The giant space rock that wiped out the dinosaurs may have set off a chain of cataclysmic volcanic eruptions on land and undersea, claims a new study that is already dividing scientists.

About 66 million years ago, a 6-mile wide asteroid smacked into Earth, creating the Chicxulub crater in the Yucatan and sparking deadly chaos. Superhot particles rained from the air causing fires across the globe and sending temperatures higher. Then it got worse.

Around the world, people have heard about the impending extinction of the Great Barrier Reef: some 133,000 square miles of magnificent coral stretching for 1,400 miles off the northeast coast of Australia.

The reef is supposedly almost dead from the combined effects of a warming climate, nutrient pollution from Australian farms, and smothering sediment from offshore dredging.

Except that, as I have said publicly as a research scientist who has studied the reef for the past 30 years, all this most likely isn’t true.

A cutting-edge scientific analysis shows that a Briton from 10,000 years ago had dark brown skin and blue eyes.

Researchers from London’s Natural History Museum extracted DNA from Cheddar Man, Britain’s oldest complete skeleton, which was discovered in 1903.

University College London researchers then used the subsequent genome analysis for a facial reconstruction. It underlines the fact that the lighter skin characteristic of modern Europeans is a relatively recent phenomenon.

I looked it up – I was curious. How many times does a normal healthy human being breathe in and breathe out in just one minute? Well, Google tells me that we exhale (that means breathe out for the scientifically illiterate friends of mine on Facebook) some fifteen to twenty times in one minute.

Let us take the lower number. What is 15 x 60? It equals 900 exhalations in every hour! Let us now multiply 900 by 24 to get the number of breaths in 24 hours. That comes to 21,600 exhalations of Carbon Dioxide at 40,000 parts per million in one single day by one average person.

The international climate machine is about to achieve a new degree of alarmist absurdity, basically speeding up as they hit the wall. It is all about the Paris Climate Agreement targets and it is kind of fun to watch. Here’s how it goes.

The Agreement has a hard (and silly) target of limiting future global warming to two degrees C above what are called pre-industrial levels.

But there is also a softer (and sillier) target of 1.5 degrees. As usual with international agreements, the language is vague, but all the countries say they will go for two but try for 1.5.

Dr. Sebastian Lüning and Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt posted here yesterday results showing that hurricane activity has decreased over the past decades, despite all the hysteria we’ve been hearing from the usual suspects.

Taking a look at the recent literature, we find a paper authored by Ryan Truchelut and Erica Staehling appearing in the Geophysical Research Letters on December 8, 2017. They looked at the development of American hurricanes based on accumulated cyclone energy (ACE).

A team led by researchers from ETH Zurich and the Physikalisch-Meteorologisches Observatorium Davos in Switzerland have found that despite the ban on CFCs, the concentration of ozone in the lower part of the stratosphere has continued to decline at latitudes between 60 degrees South and 60 degrees North.

The scientists were somewhat surprised that the ozone is thinning out in the lower stratosphere because their models do not show this trend and CFCs continue to decline. — Press Trust of India, 6 February 2018

Image copyright: ESA

UK scientists and engineers will play a leading role in developing a satellite that can warn if Earth is about to be hit by damaging solar storms.

The European Space Agency has requested studies be undertaken to design the mission that would launch in the 2020s. Explosive eruptions from the Sun can lead to widespread disruption on our planet – degrading communications, even knocking over power grids.

Paper Reviewed: Hodgkins, G.A., Whitfield, P.H., Burn, D.H., Hannaford, J., Renard, B., Stahl, K., Fleig, A.K., Madsen, H., Mediero, L., Korhonen, J., Murphy, C. and Wilson, D. 2017. Climate-driven variability in the occurrence of major floods across North America and Europe. Journal of Hydrology 552: 704-717.

Model projections of future increases in precipitation from anthropogenic global warming have led to concerns that there will be corresponding increases in river flooding. Consequently, many researchers have begun to search for evidence of more frequent and/or severe flooding over the past several decades.

New peer-reviewed scientific paper published in the journal Earth Sciences (December 2017) provides precise calculations for planetary temperatures without need to have a greenhouse effect or greenhouse gases to bridge a hypothetical “heat gap.” Thus greenhouse gas theory is invalidated.

Princeton University physicist William Happer is not a fan of models used to predict future manmade global warming, and stars in a new educational video laying out the reasons he believes climate models are faulty.

“And I know they don’t work. They haven’t worked in the past. They don’t work now. And it’s hard to imagine when, if ever, they’ll work in the foreseeable future,” Happer said in a video produced by PragerU.

Over the past months, a spate of scientific papers published shows sea level rise has not accelerated like many climate warming scientists warned earlier. The reality is that the rise is far slower than expected, read here and here.

Scary scenarios abound

The latest findings glaringly contradict alarmist claims of accelerating sea level rise. For example, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) here wrote sea levels would “likely rise for many centuries at rates higher than that of the current century”, due to global warming.

In the old Soviet Union, science was subverted to promote failed socialist policies. The results were disastrous to both Russian society and to Russian science itself.

Everything scientists did was for the advancement of the state, meaning the dictators. Individual scientists were imprisoned under torturous conditions, even murdered, if their science did not comport with official propaganda.

Of course, in the end, the USSR collapsed. Incredibly, the same failed trend toward politicizing science has resurfaced right here in the United States.

The onset of La Niña in the tropical Pacific Ocean has caused temperatures to drop to levels not seen in six years, according to satellite temperature data.

“Note that La Niña cooling in the tropics has finally penetrated the troposphere, with a -0.12 deg. C departure from average,” wrote atmospheric scientists John Christy and Roy Spencer, who compile satellite data at the University of Alabama, Huntsville.

Cosmic rays from supernovae can influence Earth’s cloud cover and thereby climate according to new research from a team from Denmark.

The study reveals how atmospheric ions, produced by the energetic cosmic rays raining down through the atmosphere, helps the growth and formation of cloud condensation nuclei – the seeds necessary for forming clouds in the atmosphere. When the ionization in the atmosphere changes, the number of cloud condensation nuclei changes, affecting the properties of clouds.