Bits and Bites from Around the World > Denmark - First country to tax cow farts; Chinese robot with human stem cells in brain

 

Denmark the world’s first country to tax farting cows

Shaun Polczer

Published on: 

26 Jun 2024, 10:14 am

Denmark will be the first country to tax livestock emissionsPhoto Illustration generated by Meta AI

To err is human; to moo bovine.

Denmark will become the first country in the world to begin taxing farmers for Methane emissions from livestock starting in 2030.

Lawmakers agreed Monday to impose a tax of 120 kroner ($25) per tonne of greenhouse gas emitted from livestock, a level that will climb to about $50 by 2035.

The revenues will be pooled into a fund aimed to support the livestock industry’s so-called ‘green transition’.

“We are writing a new chapter in Danish agricultural history,” said farm minister, Jacob Jensen.

Farmer’s protest Files

Added Nicolai Wammen, Denmark’s finance minister: “We know that a CO2 tax model aligned across all sectors gives us the lowest societal costs in total. What we have now done, from industry sectors to agriculture, shows us that an ambitious green transition is possible.”

Denmark is one of Europe’s largest pork producers and a significant producer of beef and dairy as well. According to government statistics, it is home to about 1.5 million cows.

Ruminant animals such as sheep and cattle release methane when digesting food, which about 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Some estimates suggest agriculture is responsible for a third of GHG emissions, half which come from animals.

Global livestock emissions 1990-2020Statista

Emissions by livestock sourceResearch Gate

Cows are by far the biggest culprits, producing about 6 tonnes per year.

But EU lawmakers are taking a huge risk; just last week, New Zealand scrapped plans to tax its agricultural emissions after stiff resistance from farmers.

In the EU, farmers have staged massive and often violent protests that have brought traffic to a standstill and sprayed manure in European capitals this year over proposed environmental policies as part of its so-called ‘Green Deal’.

On Monday EU lawmakers in Luxembourg passed a ‘Nature Restoration Law’ — by a slim 1% majority —which aims to restore as much as a third of arable farm land back to a natural state.

Dutch farm group LTO, one of the country’s largest, on Wednesday issued a statement that said they were “concerned and indignant” over the act. It’s significant because the Dutch farmer’s party BBB gained seats for the first time in last week’s EU elections.

Livestock emissions by countryAmerican geophysical Union

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Chinese scientists create robot with brain

made from human stem cells

• 
  
• Researchers have developed brain-on-chip technology to train the robot to perform tasks such as gripping objects
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Victoria Bela

Published: 3:00pm, 29 Jun 2024

The robots have an artificial brain as well as a neural chip. Photo: Tianjin University

Chinese scientists have developed a robot with a lab-grown artificial brain that can be taught to perform various tasks.

The brain-on-chip technology developed by researchers at Tianjin University and the Southern University of Science and Technology combines a brain organoid – a tissue derived from human stem cells – with a neural interface chip to power the robot and teach it to avoid obstacles and grip objects.

The technology is an emerging branch of brain-computer interfaces (BCI), which aims to combine the brain’s electrical signals with external computing power and which China has made a priority.

It is “the world’s first open-source brain-on-chip intelligent complex information interaction system” and could lead to the development of brain-like computing, according to Tianjin University.

“[This] is a technology that uses an in-vitro cultured ‘brain’ – such as brain organoids – coupled with an electrode chip to form a brain-on-chip,” which encodes and decodes stimulation feedback, Ming Dong, vice-president of Tianjin University, told state-owned Science and Technology Daily on Tuesday.

BCI technology has gained widespread attention due to the Elon Musk-backed Neuralink, an implantable interface designed to let patients control devices with only their thoughts.

Tianjin University now says its research could lead to the development of hybrid human-robot intelligence.

Brain organoids are made from human pluripotent stem cells typically only found in early embryos that can develop into different kinds of tissues, including neural tissues.

When grafted into the brain, they can establish functional connections with the host brain, the Tianjin University team wrote in an unedited manuscript published in the peer-reviewed Oxford University Press journal Brain last month.

“The transplant of human brain organoids into living brains is a novel method for advancing organoid development and function. Organoid grafts have a host-derived functional vasculature system and exhibit advanced maturation,” the team wrote.

