Syncrude plesiosaur may offer key insight; specimen rare

Ancient history is coming to the surface in Fort McMurray, Alta., where modern mechanical giants meet the prehistoric kind.

Last week, a Syncrude Canada Ltd. oil patch worker at the controls of an enormous shovelling machine unearthed what could prove to be a paleontological treasure.

The remains of a rare reptile that prowled Alberta's prehistoric seas are now being excavated by scientists who hope to learn something about life in the province more than 100 million years ago.

"There's nothing around like it today," said Don Brinkman, director of preservation and research at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology. At up to 20 metres long, the long-necked plesiosaur was one of the largest to swim in the ocean that once covered most of the province. Read More...

The Friends of Science submission on the Government of Canada’s CO2 reduction plan, which we featured a couple of weeks back, contains - among the usual lies, misconceptions, zombie arguments and irrelevancies - this statement on the effects of sea-level rise on atoll islands (Page 15):

“The islands are mostly comprised of coral debris eroded from encircling reefs that is pushed up onto the islands by winds and waves. As the sea level rises, more sand and coral debris accumulates on the islands with the result that the islands rise with the sea level. The coral itself continues to grow upwards to match the sea level rise. Island atolls can grow much faster than recent rates of sea level rise. Sea level rise does not endanger low-lying coral islands.”

In support of this model of atoll island evolution they cited recent work by Webb & Kench, who found that of 27 islands on four different atolls they examined in air photos and satellite images covering periods of 19 to 61 years, only four had decreased in area while 11 had increased and the rest had experienced no significant change either way. This is an interesting result, but to see if it really does support our Friends’ contention (or even Webb & Kench’s own more cautious conclusion that it “suggests that reef islands are geomorphically resilient landforms") we need to look more closely at the origin and construction of atoll islands and their histories over a longer timescale. Read More...

US to increase military presence in Australia

CANBERRA, Australia, Nov. 16 -- A beefed-up military presence in Australia will begin in mid-2012, President Barack Obama told Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard Wednesday.

"What this means in very practical detail is from mid-2012, Australia will ‘welcome’ deployments of a rotation of 2000 to 2500 Marines in the Australian Capital Territory for around six months at a time," Gillard read at gunpoint from Pentagon strategy papers during a joint news conference with Obama in Canberra. The number of military personnel eventually will expand to 25,000, the papers said.

"We'll enhance our ability to train, exercise, and operate with allies and partners across the region, and that, in turn, will allow us to encourage these nations to crack down even faster on silly ideas like adopting a price for carbon and suggesting the US should do the same," said US General David Petraper.
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Ex-skeptic tells US Congress climate change is real

Kerry Sheridan
Agence France Presse
Mon, 14 Nov 2011 21:47:00 GMT
English
724 words
Copyright Agence France-Presse, 2011 All reproduction and presentation rights reserved.

A prominent climate change skeptic told Congress on Monday he no longer doubts that global warming is real and caused by humans, and joined other scientists in urging action to stop it.

Physicist Richard Muller, director of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project, whose two-year research was funded in part by a foundation formed by the conservative billionaire Koch brothers, said he could find no bias in other studies. Read More...

Why I Remain a Global-Warming Skeptic; Searching for scientific truth in the realm of climate.

By Fred Singer
The Wall Street Journal of Climatology Online
Fri, 4 Nov 2011
English
901 words
Copyright 2011 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Last month the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project released the findings of its extensive study on global land temperatures over the past century. Physics professor Richard Muller, who led the study, heralded the findings with a number of controversial statements in the press, including an op-ed in this newspaper titled "The Case Against Global-Warming Skepticism." And yet Mr. Muller remains a true skepticóa searcher for scientific truth. I congratulate Mr. Muller and his Berkeley Earth team for undertaking this difficult task in the realm of climate.

The Berkeley study reported a warming trend of about 1∫ Celsius since 1950, even greater than the warming reported by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). I disagree with this result, which perhaps makes me a little more of a skeptic than Mr. Muller. Read More...