Written by B. Croft, G. R. Wentworth, R. V. Martin, W. R. et al
It turns out bird feces may help cool the Arctic. That’s according to new research by atmospheric scientists, who are working to better understand key components of Arctic climate systems.
That’s according to new research from Colorado State University atmospheric scientists, who are working to better understand key components of Arctic climate systems.
Written by J. Zalasiewicz, M. Williams, C. N. Waters, A. D. et al.
An international team led by University of Leicester geologists has made the first estimate of the sheer size of the physical structure of the planet’s technosphere — suggesting that its mass approximates to an enormous 30 trillion tons.
The technosphere is comprised of all of the structures that humans have constructed to keep them alive on the planet — from houses, factories and farms to computer systems, smartphones and CDs, to the waste in landfills and spoil heaps.
In a new paper published in the journal The Anthropocene Review, Professors Jan Zalasiewicz, Mark Williams and Colin Waters from the University of Leicester Department of Geology led an international team suggesting that the bulk of the planet’s technosphere is staggering in scale, with some 30 trillion tons representing a mass of more than 50 kilos for every square meter of Earth’s surface. 
Professor Zalasiewicz explained: “The technosphere is the brainchild of the USA scientist Peter Haff — also one of the co-authors of this paper. It is all of the structures that humans have constructed to keep them alive, in very large numbers now, on the planet: houses, factories, farms, mines, roads, airports and shipping ports, computer systems, together with its discarded waste.
“Humans and human organisations form part of it, too — although we are not always as much in control as we think we are, as the technosphere is a system, with its own dynamics and energy flows — and humans have to help keep it going to survive.”
The Anthropocene concept — a proposed epoch highlighting the impact humans have made to the planet — has provided an understanding that humans have greatly changed Earth.
Professor Williams said: “The technosphere can be said to have budded off the biosphere and arguably is now at least partly parasitic on it. At its current scale the technosphere is a major new phenomenon of this planet — and one that is evolving extraordinarily rapidly.
“Compared with the biosphere, though, it is remarkably poor at recycling its own materials, as our burgeoning landfill sites show. This might be a barrier to its further success — or halt it altogether.”
The researchers believe the technosphere is some measure of the extent to which we have reshaped our planet.
“There is more to the technosphere than just its mass,” observes Professor Waters. “It has enabled the production of an enormous array of material objects, from simple tools and coins, to ballpoint pens, books and CDs, to the most sophisticated computers and smartphones. Many of these, if entombed in strata, can be preserved into the distant geological future as ‘technofossils’ that will help characterize and date the Anthropocene.”
If technofossils were to be classified as palaeontologists classify normal fossils — based on their shape, form and texture — the study suggests that the number of individual types of ‘technofossil’ now on the planet likely reaches a billion or more — thus far outnumbering the numbers of biotic species now living.
The research suggests the technosphere is another measure of the extraordinary human-driven changes that are affecting Earth.
Professor Zalasiewicz added: “The technosphere may be geologically young, but it is evolving with furious speed, and it has already left a deep imprint on our planet.”
The research is associated with the major new project of Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt on the technosphere. More information about the project is available here: http://www2.le.ac.uk/news/blog/2016-archive/november/leicester-geologist-contributes-to-major-project-examining-the-2018technosphere2019
Written by Tony Heller
Thermometers show the US cooling since about 1920, but NOAA massively cools the past to create the appearance of a warming trend.
These adjustments make a spectacular hockey stick of data tampering.
When plotted against atmospheric CO2, the correlation is almost perfect. NOAA is tampering with the data exactly to match their theory.
Read more at realclimatescience.com
Written by James Delingpole
Global land temperatures have plummeted by one degree Celsius since the middle of this year – the biggest and steepest fall on record.
But the news has been greeted with an eerie silence by the world’s alarmist community. You’d almost imagine that when temperatures shoot up it’s catastrophic climate change which requires dramatic headlines across the mainstream media and demands for urgent action. But that when they fall even more precipitously it’s just a case of “nothing to see here”.
