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Asian stocks rebound after Trump avoids reigniting trade war | Inquirer Business
business / Stocks
Asian stocks rebound after Trump avoids reigniting trade war
Associated Press / 01:35 PM June 01, 2020
BEIJING — Asian stock markets rebounded Monday after President Donald Trump avoided reigniting a trade war with China amid tension over Hong Kong and the coronavirus pandemic.
A woman wearing a face mask walks past a bank electronic board showing the Hong Kong share index at Hong Kong Stock Exchange Monday, June 1, 2020. Asian stock markets have rebounded after U.S. President Donald Trump avoided reigniting a trade war with China amid tension. (AP Photo/Vincent Yu)
Hong Kong's benchmark gained more than 3% and Shanghai and Tokyo rose more than 1%.
Global markets sank Friday as investors waited for Trump's response to Beijing's security law on Hong Kong. In the end, Trump ended Hong Kong's special trade status and suspended visas of some Chinese students but avoided pulling out of a truce in a tariff war with Beijing that weighs on global growth.
"Markets may draw hollow consolation that the U.S. is treading carefully," said Mizuho Bank in a report. However, it warned, relief may be "set to evaporate."
Hong Kong's Hang Seng index surged 3.2% to 23,689.38 and the Nikkei 225 in Tokyo rose 1.2% to 22,140.01. The Shanghai Composite Index advanced 1.8% to 2,903.20.
The Kospi in Seoul added 1.4% to 2,058.42 and Australia's S&P-ASX 200 was 0.9% higher at 5,805.20. Singapore gained 1.4%.
U.S.-Chinese tension has weighed on investor optimism about the global economy's recovery from its deepest slump since the 1930s.
As China and some European countries revive economic activity, stock markets have been regaining much of this year's losses despite rising numbers of virus cases in the United States, Brazil and some other countries.
On Friday, Wall Street's benchmark S&P 500 index ended the week with a 3% gain at 3,044.31 following a late-afternoon rally boosted by Trump's news conference.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 0.1% to 25,383.11. The Nasdaq composite, which is heavily weighted with technology stocks, gained 1.3% to 9,489.87.
Before the virus outbreak, the global economy already was under pressure from the U.S.-Chinese dispute over Beijing's technology ambitions and trade surplus.
The world's two biggest traders had raised tariffs on billions of dollars of each other's goods. They signed a truce in January but Trump has added to market jitters by threatening to pull out if China doesn't buy more American goods.
On Friday, Trump said Washington would begin eliminating agreements that gave Hong Kong privileges that China lacked, including exemption from some import controls.
That followed the ceremonial Chinese legislature's endorsement of a security law for Hong Kong that pro-democracy advocates say undermines the autonomy promised to the former British colony.
It is unclear how the decision might affect U.S. companies in Hong Kong or the territory's status as a finance and business center. But business groups say the uncertainty over its status might hurt its attractiveness to foreign investors.
In energy markets, benchmark U.S. crude lost 1 cent to $35.49 per barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The contract gained $1.78 on Friday to settle at $35.49. Brent crude, used to price international oils, advanced 10 cents to $37.94 per barrel in London.
The dollar declined to 107.65 yen from Friday's 107.81. The euro retreated to $1.1136 from $1.1165.
Shakey's Pizza's Q1 profit down 35%
9 NBI agents face raps over abuse of 2 suspects in cockight case
TAGS: Asian stocks, shares, Stock Market, trade war, Trump
Philippines' Maria Luisa Varela wins in controversial Miss Planet International pageant


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I am comfortable doing post operation care, simple dressing, and tube feeding. Further, I have a drivers license. With respect to previous experience, I have years of experience.


On a beautiful July evening, OWs played the second annual golf match against a specially chosen school six.
With both teams eager to get their names on the new silver claret jug, 18 holes of four-ball better ball match play had to be decided for three pairs. And with all matches played under new full handicap allowances, a strong OW team found that, thankfully, they were not giving away too many shots - a testament to the strength of the school team.
OWs Richard Tidman and James Yearsley were in conquering form, putting the OWs into a 1-0 lead. An in form Geoff Tedstone and OW captain finally achieved parity on the 17th green. Matthew Leefe and Andy Haslam, with an eagle 3 from Andy at the last, ensured the trophy went to a thankful OW six.
Well done to the school and to all the players. The OWs are looking forward to a similarly close encounter in 2009.


NEW DELHI: The Bahujan Samaj Occasion (BSP) has the most important financial institution steadiness amongst all events, in line with official data. The expenditure report submitted by BSP to the Election Fee on February 25 states that it has Rs 669 crore deposited in eight accounts in branches of public sector banks within the nationwide capital area.
The get together, which scored a clean within the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, has additionally declared Rs 95.54 lakh as money in hand. The expenditure report is predicated on particulars of the central kitties of events. Samajwadi Occasion, occupies the second slot with Rs 471 crore in its financial institution accounts. The get together's money deposits dipped modestly after the latest meeting polls in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan and Telangana, coming down by Rs 11 crore.
Congress takes third spot with Rs 196 crore in financial institution steadiness. Nevertheless, that is based mostly on the small print the get together submitted to the EC on November 2 final yr after the conclusion of meeting polls in Karnataka. The get together has not up to date the small print about its reserves after it gained the state elections in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh.
BJP occupies fifth place with a financial institution steadiness of Rs 82 crore, and lags one other regional outfit, Telugu Desam Occasion which has proven a deposit of Rs 107 crore.
The quantity proven by BJP seems slightly small contemplating that it's manner forward in mopping up contributions, together with by electoral bonds. A attainable rationalization comes from the small print it has submitted. The get together has claimed to have spent Rs 758 crore — the most important expenditure by any get together — of the Rs 1,027 crore it had raised in 2017-18.
The SP's money reserves dipped by Rs 11 crore through the November-December polls for the 4 assemblies of Chhattisgarh, MP, Rajasthan and Telangana. In distinction, BSP, which collected Rs 24 crore throughout these elections, noticed its reserves enhance from Rs 665 crore to Rs 670 crore.
Based on an evaluation of earnings tax returns of those events, carried out by Affiliation for Democratic Reforms, BJP confirmed the very best earnings with contributions value Rs 1,034 crore for 2016-17 and Rs 1,027 crore in 2017-18. Throughout the identical interval, BSP's earnings nosedived from Rs 174 crore to Rs 52 crore. Congress's earnings for 2016-2017 is proven as Rs 225 crore. It has not declared its earnings within the subsequent monetary years to the EC. CPM has declared an earnings of over Rs 100 crore on a median in every of the previous few monetary years. About 87% of the earnings of those events is thru voluntary contributions, with BJP being the one one to have proven a achieve of Rs 210 crore by electoral bonds in 2017-18.


JUX is a European fashion label that combines cool design with the handsomeness of labor transparency. You can see who actually stitched your clothes depending upon the number sewn into the seam. They use many materials like organic cotton, hemp and recycled coke bottles (but do steer clear of their wool products, considering that the flatulence of a single sheep could power a small truck for 25 miles a day, according to New Zealand scientist Dr David Lowe).
• ReCLOTHINGS by designer and tailor Daniel Kroh, restyles used work-clothes into fine menswear... and even furniture. Work-wear is built to be durable, so it only makes sense to se it again and again rather than throwing it into a landfill.
• Ken Panda is a Berlin-based streetwear label using organic cotton and fair labor, amde small-scale by hand. You can buy this fresh collection online.


This is a first edition of The Lurker at the Threshold by H.P. Lovecraft & August Derleth, published in 1945 by Arkham House. Arkham House was founded by Derleth in Sauk City, Wisconsin in 1939 and primarily published works by H.P. Lovecraft and related American horror novels. One of my favorite bookstores in Hadley Massachusetts (Grey Matter Books) recently acquired a massive library of old Arkham House first editions; they're kept in a locked room with poor lighting, in my opinion the perfect way to discover bowing shelves of the Cthulhu Mythos.
These are all priced appropriately (expensive!) but I've had the pleasure of picking up a few of the many books there - including this very early Arkham House work. The Lurker at the Threshold is lesser Lovecraft, and in fact more of a Derleth book. Derleth completed the majority of the book after Lovecraft's death in 1937 by using Lovecraft's notes. It was printed in a very small run of around 3,000 copies and is one of the more rare Arkham House editions out there.
Various Artists, "Los Alamos Grind!"


Apple released an update for IOS 8 that was supposed to fix some issues, instead two new serious problems were created. Not long after, Apple released another update to fix the first update's problems including Finger scan and mobile network problems. Now while I agree that Apple made a huge disappointment, the problem was handled fast and I can confirm that it is indeed fixed as I personally tested it on my iPhone 5S. Reports allover the web confirm the same thing as well.
I really hope that Apple take testing more seriously as another major screw u like this will send the company backwards. Never the less, this is not the first time that a big corp release a faulty update, nor will this be the last time. At least the problem was fixed quickly and everything should now be in the correct working order.
I understand the disappointment of people who do business by phone as they are effected the most but like I said, at least IOS 8.0.2 came out quickly.


