Barry Evans

1 week ago | northcoastjournal.com | Barry Evans

Talk to a climate denier — someone who believes global warming has purely natural causes — and chances are you'll soon hear the phrase "Milankovitch cycles." These, not humans, are responsible for climate change, they'll say. Actually, this is what your regular climate denier will claim. In the extreme version, some of these benighted souls deny that Earth is actually warming, despite 19 of the last 20 years being the hottest on record.

3 weeks ago | northcoastjournal.com | Barry Evans

Don't blame me for the clickbait heading. Capitalizing on Dubya Bush's 2002 State of the Union address in which he singled out Iraq, Iran and North Korea as Earth's baddies, cosmologists Kate Land and João Magueijo employed the same phrase three years later for the title of their scientificxpaper. In it, they described a spooky coincidence linking a 14-billion-year-old pattern in the universe with the plane of our planet's orbit around the sun.

1 month ago | northcoastjournal.com | Barry Evans

Following the death of his great friend Arthur Henry Hallam in 1833, the poet Alfred Tennyson began writing In Memoriam AHH, perhaps the greatest elegy in the English language. It would take him 17 years of composing, writing and editing until he finally published it — anonymously — in 1850.

1 month ago | northcoastjournal.com | Barry Evans

Thirty minutes. That's all it took, 66 million years ago, to put the future on track for you to be reading this. Had the Manhattan-Island-size asteroid that crashed into the Gulf of Mexico arrived 30 minutes earlier or later, we wouldn't be around to unravel the consequences of that mighty collision. We know very little about that huge rock, other than it was rich in the element iridium.

2 months ago | northcoastjournal.com | Barry Evans

Like other acronyms that slowly seeped into our consciousness — think COVID — I predict that you'll soon be familiar with AMOC, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. We and our children may — with a great deal of luck and statesmanship — dodge such potential global catastrophes as another pandemic (thanks to the magic of RNA vaccines — see "mRNA Vaccines vs. the Pandemic," May 23, 2024), nuclear war, or an AI doomsday scenario.