Venus is hot because it has an atmospheric pressure almost 100X that of Earth. The same reason why the top of the Grand canyon is cold, and the bottom of the Grand Canyon is hot. Temperatures in Venus troposphere at the elevation where pressure is 1 bar, are similar to earth. Only a complete moron would believe that adding 0.0001 mole fraction CO2 to the atmosphere would cause that.
When China halted plans for more than 100 new coal-fired power plants this year, even as President Trump vowed to “bring back coal” in America, the contrast seemed to confirm Beijing’s new role as a leader in the fight against climate change.
But new data on the world’s biggest developers of coal-fired power plants paints a very different picture: China’s energy companies will make up nearly half of the new coal generation expected to go online in the next decade.
These Chinese corporations are building or planning to build more than 700 new coal plants at home and around the world (…)
Les hommes politiques, à l’image de Barack Obama avancent que 97% des scientifiques sont d’accord sur les causes humaines et les dangers du réchauffement climatique. Des chercheurs ont étudié l’ensemble des 11 944 publications sur le climat parues entre 1991 et 2011. Les résultats publiés en 2013 montrent que près de 66% des publications n’expriment pas d’avis, ni positif, ni négatif sur le réchauffement climatique.
Estimates of climate change damage are central to the design of climate policies. Here, we develop a flexible architecture for computing damages that integrates climate science, econometric analyses, and process models. We use this approach to construct spatially explicit, probabilistic, and empirically derived estimates of economic damage in the United States from climate change.
Proponents of drastic greenhouse gas controls claim that human greenhouse gas emissions cause global warming, which then exacerbates the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, including extreme heat, droughts, floods, and storms such as hurricanes and cyclones.
In fact, even though reporting of such events is more complete than in the past, morbidity and mortality attributed to them has declined globally by 93%–98% since the 1920s
The study found that dispersants broke up the oil into tiny droplets, making them less buoyant and unable to float to the surface. This meant that the oil formed a layer deep below the surface of the water, making it easier for microbes that live in the deep ocean to eat it. However, scientists weren’t able to measure the exact amount of oil eliminated by the microbes.
Due largely to these oil-eating bacteria, the Gulf of Mexico recovered from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill faster than scientists thought possible and has returned to pre-spill levels of environmental health.
Serge Galam, directeur de recherche au CNRS, est physicien, théoricien du désordre et inventeur de la sociophysique. Il travaille sur la propagation démocratique d’opinions minoritaires, le phénomène des rumeurs, les effets du mensonge et de l’opposition systématique dans la formation de l’opinion publique, le soutien passif au terrorisme, les dictatures démocratiques, la formation des coalitions et la nature millénariste du réchauffement climatique.
As both the word and the concept “average” are subject to a great deal of confusion and misunderstanding in the general public and both word and concept have seen an overwhelming amount of “loose usage” even in scientific circles, not excluding peer-reviewed journal articles and scientific press releases, I gave a refresher on Averages in Part 1 of this series. If your maths or science background is near the great American average, I suggest you take a quick look at the primer in Part 1 before reading here.
The levels of microplastic particles accumulating in the Antarctic are much worse than expected, a team of experts has warned.
The continent is considered to be a pristine wilderness compared to other regions and was thought to be relatively free from plastic pollution. However new findings by scientists from University of Hull and British Antarctic Survey (BAS) have revealed that recorded levels of microplastics are five times higher than you would expect to find from local sources such as research stations and ships
The electric car has dropped out of favor in the country that pioneered renewable energy.
Sales in Denmark of Electrically Chargeable Vehicles (ECV), which include plug-in hybrids, plunged 60.5 percent in the first quarter of the year, compared with the first three months of 2016, according to latest data from the European Automobile Manufacturers Association (ACEA). That contrasts with an increase of nearly 80 percent in neighboring Sweden and an average rise of 30 percent in the European Union.
Plastics in the marine environment have become a major concern because of their persistence at sea, and adverse consequences to marine life and potentially human health. Implementing mitigation strategies requires an understanding and quantification of marine plastic sources, taking spatial and temporal variability into account. Here we present a global model of plastic inputs from rivers into oceans based on waste management, population density and hydrological information.
In the western United States 160,000 abandoned mines contaminate soils in the region. Researchers hope to solve this problem with biochar, a charcoal-like substance that can reduce the toxic consequences of mining for metals.
The Age of Exploration may be long past, but even in the 21st century, our maps can still get a major update. Using satellite imagery, a new study has found hidden forests all over the world—almost enough for a second Amazon—in areas with little moisture known as drylands.
A new estimate of dryland forests suggests that the global forest cover is at least 9 percent higher than previously thought. The finding will help reduce uncertainties surrounding terrestrial carbon sink estimates.
Throughout history, humans have existed side-by-side with bacteria and viruses. From the bubonic plague to smallpox, we have evolved to resist them, and in response they have developed new ways of infecting us.
However, what would happen if we were suddenly exposed to deadly bacteria and viruses that have been absent for thousands of years, or that we have never met before?
The Dutch toilet cleaner ‘WC-EEND’ (literally: ‘Toilet Duck’) aired a famous commercial in 1989 that had the slogan ‘We from WC-EEND advise… WC-EEND’. It is now a common saying in The Netherlands whenever someone gives an opinion that is clearly aligned with their self-interest. In this blog, I will examine the hypothesis that blogs are, on average, of higher quality than journal articles. Below, I present 5 arguments in favor of this hypothesis. [EDIT: I’m an experimental psychologist. Mileage of what you’ll read below may vary in other disciplines].
DMI have now published the Arctic sea ice extents for March. The average this year was 14.71 million sq km, exactly the same as 2015, and only 60,000sq km less than in 2006.
With soaring car sales in China in mind, U.S. President Donald Trump might want to sway his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping to grant American manufacturers easy access to the Chinese market. In 2008, sales in China caught up with those in the United States (at 6.7 million units). In 2016, sales stood at a whopping 24.4 million and counting. Sales of cars in other big manufacturing nations are almost stagnant.
La géologie, une science plus que passionnante … et diverse
