‘We will not, at any time, debate the science of climate change’ Three professors co-teaching an online course called “Medical Humanities in the Digital Age” at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs recently told their students via email that man-made climate change is not open for debate, and those who think otherwise have no place in […]

A new study from the University of California, Irvine and the University of Washington shows that water conserved by plants under high CO2 conditions compensates for much of the effect of warmer temperatures, retaining more water on land than predicted in commonly used drought assessments. According to the study published this week in the Proceedings […]

For the past year, neutron monitors around the Arctic Circle have sensed an increasing intensity of cosmic rays. This colorized picture of the sun is a mosaic of ultraviolet images from the orbiting TRACE satellite sensitive to light emitted by highly charged iron atoms. Growing in number, the intricate structures visible are the Sun’s hot […]

Man’s nearest star is less active after scientists noticed a plunge in the number of sunspots. As a result, some say, global temperature levels will not rise as much as predicted, while others insist this will do little to slow climate change. ABU DHABI // August may be its usual sweltering self in the UAE, […]

A team of scientists from the National Space Institute at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU Space) and the Racah Institute of Physics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has linked large solar eruptions to changes in Earth’s cloud cover in a study based on over 25 years of satellite observations.   The solar eruptions […]

Testing the historic tracking of climate models Abstract: IPCC and others use in-sample correlations to confirm the ability of climate models to track the global surface temperature (GST) historically. However, a high correlation is a necessary but not sufficient condition for confirmation, because GST is nonstationary. In addition, the tracking errors must also be stationary. […]

Jeremy Berg, new editor-in-chief of Science Mag, warns scientists are straying into policy commentator roles. Illustration by David Parkins — Nature, September 2015 Jeremy Berg is taking on one of the most influential jobs in science just as the scientific endeavour is facing a challenge of historic proportions. As the new editor-in-chief of Science, a highly […]

Oxford University researchers say that trees which grew during intense radiation bursts in the past have ‘time-markers’ in their tree-rings that could help archaeologists date events from thousands of years ago. In a new paper, the authors explain how harvesting such data could revolutionise the study of ancient civilisations such as the Egyptian and Mayan […]