Li Xiaohong, a professor at Tianjin University, told Science and Technology Daily that while brain organoids were regarded as the most promising model of basic intelligence, the technology still faced “bottlenecks such as low developmental maturity and insufficient nutrient supply”.

In the paper, the team said it had developed a technique to use low-intensity ultrasound, which could help organoids better integrate and grow within the brain.

The team found that when grafts were treated with low-intensity ultrasound, it improved the differentiation of organoid cells into neurons and helped improve the networks it formed with the host brain.

The technique could also lead to new treatments to treat neurodevelopmental disorders and repair damage to the cerebral cortex, the paper said.

“Brain organoid transplants are considered a promising strategy for restoring brain function by replacing lost neurons and reconstructing neural circuits,” the team wrote.

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Coronavirus: Some Provoking Thoughts

I hope to do a series on COVID-19

Today's piece is a quick and dirty history

and, also, some thoughts on global warming and governments

In the months after 911, I told our pastor that something had changed in 'the Heavenlies', and the world will never be the same again. That was followed by several plagues, SARS, the Bird Flu, etc., and by an increase in mostly Islamic terrorism. 

In 2008, we had that incredible stock market crash and serious depression. In 2011, the Arab Spring, and the beginning of the Syrian proxy war which is not over yet. In 2015, the consequences of the Syrian war and the rape of African countries by European colonialists came home to roost as millions of migrants made their way into Europe. 

In 2020, came COVID-19! It actually started in China sometime in 2019, but they managed to keep it hidden until a courageous doctor, now deceased, managed to announce it to the world around New Years. By then it had taken hold in Hubei Province and the bodies were beginning to pile up. China appeared to take very drastic action, which, in retrospect, should have come months earlier.

About the same time, doctors in Lombardy region, in northern Italy, began to notice people were dying from a strange form of Pneumonia. It was soon realized that that new type of Pneumonia which was how the Coronavirus claimed most of its victims.

It has now spread to most countries in the world. Some countries, like Canada, are somewhat prepared for it, because of SARS, while others are not the least bit prepared, like Italy and Iran.

In Hubei Province, 60 million people were locked down for nearly three months. Just yesterday, India locked down 1.3 billion people, one 6th of the population of the earth. Shelter-in-place orders are happening across Europe's most populated countries, with increasing penalties for those idiots who flagrantly ignore those orders. 

Cruise ships are being grounded, those that can find a port to take them in. Container ship traffic will be reduced significantly, if it hasn't already, as many factories making frivolous things for which the market is dwindling, are shut down. Large ships make a lot of pollution!

Airlines around the world are laying off most of their staff, some, all of their staff, as airports everywhere are closing, even to some domestic traffic. That's a lot of airplanes that are not flying.

Many businesses are shutting down, and most are likely to in the next little while. Videos from cities in most countries show empty streets during 'rush hours'. Boeing closed its Washington State production plants putting about 40,000 people out of work. That's a lot of commuters who are not commuting. 

Globally, probably close to a billion commuters are out of work or working from home, but not commuting. Taxi companies are laying off staff. 

In less than 3 months, Coronavirus has done more to reduce the CO2 in the atmosphere than any climate change heroics could do in 15 years. And it will continue for at least another couple months - much longer in countries where it is just arriving.

Wuhan has had its movement restrictions loosened just today. So there is a light at the end of the tunnel. How long that tunnel is we don't really know because of China's secrecy at the beginning. But certainly, it can be measured in months. We may not get completely rid of COVID-19 for a few years, if ever, but its dramatic effects will reduce greatly after some months, especially in countries with good health-care systems and sensible governments. I greatly fear for those countries where there is much crowding and poor health-care. This emergency will lead to draconian measures that might never be removed even after the virus is. 

A crisis is the most dangerous time

in the governance of any country

In Canada, Trudeau has embedded clauses that gives him and his Finance Minister sweeping powers to tax, to borrow, to spend without consulting parliament, in an emergency measures bill. The purpose is not to help Canadians, but to allow Trudeau to continue to govern with his minority without fear of being overthrown by a finance bill in the House of Commons. The clause was not for a few weeks or months, but for 21 months. This is playing politics at a time of crisis and is shameful.

