Paper Reviewed: Yin, J., Fang, X. and Su, Y. 2016. Correlation between climate and grain harvest fluctuations and the dynastic transitions and prosperity in China over the past two millennia. The Holocene 26: 1914-1923.

In their study of climate change impacts on dynastic wellbeing in China over the period 210 BC to AD 1910, Yin et al. (2016) focused on relationships among dynastic transition and prosperity and how they were impacted by historical climate change and its impacts on grain harvests. And what did they learn by so doing?

Despite the dizzying rate of progress in the modern world – fuelled by human ingenuity – it often seems that people would prefer to see no change. Not only that, but we have a seemingly inbuilt perception that certain things – our local environment, the weather etc – should conform to an established pattern we are familiar with and that any change is automatically for the worse.

The US has by far the best temperature record of any large area on Earth. We have an excellent network of 1200+ USHCN (United States Historical Climatology Network) stations with data going back to 1895 and earlier. The raw USHCN temperature record shows that there has been a slight cooling since 1920. USHCN is a subset of GHCND (Global Historical Climatology Network Daily.)

Cooling doesn’t suit the needs of NOAA and NASA, so they cherry picked a small subset of GHCND stations which show a large amount of warming since 1920, for use in the global GSN temperature record.

Image copyright: XIUJIE WU

Two skulls found in China shed light on the ancient humans who inhabited the region before our own species arrived. We know that Europe and western Asia was dominated by the Neanderthals before Homo sapiens displaced them.

But remains belonging to equivalent populations in East and Central Asia have been scarce.It’s unclear if the finds are linked to the Denisovans, a mysterious human group known only from DNA analysis of a tooth and finger bone from Siberia.

It may have been one of the world’s largest oil spill disasters but the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico appears to have had little effect on the ecosystem as dozens of new species of animals are living in the body of water.

A group of oceanographers from the research project the Deepend Consortium have been looking into the effects of the 2010 oil spill that leaked 3.19 million barrels of oil over the course of three months. What they discovered is that sea life is actually flourishing in the Gulf according to Quartz.com.

In a new paper (Stein et al., 2017), scientists find that Arctic sea ice retreat and advance is modulated by variations in solar activity.

In addition, the sea ice cover during the last century has only slightly retreated from the extent reached during coldest centuries of the Little Ice Age (1600s to 1800s AD), which had the highest sea ice cover of the last 10,000 years and flirted with excursions into year-round sea ice.

There are many deadly and disastrous stories associated with the deception that human CO2 is causing global warming. Some are more obscure than others, but no less deadly in the unnecessary damage and destruction they caused. One was the myth of what was called “Arab Spring.”

It never occurred, but what happened was a result of ‘green’ policies based on non-existence science. Unintended consequences are the inevitable result of actions and must not be used to inhibit action and progress. However, there is a difference if the objective was based on evidence and provides benefits or was based on concocted evidence and was mostly detrimental.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/mar/01/northern-hemisphere-sees-in-early-spring-due-global-warming?CMP=twt_a-environment_b-gdneco

More fake news from the Guardian:

Spring is arriving ever earlier in the northern hemisphere. One sedge species in Greenland is springing to growth 26 days earlier than it did a decade ago. And in the US, spring arrived 22 days early this year in Washington DC.

A team of engineers led by 94-year-old John Goodenough, professor in the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin and co-inventor of the lithium-ion battery, has developed the first all-solid-state battery cells that could lead to safer, faster-charging, longer-lasting rechargeable batteries for handheld mobile devices, electric cars and stationary energy storage.

Introduction: The Correlation of Seismic Activity and Recent Global Warming [1] (CSARGW) demonstrated that increasing seismic activity in the globe’s high geothermal flux areas (HGFA) is strongly correlated with global temperatures (r=0.785) from 1979-2015.

The mechanism driving this correlation is amply documented and well understood by oceanographers and seismologists. Namely, increased seismic activity in the HGFA (i.e., the mid-ocean’s spreading zones) serves as a proxy indicator of higher geothermal flux in these regions.

Did government researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration tamper with temperature data to boost the global warming campaign?Dr. John Bates, a climate scientist and former official with NOAA, says they did.

This needs to be fully investigated, but we must not allow climate campaigners to turn this investigation into an exercise in whitewashing. CFACT is petitioning President Trump to ensure the people investigating NOAA are genuine, impartial outsiders.

Scientists have created “artificial embryos” using stem cells from mice, in what they believe is a world first. The University of Cambridge team used two types of stem cells and a 3D scaffold to create a structure closely resembling a natural mouse embryo.

Previous attempts have had limited success because early embryo development requires the different cells to coordinate with each other. The researchers hope their work will help improve fertility treatments. It could also provide useful insights into the way early embryos develop.

Ask a climate academic which, if ANY, gas has great power to ‘trap heat’ and you will be told ‘carbon dioxide, you idiot!’ This is fake news, junk science. Ask an applied scientist the same question and you will be told, ‘no gas can trap heat – it’s physically impossible!’

‘But, but….there is 160 years of climate science (e.g. Fourier, Tyndall, etc) to say it is so!’ comes the retort from the climate clowns and their revisionism of history.

The summer holidays stretched before us, hot and tempting. After the Kaikoura earthquake and the surprise of losing our prime minister before his term was out, we lusted for the Kiwi summer. The year had felt long, turbulent and tiring.

We needed summer, because everyone felt bruised and battered by 2016. We needed her warm temperatures to soften our bones and untwist the knots in our spine. We needed to feel coal-hot bitumen burn our bare feet, and taste bland sausages charred on the barbecue.

The Pacific Ocean called too, wondering when I’d visit for a swim, opening my mouth wide in her depths to let the salt and bubbles scour my throat.

A new study led by The Australian National University (ANU) has found seawater cycles throughout Earth’s interior down to 2,900km, much deeper than previously thought, reopening questions about how the atmosphere and oceans formed.