Follow Science, New York Times, Coral’s Are Doing Well Amid Modest Climate Change

The New York Times (NYT) ran a story claiming climate change is threatening the survival of the world’s coral reefs. This is false. New coral colonies, adapted to warmer waters are being found with regularity and the largest coral reef in the world, Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, as set records for growth and extent in recent years, confounding climate model predictions of decline.

From ClimateRealism

By H. Sterling Burnett

The New York Times (NYT) ran a story claiming climate change is threatening the survival of the world’s coral reefs. This is false. New coral colonies, adapted to warmer waters are being found with regularity and the largest coral reef in the world, Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, as set records for growth and extent in recent years, confounding climate model predictions of decline.

In the story, “The World’s Coral Reefs Are Running Out of Time to Recover, Research Finds,” climate reporter, Quinn Glabicki, writes, “[c]oral reefs around the world, struggling as climate change drives more frequent and more intense marine heat waves, are running out of time for recovery, according to a sweeping new report on the state of the world’s corals published on Monday.

“The comprehensive global assessment … found that the world’s coral reefs had declined by 9.5 percent in the period from 2020 to 2024, compared with 1980 to 2009,” Glabicki continued. “The largest single-year coral decline on record, which affected 87 percent of reefs worldwide, occurred in 2024.”

Glabicki and the NYT’s fact checkers should have exercised a modicum of journalistic curiosity instead of reporting this study as if it were the final authoritative word on the state of the world’s corals. The 2023 through 2024 decline the story reported on represented one bad year of bleaching, but even the underlying report admits that bleaching does not per se equal coral death. Of the 8.9 percent of coral bleached, 6 percent had recovered in just one year, and based on past bleaching events, more coral might recover over time, resulting in possibly no net loss in coral during the sever 2023 to 2024 event. In fact, science hasn’t tracked coral extent for long, and hasn’t mapped all coral reefs, and types of coral, in existence.

Corals first developed on Earth during an explosion of life during the Cambrian period more than 540 million years ago when. At that time global temperatures, including ocean temperatures were warmer than today, and carbon dioxide concentrations were 10 to 30 times higher.

In fact, as discussed in Climate at a Glance: Coral Reefs, coral thrive in warm water, not cold water. As a result, the recent modest warming has allowed coral to expand their range poleward, while still thriving near the equator and the tropics.

Evidence, that is coral responses to past bleaching events tied to warming, also clearly shows that coral bleaching is not tantamount to coral death. Subsequent to previous strong El Niño induced recent bleaching events at the GBR, the coral reef repeatedly set new records for coral extent. That’s right, the coral not only recovered, but the coral colonies also seemingly adapted and expanded. This fact has been discussed in a number of previous Climate Realism posts, here, here, and here, for example.

In fact, warming seas are hardly the only and perhaps are not even the primary cause of bleaching. As discussed at Climate Realism, here and here, for example, inappropriate commercial fishing, terrestrial run-off and pollution from farms and urban development along the coasts, sedimentation, chemicals in some sun screens, and periods of rapidly cooling waters have all been linked to bleaching events and declines in local coral populations.

In recent years massive new and growing coral reefs have been discovered in places previously believed to be inhospitable to coral colonization. In a story titled “This huge coral reef has only just been discovered, and it’s undamaged by climate change,” CBC reported on the discovery of reef, deeper than most, suggesting there may be more unknown large reefs in oceans. CBC wrote:

Scientists have discovered a pristine, three-kilometre-long reef of giant rose-shaped corals off the coast of Tahiti, in waters of the southern Pacific Ocean thought to be deep enough to protect it from the bleaching effects of the warming ocean.

…

The reef off Tahiti lies in the “twilight zone” 30 to 120 metres below the surface where there is still enough light for coral to grow and reproduce. The discovery off Tahiti’s shores suggests there may be many more unknown large reefs in our oceans, given that only about 20 per cent of the entire seabed is mapped, according to UNESCO scientists.

“It also raises questions about how coral reefs become more resilient to climate change,” UNESCO’s head of marine policy, Julian Barbiere, told Reuters.

And that’s just one recent coral discovery. In 2022, research reported in a Phys.org story titled “Half a trillion corals: World-first coral count prompts rethink of extinction risks,” found that number of corals in the Pacific Ocean alone exceed half a trillion with likely trillions more globally.

The scientists involved in the research say the sheer number of corals and coral species means the risk of extinction due to climate change is vastly lower than previously claimed.

“In the Pacific, we estimate there are roughly half a trillion corals,’ said the study lead author, Dr. Andy Dietzel from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University,” writes Phys.org. “This is about the same number of trees in the Amazon, or birds in the world.

“The findings suggest that while a local loss of coral can be devastating to coral reefs, the global extinction risk of most coral species is lower than previously estimated,” Deitzel continued.

It is unclear if the trillions of corals and newly discovered reefs disclosed in those two recent discoveries were included in the sampling conducted by the authors of the report discussed by NYT, but it is doubtful. The study purports to examine long-known, long-term coral reef systems. Throwing the newly discovered trillions of corals in a study that was already ongoing at the time of discovery would have necessarily resulted in disclosing an increase in coral, not the decrease reported.

In fact, just two weeks before the NYT went on its coral decline hype, the Guardian, a well-known liberal paper which covers climate change extensively and alarmingly, ran a story, titled, “The Great Barrier Reef isn’t dead yet. According to News Corp that makes climate science a ‘pseudo-religion,’” discussing both a news story and a commentary published in The Australian. The news report and the commentary discuss the fact that extensive surveys of the world’s largest coral reef, The Great Barrier Reef (GBR), reveal that coral cover has rebounded to near-record levels across all regions following a recent mass bleaching event, with research and data indicating that coral reef system maintains resilience and is able to bounce back from disturbance.

Twenty-twenty six’s good news about the GBR followed closely on three straight years of record setting extent of the GBR. (see the figure, below).

The GBR’s success is due to the ability of the corals which make it up to adapt and evolve in the face of various environmental perturbations. It is not just that coral are bouncing back, it is that the newly formed/recovered coral are evolving rapidly to adapt and flourish in warmer temperatures. There is no reason that what’s happening on the Great Barrier Reef, shouldn’t also be happening in coral colonies across the globe, with newly formed corals showing plasticity and flexible responses in response to warming waters.

Even if it were the case that corals were undergoing decline, which is debatable, a decline caused primarily by warming oceans, also open to scientific debate, it is unclear whether anthropogenic warming is the cause. In fact the authors of the report underlying the NYT story assume human caused climate change is responsible for recent ocean warming, but not only is this connection not proven, other possible factors were ignored. The study reports on coral conditions, with the authors doing little or no original research into the cause of the present coral conditions they monitored. Yet other forcing factors, such as more sunlight reaching the sea surface as shipping emissions have been reduced or natural factors like the ongoing El Nino, discussed recently here and here, are also at play in ocean warming but have nothing to do with greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, recent bleaching events have coincided with recent strong El Ninos.

In the end, Glabicki and the New York Times went off half-cocked, reporting on a single study’s findings about coral reef conditions without checking them against other sources of data and research on coral. This makes for a scary story that advances the narrative that humans are causing catastrophic climate change, but doesn’t honestly report on the status of coral reefs and the various factors that affect them. Get back to reporting, New York Times, not advocating for progressive causes like ending fossil fuel use to battle a purported climate crisis.

Green Taxes Are Decimating British Industry – And My New Report Proves It

Britain lost two oil refineries last year – Grangemouth closed in April and Lindsey followed in August, leaving just four operating sites: Fawley, Humber, Pembroke and Stanlow.

Britain is increasingly dependent on imports.

