We think of outer space as distant and unreachable, but in fact events out in the cosmos may have helped and hindered the evolution of life on Earth.

We are here by the skin of our teeth. Evolution could well have turned out differently, and the fact that it did not may well be down to freak, chance events. Life on Earth has faced a string of accidents, weird situations and outright catastrophes, from sudden ice ages to collisions with asteroids – and it is how life responded to these contingencies that ultimately led to us.

If that is so, we can only understand the story of life by taking the broadest possible view. Organisms are shaped by their environments, and those environments are shaped in turn by huge geological forces like volcanoes and ice sheets, and by the shifting climate.

Pioneering Australian geological expert publishes ‘The Origin of Rocks and Mineral Deposits.’  New book is the culmination of a lot of research effort by many people and it contains significant new knowledge.

Author, John Elliston, has been involved in the conduct and supervision of mineral exploration and research for over 45 years. The evidence he presents in this new book is clear and the conclusions commonsense and logical. 

Because it is interdisciplinary a preview edition was printed for evaluation. For that reason it is probably one of the most thoroughly reviewed and verified scientific theses ever published.

” In contrast, the aquaculture industry was farming aquatic animals at CO2 levels that far exceed end-of-century climate change projections (sometimes >10 000 μatm) long before the term ‘ocean acidification’ was coined, with limited detrimental effects reported.”

Top NASA climate scientist Gavin Schmidt claims in the Canberra Times that he has not removed the 1940’s warmth in the Arctic:

“You appear to hold a number of misconceptions which I am happy to clarify at this time,” Dr Schmidt told Senator Roberts in letters and emails obtained by Fairfax Media. “The claim that GISS has ‘removed the 1940s warmth’ in the Arctic is not correct.”

NASA chief slaps down climate sceptic senator Malcolm Roberts: ‘You hold a number of misconceptions’

Gavin told lots of lies in this article, but none bigger than this one. He has in fact removed the 1940’s warmth at every single Iceland station active during the 1940’s.

All but one member of the editorial advisory committee for Australia’s top medical journal have resigned following the sacking of its eminent editor.

Stephen Leeder, an emeritus professor of public health at the University of Sydney and chair of the Western Sydney Local Health District Board, was sacked as editor of the prestigious Medical Journal of Australia after he raised concerns about a decision by the journal’s publisher AMPCo to outsource the journal’s production to Elsevier. AMPCo is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Australian Medical Association.

We’ve learned a lot in the last 25 years, especially when it comes to underwater volcanoes.  When I began researching and writing Not by Fire but by Ice in 1991, scientists guestimated that there were 10,000 submarine volcanoes in the entire world.

Two years later, marine geophysicists discovered 1,133 previously unmapped underwater volcanoes off the coast of Easter Island.

And they were huge. (Still are.) Some of the newly-found volcanoes rose almost 1½ miles above the seafloor. Even then, their peaks remained about 1½ miles below the water’s surface. They’re packed into a relatively small area about the size of New York state.

Posted by S. J. Crockford PhD under History of anxiety over sea ice gets a video Crockford writes, “A brief historical perspective on the failed predictions that have plagued scientific understanding of Arctic sea ice changes – predictions embraced wholeheartedly by polar bear specialists and conservation experts. It’s worth a watch.”

Transcript here from the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

Read more at polarbearscience.com

New findings suggest the rate at which CO₂ is accumulating in the atmosphere has plateaued in recent years because Earth’s vegetation is grabbing more carbon from the air than in previous decades.

That’s the conclusion of a multi-institutional study led by a scientist from the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). It’s based on extensive ground and atmospheric observations of CO₂, satellite measurements of vegetation, and computer modeling. The research is published online Nov. 8 in the journal Nature Communications.

Global land temperatures have plummeted by one degree Celsius since the middle of this year – the biggest and steepest fall on record.

