For decades taxpayers and other innocents have supported a parasitic industry in academia, bureaucracy, law, media and the tax-exempt Green Alarm “Charities”, all studying, regulating, inspecting and writing about yet another “imminent threat to Queensland’s Great Barrier Reef.”

Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) is settled science, proclaim the predictors of weather doomsday. Settled Science?

Science evolves continuously and can never be settled, unless, of course, the ‘settled’ subject is dogma, not science. Is it just a ‘my way or the highway’ attempt by vested interests to close discussion on their terms?

Consider the term “peer reviewed.” Science evolves through the contribution of new ideas which are published so that their peers (other scientists) can review, validate, contribute, or argue with them.

Sunshine is in short supply across a swathe of north-west Europe, shrouded in heavy cloud from a seemingly never-ending series of low pressure systems since late November and suffering one of its darkest winters since records began.

If you live in Brussels, 10 hours and 31 minutes was your lot for the entire month of December. The all but benighted inhabitants of Lille in France got just two hours, 42 minutes through the first half of January.

The concept of a “Galiliean” Doppler redshift, vs. the expanding space-time redshift, is introduced as an alternative for why redshift appears to increase with distance.

Encouraged by my presentation in 2013, I was inspired to delve further into my speculation regarding non-constant light speed.

While the Natural Philosophy Alliance collapsed in 2014, prominent members started the current organization, the John Chappell Natural Philosophy Society, which held its first annual conference in 2015.

The issue of global warming/climate change has been used to polarize populations for political leverage. People like myself who are skeptical of alarmist claims find it difficult to engage with others whose minds are made up with or without a factual basis.

In a recent email, Alex Epstein gives some good advice how to talk about energy and climate. At the end, I provide links to other material from Alex supporting his principle message regarding human benefits from using fossil fuels.

In my previous essay John O’Sullivan, the PSI editor, had changed the title (How Stupid Am I) of this essay when he published it.  It is a fact that I earned a Doctor of Philosophy degree in chemistry nearly fifty years ago (1969).

But I have never taken a philosophy course.  So, for a long time I had never considered that I was a philosopher.  Now, I am not so certain about this.

 

Scientists have taken a step towards one of the biggest goals in medicine – a universal blood test for cancer. A team at Johns Hopkins University has trialled a method that detects eight common forms of the disease.

Their vision is an annual test designed to catch cancer early and save lives. UK experts said it was “enormously exciting”. However, one said more work was needed to assess the test’s effectiveness at detecting early-stage cancers.

Tumours release tiny traces of their mutated DNA and proteins they make into the bloodstream. The CancerSEEK test looks for mutations in 16 genes that regularly arise in cancer and eight proteins that are often released.

Are bees endangered because of the use of insecticides, and in particular the class of chemicals known as neonicotinoids, which are used on many crops?

It’s a debate that’s played out in research laboratories and in the media over the past decade since the phenomenon known as Colony Collapse Disorder roiled the bee industry in California and elsewhere in North American and Europe beginning in 2006-7.

Image copyright: ISRAEL HERSHKOVITZ, TEL AVIV UNI

Researchers have identified the remains of the earliest known modern humans to have left Africa.

New dating of fossils from Israel indicates that our species (Homo sapiens) lived outside Africa around 185,000 years ago, some 80,000 years earlier than the previous evidence. Details appear in the journal Science.

Respected retired scientist Dr. Frank Schnell,  member of the American Council on Science and Health Scientific Advisory Panel comes out to publicly trash the science cornerstone of man-made global warming. Calling the greenhouse gas effect (GHE) “a fallacy” and explaining why, this former toxicologist from the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry pulls no punches about the junk science behind carbon dioxide’s alleged climate impact.

A team of divers have discovered what is believed to be the biggest flooded cave on the planet in eastern Mexico.

By connecting two underwater caverns, the Gran Acuifero Maya (GAM) project identified the 216 mile (347km) cave after months of exploring a maze of underwater channels.

The project, which is dedicated to the study and preservation of the subterranean waters of the Yucatan peninsula, said the discovery could shine new light on the ancient Mayan civilisation.

The solar variability is not negligible in comparison with the energy imbalance that drives global temperature change.

Therefore, because of the combination of the strong 2016 El Niño and the phase of the solar cycle, it is plausible, if not likely, that the next 10 years of global temperature change will leave an impression of a ‘global warming hiatus.’ —James Hansen et al, 18 January 2018

Professor Michael Mann famously rushed to file a libel suit against Dr Tim Ball over six years ago because Ball said Mann “belongs in the state pen, not Penn. State.”

Mann has since stalled in bringing the case to trial.  Below we provide an insight into why Mann doesn’t want his dirty data washed in public.

Greenland’s ice sheet is becoming smaller and smaller. The melting taking place is at an increased strength and speed that no models have previously predicted.

Today, in the esteemed journal Scientific Reports, researchers from the Arctic Research Centre, Aarhus University, and the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources present results that, for the first time, show that the deep bottom water of the north-eastern Greenland fjords is being warmed up by heat gradually lost from the Earth’s interior.

And the researchers point out that this heat loss triggers the sliding of glaciers from the ice sheet towards the sea.

Saturn’s largest moon Titan is the only known planetary object in the solar system that has, like Earth, stable liquid on its surface. A new study, based on data gathered by Nasa’s Cassini spacecraft, reveals that Titan has Earth-like sea levels. The new findings showcase how “eerily similar” the two worlds are, despite being located nearly a billion miles away from each other.

Nagoya, Japan, is the place where the international “Nagoya Protocol on Access to Genetic Resources and the Fair and Equitable Sharing of Benefits Arising from their Utilization to the Convention on Biological Diversity” was negotiated (in 2010) and signed onto by many countries.

It became a binding international treaty (to the countries which ratified it) in 2015. Let’s just call the arrangement the Nagoya Protocol, or NP for short.