Trudeau hasn't done a terrible job at managing this crisis until now, especially compared to some. Except that he has sunk Canada so deeply into debt that we have no budgetary room to handle this crisis. I have been warning us about this for years. Now, he will be borrowing at least 100 billion dollars over the next few months which means another generation of Canadians will be living off a fraction of their taxes as much of our tax money will go to pay interest on a more than $1 trillion debt. I can't see where the next three generations of Canadians will be able to pay this down, and, God-forbid, another crisis in a few years, or a few decades, and we will completely crash.

Politics trumps humanity

One good thing Trudeau and his Finance Minister could do to help a rapidly crumbling economy is to remove the carbon tax he so recently installed. Atmospheric carbon should be dramatically reduced this year, and if our climate 'scientists' are right, that should result in a significant drop in global temperatures sometime over the next several years. 

Right now, the carbon tax is useless as only essential workers and truck-drivers are driving. We should be encouraging these heroes, not punishing them for their heroics.

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NATIONAL PARK QUIETLY REMOVED WARNING THAT GLACIERS ‘WILL ALL BE GONE’ BY 2020 AFTER YEARS OF HEAVY SNOWFALL

The Daily Caller
Michael Bastasch | Energy Editor

Fred Longheart and Marjory McClaren of Kalispell, Montana hike through snow along the Highline Trail in Glacier National Park, Montana August 24, 2011. REUTERS/Matt Mills McKnight.

The National Park Service (NPS) quietly removed a visitor center sign saying the glaciers at Glacier National Park would disappear by 2020 due to climate change.

As it turns out, higher-than-average snowfall in recent years upended computer model projections from the early 2000s that NPS based its claim glaciers “will all be gone by the year 2020,” federal officials said.

“Glacier retreat in Glacier National Park speeds up and slows down with fluctuations in the local climate,” the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), which monitors Glacier National Park, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

“Those signs were based on the observation prior to 2010 that glaciers were shrinking more quickly than a computer model predicted they would,” USGS said. “Subsequently, larger than average snowfall over several winters slowed down that retreat rate and the 2020 date used in the NPS display does not apply anymore.”

NPS updated signs at the St. Mary Visitor Center glacier exhibit over the winter. Sign changes meant the display warning glaciers would all disappear by 2020 now says: “When they completely disappear, however, will depend on how and when we act.”

The total area of Glacier National Park covered in its iconic glaciers shrank 70% from the 1850s to 2015, according to USGS. Melting began at the end of the so-called Little Ice Age when scientists believe 146 glaciers covered the region, opposed to just 26 in 2019. 

USGS still says on its website glaciers could all disappear sometime between 2030 and 2080, depending on how much warming occurs. As recent years demonstrate, however, glacial melt can be slowed by heavy winter snowfall.

“The overall picture remains the same, however, and that picture is that the glaciers all continue to retreat,” USGS said.

Which is, of course, what you would expect as the world is still recovering from the little ice age (1645–1715), which coincided with the Maunder Minimum, a period of very little sunspot activity. Another period of low sunspot activity is expected to begin around 2030. Probably not as low as the Maunder Minimum, but perhaps enough to result in overall cooling of the earth.

Blogger Roger Roots first noted the signage change in a blog post published Thursday on the website Watts Up With That. Roots was able to compare the signs to film and photographs he had taken on previous visits.

“As recently as September 2018 the diorama displayed a sign saying GNP’s glaciers were expected to disappear completely by 2020,” Roots wrote. “The ‘gone by 2020’ claims were repeated in the New York Times, National Geographic, and other international news sources.”

The usual suspects of the climate change hysteria!

Mike Neighbors and his wife Karin Neighbors hike through snow along the Hidden Lake Trail near Clements Mountain in Glacier National Park, Montana - REUTERS/Matt Mills McKnight.

Roots also noted another sign had been changed from 2030 had also been changed to be more “nuanced.” Roots put up a $5,000 bet that Glacier National Park would still have glaciers in 2030.

“Almost everywhere, the Park’s specific claims of impending glacier disappearance have been replaced with more nuanced messaging indicating that everyone agrees that the glaciers are melting,” Roots wrote.

