Is #Arctic Sea Ice decline natural?

February 2017 saw new records being established. Arctic sea ice extent for February 2017 averaged 14.28 million square kilometers (5.51 million square miles), the lowest February extent in the 38-year satellite record. This is 40,000 square kilometers (15,400 square miles) below February 2016, the previous lowest extent for the month, and 1.18 million square kilometers (455,600 square miles) … Read more

Earth’s oceans are warming 13% faster than previously thought, and accelerating

A new paper has been published within Science Advances that lays out new estimates of the heat content within the worlds oceans. It is entitled “Improved estimates of ocean heat content from 1960 to 2015“. Background Now before we get into it, let’s cover the basics. We have more carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, and … Read more

Testing Poe’s Law: Can Trump supporters detect BS?

Back in 2005, a chap called Nathan Poe made an observation within an on-line discussion group as follows … Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a Creationist in such a way that someone won’t mistake for the genuine article. This has in turn led to a generic … Read more

Top 3 weird Religious News Items for the week – Sun 12th March 2017

I do wonder if there will ever be a week in which nothing truly daft was said or done under the banner of religion. Will this be that week? Er … no. I should perhaps also add one additional thought. A rather important point to grasp is that most humans, regardless of their specific belief, … Read more

Does Scott Pruitt simply lack a bit of information? – #climate #CarbonDioxide

Scott Pruitt

The truly jaw dropping moment of the week just has to be the sight of the new head of the EPA, Scott Pruitt, explaining the following on CNBC, after being asked directly … I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there’s tremendous disagreement about the … Read more

What are the implications of the NOAA funding cuts?

You are perhaps aware the Mr T is proposing to deploy a rather hefty axe to the funding for NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) and radically slash its budget. If you did not know that then your starting point can be an article within The Washington Post (3rd March) entitled “White House proposes steep budget cut to … Read more