The Science Behind the Trillion Tree Campaign

The 2018 report from the UN IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) estimates that an increase worldwide of one billion hectares (2.47 billion acres) of forestland would keep global warming this century below 1.5 degrees centigrade More...

Plants to the Rescue

Plants made our current atmosphere and plants can keep it balanced.

When plants first showed up on earth about 3.5 billion years ago, carbon dioxide made up more than 20% of the atmosphere. There was no significant oxygen in the air so More...

The Ideal Green Solution

The Salk Institute for Biological Studies has a simple solution for reducing atmospheric levels of  CO₂ without undoing civilization as we know it or denying people in developing countries the right to live as we do. Although Salk believes that More...

“There Are No Facts About the Future”

This wonderful quote comes from Don Swanson, scientist emeritus at the United States Geological Survey’s Hawaiian Volcano Observatory as he speculates about the future of the lava lake which has just More...

Stopping Climate Change Would Be an Unnatural Act

But Climate Change IS an Existential Issue

Is the climate changing? Yes, of course. 20,000 years ago there was a mile of ice over the top of 4,000 foot Mt. Mansfield in Vermont. Long before that, there was no ice at the earth’s poles More...

Rules for Detecting BS

Borrowed from Astronomer Carl Sagan.

He called them rules for avoiding baloney but he wrote at a politer time. Given the flood of alleged science on the Internet and the impossibility of fact-checking it all, these rules are even more More...

Why Vaccinations Need to be Mandatory

There are multiple news reports (see here and More...

Believers and Deniers

Which of these statements is scientific?

1. I believe in creationism exactly the way the story is told in Genesis.
2. I believe that species did evolve from each other but there must be some sort of intelligent guidance to account for wonderful constructs like the eye. More...

The Latest on Speeding Neutrinos

Son Jarah was interviewed last week on CRI, China's English-Language equivalent of the BBC. The subject was the possible evidence of neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light, which came from an experiment at CERN. Here's the show description from CRI:

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v-c: What If It’s Positive?

We all know that nothing can travel faster than c, the speed of light in a vacuum; or do we? A recent experiment called OPERA at CERN measured some neutrinos travelling fractionally faster than c. To be precise: (v-c)/c is approximately 3x10^-5More...