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.
Dans la lutte que mènent nos villes contre la pollution urbaine, on perçoit la recherche désespérée de solutions alternatives aux véhicules conventionnels. C’est le cas en particulier pour les particules fines, même s’il est de bon ton de passer sous silence que le chauffage contribue aussi largement à cette pollution….
Currently (as of year 2007), human population on earth is 6.6 billion (via wikipedia). I went around to look for how much CO2 is exhaled out per person, and 2 claims were found (both via wikipedia)
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
What is causing the death of the polar bear as a climate change icon? Fat bears are part of it, but mostly it’s the fact that polar bear numbers haven’t declined as predicted.
Earlier this year, DEFRA published a report by the Air Quality Expert Group into the impacts of biomass on air quality. The results make for startling reading.
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.
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.
by P Gosselin, August 15, 2017 in ClimateChangeDispatch
Here’s a good example of how climate alarmists and leftists in Germany react when confronted with different opinions or the truth. It just illustrates the brand of radicalism we’re up against.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.”
The hidden consequences of a massive use of intermittent renewable energy systems for electricity production are highlighted, using existing electricity production data from Germany from the last 5 years, where presently a system is in operation with an installed capacity of about 50 GW in wind turbines (sum of onshore and offshore wind) and 40GW in photovoltaic panels.This fleet of intermittent renewable systems produces more than half of the yearly renewable electrical energy of Germany, the rest being produced by hydro, so-called ‘biomass’ and a very small fraction of geothermal sources
Each country is committed “to prepare and maintain successive individual nationally determined contributions (INDCs) that it intends to achieve”, to update these plans every five years and to pursue and report on the related domestic emission reduction measures. After three years, a Party may withdraw from the Agreement with one year’s notice.
There is an unresolved debate as to whether to call COP21 an agreement or a treaty.
Dec 14, 2009 : New computer modeling suggests the Arctic Ocean may be nearly ice-free in summer as early as 2014, Al Gore said today at the U.N. climate conference in Copenhagen.
Yes, Arctic sea ice has declined since satellite records began in 1979 but polar bears have adjusted well to this change, especially to the abrupt decline to low summer sea ice levels that have been the norm since 2007. Some polar bear subpopulations have indeed spent more time on land in summer than in previous decades but this had little negative impact on health or survival and while polar bear attacks on humans appear to have increased in recent years (Wilder et al. 2017), the reasons for this are not clear: reduced summer sea ice is almost certainly not the causal factor (see previous post here).
La géologie, une science plus que passionnante … et diverse