A new paper on the evolutionary history of bears (Bears breed across species borders: Kumar et al. 2017) has concluded that hybridization is common and natural among all species of ursids. And while some media outlets (e.g. DailyMail) have framed this as surprisingly convincing proof that experts were wrong to claim that climate change is the cause of recent polar bear X grizzly hybrids, definitive evidence against that interpretation has been available for years to anyone who bothered to look: see my recent “Five facts that challenge hybridization nonsense.”

… Dr. [J. Elliott] Campbell and his colleagues have discovered that  in the last century, plants have been growing at a rate far faster than at any other time in the last 54,000 years. Writing in the journal Nature, they report that plants are converting 31 percent more carbon dioxide into organic matter than they were before the Industrial Revolution. The increase is because of the carbon dioxide that humans are putting into the atmosphere, which fertilizes the plants, Dr. Campbell said.

– Carl Simmer, A Global Greening, New York Times, April 5, 2017.

Image copyright: GETTY IMAGES

A consortium of British companies has unveiled a plan to test driverless cars on UK roads and motorways in 2019. The Driven group also plans to try out a fleet of autonomous vehicles between London and Oxford. The cars will communicate with each other about any hazards and should operate with almost full autonomy – but will have a human on board as well.

Deaths from air pollution is a topic which frequently claims newspaper headlines. Rightly so. The World Health Organization (WHO) highlights air pollution as the number one reason for environment related deaths in the world. It’s estimated to be the cause of seven million premature deaths every year – 4.3 million from indoor air pollution, and 3 million from ambient outdoor pollution. With historical links to development and economic growth, we expect the number of deaths from outdoor pollution to grow (largely in Asia and Africa).

It’s astounding how the same tired message gets repeated decade after decade, yet is always wrong. It raises a serious question. How can large groups of people succumb to a message that is demonstrably wrong? While that question can’t be answered quickly, the examples of these failed messages can be cataloged.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, theoretical physicist Steven Koonin proposed a ‘Red Team’ exercise on climate science – an alternative analysis by qualified parties who are knowledgeable but do not have a “stake” in the outcome. The disagreements regarding the positions of the IPCC, and its followers such as the US Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), and those who disagree with their findings is becoming quite intense as can be seen by the reactions to the March 29 hearing of the U.S. House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology on “Climate Science: Assumptions, Policy Implications, and the Scientific Method.”

This is a key issue: whether humans are responsible for all or most of the increase in atmospheric CO2. If they are not then it does not matter if alarmists believe that CO2 is the dominant ‘greenhouse gas’, which it is not because the increase is natural. Human CO2 is a very small {154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of the total CO2 going into the atmosphere, The {154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of human CO2 going into the atmosphere is shown by Figure 7.3, AR4, 3.67{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} (218.2 GT divided by 8 GT):

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).

Image copyright: GETTY IMAGES

Norwegian scientists have put forward a new theory to explain the inspiration behind one of the most famous works of art ever produced. The Scream (1892), by Edvard Munch, depicts a figure holding its face, which is making an agonised expression. But look above this individual and the sky is full of colourful wavy lines.

The claim of “consensus” is one of the pillars of sand that is supporting the climate change political movement. The problem is, the way this conclusion was reached, it isn’t defensible. Searching published articles for certain words doesn’t prove a “consensus.” No one went or record supporting the claims of “consensus,” it all came from research of articles.

Is atmospheric phenomena on Jupiter better explained under a new concept of electromagnetic resistance generating heat? Retired science writer and analyst, Edsel Chromie, provides a novel and compelling re-examination.

On April 19, 2017 the Science channel ran a program titled “Curse of the Gas Giant” It stated:

“The NASA satellite probe recorded a temperature of 1,300 degrees F. above the clouds in the area of the auroras of Jupiter. Jupiter is 400 million miles away from the warmth of the Sun. The data defies scientific explanation. We have several pretty nice theories but all of them have problems Scientists need more data before we can really figure out what’s going on with Jupiter. For now. the mysterious heat source on Jupiter remains unknown.”

The March for Science was last Saturday. Will J Grant and Rod Lambert struggled with the message behind the “March for Science” at The Conversation. We should march, they said a month ago, because “science is a human process”, which will be news to people who thought science was about evidence and reason instead. On Saturday they will be marching for the kind of science that is  “passion” and “belief”. Don’t turn up thinking this is about the dispassionate Laws of Physics. You’ll be at the wrong rally.

Study suggests ban on neonicotinoids has done more harm than good. Is the European Commission determined to dim the Enlightenment? I ask this because its behaviour in one specific instance goes so utterly with dogma and against evidence as to suggest that there is no longer even a pretence of respect for reason left in Brussels. It concerns bees.

What is the “Scientific method”? Saturday’s March for Science calls for “robustly funded” science and “political leaders and policy makers to enact evidence based policies in the public interest.”  But is this just an attempt to dress up the marchers’ political beliefs as science? And what do they mean by science?

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.