Written by Susan J Crockford
A few days ago in a radio interview, a senior US Fish & Wildlife biologist repeated the tall tale that Southern Beaufort Sea polar bear numbers declined in recent years due to loss of summer sea ice. But restating this egregious misinformation does not make it true.
The Southern Beaufort population did decline between 2001 and 2006 but it was due to natural causes (thick ice in spring from 2004 to 2006) – it had nothing to do with recent summer sea ice loss and Eric Regehr knows it.
Written by PATRICK J. MICHAELS and PAUL C. "CHIP" KNAPPENBERGER
This week we focus on an in-depth article in Slate authored by Sam Apple that profiles John Arnold, “one of the least known billionaires in the U.S.” Turns out Mr. Arnold is very interested in “fixing” science.
His foundation, the Arnold Foundation, has provided a good deal of funding to various research efforts across the country and across disciplines aimed at investigating how the scientific incentive structure results in biased (aka “bad”) science.
Written by St John's College, University of Cambridge
Researchers have identified traces of what they believe is the earliest known prehistoric ancestor of humans — a microscopic, bag-like sea creature, which lived about 540 million years ago.
Named Saccorhytus, after the sack-like features created by its elliptical body and large mouth, the species is new to science and was identified from microfossils found in China. It is thought to be the most primitive example of a so-called “deuterostome” — a broad biological category that encompasses a number of sub-groups, including the vertebrates.
Written by Robert Tracinski
I recently wrote about the wretched reporting on the claim that 2016 was the “hottest year on record,” using as my main example a New York Times article by Justin Gillis that gave his readers none of the relevant numbers they could use to evaluate that claim. None of them.
If you search for the actual numbers, you will eventually find that the effect they are claiming, the actual amount by which this year was hotter than previous years, is smaller than the margin of error in the data.
Written by Andy Coghlan
Our planet may be blue from the inside out. Earth’s huge store of water might have originated via chemical reactions in the mantle, rather than arriving from space through collisions with ice-rich comets.
This new water may be under such pressure that it can trigger earthquakes hundreds of kilometres below Earth’s surface – tremors whose origins have so far remained unexplained. That’s the upshot of a computer simulation of reactions in Earth’s upper mantle between liquid hydrogen and quartz, the most common and stable form of silica in this part of the planet.
Written by Donna Laframboise
The US Department of Energy (DOE) describes itself as the “largest federal sponsor of basic research in physical sciences.” It consumes $32 billion in federal spending annually, funding numerous projects connected to climate change and renewable energy.
Earlier this month, the DOE decided its scientific integrity policy, last updated in 2014, was wholly inadequate. With nine days remaining in the Obama administration, energy Secretary Ernest Moniz unveiled a brand new policy at the National Press Club.
Written by John L. Casey and Dr. Nils Axel Morner
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) publishes their latest prediction of accelerated sea level rise in defiant snub to President Donald Trump’s ‘hoax’ claims on climate change.
Despite Trump’s campaign rhetoric about climate change and the appointment of fellow global warming skeptic – Oklahoma attorney general – Scott Pruitt to take over the EPA, NOAA doubles down on alarmist junk science forecasting.
Written by Nick Schroeder, BSME, PE
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
H. L. Mencken
IPCC graphs like the one above tells us Earth’s carbon cycle contains 45,000 Gt (E15 gr) +/- 850 GT of stores and reservoirs with a couple hundred Gt/y +/- ?? ebbing and flowing between those reservoirs. Mankind’s gross contribution over 260 years was 555 Gt or 1.2{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117}. (IPCC AR5 Fig 6.1) Mankind’s net contribution, 240 Gt or 0.53{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117}, (dry labbed by IPCC to make the numbers work) to this bubbling, churning caldron of carbon/carbon dioxide is 4 Gt/y +/- 96{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117}. (IPCC AR5 Table 6.1) Seems relatively trivial to me. IPCC et. al. says natural variations can’t explain the increase in CO2. With these tiny percentages and high levels of uncertainty how would anybody even know?
Written by Julie Kelly
In his recently released and timely book, Scare Pollution: Why and How to Fix the EPA, author Steve Milloy says this about the Environmental Protection Agency:
“The EPA has over the course of the last 20 years marshaled its vast and virtually unchallenged power into an echo chamber of deceptive science, runaway regulations and fatally flawed research derived from unethical human experiments. The EPA’s conduct runs the gamut from subtle statistical shenanigans to withholding key scientific data, from seeking to rubberstamp baseless research data to illegally spraying diesel exhaust up the noses of unsuspecting children and other vulnerable populations.”