Refining is highly energy intensive, so refiners have always had strong commercial incentives to improve efficiency: every unit of energy they save reduces costs.

AI generated by Grok

From The Daily Sceptic

By Kathryn Porter

Green taxes are decimating British industry and driving up energy prices, with nothing to show for it as emissions are merely pushed offshore, says Kathryn Porter, who has a new report setting out the damning details.

This week I published a new report into Britain’s oil refining sector, Fuel, Refineries and the UK ETS: What Policymakers Need to Know. Its conclusions are alarming.

Britain lost two oil refineries last year – Grangemouth closed in April and Lindsey followed in August, leaving just four operating sites: Fawley, Humber, Pembroke and Stanlow. My report finds that Government policy, and in particular the UK Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), is making it increasingly hard for the remaining refineries to compete.

This matters because liquid fuels still provide 47% of UK final energy consumption. Diesel, petrol and jet kerosene remain essential to transport, aviation, agriculture, construction and industry, with no alternatives available at scale in the near term.

Yet Britain is increasingly dependent on imports. In 2025 we imported 15.5 million tonnes more petroleum products than we exported, the largest deficit since becoming a net importer in 2013. Closing domestic refining capacity doesn’t mean we stop consuming refined products, it just means we import more, effectively outsourcing their production. Bizarrely, Government policy is actively encouraging this.

My analysis finds that the four remaining UK refineries face a net ETS cash cost of around £200 million per year. Their gross carbon-cost disadvantage relative to refiners outside carbon-pricing regimes is around £540 million per year. That’s a significant handicap in an internationally competitive, relatively low-margin business.

British refineries compete against facilities in the US, Middle East and Asia, many of which are newer, larger and more sophisticated, while also benefiting from state support, preferential access to crude oil, cheaper labour and much cheaper energy.

ExxonMobil UK’s Managing Director Paul Greenwood recently told MPs that his company is paying £70-80 million a year in carbon dioxide costs, which he expects to rise to £150 million over the next four or five years. His competitors, he pointed out, aren’t paying them. He explicitly identified this cost differential as one of the factors causing UK refineries to close. This might be defensible if the ETS was causing refiners to reduce their emissions. But it isn’t.

Refining is highly energy intensive, so refiners have always had strong commercial incentives to improve efficiency: every unit of energy they save reduces costs. European refineries were making significant efficiency improvements long before emissions trading existed.

Beyond incremental efficiency gains, there are few meaningful investments UK refiners can make today to materially reduce their emissions. All four remaining refineries have explored major decarbonisation investments, but none has gone ahead. Carbon capture and hydrogen schemes are not commercially viable without substantial government support, which has been discussed for years but not actually delivered.

Increasing the carbon price doesn’t magically make new decarbonisation technologies available. It just makes refining in Britain more expensive.

The Government knows carbon pricing creates a competitiveness problem, which is why energy-intensive industries receive some ETS allowances for free and why it is introducing a Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM). The CBAM is supposed to protect British manufacturers by imposing an equivalent carbon cost on imported goods. Except refined petroleum products aren’t included.

A tanker of diesel or jet fuel can arrive from India, the Middle East or elsewhere without bearing the carbon cost imposed on the British refinery with which it competes. And refiners can’t simply pass their ETS costs through to consumers: refined products are internationally traded and largely fungible. If the British product becomes too expensive, buyers can buy imported alternatives.

When a British refinery closes, our demand for fuel doesn’t disappear – it’s met by imports instead. Imports that often have a higher carbon intensity because they are refined in countries with dirtier energy, with further emissions incurred in transportation. Closing the British refinery does not eliminate the associated emissions, it simply moves them somewhere else. That’s not decarbonisation, it’s offshoring.

In fact, it’s a form of greenwashing. Politicians celebrate reductions in Britain’s territorial emissions while ignoring emissions embodied in the increasing amounts of imported goods we use.

One of the most significant findings in my report comes from examining emissions trading compliance data. Of 1,702 UK installations on the EU ETS compliance register, 292 closed between 2008 and 2020. Since the UK ETS began in 2021, another 183 sites out of 1,415 registered installations have closed. Those figures don’t yet include Lindsey and Grangemouth.

Free allocations tell a similar story, falling from 37.8 million tonnes in 2021 to just 23.6 million tonnes in 2026, a drop of 38%. The largest recent reduction was 4.6 million allowances following the closure of the Port Talbot blast furnaces. Yet British demand for steel didn’t disappear with the blast furnaces. UK steel demand actually increased from 8.1 million tonnes in 2023 to 9.3 million tonnes in 2024 while the domestic share of supply fell dramatically.

Carbon dioxide molecules don’t care whether they were emitted in Port Talbot, Immingham, India or China. If climate change is the justification for these policies, global rather than domestic emissions are what matter.

This also casts a different light on falling European energy demand. EU industrial energy consumption fell 8.1% between 2014 and 2024 and has been in structural decline since 1990. Since the 2022 energy crisis there has been a particularly sharp contraction in energy-intensive industrial output as European businesses struggle with high energy costs.

This hits demand for refined products because factories consume diesel for on-site logistics, mobile machinery and backup generation, while their supply chains generate road-freight demand. Close the factory and all of that demand disappears. Falling energy consumption isn’t necessarily evidence of successful decarbonisation – it often just means we’re producing less.

This absurdity isn’t confined to industry. Since coal disappeared from Britain’s electricity system, gas has been the principal source of large-scale dispatchable generation. We still need it when wind and solar output is low, and there is currently no commercially viable investment that allows gas generators to significantly reduce or eliminate their emissions. Renewables aren’t incentivised by the ETS since they require huge subsidies to be built.

So what exactly is the ETS achieving in electricity? It makes electricity more expensive. And that’s it.

Gas generation sets the wholesale electricity price most of the time, with carbon costs now accounting for more than a fifth of wholesale electricity prices. Unlike refineries, generators can pass those costs through, so households and businesses pay more for their electricity.

Worse, we tax industries into near-oblivion and then, realising they’re actually important, are forced to consider subsidising them to help them stay open. That is utterly incoherent.

The original economic logic behind carbon pricing is superficially attractive: put a price on emissions and allow businesses to discover the cheapest means of reducing them. But that mechanism only works where real, viable decarbonisation choices exist.

Where economically sensible efficiency improvements are available, businesses already have strong incentives to pursue them. Where commercially viable substitutes exist, businesses already have incentives to adopt them. Where neither exists, increasing the carbon price doesn’t create them. It either makes British production uncompetitive against imports or raises costs for British consumers.

My report concludes that the UK should, at the very least, remove refineries from the ETS. Apply the same analysis to the rest of the economy and the justification for the entire scheme falls apart.

The UK needs to stop confusing lower territorial emissions with decarbonisation. An environmental policy which exports emissions, destroys domestic industry, increases import dependence and raises global emissions is deeply irrational.

It’s time to abolish the ETS.

Fuel, Refineries and the UK ETS: What Policymakers Need to Know can be downloaded here.

Kathryn Porter is an Independent Energy Consultant. She holds a Master’s degree in Physics and an MBA, and is an associate member of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Energy Studies executive council. Subscribe to her blog.

Why Net-Zero Policies Risk Human Catastrophe and Carbon Dioxide Doesn’t

For years, the CO2 Coalition and independent scientists have warned that the U.S Fifth National Climate Assessment (NCA5) rested on a foundation of sand. Its dramatic projections of catastrophe relied heavily on U.N.-sponsored Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 (RCP8.5) and its successor SSP5-8.5—both extreme predictions of carbon dioxide emissions that were treated as realistic.

