The dinosaurs were already in decline 50 million years before the asteroid strike that finally wiped them out, a study suggests.

The new assessment adds further fuel to a debate on how dinosaurs were doing when a 10km-wide space rock slammed into Earth 66 million years ago.

A team suggests the creatures were in long-term decline because they could not cope with the ways Earth was changing.

The study appears in PNAS journal.

Researchers analysed the fossil remains of dinosaurs from the point they emerged 231 million years ago up to the point they went extinct.

LONDON, April 18 (UPI) — The so-called Gatwick Gusher, a shale basin in the United Kingdom, could add as much as $74 billion to the nation’s economy, a study finds.

U.K. Oil & Gas Investments commissioned Ernst & Young to examine the future potential of oil production from the Weald shale basin.

“Assuming it can be extracted from a development site at the volumes projected by U.K. Oil & Gas, has the potential to generate significant economic value to the U.K. economy,” the report read.

Oil & Gas U.K., the industry’s lobbying group, said the North Sea oil sector is in for a long period of decline, with less than $1.4 billion in new spending expected in 2016. Inland shale, meanwhile, has the potential to add between $10 billion and $74.6 billion to the British economy in gross value, the commissioned report said.

In this age of specialization, it is very difficult for scientists to integrate information and create a wider cross-discipline understanding of how the Earth works. Three scientists, Alfred Wegener, Milutin Milankovitch, and Vladimir Köppen, had such abilities and their work profoundly impacted our view and understanding of the world and climate.

Sadly, because of the glorification of specialization and denigration of generalization, and control of knowledge and education by the government they are little known or understood today. As always happens with a history they are accused of saying things they never said, or not saying things they did say. It is why in all my classes students were required to go back to the source and not perpetuate the practice of what I call “carping on carping.”

Assignment of the three to the arcane backwaters of the history of science and climate reflects the loss of perspective in climate science manifest in the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). That political body deliberately directed climate science and world attention to anthropogenic global warming (AGW), and more narrowly to one greenhouse gas, CO2. They even proved the validity of their attention with computer models that pre-determined that CO2 from humans explained 95 percent of all temperature and climate change since 1950.

Wegener, Milankovitch, and Köppen knew each other very well (Wegener married Köppen’s daughter). The three produced groundbreaking individual and specific research, but the fruits of their collaboration led to the production of general global theories that underpin so much of climate and earth sciences today.

Vladimir Köppen’s global climate classification, the basis of most systems in use today, combined meteorology, climatology, and botany so that plants were a primary indicator of climate categories and regions. It introduces the important and mostly overlooked concept of the “effectiveness” of precipitation. Wegener produced the continental drift theory that provides the foundation for geophysics and the understanding of earthquakes and volcanic activity. Milutin Milankovitch, a Serbian mathematician, and climatologist, combined the effects of changes in Sun/Earth relationships to determine their role in varying the amount of energy reaching the Earth and causing climate change.

A new generation of muon telescopes has been built to detect the presence of secret structures and cavities in Egypt’s pyramids, a team of researchers announced on Friday.

Built by CEA (French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission) the devices add to an armory of innovative, non-destructive technologies employed to investigate four pyramids which are more than 4,500 years old. They include the Great Pyramid, Khafre or Chephren at Giza, the Bent pyramid and the Red pyramid at Dahshur.

The project, called ScanPyramids, is scheduled to last one year and is being carried out by a team from Cairo University’s Faculty of Engineering and the Paris-based non-profit organization Heritage, Innovation and Preservation (HIP Institute) under the authority of the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities.

Sunday’s devastating earthquake in Ecuador might just be the beginning, according to a seismologist who says that current conditions in the Pacific Rim could trigger at least four quakes with magnitudes greater than 8.0.

Roger Bilham, a University of Colorado seismologist, told the Express, “If (the quakes) delay, the strain accumulated during the centuries provokes more catastrophic mega earthquakes.”

A total of 38 volcanoes are currently erupting around the world, making conditions ripe for seismic activity in the Pacific area.

More than 270 people are now confirmed dead after Sunday’s quake in Ecuador, with the number expected to rise.

There are 2300 new coal plants with 1400GW of capacity planned worldwide. China is planning to keep burning coal and to ship electricity to Germany, where the renewable revolution has made power so expensive it may soon be cheaper to get it from half a world away, from coal. 

[….] The US still gets roughly one-third of its electricity from coal. Rather than climate change and renewables, the fall of Peabody is largely a story of heavy debt burden and increased competition from shale gas.

