As The Selfish Gene notches up 40 years in print, BBC News asked Richard Dawkins whether his most famous book is relevant today (answer: yes), whether he has any regrets about public spats over religion (no), and whether he is quitting Twitter (sort of).

“I’d so much rather talk about this than about politics.”

This, from a thinker most famous as a fearless firebrand, sounds rather incongruous. But as Prof Dawkins hunches over his laptop to dig up examples of biomorphs – the computer-generated “creatures” he conceived in the 1980s to illustrate artificial selection – it is transparently, genuinely felt.

Later, we touch on the fact that he sees public debate as a scientist’s responsibility. Right now, he wants to talk about molluscs.

Pretend molluscs.

An Inuit hunter from Arviat, Canada, shot a blonde polar bear and it’s causing quite a stir this week. Not because the hunter, Didji Ishalook, killed the animal for sustenance, but rather the various news outlets alleging this was a grizzly-polar bear hybrid, a clear sign of global warming. While DNA evidence was only recently sent out to make a ‘hybrid’ determination, that didn’t stop The Washington Post from running a misleading story that global warming was forcing grizzlies to hook up with polar bears. The DNA results are still being processed.

Ishalook, who hunts mainly in Canada’s Nunavut territory, brought the blonde bear to people’s attention when he shared his kill photos on social media May 15, writing beneath it: ” “Female grizzly/polar bear. Got my first bear woohoo!!” (See slideshow) Inuits hunt bears for food and use their skin for clothing.

The media machine took the normally common story of Inuits hunting and built another rickety polar bear story about grizzlies invading the Arctic and raping the natural world, namely the female polar bear population, due to climate change. That was the final straw for zoologist Dr. Susan Crocker, who devoted three postings on her Polar Bear Science website trying to insert the facts into the global warming hybrid hysteria.

“In war, truth is the first casualty.” Aeschylus (525 BC – 456 BC)

Maybe my first payment from Exxon for my climate views will arrive with the subpoena from the Attorney General (AG) of the Virgin Islands charging me under the Criminally Influenced and Corruptions Organizations Act (CICO) for trying to tell the truth. This is the Virgin Island’s version of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). Most who contribute to WUWT, are included because at the public event,

“Al Gore, announced that his new coalition would find “creative ways” to prosecute fossil fuel companies, individuals, and organizations who disagree with the catastrophic global warming narrative.”

From left to left; Al Gore, NY Ag Eric Schneiderman, and Claude Walker.

Scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and many universities are at a loss to explain recent conflicting temperature trends from Earth’s oceans and atmosphere. It can be boiled down to this: temperatures of the Earth’s three big fluid systems are each trending in different directions. The temperature of the Pacific Ocean is rising, the temperature of the atmosphere has remained constant, and the temperature of the Atlantic Ocean is cooling.

That’s a problem.

(NaturalNews) “It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of [The New] England Journal of Medicine” — These are the words of Dr. Marcia Angell, a physician and longtime editor-in-chief of The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), which is considered to be one of the most prestigious peer-reviewed science journals in the world.

The Lancet, another top, well respected peer-reviewed medical journal also publishes research findings that are unreliable and many times false. The current editor-in-chief, Dr. Richard Horton recently spoke out about the fake science often published in the prestigious medical journal. “The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness,” he warns, as reported by Collective-Evolution.com.

The search for scientific truth in one field often leads to unexpected insights into other fields. In researching the ignored or vastly underrated role of Earth’s nuclear fission in climate change another truth became self evident. Matter is neither created nor destroyed. The proton, neutrons and electrons released during nuclear fission become ‘elemental’ atoms, as mentioned before in this chapter.

Under the high heat and high pressure of the fission reactor the simplest of these atoms join into either diatomic atoms like Hydrogen, Helium, and Oxygen or into simple ‘elemental’ molecules. Since we have no direct knowledge of these processes, we must assume certain parameters about these reactions.