Written by Dan Colman
We know that depression affects people from all walks of life. Rich. Poor. Celebs. Ordinary Joes. Young. Old. But, somehow after the death of Robin Williams, there’s a renewed focus on depression, and my mind turned immediately to a lecture we featured on the site way back in 2009.
The lecture is by Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford biologist, who has a talent for making scientific subjects publicly accessible.
A recipient of the MacArthur genius grant, Sapolsky notes that depression — currently the 4th greatest cause of disability worldwide, and soon the 2nd — is deeply biological. Depression is rooted in biology, much as is, say, diabetes.
Written by Adam Marcus & Ivan Oransky
Hoss Cartwright, a former editor of the International Journal of Agricultural Innovations and Research, had a good excuse for missing the 5th World Congress on Virology last year: He doesn’t exist.
Burkhard Morgenstern, a professor of bioinformatics at the University of Gottingen, dreamt him up, and built a nice little scientific career for him. He wrote Cartwright a Curriculum Vitae, describing his doctorate in Studies of Dunnowhat, his rigorous postdoctoral work at Some Shitty Place in the Middle of Nowhere, and his experience as Senior Cattle Manager at the Ponderosa Institute for Bovine Research.
Written by David Rose
The news comes amid mounting evidence that the recent run of world record high temperatures is about to end. The fall, revealed by Nasa satellite measurements of the lower atmosphere, has been caused by the end of El Nino – the warming of surface waters in a vast area of the Pacific west of Central America.
Some scientists, including Dr Gavin Schmidt, head of Nasa’s climate division, have claimed that the recent highs were mainly the result of long-term global warming. Others have argued that the records were caused by El Nino, a complex natural phenomenon that takes place every few years, and has nothing to do with greenhouse gas emissions by humans.
Written by iceagenow.info
The previously undiscovered volcanoes lie just three km (2 miles) from the Gulf of Naples, home to Mt Vesuvius, and the most densely populated volcanic region in the world. Some three million people live in the city of Naples.
When Mt. Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD, it killed all 11,000 inhabits of Pompeii, making it one of the deadliest eruptions in human history.
Researchers discovered the new volcanoes in 2014 while garnering more information on Vesuvius, which is overdue an eruption.
Written by William R. Boos, Robert L. Korty
Robert Korty, associate professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences, along with colleague William Boos of Yale University, have had their work published in the current issue of Nature Geoscience.
The two researchers have looked into precipitation patterns of the Holocene era nd compared them with present-day movements of the intertropical convergence zone, a large region of intense tropical rainfall. Using computer models and other data, the researchers found links to rainfall patterns thousands of years ago.
“The framework we developed helps us understand why the heaviest tropical rain belts set up where they do,” Korty explains.
“Tropical rain belts are tied to what happens elsewhere in the world through the Hadley circulation, but it won’t predict changes elsewhere directly, as the chain of events is very complex. But it is a step toward that goal.”
The Hadley circulation is a tropical atmospheric circulation that rises near the equator. It is linked to the subtropical trade winds, tropical rainbelts, and affects the position of severe storms, hurricanes, and the jet stream. Where it descends in the subtropics, it can create desert-like conditions. The majority of Earth’s arid regions are located in areas beneath the descending parts of the Hadley circulation.
“We know that 6,000 years ago, what is now the Sahara Desert was a rainy place,” Korty adds.
“It has been something of a mystery to understand how the tropical rain belt moved so far north of the equator. Our findings show that that large migrations in rainfall can occur in one part of the globe even while the belt doesn’t move much elsewhere.
“This framework may also be useful in predicting the details of how tropical rain bands tend to shift during modern-day El Niño and La Niña events (the cooling or warming of waters in the central Pacific Ocean which tend to influence weather patterns around the world).”
The findings could lead to better ways to predict future rainfall patterns in parts of the world, Korty believes.