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Hot Tickets
Immersive Mysteries - The Silhouette in the Smoke
London Museum of Water and Steam
Dates and tickets
Various dates from Monday 9th September 2019
Tickets from £26.00 - £28.00
Theatre/Arts, Something A Little Different and Immersive
Join us for a sinister evening of theatre, puzzle solving and ghostly encounters.
It was 1871, and every level of the pumping station was bustling with activity in preparation for the grand opening of the 100" Cornish Engine, when two unexpected guests from the workhouse arrived demanding to see the small boy who had been apprenticed to the Chief Engineer.
Now, more than a century later, a child's crying has been heard from beneath the Cornish Engine and it is starting to unnerve the tourists. The Museum has invited the master of the supernatural, Jack Daw, to awaken the past and uncover the truth.
You must solve the mystery in groups of six so bring friends or we can put you into a group with other audience members on the night.
Victorian High Tea is included in the ticket price. Drinks for the interval can be pre-ordered at the cafe between 7.15 and 7.30pm.
High Tea includes vegetarian options. If you have any other dietary restrictions please email info@immer-city.com before buying your ticket.
Unfortunately this show is not wheelchair accessible.
"Think of an interactive murder mystery in which you, the audience, must solve the crime, and you'll probably imagine a seedy hotel ballroom in the off-season downtime. But The Silhouette in the Smoke is a genre-busting show that breathes new life into a tired genre....This is a show that achieves all it sets out to do, with wit and style. The magnificent surroundings of the pumping station provide the perfect backdrop, and the actors' characterisation never wavers under pressure. A hugely enjoyable evening, which cannot be recommended too highly. (And the high tea was a real bonus.)"
Everything Theatre
"...the looming threat of the powerful machines all lend a deliciously gloomy air of menace and otherworldliness to the proceedings...It's all about the fun of the chase, the atmosphere and the escape from the cold, dark reality of January. Theatre doesn't get much more interactive or much better than this."
LondonTheatre1
Tickets/Times
Jack Daw's Guest
Includes Victorian High Tea
19:15 - 22:00 £28.00
Table (6-8 people)
No Tea for Me (use only with discount code)
FOR DISCOUNT CODE TO USE THIS TICKET Please email info@immer-city.com with your allergies and we will send you the appropriate discount code to reduce the price.
London Museum of Water and Steam, Green Dragon Lane, London, TW8 0EN
Gunnersbury (Tube)
Immersive Mysteries - The Silhouette in the Smoke menu
ImmerCity
Immersive theatre company: site-specific, history-specific, audience-as-agent
More from Immersive Mysteries
Immersive Mysteries - The Unholy Marriage of Slice and Sweetly

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


I walked through the Student Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts a few hours before I was scheduled to speak.
There were hundreds of students passing through, coming in and out of classrooms, grabbing a bite to eat at some of the campus restaurants, but it remained almost creepily quiet.
There was little socializing, almost a polar opposite environment to my college experience at the University of Florida where you walk into the student center and immediately feel the extroversion crawling all over your arm. Socializing was the ideal, which is why if you walked into our student center on a weekday, you could hear 1,000 voices slowing coming to a crescendo as you neared the cafeteria. But here in Cambridge, it was quiet. There was a level of respect in the air that was palpable.
I passed through the Student Center and quickly found myself in a new building. Most of the buildings on it's campus are connected, so you can to almost any building without having to step foot outside into the frigid cold, which is nice, but you can also get lost very easily if you don't know where you're going.
I heard some chatter coming from a classroom down the hall so I went to check it out. I approached and noticed an older grey-haired professor dressed in a full, three piece suit who bore a striking resemblance to the main character in the Pixar movie, Up.
He was offering bowtie-tying lessons to students, which seemed rather appropriate.
I introduced myself and confessed that my girlfriend had just bought me a bowtie for Christmas and that I had watched approximately 700 Youtube tutorials to try and figure out how to tie one for our New Year's party but I failed miserably each time.
He reached into a box and grabbed a tie for me to practice with. I fumbled. I looped. I swooped. I failed.
To ease my embarrassment, I tried to distract him with small talk. "What do you do here?" I asked. He told me he was a professor.
I told him I'm a public speaking coach for introverts. "Tough job," he said. He told me he's never been shy about speaking in public.
That's not right. I must have misunderstood. He had a traumatic experience and that's when he stopped fearing public speaking?
"You do realize that this is where most people begin to fear public speaking more than death, right?" My tone was condescending.
There's a concept preached religiously in finance, that the M.I.T. professor understood, called diversifying.
Diversifying is about spreading out risk.
Basically, if we're too heavily invested in one thing (like one stock… or only stocks...or say the outcome of a single performance) we need to invest into other things (like gold, or bonds, or cash) so if something goes wrong with that one stock, we're not screwed.
Okay. Forget about finance now and think about your fear of public speaking. If we're too invested in a single outcome (like impressing an audience or it's evil cousin, not failing and looking stupid), the only way to correct this cycle is to: invest excessively in other areas of your life.
In other words, stop only caring about the outcome of one event and do other things. Invest in other areas of your life and spread out the risk so that if you do fail miserably, whether during a work presentation, during a job interview, etc. the blow isn't so devastating.
Give me some examples. Okay.
Try weight lifting and getting into shape. Build your social circle and meet new friends. Learn new skills: like a new language, acting, painting, writing, or carpentry. Take an improv or acting class. Join a church group. Join a book club. Join a boozy book club (my friend just started one of these and they're great). Join a networking group in your industry. Learn to cook. Cook for your family once a week. Take martial arts. Do yoga. Become a yogi. Write a book. Teach a free class at a local university. Volunteer to work at a charity once a week for an hour. Start running. Start swimming. Travel to a few places close by. Move to China.
But isn't the only way to get better at public speaking through practice? No. It's one way. But maybe your technical speaking skills or charisma or storytelling isn't the issue.
Maybe you care too much. Maybe that's the problem. So invest somewhere else. Actually not just somewhere else, but everywhere else.
So when you do fail, because you will, you've got other things to lean on.


I´m totally in love with my new baby – Joana Saahirah´s Online Dance School – and all the students who have already joined us. The treasures we reap when we work with love are amazing!
A lot of vision, passion and work has already been put into the school, as well as technological know-how which is totally out of my comfort zone (I´m NOT a machine/technology person), and this is just the beginning.
We´ve opened our first class on a special day – 13th May -, less than one month ago, and it already feels like the ship is up, running and conquering the Oceans. When I´m in love, I´ll go all the way into that love. I´m also a Capricorn ascendant who likes to do things with excellence.
The thing about building a long term career is that you have to keep growing, evolving, adapting without compromising your integrity, as a person and creator (for me, there´s no difference between the two); you have to create new venues for your craft and reach out to the world as it evolves; you gotta reinvent yourself and be reminded you´re only as good as your last work. It doesn´t matter how much success, achievements and experience you´ve gathered under your belt, you´re a beginner always proving your worth for the first time. If you don´t like to grow, being constantly put to the test and taking risks, Dance is probably not the right profession for you. I DO like to grow; I DO like being challenged and I know growing involves risks. Just like love.
And one of the risks is flying. Going higher than we´ve gone before. That´s a risk I´ll gladly take.


Medina, OH - New details on a missing woman and her teenage son.
Lori Galina, age 39 of Tionesta, Pennsylvania and her son 16-year-old son Tim were reported missing.
Ms. Galina and her son have been located in a truck stop in Davenport, Iowa.
There was no evidence of abduction and it is believed that Ms. Galina created the entire incident.
The Pennsylvania State Police is investigating the case and possible criminal charges may be filed against Ms. Galina for making a false report.


You know what I'm not here to do?
-Engage in meaningless internet "discussions" where no one changes their mind and no one feels good at the end anyway.
But, I know some people in Washington D.C. today, and I've been there myself many times.
Today, this post is for my brothers and sisters who I'll never have the honor, the privilege of meeting. This is for the women and men who grieve because of the decisions they make–haunted by the memories triggered by the sound of suction or a baby crying.
-compassion, mercy, healing and justice in our land.


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A private landlord was prosecuted today after failing to provide gas safety certificates for two rented properties.
Home » News » A private landlord was prosecuted today after failing to provide gas safety certificates for two rented properties.
In Premier Risk News
A private landlord was prosecuted today after failing to provide gas safety certificates for two rented properties.2016-01-272016-01-27https://www.premierriskservices.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/MT-PRS-Brand-Manual-Draft_Logo-150mm1.pngPremier Risk Services. Health and Safety, Employment Consultants Leedshttps://www.premierriskservices.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/MT-PRS-Brand-Manual-Draft_Logo-150mm1.png200px200px
A private landlord was prosecuted today after failing to provide gas safety certificates for two rented properties. The landlord did not comply with an improvement notice and pleaded guilty to breaching section 33(1) of the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 and sections 36(3) and 36(6) of the Gas Safety Installations and Use Regulations. He was given 240 hours of community service and instructed to pay full HSE costs of £2767.
Total Costs = 240 hours of community service + £2767 fine
Yorkshire company fined after worker killed
Woodwork company fined after persistent failure to guard and maintain equipment
Council fined after obvious risk to employees ignored
HSE proud to fly Suffrage Flag over Buxton laboratory
A builder has been fined after a labourer fell to his death from an unsecured ladder.Premier Risk News
A bar owner has been fined after serving a customer a glass of caustic soda (beer line cleaner) instead of beer.Premier Risk News


St. Mary's has two mini buses donated to the school by Kinane development Ltd & PGA European Tour & Ryder Cup Ltd. Pupil Transport is provided by Bus Eireann School transport division. A Bus Eireann Inspector liaises with the school on a regular basis. All pupils are transported to school via mini bus or taxi. Bus escorts travel on all school transport.
To develop individual programmes for students so that they have appropriate means of communicating their wants, likes and choices.
To facilitate a child's potential in the areas of learning, living and leisure skills. To interact with the child in a holistic manner to facilitate their own sense of self and self-confidence.
To monitor, assist and remediate the development of body skills and encourage exercise and participation for health and recreation.


