Deaths from air pollution is a topic which frequently claims newspaper headlines. Rightly so. The World Health Organization (WHO) highlights air pollution as the number one reason for environment related deaths in the world. It’s estimated to be the cause of seven million premature deaths every year – 4.3 million from indoor air pollution, and 3 million from ambient outdoor pollution. With historical links to development and economic growth, we expect the number of deaths from outdoor pollution to grow (largely in Asia and Africa).

The March for Science was last Saturday. Will J Grant and Rod Lambert struggled with the message behind the “March for Science” at The Conversation. We should march, they said a month ago, because “science is a human process”, which will be news to people who thought science was about evidence and reason instead. On Saturday they will be marching for the kind of science that is  “passion” and “belief”. Don’t turn up thinking this is about the dispassionate Laws of Physics. You’ll be at the wrong rally.

It’s astounding how the same tired message gets repeated decade after decade, yet is always wrong. It raises a serious question. How can large groups of people succumb to a message that is demonstrably wrong? While that question can’t be answered quickly, the examples of these failed messages can be cataloged.

Study suggests ban on neonicotinoids has done more harm than good. Is the European Commission determined to dim the Enlightenment? I ask this because its behaviour in one specific instance goes so utterly with dogma and against evidence as to suggest that there is no longer even a pretence of respect for reason left in Brussels. It concerns bees.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, theoretical physicist Steven Koonin proposed a ‘Red Team’ exercise on climate science – an alternative analysis by qualified parties who are knowledgeable but do not have a “stake” in the outcome. The disagreements regarding the positions of the IPCC, and its followers such as the US Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), and those who disagree with their findings is becoming quite intense as can be seen by the reactions to the March 29 hearing of the U.S. House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology on “Climate Science: Assumptions, Policy Implications, and the Scientific Method.”

What is the “Scientific method”? Saturday’s March for Science calls for “robustly funded” science and “political leaders and policy makers to enact evidence based policies in the public interest.”  But is this just an attempt to dress up the marchers’ political beliefs as science? And what do they mean by science?

This is a key issue: whether humans are responsible for all or most of the increase in atmospheric CO2. If they are not then it does not matter if alarmists believe that CO2 is the dominant ‘greenhouse gas’, which it is not because the increase is natural. Human CO2 is a very small {154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of the total CO2 going into the atmosphere, The {154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of human CO2 going into the atmosphere is shown by Figure 7.3, AR4, 3.67{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} (218.2 GT divided by 8 GT):

Stefan Rahmstorf is against the notion of a warming hiatus. In his eyes it doesn’t exist. Instead he prefers to live in his Rahmstorfian world, where every thing is the way it’s supposed to be: warming is galloping along. It’s a strange parallel world that has nothing to do with reality.

The rest of the scientific community, fortunately, see things somewhat more realistically and are busily publishing papers on the reasons for the hiatus or slowdown. The Institute for Atmospheric Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has even issued a press release on the subject:

Every year, thousands of scientific journal papers are published by researchers across the world, but only a tiny proportion make it into the pages of the newspapers. Using Altmetric, we’ve compiled a list of the 25 most talked-about climate papers of 2016. You can see the Top 10 in our infographic above (zoomable version here).

Our source of energy continued to be especially quiet last month. The mean sunspot number (SSN) was 17.7 and the sun was completely blank for 16 days.

It is important to recall once again that the SSN is not simply the sum of the observed sunspots, rather it is generated by the number of spots multiplied by the 10-fold of the observed sunspot regions. When one single spot is observed in an active region, this yields an SSN of 11.

In the May 2000 issue of Reason Magazine, award-winning science correspondent Ronald Bailey wrote an excellent article titled “Earth Day, Then and Now” to provide some historical perspective on the 30th anniversary of Earth Day. In that article, Bailey noted that around the time of the first Earth Day in the 1970, and in the years following, there was a “torrent of apocalyptic predictions” and many of those predictions were featured in his Reason article.

Image copyright: NASA/JPL-CALTECH/GSSR

A large asteroid the size of the Rock of Gibraltar has passed safely by Earth. The object, measured to be almost a kilometre wide, came within five times the distance between the Earth and the Moon. Known as 2014 JO25, the asteroid is the biggest such space rock to skim our world since 2004.

Billions of pounds of plastic waste are littering the world’s oceans. Now, a Ph.D. organic chemist and a sailboat captain report that they are developing a process to reuse certain plastics, transforming them from worthless trash into a valuable diesel fuel with a small mobile reactor. They envision the technology could someday be implemented globally on land and possibly placed on boats to convert ocean waste plastic into fuel to power the vessels.

After several more e-mail exchanges, NAS President Marcia McNutt has apparently returned to the view that JunkScience should drop dead.

Before reading further, you should already have read Part 1 and Part 2 of “NAS President to JunkScience: Drop Dead.”

“Resources exist to be consumed. And consumed they will be, if not by this generation then by some future. By what right does this forgotten future seek to deny us our birthright?” –Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri

For almost six decades since Sputnik first circled the Earth, satellites have been the exclusive domain of the richest governments and companies, costing billions and weighing tons. Now with the advancements in space flight and digital cameras, cheap orbiting cameras are becoming ubiquitous.