Global warming hiatus claims prebunked in 1980s and 1990s

Recent global warming hiatus has been a subject of intensive studies during the last ten years. But it seems that there already was some research on global warming hiatus during 1980s and 1990s (earliest studies on the issue were actually back in 1940s-1970s). This seems to have gone largely unnoticed in the scientific literature of current global warming hiatus, and it certainly seems to have gone unnoticed by climate mitigation opponents who have made claims on global warming hiatus since at least 2006 and still continue to do so.

Some time ago I stumbled on a few old papers which discussed the temperature evolution of 1940s to 1970s. In the early 20th century there had been warming which seemed to have stopped around 1940 until it continued again in the turn of 1970s and 1980s. Here I will use "global warming moratorium" to describe this early hiatus (reason for this can be found below). Below I'll go through some of the papers in question.

Early studies on the 1940s-1970s global warming moratorium

Global surface temperature increased during the first half of the 20th century. In 1940s, this warming apparently stopped. Possibly the first to notice this was Kincer (1946):

Up to the end of 1945, records for 13 subsequent years have become available, and these are here presented, supplementary to the original data, to determine tendencies since 1932. They show that the general upward temperature trend continued for several years but that the more recent records indicate a leveling off, and even contain currently a suggestion of an impending reversal.

This was confirmed by Mitchell (1961, 1963), as described by Wigley et al. (1985):

Mitchell (1961, 1963) extended Willett's analysis beyond 1940, improved the method of area averaging, and found that the warming prior to 1940 had subsequently become a cooling trend (as suggested earlier by Kincer [1946]).

Later, Mitchell (1970) studied the effect of anthropogenic forcings (carbon dioxide and aerosols) on the temperature evolution of 20th century. Mitchell noted on the carbon dioxide forcing:

Changes of mean atmospheric temperature due to CO2, calculated by Manabe et al. as 0.3°C per 10% change in CO2, are sufficient to account for only about one third of the observed 0.6°C warming of the earth between 1880 and 1940, but will probably have become a dominant influence on the course of planetary average temperature changes by the end of this century.

And on the global warming moratorium:

Although changes of total atmospheric dust loading may possibly be sufficient to account for the observed 0.3°C-cooling of the earth since 1940, the human-derived contribution to these loading changes is inferred to have played a very minor role in the temperature decline.

Reitan (1974) extended the temperature analysis to 1968 and reported that the global warming moratorium had continued. Brinkmann (1976) extended the analysis to 1973 and saw the first signs of global warming moratorium ending and warming resuming.

Wigley et al. (1985) mention one further point worth mentioning about the global warming moratorium:

All seasons show the same long-term trends, trends that are also common to all other land-based data sets: a warming from the 1880s to around 1940, cooling to the mid-1960s/early-1970s (less obvious in winter), and subsequent warming, beginning later in summer and autumn than in spring and winter.

According to Wigley et al. (1985), the global warming moratorium remained largely unexplained, although there had been some relatively successful attempts to explain the short-term variability in the surface temperature by volcanic aerosols and solar variations, see for example the discussion and analysis in Hansen et al. (1981) and in Gilliland (1982).

Oceans and surface temperature studies in 1980s

Watts (1985) used a simple model to suggest that changes in the rate of the deep water formation can have an effect to surface temperature:

...variations in the rate of formation of deep water can lead to fluctuations in the globally averaged surface temperature similar in magnitude to variations in the earth's surface-air temperature that have occurred during the last several hundred years.

Gaffin et al. (1986) got similar results:

The largest features of the northern hemispheric surface land temperature record can be simulated with our climate and deep ocean feedback formulation and CO₂ forcing alone.

Jones et al. (1987) studied the rapidity of carbon dioxide induced climate change. Within this study, they also looked at how changes in deep water formation affected warming caused by carbon dioxide. They created a simulation, where there was a global warming caused by carbon dioxide, and then they turned off the deep water formation in the Northern Hemisphere (because the global warming moratorium was strongest in Northern Hemisphere). This resulted in surface cooling right after the deep water formation was stopped, and later warming continued again.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s there were some other similar studies also.

The global warming moratorium discussion of early 1990s

So, it seems that at the turn of 1980s and 1990s there had been several studies suggesting that oceans could have considerable effect on the surface temperature. At this point, there was a discussion in the scientific literature on the global warming moratorium, and this discussion has some interesting resemblance to the current global warming hiatus discussion.

Watts and Morantine (1991), in an editorial of Springer's journal Climatic Change, reviewed the research which I already have discussed above. They noted the possibility of energy transfer between the surface and the deep ocean and concluded:

It is entirely possible that the greenhouse gas climate change signal is alive and well and hiding in the ocean intermediate waters, having reached there because of increased upwelling, or by some other mechanism that could effectively transport heat from the upper layers of the ocean into the huge thermal reservoir of the intermediate and deep ocean.

Kellogg (1993) revisited the issue, also in the same journal, with a letter named as "An Apparent Moratorium on the Greenhouse Warming Due to the Deep Ocean". Kellogg described some new observational evidence for the ocean's role in the issue. Based on this he suggested:

...oceans could sequester a significant part of the incremental greenhouse-generated heat over a period of a few decades, a period during which the surface warming would be curtailed.

Kellogg also discussed some issues relating to timing of the global warming moratorium and what would have happened if oceans wouldn't have had a role in the surface temperature. Relating to the current global warming hiatus discussion, Kellogg made an interesting note:

One of the arguments most frequently advanced by the skeptics is that the observed warming in this century should have been larger, based on climate models that do not take account of ocean circulations, and that there should theoretically have been no such 'moratorium' between 1940 and 1975.

Kellogg then notes that if the oceans played a role, there wouldn't be such a problem.

Watts and Morantine (1993) also revisited the issue (perhaps the journal sent them Kellogg's letter and asked for their response). There were couple of additional interesting points in their response relating to current discussion on global warming hiatus. They noted on the significance of the moratorium:

In a recent article by Galbraith and Green (1992), a series of statistical tests were performed on the global average temperature time series from 1880 to 1988 (Hansen and Lebedeff, 1987). A statistically significant trend that can be approximated by a linear term was found, and the deviation from this trend during the period between 1940 and 1970 was found to fall within the range of sample fluctuation.

And:

Even though the surface temperature of the Earth is an important piece of information, the distribution of thermal energy is a three-dimensional problem.

What I have shown here is just a sample of all papers that were studying the issue. The research on the issue also continued after the papers presented here.

The significance for current hiatus discussion

It is clear that before 2000s there had been lot of research on the subject of short-term variability of surface temperature in a presence of long-term warming trend. The research back then also pointed to probable causes of the short-term variability.

Apparently, the first claims of global warming hiatus after 1998 were made in 2006 by well-known climate change mitigation opponents. This was obviously far too soon statistically to make those claims, and there was no indication that the claims were made with knowledge of the earlier discussion and research on the subject. It also should be noted, that the claims in question were not made in scientific literature but in popular media (a situation that has continued after that and largely continues even today).

However, lots and lots of papers have been published on the recent global warming hiatus. I have sampled the reference lists of some of them and it seems that also scientific community has largely forgot that the issue has already been studied. This seems a bit unfortunate and makes one wonder if we will have forgotten the current research when the next moratorium or pause or hiatus or whatever happens.

References:

Waltraud A.R. Brinkmann (1976), Surface temperature trend for the Northern Hemisphere-updated, Quaternary Research, Volume 6, Issue 3, September 1976, Pages 355-358, doi:10.1016/0033-5894(67)90002-6. http://ift.tt/2kqMRm3

Gaffin, S. R., M. I. Hoffert, and T. Volk (1986), Nonlinear coupling between surface temperature and ocean upwelling as an agent in historical climate variations, J. Geophys. Res., 91(C3), 3944–3950, doi:10.1029/JC091iC03p03944.
http://ift.tt/2jD9LlB

Gilliland, R.L. (1982), Solar, volcanic, and CO2 forcing of recent climatic changes, Climatic Change, 4: 111. doi:10.1007/BF00140585.
http://ift.tt/2kqUAQT

J. Hansen, D. Johnson, A. Lacis, S. Lebedeff, P. Lee, D. Rind, G. Russell (1981) Climate Impact of Increasing Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide, Science  28 Aug 1981: Vol. 213, Issue 4511, pp. 957-966, DOI: 10.1126/science.213.4511.957.
http://ift.tt/1MrZ57g

P. D. Jones, T. M. L. Wigley, , S. C. B. Raper (1986), The Rapidity of CO2-Induced Climatic Change: Observations, Model Results and Palaeoclimatic Implications, in Abrupt Climatic Change, Volume 216 of the series NATO ASI Series pp 47-55.
http://ift.tt/2kqMKH5

Kellogg, W.W. (1993), An apparent moratorium on the greenhouse warming due to the deep ocean, Climatic Change 25: 85. doi:10.1007/BF01094085.
http://ift.tt/2jDjGaV

Kincer, J. B. (1946), Our changing climate, Eos Trans. AGU, 27(3), 342–347, doi:10.1029/TR027i003p00342.
http://ift.tt/2kqRqN2

Mitchell, J. M. (1961), RECENT SECULAR CHANGES OF GLOBAL TEMPERATURE. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 95: 235–250. doi:10.1111/j.1749-6632.1961.tb50036.x
http://ift.tt/1N18Sjs

J. Murray Mitchell Jr. (1970), A Preliminary Evaluation of Atmospheric Pollution as a Cause of the Global Temperature Fluctuation of the Past Century, 139-155. In, S.F. Singer (ed.), Global Effects of Environmental Pollution. Springer Verlag, New York, New York.
http://ift.tt/2kqXc1b

Clayton H. Reitan (1974), A climatic model of solar radiation and temperature change, Quaternary Research, Volume 4, Issue 1, March 1974, Pages 25–38, http://ift.tt/2jDeX93.
http://ift.tt/2kqJDyY

Watts, R. G. (1985), Global climate variation due to fluctuations in the rate of deep water formation, J. Geophys. Res., 90(D5), 8067–8070, doi:10.1029/JD090iD05p08067.
http://ift.tt/2jDt6mx

Watts, R.G. & Morantine, M.C. (1991), Is the greenhouse gas-climate signal hiding in the deep ocean?, Climatic Change 18: iii. doi:10.1007/BF00142966.
http://ift.tt/2kqOCiW

Wigley, T.M.L., Angell, J.K. and Jones, P.D., 1985. Analysis of the temperature record. In: M.C. MacCracken and F.M. Luther (Eds.), Detecting the Climatic Effects of Increasing Carbon Dioxide, (DOE/ER-0235), U.S. Department of Energy, Carbon Dioxide Research Division, Washington, D.C., 55-90.
http://ift.tt/2jDgGLv

from Skeptical Science http://ift.tt/2kqRAUI

Recent global warming hiatus has been a subject of intensive studies during the last ten years. But it seems that there already was some research on global warming hiatus during 1980s and 1990s (earliest studies on the issue were actually back in 1940s-1970s). This seems to have gone largely unnoticed in the scientific literature of current global warming hiatus, and it certainly seems to have gone unnoticed by climate mitigation opponents who have made claims on global warming hiatus since at least 2006 and still continue to do so.

