Environmentalists pressure firms to endorse positions counter to the interests of their shareholders, employees or the communities in which they operate.  Few businesses support central planning or back restrictions on economic growth. But fear of demonization, boycotts or legal action by government or advocacy groups has convinced many businesses to seek a compromise by endorsing “sustainability.”

Scientists Increasingly Discarding ‘Hockey Stick’ Temperature Graphs

“[W]hen it comes to disentangling natural variability from anthropogenically affected variability the vast majority of the instrumental record may be biased.”  — Büntgen et al., 2017

Last year there were at least 60 peer-reviewed papers published in scientific journals demonstrating that Today’s Warming Isn’t Global, Unprecedented, Or Remarkable.

Global warming could keep Americans from getting enough sleep, according to a study published Friday by scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of California.

Paper Reviewed
Watson, P.J. 2017. Acceleration in European mean sea level? A new insight using improved tools. Journal of Coastal Research 33: 23-38.

Of all the predictions that could possibly result from CO2-induced global warming, few carry the level of concern as that associated with rapidly rising seas, where fears of flooded coastal infrastructure causing billions of dollars in economic damage and displacing millions of lives have frenzied the imagination of climate alarmists.

Scientists have quantified for the first time how vegetation across the African continent has changed in the past 20 years. Thirty six per cent of the continent has become greener, while 11 per cent is becoming less green. The study challenges the view that Africa is undergoing a sustained loss of trees and bushes. –Kristian Sjøgren, Science Nordic, 28 May 2017

Best practice in science is achieved through a minimum of two critical conditions: humility and perspective. If humility and perspective are ignored, science suffers.

The field of climate science is suffering from some lack of both humility and perspective.

There is a little-known fact that gas molecules excite with direct radiation, while atom pairs do not. This warming is called “resonance,” not because we hear them singing when buzzed by solar photons, but because physicists have no other way of describing how molecules pass on heat energy.

The Climate-Industrial Complex (CIC) is fighting hard to keep the US in the Paris Accord (to the extent it ever was in it given that the Senate has never consented to it), which I call the Paris non-treaty Treaty. And President Trump promises a decision after the G-7 meeting this weekend.

Arctic sea ice extent is almost exactly “normal.”

2017

Several entities are developing orbiting “garbage trucks” to remove growing amounts of debris from space, experts told Bloomberg Wednesday.

Last October, David Rose wrote that Nick Stern’s (pictured) research centre has falsely claimed credit for papers it had no role in. Rose listed a few anecdotes.

Am I reading right? A (railway) train jumped the tracks, right in a major city’s main train station? Perhaps I misread that (reminder to myself: get an eye checkup forthwith!)  — that must be a MISPRINT!

Found this inspiring:

VIDEO AFTER THE JUMP

If only universities inculcated an attitude like this.

The American space agency says the Cassini satellite encountered very few particles as it dived between Saturn and its rings last week.

There were fears that the probe might hit fragments of ice or rock, and that these could cause significant damage.

A box of rare daisies from the 1850s had been sent to Brisbane from the National Museum of Natural History in Paris.

But the pressed plant samples were incinerated because accompanying documents were filled out incorrectly.

Men and women differ in obvious and less obvious ways — for example, in the prevalence of certain diseases or reactions to drugs. How are these connected to one’s sex? Weizmann Institute of Science researchers recently uncovered thousands of human genes that are expressed — copied out to make proteins — differently in the two sexes. Their findings showed that harmful mutations in these particular genes tend to accumulate in the population in relatively high frequencies, and the study explains why. The detailed map of these genes, reported in BMC Biology, provides evidence that males and females undergo a sort of separate, but interconnected evolution.