Are the hundreds of polar bears spending the summer on Wrangel Island in the Chukchi Sea starving and desperate for any scrap of food? Hardly!

Nasa’s Kepler space observatory has found three new exoplanets orbiting a star close to our solar system. The newly-discovered entities were found orbiting a K-type of dwarf star called GJ 9827, located some 100 light years away from Earth and have been classified as ‘super-Earth’ planetary bodies.

Image copyright: GETTY IMAGES

Humans are used to being outdone by computers when it comes to recalling facts, but they still have the upper hand in an argument. For now. It has long been the case that machines can beat us in games of strategy like chess.

The amount of Arctic summer melt is down nearly 10% over the past decade, with 2017 being the lowest.

Confidence is rising in two key aspects of healthy climate scepticism. First, climate models have run “hot” and been wrong in predicting the speed and extent of warming. Second, the extended slowdown in the rate of warming since the turn of the century was real.  —Graham Lloyd, The Australian, 23 September 2017

On Twitter, physical scientist Ned Nikolov informs us of a 2015 paper that “finds NO trend in global Tropical Cyclone Activity between the decade 1965-1974 and the present. Hence, warming has NOT affected hurricane activity for the past 45 yrs!”

Satellites show that the troposphere has not warmed since 1997. The warming reported by NASA (red line below) has nothing to do with reality.

The recent spate of hurricanes has inevitably attracted attention and spawned wildly inaccurate headlines, such as “a 1000 year event”, “the most powerful Atlantic storm on record”, “storm of the century”, and even “most deadly storm in history”.

Image copyright: AIRBUS DS/MAX ALEXANDER

Europe has begun the process of scoping an expansion to its Sentinel Earth observation network. Six new satellite concepts will be studied, including a constellation of spacecraft that can monitor emissions of carbon dioxide.

Since time immemorial, the weather has been a common theme among people. That was the case a thousand years ago and modern newscasts would be incomplete without weather information.

The lost, underwater continent of Zealandia may have been used by animals and plants to cross continents 80 million years ago, research has found.

A six year drought in California was finally declared over this year but the threat for the south-western state as well as other locations in the world remains the same.

3 Atmospheric Scientists: Greenhouse Effect Based On ‘Physically Irrelevant Assumptions’

Yet another new scientific paper has been published that questions the current understanding of the Earth’s globally averaged surface temperature and its relation to the theoretical greenhouse effect.

A 35-year-old man who had been in a persistent vegetative state (PVS) for 15 years has shown signs of consciousness after receiving a pioneering therapy involving nerve stimulation.