Blowout Sale! Up to 69% off on Microphones at MT Global. Top brands include FOCULED, DLH MOBILE, CASEMATIX, EXMAX, Luckymore, aokeo, Sanovo, Pyle, Micpioneer, TP-WIRELESS, VERKB, TOSING, Ula, Retekess, Megan, & Olio. Hurry! Limited time offers. Offers valid only while supplies last.


Unleashed by ancient geologic forces, a magnitude 8.25 earthquake rocked San Francisco in the early hours of April 18, 1906. Less than a minute later, the city lay in ruins. Bestselling author Simon Winchester brings his inimitable storytelling abilities to this extraordinary event, exploring the legendary earthquake and fires that spread horror across San Francisco and northern California in 1906 as well as its startling impact on American history and, just as important, what science has recently revealed about the fascinating subterranean processes that produced it—and almost certainly will cause it to strike again.
At least 19 people were killed and about 250 injured in the quake that struck a remote region of China's Sichuan province that is popular among tourists.
A shallow magnitude 5.7 earthquake struck beneath the Pacific Ocean off the Northern California coast Friday afternoon, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. No tsunami warnings were issued for the coast, according to the National Weather Service.
Are the Two Mexican Earthquakes Connected – and Are More on the Way?
SOME WHILE AGO, WHEN I WAS HALF-IDLY BROWSING MY way around the Internet, I stumbled across the home page of an obscure small town in western Ohio with the arresting name of Wapakoneta. It rang a distant bell. Once, very much longer ago, I had passed by the town on what I seem to recall was a driving expedition from Detroit down to Nashville. But, so far as I remember, I didn't stop there, not even for a cup of coffee. It only struck me at the time as being a rather attractive name for a town—a name that was (I subsequently read) a settler adaptation from a word in the language of the local Shawnee Indians.
The town these days is nothing too exciting—which is what one might expect of a place that lies just off that part of the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System known as the I-75, not very far from the rather better-known and quintessentially midwestern Ohio city of Lima. It has some 10,000 inhabitants, and the way in which it was built, ordered, and settled a century or so ago makes it very similar to uncountable other cities found between the bookends of the Rocky Mountains and the Appalachians.
It is, in other words, a classic example of the modern Middle American community. A place Sinclair Lewis would have favored. A place of unexceptional ordinariness, known locally for the making of light machinery, car parts, and rubberware, and surrounded by large and generally family-owned farms where soybeans and corn are grown, and where hogs are raised. Reading between the lines, one can perhaps detect the faintest tone of fretfulness: a concern for the town's future, born of such newfangled developments as the spread of manufacturing to Mexico, the outsourcing to Asia of much of the service economy, and the drumbeat growth of China. No doubt wishing to encourage new businesses, the chamber of commerce makes a claim for Wapakoneta that is shared with many other towns similarly unburdened by excessive splendor: that by virtue of its strategically important location, with all the roads and railway lines that run nearby, it is something called a transportation hub.
It is a town with a past built on the bedrock of America's previous success, a present that clings by its fingernails to its own notion of stability, and yet a future in which the old Ohio bedrock seems not quite as firm as had initially been supposed, one that most people in consequence do not care to ponder too closely.
The town's Web site is where all this is so serendipitously revealed. It opens with a scratchy sound recording of an unidentified baritone reading a launchpad countdown. He follows this with the announcement of the liftoff, in July 1969, of the Apollo 11 spacecraft, a ship that is destined, he says gravely, for the moon. And while his voice is intoning on what turns out to be an original NASA recording, an image of the moon swirls and grows steadily bigger on the screen—until it is eventually replaced, with a booster's flourish, by an image of a bustling community and, in bold type, the name of the town: Wapakoneta.
It is fitting that this small town should celebrate so eagerly the exploration of space: The worldwide excitement over the samples of lunar rock brought back to earth is just one small indication of the value, in real scientific terms, of America's having sent up a man to get them. But there was an unanticipated and less obvious consequence of the expedition, the effect of which has been, in many ways, rather more enduring.
For it appears now that one field of scientific discovery was changed forever by the journeyings of Neil Armstrong and all those others who have gone to the moon in the years since. This sea change has come about specifically in the science of geology, and it is a change that has its origins in a very simple fact. When Wapakoneta's first citizen was teetering gingerly about up there on the moon, he was able to do something that had never been done before, and that provided science with a profound, paradigm-shifting moment of unforgettable symbolism: He was able to stand on the lunar surface and look back at the earth.
To be sure, astronauts who had gone into orbit in the years beforehand were also able to see the totality of the planet; but there was something wholly remarkable in being able to stand upright on one world and gaze back at another, more than 200,000 miles away.
Viewed from the distance of the moon, the astonishing thing about the earth, catching the breath, is that it is alive. The photographs show the dry, pounded surface of the moon in the foreground, dry as an old bone. Aloft, floating free beneath the moist, gleaming, membrane of bright blue sky, is the rising earth, the only exuberant thing in this part of the cosmos. If you could look long enough, you would see the swirling of the great drifts of white cloud, covering and uncovering the half-hidden masses of land. If you had been looking for a very long, geologic time, you could have seen the continents themselves in motion, drifting apart on their crustal plates, held afloat by the fire beneath. It has the organized, self-contained look of a live creature, full of information, marvelously skilled in handling the sun.
Five years later a British chemist and environmentalist named James Lovelock, thinking along much these same lines, used the moon view of the earth to advance a long-considered idea he called the Gaia hypothesis. The idea—which he christened with the ancient Greeks' name for the earth goddess, Gaia or Ge, and which has been rechristened as the even more plausible-sounding Gaia theory, now that his supporters believe so much of it has been proved—holds that the earth in its totality is very much a living entity. It is alive, it is fragile, and everything that is in it preserves a complex balance with everything else in a state of mutually beneficial equilibrium. It so happens, to the dismay of many present-day scientific philosophers, that humankind's current disharmonious behavior is affecting this careful balance; there is a growing feeling that it must be changed, radically and soon, if life on earth is to continue and to flourish.
This is not an environmental book by any means. It is, more simply, the story of one remarkable and tragic event that befell California a century ago, when a 300-mile-long swath of the earth briefly shifted, wrecking the cities that lay atop it. But, though it is not intended to be a Gaia book, it seems right to tell the story of the events that so ruined the city of San Francisco in 1906 within the context of the Gaia idea. There is, for a start, an interesting synchronicity at work: At the moment when Thomas and Lovelock were putting forward their ideas (in the late 1960s, at the same time as the beginning of space travel and, in part, of course, because of it), the geological sciences were also changing very profoundly, as we shall see.
Neil Armstrong was able to gaze across the quarter million miles that separate these two small planetary bodies and look directly toward that area of America from which he had come, at the hills and valleys of the selfsame rocks where he had grown up—rocks that established geology and the fossil record tell us belong to the Silurian Age. And I have no doubt that it was in large measure because of this most extraordinary vision—extraordinary both for Neil Armstrong and, in time, for the rest of us, too—that the birth was signaled of what is now coming to be regarded as an entirely new science. It was a science that was born and then helped to its feet quite simply by virtue of this new perspective that Neil Armstrong's view, even though it had been long anticipated by those who sent him and his colleagues into space, would shed on our planet.
What he saw—and what we saw through his eyes, which we now perhaps take somewhat for granted—was a thing of incredible and fragile beauty. It was a floating near-spherical body, tricked out in deep blue and pale green, with the white of polar ice and mountain summits, with great gray swirls and sheets of clouds and storms, and with the terminator line, that divides darkness and light seeming to sweep slowly across the planet's face as it turned into and out of the sun. It was a lovely aspect to contemplate. And it was a view that in time compelled humankind to take stock.
To see oursels as others see us, as Robert Burns had written. Here and now, all of sudden, we realized that we could do just that—and, with this unanticipated ability to do so, something about us suddenly changed. Almost overnight, and essentially because of this new world-view to which we had access, we discovered a whole raft of new reasons to ponder the oldest of age-old questions: just where we stood in the celestial scheme of things, what the universe and its creation might mean, and how the very earth itself may have first come into being. And such ruminations led, in short order, to the makings of the scientific revolution—and, most specifically, to the geological revolution—that is central to this story.
Like alchemy and the medicine of the leech and the bleeding rod, the Old Geology is a science born long ago (most formally in the eighteenth century): one that, unlike so many of its sister sciences—chemistry, physics, medicine, and astronomy—never truly left the era of its making. Since its beginnings geology has been a field mired in some alluvial quagmire, defined by dusty cases of fossils, barely comprehensible diagrams of crystals, and the different kinds of breaks that were made in the earth's surface (as well as by unlovely Continental words like graben, gabbro, and graywacke), and explained with cracked-varnish wall roller charts showing how the world may have looked at the time of the Permian Period. To me it remains the most lyrical and romantic of the sciences; but in terms of glamor, and when compared with astrophysics or molecular biology, the Old Geology is somewhat wanting.
The New Geology is, on the other hand, a creature fashioned wholly from the science of the space age, from the attitude that was born when Neil Armstrong first looked back and gazed at the earth. It is a science that now presents us with an entire canon of new ways in which we might look at this planet and at our stellar and solar neighbors.
It seems to me quite fair and proper that the principles of this new science should underpin everything that follows: the terrifying and extraordinary event that enfolded the small but fast-growing western American city of San Francisco one twilit California morning in the middle of April 1906.
Many other scientific disciplines that are revolutionary and dauntingly modern—cosmology, genetic engineering, quantum mechanics—have been formed or founded in recent years, and had no past to hold them back. But geology is different. It is a very old science indeed and hugely proud of its origins: Portraits of the bearded ancients of its founding priesthood invariably hang in esteemed positions in departments from Anchorage to Adelaide. Its antiquity, however, has long been a problem for it, one that has tended to inhibit too many of its practitioners from escaping the glutinous hold of its earliest ideas. Students who remember measuring the umbos of brachiopods or trying to fathom the mysteries of recumbent folding can reach through the centuries and join hands with students who were taught the same topics at the time of George IV and President John Adams. It was only when the professors happened to mention in more modern classes such wonders as the K-T boundary event, with the massive dinosaur extinctions that were mysteriously triggered at the end of the Cretaceous Period (perhaps by a monstrous collision with an immense asteroid), that geology as taught seemed, briefly, to come alive.
