Ligin Joseph: How can the same El Niño cause drought in one part of the world and floods in another?

The Pacific Ocean is warming unusually quickly, and this year’s El Niño has already surpassed previous records. Forecasters expect it to strengthen even further before approaching its usual peak around December.

El Niño, the warm phase of a natural fluctuation in the Earth’s climate system, can reshape weather thousands of miles away, bringing drought to some regions while increasing the risk of heavy rain and flooding in others. To understand why, you need to follow what happens to the Pacific’s warm water – and the air above it.

Owen Jennings: Truth – a Lost Pillar

I loved playing rugby at school and looked forward to Friday afternoon when time was set aside for sport. I was much more interested in getting out onto the field than trying to figure Shakespeare or remember what an isosceles triangle looked like.

Friday rolled around and I was itching to get free of the books when our teacher intercepted one of those stupid, crude notes that got passed around furtively – something that wouldn’t happen today in an era of cell phones. The teacher demanded to know who started the little chain. No one owned up.

Bruce Moon: A Few Thoughts

We live on what is mostly a rather viscous ball of very hot and dense fluid surrounding a lump of iron – our world.

The bits we live on are mostly solid chunks which we call “land” floating on this gooey mess, bumping into each other, pushing over and under each other as they have done for billions of years and surrounded, marvellously, with a thin layer of another remarkable fluid - water - in what we call “oceans”.

On the surface - or very near it - there has been another marvellous development - it is called "life", in millions of diverse forms. 

Paul Driessen: Perverse, Conflicted Ethical Systems

Third Reich Forest Minister Hermann Goering was an avid hiker and ecologist who once sent a man to a concentration camp for cutting up a frog for fish bait. In 1933 he and other Nazi Party leaders enacted anti-vivisection laws to stop what he called “unbearable torture and suffering in animal experiments.”

Intensely hostile to capitalism, the Nazis controlled all industries and envisioned large-scale wind turbine projects that would generate “huge amounts of cheap energy” and create millions of German jobs.

Roy Spencer: Study - Sea Level Rise Revised Downward

If I had not looked past the headline of the press report on a new study, I would have just filed it under “It’s worse than we thought”. 

A new study in Nature reported on July 17 carried the following headlines:

“Satellite snafu masked true sea-level rise for decades”
“Revised tallies confirm that the rate of sea-level rise is accelerating as the Earth warms and ice sheets thaw.”

When I read that, I (like everyone else) assumed that corrections to the satellite sea level data since 1993 have now led to a revised trend toward faster (not slower) sea level rise. Right? 

Wrong.

Matt Ridley from the UK: The coerced consensus

Lennart Bengtsson is about as distinguished as climate scientists get. His decision two weeks ago to join the academic advisory board (on which I also sit, unremunerated) of Nigel Lawson’s Global Warming Policy Foundation was greeted with fury by many fellow climate scientists. Now in a McCarthyite move — his analogy — they have bullied him into resigning by refusing to collaborate with him unless he leaves.

The GWPF aims to ensure that the climate-change debate is more balanced. Its members are not “deniers”, yet as Lord Lawson said in a recent speech: “I have never in my life experienced the extremes of personal hostility, vituperation and vilification that I, along with other dissenters, of course, have received for my views on global warming and global-warming policies.”