kepler could detect. It’s only a matter of time before more Kepler observations lead to smaller planets with longer-period orbits, coming closer and closer to the discovery of the first Earth analog."

Launched on March 6, 2009, from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, the Kepler mission continuously and simultaneously observes more than 150,000 stars. Kepler’s science instrument, or photometer, already has measured hundreds of possible planet signatures that are being analyzed. 

While many of these signatures are likely to be something other than a planet, such as small stars orbiting larger stars, ground-based observatories have confirmed the existence of the five exoplanets. The discoveries are based on approximately six weeks’ worth of data collected since science operations began on May 12, 2009. 

Kepler looks for the signatures of planets by measuring dips in the brightness of stars.  When planets cross in front of, or transit, their stars as seen from Earth, they periodically block the starlight. The size of the planet can be derived from the size of the dip. The temperature can be estimated from the characteristics of the star it orbits and the planet’s orbital period. 

Kepler will continue science operations until at least November 2012. It will search for planets as small as Earth, including those that orbit stars in a warm, habitable zone where liquid water could exist on the surface of the planet. Since transits of planets in the habitable zone of solar-like stars occur about once a year and require three transits for verification, it is expected to take at least three years to locate and verify an Earth-size planet.

According to Borucki, Kepler’s continuous and long-duration search should greatly improve scientists’ ability to determine the distributions of planet size and orbital period in the future.

"Today’s discoveries are a significant contribution to that goal," Borucki said. "The Kepler observations will tell us whether there are many stars with planets that could harbor life, or whether we might be alone in our galaxy."

PASADENA, Calif. — NASA’s Cassini Spacecraft has captured the first flash of sunlight reflected off a lake on Saturn’s moon Titan, confirming the presence of liquid on the part of the moon dotted with many large, lake-shaped basins.

Cassini scientists had been looking for the glint, also known as a specular reflection, since the spacecraft began orbiting Saturn in 2004. But Saturn’s northern hemisphere, which has more lakes than the southern hemisphere, has been veiled in winter darkness. The sun only began to directly illuminate the northern lakes recently as it approached the equinox of August 2008, the start of spring in the northern hemisphere. Titan’s hazy atmosphere also blocked out reflections of sunlight in most wavelengths. This serendipitous image was captured on July 8, 2009, using Cassini’s visual and infrared mapping spectrometer.

The new infrared image is available online at: http://www.nasa.gov/cassini.

“This one image communicates so much about Titan — thick atmosphere, surface lakes and an otherworldliness,” said Bob Pappalardo, Cassini project scientist, based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.  “It’s an unsettling combination of strangeness yet similarity to Earth. This picture is one of Cassini’s iconic images.”

Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, has captivated scientists because of its many similarities to Earth. Scientists have theorized for 20 years that Titan’s cold surface hosts seas or lakes of liquid hydrocarbons, making it the only other planetary body besides Earth believed to harbor liquid on its surface. While data from Cassini have not indicated any vast seas, they have revealed large lakes near Titan’s north and south poles.

In 2008, Cassini scientists using infrared data confirmed the presence of liquid in Ontario Lacus, the largest lake in Titan’s southern hemisphere. But they were still looking for the smoking gun to confirm liquid in the northern hemisphere, where lakes are also larger.

Katrin Stephan, of the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Berlin, an associate member of the Cassini visual and infrared mapping spectrometer team, was processing the initial image and was the first to see the glint on July 10th.

“I was instantly excited because the glint reminded me of an image of our own planet taken from orbit around Earth, showing a reflection of sunlight on an ocean,” Stephan said. “But we also had to do more work to make sure the glint we were seeing wasn’t lightning or an erupting volcano.”

Team members at the University of Arizona, Tucson, processed the image further, and scientists were able to compare the new image to radar and near-infrared-light images acquired from 2006 to 2008.

They were able to correlate the reflection to the southern shoreline of a lake called Kraken Mare. The sprawling Kraken Mare covers about 400,000 square kilometers (150,000 square miles), an area larger than the Caspian Sea, the largest lake on Earth. It is located around 71 degrees north latitude and 337 degrees west latitude.

The finding shows that the shoreline of Kraken Mare has been stable over the last three years and that Titan has an ongoing hydrological cycle that brings liquids to the surface, said Ralf Jaumann, a visual and infrared mapping spectrometer team member who leads the scientists at the DLR who work on Cassini. Of course, in this case, the liquid in the hydrological cycle is methane rather than water, as it is on Earth.

 “These results remind us how unique Titan is in the solar system,” Jaumann said. “But they also show us that liquid has a universal power to shape geological surfaces in the same way, no matter what the liquid is.”

PASADENA, Calif. – In the first video showing the auroras above the northern latitudes of Saturn, Cassini has spotted the tallest known “northern lights” in the solar system, flickering in shape and brightness high above the ringed planet.

The new video reveals changes in Saturn’s aurora every few minutes, in high resolution, with three dimensions. The images show a previously unseen vertical profile to the auroras, which ripple in the video like tall curtains. These curtains reach more than 1,200 kilometers (750 miles) above the edge of the planet’s northern hemisphere.

 The new video and still images are online at: http://www.nasa.gov/cassini , http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and http://ciclops.org .

Auroras occur on Earth, Jupiter, Saturn and a few other planets, and the new images will help scientists better understand how they are generated.

“The auroras have put on a dazzling show, shape-shifting rapidly and exposing curtains that we suspected were there, but hadn’t seen on Saturn before,” said Andrew Ingersoll of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, who is a member of the Cassini imaging team that processed the new video. “Seeing these things on another planet helps us understand them a little better when we see them on Earth.”

