We Are F%$#ed

The numbers are in, and 2025 and 2026 were catastrophic years in terms of arctic sea ice.

Things are going from bad to worse in terms of climate change.

A previously recorded slowdown in Arctic sea ice decline has ended, according to a new study, with the largest year-to-year wintertime reduction ever recorded.

In a study published last summer, researchers found that melting sea ice in the Arctic had slowed down over the past 20 years, with no statistically significant decline in its extent recorded between 2005 and 2024.

Given the increase in global temperatures during this period, the finding was surprising.

However, the researchers said natural variations in ocean currents that limit ice melting probably balanced the rise in global temperatures. They said this was only a temporary reprieve and melting was highly likely to start again at about double the long-term rate at some point in the next five to 10 years.

Just two years later, the new study has found the slowdown in sea ice decline is now over.

………

Sea ice area in September, when it reaches its annual minimum, has halved since 1979, when satellite measurements began.

The researchers found that between 2024 and 2025 Arctic sea ice declined by 5.8%. This is the largest year-to-year wintertime drop ever recorded.

Dr Alessandro Silvano, co-author of the paper at the University of Southampton, said this sharp drop in 2025 was unusual, but physically plausible under current Arctic warming.

Because the winter sea ice acts as an insulator between the relatively warm Arctic ocean and the much colder atmosphere, a reduction in ice will mean more ocean heat and moisture will enter the atmosphere.

To quote the character Andrei Bonovia from the movie The Hunt for Red October, "You arrogant ass. You've killed us!"

I Am Not Sure That This Qualifies as News

So some researchers have determined that sometimes one cat will groom another bust to annoy that cat.

Given that cat grooming is a dominance play, and given the behavior of our cats relative to each other, Destructo will groom Meatball* when he wants her to go away, this has been common knowledge for about 3,000 years.

How about studying something really important, like why cats will suddenly stare intently at nothing for 15 minutes.

Seriously, what the f%$# are they seeing? 

Let’s just say cats have a reputation — of being standoffish, manipulative, maybe even jerks. Here’s more corroborating evidence: Scientists are beginning to think that even seemingly innocent cat behavior — grooming another cat — might not always be nice.

The licking can be a method of subtle torment, according to new research published in the journal Applied Animal Behavior Science.

Mutual grooming, called allogrooming, is widespread in the animal kingdom and found in primates, birds, horses and even insects. The grooming is typically focused on parts of the body that are difficult for an animal to reach on its own, like its back and neck, making the behavior an act of kindness that supports social bonding and wins friends.

Like primates that pick lice from each other’s backs, cats that lick each other have also been considered an indicator of social bonding. “So far, mutual grooming in cats has been categorized as affiliative, or ‘friendly,’ cat behavior,” said Noema Gajdos Kmecova, a cat behavioral scientist at Ghent University and an author of the new study.

Or so we thought.

Morgane Van Belle, another cat behavioral scientist at Ghent University and the study’s lead author, was observing her own cats, Fabio and Giovanni, interacting over a favorite napping spot in the sun and noticed something.

“I saw these weird grooming patterns in my own cats where I thought, This is not super friendly at all,” she said. “Sometimes one cat would lay on the blanket near the window and the other cat would come up and start licking it — but in an annoying way.” The interaction would induce the licked cat to get up and forfeit the sunny spot, she said.

To check whether this behavior was more widespread, Ms. Van Belle and her colleagues looked at 53 households across Europe with two or more cats. After telling the pet owners what to look for, the researchers had them submit videos of their cats’ interactions. The scientists then randomly selected a submission from each participant and used statistical analyses to tease apart the hidden nuance in cat-licking behavior. 

I will note that I am a bit jealous.  The idea of making a career out of observing cats sounds like paradise to me.

^*The names are not my fault. I firmly believe that one does not name a cat, one discovers a cat's name.

It's TACO Friday

Following push-back from the climate community and Congress, the Trump has backpedaled on its plan to remove Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) sensors.

This would have left the United States blind to climate change events.

Thankfully, Trump Always Chickens Out (TACO). 

The Donald Trump administration has reversed its decision to dismantle a $368m deep-sea observation system following an outcry from lawmakers and ocean experts.

On Thursday, the National Science Foundation announced that it would halt plans to dismantle the Ocean Observatories Initiative, stating: “effective immediately, [it] will not proceed with further removal or descoping of equipment from the remaining arrays and will continue operations including planned maintenance”.

