There's nothing like evidenced-based public policy... News that the CSIRO plan to cut over 100 jobs from the agency’s climate science staff. Wide-spread opinion fears cuts to the CSIRO’s climate modelling and measuring research will breach Australia’s obligations under the recent Paris agreement and will result in huge costs to the economy. News reports here, here, here, here and here . Australia’s Climate Council has published…
Category Archives Science
Hearing the Universe We have detected gravitational waves. We did it. - David Reitze, executive director of LIGO At a time when reason and evidence appear under siege, and "belief" and "opinion" have a seeming privileged status in civil discourse unknown since the enlightenment, I am reminded of the words of the 17th Century Dutch Philosopher, Spinoza: The highest activity…
From the University of Melbourne [@UniMelb] A group of paralysed patients will soon undergo a revolutionary procedure that could allow them to walk with the power of thought. The key to returning mobility is a tiny, matchstick-sized device called a stentrode. It will be implanted into a blood vessel next to the motor cortex, the brain’s control centre –…
Innovation Five frogs sitting on a log, four decide to jump in, how many are left? The answer? Five! ... because deciding and doing are two very different things... The Wendelstein 7-X fusion device at Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) in Greifswald produced its first hydrogen plasma on 3 February 2016. This marks the start of scientific operation.…
Some thoughts for the new year... The. Hottest. Twelve. Months. EVER... 2015 was Earth’s hottest year by record-wide margin https://t.co/smkEn7VzRz via @NOAA #HottestYear pic.twitter.com/yXrpysDQmQ — Climate Council (@climatecouncil) January 21, 2016 2015 was the hottest year on record globally. Climate change was a major factor in driving the record-breaking heat in 2015 worldwide. The global average temperature for 2015 was…
There’s a lot riding on how Earth spins...
Where were you on November 11th 2015? Bob Henson [ @bhensonweather ] writing in Dr. Jeff Masters' WunderBlog just last week, makes the observation: The daily average concentration of carbon dioxide in the air that day at Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory was 399.68 parts per million. On November 12 it rose to 401.64 ppm, and it’s quite possible that we’ll never see another day in…
NOAA Coral Reef Watch NOAA Coral Reef Watch (CRW) has developed a new set of experimental 5-km Regional Virtual Stations (211 total). The Regional Virtual Stations represent a change in the way we have looked at Virtual Station data in the past. They have been designed to take advantage of higher resolution data while simultaneously providing comprehensive and collective information on all…
This never gets old... An excellent treatment by Joel Somerfield. Carl Sagan would have been 81 this week. Pale Blue Dot from ORDER Productions on Vimeo. Links http://www.carlsagan.com http://www.thisisorder.com Voyager - NASA Voyager's real-time odometer! Location: Voyager 1 is in "Interstellar space" and Voyager 2 is currently in the "Heliosheath" -- the outermost layer of the heliosphere where the solar wind is…