It is first assumed that the Uranium fission occurs in the molten zone somewhere near the Iron crystal core. Uranium has one of the highest densities of any natural occurring element and in a ‘liquid’ suspension would sink to the lowest level. The lighter, elemental atoms and compounds produced by fission at this great depth would naturally form bubble tracks thru the molten rock. The diatomic gases, along with elemental water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane and hydrogen sulfide would then rise up into solidified rock formations beneath the Earth’s crust.

India has successfully launched a scaled-down model of a planned “Reusable Launch Vehicle” (RLV).

Today’s launch was dubbed the “hypersonic flight experiment” (HEX) and saw a 6.5m, 1.75 tonne model of a winged spaceplane hoisted aloft atop a modified sounding rocket using the S9 engine India uses as an auxiliary for its PSV satellite launch vehicles.

That rocket climbed to about 70km, then released the RLV. The dummy craft then made a hypersonic descent to earth, splashing down into the Bay of Bengal about ten minutes after launch.

Ben Hur “a la moderne.” That’s what the new technology of “autonomous cars” is promising. How long until “Hollywood” is providing an updated version of the epic movie? Movie star Charles Heston (RIP) would probably have to take “driving lessons” on autonomous chariots for that too; the unplanned non-autonomous kind of chariot experience was scary enough, see picture nearby.

Screenshot of the chariot race in the 1959 movie Ben Hur—actor Charles Heston (or stunt double ?) barely managed to hang on (it wasn’t planned to be that way).

The modern chariots come with additional benefits like “back-seat comfort” while you text your significant other and so forth. But that’s nothing in the grand scheme of modern civilisation, where your every step is recorded for eternity by cameras at every intersection, drones in the sky to scrutinize your every move, recording and analysis of your email and phone conversation, internet searches, etc. Of course, it’s all solely for your comfort, convenience and—most importantly—safety.

Sea level rise and threats to small Pacific islands are back in the news, like the recent concern about five Pacific islands. Part of the alarmist strategy is that as the global warming claim loses traction, they resurrect stories that were successful in the past. Climate alarmists got a lot of media coverage and emotional reaction from small island stories such as the Maldives and Tuvalu. A 2009 story titled “Rising sea levels threaten small Pacific island nations” is typical,

The ocean could swallow Tuvalu whole, making it the first country to be wiped off the map by global warming.

The article identifies the level of speculative alarmism.

“Entire Pacific islands disappearing from inundation is indeed dramatic,” said Asterio Takesy, director of the Pacific Regional Environment Program, an intergovernmental organization based in Apia, Samoa. “But a complete loss of livelihoods from decreased fisheries, damaged coral reefs, tourism affected by dengue epidemics, and agriculture destroyed because of changing rain patterns – surely these are just as worthy of our attention.”

Scientists think they have spotted the remains of two huge tsunamis on Mars caused by asteroids striking the planet back when it still had water.

In a paper published in Nature Scientific Reports, the boffins say pictures from the imaging and radar satellites orbiting Mars show the effects of two separate asteroid strikes on what was once a vast ocean in the northern hemisphere of the Red Planet, 3.4 billion years ago.

“For more than a quarter century, failure to identify shoreline features consistently distributed along a constant elevation has been regarded as inconsistent with the hypothesis that a vast ocean existed on Mars approximately 3.4 billion years ago,” said lead author J. Alexis Palmero Rodriguez from the Planetary Science Institute.

Misaligned mirrors are being blamed for a fire that broke out yesterday at the world’s largest solar power plant, leaving the high-tech facility crippled for the time being. It sounds like the plant’s workers suffered through a real hellscape, too.

A small fire was reported yesterday morning at the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System (ISEGS) in California, forcing a temporary shutdown of the facility. It’s now running at a third of its capacity (a second tower is down due to scheduled maintenance), and it’s not immediately clear when the damaged tower will restart. It’s also unclear how the incident will impact California’s electricity supply.

Putting out the blaze was not easy task, either. Firefighters were forced to climb 300 feet up a boiler tower to get to the scene. Officials said the fire was located about two-thirds up the tower. Workers at the plant actually managed to subdue the flames by the time firefighters reached the spot, and it was officially extinguished about 20 minutes after it started.