Now, however, thanks to a number of recent developments—space travel being one of them, the most spectacular but in terms of science not the most important—geology has suddenly and seriously changed, and at a pace so rapid as to bewilder and astonish all who come up against it anew, or return to it after a while away. It is probably fair to say that never before has any long-existing science been remodeled and reworked so profoundly, so suddenly, and in so short a time. Wholly unimagined visions and possibilities allow us to contemplate our planet in brand-new ways. These means have evolved right before our eyes, and, to the less prescient among us, they have done so well-nigh invisibly and, moreover, in rather less than half a century.
Thanks to the attitudes and instruments and scientific philosophies of the new science, all the events of great geological moment—with chief among them the earthquakes and volcanoes that so plague humankind—can now be seen and interpreted in an entirely fresh context, and in a manner that had rarely before occurred to those who practiced the confusing and cobweb-bound older science with which (from memories of school and university) we are still so vaguely familiar.
IT WAS NOT NEIL ARMSTRONG'S venture alone that brought about this transformation. It is fair to say that geology flowered as rapidly as it did because at almost the exact same moment as the rockets started to soar up through the stratosphere from their bases in Florida (and from the cosmodromes in Baikonur—for this new perspective was one offered to Russian scientists too, of course) something else occurred. A previously little-known professor in Toronto (a man whose very ordinary surname—Wilson—might have kept him marooned in the shadows forever, had not one of his given names—Tuzo—been so strange) drew up the foundations of an entirely new geological subdiscipline, the now all-too-familiar theory known as plate tectonics.
Plate tectonics and space travel each burst onto the world stage at the same time—plate tectonics becoming fully developed by 1967, manned lunar exploring getting under way in 1969—and it is this that led to the unprecedented evolution of the science that was common to both. I shall try to explain the more relevant details of plate tectonics later in the story; but in essence it was a theory that also happened to encourage its believers to stand back, as it were, just as Neil Armstrong was doing at that moment. Plate tectonics allowed us—compelled us, even—to view the world as a complete entity, for the first time to look and to see the earth entire.
For it should be remembered that every single one of those Old Geologists—the tweedy figures who, with hammer and lens and acid bottle, had explored and observed and thought and written since the days when it was first realized that the earth is actually very old and that rocks are laid down with some natural purpose and that no deity had anything much to do with the actual manufacture of the planet—found their evidence for the theories and principles of the Old Geology in the rocks, fossils, faults and minerals that were scattered around simply and solely on the surface of the earth. They made crucially important discoveries, true; they laid the foundations for this most elemental of disciplines, true; but they did so by examining only the topmost layers—or at most the topmost few miles of thickness, if you will—of the planet.
And that, it is now realized, was a very limiting way indeed of conducting the science—a science that, after all, should more properly be concerned with the nature and history of the earth in its entirety, and not with its surface alone. Before the 1970s we had knowledge about the earth's outer cover and not much more. What we wanted to know involved, if we thought about it, much, much more. We wanted to know—and geology was, in its theoretical essence, established purely so as to enable us the better to know—about the earth as a whole. And when the intellectual revolution of the sixties came about, we started swiftly to understand that up until that point we had, quite literally, only been scratching the surface; we had never considered the earth as it truly deserved to be considered.
It promptly started to dawn on those sixties geologists who had listened to Tuzo Wilson or his acolytes, or who had seen the spacecraft pictures, that it was somewhat misleading for a science to draw conclusions about the earth entire by examining only those minor features that occurred upon, or just beneath, the planet's outer covering. A fault in Scotland or the relic of a volcano in Montana or the succession of types of trilobite that had been found buried in a shale high on a hillside in British Columbia—such things might be interesting in and of themselves, but only when they were viewed in the context of the big picture, of the planet as a whole, were they able to offer up evidence that allowed the whole-earth portrait to be inked in and made to look something like complete.
So this, then, lies at the heart of the New Geology. The world is these days viewed by most as one entire and immense system, the most refined of its details all interwoven with the biggest of big concepts. It is a living system four and a half billion years old. In a purely physical sense it is an entity warmed up from inside by radioactive decay, with fragments of its fairly recently cooled crust moving about on top of its more mobile inner self, and with solid rocks that have formed (or are still forming) on or beside these fragments creating continents or the floors of oceans. These rafts of solid rock have since been (or are still being) folded or lifted or broken apart as the plates on which they ride move about until they collide and bounce and dive beneath one another. In places, the rocks rise up to great heights; these are eventually eroded, causing the formation of sediment. Ageological cycle of creation and decay continues, endlessly. And meanwhile there is life, almost in global terms a brief irrelevance; animals and plants evolve and disappear by turns on the various wet or dry surfaces of the planet according to a series of complex sets of rules that have been laid down by the practical realities of tectonics, of temperature, of pressure, and of almost limitless quantities of time.
The finer details of these things have been studied for decades—such arcane niceties as the suture lines of ammonites (by which one can determine the species and subspecies of this particular beast, which floated gently about in the Mesozoic seas), or the varying degrees of sphericity of the ooliths in a Jurassic limestone, or the patterns of those parts of bivalved creatures that are inelegantly known as muscle scars. But now, in the light of the whole-earth, big-picture view of the science of which they are so infinitesimal a part, they seem tangential to the broad realities of the New Geology, as the pores in an elephant's skin do to a biologist or the volume of sap that courses through the leaves of a live oak from San Antonio does to a forest botanist.
Which is not to say that such things are unworthy of our fascination. Small pieces of puzzles can often lead to grand ideas: The beaks of the Galápagos finches, after all, led Charles Darwin to his big notions about natural selection, the origin of species, and evolution. But it is important to remember that Darwin had at the time all of what was known of earth's biology at his intellectual disposal—every beak and claw, every feather and fin was there, and his journeys took him to far and remote parts of our planet, so that he saw and thought about evidence from all manner of perspectives. When he sat down to write and think at his desk in Down House, he had an immense and almost unimaginable accumulation of information available to him, the finches' beaks being just a scattering of tiles from the great mosaic of biological knowledge.
But, by contrast, geology, at least before the 1960s, was able to lay out before its practitioners only the tiniest portion of available information—very little more than the superficial, the minute, the peripherally relevant. And then, in the nick of time (for without it, where would geology have gone?), everything altered: Along came the astronauts and the unmanned satellites and the space-born magnetometers and gravimeters and mass spectrometers and ion probes, and along came J. Tuzo Wilson and a whole army of like-minded tectonicists. They, combined with the new way of looking at the earth, taught the Old Geological community that there was much, much more to know—and what was once merely a hunch, an inner feeling, became a settled idea. It became abundantly clear that very few grand theories could actually ever be derived from minutiae such as ammonite suture lines and oolith sphericities and relative umbo sizes alone, except forensically; and that nowadays the grand geological ideas are the ones that truly matter.
And seen in that great and glorious context is the earth of the Californian morning of what Western Christian mankind had chosen to call April 18, 1906. Had any geologist at the time been able to look down at the planet in its entirety and witness what took place then, he would at the very least have been utterly amazed by the physical context of the event, even if the event itself, when viewed from on high, appeared less than overwhelming.
For, as context, the planet would have been memorably beautiful. Had he been standing on the moon, say—had he been a 1906 version of Neil Armstrong, scanning with a hugely powerful telescope the surface of the blue and green and white ball that was hanging in his ink black sky—he would have seen illuminated in front of him (assuming that the cloud cover was not too dense) a tract of the world that extended from what some of mankind called India to what others called the Rocky Mountains, all of which would have been bathed in the brilliant white light of sunshine.
He readily could have made out all of Europe and Africa, Asia Minor, and Arabia; he could have seen the deep blue of the Atlantic Ocean, the pure white mass of Greenland to its north, the blinding white immensity of the Antarctic deep below. The corpulent mass of what we now know as Brazil would have been sparkling in the sunlight, with the city-smudged eastern coasts of North America and Patagonia only slightly less so, places peopled with a humanity that was just waking on what many of earth's inhabitants would call a Wednesday, a day that thousands of miles away, in the darkness of China and all points east, was in any case already coming to its end.
At the moment that we find interesting—five o'clock in the morning, give or take—he could have seen the terminator line of western darkness pushing its way rapidly toward the Pacific. The earth would have been moving relentlessly at a speed of some hundreds of miles an hour eastward toward it, opening ever more populated parts of the landmasses to the light of the dawning day.
The line at that very moment would seem to begin in the north near Melville Island in the Canadian Arctic, pass on down through Banks Island and the unpopulated and icebound wilderness of the Northwest Territories and the Yukon, through Saskatchewan and Alberta, raggedly on down through the newly created state of Montana, through the bison-and-Comanche country of Wyoming and Colorado and New Mexico, across the Rio Grande toward Acapulco, and arrive at a point on the coast where it would finally slide off the North American landmass and eventually brighten the still-inky emptiness of the Pacific Ocean.
To the east of the line, all would have been bright and daylight. To the west, an impenetrable dark. And on the line itself, an uncertain penumbra of a few hundred miles of a swath of half dark and half light. On earth this penumbral vagueness would have translated itself into the morning twilights that early risers were experiencing just then in cities and on farms and in small villages all the way from Vancouver Island in the north down to Baja California in the south, where the day designated as April 18 was about to begin.
It is fanciful to suppose that anyone watching so far away, in distance or in time, would have had access to a telescope that was large enough to do the job. But, assuming that such a device did exist, and that the person at this lunar viewing point had its brass and glassware trained precisely on the northern coast of California at that very particular moment, with the terminator line brightening his view inch by inch—what, precisely, would he have seen?
The answer is inevitably dismaying to all of those who like to think that the earth and its inhabitants and the events that occur upon it have any importance at all, in a cosmic sense. For from that distance he would have seen, essentially, nothing.
Yet at a few minutes past five in the morning of that day something did, indeed, happen.
The planet very briefly shrugged.
It flexed itself for a few seconds, perhaps a little short of a minute. If our observer had been acutely aware of his geography, and if he had been fortunate enough to have been staring at a very precisely defined spot in the north of California at exactly the right moment, then he would have seen what appeared to be a tiny ripple spurt in toward the coast from the sea. He would, moreover, have seen that spreading ripple as it moved slowly and steadily inshore, and then watched as it moved, fanlike and subtle, up and down the coastline as a tiny shudder. It would have seemed to him a momentary loss of focus, something that would have made his vision suddenly blur very slightly, and then just as quickly clear again.