And on this front, coal is not alone. New-generation solar ­energy company and former Silicon Valley darling SunEdison is itself on the verge of bankruptcy after its value plunged from $10bn in July to $650m. The company was once the great hope of renewable energy but has surrendered under the weight of heavy borrowings used to make overly expen­sive acquisitions as part of a poorly thought through strategy.

A group calling itself “The FS-UNEP Collaborating Centre for Climate and Sustainable Energy Finance,” working out of the Frankfurt School, in collaboration with the United Nations Environment Program and the Bloomberg New Energy Finance Group has published study called “Global Trends in Renewable Energy Investment,[2] according to which, in the period between 2004 and 2014, the world expenditure on so called “renewable energy” amounted to 1.801 trillion dollars (US).  Of this, 711 billion dollars was applied to developing wind energy, an amount exceeded only by the investment in solar energy, which was 875.1 billion dollars in that same period.

The total “investment” in so called “renewable energy” in the last ten years is greater than the annual GDP (2013) of 179 of 192 nations as recorded by the World Bank[3], only 75 billion dollars smaller than the GDP of India, a nation estimated to contain a population of 1.396 billion human beings as of 2015, roughly 20{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of the human race.[4]  For the amount of money spent on so called “renewable energy” in the last decade we could have written a check for about $1,200 dollars to every man, woman and child in India, thus almost doubling the per capita income[5] of that country.  It is roughly comparable to the 2013 GDP of Canada, a few hundred billion dollars larger than the annual 2013 GDP of Australia.

There was a lot of news this week about a study, published in the medical journal BMJ, that looked at how diet affects heart health. The results were unexpected because they challenged the conventional thinking on saturated fats.

And the data were very old, from the late 1960s and early 1970s.

This has led many to wonder why they weren’t published previously. It has also added to the growing concern that when it comes to nutrition, personal beliefs often trump science.

Perhaps no subject is more controversial in the nutrition world these days than fats. While in the 1970s and 1980s doctors attacked the total amount of fat in Americans’ diets, that seems to have passed. These days, the fights are over the type of fat that is considered acceptable.

NEW YORK – The collapse of a Spanish-based multinational renewable energies company could cause election-year embarrassment not only to President Obama, Hillary Clinton, the Clinton Foundation and the Democratic Party, but also to Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz and his wife Heidi, through their ties to Goldman Sachs.

Announced Tuesday, Seville-headquartered renewables multinational firm Abengoa plans to sell off four solar photovoltaic power plants in Spain for a collective value of $65.13 million, $57.26 million and a net cash flow of $13.9 million, helping the company meet its debt-restructuring targets set out in its feasibility plan.

The asset sale announced Tuesday comes after the company sold in February its 20 percent share in the 100MV Shams-1 concentrated solar power plant in the United Arab Emirates to the Abu Dhabi-based renewable energy company Masdar.

Scientists say they have developed ultra-thin electronic “skin” that can measure oxygen levels when stuck to the body.

The goal is to develop such “skin” to monitor oxygen levels in organs during surgery, say researchers in Japan.

Tests on volunteers found the “skin” provided stable measurements of oxygen concentration in blood.

The device contains micro-electronic components that light up in red, blue and green on the surface of the body.

Scientists at the University of Tokyo are working on ways to display numbers and letters on the skin for health monitoring purposes.

It’s something climate skeptics have long suspected: Government involvement in science has skewed data to reflect the government’s agenda.

“Many have suspected that U.S. political intervention in climate science has corrupted the outcome,” notes Ron Arnold in an essay posted on CFact.org. “The new emergence of an old 1995 document from the U.S. State Department to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change confirms those suspicions, or at least gives the allegation credence enough to ask questions.”

Once respected American space agency, NASA, is again mired in allegations of a data fraud over historic global climate temperatures. Independent researcher, Steven Goddard, uncovers further proof that the narrative on man-made climate change is riddled with misrepresentations and alterations of long-undisputed facts. He writes:

In 1974, NCAR and CRU reported half a degree global cooling since the early 1940’s, and blamed drought and famine on it.

Fears that catastrophic earthquake is building today grew after a fourth major tremor struck the same region in just 48 hours.

There have been three large earthquakes recorded in recent days, including a major one in southern Japan which destroyed buildings and left at least 45 people injured, after Myanmar was rocked on Wednesday.

Tremors were also felt as far as 500 miles away at the national park in India where the Royal couple Kate and William were visiting.

Yesterday, The Japanese Red Cross Kumamoto Hospital confirmed 45 were injured, including five with serious injuries after a quake of magnitude 6.2 to 6.5 and a series of strong aftershocks ripped through Kumamoto city.