Some time ago I stumbled on a few old papers which discussed the temperature evolution of 1940s to 1970s. In the early 20th century there had been warming which seemed to have stopped around 1940 until it continued again in the turn of 1970s and 1980s. Here I will use "global warming moratorium" to describe this early hiatus (reason for this can be found below). Below I'll go through some of the papers in question.

Early studies on the 1940s-1970s global warming moratorium

Global surface temperature increased during the first half of the 20th century. In 1940s, this warming apparently stopped. Possibly the first to notice this was Kincer (1946):

Up to the end of 1945, records for 13 subsequent years have become available, and these are here presented, supplementary to the original data, to determine tendencies since 1932. They show that the general upward temperature trend continued for several years but that the more recent records indicate a leveling off, and even contain currently a suggestion of an impending reversal.

This was confirmed by Mitchell (1961, 1963), as described by Wigley et al. (1985):

Mitchell (1961, 1963) extended Willett's analysis beyond 1940, improved the method of area averaging, and found that the warming prior to 1940 had subsequently become a cooling trend (as suggested earlier by Kincer [1946]).

Later, Mitchell (1970) studied the effect of anthropogenic forcings (carbon dioxide and aerosols) on the temperature evolution of 20th century. Mitchell noted on the carbon dioxide forcing:

Changes of mean atmospheric temperature due to CO2, calculated by Manabe et al. as 0.3°C per 10% change in CO2, are sufficient to account for only about one third of the observed 0.6°C warming of the earth between 1880 and 1940, but will probably have become a dominant influence on the course of planetary average temperature changes by the end of this century.

And on the global warming moratorium:

Although changes of total atmospheric dust loading may possibly be sufficient to account for the observed 0.3°C-cooling of the earth since 1940, the human-derived contribution to these loading changes is inferred to have played a very minor role in the temperature decline.

Reitan (1974) extended the temperature analysis to 1968 and reported that the global warming moratorium had continued. Brinkmann (1976) extended the analysis to 1973 and saw the first signs of global warming moratorium ending and warming resuming.

Wigley et al. (1985) mention one further point worth mentioning about the global warming moratorium:

All seasons show the same long-term trends, trends that are also common to all other land-based data sets: a warming from the 1880s to around 1940, cooling to the mid-1960s/early-1970s (less obvious in winter), and subsequent warming, beginning later in summer and autumn than in spring and winter.

According to Wigley et al. (1985), the global warming moratorium remained largely unexplained, although there had been some relatively successful attempts to explain the short-term variability in the surface temperature by volcanic aerosols and solar variations, see for example the discussion and analysis in Hansen et al. (1981) and in Gilliland (1982).

Oceans and surface temperature studies in 1980s

Watts (1985) used a simple model to suggest that changes in the rate of the deep water formation can have an effect to surface temperature:

...variations in the rate of formation of deep water can lead to fluctuations in the globally averaged surface temperature similar in magnitude to variations in the earth's surface-air temperature that have occurred during the last several hundred years.

Gaffin et al. (1986) got similar results:

The largest features of the northern hemispheric surface land temperature record can be simulated with our climate and deep ocean feedback formulation and CO₂ forcing alone.

Jones et al. (1987) studied the rapidity of carbon dioxide induced climate change. Within this study, they also looked at how changes in deep water formation affected warming caused by carbon dioxide. They created a simulation, where there was a global warming caused by carbon dioxide, and then they turned off the deep water formation in the Northern Hemisphere (because the global warming moratorium was strongest in Northern Hemisphere). This resulted in surface cooling right after the deep water formation was stopped, and later warming continued again.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s there were some other similar studies also.

The global warming moratorium discussion of early 1990s

So, it seems that at the turn of 1980s and 1990s there had been several studies suggesting that oceans could have considerable effect on the surface temperature. At this point, there was a discussion in the scientific literature on the global warming moratorium, and this discussion has some interesting resemblance to the current global warming hiatus discussion.

Watts and Morantine (1991), in an editorial of Springer's journal Climatic Change, reviewed the research which I already have discussed above. They noted the possibility of energy transfer between the surface and the deep ocean and concluded:

It is entirely possible that the greenhouse gas climate change signal is alive and well and hiding in the ocean intermediate waters, having reached there because of increased upwelling, or by some other mechanism that could effectively transport heat from the upper layers of the ocean into the huge thermal reservoir of the intermediate and deep ocean.

Kellogg (1993) revisited the issue, also in the same journal, with a letter named as "An Apparent Moratorium on the Greenhouse Warming Due to the Deep Ocean". Kellogg described some new observational evidence for the ocean's role in the issue. Based on this he suggested:

...oceans could sequester a significant part of the incremental greenhouse-generated heat over a period of a few decades, a period during which the surface warming would be curtailed.

Kellogg also discussed some issues relating to timing of the global warming moratorium and what would have happened if oceans wouldn't have had a role in the surface temperature. Relating to the current global warming hiatus discussion, Kellogg made an interesting note:

One of the arguments most frequently advanced by the skeptics is that the observed warming in this century should have been larger, based on climate models that do not take account of ocean circulations, and that there should theoretically have been no such 'moratorium' between 1940 and 1975.

Kellogg then notes that if the oceans played a role, there wouldn't be such a problem.

Watts and Morantine (1993) also revisited the issue (perhaps the journal sent them Kellogg's letter and asked for their response). There were couple of additional interesting points in their response relating to current discussion on global warming hiatus. They noted on the significance of the moratorium:

In a recent article by Galbraith and Green (1992), a series of statistical tests were performed on the global average temperature time series from 1880 to 1988 (Hansen and Lebedeff, 1987). A statistically significant trend that can be approximated by a linear term was found, and the deviation from this trend during the period between 1940 and 1970 was found to fall within the range of sample fluctuation.

And:

Even though the surface temperature of the Earth is an important piece of information, the distribution of thermal energy is a three-dimensional problem.

What I have shown here is just a sample of all papers that were studying the issue. The research on the issue also continued after the papers presented here.

The significance for current hiatus discussion

It is clear that before 2000s there had been lot of research on the subject of short-term variability of surface temperature in a presence of long-term warming trend. The research back then also pointed to probable causes of the short-term variability.

Apparently, the first claims of global warming hiatus after 1998 were made in 2006 by well-known climate change mitigation opponents. This was obviously far too soon statistically to make those claims, and there was no indication that the claims were made with knowledge of the earlier discussion and research on the subject. It also should be noted, that the claims in question were not made in scientific literature but in popular media (a situation that has continued after that and largely continues even today).

However, lots and lots of papers have been published on the recent global warming hiatus. I have sampled the reference lists of some of them and it seems that also scientific community has largely forgot that the issue has already been studied. This seems a bit unfortunate and makes one wonder if we will have forgotten the current research when the next moratorium or pause or hiatus or whatever happens.

References:

Waltraud A.R. Brinkmann (1976), Surface temperature trend for the Northern Hemisphere-updated, Quaternary Research, Volume 6, Issue 3, September 1976, Pages 355-358, doi:10.1016/0033-5894(67)90002-6. http://ift.tt/2kqMRm3

Gaffin, S. R., M. I. Hoffert, and T. Volk (1986), Nonlinear coupling between surface temperature and ocean upwelling as an agent in historical climate variations, J. Geophys. Res., 91(C3), 3944–3950, doi:10.1029/JC091iC03p03944.
http://ift.tt/2jD9LlB

Gilliland, R.L. (1982), Solar, volcanic, and CO2 forcing of recent climatic changes, Climatic Change, 4: 111. doi:10.1007/BF00140585.
http://ift.tt/2kqUAQT

J. Hansen, D. Johnson, A. Lacis, S. Lebedeff, P. Lee, D. Rind, G. Russell (1981) Climate Impact of Increasing Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide, Science  28 Aug 1981: Vol. 213, Issue 4511, pp. 957-966, DOI: 10.1126/science.213.4511.957.
http://ift.tt/1MrZ57g

P. D. Jones, T. M. L. Wigley, , S. C. B. Raper (1986), The Rapidity of CO2-Induced Climatic Change: Observations, Model Results and Palaeoclimatic Implications, in Abrupt Climatic Change, Volume 216 of the series NATO ASI Series pp 47-55.
http://ift.tt/2kqMKH5

Kellogg, W.W. (1993), An apparent moratorium on the greenhouse warming due to the deep ocean, Climatic Change 25: 85. doi:10.1007/BF01094085.
http://ift.tt/2jDjGaV

Kincer, J. B. (1946), Our changing climate, Eos Trans. AGU, 27(3), 342–347, doi:10.1029/TR027i003p00342.
http://ift.tt/2kqRqN2

Mitchell, J. M. (1961), RECENT SECULAR CHANGES OF GLOBAL TEMPERATURE. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 95: 235–250. doi:10.1111/j.1749-6632.1961.tb50036.x
http://ift.tt/1N18Sjs

