• Most species originate in the tropics: ‘Tropics is where the concentration of life is maximized…the place with the highest biodiversity

  ‘A 20 °C temperature rise would be beneficial for life – with the insane fearmongering about a 2 °C warming (from which only 0.7 °C or so was realized in the last 100 years)’

  In my neck of the woods, close to one of the hottest regions in Australia, warmer weather is fantastic for the environment. Flora and fauna are adapted to temperatures as high as 50C in the shade during summer, and as low as 1C in winter.

  

  the Dogwood, Acacia coriacea is a wattle with large edible seeds from the hot East Pilbara

  Dr Motl continues:

  [...] Because Slovak geologist Mr Adam Tomášových is among the 8 authors of the paper, the science section of the Slovak daily Sme.sk reviewed the article

  Out of the tropics, but how? Fossils, bridge species, and thermal ranges in the dynamics of the marine latitudinal diversity gradient
  written by David Jablonski et al. and published in PNAS. See also futurity.org.

  

  They looked at three slices of Cenozoic (from 66 million AD through now) and decided that most marine genera originated in the tropics. You may view the paper as a followup to the “out of the tropics” mechanism coined by Jablonski and others in 2006. [...]

• Read the rest over at ‘the reference frame’, Dr Motl’s website.

  

  tropical forest in the North Kimberley

• ‘Despite the fact the drought was worse than 1988, yields were 50% higher. Part of that are improved hybrids and farming practices but part is the positive effect of CO2, which produces more growth and makes plants more drought resistant. The 1988 drought in 2012 dollars produced between $80B and $120B in losses. Under conditions of atmospheric CO2 enrichment, stomatal apertures typically decrease, thereby reducing stomatal conductance and transpirational water losses from plants.

   

  ‘Water Stress: When plants are growing under less than optimal conditions of soil water availability, the percent growth enhancement due to atmospheric CO2 enrichment is generally greater than it is when water is readily available to them’

  Popeye the Sailor Man will also be impressed about just how much CO2 is worth to Agriculture: New paper finds increased CO2 improves both the productivity and nutritional quality of spinach
  The Hockey Schtick

  

If it hadn’t been for the shine on this guy’s coat we wouldn’t have seen him. We would have crushed him with our feet. He was momentarily tolerant of us getting close to him so we could really see him. I thought he was ugly but I could see, looking at him through my children’s eyes, why they thought he was beautiful, although we agreed his bulging brown eyes were a bit creepy.

Some day I’ll invest in a camera that will allow me to zoom in at a micro level to capture the “goose bumps” on his coat. Now that would be really cool! There’s a fabulous world out there just waiting to be explored and plenty of beauty and inspiration for us to draw on if only we learn to see (and understand).

His tightly knit team comprises of his wife Gill, his son Ross, daugher in-law Anna, his grandson Tristan as well as humanitarian volunteers and journalists. He believes that “a person is a person through other people” and it is this motto that has managed to see Kingsley and his team reach some of the most remote parts of Africa. Whether it’s an expedition to Somalia to distribute thousands of mosquito nets to pregnant mothers and children, or embarking on a 448 day journey around the outline of Africa covering 33 countries, their work knows no bounds.

We will be following the Holgates on their latest adventure and providing updates and interviews as they carry out their latest mission. Details to be released soon!

In the mean time, visit the Kingsley Holgate website for more information on previous expeditions. Here’s a link to a video interview that was done on a mission called “Boundless Africa”.

The Climate Commissioners on their days off…

Tell us something we don’t already know. The Climate Commission has got nothing whatsoever to do with impartial, free-thinking scientific enquiry. It’s sole purpose is to regurgitate government climate policy, couched in pseudo-science and alarmism.

Monday’s “Critical Decade” report, which claimed that there is a one-in-two chance that there will be no humans left on the planet by 2100, has been rightly exposed as extremist environmental propaganda:

Minerals Council of Australia chief executive Mitch Hooke said the report, which called for an end to most coal mining, crossed the line from scientific analysis into environmental campaigning.

The report warns that unchecked climate change would hit hard at Queensland’s biggest industries: mining, cattle and potentially tourism, through impacts on the Great Barrier Reef and Wet Tropics.

