Promoting Science and Critical Thinking
As I drive north, one big surprise has been the sight of dead trees … not just the odd one or two, but entire forests, mile after mile after mile … millions. Why … what is going on here? Two words sum it up … “Climate change” … or to be more precise, “spruce beetles”. … Read more
I blogged the day before yesterday about a study soon to be published in Psychological Science . It revealed that conspiracy theories tend to cluster, those that buy into moon hoax theories are prone to buy into other conspiracy theories such as 9/11 being an inside job, or climate change denial. Interestingly enough they also found that … Read more
I wrote a brief post the other day entitled “The Climate Change Skeptics are still as crazy as ever“. Yikes … bad move … really bad move on my part …. and so a few folks quite rightly pointed out that this is a highly inappropriate term to use. OK, lets clarify why. There are … Read more
New calculations suggest more than one in ten chance of colder UK winters.
As the Sun enters a period of low solar activity over the next 50 years, new research has calculated the probability of unusually cold winter temperatures occurring in the UK.
Last year, the same group of researchers, from the University of Reading, linked colder winters in Europe to low solar activity and predicted that the Sun is moving into a particularly low period of activity, meaning the UK will experience more cold winters in the future – potentially similar to those experienced in the Maunder minimum at the end of the 17th century.
The new research, published today in Environmental Research Letters, supports recent suggestions that sunspot activity is waning, and goes further, using the behaviour of the Sun over the last 9300 years to predict the probabilities of future solar changes.
As no doubt you are aware, there have been various predictions regarding climate change. What is now being observed is that those predictions are wrong … because what we are actually seeing is a far faster rate of change. David Biello wrote about this in Scientific American yesterday … Climate change is happening faster than … Read more