Promoting Science and Critical Thinking
It is distinctly possible that after Salman Rushdie published his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, back in 1988, you would normally have never heard of it. Can you for example name any other novel he has written? Everything changed when the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran at that time, issued a formal fatwā calling … Read more
There has been a sudden and very dramatic loss of sea ice in the Bering sea. Within an 8 day period one third of the sea ice has gone. It’s not spring, we are in the middle of February. So what exactly has happened? Basically this … Weather (e.g., wind) has a significant role in … Read more
Sometimes a few pictures is a more powerful statement than many pages of words. The UK’s Guardian has a callout here for readers to send in pictures of any early signs of spring in the UK. What came back was published a few days ago last Tuesday (13th Feb) … ‘A first in my 60 years’: … Read more
A new paper has been published by the Chinese International Center for Climate and Environment Sciences (That’s part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences). Within it they present their analysis of data gathered from all around the earth’s oceans and demonstrate a very clear ongoing ocean warming trend. There is a short clip that visualises the data … … Read more
2018 has been designated the International Year of the reef. This is in fact the 3rd “International Year of the Reef”. The first was in 1997 in response to the increasing threats Coral Reefs then faced and was designed to increase awareness of that. It worked well because over 225 organisations spread across 50 nations … Read more
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