Atmospheric

Ice cream sellers Ben&Jerry's, which are a division of a giant multinational food conglomerate, seem to have a lot of marketing leeway, because they are claiming global warming is coming for your ice cream freezer. Many nutrition groups think global warming is the best thing that could happen to their ice cream, with its loads of fat and sugar and implications for diabetes, but they are not selling to those people anyway, they are selling to fat people who like to buy organic, or people who think ice cream is health food if it was made using free-range peanut butter, or something. So the…

For at least a billion years of the distant past, planet Earth should have been frozen over but wasn’t, and one popular notion was that methane, with 23-34 times (yes, it is unclear) the heat-trapping capacity of carbon dioxide, could have reigned supreme for most of the first 3.5 billion years of Earth history, when oxygen was absent initially.  Environmentalists today are in a panic about greenhouse gases, but between 1.8 billion and 800 million years ago, microscopic ocean dwellers really needed them. The sun was 10 to 15 percent dimmer than it is today—too weak to warm the planet on…

California Governor Jerry Brown has signed a new law demanding that dairy cows stop producing so much methane. They are basically giant fracking wells on four legs, after all.  Why focus on methane? Carbon dioxide has plummeted, thanks to what seems like a decade of gross economic mismanagement, which means fewer emissions due to people driving to work or manufacturing stuff (government jobs are, however, still doing nicely) and then we also had natural gas replace a lot of coal. Natural gas - methane - was always prized because it burns so much cleaner. Environmentalists loved it for 50…

Atmospheric scientists overwhelmingly deny the existence of a secret, elite-driven plot to release harmful chemicals into the air from high-flying aircraft, according to the first peer-reviewed journal paper to address the "chemtrails" conspiracy theory. Researchers from the University of California, Irvine, the Carnegie Institution for Science and the nonprofit Near Zero organization asked 77 atmospheric chemists and geochemists if they had come across evidence of such a large-scale spraying program, and 76 responded that they had not. The survey results were published Wednesday in…

If man-made greenhouse gas emissions are going to cause more droughts and storm surges on a persistent basis, why did it take so long? And why is it only a concern in the last 25 years, rather than in the 1930s, when things were really hot? A new estimate claims it's because the natural atmosphere already contained carbon dioxide  that human-induced changes were relatively small. Had these natural concentrations been lower, the effects of the emission of harmful greenhouse gases would have been felt much earlier. Writing in Climatic Change, David Archer of the University of Chicago…

New work suggests Earth's ancient magnetic field was significantly different than the present day field, originating from several poles rather than the familiar two.  Earth generates a strong magnetic field extending from the core out into space that shields the atmosphere and deflects harmful high-energy particles from the Sun and the cosmos. Without it, our planet would be bombarded by cosmic radiation, and life on Earth's surface might not exist. The motion of liquid iron in Earth's outer core drives a phenomenon called the geodynamo, which creates Earth's magnetic field. This motion…

Greenland's glaciers are melting, but they do that every year. However, a recent computer simulation sounds the alarm about a 50 percent increase in the freshwater flux since 1990, which is too narrow a timeframe for scientific purposes, it is the target date for the original Kyoto treaty on global warming, but will be a clarion for policy makers.  The authors believe is it due to both enhanced summer melt and calving of outlet glaciers; more than 5000 cubic kilometers of extra meltwater have been flowing into the sea, equivalent to a quarter of the volume of the Baltic Sea. The fate of…

In the 1970s, current Obama administration science czar Dr. John Holdren wrote a book advocating various measures to stop global starvation, including a world government and mandatory birth control. Food is no longer an issue, science took care of that despite the protestations of Holdren and fellow doomsday prophet Professor Paul Ehrlich, so culture moved onto something new that would require social engineering and selecting who gets to give birth: global warming. John Guillebaud, Emeritus Professor of Family Planning and Reproductive Health at University College London, writes in BMJ that…

Earlier this month, the U.S. Energy Information released a report projecting that by 2040, world energy consumption will have grown by 48% from 2012 levels.   That sounds like a terrific advancement for developing nations.  We worry about water in other countries, we worry about food, we worry about education and culture. Every single one of those is resolved with affordable energy. Energy is the great equalizer and America's second most important strategic resource after, obviously, food.  There is a cost issue, energy is useless if people can't afford it, and the road map for…

We’re not even halfway through the year but already you may have heard talk of 2016 being the hottest on record. But how can scientists be so sure we’re going to beat the previous record, set just last year? Even before the end of 2015, the UK Met Office was forecasting with 95% confidence that 2016 would beat the record. Since then, that confidence has grown still further, as record after record has tumbled. April 2016 broke the record for the hottest April after we had experienced the hottest February and March on record already this year. NASA climatologist Gavin Schmidt recently…