The immense gravity of the case weighed heavily on the Supreme Court on Thursday, with justices across the ideological spectrum expressing fears of the new order they could unleash.
The immediate question is whether Trump will face trial in his Jan. 6 criminal case before the 2024 election. But the conservative-led court‘s decision will shape history well beyond November.
„We‘re writing a rule for the ages,“ Justice Neil Gorsuch observed.
(September 1, 2015)
Now let’s take a look at point #2: Scientists are not in charge at the IPCC. Its latest report contains 60 chapters and totals more than 7,000 pages. Many good, sincere scientists toiled away on their own small portion of that enormous report. These people no doubt did their best to be honest and accurate.
But here’s the problem: almost no one will ever read that 7,000-page report. (…)
Everyone knows this. Which is why the IPCC also produces documents in the 20 to 30-page range bearing the title: Summary for Policymakers. (…)
In fact, IPCC authors only draft these summaries. And then something incredible transpires.
A big IPCC meeting takes place. Attended by governments. Although some people in the room are scientists, the vast majority are diplomats, politicians, foreign affairs specialists, bureaucrats, and assorted other officials. These people then spend the next week re-writing the summary authored by scientists.(…)
But the bad news doesn’t stop there. There’s actually a step in the IPCC process in which the original, lengthy report gets amended so that it conforms to the politically-negotiated Summary. I am not making this up.
(24 April 2024)
The question is, Do periods of low magnetosphere intensity also correlate with major upheavals in Earth‘s biosphere, the complete zone of our planet over which life exists, ranging from mountaintops to the deepest ocean trenches?
„Understanding these extreme events is important for their occurrence in the future, space climate predictions, and assessing the effects on the environment and on the Earth system,“ Sanja Panovska, a scientist at GFZ Potsdam in Germany, said in a statement.
(February 2, 2021)
Neanderthals once stretched across Eurasia from Portugal and the British Isles to Siberia. As Homo sapiens became more prevalent across these areas the Neanderthals faded in their turn, being generally consigned to history by some 40,000 years ago. (…)
Despite the bits of genetic ancestry they contributed to living people, all of our close relatives eventually died out, leaving Homo sapiens as the only human species. Their extinctions add one more intriguing, perhaps unanswerable question to the story of our evolution—why were we the only humans to survive?
(19 Feb 2021)
Do terrestrial geomagnetic field reversals have an effect on Earth‘s climate? Cooper et al. created a precisely dated radiocarbon record around the time of the Laschamps geomagnetic reversal about 41,000 years ago from the rings of New Zealand swamp kauri trees. This record reveals a substantial increase in the carbon-14 content of the atmosphere culminating during the period of weakening magnetic field strength preceding the polarity switch. The authors modeled the consequences of this event and concluded that the geomagnetic field minimum caused substantial changes in atmospheric ozone concentration that drove synchronous global climate and environmental shifts.
(…)
We precisely characterize the geomagnetic reversal and perform global chemistry-climate modeling and detailed radiocarbon dating of paleoenvironmental records to investigate impacts. We find that geomagnetic field minima ~42 ka, in combination with Grand Solar Minima, caused substantial changes in atmospheric ozone concentration and circulation, driving synchronous global climate shifts that caused major environmental changes, extinction events, and transformations in the archaeological record.
(…)
In addition, chronological uncertainties are complicated in radiocarbon-dated terrestrial and marine records around the Laschamps because of the elevated production of C and Be, cosmogenic radionuclides resulting from the substantial increase in high-energy cosmic radiation reaching the upper atmosphere. The high Be flux has been well described from Greenland and Antarctic ice core records (6, 20, 21), which reveal synchronous century-long Be peaks across the Laschamps that appear to reflect a series of pronounced Grand Solar Minima (GSM; prolonged periods of low solar activity similar to the Spörer and Maunder Minima: 1410 to 1540 CE and 1645 to 1715 CE), with unknown climate impacts (20, 21).
(November 19, 2020)
Effects of Earth’s magnetic field — Science News, November 21, 1970
„Earth’s magnetic field has frequently reversed at intervals of 1 million to 100 million years. A few scientists now suspect that these reversals may have had drastic effects on terrestrial life.… During the past 2.5 million years, eight species of one-cell marine animals called Radiolaria became extinct. Six of these extinctions occurred simultaneously throughout their geographic range immediately following magnetic reversals.“
(April 19, 2021)
The researchers examined the rings of the tree to look for changes in the amount of carbon-14 over a period of years, Gramling explains. Carbon-14 is useful not only for dating things, but because the interaction of cosmic rays with molecules in the atmosphere produces a lot of it. And when the Earth has a weakened magnetic field, more cosmic rays hit the planet.
The scientists indeed found a large spike in carbon-14 in the tree, which they could then compare with the rock record that indicated a magnetic reversal. (…)
In addition, there is the documented rise in cave art right about 41,000-42,000 years ago, Gramling points out.
(Feb 6, 2019)
Scientists on Monday released an emergency update to the World Magnetic Model, which cellphone GPS systems and military navigators use to orient themselves.
It‘s a minor change for most of us – noticeable only to people who are attempting to navigate very precisely very close to the Arctic.
(December 16, 2014)
Changes in the Earth‘s outer core trigger unpredictable changes in its magnetic field, an invisible force that extends from Earth‘s interior to where it meets a stream of charged particles emanating from the Sun.
(August 2008)
Correlations between geomagnetic-field and climate parameters have been suggested repeatedly, but possible links are controversially discussed. Here we test if weak (Earth-strength) magnetic fields can affect climatically relevant properties of seawater. We found the solubility of air in seawater to be by 15% lower under reduced magneticfield (20 mT) compared to normal field conditions (50 mT). The magnetic-field effect on CO2 solubility is twice as large, from which we surmise that geomagnetic field variations modulate the carbon exchange between atmosphere and ocean. A 1% reduction in magnetic dipole moment may release up to ten times more CO2 from the surface ocean than is emitted by subaerial volcanism.
(29.3.2018)
The strength of Earth’s main magnetic field is currently about 29.5 microteslas, down 5 microteslas, or 14 percent from its strength three centuries ago.
We know this. There is no question of this.
(24 April 2024)
The preservation of a temperate climate and liquid water on early Earth depends critically upon the strength of the magnetosphere (Sterenborg et al., 2011; Tarduno et al., 2014). Recent atmospheric escape models have suggested that both weak (<10 μT) and strong (>1 mT) magnetic fields could substantially enhance atmospheric escape under present-day solar wind conditions via the polar wind or cusp escape, respectively (Gronoff et al., 2020; Gunell et al., 2018; Lundin et al., 2007). During the Archean, the Sun was rotating faster, generating a stronger stellar dynamo and therefore the solar wind was more intense than today (Vidotto, 2021). An increased solar wind strength causes greater interaction with the upper atmosphere and greater escape of ions assuming a constant level of protection from Earth‘s magnetosphere. Previous magnetohydrodynamic simulations have suggested that if Earth‘s magnetic field was half its present day strength 3.5 Ga ago, the area of the polar cap (the area containing open dipolar magnetic field lines, allowing atmospheric escape via the polar wind) could increase by up to 50% (Sterenborg et al., 2011).