Three and a half billion years ago, a mega asteroid slammed into Earth, triggering massive tsunamis and leaving craters bigger than many U.S. states. It was the second oldest and one of the largest impacts known to have hit the planet.

Now, for the first time, remnants of that impact have been uncovered in ancient sediments in Australia, and they’re revealing more intriguing details about the Earth at that time.

The mega asteroid that battered the primeval Earth was likely between 12 and 19 miles (20 to 30 kilometers) across, dwarfing the space rock that caused the dinosaur-killing Chicxulub impact, the research suggests. [Crash! The 10 Biggest Impact Craters on Earth].

“The impact would have triggered earthquakes orders of magnitude greater than terrestrial earthquakes; it would have caused huge tsunamis and would have made cliffs crumble,” study co-author Andrew Glikson, a planetary scientist at the Australian National University, said in a statement.

As the naturally occurring El Niño of 2015-2016 wends down, NOAA is forecasting this week that conditions in the Pacific Ocean will likely flip from an El Niño to a La Niña, lowering temperatures worldwide this fall and winter.

The now-dissipating El Niño is part of ENSO, or the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, a natural climate pattern where the tropical Pacific Ocean’s sea surface temperatures (SSTs) swing between warmer-than-normal (El Niño) and colder-than-average (La Niña) temps. This recent El Niño is the primary reason we saw above-normal temperatures for the latter months of 2015 and first few months of 2016.

Earth’s naturally occurring ENSO, NOAA writes, can influence everything from “wind, air pressure, and rain throughout the tropics” and “can havecascading side effects around the whole globe.” It also impacts the “mid-latitude jet streams that guide storms towards the United States.”

From the outside, Elidir Mountain looks like an old industrial site that has returned to nature. The slopes facing the Llyn Peris reservoir have been hacked into terraces by slate quarrying – this was once the second-biggest quarry in the world, with 3,000 workers – but they are now peaceful.

Only a few buildings at ground level and a road leading into the mountain provide a clue that there is still something going on.

A longer look would reveal that Llyn Peris has a habit of rising all day, then falling back overnight. The smaller and higher Marchlyn Mawr reservoir up in the hills does the reverse, dropping as much as 121ft (37 metres) during the day.

Is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere a bad thing?  Not according to horticulturalists. They are the experts when it comes to getting the best yield on greenhouse-grown plants. For generations cultivators have filled their greenhouses with carbon dioxide (CO2), specifically to boost plant growth. 

Likewise, more CO2 in the atmosphere means a greener, cleaner, healthier planet. As an example, below is an extract about the Johnson CO2 Generator, successfully used by greenhouse growers since 1901. Plant growers understand how crucial more (not less!) CO2 in our carbon-starved atmosphere is good for us all.

Are politicians willing to learn from greenhouse operators? Such knowledge will enable them to challenge the climate-change alarmist propaganda, which wrongly classifies carbon dioxide as a pollutant. 

The advertisement (link here : http://www.johnsongas.com/industrial/CO2Gen.asp) for the Johnson CO2 generator reveals that:

Carbon dioxide is one of the essential ingredients in green plant growth, and is a primary environmental factor in greenhouses. CO2 enrichment at 2, 3 or 4 times natural concentration will cause plants to grow faster and improve plant quality.

The dodgy scientists who wrote to President Obama and Attorney General Loretta Lynch demanding that RICO laws be used to prosecute climate skeptics just got even more badly screwed.

Already one of them — George Mason University professor Jagadish Shukla — is under Congressional investigation for what has been described as the “largest science scandal in US history.”

Now the background to their footling conspiracy has been exposed thanks to a FOIA request by the Competitive Enterprise Institute which has forced them to release their private letters and emails.

Like Climategate, it makes for some fascinating reading, mainly because — yet again — it shows the climate alarmist establishment in such a terrible light.

NASA boffins have crunched 34 million weather observations collected by the Curiosity rover its two full Martian years trundling about the red planet.

The basics are pretty simple: Mars is reliably cold, dry and windy, while the thin atmosphere means not much heat is retained so air temperature “usually plummets by more than 100 Fahrenheit degrees (55 Celsius degrees) between the afternoon high and the overnight low.”

NASA’s analysis also shows that the atmosphere is so thin that air pressure fluctuates seasonally as atmospheric carbon dioxide freezes into Mars’ ice caps.

