Natural Forcing Of Arctic Climate Increasingly Affirmed By Scientists
Three years ago a cogent paper was published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature that was surprisingly candid in its rejection of the position that the substantial warming and sea ice reduction in the Arctic occurring since the late 1970s should be predominantly attributed to anthropogenic forcing.
Dr. Quinhua Ding and 6 co-authors indicated in their paper that internal processes — natural variability associated with planetary waves and the North Atlantic Oscillation — are drivers of the recent Arctic warming and sea ice reduction, concluding that “a substantial portion of recent warming in the northeastern Canada and Greenland sector of the Arctic arises from unforced natural variability.”
Image copyright: BARCROFT PRODUCTIONS/BBCImage caption: Artwork: The impact hit with the energy equivalent to 10 billion Hiroshima bombs
Scientists who drilled into the impact crater associated with the demise of the dinosaurs summarise their findings so far in a BBC Two documentary on Monday. The researchers recovered rocks from under the Gulf of Mexico that were hit by an asteroid 66 million years ago. The nature of this material records the details of the event. It is becoming clear that the 15km-wide asteroid could not have hit a worse place on Earth.
The sun is spotless again today which makes 6 days in a row and marks the 36th day this year – already more than all of 2016.
Overview
Today marks the 6th day in a row that the sun is blank and the 36th time this year – already more spotless days than all of 2016. In what has turned out to be a historically weak solar cycle (#24), the sun continues to transition away from its solar maximum phase and towards the next solar minimum.
According to the United States Geological Survey, there are around 17 major earthquakes measuring above 7.0 on the Richter scale – and one great earthquake measuring above 8.0 – each year. However, experts estimate that there are actually several million earthquakes annually; many go undetected due to their geographical remoteness or small magnitude.
2. An earthquake can affect the length of a day
On 11 March 2009, an 8.9 magnitude earthquake which struck northeast Japan altered the distribution of the earth’s mass, causing it to rotate slightly faster, and shortening an earth day by around 1.8 microseconds.
‘Sustainable’ has become a buzzword applicable not only to agriculture and energy production but to sectors as far afield as the building and textile industries. Many large companies tout the concept and boast a sustainability department, and the United Nations has hundreds of projects concerned with sustainability throughout its many agencies and programs.
An overwhelming 82 percent of research papers produced by academics in the humanities are never cited, according to a recent study.
According to Inside Higher Ed, citations are the primary measure of a paper’s “scholarly impact.” The humanities, which include anthropology, archaeology, history, law and politics, literature, and the arts, has faced an overwhelmingly low citation rate in recent years. Recent studies have suggested that over 80 percent of humanities paper are never cited.
Until around half a century ago, this scepticism chimed with the scientific evidence. According to scientists’ best understanding of how waves are generated, a 30m wave might be expected once every 30,000 years. Rogue waves could safely be classified alongside mermaids and sea monsters. However, we now know that they are no maritime myths.
Late last year, a story emerged questioning the validity of a paper that had made a big splash when it was published in Science earlier in 2016. [featured above in The Guardian and round the world]
The paper was high profile, in large part because of its subject — the effect of plastic microbeads on fish. The authors claimed their data showed that young fish preferentially eat plastic microbeads instead of their other food options.
From the Guardian, via Yahoo: Finland, the new chair of the Arctic council, has appealed to climate change scientists to fight the threat of the US and Russia tearing up commitments to combat global warming.
The Nordic country takes up the two-year chairmanship of the body, increasingly a forum where arguments about climate change play out, at a ministerial meeting on Thursday in Fairbanks, Alaska, where the US secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, will represent the Trump administration.
The Global Wind Energy Council recently released its latest report, excitedly boasting that ‘the proliferation of wind energy into the global power market continues at a furious pace, after it was revealed that more than 54 gigawatts of clean renewable wind power was installed across the global market last year’.
Written by Dr. Sebastian Lüning & Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt (Translated/edited by P Gosselin)
On April 29 German ARD public television presented a report on a Canadian sea ice reconstruction using coral algae growth. The report (in German) can be seen at the ARD-Mediathek in the Internet (begins at the 16:38 mark).
German researcher Jochen Halfar of the University of Toronto found a coral algae type in Canada’s Arctic Ocean that forms annual rings. During the polar nights of winter, photosynthesis stops. In the spring it reactivates again and the algae starts to grow, and does so much better when there is less ice to block out the sunlight. This allows the sea ice cover to be reconstructed over the past several centuries.
Colonizing the Moon has been claimed to be the stepping stone for colonizing planet Mars (NASA: “En Route to Mars”). Some folks are all in favor, with headlines like “Make American First on the Moon again!”
Even the renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking has been adamant in his doom scenario projections: In one hundred years or so, mankind can no longer live on earth. That’s a big “upgrade” from “… one thousand years …” that Hawking made just a few months ago. No wonder then, the (renewed) race to the moon and planets (not limited to Mars) is just getting underway.
One of the main accusations launched by climate activists is that anyone arguing against man-made global warming is “anti-science.” They tell us that the science is “settled,” and that anyone who objects is ignoring a blindingly obvious set of facts.
But what to do about someone like me? I’m in hearty agreement that the global climate has warmed by roughly one degrees Celsius over the past 150 years. However, my study of the relevant geology and physics leads me to believe that solar variability, not carbon dioxide, is responsible for this warming.
In the wake of last month’s marches for science and climate in Washington and around the country, Americans are divided in their support of the events’ goals and their sense of whether it will make a difference. In particular, a new Pew Research Center survey finds that most Democrats and younger adults are convinced that these public events will help the causes of scientists.
Professor Pierre-Marie Robitaille has upset many defenders of consensus science with a ground-breaking peer-reviewed study that casts doubt on the validity of Max Planck’s famous theory of radiation. It is shown that Planck misrepresented Kirchhoff’s Law such that the behavior of nature is not properly accounted for. Robitaille now presents a series of lectures for viewing on Youtube.
Throughout “The Theory of Heat Radiation’ the celebrated Max Planck employed extreme measures to arrive at Kirchhoff’s Law. Professor Robitaille exposes the flaws in Planck’s work that others have previously declined to address.
Obviously it can’t be both. If you are surprised it means you didn’t predict it would happen. And then to call the surprise “inevitable” means the only thing you are certain of is that you can’t predict climate.
I (Duane Thresher) was a contributor to the National Academy book “Abrupt Climate Change: Inevitable Surprises”. So was Dr. Gavin Schmidt, leading global warming spokesperson and current head of NASA GISS (anointed by former head Dr. James Hansen, father of global warming). Unlike Schmidt, I questioned the whole premise but was just a graduate student at the time so didn’t speak up.