Climate Commissioner Will Steffen said an orderly transition had to be made from most fossil fuel use such as coal if the climate was to be stabilised this century.

Mr Hooke said extreme green groups had promoted an end to the coal industry in a secret campaign called Stopping the Coal Export Boom.

The document outlined a plan to eliminate the industry and he wanted to know why a taxpayer-funded agency with a charter that demanded scientific rigour was following the same approach.

Professor Steffen hit back, saying there were no conspiracies [Conspiracy? Quick, where's Loon-dowsky when you need him? - Ed], he had not heard of the campaign and his organisation had no contact of any sort with conservationists.

“If he’d cared to read the report [Sarcasm, lowest form of wit - Ed], he would find pages of [alarmist] scientific references in it [and none that challenged the consensus],’’ Professor Steffen said. “(The report) is based on the [fudged and fiddled] science and consistent with what the International Energy Agency says, what the Grantham Institute says and what (economist) Lord Stern says.

“It’s well understood in investment and science communities [both of which are making shed-loads of cash from the climate scare].’’

The stopping coal document, which is sponsored by Greenpeace, Coalswarm and the Graeme Wood Foundation [remember to boycott Wotif.com] and is available on the internet, says its strategy is to disrupt and delay key projects while eroding support for coal mining.

Mr Hooke said there would be severe economic consequences if coal mining ended but no tangible environmental dividend.

“Eliminating the Australian coal industry would reduce Australia’s GDP by between $29 billion and $36 billion per year,’’ he said. “It would reduce Australian jobs by almost 200,000 and reduce income to the Commonwealth by $6 billion.’’ (source)

But that’s OK, because the activists’ quasi-religious duty to ‘save the planet’ trumps everything, including common sense, apparently.

Scarlet shorebird serves as harbinger of climate change between the poles

Remember you can donate and help by clicking the image of the ice canyon on the right of your screen and thanks!!

The study comes as governments in India and China are deciding how to address their increasing pollution, which can contribute to fatal human health problems. Over the weekend, state-controlled media in China announced new pollution rules targeting both power plants and emissions from cars and trucks.

Aerosol pollutants such as sulfur dioxide, soot, and ozone are all bad for human health, but they have different effects on the climate. “Some of the aerosols are warming the planet, and some are cooling the planet,” says Phil Rasch, a fellow at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington. For example, sulfates that form from coal-plant exhaust reflect sunlight back into space, acting to shade the planet and cool it off. Black-carbon particles from diesel exhaust, on the other hand, absorb sunlight and heat up, warming the atmosphere.

“When you add them together, we think that on balance they’re cooling the planet,” Rasch says. That is, they mask some of the temperature increase that would have occurred as a result of carbon dioxide emissions, the main human contribution to global warming. But this effect would be more significant if the particulates that help heat up the atmosphere were removed. “If we could get rid of the ones that are warming the planet,” he says, “then that would buy us some more time.”

Rasch says that several other recent papers have asked the question posed in the one that came out this week: “What would happen if we immediately got rid of only the black-carbon aerosols?” He says doing that “might lead to a cooling of the planet by half a degree to a degree Celsius.” He notes, however, that the impact on temperature is hard to pin down. For one thing, pollution affects clouds and rainfall, which have complicated effects on climate.

One advantage of going after black carbon is that the effects would be almost immediate. These pollutants fall out of the atmosphere in the course of a few days or weeks, so once emissions stop, the air quickly clears. Carbon dioxide, on the other hand, stays in the atmosphere for hundreds of years.

Of course, it’s ultimately important to reduce all pollution, since it kills millions of people a year. “We want to cut down on pollution in every way that we can because of human health,” says Lai-yung Ruby Leung, a fellow at PNNL, who is one of the authors of the black-carbon study that came out his week. Selectively reducing pollutants as a way of countering global warming “is an important strategy we can think about,” she says, “but it needs to be carefully done.” Rasch emphasizes speeding up reduction of the pollutants that warm the planet, not necessarily putting off regulations to reduce the ones that cool it.

Leung says the research suggests at the very least that as countries clean up sulfates from power plants, they should make sure to cut down on diesel emissions at the same time. Just reducing the sulfates would cause the planet to warm up.

