SPOTLIGHT: We’re told that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a scientific organization that makes scientific determinations. But that isn’t true.

BIG PICTURE: The process by which climate change was declared a problem is a process only bureaucrats could love. In his brilliant book, Belgian writer Drieu Godefridi explains why the ‘IPCC = science’ claim is false.

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Space is a dangerous and unforgiving place, and spending time away from gravity takes its toll on the human body, as many astronauts have found out after returning to Earth. But what exactly are the risks?

Japanese astronaut Norishige Kanai this week may have briefly grabbed news headlines by announcing he had stretched a staggering 9cm (3.5in) in just three weeks onboard the International Space Station (ISS).

A series of pictures taken by the space agency’s Curiosity rover have given rise to the idea, after researchers found what looks like fossils among the rocks.

Barry DiGregorio, a research fellow at the University of Buckingham, believes these photos (taken on January 2, 2018) reveal “trace fossils” on the surface of Mars.

Karl Popper, a philosopher and professor from London School of Economics once likened scientific research to a dark man, dressed in dark, who enters a dark room in search of a dark hat that may not be there. One of the greatest philosophers of science of the 20^th Century, Popper, who died in 1994, captured the soul of this enterprise in this analogy. Not only does it require a different kind of people to go down this path, but even requires a different sensibility to appreciate, and evaluate, scientific research.

Scientists in the Netherlands have found a new excuse as to why sea levels are stubbornly refusing to rise in line with Al Gore’s doomsday predictions: “ocean bottom deformation.”

Apparently, they claim in a study by Thomas Frederikse et al, the weight of the extra water caused by all those melting glaciers and ice caps is so great that it is causing the seabed to sink.

Scientists have known for years that water behaves weirdly. Other liquids like alcohol and oil grow heavier as they’re compressed. But water becomes lighter — ice cubes float in a glass of water, after all.

Other fluids grow denser as they cool. But, oddly, water is most dense at around 39 degrees Fahrenheit, or before it freezes.

A recent New Time Times article about Google’s practice of generating ad revenue via ‘promoted’ search results (“How Climate Change Deniers Rise to the Top in Google Searches” 29 December 2017) had a surprising and disquieting ending about the prospect of internet censorship.

Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) announced it was the hottest ever day in Sydney today (January 8, 2018), then realized it had it wrong, but not before headlines spread across the world. For a million dollars a day you’d think the BOM would check their own “high quality” database.

Princeton University researchers have found that the climate models scientists use to project future conditions on our planet underestimate the cooling effect that clouds have on a daily—and even hourly—basis, particularly over land.

The researchers report in the journal Nature Communications Dec. 22 that models tend to factor in too much of the sun’s daily heat, which results in warmer, drier conditions than what might actually occur.

Another giant piece of the climate science puzzle just fell into place, specifically that geological heat flow is a primary force responsible for unusual bottom melting and break up of West Antarctic glaciers.

This new insight is the result of a just-released National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Antarctica geological research study (see here).

Here is a question – Why did the man’s bald patch on the top of his head get hot? Why indeed do any sunbathers get hot?

Curiously, the Sun does not send heat through space but radiation – and radiation has to encounter mass to produce heat. So a man’s bald patch gets hot when out in the sun because he is substantial – he has mass. Since to the best of my knowledge I have never met the bald man in the photo above, I have no idea whether he is fat or slim, tall or tiny. No matter, every single one of  us are mass, so we warm up under the Sun.

The BBC has accepted Lord Lawson’s complaint that they made a serious factual error in claiming that reindeer were in “steep decline” because of climate change.

The alarming claim that reindeer populations across Northern Russia were “in steep decline because of climate change”, was made during the first episode of the recent BBC 2 series: Russia with Simon Reeve.

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In Las Vegas this week you can learn a lot about the exciting potential of artificial intelligence. You can also be left wondering whether AI is a triumph of marketing, yet to deliver real improvements to the economy and the way we live.

One of my first stops here was at a University of Las Vegas robotics lab. Scientists there were working on projects ranging from drones to virtual reality, but they were also collaborating with the team behind one of the stars of the robot world.

In today’s crazy world, Western politicians are wasting billions of taxpayer dollars force-feeding costly, unreliable green energy in the bizarre belief that this will somehow change Earth’s climate.

Even more incredible, they fear global warmth and seem hell-bent on creating global cooling. They should study climate history.  It is snow and ice; cold, dry air; and carbon dioxide starvation we need to fear, not a warm, moist, fertile, bountiful atmosphere.

El Niño and La Niña are two distinct phases of the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO), a naturally occurring phenomenon characterized by how water temperatures in the tropical Pacific periodically oscillate between warmer than average during El Niños and cooler during La Niñas.

Polar bear experts who falsely predicted that roughly 17,300 polar bears would be dead by now (given sea ice conditions since 2007) have realized their failure has not only kicked their own credibility to the curb, it has taken with it the reputations of their climate change colleagues.