If he had blinked, he would have missed it. Having noticed it, however, he would probably have assumed it was more of a problem with his lens and his telescope than with the surface of the planet below. And even if he had realized that the ripple and the shudder had in fact occurred on the green and blue and white planet that floated serene in the lunar sky, he would have been quick to conclude that whatever it was had been momentary, trivial, and utterly forgettable. No more, for the earth entire, than a gentle and momentary heave of the shoulders.
It was all so very different down on the surface of the planet itself. On earth, in the western part of that great entity called by most English-speakers North America and particularly in and around the fragile and rather delicately constructed young northern city of San Francisco, a number of people grasped all too quickly that something of immense significance was happening. And if they were sensible and observant they took care to note and remember exactly when it all began, and we have their memories set down for us still.
In the city it was a little after five by the local clocks and still not yet light (though some speak of a rosy glow just discernible behind the hill named Mount Diablo, to the east). The air was cold and moist in the way that spring mornings often are in Northern California. But there is a robust heartiness about those who choose to live in this corner of America, and, in spite of the chill and the gloom of this particular morning, a man of middle years, described in the directories simply as a laborer, was already in the sea taking his morning constitutional: This involved swimming through the rough-breaking waters of the Pacific, a few yards off the shore at Ocean Beach.
At the same moment, five city miles away, a young reporter was walking home with two friends, having completed the routine tasks of what newspapermen were in those days starting to call the graveyard shift. He had stopped on Larkin Street near City Hall to smoke a cigarette and exchange pleasantries with a pair of patrolling policemen, and so further secure these necessary professional connections.
A professor of geology—an immensely eminent man of sixty-three who had been honored around the world for painstakingly exploring and mapping the Rocky Mountains, the Grand Canyon, Death Valley, and a score of other remote and dramatic wildernesses besides—was lying asleep in a room at the Faculty Club at the University of California.
The head of the City Weather Bureau, a future professor at Harvard College, an expert on frost, and at the time an enthusiastic advocate for naming the study of weather aerography, was also asleep, in his house at 3016½ Clay Street. But, as was his custom, he slept lightly, and kept a flashlight, a watch, an already-date-stamped notebook, and a pencil on the table beside his pillow so that he might be ready for whatever mayhem—aerographic or meteorological or otherwise naturally made—the night might throw at him.
And an elderly English astronomer, the founder of the first real observatory in California, a man of great energy and yet one whose career had precipitated no little controversy and disappointment and who had just retired at the age of eighty-one from the post of professor of geography at the University of California, was lying half awake in his house at 2221 Washington Street, on that fashionable square in Pacific Heights known as Lafayette Park.
AT THE PRECISE MOMENT when the members of this quintet—three of them very distinguished men of science and two others of relatively modest social standing—were undertaking their very mundane activities of swimming or walking or chatting or sleeping or drowsing, with most of them unknown to one another and each certainly unaware of the others' exact circumstances at that second, it was twelve minutes after five o'clock in the morning.
However, this was a matter of provable fact only for the Englishman, so far as the record relates. His name was George Davidson, and he, like his fellow scientists, wrote about the event that was to follow with a certain icy detachment. He took care to mark the time that he first noticed something happening: Suddenly and without warning his room, his house, and the very land all was standing upon began to shake, with a great, ever-increasing, and uncontrollable violence.
It was, he knew full well, an earthquake.
from north to south, and the only description I am able to give of its effect is that it seemed like a terrier shaking a rat. I was in bed, but was awakened by the first shock. I began to count the seconds as I went towards the table where my watch was, being able through much practice closely to approximate the time in that manner. The shock came at 5.12 o'clock. The first sixty seconds were the most severe. From that time on it decreased gradually for about thirty seconds. There was then the slightest perceptible lull. Then the shock continued for sixty seconds longer, being slighter in degree in this minute than in any part of the preceding minute and a half. There were two slight shocks afterwards which I did not time.
Professor Davidson must have been as terrified as anyone, but he was a man trained to observe, and he knew in an instant what was taking place. So he took painstaking care to note that his watch, as he later reported, stood at 5h 12m oos. Only he then added the caveat, for safety's sake—and with the sense of caution that was hardwired into his astronomer's mind—that this observation was subject to an error of plus or minus two seconds. This reflected, one imagines, any error that he might have made when calculating how long he had spent staggering, his nightshirt awry and his mind still marginally befuddled by sleep, from his bed to the bureau where his watch was ticking and readying itself to slide, along with the pitcher and the shaving mug, onto the redwood floor.
The first full series of hard shocks, say his notes, lasted until 5h 13m 00s. The shocks were slightly less from that point until 5h 13m 30s, then there was a slight lull, and by 5h 14m 30s all was quiet again. The entire event—which was to destroy an American city and leave an indelible imprint on the mind of the entire nation—had lasted for just over two and a half minutes. That, at least, was the considered view of a man so esteemed that three mountains, a glacier, a seamount, an inlet, a bank, and a San Francisco avenue were later named after him. The official report on the earthquake said, in a tone that brooked no dispute, We shall accept Professor Davidson's time as the most accurate obtainable for San Francisco.
JUST ONE BLOCK SOUTH and eight-tenths of a mile to the west slept the weatherman whose name, still celebrated in meteorological circles (though he had only one mountain named after him), was Alexander George McAdie. A New Yorker, he became a soldier in the Signal Corps after college and made a name for himself by promoting the use of kites rather than balloons for the study of the upper atmosphere (in which signalers were officially interested, since radio waves were affected by what went on there). He became an academic and then joined the government. In 1895, together with his young wife, Mary, he moved out to San Francisco to head the Weather Bureau and to direct the state's Climate and Crop Service, the latter post carrying with it the title of professor. One of his tasks at the bureau was to record, as accurately as possible, any and all seismic events that happened in and around San Francisco.
Professor McAdie was an ambitious and a punctilious man, and at the very moment that he was awakened on that dark and chilly April morning, both his ambition and his scrupulous regard for factual observation—as critical in the world of weather as in the study of the stars—came promptly to the fore. As had been his custom ever since he went through the Great Charleston Earthquake of 1886 ( for twenty years I have timed every earthquake I have felt, he was later to write), the instant he awoke and felt movement he clicked on his flashlight, noted the time on his fob watch, and recorded in his notebook everything that transpired.
I have lookt up the record in my note-book made on April 18, 1906, while the earthquake was still perceptible. I find the entry 5h 12m and after that Severe lasted nearly 40 seconds. As I now remember it the portion severe, etc was entered immediately after the shaking.
my error was I minute slow at noon by time-ball, or time signals received in Weather Bureau and which my watch has been compared for a number of years. The rate of my watch is 5 seconds loss per day; therefore the corrected time of my entry is 5h 13m 05s AM. This is not of course the beginning of the quake. I would say perhaps 6 or more seconds may have elapsed between the act of waking, realizing, and looking at the watch and making my entry. I remember distinctly getting the minute-hand's position, previous to the most violent portion of the shock. The end of the shock I did not get exactly, as I was watching the second-hand, and the end came several seconds before I fully took in that the motion had ceased. The second-hand was somewhere between 40 and 50 when I realized this. I lost the position of the second-hand because of difficulty in keeping my feet, somewhere around the 20-second mark.
However, there is one uncertainty. I may have read my watch wrong. I have no reason to think I did; but I know from experiment such things are possible. I have the original entries untouched since the time they were made.
The official report accepts that the unfortunate man did effect an error in making what was probably the most critical observation of his career—but, out of courtesy, adds that such a mistake would have been very easy to make. The one-minute error is, then, officially compensated for, and Alexander McAdie enters the lists as having, essentially, timed the Great San Francisco Earthquake as beginning at 5h 12m 05s, recorded that it became extremely severe at 5h 12m 25s, and noted that it tailed off into bearable oblivion at 5h 12m 50s. The whole event, in McAdie's eyes, extended over little more than forty seconds—about half the time that Davidson had computed, from his observations that were made a little bit closer to town.
It is the natural and legitimate ambition of a properly constituted geologist to see a glacier, witness an eruption and feel an earthquake. The glacier is always ready, awaiting his visit; the eruption has a course to run, and alacrity is always needed to catch its more important phases; but the earthquake, unheralded and brief, may elude him through his entire lifetime. It has been my fortune to experience only a single weak tremor, and I had, moreover, been tantalized by narrowly missing the great Inyo earthquake of 1872 and the Alaska earthquake of 1899. When, therefore, I was awakened in Berkeley on the eighteenth of April last by a tumult of motions and noises, it was with unalloyed pleasure that I became aware that a vigorous earthquake was in progress.
The net result of Gilbert's enthusiasm was probably much to his liking. Within hours he was co-opted into all of the inevitable investigations and seismic postmortems; his name appears on every masthead of every official publication about the event for the next decade. Such fame as he had already enjoyed—from his writings on topics as diverse as the erosion of Niagara Falls, the recognizable features of the moon's face, the Bonneville Salt Flats, and the philosophy of scientific hypothesis—was magnified a hundredfold by his authoritative account of the San Francisco events; and his reputation was in no way besmirched when he began to speculate (as legions of others have since, often unwisely) on how earthquakes might successfully be predicted.
The hand of an avenging God fell upon San Francisco. The ground rose and fell like an ocean at ebb tide. Then came the crash … I saw those policemen enveloped by a shower of falling stone.
It is impossible to judge the length of that shock. To me it seemed like an eternity. I was thrown prone on my back and the pavement pulsated like a living thing. Around me the huge buildings, looking more terrible because of the queer dance they were performing, wobbled and veered. Crash followed crash and resounded on all sides. Screeches rent the air as terrified humanity streamed out into the open in agony of despair.
Affrighted horses dashed headlong into ruins as they raced away in their abject fear. Then there was a lull. The most terrible was yet to come.
The first portion of the shock was just a mild forerunning of what was to follow. The pause in the action of the earth's surface couldn't have been more than a fraction of a second. It was sufficient, however, to allow me to collect myself. In the center of two streets I rose to my feet. Then came the second and more terrific crash….