J. Murray Mitchell Jr. (1970), A Preliminary Evaluation of Atmospheric Pollution as a Cause of the Global Temperature Fluctuation of the Past Century, 139-155. In, S.F. Singer (ed.), Global Effects of Environmental Pollution. Springer Verlag, New York, New York.
http://ift.tt/2kqXc1b

Clayton H. Reitan (1974), A climatic model of solar radiation and temperature change, Quaternary Research, Volume 4, Issue 1, March 1974, Pages 25–38, http://ift.tt/2jDeX93.
http://ift.tt/2kqJDyY

Watts, R. G. (1985), Global climate variation due to fluctuations in the rate of deep water formation, J. Geophys. Res., 90(D5), 8067–8070, doi:10.1029/JD090iD05p08067.
http://ift.tt/2jDt6mx

Watts, R.G. & Morantine, M.C. (1991), Is the greenhouse gas-climate signal hiding in the deep ocean?, Climatic Change 18: iii. doi:10.1007/BF00142966.
http://ift.tt/2kqOCiW

Wigley, T.M.L., Angell, J.K. and Jones, P.D., 1985. Analysis of the temperature record. In: M.C. MacCracken and F.M. Luther (Eds.), Detecting the Climatic Effects of Increasing Carbon Dioxide, (DOE/ER-0235), U.S. Department of Energy, Carbon Dioxide Research Division, Washington, D.C., 55-90.
http://ift.tt/2jDgGLv

from Skeptical Science http://ift.tt/2kqRAUI

Neil Gorsuch: to the right of Scalia? [Greg Laden's Blog]

Neil Gorsuch is a significant and meaningful choice for SCOTUS. The image above is not fake, it really is his Harvard Law yearbook photo. If he was a Democratic pick, that one image would end him. Since he is a Republican pick, democrats have a Big Tent instead of a spine, and Republicans have no ethical floor to avoid crashing into, he will be confirmed.

Judge Neil Gorsuch speaks, after US President Donald Trump nominated him for the Supreme Court, at the White House in Washington, DC, on January 31, 2017.
President Donald Trump on nominated federal appellate judge Neil Gorsuch as his Supreme Court nominee, tilting the balance of the court back in the conservatives’ favor. / AFP / Brendan SMIALOWSKI (Photo credit should read BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images)

He is a very conservative judge, probably more conservative than anyone who has been on the court in recent memory or possibly ever.

This pick seems to say a lot about how the Trump administration seems to be operating. (See: The Norms of Society and Presidential Executive Orders.)

Gorsuch is a Geroge W. Bush appointee (10th circuit, May 2006). He is famously the son of Anne Gorsuch-Buford, who was EPA Administrator under Reagan, forced to resign after being shown ineffective in actually protecting the environment.

Gorsuch produced an op-ed in the ridiculously conservative National Review, in 2005 (NR 2/7/05), criticizing liberals, in which he wrote,

“But rather than use the judiciary for extraordinary cases, von Drehle recognizes that American liberals have become addicted to the courtroom, relying on judges and lawyers rather than elected leaders and the ballot box, as the primary means of effecting their social agenda on everything from gay marriage to assisted suicide to the use of vouchers for private-school education. This overweening addiction to the courtroom as the place to debate social policy is bad for the country and bad for the judiciary. In the legislative arena, especially when the country is closely divided, compromises tend to be the rule the day. But when judges rule this or that policy unconstitutional, there’s little room for compromise: One side must win, the other must lose.”

He has been very active in the Federalist Society, a libertarian and conservative group of lawyers and judges.

Gorsuch has fairly direct ties to the Anschutz Foundation. He wa a member of the Walden Group (a company) which was registered to Cannon Harvey of Colorado, and the Harveys (Cannon and Lyndia) were or are friends of Gorsuch according to a 2008 financial disclosure report. Harvey was an officer and member of the board of directors of Anschutz, and Anschutz funds directly and indirectly anti-science organization ssuch as the Heritage Foundation, extremely conservative groups like the Goldwater Institute, supports Right to Work (think Wisconsin), and has seemingly funded anti-LGBTQ efforts. According the Huffington Post (1/5/17),

“The 77-year-old entrepreneur, who is the chairman of the Anschutz Corporation, is listed as a key ‘enemy of equality’ in an infographic produced by the Washington, D.C.-based LGBTQ advocacy group Freedom for All Americans. The infographic indicates that Anschutz has donated thousands of dollars to the Family Research Council, the Alliance Defending Freedom and the National Christian Foundation, all of which have been staunch opponents in the fight for LGBTQ equality, through the Anschutz Family Foundation.”

This has been disputed by the Anschutz Foundation CEO. At the very least, esposure of this possible connection may have caused Anschutz to withdraw support form anti-LGBTQ groups. This has little do do with Gorsuch per se, but as background, we can see that he hangs with, and supports, the most conservative groups and folk. That together with his anti-Liberal screen regarding judicial legislating places him firmly at the borked end of the judicial spectrum, at least.

Here is some background (from a backgrounder compiled by a group of experts) on his positions in various important areas, provided in a white paper by :

Gorsush on The Environment

In an August 2016 concurring opinion to a case involving residency for undocumented immigrants, Gorsuch wrote a “blistering” 23-page critique of the Chevron Doctrine, which he believes gives far too much power to administrative agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency.

The Chevron Doctrine allows judges to defer to administrative agencies’ interpretation when the law as written by Congress is “silent or ambiguous.” The doctrine arose from the 1984 Supreme Court decision Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council and is frequently cited in litigation regarding environmental regulations. In his work on the 10th Circuit, Gorsuch has upheld environmental regulations in at least two instances. In 2015, as part of a three-judge panel, Gorsuch upheld Colorado’s renewable energy standard in a lawsuit filed by the Energy and Environment Legal Institute. He argued that no in or out of state fossil fuel producers would be disproportionately disadvantaged or advantaged by the standard since “all fossil fuel producers in the area served by the grid will be hurt equally and all renewable energy producers in the area will be helped equally.” Gorsuch further argued that whether the mandate raised energy prices was unimportant since Colorado voters had approved the standards with ‘overwhelming support” and were “apparently happy to bear” potential increases in electricity prices.

** ADVANCE FOR WEEKEND EDITIONS MAY 10-11 ** A raw materials storage pond lies in front of the USMagnesium production facility Tuesday, April 22, 2003 in Tooele, Utah. Magnesium is brewed from mineral-rich water baked for years in solar ponds. The smelter on the remote Great Salt Lake western shore ranked No. 1 on a government list of industrial air polluters for five years, a branding its executives disputed but found hard to counter. They’re also fighting federal allegations of stealing minerals — skimming concentrated brines from public lands inundated by an overflowing Great Salt Lake. (AP Photo/Steve C. Wilson)

In 2010, Gorsuch ruled against a U.S. District Judge that had exempted a Utah magnesium plant from hazardous waste disposal as outlined in the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA). Gorsuch argued that since the EPA had never issued a definitive interpretation, the agency could reinterpret an ambiguous regulation without public notice and comment. In 2016, Gorsuch and another 10th Circuit Judge denied the Obama Administration’s request to fast-track a reconsideration of a fracking rule decision, but also denied an industry request to throw out the administration’s appeal all together.

Gorsush on Public Lands

In 2009, the state of Wyoming asked the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals to essentially block a National Park Service proposal to limit the number of snowmobiles in Yellowstone National Park. A U.S. District Court judge had previously set the snowmobile cap at 720 per day, but the NPS wanted to decrease the number to 318. Gorsuch was skeptical that the 10th Circuit had authority to stop the agencies’ rule and ultimately ruled in favor of the Park Service. In 2011, Gorsuch ruled that the U.S. Forest Service was not violating the law by charging visitors to access Mount Evans, a popular hiking site in Denver, CO. However, Gorsuch did suggest that the “[fee] might well be susceptible to a winning challenge as applied to certain visitors, perhaps even the plaintiffs themselves.”

In a 2014 decision, Gorsuch ruled that Entek Energy could legally cross private land to make use of an oil and gas well nearby. The suit was initiated by the surface rights owner, Stull Ranches, which was concerned about the effect of the drilling operations on the grouse. Gorsuch suggested that he could “certainly understand [Stull Ranches] point of view” but suggested that its efforts “would be better directed to legislators than courts.”

Gorsush on Education

In 2013, Gorsuch ruled that a Colorado school district had to pay tuition for a special-needs student to attend a private, out-of-state school as directed by the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). IDEA requires public schools to provide specialized education at the school or compensate parents for tuition at a school that can meet their child’s needs. Gorsuch stated, “The defendant school district failed to provide Elizabeth with a free and appropriate public education. Her private placement was essential to ensure she received a meaningful educational benefit, and her private placement was primarily oriented toward enabling her to obtain an education.” Prior to 2014, Gorsuch was on the Board of Directors at the Boulder Country Day School, a private Pre-K-8 school in Boulder, Colorado. Gorsuch was an adjunct professor at the University of Colorado Law School as recently as 2014.

A half-dozen protestors holds signs outside Hobby Lobby in Duluth on Wednesday morning, July 2, 2014 to protest the company’s winning of its appeal to not comply with the Affordable Health Care’s contraception mandate. Bob King / rking@duluthnews.com

Gorsush on Reproductive Freedom, Religion, and Civil Rights

Gorsuch sided with Hobby Lobby and Little Sisters of the Poor in their cases challenging the contraceptive mandate of the affordable care act. In his book about assisted suicide, Gorsuch wrote “In Roe, the Court explained that, had it found the fetus to be a ‘person’ for the purposes of the Fourteenth Amendment, it could not have created a right to abortion because no constitutional basis exists for preferring the mother’s liberty interests over the child’s life.” SCOTUS Blog noted that Gorsuch “would be a natural successor to Scalia in adopting a pro-religion conception of the Establishment Clause” of the US Constitution. Although Gorsuch has not decided cases directly related to LGBTQ issues, he specifically mentioned gay marriage in a National Review opinion piece about using courts to advance civil rights. Gorsuch wrote “American liberals have become addicted to the courtroom, relying on judges and lawyers rather than elected leaders and the ballot box, as the primary means of effecting their social agenda on everything from gay marriage to assisted suicide to the use of vouchers for private-school education.”