We routinely read from fellow skeptics that they wish Dr. Murry Salby’s research could be made available in written form, or perhaps in a peer-reviewed paper.

Indeed we do have access to his Youtube lecture research (at least a written summary of it) from an even better source than peer-reviewed paper: Dr. Murry Salby’s 2012 university-level textbook: Physics of the Atmosphere and Climate.

Here is a pdf link to the full textbook written by a world-renown expert on atmospheric physics (he’s published several dozen papers in the scientific literature on the subject). We therefore can effectively say that a skeptical view of the CO2-dominated climate paradigm is actually textbook science, not “fringe” science for the “3 percent”.

Below I’ve compiled a short list of some of the written statements from the textbook (emphasis added):

(a) temperature changes occur first and lead to CO2 emission from natural sources (e.g., more ocean outgassing upon warming, more CO2 retention as the ocean cools), indicating that warmer temperatures are driving up CO2 concentrations significantly more than human activity or fossil fuels;

Virtual Reality (VR) has been with us for many decades – at least as an idea – but the technology has now come of age.

And it’s not just gamers who are benefiting from the immersive possibilities it offers.

Four experts, including Mark Bolas – former tutor of Palmer Luckey, who recently hand-delivered the first VR handset made by his company Oculus Rift – talked to the BBC World Service Inquiry programme about the future of VR.

Ever dreamt of hiking over the landscape and finding a mineral vein rich with ores, perhaps even silver or gold glittering in the sunshine, like in the Hand of Faith vein in Australia? How about joining the gold rush fever – without trekking up the Chilkoot Pass as thousands of prospectors did well over 100 years ago?

The chances of finding a “mother lode” are slim, even when trying hard. They are similar to winning the jackpot in a big lottery. But don’t give up just yet; there is a new “horizon” for your exploration activity—the new frontiers are way up in the outer space and deep down in the oceans (the latter to be the subject of another post)!

The Outer Space

That’s where one modern Klondike Gold Rush is heading. No more drudging in the wilderness, just go out into the intergalactic space and simply collect the golden marbles afloat in space without direction. To top it off, no biting insects or other menacing critters to worry about there either; in short, any prospector’s dream come true!

Science is pervasive directly and indirectly in every phase of modern life. While the majority are not directly involved in science, they need to understand science and how it works. It is increasingly the underlying control of social, political, and economic decisions made by them or for them. They need to understand how it works, even if they don’t make it work. This knowledge must be a fundamental part of any school curriculum.

Climate skeptics struggle with getting the majority of people to understand the problems with the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) anthropogenic global warming (AGW) story. It was the theme of my presentation at the first Heartland Climate Conference in New York and many articles and presentations since. The problem is much wider because it relates to the lack of scientific abilities among a majority of the population. Based on teaching a science credit for science students for 25 years, giving hundreds of public presentation and involving myself in education at all levels from K-12, to graduate, and post-graduate, plus the transition to the workplace, I believe a fundamental mandatory change in thinking and curricula are required.

I believe abilities are an example of the ongoing nature/nurture argument. People can learn an ability, but can only achieve a high level of competence with an innate ability. For example, most people can learn the mechanics of teaching, but only a few are ‘gifted’ teachers. These concepts are particularly true of certain abilities, such as music, art, languages and mathematics. From my experience, I learned that most people with these gifts struggled with understanding why other people cannot do as they do. Often, they do not even see their ability as unique, and some deride those without their ability. On a larger scale than just mathematics, which philosophically is an art, is the distinction of abilities between those who are comfortable with science and those who are not.

The floating portion of Totten Glacier in East Antarctica may be melting from warm sea water swirling beneath it, making it more vulnerable than previously thought to future melting. That’s according to a new study by scientists at the Imperial College London and institutions in Australia, the US, and New Zealand, and published yesterday in Nature. The study’s team found that a part of the Totten Glacier that floats on warm sea water is losing some ice, even while total ice cover in Antarctica continues to expand.

The East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS) is relatively stable compared to West Antarctica, which sits on an enormous fault zone. However, the region of the Totten Glacier studied sits on ocean water heated from geothermal activity, which explains the possibility that it could progressively melt.