The agency added that it “appreciates the concerns raised by the range of stakeholders that have informed us they rely on data” from the OOI.

The NSF also said it would “issue a Dear Colleague Letter to collect input from stakeholders and convene an expert panel to assess observational needs, evaluate available data sources, consider responses … and help the agency identify a sustainable path for NSF’s ocean observing systems”.

The OOI comprises more than 900 instruments that collect data on ocean health, including current patterns, climate variability and marine biodiversity. Its observation arrays are located off the coasts of North Carolina, Oregon, Washington and Alaska, as well as in the Irminger Sea, a marginal sea between Greenland and Iceland.

They hoped to pass this through with no one noticing, because their response to anthropogenic climate change is to cover it up.

The foal was to  

The Big One

There are indications that the San Andreas and related faults have unprecedentedly high stress levels, raising concerns that a 7+ earthquake is due sooner and not later in the area.

Having had been in 2 earthquakes, and remembering one (I was less than 2 years old for the first one), I really hope that is not going to be as bad as it looks.

Earthquakes usually occur along fracture zones in Earth's crust, where large tectonic plates slide past one another and become locked. Stress builds up over long periods and is suddenly released in the form of an earthquake. In Southern California, the San Andreas and San Jacinto faults are among the most significant of these zones, accommodating most of the plate motion in the region.

Where the two fault systems approach each other northeast of Los Angeles lies the Cajon Pass—a tectonically complex junction where a rupture on one fault could potentially cross onto the other. Since the last major earthquake to affect the wider Los Angeles region, the Fort Tejon earthquake of 1857, with a magnitude of 7.9, tectonic stress along the fault segments has built up continuously during a prolonged quiet period that has long concerned researchers, given the potential for a large future rupture.

In a new study led by Dr. Liliane Burkhard of the Division of Space Research and Planetary Sciences (WP) at the Physics Institute of the University of Bern, an international research team modeled 1,000 years of earthquake history along the southern San Andreas and San Jacinto fault systems to estimate the present-day stress loading at Cajon Pass. Researchers from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, the U.S. Geological Survey Earthquake Science Center in Pasadena, and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego were involved.

The results show that tectonic stresses in the region have reached and, in some cases, exceeded the highest levels of the last millennium.

In the study, the researchers also introduced the concept of Cajon Pass as an "earthquake gate," a junction that controls whether large earthquakes remain confined to a single fault or propagate across both systems simultaneously. The study has just been published in Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth.

There are indications that stress is high in both the San Andreas and San Jacinto faults, meaning that there is an elevated chance of both faults rupturing at the same time.

Not good, but still better than Donald Trump. 

Adjusting the Facts to Match Their Ideology

The Trump administration is dismantling a network of ocean sensors that monitor conditions related to anthropogenic climate change, because if they plug their ears and close their eyes, there is no problem.

Attempting to suppress information about an ongoing planet-wide catastrophe will not end well.

The Trump administration is targeting one of the world’s most trusted sources of climate and oceanic data—the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI). According to the New York Times, ships will be dispatched this month to remove the more than 900 deep-sea instruments that comprise the network, which, for the past decade, has collected crucial data on physical, chemical, geological and biological conditions from all layers of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans on a continuous basis.

In a statement dated May 21, the OOI confirmed that the National Science Foundation (NSF) had begun a “descoping” process, including removing all in-water infrastructure from four of the OOI’s five deployed arrays. “This plan includes the removal of all in-water infrastructure from the Irminger Sea, Station Papa, Endurance and Pioneer Arrays, subject to ship scheduling and other operational constraints,” the OOI said in the statement. This covers instruments stationed in the Pacific, as well as others in the waters off the U.S. Atlantic coast and Greenland and Iceland. The initiative was originally meant to run for 25 years.

In a statement, an NSF spokesperson said the intention was not to cancel the OOI but to transition to a “nimbler approach to prioritize support for evolving scientific priorities and emerging technologies, as well as smart lifecycle management within its research infrastructure portfolio.”

The NSF statement is best described as an attempt to get a, "Bullsh%$ bingo," win.

The suppression of this data, which is literally right out of the Project 2025 playbook, will cripple climate science for decades.

Trying to Kill Us

I am referring, of course, to the Food and Drub Administration which just suppressed studies showing the Covid and Shingles vaccines are safe and effective.

RFK, Jr. is a cancer on the American body politic.