But the news has been greeted with an eerie silence by the world’s alarmist community. You’d almost imagine that when temperatures shoot up it’s catastrophic climate change which requires dramatic headlines across the mainstream media and demands for urgent action. But that when they fall even more precipitously it’s just a case of “nothing to see here”.

We know that depression affects people from all walks of life. Rich. Poor. Celebs. Ordinary Joes. Young. Old. But, somehow after the death of Robin Williams, there’s a renewed focus on depression, and my mind turned immediately to a lecture we featured on the site way back in 2009.

The lecture is by Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford biologist, who has a talent for making scientific subjects publicly accessible.

A recipient of the MacArthur genius grant, Sapolsky notes that depression — currently the 4th greatest cause of disability worldwide, and soon the 2nd — is deeply biological. Depression is rooted in biology, much as is, say, diabetes.

Hoss Cartwright, a former editor of the International Journal of Agricultural Innovations and Research, had a good excuse for missing the 5th World Congress on Virology last year: He doesn’t exist.

Burkhard Morgenstern, a professor of bioinformatics at the University of Gottingen, dreamt him up, and built a nice little scientific career for him. He wrote Cartwright a Curriculum Vitae, describing his doctorate in Studies of Dunnowhat, his rigorous postdoctoral work at Some Shitty Place in the Middle of Nowhere, and his experience as Senior Cattle Manager at the Ponderosa Institute for Bovine Research.

The news comes amid mounting evidence that the recent run of world record high temperatures is about to end. The fall, revealed by Nasa satellite measurements of the lower atmosphere, has been caused by the end of El Nino – the warming of surface waters in a vast area of the Pacific west of Central America.

Some scientists, including Dr Gavin Schmidt, head of Nasa’s climate division, have claimed that the recent highs were mainly the result of long-term global warming. Others have argued that the records were caused by El Nino, a complex natural phenomenon that takes place every few years, and has nothing to do with greenhouse gas emissions by humans.

The previously undiscovered volcanoes lie just three km (2 miles) from the Gulf of Naples, home to Mt Vesuvius, and the most densely populated volcanic region in the world. Some three million people live in the city of Naples.

When Mt. Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD, it killed all 11,000 inhabits of Pompeii, making it one of the deadliest eruptions in human history.

Researchers discovered the new volcanoes in 2014 while garnering more information on Vesuvius, which is overdue an eruption.

A new NASA study, released on Friday, admits that ice is accumulating in Antarctica. Satellite measurements show an 82-112 gigaton-a-year net ice gain. That’s 82-112 billion tons per year! Nine zeroes!

in other words that is 112,000,000,000 tons. Per year.

It’s hard to comprehend how much ice that really is, so let’s put it in perspective. Let’s assume that they’re talking short tons (2,000 lbs). That’s about the weight of an old VW Beetle.

Those old Beetles measured 14 feet long.  Multiply 112 billion by 14 feet and you get 1,560 billion feet. Divide that by the distance from the earth to the moon (239,000 miles),  and you’d have a string of VW Beetles stretching all the way to the moon.

Image copyright: RGS

Log books from the early Antarctic expeditions indicate that the area of summer sea-ice around the continent has barely changed in size in a century.

Researchers have studied the records of pioneering explorers, including Captain Robert Scott and Sir Ernest Shackleton. The study suggests that Antarctic sea-ice is much less sensitive to climate change than the Arctic, which has declined dramatically.

The research has been published in The Cryosphere journal.

US President-elect Donald Trump calls man-made global warming a “hoax.” In his new administration Trump has appointed scientists who support that view. Below an eminent independent skeptic scientist, Dr Vincent Gray – an Expert Reviewer of every UN climate report – shows why Trump is correct.

Despite over 20 years’ of effort and four major Reports, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has not succeeded in providing any evidence that increases in greenhouse gases are having a measurable effect on the climate. Why is it, then, that so many people believe that they have done so.

The answer lies in their subtle use of doublespeak, the technique of creating confusion by manipulation of language.. This paper shows how they have confused and twisted the meanings of words in such a way as to create triumph out of failure.