Promoting Science and Critical Thinking
Every five years, an Outlook Report that examines the Great Barrier Reef’s health, pressures, and likely future is published. The latest, the 2019 edition, is now available. It is very grim reading. If you have your finger on the pulse of the Great Barrier Reef then what it reveals will not be a surprise. The Great Barrier … Read more
Last May I was writing about sea level rise. That posting was about a new study that had revised the projected sea level rise from 1 meter to 2 meters by the year 2100, just 81 years from now. There is of course nothing magical about the year 2100, it does not mark the end-game. … Read more
I have two new studies to cover today. Both are interesting because they add data to the conversation. One reveals that parts of Europe are warming faster than the models predict, and the other reveals that Europe is flooding exactly as the models predict. Let’s take a quick look at each. Study 1: Detection of … Read more
Wildfires happening in the Amazon. Vast swathes of Brazil’s rainforest have been set ablaze. This of course is not natural, it is the result of farmers and loggers clearing land. It is also not new, it happens each year. This year is different, it has scaled up by roughly 84% compared to last year and … Read more
Reports of dramatic melt events in Greenland provoke different reactions. Some, (thankfully only a small number), sit back and observe, “It is summer, this is what happens in the summer“. Others respond more dramatically. During the last Democratic debate, long-shot candidate Andrew Yang urged people to move away from the coast because we are already … Read more
On 14th Aug 2019, a new paper was published in The Astronomical Journal that addresses the question of the quantity of earth like planets. Titled “Occurrence Rates of Planets Orbiting FGK Stars: Combining Kepler DR25, Gaia DR2, and Bayesian Inference” it attempts to answer the question. The abstract explains it as follows: We characterize the occurrence rate of planets, … Read more