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HomeWeekly Climate and Energy News Roundup # 372
Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup # 372
August 28, 2019 usissuescom CAGW Alarmism, Energy Policy, RegulationCAGW, Censorship, Climate Change, Climate Models, Data, EPA, GISS, IPCC, NOA
The Week That Was August 17, 2019, By Ken Haapala, President SEPP
Brought to You by www.SEPP.org The Science and Environmental Policy Project
Quote of the Week: "There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn't true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true."—Soren Kierkegaard [H/t William Readdy]
Number of the Week: 22 Years
Censorship: Solar physicist Nir Shaviv reluctantly granted science journalist Doron Levin an interview, although Shaviv was skeptical that it would be published. A similar interview to a reporter for Bloomberg was reject by its editorial board. Leven assured Shaviv that Forbes would publish the interview online. It did – for a few hours. The interview was an immediate hit. Then, Forbes yanked the report with the statement:
"After review, this post has been removed for failing to meet our editorial standards.
"We are providing our readers the headline, author and first paragraphs in the interest of transparency.
"We regret any inconvenience."
Shaviv strongly supports the Svensmark hypothesis and has co-authored papers with Svensmark. The key issue is that Shaviv considers that the increase in solar irradiation in the 20th century contributed one-half to two-thirds of estimated 20th century warming. These estimates are in direct contrast to the orthodox view expressed by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and its supporters who claim that the role of the sun in climate change is minor, miniscule, compared to carbon dioxide (CO2). To his credit, the journalist involved wrote up the incident and the offending passages, which were posted on the Global Warming Policy Forum.
In demonstrating its support of the climate orthodoxy, "Forbes" substituted an article by Marshall Shepherd, past president of the American Meteorological Society (AMS). The opening paragraph states:
As a climate scientist, I hear my share of myths about what is causing climate change or why it is a 'hoax.' I call them 'zombie theories' because they just will not die. They persist in blogs, certain networks, and social media like zombies long after scientists have killed them off. I debunked 20 of them in a previous article in Forbes. The 'sun and its variability' is one that makes the rounds. I am pretty sure I've had to spray 'climate science repellent' on that nagging 'mosquito' numerous times. This week I heard of a variation of this myth involving cosmic rays. Here is a science-based debunking of the solar-cosmic ray myth.
Shaviv does not take the bait and go into a name calling contest. Instead he presents hard observational evidence supporting his views and contradicting Shepherd's views and those of the IPCC. One of the strongest pieces of evidence is a graph of over eighty years, from about 1915 to 2005 showing the relationship between Sea Level Change Rate (mm/year) and changes in the Reconstructed Solar Constant (watts per square meter).). The sea level change rate is from stable tidal gages. As the oceans heat, they expand; as they cool, they contract. The relationship of the changes is quite dramatic.
Shaviv presents a graph showing the relationship between sea levels based on satellite altimetry (minus the linear trend) and a model which includes the solar cycle plus the El Niño Southern Oscillation. Again, the relationship is very strong. [Note: those attempting to establish that sea level rise is increasing would do well to examine these relationships, but it is doubtful that they will. Also, since sea level change cannot cause significant changes in the solar constant, this analysis does not fall into the trap Al Gore did with ice cores showing CO2 and temperatures, where he confused the timing of the changes.]
Shaviv then modifies a standard IPCC graph to show what his evidence indicates is the real solar contribution over the 20th century and the total forcing, natural and anthropogenic. He effectively dismisses the arguments that the solar effects should be instantaneous by stating that the hottest time of the day is usually after high noon, and the hottest month of the season is usually after the summer solstice.
A big issue with the IPCC and its followers dismissing the solar influence is the heat capacity of the oceans. As Shaviv states:
… "As a Professor of meteorology, Prof. Shepherd should know about the heat capacity of the oceans such that assuming that the global temperature is something times the CO2 forcing plus something else times the solar forcing is too much of a simplification.
"Instead, one can and should simulate the 20th century, and beyond, and see that when taking the sun into account, it explains about 1/2 to 2/3s of the 20th century warming, and that the best climate sensitivity is around 1 to 1.5°C per CO2 doubling (compared with the 1.5 to 4.5°C of the IPCC). Two points to note here. First, although the best estimate of the solar radiative forcing is a bit less than the combined anthropogenic forcing, because it is spread more evenly over the 20th century, its contribution is larger than the anthropogenic contribution the bulk of which took place more recently. That's why the best fit gives that the solar contribution is 1/2 to 2/3s of the warming. Second, the reason that the best fit requires a smaller climate sensitivity is because the total net radiative forcing is about twice larger. This implies that a smaller sensitivity is required to fit the same observed temperature increase."
Shaviv then gives the results of a model by Ziskin and Shaviv and compares it with the global climate models used by the IPCC. He compares the IPCC version 5 models with satellite data by both UAH and RSS and reanalysis data. He demonstrates that the Ziskin and Shaviv model more closely matches atmospheric data than others, except for the one from the Institute of Numerical Mathematics in Moscow. Shaviv concludes:
"Namely, our predictions are totally consistent with the satellite (RSS / UAH, whichever you prefer) and the Reanalyses datasets. Remember, this was obtained for a model which included the real solar contribution which requires a small climate sensitivity.
"Shepherd also mentions that the link through cosmic ray flux variations has been debunked. I point the reader to a summary of why those attacks don't hold any water, which I wrote yesterday.
"To summarize, Shepherd did not debunk the solar forcing. His arguments are defunct. Unless he comes up with a very good explanation to the first graph above, he should instead advocate taking solar forcing into account. The fact that Forbes hushes up any possibility for having a scientific debate should be considered truly bothersome by anyone who values free speech and scientific debate. Truth will prevail irrespectively."
Shaviv gives a list of publications in respected journals that are generally ignored by the IPCC and its followers, especially by the US Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) in its Fourth National Assessment. It is clear that the IPCC and the USGCRP are political, not scientific. They do not adhere to the scientific method.
Out of the sordid action of censorship, those skeptical of the claim that CO2 is the primary cause of global warming have an excellent summary of the solar influences on climate to refer to, to the extent they are understood today. See links under Science: Is the Sun Rising? and Censorship.
Nature's Authority: "Nature, Communications" published "Discrepancy in scientific authority and media visibility of climate change scientists and contrarians." In the title one can recognize a distinct disconnect. In science, there are no authorities; there are only experts, and they do not always agree. However, there is a recognized procedure, the rigorous application of the scientific method, which is an ongoing process. Since CO2-caused global warming skeptics, contrarians, don't recognize an authority, particularly the IPCC and its followers; there is no reason for them to adhere to their prescriptions other than for personal gain.
The foolishness of the article is well discussed by Judith Curry, Christopher Monckton, and others. It is amusing to note that a list ranked various individuals, the top 25 names include Fred Singer and the late Bob Carter; Singer was founder of SEPP and the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), and Carter was an editor of NIPCC reports. Also, though the late Frederick Seitz is ranked lower down, four of the six recipients of the Fredrick Seitz Memorial Award are in the top 25: Roy Spencer, Richard Lindzen, John Christy, and Willie Soon.
The award is given annually to a person "For exceptional courage in the quest for knowledge." It was created to recognize the unsung heroes who rigorously apply the scientific method. It rewards scholars for having the courage to "swim against the tide" of conventional thinking despite the financial and professional disincentives. See links under Challenging the Orthodoxy and Communicating Better to the Public – Go Personal.
Teen Brain Needed? Time Magazine had a foolish article on "Why Your Brain Can't Process Climate Change." The thrust is that during a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) examination, certain parts of the brain respond to different stimuli. For teenagers, the prefrontal cortex, the big part of the brain that separates humans from other mammals is not well used, while the part of the brain that responds personal needs is. The author uses this and asserts:
"How we choose to value future generations will help decide what we should do now about existential risks. This is especially true for climate change, which demands action in the present to avert devastation that will largely be felt in the future, perhaps after many of us now alive are dead."
Thus, the argument is that mature adults need to listen to teenagers when it comes to climate change or any other long-term threats.
Rather than consulting futurists and others who believe in "climate collapse" without hard evidence, the author would have done well by consulting Health Encyclopedia of the University of Rochester Medical Center on the teen brain. It reads:
