As we step into a new decade, here’s a look at the climate drama that just ended.
The 2010s were dominated by the failure of doomsday prophecies, the adoption of a fantasy climate agreement, unexpected weather trends, and the beginning of the climate emergency cult movement that reminded many of the overpopulation hype of the 1970s and 1980s. Al Gore Prophecies
Al Gore’s legacy of lies continued to spill into the second decade of this century. Contrary to his predictions in the famous climate documentary An Inconvenient Truth, polar bear populations increased, the Arctic and Antarctic remained relatively unaffected, and no major coastal economy was threatened by rising sea levels.
About 790,000 years ago, a meteor slammed into Earth with such force that the explosion blanketed about 10% of the planet with shiny black lumps of rocky debris. Known as tektites, these glassy blobs of melted terrestrial rock were strewn from Indochina to eastern Antarctica and from the Indian Ocean to the western Pacific. For more than a century, scientists searched for evidence of the impact that created these pitted blobs.
But the crater’s location eluded detection — until now.
Geochemical analysis and local gravity readings told researchers that the crater lay in southern Laos on the Bolaven Plateau; the ancient impact was concealed under a field of cooled volcanic lava spanning nearly 2,000 square miles (5,000 square kilometers), the scientists reported in a new study.
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Was the crater buried? On Laos’ Bolaven Plateau, the scientists found a site where fields of volcanic lava might have hidden signs of an older meteor impact. In a region that the researchers targeted as a likely spot for a crater, most of the lava flows were also in the right age range: between 51,000 and 780,000 years old.
In this geological map of the volcanic field’s summit region, the dashed, yellow ellipse marks the buried crater perimeter for the best-fitting gravity model. The dashed, white circle marks the buried perimeter that best fits geological observations. (Image credit: Sieh et al./PNAS 2019)
The study authors peered below the lava’s surface by taking gravity readings at more than 400 locations. Their resulting gravity map showed one area “of particular interest” with a gravitational anomaly, a subsurface zone less dense than the volcanic rock surrounding it. Their measurements hinted at an elliptical, “elongated crater” about 300 feet (100 m) thick, about 8 miles (13 km) wide and 11 miles (17 km) long, according to the study.
Together, all of these clues suggested that “this thick pile of volcanic rocks does indeed bury the site of the impact,” the scientists wrote.
by P. Homewood, January 7, 2020 in ClimateChangeDispatch
The Lancet has published its latest annual report on health and climate change, which inevitably orders us to stop using fossil fuels or the kids will get it!
It is the usual load of overhyped rubbish of the sort we have seen in previous years.
The executive summary contains a number of questionable claims and statements which seriously undermine the report’s integrity and reliability.
For a start, it claims that ‘a child born today will experience a world that is more than four degrees warmer than the pre-industrial average.’
Really? A temperature rise of three degrees in 50 years or so? Even the highly discredited climate models don’t regard this as realistic. For the Lancet to state this as a bald-faced fact calls into question the objectivity of its contents.
It then proceeds to list all sorts of ways in which health is already being impacted by climate change, including disease transmission, air pollution, extreme weather (which apparently will affect women more – yes, that’s got me and all!), wildfires, heatwaves and goodness knows what else.
Yet, tucked away in Figure 5 is the dirty little secret that mortality rates from climate-related causes have been plummeting since 1990.
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La géologie, une science plus que passionnante … et diverse
