Tropical America is one of many regions that have seen significant losses of amphibian species over the past few decades. In 2004, the first global assessment of amphibians revealed that almost a third of the world's known species are threatened with extinction. Early on, experts linked the mysterious disappearance of frog species throughout Central and South America to a fungal disease that was supposedly exacerbated by global warming. Now, according to new discoveries, it looks like climate change isn't to blame after all.
The Oklo uranium mine in Gabon contains well known evidence of natural nuclear reactors, but how widespread were they? A team of researchers has proposed a scenario to account for the disappearance of a radioactive mineral from the geological record. Part of their hypothesis is that a surge of oxygen billions of years ago caused the creation of millions of tiny nuclear reactors. If true, this primordial nuclear age could have played a role in the evolution of early life forms.
A report out from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change meeting, which was held in Barcelona, identifies peaty wetlands as a major source of CO2. Marshes, swamps and bogs emit about 1.3 billion tonnes of CO2 a year as a result of human activity that drains them. If those dried out former swamps catch fire that amount can double and large amounts of aerosols can be emitted as well. With governments offering subsidies for growing biofuel crops the question is, how do we stop people from draining the world's remaining wetlands?
In the run up to Copenhagen, global warming alarmists are spreading the word that climate change is progressing even faster than the IPCC has projected. But contradictory data from skeptics and open minded scientists continues to indicate that global warming has gone on hiatus and may not return for decades. This has sparked a noticeable drop in public concern over climate change and has led some climate change true believers to bemoan increasing public “Climate Fatigue.”
According to a flurry of recent reports by the BBC and other mass media, the glaciers in the Himalayan mountains are melting at a furious pace. Of course this is taken as proof that climate change is still taking place at an ever accelerating rate, despite the fact the global temperatures have remained flat for the past decade. What, then, explains the rapidly retreating Himalayan glaciers? Nothing, because the glaciers are not shrinking. A new report by a senior Indian glaciologist states that the glaciers remain frozen and quite intact, thank you.
The Appalachian mountains are seldom mentioned among the world's great mountain ranges. Consisting mostly of low gentle ridges, when compared with the snow-capped peaks of the Himalaya, Andes, or Alps many would hesitate to call them mountains at all. But they are a large and ancient range, stretching over 1500 miles along the eastern portion of North America. The time of their formation has been dated back to the Paleozoic, with major uprisings occurring 650 million years ago. Then, about 460 million years ago, during the Ordovician period, they were the site of one of the most violent volcanic outbursts in Earth's history. New research reveals that, following that bout of vulcanism, weathering of Appalachian rock may have triggered one of Earth's major ice ages—a relatively brief frigid period that ultimately killed two-thirds of all species on the planet.
A new study in the journal Science has just shown that all of the climate modeling results of the past are erroneous. The IPCC's modeling cronies have just been told that the figures used for greenhouse gas forcings are incorrect, meaning none of the model results from prior IPCC reports can be considered valid. What has caused climate scientists' assumptions to go awry? Short lived aerosol particles in the atmosphere changing how greenhouse gases react in previously unsuspected ways. The result is another devastating blow to the climate catastrophists' computer generated apocalyptic fantasies.
A new book, entitled Data Engineering: Mining, Information and Intelligence, has just been published by Springer as part of the International Series in Operations Research & Management Science. Dr. Doug L. Hoffman was lead author on the Performance Modeling of Enterprise Grid Systems chapter of the newly published text book. The work is aimed at academics, students and industrial researchers in computer science and information systems.
In the face of ever mounting evidence that CO2 is incapable of causing the level of global devastation prophesied by climate change catastrophists a new villain is being sought. The leading candidate is nitrous oxide (N2O), better known as laughing gas. A report in Science claims that N2O emissions are currently the single most important cause of ozone depletion and are expected to remain so throughout the 21st century. The IPCC rates N2O as 310 times as potent a greenhouse gas as CO2 on a 100 year time scale. Is this a greenhouse gas bait and switch, or are the global warming alarmists trying to up the ante?
One of the things that has been obscured by all the hand wringing and arm waiving about global warming is the existence of a threat to our planet that is very real and could arise suddenly. That threat is from non-planetary bodies within the solar system: asteroids, comets and other celestial wanderers. While the world's politicians and tree-hugging blowhards rail about the damage climate change might cause, a symposium was held in San Francisco to address a problem that actually could end life on Earth.
A new study has confirmed the astronomical theory of the ice ages, but with a new twist: The shutoff of the meridional ocean circulation, or MOC, and an associated southward shift of tropical monsoon rain belts seems to play an integral role in the melting of glacial period ice sheets. These changes cause warming of the Southern Hemisphere and a rise in atmospheric CO2 levels, which in turn provides a positive feedback loop that helps drive glacial termination. This is why, every 100,000 years or so, the great Northern Hemisphere ice sheets collapse and glacial conditions give way to a warm interglacial period, such as the Holocene warming humanity is currently enjoying. This, however, does not support recent claims that global warming is causing the Southeast Asian monsoon to fail.
According to State of the Climate in 2008, a special supplement to the August, 2009, issue of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, greenhouse warming has been stopped in its tracks for the past 10 years. The HadCRUT3 temperature record shows the world warmed by only 0.07°C (±0.07°C) from 1999-2008. The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, who have led the global warming disaster circus for the past two decades, had predicted 0.20°C. Just a temporary setback claim the true believers, global warming will be back with a vengeance. Add a mad scientist's cackling laugh and you have a story fit for a comic book villain.
Despite recent attempts to revive the discredited “hockey stick” temperature graph, invented by Michael Mann and promulgated by the IPCC, new research on tropical glaciers has once again shown that supposed temperature history to be bogus. While the role of the tropics in climate change remains an open debate in climatology circles, new data suggests linkages between the tropics and the North Atlantic region. In particular, prominent glacial events and associated climatic shifts in the outer tropics during the early Holocene and late in the “Little Ice Age” period indicate that the LIA was indeed a global event.
The search for ways to reduce carbon emissions has led to government grant money for schemes ranging from promising to wacky. Recognizing that there is no currently viable replacement for fossil fuels, with the possible exception of nuclear power, the US and other countries with large coal deposits are desperately looking for ways to continue burning coal without incurring the wrath of nature or the IPCC. Clear evidence of the seriousness of this effort is evident in this week's special edition of Science, dedicated to carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology.