Written by Helen Briggs
Image copyright: GETTY IMAGESBarn owls keep their acute sense of hearing into old age, scientists have discovered. Previously, starlings have been found to have this ability, suggesting birds are protected from age-related hearing loss.
Written by Tony Heller
September 18 used to be a hot day in the US, but temperatures have plummeted over the past century.
On this date in 1925, temperatures were over 100 degrees in much of the Midwest and South.
Written by Dr Tim Ball
In his recent article on WUWT titled “HADCRU Power and Temperature” Andy May refers to the challenges of modelling the atmosphere. He wrote,
The greenhouse effect (GHE), when calculated this way, shows an imbalance of 390-239=151 W/m2. Kiehl and Trenberth, 1997 calculated a similar overall forcing of 155 W/m2 using the same procedure. This GHE calculation makes a lot of assumptions, not the least of which is assuming the Earth has an emissivity of 1 and is a blackbody. But, here we want to consider the problem of using a global average temperature (T) for the Earth, which is a rotating sphere, with only one-half of the sphere facing the Sun at any one time.
Written by Jonathan Amos
Scientists have seen once again just how dynamic a place the underside of the Antarctic ice sheet can be. Survey data collected from the middle of the White Continent shows liquid water is being frozen on to the bottom of the sheet in huge quantities.
Written by Syed Ashfaqul Haque
Smart phone, smart watch, smart TV, smart fridge, smart washing machine, and so it goes. All gadgets are getting smart in the age of technological innovation.
Smart house is the next big thing to have in the developed world. And a leading Bangladeshi software company is set to be creating the new way of smart living in a large apartment complex away in Japan.
Written by Paul Driessen
The first justification was that internal combustion engines polluted too much. But emissions steadily declined, and today’s cars emit about 3{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of what their predecessors did. Then it was oil imports: electric vehicles (EVs) would reduce foreign dependency and balance of trade deficits. Bountiful oil and natural gas supplies from America’s hydraulic fracturing revolution finally eliminated that as an argument.
Written by scientific-alliance.org
Electric cars may well be the future of personal transport, but only if consumers choose to buy them in preference to the cars of today or if governments effectively ban the internal combustion engine. In both France and the UK, politicians are leaning towards the latter, announcing a cut-off date of 2040 for the sale of conventional petrol- or diesel-fuelled cars.
Written by Dr A Fred Singer
Climate cooling, as opposed to warming, presents serious problems for humanity. As cooling causes agriculture to fail, most of the world’s population will starve and we will be reduced from its present level to about a million, hunting animals and collecting nuts and seeds for sustenance. This has happened before during the ice ages, when nomadic bands of prehistoric humans had to shelter in caves for protection from the cold, and had to rely on uncertain supplies of food.
Written by Kate Samuelson
Large earthquakes are more likely to occur when there is a full or new moon because of the gravitational pull on tides, a new study suggests.
Written by Tony Heller
Arctic sea ice extent is up 40% from this date five years ago.
Greenland’s surface gained ten times as much ice as it did five years ago, and was the fifth highest on record.
Guest post: How the Greenland ice sheet fared in 2017 | Carbon Brief
Greenland’s most famous glacier, the Petermann Glacier, has grown substantially and steadily over the past five years.
Written by James Delingpole
Climate alarmists have finally admitted that they’ve got it wrong on global warming. This is the inescapable conclusion of a landmark paper, published in Nature Geoscience, which finally admits that the computer models have overstated the impact of carbon dioxide on climate and that the planet is warming more slowly than predicted.
Written by ESA/Hubble Information Centre
Astronomers have discovered that the well-studied exoplanet WASP-12b reflects almost no light, making it appear essentially pitch black. This discovery sheds new light on the atmospheric composition of the planet and also refutes previous hypotheses about WASP-12b’s atmosphere. The results are also in stark contrast to observations of another similarly sized exoplanet.
Written by Ian Johnston
Antibiotic-resistant genes are being spread around the world in animal feed, according to new research that adds to fears humanity could lose one of our most important medicines.
Written by Chester Dawson
Hackers may have a new target in their sights—one that’s just as central to everyday life as computers are. Our cars. As vehicles fill up with more digital controls and internet-connected devices, they’re becoming more vulnerable to cybercriminals, who can hack into those systems just like they can attack computers.
Written by Pierre L. Gosselin
Late last month a video of a discussion round featuring green energies was put up on Youtube. The segment that follows below shows Dr. Detlef Ahlborn, President of the Wind Energy protest group Bundesinitiative Vernunftkraft (German Initiative for Sensible Power) telling us, without mincing words, why wind energy has been a flop in Germany.
Written by Tom Harris
Hurricanes like Irma and Harvey are not caused by climate change. As Madhav Khandekar, a Ph.D. in meteorology from Florida State University and a former Environment Canada Research Scientist explains, “the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said in 2012 that a relationship between global warming and hurricanes has not been demonstrated.