Related articles

• A no-nonsense introduction to the worst pollutant on the planet (io9.com)
• Super Pollutants 101: How To Cut Climate Impacts And Safeguard Public Health (thinkprogress.org.feedsportal.com)

But you can’t resume the area just with the Dead Sea, there is much more to visit, especially there is much more history – which is under every stone in Israel, actually – to be found.
The perfect example is Masada.
History has been made around this place, which has become one of the most important places in the history of the jewish people, although very tragic events took place here.

I prefer not to moan because I like it that, every day here, you don’t know what you’re going to get. On the other hand, in recent years the weather has gone really weird. As my fellow blogger robertscribbler pointed out, the weird weather is probably due to what people are doing.

Today our Government’s Met (Meteorology) Office hosted a meeting about the UK’s run of what it politely calls ‘unusual’ seasons. Here’s the report.

When you’re standing on the beach close to the water, your feet can’t sink in the sand, because there’s none, but a stiff and sharp ground made of salt. It’s advisable to keep your shoes.

I chose 2203 as the starting date because the impact of climate change and Man’s achievements in space exploration technology (flux-drive, far dark light fuel etc) had to coincide, but maybe I was being too optimistic about Earth’s ability to sustain us up to that point.

A recent email from AVAAZ.org indicates that methane release from under the oceans has grown dramatically over a relatively shot period and that we could be on the cusp of a near-term catastrophe. Science has yet to prove this, but there are signs that methane is 20-30 times more harmful than carbon dioxide when released into the atmosphere. And whereas methane releases are commonplace and have occurred for hundreds of years, in recent years the acceleration of these releases and the scale of them has grown exponentially. Some flumes are now one kilometre wide. There are hundreds of these flumes. Here’s a link to AVAAZ.org‘s campaign to get that fixed, and to a couple of others that explain the discoveries. Here and here.

I won’t be going back to revise Scat until the jury is in, but the unintended consequences of Man’s activities on our planet might require me to change Scat from a scifi thriller to a near-future horror story. I’d rather not, of course. Revising and editing a novel and then uploading a new document to Amazon can be a bitch. More so than wearing a gas mask.

Scat is currently free to download to your preferred ereader from Amazon, Smashwords, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Sony Reader Store, Diesel and Apple.

Clean air is also free. Long may it last.

DanglingtheLocalCarrotVBlog1

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I thought it might be helpful for you to meet me and hear what I’m doing. I should add that I have nothing in particular against importing food if it’s something we don’t grow here. But why do we: put trucks on the road; using fossil fuels we’re running out of; that are eroding the ozone layer and changing the climate on the planet, when we can grow those things right HERE?

I want collaboration with anyone who cares about local food and I invite you to contact me at mhrynkow@cca.edu.

We undertake the first comprehensive effort to integrate North Atlantic marine climate records for the last millennium, highlighting some key components common within this system at a range of temporal and spatial scales. In such an approach, careful consideration needs to be given to the complexities inherent to the marine system. Composites therefore need to be hydrographically constrained and sensitive to both surface water mass variability and three-dimensional ocean dynamics. This study focuses on the northeast (NE) North Atlantic Ocean, particularly sites influenced by the North Atlantic Current. A composite plus regression approach is used to create an inter-regional NE North Atlantic reconstruction of sea surface temperature (SST) for the last 1000 years. We highlight the loss of spatial information associated with large-scale composite reconstructions of the marine environment. Regional reconstructions of SSTs off the Norwegian and Icelandic margins are presented, along with a larger-scale reconstruction spanning the NE North Atlantic. The latter indicates that the ‘Medieval Climate Anomaly’ warming was most pronounced before ad 1200, with a long-term cooling trend apparent after ad 1250. This trend persisted until the early 20th century, while in recent decades temperatures have been similar to those inferred for the ‘Medieval Climate Anomaly’. The reconstructions are consistent with other independent records of sea-surface and surface air temperatures from the region, indicating that they are adequately capturing the climate dynamics of the last millennium. Consequently, this method could potentially be used to develop large-scale reconstructions of SSTs for other hydrographically constrained regions.

Click here for full paper (Open Source).