Earth's landmasses in the late Precambrian probably weren't pleasant, but at least they were green. A new analysis of limestone rocks laid down between 1 billion and 500 million years ago suggests that there was extensive plant life on land much earlier than previously thought.

The plants were only tiny mosses and liverworts, but they would have had a profound effect on the planet. They turned the hitherto barren Earth green, created the first soils and pumped oxygen into the atmosphere, laying the foundations for animals to evolve in the Cambrian explosion that started 542 million years ago.

It was already known from genetic evidence that mosses and liverworts probably evolved around 700 million years ago, but up till now there was little sign that they had colonised land to any great extent. The assumption was that terrestrial life consisted of patchy bacterial mats and "algal scum" until the mid-Ordovician, 475 million years ago, when land was first invaded by modern-looking vascular plants.

Paul Knauth of Arizona State University and Martin Kennedy of the University of California, Riverside, examined the chemical composition of all known limestones dating from the Neoproterozoic era, which stretched from 1 billion years ago up to the start of the Cambrian. Knauth says the balance of carbon-12 to oxygen-18 in the limestones is "screaming" that they were laid down in shallow seas that received extensive rainwater run-off from a land surface thick with vegetation.

Timo Niroma, a physicist from Finland, publishes a Solar Report each month. He has given his permission to use it and distribute it to all so here it is. It will be a regular feature here and I hope you look forward to it as much as I do. The report is not written in the usual user-friendly way, but is rather intended for scientists that are familiar with the information contained in it. I will attempt to simplify and explain the details of the report and how it could impact you and, of course, Al Gore and company. As the predictions come true, as I assume they will, the green lobby will go on unemployment compensation. Let's start at the beginning and take it piece by piece.

"June Breaking News: The Cycle Goes at the Moment Below Dalton Level" gives away the punch line but let's see how he gets there.

They may not be as discerning as a Michelin Guide, but dogs decide where to look for food by sniffing the breath of others.

When tasked with finding a hidden treat, pet dogs heed the advice of another pup that has faced the same challenge.

Such behaviour is common in the animal world. Rats, gerbils, chickens and monkeys are just a few of the creatures known to direct friends and family members to a nearby meal via scent or sound. Chimpanzees tap the shoulders or glare at other chimps while leading them to a treat; the cunning apes also sometimes employ misinformation to keep a food stash secret.

Perhaps most famously, honeybees tell their hive-mates where to find nectar via elaborately choreographed "waggle dances".

Such evidence suggests that domestic dogs should also learn where to find food by communicating with their fellows, yet evidence has been tough to come by.

Over at Real Climate, quite a few of the comments that they post continue to incorrectly interpret the observed behavior of the global average upper ocean heat content changes and sea level rise over the last 5 years (see the misinformation in the comments on the Real Climate weblog More bubkes).

The authors of Real Climate, unfortunately, are permitting this erroneous information (and personal insults) to be posted without their comments and correction. Apparently, the balance provided by Gavin Schmidt that I reported on in my weblog Gavin Schmidt's Interview On Media Hype On Climate Science Issues was just a fluke.

In this weblog, I will correct two of the major errors made in a number of the comments on the Real Climate website.

One of the commentators on Real Climate list three papers that purportedly refute the finding of no recent upper ocean warming and that the sea level rise has flattened since 2006 . These papers are

Levitus S. et al. (2009) Global ocean heat content 1955 - 2008 in light of recently revealed instrumentation problems Geophys. Res. Lett. 36, L07608

Cazenave A. et al. (2009) Sea level budget over 2003-2008: A reevaluation from GRACE space gravimetry, satellite altimetry and Argo Glob. Planet. Change 65, 83-88

Leuliette E.W. and Miller L. (2009) Closing the sea level rise budget with altimetry, Argo, and GRACE Geophys Res. Lett. 36, art # L0406

Dr. Roy Spencer announced on his blog that June's anomaly globally using the Aqua satellite dropped to 0.001C. This continues the downtrend that started after 2001.