On Earth, we can definitely say that there is a significant, and important, direct solar heating of the planetary surface to high temperature by the action of sunlight.  This fact alone allows for a phase of physics to be entered that would not be allowed under the climate science supposition of a sunlight that can only warm the surface by itself to -18 °C (i.e., the ability for sunlight to generate liquid and vaporous water, or not), and this is sufficient to reject the foundation of climate science and its alarmism, and its radiative greenhouse effect, which erroneously dilutes solar power to such a low temperature value.

It must however be simultaneously included that despite whatever temperature-driving force the direct action of sunlight presents on the surface, an atmosphere above that surface has a natural temperature gradient with the bottom of the atmosphere being the warmest region, and the top the coolest.  This fact necessarily results in that any expected average temperature state of the atmosphere thus can not be found at either of its extremities, i.e. the bottom or top of the atmosphere, since the temperature gradient is constant in its direction.  That is, any expected average of a sequential series of values can not be found at either end of the sequence, but must be found within the sequence.

Abstract: The source of energy in the core of the Sun is neutron repulsion, the same source of energy in cores of the uranium and plutonium atoms that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August 1945, respectively. The Sun is an ordinary star that produces and discards hydrogen generated by neutron-emission followed, in succession, by neutron-decay. This conclusion is based on precise measurements of meteorites, planets, the Moon and the Sun during the space age and on precise atomic rest mass data. It assumes that free neutrons decay spontaneously into hydrogen atoms and that solar energy arises from the conversion of nuclear rest mass (m) into solar energy (E).

1. Introduction

I am grateful for the invitation to submit this review on neutron repulsion as the source of solar energy. The manuscript is based primarily on the work of two great scientists that participated on opposing sides of the Second World War and then died in 2001. The astronomer, astrophysicist and cosmologist, Sir Fred Hoyle (1915-2001), led a radar development group for the British during WWII and later left unambiguous hints in his 1994 autobiography [1] of inexplicable, sudden changes in the foundations of these major fields of science in 1946. The nuclear geochemist, Paul Kazuo Kuroda aka Kazuo Kuroda (1917-2001), was more circumspect in leaving hints in the description of his life as a graduate student and then as a faculty member at the Imperial University of Tokyo, studying radium, radon and other trace elements in hot springs and later extracting uranium from Manchurian euxenite ore for Japan during WWII [2].

We recently published an article by Edward Hoskins entitled “The Junk Science Of A Supposed Climate Sensitivity Formula”. The author requested a review from PSI’s former chairman Dr. Tim Ball, which we pleased to be publishing below with extracts from the original article.

The diminishing influence of increasing Carbon Dioxide CO2 on temperature

The diminishing effect of CO2 on temperature

The temperature increasing capacity of atmospheric CO2 is small, but it is real enough.

The influence of CO2 concentration on temperature is known and widely accepted to diminish progressively as its concentration increases.

I understand that this is the generally accepted position about CO2 as greenhouse gas (GHG). I have yet to find or hear of any definitive proof that CO2 operates as a GHG, I have read much about rotating dipoles and other issues. I also heard the argument made some 20 years ago at a presentation in Calgary by a prominent skeptic that it was politically safer to say CO2 had a small greenhouse effect but it was so small as to be insignificant. I never agreed with this position and still don’t.

CO2’s effect diminishes logarithmically with increasing concentration. Both  Global Warming advocates and Climate Change sceptics agree on this.  IPCC Published reports, (TAR3), acknowledge that the effective temperature increase caused by growing concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere radically diminishes with increasing concentrations.[i].

This information has been presented in the IPCC reports. However it is well disguised for any lay reader, (Chapter 6. Radiative Forcing of Climate Change: section 6.3.4 Total Well-Mixed Greenhouse Gas Forcing Estimate).

One of several deceptions about CO2 made by the IPCC to further their objective of proving their hypothesis is that CO2 is evenly distributed throughout the atmosphere. I knew that was wrong and was borne out by the recent results from the NASA satellite OCO2.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/oco2/index.html

Other deceptions included the residency time of CO2 in the atmosphere, to support their argument that even if we stopped production now the problem would persist for decades.

There are other deceptions but you get the picture.

This is a crucial fact.  It is not acknowledged in the IPCC summary for Policy Makers.[ii].

The rapid logarithmic diminution effect is an inconvenient fact for Global Warming advocates and alarmists.

It is well understood within the climate science community.

It is certainly not much discussed.

This logarithmic diminution effect is the likely reason there was no runaway greenhouse warming caused by CO2 in earlier eons when CO2 levels were known to be at levels of several thousands parts per million by volume, ppmv.

The following simplifying diagram shows the logarithmic diminution effect using tranches of 100ppmv up to 1000ppmv and the proportional significance of differing CO2 concentrations on the biosphere.