Environment

Climategate is being evaluated by several committees. The truth about transparency of climate data and scientific methods is supposed to be revealed after analyses of the hacked emails from University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU). The first independent report on Climategate was published today; Wednesday 31. March 2010. The  UK Parliament's Science and Technology Committee announced that “Climate science must become more transparent”. Furthermore, the accompanying press release stated: Phil Willis MP, Committee Chair, said: "Climate science is a matter of global…

The symbol of the Godness Venus Did you know that strawberries are not really a fruit? It's in fact a receptacle that is the modified or expanded portion of the stem or axis that bears the organs of a single flower or the florets of a flower head. California is to be known as the largest producer in the U.S.A,  and it holds 20000 acres of land for growing this receptacle.  In reality, the whole country of th U.S.  is considered to be fertile to grow this receptacle. The strawberry has 20% of the daily body requirements for folic acid and has up to 140% of…

An analysis of tree rings and archeological remains suggests that decades of drought, interspersed with intense monsoon rains, may have helped bring about the fall of Cambodia's ancient Khmer civilization at Angkor nearly 600 years ago. The findings, published this week in PNAS,  indicate that advanced civilizations are still vulnerable to the influence of climate change. Historians have offered various explanations for the fall of an empire that stretched across much of Southeast Asia between the 9th and 14th centuries, from deforestation to conflict with rival kingdoms. But the new…

Understanding Climate : #4 - Calculating Sunshine The Fire In The Sky Understanding climate science requires a cross-disciplinary approach.  I am trying to explain in this series the most important aspects of the relevant sciences.  This is the 4th part of the mainly astronomical section.  In part 2, I introduced the idea of, in a manner of speaking, building a model of our earth-moon-sun system.  In part 3 I continued with a discussion of seasons and their primary astronomical causes.  Here I begin to discuss the astronomical factors affecting how much heat the earth…

More Snow Anyone? We may get a little snow in England in a day or two.  Scotland, being in somewhat cooler climes, may get a little more. Quite apart from the UK Met Office's ability - or lack of it - to predict weather, the current Arctic Oscillation trend, if continued, could lead to some surprise sprinklings of snow. I can't predict who will get snow, nor how much.  Boston?  New York?  What I can predict, as a virtual certainty, is that if there is more snow we will see more inane questions from parochial northern hemisphere residents asking what happened to global…

If you happen to travel by air on good sunny day across India and  you are crossing Aravallis and hills of Udaipur and Ajmer and Jaipur  its needless to mention that hills which were once covered with thick forests have gone barren and getting degraded and denunded at a very faster rate with scores of visible or invisible mining sites.  Satellite imagaries will confirm my observations if you compare of present with that of 10 or 20 years ago.  Huge water bodies are dry and banks are degraded. Silting has filled most of the rivers . Making dams has worsened the situations…

CO2 Emissions : More Is The New Less As part of its climate change strategy, the Government set a UK aviation target in January 2009, to reduce UK aviation emissions back to 2005 levels in 2050. Together with deep cuts in other sectors, this would achieve the UK’s legislated economy-wide greenhouse gas (GHG) target to reduce emissions by 80% in 2050 relative to 1990.  http://www.theccc.org.uk/sectors/aviation Saturday, 27 March 2010The political arguments about a third runway for London's Heathrow airport broke out again fiercely last night after a High Court judge declined to quash…

It's Earth Hour - Let's Black Out Big Time! Earth hour is an event organised by the World Wide Fund for Nature in which participants switch off lights for one hour at night.  The objective is to produce an hour of darkness as a means of highlighting the need for global action on climate change. Earth Hour - climate change campaigners urge global switch-off The fourth annual lights-out event expects 1 billion participants, and counts for the first time international landmarks including the Eiffel Tower, the Empire State building and the Burj Khalifa http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/…

Nonsense On Ice What follows is quoted from an article: 'Climate Cools But Arctic Ice Scares Continue'by Dr. Tim Ball  Monday, January 18, 2010: My badge of honor is an attack by Phil Jones, disgraced and displaced Director of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) whose leaked emails showed how they falsified climate science. On May 22, 2009 Jones wrote to Mann, “Our web server has found this piece of garbage - so wrong it is unbelievable that Tim Ball wrote a decent paper in Climate Since AD 1500. http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/19087 Now, leaving aside the lack of…

Watts Up With Giving Credit? This is really old news, but sauce for the goose ... Science relies on data collection.  Technology moves on year by year.  As new technologies and methodologies become available scientists fall over themselves to update and correct their data. Sometimes the new data needed for data correction comes from unexpected sources.  Anthony Watts, founder of wattsupwiththat.com set up surfacestations.org to collect data on US weather stations with the objective of showing up errors which would support his view that anthropogenic global warming isn't…