NOAA has 2017 stats: Climate disasters cost US $306 billion

Climate Disasters

Addressing Climate Change is often perceived to be a costly effort and so some might argue that doing nothing is a viable option. The problem with that thought is that the cost of doing nothing is going to increase year by year. NOAA has now completed calculating the numbers for 2017 and the costs adds … Read more

#Climate – Does 2017 continue the Global Warming trend?

global warming trend

Was 2017 the warmest year ever? Not quite, it was only the second hottest ever. Working out the trend is not as simple as comparing one year to the next and so drawing a conclusion when comparing this year with the previous one is not sufficient. This is because you need to also consider not … Read more

Top 3 Items of Religious Weirdness in 2017

religious weirdness trump support

Normally, once per week, I write up a posting that spotlights my personal selection of the top three items of religiously inspired weirdness that happened during the past seven days. Today however, for rather obvious reasons, I’m looking back over the past calendar year to pick out the top three items of religious weirdness. Rather … Read more

Output from the 2017 AGU meeting – Scientific Activism

AGU

Once a year the Comic-Con of the Earth, space and climate sciences holds a meeting, and in 2017 it was in New Orleans. This is the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union. As a result Reporters will inevitably suffer the horrendous stress of being sent to hang out in New Orleans for the weekend (oh the … Read more

2017 Arctic Report card published by NOAA

Arctic Report Card

For the past 12 years now NOAA has been published an annual Arctic Report card and the 2017 issue is now available on-line. The report card exists because something quite extraordinary has been happening in the Arctic and 2017 has not seen any pause in that. Highlights Arctic shows no sign of returning to reliably … Read more

2017 Nobel Prize – Peace

If you want to know about this year’s winner, just jump around my preamble by scrolling down. “Peace” is perhaps the joker in the Nobel pack because this is the award that has often resulted in what can be best described as WTF moments. The other awards are worthy of attention because they spotlight work … Read more