On 30 June 1908, an explosion ripped through the air above a remote forest in Siberia, near the Podkamennaya Tunguska river.

The fireball is believed to have been 50-100m wide. It depleted 2,000 sq km of the taiga forest in the area, flattening about 80 million trees. The earth trembled. Windows smashed in the nearest town over 35 miles (60km) away. Residents there even felt heat from the blast, and some were blown off their feet.

Fortunately, the area in which this massive explosion occurred was sparsely inhabited. There were no official reports of human casualties, though one local deer herder reportedly died after he was thrust into a tree from the blast. Hundreds of reindeer were also reduced to charred carcasses.

[graphic: Climate court: Michael Mann (left) is suing Tim Ball (right) in the most important science lawsuit since the Scopes Monkey Trial (1925)]

“I’ve waited 40 years for this moment.”

In a congressional meeting room, somewhere on Capitol Hill, one of the world’s leading sceptical climate scientists, Dr. Tim Ball, is toasting the advent of the Trump administration.

“I don’t want to use the phrase tipping point because that’s a phrase that has been abused in the scientific area. But I think we’re on the verge of a dramatic shift,” Ball tells the small invited audience of journalists, scientists, think-tankers, lawyers and DC politicos. He’s talking about the war on the Green Blob.

After almost 30 years of construction, an experimental French fusion reactor is finally about to be tested.

The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor’s (ITER) Tore Supra tokamak in France will start its first set of experiments this coming spring. It will heat gas to several million degrees Celsius and contain the plasma from the resulting reaction. Construction of the tokamak began in the 1980s.

These experiments are intended to collect scientific data that will ultimately allow researchers to create plasma which lasts for longer periods of time, a critical necessity for fusion power. The project is also intended to minimize the risk of future delays and cost overruns.

Image copyright: SPL

Cells in the amniotic fluid that surrounds a developing baby can revive ageing and weak bones, say UK scientists.

The discovery could help babies with genetic diseases, elderly people and even astronauts, they say. The findings in mice, published in Scientific Reports, showed cells in the fluid strengthened bone and cut fractures by 80%. Human clinical trials are planned within the next two years.

Brittle bones

The amniotic fluid protects the baby and helps it develop inside the mother’s womb. It also contains stem cells that are the building blocks of other tissues.

Image copyright: SPL

The researchers collected the amniotic stem cells from material left over from screening tests during pregnancy or collected immediately before birth.

The team at the Institute of Child Health – a collaboration of Great Ormond Street Hospital and University College London – injected the cells into diseased mice. The animals had brittle bone disease or osteogenesis imperfecta.

In people, the condition affects around one in every 25,000 births and can be fatal, with babies born with multiple fractures. Even those who survive face up to 15 bone fractures a year, brittle teeth, impaired hearing and growth problems.

Two fundamental tenets of the anthropogenic global warming narrative are (1) the globe is warming (i.e., it’s not just regional warming), and (2) the warming that has occurred since 1950 can be characterized as remarkable, unnatural, and largely unprecedented.  In other words, today’s climate is substantially and alarmingly different than what it has been in the past….because the human impact has been profound.

Well, maybe.  Scientists are increasingly finding that the two fundamental points cited above may not be supported by the evidence.

Western Siberia is currently stuck in a mini Ice Age as temperatures plummeted to nearly -80 degrees Fahrenheit, breaking all previous cold records. And meteorologists say that even icier weather is coming. Temps tumbled to -62 degrees Celsius (-79.6°F) at the Bolshoe Olkhovskoe oilfield in the Khanti-Mansi region this week. And the Kazym village in the Beloyarsky district showed a biting -58 degrees C (-72.4°F).

In the province of Nadym, the bone-shattering cold pushed past the -50 degrees C (-58°F) mark, forcing schools to shut down. In provinces like Yakutia, schools stayed open despite a bone-chilling -52 degrees C (-61.6°F). While these arctic temperatures are commonplace in eastern Siberia, it rarely gets this frigid in the west.

Despite below-average temperatures breaking records across the Northern Hemisphere, the Washington Post is warning readers the North Pole may warm up 40-50 degrees on Thursday, which they blame for Arctic sea ice loss. Except the data doesn’t back up the claim. The Danish Meteorological Institute, which tracks Arctic sea ice, shows 2016 being similar to 2014 and 2015.

The anomalous weather event is a consequence of an always shifting jet stream, and not #Climate Change, which alarmists repeatedly claim is long-term weather over many years. Even 19 years of no statistical warming wasn’t long enough for NASA and NOAA to declare the great global warming scare was over. But a day of warming from a naturally occurring event is a beacon of impending doom.