From CO2 Coalition

By Angela Wheeler

For years, the CO2 Coalition and independent scientists have warned that the U.S Fifth National Climate Assessment (NCA5) rested on a foundation of sand. Its dramatic projections of catastrophe relied heavily on U.N.-sponsored Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 (RCP8.5) and its successor SSP5-8.5—both extreme predictions of carbon dioxide emissions that were treated as realistic.

As far back as 2017, scientists noted the far-fetched nature of the U.N. predictions. In August, the Trump administration proposed an amendment to NCA5 that acknowledges its emission forecasts are implausible and must not guide federal policymaking. This is a welcome restoration of scientific integrity.

The amendment, issued under the U.S. Global Change Research Program and aligned with Executive Order 14303, “Restoring Gold Standard Science,” states that results dependent on RCP8.5, SSP5-8.5, or equivalent emission scenarios “should not be used as expected, baseline, business-as-usual, likely, central, or policy-relevant federal planning futures.”

Any NCA5 figure, table, or claim based on these “implausible” scenarios must carry an explicit caveat. Projections of damages, health effects, or ecosystem collapse cannot stand alone as policy premises without comparison to plausible alternatives and real-world observations.

This correction is long overdue. RCP8.5 was never designed to forecast the most likely future. It was constructed as an upper-bound for climate-model experiments—an exploratory tool of imaginary, extreme conditions. Its predictions of global warming defied observed trends in growth of coal consumption, technological development, and socioeconomic trajectories, according to multiple peer-reviewed analyses.

Treating extreme emission scenarios as ordinary distorted the entire national climate assessment. It inflated projected impacts, fueled exaggerated risk narratives, and justified costly regulatory interventions that ignored economics and human welfare. The amendment properly requires that such results be contextualized or set aside for decision-making.

Yet this amendment, while necessary, is only a first step. NCA5’s deeper problems remain. It continues to lean on climate models that have systematically overestimated warming and failed basic observational tests. It elevates politically driven documents of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change over scientific data. Most critically, it omits the extraordinary benefits of rising atmospheric CO2 and of the fossil fuels that produce it.

Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant; it is the essential plant food that makes life on Earth possible. Current concentrations, near 420 parts per million, remain far below levels that have prevailed for much of Earth’s history and are still low for optimal plant growth. Decades of laboratory and field evidence demonstrate that elevated CO2 increases photosynthetic rates, improves water-use efficiency, and boosts crop yields—wheat by 20% to 30% and soybeans by up to 46% under controlled conditions. Satellite observations confirm global greening, with rising CO2 responsible for most of the increase in leaf area across vast regions. Nitrogen fertilizers derived from fossil fuels support roughly half the world’s population.

Without affordable energy and the CO2 fertilization effect, feeding 8 billion people becomes far more difficult.

Modest warming itself brings many benefits, including longer growing seasons in temperate zones, reduced cold-related mortality (which exceeds deaths from heat), and expanded habitable ranges. Trends of weather-driven disasters—hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires—do not match the alarmist storyline when examined against long-term records rather than model outputs.

The real catastrophe would come from policies that deliberately restrict reliable energy in pursuit of net zero. Such policies raise energy costs, harm the poor, slow development in the Global South, and risk food insecurity by limiting fertilizers and mechanization.

True gold-standard science demands that we begin with observations, test models against data, disclose assumptions transparently, and weigh risks and benefits. Future assessments must evaluate every emission scenario on empirical grounding, not institutional pedigree. They must acknowledge that humanity’s use of fossil fuels has lifted billions from poverty while restoring CO2 to levels that enhance the biosphere.

Validating what rigorous scientists have documented for years, the proposed NCA5 amendment is progress. Now, policymakers should seize this moment to reassess the entire report against observations, restore balance by including the benefits of CO2, and reject fearmongering that has driven policy for too long.

Energy abundance, a greener planet, and prosperity can be celebrated and advanced further through the application of science when ideology is set aside.

Originally published in Daily Wire on September 1, 2026.

Angela Wheeler is executive director of the CO2 Coalition, Fairfax, Virginia. She is a cum laude graduate of Emporia State University, Kansas, where she studied communication, with additional biology and pre-medicine coursework.

New CFACT Report: ESA Implementation Is Severely Flawed

A new CFACT policy report, “Endangered Species Act Implementation Is Severely Flawed,” by David Wojick, Ph.D., examines several major problems with the way the ESA is administered today — from extraordinarily expensive permitting requirements to questionable federal spending priorities and ongoing legal battles over recovered species such as the gray wolf.

From CFACT

By Christina Norman

The Endangered Species Act was created with a worthy goal: protecting species at risk of extinction. But more than 50 years later, its implementation has strayed far from that original purpose.

A new CFACT policy report, “Endangered Species Act Implementation Is Severely Flawed,” by David Wojick, Ph.D., examines several major problems with the way the ESA is administered today — from extraordinarily expensive permitting requirements to questionable federal spending priorities and ongoing legal battles over recovered species such as the gray wolf.

Among the report’s findings, a Florida landowner seeking to build a home on five acres faced an ESA-related fee of $139,440, while federal ESA expenditures totaled more than $1.1 billion in the most recent year examined.

The report argues that protecting endangered species remains a worthy objective, but that the ESA’s implementation needs significant reform to better respect property rights, sound science and responsible government.

Read the full report below.

Endangered Species Act Implementation is Severely Flawed

Earth’s Magnetic North Pole Now Closer to Russia Than Canada After 2,200 km Journey

The north magnetic pole moves because of changes deep inside Earth.

The geodynamo is the self-sustaining process that generates and maintains Earth’s magnetic field through the motion of electrically conducting fluid in the outer core.

Despite the north magnetic pole’s ongoing drift toward Siberia (Russia), there is no evidence that a full geomagnetic reversal (polarity flip) is imminent.

AI generated by Grok

Earth’s north magnetic pole has continued its long drift from the Canadian Arctic toward Siberia (Russia), and recent official models confirm it is now closer to Russia than to Canada.

The map you shared illustrates the historical path of the north magnetic (dip) pole, the point where the magnetic field is vertical, from roughly 1590 through 2019. Key labeled positions include:

Early locations near what is now northern Canada (e.g., around 1590-1730).

Movement through the 19th and 20th centuries (1860, 1900, 1975).

Acceleration northward past Ellesmere Island toward the geographic North Pole by 2000- 2019.

Unlike the fixed geographic North Pole, the magnetic pole wanders because of changes in the flow of molten iron in Earth’s outer core, which generates the geomagnetic field.

Recent updates (World Magnetic Model 2025):

The World Magnetic Model 2025 (WMM2025), released by NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information and the British Geological Survey, tracks the pole’s ongoing movement. A higher-resolution version (WMMHR2025) was also issued for improved accuracy.

After more than 190 years centered in the Canadian Arctic, the pole has traveled over ~2,200 km overall. It accelerated in the 1990s- 2000s (reaching ~50- 60 km/year at times) but has slowed to roughly 35- 36 km/year recently, the largest deceleration recorded in the modern era.

By the mid- 2020s it lies closer to Siberia/northern Russia than to Canada. Positions around 2025- 2026 are near ~85.5- 86°N and longitudes shifting eastward into the Eastern Hemisphere (roughly 135- 140°E range in models).

Navigation systems (aviation, shipping, military, smartphones, and GPS corrections) rely on the WMM for magnetic declination. Outdated models would introduce growing errors, especially in polar regions. Blackout/caution zones (where compasses become unreliable) also shift with the pole. The model is updated at least every five years for this reason.

Experts emphasize this is normal secular variation in the geomagnetic field, not a sign of an imminent full pole reversal (which occurs on timescales of hundreds of thousands of years and is not indicated by current trends).

