The EU’s Sentinel-3a satellite has given a sneak peek at what will be one of its most fundamental products – a map of sea surface height anomalies.

Launched in February, the spacecraft carries an altimeter to sense the oceans’ “hills” and “valleys”.

It is basic information that is needed to track currents and eddies, inform ocean forecasts and track variability in climate-driven sea-level rise.

This first Sentinel-3a global map contains just one month’s data.

The acquisition was made between 3 March and 2 April 2016.

Red shows (positive) areas where the sea surface is higher than the reference sea level, and blue (negative) areas reveal where it is lower.

Europe’s rover mission to Mars is “drinking in the last chance saloon”, warns the European Space Agency’s director general.

Jan Woerner has told reporters of his deep frustration that the project to put the robot on the surface of the Red Planet has been delayed yet again.

The venture could not have an open-ended schedule or budget, he said.

The ExoMars six-wheeled vehicle was originally destined to leave Earth in 2011, but will not now go until 2020.

Inability of teams to meet hardware delivery deadlines has been cited as the reason for the latest delay.

Skywatchers across the globe have enjoyed an opportunity to see Mercury transit the Sun.

Mercury’s sojourn between Earth and our star lasted from 11:12 until 18:42 GMT.

It was the third such pass of 14 this century; Mercury will not make another transit until 2019 and then 2032.

The event is impossible – and dangerous – to view with the naked eye or binoculars, but astronomy groups worldwide are offering the chance view it through filtered telescopes.

Live views from space and ground telescopes were also available online.#

SpaceX has made another successful landing of a rocket stage at sea.

The Falcon-9 booster returned to a drone ship off the Florida coast just a few minutes after it had sent a Japanese satellite on its way to orbit.

It is the second at-sea touchdown for California’s SpaceX company, having completed the same task last month.

This latest effort was all the more impressive however because the rocket was carrying much more speed when it made its return.

Scientists have had a literal breakthrough off the coast of Mexico.

After weeks of drilling from an offshore platform in the Gulf of Mexico, they have reached rocks left over from the day the Earth was hit by a killer asteroid.

The cataclysm is believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs. “This was probably the most important event in the last 100 million years,” says Joanna Morgan, a geophysicist at Imperial College in London and a leader of the expedition.

Since the 1980s, researchers have known about the impact site, located near the present-day Yucatan Peninsula. Known as Chicxulub, the crater is approximately 125 miles across. It was created when an asteroid the size of Staten Island, N.Y., struck Earth around 66 million years ago. The initial explosion from the impact would have made a nuclear bomb look like a firecracker. The searing heat started wildfires many hundreds of miles away.

They call it the “Jacuzzi of Despair” and it’s not another teen horror movie … unless you’re a teenage fish trying to swim through it. Marine scientists have discovered a hot, toxic undersea pool on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico that kills every living thing attempting to cross it.

While researching corals in the Gulf using a remotely-controlled underwater robot, Temple College biology professor Erik Cordes found the mysterious lake-in-a-gulf in 2014. He returned in 2015 with a three-man sub for a better look.

What he saw belongs in an underwater monster flick.

“You go down into the underside of the ocean and you’re looking at a lake or a river flowing. It seems like you aren’t on this world. We have been in a position to see the primary opening of a canyon … we noticed the brine falling over this wall like a dam. It was this stunning pool of purple white and black colors.”

It has been going on for so long now. For far too long the scientifically illiterate have hurled abuse at Climate Sceptics for the great sin of believing in Great Nature and the scientific method. So now in the United States of America you have the real possibility of electing a President who does not believe in man-made Global Warming, but in Sun-made Global Warming, who actually believes that the Sun makes us warm, and believes that the Sun is inconstant with Solar flares and mighty Solar storms.

Is it not amazing that such a collective madness could have troubled mankind for so long? In the United Kingdom there was a well-loved Botanist who appeared regularly on BBC television, who suddenly disappeared from the networks. His contracts were not renewed. He became persona non grata.

What was his great sin in the eyes of the scientifically illiterate mob? He believed and declared that Carbon Dioxide was, and is, a food for green plants, and that these same green plants produce for us and for all mankind the Oxygen of life.

Moon caves could provide shelter for astronauts exploring Earth’s nearest neighbor, researchers say.

A new analysis of data gathered by NASA’s twin Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) spacecraft, which mapped the moon’s gravitational field in unprecedented detail, turned up a number of new candidates for lava tubes — cave-like structures that could be large enough to house supplies and astronauts.

Space is a harsh environment. Radiation from the sun, galactic cosmic rays and constantly falling micrometeorites all present a threat to human explorers. [Home on the Moon: How to Build a Lunar Colony (Infographic)

“A lava tube provides a safe haven from all these hazardous environmental conditions,” study team member Rohan Sood, a graduate student at Purdue University in Indiana, told Space.com.

An Italian economist says his flight was delayed after a fellow passenger saw him working on a differential equation and alerted the cabin crew.

Guido Menzio was taken off and questioned by agents who did not identify themselves, after the woman next to him said she felt ill.

He showed them what he had been writing and the flight eventually took off – more than two hours late.

Mr Menzio told the Washington Post that the pilot seemed embarrassed.

He wrote on Facebook that the experience was “unbelievable” and made him laugh.

“The Danish Council of Ethics” (DCE) wants its Government to do a Robin Hood – but instead of robbing the rich, it would be red meat, while wind turbines take the place of the poor” as reported by the Market Business News (MBN). 

