‘Ozone layer is not recovering over populated areas’, scientists warn;  And so the UK’s The Guardian newspaper (February 6, 2018) spins more eco fake news. While the hole over Antarctica has been closing, the protective ozone is thinning at the lower latitudes, where the sunlight is stronger and billions of people live. (Be scared, will ya!)

So, what’s the truth behind it all?

In 2007, University of Pennsylvania Professor J. Scott Armstrong challenged former U.S. Vice President Al Gore to a bet on what would happen to global average temperatures over the following 10 years.

Armstrong’s challenge was in response to Gore’s warning of a looming dangerous “tipping point” in global mean temperatures. His proposal of a $10,000 bet was intended to draw attention to the need to assess the predictive validity of climate forecasts in an objective manner. Armstrong issued his challenge based on the knowledge that predictions of dangerous global warming were the product of methods that violated 72 of 89 forecasting principles relevant to the forecasting problem.

The most cataclysmic scenarios for global warming have been ruled out, according to a new report from the University of British Columbia.

But the report also warns that the climate will still destabilize, wreaking havoc on the planet. According to the report, it all comes down to a reduction in the use of coal.

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Scottish ski industry could disappear due to global warming, warns Met Office – Telegraph

Nine years ago this week, the UK government’s top scientist announced the end of Scottish skiing, due to a 0.0001-mole fraction increase in an essential and harmless trace gas over the prior century

Eighteen years ago, CRU announced the end of snow in the UK, for the same reason.

According to Dr. David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, within a few years winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event”. “Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” he said.

AFP — The Pacific nation of Tuvalu — long seen as a prime candidate to disappear as climate change forces up sea levels — is actually growing in size, new research shows.

A University of Auckland study examined changes in the geography of Tuvalu’s nine atolls and 101 reef islands between 1971 and 2014, using aerial photographs and satellite imagery.

It found eight of the atolls and almost three-quarters of the islands grew during the study period, lifting Tuvalu’s total land area by 2.9 percent, even though sea levels in the country rose at twice the global average.

Co-author Paul Kench said the research, published Friday in the journal Nature Communications, challenged the assumption that low-lying island nations would be swamped as the sea rose.

Climate change that occurred 307 million years ago caused some species to perish and others to thrive, according to a new study.

The research, from the University of Birmingham, suggests some species of tetrapods – vertebrates that have four feet – were greatly affected by the onset of a less humid climate millions of years ago.

The change resulted in mass extinctions, but it caused some groups, among them the species that gave rise to modern mammals, to thrive and expand across the world, according to the new study.

The giant space rock that wiped out the dinosaurs may have set off a chain of cataclysmic volcanic eruptions on land and undersea, claims a new study that is already dividing scientists.

About 66 million years ago, a 6-mile wide asteroid smacked into Earth, creating the Chicxulub crater in the Yucatan and sparking deadly chaos. Superhot particles rained from the air causing fires across the globe and sending temperatures higher. Then it got worse.

Around the world, people have heard about the impending extinction of the Great Barrier Reef: some 133,000 square miles of magnificent coral stretching for 1,400 miles off the northeast coast of Australia.

The reef is supposedly almost dead from the combined effects of a warming climate, nutrient pollution from Australian farms, and smothering sediment from offshore dredging.

Except that, as I have said publicly as a research scientist who has studied the reef for the past 30 years, all this most likely isn’t true.

A cutting-edge scientific analysis shows that a Briton from 10,000 years ago had dark brown skin and blue eyes.

Researchers from London’s Natural History Museum extracted DNA from Cheddar Man, Britain’s oldest complete skeleton, which was discovered in 1903.

University College London researchers then used the subsequent genome analysis for a facial reconstruction. It underlines the fact that the lighter skin characteristic of modern Europeans is a relatively recent phenomenon.

I looked it up – I was curious. How many times does a normal healthy human being breathe in and breathe out in just one minute? Well, Google tells me that we exhale (that means breathe out for the scientifically illiterate friends of mine on Facebook) some fifteen to twenty times in one minute.

Let us take the lower number. What is 15 x 60? It equals 900 exhalations in every hour! Let us now multiply 900 by 24 to get the number of breaths in 24 hours. That comes to 21,600 exhalations of Carbon Dioxide at 40,000 parts per million in one single day by one average person.

The international climate machine is about to achieve a new degree of alarmist absurdity, basically speeding up as they hit the wall. It is all about the Paris Climate Agreement targets and it is kind of fun to watch. Here’s how it goes.

The Agreement has a hard (and silly) target of limiting future global warming to two degrees C above what are called pre-industrial levels.

But there is also a softer (and sillier) target of 1.5 degrees. As usual with international agreements, the language is vague, but all the countries say they will go for two but try for 1.5.

Dr. Sebastian Lüning and Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt posted here yesterday results showing that hurricane activity has decreased over the past decades, despite all the hysteria we’ve been hearing from the usual suspects.

Taking a look at the recent literature, we find a paper authored by Ryan Truchelut and Erica Staehling appearing in the Geophysical Research Letters on December 8, 2017. They looked at the development of American hurricanes based on accumulated cyclone energy (ACE).

A team led by researchers from ETH Zurich and the Physikalisch-Meteorologisches Observatorium Davos in Switzerland have found that despite the ban on CFCs, the concentration of ozone in the lower part of the stratosphere has continued to decline at latitudes between 60 degrees South and 60 degrees North.

The scientists were somewhat surprised that the ozone is thinning out in the lower stratosphere because their models do not show this trend and CFCs continue to decline. — Press Trust of India, 6 February 2018

Image copyright: ESA

UK scientists and engineers will play a leading role in developing a satellite that can warn if Earth is about to be hit by damaging solar storms.

The European Space Agency has requested studies be undertaken to design the mission that would launch in the 2020s. Explosive eruptions from the Sun can lead to widespread disruption on our planet – degrading communications, even knocking over power grids.

Paper Reviewed: Hodgkins, G.A., Whitfield, P.H., Burn, D.H., Hannaford, J., Renard, B., Stahl, K., Fleig, A.K., Madsen, H., Mediero, L., Korhonen, J., Murphy, C. and Wilson, D. 2017. Climate-driven variability in the occurrence of major floods across North America and Europe. Journal of Hydrology 552: 704-717.

Model projections of future increases in precipitation from anthropogenic global warming have led to concerns that there will be corresponding increases in river flooding. Consequently, many researchers have begun to search for evidence of more frequent and/or severe flooding over the past several decades.

New peer-reviewed scientific paper published in the journal Earth Sciences (December 2017) provides precise calculations for planetary temperatures without need to have a greenhouse effect or greenhouse gases to bridge a hypothetical “heat gap.” Thus greenhouse gas theory is invalidated.