It is worth returning to that letter in last week’s Sunday Telegraph, criticising Booker’s global warming groupthink article:

SIR – I agree with Christopher Booker that people tend to adopt the views of their “group” without checking facts or using critical thinking.

Nevertheless, his article contains inaccuracies. A big one: that climate change theory was immediately hailed as a scientific consensus.

The alarms are sounding about lack of ice extent in the Bering Sea, studiously ignoring what else is happening in the Arctic.

For instance, the above image shows the last 10 days on the European side, with the Barents Sea on the right growing steadily to a new maximum. On the left, Gulf of St. Lawrence ice is retreating as usual while the Baffin Bay holds steady.

A group of U.S. scientists has had to be rescued by helicopter from Antarctica after being trapped by encroaching ice.

Good Morning America reports:

A group of American scientists was rescued from an island off Antarctica’s coast after ice prevented a U.S. Antarctic Program research vessel from reaching them.

A huge solar storm is heading for Earth, and it’s likely to hit tomorrow. Nasa spotted the solar flare releasing a coronal mass ejection earlier this week. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued a ‘G1’ storm watch. It coincides with the formation of ‘equinox cracks’ in the sun, which form around the equinoxes on March 20 and September 23 and weaken the magnetic field.

What would happen if it were proven that “fossil fuels” weren’t the result of decaying plant and animal matter, were actually created within the Earth due to simple chemistry and you could not be scared into believing that we were “running out” of oil and natural gas?

Learning can result in the increase of how much information our brains can hold, researchers have found.

Researchers at UT-Austin, the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the University of Otago in New Zealand discovered that the capacity of a synapse, the junctions between brain cells, expand in response to learning.

“Our most recent finding found that the range of a synapse is not fixed,” said Kristen Harris, a UT neuroscience professor. “On the other hand, if you buy a flash drive, the factory determined how much info you could store; it’s at a fixed level. Our brains are not like that.”

Trapped in the rigid structure of diamonds formed deep in the Earth’s crust, scientists have discovered a form of water ice that was not previously known to occur naturally on our planet.

The finding, published Thursday in Science, represents the first detection of naturally occurring ice-VII ever found on Earth. And as sometimes happens in the scientific process, it was discovered entirely by accident.

Editor’s Note: This is part II; part I can be found here.

Professor Brian Wansink is head of the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University. The lab has had problems, some described in an article called “Spoiled Science” in the Chronicle of Higher Education early in 2017:

Four papers on which he is a co-author were found to contain statistical discrepancies. Not one or two, but roughly 150. That revelation led to further scrutiny of Wansink’s work and to the discovery of other eyebrow-raising results, questionable research practices, and apparent recycling of data in at least a dozen other papers. All of which has put the usually ebullient researcher and his influential lab on the defensive.

A new study shows that the Antarctic Ice Shelf has been thickening – in times of global warming. Logic: Global warming cannot be the driving factor for Antarctic ice shelf mass, let alone CO2.

In an expanding universe, as postulated by mainstream cosmology, the farther away we look at galaxies, the further back in time we are also looking.

Therefore, we would expect to see galactic density increase with distance, since the volume of the early universe would have been smaller such that galaxies would have been more closely packed.  Astronomical observations appear to show relatively constant galactic density vs. distance, inconsistent with the concept of an expanding universe started from a Big Bang, but not inconsistent with one that has existed indefinitely in a steady state.

Abstract: The measurements of gravitational waves, γ- rays, X-rays, UV, blue light, and red light from collision of neutron stars on 17th August 2017 opened a subject of gravitational wave astronomy.

As these emissions are found similar to radioisotopes and solar emissions caused by 235uranium fission, fission is reported to be taking place during collision. Therefore, fission could be the source for gravitational waves (GW170817). Early arrival of blue light than red light is attributed to its high energy and signifies reliability of measurements.

Whenever you see a headline like this, you know it will go along the lines of “did you know that petroleum stands for rock oil?” Yes you did, goes the reply of an overwhelming majority of readers.

For this reason, the list below is one which holds the reader in high esteem, as a dear colleague on the road to broaden our knowledge of the oil industry. So here we go…

A new study has, for the first time, cut a clear path through a nettlesome problem: accurately measuring a powerful effect on global sea level that lingers from the last ice age.

Just how quickly Earth’s deep, rocky mantle is rebounding from the heavy burden of ancient ice sheets and oceans remains somewhat uncertain. But this rebound effect, known as glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA), is critical to properly understanding the causes of sea level change.

Doing lots of exercise in older age can prevent the immune system from declining and protect people against infections, scientists say.

They followed 125 long-distance cyclists, some now in their 80s, and found they had the immune systems of 20-year-olds. Prof Norman Lazarus, 82, of King’s College London, who took part in and co-authored the research, said: “If exercise was a pill, everyone would be taking it.