The geothermal energy revolution

There is a revolution coming in geothermal energy. How big it will be and how fast it can grow remains to be seen, but the revolutionary technology is here now.

Green recovery must end the reign of GDP, argue Cambridge and UN economists

Our fixation with Gross Domestic Product for over half a century as the primary indicator of economic health has rendered nature “invisible” from national finances, intensifying the biosphere’s destruction by…

Gardens of Old Porites, Without Sharks

It is often reported that the Great Barrier Reef is half dead, specifically that the corals are bleached, and the water quality is degraded with pesticides and plastics. If I…

Raise your hand if you knew Newfoundland was devastated by a major tsunami in 1929

On 18 November 1929 a tsunami struck Newfoundland’s Burin Peninsula and caused considerable loss of life and property. Giant waves hit the coast at 40 km/hr, flooding dozens of communities…

Novel cathode design significantly improves performance of next-generation battery

Li-S batteries can potentially offer an energy density of over 500 Wh/kg, significantly better than Li-ion batteries that reach their limit at 300 Wh/kg. The higher energy density means that…

500 Years of Global SST Variations from a 1D Forcing-Feedback Model

If nothing else, the results in Fig. 3 might give us some idea of the ENSO-related SST variations for 300-400 years before anthropogenic forcings became significant, and how those variations…

Claim: The greening of the earth is approaching its limit

An article published today in Science shows that this fertilizing effect of CO2 is decreasing worldwide, according to the text co-directed by Professor Josep Peñuelas of the CSIC at CREAF…

The natural ‘Himalayan aerosol factory’ can affect climate

“To understand how the climate has changed over the last century we need to know as reliably as possible the natural atmospheric conditions before the industrialization,” says Associate Professor Federico…

NSF-funded deep ice core to be drilled at Hercules Dome, Antarctica

Antarctica’s next deep ice core, drilling down to ice from 130,000 years ago, will be carried out by a multi-institutional U.S. team at Hercules Dome, a location hundreds of miles…

Peter Ridd: It’s the science that’s rotten, not the Great Barrier Reef

Sixty years ago, when these cycles of death and destruction were first being discovered by scientists, it was legitimate to be concerned about whether they were unnatural. But there is…

Anthropocene: human-made materials now weigh as much as all living biomass, say scientists

Now a new study in Nature by a team of scientists from the Weizman Institute in Israel upends that perspective. Our constructions have now – indeed, spookily, just this year…

Coral recovery during a prolonged heatwave offers new hope

University of Victoria biologists have discovered how some corals managed to survive a globally unprecedented heatwave, in a first-ever study that provides new hope for the long-term survival of coral…

HURRICANE SEASON 2020 UPDATE (11/29/2020)

The 2020 hurricane season in the Atlantic Basin is the most active in history with 30 named storms, breaking the previous record set in 2005 (which had 28). 6 storms…

Speculation on ice-trapped whales: science-based fiction vs. dishonest science

Ice entrapment of whales is known to happen across the Arctic, including Davis Strait and the Gulf of St. Lawrence. How common such phenomena were in the past or might…

The blame game

An essay on how attempting to identify blame for complex societal problems can get in the way of finding solutions to these problems. What the climate ‘blame game’ can learn…

Newly discovered Greenland (mantle) plume drives thermal activities in the Arctic

The research team discovered that the Greenland plume rose from the core-mantle boundary to the mantle transition zone beneath Greenland. The plume also has two branches in the lower mantle…

*The role of weather on December 7th, 1941 and a little known important indirect benefit*

Unfortunately, the weather conditions on that particular day would play a role in the bombing of the U.S. naval base by Japanese fighter planes at Pearl Harbor near Honolulu, Hawaii.…

Claim: The climate changed rapidly alongside sea ice decline in the north

Researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen have, in collaboration with Norwegian researchers in the ERC Synergy project, ICE2ICE, shown that abrupt climate change occurred as a result…

Biden’s Coming China Headache: Climate Change And “Developing Countries”

A Biden presidency, which now seems most likely, will have plenty on its foreign policy plate, ranging from relations with Russia, China and Europe to the Iran question in the…

Using Milankovitch Cycles to create high-resolution astrochronologies

The remarkable stability of the 405 thousand year cycle, which is modulated by Jupiter and Venus, makes it the Milankovitch Cycle of choice to construct astrochronologies.