I looked it up – I was curious. How many times does a normal healthy human being breathe in and breathe out in just one minute? Well, Google tells me that we exhale (that means breathe out for the scientifically illiterate friends of mine on Facebook) some fifteen to twenty times in one minute.

Let us take the lower number. What is 15 x 60? It equals 900 exhalations in every hour! Let us now multiply 900 by 24 to get the number of breaths in 24 hours. That comes to 21,600 exhalations of Carbon Dioxide at 40,000 parts per million in one single day by one average person.

The total world population is presently reckoned to be 7.4 billion. And rising! You do the maths for that!

“Science” is perhaps the most abused word in the English language.

The word used to name the method of Galileo, Newton, and Einstein has also been used to rationalize some of the most destructive political policies in human history, such as socialism and population control. The Nazis invoked the once-renowned “science” of eugenics to justify a Holocaust of “scientifically inferior” races.

How do we protect ourselves against such abuses of science? By knowing the one key difference between real scientists and science abusers. Science abusers treat science as an infallible authority to be blindly obeyed by the public. Real scientists treat science as a method to be carefully explained to the public.

According to Gavin Schmidt at NASA, global warming didn’t begin until the mid-1970s. His graph below shows that the 1970’s were barely warmer than 1880, with only minor fluctuations in temperature between 1880 and 1970.

If President-elect Donald Trump is looking for places to cut costs, he might want to take a look at the National Weather Service’s seasonal forecasting unit.

Yesterday at the Daily Update over at Weatherbell Analytics, veteran meteorologist Joe Bastardi looked at the season forecasts, generated by billion dollar super-computers,  recently put out by NCEP. Turns out they were totally wrong. You have to pity the poor persons who placed their bets on them.

The first example is the forecast for North America made by NCEP in November for December:

Fortunately, the Titanic only sunk once because engineers and navigators did not continue to make the same mistakes over and over.

But “experts” and climate models provide a never-ending loop of sinking and re-floating of a wide assortment of climate change predictions, forecasts and scenarios. The weather/climate researchers seem unable to embrace the humility and reality that their computer simulation predictions rarely stay afloat for any length of time before being sent down to deep and cold watery graves.

A recent noteworthy example of a failed prediction is the Hurricane Matthew event.

In order to understand the workings of the thought-police there is no better place to start than with the Trial of Galileo.

It is well worthwhile taking twenty minutes or so to read the story of Galileo. Here was a brilliant scientist and mathematician, considered by many to be the founder of modern Physics, who feared for his life, because he accepted the theory of Copernicus that the Earth was not the centre of the universe and stayed still, but that the Earth revolved upon its own axis as it travelled round the Sun.

Since nobody today has any qualms about accepting such a notion it is difficult to believe that in 1597 Galileo wrote to Johannes Kepler to say that he dared not bring into the open his support for the Copernican theory. Why? Because the Catholic Church considered that it was against Holy Writ and the very idea that the Earth was not still and the centre of the Universe was considered absurd.

Image copyright: ESA

Scientists say they have identified a remarkable new feature in Earth’s molten outer core.They describe it as a kind of “jet stream” – a fast-flowing river of liquid iron that is surging westwards under Alaska and Siberia.

The moving mass of metal has been inferred from measurements made by Europe’s Swarm satellites. This trio of spacecraft are currently mapping Earth’s magnetic field to try to understand its fundamental workings. The scientists say the jet is the best explanation for the patches of concentrated field strength that the satellites observe in the northern hemisphere.

“This jet of liquid iron is moving at about fifty kilometres per year,” explained Dr Chris Finlay from the National Space Institute at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU Space).

It may be hard to believe that computer programming was once considered “woman’s work.” Today women are vastly underrepresented in science and technology-based industries. The number of women in STEM related subjects is so low that toy companies are even creating engineering sets specifically targeted for young girls.

So for those of us who’ve grown up in this reality, it’s hard to imagine a time or place where female programmers were the only people considered appropriate for the job.

Scientists from NASA and three universities have presented new discoveries about the way heat and energy move and manifest in the ionosphere, a region of Earth’s atmosphere that reacts to changes from both space above and Earth below.

Far above Earth’s surface, within the tenuous upper atmosphere, is a sea of particles that have been split into positive and negative ions by the sun’s harsh ultraviolet radiation. Called the ionosphere, this is Earth’s interface to space, the area where Earth’s neutral atmosphere and terrestrial weather give way to the space environment that dominates most of the rest of the universe – an environment that hosts charged particles and a complex system of electric and magnetic fields.