Timeblog.net

In a recent article, RealClimate discusses what we experience whenever we go outside: It’s uncharacteristically warm for wintertime.
Now, RealClimate is very careful about the words and arguments they use, so I try not to stomp too much on their meticulously chosen words. They put two possible arguments for this warm phase to the trial: Influence […]

Just sit back and think for a moment, what would be the worst place to install a gigantic Physics experiment? Several kilometres under the South Pole? Maybe, but exactly this is done with the Ice Cube Neutrino Observatory!

Today, as a special guest talk for my institute’s seminar, Paul Crutzen had been invited. He received the Nobel prize in Chemistry in 1995 for his work on discovering the mechanisms that lead to the destruction of ozone in the athmosphere.
He today talked about the influence humans have on our planet’s climate. He listed the […]

This little guy here is a robot, that’s not too special. Special about him is the way he gets energy. He has eight batteries that are loaded by energy from bacteriae. From bacteriae that eat flies! So they feed a fly into each cell, the bacteriae consume them, and after 14 minutes of battery […]

So, finally, KATRIN was moved into the hall. The roof of the hall had been removed, so the crane could lift the spectrometer straight into it.

Yesterday, I told you of KATRINs arrival. Today, KATRIN was moved to its position in front of the hall into which a crane will lift it tomorrow. Of course, I didn’t bring my camera but the nahdy camera did quite well. So here are some more pictures. When we came back, the convoy was already […]

KATRIN is much like AC/DCs Rosie:
She ain’t exactly pretty
She ain’t exactly small

Especially in discussions of global warming, one can often see the argument “computer models have never worked”. I think most often these people have wrong expectations about models. Maybe in their mind, they see some hollywood-ish animations that jump out of the computer by pressing a button and illustrate in Technicolor how the future will […]

Following up on the climate conference ranting, Real Climate has an article focusing on how drastically we’d have to cut CO2 emissions. It goes something like 50% now, 85% in the long term. That’s pretty drastic, and will not be achieved. Just goes to show how deep in trouble we are.

The UN climate change conference in Nairobi has started. Maybe the most important goal is to start a follower protocol to the Kyoto protocol, which was but a start towards a working climate protection system. Still, rogue states like the USA say that Kyoto will not do anything and don’t follow it. But they haven’t […]