Image copyright: ANSMET/K.JOY

The go-ahead has been given for the first British expedition to collect meteorites in Antarctica. Most of the space rocks now in collections worldwide have been picked up on the continent. The region’s great expanse of ice makes searching for the blackened remains of objects that have fallen from the sky a particularly productive exercise.

But the UK venture will target a strangely underrepresented class of meteorites – those made of iron. These are the smashed up innards of bodies that almost became planets at the start of the Solar System. Finding more of them could give us important clues to events that occurred some 4.6 billion years ago, said Dr Katherine Joy from Manchester University.

Paper Reviewed: Rojo-Garibaldi, B., Salas-de-León, D.A., Sánchez, N.L. and Monreal-Gómez, M.A. 2016. Hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea and their relationship with sunspots. Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics 148: 48-52.

Although some climate alarmists contend that CO2-induced global warming will increase the number of hurricanes in the future, the search for such effect on Atlantic Ocean tropical cyclone frequency has so far remained elusive. And with the recent publication of Rojo-Garibaldi et al. (2016), it looks like climate alarmists will have to keep on looking, or accept the likelihood that something other than CO2 is at the helm in moderating Atlantic hurricane frequency.

A few days ago in a radio interview, a senior US Fish & Wildlife biologist repeated the tall tale that Southern Beaufort Sea polar bear numbers declined in recent years due to loss of summer sea ice. But restating this egregious misinformation does not make it true.

The Southern Beaufort population did decline between 2001 and 2006 but it was due to natural causes (thick ice in spring from 2004 to 2006) – it had nothing to do with recent summer sea ice loss and Eric Regehr knows it.

In his recently released and timely book, Scare Pollution: Why and How to Fix the EPA, author Steve Milloy says this about the Environmental Protection Agency:

“The EPA has over the course of the last 20 years marshaled its vast and virtually unchallenged power into an echo chamber of deceptive science, runaway regulations and fatally flawed research derived from unethical human experiments. The EPA’s conduct runs the gamut from subtle statistical shenanigans to withholding key scientific data, from seeking to rubberstamp baseless research data to illegally spraying diesel exhaust up the noses of unsuspecting children and other vulnerable populations.”

This week we focus on an in-depth article in Slate authored by Sam Apple that profiles John Arnold, “one of the least known billionaires in the U.S.” Turns out Mr. Arnold is very interested in “fixing” science.

His foundation, the Arnold Foundation, has provided a good deal of funding to various research efforts across the country and across disciplines aimed at investigating how the scientific incentive structure results in biased (aka “bad”) science.

During the last Ice Age, Australia, Tasmania and New Guinea formed a single landmass, called Sahul. It was a strange and often hostile place populated by a bizarre cast of giant animals.

Researchers have identified traces of what they believe is the earliest known prehistoric ancestor of humans — a microscopic, bag-like sea creature, which lived about 540 million years ago.

We have been lied to: Carbon dioxide (CO2) is an alleged ‘well-mixed gas’ also alleged to reside in sufficient quantities high in the atmosphere to cause global warming (via the so-called greenhouse gas effect). But as President Trump looks to help dismantle the hoax there is much inconvenient science at hand to help his administration discredit this ‘theory’ beloved by climate alarmists.

The first damaging fact to the theory: CO2 is actually a heavy gas. It is not ‘well mixed’ in the air as per the glib claim.  Just check out the NASA image (above) showing widely varying carbon dioxide concentrations. Indeed, schoolchildren are shown just how heavy CO2 is by way of a simple school lab experiment. This heavy gas thus struggles to rise and soon falls back to earth due to its Specific Gravity (SG). Real scientists rely on the SG measure which gives standard air a value of 1.0 where the measured SG of CO2 is 1.5 (considerably heavier). Thus,  in the real world the warming theory barely gets off the ground.

I recently wrote about the wretched reporting on the claim that 2016 was the “hottest year on record,” using as my main example a New York Times article by Justin Gillis that gave his readers none of the relevant numbers they could use to evaluate that claim. None of them.

If you search for the actual numbers, you will eventually find that the effect they are claiming, the actual amount by which this year was hotter than previous years, is smaller than the margin of error in the data.

My Dear Aunt Climate,

First of all, somewhat belatedly, my best wishes for your continued happiness and prosperity in this new year of The Lord, 2017! And when you change your attire with the seasons, from white to brown, to green, and back again to white, please be mindful of and stay within accustomed-to conventions.

Just a fraction of one degree above or below the global mean temperature could cause some folks to become upset.

Our planet may be blue from the inside out. Earth’s huge store of water might have originated via chemical reactions in the mantle, rather than arriving from space through collisions with ice-rich comets.

This new water may be under such pressure that it can trigger earthquakes hundreds of kilometres below Earth’s surface – tremors whose origins have so far remained unexplained. That’s the upshot of a computer simulation of reactions in Earth’s upper mantle between liquid hydrogen and quartz, the most common and stable form of silica in this part of the planet.

    Image copyright: HARVARD UNIVERSIT/R.DIAS/I.SILVERA

Scientists in the US say they have at last managed to turn hydrogen into a state where it behaves like a metal. If that is true – and it is a controversial claim – it fulfils a more than 80-year quest to produce what many have said would be a wonder material.

Theory suggests metallic hydrogen could be used to make zero-resistance electrical wiring and super-powerful rocket fuel, among many applications. Ranga Dias and Isaac Silvera are the Harvard researchers behind the work.

The US Department of Energy (DOE) describes itself as the “largest federal sponsor of basic research in physical sciences.” It consumes $32 billion in federal spending annually, funding numerous projects connected to climate change and renewable energy.

Earlier this month, the DOE decided its scientific integrity policy, last updated in 2014, was wholly inadequate. With nine days remaining in the Obama administration, energy Secretary Ernest Moniz unveiled a brand new policy at the National Press Club.

NEWLY hatched turtles head straight for the sea and tadpoles recognise a predatory salamander the very first time they see one. But what may, on the surface, appear to be a primordial instinct can sometimes hide a deeper, stranger truth: that our first lessons in life come before birth itself.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) publishes their latest prediction of accelerated sea level rise in defiant snub to President Donald Trump’s ‘hoax’ claims on climate change.

Despite Trump’s campaign rhetoric about climate change and the appointment of fellow global warming skeptic – Oklahoma attorney general – Scott Pruitt to take over the EPA, NOAA doubles down on alarmist junk science forecasting.

Thirty-two scientists from nine countries use satellite records to prove global growing season has been boosted by between 25 to 50 percent. The international team of experts found that CO2 enrichment is proving to be a tremendous biospheric benefit contrary to climate alarmist fears.

Paper Reviewed: Zhu, Z., Piao, S., Myneni, R.B., Huang, M., Zeng, Z., Canadell, J.G., Ciais, P., Sitch, S., Friedlingstein, P., Arneth, A., Cao, C., Cheng, L., Kato, E., Koven, C., Li, Y., Lian, X., Liu, Y., Liu, R., Mao, J., Pan, Y., Peng, S., Penuelas, J., Poulter, B., Pugh, T.A.M., Stocker, B.D., Viovy, N., Wang, X., Wang, Y., Xiao, Z., Yang, H., Zaehle, S. and Zeng, N. 2016. Greening of the Earth and its drivers. Nature Climate Change DOI: 10.1038/NCLIMATE3004.