Officials at the Food and Drug Administration have blocked publication of several studies supporting the safety of widely used vaccines against Covid-19 and shingles in recent months, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services confirmed.

The studies, which cost millions of dollars in public funds, were conducted by scientists at the agency, who worked with data firms to analyze millions of patient records. They found serious side effects to be very rare.

In October, the scientists were directed to withdraw two Covid-19 vaccine studies that had been accepted for publication in medical journals. In February, top F.D.A. officials did not sign off on submitting abstracts about studies of Shingrix, a shingles vaccine, to a major drug safety conference.

The withdrawal of the studies is the latest step by the administration to try to limit access to vaccines. It has sharply cut research funding for vaccine development, released unvetted information casting doubt on vaccines, and blocked other information supporting their safety, most recently a paper on Covid vaccine effectiveness by career scientists from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

These folks need to spend the rest of their lives in prison. 

They’d none of them be missed.

Bringing Jobs Back to America

Or not.

Because of concerns about threats to travelers to the United States by immigration authorities, the Ig Nobel Prize will be moving its awards ceremony to Europe.

Honestly, I understand the need to relocate to a safer place than the United States.

It could have been Europe, it could have been Japan, it could have been Karg Island, or it could have been Chernobyl. They would all be safer for people going through US customs.

The annual Ig Nobels, a satirical award for scientific achievement, are shifting for the first time from the US to Europe due to concerns about attendees getting visas, organizers announced on Monday.

Organized by the Annals of Improbable Research, a digital magazine that highlights research that makes people laugh and then think, the 36th annual ceremony will be held in Zurich. It’s usually held in the US in September, a few weeks before the actual Nobel prizes are announced.

“During the past year, it has become unsafe for our guests to visit the country,” Marc Abrahams, master of ceremonies and editor of the magazine, told the Associated Press in an email interview. “We cannot in good conscience ask the new winners, or the international journalists who cover the event, to travel to the USA this year.”

The move comes amid Donald Trump’s sweeping crackdown on immigration, in which he has focused on deporting migrants illegally in the US, as well as holders of student and visitor exchange visas.

………

But four of the 10 winners last year chose not to travel to Boston for the ceremony. In previous years, the ceremony has taken place at Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boston University.

I think that someone should publish a paper in a peer-reviewed journal about this.  You might even get an Ig Nobel Prize for that.

 

Not a Surprise

Scientists have repeatedly cloned a mouse.  Somewhere around generation 30, reproductive success dropped, and by generation 58, all of the mice were born dead.

This is not particularly surprising.

Sexual reproduction evolved as a genetic repair device, some bacteria exchange genetic material to this day.

Cloning does not necessarily cause genetic damage, but it necessarily fails to repair damage as sexual reproduction does. 

Here’s the cautionary tale you didn’t know you needed: cloning the same mouse in perpetuity will produce horrific affronts to mammalian biology.

A team of researchers in Japan discovered this firsthand. In a stunning experiment lasting two decades, they cloned a female mouse, and then cloned its clones, for 58 successive generations. But over 1,200 clones later, the experiment stopped, because by that last generation the mice kept dying immediately after being born, despite displaying no outward physical abnormalities.

The findings, published in a new study in the journal Nature Communications, suggest there’s a hard limit to duplicating mammals. And to scientists hoping for “infinite” cloning, this came as a major let down.

“We had believed that we could create an infinite number of clones. That is why these results are so disappointing,” study senior author Teruhiko Wakayama, of the University of Yamanashi, told Reuters.  

………

Perfect clones, it turns out, aren’t perfect clones. Sequencing their DNA throughout the generations revealed that they were accruing small mutations over time that snowballed into larger ones, even though the clones were superficially identical. In some cases, the clones even lost an entire copy of their X chromosome.

“It was once believed that clones were identical to the original, but it has become clear through this study that mutations occur at a rate three times higher than in ​offspring born through natural mating,” Wakayama said. 

So Not a Surprise

The study which showed that the herbicide glyphosate was safe to humans, you know, the one that was literally bought and paid for by Monsanto, has been formally retracted.

Given that RFK, Jr. was counsel on a lawsuit against Monsanto about its health risks, and given that a law requires that the EPA review the chemical by the end of 2026, this raises some interesting questions.

It's pretty clear that Trump and his thugs do not want to make a fair review of the chemical, one which would likely restrict or ban it, but now one of the cornerstones of doing nothing has been knocked out.