Gorsuch on Criminal Law

Gorsuch is expected to follow Scalia’s interpretation of criminal laws to the advantage of criminal defendants, and in his handling of death penalty cases. SCOTUS Blog reported that a Gorsuch appointment would be “very unlikely to make the court any more solicitous of the claims of capital defendants.” Additionally, SCOTUS Blog observed that “Gorsuch, just like Scalia, is sometimes willing to read criminal laws more narrowly in a way that disfavors the prosecution – especially when the Second Amendment or another constitutional protection is involved.”

Why it could be worse

This is a two edged sword, and I don’t have much to offer you to make you feel better.

1) Gorsuch would replace a very conservative judge. So replacing a very conservative judge with a very conservative judge is not as bad as replacing a liberal judge with a very conservative judge.

2) Because of #1, Democrats will fight less hard to stop this appointment. What Democrats should do is to respond to what the the Republicans did last time there was a SCOTUS appointment. Don’t let this appointment go through. Let’s wait until we have a president and a strong Senate majority from the same party at the same time to appoint any more judges. Then, let’s hope that doesn’t become Trump and a huge Republican majority in the Senate!

I refer you back to the quote at the top of the post. That was August, 1967, when Kissinger said that. (Gorsuch was at Harvard Law much later, contemporary with me and Barack Obama. But I was across the street in the University Museums, not studying law!)

Anyway, I thought it would be interesting to look up what was going on that month, the month Kissinger said that, as well as the same month in the year of Gorsuch’s graduation from Harvard Law. Turns out to be pretty interesting. Here it is from Wikipedia:

1967

August 1 – Race riots in the United States spread to Washington, D.C.
August 9 – Vietnam War – Operation Cochise: United States Marines begin a new operation in the Que Son Valley.
August 21 – The People’s Republic of China announces that it has shot down United States planes violating its airspace.
August 23 – Jimi Hendrix’s debut album Are You Experienced is released in the United States.
August 25 – American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell is assassinated in Arlington, Virginia.
August 30 – Thurgood Marshall is confirmed as the first African American Justice of the United States Supreme Court.

1991 (selected)

August 6 – Tim Berners-Lee announces the World Wide Web project and software on the alt.hypertext newsgroup. The first website, “info.cern.ch” is created.
August 7 – Shapour Bakhtiar, former prime minister of Iran, is assassinated.
August 8 – The Warsaw radio mast, the tallest construction ever built at the time, collapses.
August 13 – The Super Nintendo Entertainment System (or “Super Nintendo”) is released in the United States.
August 19+ – Dissolution of the Soviet Union:
August 25 – Serbian aggression (Yugoslav People’s Army and Chetniks) starts
August 25 – Student Linus Torvalds posts messages to Usenet newsgroup about the new operating system kernel he has been developing.
August 29 – Boris Yeltsin bans and dissolves the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

August, 2017:

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/2kVErzC

Neil Gorsuch is a significant and meaningful choice for SCOTUS. The image above is not fake, it really is his Harvard Law yearbook photo. If he was a Democratic pick, that one image would end him. Since he is a Republican pick, democrats have a Big Tent instead of a spine, and Republicans have no ethical floor to avoid crashing into, he will be confirmed.

Judge Neil Gorsuch speaks, after US President Donald Trump nominated him for the Supreme Court, at the White House in Washington, DC, on January 31, 2017.
President Donald Trump on nominated federal appellate judge Neil Gorsuch as his Supreme Court nominee, tilting the balance of the court back in the conservatives’ favor. / AFP / Brendan SMIALOWSKI (Photo credit should read BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images)

He is a very conservative judge, probably more conservative than anyone who has been on the court in recent memory or possibly ever.

This pick seems to say a lot about how the Trump administration seems to be operating. (See: The Norms of Society and Presidential Executive Orders.)

Gorsuch is a Geroge W. Bush appointee (10th circuit, May 2006). He is famously the son of Anne Gorsuch-Buford, who was EPA Administrator under Reagan, forced to resign after being shown ineffective in actually protecting the environment.

Gorsuch produced an op-ed in the ridiculously conservative National Review, in 2005 (NR 2/7/05), criticizing liberals, in which he wrote,

“But rather than use the judiciary for extraordinary cases, von Drehle recognizes that American liberals have become addicted to the courtroom, relying on judges and lawyers rather than elected leaders and the ballot box, as the primary means of effecting their social agenda on everything from gay marriage to assisted suicide to the use of vouchers for private-school education. This overweening addiction to the courtroom as the place to debate social policy is bad for the country and bad for the judiciary. In the legislative arena, especially when the country is closely divided, compromises tend to be the rule the day. But when judges rule this or that policy unconstitutional, there’s little room for compromise: One side must win, the other must lose.”

He has been very active in the Federalist Society, a libertarian and conservative group of lawyers and judges.

Gorsuch has fairly direct ties to the Anschutz Foundation. He wa a member of the Walden Group (a company) which was registered to Cannon Harvey of Colorado, and the Harveys (Cannon and Lyndia) were or are friends of Gorsuch according to a 2008 financial disclosure report. Harvey was an officer and member of the board of directors of Anschutz, and Anschutz funds directly and indirectly anti-science organization ssuch as the Heritage Foundation, extremely conservative groups like the Goldwater Institute, supports Right to Work (think Wisconsin), and has seemingly funded anti-LGBTQ efforts. According the Huffington Post (1/5/17),

“The 77-year-old entrepreneur, who is the chairman of the Anschutz Corporation, is listed as a key ‘enemy of equality’ in an infographic produced by the Washington, D.C.-based LGBTQ advocacy group Freedom for All Americans. The infographic indicates that Anschutz has donated thousands of dollars to the Family Research Council, the Alliance Defending Freedom and the National Christian Foundation, all of which have been staunch opponents in the fight for LGBTQ equality, through the Anschutz Family Foundation.”

This has been disputed by the Anschutz Foundation CEO. At the very least, esposure of this possible connection may have caused Anschutz to withdraw support form anti-LGBTQ groups. This has little do do with Gorsuch per se, but as background, we can see that he hangs with, and supports, the most conservative groups and folk. That together with his anti-Liberal screen regarding judicial legislating places him firmly at the borked end of the judicial spectrum, at least.

Here is some background (from a backgrounder compiled by a group of experts) on his positions in various important areas, provided in a white paper by :

Gorsush on The Environment

In an August 2016 concurring opinion to a case involving residency for undocumented immigrants, Gorsuch wrote a “blistering” 23-page critique of the Chevron Doctrine, which he believes gives far too much power to administrative agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency.

The Chevron Doctrine allows judges to defer to administrative agencies’ interpretation when the law as written by Congress is “silent or ambiguous.” The doctrine arose from the 1984 Supreme Court decision Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council and is frequently cited in litigation regarding environmental regulations. In his work on the 10th Circuit, Gorsuch has upheld environmental regulations in at least two instances. In 2015, as part of a three-judge panel, Gorsuch upheld Colorado’s renewable energy standard in a lawsuit filed by the Energy and Environment Legal Institute. He argued that no in or out of state fossil fuel producers would be disproportionately disadvantaged or advantaged by the standard since “all fossil fuel producers in the area served by the grid will be hurt equally and all renewable energy producers in the area will be helped equally.” Gorsuch further argued that whether the mandate raised energy prices was unimportant since Colorado voters had approved the standards with ‘overwhelming support” and were “apparently happy to bear” potential increases in electricity prices.

** ADVANCE FOR WEEKEND EDITIONS MAY 10-11 ** A raw materials storage pond lies in front of the USMagnesium production facility Tuesday, April 22, 2003 in Tooele, Utah. Magnesium is brewed from mineral-rich water baked for years in solar ponds. The smelter on the remote Great Salt Lake western shore ranked No. 1 on a government list of industrial air polluters for five years, a branding its executives disputed but found hard to counter. They’re also fighting federal allegations of stealing minerals — skimming concentrated brines from public lands inundated by an overflowing Great Salt Lake. (AP Photo/Steve C. Wilson)

In 2010, Gorsuch ruled against a U.S. District Judge that had exempted a Utah magnesium plant from hazardous waste disposal as outlined in the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA). Gorsuch argued that since the EPA had never issued a definitive interpretation, the agency could reinterpret an ambiguous regulation without public notice and comment. In 2016, Gorsuch and another 10th Circuit Judge denied the Obama Administration’s request to fast-track a reconsideration of a fracking rule decision, but also denied an industry request to throw out the administration’s appeal all together.

Gorsush on Public Lands

In 2009, the state of Wyoming asked the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals to essentially block a National Park Service proposal to limit the number of snowmobiles in Yellowstone National Park. A U.S. District Court judge had previously set the snowmobile cap at 720 per day, but the NPS wanted to decrease the number to 318. Gorsuch was skeptical that the 10th Circuit had authority to stop the agencies’ rule and ultimately ruled in favor of the Park Service. In 2011, Gorsuch ruled that the U.S. Forest Service was not violating the law by charging visitors to access Mount Evans, a popular hiking site in Denver, CO. However, Gorsuch did suggest that the “[fee] might well be susceptible to a winning challenge as applied to certain visitors, perhaps even the plaintiffs themselves.”

In a 2014 decision, Gorsuch ruled that Entek Energy could legally cross private land to make use of an oil and gas well nearby. The suit was initiated by the surface rights owner, Stull Ranches, which was concerned about the effect of the drilling operations on the grouse. Gorsuch suggested that he could “certainly understand [Stull Ranches] point of view” but suggested that its efforts “would be better directed to legislators than courts.”

Gorsush on Education

In 2013, Gorsuch ruled that a Colorado school district had to pay tuition for a special-needs student to attend a private, out-of-state school as directed by the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). IDEA requires public schools to provide specialized education at the school or compensate parents for tuition at a school that can meet their child’s needs. Gorsuch stated, “The defendant school district failed to provide Elizabeth with a free and appropriate public education. Her private placement was essential to ensure she received a meaningful educational benefit, and her private placement was primarily oriented toward enabling her to obtain an education.” Prior to 2014, Gorsuch was on the Board of Directors at the Boulder Country Day School, a private Pre-K-8 school in Boulder, Colorado. Gorsuch was an adjunct professor at the University of Colorado Law School as recently as 2014.

