A new study by a team of climatologists “all but rules out” the worst-case “doomsday” U.N. climate change scenarios, significantly narrowing the range of the possible temperature increases, while also eliminating the low-end predictions.

Image copyright: EPA

December set the record for the least amount of sunshine seen in Moscow, Russian weather experts say.

“The sun didn’t come out even once for the entire month,” said the weather website Meteonovosti.

According to Russia’s main weather centre, the sun did shine for six minutes. But normally Muscovites get dozens of hours of December sunshine. Russian winters are famously freezing, but this week the cold in Yakutia, in the far east, dipped below -60C (-76F).

It is about -7C in Moscow.

Image copyright: ANASTASIAGAV/INSTAGRAM

Yakutia – a remote region also known as the Sakha Republic – is historically the coldest part of Russia.

“Even for the Sakha Republic, famous for its harsh cold, this temperature is abnormal,” Meteonovosti said. On Tuesday, the temperature remained below -50C across the vast region, whose capital Yakutsk lies 4,900km (3,045 miles) east of Moscow. Russian children are usually kept indoors and schools are shut when the cold plunges below -50C.

Image copyright: GETTY IMAGES

Roman Vilfand, head of the Russian Meteorological Centre, attributed Moscow’s exceptionally overcast weather in December to big cyclonic air masses, which had moved in from the Atlantic.

Moscow’s previous record for December darkness was in 2000, when the capital got just three hours with the sun breaking through the cloud.

Russia’s hot tips for cold weather:

• Don’t drink spirits – drunkenness causes great heat loss
• Wear loose clothing to keep blood circulation normal
• If you feel frost-bitten on a walk, find any warm place – a shop, cafe, doorway – and warm up
• Don’t remove your boots if your feet are frozen – they’ll swell up and you won’t be able to get your boots on again. Get to a warm place as quickly as possible. You could shove your frozen hands in your armpits to warm them up
• If your car breaks down far away from habitation, you should stay in your car and phone for help or wait for another vehicle to come along the road
• Avoid the wind, as it increases the risk of freezing
• When children are outdoors they should return to the warmth every 15-20 minutes.

Source: Russian Emergencies Ministry

Read more at www.bbc.co.uk

Humans – and not rats – could have been the cause for the spread of plague during the Black Death, a new study suggests. The Black Death was one of the worst pandemics in human history. It devastated European populations from 1346 to 1353 and resulted in the deaths of an estimated 75 to 200 million people.

Few people are aware of the relatively new science of geoengineering. Some scientists who are aware (like me) consider it a genuine threat to our planet’s climatic stability and ecosystems. Moreover, geoengineering, if left unconstrained, could pose a real danger to human health through the choice and toxicity of the materials used.

Optimism in conservation science — which the Smithsonian says we desperately need (Earth Optimism Summit 21-23 April 2017, apparently a huge success) — means it’s time to acknowledge and celebrate real conservation success stories.

The Smithsonian folks probably won’t say it but I will — one of those successes is the recovery of polar bears.

Image copyrightVELIZAR SIMEONOVSKI, THE FIELD MUSEUM/REUTERS

Scientists in China have made a colourful discovery – a bird-like dinosaur with rainbow-coloured feathers. The fossilised remains were found in the north-east of China and it’s believed to have lived 161 million years ago during the Jurassic Period.

It’s been called Caihong juji, which is the mandarin word for ‘rainbow with the big crest’. When dinosaur experts studied the fossil they could see evidence of brightly-coloured plumage.

Perhaps the key experiment which led to Einstein postulating his theory of relativity in 1905, in particular the invariance of the speed of light and the complete absence of a medium (the “aether”) for light being a wave, was the Michelson-Morley Interferometer Experiment of 1887 (see image above).

Despite noticing some potential dependence of light speed with direction, this was considered far enough below the expected result to declare the result “null” – namely there is no aether medium for light as originally proposed by Maxwell and others.

Given the title, this obviously is a personal essay.  Although, if the shoe fits, put it on. I have had a lot of stupidities, but this one started when I began to teach general chemistry at Hibbing Community College, Hibbing, MN in 1973.

For a topic that quickly became apparent was that I needed to teach the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide.  Which obviously could have something to do with the physical properties of carbon dioxide, but this was a topic which I had never studied during my formal education to become a physical chemist.

Paper Reviewed:  Almén, A.-K., Brutemark, A., Jutfelt, F., Riebesell, U. and Engström-Öst, J. 2017. Ocean acidification causes no detectable effect on swimming activity and body size in a common copepod. Hydrobiologia 802: 235-243.

Ocean acidification (defined as a decline in oceanic pH caused by the dissolution of atmospheric CO2 into the surface waters of the world’s oceans) has been projected to impact marine life in a number of different ways, including growth, survival, fertility, calcification and organism behavior.

There are quite a number of Climate Sages, who say they are skeptical, adding almost sotto voce that the heating by Greenhouse Gases is exaggerated. I met one this evening, an engineer retired and a most avid reader of science fiction.  He has over 350,000 books and reads something like 2,000 books a month.

The Cloud Mystery Duration: 52 minutes. Language: English: “Our clouds take their orders from the stars,” says the Danish scientist Henrik Svensmark. That’s the amazing and provocative discovery reported here.

In Yakutia — a region of 1 million people about 3,300 miles (5,300 kilometers) east of Moscow — students routinely go to school even in minus 40 degrees. But school was canceled Tuesday throughout the region and police ordered parents to keep their children inside.

Cardiologists at the Catharina hospital in Eindhoven have succeeded in the localized cooling of the heart during a heart attack, a world first.

By cooling part of the heart prior to and following angioplasty, the cardiologists believe that the damage from a heart attack can be limited. On 11 January cardiologist Luuk Otterspoor received his doctorate at Eindhoven University of Technology for this study.

For well over three decades now the world has been held to ransom by a perceived “consensus science” that has convinced scientists and politicians alike that human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO₂) cause a myriad of “extreme” weather events and other claimed but unrelated issues.

We have been told repeatedly that the “consensus science” has been settled for over a century and that carbon dioxide is a so-called “greenhouse gas” that “traps heat” and thus makes the earth “warmer than it would otherwise be”. ^{1, 2}

There exists on the internet, at the time of this writing, a video, purported to be: ‘Climate 101 with Bill Nye’
-although we never actually see his face- with the comment that anyone can replicate it.

In this video, a simple experiment is presented where two glass jars with thermometers in them, one filled with air and one filled with CO2, are exposed to energy from heat lamps, to show how CO2, as compared to normal air, causes excess temperature rise when exposed to heat.