I’ve been keeping a spreadsheet since late last summer, and here are the results, as of June 6th, 2017. (Quick and easy data source, the daily sunspot image archives from Solarham.)
This data (through March; I’ve updated it since then) was posted on Jerry Pournelle’s blog a while back, and it elicited several questions from readers, who didn’t understand the information contained therein. So here is an effort to elaborate on the data, for those of you who aren’t astronomers/ astrophysicists and don’t want to have to keep up with all this stuff.
A new fossil mushroom is described and illustrated from the Lower Cretaceous Crato Formation of northeast Brazil. Gondwanagaricites magnificus gen. et sp. nov. is remarkable for its exceptional preservation as a mineralized replacement in laminated limestone, as all other fossil mushrooms are known from amber inclusions. Gondwanagaricites represents the oldest fossil mushroom to date and the first fossil mushroom from Gondwana.
Some wars are fought on the sidelines. They too are full of ideas, intrigue and bravado. Some backfire thoroughly. The Saudis took a brunt of it in their war with shale.
In the US, after the peak oil production of early seventies, the oil industry went into a limbo. It even looked like the US would be an importer of oil forever. Yet, thing did change.
In April 2016, southeast Asia experienced surface air temperatures (SATs) that surpassed national records, exacerbated energy consumption, disrupted agriculture and caused severe human discomfort. Here we show using observations and an ensemble of global warming simulations the combined impact of the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon and long-term warming on regional SAT extremes. We find a robust relationship between ENSO and southeast Asian SATs wherein virtually all April extremes occur during El Niño years.
High latitude ocean gateway changes are thought to play a key role in Cenozoic climate evolution. However, the underlying ocean dynamics are poorly understood. Here we use a fully coupled atmosphere-ocean model to investigate the effect of ocean gateway formation that is associated with the subsidence of the Greenland–Scotland Ridge. We find a threshold in sill depth (∼50 m) that is linked to the influence of wind mixing.
In the last post (see here) we introduced a new Holocene temperature reconstruction for Antarctica using some of the Marcott, et al. (2013) proxies. In this post, we will present two more reconstructions, one for the Southern Hemisphere mid-latitudes (60°S to 30°S) and another for the tropics (30°S to 30°N)
Solar cycle 24 has seen very low solar activity thus far, likely the lowest in 100 years. The F10.7 flux shows that over the last three and a half years the Sun has gone from solar maximum through a bounded decline to the current stage of the trail to minimum. Solar minimum is likely to be still three years away.
The EU’s total greenhouse gas emissions increased in 2015 for the first time since 2010.
According to new data published by the European Environment Agency (EEA), the 0.5% increase happened largely due to increasing demand for transport – better fuel efficiency in the sector was not enough to offset this.
A controlled lab study led by Mote Marine Laboratory and published June 1 in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS ONE revealed that black band disease was less deadly to mountainous star coral (Orbicella faveolata) as water acidified, or decreased in pH.
As slabs of Earth’s crust decend into the mantle, they encounter a zone about 1,100 kilometers down where the mantle rock abruptly becomes stiffer, flowing less easily. Similarly, rising plumes of molten rock encounter the same layer and have difficulty punching through from below.
A statement submitted to the ARD Capital Studio, the “Berliner Kreis (Berlin Circle)”, which includes numerous federal and communal politicians of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), calls for an end to “moral blackmail” by climate research and a “farewell to unilateral German CO2 targets.”
on Fox News, in Climate Change Dispatch , June 5, 2017
Former Vice President Al Gore was forced to admit on Sunday that the UN Paris climate accord was a symbolic effort and merely “sends a very powerful signal.” Gore once again spun a series of climate falsehoods in just a few short sound bites
by Clives James, The Australian in GWPF, June 6, 2017
Actually, a more illustrative starting point for the theme of the permanently imminent climatic apocalypse might be taken as August 3, 1971, when The Sydney Morning Herald announced that the Great Barrier Reef would be dead in six months.
