Most people have never heard of the Anthropocene era and with good reason—it is not an officially recognized geologic time period. It is the invention of a small group of scientific busy bodies who evidently have nothing better to do than try to effect a change in the official timeline of Earth's past. The International Commission on Stratigraphy, the body charged with formally designating geological time periods, has been petitioned in the past and just recently a group of chuckle-heads attending the Society for American Archaeology meetings in Hawaii have brought the idea up again. Only problem is, the proponents of the Anthropocene have fallen to arguing amongst themselves—when did the “Age of Man” really start?

It has been vilified in the press and maligned in school classrooms by the ignorant. Opposing it has become a cause célèbre in Hollywood an a litmus test for liberal politicians. Labeled man's chosen weapon for ravaging nature and laying waste to the environment this poor, largely misunderstood gas is in fact essential to our existence. Without carbon dioxide, CO₂, we would not be here and Earth would be a frozen lifeless chunk of rock. Forget that life would never have developed on a planet without greenhouse warming, a recent scientific study say the daemon gas has rescued the planet from the deep freeze at least twice during the Neoproterozoic era, roughly 750 to 635 million years ago.

NASA says that something unexpected is happening on the Sun.  This year, 2013, is supposed to be the peak of the 11-year sunspot cycle—the year of Solar Max. Yet solar activity is well below the expected level. Out somnolent star refuses to behave according to the predictions of Sun watching scientists, leading some observers to wonder if forecasters missed the mark. The botched solar forecast not only has implication for our understanding of the physical processes inside the Sun, it has possible links to future climate change here on Earth. Scientists admit that no one knows for sure what the Sun will do next.

For decades the US government has funded research into “clean coal” technology. Billions of dollars have been spent with the only visible result being employment for a small army of government coal researchers and academics. Now scientists at Ohio State University have announced that, after 15 years of effort, they have produced a breakthrough—a new technology capable of turning coal green and carbon dioxide emission free. This was widely reported in the news media and passed practically without critical comment. Is it true? Is coal no longer the dirty, devil spawned fuel of evil industrialists everywhere?

It's everywhere on Earth, on the other planets and moons of the solar system, and even in comets from deep space. It is the frozen form of water, commonly called ice. Something so ubiquitous and familiar, one would think that science knows a lot about ice. It turns out science knows less than we might suppose. In a commentary in the journal Nature, an ice scientist raises ten open questions about ice. For example, the article states: “We cannot predict with certainty when and where ice clouds will form in the atmosphere; areas of the sky remain humid when we would expect them to freeze.” Ice is a fundamental part of Earth's climate, yet these questions and others remain unanswered. How can climate science claim to predict the fate of the polar ice sheets or mountain glaciers when we do not really understand the substance that they are made of?

Back in 2005, the IPCC Working Group III Special Report on Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage declared that the storage of naturally and industrially produced carbon dioxide in depleted hydrocarbon reservoirs and aquifers was considered an essential component of the strategy to combat the build-up of greenhouses gases in the atmosphere. It seemed like an easy solution, pump CO₂ captured from nasty coal power plants and other high volume greenhouse gas sources back into the underground reservoirs that oil and gas has been extracted from. After all, those geologic formations held hydrocarbons for millions of years—now the pumped out oil fields are just sitting there, waiting to be put to use. That was until testing was done on rock from actual cap strata. It would appear that infusing rock layers with CO₂-saturated aqueous fluid can alter the properties of caprock, leading to the escape of the sequestered carbon back into the environment.

A newly released study from the Research Council of Norway has climate change alarmists abuzz. One of the things the alarmists have been pushing for is to halt warming at a 2°C increase at any cost (and they mean that literally). In the Norwegian study, much to the alarmists' dismay, researchers have arrived at an estimate of 1.9°C as the most likely level of future warming. The report also recognizes that temperatures have stabilized at 2000 levels for the past decade even though CO₂ levels have continued to rise. Meanwhile, a reconstruction of the Eemian interglacial from the new NEEM ice core, published in the journal Nature, shows that in spite of a climate 8°C warmer than that of the past millennium, the ice in Northern Greenland was only a few hundred meters lower than its present level. This finding casts doubt on the projected melting of ice sheets and resulting sea-level rise.