Written by Vanderbilt University
During the last Ice Age, Australia, Tasmania and New Guinea formed a single landmass, called Sahul. It was a strange and often hostile place populated by a bizarre cast of giant animals.
There were 500-pound kangaroos, marsupial tapirs the size of horses and wombat-like creatures the size of hippos. There were flightless birds that weighed twice as much as modern emu, 33-foot snakes, 20-foot crocodiles, 8-foot turtles with horned heads and spiked tails, and giant monitor lizards that measured greater than 6 feet from tip to tail and were likely venomous.
Written by John O'Sullivan
We have been lied to: Carbon dioxide (CO2) is an alleged ‘well-mixed gas’ also alleged to reside in sufficient quantities high in the atmosphere to cause global warming (via the so-called greenhouse gas effect). But as President Trump looks to help dismantle the hoax there is much inconvenient science at hand to help his administration discredit this ‘theory’ beloved by climate alarmists.
The first damaging fact to the theory: CO2 is actually a heavy gas. It is not ‘well mixed’ in the air as per the glib claim. Just check out the NASA image (above) showing widely varying carbon dioxide concentrations. Indeed, schoolchildren are shown just how heavy CO2 is by way of a simple school lab experiment. This heavy gas thus struggles to rise and soon falls back to earth due to its Specific Gravity (SG). Real scientists rely on the SG measure which gives standard air a value of 1.0 where the measured SG of CO2 is 1.5 (considerably heavier). Thus, in the real world the warming theory barely gets off the ground.
Written by Dr Klaus L E Kaiser
My Dear Aunt Climate,
First of all, somewhat belatedly, my best wishes for your continued happiness and prosperity in this new year of The Lord, 2017! And when you change your attire with the seasons, from white to brown, to green, and back again to white, please be mindful of and stay within accustomed-to conventions.
Just a fraction of one degree above or below the global mean temperature could cause some folks to become upset.
Written by Jonathan Amos
Image copyright: HARVARD UNIVERSIT/R.DIAS/I.SILVERAScientists in the US say they have at last managed to turn hydrogen into a state where it behaves like a metal. If that is true – and it is a controversial claim – it fulfils a more than 80-year quest to produce what many have said would be a wonder material.
Theory suggests metallic hydrogen could be used to make zero-resistance electrical wiring and super-powerful rocket fuel, among many applications. Ranga Dias and Isaac Silvera are the Harvard researchers behind the work.
Written by Guy Lewy
NEWLY hatched turtles head straight for the sea and tadpoles recognise a predatory salamander the very first time they see one. But what may, on the surface, appear to be a primordial instinct can sometimes hide a deeper, stranger truth: that our first lessons in life come before birth itself.
Written by Zhu, Z., Piao, S., Myneni et al.
Thirty-two scientists from nine countries use satellite records to prove global growing season has been boosted by between 25 to 50 percent. The international team of experts found that CO2 enrichment is proving to be a tremendous biospheric benefit contrary to climate alarmist fears.
Paper Reviewed: Zhu, Z., Piao, S., Myneni, R.B., Huang, M., Zeng, Z., Canadell, J.G., Ciais, P., Sitch, S., Friedlingstein, P., Arneth, A., Cao, C., Cheng, L., Kato, E., Koven, C., Li, Y., Lian, X., Liu, Y., Liu, R., Mao, J., Pan, Y., Peng, S., Penuelas, J., Poulter, B., Pugh, T.A.M., Stocker, B.D., Viovy, N., Wang, X., Wang, Y., Xiao, Z., Yang, H., Zaehle, S. and Zeng, N. 2016. Greening of the Earth and its drivers. Nature Climate Change DOI: 10.1038/NCLIMATE3004.
Written by Tim Cross
In 1971, Intel, then an obscure firm in what would only later come to be known as Silicon Valley, released a chip called the 4004. It was the world’s first commercially available microprocessor, which meant it sported all the electronic circuits necessary for advanced number-crunching in a single, tiny package. It was a marvel of its time, built from 2,300 tiny transistors, each around 10,000 nanometres (or billionths of a metre) across – about the size of a red blood cell. A transistor is an electronic switch that, by flipping between “on” and “off”, provides a physical representation of the 1s and 0s that are the fundamental particles of information.