Paper Reviewed:  Almén, A.-K., Brutemark, A., Jutfelt, F., Riebesell, U. and Engström-Öst, J. 2017. Ocean acidification causes no detectable effect on swimming activity and body size in a common copepod. Hydrobiologia 802: 235-243.

Ocean acidification (defined as a decline in oceanic pH caused by the dissolution of atmospheric CO2 into the surface waters of the world’s oceans) has been projected to impact marine life in a number of different ways, including growth, survival, fertility, calcification and organism behavior.

Humans – and not rats – could have been the cause for the spread of plague during the Black Death, a new study suggests. The Black Death was one of the worst pandemics in human history. It devastated European populations from 1346 to 1353 and resulted in the deaths of an estimated 75 to 200 million people.

There are quite a number of Climate Sages, who say they are skeptical, adding almost sotto voce that the heating by Greenhouse Gases is exaggerated. I met one this evening, an engineer retired and a most avid reader of science fiction.  He has over 350,000 books and reads something like 2,000 books a month.

Few people are aware of the relatively new science of geoengineering. Some scientists who are aware (like me) consider it a genuine threat to our planet’s climatic stability and ecosystems. Moreover, geoengineering, if left unconstrained, could pose a real danger to human health through the choice and toxicity of the materials used.

The Cloud Mystery Duration: 52 minutes. Language: English: “Our clouds take their orders from the stars,” says the Danish scientist Henrik Svensmark. That’s the amazing and provocative discovery reported here.

Optimism in conservation science — which the Smithsonian says we desperately need (Earth Optimism Summit 21-23 April 2017, apparently a huge success) — means it’s time to acknowledge and celebrate real conservation success stories.

The Smithsonian folks probably won’t say it but I will — one of those successes is the recovery of polar bears.

In Yakutia — a region of 1 million people about 3,300 miles (5,300 kilometers) east of Moscow — students routinely go to school even in minus 40 degrees. But school was canceled Tuesday throughout the region and police ordered parents to keep their children inside.

Image copyrightVELIZAR SIMEONOVSKI, THE FIELD MUSEUM/REUTERS

Scientists in China have made a colourful discovery – a bird-like dinosaur with rainbow-coloured feathers. The fossilised remains were found in the north-east of China and it’s believed to have lived 161 million years ago during the Jurassic Period.

It’s been called Caihong juji, which is the mandarin word for ‘rainbow with the big crest’. When dinosaur experts studied the fossil they could see evidence of brightly-coloured plumage.

Cardiologists at the Catharina hospital in Eindhoven have succeeded in the localized cooling of the heart during a heart attack, a world first.

By cooling part of the heart prior to and following angioplasty, the cardiologists believe that the damage from a heart attack can be limited. On 11 January cardiologist Luuk Otterspoor received his doctorate at Eindhoven University of Technology for this study.

Perhaps the key experiment which led to Einstein postulating his theory of relativity in 1905, in particular the invariance of the speed of light and the complete absence of a medium (the “aether”) for light being a wave, was the Michelson-Morley Interferometer Experiment of 1887 (see image above).

Despite noticing some potential dependence of light speed with direction, this was considered far enough below the expected result to declare the result “null” – namely there is no aether medium for light as originally proposed by Maxwell and others.

For well over three decades now the world has been held to ransom by a perceived “consensus science” that has convinced scientists and politicians alike that human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO₂) cause a myriad of “extreme” weather events and other claimed but unrelated issues.

We have been told repeatedly that the “consensus science” has been settled for over a century and that carbon dioxide is a so-called “greenhouse gas” that “traps heat” and thus makes the earth “warmer than it would otherwise be”. ^{1, 2}

There exists on the internet, at the time of this writing, a video, purported to be: ‘Climate 101 with Bill Nye’
-although we never actually see his face- with the comment that anyone can replicate it.

In this video, a simple experiment is presented where two glass jars with thermometers in them, one filled with air and one filled with CO2, are exposed to energy from heat lamps, to show how CO2, as compared to normal air, causes excess temperature rise when exposed to heat.

Frustration with criticism over the fate of polar bears decades into the future has plagued consensus experts since they first brought their concerns to the attention of conservation organizations in the mid-2000s.

But now that catastrophe has not materialized, these researchers have shifted their defensive style from logical reasoning to relentless insult.

Many people are actively worried about global warming. And it frustrates them that skeptics and “deniers” refuse to acknowledge the “science” of such an urgent, man-made problem.

But there may be valid reasons to dispute the theory that man is responsible for climate change. And to demonstrate why the issue isn’t so clearcut here’s a basic climate question to ponder:

As the level of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere increases, does its ability to absorb heat increase, decrease, or remain the same?

The recent cold snap was “highly unusual in the current climate,” and not the product of man-made global warming, a new study found.

But wait, other scientists said the two-weeks of frigid weather and snow in the eastern U.S. was “very much consistent with our expectations of the response of weather dynamics to human-caused climate change.”