In a new paper (Stein et al., 2017), scientists find that Arctic sea ice retreat and advance is modulated by variations in solar activity.

In addition, the sea ice cover during the last century has only slightly retreated from the extent reached during coldest centuries of the Little Ice Age (1600s to 1800s AD), which had the highest sea ice cover of the last 10,000 years and flirted with excursions into year-round sea ice.

The summer holidays stretched before us, hot and tempting. After the Kaikoura earthquake and the surprise of losing our prime minister before his term was out, we lusted for the Kiwi summer. The year had felt long, turbulent and tiring.

We needed summer, because everyone felt bruised and battered by 2016. We needed her warm temperatures to soften our bones and untwist the knots in our spine. We needed to feel coal-hot bitumen burn our bare feet, and taste bland sausages charred on the barbecue.

The Pacific Ocean called too, wondering when I’d visit for a swim, opening my mouth wide in her depths to let the salt and bubbles scour my throat.

There are many deadly and disastrous stories associated with the deception that human CO2 is causing global warming. Some are more obscure than others, but no less deadly in the unnecessary damage and destruction they caused. One was the myth of what was called “Arab Spring.”

It never occurred, but what happened was a result of ‘green’ policies based on non-existence science. Unintended consequences are the inevitable result of actions and must not be used to inhibit action and progress. However, there is a difference if the objective was based on evidence and provides benefits or was based on concocted evidence and was mostly detrimental.

A new study led by The Australian National University (ANU) has found seawater cycles throughout Earth’s interior down to 2,900km, much deeper than previously thought, reopening questions about how the atmosphere and oceans formed.

https://twitter.com/greenpeace/status/837005520313679872

Today’s fake news story comes from Greenpeace. The supposed record comes from Esperanza. As Jim Steele at WUWT points out, Esperanza is at the northern tip of the Antarctic peninsula, at a latitude of 63.4S, just about as far outside the Antarctic Circle as you could get.

Image copyrigh: tM DODD

Scientists have discovered what they say could be fossils of some of the earliest living organisms on Earth. They are represented by tiny filaments, knobs and tubes in Canadian rocks dated to be up to 4.28 billion years old.

That is a time not long after the planet’s formation and hundreds of millions of years before what is currently accepted as evidence for the most ancient life yet found on Earth.The researchers report their investigation in the journal Nature.

Radiant energy can transfer from a colder to a warmer radiator.

Abstract: The rigorous model of simultaneous thermal and radiant energy transfer proves energy transfer by radiation can flow from a colder radiator to a warmer one, heating the warmer one further. It explains and quantifies how dissimilar walls in a room can have different steady-state temperatures.

Only the general laws of thermal and radiant energy transfer and the First Law of Thermodynamics, conservation of energy, are employed. [Editor’s note: since publication PSI has negatively reviewed this post*]

Introduction: Many claim radiant energy can only transfer from a hot radiator to a colder one. Otherwise the Second Law of Thermodynamics would be violated.

Climate-change alarmists who have been largely unchallenged by the media over the past decade have finally met their match in Fox News host Tucker Carlson. And it ain’t pretty.

Since the premiere of his new nighttime show, Carlson has frequently confronted the dogma of man-made global warming, pushing “experts” to cite data and evidence to back up their claims rather than allowing them to repeat well-worn platitudes about a scientific consensus and the planet’s impending doom.

According to The Nation’s Report Card, only 37 percent of American 12th-graders were proficient in reading in 2015, and just 25 percent were proficient in math (https://www.nationsreportcard.gov). For black students, achievement levels were a disgrace.

Nationally, 17 percent of black students scored proficient in reading, and 7 percent scored proficient in math. In some cities, such as Detroit, black academic proficiency is worse; among eighth-graders, only 4 percent were proficient in math, and only 7 percent were proficient in reading.

As U.S. President Donald Trump works towards deep cuts to federal funding for climate research an independent Japanese climate researcher shows why climate modeling was really junk science all along.

Kyoji Kimoto, a retired expert in fuel cell energy and thermodynamics, points to recent evidence to prove a statistical “hoax” in a heated email exchange with a top UN climate modeler, Dr Robert D Cess of Stony Brook University, New York.

Image copyright: SPACEX

Elon Musk, it seems, loves nothing more than to spin plates. When most of us might be looking to lighten the load, he’s piling on the ambition.

The serial entrepreneur’s latest gambit is to fly people around the Moon. Two wealthy individuals have apparently lodged significant deposits with his SpaceX company to make this journey. We have no idea who they are, just that these space tourists include “nobody from Hollywood”.

Will Rogers (and Mark Twain) observed, “It’s not ignorance that is the problem, but that so much of what we know just ain’t so.” Adding to the “33C without an atmosphere” that is completely wrong is the case of Venus.
Venus, we are told, has an atmosphere that is almost pure carbon dioxide and an extremely high surface temperature, 750 K, and this is allegedly due to the radiative greenhouse effect, RGHE. But the only apparent defense is, “Well, WHAT else could it BE?!”

There is a popular fantasy that the earth is 33C warmer with an atmosphere than without due to the radiative greenhouse effect, RGHE and .04{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} CO2.  Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start – or so I hear.

The 33C difference is between an alleged average surface temperature of 288K/15C and 255K/-18C, the alleged surface temperature without an atmosphere. Let’s take a closer look. Just which average surface temperature? The two extremes? (71C + -90C) / 2 = -10C?

A dire shortage of electricity could mean Africa’s emerging economies turn to nuclear to underpin industrial growth. This would be a neat fit, considering Africa is where the nuclear age had its origins.

The raw material used for nuclear development during the Second World War was sourced in what was then the Belgian Congo. Africa is also where one of the world’s only natural reactors is found – geologists stumbled on a uranium deposit in Gabon that was found to have developed self-sustaining nuclear reaction aeons ago, and remained active for millennia.

New research shows that people with blue eyes have a single, common ancestor. A team at the University of Copenhagen have tracked down a genetic mutation which took place 6-10,000 years ago and is the cause of the eye colour of all blue-eyed humans alive on the planet today.

The last Neanderthal died 40,000 years ago, but much of their genome lives on, in bits and pieces, through modern humans. The impact of Neanderthals’ genetic contribution has been uncertain: Do these snippets affect our genome’s function, or are they just silent passengers along for the ride?

In Cell on February 23, researchers report evidence that Neanderthal DNA sequences still influence how genes are turned on or off in modern humans. Neanderthal genes’ effects on gene expression likely contribute to traits such as height and susceptibility to schizophrenia or lupus, the researchers found.