In 2000, a landmark study claimed to set the record straight on glyphosate, a contentious weedkiller used on hundreds of millions of acres of farmland. The paper found that the chemical, the active ingredient in Roundup, wasn’t a human health risk despite evidence of a cancer link.

Last month, the study was retracted by the scientific journal that published it a quarter century ago, setting off a crisis of confidence in the science behind a weedkiller that has become the backbone of American food production. It is used on soybeans, corn and wheat, on specialty crops like almonds, and on cotton and in home gardens.

The Environmental Protection Agency still considers the herbicide to be safe. But the federal government faces a deadline in 2026 to re-examine glyphosate’s safety after legal action brought by environmental, food-safety and farmworker advocacy groups.

The E.P.A. has also faced pressure to act on glyphosate from the Make America Healthy Again movement, led by supporters of the health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who once served as co-counsel in a lawsuit against Monsanto over exposure to Roundup.

The 2000 paper, a scientific review conducted by three independent scientists, was for decades cited by other researchers as evidence of Roundup’s safety. It became the cornerstone of regulations that deemed the weedkiller safe.

But since then, emails uncovered as part of lawsuits against the weedkiller’s manufacturer, Monsanto, have shown that the company’s scientists played a significant role in conceiving and writing the study.

In the emails, Monsanto employees praised each other for their “hard work” on the paper, which included data collection, writing and review. One Monsanto employee expressed hope that the study would become “‘the’ reference on Roundup and glyphosate safety.” The pharmaceutical giant Bayer acquired Monsanto in 2018 for $63 billion.

I don't generally favor criminally charging researchers with criminal fraud and conspiracy, but this is a slam dunk, and their continued silence means that the conspiracy has been ongoing, and so that is not subject to the statute of limitations.

Charge the researchers, charge the Monsanto staff, charge the Monsanto executives. 

Fuck Yeah!!!!!

A study has shoen that swearing makes you stronger and less sensitive to pain.

This being the case, I should be able to life Mount Everest. 

We Are Unbelievably Screwed

It looks like a collopse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is increasingly likely.

This will disrupt weather over the world, but particularly in Europe, where would could see temperatures drop by 10°C (18°F).

Note that Paris, France is 3 degrees latitude further north than Toronto, Canada, so this is a big deal.

Time for a climate update. Tipping points are approaching. To present this information this systematically, consider the following:

•  Bad things are already happening, and they’ll continue.
•  Over not much time, the bad things will also get worse.
•  Then tipping points will be reached, after which the worst is baked in.
•  Some years after that, the worst arrives in full.

This process is true in a great many areas: sea level rise, for example, and coastal destruction.

The seas are already rising, due partly to ocean expansion (warm water takes up more space than cold water), but due mainly to melting ice in Greenland and Antarctica. Once the tipping point for glacial melt has been reached, all ice will be guaranteed gone at some future time, and a full sea level rise disaster is bound to occur.

What will that look like? Greenland ice melt will cause 24 feet of sea level rise; Antarctica ice melt, 230 feet. The world’s coastal cities, where 15% of world population lives, will erode with the shores and be drowned. In the U.S., 45% of GDP will be lost. 

The tipping point for the collapse of AMOC is currently predicted at 10-30 years.

We need to do something now,  and we are currently ruled by people who are literally pro anthropogenic climate change.

Game over, dudes! 

Well Imagine That

From Reason magazine, we have a report that shows that mRNA COVID vaccines do not have increased mortality, in fact, morbidity, including long COVID, has decreased.

When JFK, Jr. has lost Reason, he's lost everyone.

A few years before he took over the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called COVID-19 shots the "deadliest vaccine ever made." More recently, various anti-vaccination activists have been claiming that the mRNA vaccines are causing a turbo-cancer epidemic.

A huge new French study in the Journal of the American Medical Association Network deflates those claims and confirms the safety and efficacy of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. The researchers followed 22.7 million vaccinated individuals and 5.9 million unvaccinated individuals for nearly four years. They found not only that vaccinated people have a 74 percent lower risk of death from severe COVID-19, but also that those individuals have a lower risk of death, period. Specifically, people who received the shots have a 25 percent lower risk of all-cause mortality.

Because COVID-19, is associated with increased cancer rates, blood clots, heart attacks, etc.

As for the turbo-cancer claims, the researchers report that the incidence of tumors among vaccinated adults is 769 per million. For the unvaccinated, the rate is versus 853 per million. In other words, vaccinated adults were about 15 percent less likely to be diagnosed with cancer than those were unvaccinated.

