Stefan Rahmstorf is against the notion of a warming hiatus. In his eyes it doesn’t exist. Instead he prefers to live in his Rahmstorfian world, where every thing is the way it’s supposed to be: warming is galloping along. It’s a strange parallel world that has nothing to do with reality.

The rest of the scientific community, fortunately, see things somewhat more realistically and are busily publishing papers on the reasons for the hiatus or slowdown. The Institute for Atmospheric Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has even issued a press release on the subject:

Our source of energy continued to be especially quiet last month. The mean sunspot number (SSN) was 17.7 and the sun was completely blank for 16 days.

It is important to recall once again that the SSN is not simply the sum of the observed sunspots, rather it is generated by the number of spots multiplied by the 10-fold of the observed sunspot regions. When one single spot is observed in an active region, this yields an SSN of 11.

Image copyright: NASA/JPL-CALTECH/GSSR

A large asteroid the size of the Rock of Gibraltar has passed safely by Earth. The object, measured to be almost a kilometre wide, came within five times the distance between the Earth and the Moon. Known as 2014 JO25, the asteroid is the biggest such space rock to skim our world since 2004.

After several more e-mail exchanges, NAS President Marcia McNutt has apparently returned to the view that JunkScience should drop dead.

Before reading further, you should already have read Part 1 and Part 2 of “NAS President to JunkScience: Drop Dead.”

For almost six decades since Sputnik first circled the Earth, satellites have been the exclusive domain of the richest governments and companies, costing billions and weighing tons. Now with the advancements in space flight and digital cameras, cheap orbiting cameras are becoming ubiquitous.

Image copyright: GETTY IMAGES

A UK-led team of scientists is rolling out a project to monitor every land volcano on Earth from space. Two satellites will routinely map the planet’s surface, looking for signs that might hint at a future eruption. They will watch for changes in the shape of the ground below them, enabling scientists to issue an early alert if a volcano appears restless.

Top climate experts are admitting the science behind man-made global warming isn’t what has been claimed. We examine the astonishing new evidence getting scientists talking – serious numerical errors in the supposed ‘settled science’ of the greenhouse gas theory.

For this article we put under the microscope two key players from British meteorology, W. H. Dines & Lewis Fry Richardson. These are the men responsible for creating the mathematical algorithms that turned the greenhouse gas theory into the number form fed into modern computer models.

Every year, thousands of scientific journal papers are published by researchers across the world, but only a tiny proportion make it into the pages of the newspapers. Using Altmetric, we’ve compiled a list of the 25 most talked-about climate papers of 2016. You can see the Top 10 in our infographic above (zoomable version here).

In the May 2000 issue of Reason Magazine, award-winning science correspondent Ronald Bailey wrote an excellent article titled “Earth Day, Then and Now” to provide some historical perspective on the 30th anniversary of Earth Day. In that article, Bailey noted that around the time of the first Earth Day in the 1970, and in the years following, there was a “torrent of apocalyptic predictions” and many of those predictions were featured in his Reason article.

Billions of pounds of plastic waste are littering the world’s oceans. Now, a Ph.D. organic chemist and a sailboat captain report that they are developing a process to reuse certain plastics, transforming them from worthless trash into a valuable diesel fuel with a small mobile reactor. They envision the technology could someday be implemented globally on land and possibly placed on boats to convert ocean waste plastic into fuel to power the vessels.

“Resources exist to be consumed. And consumed they will be, if not by this generation then by some future. By what right does this forgotten future seek to deny us our birthright?” –Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri

In real science, numbers speak, and they talk through what is called a regression. Most people are familiar with the 2nd-grade bean plant experiment where you shine different amounts of light on different bean plants and measure the rate of growth. Y, the dependent variable, is the bean plant height, X, the independent variable, is the amount of sunlight allowed to reach the bean plant, m is the slope or rate of change of the bean plant per unit of light, and b is the constant, which in this case would be the starting height of the plants.

Many non-government organizations aim to inform the public, policymakers and scientists about a wide range of complex and important issues. But there are times when science takes a backseat to ideology. Perhaps nowhere is this more common than in the volatile landscape surrounding genetically modified foods and modern agriculture. Criticism of GMOs, and everything connected to them, has given rise to a host of organizations pushing messages that often lack scientific support. Here are 10 NGOs that often abandon the science behind genetic modification of food in favor of such ideology.