Promoting Science and Critical Thinking
A new and quite impressive paper has been published in Nature that lays out about two million years of climate history. What has happened in the past is a rather obviously valuable tool because it also enables us to understand the future we face. Prior to this specific paper only small windows of specific periods … Read more
Almost every Spring and Autumn for the past couple of years the UK’s Daily Express has run stories such as the above claiming that the season ahead is about to hit extremes. Instead of seeking guidance from a real meteorologist, their source is weather eccentric James Madden, forecaster for his one-man company Exacta Weather. Autumn is … Read more
It has been known for some time that the annual ice loss during the seasonal melt in Greenland was large, but new calculations revel that it is even bigger than previously thought. The challenge of working out just how big that ice loss is has lacked data because nobody is there on the ground at … Read more
Many calculation made by cosmologists about the universe start with the assumption that it is uniform and is not stretched or distorted. If this assumption turned out to be false, then all such calculations would be invalidated, so is it true? The idea that it is uniform does not appear to be correct when you consider … Read more
This year’s Ig Nobel awards have been announced. No, not Nobel, but Ig Nobel, because these are spoof awards, but the research that gets an Ig Nobel is wholly real. The fact that the scientific community is prepared to both mock and laugh at itself is indeed both praiseworthy and truly entertaining as well. To qualify … Read more
Last Wednesday, 21st Sept, the ratification of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change leapt boldly towards coming into force. We are not quite there yet, but it is a lot closer. I was blogging about this a few days ago, and so this was something I did anticipate. At the time the expectation was that another 20 … Read more