The researchers sought to control for various confounders, such as a healthy-vaccinee effect, where healthier individuals are more likely to opt for vaccination, or a frailty-related bias, where those in poorer health may avoid it. They also note that vaccinated individuals in their study were generally older and tended to have more co-morbidities, such as obesity and chronic illnesses, which would usually be associated with an increased risk of dying. (The different results, they note, might be partially explained by the fact that vaccinated individuals tend to be more socioeconomically advantaged.)

Get your f%$#ing shots (I did, though I got the the adjuvent based Novavax), and wear your f%$#ing masks.

We Are F%$#ed

A new study of changes in the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation shows that the current that keeps Europe out of the deep freeze is far more likely to collapse than previously thought.

The collapse of a critical Atlantic current can no longer be considered a low-likelihood event, a study has concluded, making deep cuts to fossil fuel emissions even more urgent to avoid the catastrophic impact.

The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc) is a major part of the global climate system. It brings sun-warmed tropical water to Europe and the Arctic, where it cools and sinks to form a deep return current. The Amoc was already known to be at its weakest in 1,600 years as a result of the climate crisis.

Climate models recently indicated that a collapse before 2100 was unlikely but the new analysis examined models that were run for longer, to 2300 and 2500. These show the tipping point that makes an Amoc shutdown inevitable is likely to be passed within a few decades, but that the collapse itself may not happen until 50 to 100 years later.

The research found that if carbon emissions continued to rise, 70% of the model runs led to collapse, while an intermediate level of emissions resulted in collapse in 37% of the models. Even in the case of low future emissions, an Amoc shutdown happened in 25% of the models.

Scientists have warned previously that Amoc collapse must be avoided “at all costs”. It would shift the tropical rainfall belt on which many millions of people rely to grow their food, plunge western Europe into extreme cold winters and summer droughts, and add 50cm to already rising sea levels.

This is real end of the world sh%$.

Headline of the Day

Bitter Fight over 2020 Microsoft Quantum Paper Both Resolved and Unresolved

— The Register

Short version is that the editors split the baby.  The longer version is available at the link and is incredibly boring, but the hed is marvelous. 

We Are F%$#ed

See the blue spot south of Greenland and Iceland As my reader(s) may recall, I have suggested that the potential for anthropogenic climate change causing a collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) could change climate significantly, particularly in Europe, where it could cause a temperature drop of 5-15°C (9-27°F).

The problem is that the anything near a remotely accurate measurement of the AMOC has only been done over the last few decades, so there is not good data to see how this massive current has changed. 

Total volume of the AMOC is about  18 Sverdrup (Sv) or 18,000,000 m³/s, which made observations extremely difficult in the past.

Well , a group of researchers believe that they have found a correlation between AMOC flow rate and the temperature of the cold spot in the Atlantic Ocean south of Greenland.

Given that we have surface temperature readings going back centuries for the Atlantic, this allows us to see trends, and the trends ain't good: 

For months – if not years – debate has raged among scientists over the general health of an ocean current system critical to regulating Earth’s climate – arguing over whether or not the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (or AMOC) is slowing down.

This week, researchers looking into the root cause of a centuries-old patch of cold water south of Greenland and its resistance to the overall warming trend of the Atlantic Ocean, has come to one simple conclusion. That it is.

Landing on only one explanation for the observed ocean temperatures and patterns in salinity across the region, researchers from the University of California, Riverside concluded that the AMOC – a massive current system responsible for moving warm, salty water northward and cooler water southward at depth, is indeed weakening.

“People have been asking why this cold spot exists,” said University of California, Riverside climate scientist Wei Liu, who led the study with doctoral student Kai-Yuan Li. “We found the most likely answer is a weakening AMOC.”

The AMOC acts like a giant conveyor belt, delivering heat and salt from the tropics to the North Atlantic. A slowdown in this system means less warm, salty water reaches the sub-polar region, resulting in the cooling and freshening observed south of Greenland.

………

Together, Li and Liu analysed a century’s worth of this data, as direct AMOC observations go back only as far as 20 years. From these long term records, they reconstructed changes in the circulation system and compared those with nearly 100 different climate models.

Their paper – published this week in Communications Earth & Environment – shows that only in the models simulating a weakened AMOC were outcomes generally matched to the real-world data. Models that assumed a stronger AMOC didn’t come close.