A half-dozen protestors holds signs outside Hobby Lobby in Duluth on Wednesday morning, July 2, 2014 to protest the company’s winning of its appeal to not comply with the Affordable Health Care’s contraception mandate. Bob King / rking@duluthnews.com

Gorsush on Reproductive Freedom, Religion, and Civil Rights

Gorsuch sided with Hobby Lobby and Little Sisters of the Poor in their cases challenging the contraceptive mandate of the affordable care act. In his book about assisted suicide, Gorsuch wrote “In Roe, the Court explained that, had it found the fetus to be a ‘person’ for the purposes of the Fourteenth Amendment, it could not have created a right to abortion because no constitutional basis exists for preferring the mother’s liberty interests over the child’s life.” SCOTUS Blog noted that Gorsuch “would be a natural successor to Scalia in adopting a pro-religion conception of the Establishment Clause” of the US Constitution. Although Gorsuch has not decided cases directly related to LGBTQ issues, he specifically mentioned gay marriage in a National Review opinion piece about using courts to advance civil rights. Gorsuch wrote “American liberals have become addicted to the courtroom, relying on judges and lawyers rather than elected leaders and the ballot box, as the primary means of effecting their social agenda on everything from gay marriage to assisted suicide to the use of vouchers for private-school education.”

Gorsuch on Criminal Law

Gorsuch is expected to follow Scalia’s interpretation of criminal laws to the advantage of criminal defendants, and in his handling of death penalty cases. SCOTUS Blog reported that a Gorsuch appointment would be “very unlikely to make the court any more solicitous of the claims of capital defendants.” Additionally, SCOTUS Blog observed that “Gorsuch, just like Scalia, is sometimes willing to read criminal laws more narrowly in a way that disfavors the prosecution – especially when the Second Amendment or another constitutional protection is involved.”

Why it could be worse

This is a two edged sword, and I don’t have much to offer you to make you feel better.

1) Gorsuch would replace a very conservative judge. So replacing a very conservative judge with a very conservative judge is not as bad as replacing a liberal judge with a very conservative judge.

2) Because of #1, Democrats will fight less hard to stop this appointment. What Democrats should do is to respond to what the the Republicans did last time there was a SCOTUS appointment. Don’t let this appointment go through. Let’s wait until we have a president and a strong Senate majority from the same party at the same time to appoint any more judges. Then, let’s hope that doesn’t become Trump and a huge Republican majority in the Senate!

I refer you back to the quote at the top of the post. That was August, 1967, when Kissinger said that. (Gorsuch was at Harvard Law much later, contemporary with me and Barack Obama. But I was across the street in the University Museums, not studying law!)

Anyway, I thought it would be interesting to look up what was going on that month, the month Kissinger said that, as well as the same month in the year of Gorsuch’s graduation from Harvard Law. Turns out to be pretty interesting. Here it is from Wikipedia:

1967

August 1 – Race riots in the United States spread to Washington, D.C.
August 9 – Vietnam War – Operation Cochise: United States Marines begin a new operation in the Que Son Valley.
August 21 – The People’s Republic of China announces that it has shot down United States planes violating its airspace.
August 23 – Jimi Hendrix’s debut album Are You Experienced is released in the United States.
August 25 – American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell is assassinated in Arlington, Virginia.
August 30 – Thurgood Marshall is confirmed as the first African American Justice of the United States Supreme Court.

1991 (selected)

August 6 – Tim Berners-Lee announces the World Wide Web project and software on the alt.hypertext newsgroup. The first website, “info.cern.ch” is created.
August 7 – Shapour Bakhtiar, former prime minister of Iran, is assassinated.
August 8 – The Warsaw radio mast, the tallest construction ever built at the time, collapses.
August 13 – The Super Nintendo Entertainment System (or “Super Nintendo”) is released in the United States.
August 19+ – Dissolution of the Soviet Union:
August 25 – Serbian aggression (Yugoslav People’s Army and Chetniks) starts
August 25 – Student Linus Torvalds posts messages to Usenet newsgroup about the new operating system kernel he has been developing.
August 29 – Boris Yeltsin bans and dissolves the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

August, 2017:

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/2kVErzC

Pan-STARRS solves the biggest problem facing every astronomer (Synopsis) [Starts With A Bang]

“If you can’t measure something, you can’t understand it. If you can’t understand it, you can’t control it. If you can’t control it, you can’t improve it.” -H. James Harrington

If you want to observe the night sky, it’s not quite as simple as pointing your telescope and collecting photons. You have to calibrate your data, otherwise your interpretation of what you’re looking at could be skewed by gas, dust, the atmosphere or other intervening factors that you’ve failed to consider. Without a proper calibration, you don’t know how reliable what you’re looking at is.

Pan-STARRS1 Observatory atop Haleakala Maui at sunset. Image credit: Rob Ratkowski.

The previous best calibration was the Digitized Sky Survey 2, which went down to 13 millimagnitudes, or an accuracy of 1.2%. Just a few weeks ago, Pan-STARRS released the largest astronomy survey results of all-time: 2 Petabytes of data. It quadruples the accuracy of every calibration we’ve ever had, and that’s before you even get into the phenomenal science it’s uncovered.

This compressed view of the entire sky visible from Hawai’i by the Pan-STARRS1 Observatory is the result of half a million exposures, each about 45 seconds in length. Image credit: Danny Farrow, Pan-STARRS1 Science Consortium and Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics.

Come learn how it’s solved the biggest problem facing every astronomer, and why observational astronomy will never be the same!

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/2kqNqMv

“If you can’t measure something, you can’t understand it. If you can’t understand it, you can’t control it. If you can’t control it, you can’t improve it.” -H. James Harrington

If you want to observe the night sky, it’s not quite as simple as pointing your telescope and collecting photons. You have to calibrate your data, otherwise your interpretation of what you’re looking at could be skewed by gas, dust, the atmosphere or other intervening factors that you’ve failed to consider. Without a proper calibration, you don’t know how reliable what you’re looking at is.

Pan-STARRS1 Observatory atop Haleakala Maui at sunset. Image credit: Rob Ratkowski.

The previous best calibration was the Digitized Sky Survey 2, which went down to 13 millimagnitudes, or an accuracy of 1.2%. Just a few weeks ago, Pan-STARRS released the largest astronomy survey results of all-time: 2 Petabytes of data. It quadruples the accuracy of every calibration we’ve ever had, and that’s before you even get into the phenomenal science it’s uncovered.

This compressed view of the entire sky visible from Hawai’i by the Pan-STARRS1 Observatory is the result of half a million exposures, each about 45 seconds in length. Image credit: Danny Farrow, Pan-STARRS1 Science Consortium and Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics.

Come learn how it’s solved the biggest problem facing every astronomer, and why observational astronomy will never be the same!

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/2kqNqMv

February birthstone is the amethyst

Image via UCL Mathematical and Physical Sciences

February’s birthstone is the amethyst. Amethysts contain the second most abundant mineral found in Earth’s crust – quartz. Quartz is often found lining the insides of geodes. So it’s no wonder that geodes sometimes contain amethysts, too. Like quartz, amethysts are a transparent form of silicon dioxide (SiO2). An amethyst’s color can range from a faint mauve to a rich purple. It’s not clear why they’re purple. Some scientists believe the purple color arises from the amethysts’ iron oxide content, while others attribute the color to manganese or hydrocarbons.

Amethysts are very sensitive to heat. When heated to 400 or 500 degrees Celsius, an amethyst’s color changes to a brownish-yellow or red. Under some circumstances, the stones can turn green when heated. Heat may even transform an amethyst into a naturally-rare mineral called citrine. And even without heating, the violet color of an amethyst may fade over time.

An amethyst geode that formed when large crystals grew in open spaces inside the rock. Image via Wikipedia

Commercial sources of amethyst are Brazil and Uruguay; while in the U.S., most amethyst is found in Arizona and North Carolina.

Image via photodomic.ru

The amethyst has a rich history of lore and legend. It can be traced back as far as 25,000 years ago in France, where it was used as a decorative stone by prehistoric humans. It has also been found among the remains of Neolithic man.

It’s said that the signet ring worn by Cleopatra was an amethyst, engraved with the figure of Mithras, a Persian deity symbolizing the Divine Idea, Source of Light and Life. It is also said to be the stone of Saint Valentine, who wore an amethyst engraved with the figure of his assistant, Cupid. Saint Valentine’s Day is still observed in February.

Roman intaglio engraved gem of Caracalla in amethyst, once in the Treasury of Sainte-Chapelle. Image via Marie-Lan Nguyen

The word amethyst comes from the Greek word “amethystos” meaning “not drunk,” and was believed to prevent its wearers from intoxication. The following is a story from Greco-Roman mythology, as quoted from Birthstones by Willard Heaps:

Bacchus, the god of wine in classical mythology, was offended by Diana the huntress. Determined on revenge, he declared that the first person he met as he went through the forest would be eaten by his tigers. As it happened, the first person to cross his path was the beautiful maiden Amethyst on her way to worship at the shrine of Diana. In terror, she called upon the goddess to save her, and before his eyes, Bacchus observed the maiden changed to a pure white, sparkling image of stone. Realizing his guilt and repenting his cruelty, Bacchus poured grape wine over her, thus giving the stone the exquisite violet hue of the amethyst. The carryover to non-intoxication was quite logical, and in ancient Rome, amethyst cups were used for wine, so drinkers would have no fear of overindulgence.

The early Egyptians believed that the amethyst possessed good powers, and placed the stones in the tombs of pharaohs. During the Middle Ages, it was used as medication, believed to dispel sleep, sharpen intellect, and protect the wearer from sorcery. It was also believed to bring victory in battle. In Arabian mythology, the amethyst was supposed to protect the wearer from bad dreams and gout.

Enjoying EarthSky so far? Sign up for our free daily newsletter today!

