First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.
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I really want to know the Homo naledi fossils’ age now, but I’m totally at a loss to suggest a suitable dating method. We can be sure they are way out of the range for carbon. In the absence of dripstones and with neither heat nor light to reset radiometric clocks I have no idea what material to date.
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Iceland is one of the few (the only?) region with abundant non-fossil energy far in excess of local needs. They used to harness it to electrolyse bauxite to aluminium. According to Service they now find it more profitable to dip deeply into the subsidies pot and split carbon-dioxide. So that aluminium is now produced elsewhere, using other sources of energy, resulting in a net rise of carbon-dioxide release and a warm fuzzy feeling for all those politically correct and morally superior members of the chattering classes, who have shunned elementary maths and science all their lives.
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The recent hiatus in the warming trend marking the end of the Little Ice Age has thrown the adherents of the climate change religion into a crisis of faith. Now a way out seems in sight. Following Mikaloff-Fletcher it seems the Southern Ocean is taking up a rising flow of CO2 again. There is only a tiny part wrong with that explanation. If it were true the effect was indirect – the sea takes up CO2, thereby lowers the atmospheric concentration and slows warming. But it’s not happening that way, in fact the atmospheric concentration has been inexorably rising and temperature still has lagged behind. Could it be that there is saturation, negative feedback and inherent stability at work after all?
Reassuringly Landschützer et al. make no such claims in their primary article.