“It’s a very robust correlation,” said Li. “If you look at the observations and compare them with all the simulations, only the weakened-AMOC scenario reproduces the cooling in this one region.”

………

With limited direct data on the AMOC, temperature and salinity records provide a valuable alternative for detecting long-term circulation change, and for helping to predict future climate scenarios.

This does not bode well for our society or our planet.

Speaking of Things Getting Worse

Over the past few years I have pointed out issues with the most used models for anthropogenic climate change.

When compared to the actual climate data, the predictions of the models always seem to be too conservative.

It's worse than the models predict.

Well, we now have a potential explanation for this, that the models underestimate the water content and temperature of polar clouds:

The Arctic is one of the coldest regions on Earth, but in recent decades it has been warming rapidly, three to four times faster than the global average. Yet current climate models have struggled to explain this accelerated warming.

Now, researchers from Kyushu University—graduate student Momoka Nakanishi of the Interdisciplinary Graduate School of Engineering Sciences and her adviser, Associate Professor Takuro Michibata of the Research Institute for Applied Mechanics—have suggested that clouds may be the key factor. Their findings were published in the journal Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Research.

Heat-trapping properties of mixed-phase clouds

The most common clouds in the Arctic are mixed-phase clouds, which contain both ice crystals and supercooled liquid water droplets. During the Arctic summer, when sunlight is constant, these clouds reflect sunlight back into space like a parasol, helping to cool the region. In contrast, during the long, dark Arctic winter, when there is no sunlight to reflect, the same clouds behave like a blanket, trapping heat radiated from the Earth’s surface and sending it back down to the ground.

“However, how well these mixed-phase clouds trap heat depends on their ratio of ice to liquid,” explains Nakanishi. “The more liquid water the clouds contain, the better they are at trapping heat. But many climate models have a large bias in representing this ratio, causing incorrect predictions.”

Satellite comparison reveals model bias

In this study, Nakanishi and Michibata analyzed 30 climate models and compared them to satellite observations of clouds in the Arctic during winter over the last decade. They found that 21 of the 30 models significantly overestimated the fraction of ice to liquid in wintertime Arctic clouds.

“These ice-dominant models are not properly accounting for the present-day warming potential of the clouds during the winter,” says Nakanishi. “That’s why they cannot account for the rapid warming we are currently seeing.”

Yeah, it's a lot worse than we thought.

If It Farts, It Charts

On the local news, if it bleeds, it leads. On this blog ………

 

Lovely News

In the journal Nature Medicine, a paper is showing that,"SARS-CoV-2-specific plasma cells are not durably established in the bone marrow long-lived compartment after mRNA vaccination.

Translated into English, it means that immunity to the disease falls off of a cliff after 3 months.

Abstract

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) mRNA vaccines are effective at protecting from severe disease, but the protective antibodies wane rapidly even though SARS-CoV-2-specific plasma cells can be found in the bone marrow (BM). Here, to explore this paradox, we enrolled 19 healthy adults at 2.5–33 months after receipt of a SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccine and measured influenza-, tetanus- or SARS-CoV-2-specific antibody-secreting cells (ASCs) in long-lived plasma cell (LLPC) and non-LLPC subsets within the BM. Only influenza- and tetanus-specific ASCs were readily detected in the LLPCs, whereas SARS-CoV-2 specificities were mostly absent. The ratios of non-LLPC:LLPC for influenza, tetanus and SARS-CoV-2 were 0.61, 0.44 and 29.07, respectively. In five patients with known PCR-proven history of recent infection and vaccination, SARS-CoV-2-specific ASCs were mostly absent from the LLPCs. We show similar results with measurement for secreted antibodies from BM ASC culture supernatant. While serum IgG titers specific for influenza and tetanus correlated with IgG LLPCs, serum IgG levels for SARS-CoV-2, which waned within 3–6 months after vaccination, were associated with IgG non-LLPCs. In all, our studies suggest that rapid waning of SARS-CoV-2-specific serum antibodies could be accounted for by the absence of BM LLPCs after these mRNA vaccines.

The study does not do a comparison between mRNA and other vaccines, so it is unclear whether this is an artifact of the Covid virus or of the mRNA vaccines, but I'm due for a booster, and I am getting Novavax, and I recommend that you do to.

Remember though, I am an engineer, not a doctor, dammit*, so my advice is simply based on my very flawed gut, and nothing else.

Any shot is better than no shot.

^*I love it when I get to go all Dr. McCoy!