Amethyst cluster from Magaliesburg, South Africa. Image via J.J. Harrison

See the birthstones for the rest of the year.

January birthstone
February birthstone
March birthstone
April birthstone
May birthstone
June birthstone
July birthstone
August birthstone
September birthstone
October birthstone
November birthstone
December birthstone

from EarthSky http://ift.tt/1oJAFXt

Image via UCL Mathematical and Physical Sciences

February’s birthstone is the amethyst. Amethysts contain the second most abundant mineral found in Earth’s crust – quartz. Quartz is often found lining the insides of geodes. So it’s no wonder that geodes sometimes contain amethysts, too. Like quartz, amethysts are a transparent form of silicon dioxide (SiO2). An amethyst’s color can range from a faint mauve to a rich purple. It’s not clear why they’re purple. Some scientists believe the purple color arises from the amethysts’ iron oxide content, while others attribute the color to manganese or hydrocarbons.

Amethysts are very sensitive to heat. When heated to 400 or 500 degrees Celsius, an amethyst’s color changes to a brownish-yellow or red. Under some circumstances, the stones can turn green when heated. Heat may even transform an amethyst into a naturally-rare mineral called citrine. And even without heating, the violet color of an amethyst may fade over time.

An amethyst geode that formed when large crystals grew in open spaces inside the rock. Image via Wikipedia

Commercial sources of amethyst are Brazil and Uruguay; while in the U.S., most amethyst is found in Arizona and North Carolina.

Image via photodomic.ru

The amethyst has a rich history of lore and legend. It can be traced back as far as 25,000 years ago in France, where it was used as a decorative stone by prehistoric humans. It has also been found among the remains of Neolithic man.

It’s said that the signet ring worn by Cleopatra was an amethyst, engraved with the figure of Mithras, a Persian deity symbolizing the Divine Idea, Source of Light and Life. It is also said to be the stone of Saint Valentine, who wore an amethyst engraved with the figure of his assistant, Cupid. Saint Valentine’s Day is still observed in February.

Roman intaglio engraved gem of Caracalla in amethyst, once in the Treasury of Sainte-Chapelle. Image via Marie-Lan Nguyen

The word amethyst comes from the Greek word “amethystos” meaning “not drunk,” and was believed to prevent its wearers from intoxication. The following is a story from Greco-Roman mythology, as quoted from Birthstones by Willard Heaps:

Bacchus, the god of wine in classical mythology, was offended by Diana the huntress. Determined on revenge, he declared that the first person he met as he went through the forest would be eaten by his tigers. As it happened, the first person to cross his path was the beautiful maiden Amethyst on her way to worship at the shrine of Diana. In terror, she called upon the goddess to save her, and before his eyes, Bacchus observed the maiden changed to a pure white, sparkling image of stone. Realizing his guilt and repenting his cruelty, Bacchus poured grape wine over her, thus giving the stone the exquisite violet hue of the amethyst. The carryover to non-intoxication was quite logical, and in ancient Rome, amethyst cups were used for wine, so drinkers would have no fear of overindulgence.

The early Egyptians believed that the amethyst possessed good powers, and placed the stones in the tombs of pharaohs. During the Middle Ages, it was used as medication, believed to dispel sleep, sharpen intellect, and protect the wearer from sorcery. It was also believed to bring victory in battle. In Arabian mythology, the amethyst was supposed to protect the wearer from bad dreams and gout.

Enjoying EarthSky so far? Sign up for our free daily newsletter today!

Amethyst cluster from Magaliesburg, South Africa. Image via J.J. Harrison

See the birthstones for the rest of the year.

January birthstone
February birthstone
March birthstone
April birthstone
May birthstone
June birthstone
July birthstone
August birthstone
September birthstone
October birthstone
November birthstone
December birthstone

from EarthSky http://ift.tt/1oJAFXt

New Book Alert: “Breakfast With Einstein” [Uncertain Principles]

So, I tweeted about this yesterday, but I also spent the entire day feeling achy and feverish, so didn’t have brains or time for a blog post with more details. I’m feeling healthier this morning, though time is still short, so I’ll give a quick summary of the details:

— As you can see in the photo (taken with my phone at Starbucks just before I took these to the post office to mail them), I signed a contract for a new book. Four copies, because lawyers.

— The contract is with Oneworld Publications in the UK, who had a best-seller on that side of the pond with How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog.

— The working title of the book is Breakfast With Einstein, and the subject matter is basically this talk I gave at TEDxAlbany:

The basic idea is to use ordinary morning activities as a hook to talk about the quantum physics underlying everyday phenomena.

— The due date for the book is in December 2017, publication to be sometime in 2018. Probably. You know, publishing– everything is subject to change.

— There is not yet a US publisher for this book– we’ve had some interest, but to my great sorrow and annoyance, Eureka didn’t sell well, and that makes things difficult. We’re still working on getting a publisher for this side of the Atlantic, and when that happens, I’ll post another cell-phone photo of legal documents. If you’re a publisher and this sounds interesting, please drop me a line and I’ll put you in touch with my agent…

I’ve known about this for a while– we agreed to the deal on election day last November, so at least one good thing happened that day– but transatlantic business deals are more complicated, so it took a while to get everything set up. And now, I’ve signed the contracts, and I guess I need to write the book. Once I have brains and time for that, which is not this morning.

The traditional photo of a pile of signed contracts for a new book, just before mailing them.

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/2kgqHQT

So, I tweeted about this yesterday, but I also spent the entire day feeling achy and feverish, so didn’t have brains or time for a blog post with more details. I’m feeling healthier this morning, though time is still short, so I’ll give a quick summary of the details:

— As you can see in the photo (taken with my phone at Starbucks just before I took these to the post office to mail them), I signed a contract for a new book. Four copies, because lawyers.

— The contract is with Oneworld Publications in the UK, who had a best-seller on that side of the pond with How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog.

— The working title of the book is Breakfast With Einstein, and the subject matter is basically this talk I gave at TEDxAlbany:

The basic idea is to use ordinary morning activities as a hook to talk about the quantum physics underlying everyday phenomena.

— The due date for the book is in December 2017, publication to be sometime in 2018. Probably. You know, publishing– everything is subject to change.

— There is not yet a US publisher for this book– we’ve had some interest, but to my great sorrow and annoyance, Eureka didn’t sell well, and that makes things difficult. We’re still working on getting a publisher for this side of the Atlantic, and when that happens, I’ll post another cell-phone photo of legal documents. If you’re a publisher and this sounds interesting, please drop me a line and I’ll put you in touch with my agent…

I’ve known about this for a while– we agreed to the deal on election day last November, so at least one good thing happened that day– but transatlantic business deals are more complicated, so it took a while to get everything set up. And now, I’ve signed the contracts, and I guess I need to write the book. Once I have brains and time for that, which is not this morning.

The traditional photo of a pile of signed contracts for a new book, just before mailing them.

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/2kgqHQT

Alternative medicine for premature ejaculation? Surprise, surprise! It doesn’t work. [Respectful Insolence]

I must admit that the last couple of weeks have been rather grim here on the old blog. Betweemn Donald Trump’s White House spewing , an unfortunate patient embracing quackery, pseudoscience at the VA, and more. So it is that I feel as though it might not be a bad idea to step back for a day, to look into an acupuncture “study” that’s been making the rounds in the media. Oddly enough, I remember it showing up a week ago and meant to discuss it then. So I’m glad that I saw a new news story on it in —where else?—The Daily Mail in the form of an article entitled Forget Viagra – acupuncture could stave off erectile dysfunction, experts claim.

As soon as I read the article, I laughed. It was so sloppily done that the title didn’t even match what the study was about, saying “Acupuncture could help men with premature ejaculation, a new report claims..” So what was the paper about, erectile dysfunction or premature ejaculation? It turns out that it’s about premature ejaculation. Darn. There go the boner jokes. Oh, well, there is this:

Acupuncture could help men with premature ejaculation, a new report claims.

The improvements were small, and the studies were of varying quality.
However, researchers in the UK concluded various alternative treatments – including acupuncture, Chinese herbal medicine, Ayurvedic herbal medicine and a Korean topical cream – have significant desirable effects.

Experts claim the finding could bring welcome relief for men who have not got Viagra out of embarrassment, or are marred by a months-long wait to see a doctor.

‘It’s important to evaluate the evidence for other therapies,’ said lead author Katy Cooper of the University of Sheffield.

‘To our knowledge, this is the first systematic review to assess complementary and alternative medicine for premature ejaculation.

So wait a minute. Is this study about acupuncture and premature ejaculation or is it about more? I was puzzled. So I did what I always do in cases like this. I went to the source, which, I point out, took a bit of effort to find, thanks to the Mail’s failure to link to the actual study. Find it I did (eventually), though, in the form of an article by Cooper et al entitled Complementary and Alternative Medicine for Management of Premature Ejaculation: A Systematic Review. So wait. This is about all CAM for management of premature ejaculation. There go the jokes about sticking needles into men’s nether regions and/or early liftoff. Or not. Or, I could just go for the joke about my never, ever having a problem or needing treatment for something like this.

In any case, it’s important to understand what premature ejaculation is. According to this article, premature ejaculation (PE) is defined as ejaculation within 1 minute (lifelong PE) or 3 minutes (acquired PE), inability to delay ejaculation, and negative personal consequences. I wasn’t familiar with the treatment of PE; so it was of interest for me to read the authors’ summary in the introduction:

Management of PE can involve a range of interventions. These include systemic drug treatments such as selective serotonin reup- take inhibitors (SSRIs), tricyclic antidepressants, phosphodiesterase type 5 inhibitors, and analgesics and topical anesthetic creams and sprays that are applied directly to the penis shortly before inter- course.9,10 Behavioral therapies also can be useful.6,9,11,12 These can include psychosexual or relationship counseling for men and/or couples to address psychological and interpersonal issues that could be contributing to PE. Behavioral therapies also can include physical techniques to help men develop sexual skills to delay ejaculation and improve sexual self-confidence, such as the “stop- start” technique, “squeeze” technique, and sensate focus.6,9,11,12 There are sparse data on whether and for how long effectiveness is maintained after cessation of treatment (drug or behavioral) and whether repeat treatments are effective.