After six months the reef had not died, but it has been going to die almost as soon as that ever since, making it a strangely durable emblem for all those who have wedded themselves to the notion of climate catastrophe.
Even if we assume that these promises would be extended for another 70 years, there is still little impact: if every nation fulfills every promise by 2030, and continues to fulfill these promises faithfully until the end of the century, and there is no ‘CO₂ leakage’ to non-committed nations, the entirety of the Paris promises will reduce temperature rises by just 0.17°C (0.306°F) by 2100.
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Where is the paper published?
The peer-reviewed paper is published in the upcoming issue of Global Policy journal (November 2015). You can access the article online here.
by Collin Eaton, May 27, 2017 in Houston Chronicle
Drillers have mastered feat of pumping more at less cost
On a drilling rig towering above quiet cattle farms in Southeast Texas, Eric Williams perched inside the cabin of the 16-story machine, twisting a pair of joysticks to guide a gigantic wrench roaring into action, drowning out every sound as it reached for a 1,500-pound pipe emerging from the earth – pipe that soon will feed oil into a second shale boom.
U.S. oil production continues to rise relentlessly, frustrating efforts by OPEC and non-OPEC oil exporters to rebalance the global market and secure an increase in the price of crude.
After a devastating slump in 2015 and 2016, the U.S. oil industry has returned to strong growth, with drilling and output rising rapidly
In a joint US-German study, seven scientists recently tried to discredit the sun’s impact on climate. On April 19, 2017, Guoyong Wen and colleagues published a modeling study in the Journal of Space Weather and Space Climate, which suggested a maximum solar-dependent share of 0.1°C on the temperature development over the past 400 years. Here the scientists relied on the old, well-known trick of using the Little Ice Age as the starting.
Prospère de nos jours le climatisme est sans conteste le plus formidable dispositif idéologique de ce début de XXIe siècle. Et si on posait la question de son financement et de sa réalité scientifique ?
Summer is here, and climate alarmists are about to bombard us with claims that global warming is going to burn us up. The data shows the exact opposite. There are 693 USHCN stations which were active in both 1920 and 2016. I ran statistics on this stable group of stations.
The average summer maximum temperature in the US is down about one degree since the 1920’s.
Regardless of the actual mechanism responsible for the densely aggregated corals to maintain calcification rates in the face of ocean acidification, the study of Evensen and Edmunds, in their words, offers “a compelling case for differential densities of branching coral colonies (i.e. aggregation types) mediating the sensitivity of coral communities in at least some habitats” and it further supports “recent indications that neighboring organisms, such as conspecific coral colonies in the present example, can create small-scale refugia from the negative effects of ocean acidification” And that is more good news for those concerned about the future health of these important marine ecosystems.
Contributors to Climate Change: The Facts 2017 do not conform to a unitary view. As I explain in the book’s introduction:
“An advantage of my approach in the compiling of the chapters for this book – an approach where there has been no real attempt to put everything into neat boxes – is that there are many surprises. I am referring to the snippets of apparently anomalous information scattered through the chapters. These can, hopefully, one day, be reconciled. As this occurs, we may begin to see the emergence of a coherent theory of climate – where output from computer-simulation models bears some resemblance to real-world measurements that have not first been ‘homogenised’.
Russian energy major Rosneft and the Kurdistan Regional Government in northern Iraq have signed a number of oil exploration and production agreements. It is the biggest deal made by a Russian company so far at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF 2017).
“Ceux qui me font l’honneur (et le plaisir) de suivre ma page Facebook “belgotopia” suivent ma rubrique : “Dans l’hilarante série, les délires climatiques” dans laquelle je distille à doses homéopathiques toutes les épouvantables conséquences du réchauffement climatique. Celles-ci sont publiées soit dans des médias, soit dans des revues scientifiques dont on ne peut mettre le sérieux en doute.
Etant arrivé au centième, j’en fais ici une compilation. J’ en ai encore un nombre considérable en réserve !”
La géologie, une science plus que passionnante … et diverse