“Now the Park Service is scrambling to remove the signs without their visitors noticing,” Roots posted on his Facebook wall, along with video footage showing the sign changes.

The Park Service works closely with USGS to understand glacial melt and the information it puts on informational signs. NPS, however, does not notify the public when it adds or changes signage.

“There are currently 26 glaciers in the park. Scientific models project that many will no longer meet the size criteria used to define a glacier sometime between 2030 and 2080,” NPS said in a statement to TheDCNF.

Essay: Solar Cycle Wave Frequency Linked to Jet Stream Changes - Dramatic Weather Events

Many 'experts' attribute the dramatic flooding events of this spring to climate change/global warming. Researcher explains in quite logical terms why such weather extremes may have more to do with the sun-spot cycle than CO2. Interesting read.

By Francis Tucker Manns, PhDy

Principal at Artesian Geological Research

Abstract: The sun controls climate change. Not industry. Not you. Not me. It is the sun.

Solar cycle 24, the weakest in 100 years, is stumbling to an end. The sunspot cycle averages about 11 (± 1.5) years. There may not be any sunspots this week. In the spring of 2017 the sunspot number was low or zero and Canada was plagued with spring floods from melting snow and heavy rainfall.

February 2019 recorded no sunspot activity whatsoever. The first month without any sunspot activity since 2008 (11 years ago). This spring (2019), devastating floods occurred across eastern Ontario, southern Quebec and New Brunswick. Very similar to the 2017 floods. And California's long drought came to an abrupt end.

In 2017 - Major floods have occurred in Quebec and caused a human tragedy in loss of habitation; the army was called in. The fire chief was lost at Cache Creek, BC. Canada is wet from the Pacific to the Atlantic.

Toronto Island is sandbagged and may be closed for several months. The Lake Ontario high water is the 22nd anniversary of the previous highest water levels recorded. This year’s Minden Ontario flood occurred on the 11th anniversary of the Peterborough flood. But not just that, worse calamities, Hurricane Hazel (1954) occurred during a solar minimum. Eighty-eight people died in Toronto and Toronto abandoned living in its beautiful wooded ravines. Toronto, if you will, is within a Great Lakes cloud chamber.

Sorry, I have worked in meteorology and climatology all my life and have no idea what a cloud chamber is in this context.

History supports this hypothesis – the horrible Johnstown flood occurred on 31 May 1889 with loss of 2,200 lives. The Johnstown Flood of 1936 and another Johnstown flood in 1977 occurred during solar minima. In 1977 nearly 12 inches of rain fell in 24 hours, when a thunderstorm stalled over the area.

But these phenomena are not restricted to North America or Canada. In early June, rescue workers battled to reach remote areas of Bangladesh hit by landslides and heavy rains that have killed at least 137 people, with dozens more missing. “Authorities say hundreds of hillside homes were buried by landslides in the southeast of the country as people slept. The landslides were triggered by heavy monsoon rains, with 343 millimetres (13.5 inches) of rain falling on the area.” In May, Sri Lanka has suffered 2,000 deaths due to landslides, and 200,000 displaced this spring. On 1 July 2017 China reported the highest rainfall in 60 years. The climate is changing globally, but it’s not caused by the heat. It’s the humidity.

The effect of the solar cycle is seriously misunderstood. There is no correlation with the number of sunspots, though we know that sunspots are a proxy for the sun’s electromagnetic behavior. Astrophysicists in Denmark, however, have teased out the relationship between sunspots and climate (Friis-Christensen and Lassen, 1991). It’s the frequency of the wave. A very tight correlation to climate is coupled to the frequency of the solar cycle. When solar cycles are shorter than 11 years over several cycles the planet warms; when cycles are longer than 11 year for a few cycles, the planet cools. There has been a strong (95%) correlation between the solar cycle and cooling and warming of the northern hemisphere over the past 150 years. Climate, moreover, is also tightly tied to what Zharkova et al. (2015) have called the heartbeat of the sun. Ironically, Lockyer in 1872 called sunspot observation the meteorology of the future. Ask your weather bureau if this is true. The emphasis has always been on the peaks, but the real story is in the troughs and the wavelength.