We Are F%$#ed

For a while, I have been saying that climate scientists have been underestimating the severity of global warming.  (See here, here, here, and here)

Remember all those dire consequences for a 1.5°C (2.7°F) increase in temperatures globally?

Remember how the IPCC said that a doubling of  CO2 levels might result in a global temperature increase of 4.5°C? (8.1°F)

Well, a new study is suggesting that the impact of increasing CO2 is even greater than previously thought, and that a doubling of atmospheric CO2 levels might result in a 14°C (25°F) temperature increase.

That is real end of the world stuff:

Doubling the atmospheric CO2 levels could raise Earth’s average temperature by 7 to 14 degrees Celsius (13 to 25.2 degrees Fahrenheit), according to sediment analysis from the Pacific Ocean near California conducted by researchers from NIOZ and the Universities of Utrecht and Bristol.

The results were recently published in the journal Nature Communications

“The temperature rise we found is much larger than the 2.3 to 4.5 degrees Celsius (4.1 to 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit) that the UN climate panel, IPCC, has been estimating so far,” said the first author, Caitlyn Witkowski. 

45-year-old drill core

The researchers used a 45-year-old drill core extracted from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. “I realized that this core is very attractive for researchers, because the ocean floor at that spot has had oxygen-free conditions for many millions of years,” said Professor Jaap Sinninghe Damsté, senior scientist at NIOZ and professor of organic geochemistry at Utrecht University. 

………

From this record, the researchers were able to extract an indication of the past seawater temperature and an indication of ancient atmospheric CO2 levels, using a new approach.

………

The researchers derived the temperature using a method developed 20 years ago at NIOZ, called the TEX86 method. “That method uses specific substances that are present in the membrane of archaea, a distinct class of microorganisms,” Damsté explains.

“Those archaea optimize the chemical composition of their membrane depending on the temperature of the water in the upper 200 meters of the ocean. Substances from that membrane can be found as molecular fossils in the ocean sediments, and analyzed to this day.”

………

Damsté: “A very small fraction of the carbon on Earth occurs in a ‘heavy form,’ 13C instead of the usual 12C. Algae have a clear preference for 12C. However: the lower the CO2 concentration in the water, the more algae will also use the rare 13C. Thus, the 13C content of these two substances is a measure of the CO₂ content of the ocean water. And that in turn, according to solubility laws, correlates with the CO₂ content of the atmosphere.”

Using this new method, it appears that the CO2 concentration dropped from about 650 parts per million, 15 million years back, to 280 just before the industrial revolution.

………

When the researchers plot the derived temperature and atmospheric CO2 levels of the past 15 million years against each other, they find a strong relationship. The average temperature 15 million years ago was over 18 degrees Celsius (64.4 degrees Fahrenheit): 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than today and about the level that the UN Climate Panel, IPCC, predicts for the year 2100 in the most extreme scenario.

Fighting anthropogenic climate change cannot be about convincing emitters to reduce output through incentives, and not just because it has been repeatedly shown that carbon offsets are a scam.

It won't get us there.

Legal mandates with a probability of swift criminal enforcement is the only way to fix this.

Headline of the Day

Down into the Ocean’s ‘Twilight Zone’ with Boaty McBoatface

—BBC

Yeah, I know, "Boaty McBoatface," is so last decade, and I still think that they should have named the boat that, and not just the remotely piloted submersible.

Still, it's nice that Boaty is doing science:

Battling choppy waves and high winds, three engineers pulled ashore a yellow submarine in Scotland this week.

With sheets of water pouring from its body, the UK’s most famous robot - Boaty McBoatface - was winched up after 55 days at sea.

“It’s a bit slimy, and ocean smells have seeped in. There’s a few things growing on it,” says Rob Templeton, now dismantling the 3.6m robot in Leverburgh, on the Isle of Harris.

Boaty has completed a more-than-2,000km scientific odyssey from Iceland that could change what we know about the pace of climate change.

It was hunting for marine snow - “poo, basically” in the words of one researcher. This refers to tiny particles that sink to the ocean floor, storing huge amounts of carbon. 

………

The public originally picked the name Boaty McBoatface for a polar ship in 2016. That didn't happen, but instead the name was quietly given to a fleet of six identical robots at the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton.

They said that they would name the next research based on the public vote, and then they ignored the voice of the public, and named the boat RRS Sir David Attenborough.

No offense to Sir Attenborough, but Boaty was robbed.