“One of the implications of this is that we can deduce how the position of the rainfall will change in response to individual forces,” he says. “We were able to conclude that the variations in Earth’s orbit that shifted rainfall north in Africa 6,000 years ago were by themselves insufficient to sustain the amount of rain that geologic evidence shows fell over what is now the Sahara Desert. Feedbacks between the shifts in rain and the vegetation that could exist with it are needed to get heavy rains into the Sahara.”
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Written by Michael Sununu
The recent US presidential elections have caused the climate alarmists’ heads to spin. Regardless of policy preferences, what elected officials need to focus on is what is actually going on in our climate and what steps need to be taken to address them. It’s the data that count. The real data.
On this point, let’s all agree that the world is warming. It has been since the 1800s when the world started to emerge from the Little Ice Age. We have had periods of warming, periods of cooling and periods when global temperatures didn’t do much of anything.
Written by Phillip Ball
We think of outer space as distant and unreachable, but in fact events out in the cosmos may have helped and hindered the evolution of life on Earth.
We are here by the skin of our teeth. Evolution could well have turned out differently, and the fact that it did not may well be down to freak, chance events. Life on Earth has faced a string of accidents, weird situations and outright catastrophes, from sudden ice ages to collisions with asteroids – and it is how life responded to these contingencies that ultimately led to us.
If that is so, we can only understand the story of life by taking the broadest possible view. Organisms are shaped by their environments, and those environments are shaped in turn by huge geological forces like volcanoes and ice sheets, and by the shifting climate.
Written by PSI staff
Pioneering Australian geological expert publishes ‘The Origin of Rocks and Mineral Deposits.’ New book is the culmination of a lot of research effort by many people and it contains significant new knowledge.
Author, John Elliston, has been involved in the conduct and supervision of mineral exploration and research for over 45 years. The evidence he presents in this new book is clear and the conclusions commonsense and logical. 
Because it is interdisciplinary a preview edition was printed for evaluation. For that reason it is probably one of the most thoroughly reviewed and verified scientific theses ever published.
Written by Steve Milloy, junkscience.com
” In contrast, the aquaculture industry was farming aquatic animals at CO2 levels that far exceed end-of-century climate change projections (sometimes >10 000 μatm) long before the term ‘ocean acidification’ was coined, with limited detrimental effects reported.”
Written by Tony Heller
Top NASA climate scientist Gavin Schmidt claims in the Canberra Times that he has not removed the 1940’s warmth in the Arctic:
“You appear to hold a number of misconceptions which I am happy to clarify at this time,” Dr Schmidt told Senator Roberts in letters and emails obtained by Fairfax Media. “The claim that GISS has ‘removed the 1940s warmth’ in the Arctic is not correct.”
NASA chief slaps down climate sceptic senator Malcolm Roberts: ‘You hold a number of misconceptions’
Gavin told lots of lies in this article, but none bigger than this one. He has in fact removed the 1940’s warmth at every single Iceland station active during the 1940’s.
Written by Anna Patty & Julia Medew
All but one member of the editorial advisory committee for Australia’s top medical journal have resigned following the sacking of its eminent editor.
Stephen Leeder, an emeritus professor of public health at the University of Sydney and chair of the Western Sydney Local Health District Board, was sacked as editor of the prestigious Medical Journal of Australia after he raised concerns about a decision by the journal’s publisher AMPCo to outsource the journal’s production to Elsevier. AMPCo is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Australian Medical Association.
Written by Robert W. Felix
We’ve learned a lot in the last 25 years, especially when it comes to underwater volcanoes. When I began researching and writing Not by Fire but by Ice in 1991, scientists guestimated that there were 10,000 submarine volcanoes in the entire world.
Two years later, marine geophysicists discovered 1,133 previously unmapped underwater volcanoes off the coast of Easter Island.
And they were huge. (Still are.) Some of the newly-found volcanoes rose almost 1½ miles above the seafloor. Even then, their peaks remained about 1½ miles below the water’s surface. They’re packed into a relatively small area about the size of New York state.