Auroras appear mostly in the high latitudes near a planet’s magnetic poles. When charged particles from the magnetosphere — the magnetic bubble surrounding a planet — plunge into the planet’s upper atmosphere, they cause the atmosphere to glow. The curtain shapes show the paths that these charged particles take as they flow along the lines of the magnetic field between the magnetosphere and the uppermost part of the atmosphere.

The height of the curtains on Saturn exposes a key difference between Saturn’s atmosphere and our own, Ingersoll said. While Earth’s atmosphere has a lot of oxygen and nitrogen, Saturn’s atmosphere is composed primarily of hydrogen. Because hydrogen is very light, the atmosphere and auroras reach far out from Saturn. Earth’s auroras tend to flare only about 100 to 500 kilometers (60 to 300 miles) above the surface.

The speed of the auroral changes in the video is comparable to some of those on Earth, but scientists are still working to understand the processes that produce these rapid changes. The height will also help them learn how much energy is required to light up auroras.

“I was wowed when I saw these images and the curtain,” said Tamas Gombosi of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, who chairs Cassini’s magnetosphere and plasma science working group. “Put this together with the other data Cassini has collected on the auroras so far, and you really get a new science.”

Ultraviolet and infrared instruments on Cassini have captured images of and data from Saturn’s auroras before, but in these latest images, Cassini’s narrow-angle camera was able to capture the northern lights in the visible part of the light spectrum, in higher resolution. The movie was assembled from nearly 500 still pictures spanning 81 hours between Oct. 5 and Oct. 8, 2009. Each picture had an exposure time of two or three minutes. The camera shot pictures from the night side of Saturn.

The images were originally obtained in black and white, and the imaging team highlighted the auroras in false-color orange. The oxygen and nitrogen in Earth’s upper atmosphere contribute to the colorful flashes of green, red and even purple in our auroras. But scientists are still working to determine the true color of the auroras at Saturn, whose atmosphere lacks those chemicals. 

PASADENA, Calif. — NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has contributed to the discovery of the youngest brown dwarf ever observed — a finding that, if confirmed, may solve an astronomical mystery about how these cosmic misfits are formed.

Brown dwarfs are misfits because they fall somewhere between planets and stars in terms of their temperature and mass. They are cooler and more lightweight than stars and more massive (and normally warmer) than planets. This has generated a debate among astronomers: Do brown dwarfs form like planets or like stars?

Brown dwarfs are born of the same dense, dusty clouds that spawn stars and planets. But while they may share the same galactic nursery, brown dwarfs are often called “failed” stars because they lack the mass of their hotter, brighter stellar siblings. Without that mass, the gas at their core does not get hot enough to trigger the nuclear fusion that burns hydrogen — the main component of these molecular clouds — into helium. Unable to ignite as stars, brown dwarfs end up as cooler, less luminous objects that are more difficult to detect — a challenge that was overcome in this case by Spitzer’s heat-sensitive infrared vision.
To complicate matters, young brown dwarfs evolve rapidly, making it difficult to catch them when they are first born. The first brown dwarf was discovered in 1995 and, while hundreds have been found since, astronomers had not been able to unambiguously find them in their earliest stages of formation until now. In this study, an international team of astronomers found a so-called "proto brown dwarf" while it was still hidden in its natal star-forming region. Guided by Spitzer data collected in 2005, they focused their search in the dark cloud Barnard 213, a region of the Taurus-Auriga complex well known to astronomers as a hunting ground for young objects.

“We decided to go several steps back in the process when (brown dwarfs) are really hidden,” said David Barrado of the Centro de Astrobiología in Madrid, Spain, lead author of the paper on the discovery in the Astronomy & Astrophysics journal. “During this step they would have an (opaque) envelope, a cocoon, and they would be easier to identify due to their strong infrared excesses. We have used this property to identify them. This is where Spitzer plays an important role because Spitzer can have a look inside these clouds. Without it this wouldn’t have been possible.”

Spitzer’s longer-wavelength infrared camera penetrated the dusty natal cloud to observe a baby brown dwarf named SSTB213 J041757. The data, confirmed with near-infrared imaging from Calar Alto Observatory in Spain, revealed not one but two of what would potentially prove to be the faintest and coolest brown dwarfs ever observed.

 Barrado and his team embarked on an international quest for more information about the two objects. Their overarching scientific objective was to observe and characterize the presence of this dusty envelope — proof of the celestial womb of sorts that would indicate that these brown dwarfs were, in fact, in their earliest evolutionary stages.

 The twins were observed from around the globe, and their properties were measured and analyzed using a host of powerful astronomical tools. One of the astronomers’ stops was the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory in Hawaii, which captured the presence of the envelope around the young objects. That information, coupled with what they had from Spitzer, enabled the astronomers to build a spectral energy distribution — a diagram that shows the amount of energy that is emitted by the objects in each wavelength.

From Hawaii, the astronomers made additional stops at observatories in Spain (Calar Alto Observatory), Chile (Very Large Telescopes) and New Mexico (Very Large Array). They also pulled decade-old data from the Canadian Astronomy Data Centre archives that allowed them to comparatively measure how the two objects were moving in the sky. After more than a year of observations, they drew their conclusions.

“We were able to estimate that these two objects are the faintest and coolest discovered so far,” Barrado said. Barrado said the findings potentially solve the mystery about whether brown dwarfs form more like stars or planets. The answer? They form like low-mass stars. This theory is bolstered because the change in brightness of the objects at various wavelengths matches that of other very young, low-mass stars.

 While further study will confirm whether these two celestial objects are in fact proto brown dwarfs, they are the best candidates so far, Barrado said. He said the journey to their discovery, while difficult, was fun. “It is a story that has been unfolding piece by piece. Sometimes nature takes its time to give up its secrets.”

 These observations were made before Spitzer ran out of its liquid coolant in May 2009, beginning its "warm" mission.