NASA’s own data is showing that the star our globe revolves around is dimming.  With no sunspots reported in 96 days, the sun is going dark and the evidence could point to an approaching ice age.

As the sun gets successively more blank with each day, due to lack of sunspots, it is also dimming, says the website Watts Up With That? According to data from NASA’s Spaceweather, so far in 2017, 96 days (27%) of the days observing the sun have been without sunspots.

 

In a new paper published in Geophysical Research Letters, three MIT scientists assert that the human influence on the climate of the Central United States is dominated by agricultural activity rather than greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

Researchers have claimed a breakthrough in understanding how cosmic rays from supernovas react with the sun to form clouds, which impact the climate on Earth.

The findings have been described as the “missing link” to help resolve a decades long controversy that has big implications for climate science.

Chance Favors The Prepared Mind (Louis Pasteur)  What is a prepared mind?  John O’Sullivan, editor of PSI, recently posted, unknown to me, an essay I had written in 2013. (https://principia-scientific.com/education-and-science-science-and-education/)  This essay was from a blog-site I had begun at that time. (http://semivision.blogspot.com/)

The continental rock underlying the east coast of North America is pretty boring, tectonically speaking. The last dramatic geological goings-on there happened around 200 million years ago, and most change since then has been from glacial, wind and water erosion.

The world’s first nuclear fusion plant has now reached 50 percent completion, the project’s director-general announced on December 6, 2017.

When it is operational, the experimental fusion plant, called the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), will circulate plasma in its core that is 10 times hotter than the sun, surrounded by magnets as cold as interstellar space.

I recently came across a site that compared commonly used metals in terms of the energy required to produce them. This raises interesting questions. Shall we criticize auto and motorcycle manufacturers for using more aluminum in their vehicles and less steel?

The energy cost to win a kilogram of aluminum from its aluminum oxide (bauxite) ore is roughly 10 times greater than what is consumed in transforming iron into steel. Or shall we praise them because the lighter weight of the resulting vehicles requires less fuel to accelerate them in stop-and-go driving?

Growing number of scientists are predicting global cooling: Russia’s Pulkovo Observatory: ‘We could be in for a cooling period that lasts 200-250 years’

Danish Solar Scientist Svensmark declares ‘global warming has stopped and a cooling is beginning…enjoy global warming while it lasts’

A whopping two hundred and fifty-two million years ago, Earth was crawling with bizarre animals, including dinosaur cousins resembling Komodo dragons and bulky early mammal-relatives, millions of years before dinosaurs even existed.

New research shows us that the Permian equator was both a literal and figurative hotspot: it was, for the most part, a scorching hot desert, on top of having a concentration of unique animals. Here, you could find ancient crocodile-sized amphibians right next to newly evolved dinosaur and croc relatives. Many of these species were wiped out after an extinction which changed life on the planet forever.

Recent stories in the national media are magnifying fears of a catastrophic eruption of the Yellowstone volcanic area, but scientists remain uncertain about the likelihood of such an event.

To better understand the region’s subsurface geology, University of Illinois geologists have rewound and played back a portion of its geologic history, finding that Yellowstone volcanism is more far more complex and dynamic than previously thought.

Image copyright: GETTY IMAGES

Researchers in the UK have developed a method of improving the long range accuracy of summer weather in the UK and Europe. The scientists found a connection between sea surface temperatures in the North Atlantic in March and April and the subsequent summer’s rain or shine.

A new analysis of the oldest known fossil microorganisms provides strong evidence to support an increasingly widespread understanding that life in the universe is common.

Before getting to the subject of climate models and why they aren’t reliable as forecasting tools, there are two small points worth bringing up:

In assessing the global-scale trends in near-surface (0-20 m) ocean temperatures between 1900 and 2010, Gouretski et al. (2012) determined that the world’s oceans warmed by about 1.1°C between 1900 and 1945 (~0.24°C per decade), but then only warmed by an additional net 0.3°C between 1945 and 2010 (~0.046°C per decade), including a cooling trend between 1945 and 1975.