"Understanding the Teen Brain
"It doesn't matter how smart teens are or how well they scored on the SAT or ACT. Good judgment isn't something they can excel in, at least not yet.
"The rational part of a teen's brain isn't fully developed and won't be until age 25 or so.
"In fact, recent research has found that adult and teen brains work differently. Adults think with the prefrontal cortex, the brain's rational part. This is the part of the brain that responds to situations with good judgment and an awareness of long-term consequences. Teens process information with the amygdala. This is the emotional part.
"In teen's brains, the connections between the emotional part of the brain and the decision-making center are still developing—and not always at the same rate. That's why when teens have overwhelming emotional input, they can't explain later what they were thinking. They weren't thinking as much as they were feeling." [Boldface and underline added.]
It is not becoming emotionally alarmed that is important. But understanding the cause of the alarm, and what to rationally do about the cause of the alarm, that are important. See links under Communicating Better to the Public – Go Personal, and Other News that May Be of Interest.
Propaganda Props: Advertising has long used children to promote the message. It can be seen on television every day with varying degrees of success. It has long been used in politics. Lyndon Johnson's Presidential Campaign used a young child playing in the foreground with a nuclear bomb exploding in the background to paint his opponent, Barry Goldwater, as a war monger. Many supporters found the ad deplorable.
The same may apply for CO2 alarmists using children as props to support their arguments, be it species extinction, litigation efforts, or symbolic sailing. The arguments are failing, because the evidence is weak. See links under Communicating Better to the Public – Use Children for Propaganda.
July 2019 – Hottest Since 1880: Newspaper headlines have blared that NOAA declared that July 2019 "was the hottest month measured on Earth since records began in 1880." "Last month's temperatures narrowly topped the previous July record, set in 2016, by 0.03 C (0.05 F)." The precision of one-hundreds of a degree is highly questionable, and not really possible before satellites – yet NOAA ignores satellite temperature records. Also interesting is where the instruments located in 1880? In Greenland?
Little was known about the interior of Greenland until the 1880s. The great Swedish explorer of the Arctic, Nordenskiold, thought the center of Greenland was a huge ice-free valley. In 1883 he tried to discover it, but failed, and only got about 73 miles in from the coast on the West. His scouts went farther but found no valley and reported the ice continued to rise to the east.
In 1888, the great Norwegian explorer, later statesman, Fridtjof Nansen and his party climbed the high mountains on the East and skied across Southern Greenland. They reached an estimated altitude of 2,700 meters (8,900 ft) above sea level and found no valley. TWTW is seeking any evidence of NOAA weather stations in the interior of Greenland in 1880, supporting the claim in the newspaper headlines. See links under Measurement Issues – Surface.
Homogenization: One of the highly questionable practices undertaken by NOAA and NASA-GISS, the practice called Homogenization. Paul Homewood posted an excellent video by Tony Heller demonstrating how this practice can greatly distort surface temperature records, making the claims of records dating back to 1880 even more questionable. See links under Challenging the Orthodoxy.
The Greenhouse Effect – Solar: As stated above, Nir Shaviv estimates that once the influence of changing solar intensity is accounted for, his estimate of a temperature increase due to a doubling of CO2 is 1 to 1.5°C (2 to 3°F) as compared with the 1.5 to 4.5°C of the IPCC (3 to 8°F). The difference is enormous when considering the purported dangers of increasing CO2.
Shaviv's estimate is very close to the estimates of John Christy and his colleagues and William van Wijngaarden and his colleagues. Each group uses a different approach using different datasets. We can expect even more strident objections and claims from the IPCC and its followers as their exaggeration is being exposed by the use of the scientific method.
Of course, we can expect even more extravagant exaggerations from those who are profiting from damaging policies undertaken by misguided politicians. See links under Questioning Green and Energy Issues.
SEPP'S APRIL FOOLS AWARD
THE JACKSON
The voting is closed and the winner who most closely meets the qualification is being selected. No missing shards here, one hopes.
Number of the Week: 22 Years: Shaviv asserts the solar cycle is really about 22 years, not the 11 years as generally used. The sun changes polarity after every cycle, and this changes its influence on cosmic rays, thus changing cloudiness. He states:
"Cloud cover varies over the 11-year solar cycle (e.g., reference 9 below). This by itself is not proof that the link is through cosmic rays, since there are several things that change with the solar cycle. However, one particularly interesting aspect is that the cloud cover variation are asymmetrical between odd and even cycles, just as cosmic rays are, and unlike other solar related variables that are blind to the fact that the real cycle is 22 years (Polarity returns back to the same state after two switches, hence, 22 years…"
1. A Kamikaze Climate Suit
Democratic states suing the EPA could hurt their own emissions cause.
Editorial, WSJ, Aug 16, 2019
https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-kamikaze-climate-suit-11565996020?mod=hp_opin_pos_1
SUMMARY by TWTW: The editorial opens by stating a key lawsuit may backfire. It explains:
"Twenty-two Democratic state Attorneys General and seven cities this week asked the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals to vacate the Trump EPA's CO2 emission rules for coal plants. The Clean Air Act directs the EPA to implement the "best system of emission reduction" for pollutants, which the agency has traditionally applied to individual power plants.
"The Obama EPA went further and required states to re-engineer their electric grids by replacing all coal and eventually natural gas with wind and solar. The Supreme Court in 2016 stopped the Obama power grab from being implemented as it likely exceeded the EPA's legal authority and unconstitutionally commandeered the states.
"The result is that federal CO2 emission standards for power plants have been nonexistent. Last month the Trump EPA issued new regulations requiring states to implement the "best system of emission reduction" by making on-site efficiency improvements at coal plants. The rule gives states flexibility and won't force them to prematurely close plants.
"Yet Democratic states complain in announcing their lawsuit that the "EPA's rule rolls-back [the Obama] limits and will have virtually no impact on these emissions prolonging the nation's reliance on polluting, expensive coal power plants and obstructing progress of states toward clean, renewable, and affordable electricity generation." This is false in every respect.
The Trump rule will cover 600 coal-fired plants and cut emissions to 34% below 2005 levels—similar to what the Obama Clean Power Plan purported to achieve. As the Trump rule notes, 'updated analysis shows the [Clean Power Plan] would have no effect on future CO2 emissions' due to 'current market trends.'
"Coal plants have struggled to compete with cheap natural gas and heavily subsidized renewables. As much coal power will be phased out during President Trump's first three years in office as during Barack Obama 's last three. Dozens of coal plants are slated to retire over the next few years regardless of government diktats.
"Yet some utilities and coal plant owners are currently investing in emission-control technologies to become more efficient and competitive. By giving coal a death sentence, the Obama rule would have halted these investments and coal emission reductions in the short term.
"Also note that energy-related CO2 emissions declined by 14% in the U.S. from 2005 to 2017 while increasing 21% globally. Most of the U.S. reduction was due to natural gas replacing coal. Carbon dioxide emissions fell five times more in Ohio and four times more in Pennsylvania between 2006 and 2016 than in California, which had long banished coal.
"Vacating the Trump rule wouldn't reinstate the defunct Obama Clean Power Plan, but would instead produce a regulatory vacuum. Democrats may not have standing to sue since they won't suffer a concrete harm from the Trump rule, and they remain free to impose climate mandates within their borders.
"Perhaps they hope the D.C. Circuit will enjoin the Trump rule and force EPA to issue more aggressive standards under the Supreme Court's Massachusetts v. EPA (2007) ruling, which required the agency to regulate CO2 as a pollutant. But the Court's four conservatives who dissented said states lacked standing to sue and courts could not impel EPA to regulate CO2.
"In his dissent, Chief Justice John Roberts noted that 'the very concept of global warming seems inconsistent with this particularization requirement' of standing since 'global warming is a phenomenon 'harmful to humanity at large,' and the redress petitioners seek is focused no more on them than on the public generally—it is literally to change the atmosphere around the world.'
"Even some liberals warn that suing the Trump Administration could invite the Court's new conservative majority to revisit Massachusetts v. EPA. Democratic states may be betting that President Trump won't be around by the time the Court could consider his EPA's new rule. But don't be so sure if Democrats continue their anti-fossil fuel crusade."
2. 'Fraud in the Lab' Review: Experiments in Doubt
Lapses of rigor, misleading methods, outright falsification: How common are the transgressions of research scientists?
By Sally Satel, WSJ, Aug 14, 2019
https://www.wsj.com/articles/fraud-in-the-lab-review-experiments-in-doubt-11565823628
SUMMARY by TWTW: The psychiatrist and a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute opens her review the book by stating