Well, OK, then. That’s a bit more than I wanted to know.

Now, I can understand why men might try quackery if they have problems in the sack. It doesn’t take much searching online to find the veritably panoply of remedies, herbal and otherwise, for PE and erectile dysfunction. That doesn’t even take into account the various products sold as aphrodisiacs. So it makes sense to see what the authors defined as “CAM”:

CAM has been defined by the Cochrane Collaboration as “a broad domain of healing resources that encompasses all health systems, modalities, and practices and their accompanying the- ories and beliefs, other than those intrinsic to the politically dominant health system of a particular society or culture in a given historical period.”15 In addition, many CAM therapies are based on a traditional model of health and well-being, and many (although not all) are designed to treat the whole patient as opposed to a specific condition, whereas some (although not all) involve the use of traditional or natural therapies. Therefore, CAM is defined in this study as therapies for PE that have typically not been provided within conventional Western health care systems and that appear on the list of CAM therapies collated by the Cochrane Collaboration.

In other words, CAM is anything outside of science-based medicine. Yeah, that will do it. They looked for randomized clinical trials, with a study being eligible for inclusion if they compared CAM therapies for management of PE against placebo, waitlist, no treatment, or another therapy or assessed combination treatment with CAM. They also had to include standard measures of PE outcomes, including:

• Premature Ejaculation Profile (PEP)
• Index of Premature Ejaculation (IPE)
• Premature Ejaculation Diagnostic Tool (PEDT)
• Arabic Index of Premature Ejaculation (AIPE)
• Chinese Index of Premature Ejaculation–5 (CIPE-5)
• International Index of Erectile Function (IIEF)

Live and learn. I had no idea there were so many measurement of PE. For instance, one of them mentioned is intravaginal ejaculation latency time (IELT), which, I learned through Googling, frequently measured by couples using a stopwatch. (It seems to me that that would really ruin the mood.) Again, I learned more reading this paper than I probably actually wanted to.

Not surprisingly, the quality of the studies was pretty crappy, too:

The risk of bias within included studies is presented in Table 2. Five studies reported the method of randomization,26, 28, 29, 32, 35 whereas the other five did not report the method but did state that the study was randomized. Allocation concealment was unclear in all studies. Blinding of participants and personnel was reported as being undertaken in five studies.26, 29, 33, 34, 35 Blinding of outcome assessment was unclear in all studies except one,35 which reported that this was blinded. All studies except one35 were considered at low risk of bias for completeness of outcome data, with eight studies including at least 90% of randomized patients in the primary analysis and the two studies of SS cream including 85%34 and 68%,35 respectively. All studies scored a low risk for selective reporting except for one that did not report on IELT.27 Of the nine studies reporting on IELT, this was measured by stopwatch in five studies,26, 28, 29, 34, 35 by questionnaire in one study,32 and the method of IELT assessment was not reported in three studies.30, 31, 33 In summary, all 10 studies were classed as having an overall unclear risk of bias because of unclear reporting of allocation concealment (all 10 studies) and unclear blinding of participants and personnel (five studies).

On to the results. Overall, 2,455 citations were identified through the search strategy chosen, which lead to 14 of them meeting all their criteria. Two of these were studies of Chinese medicine that were excluded because they did not report on IELT or any validated or widely used PE outcome measurement. Two more studies assessing a combination of yoga and pelvic floor exercises were excluded because one was not randomized and the other did not report on IELT or any validated or widely used PE outcome measurement. That left only ten RCTs. Two studies examined acupuncture, five looked at Chinese herbal medicine, one studied Ayurvedic herbal medicine and two of Korean topical ‘severance secret’ cream.

Despite all the news stories I saw about this systematic review emphasizing acupuncture, of the two acupuncture studies examined, one was from Turkey and one from China, each comparing acupuncture with either sham or various drugs used to treat PE. The results were, at best, quite equivocal. Indeed, the best the authors could say was this:

One study compared acupuncture against sham acupuncture (N analyzed = 60) and In summary, the available data indicate that acupuncture might be slightly more effective than placebo (sham) in treating PE, although this is based on only one study of unclear quality.

Yes, the “positive” result found is based on one crappy study. In other words, there’s no good evidence that acupuncture helps PE. This is not surprising, given that there is no physiological reason to think that there would be Basically, what was presented was a grab bag of studies:

The included studies evaluated the effectiveness of acupuncture, Chinese herbal medicine, Ayurvedic herbal medicine, and topical SS cream in improving IELT and other outcomes. Overall risk of bias was unclear in all studies because of unclear allocation concealment and/or blinding. Studies were clinically heterogeneous and stopwatch-measured IELT was reported in only 5 of 10 studies. Acupuncture increased IELT over placebo (one study; MD = 0.55 minute, P = .001). Ayurvedic herbal medicine increased IELT over placebo (one study; MD = 0.80 minute, P = .001). Topical SS cream improved IELT over placebo in two crossover studies (MD = 8.60 minutes, P < .001), although inclusion criteria were broad (IELT < 3 minutes), and there were mild irritant effects in some patients. SSRIs were more effective on IELT than Chinese herbal medicine (three studies; MD = 1.01 minutes, P = .02). However, combination treatment with Chinese medicine plus SSRIs improved IELT over SSRIs alone (two studies; MD = 1.92 minutes, P < .00001) or Chinese medicine alone (two studies; MD = 2.52 minutes, P < .00001). Adverse effects were not consistently assessed but where reported were generally mild. There were sparse data on the potential for drug interactions.

In other words, the results were mixed and pretty unconvincing. Even the Daily Mail article concedes it, stating quite plainly that “The main limitation of the study is the underlying weakness of the studies evaluated” and that “the studies are so different, it’s tough to draw conclusions about the different options.” In the article, the authors dance around this issue quite impressively:

Pragmatically, because there are so many CAM therapies available, it seems unlikely that they will all undergo further evaluation in large-scale studies. Therefore, it might be reasonable to summarize that the CAM therapies reviewed here have some (although limited) evidence for effectiveness in treating PE, and that they might provide another option for patients who favor a mind-body approach or who wish to avoid long-term pharmacologic treatment. It would need to be borne in mind that the effectiveness evidence is not conclusive, and care would need to be taken to monitor for adverse effects and to consider the potential for herb-drug interactions.

No it isn’t reasonable to say that the CAM therapies reviewed “might provide another option for patients,” and the evidence for effectiveness is far less than “not conclusive.” In fact there’s nothing much in this review article to suggest that alternative medicine helps PE.

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/2kQOfPc

I must admit that the last couple of weeks have been rather grim here on the old blog. Betweemn Donald Trump’s White House spewing , an unfortunate patient embracing quackery, pseudoscience at the VA, and more. So it is that I feel as though it might not be a bad idea to step back for a day, to look into an acupuncture “study” that’s been making the rounds in the media. Oddly enough, I remember it showing up a week ago and meant to discuss it then. So I’m glad that I saw a new news story on it in —where else?—The Daily Mail in the form of an article entitled Forget Viagra – acupuncture could stave off erectile dysfunction, experts claim.

As soon as I read the article, I laughed. It was so sloppily done that the title didn’t even match what the study was about, saying “Acupuncture could help men with premature ejaculation, a new report claims..” So what was the paper about, erectile dysfunction or premature ejaculation? It turns out that it’s about premature ejaculation. Darn. There go the boner jokes. Oh, well, there is this:

Acupuncture could help men with premature ejaculation, a new report claims.

The improvements were small, and the studies were of varying quality.
However, researchers in the UK concluded various alternative treatments – including acupuncture, Chinese herbal medicine, Ayurvedic herbal medicine and a Korean topical cream – have significant desirable effects.

Experts claim the finding could bring welcome relief for men who have not got Viagra out of embarrassment, or are marred by a months-long wait to see a doctor.

‘It’s important to evaluate the evidence for other therapies,’ said lead author Katy Cooper of the University of Sheffield.

‘To our knowledge, this is the first systematic review to assess complementary and alternative medicine for premature ejaculation.

So wait a minute. Is this study about acupuncture and premature ejaculation or is it about more? I was puzzled. So I did what I always do in cases like this. I went to the source, which, I point out, took a bit of effort to find, thanks to the Mail’s failure to link to the actual study. Find it I did (eventually), though, in the form of an article by Cooper et al entitled Complementary and Alternative Medicine for Management of Premature Ejaculation: A Systematic Review. So wait. This is about all CAM for management of premature ejaculation. There go the jokes about sticking needles into men’s nether regions and/or early liftoff. Or not. Or, I could just go for the joke about my never, ever having a problem or needing treatment for something like this.

In any case, it’s important to understand what premature ejaculation is. According to this article, premature ejaculation (PE) is defined as ejaculation within 1 minute (lifelong PE) or 3 minutes (acquired PE), inability to delay ejaculation, and negative personal consequences. I wasn’t familiar with the treatment of PE; so it was of interest for me to read the authors’ summary in the introduction:

Management of PE can involve a range of interventions. These include systemic drug treatments such as selective serotonin reup- take inhibitors (SSRIs), tricyclic antidepressants, phosphodiesterase type 5 inhibitors, and analgesics and topical anesthetic creams and sprays that are applied directly to the penis shortly before inter- course.9,10 Behavioral therapies also can be useful.6,9,11,12 These can include psychosexual or relationship counseling for men and/or couples to address psychological and interpersonal issues that could be contributing to PE. Behavioral therapies also can include physical techniques to help men develop sexual skills to delay ejaculation and improve sexual self-confidence, such as the “stop- start” technique, “squeeze” technique, and sensate focus.6,9,11,12 There are sparse data on whether and for how long effectiveness is maintained after cessation of treatment (drug or behavioral) and whether repeat treatments are effective.

Well, OK, then. That’s a bit more than I wanted to know.