Here is how it works. When sunspot peaks are far apart, the electromagnetic shield is down for a long period of time, cosmic radiation seeds the clouds, and there is more rain and snow (with its albedo reflectivity) and the planet cools (Svensmark, J. et al., 2016). The rainfall makes sense in this context because cooling results in condensation. When the sunspot peaks are frequent the minima have less effect and earth warms (Svensmark, H. and Friis-Christensen, 1997; Svensmark H., et al. 2007).

This pattern is completely consistent with the extremes, the thundery hot summers and cold winters of the Little Ice Age which coincided with the Maunder Minimum when sunspots were few or completely absent for 60 years. Zharkova’s research group is predicting another Little Ice Age beginning right now, today, or at the end of Cycle 24. So think many others who study the sun and think it trumps carbon dioxide (Shaviv, 1998).

How does that happen? Here’s how. NASA says, as we enter the solar minimum, our wispy atmosphere shrinks. NASA has learned to juggle satellites that drop into lower orbits during the solar cycle. Lower down in our atmosphere the sun drives our winds and the most important winds of all, that rule all the others, are the jet streams that power around the planet at well over 160 kilometres an hour.

When the atmosphere contracts, the jets start to meander. The meandering happens because there is a space problem; the same jet stream is jammed into less volume within a shrunken atmosphere; hence the jet streams kink. The cloud levels are slightly but measurably lower as well.

Figure 1: The relationship between the weather and a jet stream Rossby wave.

The meanders with ridges and troughs (similar to those of a great river like the Mississippi but far more vast) typically carry the weather fronts with them with low pressure and a high pressure zones: a ridge and a trough. The jet streams maintain their velocity as in a solar maximum, but wander farther north and farther south taking colder air south and hotter air north. The meanders are called Rossby waves. Hence, wide temperature variations occur; most of North America had two temperature swings in May from the teens to the high twenties and back again. Kinking of the jet stream causes extreme weather. As the wandering is slow, the storms behave like broken lawn sprinklers. Under certain conditions, a normal weather front can cause dangerous flooding because, although the jet stream is moving rapidly (consistent with its name) the lateral course of the jet stream meander wanders slowly from west to east and occasionally stalls.

Figure 2: Condition of the Greenland Ice Sheet as of September 2018. Numerous papers were produced attributing Greenland’s icy decline in 2011-12 to arctic temperature amplification (Greenland Climate Research Centre and

Danish Meteorological Institute). The Greenland Ice sheet has rebounded strongly since the summer of 2011-12.

The result is like a broken water sprinkler dumping rain or snow in one spot, a region out of equilibrium with local conditions on the ground. The result is flooding or a numbingly serious blizzard. Today the Gulf Coast is swamped by tropical storm Cindy caught in a slowly moving jet stream.

We are witness to the climate change we have been taught to fear, and it is not anthropogenic; it is extraterrestrial.

It has never been proven that carbon dioxide affects the climate. It is an interesting hypothesis, but not only is it not proven, I am unaware of any experimental support for the CO2 hypothesis. It stands equal to any other unsupported hypotheses – all the hypotheses of ghosts or special creation, but does not rise to the credibility of a theory without experimental support. Friis-Christensen and Lassen (op cit), however, estimated a 95% correlation with sunspot peak frequency, a remarkable correlation, rare in natural science; the editor of Science magazine at the time commented that the “ball [meaning Anthropogenic Global Warming] is now in the other court”. Only matching your right hand with your left might exceed 95%. Not meaning to be glib, but, 95% for solar leaves only 5% for any other cause (without considering the standard deviation).

The alarmist outcry was that “correlation is not causation”, yet the same alarmists, using the precautionary principle (which is not science) asked us to believe a correlation of temperature with CO2. Moreover, in recent years (the entire 21st century) there has been no correlation even as CO2 continues to nudge above 400 parts in 1,000,000 parts in the atmosphere over Hawaii.

