When the observed Arctic ice cover hit a record low last summer, I reviewed the last 20 years or so of ice coverage data, which showed a clear long(ish)-term decrease in both winter and summer ice cover, and concluded: At...
Posted on April 3, 2008 7:49 AM • 0 Comments •
The little fellow circled here (in the solar sense of "little" - it's probably a few thousand miles across) appeared on the 4th January, and probably marks the start of Solar Cycle 24. A slight dent in those bold...
Posted on January 23, 2008 7:35 AM • 1 Comments •
Reports of a Maunder-like minimum are somewhat premature
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Posted on December 13, 2007 12:20 PM • 5 Comments •
In amongst the sound and fury which accompanied last week's fight to the death between Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy and Steve McIntyre's Climate Audit in the 2007 Weblog Awards (which was eventually declared a draw), I noticed an interesting attitude...
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Posted on November 14, 2007 12:05 PM • 4 Comments •
The north pole of Titan, courtesy of Cassini: Here's why we think the dark patches are lakes, which everyone is very excited about. The first snapshots of Titan's southern polar region have also found a couple of probable small lakes,...
Posted on October 12, 2007 12:45 PM • 0 Comments •
Was the biggest cold snap in the last deglaciation caused by an extraterrestrial impact?
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Posted on October 3, 2007 9:20 AM • 16 Comments •
The BBC have just released the results of a global survey of attitudes to anthropogenic climate change, and it makes interesting reading.
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Posted on September 28, 2007 10:00 AM • 2 Comments •
Blockbuster headlines about the thawing of the North-West Passage are all very well, but you can't really assess the significance of the record low in Arctic summer sea-ice cover (as reported by both the European Space Agency and the National...
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Posted on September 20, 2007 11:54 AM • 5 Comments •
Pictures, and thoughts, on the recent flooding in the UK
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Posted on July 29, 2007 8:05 AM • 3 Comments •
All this fuss about the "F-word" should not distract from the fact that the mainstream media has problems reporting a science story even if we do pitch it right. Take, for example, Bryden et al.'s 2005 Nature paper, which reported...
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Posted on April 19, 2007 12:44 PM • 1 Comments •
Chris Rowan is a geologist specialising in the dark arts of paleomagnetism, and getting people to pay him to travel to exotic destinations for fieldwork. Having drilled up New Zealand during his PhD, he is now a post-doc at the University of Johannesburg. 