Official NOAA/BGS data and ongoing satellite monitoring (e.g., Swarm) provide the underlying measurements.

The north magnetic pole, the point on the Earth where a compass needle would point down, is sliding about 35 miles closer to Russia each year. By Jonathan Corum | Source: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

The north magnetic pole moves because of changes deep inside Earth.

Earth’s magnetic field is generated by the geodynamo in the outer core (roughly 2,900- 5,150 km below the surface). This region consists of liquid iron and nickel that is extremely hot and continuously in motion.

Heat from the inner core drives convection currents in the molten metal.

Earth’s rotation organizes these flows into large- scale patterns.

The moving electrically conducting fluid creates electric currents, which in turn produce the planet’s magnetic field (the dynamo effect).

These fluid motions are turbulent and slowly change over decades to centuries. As the pattern of flow shifts, the overall magnetic field weakens or strengthens in different regions and its orientation gradually drifts. The points on the surface where the field is vertical, the magnetic (dip) poles, therefore wander.

This process is called secular variation. It has been continuous for at least the last few centuries of direct observation (and far longer in the geologic record). The recent acceleration toward Siberia, followed by a slowdown, simply reflects evolving flow patterns in the outer core; it is not a sign of an imminent full polarity reversal.

In short: the pole moves because the liquid-metal “engine” that creates the magnetic field itself is slowly rearranging.

AI generated by Grok

The geodynamo is the self- sustaining process that generates and maintains Earth’s magnetic field through the motion of electrically conducting fluid in the outer core.

1. The Setting

  • Outer core: A layer of liquid iron-nickel alloy (with lighter elements such as sulfur, oxygen, or silicon) lying between roughly 2,900 km and 5,150 km depth.
  • Inner core: A solid iron-rich sphere at the center that is slowly growing as the Earth cools.
  • The fluid is an excellent electrical conductor and is vigorously stirred by convection.

2. Energy Sources Driving the FlowTwo main buoyancy sources power the convection:

  • Thermal convection: Heat escaping from the inner core and residual heat from Earth’s formation create temperature differences. Hotter, less-dense fluid rises; cooler, denser fluid sinks.
  • Compositional convection: As the inner core solidifies, pure iron crystallizes onto it, leaving behind a residual liquid enriched in lighter elements. This lighter fluid is buoyant and rises.

These buoyancy forces, combined with Earth’s rapid rotation, produce complex, turbulent flow.

3. Role of Rotation (Coriolis Force)

Because Earth rotates once per day, the Coriolis force strongly organizes the fluid motion.

The flow tends to form elongated, helical columns aligned roughly with the rotation axis (Taylor columns). This rotational constraint is crucial: it converts chaotic convection into organized, large- scale helical motions that are efficient at generating magnetic fields.

4. The Dynamo Mechanism ItselfThe fundamental principle is electromagnetic induction in a moving conductor:

  1. A small “seed” magnetic field is present (left over from earlier times or generated by weak currents).
  2. Conducting fluid moves across magnetic field lines, inducing electric currents (Faraday’s law / v×B\mathbf{v} \times \mathbf{B}).
  3. These electric currents generate their own magnetic field (Ampère’s law).
  4. If the fluid motions are sufficiently vigorous and helical, the newly generated field reinforces and amplifies the original field, overcoming the natural tendency of the field to decay by ohmic dissipation.

In mathematical terms, the evolution of the magnetic field

B\mathbf{B} in the core is governed by the induction equation:

∂B∂t=∇×(v×B)+η∇2B

where v\mathbf{v} is the fluid velocity and η\eta is the magnetic diffusivity. The first term on the right is the generative (induction) term; the second is the dissipative term. A self-sustaining dynamo requires the inductive term to dominate on average.

5. Outcome and Observed Behavior

  • The process preferentially generates a strong dipole field aligned roughly with the rotation axis (the familiar north- south magnetic poles).
  • Higher-order multipoles and non- axisymmetric components are also produced.
  • Because the underlying fluid flow is turbulent and time- varying, the magnetic field continually changes:
    • Secular variation (gradual drift of the poles, changes in field strength and direction).
    • Occasional excursions and, on longer timescales, full polarity reversals.

The same physics that keeps the field alive for billions of years is also responsible for the observed wandering of the magnetic north pole toward Siberia in recent centuries.

In summary: heat- driven convection of liquid metal in a rapidly rotating, electrically conducting outer core converts kinetic energy into magnetic energy through electromagnetic induction, continuously regenerating Earth’s magnetic field against resistive losses.

A closer look at the map above shows the north dip magnetic pole (marked by a bold white asterisk) is now closer to Siberia than it is to Canada. Credit: NOAA/NCEI

Despite the north magnetic pole’s ongoing drift toward Siberia (Russia), there is no evidence that a full geomagnetic reversal (polarity flip) is imminent.

Key reasons experts reach this conclusion:

Pole wander but not reversal

The magnetic poles have always wandered due to changing flow patterns in the outer- core geodynamo. The recent acceleration and subsequent slowdown toward Russia is part of normal secular variation, not a precursor to a flip.

Field strength is still within normal historical ranges


The global dipole field has weakened by roughly 9-10 % over the past ~200 years, and the South Atlantic Anomaly (a region of unusually weak field) continues to evolve. However, paleomagnetic records show that the field has weakened and recovered many times without reversing. Similar anomalies have appeared and disappeared over the past 9,000 years.

Reversals take thousands of years


When polarity reversals do occur, they unfold over several thousand years (typically 1,000- 10,000 years). The field becomes weaker and more multipolar during the transition, then re-establishes itself in the opposite orientation. Nothing in the current satellite or ground data indicates that such a multi-millennial process has begun.

Last full reversal was ~780,000 years ago


Reversals happen irregularly (average interval of a few hundred thousand years in the recent geological past). The present “normal” polarity interval is longer than average but not unusually long. There is no fixed schedule that makes a reversal “overdue.”

Laschamp (Laschamps) excursion (also called the Adams event) ~42,000 years ago

The 42,000- year event was a major excursion, not a full reversal. It was a short- lived geomagnetic excursion: the magnetic field weakened dramatically (down to as low as ~5- 25% of its normal strength), the poles wandered widely (and briefly appeared reversed in some records), but the field then recovered and returned to the same polarity it had before. The whole event lasted only a few hundred to about 1,000- 2,000 years.

Recent studies


Research reconstructing the field over the last 9,000 years (including work from Lund University and others) concludes that features like the South Atlantic Anomaly are recurring and that Earth is not currently heading toward a polarity reversal. The anomaly is expected to weaken or disappear on timescales of a few hundred years.

The magnetic north pole’s march toward Russia is real and requires navigation models to be updated, but it is ordinary geodynamo behavior. A full geomagnetic reversal remains a distant, unpredictable future possibility measured in many thousands to hundreds of thousands of years, not decades.

How dare YOU – Doom Pixie Greta and your political pals!?!

Swedish activist Greta Thunberg earned her moniker Doom Pixie because of her diminutive height and shrill accusations of human and planetary doom allegedly due to fossil-fuel-fueled climate change.

How dare YOU employ bogus scares based on computer models that can’t even recreate past climates, much less predict future climate and weather? How dare you turn every temperature and weather event, flood, drought, and forest fire into assertions that wildlife, humanity, and planet face imminent demise?

How dare YOU claim plant-fertilizing, planet-greening, life-sustaining carbon dioxide from fuels, manufacturing, and agriculture somehow endangers our human health and welfare?

From CFACT

By Paul Driessen

Swedish activist Greta Thunberg earned her moniker Doom Pixie because of her diminutive height and shrill accusations of human and planetary doom allegedly due to fossil-fuel-fueled climate change.