Like werewolves and vampires, bacteria have a weakness: silver. The precious metal has been used to fight infection for thousands of years — Hippocrates first described its antimicrobial properties in 400 bc — but how it works has been a mystery. Now, a team led by James Collins, a biomedical engineer at Boston University in Massachusetts, has described how silver can disrupt bacteria, and shown that the ancient treatment could help to deal with the thoroughly modern scourge of antibiotic resistance. The work is published today in Science Translational Medicine.

“Resistance is growing, while the number of new antibiotics in development is dropping,” says Collins. “We wanted to find a way to make what we have work better.”

Collins and his team found that silver — in the form of dissolved ions — attacks bacterial cells in two main ways: it makes the cell membrane more permeable, and it interferes with the cell’s metabolism, leading to the overproduction of reactive, and often toxic, oxygen compounds. Both mechanisms could potentially be harnessed to make today’s antibiotics more effective against resistant bacteria, Collins says.

Computer modeling plays an important role in all of the sciences, but there can be too much of a good thing. A simple semantic analysis indicates that climate science has become dominated by modeling. This is a bad thing.

What we did

We found two pairs of surprising statistics. To do this we first searched the entire literature of science for the last ten years, using Google Scholar, looking for modeling. There are roughly 900,000 peer reviewed journal articles that use at least one of the words model, modeled or modeling. This shows that there is indeed a widespread use of models in science. No surprise in this.

However, when we filter these results to only include items that also use the term climate change, something strange happens. The number of articles is only reduced to roughly 55{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of the total.

The oldest space dust yet found on Earth suggests that the ancient atmosphere of Earth had significantly more oxygen than previously thought, a new study finds.

Although oxygen gas currently makes up about one-fifth of Earth’s air, there was at least 100,000 times less oxygen in the primordial atmosphere, researchers say. Oxygen easily reacts with other molecules, which means it readily gets bound to other elements and pulled from the atmosphere.

Previous research suggests that significant levels of oxygen gas started permanently building up in the atmosphere with the Great Oxidation Event, which occurred about 2.4 billion years ago. This event was most likely caused by cyanobacteria — microbes that, like plants, photosynthesize and release oxygen. [Infographic: Earth’s Atmosphere Top to Bottom].

A strange new behavior of water molecules has been observed inside crystals of beryl, a type of emerald, caused by bizarre quantum-mechanical effects that let the water molecules face six different directions at the same time.

Under normal conditions, the two hydrogen atoms in each water molecule are arranged around the oxygen atom in an open “V” shape, sometimes compared to a boomerang or Mickey Mouse ears.

But in a new experiment, scientists have found that hydrogen atoms of some water molecules trapped in the crystal structure of the mineral beryl become “smeared out” into a six-sided ring. [The Surprisingly Strange Physics of Water].

The ring shape is caused by the “quantum tunneling” of the molecules, a phenomenon that lets subatomic particles pass or “tunnel” through seemingly-impossible physical barriers.

Astronomers have used observations from the Kepler space telescope and the Herschel Space Observatory to determine that the trans-Neptunian object “2007 OR10” is bigger than previously thought, and now ranks third in the solar system’s dwarf planet size league table, behind Pluto and Eris.

The distant body was first spied back in 2007, as its provisional name indicates, by skygazers Mike Brown, David Rabinowitz and Meg Schwamb during “a survey to search for distant solar system bodies using the Samuel Oschin Telescope at Palomar Observatory near San Diego, California”, as NASA puts it.

While initial data from Herschel alone indicated a diameter of around 1,280 kilometers (795 miles), scientists needed to determine 2007 OR10’s rotational period “to estimate its overall brightness, and hence its size”.

There can be little doubt that the entire human caused climate fraud has been an intentional politically motivated movement. This has involved an elaborate network of direct government involvement and indirect government funding to provide the illusion of ‘consensus’ that would be beyond any further debate. Fortunately for the future of science, truth and humanity many honest scientists and analysts from many lands have objectively looked at the hypothesis of Anthropomorphic Global Warming and found it invalid. No analysis of this failed hypothesis is complete without examining what has been endorsed by the AGW supporters as the ‘solution’ to this non-existent problem.

The proposed ‘Green Energy Solution’ is as defective as the AGW science, with defects so obvious that endorsement must also qualify as an intention deception. The ‘Green Energy Solutions’ are primarily focused on wind energy and solar energy, with fictional claims for future tidal and geothermal which have been fictional claims for over a half century already. If stopping the release of hydro-carbons was the highest priority, then nuclear and hydro-electric would be considered ‘green’, but these power sources have long been on the eco-zealot ‘hit’ list. The Eco-religion could not allow reclassification of these two carbon-free energy systems and maintain peace between the devout tree-huggers and the obsessed warmists. Demise of the warmist orthodoxy will reopen debate and action on all reliable systems of energy production. For now, some further analysis of the unreliable ‘green energy’ systems.

