Were they unusual during the 20th century? No, not during the past two millennia, as this study suggests that modern warming cannot be distinguished from warming induced by “natural processes,” which ultimately suggests there is no compelling reason to attribute modern warming to anthropogenic CO2 emissions… Read More
Cyanobacteria of the Subtropical North Atlantic Ocean (25 December 2012)
How do they respond to atmospheric CO2 enrichment? Quoting the team of researchers that conducted the study, their results for Trichodesmium, along with the similar results of several other marine scientists, suggest that “ocean acidification would likely result in a positive feedback on the growth and physiology of natural populations, resulting in a positive change in their role in ocean carbon and nitrogen cycles,” which is, of course, great news for the biosphere!… Read More
The Greenland Ice Sheet: What It’s Been Doing Lately (25 December 2012)
A new report “challenges predictions about the future response of the Greenland Ice Sheet to increasing global temperatures”… Read More
Ocean Acidification Effects on Two Predator-Prey Relationships (25 December 2012)
In which direction do they shift as acidification occurs: in favor of the predator or its prey? … or do they shift at all? Results of this study “illustrate that different stress effects on interacting species may not only enhance but also buffer community level effects,” further emphasizing that “when stress effects are similar (and weak) on interacting species, biotic interactions may remain unaffected”… Read More
Marine Reserves May Ameliorate the Negative Consequences of Both Local and Global Stressors of Sea Life (26 December 2012)
Is there actually something out there in “we-should-do-it land” that climate alarmists and skeptics can agree upon? It would seem they both would deem it wise to establish more marine reserves throughout the world’s oceans, in order to help prevent the deleterious effects of (1) verified local threats and (2) postulated global threats to the well-being of Earth’s marine life… Read More
Just How Icy was the Little Ice Age? (26 December 2012)
The question is very important, as the interglacial record cold of the Little Ice Age was the springboard from which modern global warming was launched… Read More
Earth’s Land and Water Surfaces: Net Sources or Sinks for CO2? (26 December 2012)
Real-world evidence trumps coupled climate/carbon-cycle models … and in a really big way, as “although present predictions indicate diminished C uptake by the land and oceans in the coming century, with potentially serious consequences for the global climate, as of 2010 there is no empirical evidence that C uptake has started to diminish on the global scale.” In fact, as their results clearly indicate, just the opposite appears to be the case, with global carbon uptake actually doubling over the past half-century… Read More
The Ability to Identify Category 4 and 5 Atlantic Hurricanes with Mid-20th-Century Tools (1 Jan 2013)
Were the tools of that earlier age good enough to do a good enough job? In a word, no. And that discrepancy may very well temper the historicl hurricane counts… Read More
Lake Restoration in a Warming World (1 Jan 2013)
Do rising temperatures help or hinder human efforts to restore freshwater planktonic ecosystems to more primitive and species-rich conditions? The present analysis suggests “that climate warming and re-oligotrophication may favor an increase in spatial (depth) heterogeneity in the water column of deep lakes, enhancing the potential for phytoplankton species co-existence and an increase in plankton richness”… Read More
Eight Decades of Glacier Movements in Southeast Greenland (1 Jan 2013)
The team of Danish and U.S. scientists report that two recessional events stand out, one that occurred during the 1930s (1933-1943) and another that occurred during the 2000s (2000-2010); and they state that the second of these retreats was “matched in its vigor” during the “period of warming in the 1930s with comparable increases in air temperature”… Read More
Effects of Ocean Acidification on Marine Coccolithophores (1 Jan 2013)
In the words of Smith et al., “our finding that the most heavily calcified morphotype dominates when conditions are most acidic is contrary to earlier predictions and raises further questions about the fate of coccolithophores in a high-CO2 world”… Read More
Drifting Along with the CMIP3 Models (2 Jan 2013)
Climate drift arises for various reasons, such as “deficiencies in either the model representation of the real world or the procedure used to initialize the model.” However, “significant efforts by the climate modeling community have gone into reducing climate drift.” Nevertheless, climate drift still persists and is causing modelers significant headaches… Read More
Dying from Heat and Cold in Chiang Mai, Thailand (2 Jan 2013)
Once again, extreme heat is shown to be less deadly than extreme cold… Read More
Nine Decades of Daily Precipitation Over Europe’s Central Alps (2 Jan 2013)
How do the data appear to have been impacted by the global warming of the past century or so? Based upon the reported observations, they cast a huge amount of doubt upon climate-alarmist predictions of greater precipitation – including more intense precipitation extremes – occurring in tandem with rising temperatures… Read More
Dr. Idso is the founder, former president, and currently chairman of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change.