Her most famous tirade was directed at world leaders for allegedly doing too little to stop it.

“How dare you?” she fiercely scowled at United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, presidents, prime ministers, dignitaries, and functionaries in the UN’s General Assembly Hall.

“You have stolen my dreams, my childhood with your empty words…. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction. How dare you?!”

No, Miss Thunberg and the politicians, bureaucrats, and activists who turn your diatribes into policy.

How dare YOU employ bogus scares based on computer models that can’t even recreate past climates, much less predict future climate and weather? How dare you turn every temperature and weather event, flood, drought, and forest fire into assertions that wildlife, humanity, and planet face imminent demise?

How dare YOU claim plant-fertilizing, planet-greening, life-sustaining carbon dioxide from fuels, manufacturing, and agriculture somehow endangers our human health and welfare?

How dare YOU demand that we shut down the energy systems that make our lives, health, and living standards possible? That we must be deprived of modern comforts, aspirations and loved ones, because you force us to eliminate energy systems that work – and replace them with expensive weather-dependent substitutes that bring blackouts, poverty, disease, deprivation, joblessness and shortened lives?

How dare YOU tell the poorest people on Earth that they must renounce their God-given right to modern technologies, health, and living standards – and sacrifice their landscapes and wildlife with wind turbines, solar panels, and renewable energy trash on your altar of climate fanaticism?

How dare YOU demand that we abandon free enterprise democratic capitalism that has brought health and prosperity to billions – and replace it with socialist-communist-totalitarian governments that have immiserated billions and starved and murdered over 100,000,000 people?

Shortly after the October 7, 2023, barbarities, Doom Pixie shifted her focus to promoting Hamas, Hezbollah and Palestinian terrorist dreams of eradicating Israel and Israelis “from the river to the sea.” Perhaps her audiences had tired of her climate rants, perhaps because they realize the “crisis” is wildly overblown, the world will need oil and gas for decades to come, and mining, manufacturing and installing wind, solar and battery power is environmentally horrific. Or maybe vilifying Israel simply pays better.

But her climate harangues continue – and her acolytes still glory in imposing diktats that raise costs and cost lives, while doing nothing to stabilize Earth’s frequently and perpetually fluctuating climate.

Indeed, I am eternally astonished at how often I think their callous insanity and depravity couldn’t possibly sink any lower … and I’m proven wrong.

California policies have forced oil drilling and production, refineries, coal, gas and nuclear power plants, and even hydroelectric plants to shut down. Big surprise: it now has the highest electricity and gasoline prices in the continental USA. Kind bureaucrats now say they will shave a few cents off per gallon.

By mandating improved “tire efficiency,” so tires glide along roads with less resistance. All-season 65,000-mile US tires must now be replaced with 27,000-mile Euro tires. That will at least double tire costs over a vehicle’s lifetime. Far worse, it will bring more accidents, injuries and deaths, because the new tires require longer stopping distances, especially under wet conditions.

California, Connecticut and New York also lead the US on Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative and net-zero policies – with Virginia’s “moderate” governor and legislators working feverishly to catch up, thereby driving household, school, hospital, business, factory, and data center electricity and operating costs ever higher. You need heating, air conditioning, cooking, lighting, and computing? Too bad.

Under those same climate-centric policies, Britain’s per capita primary energy consumption has plummeted since 2005. Its wealth and living standards have done likewise. Meanwhile, its electricity prices are among the world’s highest, thanks to wind and solar replacing coal, natural gas, and nuclear power plants. Jobs and entire industries have disappeared, and residents have been forced to remove air conditioning units if they actually use them during heatwaves.

The jobs, energy cost, and industrial situation is just as bleak in Germany where “bathroom ministers” now inform homeowners they cannot have a shower and bathtub in the same bathroom.

As absurd as all this is, nothing compares to the totalitarian imperialism of UN, European, World Bank, World Economic Forum, Obama-Biden, and other “climate crisis,” “energy transition,” and “traditional agriculture” ministries. For decades, they have imposed their “moral” and “ethical” principles on poor countries, to keep them from developing “excessively.” Until recently, they’ve gotten away with it.

Obama science advisor John Holdren insisted that the United States and other industrialized nations must “de-develop” – and then tell underdeveloped countries what “ecologically feasible development” they will be permitted to reach.

For decades, this meant no grants or loans for coal, gas, or even nuclear power plants – because impoverished countries were expected to “leapfrog dirty fossil fuels” and go directly to “clean, renewable, sustainable” wind and solar.

That’s why, even today, the average Sub-Sahara African has electricity 20 minutes a day, 141 minutes a week, 123 hours per year (out of 8,760) – sporadically, at totally unpredictable times, for a few minutes or hours at a time. Homes, shops, and even schools and hospitals are severely energy-deprived, and access to clean water is a luxury.

Eco-imperialist, neo-colonialist policies have also dictated agricultural and health policies. Farmers were told for years that they must not use pesticides, herbicides, or biotech seeds – especially if they want to sell their produce in European markets. They should even forego tractors and be content with ox-pulled plows and “traditional,” “ecological” subsistence farming.

Even malaria control must be done without pesticides, with often counterfeit and substandard drugs, and with hospitals that lack clean water, adequate electricity and even window screens.

Thankfully, President Trump has restored regulatory sanity and American energy dominance – and ended the use of foreign aid as a weapon to browbeat poor countries into accepting these lethal policies.

That compassionate approach – and the refusal of China, India, and other emerging powerhouse economies to buy into the insanity – has further encouraged still poor developing countries to reject eco-imperialism and neo-colonialism. They now tell the world they want, demand, and expect rapid, dramatic transformations in living standards, nutrition, and health through modern energy, industrial, agricultural, and healthcare infrastructure. As their sacred right.

The world is changing, at least in many states and countries. It’s about time. But there is still much left to be done – beginning with electing American, European, Asian, and African leaders who understand and champion these realities.

Wrong, New York Times, Nepal’s Tragedy Wasn’t Caused by Climate Change

The New York Times (NYT), in its article “Climate Change Raises Risk of Disasters Like Nepal Floods,” claims that climate change increased the risk of the catastrophic glacier collapse and flooding in Nepal by thawing permafrost and destabilizing the mountainside. This is false.

From ClimateRealism

By Anthony Watts

The New York Times (NYT), in its article “Climate Change Raises Risk of Disasters Like Nepal Floods,” claims that climate change increased the risk of the catastrophic glacier collapse and flooding in Nepal by thawing permafrost and destabilizing the mountainside. This is false. The best evidence suggests the disaster was primarily the result of a complex cascade of geological failures and human infrastructure vulnerabilities, not proof of a climate crisis.

The scenes from Nepal are heartbreaking. Entire communities were devastated as millions of tons of rock, ice, mud, and water thundered down the Langtang Lirung valley. Hundreds are dead or missing, roads and bridges have been swept away, and the landscape has been permanently altered.

When disasters of this magnitude occur, journalists should resist the temptation to immediately assign blame before the evidence is fully understood.

The NYT did exactly the opposite.

Even within its own reporting, the paper admits scientists are “still determining the exact cause” of the catastrophe and that research could take months. Despite this acknowledgement, the NYT nevertheless frames the disaster as another consequence of climate change from the headline onward. That is not reporting. It is climate crisis narrative promotion.

“Climate change is heating up the Himalayas and supercharging the risk of disasters like the deadly flash flooding in Nepal and Tibet,” says the NYT, which quotes one researcher saying, “‘There’s a very straight link between climate change and these types of disasters.’”