Now, I can understand why men might try quackery if they have problems in the sack. It doesn’t take much searching online to find the veritably panoply of remedies, herbal and otherwise, for PE and erectile dysfunction. That doesn’t even take into account the various products sold as aphrodisiacs. So it makes sense to see what the authors defined as “CAM”:

CAM has been defined by the Cochrane Collaboration as “a broad domain of healing resources that encompasses all health systems, modalities, and practices and their accompanying the- ories and beliefs, other than those intrinsic to the politically dominant health system of a particular society or culture in a given historical period.”15 In addition, many CAM therapies are based on a traditional model of health and well-being, and many (although not all) are designed to treat the whole patient as opposed to a specific condition, whereas some (although not all) involve the use of traditional or natural therapies. Therefore, CAM is defined in this study as therapies for PE that have typically not been provided within conventional Western health care systems and that appear on the list of CAM therapies collated by the Cochrane Collaboration.

In other words, CAM is anything outside of science-based medicine. Yeah, that will do it. They looked for randomized clinical trials, with a study being eligible for inclusion if they compared CAM therapies for management of PE against placebo, waitlist, no treatment, or another therapy or assessed combination treatment with CAM. They also had to include standard measures of PE outcomes, including:

• Premature Ejaculation Profile (PEP)
• Index of Premature Ejaculation (IPE)
• Premature Ejaculation Diagnostic Tool (PEDT)
• Arabic Index of Premature Ejaculation (AIPE)
• Chinese Index of Premature Ejaculation–5 (CIPE-5)
• International Index of Erectile Function (IIEF)

Live and learn. I had no idea there were so many measurement of PE. For instance, one of them mentioned is intravaginal ejaculation latency time (IELT), which, I learned through Googling, frequently measured by couples using a stopwatch. (It seems to me that that would really ruin the mood.) Again, I learned more reading this paper than I probably actually wanted to.

Not surprisingly, the quality of the studies was pretty crappy, too:

The risk of bias within included studies is presented in Table 2. Five studies reported the method of randomization,26, 28, 29, 32, 35 whereas the other five did not report the method but did state that the study was randomized. Allocation concealment was unclear in all studies. Blinding of participants and personnel was reported as being undertaken in five studies.26, 29, 33, 34, 35 Blinding of outcome assessment was unclear in all studies except one,35 which reported that this was blinded. All studies except one35 were considered at low risk of bias for completeness of outcome data, with eight studies including at least 90% of randomized patients in the primary analysis and the two studies of SS cream including 85%34 and 68%,35 respectively. All studies scored a low risk for selective reporting except for one that did not report on IELT.27 Of the nine studies reporting on IELT, this was measured by stopwatch in five studies,26, 28, 29, 34, 35 by questionnaire in one study,32 and the method of IELT assessment was not reported in three studies.30, 31, 33 In summary, all 10 studies were classed as having an overall unclear risk of bias because of unclear reporting of allocation concealment (all 10 studies) and unclear blinding of participants and personnel (five studies).

On to the results. Overall, 2,455 citations were identified through the search strategy chosen, which lead to 14 of them meeting all their criteria. Two of these were studies of Chinese medicine that were excluded because they did not report on IELT or any validated or widely used PE outcome measurement. Two more studies assessing a combination of yoga and pelvic floor exercises were excluded because one was not randomized and the other did not report on IELT or any validated or widely used PE outcome measurement. That left only ten RCTs. Two studies examined acupuncture, five looked at Chinese herbal medicine, one studied Ayurvedic herbal medicine and two of Korean topical ‘severance secret’ cream.

Despite all the news stories I saw about this systematic review emphasizing acupuncture, of the two acupuncture studies examined, one was from Turkey and one from China, each comparing acupuncture with either sham or various drugs used to treat PE. The results were, at best, quite equivocal. Indeed, the best the authors could say was this:

One study compared acupuncture against sham acupuncture (N analyzed = 60) and In summary, the available data indicate that acupuncture might be slightly more effective than placebo (sham) in treating PE, although this is based on only one study of unclear quality.

Yes, the “positive” result found is based on one crappy study. In other words, there’s no good evidence that acupuncture helps PE. This is not surprising, given that there is no physiological reason to think that there would be Basically, what was presented was a grab bag of studies:

The included studies evaluated the effectiveness of acupuncture, Chinese herbal medicine, Ayurvedic herbal medicine, and topical SS cream in improving IELT and other outcomes. Overall risk of bias was unclear in all studies because of unclear allocation concealment and/or blinding. Studies were clinically heterogeneous and stopwatch-measured IELT was reported in only 5 of 10 studies. Acupuncture increased IELT over placebo (one study; MD = 0.55 minute, P = .001). Ayurvedic herbal medicine increased IELT over placebo (one study; MD = 0.80 minute, P = .001). Topical SS cream improved IELT over placebo in two crossover studies (MD = 8.60 minutes, P < .001), although inclusion criteria were broad (IELT < 3 minutes), and there were mild irritant effects in some patients. SSRIs were more effective on IELT than Chinese herbal medicine (three studies; MD = 1.01 minutes, P = .02). However, combination treatment with Chinese medicine plus SSRIs improved IELT over SSRIs alone (two studies; MD = 1.92 minutes, P < .00001) or Chinese medicine alone (two studies; MD = 2.52 minutes, P < .00001). Adverse effects were not consistently assessed but where reported were generally mild. There were sparse data on the potential for drug interactions.

In other words, the results were mixed and pretty unconvincing. Even the Daily Mail article concedes it, stating quite plainly that “The main limitation of the study is the underlying weakness of the studies evaluated” and that “the studies are so different, it’s tough to draw conclusions about the different options.” In the article, the authors dance around this issue quite impressively:

Pragmatically, because there are so many CAM therapies available, it seems unlikely that they will all undergo further evaluation in large-scale studies. Therefore, it might be reasonable to summarize that the CAM therapies reviewed here have some (although limited) evidence for effectiveness in treating PE, and that they might provide another option for patients who favor a mind-body approach or who wish to avoid long-term pharmacologic treatment. It would need to be borne in mind that the effectiveness evidence is not conclusive, and care would need to be taken to monitor for adverse effects and to consider the potential for herb-drug interactions.

No it isn’t reasonable to say that the CAM therapies reviewed “might provide another option for patients,” and the evidence for effectiveness is far less than “not conclusive.” In fact there’s nothing much in this review article to suggest that alternative medicine helps PE.

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/2kQOfPc

Seen the moon, Mars, Venus yet?

Tonight – February 1, 2017 – the moon and the planets Mars and Venus line up in front of the constellation Pisces the Fishes. Did you see the moon and these planets last night, when they made a triangle on the sky’s dome? Now the moon has moved in its orbit around Earth, and so the three appear differently in our sky.

First thing at dusk, look for the waxing crescent moon and Venus, the second-brightest and third-brightest celestial bodies, respectively, after the sun. Then, as dusk turns into darkness, seek for fainter Mars in between the moon and Venus. Mars should be fairly easy to see with the eye alone in a dark sky, but binoculars will help if your sky is marred by light pollution.

As darkness falls, you might see an asterism – or noticeable pattern of stars – known as The Circlet in Pisces. The Circlet (Western Fish) is near Venus, but requires a dark sky to be seen.

Pisces, meanwhile, is a faint constellation, but its shape is distinctive. It’s V-shaped, with the two parts of the V representing the Northern and Western Fish. (See sky chart below.) And it also has a prominent asterism – a noticeable pattern of stars – known as the Circlet of Pisces. Given a clear and dark-enough sky, you might be able to make out the Circlet (Western Fish) near Venus. If so, you might spot the Great Square of Pegasus to the north of the Circlet. We give you fair warning: The Square of Pegasus is much easier to view from the Northern Hemisphere than the Southern, especially at this time of year.

First find the signpost known as the Great Square of Pegasus. That’s your jumping off spot for finding Pisces’ place in the great celestial sea. Click here for a larger chart.

On the other hand, from either the Northern or Southern Hemisphere, an unobstructed view of your western sky after sunset should provide a grand view of the moon, Venus and Mars at nightfall on February 1. After this night, the moon will continue moving eastward in its orbit around Earth, but Mars and Venus will remain in the western sky, with Venus getting brighter!

Bottom line: Tonight – February 1, 2017 – the moon and the planets Mars and Venus line up in front of the constellation Pisces the Fishes.

from EarthSky http://ift.tt/2kTTSIo

Tonight – February 1, 2017 – the moon and the planets Mars and Venus line up in front of the constellation Pisces the Fishes. Did you see the moon and these planets last night, when they made a triangle on the sky’s dome? Now the moon has moved in its orbit around Earth, and so the three appear differently in our sky.

First thing at dusk, look for the waxing crescent moon and Venus, the second-brightest and third-brightest celestial bodies, respectively, after the sun. Then, as dusk turns into darkness, seek for fainter Mars in between the moon and Venus. Mars should be fairly easy to see with the eye alone in a dark sky, but binoculars will help if your sky is marred by light pollution.

As darkness falls, you might see an asterism – or noticeable pattern of stars – known as The Circlet in Pisces. The Circlet (Western Fish) is near Venus, but requires a dark sky to be seen.

Pisces, meanwhile, is a faint constellation, but its shape is distinctive. It’s V-shaped, with the two parts of the V representing the Northern and Western Fish. (See sky chart below.) And it also has a prominent asterism – a noticeable pattern of stars – known as the Circlet of Pisces. Given a clear and dark-enough sky, you might be able to make out the Circlet (Western Fish) near Venus. If so, you might spot the Great Square of Pegasus to the north of the Circlet. We give you fair warning: The Square of Pegasus is much easier to view from the Northern Hemisphere than the Southern, especially at this time of year.

First find the signpost known as the Great Square of Pegasus. That’s your jumping off spot for finding Pisces’ place in the great celestial sea. Click here for a larger chart.

On the other hand, from either the Northern or Southern Hemisphere, an unobstructed view of your western sky after sunset should provide a grand view of the moon, Venus and Mars at nightfall on February 1. After this night, the moon will continue moving eastward in its orbit around Earth, but Mars and Venus will remain in the western sky, with Venus getting brighter!

Bottom line: Tonight – February 1, 2017 – the moon and the planets Mars and Venus line up in front of the constellation Pisces the Fishes.

from EarthSky http://ift.tt/2kTTSIo