More specifically, the council advocates a “red meat climate tax” imposed by the government. Having to pay what is already among the highest electricity rates within the European Union is not enough for some do-gooders in Denmark. Obviously, more punitive measures are necessary.

Why?

You, dear Readers, really ought to be ashamed of yourself; how could you even ask such a question? Don’t you know that cattle, like other ruminants, emit carbon dioxide and methane? Don’t you know that they require grass or similar plants as fodder? Not to mention their need of water to live?

How long does carbon dioxide linger in the air?

This is actually an important question, a question of so-called residence time. As previously discussed on this blog icecap.us, studies compiled by geologist Tom Segalstad rather convincingly show that earth’s biological and chemical processes recycle CO2 within a decade, meaning that a CO2 molecule you’re exhaling at the moment is bound to be captured by a plant or a rock or the ocean just a few years from now. Yet the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and other authorities insist that carbon dioxide generally remains in the air for up to 200 years.

Who to believe?

We’ll present some evidence here and you be the judge.

Looking at the rising trend of carbon dioxide, the U.S. government’s Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center – http://cdiac.ornl.gov – states the matter plainly: “Atmospheric CO2 concentrations had not changed appreciably over the preceding 850 years, so it may be safely assumed that they would not have changed appreciably in the 150 years from 1850 to 2000 in the absence of human intervention.”
“Safely assumed.”

In other words, what people were doing in 1850 is supposedly still exerting an effect today. Having nowhere else to go, the man-made CO2 tally builds and builds in the air. Even if we all suddenly stopped driving cars and clearing forests and heating our homes – you name it – we’d have to wait more than a century to see the same CO2 level that the 1850s saw. For here is what the historical trend looks like.

In 1997, Joel Griffiths and Chris Bryson, two respected mainstream journalists, peered into an abyss. They found a story about fluorides that was so chilling it had to be told.

The Christian Science Monitor, who had assigned the story, never published it.

Their ensuing article, “Fluoride, Teeth, and the Atomic Bomb,” has been posted on websites, sometimes with distortions, deletions, or additions. I spoke with Griffiths, and he told me to be careful I was reading a correct copy of his piece. (You can find it—“Fluoride, Teeth, and the Atomic Bomb,” at fluoridealert.org.)

Griffiths also told me that researchers who study the effects of fluorides by homing in on communities with fluoridated drinking water, versus communities with unfluoridated water, miss a major point: fluorides are everywhere—they are used throughout the pharmaceutical industry in the manufacture of drugs, and also in many other industries (e.g., aluminum, pesticide).

Simultaneous warming on Earth and Mars suggests that our planet’s recent climate changes have a natural—and not a human-induced—cause, according to one scientist’s controversial theory.

Earth is currently experiencing rapid warming, which the vast majority of climate scientists says is due to humans pumping huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. (Get an overview: “Global Warming Fast Facts”.)

Mars, too, appears to be enjoying more mild and balmy temperatures.

In 2005 data from NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor and Odyssey missions revealed that the carbon dioxide “ice caps” near Mars’s south pole had been diminishing for three summers in a row.

Water quality is a subject that’s been big news lately. Residents of Flint, Michigan are suffering from toxic levels of lead in their water due to incompetent governance. Unfortunately, water quality issues are not a recent development. Industrial dumping, pesticide runoff, leaky storage tanks, and government mandates have created big problems. Let’s take a look at some of the nastiest water contaminants that may be pouring out of your faucet.

1. Fluoride

Adding fluoride to drinking water is a process that began back in the 1940’s to help reduce tooth decay. It sounds like a noble cause but fluoride is a neurotoxin and an endocrine disruptor. It can harm the thyroid gland and calcify the pineal gland. It’s so toxic that several countries have banned water fluoridation. Even some U.S. cities have caught on and started rejecting the process of fluoridation.^[1]

Venezuela’s Lake Maracaibo has wrested the world’s “maximum lightning activity” crown from Africa’s Congo Basin, according to electrifying data from the joint NASA and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM).

Using 16 years of detection data from the now-deceased TRMM satellite’s Lightning Imaging Sensor (LIS), scientists were able to identify “an average rate of about 233 flashes per square kilometer per year” at the lake.

NASA explains: “Located in northwest Venezuela along part of the Andes Mountains, it is the largest lake in South America. Storms commonly form there at night as mountain breezes develop and converge over the warm, moist air over the lake. These unique conditions contribute to the development of persistent deep convection resulting in an average of 297 nocturnal thunderstorms per year, peaking in September.”

“If the facts don’t fit the theory, change the facts.” – Albert Einstein

Einstein was just joking, but that is exactly what the Climategate team has done to the surface temperature record.

Fig.A.gif 

We have all grown used to seeing graphs like the one at above from NASA, showing nearly continuous global warming over the last 135 years – with a flat period between 1940 and 1980, and 1.2C warming from 1880 through 2000.

Much of climate science, journalism and public policy is based around the belief that these NASA graphs are an accurate representation of the temperature record, and that the apparent warming which is shown in the graphs is due to an increase in atmospheric CO2. It is therefore very important to understand the accuracy, consistency and integrity of these graphs.

However, if we look at earlier versions of the same graph, we see something very different. The graph below was published by NASA in 2001, and showed 1975 as barely warmer than 1880 – with less than 0.6C warming from 1880 to 2000. The 2001 version showed only half as much warming from 1880 to 2000 as the 2016 version of the same graph above.

Fig.A.ps