Yet just a few paragraphs later the article quotes Newcastle University geomorphologist Stuart Dunning, “I don’t think we can simply say this is a result of climate change.”

That caution should have been the headline. Instead, it was buried.

Dr. Roger Pielke Jr.’s analysis of the event, “What Actually Caused the Nepal Disaster,” reaches a much more measured conclusion. The immediate trigger appears to have been an enormous bedrock collapse beneath the glacier, which destabilized the overlying ice and produced a massive rock-ice avalanche. The resulting debris flow raced downstream at extraordinary speed. That is fundamentally a geological process, not an atmospheric or climate-related one. More importantly, much of the destruction was amplified by human decisions completely unrelated to climate.

Roads, bridges, hydropower facilities, and communities had been constructed directly within vulnerable river valleys and debris-flow pathways, areas where floods have hit in the past. Infrastructure occupied locations long known to be exposed to landslides and flash floods in one of the most geologically active mountain ranges on Earth. Those choices dramatically increased the disaster’s consequences.

In other words, the event was catastrophicly worse than it might otherwise have been had people and governments not placed expensive infrastructure and growing populations directly in the path of natural mountain hazards. That is a very different conclusion than “climate change caused it.”

Ironically, the NYT itself provides historical context that weakens its central narrative. The article acknowledges that glacier failures have occurred dozens of times in the China- Nepal border region since 1900.

That matters far more than their click- bait headline.

Since these events occurred repeatedly for well over a century, long before human greenhouse gas emissions rose, this event cannot automatically be linked to modern greenhouse gas emissions and human induced climate change. Mountain glaciers fail for many reasons, including gravity, unstable rock formations, earthquakes, heavy snowfall, freeze-thaw cycles, and natural slope failure.

The Himalayas are among the youngest and most tectonically active mountain systems on Earth, caused by when the Indian Plate slammed into the Eurasian landmass. Landslides are not unusual there. Neither are rock, snow, and ice avalanches. The NYT also acknowledges that scientists initially suspected a glacial lake outburst flood before satellite observations showed no overflowing lake was involved.

That illustrates an important lesson: early assumptions after disasters are often wrong.

Unfortunately, that lesson was not applied to the climate narrative. Instead of waiting for investigators to complete their work, many media outlets including NPR, the New York Times, the Associated Press immediately declared the disaster another example of climate change. Once again, the conclusion came before the evidence.

There is another glaring omission. The article briefly notes that Nepal’s warning systems were not designed to detect this type of rapidly developing debris flow. That is a practical issue policymakers can actually address and should.

Improved geological monitoring, better hazard mapping, stronger infrastructure design, and avoiding construction in known debris-flow channels will save lives regardless of future climate conditions. Those are the real solutions. Ending fossil fuel use will not mitigate or prevent future avalanches, but it would hamper recovery efforts and infrastructure improvements.

The tragedy in Nepal deserves careful scientific investigation, not instant political messaging. Good journalism follows the evidence wherever it leads. In this case, the evidence points first to geology and human exposure to natural hazards, not to climate change. The New York Times should have let science finish its work before declaring the verdict. Sadly, the “publish first, ask questions later” method seems to be the norm these days when it comes to climate change related news.

Measuring Meaningless Climate Actions

What would Americans gain from eliminating every ton of carbon dioxide emitted from the use of fossil fuels in the United States?

The global campaign against carbon dioxide (CO2) rests on a promise that has never been audited.

You were told this would help the planet. Nobody said by how much.

From The CO2 Coalition

By Vijay Jayaraj

What would Americans gain from eliminating every ton of carbon dioxide emitted from the use of fossil fuels in the United States? The answer, even accepting unfounded assumptions that make the so-called benefit look as large as possible, is nothing.

The global campaign against carbon dioxide (CO2) rests on a promise that has never been audited. Governments around the world have instituted levies, cap-and-trade markets, fuel standards, and subsidies on the unexamined premise that national sacrifice – to the point of economic destruction – would avoid calamitous warming.

Washington signed on to the premise twice. The Obama administration delivered the Clean Power Plan and a Paris pledge to cut emissions more than 25% below 2005 levels. The Biden administration made a fiscal commitment that Congress put at $391 billion in the climate provisions of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. Add rules for tailpipes and power plant exhausts, appliance standards, and fuel mandates, and Americans are financing the largest reordering of an energy system in history.

You were told this would help the planet. Nobody said by how much.

Demolishing Economies of 50 States for Zero Gain
A report by Advancing American Freedom’s Kevin Dayaratna, “Fifty States, Virtually No Impact,” puts the question through computer models emulating alarmist climate simulations of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In an accommodation to the IPCC’s far-fetched apocalyptic claims, the analysis assumes the fantasy that cuts in greenhouse gas emissions began in 2020 and became permanent. Disputed technical assumptions of the IPCC were included as well.

Even so, Dayaratna found that the amount of global warming avoided by elimination of U.S. CO2 emissions would be about 0.11 degrees Celsius by 2050 and 0.24 degrees Celsius by 2100. The report ranks the 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia according to their theoretical warming potential, showing differences of tiny fractions of a degree. Of course, it is ludicrous to think that such small differentials could be predicted decades in advance when the weekend’s weather forecast often is wrong.

The report’s overarching message is that a state legislator voting for U.N.-style climate policies would impose catastrophic economic costs on constituents in exchange for a temperature reduction that cannot be observed or felt.

Real Physics Exposes Pseudoscientific Absurdities

To add to the absurdity, every figure in the Dayaratna analysis assumes the U.N. IPCC’s warming analysis is sound. Strip away the pseudoscientific assumptions and the collapse of the case for favored climate programs compounds. Real-world physics tells a completely different story.

Greenhouse gases, including CO2, exhibit diminishing returns in their warming effect as atmospheric concentrations rise. At current levels, the infrared absorption bands for CO2 are already largely saturated, meaning additional molecules contribute progressively less to warming. Doubling CO2 from today’s 420 parts per million translates to a trivial temperature increase of less than 1 degree Celsius.

Using more realistic assumptions, the amount of warming averted by 2050 would be 0.0084 degrees Celsius (instead of 0.11 degrees) if U.S. emissions were eliminated. Cutting out all global emissions would avoid only 0.070 degrees Celsius of warming, again assuming that any of this can be predicted at all.

Natural, Beneficial Warming
In 2025 comments to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Dr. William Happer, professor of physics emeritus at Princeton University, called the assertions of the IPCC “badly flawed science.” First, he said, greenhouse gases from the Industrial Revolution to the present have not caused catastrophic warming, extreme weather, or harm; saturation ensures their future impact will be even smaller. Second, most observed warming since 1750 reflects natural recovery from the Little Ice Age, with greenhouse gases contributing only a fraction.

The EPA, Happer said, should “inform the public of the real science that increasing carbon dioxide and other (greenhouse gas) emissions, and increasing the use of fossil fuels will benefit people worldwide with more food and cheap energy, with only a trivial effect on temperature and extreme weather.”

So, the return on trillions in subsidies, costs of regulatory compliance, higher electricity prices, and lost economic growth is hypothetical, minuscule temperature changes that mean nothing.

Policymakers should weigh their energy decisions accordingly, prioritizing affordable and reliable energy supplies over the vacuous gestures of an antihuman

ideology.Originally published at American Thinker, September 1, 2026.

Vijay Jayaraj is a Science and Research Associate at the CO2 Coalition, Fairfax, Virginia. He holds an M.S. in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia and a postgraduate degree in energy management from Robert Gordon University, both in the U.K., and a bachelor’s in engineering from Anna University, India. He served as a research associate with the Changing Oceans Research Unit at University of British Columbia, Canada.