Roy notes:

June 2009 saw another - albeit small drop in the global average temperature anomaly, from +0.04 deg. C in May to 0.00 deg. C in June, with the coolest anomaly (-0.03 deg. C) in the Southern Hemisphere. The decadal temperature trend for the period December 1978 through June 2009 is now at +0.12 deg. C per decade.

NOTE: A reminder for those who are monitoring the daily progress of global-average temperatures here:

As people continue to resist draconian greenhouse gas control schemes that would virtually re-order society around energy rationing and technocratic authoritarianism, proponents of such an eco-revolution are ratcheting up the rhetoric of hate.

People such as James Hansen and Al Gore have long been at the forefront of slandering those who oppose them. As my colleague and I wrote in "Scenes from the Climate Inquisition":

Anyone who does not sign up 100 percent behind the catastrophic scenario is deemed a "climate change denier." Distinguished climatologist Ellen Goodman spelled out the implication in her widely syndicated newspaper column last week: "Let's just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers." One environmental writer suggested last fall that there should someday be Nuremberg Trials - or at the very least a South African-style Truth and Reconciliation Commission - for climate skeptics who have blocked the planet's salvation.

Former Vice President Al Gore has proposed that the media stop covering climate skeptics, and Britain's environment minister said that, just as the media should give no platform to terrorists, so they should exclude climate change skeptics from the airwaves and the news pages. Heidi Cullen, star of the Weather Channel, made headlines with a recent call for weather-broadcasters with impure climate opinions to be "decertified" by the American Meteorological Society.

Australia's Minister for Climate Change, Penny Wong, recently suggested that most of the global warming since 1960, about 85 percent, has happened in the oceans and that change in ocean heat content is thus the most appropriate measure of global warming.

But, calculating from first principles, according to this data the oceans have absorbed far less energy than the IPCC estimates for the impact of rising carbon dioxide levels. While the government data suggests a warming rate of 0.38 watts/ m² the IPCC data suggests a warming rate of 3.6 watts/ m² . This is a significant discrepancy of nearly 10:1 and needs to be resolved. If the oceans really are the major heat sink for the planet where is the rest of the energy going? Alternatively, is the error in the IPCC estimates.

Here's my logic:

On June 24, 2009, the Minister for Climate Change posted 'Response to Senator Fielding's questions about the climate change science' (Link).

This article included the above graph and comments reproduced below. The straight red line on the ocean heat content graph, however, is my addition and was not part of the original article. The line was placed by eye and is not claimed to be a least squares line of best fit.

The quoted items below are taken from the Minister's website.

"In terms of the climate system as a whole, only about five percent of the warming since 1960 has taken place in the air."

"Most of warming since 1960 (about 85 percent) has happened in the oceans. Thus, in terms of a single indicator of global warming, change in ocean heat content is the most appropriate."

"The change in ocean heat content since 1960 is shown in the figure below. Note the significant warming trend since 1998."

Commencing Tuesday, three eclipses - a lunar eclipse, a solar eclipse and another lunar - will take over the skies, a phenomenon which although experts say is not rare, will nevertheless be nature's grand spectacle.

On July 7, a penumbral lunar eclipse will occur as the moon rises over Australia and sets in western north and south America in the early pre-dawn hours, said C.B. Devgun, director of Science Popularization Association of Communicators and Educators (SPACE).

The eclipse, however, will not be visible over India.

"The penumbral eclipse will be so slight - just about eight percent - that it will not be visible to those in India," Ajay Talwar of the Amateur Astronomers Association told IANS.

Watching whales is far more profitable than eating them, concludes a report published last week by the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW). It found that revenues from whale watching in 2008 reached $2.1 billion - double the amount earned a decade ago.

"It's clearly the most sustainable use of whales," says Patrick Ramage of the IFAW. "You can watch the same whales dozens of times, but you can only kill a whale once."

Globally, whale watching has grown by 3.7 per cent each year in the last decade. Last year, 13 million people observed whales in 119 countries, supporting 13,000 jobs.

VERNON -- Police say it was an "attack." At this point, New Jersey wildlife officials say, it was an "incident."

Either way, Henry Rouwendal, who was nursing a head injury, dislocated shoulder and other injuries at his Vernon home last night, says his run-in with a hungry black bear was "a pretty wild ordeal."