An ancient continent that was once sandwiched between India and Madagascar now lies scattered on the bottom of the Indian Ocean.

The first clues to the continent’s existence came when some parts of the Indian Ocean were found to have stronger gravitational fields than others, indicating thicker crusts. One theory was that chunks of land had sunk and become attached to the ocean crust below.

Mauritius was one place with a powerful gravitational pull. In 2013, Lewis Ashwal at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa and his colleagues proposed that the volcanic island was sitting on a piece of old, sunken continent.

For those who have ever wondered how the Environmental Protection Agency became a “bloated regulatory behemoth,” a new book exposes the hypocrisy and corruption running rampant inside the agency. 

“Scare Pollution”, written by lawyer and statistician Steven #milloy, is an easy-to-read investigation into the #epa’s inner workings. Well researched and organized, the book provides an “alarming narrative of concocted dangers and contorted science designed to expand the reach of an already-too-powerful federal agency.”

A small asteroid barely missed Earth over the weekend, just hours after scientists first spotted the space rock.

The near-Earth asteroid 2017 BH30 got within 32,200 miles of the planet, about 7.6 times closer to Earth than the moon. The asteroid is about 19 feet wide, according to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Space rocks of that size only pose a threat to Earth or human life under extremely specific orbital circumstances, like entering the atmosphere at a very exact angle and speed. This isn’t to say they can’t do damage. A 65-foot object exploded over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk in February 2013, injuring more than 1,000 people.

Abstract. A 22.4 m-long shallow firn core was extracted during the 2006/2007 field season from coastal Adélie Land.

Annual layer counting based on subannual analyses of δ¹⁸O and major chemical components was combined with 5 reference years associated with nuclear tests and non-retreat of summer sea ice to build the initial ice-core chronology (1946–2006), stressing uncertain counting for 8 years.

We focus here on the resulting δ¹⁸O and accumulation records. With an average value of 21.8 ± 6.9 cm w.e. yr⁻¹, local accumulation shows multi-decadal variations peaking in the 1980s, but no long-term trend. Similar results are obtained for δ¹⁸O, also characterised by a remarkably low and variable amplitude of the seasonal cycle.

Paper Reviewed: Rojo-Garibaldi, B., Salas-de-León, D.A., Sánchez, N.L. and Monreal-Gómez, M.A. 2016. Hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea and their relationship with sunspots. Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics 148: 48-52.

Although some climate alarmists contend that CO2-induced global warming will increase the number of hurricanes in the future, the search for such effect on Atlantic Ocean tropical cyclone frequency has so far remained elusive. And with the recent publication of Rojo-Garibaldi et al. (2016), it looks like climate alarmists will have to keep on looking, or accept the likelihood that something other than CO2 is at the helm in moderating Atlantic hurricane frequency.

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.”

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.

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.

The global warming pseudo-scientists are desperately trying to keep their funding. Now these con artists are trying to claim that that the oceans’ surface water is cooling and below the water is warming.

Those who stop driving to work, opting to walk or ride a bicycle instead, are perhaps speaking at least of what they believe, rather than crying that the planet is warming and we need to hand them billions of dollars to figure out some new technology to reverse the trend.

El Niño intensity and date of initial ocean warming data was gathered from several reliable published data sources. This cross plot/comparison process yielded an excellent correlation, specifically that all historical and modern data confirm the onset of El Niño ocean warming occurs a few months after the beginning of very high magnitude earthquake swarms located in the greater Solomon Island area.

This proven correlation supports the idea, as per the Plate Climatology Theory, that these earthquake swarms are an excellent proxy for the beginning of massive pulses of geological heat and heated fluid flow from deep-sea geological features located in the Solomon Island area. These anomalous heat flow pulses act to warm the overlying ocean, thereby generating an El Niño.

In a week when mainstream fake news outlets try to sell him as the ‘World-leading climate change scientist’ Professor Michael Mann (above image: left) concedes legal ground in major court case about his alleged climate data fraud.

After the news leaked out defendant in the case, Dr Tim Ball (above image: right) told colleagues at Principia Scientific International (PSI):

“What my lawyers did was demand a series of concessions, all of which were agreed. I can’t discuss the details but, under the circumstances, it is a good outcome.”

Image copyright: ANSMET/K.JOY

The go-ahead has been given for the first British expedition to collect meteorites in Antarctica. Most of the space rocks now in collections worldwide have been picked up on the continent. The region’s great expanse of ice makes searching for the blackened remains of objects that have fallen from the sky a particularly productive exercise.

But the UK venture will target a strangely underrepresented class of meteorites – those made of iron. These are the smashed up innards of bodies that almost became planets at the start of the Solar System. Finding more of them could give us important clues to events that occurred some 4.6 billion years ago, said Dr Katherine Joy from Manchester University.

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.

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.

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.

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.