The Restless Roof of the World: How Colliding Continents Keep Raising the Himalayas and Shaking the Tibetan Plateau

The Himalayas are actively growing due to ongoing plate tectonics.

About 50–55 million years ago, the leading edge of the Indian Plate collided with the southern margin of the Eurasian Plate.

The collision is not finished. The Indian Plate is still moving northward relative to Eurasia at roughly 4– 5 cm per year.

AI generated by Grok

The Himalayas are actively growing due to ongoing plate tectonics.

The Earth’s lithosphere is broken into large tectonic plates that move slowly over the underlying mantle. The Himalayas formed (and continue to rise) because of the collision between two of these plates:

  • Indian Plate (carrying the Indian subcontinent)
  • Eurasian Plate (carrying most of Asia, including the Tibetan region)

Around 120-100 million years ago, India was part of the southern supercontinent Gondwana and began drifting northward after it separated from Antarctica and Australia. It moved rapidly (up to ~15–20 cm/year at times) across the Tethys Ocean toward Asia.

AI generated by Grok

About 50-55 million years ago, the leading edge of the Indian Plate collided with the southern margin of the Eurasian Plate. This was a continent- continent collision (not an oceanic subduction zone like the Andes or Japan).

Because both plates are made of relatively buoyant continental crust, neither one can easily sink deep into the mantle. Instead:

  1. The Indian Plate is forced underneath the Eurasian Plate (a process called underthrusting or continental subduction).
  2. Enormous compressive forces crumple, fold, and stack the crust into multiple layers (thrust sheets and nappes).
  3. The crust thickens dramatically, in places the continental crust under the Himalayas and Tibetan Plateau is 60- 80 km thick (normal continental crust is ~35- 40 km).
  4. This thickened, buoyant crust rises isostatically, creating the high elevations of the Himalayas and the vast Tibetan Plateau.

The ancient Tethys Ocean that once separated India from Asia was completely closed and its sedimentary rocks were scraped up and incorporated into the mountain belt.

The collision is not finished. The Indian Plate is still moving northward relative to Eurasia at roughly 4- 5 cm per year. As a result:

The Himalayas continue to rise at average rates of about 5- 10 mm per year (locally higher in some segments).

Earthquakes are frequent along the Main Himalayan Thrust and other major faults as the crust accommodates the ongoing convergence.

Erosion (by rivers, glaciers, and landslides) continually removes rock from the high peaks, but the tectonic uplift currently outpaces erosion in many areas, so the mountains keep growing overall.

The same collision that built the Himalayas also created and elevated the Tibetan Plateau, the largest and highest plateau on Earth (average elevation ~4,500- 5,000 m). Crustal thickening and lateral flow of the lower crust have expanded the plateau both vertically and horizontally over the past 50 million years.

The Himalayas are a classic example of a collisional mountain belt formed by the ongoing convergence of the Indian and Eurasian plates. What began ~50 million years ago is still active today: India continues to push northward into Asia, driving continued uplift, crustal deformation, and the growth of the world’s highest mountain range.

AI generated by Grok

The uplift history of the Tibetan Plateau is a complex, progressive process closely tied to the ongoing collision between the Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates.

It is not a single, uniform event in which a flat plateau rose all at once. Instead, different regions of the plateau reached high elevations at different times, with earlier high mountain belts in the south and center, a long- lived low central valley, and later outward expansion and filling of lower areas.

The Tibetan region is an amalgam of several continental terranes (blocks) that rifted from Gondwana and successively accreted to the southern margin of Asia during the Mesozoic.

Key events included the collision of the Lhasa and Qiangtang terranes (roughly Late Jurassic to Cretaceous).

These earlier collisions already produced localized mountain building, crustal thickening, and a complex topography with highlands and basins long before India arrived. Cretaceous ocean- continent convergence also built Andean- style mountains (e.g., the Gangdese arc) in southern Tibet.

Most geological evidence indicates that the Indian Plate began colliding with Asian-affinity rocks around 65– 60 million years ago (Ma), somewhat earlier than the classic ~50 Ma estimate (though the exact timing and possible diachroneity remain debated).

Key stages of surface uplift (based largely on paleoaltimetry, sedimentology, thermochronology, and fossils):

  • Southern Tibet (Lhasa terrane / Gangdese region): High elevations (>4 km) were established by ~55 Ma.
  • Central Tibet (Qiangtang region): High east- west mountain belts reached >4 km by ~45 Ma.
  • Central valley: A relatively low -elevation (<2 km) east- west basin/valley system persisted between the southern and central highlands until roughly 38- 29 Ma, after which it was uplifted.
  • India–Asia suture zone, Himalayas, and northern Tibet: Significant uplift to near- modern elevations was delayed until around ~20 Ma (and later in some northern and northeastern margins).

By the late Oligocene to early Miocene (~26 Ma in some central basins), large parts of central Tibet had reached high elevations (3.5- 4.5 km or more). The modern- style high plateau, with its broad, relatively flat high surface, largely assembled through a combination of continued crustal shortening, sedimentary infilling of internal basins, and outward growth.

From ~30 Ma onward, and especially around 25-10 Ma and later, the plateau expanded outward (northward, northeastward, and eastward). Notable pulsed deformation and uplift occurred along the northern and northeastern margins (e.g., Qilian Shan, Qaidam Basin region) at roughly ~30 Ma and again ~10 Ma. These pulses are often linked to removal (delamination or break-off) of dense lithospheric mantle beneath different parts of the plateau, which causes rapid isostatic rebound and surface uplift.

The dominant processes include:

  • Crustal shortening and thickening from the northward push of India (the Indian Plate is still converging at ~4- 5 cm/year).
  • Underthrusting of Indian lithosphere beneath Tibet.
  • Delamination/break- off of subducted Indian and Asian lithosphere, allowing hot asthenosphere to rise and buoyantly uplift the surface.
  • Inherited lithospheric strength variations that controlled where and when uplift was concentrated.
  • Secondary contributions from magmatic underplating, lower- crustal flow, and sedimentary loading/filling of basins.

Some researchers emphasize that the phrase “the uplift of the Tibetan Plateau” can be misleading because it implies a coherent, simultaneous rise of a flat surface driven solely by the India collision; the reality was more piecemeal and built on pre- existing topography.

Scientists combine multiple independent methods:

  • Paleoaltimetry (stable isotopes in carbonates, leaf fossils, etc.) to estimate past elevations.
  • Thermochronology (fission- track, U-Th/He dating) to track when rocks cooled as they were exhumed toward the surface.
  • Sedimentary records, paleocurrents, and provenance studies in basins.
  • Fossil floras and faunas that indicate past climate and elevation (low- elevation tropical/subtropical fossils in what are now high areas provide key constraints).
  • Magmatism patterns and geophysical imaging of the current lithosphere.

The plateau averages ~4,500- 5,000 m elevation and is still tectonically active. Uplift continues in many areas (typically several mm/year), balanced to varying degrees by erosion. The ongoing collision also drives east- west extension in the plateau interior and frequent earthquakes.

the Tibetan Plateau’s uplift history spans from pre- Cenozoic terrane assembly, through early high mountain belts shortly after the start of the India- Asia collision (~55- 45 Ma), progressive filling and raising of intervening lows, and later outward expansion into the modern “Roof of the World.” Research continues to refine the precise timing and mechanisms in different sectors.

Seismic activity along faults in the Himalayan- Tibetan region is among the most intense on Earth, driven by the ongoing collision between the Indian and Eurasian plates (converging at roughly 4- 5 cm/year).

This collision builds enormous strain that is released through earthquakes on a network of active faults.

More than half of China’s major historical earthquakes (and a large share of those affecting South Asia) occur in or around the Tibetan Plateau and its margins.

