Archives de catégorie : better to know…?

Incredible moment more than 230 polar bears descend on a Russian beach to feast on a giant whale carcass

by Will Stewart,  September 29, 2017 in ‘The Sun’ 


The extraordinary sight was witnessed by tourists on an Arctic cruise aboard the Finnish-built MV Akademik Shokalskiy.

A source at Wrangel Island Nature Reserve said: “There were at least 230 polar bears, including single males, single females, mothers with cubs and even two mothers with four cubs each.”

Experts called the sight of so many polar bears together “unique”. The huge number could in fact amount to as much one per cent of the entire world’s population of the creatures.

Techniques d’exploitation des mines de charbon

by Connaissance des Energies, 16 mars 2015


Les gisements sont des zones généralement profondes où l’on trouve de grandes quantités de charbon. Il faut forer des puits pour y accéder et extraire le minerai. Lorsque les réserves de charbon sont relativement proches de la surface de la terre, une exploitation à ciel ouvert peut être mise en place. Il existe également des gisements de charbon sous les océans, pour le moment inexploités.

Possible hominin footprints from the late Miocene (c. 5.7 Ma) of Crete?

by Gerard D. Gierlinski et al., August 31, 2017 in Proc.Geologist’sAssoc.


We describe late Miocene tetrapod footprints (tracks) from the Trachilos locality in western Crete (Greece), which show hominin-like characteristics. They occur in an emergent horizon within an otherwise marginal marine succession of Messinian age (latest Miocene), dated to approximately 5.7 Ma (million years), just prior to the Messinian Salinity Crisis.

Quantifying the causes of the recent decrease in US CO2 emissions

by Roger Andrews, August 23, 2017 in Energy Matters (blog)


Between 2007 and 2015 total annual US CO2 emissions decreased by 740 million tons (12%). An updated analysis shows that 35% of this decrease was caused by natural gas replacing coal in electricity generation, 30% by lower fuel consumption in the transportation sector, 28% by renewables replacing

NASA’s Secret Plan to Save Earth From Super-Volcanoes… Seriously?

by David Middleton, August 18, 2017 in WUWT


If “the supervolcano threat is substantially greater than the asteroid or comet threat,” does this mean we can stop fretting about Gorebal Warming and the Sixth Mass Extinction?  Is NASA really moving on to actual threats to the planet?  Well, not threats to the planet… The planet has handled supervolcanoes, asteroids and comets quite well over its 4.5 billion year lifespan.

Geologists warn us about dangerous volcanoes. Will we spend pennies for warnings?

by Larry Kummer, August 15, 2017


While we obsess about climate change and debate if we live in the Anthropocene, we prepare poorly or not at all for natural forces like volcanoes that can level cities. This is folly we can no longer afford. Experts recommend a simple first step to better protect ourselves. Let’s start listening, or nature will teach us an expensive lesson.

California is the State most at risk due to its volcanoes near major cities, as shown in this map from the website of the California Volcano Observatory

On Carbon Dioxide Toxicity

by Blair King, April 10, 2016


Specifically the Bureau of Land Management Health Risk Evaluation for Cabon Dioxyde  points out:

A value of 40,000 ppm is considered immediately dangerous to life and health based on the fact that a 30-minute exposure to 50,000 ppm produces intoxication, and concentrations greater than that (7-10%) produce unconsciousness (NIOSH 1996; Tox. Review 2005). Additionally, acute toxicity data show the lethal concentration low (LCLo) for CO2 is 90,000 ppm (9%) over 5 minutes (NIOSH 1996).

See also The Lake Nyos Disaster

See also here

US Climate Report Edits Out Highly Embarrassing Section

by Paul Homewood, August 10, 2017, in WUWT


I mentioned in my previous post that the latest draft climate report, published in June, had seemingly left out a rather embarrassing table from the Executive Summary, one that had previously been written into the Third Draft, published last December.

As the link to the Third Draft had disappeared from the NYT, I could not show it.

However, Michael Bastasch, writing over at WUWT, did have the link, so we can now compare the relevant sections.

See also here

Global Warming Caused Vikings to Become Terrorists

by David Middleton, August 7, 2017 in WUWT 


So… If climate change caused the Vikings to turn their plowshares into swords, abandoning their farms to become terrorists… the climate change would have been of the warming variety.  I’m not a farmer, but it seems to me that global warming would have actually enhanced the Vikings’ ability to farm up around the Arctic Circle.

nother BOM scandal: Australian climate data is being destroyed as routine practice

by JoNova, August 7, 2017 in ClimateChangeDispatch


In the mid-1990s thermometers changed right across Australia — new electronic sensors were installed nearly everywhere. Known as automatic weather sensors (AWS) these are quite different to the old “liquid in glass” type.

The electronic ones can pick up very short bursts of heat—so they can measure extremes of temperatures that the old mercury or liquid thermometers would not pick up unless the spike of heat lasted for a few minutes.

It is difficult (impossible) to believe that across the whole temperature range that these two different instruments would always behave in the exact same way.

…Next Generation of Fossil Fuels…

by Donn Dears, August 2017


As noted in my article four years ago, Japan has a program for producing natural gas from methane hydrates located near its coast, and predicts it will be successful by 2019.

Most people believe that Japan’s objective is highly optimistic, but it does shed light on the efforts currently underway to develop the technology for extracting natural gas from methane hydrates.

No Direct Human Health Risk Under a CO2 Exposure of 3000 ppm

by W. Liu et al., August 1st 2017


And what did these analyses reveal?

Not surprisingly, when all was said and done, the authors report that “increasing [the] CO2 concentration to 3000 ppm at 35°C did not cause changes in any of the measured responses.” They did note, however, that the heart rates of the subjects were slightly reduced under elevated CO2 conditions (Figure 1, top left panel), although these reductions were not statistically significant.

100 companies to blame for 71% of carbon “pollution”, but world’s worst corporates are Big Government

by JoNova, August 2017


Since 1988, a mere 100 companies have been responsible for 71 percent of the entire world’s industrial greenhouse gas emissions.

This data comes from an inaugural report published by the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), an environmental non-profit. Charting the rapid expansion of the fossil fuel industry in the last 28 years, they have now released some truly staggering numbers on the world’s major carbon polluters.

Plastics Yet Again

by Kip Hansen, July 28, 2017 in WUWT


The New York Times’ article breathlessly reports:

“From the 1950s to today, 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic have been produced, with around half of it made since 2004. And since plastic does not naturally degrade, the billions of tons sitting in landfills, floating in the oceans or piling up on city streets will provide a marker if later civilizations ever want to classify our era. Perhaps they will call this time on Earth the Plastocene Epoch.”