It’s that time of year again. The American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting is December 11 – 15. Unlike previous years when it was in San Francisco, this year it is in New Orleans. When we (Dr. Duane Thresher and Dr. Claudia Kubatzki) used to go, it was always in San Francisco.

Tom Hanks – of all people  – this time last year, was discussing overpopulation on NBC’s Today show. He was doing it to promote his upcoming movie, Inferno, which is all about an overpopulation crisis. The actor claimed that we will have too many people “in an instant” and that the planet will be unable to support them. This is not a new idea. It dates back to the late 1700s, when Thomas Robert Malthus feared that large population would exhaust Earth’s resources and result in mass poverty and starvation.

We finally have this year’s example of the new fad of claiming every polar bear that died of starvation (or on its way to starving to death) — and caught on film — is a victim of climate change: a young bear on Somerset Island near Baffin Island, Nunavut filmed in August during its last angonizing hours by members of an activist conservation organization called SeaLegacy.

Empirical evidence does not support the claim that anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions cause global warming and/or climate change. We suggest that without adequately proven evidence being demonstrated – should it exist in the first place – such a conclusion can not be adduced from the facts.

Image source: York et al., 2016, Journal of Ecology and Evolution.

Most of the world’s polar bears live in Canada.  Hunters and elders from northern Canada’s native communities have been immersed in studying polar bear ecology for centuries.

The world is watching one volcano in Bali, but it’s sobering to think there may be hundreds of others going off, and almost certainly ones we don’t even know about.

I want to have a go at analysing the World’s Worst Scientific Paper one of these days, but first there’s the question: Who among the fourteen listed authors actually wrote it?

The UN’s climate summit in Paris at the end of 2015 concluded with a bang. The world’s governments promised sweeping cuts in carbon emissions. Rich countries promised to help poor ones with $100 billion per year in climate assistance.

A prominent glaciologist is facing criminal charges in Argentina after he released a glacier survey that angered environmental activists because it didn’t result in the closing of a gold mine.

A federal judge charged Ricardo Villalba, who headed the Institute of Snow, Ice and Environmental Research (IANIGLA), with “abusing his authority and violating his duty as a civil servant,” Nature.com reported.

Recently I wrote about 7 signs showing that the earth has been cooling and likely will continue to cool.

To back this up, Kenneth Richards commented in a reply that this year has seen 7 new peer-reviewed papers that show us that the earth’s surface temperature at the poles and elsewhere has been cooling since about a decade. What’s worrisome is that the southern hemisphere surface is mostly ocean.

Why not just take the next rocket to that holiday resort there? Sure, it’s a long journey but the vistas are breath-taking. In fact, not just the vistas, the atmosphere too!

A team of scientists from the National Space Institute at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU Space) and the Racah Institute of Physics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has linked large solar eruptions to changes in Earth’s cloud cover in a study based on over 25 years of satellite observations.

This post summarises some of the lies associated with the recent Harvey et al paper. There’s also a request for reader input! See bold italics below.

Re-examination of cold, hard data relating to the climate debate and whether earth’s atmosphere cools or warms us, is becoming an obsession among an increasing number of independent and curious applied scientists and engineers.

After 3o years of being browbeaten about man-made global warming by government ‘scientists’, skeptical specialists from applied science and engineering are exposing just how much those ‘experts’ have been lying to us.

Researchers in the U.S. just came one step closer to achieving immortality through “cryo-preservation” or the freezing of bodies in the hopes of bringing them back to life at a later time.

Although only performed on zebra fish embryos, advances in cryo-preservation succeeded in preserving brains and bodies “in a state of suspended animation” by freezing and reviving individuals at the time of their choice.