The region features different fault types depending on location:

Himalayan thrust system (southern margin): The dominant plate-boundary structure is the Main Himalayan Thrust (MHT), a gently north-dipping megathrust that accommodates most of the India–Eurasia convergence. It is locked (stuck) in its shallow portion (~100 km wide from the Main Frontal Thrust northward) and creeps aseismically at greater depths. Strain accumulates for centuries and is released in great (Mw 8+) earthquakes that can rupture to the surface along the Main Frontal Thrust (MFT). Parallel older thrusts include the Main Boundary Thrust (MBT) and Main Central Thrust (MCT).

Interior of the Tibetan Plateau: Dominated by strike- slip faults (left-lateral: Altyn Tagh, Kunlun, Haiyuan, Xianshuihe- Xiaojiang; right- lateral: Karakoram) that allow eastward extrusion of crustal blocks, plus north- south- trending normal faults (grabens/rifts) that accommodate east- west extension. These produce frequent moderate-to-large earthquakes.

Eastern and northern margins: Thrust and oblique- slip systems such as the Longmenshan Fault (eastern edge; site of the 2008 Mw 7.9 Wenchuan earthquake) and faults along the Qilian Shan and Qaidam Basin. These accommodate compression as the plateau pushes outward.

Most seismicity is shallow (typically <20- 50 km depth) and closely follows mapped surface faults.

Intermediate- depth earthquakes (50- 300 km) occur in places such as the Hindu Kush- Pamir, southern Tibet, and the Indo- Burmese region, often linked to the subducted/underthrust Indian lithosphere.

Earthquake Patterns and Notable Events:

Great Himalayan earthquakes (Mw ≥ 8) typically involve full or large ruptures of the locked MHT. Historical examples include the 1934 Bihar- Nepal (Mw ~8.4), 1950 Assam-Tibet (Mw ~8.6), and partial ruptures such as the 2015 Gorkha (Mw 7.8) event in Nepal.

Strike- slip and normal- fault earthquakes dominate the plateau interior and can reach Mw 7- 8 (e.g., 2001 Kunlun Mw 7.8).

Activity often occurs in temporal clusters and migrates between fault systems or blocks (e.g., sequential series on the Bayan Har block margins in recent decades).

Some segments show seismic moment deficits (accumulated strain not yet released), raising the potential for future large events. Central Himalayan “seismic gaps” have long been of concern, though recent paleoseismic work suggests more frequent moderate events than previously thought and a more random (less strictly periodic) recurrence pattern.

Recent instrumental records (including 2025- 2026) show ongoing moderate activity: frequent small-to- moderate events (M 4- 6) along the western Himalaya, Ladakh, Himachal Pradesh, Sikkim, Nepal, and parts of Tibet, consistent with continuous strain accumulation. Clusters of dozens of tremors in short periods are common.

Plateau margins and densely faulted interior zones are the primary loci of future large earthquakes.

The combination of high population density in the Himalayan foothills and Indo- Gangetic plain, vulnerable infrastructure, and the potential for cascading hazards (landslides, glacial lake outbursts) makes the region exceptionally high- risk.

Monitoring relies on dense seismic networks, GPS/InSAR geodesy (tracking interseismic locking and post- seismic relaxation), and paleoseismology.

Seismic activity here is the short- term expression of the same plate- tectonic forces that have built and continue to elevate the Himalayas and Tibetan Plateau over millions of years.

Strain builds steadily on locked fault segments and is released abruptly in earthquakes that range from frequent moderate events to rare, devastating megathrust ruptures.

‘Supercharged’ Global Greening in African Savannah: CO2 Brings Huge Boost to Grass Growth

More evidence of global greening from carbon dioxide fertilisation has been published in the prestigious publication Nature.

The research involved 70 experiments and three decades of field data from many locations in the savannah of South Africa’s Kruger National Park.

AI generated by Grok

From The Daily Sceptic

By Andrew Sibley

Global greening is being supercharged in the African savannah, new research published in Nature has found, with higher CO2 levels driving a 28% increase in plant growth in just 32 years, writes Andrew Sibley.

More evidence of global greening from carbon dioxide fertilisation has been published in the prestigious publication Nature. The research involved 70 experiments and three decades of field data from many locations in the savannah of South Africa’s Kruger National Park. The international scientific team was led by Dr Kimberley Simpson of the University of Sheffield, the paper entitled ‘Increasing CO2 levels fertilise C4 grass production‘. Phys.org reported the study as follows: ‘Rising carbon dioxide is supercharging grass growth in African savannas, study finds.’ The latest study challenges the previously held view that the dominant grasses in the savannah (known as ‘C4’) benefit little from rising levels of carbon dioxide.

African savannah covers approximately half of the great continent and sustains a vast habitat for wildlife across tropical and sub-tropical regions. Globally, savannah grassland covers about 20% of Earth’s land surface, and contributes nearly one-third of plant productivity. C4 grasses form a major part of these ecosystems in hot climates; they utilise a more complex form of photosynthesis which allows them to thrive in harsher conditions where hotter and sunnier conditions prevail. These grasses are able to retain water and capture carbon dioxide more efficiently than other types of plants. C4 grasses include both wild grasses and important crops such as maize and sugarcane.

Given higher levels of carbon dioxide, the C4 plants have been found to increase their growth by capturing more of the greenhouse gas while limiting water loss through leaf stomata. In the Kruger National Park, it was found that there was a 28% increase in plant growth from 1989 to 2021. After discounting other factors, such as changes to rainfall, temperature and nitrogen, the report concluded that increased carbon dioxide was the main factor in the extra plant growth. It was also noted that there was an increase in the number of herbivores in the park over the period, thus benefitting the wider ecosystem.

As with other recent findings, this study shows that there are some benefits to higher levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. You would think that evidence of growth of grassland in drier parts of the world would be welcome news for environmentalists. But of course, the study put a dampener on the positive benefits and discussed a few possible downsides: it noted the risk of increased fuel for wildfires, possible changes to the distribution of foraging animals and that extra grass production may not feed into long-term carbon storage. Simpson commented that: “More grass does not automatically mean more carbon will be stored. The wider impact depends on where the extra grass ends up. If it is eaten by animals or burned in fires, much of the carbon is quickly released back into the atmosphere.” And: “Because savannahs cover such large areas, even modest changes could have major consequences for wildlife, livestock, fire and the global carbon cycle.”

Other recent studies have noted the benefit to plant growth from higher carbon dioxide levels; see: ‘Global Greening Hits New Record as Climate Emergency Fails to Materialise‘, and ‘Vegetation greenness in 2025‘. Evidence of global greening has been known for many years and reported in an IPCC Special Report on Climate Change and Land (A2.3) in 2019. A paper in Nature Climate Change in 2016 discussed the drivers for global greening, estimating from computer modelling that 70% of the change to plant growth was caused by higher levels of carbon dioxide, with an increase of between 25% and 50% in global vegetation coverage.

As well as evidence of increased plant growth and wildlife in parts of Africa, the benefits of carbon dioxide fertilisation include higher crop yields to feed a growing world population, now above eight billion people. Policy makers committed to achieving Net Zero in the UK need to take into account the benefit of higher levels of carbon dioxide for the ecosystem and global food provision. The Net Zero policy is looking increasingly archaic in light of the direction of scientific research and global developments. Instead of the very costly and futile subsidies, I would suggest that resources need to be directed towards the development of mitigation strategies to protect against natural disasters such as wildfires and flooding.

Andrew Sibley is a semi-retired chartered meteorologist with an MSc in Environmental Decision-Making and an MPhil in Theology.