General Circulation Models (GCM), which simulate the physics and chemistry of Earth's land, oceans and atmosphere, are an essential component of the pseudoscience behind the global warming scam. Using large, complex computer programs doing indecipherable things while burning up exa-cycles of supercomputer time allows climate scientists to lay down a fake science smokescreen few can penetrate. Naturally, other scientists, with lower funding, are envious of climate modelers and their play toys, including ecologists. In an impassioned plea published in Nature, a group of environmental scientists argue that it is high time that they get to build models of their own. General Ecosystem Models (GEMs) could radically improve understanding of the biosphere and inform policy decisions about biodiversity and conservation they claim. But are they really aware of what they are asking for?

Time and again the proponents of catastrophic climate change use the mantra of “settled science” to shout down their critics. This is nothing less than blind faith that science actually knows what is going on in the complex environment that regulates this planet's climate. Imagine a part of that system that is literally only 10km from anywhere on Earth, a component of our environment that science thought it understood quite well. Now imagine the embarrassment when a major review in a noted journal finds that previous datasets associated with this component are wrong and have been wrong for more than a quarter of a century. Yet that is precisely what has happened. The area in question is Earth's stratosphere and the impact of this report is devastating for climate scientists and atmospheric modelers everywhere.

Just when it seems that public figures can sink no lower, be more cynical, act more duplicitous, a news story comes along that plumbs new depths in ideological betrayal. And so it was this week when the shocked staff at Current TV was called to an all hands staff meeting. They were informed that the Current TV network, supposedly a bulwark of liberal green thought holding back the barbarian hoards from FOX and talk radio, had been sold to those leading mideast liberals at Al Jazeera. Former Vice President and self styled eco-prophet Al Gore has made himself a much, much richer man by doing what the political class has done since the dawn of human history—sell out to the other side.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has consistently predicted expanding world wide drought as one of the horrors of global warming. New research suggests that things may not be quite as arid as they predicted. According to scientists, a commonly used technique for estimating drought severity may actually overestimate the effects of dry spells. Revisiting historical data for the period 1980-2008, a new assessment technique found that the global area stricken by drought grew by approximately 0.08% per year—less than one-seventh (14%) the increase previously reported. Moreover, researchers found that drought causes higher temperatures, not the other way around. Once again, the horrendous effects of anthropogenic global warming have been found to be over hyped by the self-serving savants of the IPCC.

For half a century, climate scientists have been attempting to simulate the workings of Earth's climate system in computer models. Over that period of time computers have increased in computational power a million fold, allowing models to grow in complexity and, if you accept the word of the modelers themselves, accuracy. Today's models may produce more realistic output but that should not be confused with more accurate output—modern climate models are still unable to accurately predict future fluctuations in Earth's environment. Why this should be so is highlighted in a new paper published in the Journal Of Advances In Modeling Earth Systems (JAMES), a publication of the American Geophysical Union. In it the tuning secrets of those modern-day mystics, climate modelers, are revealed.

In a mad rush to prove who can put out the most inane press release, various warm-mongers, news hacks and climate alarmists have gone on a predictable spree, trying to blame Hurricane Sandy and the resulting disaster in the US Northeast on CO₂ levels. Who are these clowns? Even the IPCC issued a statement saying that global warming was not to blame. Have none of these empty headed blatherskites noticed that it has been more than seven years since a major hurricane struck the US, the longest such period since the Civil War? Evidently not, since they continue to spew unscientific twaddle and the news media continues to lap it up like a dog eating its own vomit.

Earth's climate is controlled by the global balance of energy. Radiation from the Sun heats up the planet while heat energy is re-radiated into space through complex interactions of land, sea and air. The journal Nature Geoscience has just published an update about the balance that controls Earth's temperature and overall climate. Scientists conclude the global balance of energy flow within the atmosphere and at Earth's surface cannot be accurately measured using current techniques and is therefore uncertain. The current uncertainty in this net surface energy balance is an order of magnitude larger than the changes associated with greenhouse gasses. In short, previous estimates of climate change are invalid, swamped by fundamental uncertainty.

Heralded far and wide as a harbinger of global climate change, this year's record Arctic ice melt has the uninformed climate alarmists celebrating and the more knowledgeable scratching their heads. You see, this summer's ice retreat was predicted by no computer model and few scientists even though it possible. While climate scientists ponder what is wrong with their theories nature has carried on—no fuss, no muss, no drama. Circulation patterns are shifting and living creatures from zooplankton to megafauna are taking the change in stride. What has flummoxed environmental scientists is the simple and now demonstrated fact that successful life forms have a common trait—they are adaptable, something many scientists are not.