No the Pacific islands are not drowning because of climate change – and all the media outlets who insist on claiming otherwise really need to get a grip.

This is the highly unusual message in the normally eco-hysterical Guardian from a scientific researcher evidently disgusted by the way any new paper even remotely connected with climate change is seized on by the usual media suspects as further proof of imminent “man-made global warming” catastrophe.

Dr Simon Albert, a researcher at the School of Biological Sciences at University of Queensland, was speaking out in irritation at the way a paper he had published in Environmental Research Letters on the Solomon Islands had been misrepresented by alarmists.

I am pleased to announce that as of the middle of April, my Elsevier publications had received 30,752 page views and 2,025 citations. I got these numbers in a promotional e-mail from Elsevier, and although I’m not sure what they mean, I presume that it would be even better to have even bigger numbers.

Indeed, the widespread availability of bibliometric data from sources such as Elsevier, Google Scholar and Thomson Reuters ISI makes it easy for scientists (with their employers looking over their shoulders) to obsess about their productivity and impact, and to compare their numbers with those of other scientists.

What’s so enticing about the (just-around-the corner) self-driving cars?

In view of my slightly advanced age, I may be forgiven to be a bit slow in learning — but now I understand: It’s all about what happens in the back seat! 

As the Globe and Mail reports, Kirk, of the Canadian Automated Vehicles Centre of Excellence, told the Canadian Press on Monday that “… once computers are doing the driving, there will be a lot more sex in cars.” Another (biased ?) pundit, Sergio Marchionne, is claimed to have stated that the new system “… will be fundamental to delivering automotive technology solutions that ultimately have far-reaching consumer benefits.”

Really, it’s a no-brainer. If people have hours of spare time while cruising along the highway, the mind wonders and the feelings can too…

Coming to think of it, the new technology may also spur the revival of an age-old tradition, namely hitchhiking.

Abstract

The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change states with high confidence that the warming of global temperatures since 1901 has been driven by increased radiative forcing. The gases responsible for this enhanced forcing are ‘greenhouse gases’ of anthropogenic origin, and include carbon dioxide, methane, and halocarbons. The Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change has challenged these findings and concludes that the forcing from greenhouse gases is minimal and diminishing. They add that modelling attempts of past and future climate states are inaccurate and do not incorporate important solar inputs, such as magnetic strength and total irradiance. One geophysical variable that has been overlooked by both groups is geothermal flux.

 This study will show that increasing seismic activity for the globe’s high geothermal flux areas (HGFA), an indicator of increasing geothermal forcing, is highly correlated with average global temperatures from 1979 to 2015 (r = 0.785). By comparison, the correlation between carbon dioxide loading and global temperatures for the same period is lower (r = 0.739). Multiple regression indicates that HGFA seismicity is a significant predictor of global temperatures (P < 0.05), but carbon dioxide concentrations do not significantly improve the explained variance (P > 0.1). A compelling case for geothermal forcing lies in the fact that 1) geothermal heat can trigger thermobaric convection and strengthen oceanic overturning, important mechanisms for transferring ocean heat to the overlying atmosphere, and 2) seismic activity is the leading indicator, while global temperature is the laggard.

Introduction

 The prevailing thought in the scientific community is that human-induced alterations to the earth-atmosphere system are the primary drivers of climate change in the 20th and 21st centuries. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently completed its Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) and they argue that there has been unprecedented warming of both the oceans and the atmosphere since the 1950s [1].The bulk of this warming has occurred over the past three decades, and the Northern Hemisphere has probably seen its warmest temperatures in the past 1,400 years. Temperatures at these levels have caused sea levels to rise, snow and ice extent to decline, and they have amplified extreme events in the atmosphere, to include increases in tropical cyclone intensity, drought intensity, hot spells, and heavy precipitation episodes. Central to the report’s findings is that there is a very high chance that recent warming has been caused by enhanced radiative forcing (RF) via increased concentrations of greenhouse gases (GHG), to include carbon dioxide (CO2, primary), methane, nitrous oxide, and halocarbons (secondary). The jump in GHG loadings is mostly anthropogenic and is strongly driven by the burning of fossil fuels (primary) and land-use change (secondary).