The Danish laboratory now directed by Henrik Svensmark and sustained by his colleagues has produced experimental support over the interval since 1991 for cloud seeding by cosmic radiation from deep space a cycle modulated by an electromagnetic solar cycle. It’s a mouthful and a complex theory but it has been tested in cloud chambers in Copenhagen and also by an international team of astrophysicists in THE LARGE HADRON COLLIDER in Switzerland. Despite difficulties with introduction of extraneous experimental matter (organic aerosols were introduced to complicate the trial) there can be little doubt that cosmic radiation seeds the clouds whether the nuclei was sulphur or Great Smoky Mountain aerosols. Moreover, the Greenland Ice sheet is growing again and the California drought has broken. During the recent solar maximum of solar cycle 24 the melting of the Greenland Ice Cap was the foremost worry of the alarmists.

In Figure 3 one sees the big picture of the solar cycle wavelength or frequency. There is an empirical relationship between the cumulative length of several solar cycles and past climate. For brevity, the Maunder Minimum is not shown. It falls on the left of the chart and shows no cycles and few sunspots, hence the name minimum. It was a lengthy period of the Little Ice Age that was characterised by Alpine glacial advance, epidemics, and the potato famine. The Dalton Minimum was similar and the continuation of the Little Ice Age. Since then the frequency has stabilized around a half wavelength of 11.0 ± 1.5 years. I call this as the Goldilocks trend (obviously not too cold, and not too hot) we have enjoyed as the planet warmed. However, the Goldilocks trend may be about to end. There has been no statistical warming for the 21st century despite the rising CO2 and the corresponding solar cycles have been approximately 12 years long. If the current cycle 24 lasts much longer, expect Niagara Falls to freeze over as it did in 1912 and 2014.

Figure 3: The Goldilocks Trend or the Big Picture. This is a plot of alternating elapsed time between Maxima

and Minima of the solar cycle. Please refer to the cover page for the conventional views.

Data from National Geophysical Data Center web site, Boulder, Colorado, USA.

Conclusions

The logical progression is for the rain to fall, the clouds to clear, the earth to cool and humidity to drop and warmth to not return until the sunspots return. Regardless whether or not this forecast is correct, we must understand the danger of Lysenkoism – synonym for flawed government science – is that public science policy can lead to disaster. For example mistakes like the cholesterol [statin] myth started in the 1950s by Eisenhower’s doctors or the denial of lead poisoned water in Flint Michigan by the EPA.

NGOs, Environmental Lobby Groups, industries and governments are creating policy for the warming forecast, but serious cooling could be coming. Keeping our environment healthy is paramount to our prosperity but free speech in science and not false consensus is part of the solution.

“…Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific technological elite.”– Dwight Eisenhower, 1961

In other words - climate change hysteria. Eisenhower never envisioned the internet or its power to motivate people whether for good or otherwise. Nor could he imagine the media becoming so politically correct, IE so vulnerable to influence by the far-left.

References

Friis-Christensen, E. and K. Lassen, 1991: Length of the Solar Cycle: An Indicator of Solar Activity Closely Associated with Climate, Science 254 (5032):698-700, December 1991.

Lockyer, J. N., 1872: The Meteorology of the Future, Nature, 12 December 1872, pp 98 – 101.

Shaviv, N. J., 1998: Using the Oceans as a Calorimeter to Quantify the Solar Radiative Forcing, J. Geophys. Res., 113, A11101, doi:10.1029/2007JA012989.

Svensmark, H. and E. Friis-Christensen, 1997: Variation of Cosmic Ray Flux and Global Cloud Coverage—a Missing Link in Solar-Climate Relationships, Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics, Volume 59, Issue 11, July 1997, Pages 1225-1232

Svensmark, H., J. O. Pedersen, N. D. Marsh, M. B. Enghoff and U. I. Uggerhøj, 2007: Experimental Evidence for the Role of Ions in Particle Nucleation Under Atmospheric Conditions, Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, 463 (2078): 385–396. Bibcode:2007RSPSA.463..385S. doi:10.1098/rspa.2006.1773.

Svensmark, J., M. B. Enghoff, N. J. Shaviv, H. Svensmark, 2016: The response of clouds and aerosols to cosmic ray decrease, Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics, Volume 121, Issue 9, pp 8152–8181, September 2016.

Zharkova, V. V., S. J. Shepherd, E. Popova and S. I. Zharkov, 2015: Heartbeat of the Sun from Principal Component Analysis and Prediction of Solar Activity on a Millennium Timescale, Scientific Reports 5, Article Number: 15689.