"Scientific misconduct is surely as old as scientific inquiry, but in the modern era the mainstream media took little notice of it before 1974. In that year, it flagged the case of a medical researcher at Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York who used a felt-tip pen to darken patches of purportedly black skin transplanted onto white mice. Within a couple of years, separately, the British psychologist Cyril Burt was posthumously found to have invented data to support his theory that IQ was largely inherited.
"Rocked by these and other revelations, the scientific community began devising mechanisms to detect dishonest scientists and hold them accountable. Almost half a century later, there are still problems, according to Nicolas Chevassus-au-Louis, a French investigative journalist and a former biomedical researcher. In 'Fraud in the Lab,' a compact book that is part exposé and part manifesto, he sets out to quantify what he calls an 'epidemic' of fraud that is international in scope, to describe its effects and to chart a path forward.
"Mr. Chevassus-au-Louis says that the most common fraud offenses fit into a category he cheekily labels 'storytelling and beautification.' They include a failure to report conflicting data and the use of misleading analytical methods. ('Beautification' can be almost literal at times: In 2012, a whistleblower in Japan revealed how 'image retouching,' in more than one scientific journal, had exaggerated the results in cell-biology studies.) Other maneuvers include redefining the hypothesis that guides an experiment after the results are in, a move that, retroactively, renders the experiment's design less appropriate to what is being investigated and the results weaker than researchers may claim.
"How common are such transgressions? Most strikingly, Mr. Chevassus-au-Louis cites a 2009 review of 21 surveys asking scientists about their research conduct. A third of the respondents world-wide admitted to having committed 'questionable research practices' that fell somewhere between lapses of rigor and outright fraud. These integrity breaches are the broken windows of research: When 'passively accepted in research circles,' the author states, 'they open the door to more serious misconduct.'
By 'serious misconduct' Mr. Chevassus-au-Louis means fabrication, falsification and plagiarism. Any one of these sins can result in the retraction, or public invalidation, of a published paper. Having a paper 'pulled' for fraud, as opposed to honest error, is the ultimate scarlet letter for a researcher and a professional tragedy for his unwitting collaborators.
"The proportion of retracted articles, Mr. Chevassus-au-Louis says, jumped 11-fold between 2001 and 2010. Although less than 1% of all scientific papers were retracted in that time, he believes that the percentage should be higher. He points to that 2009 survey-review, in which 2% of the scientist-respondents admitted that they have fabricated or falsified results at least once; 14% said that they knew of colleagues who had done so.
"The research universe has been further plagued, Mr. Chevassus-au-Louis notes, by the problem of reproducibility—a matter of special attention in the social sciences. The source of the trouble in many cases is a failure by the original authors to describe research methods in sufficient detail. To its credit, a concerned group of researchers led by a professor at the University of Virginia, in 2011, was able to persuade roughly 270 colleagues to repeat 100 published psychological studies to see if they could get the same experiment-results a second time around. Less than 40% of the studies that originally reported statistically significant results did so in the attempted replications.
"The 'hard' sciences are not immune from this problem. In 2011, Bayer, the German pharmaceutical company, found that it could fully replicate only 21% of the studies that had inspired it to launch its own research; soon after, Amgen, the biotech company, found that it could replicate only 11%. Some biotech start-ups are so wary of initial discoveries that do not hold up that they demand 'reproducibility certificates' (supplied by independent labs) before investing in projects."
The article continues to discuss that scientific literature is deeply tainted and the efforts to improve it include implementing what the book author calls "the ethos of transparency."
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Home Supply Management News & Reports News & Publications Inside Supply Management Magazine Blog 2021 2021-01 Defense Mechanisms to Consider After December Cyberattack
Defense Mechanisms to Consider After December Cyberattack
By Stel Valavanis
The cyberattack against multiple federal agencies, including those responsible for the country's nuclear stockpile, and such prominent cybersecurity firms as Microsoft and FireEye, has caused concern for companies and customers alike since it was reported in December.
Internal networks had been accessed undetected since March, and attackers accessed documents, stole penetration-testing tools, and found their way into other systems. They initially inserted a maliciously modified version of SolarWinds Orion, a tool used by many private and public organizations to monitor large networks, into the SolarWinds update server as early as March.
When the investigation began, it was apparent that this trojanized update, called Sunburst, had spread widely, although it is still unclear whether the back door the hackers created for the attack allowed further intrusions and infection. It is known, however, that up to 18,000 customers of SolarWinds have been affected by the malware — and more will certainly discovered in coming weeks.
The hack — considered the most significant cyberattack in history — is causing customers, clients and others in the ecosystem to question whether there are lasting effects. Likewise, businesses and cybersecurity professionals wonder about lessons learned: Should they be changing operational measures and strategies? What changes should be made?
Among the recommendations and dynamics to consider:
Take care with the software. If your organization uses SolarWinds software, shut it down and don't turn it back on until the software company publishes a third-party code audit that makes it clear vulnerability gaps are fixed. Also, adopt the rules released to detect for SolarWinds' vulnerability and use the signatures provided by FireEye to detect Sunburst and the FireEye tools stolen in the attack.
Hacks may go undetected and cause compounded issues. The nature of the attack — that of writing a backdoor into the software and the unusually long dwell time — means that (1) it's impossible at this point to clear anyone of risk and (2) the possibility of other secondary "infections" must be considered until dispelled.
Because of the hack's long dwell time, lateral network movement is almost assured, prompting a lesson in protection versus detection: When protection and prevention fail, you might not know about it or be able to do anything until it is too late. In the case of this hack, the attackers had months inside networks, allowing lateral movement, secondary infection and other malicious activity that could require deep forensic investigation to uncover and repair. Many affected organizations are still trying to make up for lost time in their efforts to mitigate and prevent similar attacks.
Turning to managed detection and response (MDR) services can help. MDR services reduce dwell time and provide valuable forensic data that serves as a focal point for mitigation efforts and future plans.
Don't forget the software supply chain. Reliance on third-party software suppliers is increasing. There has been some discussion about hardware supplied by Chinese companies, but the SolarWinds attack shows that attackers don't need to own pieces of the supply chain to infect it.
Scrutiny — meaning code review in the case of software — must be applied where possible. Using open-source options makes review easier because a wide array of parties can collaborate on the review. APIs need to be published and open. While the U.S. government can contract from suppliers, it requires all components and licenses to meet required certifications.
Consider: As reported in a 2003 Computerworld article, Microsoft shared source code with the Chinese government as part its newly developed government security program designed to lessen concerns about the security of its software. This year, it was revealed that a Swiss company supplying secure communications to many governments included a back door for to the CIA, demonstrating a need for some sort of cyber arms treaty.
Greater collaboration with the detection process is needed. SolarWinds had been instructing clients to exclude certain Orion binaries from anti-malware scanning because false positives were produced. This could be at least one reason the attackers chose those binaries. There are reasons for exclusions — but often they are a way to avoid the harder task of collaborating with anti-malware and detection providers to supply appropriate signatures for proper scanning. Microsoft, one of the victims, quickly revoked the digital certificate for the malicious binaries. However, more care must be put into the signing and verification process as well.
Check email systems. While there is uncertainty around this hack, particularly related to the extent of the attack on organizations, some signature parts of the attack can be searched for, like email systems, which were frequent targets. Also, instances of create, execute and delete commands can be evidence of the malware covering its own footsteps. These novel stealth tactics, designed to avoid detection and increase dwell time as much as possible, mean that forensic investigators have their work cut out for them and are now put into the position of proving a negative.
In the future, supply chain attacks will be part of any organization's threat modeling and policies will be put in place to detect and even prevent similar attacks.
If anything, however, the SolarWinds incident highlights (1) the importance of detection in the cybersecurity stack, (2) the need for greater scrutiny in the code or signing of software, (3) the use of open source and open APIs where possible and (4) the need to begin serious work on cyber diplomacy.
Stel Valavanis
Stel Valavanis is CEO and founder of onShore Security, a managed cybersecurity provider in Chicago.